skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are people who talk a good game but can't actually code. Or so I've heard. Perhaps you're overconfident about being able to judge other programmers without actually asking them to write some code? How would you know? How do you explain fizzbuzz? [1]

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
And, as he points out, other people with "normal" (whatever that means) names, some of whom have supplied govt ID as proof), have still been denied their appeal.

What does it mean that Google is this insane about this one little thing? Yes, directed advertising is the obvious answer for an advertising company.

But you DON'T need a real name to have advertising directed your way, all you need is a record in a database. If I registered with G+ as John Smith (not my real name) they would be none the wiser, notwithstanding any correlation with my gmail and outside sources that they may or may not perform. The ads would still get to me.

However, if they were selling correlation to third parties ...
I caught a glimpse of one at a party the other day! Didn't get a chance to ask the guy how he liked it, unfortunately.
git's prevalence today is purely because it won the popularity contest, plain and simple

I don't believe that is at all plain and simple (or correct). I worked with many DVCS systems before git. git was obviously better, from the moment I first tinkered with it, and the more I understood of its internals the more obviously better it seemed. There's a reason that after years of DVCS fighting it out for turf and never really gaining any traction, git exploded onto the scene and took over a huge portion of projects. git got everything right...that's why it won the "popularity contest".

On top of that, while git may be a big deal for developers, git's importance to the world at large is tiny

Developers make the world as we know it today. And git is what developers use. github is awesome, but git is the engine to github's fancy automobile exterior.
"the right product at the right time"

"We chose Lisp. For one thing, it was obvious that rapid development would be important in this market. We were all starting from scratch, so a company that could get new features done before its competitors would have a big advantage. We knew Lisp was a really good language for writing software quickly. [..] And because Lisp was so high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. [..] with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release." - http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

It was the advantages of using Lisp which gave them the ability to create the right product at the right time, instead of the right product too late, or dreams of the right product, too expensive to hire the team to build it.

The claim isn't really that Haskell might be a success and F# a failure, but only that if you can take advantages of more powerful languages power, you gain some advantages over companies which use less powerful languages - but not a guaranteed make or break difference, just another bit of help.

Given that he's gone from successful founder to successful investor mentoring several thriving startups, your claim that he can't "have much clue how the industry works" feels hollow.

Or maybe, just maybe, they know a little bit more about the pros and cons of using a mainstream language to ship a product in terms of staffing and tooling and they decided that Lisp just didn't clear that bar.

Or maybe, just maybe, the guy who wrote it and was there when it was rewritten knows more accurately what happened than you do. It isn't condescending if it's true.
That, of course, depends on what you use your computer for, but in my case there are very few programs I don't run inside Emacs: a browser, a pdf and djvu viewer, Mathematica, and a media player. I do use other programs, but mostly run them within Emacs (they're LaTeX, several compilers and interpreters, and a shell).
That's his point.
If I feel the need for a full computer in my pocket, I will get an Android. Right now I keep the best appliance I have ever seen, the iPhone.
Symbian s60v3 on a Nokia E5 here. I love the keyboard on this thing, but the OS is utter crap. Does anyone else here see huge potential in Meego and the Nokia N9? If only Elop hadn't killed it off in favor of WP7..
The threat of prison is supposed to make people more likely to pay back their debts.
my understanding is that gingerbread will be released for the epic 4g. I'm not sure when, i've just seen a bunch of leaked builds on various android websites.

Gingerbread will probably be the last official release for the epic, but i assume a cyanogenmod port will be finished eventually.
I'm definitely an Apple person right now, but both webOS and WP7 will get very attractive after the Pre^3 and Mango. Depending on what hardware Apple announces, I'll be very tempted to move to one of those. Apple has done a great job with iOS, but the WP7 UI is nothing short of amazingly beautiful and webOS is the most open and hacker-friendly mobile OS I've seen (most Android phones are locked down).

It's certainly an exciting time when all of the major platforms (except Android, sadly, from my experience) are such awesome pieces of software.
I've been writing iPad apps for a while but considering testing the Android waters. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on the Android tablet development experience now that 3.2 is out.
WP7 has an awesome UI, and I can code for it. The Mango update makes it great. I have few complaints of it.
my friend was complaining about this weeks ago.
Don't discount also-rans. Google was an also-ran. In 2000, Apple was an also-ran. Microsoft was (and arguably still is) the master of the successful also-ran.
1) Keep logs of any and all materials read, communications, etc. Disclose all sources of information involved during the various phases of invention - specifically reviewing hard drives, mobile and other storage. The inventor should take care to keep logs of all research. In original invention, the trail from research to the idea should be evident if it meets the right patterns - I'm not sure exactly what these patterns would be, but I do think there is a definition that is meaningful enough to considerably aid the situation.

2) Eligible inventions would include anything that a customer pays for - as in the exchange of value designates the scope of invention from a patent enforcement perspective. From a patent defense perspective, as long as the invention logs show no use of another patent (when the attacking inventor requests certification at their own expense). This would also focus invention on creation of value instead of creation of legal IP.

3) I disagree, this proposal is an attempt to let people opt out of a broken system by certifying invention through at least one adopted methodology of original design. Again, think of it like buying insurance - every complex industry requires some sort of overhead to deal with subjective enforcement of laws. The capping of costs reduces the average overhead so much vs the current system where anyone who succeeds in the market pays a big, unpredictable legal tax.
"fierce, opinionated, blunt semi-dictator running the show."
That doesn't sound like the anti-Steve Jobs to me.

His complete lack of (aesthetic) taste might make him the anti-steve jobs though.
I have a cheap feature phone with no contract. I also carry an iPod touch and I'm around Wi-Fi often enough that I don't miss having a proper smartphone. With the portability of the new Macbooks Air I think I could pretty easily do without any mobile devices though.
My take on this is that the ethic that enables credit to function sustainably is incompatible with the corporate culture we've created. Value judgements in our economy are increasingly made by corporations who can only value what they can measure numerically, and incapable of valuing humanity.

That's why I'm working on a scalable system of interpersonal credit money:

http://ripple-project.org
Thomas, this is really an excellent page (and a sharp design). Describing up front what the process is definitely respectful of the candidates time!

We've found some success by trying to make the problems really interesting; perhaps some people jettisoned but others came back and said they had a really great time trying to solve them.

Maybe for software you could ask a question like: describe a little piece of software you'd like to build, you could build in an evening and would be useful/entertaining for you or someone else. describe how you'd do it.

and then...

show us, one week from now. :-)
You would be surprised at the elegance a smartphone adds to the things you already do. Think of fast forwarding a voice mail, or sending an email, or scrolling back through text messages, or typing in the name of your bank in an unknown city and having 5 close locations magically get pin pointed.
One option appears to be missing. All my friend's emails are always signed with

Sent from my Zune

(edit) Bah! 0 points. A gentle guideline then, perhaps?

Downvote only if you lack a sense of humour.

This is the best email sig I've seen in ages. Still tempted to adopt it myself.
Citing Stalemate, Verizon Workers Strike
being 100% sure is 100% impossible
Ask HN: Double Major CS/Math or Single CS Major?
I am going to be a Freshman in college next year attending Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. I figured out that if I just do a Single Major in Computer Science I can probably graduate in three years. To do a Double Major with Computer Science and Math it would take another year and almost $50,000. Either way I will also be getting a minor in Economics. Do people think the Double Major is worth it in terms of getting a good job out of college and differentiating myself from other people?

I want to work in the computer software industry. Not exactly sure on what, just yet.

Thanks!
If you liked this heist story, these are two of my all-time favorite HN stories:

"Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215138

"The Silver Thief"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1020547
12 Cool Site for Image Manipulation
"Gingerbread will probably be the last official release for the epic"

Anything connected to the internet needs regular updates to keep up with threats, never mind prettier icons. I got Windows XP updates for a long, long time.

I'm really rethinking the sensibility of an expensive smart phone for my world.
Regret Installing Mac OS X Lion Server? You Can Now Disable It
Breaking Bad Season 4 Episode 4
Breaking Bad Season 4 Episode 4
What are you unlearning?
Substantiate Product Ideas with Deadly Sins
"Keep logs of any and all materials read, communications, etc."

Seriously? Who the fuck has time...
One reason I'll stick with iPhone is I get amazing customer service from Apple. I had an issue with the sleep button on my iPhone 4 and they replaced it free of charge and out of warranty. The button became mushy because of the case I was using. My gf broke her screen on a 3GS (her fault), and they replaced it no charge.

For my Nexus One, I had to deal with HTC support because the charging connection pins became loose and eventually broke (I might have pushed in the plug upside-down). It was still in warranty and they charged me $195 for the service. I didn't expect HTC to replace for free, but would have won them tons of points.
On my SGS (not II) I can use volume-down as a ctrl key in terminal emulator.
Throughout my last 3 years I've used (in order): BlackBerry 9000, iPhone 3GS, Samsung Focus (WP7).
Each one for almost exactly a year.

A year ago I made the hard decision between Android & WP7 and eventually went with WP7 for 3 simple reasons:

1) I love the UI. Clean, simple, to the point.

2) Responsiveness of UI. Every Android phone I'd played with (a year ago) didn't feel great. It felt slow, and clunky - almost as if smartphone CPU speed couldn't handle all that Android. WP7 felt fast, and I'm an impatient guy.

3) Effortless Social integration. BlackBerry had none. iPhone - I felt I needed to spend too much time looking for apps to get all the features I wanted. Ex: I had to download 3 different apps to: a) post quick facebook updates, b) sync fb contacts to my address book, c) view my friend's facebook updates. As soon as I set up my WP7, all my Google Contacts and FB contacts synced automatically, linked common data together, and I could see their FB updates all in one spot! I did nothing, and I had John Smith on Gmail & FB linked with email, phone, birthday, fb wall, and so on. Little things like this make me smile.

BlackBerry did my business well, but lacked quality apps and wasn't very fun.

iPhone did my business well enough, and was entertaining - but managing all those apps felt like a chore.

WP7 already did 90% the things I wanted to do, so I only needed a few more apps to handle minor things.

As Elop said - it's a battle of ecosystems, and with great dev tools & the XBOX Live brand, I took a bet that good apps/games would eventually come.
So far - I'm still happy (probably because I'm running Mango).
I'm basically the same way with the added point that I don't really like talking on the phone. I'm not asocial - I'm just not a chatty guy.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Database Hacked 
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Database Hacked by Minhal Mehdi
> Take C++ for example. Everyone who has mastered C++ knows that you call a class that implements operator() a functor.

Nope. This is what dilettantes call them. Capable C++ programmers (I don't claim to be a master, that would be foolish) know how to grep the standard. The term "functor" is not found in it, at least not that draft that comes up first on Google. The plain and transparent term "function object" has its own section, 20.3.
Ubuntu en Commodore 64X
Anyone complaining about getting downvoted gets a nearly automatic downvote from me at this point; it's extremely highly correlated with bad comments. It also violates the site guidelines:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Basic C programming by Alex Nichols
This is an old article, but I love this blog. Peteris is so prolific you can't help but get inspired.
Recent paradox in Ireland: rates are going down on Irish bonds because Ireland is getting a better rate from their bailout borrowings. The better rate means they spend less on interest payments, which decreases the chances of default. But the rate is itself used as a measure of the risk of default! So there is a feedback loop: high rates mean higher risk of default, and high risk of default justify higher rates.
Using open source as an excuse to do the part of the work that you are best qualified for, and opening up the rest to respective experts, is a pretty good idea.
Ask and ye shall receive:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/plisp.html
Backing up Delicious bookmarks to CouchDB
Please give examples of what you mean here:

"My biggest surprise is people don't seem to think Google ever have ulterior motives, even when proven in court, or when smashing smaller industries to bits."
UX wise, I don't want to click through a random bunch of faces to solve my problem.

You will have tonnes of "experts" who buy in. There's always a supply of people who want money.

You could provide a way I can type "how do I do X", and any experts interested can give a free 30 second answer. You might want to get credit details first (to keep time-wasters away).
>Every Android phone I'd played with didn't feel great. It felt slow, and clunky - almost as if smartphone CPU speed couldn't handle all that Android.

My roommate has a Galaxy S. While I haven't played with it too much, my initial reaction was quite positive. It felt as smooth and quick as an iPhone 4.
Well, folks, when you're right 52% of the time, you're wrong 48% of the time.
My email just now to the App Store review team:

Dear Apple,
As an Apple developer and longtime user, I'm proud to recommend Apple products to my friends and family. There is simplicity, thoughtful constraint, and craftsmanship in everything Apple does.

That's why I was stunned to see this app--and numerous others from the same developer--in the App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lockify-your-lock-screen-hd/i...

I'm surprised this app was approved in the first place. By many accounts, it does absolutely nothing. I cannot count on two hands how many App Store rules this developer is violating.

And the App Store review system is obviously being gamed. This developer is earning thousands of hard-earned dollars from Apple customers who trust you to keep garbage out of the App Store.

I love Apple. Please don't let the App Store resemble the cheap, neglected morass of the Android Market.

Sincerely,
Joshua Merrill
Am I the only one feeling like some people are trying way too hard to influence others on how they perceive Google? It seems to all have happened at the same time too. I don't have any proof, but it does smell a bit like an astroturf campaign (I'm not referring to this TC article, but mostly to comments I've seen here and elsewhere).
Lulzsec Barzil Leaks the Federal Police 8 GB of Data
I've worked with computer forensics investigators before - you'd be surprised how much data you can get from your harddrive and mobile devices.. If inventors took a bit of care, and good logging / storage software was available, I think the certification process could be as straightforward as applying for a provisional patent.
Let's see. The original client is using your copyrighted work, and you never got paid?

Check with a lawyer. If you didn't get paid, he may well not have any right to use your copyrighted work. Therefore he has no ability to sell the right to your work to the original client. If so, then the original client is now in violation of your copyright.

If so then the fact that you are in a position to cause trouble for the original client might accomplish something useful. But think carefully about how to use it in negotiation before going there. (On the plus side you may poison that original client against that person. On the negative side, you're unlikely to recover much after legal expenses.)
Sparing the pain of paging through the list one javascript link at a time:

1 Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
2 Jeffrey Citron, Vonage
3 Reed Hastings, Netflix
4 Ken Kutaragi, Sony
5 Warren Lieberfarb, HD-DVD promotion group
6 Rob Malda, Slashdot
7 Aurun Sarin, Vodafone
8 Jon Schwartz, Sun Systems
9 Linus Torvalds, Linux
10 Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
You have some strange definitions of "concur" and "agree"
I think you'll find Android 2.2+ to be a very, very different experience from 1.6 - Google has really worked out many of the silly problems that you mentioned (that certainly plagued early versions of the platform, I agree) .
Frankly, I'm getting tired of the hype. Just release it already. It has been promised for a long time now, with no code in sight. Now new owners have re-promised it and it is a hackernewsworthy item all of a sudden?

Don't get me wrong - the description sounds great and I'll be one of the first users. But this is not techcrunch.
Steve Jobs might've been in this list if the article was written 10 or more so years earlier.... And look what happened instead!
"None of the system's space-faring users know the significance of the date 01970, though a few believe it is the date when computers were invented."

On a time scale of thousands of years, that guess is more than close enough.
I would argue that social skills are more important than a double major. Consider doing a year abroad? Good luck, some of the people you meet will become lifelong friends.
New lead in the only unsolved plane hijacking in U.S. history
This is a very good idea, but one downside is that it gives the government an incentive to grant patents and to prevent them from expiring.
Google u-turn on sex worker group's advert
aptitude install xclip

I map 'xc' to 'xclip' and 'xp' to 'xclip -o' (paste) with shell scripts.

Copy to/from clipboard via pipes.

Though X11 copy/paste works pretty well also. There are the odd occasions where a mouse is the right tool for the job.
This is actually an interesting entire family of crimes. Steal a unique, highly valuable item, sell fake copies for full-price now that it's plausible to be the real thing (especially if you set up a sale before the actual theft takes place), then return the original if you care enough. Nobody will turn you in because they'd be admitting to attempting to buy stolen goods.
Android. I wanted physical keyboards and hackable, and strongly disliked (and still dislike) Apple's policies governing iOS development and their dick moves toward Flash, compilers, in-app price matching, etc.

And more nebulously, I felt like Android was onto something and I wanted to go to there.

I put CyanogenMod on my phones. Response and battery life went way up.
Who is the man living in Fukushima evacuation zone?
I owned an iPhone 3G; ended up giving it away after buying myself an HTC Desire (and, later, my wife an HTC Aria). I absolutely hated the Apple walled-garden experience; emotionally, the experience was like using a borrowed phone that I couldn't set up the way I wanted to.

Switching to Android felt like being back in late 90s when I started using GNU/Linux seriously ... not quite as polished, but so much more pleasant to use.

Android + Samba server + MediaMonkey + Bigpond Music is a much nicer solution than iOS + iTunes for buying, storing and organizing music too.
Who the hell would go to that? The internet exists, therefore use it to make "physical testing centers for hackers" totally irrelevant.
I wouldn't say "great" as far as IMAP goes, as Exchange gets horribly confused when there are multiple connections made to it.

That said, I find offlineimap is a better tool than mutt's built-in IMAP support.
Ya I had thought about doing a year abroad but realized I wouldn't be able to with doing a Double Major. I hadn't thought about how I could do a year abroad with the Single Major and not have to worry about which classes to take.

I had thought of going to Singapore as a really cool place to study abroad. Any other suggestions?
I have no clue on the state of Android responsiveness nowadays - but when I played with a few a year ago, I believe the browser responsiveness was still lacking. I realize the Galaxy S is an old phone, but you might have played with one running a newer OS.
减肥药
If you cannot just forget it.
Tech media is not going to get you a lot of valuable traffic any ways.
It's nice to get that extra coverage but it's overrated. Unless of course your goal is to raise capital based on hype in the industry.
If not don't waste any time on it. Get some users.

Do people really love it in other countries? Is it users or media in other countries? What are your numbers if it's not a secret?
If you do not have a lot of users nor do you have exciting technology nor do you have exciting investors why would anyone cover it?

At it's current state it's somewhat useless, the UI is very unintuitive too.
You also seem to make some assumptions about how people explore new places that are far from the truth. Your main and only useful functionality is making those trip plans together with whoever is going to travel with you.
There are two problems here. Most people do not really plan trips that way. Most people that travel together do not really need to communicate through a website like that.

In my mind I see no mainstream appeal yet it looks like you have to get really big until you can start making any money.

What is your vision there? What do you think you're helping people with that they couldn't do before?

I don't want to be rude and I can see you spent some time doing that site but I truly don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something.
"The far-right Action Française newspaper blamed the Jews"

Looks like prejudice is as old as humanity itself!