skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I really do believe that social "skills" can't be
> learned, at least not well.

Well, I believe they can, but that's not the point. Being a social butterfly or socially inept doesn't matter here.

I have a customer-facing development position. I'm not the front-line of communication, but I am expected to answer the phone if I have to (esp. if it's a client), be polite, and not drive business away. That's really the all of it. I'm not expected to sell, or to cold-call anyone, but essentially the duties are: don't be a jerk.

If you survived an interview you're probably socially aware enough to handle this.
500 - Internal Server Error

Stop letting writers get away with technical ineptitude!
B F Advisory FZC : Financial Consultants
Ask HN: Facebook Ads Account Blocked. Huh?
Hi Guys,

I am an avid HN reader and very occasional commenter. I have a quick question on Facebook Ads. I log into my regular Facebook Account and go over to the Ad Manager to find this:

"Your account has been disabled. All of your ads have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its ads violate our Terms of Use or Advertising Guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Use and Advertising Guidelines if you have further questions."

We're a recent advertiser on Facebook having spent in the region of USD 30 to USD 50 over a few months.

Primarily we ran a few test campaigns for the iPad 2 with related text and images and links back to our e-commerce site where we sell the actual product.

Before you jump on me as say it's a simple case of using a Trademark in an Ad - my question is - I'm selling this item at a given price - I want to advertise that I sell this item at a price - surely I can do that? If I were a large big box retailer, or even a small retailer I can run newspaper / billboards for items I sell without any issues. I never claim ownership to the trademark - I just sell the items!

Regardless - that message leaves me in a tangle. It's on my main Facebook Account and I have absolutely no idea how I am meant to have the Ad service unblocked.

Is that it - I run 8 to 10 ads and my account is blocked not questions asked? With absolutely no recourse?

Back to Adwords. Any ideas?
The Man Behind the Curtain
Event delegation for touch events in JavaScript
Hi All,

This is the application which is only 10k of zipped content, completely client side! I've created it as weekend project for 10k appart competetion.
500 - Internal Server Error

Someone needs a socially inept engineer to fix their website.
"It costs money to fulfill these deals. 'Losing money on every sale' is not a way to build a real business."

I've been looking over the Groupon/etc. deals in my area. There's a reason why almost all of the deals are either low marginal cost - gym memberships, classes of various sorts, cruises, and theater and movie tickets - or they are small businesses where the major business cost is rent and employee time, time which is presumably not being currently filled with work - massages, acupuncture, spa trips and other beauty services.
The, uh, the united states doesn't have a central bank.

I don't want to be nitpicky here, but this is a conversation about not turning your brain off. Are you referring to the federal reserve? They don't regulate anything. The SEC? They're in no way similar to a central bank and have been regulating progressively less over the last 70 years. What changed in 2008 that made their regulation more burdensome?

If you're making a statement, it's on you to back it up. Shouting "regulation!" with no insight behind it might work in your social circle but in mine, it's turning your brain off.
I've spent hours trawling Amazon for cheap e-books, and I've come to the conclusion that self-publishing is not a model that produces high-quality books.

Editors provide significant value to me as a reader. Whatever strategy Amazon is using, I certainly hope it includes a competent editing arm.
I'm with you. This article sheds light on a terrible fact of American society today. When "unemployment beats a lousy job" that means that incentives are GROSSLY misaligned. Run that fact through the categorical imperative[1]- you have a country full of people doing nothing, which obviously does not work. I guess this is what happens when you get 99 full weeks of unemployment benefits, when you have a generation of millennials that think they're entitled to everything, and when you have a society that's willing to provide it no matter how much debt it involves.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
This is not about social skills. The ability to function in a crowd of strangers doesn't matter here.

Not being an asshole to paying customers is what matters here. That's not a social skill, that's a matter of maturity and respect.
Or perhaps the software side (FaceTime, iMovie) for the iPad wasn't ready yet, and they didn't want to release a half-baked solution; or it could simply be that the performance of the solution on iPad 1 hardware was unsatisfactory.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._Selden:

He filed for a patent on May 8, 1879. His application included not only the engine but its use in a 4 wheeled car. He then filed a series of amendments to his application which stretched out the legal process resulting in a delay of 16 years before the patent US 549160 was granted on November 5, 1895.
I'd be interested in an article on this topic, please write it!
Amazingly infuriating to watch company after company claim to want to be a player in the mobile/tablet space, and fail continuously against Apple. It's far less that Apple's doing so much right, but everyone else keeps getting it so wrong, even with successful competitors to copy (this isn't revolutionary groundbreaking stuff any more, launching a tablet).

It isn't easy to make a successful tablet. Apple made it look easy, but it really isn't.

Apple came into the tablet market with:

- A core OS that's had over 20 years of work put into it.

- A touch UI layer with five years of development.

- A large developer ecosystem primed and ready to start making software for the new platform.

- A worldwide online software store with a gigantic existing
customer base. (Do not estimate the difficulty of making it possible for developers anywhere in the world to sell software to customers anywhere in the world without forcing anyone to jump through the hoops of international tax law!)

- An online media store selling music, movies, and TV shows.

- A brand new ebook store.

- A worldwide network of physical stores to demo and sell the new devices.

You can't build that overnight. Apple has spent over a decade making smart decisions and putting themselves into the position where they are today.
> the poor nerd why got so frustrated that he used a totally inappropriate tone with clients.

And then canceled the accounts of paying clients, who had done nothing wrong, and deleted all of their information.
I clicked on the link and got a "500 Server Error". I cal that pretty damned rude and socially inept.
500 - Internal Server Error.

Can anyone post up a copy? Seems like a sensational title - would love to see the argument.
In other words, how much fun are you having, and how long is that going to last?

EDIT: A legitimate question, as Gabriel has cited fun as one of the perks of going DDG. How are people reading this as a negative comment/question? It was meant as a prompt to respond to the parent.
How To Steal ATM PINs With a Thermal Camera [Security]
I think he's reading too much into it. I have seen waitresses get moody and piss off customers, MBAs that have had violent disagreements and stomped out or quit on the spot. A Tmobile once hung up on me when I complained loudly about not getting cell service and being stuck in the office unable to call a cab.

There are tons of geeks who are really personable.

Taking one example of an engineer who may have had a bad day because of people being rude/confrontational and extrapolating them to social ineptitude of engineers is missing the forest for the trees.
"but a gigantic 10 year bubble sticking out to the side and then bursting doesn't seem efficient by that definition."

Where was the enormous arbitrage opportunity left behind, and why didn't you (or anybody else) exploit it?

Maybe you can answer that, but if you can't, you're not arguing for "inefficiency", you're still arguing "not good".

You also appear to be conceiving of regulations as something you simply have "more" or "less" of, which is not a useful mental model. What matters about regulations is their content, not their quantity. And what the content of our regulations created was A: mandating that banks make loans they would not have made without them and B: an implicit government backing for those bad loans.

Have you looked at the balance sheets for Fannie & Freddie lately? They're not bleeding a billion here or there.

Also, yes, the credit rating agencies are government creations as well. There are regulations (ahem) that require certain entities to take certain actions based on the word of the rating agencies, causing them to no longer just be groups of people stating their opinion, skewing their own incentives and raising the incentives others have to game them.
Perhaps intellectually honest, but a weak conclusion nonetheless: in my understanding, getting Safari 5 to run on Windows requires porting parts of Apple's huge, complicated Cocoa framework to Windows. That framework is always changing, and so is the browser-- and they both primarily target OS X. With OS X, Windows, Cocoa, and Safari all moving quite a bit between Safari versions, I would be surprised if it didn't become harder to support Windows as the product grows.
He did not. Someone's being lazy here not finding out the full facts.
How GitHub Works: Be Asynchronous
How To Market A StartUp With Social Media
9 Proven Principles for Building Effective Sales Funnels
Marshall Fisher on 'The New Science of Retailing'
Red Hat CEO: Google, Facebook owe it all to Linux, open source | ZDNet
As adults I think it's pretty immature to recognize a fault and then not even attempt to change one's behavior in a positive manner.
Here's the problem with poor social skills: you put a low ceiling over your head. If you can't interact well with your co-workers, managers, and others, you won't get very far in your company.

You are free to be an asshole. But don't complain about the corners you put yourself into because of the choices you made.
Haha, hey guys, us Agile Ruby guys are so much cooler than those stupid people that don't use Apple MacBook Pros and chill at Starbucks.

Sure, they write code and get things done while we talk about how awesome our Ruby code is, but hey, All the cool kids use ruby[1].

-- Send from my iPad

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GpOfwbFRcs
> Most developers have huge, inflated egos.

I think that stereotype is about as likely to be true as the "typical" developer's stereotype of designers and managers being the ones with inflated egos. The "typical" programming company seems to be quite the ego contest, if you listen to what everyone secretly thinks about everyone else!
"Kindness" is a pretty vague term. I think "empathy" might better suit your question.

It's rather difficult for some types of people to learn, especially if they're not exactly wired for that or their cultural or familial background didn't put much emphasis on it.

In the programming profession, it's not particularly useful when you primarily deal with computers (computers just don't care).
When Visitors Print — About That Print Stylesheet
Right now, all you have to do is modify your root element as you wish, and then call the reloadData on the tableView. That will show the new table automatically, although it won't show a nice animation that somebody would expect. Adding this functionality is in my todo list, and should be fairly simple to do.

What you're saying though is not really related to adding/removing cells. I'm not saying you shouldn't create UIViewControllers for specific things, actually its quite the oposite, I think you should have as many controllers as possible, so that they're really small. Funny your example is a login screen, bcse that's the example in my samples on the project. Take a look at the code: it's very simple, and it mostly has to do with the actions that will happen as a result of the form, instead of cell creation: https://github.com/escoz/QuickDialog/blob/master/sample/Logi...

I see this as a much cleaner approach to do exactly the same thing, with the benefit that a lot of the code can be reusable. As a developer, you can spend a lot less time implementing plumbing code to get the cells and fields displayed, and instead focus on how they're used.
Ok, but in practical terms, the thing is I really don't want to work with immature jerks, because then I'm going to be uncomfortable all day, or they're going to end up pissing someone off and there's going to be a big hoopla about it, or a whole mess of other things which is stressing me out just to think about.

I think "talented" just means they've spent a lot with an open terminal, and the side-effect of "abrasiveness" is really that sitting down for a long-time makes you tired and grumpy. So instead of crafting really complicated excuses, just go outside for a bit and stretch or something.
I don't buy it, if they can see through the boilerplate and if they are as smart as you claim then they should have no problems at least avoiding doing and saying things that hurt and block the interaction. The problem often is not lack of social grease but unnecessary remarks.
Not if it's a fault that can't be changed, or at least not easily.

I'm short, too, and I've learned to accept that, just as I've learned to accept the fact that some of my friends have more people posting "happy birthday" on their wall than I do.
Yep, sorry about this, my Linode is buckling under the pressure. I'm increasing caching as I type!
Noritaka Tatehana Shoe Guru
Yeah, that could be confusing - I updated the post.
This concept that in 2008 the market was responding to incentive misalignments created by government regulation.. what regulation? All we did was deregulate from 92 onwards.

This is false. The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in '92 and periodically ratcheted upwards thereafter, forced banks to increase loans to minority groups. It issued guidelines on how lenders should evaluate borrowers for these purposes:

Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. [1]

While not a regulation issue as such, it's also true that attempts to rein in Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae (semi-governmental entities both) were rebuffed by Congress; even when we knew there was potential trouble, the regulators wouldn't allow market concerns to dictate to their beast.

[1] http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/art... (note this link took forever to come up in my browser)
Good engineers' poor personal skill is often a manifestation of traits that allow them to be good engineers in the first place (though not a necessary condition). The same way Steve Jobs and James Cameron are horrible bosses to work for, the same way CEOs often suffer from ADD and bi-polar disorder, and the same way so many amazing Nobel Laureate have autism problems. If you appear ordinary in your personalities and traits, then chances are that you aren't the outstanding leader of your field.
Bogus Arguments of Some Global Warming "Deniers"
Is this what you're referring to?

http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=1329
I'd put the blame on whoever hired the guy and put him out front as the customer support guy, without monitoring him. Some of it's attributable to the support guy, but most of the blame should fall on his bosses.
I agree the tic you mention can be a serious problem. Here's how I dealt with it: no DSL/cable internet connection to my apartment for 6 months. Looking up technical questions on Stackoverflow was done via iPhone 3G connection (to the phone only, no tethering). Email and IM were also done via the phone.

During this time I created iOS apps. When I needed an internet connection (to download open-source code etc) I would go to a cafe, library or friend's place.

This solution is extreme. It certainly won't work for everyone (or most people for that matter). However it worked well for me so I though I'd share it.

Productivity level during this period was high.
> My professional experience involves enough interaction
> with extraordinarily talented engineers who have
> extremely abrasive personalities.

There's a difference between "that guy's kind of a jerk, but I don't think he knows it" and deleting paid accounts and backups over some words on Twitter.

I agree, very talented engineers tend to be abrasive. I know a handful myself. But each and every one of them is capable, at the very least, of not being an intentional jerk and being basically polite and respectful in their dealings.
"Here's the raw data. Firefox beats Chrome and I don't like that result, so let's fudge with the data a little bit."

"Look, now Chrome is beating Firefox. But IE still isn't losing yet, so let's make up some reasoning and fudge some more until we're happy!"

"Ah, that's better, now IE looks like it sucks and my worldview is no longer shattered. Hooray for fudging data to make it say what we want it to!"
Scour.net/Uber founder recounts Ovitz's heavy delivering death threat
It is about social skills. What do you think "maturity and respect" means in the context of interacting with other humans? These are cultural norms, and different people conform to culture in different ways. Place "respectful, mature" American employees in a Japanese zaibatsu, and I think you'll discover respect is more a convention than a universal standard. ;-)

Pedantry aside, that engineer still comes off as a dick in this context.
> The process of editorializing is making changes after the copy has been submitted.

No, it's not.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/editorialize

"1. to set forth one's position or opinion on some subject in, or as if in, an editorial.

2. to inject personal interpretations or opinions into an otherwise factual account."
Would that they were just useless. If they get involved, they will probably make the problem worse - after all, where do you think all the copyright extensions and the DMCA that have made the current copyright mess came from?
This was a crown court case, which is even more concerning. Crown court is used for serious offences which require a punishment of more than six months in prison, so for a case such as this to get from arrest to multi-year crown court sentence in a week is hugely concerning. A case has to first be heard in magistrates' court and handed to crown court, so it will have been in the hands of Chester Crown Court for just a day or two.

But for more minor offences attracting sentences under six months, magistrates' courts have been sitting through the night to "process" literally thousands of small-time, mainly first offender criminals.

Courts have been under great political pressure to serve swift and tough "justice" such that minor offences have attracted fairly lengthy prison sentences. Take the case of the mother of two young children who slept through the Manchester riots, but whose flatmate gave her a pair of stolen shorts from a store the morning after. She got five months in prison, for an offence which (if it even got as far as court) would normally attract a period of unpaid community work and/or a fine. [http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1455638_m...]

I personally can't see how any of these people can get a fair trial when the court is sitting at 3am, it's less than a week since their arrest, and politicians are pressing hard on unpaid magistrates for disproportionate sentences in a vague attempt to give the impression that a government that's fairly weak and lacking in public support is being "tough on crime."

I feel for those who are caught up in this system right now. I am no apologist for criminals, but at the moment, people leading fairly fragile and frugal existences are having even that taken away for political point-scoring.
If I were Michael Dell, I'd shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Twitter Hedge Fund Beat Market In Its First Month
If they'd just generally called for a riot that would be one thing (possibly still illegal), these guys set a particular time and place which is what did them in.

Blackshaw at least (because he actually showed up for his planned riot, the other chap didn't) would go to prison if he did this anywhere in the world. Even in the USA with its extremely strong protections for speech, inviting people to meet at a set place and time for the purpose of rioting is illegal.

Even Sutcliffe-Keenan (who at least was smart enough to delete his event from facebook after he sobered up) basically did the equivalent of calling a bomb-threat.
No, but the plural of datum is. Datum: Buffett has done rather well for himself.

Doesn't show much by itself, but then neither does trotting out an old saw.
Patent Pirates & the Duel with Android
Re. the snark: the OEMs went with microsoft but were disappointed because microsoft had a lousy OS especially as compared to iOS. Microsoft needs to do some work to gain their confidence back.

WP7 looks much more competitive though. I have Focus. Love it.
It's why I'm a little-L libertarian; free markets can and will efficiently price and trade in evil. Slaves were once traded on the open market, after all, and they were probably efficiently priced, but that certainly doesn't make it a good thing. (Just to hit the point again, efficiency has very little to do with "good".)

I think it's possible to regulate effectively, but the problem is that it requires an engineer's approach, not a government's approach. One must be able to adapt, admit one is wrong, and generally regulate at the incentives, instead of being required to stay politically viable and only then regulate, be politically unable to admit error (and via the mechanisms of politics, become insulated from the facts that would show error), and be continuously stuck in the regulation of the effects instead of the incentives that got us there. Oh, and as I alluded to previously, being regulated by people who won't even look at the mechanics of the market squarely because they think they're intrinsically evil because sometimes they make bad things happen (which they definitely do!) isn't a great start to engineering success.

Yes. The market can be evil by human standards, just as gravity feels pretty evil when you're in a crashing plane. But you gotta deal with what really exists, not what you wish existed, and when harnessed properly it's one of the bigger forces for good we've ever discovered.
Quest for Patents Brings New Focus in Tech Deals
What is the best way to start as animation programmer in animation industry?
"all FF3.5 jobs are from a long time ago, before we’d had much time to streamline and errorproof our system."

"This is the same graph as above, with the unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged browsers removed"

What? Why not take out all results from the period when your system was unstable, rather than removing the results that looked 'wrong' to you? Good grief.