skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keith,

OT, but for the second time this year, someone is newly (just as of today) using one of my secondary Gmail accounts as their FB user ID. They don't appear to have access to the Gmail account -- and I've newly killed any concurrent sessions and then changed its password and security Q/A to be sure. So, I don't know how they're accomplishing this. But that Gmail account received the sign up confirmation messages and is now filling up with friend confirmations.

Any chance you could plug me into someone relevant at FB, as this appears to be a recurring problem without a ready explanation? Email to pasbesoin at that gmail place.

P.S. As best I can determine, my systems are clean, and I've no other problems/compromises that are apparent. There appears to be something borked with the Facebook account creation confirmation process.
Evernote Acquires Skitch
That is a sign of bad planning & bad management.

And software engineers' acquiescence to being abused like that ensures that it will continue.
Evernote Acquires Image Sharing App Skitch
Hey tech startups: Winter is coming
The email that gets sent out has a disclaimer above it anyway:

<user email> has set up a Dead Man's Switch to notify you if
they were unreachable, and we haven't seen them in a while,
so we must assume the worst. If you need something, please
email us at support@deadmansswitch.net.
E, no it doesnt. It may "only" be 20c per message, but that is coming AND going. If you expect a reply for each message sent, it takes 50 back and forths to be equal with the unlimited plan.

At&t doesnt ask for you to just bend over, but also says "prepare for it deep". And the government wont do a damned thing because they grease palms on both sides of the aisle.
Man, I can just sense the total clarity in what you're saying! Thanks!

You're right. I've totally lost sight of the actual people whom I can actually help, and if you can't help people, you can't run a business!

I believe that there are people I can help to sell their old stuff. It would make more sense to start there, use a website to sell the stuff, and figure out what my fee might be for both sides.

Thanks again!
I used to just ask someone to keep it down, but now I can do it in a less effective, higher effort way that also makes me a gigantic passive aggressive douchebag too? I'm already printing!
There are plenty of studies that show that people will do things for free that they'll never do for pay, and moreover it's pretty easy to come up with intuitive examples of this in real life. Lots of people would be more than willing to help their buddies move, doing many hours of manual labor for free because that's what friends do, with the only tangible reward being pizza and beer at the end of the day. But if your buddy went on Craigslist and offered the monetary equivalent of that pizza and beer to hire movers, nobody would take him on it, as it would be way below minimum wage; if he tried to offer you that money instead of the pizza, you'd be insulted.
This is the beta rewrite that only launched two days ago or so. The main site (http://www.deadmansswitch.net) has been running since 2006, I think, with no issues.

I took care to write loads of tests for the email sending bit specifically, too, but I wouldn't want people to add their sensitive emails before it's a bit better tested in actual use, hence "beta".
A spinner generated from http://www.ajaxload.info/ is 673 bytes. The minified javascript from this is ~3K. I suppose the trade off is features and flexibility, but I don't find myself needing much out of my ajax spinners.
What's the battery drain like?
I hate to be that guy but this takes up 45% cpu under firefox for a simple spin animation.
I suppose the downvote was from you - thanks
HP Rumored To Spin Off PC Division
My initial reaction to this was shock and disgust and I quickly uninstalled the extension.

However after seeing Joel's actions to address the issue promptly I'm glad to re-install the newest version.

I think, like many users, I really don't (didn't?) mind as long as the details of what's going on behind the scenes in the extension are clearly explained. I would even be happy to pitch in a few affiliate shekels with the developer of the app.

In short, honest disclosure wins out.
I would recommend that everyone encrypts the emails that go on the service, as obviously we can't do it ourselves (we have to actually be able to read them to send them out!).
Pretty disappointed by the assessment by the HN crowd.

I find it interesting how strong cynicism has crept into our social ideology. It's almost like a social darwinian requirement nowadays. You can't be happy about an interesting situation because it is, at some level, linked to some sort of marketing directed towards you. At least that's the perception, thanks to the Internet.

And thus, you are angry. Rawr. Upset that _you_ are the victim of some kind of marketing stunt. Travesty!

So an interesting and unique deed--whether the person was truly deserving because of some arbitrary, subjective parameters placed on the recipient--is thrown the curb because the cynical perception is since it's talked about, it's marketing, and therefore it needs to be discredited.

Bravo, HN community. Bravo! But I don't blame you. I just blame the social media tools on the Internet that half of us are building.
Are you buying BitCoin at Wells Fargo and Chase? Or are you just making a deposit? This isn't as though these banks are carrying a balance of BitCoin as they would foreign currency.
I don't understand. Are you saying that it's "free money" because the discount is really easy to get?
Handing out these cards is a ruder and more offensive practice than the behaviour that the card-carriers seek to control/prevent. It's not going to work on any large scale.
you forgot to @Mortons your comment...
That sounds like a weighted graph, with different factors contributing to the weighting. Kills, terrain type, etc. can all play into that to account for each unit type's strenths and weaknesses plus historical factors such as number of kills. If you want to get clever, you could implement kill weighting while taking into account whether or not information about those kills has been communicated through direct observation, message relaying, sound, and so on. If you get really clever, you could end up with enemies who remove evidence of their kills to maintain the element of surprise, who hunt down last survivors to prevent the information from being communicated, and other emergent behavior.
I know a lot of people who seem to like working long hours. It allows them to think they're getting more done, but I suspect that many of the processes involved could be optimized if they thought about it a bit. For me, I work long hours but it's spread out over the course of a day (so removing breaks/bs it's probably not much more than 40 hours p/wk), and I love what I do, so I do get a lot done (and it feels less like work than other jobs I've had).

For other jobs, like being a big firm lawyer, long hours are kind of baked in: You get paid a salary (a big one), the company you work for bills you out by the hour, person with the highest billables doesn't get fired. That's probably not likely to change, it's not a process problem per se, and I suspect there's plenty other jobs generally like that.
> you'll see we didn't hit the 20%+ numbers until 4 years after the crash and by that measure we still have over a year.

It will be very interesting to follow this over the next year or so and watch how this trends. I'm not at all persuaded that this isn't another Depression; but like such things, it's hard to tell except in retrospect.

Another ongoing employment issue in the USA is the extraordinarily high prison rate. In other countries, most of those inmates would be unemployed rather than incarcerated.
Long hours are not always because of a broken process, or death march deadlines.

Many times when I have worked long hours, it was because I was really into the problem I was trying to solve, and didn't want to quit.
can't wait!:)
Researchers create accelerometer based keylogger with 71.5% accuracy [pdf]
This service has been around since 2006, probably earlier (I can't remember when I first built it), so this might be the same one.
That's a very good idea! I'll see if I can have some basic Twitter integration soon.
Absolutely. There are many mom and pop retailers who are doing many things wrong or inefficiently in this space, who are still surviving, even thriving. It is a target rich environment.
I want to quote on this statement as I am on the same situation:

"How do they prevent Masters students who are on an OPT from creating their own companies and sponsoring a H1B for themselves?"

With this new regulation is it possible if I start my own company with other US Citizen if I am on OPT?
I have seen plenty of developers create websites using a lot of O(n^2) code when O(n log n) was an option. Often its simple questions like should I sort this before I do some manipulation and working though which is faster can literally take a few seconds of thought. That's not to say you need to always write optimized code, just avoid writing dumb code when you know it's going to be a problem ahead of time.
When you're hiring someone who's completed an undergraduate degree in CS you have lots more information

At the CV level:

1) A university which has filtered out bad candidates for you, which university/degree you got is a good quality filter

2) An undergraduate thesis which has been chosen by the individual, both the topic and the complexity are good indicators of the candidate (did they build a website or did they implement a new GC algorithm)

3) Internships (did they spend the summer work at McDs or Google)

4) Open source / spare time projects

At the interview level:

1) An ability to write code, you can directly test if they're capable of taking a problem and turning it into a solution (aka fizzbuzz). This is a very distinct skills and no-ones come up with a good way of predicting ability in it despite numerous attempts.

2) An understanding of abstract data structures, again it's very hard to test if someone can understand concepts like call stacks and hashtables without being able to test those things directly.

That's a hell of a lot more information than you'll have with 18 year olds or even with humanities majors (incidentally I assume you classifying math as a humanity was in error).

Of those firms I know who hire non-CS grads to do programming most of them require some experience with programming (which tends to cover most maths, physics and engineering students). Very very few companies try to hire completely unexperienced programmers.
Ask HN: Logos/licensing for gratis web app?
Our business has some spare bandwidth and time and the boss has an altruistic steak, so we built a little website to help non-profits schedule volunteers for simple events.

Because the motivation behind this website is pretty selfless, there are no ads or fees. The Creative Commons licenses don't seem to apply here, does anyone know of anything similar for "free as in beer" websites that I can stick on (logos/text) to help give it some legitimacy?

For reference, the website is http://www.volunteersignup.org/
The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications
You can just send us an email and prove that you own the account and we'll change your email for you, it's not that big a problem.
Our startup team of 10 has kept pretty strict time logs for the past 3 years. We have an official policy of 40 hour work weeks, but yeah, no developers are able to have that much productive time. Usually we see about 25-30 hours of solid development time, 5 hours of meeting/admin time, and 5 hours of lunches/coffee/break time.
I've run into this exact issue.

However when you've got the managing parties who have degrees, they seek out justification for their expenditure, through self-seeking-self activities, consciously or subconsciously.

Additionally when grad students are willing to work, and have been trained in the shadow of those who are managing, all the gears in the system work as expected.

The issue comes into play when you've got kids like myself. We are ITCHING to learn, fail to see the benefit in 4 years of learning. And most of all:

We know the fastest way to the bleeding edge of research is NOT through the "tried-and-true" channels. It is most efficiently attained through jumping right into the fray and working with said researchers.

THIS is what will create that innovation that we seek. The degree system simply is the easy answer and a way to continue with the entrenched system, by providing slave labor.
I want to eventually integrate Twilio so it can call you and have you enter a PIN to check in, rather than email, or something to that effect (maybe reply to an SMS?).

That's for a bit further ahead, though.
Those sound like outliers and they happen. I think he was getting at chronic long work days.

However, I'd like to make a few points.

regression tests should be baked in from the start, especially easy at a startup starting from fresh.

Features that can be implemented in 48 hours have no business being in the way of your success.

Mission critical bugs are a symptom of a broken process. They happen, but shouldn't be pathological.

Yes, and that culture stinks. Luckily for software developers at this point in time we have MANY options and don't have to be subject to shitty working conditions.
What do long hours often represent?

Enterprise: Incompetent management, lazy co-workers, and spoiled users.

Small Business: Tough competition and limited resources.

Startup: Taking advantage of opportunites that may not pass this way again.
When iOS 5 is released, I plan on keeping my current SMS plan for a month to measure how many text I send to non-iPhone users. I'll then downgrade my plan accordingly. My guess is that I'll end up cutting my plan entirely and just paying per text. The vase majority of the people I text with frequently are iPhone users.

It would be a great move by Apple to open the iMessage protocol so Android and other smart phone OS' could participate in the exchange. Unfortunately, my guess is that this won't happen as "free texts" represent a great benefit for switching to an iPhone and opening that network to other vendors would undercut their advantage.

Predication: ATT/Verizon drastically increases the cost of bandwidth on iPhone plans to make up for the cut. We'll see...
If your company is put out of business by a feature from a competitor you can not copy it within 48 hours, you do not have a business.
Yes, precisely. This only applies if you were forced to work the long hours, as opposed to doing it because you felt like it.
> in a competitive market in a country like the US

With At&t and Verizon controlling 80% of the U.S. mobile market, I'm not so sure it's competitive. Is there only a single provider in Argentina or is it structured differently?

Buenos Aires is definitely one of the most affordable cities I've been to (c. 2003), but I do recall being astonished at the prices for electronics.
For some reason to me this looks like an Yahoo product, whereas the one linked in the OP looks like Google.
If you don't understand that there is a huge difference in a face to face meeting or a web conference or telephone call, you are frankly missing a huge part of the human experience.
The ridiculous state of wireless data (tethering, sms) has finally driven me to get rid of my smartphone. Well done AT&T/Verizon.

I am:

* Porting my number to Google Voice.

* Getting a voip "landline."

* Getting a new number with the cheapest possible wireless plan + dumbphone. Sprint still not evil?

* Routing my calls using Google Voice to the landline/dumbphone, depending on where I am.

Frankly, I'm sick of paying $120/mo and getting fucked around every corner. I dont NEED this you know; the non-phone part of this phone is a convenience, not a necessity.

I'll let the market/regulators figure this out. In the meantime, I'll be fine not checking my email every five minutes and staring at yet another screen when I'm not in the house/office.

If anybody has recommendations re: my plan of action, I'm all ears.
Additionally, I think it's generally better to refrain from commenting on how people spend their time and money, because you certainly don't want them to reciprocate.

Speak for yourself, I'm fine with it. Not only that, but I am tremendously wasteful and unnecessarily luxury-minded at times, so if this guy wants to critique my spending then it might be more likely to be the opening of a fruitful conversation.
Are you sure marketing is the correct approach for your solution, from your light description it sounds like something that might be better suited for direct sales as opposed to marketing.
Maybe I'm jaded, but that doesn't sound very slimy to me.
As Author said this a good stunt because author had many followers. I do not see how this stunt can reflect on the general customer service of the company.

I have worked in situations in where management have tried to please customers by granting them their wish list. This has almost resulted in customer treating that particular favor as his born right.
Not to split hairs, but I think it's interesting: If you drive somewhere to pick up, you pay cost of transportation, while if they deliver, they'd pay that cost. Therefore, the delivery service might raise prices making consumers believe that driving to get it yourself is a better deal. Kind of like the guys willing to drive 300 miles to save $500 on buying a car, I find people often underestimate the opportunity/transaction costs of purchases made in person.
Understanding Groupon Means Understanding ACSOI
100% on Chromium 13
Breed 3-D Printable Objects, No Technical Know-How Needed
Being able to do well by you probably made his day. That you were so flexible - "next plane anywhere" - also meant he had few constraints and was able problem-solve instead of just picking from set solutions.

And, perhaps most importantly, you treated him like a human being. People in various service positions are often treated like proxies; it's understandable, most people are busy, and they just want some item or information. But you leveled with him and talked to him like an actual person, and he responded in kind. That goes a long way.
It had a lot to do with my choosing to put myself in an uncomfortable position, and choosing to learn the necessary skills. It wasn't all "someone willing to teach me"; a lot of it was me being willing to figure stuff out.

If you do need someone to teach you, that suggests you have a significant condition -- in which case you very likely qualify for help from a specialist. For example, if you have an Autism spectrum disorder, you can find resources in the US via http://www.autismspeaks.org/community/fsdb/search.php .

It's easy to make excuses, but it's better to make progress.
Same here. Any time you are working a difficult problem, especially one that is difficult because of its complexity, you have to keep a lot of context in your head. In that situation, keep going as long as you can and are still making progress. This is the same problem, but in a more extreme context, as the "getting back on track" problem caused by interruptions that was discussed in Peopleware, and frequently since.
Quit hint: it's too easy to make a DOS by quickly drawing hundreds of lines in the same spot. It doesn't take more than two minutes and regular writing or drawing is too slow and ends up erased before finished.

Maybe limit the number of lines an user can draw during a certain time?
At the very, very least, you could've just marked the results you were adding in as "Awesome-Screenshot added links" or something similar.

Explicitly matching the font, styling, and layout of the google results is a pretty strong effort to disguise them as google's own.
1% on chrome
...because what he really means is "use good taste," but the Tao that can be blogged about is not the true Tao.
Mix gevent and zeromq and you're even closer to Erlang.
I think that having an in-house system was partly driven by the need to fully utilize Google's proprietary/confidential computational infrastructure. My understanding is that every big company is different, and leveraging your CPUs to their fullest extent means there isn't a one-size-fits-all model.

The only way you could move towards a single model is if all the companies open-sourced their data centers like Facebook did, so you'd at least have a good idea of which infrastructures you need to run on.

DISCLAIMER: I work as an intern at Google in engtools (the group that manages the linked article), but have no idea about the design decisions that went into the build system.
Google Analyzes Four Years of Web-Based Malware
what qualifies as an improvement? links? the ocassional post? a pic of gramdma? who gets to decide? you? or should we have a government agency for that?

what if they want it for just email? what if they had plans for it but life happened and they didn't get around to it?

if it wasn't a .com would there be all this stink?

like i said below a domain is not a physical asset. it's 0's and 1's. it's vapor. the value of that domain exists in peoples minds. it is not like land at all.
I felt just like the OP did when I was a child. I was teased and picked on pretty mercilessly growing up, and then we moved to a completely new and different area (ie NYC to a town of 3,000).

In the new town, I wasn't picked on, but was kind of ignored. I had a thick NYC accent and people had no idea what I was saying. I felt insecure and was always afraid to speak up... I'm terrible with remembering names, so that made it worse. Then in 7th grade, I literally woke up one morning and said to myself "This needs to stop." So I made it a point to engage with people, do things that were funny (of course as a 7th grader, "funny" is questionable in most cases!)

The whole point is not to actually be funny, it's to get some confidence. You "practice" on low-risk people like cashiers. if you get the girl at the gas station to smile, you brightened someone's day. If you sound like an idiot, you try again another time.

Later in high school, I took a drama elective where I learned to be comfortable speaking in a public setting. In college, I ended up in a retail commissioned sales job where I had to speak to a few hundred people a day.

I guess my theory is that you have to act. Don't deliberate in your head. Talk. The worst thing that can happen is you get rejected.
New Round of Funding Expected to Give Rovio $1.2 Billion Valuation
That's "UX in an Agile Environment" in action!
HTC’s patent troubles: Android alert
The best of Linux FUD
What if a competitor just launched a feature that will put you out of business if you don't implement the same thing in 48 hours?

Even if we stretched the 48 hours to 48 days, I am pretty sure this has never happened.
I see the same problem in Opera too, except it's even worse (the animation lags, and it hogs a whole CPU core).

Explorer is better than Firefox and Opera, but still pretty high CPU usage.

The only browser of the ones I tested that it seems to be relatively fine in is Chrome.
I have a virign mobile plan here in the US: $25/month

no contract
300 minutes
unlimited texts
5GB/month of data(it gets slower but not stopped or overcharge after that)

I use my phone mostly to coordinate hanging out, any long conversations happen at home where I have wifi and calls can be routed through gchat or skype on a laptop.

I'm not sure why its not more popular. Oh and I can tether.

NOTE: just checked and it looks like the plan is advertised as $35/mo now
I'm surprised C++ isn't in the lead. I've had more WTF moments reading C++ than any other language.
This is a very nice feature, but I think I still prefer http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/ This page also has the ability to see where percipitation is currently. I find that this helps with my bike commute in Portland frequently.
Faster horses - why Customer Development is hard