skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask PG: Please blacklist daringfireball.net
First and foremost, I'm a fan of John Gruber's writing and read DaringFireball regularly. That being said, having each and every one of his essays linked from HN smacks of karma-whoring. If you're into the kinds of things he writes about then you already know about DF.

The comment threads that result from DF submissions rarely lack in flaming or snark. The discussions often devolve into ad hominem attacks on Gruber, and don't seem to include anything insightful or edifying.

This is my respectful request to add daringfireball.net to the HN blacklist. Please consider it.
Net Responsibilities
From my understanding the level that you supposedly reach at 10,000 hours is virtuoso.
This is good but it's lacking something. I've done the Clifton Strengthsfinder (by the Gallop people) and there are many many strengths people have that are not related to getting things done. SO instead of hiring someone with one specific strength, whether it's getting stuff done or being responsible -- I recommend hiring people who have strengths you desperately need and also by that same caveat, make sure you push them in areas where they are strong, not in areas where they are weak.
I respectfully submit that each and every DF post isn't worth front-page attention on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019147

Edit: The link is a request for PG to blacklist DF. I honestly don't think the submissions add to the overall quality of HN.
Def unified queue. They are violating a golden rule. not giving the people what they want. They've lost the Value in Value Added Service.

As of today there stock is down 40% from when this whole debacle started.
You can't simultaneously have an invite system and a huge marketing push. It's like pretending that you are classy and telling a lot of people that they are not part of the crowd you consider good enough to make it through the front door.

You have one chance to launch a service like this for a large audience. If you want to do an invite only private beta to get the kinks out then you would probably have to do that under a different name. Once you associate the google brand with it people expect it to work and expect it to work at scale.

Anything less is blowing your first impression. 90 days to wait to try a new service? People are simply not going to wait that long, they might have tried it in the first week but three months is a relatively long period to feel left out, that's a negative first impression. It takes a lot of work to undo a negative first impression.

As for google+ not going to be killed, they did it to wave and plenty of other products that did not attract enough users to be good enough for google, why would google+ be different, especially with a purposefully slowed down launch like this? That only increases the chance.
My plan is Lambda on the left shoulder, Pi on the right. Lambda for programming and right-brain, Pi for math and left-brain. I feel that they are simple, elegant, and have a lot of meaning. My only worry is that they won't age well, but I have no knowledge of tattoos.

I made a deal with myself and my wife that I will get both tattoos once I have made a living working for myself (either a successful startup exit or my consulting taking off).
Waterfield tablet cases
I tried to star that issue, but Google Code doesn't support Google Apps accounts, either.
Samsung Dualview TL225 Digital Camera? Sure to Impress
"So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren't up for that, well they aren't going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be."

So very true. I'm in this situation at my current job: I was hired as a dev, was told to fix organisational things by senior management and am now meeting resistance and roadblocks for various reasons. I'm a dev, and I'm not an asshole, and I also have no authority to steamroll people. At first I felt empowered but lately I've just felt bogged down. It's a sucky feeling.
Wikipedia takes first steps towards "the site configuration you can edit"
This sounds just very similar to the route Apple has chosen (though their trackpad tech + latest OSX blurs the lines a bit).

If iOS apps could exist as say, dashboard widgets, there would be no difference (Apple probably thinks this is a silly and sales-reducing idea).
Wireframing?
Anyone ever use http://keynotekungfu.com/?
Demystifying Design
Is Printing a Gun the Same as Buying a Gun?
> "The fact is that their entire business revolves around collecting personal data, often without being clear to the user about the details."

BS. They sell advertising.
No I'm definitely not trolling, but I get that a lot :-)

I've seen several papers and presentations about web-based hashing schemes, where the idea is that you only have to download data once to a city and then people could download using a hash from a local cache server and avoid trips over the backbone:

http://www8.org/w8-papers/2a-webserver/caching/paper2.html

For example, if they did this with netflix, you'd be downloading from your neighbors instead of a server somewhere, and the load on your service provider would drop by orders of magnitude.

Also, since so little traffic would have to go over the whole web, they could focus more on last mile speed increases and we could all have 100 megabit lines and cheaper plans, getting charged mostly for our backbone traffic, the way long distance used to be charged.
Where I live (Bucharest) building costs are already low compared to infrastructure costs. In order to develop a piece of land you could build a decent house for a reasonable price (not $1000, but maybe $10,000). The problem is that bringing water, sewage, electricity and optionally natural gas and internet makes a joke of this number.

I've been fantasizing about a startup which would buy cheap, agricultural land and build an infrastructure core into it, not necessarily connected to the grid. Probably more expensive over time, but might be cheaper in the beginning.
The design was done in house at Signal by Drew Myler. That boy can make a pile of horse shit look sexy.
Back in June Netflix announced that they would be phasing out access to the DVD queue/movies in the API by the end of this year: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/06/upcoming-changes-to-open...

Would be interesting to see if they have any plans to add that back, but otherwise, this type of solution sounds like it might not be possible.
Not to mention that a lot of there growth was due to the fact that they had a fiercely loyal cust base that proselytized endlessly for them.

I remember getting an email from them years ago that said in essence, "We've upgraded our systems and are now more efficient. because of this your plan will be reduced by xyz." Better service and cheaper, i thought they had me for life...until recently.
Indeed. In my 10+ years of working at various companies I've found that company size doesn't really indicate how well they do process. The good thing about smaller companies though is they're a lot more agile, i.e. able to improve process, than the larger ones. Don't bet on huge companies either. My plan now is to formulate the most incisive interview questions I can if I go for other jobs, to try and get as good a feel as I can for somewhere's culture and process. It's not easy though as sometimes a company's interviewers are as full of BS as the recruiters selling you to them. :/
I agree. Also, keep in mind that the other point of the Lorem Ipsum is that it is nonsense. It is more or less gibberish even if you can read Latin, so when you look at it, you see the text for how it looks, not for its content. With something like this, you are more likely to actually read the text, and thus not notice the spacing, positioning, etc.
I think people upvote it for the conversation. People want to discuss Gruber, and since he doesn't have comments on his blog, they come to HN.
"Common sense is not so common"! This is incomparable to the actual post, it highlights the positive points and addresses some (though not all) FUDs.

Similar to HP, Netflix made the huge mistake of announcing big changes in one big lump, creating a chaotic reaction. They probably should have waited a little to announce the split.

Keeping the Netflix name for both companies would have been a great idea (see the two Motorola companies), as commented here it was done this way most probably because they will sell the DVD business and use that money to invest in streaming.
I think this is going to change. I was at an AT&T store this morning and saw one of the sales rep taking a quizz with questions about WP7 and Mango.
If all the sales reps go through it, maybe it'll change the vision they have and what they tell customers.
DromED is probably the least friendly map making program I've ever used. It made Worldcraft (now Hammer Editor) look amazing in comparison. :P

The sound propagation in Thief based on the various room types was amazing! It's a shame that modern games don't put as much focus on sound. You can do some cool stuff with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJwUVCXH-gM
Or hipster ipsum: http://hipsteripsum.me/

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So that's why I've been getting some random linkedin invites from people I don't remember or people I e-mailed once! Good to know I can ignore them.
Even worse is when an entire company's strategy revolves around risk aversion. Risk management is one thing, but avoiding any possible loss in any area can make for a pretty soul crushing job experience for people who like innovation and change.
Somebody really needs to write a Bayesian takedown of all these A/B testing articles. A/B testing is a Bayesian decision problem. There's really no other way to think about it. Determining sample size and frequentist confidence intervals are only relevant insofar as they approximate Bayesian concepts.

The issue is the proper tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. What drives the decision is outstanding uncertainty conditional on the data observed (not conditional on the null hypothesis of zero effect and some non-sequential iid sampling process), the discount rate (which is totally absent in this article), and the reward structure (which is not a Type I and Type II error).

The absurdity of the frequentist approach is clear from the admonition not to look at the results of the tests too often.
I've starred it fine with my google apps account. You do have to create a 'code' account first though IIRC. Similar to how you have to create a 'Blogger' account despite them using a Google Account.
If you squint hard enough, sure.

But that's not the point of dividing the space along these lines.

Think of gunpowder, the steam and then internal combusion engines, electric distribution and lightbulbs, the automobile, heavier than air flight at all, helicopters.

Sure, each of those solved actual pain that people had (otherwise they'd have not caught on as successful products).

But the difference is that products in the first category solve problems that customers aren't complaining about, often because there's no frame of reference to allow them to complain about it. Their bow and arrows, oxen, gas lights, carriages, ships and hot air balloons are working just fine, maybe they just need a small tweak or two. (I even put TiVo/ReplayTV into the first category, even though we had VCRs at the time.)
The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing – 31 Steps to a Profitable Blog
Lots of Opportunities to Dive into Travel APIs
I really wanted to like G+ too, but I think most news.yc users have migrated their email in one forum or another to Google Apps... muchly because it was the perfect thing for us bleeding edge users who fell in love with Gmail to be able to use a properly branded address for our mail.
Well, there's nothing wrong with copying something that works. Sometimes others get things right first and the best move is to follow. Innovation at the expense of functionality is stupid.
How about just crippling the car in front of the dealership and guaranteeing the sale?
Researchers turn wastewater into “inexhaustible” source of hydrogen
Self-employed individuals also qualify as "small businesses", so I'm not sure if that statistic reflects existing businesses dropping health coverage or new, often 1-person businesses popping into existence without setting up health coverage.
I completely concur. I am beginning to suspect another release flop ala Windows Me and Windows Vista... if Microsoft default to Metro on traditional workstations. I say 'if' because they're still a bit vague on their roadmap. There's lots of hype in the air now, but once the dust begins to settle I think more people will come to this realization.

EDIT: Changed Windows 2000 to Windows Me. Windows 2000 was generally considered to be a successful release.
This reminds me of Fillerama: http://chrisvalleskey.com/fillerama/

(filler text from a couple different shows/movies)
The Hemp Network - A Third Party Review of The Hemp Network
Again I don't know for sure but I fear that predicting the position of Snoopy over a period of more than some months is impossible. There's not only the gravitational interaction, but also the orientation dependent radiation pressure, tidal effects and gravity gradient torque. I would say the configuration space isn't just huge, it's probably all of the dynamically allowed space.

I think the distance does matter. You have to observe an object ten times more distant a hundred times longer to receive the same amount of photons. If conservation laws dictate that it's still in the Earth-Moon system, that could mean significantly shorter observation times.
I did. It does quite well. But I am no longer involved in it day-to-day.
Is it actually 0%, though? Do you make a point of asking everyone you know if they plan on buying a Windows phone? Everyone?
Microsoft profiting from Linux by extorting companies who use it is just plain wrong. But then, show me a patent system that wouldn't permit this kind of behaviour.

Software patents need to go. Microsoft is a prime example of why.
Thanks! I didn't know about PDFCrop. Now I can wrestle those ridiculous margins out of academic papers.
That sounds a lot like most warehouse jobs. I had a warehouse job while in college for a while and it was either really hot or cold. Sometimes it was busy, sometimes it wasn't. One thing remained constant - pretty much everyone complained about their job and how much they hated working there, yet nobody ever seemed to leave.
Vimeo Is Launching a Music Store Tomorrow - Report
Submitted earlier as a single-page link

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3017515
Then let's talk about Toyota and their black boxes that you can't get into:

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/02/16/toyotas-black-box-cou...
Windows 8, Metro UI, and why most people choose Windows PCs
I didn't have a bad experience with G+. I didn't have a uniquely good experience either, though. My only friends over there are techie types. For my circles, after the initial chatter, the postings have decreased significantly, and coming to HN is better than the technology news posted there.

Many people talk about how quickly G+ achieved N million users, but the import part is the engagement from users. I don't think G+ has achieved anything like that yet. Many people start using it due to the integration with Gmail but then just stop and go back to FB and Twitter.
It wasn't botched. Everything is by design. Qwikster or whatever they are calling, is a direct competitor to Netflix, in the same way that Blockbuster was a direct competitor to Netflix. It's the last generation tech. They want to kill it.

They want to kill it fast because streaming customers are more profitable. They want you to switch from physical media to streaming NOW.

Yes, yes, I know you can't get that esoteric or new release by streaming. There's a ton of stuff that never made it to DVD that is still on VHS or Beta. I don't see you crying over that.

Netflix knows this. They are accelerating the switch and they're doing that by killing their DVD division in the most horrid way possible. That game rental thing is a bone meant to mislead you and is absolutely pointless. That part of the rental industry is being killed off by Steam. They know that too.
Tell HN: Unfuddle (svn hosting) has bad password security
I was poking at Unfuddle (http://unfuddle.com) and forgot my password. I reset it, and in the email that was sent to me was a randomly generated password along with my username for their site, which is entirely different than my email address.

So, I logged back in and changed the password manually. I then signed out and did the lost password request again. Another email was sent, this time containing an entirely different randomly generated password.

This is almost as bad as Unfuddle storing my password in plaintext (which they may be doing anyway). Under no circumstances should your service ever just generate a new password and send it in the email.

There's are a few ways this is really bad.

1) The password reset request completely wipes out your old password.

2) I can reset the password of anyone who I know has an account on Unfuddle, simply by knowing their email address.

3) If I gain access to their email address, I now have 1-click access to their source code repo hosted at Unfuddle.

4) I can easily perform a denial of service request against an account(s) by writing a script that periodically submits the reset link for a given email address. While I may not be able to get access to your account, I make it hard for you to get access to it also.

If you or your team use Unfuddle, I highly recommend that you stop and look for alternative hosting.
Well, everyone except Google Apps users.
13 great examples of Box2d Flash World Construction Kit + Alchemy Port
They're only dead now because HP chose to kill them. I know there are many people still trying to get these devices but they can't, and I seriously doubt that most of these are looking to install Gingerbread on their TouchPads, given the fact that it was never designed for scaling to tablets (and Honeycomb is no great shakes in that area either).
I think light sensitivity can also play a role in this. I find direct sunlight uncomfortable, especially in summer and winter (sun reflecting off the snow). As soon as evening begins my brain fires into gear. I think other Asperger's types might struggle w this too, without even realizing it.

A friend recently recommended using sunglasses more, which I'm going to try out. Makes sense

Also +1 for Flux, it's great.
"I apologize! It's all my fault! And here's some other bad stuff, that's also my fault! What, you aren't happy I apologized?"
Video: How to Build Killer Apps for 4G/LTE Networks
I'm pretty sure they aren't going to throw that away, are you nuts? They had a big ol' contest a few years back to come up with a new recommendation algo.

Further to what I assume is your point, we have a few years of practice in linking accounts, so a particular user's historical data can easily be integrated with this new corporate architecture.

EDIT: I'm using the royal "we" to refer to technological techniques for linking accounts across disparate websites. I don't work for Netflix.
Win a Relaxation Package from Eucerin
Apologies if my tone set up the wrong impression - I think the environment, manager, motivations etc. are all crucial, and some people are very productive in some settings but not others.

That said, I also think there are many people who just aren't that productive, and screening for people who are great at GSD is crucial for a startup.
Ah, ok. We both have a fundamental difference in terms of code editing preferences then. I hate vim with a passion, but that is also because I'm a very visual user. To each their own and what works best then :)
Former Amazonian, the constant use of contractors, even in cases where the jobs are anything but contract, is one of the many things that eventually made me decide to look for something else.

I had the privilege there of working with some insanely dedicated people, smart, hard-working, and good, who were kept on near-permanent contractor status, and then unceremoniously dumped when the legal limits for contract lengths came up.

And these weren't warehouse workers, these were HR folks, recruiters, technicians, and the such - people in positions that are neither seasonal nor temporary.

Beyond the moral/compassion concerns of this, it wreaked havoc with the team to have a good hire on board for most of a year, and suddenly have him/her replaced with someone unknown who needed even more retraining. It also placed a constant load on the people involved, since you're essentially always re-hiring the same position, over and over, with the requisite interviews and costs. Suffice to say it caused a lot of disruption with the team, and I have to question the wisdom of dragging down the productivity of a dozen people to save money on one.

I can't say I know the official (or unofficial) reasoning for this, though of course the usual suspects of paying out benefits comes to mind. Also, certain headcount metrics may exclude contractors, which might be a way for management to look like they're keeping headcount down while still getting the hands they actually need. Either way, it soured my faith in the company some, and with a bunch of other factors led me to depart from the company.
The Spaceship Company
Just FWIW, I used Google+ for 2 weeks or so. Then I got bored and went back to Facebook. I think 90 days is certainly enough time to lose any early momentum you had.
The forerunners of Facebook: an ode to the BBS
I think that is a great opportunity for some creative hacker to create an awesome startup.
Apple and Ideo vets create social to-do app orchestra
Goosh, the unofficial Google shell

http://goosh.org/
One of the people in the article says he's worked in other warehouse jobs before, and was never treated like a piece of crap (his words) until he worked at the Amazon warehouse. So there is a claim that this warehouse in particular is worse than others.
i think you hit the button. there are a large group of people who are only aware of G+ in the periphery. But as people migrate to G+ and android phones become more prevalent, people will go with "integrated ease" it def has enough features so far to pique the layman's interest. not to mention as lil kids get on the internet do they want to be on their "parent's social site" or go to the hip new one?
The problem with using "Netflix Classic" is it wouldn't allow them to sell it in 12 months as a distinct brand so they can get the dropping subscriber numbers off their books.
Have you tried talking to the guys at Unfuddle about this issue? Everytime I find something wrong with a website or a service I use I first try to discuss it with them before going public about it. They might really love your comment and fix this problem very quickly if their developer can do it.
I did this a couple years back -- thus far my only tattoo. It sums up a large portion of my life in one beautiful symbol. http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg129/scaled.php?tn=0&server=...
Facebook to launch profile redesign
It is great what you can do with box2d, i want to know if some has experience with this?