skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know it's harsh, but that's a spot I'm not inclined to worry much about. Moderating on the Internet can be hard work, and stressful, and is frequently thankless, and almost always unpaid. They generally deserve a lot more slack than they get.

I see a lot of unreasonable demands placed on moderators, and one of them is expecting unpaid people to sink their spare time into going out of the way to be supportive of presumptuous efforts to drum up free publicity on someone else's dime. Even if the person in question might respond well to being called out, it's unlikely that the moderators would come to see them as a spammer if there wasn't some sort of presumptuous effort to drum up free publicity going on.
> A garbage collector for instance creates a fake reality, one in which you deal with memory as if it is unlimited and extremely fast.

Actually no, GC does not suggest that memory is unlimited let alone imply anything about its speed. Systems with GC will happily punish anyone who makes those assumptions, just like any other memory management scheme.

GC merely says that a given address may become available for reuse after the last identifiable reference goes away.
I disagree; on most Linux UIs I've seen, screen real estate is at a premium because of over-generous borders, oversized icons, oversized buttons, oversized listbox item sizes, all generally looking like a 96dpi UI rendered on a 75dpi device (I've often wondered if X Window historical baggage and ancient bitmap font sizes had something to do with it). Everything is about 33% oversized.

(I'm a fan of the relative information density on Windows. It's really noticeable in file explorer views in details mode; Windows Explorer packs in a lot of information with very thin borders so the text on each line stays large (though the icon for the file is only 16x16), while the nearest equivalent on pretty much any Linux shell file explorer I've used has large inter-item borders that force the detail text to be tiny; and it still doesn't get in as many items as Windows.)
Getting the back trace is not the hard part. When you get tens of thousands or millions of them, they become useless very quickly. The real work is in de-duplicating, coalescing, and analyzing the backtraces to tell you the insights you need, including the exact line number of code that caused the crash. Pro tip: It's usually not line 0 of the backtrace :)
Bystander effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)—since no-one else is helping, you don't want to, and since there are all these other people here, maybe they should be the ones to help. Maybe one of them is better trained to help than you.

Inconvenience—trivial sure, but can easily be rationalised as "who wants to be late to work in this climate?"

And personally I'd be worried about offering to help a random, confused, nervous looking person with blood on them. I would like to think I would help, but it would worry me.
Ask HN: What factors influence your hiring decisions?
Hackers,

I am a solitary programmer at my current job and have been given the chance to hire a second programmer to assist me.

I want a second programmer, because I need an extra set of hands with the codebase and because it will significantly improve the work environment overall. Currently I have to wear all the hats (Development, QA, Operations) and have been edging closer to my burnout point. I believe a second coder will help relieve some of the pressure and also help re-engage me in the work at hand.

Now, to the dilemma. I have a friend that is being under utilized (working helpdesk, with a degree in CS) at his current job and wants to make the jump into programming. His skills are not as sharp as mine are, but he's a known quantity, I know that I'd enjoy working with him, and I believe he will have a strong drive to learn, given a chance. The other alternative is to do a job search or a recruiter and see what we get. Would you prefer someone that you know you will be able to work with, even if their skills are not as advanced? Or would you seek an applicant and hire solely on programming skills?

Thanks!
Air Force Drone Virus Spread By Pilots Playing “Mafia Wars?”
I'd check out ebay, especially the "Listed as lots" option.
Except the FSF and open source movement has trained everyone to expect/demand that all software is free all the time.
Video is missing in Step 4. Looks good in latest Firefox and IE9.

Good luck!
Learn Ruby on Rails online from the University of Texas & Gowalla
I know there's a lot involved with changing but I recommend not necessarily a change of the brand DuckDuckGo but the domain name. It really ... seriously and I am not exaggerating, it's DuckDuckGo.com is unbearably uncomfortable to type. Now that you have funding, considering getting DDG.com or duckgg.com or something.. just not the full name.

FYI. Google.com is really easy to type.

Update: Thanks for pointing out ddg.gg
Measuring Radiation Doses in Terms of Bananas
Sometimes you are the person who has to help. What the others do is their business. Keep being you.

Some time ago I came across a dying man in the street and ended up doing CPR on him. There were also plenty of other people who could have helped.

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/you-never-think-youll-have-to-do...
Sorry to break it to you, but some are con artists and people have been burned too many times.

1) I helped a blind guy once. It was a ruse to try to get money out of me. He could have found his way easily.

2) For several months, there was this young guy who seemed to have a horribly twisted body begging for change daily. One day we saw him walking down the street perfectly normal. There was never anything wrong with him.

It's not lack of compassion at all. It's being sick of being taken for a sucker. The evil isn't in the people wary of helping. It's in those who faked the need for help.

EDITED to add: The above is not academic. I live in NYC, where these cons flourish.
> Screen real estate isn't at the premium they think it is.

It is on netbooks and tablets perhaps...

My beef with it currently is that it doesn't work well with focus-follows-mouse. If menu is on the top, and you want to access it, you mouse will eventually bring other apps to the forefront before it reaches the top, so you end up with a menu of a different application than what you intended.

But, that is just me with my hand-hacked preferences that have lingered around since 4 or 5 version ago. I bet new users don't have a way to enable focus-follows-mouse...
I find myself willing to spend more time/thought crafting a response to an article which I think will be read by more people. For example, I'm just pounding this out stream-of-consciousness style since I know it will only be read by those involved in this subthread, if that. Why not do the right thing and focus on thoughtful, well-written comments for their own sake? Because I have the karma carrot dangling in front of me. I feel like gamification has in this case removed my motivation to do what is most beneficial to the site.
Well done for stopping to help.
I've purchased a few themes as well, however every time I've gone to do it I usually contact the author via email first and offer to buy the theme directly from him for 30-40% off. I save money, they get more money, we all win.
Dream Chaser space plane soon to be dropped from the skies
The Dream Chaser, a reusable space plane currently under development by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), is to undergo high altitude drop tests in 2012 following a 25.6 million US dollar boost from NASA to top-off the 80 million US dollar contract awarded earlier this year. But it won't be chasing just any dream. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle Program this year, the very tangible goal is to deliver a low-cost, safe alternative for transporting astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station and other low Earth orbit destinations.
3 More Money-Spinners For Your Established WordPress Blog
Who Really Robbed the Middle Class? Maybe It Was Health Care
The pan-greens have been pushing ever closer towards independence for as long as I can remember. Obviously, they don't want a war, though. I think that's one of the major reasons why the name changes, proposals for changing the flag and the referendum issue carry such weight.

The referendum is an especially key piece of the strategy. They've been pushing for at least the past 7 years for public referendum on topics that are politically benign, at least on the surface. However, once there is a precedent of a referendum, the possibility exists for private citizens to start collecting the necessary signatures to put independence (or far more likely, baby steps towards independence) to a national vote. This sort of action would be very difficult politically for the PRC to punish.

Thus far, the Guomindang (aka KMT) has defeated referendum attempts by campaigning for a boycott of the referendum. Chen put two issues forward for referendum in 2004 (coinciding with the presidential election he narrowly won against a united Soong-KMT ticket after surviving a gunshot on the eve of the election). Voters agreed with both referendum questions by margins of over 90%, but the result was invalidated due to the final turnout being less than 50%.

To answer your question, I'd say that ethnic divisions between the Min and the mainlanders have died down. The issue is politics more than ethnicity. Traditionally, Hakkas have voted pan-blue, but that's much less consistent than it was before. At this point it's more of a division between the business people, those with ties to China or HK and the more local people.
Love what Gabriel's doing with DDG.

Assuming Apple maintains its policy of only allowing the Big 3 (Google, Bing, Yahoo) as default search engines in iOS, anyone know a way to manually add custom search engines?

I know DDG has an app, but it's not an ideal solution for everyday use.
Righthaven Pleading For Mercy
In many cases, this is a matter of priority. Most people either aren't interested or don't want to subject themselves potentially dangerous.

Some people might be more inclined to question your insane abuse of helium balloons while we are in the midst of a helium crisis. Why didn't anyone mention that to you? Probably because in most cases, advice like that is discarded or met with argument. Most people would rather not say anything and perhaps shake their heads than to even bring it up.

You also admit that you had to get close to notice the scrape of blood. If nobody else got that close, he probably wouldn't have appeared to be in any danger and hence, likely did not need help.

There is (what I assume to be) a homeless man in the neighborhood I'm currently in who every day visits a reflective sheet-glass window and poses, as if he is checking out his figure or how he looks for a substantial portion of the day (e.g., more than an hour) while he smokes cigarettes.

Perhaps he needs _help_ in the vague sense, but he isn't in any imminent danger that I can tell, and as I'm just passing through, I am not in a position to help him in any permanent way, nor am I inclined to contribute financially to his nicotine habit.
utter failure in mobile safari
An index makes the query fast - is that all you know?
The Turing Apology: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon-brown.html

I try not to be 'proud' of things I've done because I do believe that pride comes before a fall, but every time I see a newspaper article mention that apology I'm reminded that I did that.
Just offering a show of support for this Philadelphia startup. Congrats to Gabe and team.
Well, there's http://ddg.gg/
Fake Netflix malware for Android discovered in the wild
Thriving on oxygen.
I've used Winre in the past, but there were some other great resources I didn't know about in this presentation.
Yeow. That's a pretty harsh criticism. What alternatives were they in favor of?
Because everybody else was also thinking "Why isn't anyone helping this poor guy?".

The better question is of course "why aren't I helping this guy". Of course you did ask that as well, but most people don't. It's not in their nature.
https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

I think part of the reason emacs has better plugins is that it has real support for talking to external processes, where Vim has a bunch of ugly hacks that barely work.

Emacs users have embraced the "do everything in Emacs" philosophy whereas Vim users tend to use a specific tool for a specific job.
Congratulations Gabriel. DDG is invaluable for those of us who do not want our searches logged into a database, who do not want search results sorted by whether or not an acquaintance has "liked" a page. I wear my DDG t-shirt out and have been asked about it a couple of times. I wear it happily.
I'm curious to find out if what they're trying to isolate is "discipline." I'm not talking about the colloquial definition of discipline but rather exercising the ability to do what's best even if it's not convenient.

I'm talking about the foresight of the intellect over the mind and body. Often times, when we rationalize things or activities just become habits, the mind and body passively agree. I'd argue that's not actually practicing discipline anymore since there's nothing within ourselves (mind & body) to fight.
Try http://ddg.gg
I guess I don't have a real problem with the way you implement your behavior, I think my difficulty is that this is not like "Send to Coventry", but something actually much harsher.

In Dennehy's case, I would be annoyed with him as a blogwhore, but I wouldn't have classified him as a spammer as reddit did and defended.

Reddit and others defend it as "it works", that's an end justifies the means argument and mainly speaks to the woes of our mad skillz, not to the virtue of the method.

And since you do speak to the person first, there is no way I can have a problem with that.
What’s all that other stuff in my medicine?
So what's the plan for making money with DDG?
Do yourself a favor and read this post again one year after you get out of school.
Thomas Edison would've loved this: the energy of tomorrow looks like a kite
No, I'm saying I can't do the tour because it doesn't fit in my browser. Most potential users would just go away at that point. Instead of just going away, I mentioned it here so someone can know.
Box.net giving away 50 gigs to iOS users
Tributes to Steve Jobs from Around the Web
The most important thing to do with any article is to Google the name of the reporter.

Pui Wing Tam's only MO is writing poorly conceived hit pieces on Valley companies and personalities.

Here she is literally going through Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's garbage:
http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2006/11/17/valleywag-takes-...

Here she is beating up on every CEO who's not Zuckerberg or Chad Hurley (title tag: "Struggling CEOs"):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119741476977621971.html

And here she is saying "Venture Capitalists head for the door" -- in 2009, no less!:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124416376153487535.html

The woman is just a hack who writes the same article over and over again.
> sudo apt-get install unity-2d

You may have to add this PPA first:
http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/ppa/unity_2d?dist=oneiric

Then choose Unity 2D in the window manager options from the login manager.
Another data point confirms: static at 0.8% since '08
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-200807-201110
This is a great thread here.

I think there are a lot of people, even institutions like where I work, that are looking hard at storage that isn't block based storage from some huge vendor or storage that ends up being $5000+/TB (looking at you Isilon). Ok, maybe it's just me all alone here at my work place. :)

Even running RAID6 or RAID10 over 3TB SAS drives on some largish enclosures (ie. 36,45,60 drives per 4U) will be very cost effective even just using md, lvm, and xfs.

Or even better, use ZFS if possible. Not a huge fan of Solaris, but there is OpenIndiana, or FreeBSD has ZFS.

And object storage such as openstack swift is really gaining momentum and will likely replace most storage systems for large amounts of data over the next couple/5 years. There are single orgs that have put out 5.5 petabytes of openstack swift storage! Right now!
What a wonderful tribute to a pioneer in our field.
Obvious to you. Amazing to others. - by Derek Sivers
As always comments and suggestions appreciated :) I hope to do another class but split out the topics into 15 minute segments, so you could just find a video on Ruby Arrays, or Has and Belongs to Many Associations without having to scan through an hour long video. Thoughts?
Opera 12 alpha now available with hardware acceleration and WebGL
Don’t boot out tomorrow’s Nobels
> Its not the license itself, its the journey you have to go through to get a license, that provides the education. Like a driver's license.

What do you think that a driver's license means?

I think that it means that the person may have some skill in operating a motor vehicle and knows some of the relevant laws. I don't think that it implies that said person is less likely to drive a get-away car for bank robbery, is less likely to steal a car, is less likely to speed.

A law degree supposedly says that someone has a level of skill and knowledge. It says nothing about what they do.

Are you suggesting a journalist license that is "skill and knowledge"? If so, how does it address the problems that you're worried about?

If not, how will it work? Be precise because your examples in other fields don't work that way.

And no, it isn't enough to state your goals. Means produce ends.
IOS 5 Tethered Jailbreak Already Possible on iPhone 4
What's their obsession with blonde people not texting?
I tried switching to DDG, but found that I was really missing Google's date range filter. Especially for troubleshooting searches where you can get results that are relevant to the search terms but have obsolete old content, I almost always hit "past year" or even "past month". I know about the sort by date feature in DDG, but I really want date as a filter on the whole result set, with a sort by relevance within the filtered results.
I certainly cannot speak for Mr. Ritchie, but when someone says it "can't be done" to me, it provides me with even more incentive to prove them wrong. If nobody was bothering him with "it can't be done," maybe it would have never been done?
This HN meme is getting a little tired.
I didn't think it was appropriate to turn this into a revenue opportunity so I didn't offer that option. In fact, in the blog article, I intentionally took out the standard "tagxedo.com" attribution text in the image so this is a pure tribute instead of an advertisement.

However, I was thinking of making a different kind of tribute, which is to allow you to turn your own C/C++/C#/ObjC code into a word cloud artwork in the shape of the blue "C", and make a T-shirt/mug/bag out of it (via Zazzle). Of course you can already do that if you know how to use Tagxedo, but I presume most people don't. Stay tuned if you are interested.
Lets say i was one time incredibly stupid, it did cost me 50€ and since then i never trusted anyone on the street.

We have taxes for social care, that is what i pay for not being bothered on the street. If someone asks me to call the abulance or the police i do it, but don't believe anything else.

From Germany.
Die, VPN: We're all "telecommuters" now&mdash;and IT must adjust
From page 76 (on macros) of K&R: "The expressions are evaluated twice; this is bad if they involve side effects like increment operators or input and output."
This seems like a lot of effort for something that will be unnecessary and unused in a month. I mean, it's cool, but they already have infrastructure for "demoing" remote apps, they could have demo remote instances with websocketed/vnc (noVNC, very cool).
Yes, this is the method that Bank of America used to create its Android app until a few months ago.
The problem with selling direct is, if people don't like your themes, they'll go searching elsewhere and you get nothing. If you're in a larger site, if they go elsewhere and you've sent them to the site with your affiliate code, you get a chance of a sale after all, even if it is less than you'd make off your own theme.

Whether that's worth the 30% you're giving away, I don't know. I do know it means the designer/author hasn't had to program (or pay to have programmed) any payment gateway, doesn't have to deal with refunds, isn't a higher target for being hacked as they're dealing with e-commerce, etc etc.

Basically, if you have a small number of themes and don't like programming, my gut feeling is you're better off on a large-ish site who is getting traffic independently from your efforts. If you can make a ton of good themes and handle all the programming and marketing, being on your own starts to make more sense.
Social Coupons: A new technique for increasing referrals & conversions.
It's autohiding for me, and I don't think I did anything to it. Though, it might just be a bug, I've run into a handful of near showstoppers in the last few days.

edit: Though, now that I think about it, when I first installed, I got the sidebar not autohiding with fullscreen apps, so that it blocked the left inch of whatever was up. Annoying as hell.
Rather sneaky, that.
The Octopus Strategy to Investing
Historical Glimpse of KIRAT DEWAS RAI -2
Does Chrome have full hardware acceleration yet?
Illustrated AI class notes
His complaint is very valid in my opinion. Imagine Granny Smith being sent to that page and opening it on her 1024x768 notebook.
>Sadly, it still does not work with 2 monitors.

I've been using it with two monitors both at home and at work since launch, with zero configuration.

The second issue is certainly annoying, but 'it does not work with two monitors' is a pretty strong claim.
Apple studied this back in the 1980s. This is why the menubar is at the top of the screen. What they found was, people were able to, much more quickly and accurately, pick the menu item they wanted, because they didn't have to be as precise in their targeting when the menu was at the top of the screen than on the window.

If you've grown up with poor copies of the Mac UI (like Windows) then you're used to targeting menu items on a window, and you don't realize that you're slower at it.

But you are.

It's a lot like the one button mouse issue. People think its worse when they've always had to suffer with 2 button mice.
Congratulations! And welcome to you and DDG to the USV family.
Interesting question in interview
I was reading this link http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c_family_interview.htm and the question was asked in that interview. The answers made me chuckle. What are your opinions on the answers and the question?

Q: Is there a programming language that is the best choice for all (or nearly all) application development? If yes, which language is it, and what makes it best? If not, what would it take to create such a language?

Ritchie: No, this is silly.

Stroustrup: No. People differ too much for that and their applications differ too much. The notion of a perfect and almost perfect language is the dream of immature programmers and marketeers. Naturally, every language designer tries both to strengthen his language to better serve its core community and to broaden its appeal, but being everything to everybody is not a reasonable ideal. There are genuine design choices and tradeoffs that must be made.

Gosling: I think the one that has the best broad coverage is Java, but I'm a really biased sample. If you're doing things that are heavily into string pattern-matching, Perl can be pretty nice. I guess actually those are the ones I use much at all these days. Most of the older languages are completely subsumed; the reasons for using some of them are more historical than anything else.
Paid search results? Would it really be incongruent with what DDG is doing?
Couple of years ago after seeing his work, I was so impressed I wanted to hire him to help me with a site I was building. He quoted something way out of my ballpark. Now I know why. He's really good.