skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alcohol education will have achieved its ultimate goal not when young people in this country are afraid of alcohol and avoid it because it is toxic and dangerous, but when they are frankly just a little bit bored by it.

Perfect. Also, I find the use of the term "anti-social" in this article to be hilarious. Apparently it means something very different in the UK than here in the US.
Do Web check-ins increase sharing? A talk with Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg
Whether Facebook can get away with this depends on (i) what the data is and (ii) applicable European legal precedent, if any..

There may not be any legal precedent with regards to this type of situation since laws (in the US and abroad) are notoriously slow to adapt to new technologies, so this case may be the first test.

From a moral standpoint, it clearly seems wrong for Facebook to claim that its users' personal information is its intellectual property. Users can protest Facebook's stance through account closings, etc. But its not likely that enough users will care to force Facebook to change.
Defective diamonds could be quantum computing's best friend
Can we hack it to end every sentence with ", Master" ?
Thanks! This is even easier than asking on stack overflow!
This is incredibly annoying: http://i.imgur.com/ZrrH3.png

It distracts me, AND as a bonus feature, offers absolutely no information that I care about.
Tell HN: the site is very slow for high-traffic threads
I don't know if it's individual throttling, etc.

However, people should hack on the source / it should become more open so that some of these scalability problems go away. Just saying. You should create a platform. ;-)
Exactly. Obvious example would be whatever data facebook uses to determine what's interesting and to put in your newsfeed. If it's just profile views, that's your data, but if I were building a site running at facebook scale, I'd be performing the final calculation using some intermediate data massaged by some totally top zecret algorithms.
Very inspirational .. especially from someone who is already in his 30's and running a profitable startup.
The link placement is still a step backwards when there are actual files uploaded, e.g. binary builds. And I would argue that the new ZIP button doesn't make it easier for newcomers to find those ZIP builds. I wish there was a way to make downloads really obvious for those projects that rely on them, this is still something I miss from Google Code.
Perfect timing: Kik is back on Blackberry
AWS was pirate operation

That's amazing to me. I thought such things were never done in software anymore because: why not leave the company and do the same thing in your own startup? Same hard work, high risk, etc, but with giant upside. Was it because of something wrong with Seattle's startup culture?
I was able to successfully log on from a linux machine (1.73GHz quad-core i7 with 8G of RAM, using chrome). Unfortunately, the interface could well be the slowest web interface that I have ever seen.
Bill Gates Leaps Over Chair
>>a list of people's heights isn't going to follow the distribution.

Try centimeters.
I'm getting some pretty consistent feedback on tweaks needed in UI now.

I think modifying the radius should be possible, I'm using mongodb for storage and I think it has some nice geospatial capabilities.

Thanks for the feedback.
Seeing that he categorizes income as "bound" vs "free" tells me far more about him than his name would. And that is just one of many such details.
A lot of people have Macs. Plus Steve said that FaceTime was going to be an open standard, but that never happened. If they thought the network effect was a problem, they sure haven't tried solving it.
Maria Popova.
This looks cool but the link to the project is broken :|
Thanks ngsayjoe. One small point - I'm actually now in my 40's, but your point remains. The site was profitable enough to risk it and go full time when I was 35.
Good idea, that'd definately be handy. I'll add it to the list.
Thanks.
I want to add my "thank you too". I used wave as a personal wiki of sorts. I added my own development journals and ideas, kept track of projects. I used it mostly as a one man team but the fact that I could share and collaborate with partners far away was the big plus. I was really sad that it was killed and now I am running wave in a box in my computer, not the same thing but it still good.
> They don't know this because they don't have the instruments to detect the other bodies (such as the astral or etheric).

If there is no way to demonstrate the objective reality of those things, they are by definition in the realm of mysticism.

> You go into one room to project and in another room someone writes a number on a paper and tapes it against the wall. You quickly project into the room, read the number, come back to your body and go see if you were right.

If anybody on earth could do that, they'd qualify for James Randi's million dollar prize: http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html

Why don't take the challenge?
No VC Cash for You, Startup Founders
Run Android apps on Windows
uhm.... I'm in rural ND and most people under 30 don't use their phone to talk. Text and Facebook seem to be the main phone uses. It is my understanding that due to the cost of voice, most people in Africa use SMS and not voice.
How is the kindle fire a success? It just launched...
Thanks. Wish I'd seen that typo before my ability to edit went away.
It's not remotely surprising that Microsoft would favor its own product. What is surprising (at least to me) is that they would make efforts to APPEAR impartial.
One of the best things I did when I was really burned out from IT was get a job at a Starbucks. The money wasnt great compared to an IT salary, but I had fun, learned a lot about process management, adaption, leadership and communication. I worked that job for a year and I only left when I was offered a job by a customer (that I saw everyday) and it was in academia, not IT. I am happier than I have ever been.
I'm intrigued by the idea, because I'm not extremely good at programming and this can probably be a fairly good mockup tool that can be shown to the real hackers instead of drawings on a napkin. Then again, there are apps for that already.

But at the same time, I'm horrified that this is "Frontpage for programming" and that we'll start seeing glittery, neon-colored apps on the web, smartphones and shivers even Linux! Software design in the hands of commoners is pretty scary stuff.
I agree. It's a nice site and a lovely visualization, but it's not the right way to solve the problem. A PID controller or something similar like a Kalman filter is the way to go.

The Anybots robots are a great example of a PID filter in action.
When I was there, new hires got 24" monitors. Not too bad - but hilariously enough the old hands had to live with 17-19" old Dells (though they got two of them, as if that really helps that much).

I just don't get it. Monitors are items that survives multiple tech generations, have huge demonstrable benefits (moreso than speedy laptops or pretty offices), and don't even cost much at all! (certainly less than SSDs or high-end MacBook Pros!)
Yes javascript is already everywhere, but you know what is all over the place too? Android phones. If dart delivers on speed, and android supports it, there will be a very compelling reason for developers to use it.
It works based on geofencing, which allows you to specify and label regions.
I really like it. As a github newbie I think the new nav bar layout is much cleaner, especially the commits/branches section. Well done.
"My friends make fun of me for making a retarded life decision" ... You need to find some new friends. If these so called friends can't find it in themselves to show a little empathy for you, they are not your friends.

ps. Not working for the man is always a good decision. You will never starve working for the man, but you will also never get ahead. It sounds like you've got a crisis of faith. You need to ask yourself what you really want in life. If you can't stomach life without a safety net, then by all means, go back to a full-time job.
Getting a girlfriend is easier said that done — and probably should be — when you're broke and depressed. Dating works so much better when you're at ease with yourself.
First off, I love the idea.

Secondly, I can't sign up for the weekly email. It says: Cannot POST /new
I know someone at work who bought 3 iPhones so he could faceTime with his kids. It's definitely a growing option.
I completely get that now, and I retract my comments. I'm sorry if I cast any undue aspersions.
Apple’s iOS 5 Update Now Available For iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch
Maybe I'm not running enough apps, but my iPhone 4 has always seemed pretty damn fast getting to 'ready to take picture'.

That said, I'm really looking forward to the additional speed in the 4S and Siri.
The applications would be open until Oct. 27th. I would recommend all of you to apply. $40k without any equity and a chance to live in a beautiful country like Chile should not be missed. Plus, you get to meet entrepreneurs from all over the world.
The no button option will rock for my Mom, no button - less problems.
And to tie this back into the financial domain, company stock prices are also not open-ended but a bounded domain. Below $1 gets you delisted from the exchanges; above $500 or so starts to impact the stock's liquidity.* Companies make stock splits to stay within that range intentionally, departing from Benford's law. And it follows that any other numbers tied to the stock price - say the value of 100,000 options - will also depart from Benford's law. The effect doesn't necessarily imply chicanery or wrongdoing. (It does imply manipulation but that is not necessarily evil, and there may be many layers of indirection between the manipulation and observed numbers)

*(of course some companies like Berkshire Hathaway are famously okay with that.)
I was in your situation, but at age 30. I took a couple of years off with plenty of savings and had no idea how unhireable I would be afterwards. (I got my degree in math in the days when no specific education in CS was required at all to easily get a job). I was depressed too, and felt less free, and didn't feel like doing a single thing, exactly as you describe.

Here's what I did: I took a crappy job working full time at a coffee shop. I started on a CS degree through night school, and treated it like fighting for dear life. I did ten times more work on school projects than required and literally got a hundred percent on everything. I practiced programming and learned about it like my life depended on it.

I put out ads looking for any programming work, that ten dollars an hour would be fantastic. I got a job doing PHP for 14 dollars an hour eventually, this was after finishing a year of courses. They quickly gave me a few raises and after two years of that I was employable again - once I get my foot in a door I know I am going to be one of the best employees any given place has ever seen - it's the selling part that is hard. I got a job at a much more prestigious place, and am now firmly back on the road toward the salary range that experienced developers get these days.

(Now I'm starting to fight the malaise again that comes with moving up Maslow's pyramid, in particular being romantically rejected by every woman I've met in two years, but that's a different story. I think in your situation you can't feel the urgency of it enough.)
The source article at http://gutjahr.biz/blog/2011/09/face-off/ (in German) says (via Google translate):

For example, information on the recently discussed ...
"likes" that Facebook assigns to individuals, but also
very delicate process information such as their biometric
data collected by the activated facial recognition this
year from Facebook.

It doesn't seem to be the original source, either. My guess is that the biometric facial recognition data was requested, and that Facebook is trying to block that request.
The first thing that this post, and the comments, make me think is just how difficult it is to run a big company.
IOS 5 reviewed: Notifications, iMessages, and iCloud, oh my
Downloading already here in the UK :)
At AWS Summit back in June they said that all (US only?) pages are now rendered via servers on AWS. The databases are still big-iron type boxes due to them being on, IIRC, Oracle and I/O being what it is on EC2.
It wasn't that he set his permissions properly, it was that he posted using the wrong account (corporate account vs. personal account).
Your advice is excellent and thank you for saying it, but the way you phrased it — "WTF? … you are just plain stupid" — is really harsh. Reality is already harsh enough on its own. Please take some time to consider the person on the other end of the Internet.
TaskRabbit snags Hotwire co-founder Eric Grosse as new CEO
I think that in general, when you’re in a toxic work environment, you either realize it’s toxic or you don’t. If you don’t realize it’s toxic, then you are likely to assume that anything the boss blames on you really is your own fault, so you try to be a good team player, which is generally inconsistent with telling the boss to fuck off. If you do realize it’s toxic, then you will be looking for another job—but you don’t want to do anything that would get you fired before you can quit with dignity.
The title confused me as well. Can you revise it to something like the "Backend Service Provider StackMob Comes To Android" title which the linked article used?
This is pretty much an instance of the good old "zero, one, infinity" rule.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zero-One-Infinity-Rule.htm...
You need to start listening to some better UK bands.
What is the build number of this release? Can anyone confirm it is the same as the GM from october 4th?
Looks great, only suggestion so far is to:

hyperlink any links in the tweets.
The Meta System - probably the best-designed soundsystem you've ever seen
University of California teachers’ union aims to block online classes
First of all dude, not to be an ageist, but you are 20. You are going to have so many jobs in your life, you're JUST getting started. In 10 years when you are doing something entirely different you are going to be proud of how crazy you were. Take it in stride, you'll find work, keep looking. In the mean time be a bartender or something. That is what I'd do if I couldn't find any development work.
Cancer screenings are a gamble
That's not really Apple's style though.
Focus, and other startup broscience
Huh. I had it in my head that the Google Cloud storage was significantly cheaper than S3. Looking at the pricing here, it's pretty much the same.

Was there an announcement for a similar Google product recently, or am I just a victim of wishful thinking?
To me, the problem isn't that authentication depends on cookies and JS. The problem is that the system does the exact opposite of what it should.

An authentication system should allow access if and only only if the client presents valid credentials in the expected manner (e.g. reporting a cryptographic cookie back with the HTTP request). In other words, the auth system should use the presence of valid credentials as the criterion for access.

Instead, this system used the absence of something as the criterion. Imagine if a secure building did this. Everyone arrives at the security checkpoint, and if the guards don't recognize you, they give you a badge that says "I'm not allowed in." Anyone who's not wearing the badge is allowed in. That's what this website was doing.

Moral of the story: Your authentication system can depend on cookies, JavaScript, and any other technology being enabled on the client side as a precondition for access. If you do that, and someone has disabled the technology, they're locked out, and there's no security breach--just a frustrated user. But your system should never trust the absence of some marker as proof that the client is allowed in.
IOS 5 now available for download
Survey: Java losing popularity among developers
The Mac's desktop speech recognizer, which is so old most Mac users don't even know exists, even tells knock-knock jokes (in response to "tell me a joke" -- the script it follows is in ~/Library/Speech/Speakable Items). And this has been a feature of Mac OS since the pre-OSX days.
Red Gate software are sending a DBA into space. Could be you
Mac OS X 10.7.2: iCloud, Safari 5.1.1 and more, on Software Update
When I ran the speed check on one of my sites, almost all the low priority problems listed referred to google ad urls.

That's proper irony.
This should be fixed now. I broke it when I submitted to HN as I had to change the URL (I submitted jobstractor earlier in the year when it was a something a bit different)
Online social games company post-mortem
Here's something I wish I knew when I was 20.

Life is a dance. Sometimes we lead. Sometimes life leads.

When I was a kid, I thought either you were in charge or you were a putz. After all, all of my heroes were in complete charge of their life. Isn't that the goal? Don't people always say "You're either telling your own story or helping somebody else tell theirs?"

But then as I got older I realized that the important thing in this dance is to figure out whether you are supposed to be listening and adapting or leading. Out of work and need money? You should be listening. Where are the jobs? How do I need to adapt to be able to eat? Have some free time in the evenings? Then you should be leading. What can I do right now to help my own prospects in five years' time?

A lot of times we just give up and take what we get. We spend our free time plugged into a video game or the web. That's wrong. But it's just as wrong to think that you should be in charge all of the time, working hard, living large, and controlling your own destiny. That's another kind of giving up -- picturing some fantasy life that will never exist and then beating ourselves up because we don't live there.

It ain't that easy. The dream is important. It's all there is. But you gotta know how to dream. There is a difference between dreaming and fantasy.

So you got kicked in the teeth. Welcome to the big leagues, kid! Get good enough at getting kicked in the teeth and you might end up being a decent person one day.

Having said that, you also might be depressed. If so, you should find somebody to talk to. Thinking of killing yourself is not very healthy. The thing isn't that life doesn't suck. It's that life sucks and we learn to live in it and love it anyway. Sometimes that can be tough to do. Talking about it helps. A lot.
You're right, I don't think I chose my words carefully. Maybe I meant programming idioms? At any rate, what I meant was things like map(len, mylist) vs [len(x) for x in mylist] or the readability of a relatively complex list comprehension vs a loop.
The new nav bar seems out of place with the rest of the design. This might just be me, since I've used GitHub for a few years now, and I'll get used to it but maybe this is leading to more changes in the future. I, for one, welcome our new cleaner design overlords.
Congrats Clint - do you have any employees now helping you out?
That was actually written by Steve Hayden (http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...)
There's a lot of difference between a therapist and a psychiatrist. There's even more difference between getting paid on commission and being wooed by lobbyists. Having doctors influenced by lobbyists is almost certainly a negative overall, but it's nowhere close to having doctors literally paid on commission for writing prescriptions.
Fuck Monsanto, and by association, fuck Cloudant.

"We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership."

Thrilled? I guess money is thrilling.

"The data & reporting interfaces will be used across Monsanto and should be instrumental in the making of key business decisions."

Key business decisions like which small farmer to sue into oblivion? Or what third world nation's crops to take financially hostage? Thrilling work guys. Really.
I'm more in the "moodle for the iPhone" camp, but I see your way too. I am still doing the research.
Rails Recipes: Rails 3 Edition now in beta
It's pretty hard to get the (now increased) recommended allowance for vitamin D (600 IUs ... especially as an indoor-programmer-type). You need 10 glasses of milk to get that without supplementing.
http://www.docgurley.com/2008/05/18/the-greatest-drug-in-the...
http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/nutrition_articles.asp?i...
Virgin Atlantic to use waste gases to fuel planes
Guidelines for Securing Open Source Software
Hard Choices: Do Libraries Really Destroy Books?
Looks like it's the same as GM - 9A334 (source: http://ios.e-lite.org/)
Siri: Apple's trojan horse
I don't think such details are not mutually exclusive with the generally useful information.
iOS 5 Browser Performance Changes
Mark Suster on not being a hater
I agree with you completely that awareness is useful. The trouble is, at least where I live, I wager that a large number of people who would otherwise be sympathetic are put off because of some minor hypocrisies. Bands of (relatively) well-to-do college students and people who apparently have the luxury of skipping work and school do not paint a picture of a struggling middle class. That they are raging against the machine over a 3G connection is probably damaging as well.

Now, you and I might both see that these are the only people who can protest precisely because working stiffs are busy trying to make ends meet, but they don't elicit a lot of sympathy from people who are also just trying to get where they need to go without much fuss.

Incidentally, good luck with your plans! Where are you located?
Dude, it will take you a year to three years before you get things back in order. Half a year is not nearly enough time.

I've been twenty too, some time ago. Don't worry, you've got a lot of life ahead of you. You can do anything.
The relationship between wealth, happiness and inequality
Download stalled... :(
Internal blog posts written by Yegge earlier didn't leak afaik. Incendiary technical posts written by people in positions of power didn't leak. I mean, not even hints of them, let alone the full text. Maybe the engineering culture has dramatically changed in the last few months, but it used to be the case that full copying of internal technical discussions to external forums would have been totally unthinkable.
Ask HN: Review my landing page
Hey guys I'm building out a landing page for some in-app iOS forum software and would appreciate any feedback you can give! Thanks.

http://twothreeform.com/forum_beta
> MacRuby will be eligible for iOS apps soon, as the GC problem is solved

If I didn't miss any recent developments, that was a misunderstanding from when ARC was leaked as iOS5 having "GC", then it turned out that it was actually compiler-supported reference counting. Which means that MacRuby is still stuck on iOS and doomed on OS X, with some people expecting the GC to be deprecated sooner or later.

With the current App Store rules, I don't see why Matz' C Ruby with 'dl' disabled wouldn't be eligible.
Hi Abbas, I checked about a week before the submission and our application is already sumibtted for YC mentorship. I might have accidently applied for startup school and not remember :)

Thanks,
Given they have similar situations with finder, multitasking, folders, deleting apps etc. I suspect they're just going to rely on people remembering the feature's there.
If you're going to go the iterations route, instead of rolling your own, use PBKDF-2 which is documented in RFC-2898 and RFC-6070.
Congratulations to Cloudant for signing a big deal. Why work with a company as...ethically ambiguous as Monsanto? I would love to hear how your team decided to accept this deal, and I hope more than dollar signs crossed your minds.

Personally, I would start a startup (if I ever have the guts) for freedom. How could dealing with Monsanto differ from wearing golden handcuffs?