skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you bothered if someone starts a post with "I completely agree with you."?

If so, I think that's strange. Why would that bother you? They're giving you an idea of what their comment will be like up front to help you understand it more easily.

If not, they why does it bother you when they say essentially the same thing with four fewer words?

It's totally fine to be annoyed by a comment that doesn't add anything or is immature, but that's what you should be annoyed by, not the fact that they happened to use a particular phrase that concisely states a summary of their opinion.
Is there anything preventing some random developer from releasing a native iOS GMail app? I basically just want an "Archive" button and for it to always be in-sync with the cloud. Does anything like this exist?
I think you can "rent" a puppy/dog for an hour at your nearest animal shelter. I think the people who work there would be more than happy if you walk a puppy/dog with your kids and give it some love for an hour.
Everyone in the US (see the techcrunch title) != everyone
Speedup Ruby 1.9.3 on Windows a lot
I have flown nearly 100 times this year so far and have not been through one once. I make it a practice to make it as uncomfortable for the screener as the process is for me. I am rude and comply only to the bare minimum. If I have time, I make a point to call the supervisor over and complain about the process. If I am pulled aside and made to wait longer than 15-20 seconds for the patdown, I loudly complain. What they're doing is illegal (unreasonable search and seizure) and I feel no obligation to make that job easier. On the contrary, every single person who flies should be doing their damnedest to make this process excruciating for the TSA.
Ditto. I tried calling Apple to ask them to move my account over to a US account, but they said it can't be done, then proceeded to tell me matter-of-factly that the best solution is to abandon my Canadian account (along with all my purchases), start a new US account, and then re-buy all of my apps again (and all this while implying that it was somehow my fault for moving to a different country).

Apple is like the bitchy beauty queen who gets a pass due to her looks. Everything's peaches-and-cream until you hit a bump. Then the claws come out.

Personally, I prefer Betty to Veronica.
Tried to upload music and received this hilarious message: http://yfrog.com/ocygcp

After trying a 2nd time through the non-wizard interface, it turns out all 72 of my songs on this machine are iTunes DRM'd. Humph.
Ask HN: Blog entries about your YC interview experience.
About a year ago, I started accumulating a list of blog entries about the Y Combinator interview experience:

http://ycuniverse.com/interviewees.php

I'd like to believe that my collection of blog entries have served as useful information for somebody.

Are there any blog entries I've missed? If so, please post the url so I can add them to the list.

Thanks.
The Democratization of the API
Did you find any links?
I definitely agree. We have been using fluent migrator (https://github.com/schambers/fluentmigrator) for our .net based projects at work for database migrations and versioning
They get nasty. You cannot underestimate the complexity that collective bargaining agreements bring.

New York City, as an example, has something like 15,000 variations for payroll categories. Plus garnishments, domestic relations orders, etc.

How do you compute the extra boot benefit for a fireman who has worked more than 526 hours in a 13 month period?

Or how to you compute the salary of a garbageman who is paid by the ton of garbage hauled, instead of the hour. Except for when they haul ashes, in which case the tonnage is adjusted, or on Sundays, where they get overtime as well. What are the business rules for an ash hauling garbage guy earning overtime on Sunday, which is also a holiday?

The NYC consolidated payroll system, "CityTime"... has cost over $700M since 1996 to build. (That included some serious fraud.) Fraud aside, Accenture was raping & pillaging too -- charging $400/hr for college grad coders.
Just announced http://bumb.ly in another post today – think of it as a more elegant, fast quickmeme - powered by HTML5, Canvas, and FileReader to do some cool photo editing on the client-side.
Another example of a payroll system implementation gone awry: SAIC's CityTime in NYC [1]. $700mm+ now ...

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/nyregion/bloomberg-adminis...
Indeed, Panos's remarks are spot-on here. Reputation and quality management on small amounts of work are really only the smallest problem in crowd computing, and have been artificially created by the lack of simple reputation systems in broken markets like Turk.

This is one reason why next-generation crowd platforms like our own, MobileWorks, (and for that matter, why users of crowd platforms) should make use of a high-quality workforce as a starting point, rather than as their ultimate goal.

Once you assume that you have a high-quality workforce, a host of other problems become more relevant and valuable.

- How can we make it simple for a user to specify their tasks in a way that crowd workers can understand?
- How can we use crowds to solve arbitrary tasks, rather than a limited range of tasks?
- How can we give back responses in real time?

One of the reasons that MobileWorks (www.mobileworks.com) has been so effective as an alternative to Mechanical Turk is that it goes beyond reputation to address these problems.
I know it may seem that way on the surface, but the proponents of this bill are larger than you think.

The MPAA represents companies with a combined market cap of $250 billion dollars. That's small enough for us to beat, but Pfizer ($150bn market cap) and Microsoft ($220bn market cap) are also major proponents. All together, there's a LOT of muscle behind this act, lobbyists alone aren't going to cut it.
Wouldn't it be great if you had a conversation with someone who backed up their assertions instead of expecting belief?
I've seen dead comments show up only 1/3 of the way down the list, so there's definitely something else at play.
FBI investigates Santa Clara University hack which changed exam grades
Also "I was going to say this... but this guy beat me to it."
The other thing.
But then you have to go to the animal shelter. What about a startup that brings the shelter puppy to you for a fee, which is then split with the shelter? Win Win Win?
The wikipedia article contains a lot of detailed info on how well he did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Craig_%28Jeopardy!_contes...
Have a look at http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/money - which companies / interest are supporting - who received money from them - who's opposing - who the opposing groups sponsored etc
Unless the RIAA wins, in which case 100 years from now will be the dark ages.
Four ways to keep players in love with your game
It's a very silly thing to be bothered by. It's just that once you noticed it, you saw it everywhere, even though it wasn't happening any more or less than before. And now that you've posted this, it will bother you even more when you see it, because "they ignored my post dammmit."

In my experience, when I start getting annoyed by anonymous users on web sites, that's more a reflection on my current state than anything else.
Here's my bash pre-commit hook to check for PHP syntax errors and accidentally committed merge conflicts: https://github.com/dave1010/scripts/blob/master/git-hooks/pr...
Got it.

I wrote a couple of things in med school, some of which are still in use.

There are a lot of big players in the medical marketplace.

I would think a very specific niche app of some kind would be most successfull - as in "Helping a diabetic patient report and review their glucose levels with their physician" versus "an all purpose portal where patients can review all their information with their doctors." - you an probably get great ideas from your GF as she goes through.

BTW, I would offer this unsolicited advice: have some patience with her for the next 10 years or so. Medical school can be a major stressor. She may not have time to tell you how important you are to her...
It's better to use grammatically correct and conventionally accepted statements.

Beginning a response with "I agree" or "Good point" reads pleasantly, without the nails-on-chalkboard effect of the internet-nerd-herd-mind irritating-and-head-scratching-to-regular-people nerd-convention of "This".

Stupid nerds. They seem to like to demonstrate how "non-conforming" they are, but reading sites like this, or worse, reddit, shows how readily they imitate one big nerd group.
With a bold new redesign, AIM could finally be cool again (seriously)
Lcd Tv Deals - Black Friday LCD TV
It's a shorter way to write "I completely agree with you, and I want people to know it, but I have nothing left to add". Language and expression changes, especially in the world of Twitter and social media. People want to be part of a group and express agreement.
It's nothing more than a nod, expressed verbally. I'm not annoyed by people who nod in agreement.
Ditch your superdrive and get a Zalman ZM-VE200.

http://www.zalman.com/eng/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=431

I bought one a few months ago, then got rid of all my CD drives except for one big 5.25" internal CD/DVD drive with USB adaptor that I take out of the closet whenever I get a new CD that I may need in future. I convert the CD to an ISO, load the ISO onto the Zalman, then put the drive and CD in the closet.
Why are you relying on a bunch of random people from the internet to vet factual accuracy? I'm cool with them finding me interesting things, but that's about all I'd trust them for.

For example: I use yelp to see when stores are open/closed and if a coffee shop has wifi. I could care less about the reviews, unless one of them happens to position a specific deal I'd be interested in.
Provided that it is used as a preamble to signify agreement, and that then this agreement is expanded upon by the author, I do not see any problem with it.

It's kind of like explicitly using the "this->" or "this." formation in C++ or Java or what have you: sure, it may seem needlessly verbose, but it usually doesn't present a major issue when parsing code and can often help make sure you are in the right area when thinking about things.

"This." is useful, provided that it isn't all that's said.
How do you vet factual accuracy?
I opt out, every time. But to be fair, I'm not someone who looks like your stereotypical threat so I am sure there are those who'd just like to keep their head down, or have kids and just want to get on with their flight.
In the case of the physical CD example, yes. But in the case of iTunes, there is no physical medium to be the key.

Personally, I can't see this company working unless they can hook into iTune's servers and de-authorize the Apple account from having that song, and I don't foresee that happening at any point.
I consider it significantly less pernicious than "fanboy" and all its bastardizations and misspellings. I always feel a little warm and fuzzy inside when someone starts a reply to one of my comments with "This.".

I think its use indicates someone who maybe spends more time arguing on the internet than writing code or starting businesses or whatever other incredibly-value-generating things the Platonic Form of Hacker spends his or her time doing. At steady state, most of the content in any online community is going to come from that sort of person. Not much use pretending that ain't what's starting to happen now.
Thanks for the congrats. I'd been spending more and more time at work and neglecting all the startup ideas I had. I'm a quick learner, so in a few weeks, I know I'll see much improvement.

I kinda know why - a bit of politics, a bit of culture fit. But that's all behind me now!
I'd actually like to eventually enable it so shelters can put their pictures up for free. That way a visitor could view and then own a pup.
So why would a kernel-level rootkit like TDSS start dropping the DNSChanger trojan on 600K to 1M machines?

Just another pay-per-install malware module?

Hard for AV to detect the settings are wrong?

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Researchers-Discover-Link-...
If you use Google Sync and the native Mail client, you can get "push notifications" for your email too.
Investigating original sources when I can.
Complexity is bad, software failures limit complexity
Artist hub is sort of awesome. As classical musician, I'd be limited to uploading only public domain music. Anything modern would require licensing agreements, how would Google handle that?

How will they handle things like sampling and/or remixes? Are those considered original works? (Generally, no)

Not saying artist hub isn't a cool feature, I'm just not sure how cool it is. More information required. Then again, there are not many classical musicians interested in using modern distribution technologies.
The irony. The giants of Internet advertising spread their message via dead-tree paper ads.
Instead of erasing the taboo of suicide I think it would be more helpful to erase the taboo of depression.
I don't mind it ... and I do think its a very silly thing to be bothered by.

The entirety of your content matters here, so a singular "This" will get downvoted very quickly. But if you say "This" and follow it up with something thoughtful, then what exactly is the problem?

The colloquialisms that we'll use over the course of our time on (especially on the internet) will change frequently, new ones will pop up that require some getting used to, but that's just it ... just buckle up and adjust to it.

How people choose to communicate should be up to them, not some arbitrary lingo police.
Tufte honestly thinks pixelated type is pretty terrible, too. 16 pixel density is embarrassing compared to printed or pressed text.

But in either case, it's obvious that's a silly argument. Trends posterized to 8 levels are far easier to read in "sparkbar" form than as a list of numbers. It's suboptimal, but better than the plain list.
Any simplified payroll system must result in no employees getting paycuts. That is not as easy as it sounds.
That's not unreasonable - you don't own World of Warcraft you own a license to play it.

If you owned it you could reuse the characters in your own game, produce your own movie of the game and so on - not bad for a $50 investment. Think of the same with a book - you don't own the IP in the book and paying $0.99 on amazon doesn't give you the right to produce your own HP movie franchise.

Redigi's business model is exactly the same as you ripping your CDs to mp3 and then selling the disks, does anyone really think that people selling their downloads aren't keeping a copy?

You agree to a license to a piece of art work - you buy whatever the copyright holder decides is the deal. If that means only listening to it on an Apple hardware, only listening at home, or not letting your neighbor watch the movie with you - well that's tough, find a different artist.

The famous French scientist Louis Pasteur refused to allow his book on yeast and brewing to be read in Germany, he was mad at them for the 1870 war with France. It's his book - his rules. German beer doesn't seem to have suffered too much as a consequence (not sure what America's excuse is!)
Luxury Limousine Service in Connecticut
Register of Copyrights: without SOPA, copyright "will ultimately fail"
This just in, RIAA claims you do not own the food on your table, you only license it for consumption.

(But really, would you be surprised? God help us if RIAA gets their hands on a patent for a wheat genome. It sounds ridiculous and sensationalist, but this is the RIAA.)
>It's amazing how complacent people are when ...

in general.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

We're creatures of obedience to the extent where we cease to be intelligent beings.
40.32% to 40.78%? That's such a small change as to be noise on its own, I wouldn't ascribe any meaning to it at all.

Browser share measurements are inherently volatile. Holidays or lack thereof, software updates with bugs, temporary marketing pushes, even performance problems at a popular website.

My advice: Don't look at browser trend lines at a scale of less than 3 months, you'll just drive yourself nuts.
"The post is word-for-for the one that I opened this page in order to post".
I am going through a painful process of spending $25 on iTunes Match, waiting for it to complete matching, then finding the purchased DRM iTunes tracks, deleting them and re-downloading them so that I have DRM-free 256Kbps tracks.

That was the cost of not pirating music.
Something like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_cafe
The Internet isn’t just pipes; it’s a belief system
Actually, it should be harder for Watson to hit. Since Watson waits for the end of the question. A human can anticipate that.
The SINGLE biggest e-mail scaling mistake we made at AOL was to insist that the client stay in a wait state until we were Absolutely. Positively. Sure. that the message was guaranteed to have been delivered.

It ended up turning what could be a shared-nothing transaction (like every other ISP) into a network-wide two-phase commit requiring (at the time) millions of dollars of fault-tolerant hardware.

Meanwhile, guess what? You have no idea if that mail is queued at your ISP because the destination is down on a volume with a writeback cache on a RAID drive with a dead battery. You can never be 100% confident unless you have delivery status notifications, and those are pretty much dead these days.
There's http://www.usemailroom.com/.
Three Ways to Express Gratitude and Appreciation
Should America Be A Christian Nation?
Following the link took me to a page demanding that I agree to additional terms of service first, but dragging that window out of the way revealed the indication that Google Music won't work without Flash, so I didn't bother going any further. More sites should provide that kind of information before signup; thanks for that.

Hopefully they'll create a non-Flash version at some point in the future, at which point I look forward to trying this.
Nobody should be replying to a thread simply to say they agree/disagree with it without adding to the discussion - that's what the upvote/downvote buttons are for. Perhaps a community rule should be added and mods can enforce it.
I now listen to the majority of my music on Youtube. Most of the songs I want to listen to are there. For free. And legally.

It kills me that Google, owner of Youtube, would not directly integrate Youtube and Google Music. I can only assume this is once again a limitation imposed by the RIAA. Sigh.
Different animal shelters will vary on their policy, some being more open than others. For example a shelter where I volunteered put in a policy that volunteers had to commit to (something like) 15 hours/month. Needless to say volunteerism dropped significantly the next month...
> Can you actually copy someone else's images and serve them from your own website

Short answer: No

Long answer: It depends. On your personal site that has ads, a donate button, or products/services you sell: highly unlikely. See links below.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_under_United_...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Sta...

This is not legal advice. IANAL, etc.
Mixed feelings when it is the precursor to a cogent, interesting comment. Agree completely to stopping it when it forms the entire content of a comment.

Not displaying points was a careful, considered decision. Live with it.

As an aside, if pg decides he doesn't like comments that consist of (or begin with) "This.", they would be pretty easy to penalize. ;-)
Why would you use colour coding or tabular data to show retention rates? Why not a line graph? Maybe 3D?
> excellent developers

For some value of excellent. Simple, general rules, that are well understood, are better than complexity, even complexity your excellent developer can manage.

How about a developer, who says no to their customer, and comes up with something simpler, and better.

I just submitted this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3245550

And declare that progress depends on the unreasonable person.

Are you paving a goat track?
For those of us not in the US, what are they?
I'm extremely interested to see how today's Music announcements will tie into Google's rumored GDrive plans.
We used Pivotal Tracker for a long time (18+ months) on several large, internal projects and suffered from those same limitations. However, we kept using it because it has a very quick UX that updates concurrently with other users.

However as our team grew and we trained people on using Pivotal I was reminded of how much I hated the limitations of Tracker and how it's so hard to focus on a single story. It's just a touch too opinionated. From a management perspective it was also very hard to see what was going on across a large project with many sub-modules.

I went through every "web hook" integration in Github and tried every single project management tool, including JIRA. JIRA was so bad (slow and complicated) it was almost comical.

We ended up using Planbox, which is still story-oriented but solves pretty much every complaint I ever had about Tracker. The UX is extremely fast, handles concurrent users, supports per-task assignment, time estimation and tracking, and has single-story views that are much larger and easier to work with.

One of our devs also wrote up a git/CLI integration (https://github.com/ardell/git-planbox) that implements our branch naming scheme and provides a CLI interface to Planbox so that daily workflow can be done nearly entirely from the CLI. If you want it, he had also done a git/pivotal integration in the same vein (https://github.com/ardell/Git-Pivotal).
It blows elsewhere.

And it runs fine on my 64-bit Linux box. Crashes are incredibly infrequent compared to what is generally reported on threads like this--I don't even remember when it happened last. Probably sometime in the last year.
I think the idea is that you'll develop in a framework where the client- and server-side validation can call the same code.
I'm incredibly impressed at the willingness of these companies to stand up and be counted, to show an awareness of current events and to empower their users to do something about it. If only this was the way politics worked across the board.
Do we really need to waste our time discussing "This."? That's what down-voting is for.

Ok, my $0.02 - Agreeing with someone isn't contributing to the conversation and if you can't take the time to think of something original to say, don't say it (or face the down-vote). It would be nice to have this added to the "comments" section of the Guidelines.
Thing is, the RIAA has been arguing in court that the royalties they pay the artists for MP3s are based off physical sales, rather than license based sales.

They're playing both sides of the argument. Should artists get paid for downloads using the same rates they agreed to for physical media? Or should downloads be treated like licenses, and artists get paid according to that scale?

See also http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111104/04202416631/fight-...
What is also impressive is the presence of Zynga in the internet giants club.
You must admit the horizontal resolution is quite low as well
because dead-tree paper is cheaper
I had a similar issue a while back after having a blog post of mine featured on HN front page for some time. The problem is really apache. Either configure apache with workers (which is ain't the default config) or add nginx in front. You might be interested in this particular post:

http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/wordpress-need-for-speed-o...

This has been throughly tested with yet another post on HN front page a while later! My blog handled the load without a glitch.

Looks like I'm replying with the same comment over and over again. But I have to share nginx love :-)