skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An open letter to customers and friends on why I pivoted my startup. Thought it might be of interest to the HN community :)
> Daniel, do you still think that following the driver's advice to not look right was a good decision?

Yes, absolutely. Considering the impact this had even without throwing in the horror of seeing mutilated bodies, I think that was the right decision. It might have felt like I was in control and sane enough to handle it at the time, but considering how I spent the next 2 hours wandering around london zombie-like, I clearly was not.

When you do feel fear on public travel now (and I guess it was even worse in the past), what goes on in your mind? Is it one of those things where you know really that your worry is foolish but you can't help yourself, or is your entire brain telling you that you could be in trouble?

I know that it's foolish, I know that the chances are infinitesimal, and I know it's biased and unsubstantiated and based on racial prejudices which I abhor. And yet, I'll find myself reminded of that feeling of paralysis, and of being stuck in the tube those 45 minutes. It's not a pleasant experience, so when I change tube, you could argue I'm running away from the experience rather than the danger...
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Yeah, I think this is fairly common but mostly not emphasized in the current debate because it's not as politically sympathetic a position: terminally ill patients using marijuana to reduce nausea make better example cases.
Won't 'ps aux' show them anyway? I imagine there are some restricted userland tools available for shared hosts to use, but having just checked on a couple of my personal machines, it'll display arguments even for processes started by root.

In the past I've wrapped things in a trivial shell-script to hide their args (and messing with $0 from a perl script can probably be used for fun & games, if desired)
How To Creatively Use Affiliate Programs To Get New Reps For Your Business
Funnily enough, some of these pages are nearly valid HTML5. This one, for example: http://home.mcom.com/docs/product/netsite.html

The only issues are a missing doctype and a couple of stray tags. This is because (parts of) the site were written before Netscape went wild with extending HTML.
Margaret Thatcher used to take vitamin B shots to compensate. An a chronic insomniac myself, I really wish this macho, superhuman bullshit about sleep would just die already.

I try to get 8 hours and still struggle. Apparently there is a small fraction of people who manage with tiny amounts of sleep because they are geneticically different[1], but there is no use in using that as a standard that 95% of people should live by.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetic-mut...
The resemblance with Gmail is intentional. I think we should talk about it on the page. The idea is that most people already love Gmail for their customer support and want a few extra features on top of it. That is exactly what you get with SupportBee. A Gmail like interface and paradigm but adapted to customer support needs.
Already discussed here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370847 and I think there was a more recent repost but I cant seem to find it.
This article was written for an audience of pointy-haired bosses, and so the meh scientific insights are followed by groundbreaking! executive! decisions!
I'm missing what the mistake is, I think. Though in any case the article's talk page might be a better place to bring it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2012_(film)
I saw the 404 the second time I tried to sign in. The first time worked -- seemingly -- but returning to the petition page gave me this riddle:

http://imgur.com/Flzuk

Notice the bar on the bottom showing I'm signed in. And the prompt to sign in before I can vote.

Can't seem to get past that no matter what I try. I'll try IE, I guess.
From Drug Trafficker to Start-Up CEO
That's the cynical take at least. It's a great way of telling yourself that trying is futile and therefore not worth the time.

It's one of the things I detest about politics in Italy: ordinary people are so convinced that nothing can ever change that they make zero effort to do anything, and, surprisingly, things do not change.
Technical design for the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now
Anonymous Leaks FBI Memo
Right, and then you end up in the situation he described 3 paragraphs earlier:

"In contrast, custom software development or consulting has a lower margin, because programmer time is included as cost of revenues. For every hour of time we charge, we have to pay an hour's wage to the developer who performed the work."

So still in a low gross margin position, where the only way to scale the business is to sell more programmer-hours.
Funding News in the Heroic Couplet: Profitero Raises 750K EUR
Which movie best gives a feeling of what computer programming is like?
If you have a company accountant, book an appointment, like immediately, and get them to show you the accounts.

Make it a formal request, tell them what your concerns are, and Cc the other owners. Why? Because, as someone pointed out, these kind of financial shenanigans can land you in hock. Just making that request brings the issue into the open, it should cover you legally, and they will know that you won't stand for being messed about.

Personally, I would not stand for it, and I'd basically tell them to open the accounts or I'd walk, and I would not think twice about carrying our the threat.

That being said, if they were genuinely not involving you but are happy to let you see everything, and be a joint signatory on the bank account, then it is a simple misunderstanding.
Skepticism versus Cynicism
Very well written thank you for sharing, very few people can put this into words. What changed my life about 3 years ago was getting hit by a car (was my fault ran across a street to catch a streetcar). I clearly remember the whole thing, rolling over the hood, having the foot broken by the wheel. Lying on the pavement with people around me. Changed my life for the better.

Funny thing, I was carrying a sandwich I just bought and got pretty upset when paramedic stepped on the bag where the sandwich was!
I wish they wouldn't close questions like this.
Social Media Shouldn’t Replace Your Blog
Dr. Satnam, who is the physicist who discovers the whole phenomenon (as told in the plot) is mentioned as an Indian IT support manager? Is that a joke??
MIT Announces MITx, Expanding Its OpenCourseWare Project
0_0

High salaries, marketing costs, for SaaS companies infrastructure? ISV is not necessarily 'long guy working out of his attic' - that model is only sustainable for a small subsets of software.
The Parable of RIM: Dediu on the coordinated effort to fail in mobile
I Need Two Billion Dollars
I'm not sure I would term these ten ideas "counterintuitive"; in fact they come off as rather obvious, apropos the modern web. Maybe I'm in the minority on this but it seems like even just visiting SO a couple of times you get an impression for how and why it works and that seems to have been applied more broadly, e.g. Quora, to carry on with the Q&A model. Clearly treating this kind of thing as a social game is the root of the success of social news, for instance. Possibly this is just the benefit of the hindsight, nonetheless, certainly today they aren't counterintuitive?
I can't even imagine what it must be like living in a place where this threat is constant and tangibly real...
Are You Paying Attention to Your Social Network?
A few corrections.

IE is not preferring anything in your example. The default quality is 1.0, and since no quality is indicated for any type, they all share the highest preference.

Although IE's Accept header is technically useless, it's more likely to be a response to developers incorrectly parsing Accept than the other way around. This post is about sites using primitive string matching to parse Accept, and it's not unreasonable to imagine that this problem is not new.

You also claim that the spec leaves the resolution between text/html and text/* ambiguous, but it clearly states why text/html has precedence:

"If more than one media range applies to a given type, the most specific reference has precedence."

Lastly, I only get in a huff when people use illogic, especially ad hominems, to prop up a poor argument. In fact, I've written about this, too:

http://shiflett.org/blog/2007/sep/logic

I wrote a book on HTTP precisely because the spec is not always right, but that doesn't excuse everything.
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This is a comparison of file systems, not operating systems.
Coming back to Linux after a couple of years under OSX, it took me less than a week to start loving Unity. Sure it's got its glitches, but no more than anything else in the open-source UI world. I'm sure I'd react differently, if I hadn't unlearned the X11 worldview beforehand, though.

All this to say that Unity makes sense even out of netbooks; but I'd like to address address the final question: "can anyone figure out what the point of netbooks is?"

The netbook itself isn't much. It's the first and wrong answer to a legitimate question: "is there some room for something beyond the server and the workstation, which most non-developers would love to have?" The iPad and the iPhone provide much better answers to the same question. What matters is that the question exists, it matters, and although the right answer isn't completely known, every OS company wants to be a key part of it.

Remember a few years ago? The key question to Canonical and others was "how to dislodge Microsoft from its monopoly on workstations?". Today it's "are we really sure that MS won't dig itself out of the workstation hole when it falls into irrelevance?", and the debuts of Windows 7 for phones and Windows tablets are encouraging.

So they basically bet that there will be some room between Android and Windows for them, which they can claim. It seems worth a shot, especially given Android peculiar understanding of "open". If they manage, they can then try to re-expand back into the workstation market, successfully this time.
>I can't figure out if Peter Jackson is genuinely excited about 3D or if he's in some kind of reality distortion field where 3D will save the art of cinema.

I imagine he has no choice, that the studios stipulate he must use and promote 3D to get the funding. The studios want it, like you say, because they think it will encourage people to go to cinemas again.

If you saw Scorsese promoting his new flick recently on the Daily Show, he opined at length about the wonderful cinematographical benefits of 3D, and it didn't ring true at all. It definitely seemed like he was obliged, perhaps contractually, to say it.
Note: This article was originally published August 24th, 2011 at Muktware.com.

Some of the content here no longer represents the way that I feel about Unity at present, and much of this can be taken with a grain of salt. Even still, I do miss Gnome 2.x even though it hasn’t fully disappeared yet.

tl;dr dude got a new computer so unity isn't slow anymore.
Will that fabulous sensor in the Red camera make it to the consumer market some day?
That's an absolutely brilliant hack. I was playing with those challenges a bit, I've read about those yellow dots multiple times, but it not once occurred to me to use them. Well done.
I've spent a considerable amount of time in Iraq in the US military; it's very tough to explain to people how much energy I now spend assessing threats presented by very mundane acts/situations. It's exhausting. I constantly have to remind myself that I'm not in danger. So tired of it. I feel sometimes that if I were still in a combat zone or a constantly embattled place like Israel that energy wouldn't be expended for nought.
This is exactly my concern, only less for facebook and more for the multitudes of less-famous sites that nevertheless transact a lot of business.
There is one for Sega Genesis that I remember liking a lot when I was younger: Beyond Oasis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Oasis
With respect, "The Internet" also exists beyond the borders of the United States of America, so while we outside of the US can look on at this spectacle with a mixture of amusement and dread, it's just a little galling to be told to understand something we have little control over.

I'm not meaning to sound disrespectful, I'm just trying to explain this slow-moving car-crash of a situation has effects outside of your own continent..
But this may be even more frightening to the person you're "reporting" the breach to, who is obviously no tech genius. Now they've been burgled by invisible elves. Even if the elves appear to have done nothing but leave behind delicious cookies and thoughtfully-written notes, it's pretty freaky to the uninitiated.

They may literally change their locks and buy an alarm system. Worse, when some idiot comes along peddling a "magical charm to ward off the bad e-criminals that lurk invisibly on your Facebook page" they'll be in a nice receptive state of free-floating subliminal panic.

The moral of this story is, I guess, is that as a solo whistleblower without institutional or cultural support all available options are bad. We are slowly educating the world's organizations - lots of sites and services these days have security officers who might understand the social dynamics of exploit reports and not be so quick to fly off the handle - but I'm sure there's room for a lot more basic training. Meanwhile, it's hard being a pioneer. ;)
IPad Factory Explosion Hospitalizes 23
Yes - I went through several ugly iPad calculator apps before finding one that wasn't taxing to look at.

But... I still have Illustrator and Photoshop on my mac.
How far does SOPA extend?

Think of it this way: does the great firewall of China apply to US citizens? No, of course not. So whilst SOPA may be annoying at best to people in the US, the rest of the world will remain unaffected, and so there will always be a workaround.
My top ones

- Need to be consistent with capitalizing (try slight bold for emphasizing instead.

- Don't mix serif, sans-serif and cursive. Try all sans.

- What happened to the old logo? Maybe doesn't go well w the new clean look (which is awesome btw) but atleast gave it some character.

- Take a second look at the language construction. Make sure your primary market doesn't feel its written by foreigners.

- I think the best line is hidden in the footer. "SupportBee is a hosted Help Desk Software"
Oh ok, I see that when I look at the previous version in the article history; it looks like it was fixed 30 mins ago though: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2012_(film)&di...
Users voted for best XFCE-based Linux distribution
Why CBA hasn't gotten it entirely right with the Kaching App
Px WHMCS Pentesting Tool Pirated/Modified by Skiddos and Given Without Credits
Dude, the amount of money that politicians get in campaign contributions is tiny compared to the amount of money that is spent on lobbyists. The problem is that we have this class of people who are personable, who are well informed, have spent years creating relationships with other people in Washington, and who are very experienced at providing simple, one-sided explanations of the issues to congress-critters.

If campaign contributions were entirely banned I doubt it would make much difference, because legislators are too busy to pull information on every topic that they feel they need to Do Something about, and its the people with lobbyists who succeed in pushing out the (fraction of the) information needed.
Role of labels in product promotions
As a cliché often narrated "First impression is the last impression" can also be implied on the consumer market internationally as well as domestically.
PolitickerUSA is the best way to track politicians’ tweets
Cornell to win tech-campus grant
I'm not sure this works for things that require a lot of precision and focus, like understanding proofs of theorems. That's probably part of the “about” caveat.
MODERN WARFARE 3 IS BASICALLY A DIRECT RIP OFF OF DOOM BUT NOTHING IS EVEN IN THE SAME GENRE AS ZELDA.

Only a Nintendo fanboy could ever rationalize something so ridiculous.

There's a ton of games out there with large worlds and in-game isometric/3d action.

Sure, nothing follows the exact formula, but that's because there is no need to directly copy. The genre is alive and well and no fanboys are going to convince anyone that Zelda is a unique butterfly.
Nom et professions
I can find exceptions for every form of media. There are deaf people, blind people, and people who can't read.

However, even if you can't focus on spoken audio, you can realize that a large majority of normal people can. You're exceptions don't make this any less true.
I wouldn't really describe it as a "constant and tangibly real" fear. Most Israelis will never see a terror attack in their lives. I can say that I spent the 25 years of my life in Israel without seeing anything like a terror attack, or gunshots or anything.

It's just a bunch of hype.
So when you leave you don't have to stay out for a certain length of time, like the Schengen "no more than 90 days out of every 180 days" rule?
The Marriage of Social Influence and Shopping
Yes, and here's to hoping he doesn't do any business with Citibank, directly or indirectly.
a story that isn't just background for the gameplay... (Zelda? Check.)

Is there some hidden story mode for Zelda? Last I checked a princess got kidnapped and you go rescue her. That is the total extent of the plot. It is as paper thin as you can get. There is no character development. Outside of Link's ability to use a sword he has zero character. Gannon is an equally shallow evil wizard dude.
More generally, this kind of legal corruption is an obvious and yet unacknowledged flaw in representative democracy.

By obvious, I mean in the game theory sense i.e a system of selfish rational humans acting under the rules of "democracy".

The U.S. system has some factors which make it worse e.g. "first past the post" voting leads to a two-party system from which the electorate cannot break out.
That screen is exactly the reason why I personally prefer Android and open source. I know what those options mean, and I appreciate the opportunity to choose.

This really is a situation where you can "have your cake and eat it too". For a good user experience you need:

1) sane defaults
2) a minimal, apple-like settings screen
3) an "advanced" settings screen

The important thing about #3 is that you must make it clear that most users do not need to access that screen. A button on the main settings screen call "advanced options" does not necessarily make that clear -- there are still people that will fiddle with it even though they don't need to. My suggestion would be to make it minimally hidden, such as Firefox's about:config.
Just offer 1. Which one of them would either keep business owners awake at night, or make their mouth savor at the possibility of more money? Do that 1 instead.

Also, your idea is a very horizontal one. It seems like there are many different types of businesses that would be interested in this. But that may not be the way to go if you don't got a lot of money to spend on advertising, or a lot of connections already. Why not do something that targets a vertical niche instead? Find a specific use case, and build a product for that specific one.
American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice:

Force your legislature to start using version control.

* No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing.

* Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists.

* Simple diffing would prevent deliberate obfuscation tactics like burying provisions deep inside piles of irrelevant stuff.

* You could build a sweet github-style outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation.

* Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it; force them to write these in simple english. This alone would spin 'em around so hard they wouldn't know what day it is.

* Use your imagination. I'm sure you can think of 100 reasons why this would be awesome.

Build it, open source it, then start your own lobbying/PR machine to demand that they use it. Constantly ask for justifications as to why they are not willing to use it, given the massive, obvious benefits it would bring. Ask what they have to fear from the extra scrutiny and accountability it would bring. Surely the "social media generation" can out-lobby the lobbyists? That sounds like it should be the kind of thing we're good at.

Or just forget about that entirely and try to think of some way to decimate the lobbying industry in the same way that hackers are destroying the content distribution industries and all that other stuff.
Management - The Graveyard for Software Developers
How Negative Emotion Could Hurt Your Rankings
> I really cant believe that we're discussing this

You can't? You're the one that brought it up and whine about it.

> Nevermind. I don't like this kind of pointless discussions. I don't like HN anymore.

You realize you bring this discussion here, right? If you don't want to see it discussed here, don't bring it here.

If you see others bring it here, tell them to stop (as I did to you).
I blindly upgraded to 11.10 Xubuntu on both the latptop and work machine and have regretted it ever since. Not only did it not offer any new value, it have had stability issues that I never saw with 11.04.
Thank you for writing about this experience. I'm sure it must not be easy to relate something so traumatic and intimate to thousands of strangers, even six years later.

Many people who experience something like this never find the lesson from these experiences as you have, instead ending up with PTSD or similar; I hope that our governments can begin to respond more humanely to tragedies like this and help those who aren't able to find their own path out of fear with counseling and other assistance.

Our response to terrorism over the years has largely been one of fighting the threat (and understandably so). We should add to it a response of compassion for those who, through misfortune, find themselves harmed mentally in a way that most of society cannot understand.
Don't forget forking.

To benchmark the maximum shell script performance (in terms of calls to other tools per second), try this micro-benchmark:

while true; do date; done | uniq -c

Unix shells under Windows (with cygwin, etc.) run about 25 times slower than OS X.
this is always great to rehash and reflect on.

the link right in the first page would have been easier to digest http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/ instead of this scribd garbage
Worse than SOPA? NDAA.