skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How it has come to the point where I'm rebutting the reasonable opinion of a stranger on the internet regarding a business I didn't start, haven't run and don't really know about I'm not sure, but here we go...

One time I went tubing with a friend. We borrowed his brother's vehicle. His brother is a SWAT team member. My friend left the FOB in his pocket and it fell out, given up to the river gods. His brother had the vehicle rigged against hot wired jump starts. Clever fellow.

It was at that moment, and not an instant before, that we started paying attention to "Lock Smith For Hire" and "Jump Start Service" signs. The first guy to pick his phone up was hired.

The guy who came to jump us took an hour to show up, was an ass and didn't really quote us a price or listen to our description of the problem - but heck if he didn't have that car running 5 minutes later.

Point is, when you are down to the felt unexpectedly, you'll take the first option you can get and will judge the service in binary - it did or didn't solve your problem. If I was going to have to go the half mile to BK, but now I don't, that's good customer service.

Ever used a bail bond company to get someone out of jail? Someone had peed on the only unoccupied seat. There were still 4 customers in line ahead of me. I doubt the guys across the street offered much better. They didn't really need to.

You can't advertise in the paper "need help filling out your visa?" and expect a good return. You can't give out free drinks with your return and expect to drive repeats. Your whole business is being a printer at the right place at the right time.

Yes, if one guy wants 3 visas over his life time (they expire, he travels often, etc) then perhaps you can make 'em loyal and garner repeat business. That seems a small-ish portion due to the type of business.

Yes, if there are 10 vans out there and yours offers a free drink with the service, you will get more business until all your competitors copy your offer - then you'll all be giving away that margin, and probably paying a guy to make sure your new offers are more attractive than the other van's offers besides.

You won't drive repeat business by being super nice or wearing matching getups due to the type of business, in my humble opinion. If you are in many other types of businesses this make a lot of sense and should be focused on, but saying "customer service wins every time" seems like an over reach.

To me, a better investment would be great signage/advertising dominance/figuring out who owns that land and buying it/paying who ever owns that land to disallow other vans from parking there/etc.
Apparently, they've had "record months" since implementing this system.
THAT is a good point. I could see how that scenario can be abused - almost entirely because of PayPal having the "destroy counterfeit products" clause in the first place. Feels like this should be enough to put the law on their behinds to have this loophole plugged. Someone should bring this to the attention of the proper authorities.
Type Palettes For Your Designs
Apple want Premier League TV rights
CTRL-F... it is a generally used keyboard shortcut for "Find..." at least on windows based machines.

Actually a clever URL - would non-geeks get it though?
Language enthusiasts in general, not just Ruby programmers will enjoy this article, I think. In any case, I got to see a cool little optimisation that I hadn't thought of before.
33 Delicious Food-Styled Websites to Inspire You
It is absolutely necessary to own a food website online for those who are into the business of running a restaurant. There are some food sites which explain everything about the restaurants.
I'm assuming an Xbox phone would be more than just the name, so the design, UI, accessories, and marketing would all be Xbox-y and targeted to gamers to some degree.

An Xbox phone that looked like Windows Phone 7 would be no big deal for business, but an Xbox phone that looks like it is part of a gun from HALO probably would be a problem.
An Introduction to the Eclipse IDE - Driving Java Productivity
On the internet, anything without a link is the new plagiarism.

I think Jon is completely overreacting, but I think the lesson we should all learn here is that linking is the polite thing to do. Attribution is no longer enough.

I should not have used the word plagiarism so carelessly, in association with your name. I apologize to you.
Seems unlikely. Big burocracies don't move that fast. Also the staff in the frontlines are probably not motivated by revenue.
I created BugMuncher - a feedback widget that allows users to create marked-up screenshots of website errors (like on Google +) - http://bugmuncher.com
CSS Font Stack : A complete collection of web safe CSS font stacks
(I have a feeling that) my frequently used commands change depending on what I'm doing, and with time. Instead of trying to alias my current favourite commands, I tend to just use the backwards history search built in to my shell, and access it with Ctrl-R. I can type the beginning of the command and have the rest of it completed for me.

The only thing that would make it better is Ido-style completion.
>"eBay had to pay large sums multiple times for selling counterfeit goods"

I thought ebay provided a marketplace, I didn't realise they also sold goods?
Iowa: Was the fix in? (a statistical analysis of the results)
Does that maximum length need to be a magic number, or could it be an expression written in terms of `offsetof` and `sizeof`?
Interview with Sean Malarkey, Twitter Guru
And one in Clojure. :-)

https://github.com/clojure/core.cache/blob/master/src/main/c...
it is not too big a leap to suspect that the algorithm might be tweaked just enough in Google's favour

No, it is not a "big leap", but that doesn't mean it's true. It is conceivable that the search results are organic, especially given the content. It is also conceivable that an impartial query could determine that a G+ page (or any other page) is more relevant than the source article.
Tasker does this: http://tasker.dinglisch.net/
It's probably because the alternative is a life of poverty and little to no opportunities.
If this article shows anything it is that C++ never really "grew up". Even in Java, implementing an LRU cache is such a trivial thing to do because most people actually use, and build on, the standard library.
For that to work as it does in CPython, the file would have to know it has no name reference attached to it and that its scope is limited to the iteration and that it can close the file when the iteration ends. I'd love to have this idiom supported under other implementations - it's beautiful.
Dinosaur-Like Tails Make Terrestrial Mobile Robots More Agile
I agree.

I think a good way to identify original source content is through author attribution, with trusted identities, in a social graph, curated by users in a web of trust.

Hmm... That sounds like exactly what Google+ is doing.

If you happen to Encircle someone who created the comment in the first place, it's debatable about which post you'd rather see higher.
yes it is. it asks a legitimate question.
Linux Foundation sites almost all back in action after September attack
Ask HN: What to do in Denver?
I'm going to be in Denver, CO, for about 4 days starting on 1/24.

I'm looking for recommendations of things to do, groups to check out, etc. I'd also love to meet up with any hackers in the area.
The difference we have here is that I don't think it's anti-discrimination laws that change society. It's communication and confrontation of evil that changes society, and that happens over time.

Anti-discrimination laws didn't pop out of nowhere; the idea had been building over time, and when they hit the courts, new laws where made, instead of addressing the issues with the laws that were already made.

You argue that the status quo remains unless something is done - I agree, however that something is not law. There's a word for forcing morality on people: bigotry.

Allowing black people to use public roads is a matter of upholding existing law: All people are created equal. It took a lot of time, but eventually America began to understand the inconsistency of that law - A law that wasn't forced on people, but rather one that people chose to support when they supported the revolution. Change didn't happen by law. The change happened by people no longer standing for it.

The fact is, whether the group of people is gay, black, or whatever, there will always be a people group that is being discriminated against by someone. 20 years from now, we'll be coming up with more laws about group x, and pundits will say, "This is just like the gay rights wars of the early 21st century - we need more laws!", just as much as gay rights pundits are making comparisons to mid-20th century race relations, and demanding more laws to address an issue that people are already changing.

The point is this: laws don't change people. You can't enforce morality on people. Enforcement only creates bitterness and more problems. Change happens because of cultural influence, and that cultural influence is the input to the change function, not the output of f(law).

Your last point is that state-recognized marriages get tax benefits, but that's an issue with the tax code, not marriage. Attempting to fix the problem by defining/redefining marriage is like spraying air freshener without flushing the toilet. The problem is the tax code, not marriage. If you remove the concept of a marriage license, there are no tax benefits, for anyone, no matter their sexuality. The state simply has no jurisdiction over marriage. It's an inherently personal matter. Subsequently, Ron Paul's removal of the IRS also addresses the larger problem.

This is why I keep touting "freedom freedom freedom", because that's the core principle from which the solution is grown. Get the government out of the way, so that people, together, can work out problems. Enforcing morality by law encourages segregation. Staying out of it, thereby forcing people to deal with themselves and others without running to mommy government...that's the long term solution.

Freedom solves all problems. It's arguably the ether of human relationships.
If you choose to "follow" some of the people who've completed all of the exercises you can then view their solutions. I too found this confusing early on.
Built a simple site to visually search Kijiji (in Canada) and Craigslist (US and Canada) to help my wife look for baby stuff.

http://shopcaste.com
Every purchase on the App Store is another +1 to the metric that gets your app to the top of the "Top Paid App" or "Top Grossing App" list for a particular category. Getting into those lists has been demonstrated as very important for actually making money from your app.
Why would str2=str create a new string?

How are RStrings modified when they are referenced by other shared RStrings?

Is there any way to create a shared RString other than calling .dup?
If you want i've done this under a MIT license a while ago ; it's not a full markdown experience but...
http://diplodoc.us/stuffs/JSmarker
Optimizing Cocoa NSNumber objects with tagged pointers
IBM's ODF Viewer for Android
And on GNU/linux there is ReText

http://sourceforge.net/p/retext/home/ReText/ (Python and QT)
URDU SEX STORIES: Rangeen Awaargi
Vi Hart joins Khan Academy
I suspect FogCreek had success because their sales team is relatively small, but I'm curious to see how this works long-term. Is a lack of commission structure going to deter future recruits? They said nobody left, but have they tried hiring any additional sales reps? Big time sales reps will assuredly balk at the prospect of cutting their income to some average amount, but perhaps that type of employee only exists at larger organizations.

As a sales engineer, I'm not sure I agree that employee views can be divided into a black-and-white categorization of X vs Y. I'm not lazy, want to avoid work, etc., and yet I still think a $200,000 deal requires more work and yields more profit for the company than a $5,000 deal, and thus I should be rewarded for that additional effort.

Comparing this reward system to coding or some other profit-generating segment of the company only works part of the time. With sales, the increased profits available for reward are immediately clear. With coding, the value-add of a coder's efforts are less clear, so it's up to his or her manager to see the financial impact of that employee and reward accordingly via bonus. Simple example: a friend of mine optimized some javascript, reduced the file size, and this ultimately saved his company over $200,000 a year in bandwidth. This is quite clear, whereas a simple bug fix or new feature is not.
Isn't this what C99's uintptr_t type tries to address?
Newton's method is dead simple to implement, you just have to remember it. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/chapter1/node9.html
Great looking service with some deal breakers:

Needs Access to my entire dropbox account

Requests access to "Gmail" (I have no idea how much access that provides). Why can't it just set the To: Address on an outgoing email? Ifttt has been sending me emails no problem so far. The Gmail permission crosses a line. It doesn't help that Google doesn't explain what access I would grant.

Seems they took the easier path and just defaulted to full permissions. I'm sure enough people don't mind that it was the right decision. Just a personal deal breaker.

Also the Recipe filter needs a quick way to specify "Only my active channels." Or/also, my dashboard reads "8 Channels with 264 possible task combinations. " Why isn't this a link to existing recipes filtered by my active channels?

Ifttt provides no method for deleting your ifttt account or purging your external information.
Video Game Uses Players To Deconstruct Proteins
What makes you want to join a company?
I think it's frustrating to everyone that it's more convenient to pirate content than it is to buy it. If creating a legal alternative to piracy were easy, someone would have done it by now and the folks in Hollywood wouldn't feel like they need something like SOPA.

However, delivery is only part of the puzzle. Divvying up the pie is orders of magnitude more complicated. One suggestion might be to take all the money brought in by a subscription system and distribute it based on what percentage of total views each piece of content got.

But... not all content is created equal. Think about it for my software by subscription example. If Angry Birds gets downloaded 100,000 times in a given month and AutoCAD gets downloaded 1,000 times, should Angry Birds get a 100x bigger piece of the subscription revenue? Also, the catalogue would never be truly exhaustive because the writers of ClarisWorks might be impossible to get in touch with, or might not agree to the terms of the marketplace.

When taken in its most general terms, Hollywood's business model is strikingly similar to that of venture capitalists: "spend a lot of up front money to make something now, and hope that it generates even more money down the road". There's nothing Hollywood would love more than to give up their bonuses in the present for a future where content created now will continue to bring in small amounts of money for the rest of their lives.

I probably come off as sounding too sympathetic to Hollywood. SOPA is pretty clearly the wrong answer to a question very few people were asking. But I think we do ourselves a disservice by downplaying the complexity of the problem.
Well, your post pretty much embodies everything that is wrong with the world these days.

"Cost of doing business"? ROTFL, I'm just a dude selling a handful of trinkets and baubles on eBay, once in a blue moon.

Your argument is like one of those math "proofs" that make sense internally, but are stemming from axioms utterly divorced from reality. You could "demonstrate" anything that way. You could even "demonstrate" how PayPal is "right" to keep my money for no good reason, or how Sony is "right" to have me waive my rights to sue them if I use their product. When they do it, it's called "EULA" and "cost of doing business" or some other kind of standard boilerplate bullshit like that.

But let me try the same tactics on their skin. Then it's called "theft" or "piracy" and I go to jail.

And what's the difference? They own immense quantities of cash, out of which they can afford to pay armies of lawyers and lobbyists, effectively superseding the law. I don't have that much cash, so I must dance to whatever tune they like to play.

All they have to do is couch this behavior in intricate pseudo-rational arguments like yours, or lofty but flawed rhetoric like you see all the time on TV, and "all is well" with the world.

This is bullshit. It needs to stop.
Creating beautiful css3 dividers
If true, that'd make it an awesome interview question. After all, the professed goal of these kinds of questions is to see how somebody thinks and approaches programming problems. If they flop around without a clue, it's then the interviewer's job to start them on the right track. Surely any competent programmer should be able to come up with some kind of a iterative solution and then have an intelligent discussion about how it could be improved.

(I don't think it's an awesome interview question in practice though, too many people do already know how to do it.).
Republican Rick Santorum: 'NHS devastated Britain'
Clickable:
http://www.twentypeople.com/site/page?view=employer
Google Gets 200+ IBM Patents, Including One for a ‘Semantic Social Network’
Does it really matter ?. They had around 25-28% market share in 2004 [1].
If they had created an ecosystem like Apple based around the Sony Walkman brand they could have dominated this sector as well. There was a chance for them to create an end-to-end system as Apple did it.

This could have easily blown away the ITunes Store we know today and if i remember correctly Sony`s CEO was the only one opposed to the proposal of Steve Jobs. Did he had something like this in the pipeline he would never had agreed to it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Statistics
how do you delay a function to the next tick in javascript?
Perhaps you could get some actual idea of what goes on in the visa process rather than spouting mindless nationalistic rhetoric.

It's not like the visa process allows unskilled, unemployed workers to pour into the country. It's a lengthy, expensive process that allows employers to hire for jobs they couldn't otherwise fill from other available candidates. This brings intelligent, educated and skilled immigrants who are perfectly capable of paying their own way and who bring a massive net gain to the US.
I think that most posts are complaining that what is being called "content creation" has been reduced to simply organising others' content, which isn't without value but is minimally "creative".
Free bitcoin payment notifications
Clicking "home" brings me to the (stock GoDaddy landing page) http://www.compubomb.net/
So if one of your competitors paid for the SDK, you can just dump the binaries off their machine, flash them onto your own boards and save yourself a decent amount of money. You obviously don't get the source, and nor do you have the standing to insist that the vendor whose binaries you misappropriated give you the source.

I don't think this is correct. Since your competitor distributed the software to you (I assume you purchased the board), they are legally obligated to give you the source or stop distributing the product.

So legally, your competitor has only two choices: stop distributing the product or enforce their GPL rights against the vendor and then share the source with you.
"As Contactually is an professional "

Do people really have service oriented websites in open with such obvious mistakes?
Worth noting that H1B is more difficult to get without a college degree (so I've been told). I have no credentials and the companies I'd like to work for don't care for them either, but unfortunately the government cares because that's their only grading system for people (it's not like they're gonna look at your GitHub profile).

There have been several companies in the past years that expressed their interest in hiring me but were put away by this problem. I don't blame them, I blame the system.
Great, thanks! I'll try to include more citations of practical examples for the next article.
I created http://onepix.me in about 3 months of 2011
I did the bulk of the coding on http://localbeer.me (find great beer, brewed locally) in 2011
I created http://imgonly.info - only the images from the Reddit home page in 2011
I also created several smaller failures, which were quite fun as well.

My plan for 2012 is to create revenue from one, or all of the above sites.
Ifttt is an extremely well-designed and useful service. I look forward to the day they get a business model so I can rely on it
The E-Reader, as we know it, is doomed
It's a bit more complex, it's implementation-specific, it's definitely a hack and it's not very reliable:

* It's a CPython-only optimization

* It does not work if the first member of the concatenation is an interned string (such as a literal string, so `s = s + "abc"` may trigger the optimization but `s = "abc" + s` will never do so)

* It only works if there's a single reference to the string in the system.

* It only works for the shapes `s = s + s1` and `s += s1` and no other[0], including (excluding?) `s = s + s1 + s2` or `someFunction(s + s1)`

The way it works is that, when it sees `s = s + "abc"` or `s += "abc"` and there's a single reference to `s` (this one), CPython will call `realloc(3)` on the string's internal buffer (technically it calls `_PyString_Resize` which calls `PyObject_Realloc` unless you've compiled python --without-pymalloc then it calls a macro over realloc(3), but you get the point) instead of allocating a brand new string. And it does not work on unicode objects in CPython 2 (only str, it works on both str and bytes in CPython 3).

Interestingly, this optimization was introduced by Armin Rigo[1], one of the lead Pypy devs for which this CPython optimization is an issue (it leads developers to use more string concatenation, which pypy can not really optimize as it does not use refcounting semantics)[2]

[0] http://bugs.python.org/issue980695#msg46258

[1] http://bugs.python.org/issue980695

[2] https://bugs.pypy.org/issue814 (nb: pypy's bug tracker displays the oldest comment at the bottom)

PS: I don't think I've noted how much HN's comment-editing "facilities" suck today. They really, really suck. What's a man got to do for markdown support in order to make formatted comments readable?
TimeHue: a clock that represents time as a series of hue values
Show HN: GLSL Compiler - UglifyJS for WebGL
Friend (moved to palo alto,part of silicon valley, in Feb of 2011) makes $140 hr for five yrs experience in Ruby/PHP and 2 yr in Python/Ruby on Rails

He claims most engineers make $120-$150 with a couple years experience.
"We tried contacting AOL to find out and for comment on our story but, so far, we haven't heard back."

I'm hardly surprised. In the UK, banks have to tell me if there is a better offer on a new account so that I can change if I want to. Is it cave emptor in the USA?
Over-promising is usually a result of a poor salesman who does not focus on maintaining long-term relationships with his or her prospects/clients (and will probably jump from industry to industry). Unfortunately this is rampant at businesses with high sales volume and lower software / contract prices because there is minimal incentive to focus on anything besides quotas.

If this happens often at your company, Client Services or Development needs to have a heart-to-heart with the sales manager.
How Twitter Verified the Fake Wendi Over the Real Wendi
Looks great, I might actually use this today.
Also, nice theme... i'm using the exact same one for one of my projects.
I think the title is meant to be a hook.
Understanding scheme macros