skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's winter in Montreal, so it should be easier to find a place this time of year. Start contacting people through:
1) http://www.airbnb.com/montreal-quebec/apartments
2) http://montreal.en.craigslist.ca/hhh/
Bon jovi - its my life
The Greatest Grid: How Manhattan's Famous Street Map Came to Be
You mean, skills and luck, right? For me this remembers Youtube, not the first but the most famous of them.

We can build causal histories but maybe they exist just because they make sense not because they're true.

EDIT: I added the second paragraph.
The key difference is they took a broad approach vs. a narrow approach. Most sites like this focus on current developers - codeacademy has focused on non-programmers which makes a much better story.
Wow, the comments blaming Google for this are ridiculous.

I'm no Google apologist. But it was 20 edits from 2 people. We have no clue what their motivation was, but probably they were just being assholes.

If an asshole Google employee started trolling on HN, posting 20 obnoxious comments, and pg tracked the IP addresses back to the same IP address as this incident, do you think he should raise a stink and say that Google is trying to take down HN because it's a competitor of Google+?

Come on, that's ridiculous. Is this really the effort of Google? They have tens of thousands of employees, and hundreds of thousands of computers all over the world. Google attempted to poison an open source map using 2 employees and 20 edits? Come on. If they redirected 0.01% of their traffic to that website, they could probably keep them down indefinitely.

The one scary thing, however, is that if you do do something obnoxious, like get into a flame war with someone, or if you add some false information to wikipedia for whatever reason, and the owner of the website complains online about it, you could get fired, even if your comments were completely "anonymous". That to me is scarier than any of this other stuff.
Great job guys! Keep it up!
Show HN: Visualization of the Marriage Sort algorithm
Wasn't it the users that strongarmed most sites into publicly protesting?
losethos is another fairly tragic case: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465559
Good Solutions Do Not Win by Default
I am impressed with any decision being made on this. I think it's justified no matter how they do it. And if they do something outrageous it would only match what they are choosing to take a stand against. It's a NEED! And for a day...who cares. It's statement that should be made.

Anyone worried about the outcome of one day with Google being down aren't really thinking about what is at stake in the long run.
With a Little Help From My Friends - The Improbable Story of the CT Scanner
You missed the memo?

Protests: Unethical
Bribes: Ethical
Designer of EtherPad here. I'm a big fan of HackPad and I encourage people to give it a shot. I get a lot of questions about the best version of EtherPad out there, and HackPad is the one I recommend.

It might not look that different, but they handle similar features in smart ways.
It is very different.

Paul Graham is an investor, not a manager. If PG ran a company that hired a contractor who did some dirty deeds, PG would be in a load of hot water.
If he mentioned what his original handle was, and so provided some evidence, he might get some more sympathy.
In Tech, Starting Up by Failing
Apple could water-proof future devices with HzO technology
Yes, please. I would really like something to replace sidewiki for capturing, sharing, and later finding notes about Web sites.
This is the logical next step.
I wasn't directly replying to the OP.
That also doesn't give you a cash pile of $20k at the end of it, after you pay your current rent, pay taxes (higher as a contractor), buy food, etc. I'd estimate the cash pile to be maybe $10k? So his income from that one month was probably more like $30-$40k.
Is The Internet Boring Today?
Really? I have showdead, and rarely see hellbanned people. When I do, it's normally pretty obvious from their comment history why they got there.

UPDATE: did a quick scan through a couple of recent articles and only found two hellbans (as opposed to comments which have been retracted/deleted):

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tonio09, apparently banned for this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107413

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chadmalik, apparently banned for his reaction on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1702447

Who both seem to have deserved it, ie. they have a long string of inflammatory, poorly thought out one line posts which will never see the light of day.

UPDATE 2: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=eurohacker is another one, for: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3278165 or http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3278149
For every comment that takes you a minute to write, thousands of people take seconds to read it. In total they spend far more time reading than you spend writing.

I don't know what your comments were like, but evidently users didn't want to read them. So although hours of your time were wasted, tens of hours of other people's time was saved. The good of the many outweigh the good of the few.

You should seek out an online community where your contribution is appreciated.
If you can, please do the same for Wikipedia / SOPA.. it'll be interesting to see the difference in volume between tech media reporting and general outcry..
Does Codeschool have as many people signed up as codecademy? That could be one reason for the press. I would guess Codecademy has more users because it's free and you can start learning within 10 seconds of landing on their homepage.
Yep. It's entirely possible to say one unpopular thing, or something too reddity, and end up with a pile of downvotes.

I've seen some well-meaning people post friendly explanations to such comments by new users and to "not worry about it", but apparently such new users would be better off starting another account by that point.

ETA: One of the things I don't like about HN is that it's so opaque in that regard. It has secret rules that only exist in the Arc code and get hinted at randomly in threads, not put together somewhere a new person could read them. (No, the Guidelines are not those rules.)
Just getting started in web development
I am just starting out in web development and have kind of hit a roadblock as to which direction I should go, and was hoping that maybe some of you experienced folk might be able to offer some advice.

Over the past few months I've taught myself html, css, javascript, ajax and I also have a pretty good handle on jquery framework.

I am interested in building client side web apps, but I'm not really sure if I should dedicate some time to learning php, or mysql or some other server side language.

My goal is to eventually do this stuff full time as a freelancer.

It would be nice to take the skills I've developed so far and start building something or possibly get some work, but it really seems like some knowledge of a server side language is necessary to make that leap.

Any advice?
> What I love about that quote is it could clearly be used to condem the PSAs they've been playing in theaters and tacking on DVDs quite some time now. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE9-W9JNjio

Those lovely, piracy prevention notices/copyright infringement notices on the Blu-Ray's I've purchased. That can't be skipped.
Don't be embarrassed :) Have you done a view source on Hacker News? It works.
In addition to hellbanning, another fun trick is to view your submitted links to see which links have been removed without your knowledge. View your links in one window while logged into your account, then view the same page on another browser.

In my case, I view http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jonmc12, I see link #25 as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007314 while logged in. When I am not logged in this link is missing, and the URL contains blank content.

No idea why.. I skimmed the article, thought it would be of interest and submitted. Maybe it was omitted because it mentions a YC founder? no clue really. This was the original link: http://opensource.washingtontimes.com/blog/2010/jan/8/how-we...

I don't pretend to be an expert on community moderation, but I find these practices disingenuous. Why not just expand the guidelines page to include these things? issue warnings?
C# to take a breaking change in version 5
Not everyone is blaming Google. However, many are rightly taking the position that Google has to be held responsible for actions of its contractors, which is a different thing. Google has taken the first steps, which is to sack those people. Next it has to undertake review of all the sites that these people accessed and make good any damage they caused.
I'm confused ... who is their competition?

What other sites make learning this stuff easy and fun for the masses? Also offer it as a free service? I'm not aware of others...
My point is not that the product is bad, but that there are many products just as good, hitting the same demo.

I'm sure the team is great and the investors are great, but let's be honest, the product is fairly light right now. The UI is nifty, but there's nothing special about it.

I'm not trying to knock the guys, I'm simply trying to determine why they've become such media darlings without really having delivered anything.
Just keep typing. It really, really does get faster over time. I was typing at around 50 WPM when I graduated from high school, and 5 years later, I'm regularly typing at 80+ WPM just from sheer practice during college and in work (I'm primarily a tech writer). If you want extra practice, http://typingweb.com/ is a great online typing tutor app.
When I worked at Kink.com (NSFW), we implemented hellbanning for when people would repeatedly make mean comments about the models. That said, I think it definitely has its place because we would often get a few people who would really try to abuse the comment system and the only way to effectively deal with them was to make them think people saw their comments.

For the last few months, I've been making a small range of comments here just to kind of test the waters and see what people react to. It has been a really good personal learning experience because it is almost like people are telling you something to your face, instead of what they'd normally say behind your back or just keep to themselves.

In general, I really like the community here, mostly because it favors positivity. I wish it favored a bit more humor and sarcasm, but those are two things that are hard to convey as text on a page.
Thanks man (;
If you run media companies that own nominally-independent news operations, it is not an abuse of power to 'discourage' their coverage of your legislative agenda. If a media company that opposes this agenda successfully spotlights your non-abuse of power, it is a clear abuse of power.

Likewise, it's not a class-war until they hit back. In both cases the logic is entirely consistent.
I wish they'd just stop making movies
SOPA/PIPA Jam - games in protest of SOPA/PIPA
Tryruby.org has been doing that for years, has it not?
Manpower: World Leader Or Leadership Embarrassment?
Ask HN: Have you seen/heard any SOPA blackout discussion on local media?
Earlier today I was surprised to hear mention about the SOPA blackouts on Seattle's alternative radio station, The END. I typically avoid television and corporate media websites, so I was surprised that I heard news of the blackout (which I knew about before, of course, from HN and Reddit) on my drive home from work today, especially on a station that typically features local or music news, if any at all. Of course they didn't spend harly any airtime discussing it, but it made me curious as to what sorts of attention others have seen paid toward tomorrow's blackouts.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Big corporations are more popular than you might realize
Poignant comment:
As an industry executive with quite a bit of tenure I could certainly throw some additonal wood on this Manpower fire, however to be brutally honest, many of the issues raised within this string are common across many global staffing organizations. If the discussion is about trying to optimize on the model that built a 22 billion dollar company, then folks are wasting their time here, unless venting helps relieve some pent up angst. Unfortunately the real issue is the traditional branch based staffing model as practiced by the majors has probably reached the end of its lifecycle. Due to their market leadership positions, the corporate towers of companies like Manpower feel immune to the realities of the marketplace, an all to common arrogance that historically ends badly. They are big, bad, and think they have the power to manage the status quo into eternity, clinging to a “push” orientation which is breaking down in general. This is a fallacy any field person can recognize because they live market reality every day at street level. This business is commoditized. When you are big, profit is made and grown by volume, and operational efficiency (aka cost containment) first and foremost. Even the efforts to go up market in the skilled professions have been commodiitized, the only exception being where the laws of supply and demand heavily favor the supplier. In todays world profit is achieved at the cost of valuable high touch interaction with candidates and capital investment in the core business, ultimately sacrificing quality and driving employee dissatisfaction. This is an industry which measures success almost exclusively on the basis of size (volume or hours, which are becoming increasingly empty from a profit perspective). Besides being primitive, it is out of step with market reality which is telling all of us that for human capital its not size, but substance which matters today, for the customer, the candidate, and the delivery mode itself.

The entire way traditional staffing services are delivered needs to be re-invented and, given the stressers in the marketplace for talent, that re-engineered model probably has a substantial workforce skills development component associated with it. I expect this industry, which has experienced a measured amount of change relative to others, is headed for a period of susbstantial change soon, and when it happens, it will be fast.
Those are not divisions, they are shares in entirely separate, publicly traded companies. The valuation is market valuation -- not a number made up by Yahoo.
This is exactly how it is in the company I work for as well. There has been a half-assed attempt at CI, the guy who was setting it up left before it was finished though, its rather sad that its this way but when a codebase is 10 years old it can be hard to inject new processes.
Makanan Yang Baik Untuk Kesehatan
Setiap orang pasti ingin menjalani hidup yang sehat. Tapi tanpa sadar, seringkali kita melakukan beberapa kesalahan dalam mengonsumsi atau mengolah makanan. Untuk itu mari ketahu lebih jauh mengenai makanan yang baik untuk kesehatan, Beberapa makanan seperti sawi hijau, telur dan brokoli mengandung berbagai macam nutrisi yang dahsyat manfaatnya bagi kesehatan tubuh. Mulai dari menjaga sistem pencernaan, memenuhi kebutuhan vitamin sampai mencegah kanker.

Satu nilai plus lagi, sebagian besar makanan ini tidak harus membuat Anda merogoh kocek dalam-dalam karena harganya cukup murah dan mudah ditemukan di pasar tradisional maupun supermarket.
Not Jqmobi's fault, but some transitions (Slide up, Slide down, Flip) don't render well on Android.
Dan Gilbert's TED talk covers people having miserable experiences and synthesising happiness to make them feel good. That makes it not reliable, travel could be an instance of that.

It should be possible through behavioural studies and observation to prove whether there is any substance to "Travel is fatal to bigotry" or "You can't fail to come away from traveling inspired with a fresh perspective", and whether that makes any difference to anything.

"Traveling opens your eyes to some of the real problems people face", does it? "gives you the opportunity to come up with solutions to tackle those" and do people use that opportunity?

$22k and 1 year is a lot of opportunity cost. This is argued by someone who travelled easily from a powerful country, with an iPod and laptop, to surf, party and program while meeting Ruby programmers, and claiming travel is a way to "get out of the echo chamber"(!) From someone who talks about how possible it would be to turn it into a fulltime lifestyle doing the same consulting he did to pay for it in the first place, and after all that singing the praises, doesn't do so.

Is it really so downvotable to question how much is hype, and how much substance?
Hey, sorry for the late reply.

It seems pretty obvious to me, so I'm not sure what is confusing you.

class Monad m => ChoiceMonad m where
choice :: [a] -> m a

For the list monad, choice is just the identity function. For the probability monad, choice picks a random element from the list. (Ideally choice would take a random access structure like a set as its argument, but I'm doing it the simplest way here.)

To implement shuffle, you more or less just transliterate the Python code as you'd expect.

Before you tackle this, make you sure completely understand how the same situation plays out for the simpler case of subsets:

subset :: ChoiceMonad m => [a] -> m [a]
subset [] = return []
subset (x:xs) = do b <- choice [True, False]
xs' <- subset xs
return (if b then x:xs' else xs')

Over the list monad, this generates a list of all subsets. Over the probability monad, it generates a random subset.
My stuff always gets upvoted or downvoted. If I see even one of my comments not voted on, I discard the account and move on to a new one.

PG et al do not value your time and contributions, so it's best not to get hung up on karma or handles. Say what you want, and change accounts regularly.
> So are we trying to help teams of experts or the clueless and/or terminally lazy here?

Me? I'm trying to help teams of smart, well-intentioned people. Which is why I'm happy to share what's worked for me and encourage people to try those things if they're interested. That's what motivates the early Agile people I know.

But consultants are mostly in business to make money, and the bulk of their audience is clueless, so most of what gets sold as Agile today is tuned for them. I go into more detail on that here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...

> Also, experts will evolve a workable process for any given project without needing to follow any particular Agile process to start with. That's one of the reasons they're experts.

True, but that ignores the people who aren't experts yet. They're the ones I care most about. And it ignores the substantial costs of learning all the important lessons yourself; it's often better not to reinvent the wheel.

> [..] teams within a large organisation [...]

Personally, despite 10 years of looking, I have never seen teams within a large organization successfully adopt what I would consider a serious Agile approach. I have seen a lot of large organizations adopt Agile jargon and get nothing out of it, though.

The problem is that Agile methods require a shift in power relations from top-down to bottom-up. Their approaches and values are basically antithetical to a lot of American business culture and MBA dogma. And successful exploitation requires deep change on the business side as well.

I think Agile failed for the same reason that Lean Manufacturing failed here: the important part wasn't the easily observed rituals, but the cultural differences. And the vast majority of the people who are "doing Agile" (whatever that means) would not accept deep cultural change.
Ok, that makes more sense. I read your comment as being a recommendation of The Language Instinct to learn the fundamentals of NLP. But point taken, it's a good book about language.
Wow! I just found out about Codecademy and immediately signed up! It looks pretty cool!

I basically have no programming experience, only a tiny bit.

Do you know what the requirements are to attend the meeting? Or what it'll be about?

Thanks for your help in advance!
Tech stock. Singular. AAPL.
Thank you, I have turned this option on to try it out. I do have an immediate question though: what does it mean if a thread on Recent, for example, is marked as dead?
Join the shout on Twitter against SOPA/PIPA
Here's the path I took:

1. Worked for around eight years as an employee at a few places, including a couple of startups. Ended up with a lot of Java experience.

2. Realised I wanted to restructure my life to work less (but still make good money) and travel/have fun.

3. Spoke to various people and found that contracting through a consulting company (not recruiters, but a team of like-minded programmers) was the way to go, rather than pounding the pavement to look for contracts. The company takes its cut, but I still end up with $80-$95/hr, and they find the work for me.

As for experience: Big Corp Inc. wants contractors who can get up to speed very quickly. You tend to get pigeonholed based on technology, so if you get the assignment as a "J2EE guy" and you don't have a lot of experience, then you look pretty dumb. Spend time working as a normal employee first and really become a good programmer.

As for work duration: generally, the contracts are open-ended and I am terminated when a project gets cancelled or whatever.

I specify up front that I will spend the bulk of my time working from home and that I am taking holidays from time x to time y. The company that subcontracts me out is based in Silicon Valley, as is Big Corp and friends, and I live in western Canada, so this isn't usually an issue. I fly down once in while to hang out.

So to sum up: get experience - learn to be a good programmer who has a reputation for getting things done; learn what big companies want in terms of technology; find a company with good connections who will contract you out, possibly as a team with other people; be up front about your lifestyle but work hard to integrate with their project schedules.

It also helps to not have kids.
Yeah, this whole issue pretty much got zero Australian media attention before the wikipedia blackout was announced.
Take the skills you have and look for a job, preferably for a company doing client work. You can use what you know now to apply a designer's design as a cms template. Chances are, they'll have developers on staff that you can learn from to get into development. The reason I say to look for a company that's doing client work is that it'll give you exposure to working on a large array of solutions you wouldn't get otherwise. That exposure will come in handy when you go freelance.
If you are outside of the US for more than 330 days in a 12 month period then you qualify for the foreign earned income exclusion: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,.... It does not matter if you are earning money from a US company during that time. I actually did this one year by performing remote work for a US company while traveling around South America.

So, with a little planning, you can dodge at least the income tax portion.
SOPA isn't going anywhere. Here comes round two.
I appreciate that there is no humor... I think it's hard to allow humor without allowing puerile puns or rage comics. It's nice that if there's a good article on the net, there's usually better commentary on HN than there is below the article. If I want something funny I know where to find it, but it's much harder to find relevant, intelligent discussion.