skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is a question that probably betrays my naivety, but why can I even sign away my rights like that? What is to stop an employer from saying "We'll hire you, but only if you sign this, and if you don't we'll just find someone else." At that point, is it really a right? Or just a privilege afforded to those who aren't forced to sign it away?
Interesting post. A couple of observations:

1. I think programming is a multi-disciplinary task. Notch is obviously among the best at "writing a lot of working code". He's pointing out that he could improve in software design. I've work with many folks who are obviously strong in one area but weaker in others.

2. I think his coding sloppiness comes through in minecraft: it's an incredible game, but I've stopped playing at times due to frustration with crashes and corruption.

...oh, and 3. My guess is that the "large US based game developer" was Valve.
I have a theory that posits that the bulk of HN's subscribership is made up of Google employees who are here to astroturf. Initial test results: inconclusive but promising.
Awesome job!
Cool! The final piece of the puzzle for easy and quick OAuth integration!!

Thanks! :)
A study confirms what we've all sensed: Readers are embracing ereading
I remember reading this in Freakonomics but with a bit more embellishment. I remember that when the payment rates started to sag, he would put a picture of eyes by the money box, and that often helped the rate rise again.

A bored office worker could do a bit of his own experimentation in this vein -- how many donuts do people buy when there's a fake rubber cockroach near the box? A picture of a severely obese person, or a very fit person, or a salad?
Passwords tangled in Fifth Amendment
Web Tasarım
Web Tasarım konusunda Bwadworld olarak, Bizler web sitenizi ziyaretçilerinizin en iyi faydalanacağı şekilde yeniden tasarlayabilir, en iyi şekilde kodlayabilir ve google güzel bir yer edinip daha fazla müşteri kazanmanıza yardımcı olabiliriz.
I'd love to see a vim plugin that uses (for example) V8 to provide code completion for large "pure" Javascript projects (in a similar vein as clang_complete for C++).
Has anyone come across something like that?
I've been participating in this project: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

It's a peer-to-peer DNS system based on IPv6. The proof of concept is in place, and I've used it and it works. Now it needs to scale and hit critical mass. I encourage anyone interested in fixing DNS to participate.
That's already about as much action as we can all do, unless you've got a couple million lying around.
Indeed, I'm waiting for the (many) naysayers in these comment threads to apologize to the OP. While many preached not getting out the pitchforks and blaming Google until they had a chance to respond, that didn't stop them from immediately providing excuses and reasons why the OP had not done his homework or was full of 'malarky'.
Top new gadgets at CES 2012 – smartphones, tablets and TVs
If you already know another programming language I think the book "Dive into Python" is the best way to get up to speed. Link is http://www.diveintopython.net/
"No ending semi-colon is required." seems like a detail that could be handled behind the scenes.
Hot offer$
hot offer.pay per click.
Not really. Most movies and sports aren't carefully crafted to induce psychological addiction like many Zynga games are. Zynga will actually make games less fun and less relaxing if there's some set of people who will be driven to play more (even if they don't seem to be enjoying it much) because of the changes.
FF8 on W7/x64
So school should be thought of as nothing but a job training program?
So politicians can be bought, I meant lobbied, but won't answer to constituency? Time for tech lobbying groups to fund and put their candidates on the ballots. The Swedish Pirate Party has the right idea.

Politic is the game of deciding whose money are "redistributed" to whom. If we don't band together, we will be in the receiving end of these time and again.
I was going to sign up for Megavote but it only lets you track 5 issues from a list of talking points including "Civil Rights"?

edit: I didn't mean to be insensitive. minority rights including gay marriage and women's rights are defiantly important and heavily debated civil rights issues. The blanket term "Civil Rights" just dosen't seem to be used to describe those issues very often these days.
It's hard to tell from the wording, but it sounds like they're apologizing before actually catching the people internally.
Thanks for the info and I'll be attending with some people from the office. Seems like that information, though, is a little too important to not include it on the site.
A lot of the "press" are the same large multinational corporations that are pushing SOPA.
Electric Car battery prices on track to drop 70% by 2015, says Energy Secretary
I like Android, but the back button is totally useless to me. It only works in the simplest of cases, namely when opening an app and not navigating beyond that, I know I can press the back button to get to the home screen.

Otherwise, my workflow basically goes: press home button, use the task manager to kill everything, then visit an app and navigate top-down to where I want to go. Rinse and repeat for the next app. Like others have been saying, the back button is inherently either arbitrary or confusing, and I don't know how to fix it.

It should be replaced as a permanent UI feature with a task switcher button. I don't know how a modern operating system can get by without some sort of taskbar equivalent. I need to know what apps are open, and be able to navigate to them and close them as needed. Why has this not been implemented? I'd suggest putting this into the slide down top bar if there weren't full screen apps that totally break this function. Therefore, I suggest replacing the back button with a task switcher. I won't be holding my breath.
> It was always beyond unlikely that scammers could have access to a a Google corporate headquarters IP.

Did you read your gp? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3461252 Google Translate seems to explain this pretty well.
Visa: Year of Olympics will be watershed for contactless payments
They are certainly unpaid. I've had some experience with congressional interns (I was one last summer and lived with a bunch of others), while he's clearly not speaking officially for their Senators, they are definitely informed enough that what he said clearly wasn't an accident. Maybe he's pissed about it too (more likely than an accident), but he's certainly aware. Given the controversy about the subject, I would imagine that he's got a very standardized response.

One thing they certainly do is record all the responses. He's got a tally of how many people called, from where, and what they thought about things even if he doesn't put much effort into responding.

When things are really controversial, they get absolutely flooded. I'm a little disappointed you got through at all. I know I had some friends this summer working in the offices of people on the super committee and they couldn't answer calls fast enough or even clear voice mails fast enough to keep the answering machine open. This tells me that a whole lot less people are calling than are saying they are calling from the internet.
There is a cool application for iPhone which does this - it is called Call Recording Pro: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/call-recording-pro/id43951645...

After record is done, the app will save recording to their servers and generate a link which then you can share.
The funny thing is everyone continues to make excuses. Already 2 in the past 5 minutes...
As did I. Wish more authors rewarded you like that for reading to the end
At the state level, there's been a rash of legislation the last 2 years that's putatively aimed at curbing "voter fraud", but has the practical effect of disenfranchising black people and college kids.
Hi, thank you for all your responses. I've always known/ thought in theory that
the Internet is or should be great at enabling friendships and goodwill (beyond
just clicking on "Add to Friends" on Facebook, which is what I assume people do
on it... yes, I'm off that grid), but it is still really heartening to actually
see it happening.

I think I am going to quit, because it is succeeding in making me feel lousy
about myself, despite my attempts to rationalize it.

I am angry with myself though for not having got my act together enough to get
a new job before I do that. I can't quite say why this is so, or maybe I just
can't admit it to myself. The only answer I can come up with is it's a
combination of a lack of discipline, and a slight difficulty (and extreme
vagueness) in what I'd like to do.

I'm a bit reluctant to apply for another programming job at the moment; I don't
know how much of it is coloured by the current one. (I think by most objective
standards, my job right now is pretty boring, if not positively mind-numbing -
debugging poorly-written financial software that's 2-3 decades old on Windows -
in terms of the programming, although the "business" aspects of it, the uses of
that software and the calculations, are interesting to think about.)

But beyond wanting to "really understand how businesses work" - why/ how
certain companies do well, why/ how people work together, what motivates them,
why some people get paid so much more (for doing what appears to be sod all)
than others, what it means to "compete", what a "competitive advantage" is,
much less a "durable" one, how one can possibly see into the future - I don't
know what specifically I can or want to do that would be financially useful
enough (yet?) to someone else that they would be willing to pay me for it.

I've been trying to read up on what people's perspectives are on how or what
makes businesses work (and spluttering and gagging over the tonnes of vacuous
crap that gets spouted) - books, blogs, newspapers, annual reports - but it's
been unstructured, and I have nothing tangible to show for it. I feel like I've
some glimpses, but no insight that I can write or speak coherently about.

And I've wasted too much time wallowing and feeling sorry for myself (as you
can imagine).

... I'll need to think about it some more - what I want to do, how, why. But it
has helped just being able to "talk"/ write about it (it is easier to do it
anonymously), and to see/ hear all your advices. So I'd just like to say, once
again, a big "thank you".
Lawsuit Against TimeZone Database Deserves Sanctions
I think the biggest thing he emphasized is the fact that you can never be "The Best Programmer" because there is always something to learn and ways to grow. That is probably one of the keys to a good developer, they know that there is still plenty for them to learn.
Mobile data links are especially prone to this kind of madness in my experience. I quite often experience data links which sit at 4-5s ping times for extended periods.
Scraping their data is against the TOS you have to agree to before using it. So yes, it is illegal if they're violating the TOS.
Honeybee deaths linked to seed insecticide exposure
Netbooks (or more generally: small screen devices) where you can more easily lose a few pixels from the side than the bottom.
> Stripe handles the connection because a subscription and card is attached to a customer object.

That all sound good in top-level theory.

In practice that would mean that I have to reattach new credit card to the same customer object in Stripe.

I didn't even research if it's possible, but if it is - that's a different API call. Different than API call for signing up new customer.

Updating credit card on existing customer makes it harder to allow customer to return back to customer's previous credit card ("Use my previously entered Visa credit card ending by 1234").

How about the case when:

- Payment delayed.

- I removed premium membership from user.

- Stripe subscription finally charged old user's credit card, but my system did not receive IPN notification yet.

- User resubscribed again with new credit card.

- Then my system receives old credit card charge IPN notification.

What should my system do in that case?

What if my user decided switch to PayPal and still has Stripe subscription stuck in the limbo?

What do I do when I receive that we-were-able-to-charge-that-stubborn-credit-card IPN if user already paid by other means?

Do you see how these "Stripe-to-my-system subscription synchronization" issues are getting very ugly very quick?
German Court: ISP Must Not Block Access To Foreign Sites
Actually, many law firms publish this kind of content on their own sites all the time. You could probably arrange to aggregate their content if you properly attribute it.
I heart Maria Cantwell.
They are different situations. Here we're talking about an author who presumably has had a good relationship with a publisher for years, versus a situation like GoDaddy where customer relationships are almost entirely impersonal (and automated).

Despite the metaphors we use sometimes, businesses are not entirely machines. Writing a letter in the first place implies you're attempting to reach a human being who can do something about it. With GoDaddy, writing letters barely even makes sense. They presumably changed because people actually started moving their domains, not because they wrote letters threatening to do so.
Thanks. I'll try to grab a copy and see if it works for me.
This is nice, but why not just use the variables in variables.less? That's what they are there for.
They not check your ID at the gate? They always take my ticket and my passport, look at both, and say "Good morning Mr. B, have a nice flight".
There's nothing wrong with Authorize.net. Well documented, easy to implement API, automatic billing or charge-by-reference, reliable service, not overpriced... Why would you regret it?
Just a coincidence, yesterday on Twitter: "If you want to be happy, practice compassion." ~Dalai Lama
5 years ago it was four dudes in a two bedroom apartment trying to run a reality tv show. Web frameworks were the least of our problems, especially since none of us knew any Ruby or Python to begin with.
Pingdom Full Page Test: Test Your Site's Performance
This thread stands as a testament to the fact that HN, unlike other places, waits to see what is actually happening before sharpening the pitchforks.

The "evidence against google" here was razor thin, and we still haven't actually seen anything damning, just a sortof generic "we're looking into it and are pre-emtively sorry for what happened".
I wonder if the theft rate is differs between donuts and bagels. Are people who choose healthier food more honest?
Have you considered an optional two-column layout to utilize horizontal space better?
Snowflake is referenced in the article "Credits" with a distinction between the products -- though, the product name is a bit dubious. It [Flake] differs primarily in that we allow ourselves a wider address space in which to fit ids which means we don’t have to think about timestamp truncation or coordination of worker ids.
My favorite compiler writer (dgc of mwc fame) says "Yacc makes the hard part of a compiler harder and the easy part easier".
Agreed, I use it in all my projects now and it is a huge time saver. If nothing else, not having to futz around with form elements more than makes up for the added overhead.
> In other words for a particular millisecond seq order is only relevant on that particular node, so node should come first.

It still seems to me that T_0,0,A (issued by node A at T_0 with seq number 0) would tend to come before T_0,1,B so putting the sequence number first does add some value. On the other hand, the ordering T_0,A,0 < T_0,A,1 < T_0,B,0 < T_0,B,1 is arbitrary.

> Would you rely on sub-millisecond synchronization between nodes _and_ an almost exact load amount?

Not rely on. Absolutely not. Maybe it's better to go further, and make it more explicit that the IDs are K ordered. Say you could synchronize your host clocks reliably to a maximum delta of 512 ms, then you could chose a scheme like:

[ milliseconds >> 9, host id, milliseconds & 0x1ff, seq id ]

The value here is that you make it much harder for consumer of the IDs to make incorrect assumptions about the precision of their ordering. Basically taking away the temptation to make statements about their ordering with false precision, by making a simple sort only provide a meaningful ordering within the real available precision.
Not saying anything is a whole lot better than the call described in the blog. That at least means they know it's unpopular and haven't decided which side to come down on yet (so they don't want to speak too soon and have to flip flop). The more they get worried about talking to you, the more it seems like they don't want to have anything to do with it. The most effective way to kill a bill is just to never vote on it.

Hopefully (I'm not super hopeful), what we're seeing is that the supporters of it don't want to have to back down, but everyone else just wants to leave the issue as far away as possible so they don't have to talk about it.
Best Practices are like patterns, solutions to common problems. Sometime there are problems that require uncommon solution. They are rare, but they exist.

I just hope people don't disagree with Best Practices just because they want to show their displease with the authoritative...
Here in Finland people have two different paths to choose from after the first (compulsory) 9 years of studying. The academic path means going to an upper high school and then to a university. The other option is to go to a vocational school, and then to either get a job, or continue to a university of applied sciences[1].

The system seems to be working pretty well. The vocational path has been gaining popularity all the time (at the moment I think almost 50% of students choose it). The academic path is still considered more prestigious though.

The main difference seems to be that here we make the decision when we're 16-17 years old.

[1]: The difference is that a University teaches "computer science" while a University of Applied Sciences teaches "software engineering". You can also go to a University from a vocational school, or to a UoAS from an upper high school, but usually people don't do that.
How does this p2p dns system prevent dns poisoning?
Not a programmer, eh?
Here's another:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/us/anti-piracy-bill-sopa-b...
Gamification! Add a "wtf?" or "what does it mean?" option. Clicks on this would create/increase a community bounty on an objective, concise summary of the bill's impact.
Stuyvesant opened in the beginning of the 20th century, and there are some vestigial components that should've been amputated long ago

It's interesting to hear that Stuy requires drafting and shop. As a former NYC transplant I always thought it was more like a public prep school. My high school in rural Minnesota also required a year of shop, and drafting was one of the electives.

A few of my friends from high school focused on drafting and CAD, and have great jobs with architectural and engineering firms in the area. When I had to return for a while to deal with some family stuff, I could not find a local programming job to save my life.

NYC has continual construction, both with new buildings and public works projects. Drafting certainly seems antiquated, but perhaps there actually is a local need to get high performing students interested in the preliminaries of construction, civil engineering, city planning and other related fields?
Got a citation or two for that claim?
The worldwide internet infrastructure is remarkably fragile. I can think of a few example off the top of my head where it's been abused or broken:

1. China 'borrowing' traffic: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/11/how-china-swall...

2. Myriad undersea cable cuts slowing / segmenting the internet

3. Juniper routers going down: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/110711-internet-outage...

4. There was an incident (2 years ago?) where an European ISP broadcast a low-cost route incorrectly and blackholed a large portion of the internet, although I can't find a link right now.

With respect to buffers specifically, AT&T's network issues when the iPhone launched were largely self-inflicted by having overly large buffers: http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/10/is-att-wireless-data-c...

So yes, widespread issues are certainly possible. The internet is not nearly as resilient as people would like to believe.
> Uploaded data is always exposed, unless the user encrypts it before sending and doesn't give the decryption key to the company.

Fucking BINGO. I'm always shocked how many people on HN don't understand this, considering the high percentage of techies and programmers.
Just pick up the phone and call. If you can't be bothered to do that, you don't care enough.
Please don't hate, but are there any plans to get this to work in Windows? Running nide init executes 'which npm' to see if npm is installed, which fails on windows.

I also tried running it in my MINGW32 prompt, however it looks like MINGW32 has it's own issues with npm (since npm provides a .cmd file to run on windows, which MINGW32 doesn't know how to work with.)
It is at the top. And also in the article. Please don't make "this needs to be at the top" comments, and just use the arrows. That's what they're for.
Engineers, Save Higher Ed — Technology can propel a needed revolution
One of my dreams upon someday achieving FU money is to found a school like this in my home town (Rochester, NY). They need it.
I like this mentality. "Startup" should be treated as a transitive verb that needs an object ("business", usually, although other special cases can exist), rather than as a noun.
Google monopoly hard at work, its only a matter of time till we start viewing Google as the next Microsoft.
The articles on the web are wrongly portraying Mocality as the little startup that could. Truth is, Mocality is a division of a 14 billion dollar media giant called Naspers. Not saying that Google is right or anything, but I think some people are getting fired up because they view this as a David vs. Goliath story, and it really isn't.
There's also Instagram's implementation in PostgreSQL:

http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/10853187575/sha...
Gay marriage?
I think the best approach for you would be to keep one or two simple subscription cases and suggest your other customers who ask for edge cases to implement their own subscription system.

I wish you gave me that "do it yourself" recommendation - that would save me a lot of time (trying to squeeze what I need into subscription model that Stripe has).

Now that I do subscriptions in-house only - I don't even need to know what Stripe web-hooks are, what are all these possible subscription models and what are their limitations. Just two simple calls: one to create stripe customer and another to charge it when I need.
Iunno, defunding ACORN, anyone?
I would like a pre-set color palette option
Even if you had chosen "wrong" when you were 14, surely you could have switched to engineering when you were 20. I think that's what he meant by saying that some of his friends ended up with surprising careers despite studying programming.
Is there an equivalent app that doesn't send my call to server? I'd love to record my phone calls all the time.
HN discarded my comment to a submission I made. It seems commenting your submissions it's not possible anymore. Why? And then why the submission form makes you write a comment just to discard it?
Be happy that not everyone thinks like you, because if that was the case, you wouldn't be living in a democracy. Well, what's left of the US democracy, anyway.