skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to escape your environment, strip everything away, and see your life from 10,000 feet. It's hard to see what it's like at the bottom if you're on top and there's dozens of layers between you and the people that actually get their hands dirty. It's even harder if you've done this job for years and have no idea how things have changed since you rose in the corporate structure, if you were even at the bottom to begin with. It's a perennial problem in large groups with hierarchical structure, and GM is one of the largest and most hierarchical groups out there.

What may seem to them as being a "go-getter" and exercising earned corporate privilege just makes them seem even more elitist and out-of-touch to the general public.

It reminds me of the importance of the consigliere in the Italian Mafia (or at least in the fiction surrounding it). You need a close friend that you can trust to tell you what is right rather than what you want to hear. If you don't have a way to back up and see the big picture, you won't be able to see trouble until it's staring you in the face, no matter how dangerous it may be.

Every time I hear of something like this, I remind myself to always be aware of the echo chamber that may be surrounding my own life and its affairs. What I think is real could very possibly be wishful fantasy.
An interesting, but rather unanticipated (I expect), side effect of your experiment is that even when you post something that's not too contentious, you're getting voted down to oblivion.

That shows there are plenty of HN users who do not understand HN policy. PG himself has said don't to crazy levels (such as under -10) unless it's obviously spam or the like..
What an awesome idea! This could be very useful to us.Kudos.
This happens to people all the time... it almost never works to reply to massively downmodded posts to try and salvage them. I wouldn't even recommend he apologize as that will probably be downmodded.
At PollEverywhere, we got a great head start from textmarks.com (41411). Although we may outgrow it, it's got the most straightforward API of any.

We're also big fans of Twilio. We're eager for dictionary-constrained speech recognition. Great job, Jeff.
I think people here are taking that quote too literally. I highly doubt the author believes no male has ever turned down sex.

What he would seem to mean is that men are much easier to coerce into the sack than women. That's indisputable. To quote Chris rock:

"A man is only as faithful as his options."
This is sad, really sad.
ruby is slowly but surely showing itself to be the next PHP - popular for all the wrong reasons, terrible implementation and a foolish philosophy
There's a lot of research funding going into biofuels right now, but unfortunately the basic numbers don't make sense for biofuels as the world's primary energy source. You can convert solar energy into carbohydrates, extract the carbohydrates and convert them into ethanol, transport the ethanol to thousands of gas stations (sitting on prime commercial real estate), and combust it to create pressure that's harnessed to rotate an axle. There's a significant percentage of waste at each of those steps, and you end up requiring, like, all of the Earth's surface area for growing biofuel crops. (Even with algae.)

Alternately, you can harness sunlight directly, distribute it across the existing grid (fairly unobtrusively), temporarily store it in batteries or capacitors, and directly power an electric motor with it. Electric storage also benefits from the same economies of scale as laptops and cell phones.

My opinion, a humble one, is that biofuels are better suited for niche applications where electricity can't be used.
Tech Giants Eyeing Start-Ups Despite Downturn
All of the above = a huge bag of hurt that presents some damn near insurmountable problems (leadership, on its own, is a huge issue).

To be honest, I don't know how one would get past those things without first deciding, with a clear conscience, to hijack Ruby from Matz. I know that sounds malicious, but even Dave Thomas is calling for a fork of the language. Seems to me that forking is not quite what we need, as it keeps the language rooted in the past, bringing the performance baggage with it (you're still having to re-implement the loose idea of the Ruby spec, which as you pointed out, presents some really hard problems).

No, maybe we need someone smart, loud, and with balls big enough to arbitrate their way through whatever gray areas are left with Ruby's loose idea of a spec, perhaps make some tough calls on what language features can reasonably be supported, decide what needs to be cut, and break compatibility with existing Ruby code if necessary. To top it off? This person forms a foundation around it, a la Python.org, to ensure that the language is left in good hands, gets proper funding for new development, patches, etc (hell, I would love to donate to Ruby development if I knew the money would be put to good use. I don't have that confidence now).

Of course, what I'm talking about now is not Ruby, but a new thing. This new thing could be quite awesome. Whatever this new thing would be is still years out, even if someone decided today that they would do it.

Python in the meantime?
Agreed. Besides, this post will blow over quickly (as they all do).

One thing I've noticed a lot in the past is that I'll post something I truly believe or feel but that's slightly contentious. I'll get downvoted to, say, -4 or so in the first few hours, but then voted up into positive territory over a day or two.

Perhaps those who aren't always trawling the site for new items are more realistic in their voting, whereas those who spend more time on the site are hastier and more damning.
I meant that I assert that the profligate use of fossil fuels harms people whether you realize it or not. But it obviously doesn't feel like an activity you should be blamed for, because no specific people are harmed, much, by such actions.

It's not merely automotive enthusiasts who do such things. Nearly everyone thinks they're a special case. That really worries me.

To get a sense of the scale of things, the north pole ice-cap has receded so much in the summer that the increase albedo is putting incredible train on the greenland icecaps. If they melt, hundreds of millions of people in low lying coastal regions, such as Bangladesh, will be displaced. It could be averted if people refrained from heating all of their massive homes in winter instead of wearing a sweater and driving in two tons of steel and glass to get to the shopping mall and riding in a Lamborgini or an SUV or a big F-500 truck because it feels good to them. Because it almost doesn't matter what happens to technology in the next few decades, unless our attitudes change, we will find ourselves in a major environmental mess.
Shaq is now on Twitter
It's a very well written piece; I'm always happy to see shoddy journalism debunked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseline_(typography)

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

hmmn HN doesn't handle wikipedia links all that well.
Reddit recently had a discussion about this. Here is the top rated comment in the thread.

Sysiphuslove:

"I don't think it's so much the anonymity of the poster as the anonymity of the victim. There's obviously a 'real person' on the other end of the conversation, but there's no face, no voice...a victim online is stripped of his humanity just enough to salve the conscience, but not enough to make an unsatisfying target.

An online victim is a perfect blank slate for projection: he is represented only by the narrowest of opinions or acts, with no other definable characteristic besides an avatar and/or screen name. It is satisfying to shoot down these faceless assertions. It isn't really personal, just a private exercise of retaliation.

Look at it this way: when someone pisses you off on the highway, are you mad at the person? Or is it, in some abstract way, the car?"
Night Shade and Shiny both stay pretty readable while reducing the total amount of light coming off the screen. On a big monitor, I don't like tons of white background, so I'm using Night Shade right now. It also has some faint similarities to the color schemes of Ubuntu's Human theme and the casing of the Acer Aspire One, which appeals to me.

I looked for a theme that would make Ubuntu's new DarkRoom desktop theme usable (black text on dark gray buttons, whee!) but not even Sunset works.
Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?
The problem was that the Will Freund incident, and the exposure it received, threatened to cast all people with Aspergers as deranged homicidal maniacs.

A few media outlets were sensitive towards the issues involved and wrote thoughtfully. Others, however, were sensationalist and did the opposite of what we hoped (e.g. Geraldo's show on FOX).
Like most things in life, it's not so cut and dry.

I don't have the answers, but some would argue that by providing the forum and doing nothing - or not enough - to curtail the activities of the people on that forum, there is an element of fault with justin.tv.
Which doesn't make it any less disrespectful.
i'd like to build experience, and I have to spend two months abroad - not particularly in the us.
"Bugs can be minor and requirements can be critical"

Exactly, however "Feature requests" are always considered optional and "Bugs" are always pushed through triage. This distinction causes moderately important feature requests to be ignored while moderately important bugs are fixed.

Jeff's point is that the distinction between bugs and feature requests has the unintended consequence of weakening the sorted order of the priorities of this middle range of work items. Additionally, I would argue that identifying something as a either a bug or feature request doesn't provide any value. Spend that energy identifying customer impact.

If it doesn't provide any value and actually requires some effort, stop doing it.
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Anatomy of a Subtle JSON Vulnerability
Honestly, I think your account should be revoked after that comment, unless you see it fit to properly apologize.

Also, when you have your (and your partner's) business linked in your profile, you should think twice about what you say. Your concern about your reputation may be little, but I'm sure your livelihood is a little more important.

I'm left questioning not only your maturity, but that of user fallentimes, also from ticketstumbler, and even PG and YCombinator itself. I certainly do not want to be associated with people that feel another individual's suicide is a joke. Your business will not see any revenue from me, ever.
Do you have to know English to be a Programmer?
Global Trends 2025: the end of US dominance?
Please, elaborate. What wrong reasons is Ruby popular for? What is the foolish philosophy around Ruby?
Lesson here: When you make a mistake, buck up and say admit as much, especially when you're fronting a business.
"... We prepared Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World to stimulate strategic
thinking about the future by identifying key trends, the factors that drive them, where
they seem to be headed, and how they might interact. It uses scenarios to illustrate some
of the many ways in which the drivers examined in the study (e.g., globalization, demography, the rise of new powers, the decay of international institutions, climate
change, and the geopolitics of energy) may interact to generate challenges and opportunities for future decisionmakers. The study as a whole is more a description of the factors likely to shape events than a prediction of what will actually happen ..."

The original document can be viewed here pdf, 5.7Mb ~ http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/200...
It's harder to be anonymous here. As long as that remains, there's hope.
On possible alternatives to drive PPC at lower rates you can check one of the presentations I had done at SearchCamp, India.

http://searchcamp.googlegroups.com/web/Paid+Placement+for+Sm...
My heart and my prayers go out to this guy's family and to all families who have similarly suffered.
Subtle? It's called Cross-Site Scripting and it's pretty well known. Hell, the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting#Cookie_sec...) even has some tips on how to secure against this particular case.
This has happened before and will happen again. The first internet-based 'televised' event I know of is the 'ripper' event on IRC channel #shroomery. Logs are stilla vailable online, one instance at http://b00mb0x.org/blog/pic/chattrans.html
TicketStumbler founders - Get a life.
I haven't done any iPhone development, so I may be wrong here, but doesn't his version not do what the Google one does? How does his code prove that Google's feature could be done with documented API calls when his version uses touch instead of proximity?
MicroEmissive Displays calls in administrators & more technology failures feared
Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud
In this case if anonymity is to blame then it has to be anonymity of the poster - the victim was live on webcam.
Amen. I've settled on Vista as my main OS recently. It's not like I'm some noob. I've used Windows, OS X, and Linux extensively. I understand why others choose differently.

I've tried to do RoR on Windows, and it runs like ass. Running poorly and productivity simply don't go together.

Moreover, the .NET platform is anything but stagnant. For Web work, you've got an ORM with LINQ to SQL, and ASP.NET MVC in development. I know some people wouldn't touch it at all, but if you're not scared to drink the flavor-aid there's a lot to do and look forward to.

[Edit: Grammar]
Wow, check this out: http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/bad_move_m... ... The image shows two messages on the bodybuilder.com forums.

"A poster has said he was going to OD on JTV in the link here: http://www.justin.tv/feels_like_ecstacy. It seems like he is not breathing by the looks of the stream. Please track his IP and alert someone."

And in response, a bodybuilder.com forum moderator said:

"he's an attention whore, you should see all the threads he starts, then deletes"

This might've all turned out differently had the moderators acted on the information available. I'm not saying that it should be illegal for the moderators to not care, just that I personally would have at least looked at the information the poster provided before dismissing it as "just another attempt at attention whoring".

If you wanted to get to know the kid a little bit, or if you wanted to know the mentality of someone on the brink of suicide, here's a link to Bigg's blog: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll...
You need a certain (small) amount of karma before you can downvote people. At that point, you'll see a downarrow below each comment uparrow.

That was done to prevent people from creating new accounts for the purpose of repeatedly downvoting someone.
If he intends to experiment with the downvote threshold as he states, I certainly won't stand in his way.
My point was, "show us the code anyway, we'll decide what is and isn't usable".
I'll take some negative PR in exchange for 25 billion dollars. Email me if you're interested :P
Buildout tutorial - automating setting up your projects Python environment
You need to reach a certain "Karma" threshold. (I believe it is something in the range of 50-100)
It would be nice to see some progress made on the interpreter but I think it's to Ruby's credit that the language design hasn't changed that much in the last several years. A lot of the activity on the Python side has been fixing things that weren't well thought through in the first place.
Can't be done. What we need to do (and should have before the internet) is have a better support system for people with mental health issues. Once you're broadcasting the fact that you're thinking about suicide on the net, it's only a matter of time. It's a shame that people seem to have spurred him on, but there's a really high chance people in his life saw something coming (or would have if they knew what to look for) and didn't act, and that even if he hadn't done it yesterday, he'd do it at some point in the future.
We would be reading an essay about people painting cars?
If you call the cops every time someone on the net says they're going to do something harmful to themselves or another, law enforcement would never get anything useful done.

While I can't imagine egging someone on in that case, it's not our collective responsibility to prevent strangers from harming themselves.
It would seem to me that they should have planned on this kind of scenario. It doesn't have to be specific they just have to be able to plug some words into a statement about something tragic, but uncomfirmed on their network.

It's basic risk management.

That said, people are always going to pick holes in whatever words you use. They are either not enough or too insincere.
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What is PHP's philosophy? Getting stuff easily online? I don't find that foolish. On Ruby, is programmer happiness a foolish idea?
I respect what you're trying to say here, but seriously: stop.

It's easy to be a critical asshat on the internet. How much different is your criticism from that of the forum members involved in this incident?

You can tell these guys all about how to respond when it's your business on the stump. Maybe they can't show empathy because it weakens their legal position. I just don't know.

It's natural to mourn, to be empathetic, and for some people it's natural to be assholes. Let's try to keep cool heads in this community and show support for both the family of Abraham K. Biggs, and for the startup involved. They will learn something from this. I hope we all do.
You know that actually is pretty sad. I've heard a lot of rumors about Aspergers and violence being linked, but a cursory internet search seems to show that there's little or no evidence.

As if sufferers didn't have enough problems to deal with.
Or, surely he could check out the arc source? Doesn't add much to his argument.
It's somewhat hard not to stereotype them when the loudest among them behave like ill-behaved 8 year-old children.

Tell me what langauge you use so I can irrationally avoid it.
Python has a community?
Pentagon Hit by Unprecedented Cyber Attack
Any time. Both In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma are great. My wife also swears by The Botany of Desire but I haven't read it yet.
Don't tell the Ruby folks this -- but a lot of us still have a lot of fun with Perl. I also enjoy Common Lisp.

Just like the adage, "you can write bad code in any langauge", well, you can bore yourself to death in any language, as well. If you are doing boring things, your programming langauge choice isn't going to magically make something fun. (The opposite isn't true, though. If you pick Java or PHP for your project, you won't have much time for having fun.)

But don't worry, there will always be a new language for the fanbois to latch on to. This week, it's Clojure. (And for the record, I like Clojure. It's just hard to read anything about Lisp and not hear 138 Clojure fanbois talk about "OMG ITS THE JVM!!1", and that is pretty annoying. Blog posters should be required to install the language and write "hello world" before they start advocating it.)
Oddly enough, Zed Shaw has been a Python programmer for at least the last year or more, which undermines your second paragraph a bit...
Exactly, Python wins.

There's a massive gulf between Matz and Guido as far as decision making, even when you only look at the Languages and not their imperfect Implementations. Just for example, look at how executable objects work:

* Guido made a hard+pragmatic decision that there are only Functions. Methods and Class Methods are functions that take their binding as an explicit argument (which is inferenced when called with the . selector). Lambdas cannot contain statements and simply yield to a Function. Functions are recursively defined as objects with a __call__ method.

* Matz tried to make everything hugs all around and the result is that there's no straightforward Function type -- there are Methods, Blocks, Procs, Lambdas (1); which yield into one another bafflingly and retain scope in untoward ways. This makes some simple use cases very straightforward, but at a terrible cost.

(1). Are there more? The lack of certainty with which I can answer this question is alarming.
Well, poker has been popular for over a century. Hold'em has a lot more cachet due to having relatively (for poker) low variance, yet still enough that any clown can win. It's got faster action than anything but a craps table. It takes only a few minutes to learn and can never truly be mastered. It's still got that kinda seedy feel to it. High school kids think a top poker pro is on level with a rock star or pro athlete (I know because I was one for a while and my wife is a teacher).

I think TV ratings have come down a bit, but I'm pretty sure it'll be around for a while. I wish other games like pot limit omaha and badugi were more camera friendly, as they're a lot more skill intensive.
The talk was called Worst Website Ever, a competition between eight very smart people trying to invent their worst possible startup idea: http://waxy.org/2008/03/worst_website_e_1/

Needless to say, it was a blast. And thanks for the compliments, guys. Feel free to email/IM anytime.
Microsoft already put their real weight into IronPython
"The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD's, FOX News has learned."

WTF? Does this mean that they actually let pentagon employees bring flash drives to work and plug them into their computers?

The fact that banning such devices is considered to be "unprecedented" is proof positive that it's a good thing Bush is going to be un-presidented in January! :-)
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" Not to rub salt into this whole pile of hurt in the Ruby world lately ..."

Any reason not to think that the vast majority of Rubyists really don't give a crap about this drama and are quietly, and happily, just going about hacking Ruby?

In my little corner of the Rubyverse people seem quite happy, loving Ruby, and glad to be making a living from it. Those I know not paid to do Ruby look forward to their free time when they can work on their cool Ruby side projects.

I'm sure there are unhappy Ruby hackers, but I'm deeply skeptical that anyone is in a position to be making broad claims about The Ruby Community.
Wait... stick figures that aren't making snide comments about Linux? I am confused.
I would like you to be correct but I don't think you are.

Javascript with minor syntactic sugar for making DSLs, and with the stupidity around scoping ironed out, that might win out, though.
You should think about your own maturity level before engaging in self-indulgent posts such as the one you just wrote.

The funny thing about the sentence I just wrote is that you could validly echo it back to me. At least the self-indulgence part. Unfortunately for you, I have been thinking about my maturity level while writing this post.

In all seriousness (and my first sentence was serious too), what we have here is that your comment's parent was written by a person who is comfortable with making light of human tragedy, something which you are uncomfortable with. I'm not sure what that has to do with maturity, and in fact I'm not sure what maturity is or why you think that attribute would be a sign of immaturity.
Sun Expands MySQL With Closed Source
Programmers are not typists first