skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mean to dismiss. I love genre fiction myself. All the works listed above in my post are things i've enjoyed and mulled over. Eventually though, I started getting curious about 'why' I enjoyed them so much. When I read Dracula, objectively a poorly-written novel by someone who's other works were hardly well-considered, why did I like it so much? What was it about this novel that made me enjoy it so much while others in my literature class thought it was terrible?

I agree that calling Ender's Game "porn" doesn't work, and it doesn't work because he's really arguing that it has pornographic elements in it, not that the entire work qualifies as "porn." I disagree with his central thesis but see some truth and value in the argument he's making. Ender's Game does and has provoked a lot of great discussion, in the original poster's POV though, those elements were drowned out by the more legalistic, fetishistic elements.

And I do draw a distinction between being provoked to thought and exploration vs. being provoked to feel warm and numb inside. We should dismiss neither, but recognize them for what they are. Sometimes you want and need to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sometimes you reach for Trois Coleurs: Blue. Sometimes you build a new killer flash game to run on Kongregate. Sometimes you build a robotic arm. Both serve solid, tangible purposes, but I think its important to recognize what those are and how they're doing it.

Last point: Jurassic Park is a book I loved dearly as a kid and I'd place it in a similar boat, some elements that provoke discussion, some elements that are there to get the reader off. Both have a place.
> Its made my life quantifiably better.

Yup - and it's definitely in the "it just works" category.

The folder sharing is also extremely useful.

The only they add the ability to supply your own encryption key (and per shared folder maybe). That would increase it's utility for business. I'd certainly pay a premium for something like that.
Similarly, the word "humor" can mean both "response to something funny" and "state of mind." That's what makes "objective humor" kind of hard.
If you got mugged by most black guys you met, I would be questioning how and why you are specifically selecting black muggers to meet.
Cool nice find! At least it shows that it's possible :) It's free to try for 30 days, i'll give it a spin - after that they ask for 3%, which doesn't seem too bad, but is still quite a bit of money - the question is, will their service bring me more than that? Probably, let's see!

Still hoping for an open-source version though. I find it strange that Google itself doesn't allow this, they would win more money, too.
Not sure if you have this on your radar, but this would be useful in the corporate world.

Corporates spend massive amounts on deploying desktop software - and even then it's a painful, risky process. This would assist that process in a lot of ways.

(Edit: And when I say massive - I mean massive. I've seen XP deploys that were in the 10's to 100's of millions. A big chunk of this is software packaging and deploy).
Evil Genius Declares Hate for Twitter Following Values of N Acquisition
Good point. In the case of both last.fm and HN, maybe they would benefit from a "Lemming" feature that could be turned on and off. :)
What's your email? I don't want to go into salary details publicly.

On low pay: when I first arrived at The Corporation, I made nothing for the first nine months. I was an "intern", and they don't pay interns. I'm not complaining. It was excellent experience. After that, I was paid a very low salary. A year and a half after that, I was paid "slightly less than low, but still half of what an average developer makes" salary. So the pay wasn't especially good. I was there for the experience anyway, not the pay.

On incompetent management: We had a "daily report" to fill out each day. The idea was to list what we did, what we were "blocked" on, and what we will do soon. On Fridays, we had to fill out a weekly "time allocation sheet". We would assign percentages to various categories of what we spent time on. (e.g. "50% primary tasks, 30% debugging, 10% meetings, 10% other".) We also had many, many meetings. One day, a few months before I left, all developers spent over four hours in meetings. (The "Monday Morning Meeting", followed by the general "Developer's Meeting", followed by the "Version-one-point-something Product Meeting"... Over half the day spent in just meetings.) Our direct manager was very controlling. A few times, he walked by and asked people to implement a brand-new feature, claiming that "it would be easy". So he was apt to gloss over details, and the details are often the hardest part of software development.

The biggest reason why I left The Corporation is because I wasn't learning anything anymore. The three years I worked there were filled with nonstop learning... up to about six months before I left. At that point, it became hard to be passionate about the job, because I wasn't doing much that allowed me to grow as an engineer.

Are the conditions at your gamedev job pretty good? I heard from a friend that The Corporation was an outlier, and that every one of the five other gamedev companies my friend had worked at were a lot better, so I'm still holding out hope for the gamedev industry in general.
Just found Pubmatic which does the same thing, too - http://www.pubmatic.com/

It's free as it's in beta now - can't find how much it will cost in the future.
Refactoring Imperative Code To Functional Code
Ask HN: Does solving math problems make you a good programmer?
My question revolves around the problems that companies like Facebook put on their websites that require programmers to solve puzzles - which are essentially wordy math problems - when submitting an application.

Does this prove you are a great programmer if you can solve the problem? What is the real point?

Note: I am a UI designer with a passive interest in real development and I am simply curious what good coders think.
That's a beautiful lightning rod for finding the people you would never hire for a real project :)
Sun acts like it still owns the market.

And so do all the other cloud providers.
Auto-Copy as in the firefox extension? Or what?

I think you're going to need to be a bit more specific here.
Global downturn a boon for professional web networks
Both of these are cool but add a query to their server on each pageview, which slows down a site - and what if their server goes offline for 2 hours? - for this reason, i think a hosted solution would still be best.
Claim to be nickb instead; apparently nobody knows his real identity anyway.
I too agree with the "if you have a brain that is" being too condescending. You have to note that humor is also culturally very specific and varies across demographics. What you think of humor may not always work. (I, for example, did not find it in good taste though I did understand that it was intended to be humorous).
Sorry about that, updated.
It makes you a better programmer. It does not, in itself, make you a great programmer, and probably does not make you as good a programmer as if you'd written lots of code in problems that stretch yourself.

Similarly, if you test for math ability in interviews, you will get better candidates, on average, than if you don't. But you aren't guaranteed a great candidate, and you'll like miss a few people that are qualified but just don't do well with those sort of problems. And it's not as reliable an indicator as having written lots of code in interesting problem domains, but the number of people who are hacker-famous is less than the size of most large companies.
No, it shows that you're good at a particular type of problem-solving, which can be indicative of you being a good "programmer" all-around, as designing and implementing anything "larger" tends to involve the same type of mental processes used when you solve math problems like the ones you mention (at least from what I've seen).

The problems that companies like Facebook put on their websites tend to be at least somewhat difficult - probably because they're dealing with rather non-trivial system design problems, and want to make sure you think in a way that will help them solve them, and don't want to limit themselves to the "I have x and y degrees" crowd.
Ask YC: Where do you buy domain names?
Godaddy used to be the best but is now a mess of hot garbage. What's the cheapest, simplest registrar?
I use http://namecheap.com. I have for many years. They had issues with a ddos attack a number of months back and handled it gracefully; ie. the owner was continually posting updates on the forums and helping users individually.
I love those kinds of sites. A month ago I Googled my site name and found someone asking for a clone of my site (which is pretty complex and involve clustering and automated categorization - http://esciencenews.com ) for 250-750$. I laughed a lot, then I cried a little inside at how much people value software and IT skillset in general.
What about them? :)
But why should it be? All those environments you mention can run equally well on any operating system. If Solaris on SPARC can be made price/performance superior to Linux on Intel, then that's what they should do.

It's hard to see exactly what Linux gets Sun apart from "me too" points. They don't want to be Dell.
"Do words exist somewhere, true, pure, fixed in meaning, waiting to be used"

I don't think so. But I think when we talk about, for example, an idea, there is some consensus that we are talking about a mental model of the way something works, the way something could work, or the way something has worked previously. (For sufficiently large definitions of something.) And if I asked you whether or not a fact was the same as an idea, you would agree that it was not. So our collective agreement on what the word means doesn't differ from the dictionary definition because it comes from some platonic ideal, but rather the definition in the dictionary is wrong because of a quirk in the way dictionaries are made.

"Objectively... funny? As in, if the entire human race disappeared and no other beings capable of abstract thought existed, certain things would have the qualities of funny?"

All humor comes from something being novel or broken relative to a set of existing mental models. When I say something can be objectively funny, what I mean is that something can be objectively novel or broken in relation to an existing mental model, whether or not anyone else realizes it.

So, can something be funny independently of humans?

Imagine if you will something being novel or broken relative to a mental model that no one actually holds. Is this funny? Clearly it can't be subjectively funny to anyone, because the humor is relative to a belief that no person holds. But can it be objectively funny, in sort of a mathematical sense? I don't see why not.
Trusting mission critical things like domain name registrations to web mail seems like an unacceptably big risk to me.

What?
It's far more compelling than you think.

There are a number of companies offering this Windows app virtualization layer today in different ways (they actually have a lot of patents on this). Softricity did this and was acquired by Microsoft. Citrix also has their own app virtualization technologies. Symantec acquired AppStream which does this, too. There are some large existing markets for this, though it's vastly enterprise-based.

Streaming apps to your company desktops instead of worrying about what they have installed and how it might conflict is extremely compelling to large corporations, governments, etc.

Baseshield is aiming at the consumer side, probably, but the technology seems very similar to what these other companies provide for the enterprise.
One of Solaris rock-solid advantage over Linux was the guaranteed stable ABI. Except Sun shot themselves in the foot by introducing Java which made it irrelevant...
I just installed NetBeans 6.5 "ruby edition" after reading this post and just had to come back here to explain why Tim's thesis of "we have many great complementing products to create a coherent whole" (my words, not Tim's) is mostly an anchor around Sun's neck.

I download NetBeans 6.5 (ruby only version) and the installer tells me it needs to use 145 MB for the install. I tell it ok and it asks for my root password and I give it and away it goes. The install gleefully tells me at some point it is installing "GlassFish v3 Prelude". WTF!!! Stop doing things like this!!!

About a year or so ago, I seriously took into consideration adopting Solaris 10. I read the basic install docs and tried to get a clean and basic install of Solaris. No such luck. I wanted a server OS and the default install gives me not 1 but 3 desktop solutions, multiple Sun products like a directory and mail server and yes, 3 versions of Java setup in a "great" multi-java install method. This was done to enable the multiple other stuff to work as sun's various products it was jamming down my throat had different Java requirements.
So what would I need to get a "slimmed down Solaris install"? I would need to read through a thousand pages of docs and write install scripts.
So what did I do instead? I switched to ubuntu server. Why is ubuntu server great? Because it does not have other products it is trying to "up-sell" me.

Sun thinks that because it is giving you some free tech that it spent lots of money creating that they have the user's permission to shove more stuff on the user. This is a big problem. If I want GlassFish, I'll install it. If I want any form of X-windows or Java on my server, I'll ask for it.
I've read AC, and found it good for getting a handle on what's going on in cryptosystems. It definitely didn't leave me feeling like I was anywhere near prepared to implement one. (And the book's a bit dated).

Since you seem to have a lot of experience in this area, what would you recommend as really good reading?
And speak of the devil - they got back to me and were gracious enough to tell me that they were unable to meet our deadline, despite their interest.

Oh well, I guess I'm going with the other offer :)
For what it's worth, GitHub will be licensing copies of the site shortly using JRuby so we can distribute the code compiled.

We're fans.
I heartily recommend the author's previous work in Wired, "High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Sea." A bit lower on the drama dial, still quite interesting:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_s...
This is classic, although this is by far one of the worst comments. See the rest:

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0833030477/ref=cm_rdp_h...

One of my favorites:

Once you get about halfway in, the rest of the story is pretty predictable.

Still worth reading though.
I really like the idea and will probably use the site from time to time to get some more sanity checks. Good work.
I totally agree. It's been a fantasy of mine for years to have a company where there are a couple of beautiful quiet rooms with an armchair and some sort of couch or cot. You could reserve them for a half hour to think or sleep. I know for sure that this would enhance my productivity, and probably others' as well.
Haven't read them, but I'm guessing the reason there is no haha moment is because, quite literally, there is no moment-- explaining why the world is broken requires several hundred pages and only becomes apparent in light of the whole. Like a Woody Allen movie. It's funny but there is no point at which it's funny.

edit: So a few years ago I was attempting a startup with a cofounder who I really liked. Within about two months of starting his mom committed suicide, his high school gf died, and he came down with mono. True story. Is it funny? It's fucking hilarious. Why? Because people aren't supposed to be that unlucky. It shouldn't happen. It violates our beliefs about how the world is supposed to work.
Behind The Money: Iminlikewithyou's Charles Forman on selling virtual goods
It's $7, lighten-up. I'm about to spend $15/person/hour for deeper usability tests and now I can ask less in-depth questions but as often as I want for much less? Pure gold.
You would have to somehow get the user to click on the Flash object. I wouldn't rely on Flash for the user experience, though. What YouTube does is probably best (an input box that selects all on click). People are probably most familiar with that method.

Even better would be to figure out a workflow where the user doesn't have to copy, or paste anything.
Retried now, and did once got the header of the page down. After that failed again.
What you are missing is: 1) Analyzing a function's behavior sometimes (frequently) takes as long as running the function itself, 2) some functions can run forever, and 3) sometimes we can't tell the functions that run forever from those that run a very long time.

Example: Write a simple function F to generate prime numbers. (Search the internet for examples if you've never tried it. It can be done in a few lines with two loops.) Your prime-number-generating function F will never halt, because it will never run out of integers to check -- i.e. because there are infinite integers to be tested for being prime. So the halting problem is solvable for F, it is known that F will never halt.

Now slightly modify function F to notice whenever it has generated two primes in a row that are only two away from each other, such as 11 and 13. Increment a counter C whenever these Twin Primes are detected. This is as simple as storing the previous prime P1, subtracting it from the newly-generated prime P2, and seeing if P2-P1 is equal to 2. Finally, make one last tiny change to your function: accept a parameter X, and halt when the counter C becomes greater than X. At this point the function F is probably less than ten lines long and not very complicated at all. I get to pick X for you. Can you write an analyzer function A to decide if function F(X) halts or not?

The answer is: No, you can't. To write function A you would have to prove or disprove the Twin Prime Conjecture, which mathematicians have been trying to do and failing at for centuries.

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

Lets imagine that the Twin Prime Conjecture is wrong and there are a finite number of Twin Primes, N. We've been searching for N for so long that I'm confident than N is very, very large, whatever it is. Meaning I can pick an X that is less than N, but still so large that function F(X) will take longer than our lifetime to generate that many Twin Primes and halt. Alternately, lets imagine that the Twin Prime Conjecture is correct and there are infinitely many Twin Primes. Again, I can pick an X so large that it will take longer than our lifetime for F(X) to halt. Either way, we would both be dead before knowing the results of the test, and maybe the test will never complete, who can say?

Worse, any analyzer function A you could write would have to know N to decide if F(X) will halt or not. But N is not known and has not yet been discovered after hundreds of years of trying. So function A would either have to disprove the Twin Primes Conjecture (unlikely with anything less than artificial intelligence) or it would have to calculate C by generating all the primes that F(X) would generate, meaning that A is equivalent to F, meaning that A is no faster than F.

Therefore, neither you nor any currently-conceivable function A can decide if function F(X) will halt or if F(X) will continue searching forever. That's the halting problem and it's unsolvable for this F(X).
http://nearlyfreespeech.net

I am a big fan of these guys. Their technical knowledge is top notch and their pricing plans are perfect for small websites. Heck, I even remember them emailing me letting me know that ICANN fees were going to go up, and I should thinking about renewing my domain name before the price went up. Talk about customer service.
Actually, I have been thinking a lot on this idea. It is called adaptive web design. Cluttered web pages can be made a lot less cluttered by adaptively removing elements which are rarely used. Plus the system can also automatically test variations in designs, colours, etc depending on the user profile.

My idea was to make a javascript library which when included would automatically analyze the page structure and make the pages adaptive without much of an effort from the developer. The only thing here is that heavy javascript processing would be required to modify pages on the fly. Or, this can also be done on the backend but that would require templatizing existing websites (which could further slow down adoption of this technique).

Any thoughts?
Facebook.com dns fun
I stumbled upon this while investigating why accessing www.facebook.com was taking longer than it should. Long story short, standards compliant resolver library code sends out an AAAA RR query and an A RR query when looking up a hostname. The facebook.com authoritative servers, by incorrectly timing out on the AAAA query for www.facebook.com, are adding up significant seconds to the page load time.AAAA queries for facebook.com work as expected by the various dns standards. Trying to email facebook at the email address mentioned on their SOA record simply bounces. So, fellow hackers, if you know anyone at facebook, tell them to read rfc 4074, and roll out a fix ?
While the printed version is good, I would have expected the publisher to have an audiobook version as well. A perfect companion for one's Ipod.
Not a fan of the copying/borrowing a badge ideas. If you don't support whatever the conference is covering, you shouldn't be there. If you do, you shouldn't mind fronting some cash to support the event.
Woman In Disaster
We actually have that right now, the box selects all when you click it: http://www.grabup.com/uploads/3fa8b2cde15df8314a8ce242451b03...

Just thought it would be nice if there was an auto-copy function - so shortening with our bookmarklet and copying took just 1 click.