skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I took a class once regarding Irish-American, African-American, and Mexican-American history. For my final paper I wrote it about how race is a social construct and how ethnic groups become "white" in the eyes of society through socio-economic gains. My Mexican-American teacher, realizing that I had used his lectures the reading, and my own research on this, did not criticize my data, or my case. He simply attacked my conclusion, calling it the "Book of Mormon Thesis."

I am not a Mormon. But where others might have been upset, I took it as a great compliment. If you have to resort to denigrating the conclusion rather than attacking the case, that's a pretty good indication it has value!
It really depends on the context / configuration (or at least should depend on). Imagine a host available to public at a library. Considering that people can come there to print out some sensitive documents, you don't want to allow normal users to change printer settings. Someone could remove the default one and set up a tunnel through his own host, capturing all documents on the wire before they hit the printer. Very similar situation exists for the WiFi networks.

Of course this doesn't make any sense on a laptop. But it doesn't look like there's any sane default. You need to choose your configuration properly and that's it. If OpenSUSE doesn't allow it, then yes... that's a bug.
People mention that objection a lot but I think it might be a feature rather than a bug. Perhaps it would be best to have some non-dismissible reminders that we should not be sitting in front of a screen and pecking buttons for eight hours a day.
Really, I would think just about any startup nowadays could be considered a "bigdata" startup. If you are going to have a successful app, then you will probably have lots of data to deal with.

To answer your question, I doubt Facebook or Twitter would have been defined as "bigdata" companies.
For the lazy, here is the petition: http://wh.gov/04u

Yes, we all know that online Whitehouse petitions won't have as much effect as calling/writing your congressional representatives. But this is such a 'niche' issue that I could imagine something as small as a this having a real effect.

But call/write too, if you are so inclined!
Really? How so? Because the MacBook Air has nothing to do with the issue at hand, and it is by Linux admission the best laptop for him (from the thread: "Trust me, I tried. Nothing better exists. It's sad. They are all big and clunky").
Has the author of this app tried to monetize this?
Are you sure that is who they are ceding the market to?
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/10/despite-record-mac...

http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1565

Lenovo grew 30% to Mac 26%. Of course, Macs are growing, not ignoring that, but they aren't the only ones.

Lenovo pays attention to design, and though they may not quite have the polish of Apple hardware, they are getting better, and some of their designs really are beautiful.
Apple iOS: Apps can upload your photos, calendars or record conversations
I live in fly-over country, in a drive-past town. Cost of living here is pretty low, all things considered. So I've gotten used to stuff being far less than it cost when I lived in the city.

I wonder if I could negotiate a salary increase from my employer in return for opting out of the plan.
Ask HN: which datastore for large log files
I am working with systems that are generating 14TB of log files per day and I would like to consume them in a datastore so that I can run ad hoc queries on this data.

Since these are log files they are highly compressible (especially if compressed in a columnar fashion). What systems do people recommend for this type of system?

I'd prefer an open source solution if there's one out there.
Time zone setting can (and should) be a user-specific setting.

Since a server application most likely isn't running as a the same user as the "real" logged-in user, there's no reason anything bad would happen.
I should point out that Apple no longer offers any music with DRM.
It's worth pointing out that The Verge was started by Joshua Topolsky, who was the editor at Engadget until about a year ago.
> You probably won't have to sue anyone, but the demonstrable capability of suing will cause them to escalate this issue internally very, very rapidly.

Not even slightly true. They don't care. The cost of the occasional lawsuit is baked into the system cost already.
PandoDaily is just so meta, every other post is about itself. The only value it provides is to those that care about the writers or "tech drama".
> I mean Wordpress flat out resisted PHP 5.0 for years. Years. Everything had to be done in PHP4.

I presume that's because of the size of Wordpress' install base. The number of people who run their software on $9/month shared hosting environments is staggering. Many of those are late to upgrade PHP versions.

Wordpress gets a lot of crap for being poorly written but the truth is that it's an example of software that works really well given some really unique circumstances. If the WP devs decided that their software didn't need to support the 99% of web servers out there then it wouldn't be nearly as ubiquitous as it is today.
Which is the best [human] language to learn?
The specifications for the original IBM PC were published and could be mostly understood by a high-school student. Things get a bit crazy when the unfettered prominence of the CPU starts to wane and the GPU and bridge chipsets take over more and more responsibility for making things work.

Even now it's not like you can't understand it, but the amount of time you'd have to invest in understanding it is well beyond the commitment level of most.
New Objective-C import syntax
Yes, it is monetized by Ads and affiliate programs from photo printing companies
Are you a female developer?
I'm writing a guest blog post for Women 2.0, and want to talk to some female developers who joined early-stage startups - to find out why they joined the early-stage startup. I want to know how they got recruited? What makes you want to work there? What sells people on a risky early-stage company? If you would like to speak to me or know someone that should please email info@urbanityevents.com
Doesn't seem desperate at all. He's doing the Willie Sutton thing: go to where the jobs are!
Young designer is looking for a opportunity
Did you see how they collect their data? ("Representative consumers in the US")

http://www.compete.com/us/about/our-data/

Google shows the graph going up over time (and is international):

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com

Alexa has a different shape (bump up in 1Q2011 and then slow decline):

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com

So three different companies all claiming to have good data with three completely different shapes for the traffic in 2011. It shows just how unreliable the data is. I remember the reddit folks saying just how bad the sites like the above were compared to the actual traffic they were getting (can't be bothered to find the link).
Affordable Michigan MedicalInsurance
Review my first jQuery plugin. SliderTabs - The multi-purpose content slider
As my recent project and first jQuery plugin I decided to build SliderTabs (http://lopatin.github.com/sliderTabs). I've been studying jQuery plugins and decided to build this as practice. The first motivation for this was the Sliding Tabs $8 CodeCanyon plugin (http://codecanyon.net/item/sliding-tabs-jquery-plugin/141774) as you can tell by the names. I don't like the fact that such a seemingly simple plugin should cost money so I built a plugin with the same idea of scrolling tabs and I plan to add more and more configurable controls to make it truly a universal content slider.

What does HN think? I'm very open to suggestions and bug-fixes.
I love USAA to pieces.

For years my time in the Marines was good only for memories (good and bad), cynicism, and a career in IT.

Which isn't bad. But then they let me in the club and my insurance cost dropped like a rock.

Plus they're super easy to deal with. Had some hail damage and where my neighbors were fighting _their_ insurance provider months later USAA couldn't get me the money fast enough.

"Overnight .. is that soon enough? We can borrow an F-18 and air drop in about 90 minutes it if that would be more convenient."

Well not that good. But pretty close.
Do you have any java hosting in mind, which I can rely on?
HFT pursuing infrastructure faster than fibre optic
Apple have very respectable margins on their their PC's.

That's because they don't participate in the aforementioned low-end PC market. Dell makes respectable margins on their high-end brands (Alienware), too.
I think we're going to have to wait until a year or two after Apple releases retina display Airs before ultrabooks start having high resolution displays.
Thank you! It's coming back to me now :) This was taught to me in college, I know about currying, the right-associativity was the big part I missed!
Have you heard of Google X Lab?

Or the Google Glasses?

Or the driver-less car they have been working on?

Google are just about one of the most innovative companies around.
I'm not against using REPL, but it's not viable to solely write in REPLs, therefore we need to teach "how to run things in files" and then we're back at crappy HTML-files.
Have you tried the gestures? There would be no capacitive buttons, only gestures. I don’t know when I last used the button but it was a long time ago. Once I turned the gestures on I couldn’t go back, they are very useful and won’t be wrongly recognized.
ApnMachine: An EventMachine APN server & a Redis-backed library
NB: titlewise, the latter is being measured a year after the former was launched.
The other half of my point is that in some transactions, "should" and "fair" don't matter.

I'll give you "fair", but I think "should" has a very real meaning: If for every deal X which does not have property P there is a deal X' which does have property P such that for every participant utility(X') >= utility(X), then the participants should negotiate a deal with which has property P. To take an example I ran into recently: You should never simultaneously buy a life annuity and life insurance (on average they cancel each other; but you have to pay two risk premiums).

This may sound trivial, but it's useful for recognizing dishonest actors: If someone wants a deal which doesn't have the properties you think it should have, their utility function isn't what you think it is. In the above example, if your financial advisor is trying to convince you to buy both a life annuity and life insurance, it tells you that they're thinking about the commissions they can earn, not about optimizing your finances.

Some [VCs] bend over backwards to try to make things better for company "operators"; in a very reasonable way of looking at things, the VCs who do that may be the ones who are acting unethically.

I agree: They're sacrificing the current fund's returns (by making deals which are suboptimal for them) in order to improve their reputation (a personal benefit) and allow themselves to get better deals in the future (thereby improving future funds' returns).

An angel can spend his money to be your friend. A VC shouldn't spend his clients' money to be your friend.
I find it fascinating how a zero-sum and seemingly wasteful pursuit is the source of such cutting edge innovation.
CAN and SHOULD. but it's NOT.
Hit me up when you're in SF; we can reminisce about Eckhart Hall.
I just signed the petition. If nothing else, it was very satisfying.
Google Makes Liars Out Of White Hat SEO
I think it's just inertia and that we're ripe for a new paradigm shift. I am trying to figure out what that might be.
I want:

- persistent connection to APN Servers (as Apple recommends)

- real-time notifications (no regular polling a la Resque)

- super easy to use in Ruby and in any languages (as easy as enqueuing a serialized JSON hash in Redis)

- persist and queue messages when server is down

- horizontal scalability and out-of-the-box load-balancing

- fast/scalable daemons.

Hope you like it!
Good points, but I don't see it as a binary proposition in tech. You can't make a moonshot without building something small but useful and then pivoting a bunch of times. In retrospect you see the path of how a company got huge as if it were a foregone conclusion, but the individual choices were not necessarily made in service of a grand vision. True there are many decisions along the way that break one way or another, but when I hear early stage folks talking super huge I just get the impression they are dreamers, whereas the guys who are simply reaching for the next level that's just out of reach can do amazing things over the course of a decade.

To me lifestyle business is more about declaring that your values are in conflict with what you feel would need to be done for further growth for this company, at this time; not because it couldn't be done, and even if it couldn't you really wouldn't know until after you tried.
Good thing we're talking about laptops, then. If we were including their monitor product pages in this critique we'd really look silly.
So long as it's significantly abstracted away from them. If they were US workers, or people they might meet on the street, it would be a different issue. There is a disconnect.
> Hardly. Valve has been doing this with Steam for years. Microsoft does it with Xbox Live.

Which is disturbing but when it regards software your livelihood depends upon, not "just" games, the story gets that additional umpf.

> Once again, not unique to Apple.

Sure, but the article is about Apple.
Ah, so if the ends justify the means then there's no one qualified to question the method? Why not diagnose demonic possession and write a prescription for drowning? Who's to doubt the ethics of the method if it's "effective"?

And "effective" by whose measure, anyway? A husband who wants his wife to "act normal"? The health establishment? You?
Does my accepting Google's new privacy policy allow them to link information possibly gained via Google Analytics (using their ubiquitous cookies like _utma, _utmb, _utmz) to my other Google product activities?
Tell HN: My oppinion is that HN sucks really bad.
Oh SNAP, I said it.
Ive been a long time reader and publisher on HN but lately(> 1 year) HN really, really, really sucks. And yes, this kind of topic comes up once in a while but I feel that this is going down hill a lot further, a lot quicker than ever before.

Lets take a look at some of the top stories at ask HN right now shall we, which usually is my favorite part of my HN-routine.

Macbook Air or Macbook Pro 15"

Ask HN: What are your "Most visited" pages in Chrome (or other browser)?

How should I learn programming?

A look at the top news stories is not to promising either, for that matter.

* Dell: No longer a PC company*

* IPad Event Confirmed: Apple Invites Press to 'Touch' Something*

Oh, 5 shitty things among a ton of great stuff you might thing to yourself. But, should there be shit at all? Does HN really need another MacBook Air ask? Is iPad-news really relevant in this forum? Is "how can I learn to program" something that belongs here?

I'm sorry HN, please don't hate.
I see you all later, somewhere else.
I suspect we will see a lot of things like this.. if you aren't required to disclose the exploit used, there's very little reason for vendors to continue to participate.
Hmmm... I applied at Twitter and got the coding problem done right. I also contributed to one of Twitter's open source projects, "Snowflake." Either you got to have a great story like this Iowa guy, or hiring at Twitter is broken. :-( This might be my next HN post: "How I Interviewed Great at Twitter but a bad coder got my job."
Mine certainly never fell out of a socket, and you'd want a computer to be plugged into a surge protector anyway. I've been running it continuously as long as I've owned it; it's not a piece of junk. It's a reliable Linux server that uses 3% the power of my laptop and 0.6% the power of my desktop computer... and it was less than $100.
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-...
I most definitely care and am very interested.

Are these[1] the notes you were referring to? I couldn't find the talk itself.

[1]: http://titanpad.com/fossinasia
Announcing gentlyremind.me: a little helper for your Twitter consumption
You are looking at it wrong. Also: You are wrong.

The iPad already supports gestures. Three gestures replace all you need the home button for (one or two small and insignificant exceptions, but those would be easy enough to add).

Those gestures already declutter the interaction considerably. They make for a much smoother experience than that clusterfuck which is the home button.

It’s a nice fallback, so I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to remove it, but I haven’t touched it in ages (it’s always not where I expect it to be, anyway).
I'm pretty sure you can do the same generator does with iterators in PHP. Traits in PHP 5.4 probably cover most of use cases where you may want multiple inheritance. Decorators are superior in Python though, no real replacement for it in PHP.
That's a good one :).
This Daniel Guy is Definitely Getting Fired
I'm not talking about comedians, for pete sake. I'm talking about software development in a professional context.
How to : find the best consultant/contractor?
Following some bad encounters with our current consultant, I'm trying to see if I can find to replace him.
Usually I would ask around and see if anyone knows someone for the job, but as we are working on some very specific and not so spread out tool, I thought about using a website.

Do you guys know any good consulting/contracting platform ?
Neat but as expressed in the post, it's "really just a cool implementation of a combined projector and camera".
The First Google Maps War
Not familiar with those people except Thompson.
With Javascript being the mess that it is I doubt it would be a good starting language, it has too much idiosyncrasies. Most of the post seemed to be excusing Javascript's faults and trying to convince me that I have a problem with said faults because I've been exposed to "better" programming languages. No shit.

To be fair, Javascript is the easiest language to teach through a website, but that's it. The goal shouldn't be to make the teacher's life easy rather then providing the right tools for the student.
Again, please put this rhetoric in perspective, not in the eyes of a 21st century person from a developped society, but in the eyes of a person of that time, who had the choice between staying in an enpoverished countryside, potentially victim of starvation and malnourishment, and the perspective of having a stable, paid job in a factory.

Let's not play the "they chose it" or "at least they were fed" argument for those situations. Having to choose between starvation and working as a wage-slave in horrible conditions, as they had, is not really a choice at all.

It's just employees of the time TAKING ADVANTAGE of people that had no other option than giving in to them, and the laws et al permitting them to do so. It is only slightly better than the "choice" slaves had, i.e that of working for their masters or getting killed.

People were NOT stupid. They made the choice of "more gains", not less. They ended up richer and in better position than where they started. They progressed on the social ladder.

Yes, working to your bone and getting paid peanuts is "more gains" over dying of starvation. Nothing to write home about, though.

I wouldn't call it exactly "progressing on the social ladder" either. Those people were dirt poor, they died dirt poor, and their children were dirt poor also, usually working on the same dead end conditions. With the occasional success story.

And those people knew the were getting a raw deal. That's how the labour movement was established, that's why people fought for the 8-hour day. And those people were also many times killed, by private guards and even the national guard, ever lending a hand to the rich men of their day, when they asked for fairer treatment.

One of my most vivid memories was visiting the Ludlow site in Ludlow, Colorado, and hearing of the story of the Ludlow Massacre, one of many. Here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
Post-push reviews don't make sense to me - it's like checking movie tickets after you already watched a movie. Pre-push is much better because:

1. There's a clear outcome - the change is either approved and carries the name of the reviewer, or it is not. This creates focus and sense of responsibility. Post-push reviews tend to turn into pointless chats followed by no action: "- I think it is better to do it differently. - Yeah, probably, whatever".

2. It's easy to automate them - a simple hook can reject a change that was not reviewed. With post-push you have to nag developers to review every commit, then you have to nag them again to fix whatever the reviewers found, then you have to nag them more to review that fix itself - and so on and on ad nauseum.

3. The quality bar is higher. It is psychologically easier for reviewer to NOT approve something that doesn't look right then to insist that the author fixes it after the fact (asking permission vs forgiveness)

4. Other people don't base their work on code that haven't been reviewed. "yes, you're right, it would be better to do it differently, but now it is used in 150 places, too much trouble to fix" (and next time reviewer won't even bother to mention small problems, the whole process slowly degrades).

5. Most importantly, all code in your shared repo is always reviewed. With post-push, given sufficient volume of commits, there's always some potentially buggy stuff that nobody looked at - and you probably don't even know what it is.

I would even argue that in some teams not reviewing at all would be better then post-push because if you spend time doing reviews, and then nothing happens - you're just wasting time and effort.
New Android Application Stats still come up short
Umm, Linus is not "joking." This is his normal manner of speaking. This is not supposed to elicit laughs; it's supposed to emphasize his point.
Chapter 15 of http://www.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/ESLII_pri...
Toastmasters?
Wordpress gets a lot of crap for being poorly written because it is poorly written. There's no great mystery here.

Yes, they deal with lots of different configurations. This is not unique in the history of software development. It's called "portability" and many organisations seem to be able to achieve it without compromising quality.

My searing, eye-boiling hatred for Wordpress comes from administering it for what is now nearly a decade. Every time I dive into the code I am frequently repulsed by it.

The total absence of tests is my favourite "feature". I've seen multiple bugs closed with WORKSFORME that I was directly grappling with.
As far as I can figure out (through the US PTO's abysmal website), "retina display" or derivitaves is not trademarked.

I'd be happy to be corrected, though.
The cultural values in China are also different than in the West. Chinese culture (from my experience) tends to be less about the individual, and more about the group. This makes it easier for people to swallow 'hellish' conditions because they are sending money back home to their family, and therefore their family as a whole is 'better.'

Also, I wouldn't say that things like:

* Forcing foreign businesses to partner with a Chinese company if they want to do business in China.

or

* Kicking people out of their homes (with no compensation) to make way for construction/development (e.g. Chinese Olympic Stadium).

Necessarily jive with a capitalist society.
The impending demise of scholarly journals (1995 .PDF)
Well, the Filthy Critic is quite known on the interwebs. And BileBlog was quite read back in the day by Java devs. But, ok, those are minor websites.

But, you must have heard of Lenny Bruce (they even made him into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman) and Denis Leary. Comedian, had starred in a few movies, and had a tv series that made it into 7 seasons...