skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes things are doing by misguided employees in the false assumption that they are helping. It's not the company that is doing the deed often but an overzealous employee who doesn't think of his/her actions. We experienced this with forum posting from a competitor. When we found and I talked with the owner he was as confused as me, but he phoned me back a few days later to say that he had tracked it down to an employee. He apologised and contacted the forums to remove the posts - I had a lot more respect for them after that. We're still competitors and fight hard, but fair, with one another
Agreed, but I think it's significant that Joyent offers a lower spec starter plan under that for $199 per year.
How I Built an RPG In A Week From Scratch With No Budget
Mono for Android - Now Available on the Market
The Waterfall model didn't work for software and it doesn't work for databases.
A better way to pinpoint underground oil reserves
BS and MS in Comp. Sci already and working on my Ph.D.

The MS was more of a pit stop than a final destination :).
I've been a projectionist for about 2 years.
It's a nice job, but don't expect much time to do other things!
Mounting a film only takes about 3 to 8 minutes (depends on if the film roll is already at the right projector or not)

But then you have to start it right on time, check if everything is sharp and framed well, then come back 5 minutes later to check again and preferable come back yet again after another 5 minutes. This is because sharpness, framing may vary or the automatic lens change between commercials and the movie may screw things up.

I worked in a small theater with only 4 screens, but it was hectic none the less. Sure you have some time between films, but usually management finds more jobs for to do.
I also often helped behind the snacks counter or had to clean the seats and alleys after a screening.
Great use of Posterous :)
hrm, so use tarsnap then :p
I think the fact that this thread has 70+ comments, yet has not turned into a political flamefest, but rather an intelligent discussion on whether it belongs, is an almost unbelievably strong testament to the quality of the HN community.

I say this as someone who has very strong views on the topic, yet hope and pray that issues this divisive will not be allowed to sow seeds of disunity in an otherwise harmonic and well functioning community.
My apologies. I didn't notice until the edit link disappeared. And I have no clue why the site decided to add <code> brackets to my comment.
why not a sys admin? its fairly easy work 95% of the time ...
Am I the only one who played Deus Ex through to the end? You know, the whole "manufactured crisis, anticipated reaction" scenario? In other words, what if it's the EXACT opposite?

What if it's only happening to the extent that it is BECAUSE we're all sucked into watching/discussing it? What if the war is not so much on Palistinean civilians, but rather on OUR sense of balance, well-being, confidence about humanity, etc.? What if we're all being psychologically conditioned into a passive, regressive child-like state of mind via the various horrors we're witnessing so that we can be made to wait for some strong, daddy figure to save us all - like when Bush saved us all from the evil terrorists in Iraq? What if this is just one massive, sophisticated psy-ops operation?

Before I get downvoted to Hacker News sub-hell, just ponder this as a possibility, no matter how seemingly absurd. I find the whole situation disgusting for reasons that span the spectrum of "sides" and "issues". But I find myself creeped out as I wonder how I went from being suspicious about the UN after reading 1984 as a kid to now find myself secretly wishing it would "take over" the middle east.

We're being reduced to emotional wrecks by people who seem to be, like some sick experimenters, trying to figure out exactly what reduces the most people to emotional wrecks the fastest. And what's happening in the meantime? For starters, this country's economic infrastructure has been wrecked to well, so quickly that we've gone from object of jealousy to object of ridicule and derision.

The 'ol "watch the horrors in the front while we attack the rear" distraction.

Snap out of the bee-hive mentality. The more we're all on the same frequency the easier we are to control. "But I caaaaare!" Then stop doing the anticipated (caring) and venture out into the chaotic: start a forum calling for the blowing up of the entire middle east.

Go to some embassy and burn Israeli, Palistinean, U.S. and Russian flags. Confuse them.

Gather all your jewish friends and have them wear t-shirts that say "Jews for Hamas", then gather all your arab friends and have them wear "Arabs for Zionism" t-shirts. Call CNN and tell them that if they don't cover your stunt you'll decapitate 50 kittens and post it on YouTube.

Start a cult that promises to sacrifice the first alien that lands on earth to some ancient Chinese deity.

Wear t-shirts that say, "Me me me! Money money money! To hell with the third world! Me me me!"

Do anything but for humanity's sake, break out of this resonance conditioning.

Your "caring" is being used against you. Stop caring every time a kid, whether Israeli or Palistinean, is blown up and my hunch is that "they" will stop resorting to this nonsense to get on CNN and in your living room.

In other words, if WE alL agreed that poetry was a sign of moral correctness, I guarantee you Israel, Hamas and the UN would be flooding YouTube with their top writers trying to outdo each other in poetry.

But precisely because we get sucked into this crap by design we get more and more "Oh no, look at all the children suffering."
This is what Bill James did when he wrote his Baseball Abstracts way back when. I wouldn't generally recommend it as a lifestyle choice, but there's 1) a desk and 2) a general lack of interruptions.
http://code.google.com/p/offspringjs/ Well this will get rid of half the reasons I use jQuery, fabulous
I had a really good surgeon and didn't really suffer any permanent ill-effects. But, aside from fixing my deviated septum, no long-term positive effects either.

I still got sick, til my mother-in-law (a Viennese neurologist) put me on Broncho Vaxom.
So, you are coming to UIUC very soon? http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jayp < He definitely can help you.
http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I fixed it.
(I just updated my HN profile with my contact info... Let's meet at the Buzz sometime!)

Hmm... I think I was trying some wacky ports like "4444" (Selenium) and 5901 ('raw' VNC). I also use a non-standard SSH port (not port 22) for my remote servers. I'll have to give it another go sometime. And yeah, I know I should be doing everything over an encrypted channel anyway. :-)
That would be much appreciated
"Role Playing Game" or "Rocket Propelled Grenade"?

Ah, Role Playing Game. I guess either would have been interesting.
It is supposedly to be done in the open, not sure what that exactly entails.

There are some posts from the previous company that designed it ecco
http://community.buglabs.net/kashif/posts/55-Designing-for-B...
http://community.buglabs.net/Bradley/posts/56-more-on-Design...
Deflationary Prices? Only Energy is Down...
Front desk at a small hotel.

My wife had this job when we first got married. When she was pregnant, the hotel actually let me cover some shifts for her. It was awesome. I'd bring my laptop and once the check-in rush was over (6pm-ish), it was real quiet and I could hack away.
Have you encouraged them to join? Dropbox has more customers and awareness. Zumodrive has better technology. They'd be stronger together than apart.
Definitely start with MAMP, in my opinion. As it doesn't build/install anything itself, it keeps your system ultra clean. If you need to move beyond it, just drop it in the trash and you're done. A few hints:

- By default, the apache doc directory is mapped to an os directory inside of the MAMP folder. Change this to something in your ~ directory right away so that if you upgrade MAMP, you won't accidentally write over your work.

- Make sure MAMP dirs are at the beginning of your shell path because there are conflicting binaries pre-installed in OS X (basic, I know).

- In my opinion, the MAMP PRO upgrade is worth it. It gives you much finer control over many things.

- I've only compiled and installed the memcache pecl extension and I did that through the standard make/install process and it worked fine. I just had to drop the memcache.so file into the proper directory and find the right php.ini file to edit to enable it. See this post (and my comment -- 2nd from the end -- to see how to configure MAMP PRO): http://www.lullabot.com/articles/setup-memcached-mamp-sandbo.... Note: I did not use their process to build the extension, I used this: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-... .

- I don't think there is strong support for php pecl extensions in MacPorts, but MacPorts is great for a great many things. For example, I used it to install the memcache daemon.

I hope that helps.
Yeah, if we get too many people different from us in a confined space it will make it harder to inbreed with our cousins and the like.
good point. I wonder what size apps you could run on that, though.
Hmmm, I'd like to see a formal comparison of the two. I haven't used zumodrive but I'm soooooo impressed with Dropbox. It's amazing.

I know this is against the grain, but Dropbox replaced SVN for our development projects. It's a lot easier for designers to use... SVN is too tedious.
How about doing both? Hire 70 to write negative reviews, and 30 for positive. Tip off about the positive ones.
There must be something about a language that helps it map to our brains. The creators of the language must be "like" its users in some way for the language to make sense. Or perhaps it's the language that is the mapping between the way the world works and the perception of that world in the minds of the users and the creators.
University of Colorado at Boulder
Well if you're in Europe, what about: 'unemployed'? 80% of your current paycheck for the first 6 months, then you really should start looking for something that resembles a job. I know people who travelled the world on 'unemployment'. If you're looking for quiet time, why don't you just skip the social obligation of 'having a job'?
Ask HN: How do you start something?
Eric Raymond clearly states that being a hacker is all about 'creating things'. You might consider my question naive, but how do you start creating things? We all see problems around us, see better solutions for existing technology, or come with our own ideas for the next 'killer app'. But how do you start working on your app or how do you keep working on it? What keeps you motivated throughout the whole development? What do you do when you run into dead ends, challenges beyond your hacking skills? What makes you believe that something a 20 year old, one man army will create will be better than experienced programmers working in multi million dollar corporations? I know it's largely a mind-set question, but I also want to know how you conquer problems beyond your skills? How do you hack your learning and creating process?

Thanks in advance.
Perhaps the users value their karma points too much. A lot of votes are based on whether the user agrees with the post, and not based on the value it brings to the discussion.
Startup Interview: Elements Akademia – Build skills to land your dream job
Ruby on Rails and django?
I think I know what you mean. When I read it, I got the same impression. It's not ignorance, because what the post is saying is true. LAMP does do all those things and it is very smart in many ways. But the things listed are equivalently true of other languages and programming platforms as well.

I don't understand though, why PHP is being compared to JS, when they solve different problems.
Our wonderful universe acts in surprising ways. Human intuition is often wrong, and the only way to know something for sure is to test it. The Dvorak keyboard's logical organization seems intuitively faster, but we don't know how the human brain is wired, so we don't really know the limiting factors on typing speed. Anything is possible, and the only way to know the truth is by experiment. That's the scientific method. According to this article, the valid experiments support QWERTY over Dvorak, or at least show little difference. I don't know if the article true without examining the experiments myself, but I wouldn't call the article "unreasonable" for valuing science over fallible human reason.
I'm not a pilot but if you replace the water with the runway you've got what seems like a perfect landing.

Any HN'ers with aviation experience care to comment?
Louisiana Tech University.

Anyone else attending school in Louisiana?
I'm sorry, I hit the wrong "reply" link.
Thank you for pointing to the print version, instead of 7 small pages.

Summary: microblogs, targeting advertising, socian news sites, online video, streaming music, and enterprise social networking are going to have serious shake outs because of the lack of good revenue models. Streaming music will fail
because of licensing issues, enterprise social networks because no one wants to pay enterprise fees.

"Ad-supported video models, I mean, come on... It's over," says Wayne. "There's not enough wishful thinking left in the world to turn those guys into a business."
English is clearly not this guy's first language, so the grammar and spelling are very rough, but the information is good. I learned a few things!
The Software Design Pit
One, he's putting the NFL off for just a year - given his physical gifts, he'll still get drafted.

The man made a decision for his personal happiness - he decided that this would make him happy. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are enshrined in our Declaration of Independence as the inalienable rights of man. The founders made a conscious decision to step away from Locke's framework of life, liberty, and property (although Locke used the word estate). They did so for a reason. And if you think the "pursuit of happiness" is meaningless, Loving v. Virginia should disabuse you of this notion.

Good for Rolle. I wish more people did what made them happy instead of what would make them the most money. It's the real American way.
I'm from the Netherlands and I'd say the Dutch web is very healthy and developed.
There are only about 16 million Dutch, but you can pretty much get all you need without visiting an English website.

www.tweakers.net - A big IT-focussed news site with a great community and even better features (e.g. complete price listings of all Dutch electronics webshops for easy comparisons including webshop reviews. Is there an English equivalant to this?).

www.hyves.nl - Our own social networking site that gained popularity before Facebook or MySpace could.

www.nu.nl - Very basic, very popular generic Dutch news site. Everyone I now reads this.

www.uitzendinggemist.nl - Online repeats of recent TV shows.

www.9292ov.nl - THE integrated route-planner for public transport. Combines all trains, trams, buses and ferries timetables to extract the perfect route.

Also every Dutch company or institution has a professionally developed website these days.
Incidentally, this is RMS' (Stallman, of course, not our own 'rms') suggestion for those who are unable to find a day job doing free software: do something unrelated to software (with the idea being the avoidance of contributing to proprietary software) that gives you free time. Hearing that in person from RMS was the beginning of the end of my interest in RMS style free software.
Like just about everything in programming it seem to be a tradeoff.

In Java the try/catches are (a) implicitly "registered" on the call stack, and when an exception is thrown (b) then the runtime has to do a little analysis to determine what to do.

In Lisp, the handlers are (a) explicitly registered up front and when an "exception" is thrown (b) it just uses the most recently registered handler.

(a) is a much more common task than (b), so that's where you should optimize. But I don't know enough enough about Lisp (or Java) to know how these are implemented. If it's just pushing/popping on a stack then maybe it's just as fast.
"But here is the issue, in taking on this bank, the state has now taken on it’s liabilities. All €30Billion of them. This is now thrown on top of a €40Billion national dept. Overnight (literally as the takeover order was given Thursday night) the national dept of the country has nearly doubled, and this is a dept which our country of 4 million does not have the resources to pay."

I'm too lazy to figure out the debt-to-GDP level this has created for Ireland, but I imagine it isn't too good.
Parabolas (etc.)
How often are these meet-ups?
C-x C-f
I sell lift tickets at a ski resort. Some of our ticket windows are not at the main resort & get about 5 customers on a slow day.

Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com

I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far.
did you realize that no one can be a hacker if they don't think PHP is so l33t that ur just not cool if you don't get it! what do you mean have i ever used java? what does that matter, PHP is awesome, so java sucks.
Very cool. I ride my bike right by there when the weather is nice.
Ask HN: How do you actually get paid the money?
Please excuse the noobish nature of this question, and if it's covered before, then it was missed and any link/articles would be appreciated; "long time reader, first time poster" status aside, wondering: what would an options matrix of payment possibilities look like for automatically and instantly getting paid BY COMPANIES, not individuals, look like?

In other words, let's say you were a startup of 3-5 people who need to work on product full time and can't spare the time needed to start a "billing" department to harass big companies to "pay their bills on time" which they never seem to do.

We don't want to be at the mercy of a large customer's whim about when they feel like "sending a check" and our local banker doesn't seem to know what to make of this question (probably because their main issue is small businesses that accept VISA/MC etc.).

So what are some options for, say, a software service with a monthly or quarterly subscription?

You know, assuming you don't want to come off as amateur and give a big client your paypal account?

Give them your company's checking account number and tell them, "When we see a deposit, that's when we activate the service?"

What are some options/tradeoffs? What have you used if you ever sold consulting/software/design services aside from "send a check for the amount of ...".

Is there some thing like a "corporate credit card" that we can just charge?

The ideal would be an account we can see and if such and such client deposited "x" money that month, they continue with it, if they were late, service shuts off until they deposit it.

And it's actually there, as in our side not, "it's making it's way through our accounts payable and will get to you soon, we promise."

Any ideas/experiences would be much appreciated, thank you.
I wish there was a better way of transitioning the reels, every time the cigarette burns flash I get jerked out of the movie.
NASA Balloon Mission Tunes in to a Cosmic Radio Mystery
I never even knew those damn things existed until fight club. Now I seem them every time.
Whatever it is, make sure it doesn't require an IP agreement. The ones you mentioned obviously wouldn't.
I'm not supporting Hamas and am not supporting any attacks against civilians from either side. But you also have to look at what has happened the last 60 years. Israel is not without blood on their hands either.

Let's face it. The last 60 years have been a disaster for the Middle East, and any action from either side can be "justified" with pointing at something the other side has done.

There have been attempts to make peace, but there have been too many demands that the other side can't accept. This can only be solved by one of the sides letting history be history and try to make a real attempt at peace. I think Israel, as the dominant party, should withdraw to the borders of 1967 and that the Palestinians should accept a multi-national peace keeping force that would stabilize the region and prevent further attacks on Israel.

It might take a couple of generations for the two sides to forgive each other, but it is worth a try.
Georgia Tech, CmpE 04
Present! :) Utrecht it is. Don't know why this is on the main page though.
Building a Role Playing Game in a week is impressive. Taking an entire week to build one single Rocket Propelled Grenade would be interesting too, but much less impressive ;-)
I'm with you. Much easier to just take it with you. Less distraction all around.

Now, asking other people to watch it can be one more nice human interaction for the day if you feel the need.
I don't know much about the engineering stuff behind this, but if fuel inefficiency is the only real reason they don't want to add grills, then why not have a mechanical system that removes the grill after they pass a particular altitude (where flocks of birds don't exist) and then add the grill again for landing?
The question remains, "What did PHP win?"

I don't mean to be a jerk here, but just saying why something is good doesn't mean it wins. Lots of languages are good and I could list lots of good things about lots of languages that would make <i>them</i> win.
The title lead me to believe that I can design my own "components" as in more arrows, different types of charts etc. Instead this only allows you to share what I would call "composition of built-in system components".

In other words, you can put two boxes together and share that, but you still can not create a pentagon.
Really enjoyed this. Hopefully it can be a bit of an antidote to the self flagellating I sometimes see on Hacker News about not working on something important. The beauty of just making something is a joy in itself that shouldn't be made so difficult and angst ridden.
Man, that's weird. I just snagged a link from the page.

EC530s. That little PTH dongle is nice if you find yourself often needing to switch to hearing conversations (if you're at work for instance) but I never really found it to be worth the effort.
ran s/components/compositions/ on the headline
Interesting way of defining a week. In terms of real "work" weeks, I get the feeling this would have taken longer than only one.

Anyone willing to venture a guess how long given the author only documented productive hours?
What makes you think it would make sense for two small startups to just "join", especially in this space, where it's not like you can just plug the technology of one into the other.
Well, if he's made of straw and he's driving a car, he's probably possessed, in which case it doesn't really matter.
It isn't, but it can be.
Clever thinking -- that's just evil.
> By page 30 it has already introduced the Haskell notions of bindings, functions, let, recursion and complex nested pattern matching in a very practical and understandable way.

Why does it take 30 pages for those things?
That's cool then! That makes me smile. I never used Pownce, I have to admit, so I wasn't up on it, but it'd have been nice to be a member just to have a large dataset like that to play with.
By doing this you will get something highly similar to CL's conditions. In CL, there is mechanism similar to Java exceptions (throw/catch/unwind-protect) that is - among other things - used by condition system to actually unwind stack when it determines that is necessary. So you can probably abuse Java exceptions to implement condition system or - more generally - escape continuations.

Problem is that such mechanism has to be used consistently everywhere to be useful. And when you find yourself rewriting standard library, you could well use CL instead of Java.
You mean the Quick Stop?
Thanks a lot. I just installed MAMP and MAMP Pro, and it seems pretty seamless and easy. The "Mac Way" if you will.

I appreciate all the help!
:)

I actually found this very interesting as a peek into Dutch culture as well.