skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Work with grayscale first. Design your UI with contrast in mind rather then color. Then when all the main elements are in place, pick a good color scheme. I've always found colourlovers.com to be an invaluable resource.
I'm curious about this -- can you explain how it's a security problem, and why that changed ~2005?
Cool. I look forward to being able to print out things like "Jenny, will you marry me?"

More seriously, I wonder if you could use some combination of pattern recognition and genetic algorithms to auto discover more words/phrases of this sort.
Is there a way to do RAII in Java?

First couple of hits for "Java RAII" on Google suggest "no," but I think the HN audience might be smarter than Google about this. I just recently introduced (then found and fixed) a bug where I forgot to release a resource, and if there is an idiom that doesn't make me manually match every resource allocation with its inverse, I'd like to know about it. Looks like Java might be last to the "automated freeing of non-memory resources" party.
Wikipedia says "Yes": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
Oh man. I was just about to install Google Earth to play around with it, but now I'm having second thoughts. Can I opt out of the updates and installs, or is it just plain malicious?

(Yes, installing anything without my permission is malicious, even if the installed software is benign.)
As someone who's conducted dozens of interviews over the last few years, I can tell you that there's no way to infer from someone's age or resume if they can code or not. Plenty of people with stellar resumes and 20 years' experience come in and absolutely bomb on relatively simple coding problems. Maybe they used to know how to code but have gotten rusty since they've been doing more management or hands-off architecture recently, but for whatever reason they can't solve problems that any recent grad ought to be able to solve. Some of those people can talk a good game when discussing higher-level stuff or when they're doing a lot of hand-waving, but they just can't translate it into code effectively. My point is not that "older" people can't code: when you do find someone with 20 years experience who can code well, they're generally incredibly valuable. Rather, it's that you always have to be skeptical and can't take someone's resume or stated experience and skills at face value. Those questions are there to filter out people that won't be successful in our company because their coding skills are below par, regardless of age, experience, or education.

If someone asks you to do something that seems "beneath" you or trivial, just do it as well and as quickly as you can so you can get it over with and talk about more interesting things, or use the problem itself as an excuse to start a conversation about something more interesting than the problem itself ("the interesting thing here, is that if you write it this way it's easier to test" or "if you used a language like X, you could write this more easily," or "realistically, I think this function would be more useful if you changed it to behave like this, so that it would then be useful for doing Y and Z as well as X.")

It's nothing personal, it's just the interviewer's job to be skeptical about your stated skills until you prove to him or her that they shouldn't be.
Amazon anecdote from today:

I was at a bookstore and saw a Vernor Vinge book that I didn't have already. Unfortunately it was $18 for the paperback. On my gphone I checked on Amazon and found a used-but-mint-condition copy for $3, plus $4 shipping. So I just ordered it from Amazon and left without buying anything.

I do feel bad for not helping out the bookstore, but it's hard to spend an extra $11 for nothing.
That is an eloquent expression of a beautiful idea, and I'm not even Catholic.
That's an unfortunate misunderstanding about atheists, unfortunately embraced by most atheists. It's like when they discovered they don't believe in a god anymore, any trace of evolution in their view of the universe just freezed. This is bullshit. I can easily call myself secular humanist, vaguely militant-atheist, zen-atheist (there's also zen-christians and zen-buddhists, don't worry), and I doubt very much I will die with the same labels.

People change, and people are different. Grouping the understanding of life of Einstein or Gates in the same category as every 15-year old who just rejected religion is a limitation I strongly hope we'll overcome in the coming years.
For whatever it's worth, I think your line of reasoning makes more sense. I see the difference between atheism and agnosticism as analogous to the difference between conclusiveness and inconclusiveness.

I don't agree with the "refuted yes" idea. In logic, "no" is not necessary equal to "not yes". For example, "not black" could be "white", but also "green". "God" does not have a well defined enough definition: it's very likely that God is not a bearded man on a cloud, but questions like whether omnipotence or omnipresence exist (and their correlations) are a whole new can of philosophical worms :)
I don't understand the causation/design argument. Anything complicated enough to create the universe must be just as, if not more, complicated as the universe It creates. If God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster created our universe, then such Entity must be at least as complex as our universe, begging the infinite regress of who created said Entity and why is said Entity so complex? Causation itself is a red herring. The universe is, period, properly viewed in imaginary time, not real time. In imaginary time, it is neither created (caused) or destroyed. It just is. And if you don't understand that, I suggest you re-read 'A brief history of time'. Thus if the universe has no cause then structures within like ourselves should need no Designer, otherwise, who designed the Designer? Design in an un-caused universe ends up being an illusion given to us by natural selection. Within (real) time, natural selection works, creating things like human apes and elephants. Within imaginary time, nothing is created nor destroyed. Natural selection explains design. Imaginary time shows there is no beginning, no need for a cause. Clinging to the god delusion is going to require more than first cause and design arguments boys and girls. There is one sense in which God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster do exist, and that is, they exist as memes. They are viruses which hijack the human mind and in some cases cause the human it hijacks to hijack, say, airplanes. There is a great poster out there with the words, "Imagine no religion" superimposed over a picture of the twin towers. Without God, the meme of God, that is, those towers would still stand. I think its time this species grow up and get rid of the god delusion or else we bloody well deserve to go extinct.
Deism is the belief in a supreme natural entity that doesn't use super natural abilities.

I remember reading a section in the bible when I was younger, when I was into all the Christian stuff, that described how god knows how many feathers are on a bird and that 'god knows how many hairs are on your unborn childs head and that he has a plan for everyone before they're even born'. I believe this line is what Deist Christians believe, that there was a big bang but that fundamentally everything had already been arranged to happen long before the Earth had even formed.

I suppose when I was Christian I was probably a deist. I couldn't believe that some magical power made the red seas part, and either it never happened or god arranged a freak weather phenomena that could. I mean to create Earth how it is he obviously must have planned a Mars sized object crashing into primitive Earth to form the Moon. So at the time I took the bible on its word and I used the rational notion that a freak tidal behavior combined with a freak weather phenomena and possibly numerous other effects could have caused it, but god never lifted a finger to alter things.

The reason I never liked Intelligent Design and the reason I found it insulting when I was Christian was that God is supposed to be a supreme being, in fact everything he does including kids getting hit by buses is supposed to have a purpose... so why the fuck is he so incompetent he can't arrange for evolution to happen how he wanted it to? I mean Intelligent Design basically preaches God is an incompetent hack who can't do anything right because he kept having to nudge things to get it right. I mean imagine if Da Vinci never died, and he'd spent every year since he's did all his paintings touching them up and changing them slightly, he wouldn't be famous he'd be described as the worlds most incredible hack because he never did anything right. The ID God hasn't managed to get a single thing right in like 4 billion years! I found it fundamentally insulting.
Also, the Marble Madness construction set.

And most ridiculously, Boulderdash IV had a constructor. Me and a friend made levels so complex, we forgot how to complete them. It was all to do with timing (!).
I do feel bad for not helping out the bookstore

Why would one want to help out a bricks-and-mortar bookstore?
I think more to the point is that it's silly to define oneself in terms of the things that they don't believe in. I don't label myself an anti-Olympian because I don't believe in the Athenian gods. Socialists don't call themselves acapitalists. Atheism isn't a belief in something being true, it's a belief in other people being wrong.
Job cuts ground MS Flight Simulator
"Holding the quality and priority of the work constant"

That is a large qualification. It is possible that quality of work and willingness to be browbeaten are inversely correlated.
Honestly, this is my biggest problem with Unions. I've never had an issue with them conceptually. For jobs that aren't in high demand it's strategically foolish not to band together when dealing with an employer.

But for some reason Unions always end up answering to the lowest common denominator. So you have a group of people who largely want to do their job well being forced to walk away from that job to defend the idiots who do their jobs badly.
Turritopsis nutricula: the world's only 'immortal' creature
I'm not sure arresting him was justified but other than that I agree with the University.

He might not like grades but they are a basis by which employers judge job candidates. They represent a skill (hard work among other things) that employer's value. By doing away with them in his classroom he is compromising that whole system.

University teachers like this one need to realize that they have two tasks. To open student's minds AND to ensure they are qualified to function in society. He's completely ignored the second task and thinks he's a hero for having done so.
The way you find server guys to do contract work, is you put up a posting on the ruby and/or rails job boards. That's the way I found the backend/server guy (who is now a good friend of mine) for the company i contract with atm.

Also remember contracting rates run like $60-100/hr (sometimes more!) for people who are competent.
we launched our retail apparel site in October in the midst of the huge stock market loss days. on a suggestion from my cofounder we started listing on amazon in early December. Dec sales from amazon accounted for a 1/4 of sales, and more then 3/4 in Jan, as sales dipped on our site.

we get tons of sales on amazon from places in the midwest where on our site we get mostly right and left coast locations.

im actually lifting forecasts right now due to the strength of that channel. additionally we are often the low price on amazon, and the item is marked up from what is sells for on our site, so its not low margin dumping ground like eBay. horray for amazon.
Using redo for tail recursion in Ruby is an interesting idea, similar to Clojure's recur keyword.
One theme in Eliezer Yudkowsky's other writing (which is mostly not fictional, at least not overtly so) is that the future is likely to be weirder than we expect, and that non-human minds are likely to be much much much weirder than we expect.

Therefore, if it's difficult to put oneself in the minds of the characters of the story, "that's not a bug, it's a feature".

Also, we are supposed to imagine that the people in the story are smarter and more disciplined thinkers than we are.

Therefore, if the characters reach quickly conclusions that we would agonize over for longer, that again may be a feature rather than a bug. (It depends on how good their reasoning actually turns out to be.)

The story probably does (as it stands) assume too much acquaintance with the ideas Eliezer's been talking about on the "Overcoming Bias" blog; but then, that's where it was posted.
Arc may or may not be a success, I won't judge. But I do know that the one that does not try will never have success.

So here's to trying.
No. There's a misconception that money is immediately deposited into your merchant account once a transaction is authorized and captured.

In fact, there's a middle man called the merchant service provider which holds your funds and deposits them to your merchant account. They are contracted out by your bank.

A transaction is sent through Authorize.net to the msp then through to the customer's bank.
A forum member at banjo hideout's sig is: "Be yourself, everyone else is taken." I think that applies here as well.
Because the browsing experience is different at brick-and-mortar bookstores from that at online bookstores. I love the way Amazon reads my mind and suggests products based on what I've bought before, but I've also discovered cool books by chance glances at the shelves at the local Barnes and Noble, so I still shop there too.
We already know what it will be like for him because Trevor and I both tried being QA for a while at the last YC dinner to test it out. It's much better than being on a speakerphone-- you can actually roll up to a group of people and join their conversation-- but not, obviously, as good as being there in person.

It feels roughly like being in a cardboard box with a small, smudged little window to look out of. Which tells me the most important thing for Trevor to improve: the cameras.
Because bookstores form communities around them? I went to a book discussion club at Barnes & Noble for half a year when I was younger.

Or perhaps because the people who open non-chain bookstores are avid readers, often obsessed with helping out a community, and they love what they do, despite the fact that it's not exactly an easy business?

I know we're cool and new-wave but it's one thing to say Amazon's good. It's another to question why somebody would want to help out a business model that's never been lucrative, whose practitioners more often than not do it for the joy of helping people find a good read.
Makes sense; thank you for the explanation.
If whoever downvoted me would care to explain why, I'd be grateful. (Surely not merely for the borked attempt at italics?)
Up-voted because it links to this:

http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

Looks like a lot of interesting reading in there. If you're of a conspiratorial mind, might also give guesses as to what Google is up to (or wants to be up to in the future).
T-Shirts every geek should have
He discovered the book at the bricks-and-mortar bookstore so its beneficial to help them out once in a while. Even though I buy a lot of books online, I still discover a lot of things by good old fashioned book browsing.

For me, if the book is under $10, I usually buy it locally; otherwise I order it online.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't represent the vast majority of production servers, because it's generally too bleeding edge. Production and hosting servers tend to stay on "tried and true" stable distributions, such as RHEL, CentOS, Debian, etc, regardless of how old the software versions contained.
Start high and drop it over time if you are not satisfied. Also, maintain a "permanent license" option that is not monthly, that is about 6 times the monthly cost, and don't drop that as fast as the monthly cost if you have to drop it.
Clearly this is why they put the highlighted AdWords right at the top...
Processing Credit Cards - Phil Greenspun's Experience
What Phil Greenspun has to say about processing credit cards:
http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ecommerce
Using Multiple Inboxes in Gmail
I just make them up. They don't come "at the drop of a hat"; it takes time and a lot of hard work, usually. Often there are false starts and wrong turnings. One site design I did a while back went through four utterly different designs before I was happy with it. Sometimes that's just how it is; usually things go a little more smoothly.

Usually it's art that I draw from, rather than the work of other designers--Rothko, Hokusai. Recently I saw an understated gem of an exhibition: Vilhelm Hammershøi at the Royal Academy. I would love to incorporate some of his subtle tones and textures into something.
How Pixar Hires
>Because bookstores form communities around them?
The same Waterstones/B+N who destroyed the small bookstores by voiding the net book price agreement are now complaining that Amazon are undercutting them.
And small bookstores by selling used books on amazon are doing better than ever!
> When I visited Portland, I was amazed

suggests that your experience in Portland was different from what you are used to.

Some places do have lots of live music. (Nashville and Austin are also big.) However, they're the exceptions these days.
"I think more to the point is that it's silly to define oneself in terms of the things that they don't believe in."

Well, I do believe there is no god. And theists define themselves as not believing in the absence of a god. I mean, I think your linguistic objections are pretty disingenious.

"Atheism isn't a belief in something being true, it's a belief in other people being wrong."

I believe it is true that there is no god. And I'm pretty sure theists have a belief that me and the other atheists (and those of religions other than theirs) are wrong.

edit: Didn't capitalize "god" intentionally.
I believe PG said he is taking more of a long-run view on this. He's not trying to make Arc what's hot right now, but rather thinking more about a "hundred-year language"
We recently made this exact switch from Authorize.net to Braintree.

Being less than a year old, we were able to take advantage of Authorize.net CIM (Customer Information Manager) to store credit cards. It worked pretty well, except for the API seems to lack some basic features. For instance, if you happen to lose the id of a customer profile, there is no way to ever recover or delete the profile. It will just remain inaccessible (and blocking duplicates) forever. Additionally the API is bolted onto their old API, so you have to check two fields for error responses, etc. Definitely a solid system, but sort of rough around the edges.

Now as of this past December we decided that it was a priority to internationalize billing for our app. We have partners in Europe and have even received grant money there. Long story short, we needed to be able to bill Europeans in Euros. As it turns out, quite a few gateways advertise billing in foreign currencies, but the majority convert the currency internally and then bill in dollars. Well you can imagine that if you're in Europe and you purchase something for €5, but the gateway converts to dollars (at an unfavorable rate) and then bills your account in USD (incurring a second unfavorable rate), you're going to be pissed when you see a €7 charge on your statement.

In our (admittedly rapid) research, for any kind of low to moderate volume of transactions, Braintree is the only gateway that will actually process multiple currencies directly. We made the switch, and processing payments in 3 currencies as of 24 hours ago. The Braintree API (standard POST) is dead simple compared to Authorize.net (SOAP) and yet doesn't feel any less powerful.
Anyone could always buy point to point IP links with lower contention ratios, but this is the first time I've seen a company (Akamai) with enough of them internationally to have a serious attempt to have full Internet coverage.
Official Google Blog entry with full writeup: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/eye-tracking-studies-...
I believe that the reason why proteins fold in polynomial time (not necessarily linear) is that nature's proteins are "easy" to fabricate.

To use the TSP as an analogy, think of a protein as a configuration of cities. The proteins in our body are the solutions of the easy configurations, i.e. a group of cities arranged in a circle. Nature hasn't been able to find the really hard solutions.

We would like to explore the full configuration space, to look for new proteins, and that's still hard. Or maybe I misunderstand.
"Eventually, Mr. Graham himself seemed to spurn the language"

Imagine how ridiculous this was to read while taking a break from working on HN, surrounded by windows full of Arc source I was in the middle of editing.

A lot of people seem to feel that a language isn't real unless the designer is talking to them every day. But that's not the only way languages happen. Nor possibly the best way. I feel like you get better ideas if you think in units of occasional essays rather than a stream of tweets. It seems likely the same will be true with language design.
Very good argument - unfortunately, it likely is non-applicable in many (if not most) of the universities in the U.S.
From my personal experience, I found mediocre teachers who primarily seemed to be present for class for attendance - like many of their students. I had hoped that this appearance was superficial, and that in reality they wanted a student to inquire and ask for assistance beyond the covered material, but alas, this was not the case. In reality, my questions were usually greeted with being "irrelevant to the course material and not related to what we were covering" - even when the material was clearly an extension of the course material and was presented by me as a means to engage the teacher and hopefully learn more than how to write a C++ application to parse a txt file...
This said, my Java and ASM teachers were great and did welcome this interaction - but the majority of my professors seemed disinterested (at best) in talking about anything other than the verbatim script out of the book.
But that was just my school - mileage varies.
Interesting - But this could be a correlation vs causation issue - Hospitals with better IT may also be better organised / located / funded / regards / etc (hence have fewer deaths).
Waist circumference and BMI together give a decent measure...

In fact, wait circumference is pretty important, especially for me. Central Obesity (i.e. the stomach, love handles, etc) is correlated with a lot of health problems - much stronger correlation that just being overweight in general.

Other than that, the pinch test works well too.
Unfortunately I find it's not quite as simple as the first snappy or good idea snowballing into the top comment - I've often noticed a good long chain of replies and discussion get bumped down simply because of the high karma points of the poster of a top level comment.

The upside of that is that people with higher karma get their voice heard more easily, which (hopefully) encourages people to slowly build up karma by contributing good links or comments. Yes there's snowballing but also trolls get drowned out quicker.
That's pretty much my approach and it seems to work well. I find that it helps to concentrate on color last, and not only that, but to set the overall color scheme first and then introduce highlight and alert colors last (like cilantro on top of the main salad) rather than trying to choose the entire palette at once.