skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I admire about Branson is his ability to plow into saturated markets with a fresh sense of innovation about the product and/or service, and really understands where stagnant companies have lost touch with their consumers.

And to top it off, one of the most charismatic people to listen to. I'll admit to having a man-crush. :)
Israeli LinkedIn Groups In English That Are Good For Marketing
Most people think that LinkedIn is just a place where you add other friends and professionals to your network.Well let me share with some good news - its a lot more then that!
Yale Law School, which is consistently rated as #2 after Harvard, has pass or fail w/no grades. The implication is that getting in is enough to "signal" your "quality" on the market. Compare this all other law schools where students are mercilessly ranked based on a bell curve.
This appeared here a few months ago; http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~karp/greatalgo/

I think I'll nominate FFT.
I think I read about this hashing technique here and have been using it ever since. There's no need for any password tools and you simply remember one algorithm. After about a month of usage it takes no time to type in the PW for any site.

I designed mine to be a little more mixed up, so hopefully even if someone intelligent got my password it would just look like an assortment of characters instead of an obvious hash.
On the flip side, I don't understand why someone should get 40 karma points for a two word witty comment, no matter how funny it was. Why isn't karma per comment limited to -1 to 10? Seems like it would limit karma bashing and karma mega-boosting.
I really appreciate the input. I'm bilingual. My parents lived as expatriates in Central America for 20 years. I lived down there for the first 14 years of my life. I spend most of my time online in English, but I'm curious to find out what information is out there in Spanish.

I'm about ready to release a beta of a social news application I've been working on. I'm wondering if releasing a site in Spanish would be worth it. There seems to be a lot of competition for the geek news market in English. I don't know if there's enough news to aggregate in Spanish or not. It seems that it might help the programming community if we could create a site dedicated to aggregating the information that's out there.

The troll problem is, I think, separate from the content problem. Hopefully, we can build safeguards into the system to avoid the worst excesses.
I've had production failures on very critical systems when files were edited and silently had their \n line endings replaced with \r\n line endings. Once we found the problem it was simple enough to fix, and we changed the files in question to be robust against such changes in the future, but that was an... unpleasant day.
I've also been using this for ages. Absolute huge time saver. I used to keep vim encrypted files for every site I visited...when the list topped about three hundred, it seemed like time for a change.
Someone might be offended by being left off an inane pun thread? I'd love to be "offended" that way.
There are some students who are now saying that paying attention to your overall g.p.a. is counter productive. Cal Newport just recommends that students find the best way to learn the material, and focus on grades from tests and homework. In other words, focus on the process and use the short term results for feedback, don't stress about the long term results

He wrote a book on doing well in college, and interviewed about fifty straight-A students. Oddly enough, the ones who payed the most attention to their overall g.p.a, for example dropping courses before they affected their g.p.a., did the worst.
Link: http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/11/14/the-unconventional-sch...
Review my website: Cornify
Cornify is all about giving internet users choice of customization. MySpace is a great example of a successful company with a similar vision. Facebook with its Windows 3.1 look - not so much. Cornify provides a service that allows users to cover any website in a beautiful array of unicorn and rainbow imagery - taking back the web one 'corn at a time.

To give credit where credit is due, this concept was heavily inspired by AddThis.
How has this affected acceptance into residency programs? Do students mostly use recommendations while applying?
If it wasn't for this article you wouldn't be compelled to post this handy link to dateutil. :-)
MS has pretty standard schedules on which they "discontinue" software, and it's not short. MS would like to stop selling XP now, that's likely to happen when Windows 7 ships, unless there's a commercial reason not to.

As for support, wikipedia says "Windows XP Service Pack 2 will be retired on 13 July 2010, almost six years after its general availability ... On 14 April 2009, Windows XP will begin its "Extended Support" period that will last for 5 years until 8 April 2014"
Learning vi -- the "cheatsheet" technique
Free MySpace Dev Jam for Application Developers in SF on Feb 5th
HTML first. Do it yourself HTML is better than using web design software or prepackaged templates. Hand coded HTML gives you an understanding of what is going on. Start first with a static web site to limit complexity. CSS is next, but it can be a major conceptual leap, particularly with browser incompatibilities, so I would suggest that you create some simple style sheets, and let him experiment with it.

JavaScript is the next step. I recommend JQuery as a fundamental library. He should concentrate on simple aids for the user, until he gets a feel for it. JS is a bigger hurdle than HTML.

On the server side, I am a Python fan, but since you know Rails, that might be a good way to go, if you are into helping him. PHP is relatively easy, but it encourages really bad code. I would recommend against it.

Photoshop is a huge monster. Unless he needs it, it's a distraction.

As far as learning resources, there is lots online or get highly rated books from Amazon.
Brown does offer grades -- A, B, C and No Credit. No Credit in a course does not appear on the transcript as a fail, it simply disappears. If you didn't get credit in the course, you didn't get credit, no penalty for trying something and bailing.

[Edit: Additionally any course may be taken Pass/Fail, so students who prefer a no-grade experience can have it.]

It's a good compromise between grades and no grades. There's still numerical feedback for those who need it (and for those whose future grad schools or employers need it) but it is in broad buckets.

It's not that hard for professors to group their students into a couple of broad categories. I always felt when I got a B or C that I knew exactly why.

As a result of the relaxed system, Brown is one of the happiest and most curious campuses among its traditional peers. The psychological difference between the students at Brown and friends who would visit was always striking. It reminds me of pg's controversial essay about the differences between hacker employees and hacker founders.

Of course, I went to Brown so keep your salt shaker handy.
I have a mix of methods. For sites that I rarely visit or are of no real consequence if the password were compromised I use a memorable one for them all.

For sites that I care about the security I generate a random password with something like this:

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=12 | uuencode -

then store that in psafe (http://www.hep.wisc.edu/~dan/psafe/) with a master password that I remember. This way if some site's password does get compromised, it doesn't translate to any other site. I suppose I could also carry around the encrypted psafe file with me on a USB key, but I've found that I don't really need to log into these sorts of sites when I'm out.
I must agree, this is the number one unicorns and rainbow adding site on the internet. I am disappointed that they don't frolic about and they appear blind the concept of whitespace areas, perhaps in the "pro" edition.

I am also a bit ashamed that I executed a stranger's Javascript in my Hacker News context. Who knows what just happened to my cookie? (Ok, I just read the URL and I'm safe, at least for the javascript present the instant I downloaded it.)
Sorry, I was referring to how feature complete Yammer is compared to Twitter.

Also it's not really "fair" to compare their traffic graphs as both company is in a different category. Twitter is mainstream, while Yammer is built for intra-business communication.

And isn't Yammer already profitable?
Thanks. Great info on those sites.
Ask HN: Did your traffic drop during Google's "Malware Incident"?
I’m curious if anyone saw a traffic drop during the Google incident?

I have a modest, relatively low traffic little blog and my site’s traffic dropped by about 36% from what it was last week during that time period (which is big when you consider Saturday Morning isn’t a high traffic time to begin with). I’m not sure I ever realized Google’s referrals meant that much (referral logs aren’t necessarily accurate due to the differing ways you can click on a link)

It’s interesting because Google didn’t prevent people from going to the sites it blocked. It simply warned them they MIGHT be dangerous. Not only that, the message users got doesn’t really lay out what criteria they use to determine a site’s danger meaning not only was it just a suggestion but it was a suggestion given with no basis to judge it by. So following requires quite a bit of trust in Google.

If other people saw the same thing I did this might be the most striking sign of Google’s power yet.
Seconded. I like the simplicity with HN, but a footer would really help, especially on internet connections that time out.
Babies Know - A Little Dirt Is Good for You
We see the same for NewsCred... our traffic is an order of magnitude larger than what Compete reports. We're thinking about getting Quantified for that reason, but I'm not so sure about sharing every little detail of traffic information with the whole world.
Using a slave isn't fool proof either. If someone were to run a malicious command, it gets replicated, and could get backed up before being caught.
Am I the only person on this site who isn't a huge fan of Ticketstumbler?
How do you standardize a test of ability in computing? I'm not talking of computer science, but of plain programmers - how do you test their capability in some type of standardized test? It's very difficult.

Medicine is different because it's about a lot of knowledge and being able to product that knowledge when required (same with lawyering). Programming is different in that you look up the information, the body of relevant info often changes, paradigms change constantly. You can't standardize this field (yet).
A friend of mine's parents lived in the neighbourhood in that picture and they recently sold their house for close to $400000, which can certainly afford you both a decent apartment and a small place in the woods.
I agree, downvotes are dangerous. I know Reddit had (has? I don't know I left when I found HN) a problem where all new articles were getting downmodded by people who wanted their own links on the front page.

I repeatedly think that I would like downvotes, but I quite quickly remember that I absolutely hate downvotes. I don't completely agree with being able to downmod comments, however I think the side effects are dampened that you have to have good karma before you can downvote, which prevents trolls from abusing the system.
I have a background in business as well, and decided to learn programming around 1½ years ago. So my situation is probably similar. Looking back at my experience here's my two cents:

- Start by learning HTML to get the basics straight. This isn't hard once you grasp the basic concept.

- PHP is a good place to start, since you can almost always find help in the huge PHP community. I used www.w3schools.com for reference, and google would always point me to an answer when I had a stupid question.

- Do a real project, it's the best way to learn. I did a HN clone just to learn how stuff worked, how to deploy, etc. (www.deloghersk.dk)

The one thing I missed was a real person I could ask whenever there was something I conceptually didn't understand. Google isn't very good at answering these questions. Seems like our friend is in a better position here :-)
How to Know if a TV Show Will Get Cancelled
Okay, it sounds like it actually takes 13 to 15 minutes to roll out an update across the entire farm. That feels more like what I was expecting.
Shameless plug follows:

Our product Memengo Wallet http://www.memengo.com is a password manager that can be used in three different ways:

1. Store your passwords on the iPhone app (Windows mobile phone also supported). Encrypted with AES-256.
2. Store your passwords on the web site (AJAX). Encrypted with AES-256 within
the web browser - plaintext never leaves your computer.
3. The iPhone and the web site can be synchronized. There is a sync button in the iPhone app.

I can answer any questions. We also answer all support questions submitted from the web site (with a return address).

FAQ:

1. Q: The web site makes me uneasy. What if you decide to change your program to fish out the encryption key form the client? A: The web site does not add to the problem - any password mamanger app on the iPhone can phone home without your knowledge.
That's actually why I started posting here.
I always thought it was Harvard which was consistently rated #2 after Yale.
Peter Norvig's review of SICP
My product does exactly that - client-side AES-256 encryption in AJAX app. Works on any (modern) computer! More details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459887
Uncle Bob's rant on Jeff and Joel
I didn't say that. Read what I wrote.

You use the slave so you can shutdown the database and get a consistent file snapshot. Then you do offline backup.
For some time I read hacker news nearly daily (one of the rare places) and mostly because of the comments. Some members here have good points, ideas and are right at the mark. Even with this valuable board discussion if many of these non sense comments increase it will turn away good members. With the anonymity of the internet there will be always some characters that need moderation and so far ycombinator did a good job. Keep it up.
If suburban living had been a mere preference, it would show up in real estate prices, not in population loss. To get massive population loss, people have to be unwilling to buy at any price. When the crime rate increased in the 70's, people sold their houses at fire sale prices, or just abandoned them altogether. Great swaths of American cities ended up looking like this: http://www.jim-frizzell.com/Philadelphia2001/04-18-01/04-19-...

Meanwhile, dense city neighborhoods that have suburban levels of violence tend to have much higher real estate prices than the suburbs. This indicates that people really do prefer cities, but it's the violence that keeps them out.
I thought that standardization would be the solution, too, until I realized that that would just make it worse. There are whole industries around getting people higher marks on standardized tests like SAT, LSAT, MCAT, etc.

It really depends what role marks play. If they are used exclusively as a guide to the student of how much they are absorbing, then they could be useful because people would have no incentive to game them.
So it looks like google fixed it pretty quickly. They are saying it is human error right now. What they are saying happened is that they were updating a list of malware websites. Some how the there was a typo made and the servers were told to include every website as malware.
It was shortly fixed, and it only lasted about 40 minutes.

Contrary to early reports, google did not get their malware data from stopbadware.org, google just works with the site to create the criteria for the list. Also, legitimately bad sites still have warnings.
Link:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-yo...
Link:http://blog.stopbadware.org/2009/01/31/google-glitch-causes-...
At first glance it's the worst kind of list for hackers, all topics with no exposition. However, it's not the usual pablum. About half the items deal with producing a homogenized, pasteurized citizenry. The other half, learning for learning's sake, learn to spell, critical thinking are what we expect of education. Some like generate leaders and cultivate the gifted are wishful thinking on Grodin's part.

The list is pretty much on target The number of goals and inherent conflicts among them may explain why education is the US is not succeeding.
Many New Species Discovered In Hidden Oasis With Help Of Google Earth
Password Safe http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/

I believe it is a security risk to reveal password usage/methodology and so must politely refuse to elaborate.
While this is up on the front page, I'd like to say that I love HN and the people on it.

There's lots of things I like about HN, like that links can't be down voted and that downvoting comments is an exclusive right to people with good karma.

However, the main thing I like about HN is that I see lots of civil discussion and people giving useful comments and suggestions. When I have seen disagreements (I believe I've been in a few myself) I notice that people tend to do what they do in real life and simply 'walk away'. When I read something that really irks me I usually just close HN and will come back later or whenever when I've forgotten about it.
You should tell the founders what you dislike about it. They'd listen.
She wanted dinner and a movie.
I guess a link saying Rules in the top Orange Bar would be nice. I think that's the most visible part of the HN site.
What would you change? Feedback helps us more than praise :).

If you want to contact me off of HN my email is dan@ticketstumbler.com.
Doesn't anyone else use Thunderbird?

Spam filtering is the only thing in Gmail I'm jealous of. I wonder/wish google would offer that as a service I'd pay for that. [I think google has the corpus/skills/infrastructure to do it better than anyone else can approach]
1Password is __teh__ shit.
What online language translator do you use?
I frequently need to translate chunks of text from other languages, mostly German, to English.

Google translation is ok if one has enough context. But results are often hilarious. For example, the following text:

"Bitte überschreiten Sie die Upload-Limite von 1 MB pro Dokument nicht! Es können sonst Upload-Probleme auftreten."

... was translated to:

"Please exceed your upload limit of 1 MB per document, it can otherwise upload problems."

Are there any online translators out there better than Google's?
The age-graded system is a dehumanizing legacy of the industrial revolution. It has nothing to do with teaching people how to think but was purposed to shoehorn people into "productive" career paths. "Liberal arts" education today is structurally flawed in such a way that people only receive incoherent bits of information without ever learning to think cohesively.

So you end up going to class and learning to recite Maslow's theory in Psychology, History, Poli Sci-- they just dump information on you without seeing how any of it is inter-related.

I'm just hopeful that the new economic reality will reveal the education system for what is really is-- in most cases-- doing more harm than good.
This could be a PR nightmare for Google. On top of the Epic Google Fail, they could not even come up with an accurate blog post: http://blog.stopbadware.org/2009/01/31/google-glitch-causes-....

It will be interesting to see the stories that come up when the regular news cycle begins again.
I'm not sure it's practical to test this on a dev server with each update. All they really need to do is make sure "/" or sites ending with "google.com" and maybe some other white listed sites are never included in the file.
Women, like men, want Hacker News to stay on topic.
I use 1Password from Agile Web Solutions. It's great -- it imported all of my passwords from Firefox and I just save new ones that way. It also does work on the iPhone as a password filler if you use the bookmark. If you use Dropbox you can keep your password keychain in there and update it among all of your macs. It would be ideal if Windows and Opera were supported but maybe some day. For now I just go between Safari and Firefox.
Use MobileMe. Sync data. Cancel MobileMe. Lose data. Not right.
Cooking servers with Chef 101
Finding articles depends on the subject:

- I used to subscribe to a bunch of digg feeds, but over the past while have found digg better to skim over when I have a few moments (the noise is too much for my greader!)

- For politics I'm on http://memeorandum.com regularly along with bbc, nytimes, wsj & wpost. So far, the combination gives me enough view points from enough angles. I've paid some attention to http://commondreams.org - it has some great articles, but I need to get into it more.

- I also subscribe to a bunch of blogs in different subjects (some of the top: lifehacker, daring fireball, seth godin, techcrunch) both for the original content as well as the links to the rest of the web.

- And then to top that all off I'm spending more and more time on HN and I subscribe to the delicious hotlist feed.

As far as discussions go:

- I tend to discuss on the sites I'm on, if I feel my comment will help the discussion AND the discussion is valuable. Its mostly some blogs, and HN that I talk/comment on.

- A lot of discussions happen with people I know, via email or facebook or in person.
I'm married, and I still have no clue what women want. I have no real clue how anything happened, just like 4 years later I'm married and the 15 year old that still controls my consciousness is stunned and amazed.
The article seems to be missing the key example that cements the concept in your mind.

->

seems to be a TODO place holder. I would expect that the example would be: a = some_object; change a member field in some_object; notice that a gets changed also. The example is really needed, because using only constants it's a distinction without a difference.
But how did it change the world? There are plenty of other usable sorting algorithms.
If you limit the karma to 10 then a particularly good comment will eventually sink below comments that are upmodded later because of the way the ordering algorithm works. Similarly, a particularly bad comment will stay visible.

I don't see anything wrong with karma mega-boosting. At the end of the day it is just a number on your profile.
But the real problem here is that we treat everyone the same. Who wants a C- doctor vs. an A+ doctor?! If you really cared about the unique differences in people then one person would take 2 years, and another person would take 6-- but when they finished they would be competent. Unfortunately, treating people like machines by grading them is really just a form of moralism that tries to categorize and rank people. We love to justify our existence by comparing ourselves to others, and "objective standards" provides nice self-validation.
Reuters is having a hard time getting their wire service business model up to date, I think.

Not too long ago they sent a Cease & Desist letter to my employer for linking to articles on their site.
Javascript is good enough
I would nominate RSA.
Ayn Rand interview (1959)
"There are many versions of vi, and I'm going to be showing you how to use a version of vi called vim." Is there any other clone still under active development? Long years ago Vim won, hands down.
Interestingly, the StopBadware blog is now down - I can't get a response from it. I guess they got GoogleDotted.
Reading through it, I'm finding it's got a great story about a scientist doing her science. That should be sufficient to call it on-topic.
I suspect that companies using Outlook do not use Internet-style mailing lists. It's a cultural mismatch.