skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi there. I'm infatuated with NLP; wonder if we might talk about partnering up. Currently working (very, very slowly) on tagoracle.com, meant to be a sort of google search for tags on social & related media sites. Actually two years ago I set out to make a semantic-based social network but it's beyond me at this point. There's a video on my blog where I'm talking about doing PHP for a wordpress plugin to go along with tagoracle.com. Also I'm into writing and editing, so it could work. Hope to talk!

http://tefflox.net
Everything should be done with moderation.
From the source blog post:

Asked if this TomTom case is the start of a broader legal campaign over those alleged violations, Gutierrez said no.

"Microsoft respects and appreciates the important role that open-source software plays in our industry and we respect and appreciate the passion and the great contribution that open-source developers make in our industry," Gutierrez said. He said that respect and appreciation is "not inconsistent with our respect for intellectual-property rights."
mtkd,

Have you needed to recover a squatted domain? Have you had success with it, due to your TM? (Although I've never been in the situation,) I've heard it's tough to recover in either situation -- was your experience better b/c of the TM?
In other words, the #1 thing for a CS student to know is that the world does not stop at the borders of computer science.

Teach yourself about money, finances, and the absolute basics of contract law. There's a reason why lawyers, accountants, and the like make very good livings.
I kinda think a lot of this stuff absolutely has to be learned the hard way.
I know, I can't help it. That's why I haven't posted the link to HN yet. But it should be available for free in a week or so I think.

If you are at a University though, chances are that you can get it for free by checking with your library.
Internet Safety Act launches a new battle on privacy
Ah thanks for that :)
Fake Horoscopes - Crazy Idea (But is it legal?)
Does anybody know if that's legal? ...
Wait - if you do better at Hacker News you get invited to Startup School?

I know nothing about Startup School, but I didn't think it had anything to do whatsoever with things on Hacker News.
Unfortunately, my experience seems to be that very few wireless manufacturers are really willing to make their hardware "open." This problem seems to have hit OpenMoko as well; I'm guessing this is why they don't have 3G.

So it'll probably come along someday.
I liked this guide, even though it was brief - there were some useful career koans.

> Finally, don’t forget to be well rounded.

When I started my first real software development job at a fairly large company, I was surprised to see that practically everyone worked on their own life outside of work, with a few exceptions (like me, at the time). They were part-time geeks in that they spent time away from the computer - when they were not at work. That was the biggest difference for me - going from college to the work force.

Some had families - which were their focus - every year around Halloween time it was vividly evident how important their children were ("John has two kids!.. I had no idea") and their jobs were (to support their families).

Some invested time in hobbies - whether it involved fixing up motorcycles, renovating their house, and my favorite (volunteering to maintain old railroad steam engines and run them on occasional weekends). The weirdest hobby - was a guy who did rubbings - as in rubbings of gravestones - when he traveled.

The first years in software development can be intense because you (usually) can hyper-focus on it. Once you get some experience, you'll start to realize it's not about the technology - there are common patterns. And once you have a lot of experience, you might be on the transition path out of wanting to code with the latest out there - e.g. settle down, start a family.

> That point is worth repeating another way: an extra dollar in salary is not really a dollar, it is 60 cents.

In the crazy dot-com days, I invested a mere thousand and made $25k+ and lost it all on margin calls. And learned to realize how hard it is to actually make $25,000 while paying living expenses. Tracking is the first step to budgeting - and it can be painful.
is it better to have stock or just ask for a raise in a startup company?
Hacker News, unlike bathrooms, is instantly available and you can get to it in a few clicks. This is easily the site I spend my most time, and I'm not entirely certain that's a good thing.
Pedantic (but so's your product): The caret that indicates an insertion goes underneath the baseline of the text, not above it.

http://www.colorado.edu/Publications/styleguide/symbols.html
Sorry dude, couldn't find it.

On a personal note, I'm going back to fulltime work in the next few weeks after freelancing from home since Nov and now that I'm committed to joining another team, one of my regrets is that I didn't take more personal time for myself away from the computer, but I also think that the time passed by so quickly because I'd have weeknight conversations with my wife to look forward to while toiling away.
Breck, is that you on the left side of the picture? Glad to see you're doing well.

(This is Drew, who used to run DULUG back in the day when you were working on Free Culture stuff).
Call to action? They are overreacting to some commonly used marketing techniques.

The fastest computer ever.
The safest web browser ever.
The greenest car ever.

We've heard it before, we'll hear it again in the future.
As I remember, it's not your karma score that really matters, but being recognized from here helps when they read applications.

The same effect is obviously true everywhere. Being known by someone on the inside gets you a job more often than not, etc.
Forgive my ignorance, but was the output destroyed because he was ruining the purity of the wafers by removing them from the box?
Chi Square and Modulo 512 to find TrueCrypt Files
An honest question: how do we know we are not in the opposite of an ice age? So temperatures will get warmer and warmer till they reach a peak and then start dropping till we get to the next ice age?

How do we determine that peak and when was the last one?
A friend of mine adopted a persona at gaming conferences to promote his blog, including a big metal robot head.

At a satellite ISP I worked at a long time ago, we used the transponder during offpeak hours to stream porn and bootlegs for extra cash.

Other stuff... well if you care to poke around, a lot of sites have poor data security. Further deponent sayeth not.
I disagree. The reason twitter works is because that's all it is - a simple status update. Rather than a feature to set your status on an existing product. So google don't have it.
If you believe the faintest in scientific principles all horoscopes are fakes.

Why should this be different?
An important difference is that people actually need to use the bathroom anyway, so such chance encounters are not creating an interruption where one did not exist before. They are also self-limiting in a way that browsing the web (or RSS feeds, etc.) is not.
You got it.

Human environments are filled with dust, salt, and oils. When I was trying to finish my Ph.D. -- which required me to build some semiconductor lasers that were reliable enough to be tested more than once -- I eventually reached a mental state where I was so focused on cleanliness that I felt vaguely uncomfortable touching anything, including objects in my own home, without wearing gloves.

I'm much better now.
#1 makes me think of a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates type.
#2 is more optimistic.

But what if you started optimistic, but after years of dealing with stupid people who can't even write decent emails, your morale has fallen so low you can't stay excited?

Is there any way to recover, short of wiping your memory of the past and starting out innocent and optimistic again?

Or is that part of what makes it an exclusive trait of the successful, because it is very hard to stay optimistic over the long haul, therefore only a handful actually succeed...

Maybe the pharma industry can make "stay optimistic" drugs just for startups...
Opera,

How about you stop whining about how Apple advertises and just produce a superior product?
Google Responds To ‘Gfail’ Outage With Apps Status Dashboard
The best marketing advice I've collected over the years
XML is not the answer. It is not even the question.

I have a question for the Python hackers in the audience: what file format(s) do you use for configuration files? I've been using INI style files up until now, but I've been thinking of switching to XML for more complicated formats. For example, what about something like the following example. What format would you use to store this type of configuration data for a Python application?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<directoriesToBackUp>
<directoryInfo>
<directoryName>/media/programming</directoryName>
<excludedDirs>
<dir>/media/programming/log_files</dir>
<dir>/media/programming/temp_files</dir>
</excludedDirs>
</directoryInfo>
<directoryInfo>
<directoryName>/media/documents</directoryName>
<excludedDirs>
<dir>/media/documents/archive</dir>
</excludedDirs>
</directoryInfo>
</directoriesToBackUp>
Microsoft sues TomTom
Apparently it is a trend with FP guys :-)

HAppS (a Haskell framework) has also advocated this:

"HAppS does not come with a server-side templating system. We prefer the pattern of developing static web pages and using AJAX to populate them with dynamic content."

http://happs.org/
Google blames Gmail outage on data centre collapse
I recommend this website from Bill Moggridge (IDEO). It's based on a book + DVD but they provide a chapter (of the week) for download and the interviews.

http://www.designinginteractions.com/

This week: Chapter 4 – Adopting Technology
http://www.designinginteractions.com/download
Interesting.

With a smaller population of users, each interaction becomes an investment in an individual relationship that may pay off later (financially or otherwise). And if someone upvotes your comment, you know they are endorsing you, personally.

With a larger population, this dilutes to something like a branding exercise.

So there's some balance between having lots of diverse perspectives and skill sets (large population) vs. having individualized relationships (small population).

Similar to the idea that companies may have an optimal size, maybe there's an optimal size for social news sites. And for social news sites where utility is part of the draw (HN), this optimal size may be smaller than sites oriented more around entertainment (digg, reddit).
Light is the only thing thats done it for me, ever. In high school I made myself get up and turn on a light, which was permission to go back and lie on the bed for another 15 minutes. Without light, I've never been able to get up.

The funny part is I sometimes forget this for extended periods of time and suffer awfully trying to get up in the morning.
rufus-tokyo has the ruby interface:
http://github.com/cheapRoc/rufus-tokyo/blob/7e524947825b6f7f...
what's crazy is giving out your friend's cellphone number to a service that fails to mention how they might use that number in the future. Here's a potential horoscope for you: "I see SMS spam in your future." :-)
What do fourth generation ad networks look like?
Every time I go on a trip I carry my laptop with me, good for reading ebooks and surfing the web.

Sorry, no place for another gadget besides my cellphone.

And no, my eyes don't suffer after using my laptop for more than 10 hours non-stop, been doing that for the last 20 years.
Coding Horror: Who's Your Coding Buddy?
Light works for me too. It's also the reason why I often oversleep in hotels with heavy light-proof drapes.
East Van represent :P
Yes, _I_ do.

If _you_ don't know why you use the amount of water you do, try it with less until you see a difference. (This advice goes for pretty much everything)
Hmm, that seems a little... anachronistic. From my perspective, I figure the many thousands of programming hours that have gone into making your average RDBMS fast and reliable might be worth taking advantage of...
config.py:

backup = [{
'name': '/media/programming',
'exclude': ['log_files', 'temp_files'],
}, {
'name': '/media/documents',
'exclude': ['archive'],
}]

of the top of my head.

*editted for formatting
If your product is decent, they'll cover you.
Indeed their is an enterprise like scribd on the market now called vuzit
Absolutely. But even then, it's a good bet at some point.

That's the exact example I'm thinking of when I say avoid 12345, geometric progressions, etc. I believe that example was a simple pattern.
Yeah, I've done that as well.

Are there any security considerations to think about if using that approach?
Start With the Most Difficult Part
If I recall correctly, when I went in 2005, the application requested my reddit username. I had hardly any karma, but a few people, including Steve and Alexis knew me from my comments.
Sleep on the floor. Bang. You're out.
Think about this statement:

"I am willing to do whatever it takes to get what I want."

(If anyone is interested, I can point you to the source.)

AFAIC, that statement = "all the morale in the world".

Do you really think that someone who says and truly believes that statement would ever run out of money?
Design Techniques to Simplify and De-clutter Your Interfaces
Thats interesting because I recently tackled the same problem of storing configuration details for backing up files.

I took Python's ConfigParser module and modified it to suit my needs. The config file looks a bit like this:

[directory-details]
path = /media/programming
exclude_dirs = *log_files, *temp_files

[directory-details]
path = /media/documents
exclude_dirs = /media/documents/archive

Honestly, though, xml is a perfectly valid format for storing such configuration.
I wish it told exactly how to get 7% a year on an IRA.
Depends on how well you can predict the future.

In other words, there is a risk/reward function that has the likelihood of the company being successful as a variable. For all intents and purposes, you'll basically be guessing this value (high uncertainty != high risk).
OS #
well. it's mutable. your code can change it. don't do it (often). then you're just programming with lots of global state.
I'm actually a pretty big fan of Ayn Rand's works, so all that aside ...

How does it take "tens of thousands of acres" to house 1,000 wind turbines? All the wind farms I've seen so far have a much higher turbine density than that -- on the order of 1 / acre at least.

I also used to loathe wind farms as an example of a stupid resource sink, since I so often saw them sitting idle, and since I considered all of the energy required to manufacture and maintain the things versus their output. Turns out, I was wrong. I finally found some data -- at http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(... -- and it turns out that wind kicks the pants off all the other energy generating systems we have, even nuclear, in terms of energy-return-on-investment.

I think this article is factually wrong.
Try JSON:

{
"directories_to_backup": [
{"directory_name": "/media/programming",
"exclude_dirs": ["/media/programming/log_files",
"/media/programming/temp_files" ]
},
{"directory_name": "/media/documents",
"exclude_dirs": ["/media/documents/archive"]
}

}

Also, why not just use a python data structure? Do you really need a plain text config file?
Or...how about just 1?
jeff:disqus devin$ wc settings.py settings.xml
1 15 142 settings.py
16 19 461 settings.xml
17 34 603 total

30% of the words. and, in my opinion, just as readable if not more.
Paranoid Android: Google blocks paid apps for unlocked dev phones
Hi,

Looks really good. I have recommended www.polishmywriting.com to my team before. We would probably be interested in integrating this in our ROR app, as we do a lot of writing. I just put it up on my blog and it does the trick. It did freeze up when I clicked on explain a passive voice (Safari 4).

20$ a month for 5 users is ok if all 5 users are intensive users; but, for example, our blog has two regular users and then 2-3 people who blog twice a month. So, what I am trying to say is the pricing structure might need to be tweaked.

Otherwise, keep up the good work. How about a French version? Antidote has great software, but no web version.

Cheers,

Jonathan
This is why asset management types bring in their big bucks. Ask around to see if anyone has a trusted financial guy (gal) they use to manage the 401(k). The general advice: well-diversified; held for long-term; mix of stocks, treasury bills, bonds, preferred shares, etc.

Caveat -- Crises like the current one can wipe out even the best of portfolios.
You don't have to move on to something else, you just need to get money to pay your rent, then keep chasing your dream. That could be a 1 week to 1 month delay, but it doesn't mean you have to give up. To me, morale means keeping yourself positive and moving toward what you want, even when everything else is negative and horrible.
the lawsuit includes the patent on long filenames in the fat32 filesystem. this is a big deal.
Zumodrive vs. Dropbox
Interesting but the "savings" are minimal if you account for someone's time. A billion pounds of pasta taking an extra 6 minutes to prepare is 600 million hours, right? For a savings of $20 million a year?
I'm a bit confused: what form of "action," exactly, would Opera like us to take here?

That sounded snarky and sarcastic, but I'm really not sure what a public debunking of ad copy is supposed to do? Rockports don't actually "make me feel like walking," there are quite a few "other white meats" besides pork, and Apple is advertising their own products.

What, exactly, is supposed to happen next here?
We could, and did rely on the code he produced. But that doesn't mean anyone believed they could rely on him. If he had said, "You can rely on me", you might have an argument. Your bad for reading too much into it.

From the blog post:

> For Capistrano, I will continue to follow the mailing list, and might appear in the #capistrano irc channel from time to time, but I am no longer the maintainer of these projects.

He kind of came out and said it.

Sorry to jump on the beatdown bandwagon, but there really is no defense for your attitude here.
Expanding broadband to bail out economies
When Angels Fear to Tread
My opinion is that is entertainment. I don't think it is turning the knobs, instead it is manipulating the video tape to show you what they want you to see. And he is an outsider making the changes, the original person is not doing it themselves. In a startup, the original person needs to be coming up with ways to turn the knobs and try different things to see what will work. It seems they choose people for the entertainment and shock value. Same thing with the "We mean business" show on AETV. I recommend a different source of inspiration...
If you think about it, anti-solipsism, or at least the pre-solipsism era lasted for millions of years before solipsism. That fact alone makes me think solipsism is a bunch of hogwash.
I have definitely found utility in HN, in direct feedback/advice that I've solicited, in examples from what other people are doing, in learning about sites that I could integrate with, and from principles that helped me prioritize.

If you look at the feedback I initially got here for OurDoings, and then look at what OurDoings is like today, there's no question I've learned a lot.

Oh, and from JavaScript code I copied from the HN. The Image() voting code looks like a hack, but if Paul Buchheit did it it must be OK. :-)
What about counting calories consumed by the brain? I don't know how one could do this, but it seems sensible. You get a lot of credit when your brain is hammering away, and nearly none when you are dozing off in front of the screen. Also, if you can't do home projects at work, all the cerebral intensity would be expended on work projects. The worst that could happen is that the worker focuses on details rather than on the big picture.
welcome to the blogosphere
If you're going to improve education, why don't you start using dvorak? It's the absolute lowest hanging fruit. Hell, it's the watermelon of education.
New research shows placebos can also benefit patients who do not have faith in them
Ask YC: After Twitter.com what will be the next hot website?
It is always fun to speculate. What's going to be the next hot site.
Portraying it as a feature on another product is an interface choice -- and Google could choose to ape the Twitter simplicity.
Maybe I was unusually naive, and probably everyone's more informed these days, but the thing I'd add is that tech companies are very different from other companies for CS majors.

I supposed in my innocence that there were the overtly-sexy apps and the unsexy but still challenging apps* . I haven't had the opportunity to work for a real tech company yet, but my impression is that programming in IT is essentially a different career compared to programming in a software company.

*It's not just a matter of nasty-little-problems. It's also a question of cultural values. More on this at http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2009/02/22/programming-does....
The article is about the author and two chefs trying a series of different configurations of water volume and heat to try and find out what is traditional and what is the actual breaking point for making it not taste as good or be too much work.
The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
(WARNING: ANECDOTES)

I find that contemplating death has a very similar effect, -- not the way you'll die necessarily, just that you will, go in the ground, rot, and everybody and everything will move on without you.

It's very good for the ol perspective muscle, once you get over the initial freak-out of contemplating The End of You.
That's nice, but I don't think it makes up for how they attacked it. PJ Hyett (of GitHub fame) even commented on it at the time: http://www.pjhyett.com/posts/224-how-not-to-open-source
Sounds like a textbook example of Dunbar's number.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Maybe a good solution is to break the community down into neighborhoods of ~150 people.
If you have a programmable thermostat, set it to drop to 64 around bedtime and rise to 72 when you want to wake up.
Best thing I do is wake up and go to the bathroom or shower. I mean showering is practically sleeping anyways, white noise, quiet, warmth. Your just verticle for it.
Or maybe they just seem rather, uh, simple. If you are saying you this is a serious programming language, shouldn't you be able to show several large, complex and commonly used application - by now?

I, too, studied fp in grad school, fifteen years ago now. "Where's the beef" can seem like a cheap but if you have ... beef, it should be easily answered.
couple of steve pavlina articles on the same topic:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea...

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right...
Probably a harsher tone than you needed to take but I do agree. It often seems like Opera's marketing strategy is to scream "me too!" every time one of the more popular browsers does something.

Bottom line: Even though they're right about Apple being a little misleading the sour grapes/call to arms strategy makes me less inclined to try Opera not more.

If they really felt the need to do something they should have taken it with good humor and then turned it into a marketing pitch by extolling their products virtues.
people not building mashups based on your HTML

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Hypothetically assuming I had a product targeted at people who were technically capable of developing mashups (or, for that matter, had ever heard the word), I would want to have them use a published API rather than my HTML, because I routinely need to change my HTML. I do not want to have to give everyone 6 weeks of notice every time I do a split test to avoid breaking my core users' sites.
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/mac... ?