skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't usually discuss real news on the internet, just with friends and family. I read digg occasionally, used to be really into it but it's just become infantile. I occassionally follow a link on Twitter, and get my news from Google News.

I get my tech news from TechCrunch, GigaOm, AllThingsD, AlleyInsider, Mashable, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
The problem with not having grades is that the students who are best at social interaction will tend to do better than those who are not. Scores need to be objective, not subjective, and scores are necessary to give an impression of a persons ability, when he later applies for a job.
Playboy Magazine interview with 29-year-old Steve Jobs
Actually, I think the problem was misreported. It seemed as though google flagged its own interstitial page as malware, as all the search result links showed as http://google.com/search?interstitial=<URL>, and THAT page was malware -- unless I'm overlooking something obvious, like the interstitial page is only shown when adware is detected.

Regardless, the search engine worked perfectly, it was just the links that weren't working. Simply removing the 'google' part of the URL allowed me to get to the sites just fine.
On the Tumblr IRC a month ago, one of the Tumblr founders hinted very strongly that I shouldn't make a forum for Tumblr users, because I wouldn't be able to compete with a core built-in forum system. I'm hoping that something comes of that. Since Givemesomethingtoread is run by that same founder, it would potentially be able to use the same forum system.
OpenTable files for $40 million IPO
We're using sqlalchemy here and it's been nearly painless so far. It scores on maturity (despite the 0.5 version number), great documentation and a very active and friendly community. The learning curve is steep (as with any ORM) but very rewarding because the pieces constantly fall into place. Everyday tasks are idiomatic and syntactically sane, plus even complex joins and subqueries can be constructed using the standard building blocks. So far we have not run into any limitations, unlike with the django ORM which gave us constant headache at some point. The latter really feels like a toy when you have tasted the real thing.
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
Time for a class action?
Ask HN: How to you create and manage passwords?
I have a confession: I use the same password for pretty much everything, even though I know it's a bad idea and unsafe and all that. The problem is remembering my password at the dozen plus email and web services I use.

Is there a good solution that exists for remembering passwords? I know it's built into Firefox, which is nice, but I need something that can travel with me to use on my iPhone and other computers I might need to use. Ideally, it would magically sync up and password retrieval would be amazingly simple and secure.

So I ask you, HN, how do you create and manage your own passwords?
Dear HN: Please add a footer to every page
When I'm browsing HN on an unreliable connection, I'm never sure if the page is fully loaded or the request is timing out. A footer at the end of every page would fix this.
I don't understand why Google is dabbling in all sorts of areas while neglecting their core business.

The Usenet search and the groups interface were truly wonderful a couple of years ago. Now the interface is a web 2.0 abomination and the search is completely broken.

The web search is still o.k., but not astonishing compared to other search engines. Google is really showing signs of becoming a fat company. I would not be surprised if in a couple of years their calculator returns 77.1*850 = 100000.
Thanks a lot... this is just what I was looking for.
I would like to see his one line of ruby that replaces 20 lines of php. I am not saying that it is not possible but I am pretty sure that is more about abstraction than anything.
One thing that might help just a bit is to more prominently encourage people to add some contact information in their profiles. It is, unfortunately, fairly rare.
Incremental version numbers have proven very useful in many scenarios. I'd be careful to list the lack of support as a feature for git.

I know that support can be hacky at best in a DVCS but often, especially in the common "semi-centralized" workflow, that's good enough. Don't underestimate the communication benefits of being able to talk about specific revisions in chronological context, in plain english. "That was fixed in 982" is much easier to parse and congest for a human than "That was fixed in d934c8" or "That was fixed on last Tuesday".
Here is a post from an earlier comment on how I manage my passwords: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=384658
What three [Xanth] books should I be buying?

Perhaps not the one I mentioned, since I just spoiled it for you. :) I have found that adults don't tend to like Piers Anthony's writing (it's filled with puns and adolescent soft-porn humor), but if you want to better know where your friends - who might have read Xanth books at ages at which they could better appreciate the writing style - are coming from, I would pick the first three of the series:

* A Spell for Chameleon
* The Source of Magic
* Castle Roogna
How Google crawls the deep web
BlogExplosion.com dead?
IMO the one thing that could kill Windows would be if Apple released OS X on other platforms. I do plan on buying a Mac, however it may end up being a couple of years, but if OS X was released for all Intel computers then I'd definitely download a copy and have it in dual-boot, which could take me away from windows long enough until I got a Mac. Or even then I'd consider buying a Linux version from Dell and install OS X (it'd probably still be cheaper than going with pre-install windows).
I used to really want downvoting. Flagging really works much better. The stories that I would have ended up downvoting either don't belong here and get [dead]-ed, or they spawn a lot of fascinating conversation.

Fortunately, people haven't been doing a lot of gaming of the system yet. The biggest problem with upvoting only is that controversial posts garner the most votes (a thousand people love a subject and ten thousand people HATE it, so it gets a thousand upvotes and a TON of comments, even if most people disagree with the premise).
Never Get Tattoos
I don't approve of every food there, but it's still a good resource. But I think they're minor aberration, particularly over the meaning of "whole" and "natural".

Point being, while he is promoting a book and website, I don't see an agenda behind the foods he's recommending.

I'm vegan actually, but I don't think it's appropriate to give a personal dietary rundown in HN.
Django admin is a blender, albeit a nice one.
When the auto-admin covers your entire use-case then that's great. But beware when you run into its limitations (which happens quickly) - then you're in hell.

The other stuff can be easily had in any other python frameworks.

* Modelforms => WTForms or toscawidgets

* Middleware => Built into cherrypy (called "tools")

* ContentTypes => I'm not sure what to make of that. Looks like some really nasty hack on top of their ORM to me, I can't even understand the use-case. I guess you wouldn't need such a thing with a real ORM like sqlAlchemy or dejavu.
You really should re-read the top level of this post. It's directed squarely at you.
They're not perfect, and I think these fifteen minutes could have been a good opportunity for other search engines: I feel good for this.
Important distinction to make here between publisher and developer. The developers are 2dboy, although I'm not entirely sure why you need a publisher for a online downloadable game?

Also - Where's the iphone version already!? :)
I wondering how much it's costing HN per second
I use 1Password (for OS X and iPhone), which lets me generate random passwords for different sites. It can't auto-fill on the iPhone, so you have to go into the app and write it down somewhere (or remember it) temporarily. It's got syncing and stuff too. http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password
Agreed - one of the first businesses he started was effectively a pyramid scheme (he wrote a newspaper in college to sell to other students in bulk, who would then make money by selling the copies to individuals at a profit. Of course, the newspaper itself wasn't any good, and so it was hard to sell, which means that no-one but him made any money. I know of this story because one of my dad's college friends bought some of his newspapers, and predictably failed to sell any).

Also, his first 'real' business was Virgin Records, which made it big off the back of Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells'. However, Branson made Oldfield sign an almost usurious contract (http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2008/03/03/tubular-bells/), and didn't pay him any of the royalties on the recording for several years as he built up the company (until Oldfield, who considered Branson a personal friend, sued).

A great business man he may be, but I don't think he's a genuinely nice guy.
I use SuperGenPass, which hashes the domain of a website with a Master password, so you only need to remember one password. Then, every time you log in, you just enter in your master password, it automatically hashes it, and you get a new password for logging in like af49AgsdU8

EDIT: here's the link http://www.supergenpass.com/
In C++ and C the iteration idiom almost always looks like:

for (elementIndex = first-element; elementIndex < indexAfterLastElement; elementIndex++) {
...
}

That is, writing the equivalent of the mathematical notation:

firstElementIndex <= elementIndex < indexAfterLastElement

Two advantages of that idiom:

The first one is that indexAfterLastElement - firstElementIndex equals the number of elements being scanned.

The second advantage (which is the most debatable, and personal) is that the initial boundary condition is trivial (it's the first element) and the end boundary condition is natural i.e. just look past the element you are looking at whether there is a next one. That's what Dijkstra is talking about when telling the example of the student who would not look past the end of the page.

I used the epithet natural because for most of the objects we interact with, the end is not part of the object, rather it is the transition in between the last element and nothingness.

Now that said (in too many words) if you compare 1-based arrays and 0-based arrays you have:

for (i = 0; i < N; i++) {
...
}

for (i = 1; i < N + 1; i++) {
...
}

Both would be acceptable. However 0 based arrays have the advantage of giving i two meanings:

1. the index of the current element
2. the number of elements scanned so far.

At the end of the iteration, i also conveniently contains the number of elements having been scanned. Which can be useful in algorithms where there is an extra condition which might let you leave the iteration early.

This to me is the most important part, zero-based indexing is more expressive.
I take a layered approach.

One password for all the stuff that isn't really important like sites I visit a few times and then leave.

One password for sites I trust and use on a regular basis, but where a compromised password isn't the end of the world. HN is in this category.

Seperate and strong passwords for stuff that matters, like netbanking, gmail, etc. To remember these I have a system set up so that the passwords are similar in a non-trivial way, like [first words of sentence][number I remember]. One password derived from this could be tqbfjotld!1249057, easily derived from "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!", and 1249057 which is the serial number for the motor in my boat. This way I only have to remember a phrase and a number I already know for entering secure sites.

Using this system I don't have to rely on potential unsafe software, or writing down passwords that may be compromised.
I wonder if all the big corporations could sue Google for defamation now..? o_O

I find it amusing that Google warned me away from the Microsoft website as it might harm my computer!

Small things...
I actually had a wikipedia page give me the malware warning.

Google: Trust no one!

Me: Not even wikipedia?

(Encyclopaedia Britannica laughs maniacally in the background)
A Universal Declaration of Users' Rights
Reply all is the source of major pain in most large companies. Many folks will point to reply all "storms", where hundreds or thousands of drones will reply to an email with a large distribution with something along the lines of: "Don't reply all!" Of course, each time someone does this with reply all, the snowball grows larger.

An even worse use of reply all, in my opinion, is this underlying desire of most corporate cultures to drastically over communicate. Be it because they are trying to cover their butt or because they naively buy into "communication is good, therefore, I shall use a megaphone to speak to everyone". The end result of this is a reduction of email's effectiveness and standard conference call quotes such as, "Send me an email and put REALLY IMPORTANT in the subject so that I don't ignore it". It's pathetic.

Email etiquette is, unfortunately, dead in corporate America.

EDIT: In summary, Reply All doesn't ruin email, people ruin email. Or some such thing :).
Antivirus producers will rejoice at this. Many end-users will think they got infected.
World-Class Prosciutto from Iowa
So because of grade inflation, colleges want to get rid of grades. Ok, sure, rather than give the grades earned and hurt those poor freshies' feelings (and get the calls from mad mothers), we'll just give some sort of general evaluation of success. Oh wait, now professors are inflating the evaluations.
Wow. I think Outlook is one of the shittiest pieces of software Microsoft has ever made. Lets see... it crashes all the time. It is dog slow. You shut it down and it doesn't really shut down.

The search is pathetic. This is huge. If you can't find your email, it's not very useful.

Organizing emails by folder isn't necessary if you have a powerful search facility. Gmail search is much faster than any outlook search and it actually gives you what you need. Manual folder organization is a waste of time.

Labels are useful with the rule wizard. And I have to say I find the rules on Gmail much nicer than Outlook. And unlike Outlook, you don't have to start up your client to run them.

You can sync your contacts, etc...Google has all kinds of sync softare (gry google-ing it).

You can access gmail from any phone that uses IMAP/POP (including blackberry).

You have 7 gigs of storage. Instead of the pathetic 100 meg that you usually see with corporate Exchange servers.

The spam filtering doesn't even compare. Google has mastered it.

You can hook gmail up to your own domain easily (google apps account).

And GMail is free.

I think you have it backwards. Gmail is the power user's email, outlook is for people who are stuck in the past.
What is school for?
calorie restriction may wind your clock forward more slowly.

There is some recent evidence against the efficacy of calorie restriction: http://www.mailbucket.org/ieet-life-11416105.html

Sat, 01/24/2009 - 04:37 - NLN

If you are a mouse on the chubby side, then eating less may help you live longer. For lean mice - and possibly for lean humans, the authors of a new study predict -- the anti-aging strategy known as caloric restriction may be a pointless, frustrating and even dangerous exercise.
The system I use is this - I use a fixed combination of letters that never change (4 letters), and then I follow it up with an 8 digit series of numbers, ending up with 12 digit password.

I have a contact on my phone where all the passwords are stored as phone numbers (just the number, not the letters). If I ever forget the password, I just look it up on my phone. If my phone is ever stolen, the thief will never figure out that a particular contact happens to be having my password as their phone number, and even if he does, he does not know the fixed letter combination I tack on.

And I change this passwords every few months, and when I first change it, I use my phone to remember it. Furthermore, I split the passwords into 3 categories - important, not so important and the password I share with family.
I can't use it - I'm in Canada. But I agree that an RSS feed of events results (like a feed for events happening in your area) would be a useful feature.

It looks like you guys are off to a great start. Good luck!
I was doing research this morning for a radio show I host, and Amazon came up as malware. I was like what??? Malware on Amazon? Then I went back, and noticed every website was malware. I had to laugh, but it is interesting that Google doesn't have some sort of testing process before rolling out updates live.
The first or second letters of the words of motivational quotes with a few letter substitutions (e.g. 0 for 'o', 3 for 'e') and some random symbols work well for me as easy to recall and strong passwords. Plus when you type it in, you have to think about the quote and whether you are applying it.

w3tm0mccab1ca$@

hvh1faa0n3tac)&

"What ever the mind of man can concieve and believe, it can achieve" -Napoleon Hill
Of course the issue is almost as contentious as emacs vs. vi, but in the interest of truth I will still say it:
Reply-To-All is the button that makes correctly managed mailing lists work, because without it you cannot reply to a message on list. See http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html for the technical details.
I use this: http://www.angel.net/~nic/passwdlet.html
Coming soon :).
Brighter Minds also launched an online games destination in the middle of last year at BeanstalkGames.com

Perhaps they invested in expansion at an unlucky time.
http://www.bugmenot.com FTW

If you can't remember all the passwords to the accounts you have, one solution it to create less accounts.
The way I create passwords is to make an algorithm that no one else would know - which creates unique passwords for every site I use, but I can never forget the password since the algorithm stays the same. Example:

initials + last 3 characters in domain of site + year of birth + random sequence you know.

my + tor + 91 + e72BQo -- HN
my + igg + 78 + abwBs$ -- Digg

Again, just examples. It works for me and I never forget my passwords as long as I remember the algorithm.
ROFL! mnemonicscloth, you've made my day! It took me an hour and a half to write that post in direct response to Paul's, and it's certainly not boilerplate (feel free to Google any chunk of it you'd like, and I'd be surprised if you'd find even a single sentence written anywhere previously). But if the result was "optimally appealing, synergistic and defensible", the 90 minutes was absolutely worth it [grin].

Seriously, I'm a big fan of Paul's, and he knows it (and we know each other). I was simply responding to an overly broad-brush, inaccurate indictment (that he likely tossed off quickly) with a calm, factual response clarifying what the real story is. I believe it is completely appropriate for this forum, and I'm happy to continue the discussion either here, on my own blog (rose.vc/angelnotes) or by email (david AT angelsoft.net).

For those who would like to delve further into the role of Angels-Other-Than-Paul, there's a good book that has recently been published titled "Fool's Gold?: The Truth Behind Angel Investing in America" by Scott Shane. While I happen to personally disagree with the tone (and some of the conclusions) of the author, there's no question but that he is a serious researcher in the field, and that his underlying facts are essentially correct.

Thanks again for your comments, and feel free to email directly if you'd like to continue taking me to task :-).

-David

Disclaimer: "No Boilerplate, PR, or Legal Personnel were harmed (or used) the making of this post or the previous one."
I just learned the very hard way to never ever comment on HN after drinking.
Don't be cruel. Add 'kiss' ;)
Economy Pinches the Billable Hour at Law Firms
An alternative to placing site guidelines on a welcome page or in the navigation header (where I believe they would eventually be glossed over) would be to link to the guidelines from within inappropriate comments. If a comment gets downmodded below a certain level, it could either be appended with a link to the site guidelines or altogether replaced by a link to the guidelines. This would probably be a better hint to the commenter that something he/she said may have violated the guidelines. This may also have the side effect of keeping people from abusing the downmod option.

This could be one approach to dealing with the "broken windows" issue:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373356
A couple tips:

Gmail Notifier
http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/notifier_mac.html

This firefox extension gives you folders (among other cool features):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6076
Anyone know or have a link to the financial details?
VCs pay (because they are for-profit entities with operating budgets that are funded by management fees), angel groups don't pay (because they are typically non-profit, or informal, associations of individuals).

Individual angels don't pay (they get it through their groups), and entrepreneurs don't pay to submit to individual angel groups or to use the site's funding management tools.

The only time entrepreneurs pay is if they decide they want to broaden their funding search by making their plan available to all 450+ groups at the same time, instead of applying to a targeted few individually.
ya. typing "from: seshagiric" is pretty tough.

as far as organizing, set up a filter and create a label. that's what I do. I have half a dozen email lists I manage this way. Or get the Better Gmail firefox extension for folders, although if you think about it a label is the same as a folder anyway.
If you want some more mature books from Piers Anthony, the Apprentice Adept series and Incarnations of Immortality series are better than the Xanth ones. Plus, they're both only 7-8 books long, so it won't take you forever to read them all (if you actually get into them).

Apprentice Adept is kind of a cool dual-world series, with sci-fi in one world and fantasy in the other, and the ability for some to move between them. You should start with the first in the series, of course: Split Infinity.

Incarnations of Immortality also has the juxtaposition of sci-fi and fantasy, but in one world. The "hook" for this series is that the major "forces" in the world (time/death/fate/war/etc...) are actually offices which people fill (think The Santa Clause, but without Tim Allen or christmas). The first book of the series is On A Pale Horse.

A final word of warning: I read both of these series a long time ago, so it could be that they're actually not as mature as I remember =)
I think people need to worry less about their version control system and think more about writing useful code. Seriously, when I look at the time people waste making silly visualizations for commits done on some github project, or doing "version control advocacy", it blows my mind.

Why not do something to improve yourself, like learn C or Lisp, or port some sortware?
Lua 5.1.3 Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
>

This is using the Lua console installed by the the (excellent) Lua for Windows package.
puffing the magic dragon? :)
I have a question - is there a password manager out there thats made it possible to access passwords from a computer that isn't yours? I'm guessing not, because of the obvious security issues.

Because I'm not always in front of my laptop, or desktop and don't have an iphone I use a system similar to what is here - different passwords for different sites, with a system that helps me remember them.
If pg says you're the superman - it's better than Nietzche :)
blue is the new red shirt character
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirt_(character)
1) Neal Stephenson: Anathem
2) Victor Hugo: Les Miserables
3) Haruki Marakami: Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world.

And ditch your so-called friend.