skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And realized how bad it looked when I would schlep in at post-930 (not just for me, but for my boss and our team.
>
> Problem solved.

I was in this sort of situation too.

I know it sounds bad to say "I solved my personal problem by quitting", but I think in my case it was justified, and that sometimes it's a very good idea.

I never came in after 10:30, which is not all that late, especially considering I left at around 7 and did plenty of work at home. I added a ton of modern infrastructure to their application. I wrote documentation on everything. I introduced unit testing. I did weekly training classes for the other developers. I helped anyone that had any problem. (I also wrote code!)

I never even got a "thanks" for this. Instead, I got lectures about not being a "team player". (Apparently a "team player" is someone who warms their chair early in the morning, not someone who goes out of his way to help the other team members.)

Anyway, I just wanted to provide some contrast here. Sometimes it's in your best interest to be a good little employee and do whatever your superiors tell you. Other times, it's best to tell them to fuck off and die.

(And for the record, the job I got after that one is my current job. Nobody has had this conversation with me, and I love them as a result :)
Does he have a blog?
possibly an inside job? or by a competitor or contract channel (quest, etc.)
No. There's a correlation/causation problem to this argument. Are two-career marriages unstable because of something inherent about marrying someone else with a career, or is it that there is some other correlative factor? Noer's response to those studies (which he doesn't provide detailed citations for; only the names of journals) is about as reasonable as giving children foot-growing medicine to help their math skills.

I don't buy for a minute Noer's analysis that two working spouses produce a marriage of lower "value" (which is ill-defined in this context anyway). Missing is any kind of discussion of heterosexual marriages where the man stays at home, or of homosexual marriages of any kind. His analysis is limited enough in scope that trying to draw the kind of broad conclusions that he does is ridiculous at best.
I think a more likely theory is that the telecom providers frequently jack their rates, to see if people notice. If someone doesn't notice, they keep jacking them and rake in profits. It's a good bet that at least one NOC is asleep at the switch on a given night.
Facebook now gets over one _billion_ visits per month
I like The White Stripes a lot, but I've heard a few live performances, and... is it just me or is Jack not able to hit the right pitch to save his life?
- It's a generational thing. Under 30s are buying virtual goods a lot more than Over 30s.

- It's a "time" thing. The best virtual goods models are designed to make the purchase an exchange of time for money. This makes the market for virtual goods targeted at people who: have more money than time, and value the rewards of time-spent, not the journey getting there.

I wish I had more resources to give you that would explain it with data instead of anecdotes, but I don't really know of any.
This is an argument for mandatory crime/injury insurance. :)
thats amazing! i've got the same combination on my luggage!
Picking up that entrepreneurial date.
A bit of advice from one female entrepreneur, from her experience at start-up parties and tech mixers. Hopefully it helps you score at least A date with that cute young founder across the office/bar.
Not everyone(said the vegetarian)
I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why performers and organizers seemingly give away so much money to scalpers. If someone is profiting from arbitrage of something you sell, wouldn't you raise your prices?

The closest I've come to a reasonable explanation was in the Armchair Economist, but I remain unconvinced that they wouldn't be better off selling tickets at a higher price or engaging in some sort of price-targeting.
Stuart Brown of the blog Modern Life did a good article on this almost 3 years ago, revealing trends in passwords used in the UK. http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/top-10-most-com...

I wish he still blogged, he had an amazing signal-to-noise ratio, posting frequency, and article quality.
I really want to have intelligent discussions, but everyone over there just posts stupid personal attacks when they disagree with you. If I'm going to spend the effort composing a post, I want people to read an think about it, not just make a snide attack. (FWIW, I am guilty of making TONS of snide personal attacks on Reddit. The community rewards it.)

The thread that made me quit Reddit for good is this one:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7uvkz/to_stop_a...

My post is definitely on the sarcastic side, but it did take me some time to think about and compose. I just wanted to show that people aren't "idiots" for using an ORM. In return, I get a personal attack from someone who has probably never written a line of code in his life.

This just doesn't happen on HN. There are people with ideas that I disagree with, but at least they have something more intelligent to say than "your dumb".

So since I only have a finite amount of time, and I spend too much of it replying to social news sites, I figured I'd give up the stupid one for good. We will see how it goes.

BTW, I don't think everything on HN is intelligent... but it is several orders of magnitude better than Reddit. (I wrote a bit about this last night, as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473023). Also, I'm sure I make stupid comments from time to time... but hey, nobody's perfect :)
OK, I just finished my video. Let me know what you guys think:

http://doiop.com/81byaz
How are you defining "true value"?

The inflated prices that various assets had at the height of the bubble were "true values" in the sense that their owners could sell them (or, more importantly, put them up as collateral for loans) for those values. Someone who bought a house at the top of the market, lost their job, and is now trying to sell their house so they can move to somewhere more affordable, is certainly feeling a real loss right now.
Whitman wants to be California's next governor
Oh, here we go. Hacker News degenerating into reddit...

I seriously hope that the reddit-style "news" will not start to dominate Hacker News. I am not interested in marijuana laws in the US, abuse of power by the police in the US, Obama getting elected (we're done with that, fortunately), or other things which are not Hacker News. I come here for cool geeky stuff.

This is also the only time I will post a comment like that. Otherwise, I will make it a point to ignore "news" like these. It's a pity I can't downmod those or at least hide them like on reddit.
Kasparov versus the World, the power of collective collaboration.
addendum: Something I forgot to add. I come from the UK, but I'm living in Canada. It would currently be cheaper to buy Fable 2 and Fallout 3 from the UK and have them shipped over; sadly the whole region code bullshit prevents this. Usually it means Europe pays like double the price of NA, however now that the economy is going to craps in the UK the prices for games have been put down* unlike Bethesda in NA who seem to think putting up the price of a game will make them more money.
Auto-tune has been in use for a long time, I guess America is finally waking up to its pop-u-liciuos facade? Lets hope so. MTV ruined music when they made presentation more important than sound.

Music was great in the past-time because radio was the mass-medium and sound doesn't discriminate against physical characteristics that would otherwise make one unattractive for marketing.
Really? The US has changed a great deal then. Up here in Canada, in my 35ish years I don't really remember a great change in religious belief. In fact, if anything, I find that there is less these days than 30 some odd years ago.
Well, Langley Steinert and Olin Shivers, who both gave great presentations, were nonetheless the only local speakers apart from VC and law firm partners, right? Everyone else was flying in anyway.

Good question, though. I went to the Harvard Summer School in high school, so I'm still infatuated with the area -- I'd love to have an excuse to go back to Cambridge again. I traveled from California to Startup School '05 with a 10-month-old, so I know it can be done!
I find hard to believe that during such a special night all the company's fate depended on 3 guys with no backup and no direct supervision. If that's true, it seems to me very unprofessional.
Ok, but at that point, you've decided that the collective benefits of forcing someone to do something outweigh the individual's rights to do whatever the hell they want. How to go about finding the actual compromise that best suits everyone and is most efficient in economic terms is left as an exercise for the reader.
Me too. It really irks my wife if she's onlooking. That'll teach her to onlook I guess :-)
"If you want to apply, please submit your application online by 10 pm PST on March 18, 2009. Groups that submit early have an advantage because we have more time to read their applications."

Do we have the chance to update the submitted video with our latest video? For instance, if we decide to submit the application with the video before the deadline, then, decide to update the video later. Can we do so?
so either code a solution (eg, uploader, verify it's a video, verify private urls are secure, etc etc)

or just use a startup you've funded that does exactly this? :)
Being someone that got in fairly early (3-digit SO ID#), in my case it came from listening to the podcast. Months before the site went live, Joel and Jeff discussed the site and how it was being built.

You are right, though; the reason why I started listening to the podcast was because I enjoyed reading Joel on Software and Coding Horror, and I've continued to stay because the show is much more casual than any other programming podcast I've come across (other shows I've found tend to take themselves a little too seriously).

Anyways, that's just my opinion, but I do think that a podcast is a great way to build buzz for a site, and if you know of any shows similar to Stack Overflow I'd love to hear about them.
Thanks -- it's interesting that the professions presumably requiring some form of literacy (scribing, teaching) pay less than carpentry.
This isn't really a... well, it is a critique in the european sense, but it is not really a rebuttal. Most of it agrees with NNT, and when it doesn't it's usually on a matter of form.
Just hit the flag button. Hopefully enough of us agree that it [dead]s the story.
> Edit and resubmit as much as you want, but be sure to submit at least once before the deadline (March 18 at 10 pm PST), because you haven't applied till you do.

I assume they simply use the most recent application...
Don't view this video. It is the stupidest rickroll video. And, it is not funny at all.

Admin, please delete the link.
Well, for the record, none of the people I know who work in banking earn half a million dollars (not even including bonuses). And that's the case of 99% of "bankers".
It used to surprise me that something like "asdfasdf", which is probably the easiest/fastest to type password (at 6+ digits) never shows up on these kinds of lists. But I guess when most people in the world are typing words out one letter at a time, it really doesn't make a difference.
Top 5 Business Blogging Tips
I don't know exactly why but that sounds very funny to me. I would boast of this ability all the time.
Same with GitHub.
Statistical natural language processing is a very prominent example of a field which has developed effective methods for coping with "black swans" or the occurance of improbable events that have never been seen before.

If you take any large corpus of text and start counting the frequencies that different words occur you will rapidly notice that a huge fraction of the words have never been seen before or occur only once. Biblical scholars called these words hapax legomena instead of black swans. Methods for estimating the probabilities of these events go back to Alan Turning and his codebreaking work at Blechley Park. One need not assign zero probability to unseen events a la maximum likelihood.

Taleb's rants against VAR and mediocristan have always seemed like borderline straw man bashing to me. Sure there are many fools who believe in the gaussian or lognormal returns model, but the best knowledge in the field doesn't make these assumptions. Why doesn't he give authors like bouchard and potters who have built on mandelbrot's work their due? or does he?
The article is a little GUI centric, but you can do this sort of thing in non-GUI apps too. How many of you emacs users idly press "C-x C-s" when you are sitting around thinking? I know I do it constantly. It feels good, and the only side effect is the reassuring message "(No changes need to be saved)"
I've seen this in another form too: people who repeatedly draw a selection box around desktop icons. It's usually a background task while thinking or talking about something else or on the phone.
Mob-mentality @ price of wine
The Rise and Fall of Google Empire. Everything in less than a decade.
I also have a naive question, does a .com really have "additional credibility" over something else? Why? How about independent of what other websites are doing?
I know. But, are they going to use the latest video?
The Kindle Hardware Tax
I don't think everything on HN is intelligent... but it is several orders of magnitude better than Reddit.

I second that. In fact, I couldn't click that link because I set my HOSTS file to block reddit.com from my work computer. I was spending way too much time on that site having stupid arguments.
Right now, Amazon has an incredible way to market the kindle. It doesn't require a computer or anything from the owner (beyond an outlet to charge once or twice a week if you have EVDO on OR once or twice a month if you dont).

This is something that very few, if any other companies can claim. Not even cell phone companies can claim this - Verizon needs AT&T or Sprint or whoever in order to allow people to talk to everyone else.

Adding wifi support removes this claim - you're now dependent on the person's ISP (internet connection), router manufacturer (provides the wifi) as well as a few other misc things. That takes away from the simplicity of the device.
There appears to be a caching bug when I access HN from work. Sometimes, when I first browse to the page, the top right corner where my user name should be shows another user name and karma score. I've dropped that name into the global address list in Outlook and more than once it has come up as a valid alias for someone in a totally different building. If I click a link, the error corrects itself and I am logged in as myself.
There is simply no example, not one – in print, on line, in television – of quality content offered for free ever resulting in a viable business.

What about broadcast TV stations? Anyone with an antenna can receive them and has been able to for decades, and I think they're a "viable business."
we're asking applicants to submit videos introducing themselves

I'm glad I'm not applying this time.

Never mind the irritation of figuring out how to create a video (I'm sure it's easy, but why spend time figuring that out when I could be hacking?) -- I simply don't video well, especially in artificial-seeming situations. And I don't think a video would tell you anything useful about me anyway; my most natural voice is the written voice, so that's what you should listen to if you want to learn anything about me.

I can see a couple of potential advantages to requiring an introductory video -- first, it allows you to detect some fraudulent applications; and second, it raises the bar for entry, thus removing some of the less serious applications -- but my impression from everything I've read here is that neither of those are particularly problematic even without videos. I'll admit that some people speak better in video than in writing -- although I think this applies more often to business people than to hackers -- but surely the right solution to deal with such people is to make an introductory video optional, not to make it mandatory. I know there's a lot you can see when you engage a candidate in conversation which you can't see on a written page; but a unilateral video doesn't tell you how well someone can carry on a bilateral or multilateral conversation either.

I'm sure you guys have some reason for this... but I certainly can't see it. Why?
I was just saying you could have a place to paste in a url, and leave it at that (let the user figure out how to get their video url-accessible). If an applicant can't figure that out, it's probably a worthwhile filter.

[Edit]: Validation of the video is probably desirable, since you then don't have to ping applicants whose videos don't work. I'm willing to bet that posterous does validation and replies if the video is bad.
I'm not sure it makes sense to be concerned with whether or not a song was made by a singer or an engineer, or about anything besides the song itself for that matter.
Yes, this is a reply to Payne's post.
We used to do "comping" of vocals back in the 80's, and afaik it's been done since the early 70's. We did this on the 2" 24 track tape recorder by copying/re-recording bits of multiple takes onto a single track.

Then came Auto-Tune. That meant that less perfect singers no longer would have to strain themselves by performing a dozen tracks, we could do with three or four, focusing on performance and feel. AT would assist with the pitch. Sessions actually became more creative, since the tools were better than before.

So "perfect vocals" have been around way longer than Auto-Tune. We just did it in a more tedious way, and wore out the singers vocal cords in the process. Pop is just pop. Other genres will always cater for those who want to listen to more "real music".
Recently a niche programming-oriented website called phpbb.com

Ouch. They didn't have to say niche.
Astronaut's Video Satirizes NASA Bureaucracy
> It connotes a sort of superficiality that would lead me to choose a different dating site.

It appears that the concept behind that site is that people match your pictures with other people that you would look good with. This is the definition of superficiality.
Auto-Tune being abused: Why every Kanye West and T-Pain song sounds completely ridiculous.

It was kind of neat the first few times, now it's just annoying.
How many applications did YC get last year?

Edit: Scratch that, guess I should've searched first. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=336635
Technology’s Fingerprints on the Stimulus Bill
I agree with almost everything Paul says, but will add one caveat: ego-driven people--I'm careful not to include everyone in that category, but do tend to think most people are at least partially ego-driven--tend to be driven by their attachment and identification with/as something.

For instance, say someone takes a jab at some aspect of another person's identity like their ability to comprehend a complicated philosophical concept or programming construct (or something). At this point the second person may feverishly try to defend herself, reading all about this construct and related constructs. Even if she reads to defend herself, and in the process gets a somewhat skewed view of what is more or less objectively decidable, is it the case that she's dumber than before for having read all that? Another option is to have not been involved in the argument and perhaps as a result less prone to bias on the issue, but also less likely to have just done all that reading to clarify and defend herself.

This isn't necessary in contradiction with what Paul wrote, but it does add a little nuance to what was stated pretty bluntly: that the bigger your identity becomes, the dumber you become.

As an aside, I see a tiny bit of irony that the spirit of what Paul is saying is similar to that of Buddhism, which says that attachment and identification results in suffering (not just stupidity). Buddhism rules! Your religion sucks!

Edit: okay, so after going through a few more posts, my Buddhism crack isn't so original or funny. Doh!
how were you going to give your pitch & demo?
I cannot tell you how happy I am to finally see Ticketmaster under the gun for this. Over the summer when Radiohead came to Toronto, it was literally seconds before Ticketmaster was "sold out" and redirecting users to TicketNow for tickets at over double face value.

I was one of the lucky few to get tickets directly from Radiohead at a pre-sale a few weeks before.

It is absolutely wrong for Ticketmaster, who has control over probably 95% of the tickets for every show, to turn around and sell them for double the price. It's a conflict of interest, and makes some shows prohibitively expensive. Ticketmaster is scum.
Well, it does make live shows more difficult.
For the love of science, fix the 'code' bug already.

And you, jackowayed, could you please split that line in two?

Please?
If you want to play with this, fire up GarageBand and check out the AUPitch effect. (make a real music track, then look in the track info, go to Vocal effects and try "Male Basic with pitch")
Perhaps StackOver should be Overflow as well ;)
Yes - I used AutoTune in recordings back in 1999/2000 - it was available as a DirectX plugin even then (I was one of the rebels who used Ensoniq paris for its superior musical instrament like qualities, unlike the now dominant thug "pro tools") - even on low end processors then it was practical to do it almost real time (and in any case, often I would just draw the graph of where the notes were meant to be).

Once you did that a bit, you started to hear it everywhere. So I would put it at about 2000/1999 when I stopped hearing bum notes in pop songs on the radio.

As a fond example, listen to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers "under the bridge" - a MASSIVE hit in the early 90s, most of the notes are flat. Can you imagine that song being a hit like that now in that form?
I didn't flag the article as inappropriate because I was asking why it was relevant. Thank you for taking the time to explain - it wasn't immediately clear.
This is not relevant to Hacker News.
A lot of performers run auto-tune real time when they play live. I got to sit behind the board when a friend of mine ran sound for nsync. He let me hear the signal before it went thru the autotune box. hi-larious.
Here's the breakdown of the article: Cannabis use is up and the testicular cancer rates are proportional. However, only the fast growing form is proportionally up with cannabis use, the more common form of testicular cancer isn't up.

To me, this suggest that something other than drug use is causing an increase in testicular cancer and that the fast growing form of cancer increases the attraction to cannabis. It's the simplest explanation.

It's already been shown that testicular cancer is related to adultery and high sex drive due to the elevated levels of testosterone and this high level of testosterone causes the cancer. It's also shown that high testosterone levels increase risk taking behavior, like extreme sports but also drug taking. So Occam's razor suggests high testosterone rates will encourage drug use.

Honestly, the results are pathetic. You have a twofold increase in testicular cancer prevalence if your mother contracts lung cancer! This was the previous thing they linked with the 'testicular cancer plague' in the UK, now that that's got boring they're interested in cannabis. Next it'll be poor diet, perhaps standing in front of the microwave or cell phones will come after that!

All these things have the same things in common: correlation and not causation.

Please, can we stop seeing articles like this. The last one was masturbation and testicular cancer and again that article was flawed by the exact same thing. The precursors to testicular cancer cause all these behaviors, not the behaviors causing cancer!
at the high cost of crippled one line lambdas, no thanks