skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the most interesting things I've listened to in a while. Looking forward to part 2.
Productivity, not Bailouts
What the heck has slang got to do with gender in this case? I'd use slang like that around women or men, but probably not in the board room, no. Women aren't all delicate flowers you have to tip-toe around, y'know.
Open Invention Network Extends The Linux Ecosystem As TomTom Becomes Licensee
i use about 5 languages at work, and 2 or 3 more at home. you get used to it, really. a good IDE helps in the case of forgetting something like how to find length.
Could you add the 0.5 sec. delay and cover the diagonal issue with just CSS?
Hey HN what laptop do you use..need a replacement
Sysadmin (Windows) here (with a modest budget) looking to replace my Gateway M465 1.6ghz/1gig ram/30gig HD. Currently running Windows XP and Fedora and will prob continue for a few months. I need something semi-portable, but with a docking station. I had planned on sticking with Gateway, but.....
Duplicate. Another story for this already made it to the front page:

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=528567
I saw "GIL" and had a look into it (Global Interpreter Lock apparently) - seems like a very heavy-handed mechanism to put in.

In fact, it seems, well, extremely lazy -- but I'm not sure I understand the thinking behind it. Are there pros/cons to having a GIL approach?
"I guess this guy has posted this a few other places around the internet but I thought it was pretty good info that should be passed on."

Really? Why not just link to one of the many exact duplicates of what you posted, then? Trying to get some Google love? I'm tempted to flag this except that some Hackers may be interested in the story itself.
Eventually the fakes get found out. You have to be able to back up your marketing with something real.

Most good organizations will be suspicious of pure marketing claims unless they can be backed up with hard evidence. So yeah, they'll interview you based on that referral, but you still have to ace the interview. They'll hire you based on the interview, but they'll fire you if you don't perform well on the job.
I believe that 1.9 was supposed to be a beta (1.5 and 1.7 were), but the plans for 2.0 got to be too ambitious and there came a need for a version number between 1.8 and 2.0. I suppose it could have been called 1.10 but there were presumably good reasons.
Indeed, passion (at a macro-level) is important. But even within your passion lies a long list of tactical things that need to be selected from.

The challenge is limited resources. You can't do everything (regardless of level of passion), so you have to find some way to pick where you allocate your time and energy.
Video of FedEx jumbo-jet crash in Japan
In short, Linux doesn't suit the authors needs (where needs is defined as having the same keyboard short cuts as his favorite operating system). Nothing to see here. I'm at a loss as to why the author feels Linux's eventual goal is to convert him to Linux, or what profit he sees in moving from OSX to Linux.

If for some reason he really is determined to make this conversion (without changing his keyboard shortcuts) then he is welcome to start a Linux keyboard shortcut unification project, since as the cliche goes, the source is there.
Oops. sorry.
from what I've read:

-most of these scammers are young kids

-most of them make nothing by U.S. standards ,but are rolling in dough by local standards. Many times the scamming 14 year old, makes more cash than his father.

-The big guys who recruit the teenagers, and provide computers + internet access, are rolling in dough even by U.S. standards.
TomTom gets allies in Microsoft Linux patent lawsuit fight
I never knew about Tor. I wonder if the packets are encrypted. But its an over all good article that strangers are good people.

I have a few extra computers at home. Thinking they would be good for Tor.
That article was interesting, but didn't really seem to go anywhere - I was expecting him to bring up something about 'The dangers of operating a Tor exit node' (posted earlier today), or perhaps even a reflection on the legal status of Tor exit node operators (given that their IP addresses show up in logs, but they don't know what requests they're forwarding), but he didn't seem to make that (or any other) point...
Yeah, as the number of applicants increases due to large salaries, the difficulty to figure out which candidates are good increases.

One area that economists often point this out is in education. Many would like teachers to be both paid more and held to a higher standard (when being hired) to get the best teachers. However, as you increase the screening and competition for teaching jobs, the ones with the most alternative options (who are likely the best teachers) will seek jobs elsewhere rather than being subjected to a battery of tests and bureaucracy.

In this case, there aren't as many alternatives since CEO positions are at the top of the pile. Likewise, political positions come with other desired perks - namely power and prestige.

Economics in this area is really hard. If you (or anyone) come up with a better system of screening individuals for positions, the world will be a much better place. Right now, we typically rely on things like resumes, experience, interviews, etc. which don't really give a good picture. For example, someone who worked on impressive thing X might have had a really minor roll in X and someone else who worked on slightly less impressive Y might have been integral to Y, but resumes can sometimes deceive on that. However, both of those candidates can be filtered above someone with no experience. Eh. I really wish I had a good solution to this - and other rating problems. Yelp is nice, but just because many people are rating things doesn't make it accurate - sometimes people get angry over something that isn't the other party's fault and can take out retribution which skews the ratings.

Interesting to think about though.
8  Cases of Internet Vigilantism
Ask HN: Dealing with multiple internship job offers
I'm expecting a job offer from Company A sometime this week, and I also have my first interview with Company B. There's a second interview after that before they make a decision. I'm not sure when the Company A will expect me to get back to them on the offer. I like Company A, but Company B has some significant advantages that I cannot ignore.

What should I do if the Company A expects a response before I get an answer from Company B? I informed Company B that I would be dealing with another offer, but they didn't directly address that when they scheduled my interview shortly after that. I feel like I have to wait for Company B, but if it goes on too long it's possible that I could end up with neither job.
Jeff Raikes on Backing Agile Sports, a Football Startup Built on Microsoft Tech
I use Java and Flex throughout the day and switch to Python and Objective C in the evening. I agree that I've reached my limit on storing the massive standard libraries these languages have in my head, but I think use of IDEs in the past has made this worse for me (I got lazy).

I'm back to using Emacs almost exclusively in an attempt to remember the APIs. I know I'll take an early hit for it, but I'm hoping I'll make up for it.
There is also another step - define what you want. Targets are important.

Preferably, define targets in real (really real) world terms. This is difficult, but "a user should reasonably be able to complete this macro-process in 5 minutes" is the kind of target.

I've seen so many specs that demand "millisecond response time" for the application. Or something ludicrous. (Requirements for business continuity and downtime/etc are usually similarly crazy/unqualified).

When one consultancy I know got a similar requirement forced down their throat contractually -- they simply changed the application so that a process that was a few pages, was now dozens. Much shorter delays! The fact is that the user wouldn't even blink at a several-second delay when submitting (it was a big operation, so you'd expect a delay). The whole process was longer and more cumbersome - they'd optimised the wrong thing entirely.

It's an extreme example I know -- But the upshot is that the target was wrong -- It's not just the people writing the specs. In a lot of places, it's still rare for developers to sit down with actual users. This always seemed crazy to me (half the time it was because companies are worried that developers will go "hey yeah sure, I can implement that in an hour!" -- which does admittedly sometimes happen).

So you're absolutely right! :) Profile, Profile, Profile -- but don't forget to profile your users (imho do this first).
100% Time
The latest Passenger supports ruby 1.9.1
I'd think you'd need javascript/flash for that.
The point here is not about picking winners between S3 and you/me; Probably that's a no-brainer at this point.The thing to worry about is whether S3 is reliable enough that you can trust your user's data with S3 alone.

While S3 might be doing this for a living, Amazon doesn't. AFAIK,revenues from cloud services are not at all significant given Amazon's scale. What does S3 license say? Is Amazon liable if it loses data stored in S3?
S3, Mosso and other cloud providers are not an appropriate back up mechanism. These are good for sharing files and a temporary storage system. The only legitimate backup is a physically stored disk. S3 doesn't provide versioning nor deletion protection.

The problem is I hear about these new "Cloud" storage companies claiming backup, but when asked what do they do. They rely on Amazon to move the files into different data centers. But anyone can delete a file or directory by accident and poof the files are gone forever.

If the storage provider does have permanent physical storage in there backup plans, don't think your files are forever.
Krugman Slams Geithner Plan
I'm so glad that $40 million went into this company essentially the second before the backlash hit a fever pitch. Problem is that the local news stations that would ordinarily have a field day with this story aren't going to report it because the C4G ads are highly lucrative in this economy.
Additionally, I've found that the smartest people who go to prestigious schools care more about prestige and interesting work than about salary. The best CS and math students at Harvard wanted to be professors or do research. It was the average Harvard students, for the most part, that went to finance or consulting to make the big bucks.

PG made a point (I think in one of his essays that I can't remember - correct me if I am wrong) that I've found to be fairly true (though of course not always) - that often, jobs for a given level of qualification have a set wealth they will pay, and this payout can come in the form of a more interesting job or more money. This generalization does have a subtlety though - when you are a higher valued candidate for work, you are not only offered more wealth but a greater diversity of choices of work that offer different proportions of interest vs. money. Essentially what I mean here is that it is much easier, coming out of Harvard, to get a high paying job than it is to get a really interesting job. When you are in the middle rungs of math at Harvard, it is not that hard to get a job as an I-banker (lots of money, but two years of very boring work), but you can't just trade off some of that money for a more interesting job. It is only when you are smarter that you get the option of having either the high paying I-banking job or a lower paying job that is more interesting (i.e. cutting edge grad school work at MIT's AI lab). A lot of the smartest people want this more interesting job not only because they are driven more by their interests than money, but also because these jobs are more prestigious since only the smartest people can have them.

On top of this, I knew a lot more people from Harvard who were willing to forgo making much money in their earlier life by taking travel grants or just going off to some country to make some documentary or doing a startup (something that I think has a much lower total expected outcome of income than a finance job). A lot of the smarter people were willing to sacrifice money for freedom because they were sure they would probably eventually make enough money to survive (and the degree helped this), and freedom was just more important to them.

Given all this, measuring money in these studies doesn't even seem good enough to me to be a heuristic for success. People at the most prestigious universities seem to often have the freedom and luxury to have different priorities and to simply not care as much about money. It seems like even a study asking people about their job satisfaction some number of years later would be better.
"no code is faster than no code" (comes from yehuda katz afair)
Blogspam? Earliest copy of this I could find was http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/cash4gold-c117648....

From there it was picked up by The Consumerist... after that I lose track.
If you prefer to opt out of Google's interest tracking system:

http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
The Stumble Effect: StumbleUpon Hits the Big Leagues
That's a big jump from "the next desktop platform".

Indeed - but it's a question that a lot of people are pondering.

Still, the OP is correct that this article doesn't really further the discussion.
The facebook reference is pretty off. These guys are not the facebook types I believe. But someone like Madoff would have been found by the law or those he conned.
The funniest story I've heard regarding these scammers was the one about the guy eating the usb drive when law enforcement came into the hot spot cafe.
Yeah, we tried to ignore GameStop for such a long time, but then decided to say "screw it" and have just gone full bore against them: http://blog.dawdle.com/2009/03/why-penny-arcade-is-wrong-abo...

And we're doing a little guerrilla marketing at GDC on Thursday. Should be fun.

twirls mustache (take that, patio11)
...two bowls of rice,

three bowls of coke?

It mounts up when you're living that life.
Will tweeters with large flocks soon be the next traffic billboards?
It's a lot harder to believe that a company with a Superbowl ad is an out-and -out scam. At least in my mind, I tend to assume that if they make it to that level, they're legit.
Failure is overrated, a redux
Dtv.gov says that over a third of US stations have already switched.
Ask HN: Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields?
I tried asking this question on the actual site, but it was closed as "non-programming-related" fairly quickly.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/674232/could-stackoverflow-work-for-other-fields-closed

Unfortunately, I'm still curious to hear what people think. Here is my original question:

"Pick the specialty: medicine, law, science, finance, cars, home improvement...any field that has specialized 'domain knowledge'.

Could someone build a successful forum, like SO, for other areas of expertise? Is there something different about programming that makes this site work exceptionally well?"
Peg/leg - recursive-descent parser generators for C
I hate the name, but it found a spelling error on my site. Cool! "Langrangian" != "Lagrangian"
Ask HN: How do I penetrate the hosting market?
Just for fun, I recently purchased a domain, www.kinnetekhosting.com, and set up a reseller hosting service on there, basically reselling hosting plans and grabbing a commission from it, in theory. So now I am wondering how to drive traffic? I know places like traffic-shack.com offer targeted traffic for sale. Are there other things one could do? I know hosting has been hopelessly saturated for at least a decade, and thankfully this is not my "main gig" more just a for fun thing, but still I wondered if anyone might have some ideas along these lines. Thanks! :-)
Yes he does write good. My favourite is this one http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electr....
Sorry, didn't see the date on the article until you mentioned it - then I found it on the bottom of the page. Still, it seems like interesting information to me. I want to form a routine around these principles. How well did this process work for you?

Also, could you be more specific about detrimental supplements?
I personally like "From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line."

It focuses somewhat more on zsh (my shell of choice) than on bash, but one of the authors contributes heavily to zsh. Even so, bash users will see lots of great hints and tips. The shells' own man pages are more reference-style (see zshall), which I find heavy going when it comes to learning how to use the environment more effectively. The book explains use cases and provides examples in a way that makes the reference material more understandable.
Sorry, but this is exactly the nonsense that I falsely smelled in the original post.

Emulating a full fledged browser for a load test is akin to killing a flea with a sledgehammer - a mindboggling waste of ressources.

The webserver you are testing couldn't care less whether the requested pages are actually rendered or not. What I'd really want is a smart HTTP session recorder, smarter than Selenium and the ilk at least.

The test-creator should perform a few average user-sessions in his browser and then be assisted with inserting smart tokens into the recorded HTTP traffic. The content that passes between browser and server is highly structured anyways, so things like "user clicked on first item" could even largely be auto-determined with a bit of pattern-analysis.

I have constructed such tests in the past through ngrep and a bit of scripting magic - so I know it's possible and would merely need to be wrapped up in a shiny GUI.

You make the "poor engineer" part sound harder than it has to be here. The place where it becomes really nasty is persistent connections via flash or comet. But plain old HTTP requests (AJAX or not) would be rather easy, if the existing tools didn't suck so hard.
Anecdote Driven Development, or Why I Don't Do TDD
Probably the people who watched the superbowl commercial?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-HmD3A0GzY

The superbowl advertising sales department should probably be fired.
Different herb
got it -- lol... I guess my humor sucks online... perhaps offline, too.
There's a few reasons this is undesirable. The reason that leaps to the fore is that this means the password itself--not a hash of it--is stored in the application. Since people re-use passwords and usernames, that means a breach of security in one website could lose a large swath of many users' online identities. These days, most low-security websites randomly reset your password and email the new one. For financial or other higher security websites, two-factor authentication is normal.
S3 does this for a living. I don't.

So does Carbonite, and, as you can see in today's news, it also lost people's data. I strongly suspect Amazon does a better job than Carbonite with both software and infrastructure, but still. Mistakes happen, bugs happen, and data gets lost even by smart people working for solid and reputable companies.

S3 only backups = eggs in one basket. It's a terrific, strong basket made of titanium and suspended on aircraft cable, but it's still just one basket.
Using babel fish (http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=ur...), I discovered this page seems to be displaying an error.

"Your duration of connection expired"
Like a lot of the original dot.coms?
Like if you're as rich as Bernie Madoff you must be legit?

You do realize that the "con" in "con man" comes from the word confidence, right? The most important thing for any scam to work is building confidence.

What better way than with celebrity-ish pitch men and a Superbowl ad?
GreaseMonkey scripts can modify the page contents, and if only GreaseMonkey scripts could run before whatever JavaScript is included with the page could start, then it could completely replace the site's script rather than just modifying its behavior shortly after the site's script begins to run. I think so anyway, I haven't actually implemented this so I won't claim to know for sure that it can be done.

Chromium has this "early injection" feature for GreaseMonkey scripts, so that's one free browser for which it would be very easy to build Stallman's replacement feature. See the link I gave earlier in this thread and also http://www.mail-archive.com/chromium-discuss@googlegroups.co... for some background.
Do You Really Need a College Degree to Get a Programming Job?
This isn't Reddit or Digg.
I had no idea they were that big. Wow. Admittedly, I don't watch the super bowl or have cable, but still, even with big marketing dollars this still screams scam to me.

The fact that they can afford a super bowl ad just proves the effectiveness of their scam. Its kind of interesting as a case study, as long as no one I know, like, or care about does business with them.
Another good question -- some of it definitely might be, but I also did find the behavior at Ivy League School was characteristic of the entire school.

Then again, I did some grad-level coursework at the B.S.U. before I switched to the I.L.S., and found the same sort of differences that I described in my note above. In fact, after I.L.S., I wanted to go back to my former classmates at the State University and bring the message "you have power! You can change things! You are in charge!" But, of course, this is what every commencement speaker in the world tells every graduate, and you can't really understand what it means until you've felt it in your own bones, one way or another...
Ghostery gives you some insight in these things: http://www.ghostery.com/ .
TwitterAuth: For Near-Instant Twitter Apps - Intridea Development Blog
My site, cuuute.com is hosted on EC2. I use Elastic block for database storage, and I back both that and my EC2 instance to S3 on a regular basis.

I've been using that as my hosting for 2-3 months, and I couldn't be happier.
You may find this an interesting reading : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/26.html
it is in the open now:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/the-nasty-exploding-ter...
A Healthcare IT Premier
This happened with us, We applied to 3 groups and were accepted into two and asked to interview at YC. All the seed groups were pretty cool about it.

The first groups deadline was so early, we wouldn't have known about offers from the two other seed groups. After giving us an offer extended our decision period, by over 2 weeks. The second groups deadline was towards the end of that time and actually told us we were accepted slightly early so we could make a decision between the two groups.

YC invited us out for and interview, but that was going to be so much later that we didn't think we could put off the decision that long. PG was great about giving us his thoughts on the matter and talked on the phone with us some about the situation.

In the end we made our decision to accept one of the offers and not do the YC interview. It worked out well for us, but it was a bit stressful and complicated.

One problem is that the programs start at different times and really out of timing need to make decisions earlier. One of the programs we applied to started a week after the YC interviews and obviously by that time they need to know who is going to be showing up. It would be great if they could all sync up the timing a bit more like college semesters are roughly at the same times.
Without a GIL, you not only have to make sure that your entire VM + runtime are re-entrant, but that every library you call into is, too. You can call it "lazy," but it's a fairly standard + pragmatic way to safely layer multi-threading atop arbitrary C libraries.
"They're watching you"
"Web bugs"

Nothing like an unbiased un-sensationalist explanation. I can just imagine some granny reading that and being worried sick her computer has web bugs.
I think with most of the groups you know the basics of the offer ahead of time.