skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see any problem with classifying and labeling aspects of our behavior and experience that we might not like. We claim to accept that nobody is perfect, yet we cling desperately to the idea that only a small minority of people should be described as "defective." We would very much like to believe that our defects, though they are known to us, cannot be publicly identified and named.

When I think about it that way, it seems utterly bizarre that people feel threatened by labeling and classifying common personality traits as pathological. Yet, the fear is reasonable for four reasons.

First, mental health practitioners have the power to stigmatize a condition merely by naming it. The stigma is a relic of the past and will probably change when people realize that utterly trivial conditions can be recognized and named. Severity and degree of social undesirability are illogical distinctions that psychological thinkers simply cannot maintain, any more than physicists could have maintained an arbitrary distinction that "heavy" things have something called "weight" which can be measured, but "light" things do not have any weight at all.

Second, giving something a medical name creates the presumption (at least among laymen) that it requires expert treatment. Doctors know better, but many of them are not above exploiting this impression to manipulate a patient into accepting treatment.

Third, the creation of a label creates much more than a psychological diagnosis with a clinical definition. Laymen and experts alike fill in the gaps with assumptions and best guesses to create a complete stereotype, a story with a beginning, middle, and end. People will speculate about the underlying logic, original causes, and inferable consequences, and they will assign far more weight to these speculations than is justified by scientific evidence. This is obviously bad, but I don't think it is any different from how people have thought since time immemorial. These prejudices will just fall into place next to existing prejudices about race, gender, astrological sign, and hair color. If you think things can possibly get any worse in this regard, you don't understand how people currently think ;-)

Fourth, the diagnosis of a "mental disorder" gives government an opening to intervene and an alibi for doing so. In the United States, freedom is a sacred thing and the most popular reason for circumscribing government power. If the government can claim it is intervening in a matter where a citizen already has no freedom then it has already dispensed with the most powerful objection against government interference.

An aside: This is rather a puzzle for people like me who regard free will as a religious belief (for me, free will is my religion, my only possibly antiscientific conviction) and who balk at introducing religion into politics.
Give your elevator pitch on Virgin Atlantic Flights
What would have been your choice?
How does this make money? You were compared to Ning.com or Tangler.com, asked how will you get their customers. I think calling them customers is a stretch, none of them make money.
Is that really Get Satisfaction's doing, or was it a 37signals fanboy who put that together without permission?

Snagging the look-and-feel (graphics, colours, etc.) of a target's site is particularly sleazy and it seems very odd if Get Satisfaction has chosen to go that route for their business.

Unless Get Satisfaction provides a prominent "request this forum be deleted" link, and actually removes a forum on request, I wouldn't touch these guys with the proverbial 10' pole if site mimicking has become their standard practice.
I agree. The language was simple and clear. I have difficulty believing language that straight-forward was an accident.
I didn't mean to suggest you were trolling, just that some folks have found that adopting certain troll-like characteristics is (for better or worse) an effective means of getting informative replies.
Mars 500: Manned spaced flight to Mars
We think that there are many users that want a web page for their group but don't want to interact online. GroupieGuide is a gets out of the way solution where most of the interaction can be done over e-mail. Visitors don't need to navigate to get the information that they need.

Both ning and tangler focus on building online social interactions through the website. We are trying to cater to the users that have been ignored by social networks.
Fat Loss For Idiots Scam Free Reviews - Does It Literally Work?
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Specifically CouchDB. Not SimpleDB or Google's Big Table. I've played with CouchDB and Python and I like it but it's overkill for my tiny just for fun projects, but if it turned out more cost effective to host in-house in the future, not having the lock-in is super attractive.
I think it's quite bad form to publicly attack another company like this without discussing it in private first. I see no indication that there was any communication between 37Signals and GetSatisfaction prior to this very public post.

I've had this kind of thing done to me before, and I think it's really out of order. Essentially, 37Signals have decided, in this case, to trade politeness and "being good" for making a big noise and getting some page views and attention.

It's easy to criticise people publicly without trying to understand what's going on first. I'd love to say that I expected better from 37-Signals, but considering that their blog has been so focused on generating page views through negative disagreement, I'm not all that surprised that they do this as well.

Here's a challenge for 37-signals: Why not try to do positive things, rather than frame everything as a confrontational disagreement? Yes, being an arse generates page views, but so do other undesirable behaviour. Is that really the way you want to go in the long term?
(YouTube (Emacs Power: Can your editor do THIS))
I think having ads and being paid not to have ads is fundamentally different. The latter reminds me of protection payment.

As pointed out above, I have difficulty believing the badge wording is a mistake.
http://nhpr.org/ , click "Listen Live" at the top of the page?

What you need is a clock radio that plays MP3 streams. Maybe the Chumby can help you?
My issue with the whole thing would be the fact that they use branding, logos, and so forth from a company that they have no business relationship with. Doing so devalues the brand, and should cease immediately.

It would be like going into a storefront that has a UPS Package Store sign, and finding out it's just a counter with a guy that claims to be UPS customer support, but doesn't actually help you out with anything. And then find out it's a different company entirely.
Apple's App Store becoming a billion-dollar marketplace
There's an opportunity here for a hacker with low overhead to move into this market of an 'open search engine'. It doesn't necessarily have to be 'user powered' but should be much more open than Google/Yahoo/MSN's mighty algorithms.
One of the things I'm amazed Facebook isn't doing is spending time trying to seriously cut their infrastructure costs. As far as I can tell, Google started investing really early in building out their own data centers with commodity machines that could give them scale on the cheap. Meanwhile, Facebook is still trying to cut deals to acquire more and more big iron. Facebook's growth could be their downfall if they don't figure out a way to make all these new users' photos and videos inexpensive to store.
Why should companies be able to "delete" 3rd party forums where people discuss their products and help each other?

If someone asks a question on Stack Overflow about using Visual Studio, should Microsoft be able to delete it? Should they be able to sue SO? Should SO not be able to run ads for products that compete with VS?
I've never heard of a startup doing this. And the site looks alarming.
Not the grocery store, the mall.

Most malls in the U.S. close at 9pm or 10pm. If a mall store closes its storefront before then, it looks bad (similar to a block with abandoned buildings, a couple not open storefronts break the RetailLand experience).
I didn't say it should be flagged, I merely wondered how that article could possibly have obtained 6 upvotes.
I think whether these web apps run on my desktop, or sync/migrate to a virtual instance, should be completely transparent to me as a user. I assume a virtual instance would be necessary to keep continuity when accessing through mobile devices.
It's just not that simple. If you like Ford automobiles, but GM comes up with a new technology that allows them to sell GM cars profitably at 150 dollars, Ford is out-of-business. It doesn't matter if a million people prefer them. Unless you want to pay a 10000 percent markup for a preference, well... But perhaps GM will hire another design department to imitate the old Fords? Sorry--design's cost hasn't gone down. The extra $25/unit wasn't a big deal on a $15,000 car, but is on a $150 car.

This is what has happened to news. The internet has made the price of distribution dirt cheap, but content-production is the same price as ever. And so content will be spread thin. You'll read CNN.com's national news for free, rather than read about the local Rotary club at $1.50 an issue. Seems sensible, except: In aggregate, local happenings are more important than national.
Google Ventures is Ready To Fund Your Startup
Google Ventures is finally open and ready to fund startups...
Reminds me of a Far Side cartoon where they revealed what dogs were saying when barking (basically "hello" over and over).
Hello tptacek, it is not very common with the normal use case to decompress things that you didn't compressed yourself, but I agree with you that is better to add this checks at the cost of some speed. Btw note that this is common in compression code that tries to do fast. in things like Fastlz and similar libs this is a compile time define, I may do the same, if SAFE_DECOMPRESSOR is defined it will do the check, otherwise will just skip the checking code.

Also note that the access is read only, so basically it's not possible to use such thing to run unprivileged code. Also in moder operating systems pages are zeroed before to be used in a different process, so it is not possible to read part of memory about a different process.

Thanks for the hint
Any particular suggestions?
Agreed. Pretty bad form to not email first with concerns/questions etc.

But as you say, if they had resolved it privately, people wouldn't be reading about it on their blog.
It's the law of big numbers. Each day I spend maybe 1-2 minutes dealing with my spam. Multiply that by millions of people each day and you get massive business (and personal) time losses which equates to lost productivity/money.
Garrett Dimon's comments are the only voice of reason on that page.

Posts like that are useless, yet I'm sure Jason will use all the "I agree, GS is lame" comments from his fan club to validate his reasons for posting.
Get Satisfaction got Customer Service Served by 37Signals, ouch!
Following all kinds of human intercommunication, I'd say that this percentage only reflects the equivalent of really important communication on the positive side, and trash twitter (of our everyday life) on the other one.
How do you manage side-effects when working with the DOM?
I started working with JavaScript a few months ago for something I've been working on in my spare time. I find that there are pieces
that I love and pieces that I hate, but the pieces that I love usually enable a level of expressiveness that lets me fix the
broken bits or at the very least work around them in an elegant way.

One piece that I struggle with and have yet to find a good model for working with is the DOM -- the big piece of global state
right in the middle of my application. I've tried a few things to mitigate the inevitable problems. At first I tried wrapping up
elements in objects and treating them as private instance variables. Of course the elements were still global and I quickly grew
tired of this metaphor. My new strategy is to basically treat the DOM as a database. I use a CSS selector to grab elements I care
about and then apply changes by mapping a function over the resulting set. I never store references to the elements and simply
use the selector to get the elements I care about at any given time. I never make any assumptions about the state of the element
and merely 'apply' the changes onto the element.

But of course almost all of my functions are riddled with side effects. My strategy to prevent this from becoming over complicated
has been to keep my code base as small as possible so I can see at a glance what's going on.

So, to all the hackers out there that are much more clever than I am, please help a guy out. What strategies do you use to work with
the DOM? Am I even approaching the problem from the right direction?
Atlas: a visual IDE for desktop-like web apps
A Tutuorial on Writing Adapters for DataMapper
The crisis in a nutshell...

"Oh, people who have defaulted on loans in the past. That’s why
they’re called subprime," he informed me.

"But if they defaulted on loans at 8, how can they ever pay back a
loan at 16 percent?" I asked.

"It doesn’t matter," he confided. "As long as they pay for a while.
With all that excess spread, we can make a ton. If they pay for three
years, they will cure their credit and re-fi at a lower rate."

That never happened.

While there are those out there who would look at the writer like a gun manufacturer whose product ends up in the hands of criminals, it's really all the fault of the people who made this greedy risk, practically knowing that defaults were going to happen anyways, that really deserve the blame in this mess...
They aren't closing all of Wikia, just "Wikia Search" (which stagnated at 10K uniques/month).
I usually use google to search the wiki.
sorry to say, but featurelist.org has a horrible look and feel, although the idea is quite nice.

i'd guess you're a couple of coders -- get a graphic designer on board! (and keep up the work :)
I don't think there's any problem with third-parties putting together support forums, Q&A pages or the like. It's when they snatch the look-and-feel of a company's site to try and pass themselves off as an official part of that company (without permission!) which sends my alarm bells ringing.
What would you use it for? Also, how would one go about implementing something like this in practice?

CouchDB isn't truly distributed, so one would need to run multiple isolated instances which would in turn impose restrictions on the size of a single database as well as the number of concurrent writes.

I've been toying with the idea of writing a CouchDB interface on top of HBase (or possibly some other column oriented DBMS) to overcome these issues and am wondering if anyone else has considered doing the same thing.
How WebMynd (W08) decided to remove a feature – the 'Ask Twitter' case study
I read this, spent most of the day struggling with Vim and then went back to Textmate defeated. I still can't understand why I should move to Vim/Emacs when I spend 99.99% of my time infront of a Mac.
The interface looks wonderful (although the login link is covered by the nav menu in Firefox 2). Nicely polished.

One practical suggestion: when adding a bookmark my eye moves from left to right. I thought the green + button was a continuation of the data entry form and was surprised that clicking it didn't add the bookmark to my project. Similarly, after tabbing through the four form fields, the tab order sends me to Firefox's address bar, not Save as I expected. Both of these make adding bookmarks more difficult.

Also, the description field is hit or miss. Sometimes it's empty or the pre-filled data isn't very relevant. The thumbnail images in the Card and List tabs also have this problem.

You're really pushing the paid plans. I understand why, financially. But you need people to use and love the product first. I almost skipped signing up until I saw the link to the free plan in tiny type below the three big paid options.

As a small business founder, this is too much for my needs. Delicious isn't as fully featured, but its simpler and it's already habit to use it. But with more iteration your product could be good for bigger teams in larger organizations, which looks to be where you're headed with it. Best of luck.
Actually, length was primary since geometry was the foundation of their math.
Microsoft gets $11 million from stimulus for campus bridge
then don't. use whatever you're productive in, not what some silly weblog entry says you should.
This totally demonstrates what iteration is all about to me. It's as important to remove features as it is to add new ones, and to do so guided by the data.
Good grief... another plum passage...

I asked my colleagues, what was a CDO exactly? Like CMOs, they were
structured products, but the underlying collateral was not limited to
home mortgages. They could be anything... "Diversity of collateral"
was the pitch. Some things could go bad, but not everything at
once. It never has, except during the Depression, and we’re so much
smarter now. That could never happen again.

Sorry for the self-reply, but this article has taught me more about this fiasco than all the press and commentary over the last year. An impressive piece of writing...
I'm in the camp that says 37Signals have a valid point. Let's assume their intention is not about traffic but is to pressure GetSatisfaction into rectifying the situation as quickly as possible (and not just for 37Signals) then as harsh as the post may have been:

1) 37Signals have used their considerable influence to achieve change on behalf of many sites who have far less influence
2) 37Signals used the open model of putting pressure on a company publicly that GetSatisfaction have built their business on
3) They've effected change and created open discussion

Could they have been 'nicer'? Perhaps. But more effective, I'm not so sure...
I think it's quite bad form to publicly attack another company like this without discussing it in private first.

Whereas I think a public statement of outrage is entirely justified. Take a look at the screenshot. GetSatisfaction has been collecting feedback under the 37signals name for at least a month. Those people who typed messages into GetSatisfaction expecting a response have been disappointed for a while. Anyone who randomly came across that page and saw lots of months-old issues -- but no post from 37signals itself -- has been subliminally convinced that 37signals never gets around to answering their mail.

This is not a theoretical issue. I believe this group of confused visitors includes me. I think I remember clicking through to this page, being puzzled by the lack of back-and-forth, and then surfing away -- not consciously angry, but feeling lost and a bit let down. This incident, and others like it, is not a trivial matter. This sort of thing is costing the company money.

How is 37signals to solve this PR problem, which GetSatisfaction has intentionally inflicted on their company, except by making a big, immediate, loud public fuss? Ideally, this message needs to reach every single person who has ever visited that page on GetSatisfaction.

If GetSatisfaction doesn't want to get into confrontational disagreements, perhaps they should have avoided designing a system that automatically trashes the public image of other companies.
Thanks!

A few people have missed the free link entirely. That'll be fixed soon. Good catch on the tabindex thing as well.
Okay. You say: "I didn't think there was much need to explain why this submission should be flagged."

Please explain to me why it was flagged.
It should be noted that the look and feel is the same (except for logos) for every company. See, http://getsatisfaction.com/comcast for example.

Yes, I would say that they have a similar L & F and color scheme as 37 Signals, but I would not go so far as to say it is "ripped off."
I solved that problem by putting a JavaScript bookmarklet in my browser that narrows page text. I found this online, but I forgot where; hopefully HN doesn't mangle the following text... (you'll need to remove linebreaks to get it to work)

javascript:(function(){var%20newSS,%20styles='body%20{%20margin-left:
auto;%20margin-right:auto;%20max-width:45em;}';if(document.createStyleSheet
)%20{document.createStyleSheet(%22javascript:'%22+styles+%22'%22);%20}%20
else%20{%20newSS=document.createElement('link');%20newSS.rel='stylesheet';%20
newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles);%20document.getElementsByTagName
(%22head%22)[0].appendChild(newSS);%20}%20})();
I don't think all 5 years were heavy losses, but yeah, they might well be in the red overall. They'll recoup it fast if their current trend continues though.

Hardware-wise they made a lot of errors that cost them a lot of money and reputation. (I'm on my third unit, and everyone I know seems to be at least on #2.) On the other hand, people love it enough to deal with it, kinda like Macbooks in that regard. I'm starting to think that I've overrated the importance of build quality in things other than cars due to my experience with those. Perhaps since people aren't so reliant on non-automobiles it factors much less into their user satisfaction. (I've heard iPods too have high failure rates, though the couple I've owned never seemed to have any problem, but if that's true it clearly hasn't dented their uptake.)

If you're lucky enough to have a newer one, they're a bit quieter, especially once you rip the game to the hard drive. You still have to put the disc in, but it doesn't spin and it makes it a lot quieter. Of course, the only game I play is Rock Band and I tend to crank that up :)
GM's Problems are 50 Years in the Making
We do provide a dynamic dns for users. You can access your tonido instance by typing http://cmars232.tonidoid.com/. So if you are running tonido in your laptop or home server you can still access tonido apps from mobile devices.

Virtual instance can bring whole lot of other benefits like upload bandwidth and stable internet connection etc..
Not necessarily.

I'm not advocating more spam, just saying if there was more we might get more serious about solving the problem (in the BWF story, people are advocating more broken windows).

The fact that we're not as affected as we could be doesn't make the job of spammers any less shameful (in the BWF story, the boy is hailed as a hero).

And I didn't say it would be good for the economy (unlike in the BWF story). I said we might be better off, I didn't say in what way(s). I can tell I'd be happier with life knowing spammers don't get rich spewing shit anymore.

If you implied I implied any of those things that's a bit insulting.
Sounds like fraudulent misrepresentation/impersonation. Good luck if you try to do that with a brand like UPS. They would be down your neck in a second. A cell phone store in my neighborhood got busted by TMobile for misrepresenting themselves as official TMobile resellers. This is no different. Should be grounds for legal action.
That they have a valid point is not in question. GS themselves have acknowledged it and immediately fixed the offending badges and pages.

My point is, the way they handled conveying that point to GetSatisfaction was nasty, brutish, and totally unwarranted.
The irony was that I'd crossed swords with Ken Follet over the right thing, and now he's crossing swords with Scribd for the wrong thing!
What you say is completely true.

That said: Accept the groveling apology for what it is. GetSatisfaction has passed the first test of customer support: When the customer gets angry, you must grovel, and vice versa:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240170
i've had the aeron, the freedom chair, and now this http://www.staples.com/office/supplies/p4_Staples-Tillman-tr...

best chair. ever.