skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your right, a password that only works for a specific service or property or protocol would help, but "email box" is not the best example of your point - even if the only Google access is could steal off you was the ability to read you mail, you've pretty much hosed - I can now go to every other website and ask them to send you a password reset, and you're now lost down the Mat Honan rabbit hole. Where does your appleID reset go? Or your domain registrar accounts? Your Facebook/Twitter/HN password reset email?
Online foosball tournament score helper
In a variety of government-funded computer science projects, I've seen everything on the spectrum from "here's some cash, tell us what you do with it" to extremely detailed, measurable deliverables with heavily negotiated deadlines. Some agencies appear to lean one way or the other, and it also seems to depend on the amount of funding. In my experience, more cash means more planning up front and more oversight. No big surprise there.
Hey Timmyd,

Thanks for the question. We try to make the transaction process as fast as possible. As long as you ship your device the same day you do your swap, you can get your new device as fast as 2 days later. USPS Priority Mail shipping is used both ways and is free of charge. The time also varies based on location.

-Adam
So my user doesn't exist according to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alexcr

However, I also get That username is taken. Please choose another when I try to register the same username. Have I been banned? If so, would you like to start indicating that in the interface somewhere?

For example: "You cannot login because this account was banned" or "The user account you tried to lookup no longer exists because it was banned" ?

Account: alexcr
I've discovered a few things about reading speed in my experience.

1) When I read fiction by good authors, I take great delight in reading their sentences, so I slow down drastically to take every word and piece of punctuation in.

2) Reading speed improves with practice.

3) Read smarter: if you don't need 100% comprehension then read topic sentences of paragraphs carefully then skim the rest of the paragraph for details you think are useful. And in news stories, they follow the "inverted pyramid" for paragraphs meaning that they're ordered such that the first paragraph is the most important, second one is second most important, etc. So you can stop reading at any time.

4) Choose a column width that suits you. A lot of time is spent on line transitions. Smaller columns makes this easier which you can control via your window size.
I think you are bothered too easily.
True, but the FBI does.
I can build cool stuff without one =P
Do you live near a Hot Dog on a Stick? I don;t think a robot could compete. And if it did it would be sad for the lemonade stompers...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
Gold. Thank-you for posting this. I missed this.
Yes! Swapidy can be used in all 50 states.
What happened to charging people with crimes only when they actually might have committed them? Honest question.
Were you advised because of some condition where it was clear tonsils was the problem, or just a routine operation?
"Startup Slut" is a horrible term...
I agree to an extent, and I do use Google a lot when programming. However, I'm a systems administrator by trade and not a programmer. I have been in cases when I've wanted to write code in a cabin in Nova Scotia with no internet and wasn't able to get everything accomplished because I was unable to Google and didn't have the docs on hand.

I'd be really wary of telling people not to remember stuff and rely on the internet. The primary reason being sometimes you can't access the internet. As a sysadmin it's my job to understand this and document everything. It was personally embarrassing when I realized all I had to do was download a couple pdfs and I'd of been fine.

You may not need to keep everything in your head. However, having direct access to knowledge is important. If it's not in your head, then keep it in a local file or what I'm really fond of, get the book.
UI failures (this time it's youtube)
Collaboration requires coordination and clear expectations. You can't expect blind face time to result in productivity gains. A company without remote collaboration probably wont have onsite collaboration either.

Like many people above noted, global companies do this all the time.
One thing that's been mentioned quite a bit: working from home has a lot of challenges (kids, distractions, no social involvement).

However Remote Work doesn't necessarily mean "you must work from home". In a progressive company, I think it means: "work wherever you do your best work."
if i'm quickly reading through a paper, i love using qiqqa, but for whole textbooks i often flip through pages (as chapters may reference previous chapters) and use the information as a different type of reference material. For example, when referencing a conference or journal paper, i'm much more concerned with an overview of their method and experimentation - where with a textbook i usually really read most of the formulas to try to understand the process.

What it boils down to is that ebooks are difficult to flip through, there's usually two types of page numbers - the page of the entire book and the page number within the book, and they are often not equal - making finding a specific passage or chapter more difficult than it should be.
Fair point about the difference between immediately incapacitating and unsurvivable. I think the different amounts of danger presented to a bystander that is only hit once is still worth at least investigating though.

I think it is definitely worth considering if reliance on expanding rounds that are not perceived to penetrate has an effect on the tendency to take risks in situations where there are people behind the target. As I see it, considering the number of shots often fired by police and their poor accuracy, it doesn't really matter that the rounds won't go through multiple people. The more accurate police are, the more fragmenting rounds start to seem sensible to me.

Being concerned about bullets going through badguys and hitting innocents or hitting multiple innocents in a row instead of just one seems like... premature optimization.
Ask HN: How can I get people to try Facebook app that I'm building?
Hello Everyone,

I am making a facebook application for a few months which is not yet completed. With more and more features coming together, I am increasingly thinking about what strategies I can use to get people to try out the app.

It makes sense that the answer depends a lot on what my app is supposed to do, so although the app is in no way complete (and not yet compatible with safari or IE), for anyone who is interested, you can check it out at: http://apps.facebook.com/zollaria/

This will be a lifestyle inventory building app that applies gamification with badges and virtual money (zollars) to buy and build an inventory of virtual counterparts of real world products (amazon products API driven). This will give users a way to personify themselves through products they feel strong about, whether they actually own the product or not.

If you happen to check out the app, or have something to say about the idea, feel free to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that I am not ready for a "Show HN" for this yet.

The only obvious way to reach users I can think of are:

- Tightly integrate social features in-app and make strong cases for users to invite their friends to check out the app. Organic growth. These include from inviting new users to having option to publish in news feeds, etc.
- Run ad campaigns on facebook to reach new users.
- Ask all my friends to try out the app.

Other than these, what can I do? I am really passionate about this app, and have put a lot of effort into building it (despite how lame you may think it may be). I am not a regular blogger or twitter, but I am willing to start growing those skills. Basically I have no marketing skills, and I need some advice about positioning myself in the Facebook marketplace.

Any general advice, or the app specific advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you so much for reading this :)

Take it easy,

easymode
I'm pretty sure it had more to do with supporting Windows and Linux server installs. I know we looked at FogBugz for an internal use, but at the time it was Windows only. Since we were a Linux shop, there was no way it was going to work.
>Once the shock wears off, they are actually fascinated by how I seem to be able to instantly filter between relevant and non-relevant content and search results.

This filtering is definitely crucial. I think when you're on your own, you don't even tend to realize how much is just being ignored. I've also had people look over my shoulder and say "what about that?" and point at obviously useless results that I had skipped over. Explaining why you skipped that link and don't think it's worthwhile can be a challenge.
Allow me to clarify; there were no commits to source control on the very project we were working on. That was proof to us that no work was being done, unless there's one massive pending check-in waiting to happen, which would violate our team's internal standards.
It's good to see a Redshift evaluation. I'm wondering how does Redshift compare to hadoop airbnb setup when taking data loading and transformation into consideration as well as running aggregate queries? I mean if you want to run analysis fairly often, do you need to reload everything in Redshift? From maintenance point of view, is Hadoop setup more flexible and cheaper than Redshift?
6 Ways to Get More Traffic for Your Google App
While I agree with the rest of your post

> I don't think any other CEO in the world understands that kinda stuff.

Larry, Zuck, and Tom Preston-Warner, among others would likely take issue with that last sentence ;)
Was just wondering... I've heard of some cases where a felony conviction can be expunged after a few years (seven I think) -- wasn't that the case with Randal Schwartz? Would that option have been available to Aaron? Because from what I've read, the thing bothering him the most wasn't the jail time (the smaller sentence offered in the plea bargain), but being labeled a felon for the rest of his life. Would he have been as distraught if the expungement option was available?
Does the spec mandate thread safety? (I guess I should ask if there's a spec or is MRI the reference implementation)
I think part of the issue why so many people have gone with Hive is that good, production-ready column stores are expensive. Redshift is posed to change that. If you're shopping in this space, Infobright is also worth checking out.

And even for moderate data sizes (10+ GB per table), row store DBs tend to become painful. This is especially true when you need to support ad-hoc reporting queries, since the usual technique of matching your schema, indexes, and queries won't be effective any more. With true ad-hoc reporting, your only hope becomes lots of shallow indices rather than ones tuned to a particular query.
As opposed to things like, say, brand new languages that compile down to VBScript.

The whole Wasabi story sounds eerily similar to this classic Daily WTF: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-We-Use-BobX.aspx
You do realize Github offers educational discounts and accounts?
See: https://github.com/edu
Lux Auto Brightness: The Automatically Adjusting Comfort in Lighting
Flip side: if true, do you expect no less than a "smoking gun" memo to the effect?
The images are promotional images that have been uploaded to the movie database, an open source alternative to imdb.
Spolsky has been pumping out great, engaging content in his blog for years; I remember spending countless hours with my friends arguing over it. Then he wrote a couple of mediocre posts and stopped blogging altogether. Had it ended there, it would have been merely an astounding feat of self-awareness.

But it didn't end there. Joel had then converted his entire audience to seed Stack Overflow - the one invention that had the biggest impact on the programmer productivity in the 21st century. That's one hell of way to jump the shark, a gold-medal level performance. We would be lucky beyond measure if that sort of "disaster" happened to us every four years, or even each decade. But we're not so lucky.

Hats off to Joel Spolsky.
Congratulations guys. Our team has been using CircleCI for a month or so now and the platform has done exactly what we need so far. Keep up the good work! Simple HipChat integration is a nice bonus since we use this as well.
The Data Behind Pay-What-You-Want Pricing
FogBugz in general is terrible. I use it everyday, and it's remarkable insofar as how amazingly bad the UI is. I was shocked to finally use software by Joel, who's essays I'd been reading for years, and discover that it was terrible.
+1! Great tips, especially for a beginner like myself.
Counter-question: Which startup has a actual data table with over 3 billion rows?
Does ruby have a spec? If not, I don't really see this as a problem... synchronization, especially in a dynamic language that's already really slow, would just add more overhead.
Thanks for pointing this out! We just updated the article to reflect this.
This still doesn't explain why the MRI implementation is accidentally threadsafe. Why doesn't the interpreter switch threads after reading the value from the hash but before storing the updated value?
I can confirm that. Thanks for the instant access.
Eh, I don't know. Part of what makes Dwarf Fortress unique is its meticulous attention to detail. Tarn has so far been able to concentrate so fully on the game's simulation aspects by mostly ignoring things like the UI and optimization.

Could he hire on another person to work on the non-simulation bits? Perhaps. But that takes money. Tarn makes donation information public, and he makes between $40k-50k a year before taxes and the ~$800 a month he pays his brother for the help he provides. Enough to support himself, but not nearly enough to hire on another full time person.

Not to mention there are already other games out there attempting to emulate Dwarf Fortress (Gnomoria and Towns immediately come to mind) in a more user friendly form, but neither of them yet come close to intricacy and scale of Dwarf Fortress.
As long as you either control the whole stack, or the stack is built on top of components that are considered mature, there is not much of a problem there.
You can't be a good computer scientist if all you do is search for solutions using Google, but you can be a pretty good product shipper.
Slowly yes... But they still have a massive money cow.
Python 2 and Python 3 are not the same languages. They are neither backwards nor forwards compatible. Both versions are the current version of "A python flavored language" with one (2) being used everywhere, and the other (3) being somewhat of an attempt to capture on the success of the first, with varying degrees of success.
As soon as I read "techdirt.com" in the submission, I knew it would be better to jump directly to HN comments rather than read the OP. Thank you for validating my instinct.

I know many news sources exaggerate or mislead to push an agenda or bias. I guess it really bothers me that some of the ideals that TechDirt espouses are the same ideals I agree with, however, I support those ideals on the presumption that they are empirically and logically sounds...or so I'd like to believe. Perhaps I'm being naive, that rhetorical campaign means more than substance, but TechDirt's constant misreading of events and the law, either by mistake or intentional, is really grating.

Note: after typing up this comment, I did go and read the HuffPo piece. My first thoughts are: wasn't it already well known that the prosecutors used Aaron's writings and backgrounds as evidence that he intended to diatribute the downloaded JStore material, as opposed to just doing a personal analysis? I'm nt saying they were right, but to put that revelation in the lede is indicative of a strawman accusation
FBI didn't run the Swartz prosecution, did they? I thought USSS and the prosecutor's office did.
Building a list and sending emails is an ideal way to start building an audience early and eventually, to test market your product concept.

We expand more upon this idea in the following post: http://www.tinylever.com/building-an-audience-before-or-para...
damn yeah, I initially thought wow for $632.4 bucks i'm setting this up next week or even later this week provisioning the redshift - but 16x that at $10118.4 - I'll continue wait... probably a good thing to stay focused on features anyway
I cannot upvote you enough - especially on the first point. All the googling in the world is worthless without knowing what to Google for.

The "trick" of expert[^1] programmers is to know the difference, and to slowly expand the base they can build on.

[^1] An expert is merely a person who has learnt from more mistakes. There's nothing magical about it, as much as the cult of the rock star programmer would have us believe otherwise.
It's not immediately clear how much of the stock drop was caused by the Q4 numbers, and how much was caused by uncertainty from the NYT story. But while the NYT story can affect the stock price drop, it can not have any effect on the Q4 numbers.

I'm not sure from the article, but it sounds as though Tesla had 15,000 2013 orders by Q3 2012. Then, during Q4 2012, they added 6,000 orders for 2013, and had 1500 people unable to pay their 2013 down payment, which would leave their 2013 orders at 19,500. This is 500 cars short of Tesla's projected 20,000. If these 500 were all Roadsters, wouldn't the projected 2013 sales shortfall be around $5 million?

It's odd that they report so many people placing orders, then balking at the down payment. It's an odd item to be reporting, I don't know if other auto manufacturers report this. Maybe they should require the down payment at an earlier point in their checkout process, to remove these superfluous tire-kickers from the corporate statistics? It's got to be embarrassing to announce that ~8% of your customers decided to cancel at the last moment.
Microsoft recruiters are doing their rounds for Seattle, and I was just asked over the phone how I would implement a quick sort. The answer I wanted to give would have been something like this blog post. As a developer I would never waste valuable time trying to roll my own version of an algorithm that's probably available on Wikipedia and optimized for every programming language imaginable. I guess what they were looking for was some buzz words like "divide and conquer" and "big oh n log n time". I understand interviewing community college graduates with no experience like this, but young adults with 6 years of SE behind them? Ridiculous.
Bit9 Security Incident Update
This is fine for your own projects, but not on my time. I would expect you to look for an existing solution before writing something from scratch.
> 3. Hire a professional while you go and do revenue generating work.

Nothing wrong with acquiring a new skill. And next time you know how to do it.
>wow, you are clueless.

By all means, enlighten me.

>Approaching someone and engaging in conversation with them out of potential interest in who they are as a person is nowhere near the same thing as making offhanded remarks on their physical appearance without so much as an introduction.

Sure, you need an introduction. I'm not talking about crash pickup lines or jerk behaviour. But if you like the other person, why would you say anything less in a tech conference that what you are OK to say in the park or the library or wherever?

Plus, this isn't 1950 Sunday school. People don't just like each other because of a "interest in who they are as a person". People can _also_ like each other on the physical level, and/or have one-night-stands and the like. And modern people don't find anything wrong with that.

>get it together.

May I suggest you avoid making offhanded remarks about me as a person such as the above?
...or we could retool exceptions so that destructor exceptions are safe (as long as they are caught). Conditions in Common Lisp, for example:

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-co...
I had one 4 hour interview with managers, another 4 hour interview with owners, and another 4 hour interview with a psychologist for a position. No programming questions. Everyone asked the same kind of stuff "tell me about yourself, etc etc". A month into the process and still no answer. Thank god I have a job and they haven't fired me for all the time off...
Two corroborating sources is normally the gold standard for reporting. I'm confused about what it is you are implying, should reporters not ask and report what staffers say happened in closed hearings?
Sounds like an excellent idea to me ;-)

Walk around a mall. Watch the number of people using their phones to take photos, talk to their friends about options, phoning home to check they're getting the right thing, etc.
Agreed, but now I think of it there is a level beyond the copying/stealing of code: "The best code is the code you didn't write".

Of course, it is even better to beat a complex program with a small amount of shell-fu.[1]

[1]: http://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and...
I've also been working on a HDL DSL. I've been using Idris; the type of a circuit ensures that it implements the correct behaviour.
can you sent me too? ronalds.vilcins [at] gmail.com :)
My hearty thanks to the author for being so frank about this.
What competitors did you buy from? I ask because I'm getting some new specs and just got the try-for-free thing from WP. If I can spend only $30, I'll gladly do it.
Those are good points. The confluence of maximally tasty and minimal cost can leads to very unhealthy food. I just don't like the intent that is implied when the article uses inflammatory phrases like science of addiction or designed to addict.
Note for readers who may find tptacek's comment confusing: Not only has the original HN submission title been edited, but the link it points to has also been edited.

The original title was "DOJ Admits It Had To Put Aaron Swartz In Jail To Save Face Over The Arrest" and the link was pointing to: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130223/02284022080/doj-a...
Well my opinion here really is just 2 cents, but you asked: I'd work at Google. When you get bored with social networking apps at Facebook, there's nowhere to hide. Google has attracted minds like Ray Kurzweil. They're working on world-changing problems.

That said, I could easily be proven wrong in 10 years, but by that time you'll be gone anyhow. Also, Facebook's scale has given rise to some interesting technologies such as Cassandra and various MapReduce technologies. Still, Google has more.