skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very true.

The best you can do is allow the post to go thru and make it appear to the spammer that they have succeeded. Let them view their post on the homepage and go away with a nice warm feeling of satisfaction, secure in the knowledge that they don't need to improve their algorithm at all for this site.

It's pretty straightforward to modify your display mechanism to include spam posts if and only if they originate from the same IP address as the viewing client.

I implemented this on Blogabond, and it had two positive effects: My Spam corpus is growing at a faster rate (thus making it more effective), and the sophistication level of the average attack has dropped sharply.
This is really a terrible solution - and it sounds like what New York tried to pull a while back (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9944934-7.html?tag=mncol).

The problem is that web purchases are making up a larger and larger portion of our consumption and, as such, the amount of our consumption that we're paying sales taxes on is falling. That's leaving states with sales taxes with revenue shortfalls that have to be made up somehow.

California could get rid of its sales tax in favor of a hike in the income tax, but such large changes in tax policy are hard to pull off. In the meantime, California and other states are losing revenue more and more revenue to these types of sales - and there really is little they can do about it. Let's face it, this proposal sounds like a huge stretch to claim jurisdiction - a stretch that I'd think a federal court would laugh out of its chambers.

But whether this is a good solution or not, we're left at the same place: states are desperately hurting for revenue right now and it's becoming ever easier to avoid sales taxes. In the end, one of two things is likely to happen: states will get rid of their sales taxes seeing them as unenforceable in exchange for other tax hikes, or the federal government will step it to give states such jurisdiction ala http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9919420-7.html?tag=mncol
Great hackers for the most part are not what you'd describe as humble. They're not arrogant pricks (necessarily), but they're appropriately proud of their skills. If you do find one that you'd describe as humble, it's vastly more likely that they're shy or just not that interested in bothering to open up to you.

If you set that aside and just want great hackers, as an outsider, the best you're going to be able to do is to talk to the people you know, who know great coders who might be tied to their positions at Amazon or Microsoft, but those guys invariably know others who aren't yet handcuffed to the stock packages, are underwater on their options and don't yet have families and huge mortgages, etc.

At the end of the day, it's about networking. You won't be able to personally judge precisely the technical abilities of a potential new hire; get tech experts to help you do that.

(Side note: I've also done most of what you described, with the exception of starting a non-tech company. It's not all that uncommon or special, so at the same time you're downplaying your search for a humble tech partner, you might want to work on your own a bit so as to not come across as arrogant MBA prick to your potential tech partner. Coming across that way won't turn off the truly hungry, but it will turn off the truly great.)
Ask HN: When to use MySQL vs PgSQL?
Dear HN,

first of all thank you that you are reading this. Out of caution, please let me remind you that I don't want you to take this question and to start a "flame war". Arguments with facts would really be constructive.

I am sincerely interested if my current assumptions are true or where I am wrong.

Background:

My current employer asked me about MySQL and I mentioned those points below which were later countered with this:

http://pastie.org/456941

(Large) Parts of this gave me the classical "WTF" moment. So I thought I ask you about this.

Detailed arguments against MySQL from my side:

A long time ago I saw this nice PDF where there were some measurements between PgSQL and MySQL.
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/7.0%20and%20beyond.pdf
Title: "FreeBSD 7.0 and Beyond" on Page 9 following there is a Case Study of MySQL vs. PgSQL.

This was for me the first reason to really take a closer look at MySQL.

Secondly I know that MySQL uses two different internal SQL engines. A X/Open XA distributed transaction processing (DTP) support; two phase commit as part of this, using Oracle's InnoDB engine

Full-text indexing and searching using MyISAM engine

Should Oracle at some point decide to revoke the usage rights of InnoDB for the open source community then users of MySQL would need to
switch to MyISAM which is, frankly said, terribly slow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL#Criticism
Regarding the licensing renewal which is necessary. Now even Oracle is planning to buy Sun, which would make me think hard why they would renew the license of InnoDB for MySQL anyway? (creating competition - "multi-year" extension of their licensing agreement, why would they continue?)

The next reason was that I have no theoretical, but empirical proof (I didn't enjoy debugging that) that I end up more often with table data corruption if I run MySQL. Ok, I can repair it, but why should that take up more of my time away doing other more productive things?
(It is even mentioned in the Criticism point of the wikipedia link above).

Also critical bugs get fixed slowly. E.g. It took them from 2003-2008 to fix this bug.
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=989

Dear HN, please help me with this question.
Again, thank you for your time.
Detecting life on other planets by measuring molecular chirality
This is a lot bigger than you'd expect. Nearly all the spam that makes it into the database on my sites is human-powered. It's maybe only 1% of the total attack volume, but because simple checks knock out nearly all the noise, it becomes the most significant fraction that you have to deal with.
Like I said above they can't upvote each other. Because they need the initial upvote from someone who is already "in the system" (ie. at least 2 karma) first.

So at least one of them has to say something that the original community finds useful. And if he/she does manage to upvote his friends, those upvotes will generally be cancelled out by the community (not because they are fighting spam, but because they don't agree with the upvote)
exercise, read difficult fiction and/or philosophy, perhaps take martial arts.
As a guy, most of the time I feel rather embarrassed by suggestions on how to get more women into programming. The ideas tend to be so naive or full of prejudice.

I think that programming should be taught early in school. Not to become proficient with any language or so, but to understand computation at some fundamental level. Alan Kay probably have some very good ideas for how to run such classes.

As it is now, some guys really did get started with programming at the age of 5, or other single digit age, and by the time "ordinary people" reach university age and meet programming, these guys with 10 years of programming pretty much dominate the classes and mess them up.

Try being a newbie in any field and surround yourself with people that have 5000h of experience that give you dumb stares.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/904overview
Memorial slideshow: The rise and fall of Sun Microsystems
These are the changes in the DESKTOP Ubuntu 9.04 release
Automatic Update Hell Must End
We've all come up with names that are odd at one time right?
The key with the economist is to read between the lines. They tell you what is coming. Credit crunch? A 2006 issue talked about the "remote possibility that if housing prices came down across the board, much of the profits banks have seen in recent years will be reversed and they may have trouble getting credit." If you already knew for sure that housing was going to go down AT LEAST 10 % then you could conjecture where banks were going to head and buy put options accordingly.

Did they "shill" for the war? Yes. Was I misled by them? Yes. But in the grander scheme of things that was an excellent experience for me because it showed me to be critical of even my most trusted news sources.

I still have a well read subscription to this day, along with Harvard Business Review.

Right now if you read between the lines The Economist is clearly saying that world wide income taxes are going to start sky rocketing in 3 to 6 years. Plan accordingly. RRSPs or TFSA (Roth IRA or 401k)? Most people will keep at it with their RRSPs and cry their heart out when taxes go up.
All valid concerns, and I'll tell you that we take reliability very seriously. We have been in business, as ohdontforget.com, for over 4 years, and have learned a lot in that time.

We are not abusing e-mail or web interfaces. We spent months getting contracts set up so we could access the same data that major cell carriers use to route their text messages.

For one cent a message, give it a try, I think your concerns will be remedied :)
Because of the quite the same reasons as to why there are fewer female physicists, mathematicians and engineers.

There has been a lot of study done around it.

[PDF] http://rhig.physics.yale.edu/~nattrass/Talks/BNLICWIP/Nattra...

[PDF] http://polymer.bu.edu/hes/nicholson-viewgraphs.pdf

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnum...
You punch a small hole in each end and blow through one.

http://www.minkhollow.ca/HatchingProgram/Activities/BlowEgg....
(Pixel Qi LCD Screen) Samples Due Soon
If someone has already submitted the same article, your submission automatically becomes an upvote on the existing page.
200 players at $5/month is $12,000 a year.

"it was always our intent to make an experience accessible to anyone interested in politics and strategy gaming, the game is still free"

If there is anyone who, seriously, can't afford $5, nothing stops you from offering the game to them for free.

But $5 for many people is nothing. People spend $5 a day at Starbucks without even thinking.

And it's not just about making money for you either. An income from the site gives you time to make it better, add additional games worlds, etc. To provide real service to your players.
That's been my experience, and in hindsight I realize it's not because the little 20 minutes spurts add up to much, but because they tend to prevent the long, dark stretches of angst and doubt that come from not coding anything at all and having to work up the willpower to start up again. Most work (for me at least) gets done in intermittent bursts of productivity, but by doing something every day I don't have to climb a huge hill just to get to the point where I _could_ have one of those bursts.
yeah no kidding, I literally spent ~15 minutes just playing with it!
The clear, unambiguous meaning of the Constitution is that commerce and traffic between states is not to be interfered with or taxed.

California tried this a few years ago with cars, imposing an illegal $350 "smog tax" on cars brought in from out of state. They had to give the money back.
401ks have the same maximum dollar investment limits, but you can invest in whatever you want in an IRA. You only pay tax now on Roth IRAs, not standard IRAs, which are tax deferred. I don't like matching. I think the company should just throw some amount of money/profit sharing into the retirement plan- which is what every place I've worked at for the last 13 years (including my own company now) does.
Thanks, DannoHung. Excellent advice!

I have a buddy who is a professional artist. Of course, he's talented, but he's still just a regular guy. I once asked him how he got so good and successful. "Easy," he said, "I paint every day."

Best programming advice I ever got. Ever since, I code every day.
Hi there,

Thanks for commenting and you make an excellent point. In fact I wrote a little piece awhile ago about how one can overcome distractions and in it I describe there are essentially two motivating factors: one is pleasure and the other is pain.

http://www.davecheong.com/2006/09/13/how-to-overcome-distrac...

The same analogy can be used here. In order to accomplish something important to you (say your startup), you can either increase the pleasure or satisfaction you get when you achieve it, and/or increase the pain associated with failure.

So I take your point about focusing on the negative, but I never claim that "the only motivation that works is negative". In fact I believe both positive/negative and pleasure/pain play important roles as motivators.

Having said all that, don't underestimate the power of the fear of failure/pain/punishment, as it is a major component of the human condition. I disagree that only "mediocre" things can be created out of fear and punishment for failure.

In fact, experienced entrepreneurs will tell you that a "big unstoppable desire to build things" is a terrible thing to build a sustainable business on. Sure, it's great to kick start things, but building a business is 99% hard work. Can you truly build a business on sheer desire alone? What if that desire went away? Ask yourself that question the next time you are up at 3am trying to fix an obscure bug in someone else's code.

Thanks for the great comment! I would love to hear what everyone else thinks also given the diverse background of people here on HN.
What is a good set of financial rss feeds?
They've since added a few other employees. I'd guess they have about 5 total. Still, very impressive.
God, what a stupid rant.

Sure, a single point of updates would be nice, but when asking that reboots not be necessary, or that people just write better software in the first place he's just making himself look ignorant.

Companies don't put auto-update functionality in for fun - they're there because there _are_ security issues that need to be patched.
Open-source software myths
I don't think it's feasible to make "write once run anywhere" code for this. Input fields will be named differently, rules will vary and spam filters will trigger on different things. Even if you only have to spend an hour grooming your script for HN it seems like a lot of work to get 30 hits. You can of course reuse the script on the site once you've made it, but it won't take much before PG figures it out and bans IP-addresses, or some other measure.
Punishment is an awful way to motivate anyone, yourself included. The reason we think it works is because that's how everybody else in our lives treat us: parents, the school system, employers, financial institutions, etc. We get to the point where we think we have to be abused in order to perform, like whipping a dancing bear.

Trying to motivate with punishment leads to value judgment, leads to guilt, leads to mental avoidance.

Avoidance involves much less effort than actually doing the work.

Which is the real reason that it's hard to get personal projects done.

One other reason is that people talk themselves into doing personal projects because they "should," not because they're fired up. And lastly, burn-out from the should-punishment-guilt-avoidance cycle makes it hard to get motivated.

When you get out of this cycle, when you cut yourself a break, when you stop "shoulding all over yourself," magical things can happen... and you can devote regular time to things because you love them, without breaking out the stick or the carrot.
A human can use that account first to get beyond two votes, and then subsequently pass that off to a spam bot
> When we first started with Apple computers, it was my dream that everyone would learn to program, and that was how they'd use their computer.

Aside from the GTD fluff, this is a great article about Woz :)
I see your point, but there have been hoards of VARs (which often miss the VA of their acronym) doing exactly that for years, and in many cases the companies are very comfortable with "their" VAR and Oracle trying to cut out that middleman step will not be undertaken lightly (by Oracle).
The union leadership and the management have to be faulted here- they created a benefit based on continuing growth that can't be financially supported in a downturn. Anything besides a pension program that is funded as it goes and has market driven payouts has a high risk of turning into a Ponzi scheme.

The beauty of 401k is that the company gives you the money now, they don't just promise to give it to you in the future. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, it is a less and less likely that the company you work for today is going to exist in the same form at the time you retire. Think of all of the newspaper pensions- who's going to be paying those in 30 years?

Even if the companies establish separate pension funds that that can survive beyond the life of the company, the payouts from that fund will be based on the performance of its investments and the lifespans of the people that receive funds from it.

In short, I'd much rather have a 401k that can be rolled over into the investment freedom of an IRA (some place I can own short contracts) than be depending on a pension plan run by a company that may or may not exist at the time I retire.
Giant Plush Microbes - Toxoplasmosis, Gangrene, Etc.
Oracle's surprising takeover of Sun
In any case the HN "convention" is that you do not editorialise when posting a link - you should (whenever possible) use the title from the item you are linking to.
Nice article. I think a better topic would be, "How Woz Got Things Done." For a quick read, try Chapter 3 of "Founders at Work", which is well worth the price of the whole book.

http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...

This is Jessica Livingston's (of YC) interview of Woz. Specifically I love the way he talked about designing the Apple II. Even though it was hardware, it totally applied to the design and development of software. Perfectly suited to natural optimizers (aren't we all) who want to keep their finger on the pulse of every detail of their project.

This changed the way I treated my own work. No detail is too small and there's always plenty of room in my personal memory for whatever I need to remember. It's made a big difference.
I am interested in freemium business models, but that Pearltrees gadget was the most frustrating web experience I have had this year, once I got it to work. It really made me long for a nice synopsis of a few paragraphs, with neat hyperlinks to the relevant articles. It would have been very short, too, considering how few nodes there are in the map. In fact, in all the text it took him to explain how to use this map, he could have provided a better overview, using late-90's tech invented at CERN.
The problem is detecting the spam posts in the first place. Your idea would be incompatible with the proposed method, because you don't want to do the same thing to legitimate new users.
A Swedish court jails the founders of the Pirate Bay
I have found it difficult to entirely forgive The Economist for some woefully incorrect predictions (they were big on Goldman Sac's prediction for $200 oil, and did not see the credit crunch in any shape or form or give space to those who did [and there were a number]). Now they issued a lukewarm 'apology' at the start of this year, all good and well, but still it was delivered with their habitually self-satisfied, borderline arrogant tone.
Hi DannoHung,

Thanks for the great comment and I agree with your point. In fact, I experienced the same myself. There have been weeks where I didn't want to look at the code and subsequently nothing got done. There are other times though I fired up the IDE only to tweaked little things like a CSS style or refactor a simple method, only to find I had built up momentum and got lots of little things done.

This however wasn't the point to the article. The point I was trying to get at (perhaps not well), is the importance of setting a penalty when we didn't make a self-imposed deadline. So instead of just spending 20 mins tweaking a CSS, perhaps my time was better spent on the tasks which would actually contribute to the completion of the task. This focus on the end goal I believe can be a powerful force in helping us finish.

I can attest to that as I am the perpetual tweaker. Everytime I look at a site I'm building, I get more and more tired of its look and feel. So before I finish a project, often I'd have switched styles 10 times! For me, having the penalty clause helps me keep in focus.

Thanks for the great comment.
They shouldn't be an obligation that the company has, that's what makes them suck. They should be separately held funds that can survive beyond the lifetime of the company (like 401k plans). To make them company obligations is to invite disaster. It's analogous to the situation at GM where each current worker covers the health care of 10 other people. If you want a pension plan because you trust and want to pay pension plan administrators to manage your assets, it needs to be a separate financial entity from the company itself.
I have my own (much simpler) solution: 2 computers.

One for the internet, one for development.

Guess which one has virus protection?
limit it to 1 account creation per IP per hour :)

Yeh they can use a ton of proxies to get round that but I bet it cuts the account creation right down.

And it shouldnt affect 99.999999% of "real" users.
I too have been running for a good while now without ant-virus software. I stopped paying the "virus tax" when I realised that my SPAM filters were (collectively) filtering out all email virus packages - all I have to do now is refrain from clicking on the "dancing bunnies" when visiting new web sites.

In any case it was my experience from assisting family and friends that anti-virus software did a pretty poor job in the main - plus there were at least two occasions when I had to assist in major problems actually caused by anti-virus software deleting key system files.
I just read the whole thing. Took over 45 minutes but I was train commuting so it was worth it. I actually own a printed copy of his lectures (one of those philosophical impulse purchases near the independent bookstore's register) - but I never read it.

My biggest takeaway is that I need to live my life with more reflection (not constantly looking back in the rear-view mirror - that's more living in the past but pausing from my daily/weekly routines regularly and reflecting on life). Maybe something as simple as sitting outside on a park bench and watching people go by. Or calling up old friends and finding out what is going with them more regularly.

Reading about the old men who were Senators, those who indulged in wine/drink, those who basked in their followers' attention makes me think how far we've progressed in civilization since Roman times. Technologically, yes but philosophically and metaphorically - we'll always be human.
1. Apple updates don't choke my bandwidth and so I let the updates happen. Reboots are still a pain. So I opt out of updates needing reboot sometimes (especially for stuff like quicktime)

2. I notice that firefox has downloaded updates only when I restart/start firefox. Again no trouble there.
I've never written a bot. I thought perhaps that the process of parsing instructions (we could put more than one variable in the equation), then writing code to solve, might be more effort than it's worth to them. Especially if we're doing something that is somewhat unique so their reward would only be one page. However, phildawes is apparently implying that once the bots have parsed the problem and know what to solve for they could go to a page that implements Mathematica and submit the problem to be solved, therefore saving the time required to write problem-solving code. I didn't realize they worked like that.
I still think this is a valid goal, and would love to explore ways to make it happen.
What you can write in Perl 6 today
Heuristics aren't terribly hard. Scan for an input text box of a minimum certain size. Then try each submit button independently to see which one gets your sample text on the page.