skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've just scanned the article, and it does indeed look very worth reading.

I'm particularly interested in this (from the introduction):

> But I also discovered that I was playing with fire. Whenever I got a team ready to be really useful, there would be a bizarre negative reaction from all sorts of other people who were employed within the same organizations, but were not part of the teams I was working with. Sometimes this effect was so strong it could become a workplace hazard, and it always grew until the teams themselves were no longer able to function.

I know exactly what he is talking about. I have seen it happen in very different contexts (including contexts not at all related to software development): when you get a group of people that is starting to accomplish things, people within the organization act in strange ways to shut it down.

It looks like this particular issue is addressed on the 7th page: "The Dreaded Jungian Backlash". (It also looks like you need to read the preceding pages to understand it all.)

I look forward to finding out what the article has to say.
Promotional Keychains 
As the marketing director of a local consulting company, I needed to come up with new ideas for promotion of our business. I knew that this would be a great time to seek consulting, as the changes in the economy have presented many new challenges for businesses, but I also realized that, for the same reasons, businesses would be much less likely to have the budget available for consulting services.
Even DYI education. Stuffing things into your brain is always a plus. It seems to prevent premature dementia and the like.
Any recommendations from this list?
Another concern I have about your great .net name: once you start using it the .com holder will increase the price greatly. Or he can sell it to another business. When .com is taken I prefer to move on in order not to get in awkward situation.

Think python.com (nsfw) vs. python.org. I went to .com for the fist time and I was at work - I had an unpleasant talk with my manager: she was standing next to me at that very moment!

EDIT: All went well but we decided to go with Ruby instead :)
My implication was going to grad school for the wrong reasons. It wasn't about intellectual curiosity having anything to do with startups. But as long as we're on the subject, your understanding of intellectual curiosity as it relates to startups is flawed. It's a better essential element of a great hacker, and great hackers are essential elements of successful startups.
I actually prefer Ubuntu, but I guess that's a matter of taste.
I don't understand u. Nothing is free in this world. Twitter's 1 billion $ valuation is because of its users.
Rice-led project aims to boost performance on every chip
In a consulting agreement, you may find "Non-use" terms along with "Non-disclosure" terms in the IP language; technically, this would prevent a consultant from stealing the sales rolodex and then using it to contact customers.

Otherwise, you violate an NDA by disclosing to someone not bound under the same NDA actual confidential information. Nothing prevents you from using confidential information to compete "unfairly" with your employer.

You can add whatever terms you'd like to whatever you call a "confidentiality" or IP agreement, but now you're on a slippery slope that leads to de facto noncompetes.
You're not addressing my point. Slaves (in the most obvious case) didn't enter into unfair contracts to make themselves slaves. So, you get points for snark, but not for advancing an argument.
Brad Flora has done some really great work here. He always has interesting things to say. I'm really curious to see how his efforts to find a commission-only ad-sales guy for the WindyCitizen on Craigslist panned out.

Has anyone else tried to hire sales people via Craiglist? Any success?
RE: Opportunities and luck and not doing much to earn your money

First off: It's still their money. If someone has 100 cars and I lost mine is it ok for me to steal one of his? Damn tempting sure, but not ok.

2nd: Working my butt off != productive. My ex-father-in-law owns his own pool care business. He works his ass to the bone. He's coming up near retirement and he's in a position where he could take on new workers but instead he just chooses to work. He doesn't want to hassle with employees. I think it's a lot of extra work and he's the greatest guy in the world but he's not being as productive as he could be.

When it's time for him to retire he will probably have little to no money to live off of due to his and his wife's poor spending habits. I love them both, but do they deserve to take my money or someone else's? No. Does that mean I wouldn't help them out if I could? No, of course I would... but that's my choice.

RE: These people have sacrificed enough.
If that road doesn't improve their overall quality of life then maybe it shouldn't be built. That's a whole other topic of debate. It's almost as though generating wealth makes people feel guilty. I think it's wrong that I should be made to feel compelled to give my money away since I earned it and since I can always choose for myself whether or not I will do that. I'm all for charities because those are completely optional. Just don't have the government come to my door and demand I give more money to help so and so or else I will be taken to jail (tax evasion).

RE: Risk

Just having money does not beget more money. You still do need to know how to use it wisely. There are many wolves who would love for you to piddle your money away on their worthless services.

Also, "betting" a million dollars is a risk because that's my money! And for 99.99% of people it's a pretty big risk to boot.

I'm not saying it's fair. I'm still digesting these ideas and deciding how far I believe in them but I'm not sure whether it being fair has anything to do with it. If someone inherits money and they're rich for that reason, then I really am not sure what is ideal and I'd default to if that's what the person who earned the wealth wanted then shrug.
I don't like this guy's approach. Simply noting that a feature is rarely used is not enough information.

For example, code for error handling & recovery is typically rarely used. For some classes of products, most users will never need such code. But if you ship without it, then you're shipping a broken product. Not good.

Another example is features used only by high-end users. Something like MS-Word (also the PDF format) has some features that are really only used by high-end publishers (in the traditional sense). Microsoft (Adobe) could have left these features out of the low-end products. But that would mean multiple versions of Word, possibly incompatible formats, etc., which I think we can agree would be a bad strategy. Indeed, the success of Word (& PDFs) is, in part, due to the fact that all users can share the same documents.

That said, there are some good points here. Throwing in every feature you can think of is far too common, and results in bloated messes. Indeed, Word seems to have been designed with this philosophy. I am not claiming that the feature bloat of Word is a good thing.
How the US Air Force deals with blogs
Hmm, somewhat heavy reading for a morning's news gathering!
Let me know when you can walk into a store and buy stuff with some pundit's "valuation".

Also, its users make it valuable. Losing a few users is not a big deal to them, and your data is more valuable to you than it is to them. Set your expectations accordingly.
As if HL7 wasn't complicated enough.

I've written my own HL7 (pre-XML v2.x) message parser and generator in Java for work. I'd really like to not have to touch that code again, if possible. My code is easy enough to understand, but I don't want to have to rewrite it support this non-standard XML.

Just putting XML on the name of something doesn't instantly make it all easier.
It seems they're trying to formalize what Common Lisp and other languages do.
Exactly. That's why Open Source (Release Early, Release Often) and Agile (iterative) development works so much better. Get the users using the system/site/whatever and build on their feedback.
Quick issue -- there are many grades of levels 2 and 3 on that matrix (i.e. one could know what a red-black tree is and where it should be used -- or one could easily be able to implement it; one could know basic scheme -- tail recursion, continuations -- or one could have made a prolog compiler on top of common lisp (cf Norvig's book)).

In essence to put it this way:

"for $thing in ( technology, pattern, algorithm, methodology ):

it doesn't discriminate someone who've toyed with a $thing, someone who has made an implementation of that $thing for an employer or someone who has authored an all-new $thing."
What's Crunch doing now?
Automating Virtual World maintenance on Linux part 1 - introduction to screen
Correct, the user agent in no way indicates it's a bot. Just a standard IE6 UA.
(It doesn't matter what slaves did in the past.)

Slavery would be a matter of contract law in the present day if it was permitted -- since people would be allowed to sign themselves into slavery in return for whatever they could get out of it.

You're not "allowed" to sign yourself into slavery, even if you want to (because the state won't enforce the contract).

Non-competes will have the same properties above (if this bill is passed), therefore I suggest that slavery is a valid analogy for non-compete agreement in this context.

This opens up the opportunity for further discussion. For example it can be argued that the state is defending your freedoms by refusing to enforce a slavery contract. On the other hand, it can be argued that the state is denying you the freedom to sell yourself into slavery.

It is interesting to consider the case of non-compete agreements in a similar fashion.

(Please don't be rude or I'll be uninterested in discussing with you further, and don't tell me what I get "points" for: I'm not in a competition with you.)
I lost all the tweets from 3/18 to ~4/8

Most of them had been replicated to facebook and friendfeed. I had contacted twitter to see if they could re-store the tweets from friendfeed.

Looks like the situation was eventual consistency gone wrong?
A side question:

Do you need to get .net/.org/.[other TLDs] when you have the .com one?

e.g. google.net redirects to google.com, but google.org is for a different purpose.
IM's are too synchronous if the developer doesn't manage them properly, or if the software makes itself obnoxious enough. Email is a better example of asynchronous communication.
The content has its own identity. It would gain reputation. You, the creator, would not.

Problems: It devalues the individual, and an essentially anonymous vote system would make gaming logic and moderation interesting (but feasible) problems of their own. If these are solved well, the votes have meaning.

They're significant trade-offs, but every option has them.
It's probably cheaper to get one from a broken projection TV.
MapReduce using Amazon's cluster and differential pricing
He didn't mention twitter at all.
The Admissions Gap
A single entity with hundreds of different concerns working on a multi-year feedback loop which only replaces individual participants beats thousands of different entities working on a single concern with a monthly (or daily) feedback loop which has a do-or-die result?

hmmmm.
I'm kind of curious/concerned about the future of role-playing -- will it get picked up by kids today? What's your perspective on this a as a father of today's children? Seems like the 15-year-old at least could get into the role-playing aspect.

That said I have buddies in their 30's who still love the hack-n-slash aspect, the superhero, rolling dice, throwing fireballs fun of it all, and who kind of get bored & check out when role-playing comes to the fore of a gaming session. So it could just be a component of the gamer's personality.

Related quote from Dave Arneson:

"Pegasus: What other changes have you seen in gamers, rather than in gaming itself? How are we different?

"Dave: Well, it seems like they're a lot older. Used to all be young – high school kids, college kids – you don't see that too much any more. I don't know if that's because they're off playing video games or card games, or they're just not interested. I think some of it's the video games because you get much more of an instant feedback response from a video game than you do from a roleplaying game. Again, is that good or bad? I think that's bad, because I think they ultimately have a lot more fun playing roleplaying games than shooting up spaceships and aliens."

(http://www.judgesguild.net/guildhall/pegasus/pegasus_14/inte...)
The users aren't the customer in this business. They are the product.
> Education always pays off.

Advanced education got you killed during China's Cultural Revolution.
Obama Sees Glimmers of Economic Hope on Good Friday
How Much is that Email Contact Worth? $948, Say Researchers
I dunno if its just me, but any articles that link to nytimes.com that are currently on the front page take me to a registration screen. Anyone else?
The Best Gmail Hacks
Most of us own more than one gmail account , one of the most annoying aspects of dealing with it is the fact that you cannot have more than one opened at the same time. Luckily, Firefox has a plugin, called Gmail manager , it is an add-on for firefox that allows you to manage multiple Gmail accounts
Just download plugin from this site and install.
yeah, since january. i figured it was related to their issues the other day and that they'd all be back soon but now it looks like they're gone for good.

i demand a refund!
I certainly didn't say that government is more efficient than business, I can't imagine where you got that from.
The explanation I heard was "janky multi-level caching issue".

And when they disappeared yesterday they can back again.
Not if it was so advanced it got you out of the country.
Tokenization seems an odd place to start. Still, they look like a good read.
Very interesting. I just noticed this comment, and I think the guy stumbled into something about why FP is popular in a certain population:

"The language requirement is because Native American languages are verb based. Hopi has no nouns at all. I argue that nouns are good for sorting objects into categories and associating responses with the categories. Verbs are better for describing processes and relationships. People using verb based languages are very likely to be a population that assumes juxtapositional thinking is available to them."

Update: The short version of the article is that your brain has two modes of thinking. The one programmers use he calls "Juxtapositional", and cannot be accessed when the chemicals associated with stress are present. He then draws the relationship in the above quote, where Native American cultures were less stressed, and used verb based languages.

Notice that many of the "weird" programming languages are verb based / functional? lisp, haskell, forth, etc. Maybe some of the power of these languages is related to the fact that only people who aren't stressed like using them?
Poll: Has Hacker News influenced your decision as to whether to pursue a PhD?
Yes, HN contributed to my decision to pursue a PhD.
Yes, HN contributed to my decision NOT to pursue a PhD.
No, my decision as to whether to pursue a PhD was not influenced in any significant way by HN.
I have never considered pursuing a PhD.
I don't have a problem with profanity, but I think it's over the top here. It's meant to be a severe response to a severe offense. I don't think this warrants that. If we use it too much, it loses its punch. I want my "fuck"s to still mean something! It's becoming an adjective, which means my anger becomes subdued.
Please pre-populate with suggested sample searches and include a list of your top 5 recommendations. (I would snatch one in a heartbeat but I'm very intensely lazy.)
The Three Terms You Must Have In A Venture Investment
The want to see if the page will attempt to customize a page full of spammy keywords and ads in response to the perceived interests of the visitor.

It's a smart check to make, but Microsoft Live does it so heavily that it bugs the hell out of webmasters.
Does this really matter? The tone in that post is laughable.
Real-Time Mugshots - Tampa Bay
The results (especially any code) of this tax dollar funded research are going to go to the public domain...RIGHT?
I merely meant to point out that the government has the potential for greater efficiency.

I must be taking that quote out of context. Greater efficiency than what? Perhaps you meant that it has a potential for greater efficiency than something with no feedback loop at all?

My fault. Didn't read far enough back in the chain. Apologies.
Ask HN: Linux Development - Rapid Prototyping on the iPhone
Background: I've used Linux for 1+ decade. Familiar with vim/emacs (yes, I use both), gcc/g++, make, gdb; and recently into scheme.

Problems:
1) I find MacOSX GUI difficult to deal with (it's almost Unix, but not quite); XCode to be not nearly as nice as Emacs; and the Interace Builder + forced use of XCode quite unproductive.

2) I also want to see if there's a rapid way to write iPhone apps in Scheme or Ruby, rather than in Objective C [as nice as it's small talk like message passing is, I'm not a big fan of it.]

Others must have gone through this so:

1) What do you do on a Mac to make developing comfortable coming from a Linux background?

2) What secret programming language to you use, if any, to massively speed up iphone development?

Thanks!
That's an interesting argument tactic. Slavery is a valid analogy to noncompete contract terms if you redefine the concept of slavery to be a contractual obligation between slave owners and slaves. Indeed, then, you are right: Massachusetts would not enforce that contract clause. Good catch!
My decision as to whether to pursue a PhD was made before I started reading HN.
I lost a few a couple of days ago, a minor annoyance but nothing more.

This is the problem with twitter (and those who use it religiously or base their entire business/startup around). Some people seem to think that Twitter is a service that they are entitled to use, or have a right to use, like the internet.

Instead it's a single privately owned company providing a single service freely to a lot of people without any obligation what so ever towards it's users or dependants.

Yes it's totally radical, yes it's a new platform, yes it's useful, yes it's function, yes it's awesome, but at the end, it's just another volatile platform that has a single point of failure, and if it were to fail, it will do so with a horrendously nasty bang...

(and no, nothing is ever too big to fail either)

/rant
Now I've got stats to back up my failures. I don't know if that's a good thing or not...
I would never sell it.

Even if it ended up being worth a fortune? I guess I would be hard pressed to sell my name domains too. But for enough money maybe.
Managing iPhones with Microsoft Exchange: An Incomplete Solution
Why Breaking The DiggBar Can Actually Increase Traffic To Your Website
I guess Frank Herbert was right, "Fear is the mind killer."

Profound perspective. I programmed for 13 years and was increasingly burnt out by shorter time lines and more controlled projects. I thought I had completely lost my coding mojo and took a leave of absence Nov. 2008. I may yet relive my hayday of coding wizardry!
> Greater efficiency than what?

Greater efficiency than it has now. I guess my point is that there are many worthy government projects, but increasing the tax base won't help, since the extra money will just end up being captured by the same interests that capture it now.
Today's Dilbert is on the same subject:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-04-10
Yes, I lost mine just last week. Were visible in the home page view, but not at my own URL.
thanks! the links seems really helpful
I got that, but it seems to me for there to be reputation, some identifiable entity must be able to "give" it.
I've always seen the acronym as HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) until recently when I've seen it as CHI on some news.yc posts (mostly microsoft-related, if I recall...). Is there a significance behind this change that I'm missing?
Making Banking Boring
Actually that newspaper is the Seattle P-I, but okay.
(I take it you're being sarcastic, and thus I shall try to explain more clearly.)

The OP made an argument of this form:

"I dislike the government asserting that I am not a fully competent adult, capable of making my own decisions about what agreements I enter into and which I do not.

If I'm not competent to read a <contract of form X> and agree, or not agree, to it, then why do they think that I'm competent to drive a car, or vote, or sign a lease?"

The reply by toby noted "You can't sell yourself into slavery" by way of pointing out that the argument does not hold when X = selling yourself into slavery.

Thus toby was demonstrating the OP's argument was not valid as it stands for all forms of contract X, and so it needs to be clarified to indicate why it is valid for X = non-compete agreement (for example by reframing the argument from one based on competence to: "I don't believe the state should refuse to enforce contracts merely on economic grounds")
I'm sure WebMynd would appreciate it
1) I use XCode mostly and find it quite able. Recently, I got MacVim to be XCode's text editor (double click on a file or on a build error -> opens in MacVim) and it's very tolerable. I think MacVim is by far the best implementation of Vim on OS X yet. You can use 'xcodebuild' from the shell and live in vim/emacs entirely actually.

2) I actually happen to love Objective C. What's your issue with it?
I'm thinking: how can this be exploited? Can someone just say they're building a new way to shorten urls and need two years in the country to build their business to fruition? And what defines success or progress?
Didn't AdultFriendFinder's parent company boast of 1M+ paying members? Perhaps sites like these are only formalizing and bringing relative transparency to the way American society has been functioning for decades (or even longer)? Certainly rich men have had mistresses for quite some time. How did men find mistresses fifty years ago? Personal ads? Did women who wanted to be mistresses know at which Financial District bars they should hang out? Perhaps the more interesting question is how the "not talked about" sorts of relationships formed pre-Internet.
Having been through the hoops, I'd generally support this, but it's a tough sell in today's economy. Because there are emotions involved.

There are already similar visas (EB-5 and E-1). Especially the E-1 category is very close and could easily be amended to fit Paul's ideas (I used the E-1 as co-founder of my previous startup, EVE).

One issue that needs to be addressed: you are not likely to get funding until you move here. But if the visa gives you a grace period (say 6 months) to move first before you get funding, then it will be abused.
That's why you use investors as the test.

I don't think you need to define progress.