skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of what I see on my Wordpress Blog: lot's of 0-content comments like "this is a cool article". At first they didn't make sense (blocked them anyway), but then I remembered the Wordpress settings for comments. By default, it is set to "commentors must have been approved at least once". So I guess if I would let one of those innocent comments through, they would be back with more serious stuff.

Spammers are crafty...
That's a double edged sword - if you've read their blogs, they don't have just one blog writer and at times writers actively disagree with each other. It just gets downright bizarre. Further, the lack of a byline also results in a lack of accountability/ability to deny responsibility. Frankly, I've also found their quality has gone down over the last few years since writers like Megan McArdle left.
I don't work hard anymore. I try to eliminate the need for it. If that fails and it's more than just assembling or moving a desk, I try to pay someone else nice to do it. I'm happy that our society somehow considers typing to be more important work than roofing.

I'm in my office around 45 hours a week.. somewhere around 5am-3pm M-F with probably 5 to 10 hours of errands, lunches, and lazy times cut out of that.

I'd say I average 2 hours a week right now writing out "code" that I'd describe as my "work." That seems insanely low, but given a good typing speed, that's enough to write the K&R C book in a month. I wish my quality were that high, but I'm trying.

I think at the office I'm probably down to ~10 hours a week of "unproductive" time now (e.g. reading this stuff, writing this comment, gossiping with friends about someone's date).
I don't think it's fair to measure work by any standard other than "I feel what I'm doing is productive."

Wonderful statement. Only in extreme cases does it seem untrue for thought-workers.

If you're interested in the idea of people simply declaring their productivity (and worth), Maverick by Semler is a good read: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446670553
You can read the web just fine because you read English, not Tuareg.
Watch one piece 540 online
Sweet work. I wish someone would apply for my jobs with that as their referenced work.
> Can anybody give an example of something that makes Mac OS X better than Vista?

Mouse over a word, Ctrl + Cmd + d. Love it.
How Madoff Did It
There are lots of pointers for entrepreneurs: Things you should not let yourself slide into. What may seem like "little" ethical lapses that you seem like you could get away with... but may start you down a path for misery (and possibly is wide distribution to others).
With git, you can use combination of GIT_WORK_TREE and GIT_DIR environment variables (or the equivalent params to git command) to specify where the work tree and the .git dir reside.

Downside of this is that you have to set up env separately for each project (if you have multiple projects), basically wrapping git.

Another quick'n'dirty solution could also be to just have everything in one subdirectory of git working tree (since git doesn't pollute every directory like .svn does). This would also work with bzr or hg.
also, writing that a cracker is a "burgler" instead of a "burglar" does not make it more authoritative.
I suggest we just add a recaptcha for people posting links below a certain karma threshold.
California’s proposed "Amazon tax" - a destructive solution
As far as I am concerned a 'cracker' is someone who breaks encryption/codes or someone who makes modifcations to software to remove protection methods.
and a 'hacker', well... that's more open to interpritation.

I think what people have to realise is, that language evolves and words take on new meanings, A name is just a name, let your actions speak louder than your label.
Thank you: I needed to hear that. Part of my brain likes to keep scheming about "more absolute" ways to keep them out (and thus avoid any clean up).

Your points suggest that my utopia-philic thinking is probably less useful than accepting that some clean up is just a necessary overhead (cf: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."). Thank you.
upvoted for the use of "nefarious"

made me think of a Vaudeville Villain laughing maniacally while twisting the ends of his waxed moustache and contemplating the fate of his scrambled egg addicted clientèle.... =S

The way that I've seen it develop is that the general public now uses the term "crack" pretty exclusively (in tech terms that is) to mean the breaking of copy protection on proprietary software. Whereas the term "hack" or "hacker" still languishes in the "romanticised" picture of a lone wolf stalking the internet for system vulnerabilities to take advantage of, subvert and abuse an innocent box....
This is something all web-based entrepreneurs in California need to read and get vocal about... to their (naive, short-sighted) legislators.
Just tell me the article doesn't consist of some ridiculously obvious blah-blah on self-discipline before I click on the link.

And then tell me if any one of the famous genius people was not utterly undisciplined. Paradoxically, it is the lack of discipline that helps you think different and create great things, or maybe just interesting things.
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Utah Business Consultants: A Business Brokerage and Evaluation Company
Business brokers in Utah specializing in Utah businesses for importers and exporters, business transfer agents are helpful in selling your business at higher prices. You can easily sell or buy a running business with ubcutah.com
Cactus for Peace?
The reason USD is standard is because the US used to be gold backed.

So all the countries in continental europe inflated like crazy and got off the gold standard. That left England and America which became the standard. Then England inflated, so it was down to America. America got off the gold in standard in 1971, but there was no one else to go to. America could then inflate its currency essentially taxing all holders of US Dollars, many of which are over seas.

This is the cause of the current economic problem. By removing all ties to gold the FED was able to inflate the currency causing malinvestment & seeking risky returns to stay ahead. The final play out of this is either a tough recession or hyper-inflation; what's going to happen isn't exactly clear -- it depends on how much money they continue to print.
Would a spammer really go through that just to submit a spam link that probably wouldn't get beyond the new page anyway? It's quite a bit of work, even if you have the same framework that you can use across multiple sites. My experience is that a post that doesn't get upvoted will receive around 30 hits.

Surely there are easier ways of getting 30 hits.
None of them will be stable if you want something stable it has to be based on some sort of real asset, so that they can't print as much money as they want.
I disagree with this. I think the most important thing is to just work on your project consistently. Whether that means working on it 20 minutes a day, an hour a week, or one day a month for you, just make sure you don't put it aside. If you have to skip one time, don't worry about it, but make DAMN sure you work on it next cycle.

Even if what you end up doing when you spend your piece of time is just some silly project maintenance, that's okay; you're coming back to it consistently and you're making some small progress.
How about we keep with the intellectual stuff around here, and make 'em answer math captchas. Using latin numerals.

eg, what's LV + IV? Answer has to be given in latin numerals, too.
The risk seems to be separation of the staff from the IP. How many people are mission-critical to things like Java or the server/storage hardware lines (or Solaris)? How many people can be viewed as "opportunities for outsourcing/offshoring"? If these jewels aren't dependent on Sun-specific employees, it might be a bloodbath.
EGGcelent idea! (you asked for it... =P)

But yeh, what counts as 'breaking' the shell? Can i dissolve the egg shell in some sort of acid? concentrated sulphuric maybe? I hear acetic acid works but its incredibly slow.
We'd have to agree on how to write II + II

We could ask for a basic derivative (for example, of a polynomial), or the value of 'x' in a simple algebraic equation
x+5 = 2x + 10
If you are "good" and able to pick your field in the science/technical arena, would you pick something that's at risk to outsourcing and flooded with competition? Or, would you pick something that's harder to outsource, pays better and offers a better work/life balance?

I've build systems for years and years, and it would have been WAY better career-wise to be a user of the bloody things than a developer.
Dagnabbit! Why can't I downvote!!

doin a quick bit of research while waiting for the day to finish (trans: working), I found that the chemical composition of Egg shell is mostly Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) and that this can be effectively dissolved using many common acids. So putting an egg in vinegar (acetic acid) for some time would eventually dissolve away the shell (which is technically not _breaking_ it).

.... any others?

EDIT: saved by the common brainfart

the problem with Sulfuric is that you have to be able to eat the egg itself afterwards ;)
Concur to both.

The Economist is a necessity for my commute. I find my wife stealing before I can get to it most weeks :)

The FT is harder to justify if you have a good set of financial rss feeds but the economist has no real substitute.
Congrats to the team. Their how it works page is great. One of the best technical explonations written to cleanly and quickly explain a complex issue.

Princing is pretty straight forward as well.
I had said in the beginning of my comment that it was a good article. Everything that zappos is doing is nice and it is evidently working for them. If the article was about strictly zappos I would have had no objections. I'm happy to hear success stories too.

What I'm not happy to hear is scoble's agenda. What I objected to was the mudslinging on O'Reilly, for promoting an event which focuses on number of followers and promoting 140 conference where he is a speaker. When scoble itself focuses more on number of followers than community and engage in trash talking O'Reilly (and TechCrunch) for the same, I see lack of credibility.

What scoble cleverly tried to say is "See, Zappos is doing great with twitter without focusing on followers. So come to 140 conference where we can teach you how". Riding on Zappos's success to promote his conference was distasteful IMHO.
Suspend-to-RAM resumes almost instantly for me and even suspend-to-disk only takes about 10 seconds to resume on my ThinkPad.
Motivation can be positive and negative. This article suggests that the only motivation that works is negative.

That's terrible advice -- only mediocre things can be created that way. I believe that we should just have extremely big unstoppable desire to build great things, and only this desire should be a motivation for our work if we are going to create something better.
OK, she is the one who has done research in it for 20 years, but it all seemed too cliched to me. Honestly, I don't believe that girls are always only thinking socially, nice and eco-friendly, while boys dream of guns and bombs. Too bad she only presented anecdotal evidence, which makes me suspect they only saw what they wanted to see. For example, it would have been interesting to see 20 pictures drawn by girls and 20 pictures by boys, instead she only presented one each.

Maybe women have more choices in their work life (because they can always marry and have children, so they do not have to worry as much about their career), so they tend to choose more attractive professions (less stressful or higher social status - I hear a lot of women are becoming doctors and lawyers). That is my theory (I know it sounds a bit cynical), at least I think that is a factor. Now to me personally software development is attractive, but only so so - I like to build and create things, not necessarily the part where one sits in front of the computer all day, hardly talking to anyone.

Also, where are the campaigns to make more men become school teachers and kindergarden workers?
I've been using this setup, except with XCache instead of APC. Does anyone know enough about the differences between the two to say if this is better or worse?
I don't think there is anything noobish or wrong in thinking of your computer as just a tool (not that you said that directly, but it could be inferenced). What is it, in the end? A tool for communication, development, research, whatever.

Some people just resist any kind of change - they're used to Windows, they aren't going to try anything else, because they think (and they might be right in theory) that they don't need anything else.
I had about 200 in two weeks that I generated from a related site.
Spam bot generating comments that get voted up? Reaching the right level of sophistication, these spam bots would suddenly turn into quite acceptable members of the community, even if they are completely automated. If readers in general find these comments worth up-voting, than it would not matter much what the underlying intent was, because it is not harmful anylonger.
> But they're neither IT nor marketing savvy, so they're probably wrong :)

Really, geeks and marketers can't be wrong about what normal people like, except when that contradicts with what normal people say they like :)
Some basic Erlang questions are fine with me ;)
It should be noted that these changes are for Ubuntu Server Edition.
Cool - a challenge bots can't hope to beat. Oh wait... http://72.3.253.76/webMathematica3/quickmath/page.jsp?s1=equ...
Speaking of Ubuntu usability, I just don't understand why they require me to pick a location closest to me in order to download Ubuntu. In the age of free IP geolocation databases they could at least fill this field with a best guess based on my IP or a least loaded server...
With my low karma count, I hesitate to ask this - but what benefit is there to being the "Apple" of enterprise software? The benefits of Apple to the consumer market is that you don't have to know much about the insiders of the device in order to use it. Is that really a benefit to a mega corporation(like a bank or an insurance company), where the "insides" of the software are going to be manipulating the most valuable part of their business?

Unless Oracle is going to be targeting very small companies, I can't see how they get past that.
Taking a look at Groovy
I too was thinking of a captcha to block spam on HN. But then again thought it'd be a pain to the users.

+1 for captcha for users under certain karma level.
+1 for 2 karma to be eligible to post urls.
This is a great article although I wish it went into a bit more depth. One of the things that I have noticed about eBay in the past couple of years is that I just don't go there anymore. I mean, I used to hit it a couple of times a week looking for all kids of stuff. Now, it just doesn't occur to me to look at eBay when I need something. It doesn't even come up in conversation with my Mom like it used to.

I think eBay might be going the way of Geocities. Farewell.
10 virtues of successful entrepreneurs
Nice information really i like it....
Isn't there an easier way to reach the 2 karma threshold? Like, creating 2 accounts, the second's only purpose being upvoting some throwaway comment the first one creates and subsequently deletes?
Not very. My paid job is typical enterprisey CRUD apps in java. Most of the work comes from fixing others mistakes and battling with poor decisions around what tools we use (ClearCase?!?!, a good 1+ hours/day wasted there). I'm more productive at home on my side projects but by the time I finally hit the groove it's bedtime.
Is Google making us smarter?
I must admit my feeling is that it is tacky, too. Of course that doesn't imply that there is no market (I don't know).

But come on: adventure, but at the same time drinking the best wine and food and probably driving around in a really comfy car. What kind of adventure is that? A tacky kind...

I can only say that it doesn't appeal to me at all, I am more into creating things than consuming things (travel can be very passive, sort of like TV, only that you move around yourself instead of the image moving).
Good time for Weebly to issue a statement (press release, etc.) calling for all Geocities customers. It's a "Statue of Liberty" moment - "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe a free website" - Be Bold Weebly... call Yahoo out and get some free press.
The USD is the global standard not because of some diabolical scheme by the US, but rather because it is liquid beyond liquid.

It also helps that oil is traded in US $ and that everybody needs oil. Not a diabolical scheme but I'm sure some talented people spent a lot of effort linking oil to US $.
Ask HN: Title Reversion Bug?
Why does the title of my submission often revert to the default one included with the page?
Is it time to move beyond 960? Not yet
In the proposed scheme you can't upvote unless someone upvoted you first. So you can't create a second account to upvote the first, because that second account needs its own upvote before it's usable.
Well.. I don't really agree with you. 10+ would be a bit painful I guess. Let's first keep the bots out. Then let's find a way to keep lamers away. There's always "the erlang week" to scare away lamers anyway.
Spotted. Thanks.
Heroku Commercial Launch and Pricing
Fred Wilson on investing in Geocities
What do you use instead of eBay to buy specific used items? Or do you no longer do so? I still see no serious competitors to eBay.
It's a good point that some spam "bots" could be human. I was running a free email site when we saw a lot of strange account creation. We had recaptcha enabled and knew it hand't been cracked.

It turned out (based on IP address analysis) that the accounts were being created by humans in the Philippines and then handed over to spammers in Dubai. Ah globalization...

If you have an efficient spam vector, it's not unusual to see low-wage humans manipulating the system to get around captcha.
Abstract Data Types in Clojure
Make available what problems one would work with as "your" hacker. If your problems require hackers, then hackers will apply (and the other way around).
HiFashion
Fashion blog run by two university students in London
How Woz Gets Things Done
They only have to write the code once. Then they can get 30 hits to a different site every day.
bzr can do that.

It's used by people to track /etc/ and all sorts of stuff.

Have your files in:
/somewhere/.bzr
/somewhere/yourfolders/

So there is only one .bzr directory at the top.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/salesforce.com+squidoo.com/
Besides Dabble (which can kinda cut it for certain non-tech companies, but is primarily used by tech companies) Excel is the only real option and is probably Microsoft's best product.

Sure it may have a few strange date bugs. Its column/row order shortcomings in vlookup() and hlookup() may be annoying. But you can really, really, really DO stuff with excel.

The learn curve for the software is basically Y = x^.7 (0<x<1) so getting started is as easy as you can get for a tool that can do all of the below:

Math functions (I could have individually listed them, but they are many, including correlations for many statistical distributions)
Financial functions (Mortgages, Black-Scholes, Variance)
Multi-Dimensional Linear Optimization - seriously, this can (with a bit of tweaking) also give you all non-inferior solution sets.
VBA - I hate programming Microsoft languages, but VBA was designed to be easy, and with excel it is SO easy. Relative cell references.
Stunningly beautiful graphs - Next time you are at excel and you need to show data really dig into how much you can change. You can make these things look extremely pretty if you take some time to learn how.

The nice part about all that stuff above is that the new/uninformed users don't every really have to worry about it. I've met tons of young people who got into programming because they started with macros (and later VBA) for Excel.
On the Brevity of Life is a great work. I found it particularly interesting that Ferris made bold the sentences and paragraphs that he did. In particular, he seemed to avoid the advice that Seneca was giving. Seneca was not advocating idleness or balance. No, indeed he was recommending isolation, asceticism, detachment from frivolity and dissociation with business affairs so that one may focus on the pursuit of virtue through self-control by rational thought. More directly, he suggests that the best life is to study the ancient works. In his own words:

Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex ever age to their own; all the years that have gone ore them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men’s labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?

For more information on Stoicism (in the classical, not popular, sense) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
"Sounds pretty reasonable on paper..."

No, it really doesn't sound reasonable when you look at it on any medium. This is incredibly unreasonable.

Even if we accept that California should be allowed to force companies to collect tax that operate physically within its border, to attempt to force that status upon unwilling or unknowing companies that aren't anywhere near its jurisdiction is ridiculous.

California is not losing money due to this practice. That's like saying a mobster is losing money because he's not collecting "protection money" from people who live a thousand miles outside his territory.

And let me also say they should call this a buying tax, not a sales tax. That much is evident based on who the collector is.
Antiquarian peripherals play Bohemian Rhapsody
Many companies have a big expensive oracle-dependant app running, and would rather not have to bother too much. Today they have to get machines from one vendor, OS'es from another, storage from a third, networking from (you get the picture...) - or, get it all from an expensive third party consultant.

With this setup, Oracle can send a salesman with a spreadsheet to those companies and plot in how much computing power is needed and how much storage is needed, and have it spit out an integrated, supportable solution, build completely from Sun/Oracle components. When they run out of capacity, one way or the other, it's more-or-less instantly pluggable.

Oracle is no longer a software application, it's an appliance.
Eric Sink is writing an excellent series of articles on source control at http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html
I cant wait to get the rest of the tutorial done and show off all the awesomeness that I have found with Kohana.
Problems like that are far too easy for computer programs to solve. Clearly the right solution here is to present new users with a set of Turing machines and ask them which of the specified machines halt.

This would probably be very effective at limiting the growth rate of HN, too.