skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we get rid of guns because of the suicidal people,
will we get rid of pills next?

After that we can get rid of rope, fire, plastic bags, anything with a sharp edge, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, anything flammable and water; just to be safe.

I think your point is that guns make suicide easy, and I get that; but I think it's a tough spot to defend in terms of gun control. Suicide is easy, people will always find a way to do it.
Does Google scrape content in whole, separate them from the original page and reuse them on other people's commercial websites without my permission? Y'know, the same difference between Google and a website that steals articles from other sites and reproduces them in whole for ad revenue, which is exactly what this site does but because 'it's comments' it's suddenly magically considered okay?
Why not just define a function in your code, rather than redefining 'nil?'?
The GP didn't state that all firearm owners were "hicks, militia members, xenophobes, etc."
The A.P. with all it's resources or someone similar to it should focus on creating a Internet News channel; CNN on the web!

I use the net instead of cable, but do miss 24/7 news channels!
Another new e-book platform? Please, no, stop it.
There's also the possibility that a lot of unremarkable music existed, but has been forgotten. We're much better at archiving things now, so it tends to accumulate.
The Ayn Rand Institute

http://www.aynrand.org/
Except that scientists are notoriously close-minded.

Modern science is more of a religion than science, and anyone who questions the reigning orthodoxy is basically shunned (can't get work, can't get published, etc.).
You should browse CSS top sites and try and look up the designers behind the sites.

Are you open to remote work arrangements? If you want to get in touch with me I'm happy to refer some guys I know who are really good. Rates may be a bit high, but you tend to get what you pay for. More than anything, I've found referrals of both programmers and designers to be the most effective route of finding talent.

As for your other question about characteristics. Check their portfolio first. Just ask them what their whole belief on design is, and they should be able to go on and on about it. If they start sounding like they wrote portions of Keeping It Real (37 signals), you have a winner. Any smart designer knows design is never about making something pretty, it's always about creating something that any normal human being can use without any pain and minimal thinking involved.
The Hidden Twitter Business Model
...because people buy batteries and canned foods before a hurricane.

I look at a large increase in gun sales as an early indicator of how bad people believe the economy and crime will get.

Of course, people bought lots of batteries and guns before Y2K too.

I'm not anti-gun at all. I owned a BB gun growing up and loved it. Also have been to a few shooting ranges in my day. And I think the right to bear arms is important for keeping the Queen of England out of my face.

Regardless, it's an interesting, countercyclical stat. If you had a business that sold items that people buy a lot more of when they are afraid, it's probably boom time right now.
A local supermarket had as their policy, that if the scanned price was wrong then you got the item for free. Well they started selling other things, with much bigger price tags than a $5 ham. My wife's uncle grabbed a BBQ set from it, but when they scanned it the price came up as $349.99, not the sale price of $299.99 and he walked away with it for free.

The store amended the policy, it now has a $50 maximum.
Everyone wants their thing to be HTML
And there are no tool collectors? I also collect beautiful tools. (E.g., old timber-framing drills.)
Aren't you describing pop music in general? I don't see how what you said only applies to "modern" pop.
There are tool collectors, but they are demonstrating "collecting behavior".

In Boy Scouts we were taught to respect and appreciate guns as the very dangerous tools they are. I can personally only agree with your original statement: Guns -are- only tools, and should only be treated as tools.
But at that point in the interview you've just mentioned that you made $1-$3 per user, with millions of users active each month, and you were paying 10 cents for a portion of those users. Of course the first thing people are going to is the math and realize there's a lot of money right there.

But back to why I posted my original comment, it was more the condescending tone of the "I'm amazed" part of that sentence. My gut reaction would be: "Why yes, I can multiply in my head and it is amazing, Andrew."

Thanks for your reply though, nice to see you in this discussion.
I moved to Python recently to be able to take advantage of Google App Engine. I love the language and syntax for the reasons mentioned.
But isn't that up to the blog/site owner whether or not they want to be included in Backtype? And if the users don't like it one way or the other they can choose to go elsewhere.

I guess I've never viewed my comments on other people's sites with such strong ownership.
Andrew, I had a similar experience in elementary school. I was in elementary school during the whole pokemon phase, so about 8 years ago.

I sold pokemon cards on the playground. Now, you'd usually go to the corner store and pay $3-5 for a pack of cards. I had the idea when I was at an asian night market that I could buy a box of cards for a lot less (I think about $1.50 a pack) and then resell those.

So I started out just selling packs for $2.50 or $3, a bit below the regular stores with a decent return. Which was pretty awesome at the time. I sold about 2 full boxes then realized there was more money selling single cards.

So I bought another box and some card protector sleeves and started ripping open packs. I found a bunch of valuable cards that gathered over $10 each. In total I spent about $60 on supplies and made a bit over $450 in a 3 week span.

And then I got busted by a teacher who confiscated my earnings for a day and a binder of cards. I was told that if they caught me selling anything ever again I would be suspended.

I understand that they can't allow others to sell stuff to the students, but it really hurt my entrepreneurial spirit at the time. Until I got to highschool and started reselling illegal fireworks, but that story didn't end as well, although I made a lot more money ;)
Actually: You can make a lot of money from using someone else's idea.

I don't see anything in the story that makes an ethical judgment one way or the other on the practice.
Does it have to be sophisticated to be good? I don't think so. Some "unsophisticated" music quickly wears thin, others don't. Some of the most beautiful music is the simplest (think Ode to Joy, Brahm's Lullaby, and anything by Irving Berlin).

Case in point: Recording technology lets me, a child of the 80s, locate and listen to Ella Mae Morse, a somewhat unlikely white jazz/bluegrass/r&b singer from the 40s.

Is her Cow Cow Boogie sophisticated? No. But it makes me very, very happy. Even on repeated listenings (and singings). My life is better for it :)
"[EDIT maybe Apple?]"

The true genius of Jobs is his ability to understand, lead, motivate and inspire hacker-types (while not really being one himself). Woz, of course, being the first example.
Cool, more "founder worship." Let's see if this passed the "one word test:" Google. Nope. Nevermind.
I'd love to but unfortunately an internship is required by my college, and I don't think they'll take it very well...

But you should definitely try it.
Have you ever met anyone that has a firearm or firearm-related hobby? I'm guessing that you haven't.

This is a really, really, really bad assumption. I don't know about ankhmoop, but I own guns and have throughout my life. Most of my family members own firearms and a couple of my friends are collectors. I, too, am alarmed by sudden increases in firearm sales in the US, as are all other gun owners that I have spoken to about it, since it has been prompted by political rhetoric and the economic downturn.
okay. I am starting to JC penny right now.
http://commandshift3.com
Your comments reminded me of a salon.com article I read a few years back on tech support and a guy classifying tech support coping personalities. Hope your experience was better. A quick search found it:

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_suppor...
No need to protocol ips anymore, the police simply needs to raid all the people paying for that service. :)
You certainly don't have to give it your login details, but as I recall that isn't entirely clear. There's a "skip this step" button, but the language used doesn't make it sound like that option exists.

I may be misremembering though, and I expect the exact details change from time to time.
I wrote that blog post. Actually, one of my next posts will be about which meetings to attend in Silicon Valley.

My advice (been there, done that): you don't need to show up for more than a few weeks at a time. You can find cheap tickets currently from Europe for no more than $600.

Step 1: make a friend online who can host you for a week

Step 2: fly over

Step 3: network like crazy while in the Valley

Step 4: repeat a few times

Does that make sense?
I think he's right.
Brian Eno (among others) has often written and spoken about the effect of recording technology on music.

Some of his observations: composers can play with tone, timbre, and perceived physical space in previously unavailable ways; composition becomes much like sculpture when you can "carve out" music from a multi-track master (think of dub music); music no longer need be aimed at an active audience (hence the rise of ambient music); music can be much more dense because you can replay it as often as you need to get all the details.
Tried signing up using Chrome, to be told that the best results are available only when using Internet Explorer, although I could try using a beta for Firefox. (WTF?) Accepted the mistaken option for FF, but that required a missing Java plugin, so nothing happened. "Cool" really isn't the reaction that came to mind. Appears to be "write once, run on IE only".
Sorry, this is not exactly thought-provoking. Why did you all vote up? It boils down to "I have my employees write software in the language I know to be able to control them better." That's not a far-fetched wish for a company owner, but hardly a good reason to choose a language if you expect the language to have a certain impact by itself.
Ask HN: How does Twitter help your company?
So I found this post on a new community site, and I'm honestly curious. I hear that companies HAVE to use it, that it is a GREAT way to talk with your clients and customers. But I've tried...and I don't get it.

You guys are a pretty tech savvy bunch - how do you use Twitter?
Supply and demand. Gouging is a myth.
Yup. The farther you progress in the game the more XP/hour you get generally. Also, each expansion has had a notable increase in the XP/hour available in the areas and levels it introduces. In almost any RPG you will get more experience points per "encounter" at higher levels than low, though they will take about the same amount of time.

I got as far as that paragraph and realized this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Might make some good MBA-talk for a presentation though.
Some of us have been excited about running JRuby Web apps on Glassfish for some time now. I have one (using Ramaze) in production.

What's exciting here is that GAE offers a new venue for deployment of JVM-based languages: JRuby, Clojure, Jython, and so on.

Java language is no fun, but Java the platform is great.
IBone: not what you think
Oh, that. That is one of those problems people talk about but no one has.

While people can certainly write macros correctly and avoid them, this takes experience

No, it doesn't. It's trivial to call gensym.

Edit: I'm not saying that CL's way is the best, just that this question gets way more attention than it deserves.
I posted essentially the same article by Kevin Kelly, a week ago : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541394

It includes a link to the original paper.
"And the Second Amendment exists for a reason. Governments are less likely to turn on their people if the latter are widely armed."

Do you really think so? I support the libertarian spirit of the amendment, and I do think it was a legitimate argument in past centuries, but today I can't imagine that hunting rifles and 9mms even break the Top 10 list as to why the military doesn't stage a coup.

(If you think that's an argument for relaxed gun control, consider what types of weapons and what kind of prevalence would be necessary to compete with US armed forces. Not being an expert, I'd imagine we would need assault rifles, RPGs, and everything else we see over in Iraq and Afghanistan. In my opinion, the drawbacks of that kind of civilian militarization far outweigh the benefits.)

If you're curious, these might be my actual Top 10 (unordered): free speech and press; large territory; widespread education and literacy; fast, reliable, long-distance communication; an active Congress; civilian presidents; diversity (in all the usual categories -- ethnicity, religion, politics, etc); wealth; peace; social mobility.

After all, even a dictator requires the consent of the governed.
If you can't determine profit margins from those two numbers alone, there's something wrong with you. :-)
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=part+time+jobs+in+san+diego&l=1
And then I got busted by a teacher who confiscated my earnings for a day and a binder of cards. I was told that if they caught me selling anything ever again I would be suspended.

Confiscated your earnings? The word is stole your earnings. The crap that goes on in school sometimes drives me insane.
"Found?" Aren't you the co-founder of this Trogger thing? I feel astroturfed.
Important note: JRuby has moved to git, and the svn repo may not give you the most current code.

http://github.com/jruby/jruby
It is up to the owner (and their terms and conditions, natch). But it should be opt-in, the same way any other sort of permissive content licensing is explicitly opt-in, and the same way it's bad form to take content that isn't permissively licensed and reuse it on other sites without explicit permission. There's no reason why taking comment content should be treated differently from taking article content.

Hijacking other people's content without permission should not be considered a business model.

And for all the people who have modded me down, why? Explain the flaw in my logic, or is it a case of "Well, I like it and he doesn't so I'll mod him down"?
> ‘Because hydrogen peroxide is considered a relatively unstable molecule, scientists have always disregarded this step, deeming it implausible; but we have shown otherwise,’

Worth remembering when you're trying to do something new.

Anyone know if the metal/organic catalyst is toxic?
I only know dice.com where PT jobs sometimes show up.

What are job boards that cater towards part-time gigs? Also, if someone on HN knows of a startup or are looking to hire themselves, I'd be happy to send you my resume.
Microsoft is a shining example of this. You may or may not like them or their products, but you cannot deny it worked for them.
If they don't understand something, I'd say it's having the libraries, but I think they understand that.
Because you want to be able to pass it to functions that expect Hash semantics?

Yay weak typing! cough
I think the easiest way to be successful in sales is to align yourself with a product/service/solution that you believe in and that provides value to the people who pay for it. This applies whether you are talking about a traditional sales role or more generally the idea of being better at "salesmanship".
Aren't you describing pop music in general?

Yeah, to me "all calories and no nutrients" is pretty much the definition of pop music. Ear candy.
My favorite of company twitter usage is from Kogi (http://twitter.com/kogibbq) - They use it to tell people where their Korean BBQ Taco trucks are around L.A.
> More than 20% of the 292 of the self-made American billionaires on the most recent list of the World's Billionaires have either never started or never completed college.

Only ~25% of Americans over 25 hold a bachelor's degree. If 80% of self-made American billionaires completed college, then assuming it was the only factor, your chances of becoming a billionaire are dramatically better if you have a degree.
It's a catalyst, not an enzyme (enzymes are biological), and there certainly are man made ones.
The real-time search makes it easy to find people to lay off.
It amazing how a news distribution company is so bad at disseminating news within its own company.

It's also sad that we can add one more company to the list of those that refuse to innovate and restructure their business models when the surrounding environment changes.

Finally, it would do AP some good to empower the employees going after someone distributing copyrighted content to use sense and reason when handling these situations. If the AP employee had done a small amount of homework, or approached the situation with the mindset that the radio station should be allowed to explain itself, there might be a better way to handle it. Kind of like that 'I Want You to Apologize' article on the front page last night.
a) Talk to your friends.

b) Great involved with an open source project, which will give others experience working with you so they can recommend you into a position

c) http://jobs.37signals.com/

d) Call Ruby/Rails development companies w/ good code & tests ready to show

e) I don't know if this is ethical or even legal, but you could find a partner and ask them to pay you minimum wage to solidify your part-time requirement

f) Get creative. Come on man, you're a Ruby guy!
Company Caught in Texas Data Center Raid Loses Suit Against FBI
Eep, I am sorry for that. Yep, I am on of the founders of the site, but not the writer of the post. I was working on the site when we made an announcement about Trogger to some of our SFbeta attendees, and "found" that post from a few days ago and saw it hadn't gotten many informative responses. Was hoping people here could help me out - since I do twitter for our sfbeta event.

Sorry to leave you with some nasty scabs there. :(
They post a lot of jobs on craigslist, but be aware that employment posts in silicon valley is down 55% from last year
_why's done some work on this:
http://github.com/why/potion/tree/master

Scoped mixins. Basically, you can modify
object behavior within a scope. So changes
to core classes can be localized.
++ INCOMPLETE ++
A Grad Student's Day
Hydrogen peroxide? It will break down into water and oxygen molecules very quickly in the presence of sunlight, so I don't really deem it to be toxic.

However, as H2O2, it is corrosive.
"businesspeople are the heroes"

No. Just no. Businesspeople are useful, but, by definition, not heroic. Heroic is something else: not counting the cost.

There is also an important difference between hacker and huckster.
Gee, what a surprise. Develop alternatives to Apple, whack Apple into submission then "reward" the alternatives by making them join Apple with price increases. I think they just don't understand their market and the times... Charging more for pretty much anything digital (or computer-related) is a hard, hard sell.
Well, yeah if you click twice to see the 1000x1500 versions.
Why are you linking to your site with 3 comments when you can make self-referencing "Ask HN" post?
Sure. But I do think it is more heavily produced and optimized to be catchy than ever before. There is a quantitative, though not qualitative, difference.
I think what you really wanted was to get people from HN on your site as a way to get users and possibly buzz.

If all you wanted was to find out about how companies are using Twitter you could have posted an "Ask HN" asking just that question.

If you want feedback about your startup you can post an "Ask HN" about that, too, but don't go pretending that you weren't just playing for traffic.
This case would be very surprising if it got far, couldn't the mother have carried the gene as well? The website linked in the article says it is not always presented in characters, and another thing wouldn't they have to test the 13 year old sperm to prove something was wrong with it?

Very odd to me.
They didn't make it obvious and it comes off as they just want to rummage though all my accounts. It turned me off to them rather quickly.

Right after I signed up they started Beacon.
Sorry to hijack the discussion. But I was wondering, why do you need a part-time job to stay legal? Doesn't EAD allow you to work just on your startup and still be in legal presence?
AFAIK, no, I don't think you can work for yourself.
When did it do that? I was in pretty early, but dont remember that one....woulda been nice!
And who could forget Zuck's photo up in the upper right corner. :D
These countries need their own Hulu and other sites like it!

I never download anymore. Have no need, as 90% of the stuff I want to watch I can stream. I can wait for the other 10 %.
They don't understand why "expressive, readable, writable" code is a good thing? I doubt that very much. I think their definition of those terms just differs from yours.
Welcome to the internet. Are you at the mercy of others? Yep. Is this legally dubious? Sure. Is everybody syndicating and remixing away? Hell yeah. Welcome to a world where you can pay for the privilege of being copied, just so your name spreads more widely.
http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-03-26-03-16-33-soc

I'm reminded of websites that don't want others to link to them. Or of the losing battle of the RIAA. You can waste your breath fighting it. Or you can focus on how to keep people listening to you.
I remember reading an article in Software Development magazine a while back about it. He's had this Stupid Fun Club for a while. Crazy stuff. I love the "Sad robot"

"Wright: Are you running that … weapon? I don’t know if we want to sit here. [A dancing snowman on a wheeled platform with a circular saw mounted on its front bumper approaches a plastic toy-store robot.]"

"Dr. Dobb's | Inside the Stupid Fun Club | March 1, 2004"
http://www.ddj.com/architect/184415104
I might be wrong, but I believe you can. Im talking about EAD obtained through a pending GC process. I guess, the caveat is you need to pay yourself some salary and your role in startup has to be similar to the one you applied with.
Even with EAD obtained thru F-1, I have heard lot of people working on thier startup without working anywhere else.

Im sure you must have looked already, but might be worth checking on the rules. And also post them here :)
Is this REALLY where books are going? Personally, I still can't imagine giving up a book for another screen in my life. But talking to my hacker-ish friends, I seem to be in the losing end of the spectrum. :(
Can you incorporate and then hire yourself?
Just curious was he a co-founder?

EDITED TO ADD: Just noticed, I guess his brother replied in one of threads below.
Voted up because I'm literally writing a term paper on the wine industry right now (procrastinating on HN) and will use this article in it somewhere. Thanks.
Youthful Discretion - Why Youth Is A Stunning Entrepreneurial Advantage
Huh, that's interesting (and new to me). I think the caveat might be a thorn -- if that is true, and if you have to pay yourself a salary similar to or in the same pay scale as the position, then I'm out of luck :)

I'll look around and see what I can dig up on this.
It's a kludge so that people don't have to write:

if hash[:a][:long][:key][:chain].is_a?(SafeNestedHash::UndefinedHash)

Instead they can just say:

if hash[:a][:long][:key][:chain].nil?

If the nested hash IS defined it could be any type under the sun, therefore a method has to be defined on object, and nil? seemed the only reasonable choice.
Great, I'll be on the lookout!
The search makes it easy to see when users are having issues with my webapp.

Of course that assumes Twitter is working itself at the time... which sometimes it's not.