skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(a) I'm not a believer in zero tolerance. If you reduce the argument to a zero tolerance scenario, you'll secure my agreement. But we won't have learned anything about the many, many scenarios that aren't zero tolerance situations. It'll be a superficial win.

(b) I recognize that kids use violence because they're too dumb not to. I have an appropriate level of tolerance for that. But that doesn't address my point: this "teach them to fight back" stuff is teaching them to act stupid, to play to lose, on a bully's terms, and to handle conflicts in ways that won't help them in adulthood.

(c) Your "sophisticated" forms of bullying stretch the definition of bullying and transform this into a semantic discussion. Beaurocratic infighting is a valuable adult skill. If there was a class in it I could sign my kids up for, I would.

(d) I probably agree more than disagree on your "self worth" argument. I'm not an advocate for "run and cry" either. But if you're subjected to an unwarranted physical assault as an adult, you're a sucker if your only response is physical self defense. You're also doing the rest of your community a disservice.
All but one of my jobs I've gotten without any connections.

Out of college I worked for IBM. Initial contact was at an engineering job expo. I had interviews on campus and then on site.

After that I submitted my resume to Xanga.com on a whim. I had a phone screen and then an on site interview.

From there I got a job at a law firm where my wife worked (the only connection based job I received).

Google found me via LinkedIn. I had two phone screens and an on site interview.

A recruiter found me via LinkedIn looking to fill a position for some other company. I told him I wasn't interested but from our exchange he picked up that I would like to work closer to home. When an opportunity at OpenX came along he contacted me again, and I did two phone interviews and then an on site.

In my experience LinkedIn is a great way to have jobs find you. Being able to interview well helps seal the deal - to do that you have to know your stuff and be able to present it well.
One would hope that most people understand that life is slightly more complex than that.

Negative situations are a part of life. They make us who we are. Even if we could eliminate bullying entirely, we would also eliminate all of the valuable lessons that a child learns from the experience. This is not to suggest I support bullying at all; you don't learn how to ride a bike without falling, and you don't learn confidence and action without being challenged.
I just don't get why Apple doesn't just sell a higher-priced, unlocked iPhone, so that you don't have to get yourself screwed by your local carrier.
I can't seem to find a way to change the title - can you please help? Thank you.
In the altogether likely event that the circumstances that started an office fight are ambiguous, if you respond physically to a low-grade physical assault, you are very possibly going to get fired yourself.
MPedigree: Detecting Counterfeit Drugs in Third World Countries
Why Google Bothered to Appeal a $761 Small Claims Case (and Won)
Ask HN: Software Key Generation - Best Practices?
What are the current "Best Practices" for the following Software Key Generation scenario?

I am a small independent software vendor. When a vendor sells my software to a customers, I want them to visit my web page (PHP/MySQL) to generate a new "Software License Key" that they provide to the customer.

When the customer first starts the application, they enter their Name and Key, and the application "phones home" to validate the key.

I am very interested in recommendations for precisely how to generate they keys, and any common errors or security risks. Obviously, we want to avoid crackers being able to generate fake keys. We also need to prevent crackers getting into the key-generation web site and gaining access to the database, or tricking it into generating new keys (without being an authorized vendor). It would also be nice if there was a way to check (without phoning home) that a key is "probably" valid (such as, it has the right checksum, and is not on a blacklist hard-coded into the latest version).

Any tips and references in this area would be appreciated.
I've gotten my first job ever after being contacted by a recruiter (at 17, as still a high school student no less!). Got my first position out of college with no connection (applied online, during my senior year, in response to an ad on my university's CSE department's web page).

Left that job to go to a start-up where I was introduced to the founders through a connection. The problem is that (initially to me) the position didn't seem sufficiently technically challenging to me (standard LAMP development), so my connection ended up both a) "selling" the position to me b) "selling" me to the founders (who in turned tried harder to convince me that the position would be interesting).

That's always a sticky issue with referrals: they give additional reasons for hiring a person and a additional reasons for the person to accept the position. The company will feel the referring employee will be happier and more productive if his friend/former co-worker is hired; the referred connection will want a chance to work with someone they already knew and enjoyed working with. Problem is that these reasons can detract from the real questions at hand: "is this person a good fit for the position" (for the employer) and "is this a position where I know I will be happy" (for the employee). Neither side should be trying hard to sell themselves. Note: obviously I am talking about engineering vs. sales. In sales the candidate should be selling themselves (they're expected to sell the product) and should have built up a rolodex of connections in the industry.

When it came time to leave the start-up (due to the office moving out of my reasonable commute range and lack of technical challenge meant I wasn't interested in moving yet again), I applied to four companies (three of them big names, one a mid-sized start-up)-- two by sending in a resume in response to online job ads (Dice.com, LinkedIn), one by a contact from a recruiter, one through a referral. Got interviews from all. Got offers from three and (after more sleepless nights than I imagined) chose one-- the one position I didn't get an offer for was the one where I was referred (yes, it was Google).

All of this happened in Summer/Fall of 2008, as the market was crashing. So, your mileage may vary. My tips are this: write your resume smartly (show that you're competent, don't tell) tailor the resume (and especially) the cover letter to show that you're passionately interested in that specific job. If you use the UDP Multicast method of sending a resume (blast out 100 copies of it to 100 different positions), as expected with UDP Multicast, don't expect it to be processed. Apply only to jobs you (judging from the job description) feel you will be happy to do (which will make displaying passion and interest in that position very easy).

Here are some good resume tips (although I've read them after writing my resume): http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightl...

http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/09/26/steve-yegges-resume-ti... (in case your response towards the first link is "TL;DR")
I got my current job--my first out of college--without any connections. It's a kernel programming job. I got it because I was able to talk intelligently about writing distributed systems and what a node-local kernel can do to facilitate distributed user-space applications.

That said, never underestimate the power of connections. I got my first internship because I "knew a guy who knew a guy". You never know when your scoutmaster or soccer coach or parents' friend from church or whatever unlikely acquaintance is going to end up working for (or founding!) the company that can provide you your dream job.
Printer friendly version: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090601/joel-spolsky-a-visit-to...
Yes. According to http://www.polishmywriting.com (which is mine):

Try: "A Unified"
A and an are indefinite articles. An indefinite article is an adjective that says you want any of some noun. For example "I want a pony" means I want any pony.

You select a or an based on the sound of the first letter of the following word.

If the first word starts with a vowel sound you use an. If the first word has a consonant sound use a.
Give Women Guns
ah nice, yeah it seems like internships during college is a good first step since the barrier to entry is a bit lower ... from there you can start building your network
The Battle Over the "Battle of Fallujah" videogame
Oh. Oops. Of course you are right. That was pretty dumb of me : /
Confidence is good. Ability to physically defend yourself is good. Assault and battery is bad. Also: a crime. Your response to crime shouldn't simply be to mitigate its impact on yourself.

Someone breaks into your house. You're armed. You prevent them from stealing anything. Having mitigated the crime, do you then let the situation drop? Of course not.

Same situation. The homeowner isn't armed. Should they have been? Probably not. If you aren't extremely comfortable with firearms, you shouldn't own them.

But bullying is nowhere nearly as bad as burglary! That's probably true. But the logic is the same. At some point, the situation has escalated to a point where rugged individualism is no longer the answer.

Are there a lot of low-grade situations, particularly on a playground, where escalation to the school board isn't warranted? OF COURSE. That's why we use the term "escalation": there's a spectrum of responses. But in my case, none of those responses involves encouraging physical violence, or tolerating violence of any level directed towards my children.
I know someone else with a similar story to yours. One of the brightest security folks I know and no degree. Yet he is still involved in very important projects and no one would ever question his contribution.
As always: business. AT&T is effectively paying Apple to prevent that very scenario.

AT&T is weathering the downturn relatively nicely thanks to their exclusive deal with Apple. The ~$200 check they cut Apple per 2-year contract is paying for that exclusivity plus like-advertising.
Thanks for pointing that out guys. I've changed the title.

P.S. It's sad that we're discussing this rather than Yip.
A job that you got via connections who know and trust your technical ability is an earned job.
You can't learn to ride a bike if you're afraid of falling. You can and must be able to attend school, even if you're afraid of physical violence.
PHP introduces "goto"
This seems highly context dependent. In the SF schools I've been in, you'd get your ass handed to you by 8-15 other people if you did this to the wrong person. Also, if you hit someone with a chair you're going to get expelled, even in the public schools.
in the end, the market suffers because consumers are complacent

I believe you're projecting your own preferences here. Unless you have evidence to suggest that the average iPhone owner is not happy with his purchase, saying "the market suffers" is a bit much.
yep i agree. it's not like you just got the job cuz your father owned the company or something outright nepotistic
This is awesome! As I've mentioned before, the Google Translator team is just as interested in collecting data as they are improving their algorithms. Besides the obvious wins for Wikipedia, this helps out people translating private documents. All of the data clearly gets soaked up into the vast sea of parallel corpus and improves overall translations. Amazing!
1. Get machine fingerprint based on hardware id of the devices. Use your judgment on which one you want to include.
2. Create a one way hash, with a salt. Store it locally.
3. Call home with this key to activate the product.
4. Every once in a while check the finger print again to see if it has changed if it has redirect to the activation page. This would happen only if the hardware changed.

I am assuming that the people won't direct access to this logic in your PHP application. I don't use PHP so don't know if you can pre compile your app.
I play guitar and drums. I did the band thing 15 years ago and had some local success with a band called Uncle Knucklefunk. Our high point was opening up for Ace Frehley (who had no desire to even say hi to us by the way, which was devastating for our other guitar player whose idol was Ace.)

Now I play drums more than guitar, just because I enjoy it more. I have two boys who are both amazing on drums. The funny part is that I didn't teach them much. They learned by playing Rock Band and they're both better than me now.
It sounds good, but I don't see why he needs to curse in his introduction. I almost stopped reading. It's unprofessional and unnecessary.
Funeral Home Blogging
making backups secure from attackers that have root access is a pretty hard problem

Tarsnap handles this easily with restricted keyfiles. :-)
It's possible, I suppose, but I have a hard time imagining such a situation. What do you mean by low-grade physical assault? I'm not talking about an accidental touch or bumping.

IMHO, there is no "low-grade physical" assault in an office environment, because physical interaction of any kind is so frowned upon. What would be low-grade in the playground becomes "are you insane?" in an adult office setting.
It's better as a language than as a templating system, sad to say.
Mapping Twitter followers
soon apple will be on the line for being anti-competitive for having a large app store, a market which they created.

as microsoft stock continues to tumble, we'll see more stories like this. i tried to place a short-sell order for MSFT today and was greeted with the message: Currently, there are no shares of MSFT available for shorting.
Oh FSM I love it when someone gets it exactly right!
Google Syncs Google Apps With Outloook
I wasn't trying to beat you up, I just saw it as an opportunity to talk about myself which apparently is something I like doing. Does this make me a bad person? Yes.

Ok, two minutes have passed and I just returned from your website. I really wanted to talk about you for a minute (since this is your spot). I think what you're doing looks neat. I also like the Zed Shaw style chutzpah in your announcement. However, I'd consider shying away from the expletives and find other words to convey your edgy personality without reflecting negatively on your professionalism.
I am a system administrator for forsalebyowner.com/ I got this job the old fashioned way, by sending out resumes for job ads on the internet.
"NATO's mandate is to provide a common defence for the European and Atlantic areas."

The simple truth is most of the US military spending is domestic in nature. Historicly military benifits (heathcare, education etc.) vastly outweigh spending on classical peacekeeping missions. Toss in R&D which has little to do with defending our allies and the numbers just get silly. "As of 28 February, 2009 1,454,515 people are on active duty[12] in the military with an additional 848,000 people in the seven reserve components." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_armed_forces) compare that to the numbers from 10 years ago and you will notice that the armed forces have grown little to fight 2 wars at the same time.

PS: I am currently typing this from an Army machine. Which is limting what I am willing to say.
F that!
The competition has had that stuff for ages.

Which just goes to show how little those things mattered. The theory is those things are "basic", but the reality is that the company both succeeded and surpassed the competition without them.
Product blog update: API developer list, iPhone app for Backpack, etc.
I assume you need access to iPhone hardware features (microphone, etc). Unfortunately, you can't do that through mobilesafari.

Check out the iPhone SDK for more info:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
We can not, from within the system, conclusively prove that we have found the correct laws. For all we know, in a thousand years, the laws of physics will completely change, with absolutely no clue given in advance. And I don't mean different vacuum states or anything like that, I mean, completely different physics. We can't prove it won't happen, only be Bayesian-very-sure it won't, which isn't the same.

However, nothing necessarily stops us from determining the laws of physics all the way to the bottom. There's no contradiction there, only a question of whether they are "too far" away for us to see them or we are unable to gather enough information, not because it is fundamentally impossible to figure out the substrate you are running on but simply because the substrate itself happens to be too fuzzy to tell. Already, we're to the point where if you built a universe off of the standard model and added some hacks to cover the cases where we know it doesn't work, you could probably build a correct-enough simulation to support life.

(Also, rather than posting again: I strongly disagree with the author's claim that the real world is more complex than math. Math is radically, infinitely more complex. The real world is a vanishing subset of possible mathematical structures, regardless of what shape it takes.)
Fedora 11 has been released
I was weaned on file systems and databases which did not have any facilities for stored procedures and triggers, so I learned how to build applications without them

There are many things wrong with that article (I actually doubt that he's ever written a stored proc on a real database) but that sentence sums it all up. It's the same stupid argument that compilers can't generate good code, use assembly language. Or dynamic languages are slow, stick to binaries.

Plus, "evil"? I'm watching Channel 4 News right now, they are reporting on brutality in the Nigerian security services. So when I see some spoilt little geek whining about having to step outside his comfort zone and learn a new skill, I can't take it very seriously.
Good fiction! I think some pieces could be inserted in some hi-tech serials and even books.
Don't dismiss him so lightly. There's a huge difference between infrequent bullying and sustained bullying. As you say, sustained bullying is abuse (in its modern sense), though we often use the words interchangeably.

Imagine that you're in a situation where you're thrown together with people who if they even see you will try to do something nasty to you. Now imagine that happening every day, for years.

I can see how it would change someone.
I thought some of them seemed very useful. I liked the invention to lift manhole covers (http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepren...) and the BidMyCleaning.com idea (http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepren...).
both their domains are for sale too.
Are you fucking kidding me? He's the person who has spent months of his life coming up with his free and open source software, then just giving it away. And who on earth says "curse"? Are you like 70 years old?

"Unprofessional"? What the hell are you talking about? It's free software you nong, that's F.L.O.S.S. and until you release your own blockbuster "professional" library, you can put a sock in it.
use scp instead.
How exactly do you want your kids to respond to bullies?

Any solution that relies upon "implicitly trust authority" is even more flawed, because most bullies in the adult world operate under the color of authority, and while you won't get away with punching a pushy cop in the face, you do need the confidence to tell him to kindly get himself a warrant or leave you the hell alone.

Sometimes, even adults in the real world need to physically defend themselves from criminals. This holds doubly true for women.
Ask HN: Can I pay someone to come up with a good start-up name?
I know, call me lazy if you will. But coming up with good names is very time consuming. Is there an online service that I could use that can help me come up with "really" good names relevant to my start-up idea? I tried various name generators and they don't do the trick for me.
If you're subjected to physical assault as an adult, you're totally helpless if physical self defense is outside your repertoire.
sometimes yes, sometimes no. i know just as many people who've gotten jobs/contracts/etc because they shook the right hands as people who've gotten jobs because of their technical excellence.

it can be hard to know which is which sometimes.
Ok, I finally see what you're saying. What if your son doesn't tell you?

To press charges, you need to know what's happened, and who's responsible. You may never get this info. I know of people who were viciously bullied, but put on a brave face and never let on to their parents. This kind of situation can go on for years, by which time the lasting damage is done.
(a) Fair enough.

(b) Kids are not dumb. They use violence because it's a viable form of intimidation, particularly for males. Adults use violence too. Violence is alive and well in most blue collar male dominated jobs. The act of not being an easy target is specifically addressed by fighting back. You can't project an image of "If you screw with me, I'll make life difficult for you" as an adult if you aren't taught this as a child. This has a huge value every damn day you are not mugged, picked for a car-jacking, or otherwise selected by those people looking for easy targets.

(c) Physical violence is a subset of bullying in pretty much every standard definition. The reason for this is that males tend to solve their issues through force, while females tend to use other methods. If you separate only the male response as something worth addressing, I think you are missing the underlying nature of bullying.

(d) If you punch me, even now as an adult, you're getting your ass kicked; or I'm going to at least hurt you as bad as I can. That being said I don't think I've been punched since I left the army 13 years ago (And before then, probably once or twice in high school). I'd like to think that's because most people - even those inclined to resort to violence - can instinctively tell that would be a bad idea, or at the very least, a difficult task.

As an aside a story:

In 2001, I moved to Vancouver, BC. I was about 26 at the time. As I lived next to the beach, I decided one night to go for a stroll. It must have been about 11-12PM or so. The path by the beach was dark and away from the street down a hill, and at this time of night, almost devoid of people. I liked the water though and being new to the city felt relatively safe. As I was walking, I approached two men (probably late teens early 20's on a bench). One had a bike and one was on foot. As I got closer, they both said nothing to each other. The one on the bike started to ride on the path towards me. At this point I could see they were the stereotypical young b-boy punks. The guy on the bike got closer, slowly. I looked him straight in the eye as he passed and heard him circle around behind me.

I kept on walking, same speed and gait. As I passed the guy on the bench, I looked him straight in the eye as well. You could feel the tension, but I pretended I didn't and just kept walking. The guy on the bike stopped at the bench, now behind me and that was the end of it.

I'm convinced that those two goofs were up to no good. They concluded however, that I wasn't worth their time.

Take it for what it is, but don't ever think for a second that you aren't part of the jungle of primal human behaviour that is very much alive and well.
Companies don't want their employees to connect to the guest WiFi. Google might have configured the WiFi connection manager on their employee workstations to not allow connections to the guest network, and maybe MS though THAT would be a "waste of time," hence the different tact.

Microsoft also probably doesn't want employees to connect their personal devices the the guest WiFi -- very normal behavior.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com)
I got a job with the USMC at 17; since then, I've been all syn, syn/ack, ack: Connection-oriented.