skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The politically correct and their defenders engage in Crocodile Humor, the laughter of the powerful at the powerless[1]. It is an ugly thing to behold.

"Many UR readers have had the priceless educational privilege of growing up behind the Iron Curtain. These readers will identify Professor DeLong’s tone at once: it is the tone of the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil[2]. I will take the liberty of Anglicizing, and call it “crocodile humor.” Extremely educated readers may also be familiar with the Nazi variant, as found in Der Stürmer and the like. The material is different, of course, but the tone is unmistakable. We’ll hear a good deal more of it in the next four years.

Crocodile humor is the laughter of the powerful at the powerless. It is not intended to be funny. It is intended to intimidate. Those who laugh, as many do, are those who love to submerge themselves in a mob, feel its strength as theirs, chant and shake their spears as one."

[1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/preside...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krokodil
I guarantee that a bro with this kind of lack of self-control and awareness who has made it to CTO has been the beneficiary of a lot of informal affirmative action and quotas.

"At least three cool dudes that I can drink at lunch with? Check."
Solve which problem? Adding laws could solve the very small problem of "NSA crypto being trustworthy crypto for use by anyone other than the NSA." Obviously my proposal won't solve any large problems (like making the organization I dubbed the CSA stop... doing the stuff it does; which implicitly further requires that the government stop wanting them to do that stuff.) But specific problems have specific solutions.
`man 7 charsets` is a great read which recommends checking out the pages for console(4), console_codes(4), console_ioctl(4), ascii(7), iso_8859-1(7), unicode(7) and utf-8(7).
True, though it should be pointed out that "hold a property long term" may not necessarily involve living in that property long term.
That's a very good question. We're not a social network or a game, so most people come to us to solve a specific problem: they don't like their Google results. We have a free product because we realize many people simply want to be more visible, they want to make sure their portfolio or linkedin profile actually shows up. Other people have more to promote or are trying to bury something embarrassing. These are the people who use the product more and pay for premium.

To answer your questions

"How many converted to paying"
--about 3% converted to paying, which is slightly lower then our normal traffic (4-5%). A lot of the "non-converts" were part of the foreign traffic we eventually moved to a wait-list until we can enter those markets with a more strategic plan

"How many retained"
--This is an interesting question. Most people used the product, 3% paid. Remember, our product is meant to be free, so many people do some upfront work and then just check their email progress reports to make sure everything is still OK. Our email open rates have never dropped below 60%, so many people are retained in the sense that they check those emails. We'll have people who signed up during that surge that will pay us for the first time today based off one of those emails

"How many told their friends"

About 75% of users tell somebody else. This is based on a user survey. The problem is, almost all of them tell people in person. They tell them over dinner, or at an event when someone mentions their Google results. We haven't figured out a way to capture that same rate through online vehicles.
A bit further down the page, they cite Zapier

"Over a representative time period, Zapier polled for changes 30 million times but only took action on 460,000 of those polls (1.5% efficient)."
So, I must live and die by this ideaology because my company buys into it for raising share prices, even when I am not at my workplace? I don't think so!
Great! Glad we can just discount an extreme attention to detail but also the ability to look past the trees to see the forest. I'm sure that having the knack for seeing an opportunity and jumping at it is pretty much just a blip on the radar. And the ability to convince your friends & coworkers that your dream is do-able and great is second to just shrug luck.

There are some billionaires who inherited their money. There are some who lucked out with investments. Your last statement makes no sense. What sets them apart from the rest of the population definitely does involve their "wonderful qualities".

Sure, luck plays a big role in things. It takes a combination of other things too: hard work, an unwillingness to settle for "meh, good enough", an ability to convince other people (employees, investors) to believe in you and the ability to know your own weaknesses and bring in people to solve those weaknesses. Let's not just lump these all into the "and the rest" category.
It's not usually installed by default, but tree will do this: http://linux.die.net/man/1/tree

Available in most repositories, source code available at: http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/
After grad school, I shopped around all the sawmills in the state, bought the materials, designed and built a 2500 sqft log home. No mortgage, awesome house. It is out of town, on a great 5 acre wooded lot.
I love the woods, with the deer, birds, etc., but it is a 20 minute drive to the office. On the other hand, the only debt I have is a student loan.
Basically we're taking webhooks and adding a RESTful subscription layer to it. This way users don't have to go copy and past webhook urls into other applications... the applications they use automatically create and destroy the subscriptions for them.
I'm sorry - I misread the following quote as the OP offering suggestions to the teacher to turn it into a teaching moment. Upon a second reading I realize that your interpretation is correct, they didn't raise it to the teacher. I'll correct my prior note.

I consulted with friends — female developers — and talked to my daughter about how to handle the situation in class. I suggested that she talk to you. I offered to talk to you. I offered to come talk to the class. I offered to send one of my male friends, perhaps a well-known local programmer, to go talk to the class.
IMNSHO not sustainable: copycats are likely to spring up, narrowing your profit margin.
No, you don't get it. Quit saying you do.
Yes within the company we've adopted a motto "customer service is the most underrated marketing channel". I think this is what has driven most of our steady growth which comes through word of mouth
Isn't that the idea though, perhaps their purpose is what allowed them to survive? Hard to wrap my brain around..
I imagine VB classes came for the most part in the mid to late 90s where it made GUI applications nice and easy. Compared to console applications and Logo, it was a nice way to give a first-time programmer a more fulfilling experience.

I taught at a school with a VB 6.0 curriculum at the end of the last decade. The (veteran) teacher just continued using his old materials; he was a math teacher with some CS experience. He kept it because budgets were tight, everything ran snappily, and new computers and textbooks are expensive.

As long as a teacher is teaching programming fundamentals, it really doesn't matter (in the long run, educationally) what a student's first language is. They'll get it. Better to go with something that the teacher's good at and that interests the students.
Well this exact quote I read it as a commentary on how wrong is the "she was asking for it" rape explanation.
There was discussion, but it was flagged off the front page immediately.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/techs-grossest-website-hits-a-ne...
Khan Academy seems to have been getting a lot of criticism lately and I think this is a great response. People seem to expect perfect teaching tools from them over every subject immediately.

As a former employee of a not-for-profit I wonder if some of this comes from their not-for-profit status. If you run on charity dollars there sometimes seems to be an expectation that you will use resources 100% efficiently and do no wrong. If Khan was a startup would people be more forgiving of potential areas for growth?
Exactly. And it potentially opens up legal grounds, with evidence. Every member of the protected classes he has venomously disparaged, who applied for and didn't get a job (or was fired) to claim discrimination by him.
Practically, these are great, fair, and true points, and I agree with them. Idealistically, another side of me fucking hates this. Nothing would ever change, and humanity would never progress if we withheld our differences of opinion. At what point does an opinion become too extreme to share?
Better. That's practically the only thing that needs to be on the home page.

You also need to explain who you are and why you're doing this, too. Right now it looks like you have an interest in selling something but you never explain what it is. It reminds me a lot of those sites which sell some miracle product, and are deliberately very long and vague, and it ends finally with some button to order an ebook or something.
I tend to agree with the points you are making -- I certainly don't mean to derail this by a straw man argument, like it already happened above. But I think the importance of this particular incident is... well, somewhat overstated. Because:

> So, you see, I was all too familiar with what my daughter was going through, but I was unprepared for the harassment to start in high school, in her programming class.

Really? High school?

I went to high school, too. I distinctly remember how everyone was calling everyone else whatever they could. I've been called a faggot, a lunatic, a drug-addict, a bitch, a teacher's pet, a limp dick and a long list of other things, and I've been the target of a whole bunch of male stereotypes.

Like, you know, every fucking teenager on the planet. I cracked sexist jokes with other dudes -- hell, I cracked sexist jokes with girls -- and I've been the target of sexist jokes, too. Some of them were mean, some of them were in good spirit. Hell, at one point I was the only dude in a Latin class. Few things are more awesome than having the openly lesbian, short-haired colleague asking you whether you'd like to shine her boots and fetch her paper later (particularly after addressing you with "hey sissy" rather than your name).

But what the hell, that's what you do when you're a teenagers. We were a bunch of stupid fucks whose most important achievement in life was learning how to play the intro to Stairway to Heaven or trying to fuck while dead drunk. We insulted each other with no reason. Our behaviour was definitely unprofessional, because we went to school, not to work.

Seriously, if we're going to get upset and bring out the discrimination pitchforks every time a teenager says something mean to another teenager, we're going to be really busy. People are going to be mean to each other, particularly those who don't have this privilege of sheltered education.

I honestly sympathize with this young girl. Humour and sexist jokes apart, I had my share of insults and bullying because of a somewhat visible physical defect (one of my eyes isn't exactly agile). But being a good parent is not a good way to deal with this, no matter how much we'd like that, because it depends on other people being good parents, too.

My folks were awesome. Both were cultivated fellows, and my father was in the army and taught me how to punch. I got through school without traumas related to these experience using nothing but wits and kickboxing.
> REST Hooks itself is not a specification, it is a collection of patterns that treat webhooks like subscriptions.

Bummer. No matter if you like it or not, a collection of patterns with a name _is_ a specification, just possibly a poorly defined one. See the confusion in this thread. If it were a link to a spec, nobody would be confused.

> Skip the pedantic arguments about standards and implementation details

This reads to me as "everyone is going to have a slightly incompatible implementation. One library wont be good enough, I'll need to write a new one per site that uses this."

Furthermore, what about PubSubHubbub?

Finally, polling is great: Ive found few situations where it doesn't work well, people just tend to only do the most basic of implementations and blame polling. See http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/paper-tigers-and-hidden-d... for a really interesting example.

EDIT: numbers were real, added a supporting link
Thanks for summarizing.

The content would be a great deal more consumable (and sharable) in a blog post that didn't require 75 clicks to view all of the content.
A) "This guy is a lawsuit waiting to happen." Yep. As in... Either assign an intern to make my twitter updates for me or expect to get sued for wrongful termination and for me to finally set precedent about the limits of corporate policy with a goddamn federal lawsuit.

B) "There's plenty of other respectable talent out there." No there isn't. There are plenty of people who read hacker news and know what's trending today, but very few who can pinpoint what's going to be trending tomorrow or what a company can do to position themselves to be on the front page tomorrow.
Yeah, But he is not announcing anything on behalf of BI right? There is an implicit disclaimer that all views are his not his employers (I am sure atleast he thinks that way). Yes BI is entitled to fire him as it portrays them in bad-light in public but that wouldn't attract lawsuits (may be american law is fucked-up). I don't know.
Some of his other tweets are really bad, but I think this one is a legitimately funny satire of Mel Gibson. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/mel-gibsons-new-rac.... If The Onion had written it everyone would have had a good laugh and moved on.
cough Construct2 cough
Can you help me to not have any results in google about me?
Well, the nature of routing is such that, for communication between two VPS in a given datacenter, the traffic wouldn't really "go over the internet", but it ought to still help to have the internal traffic separated from the public side.
I really dig this idea. It would definitely provide startups with a chance to easier find product market fit by demoing and doing customer interviews in various different places around the world.
His views aren't the issue, his outspokenness is. How could a woman ever feel comfortable interviewing with this guy, let alone, working for him. What if said woman was a great fit for the company and had a lot to contribute? His ability to hire and fire effectively is compromised. Not because of his views, but because he couldn't keep his mouth shut about them.

Sometimes knowing when to shut the hell up is a far greater asset than being outspoken and opinionated. Especially about things related to your job...
Casetext seeking a CTO to help make all the world’s laws free and understandable
ABOUT US
Casetext's mission is to make all the world's laws free and understandable. To do this, we have amassed an enormous database of legal texts, starting with over a million U.S. judicial opinions. A community of law professors, lawyers, law students, and citizens interested in the law are annotating these cases, adding insight and explanations.

Casetext (YC S13) is disrupting an $8 billion legal research market currently controlled by a duopoly (Westlaw and LexisNexis) that has put access to quality legal information behind a paywall.

Casetext was founded by the former Presidents of the Stanford Law Review and the Harvard Law Review. We quit our cushy jobs at big law firms to start Casetext. We’re also coders, and built the site ourselves. Now we need a talented CTO to help architect our platform and build a world-class team.

YOUR ROLE
As CTO, you will help take on the interesting and difficult technological challenges faced in making all the world’s laws free and understandable. You will help build a search engine that accurately finds the best legal document out of millions, a community-based site based around annotating legal texts, and advanced analytics drawn from our immense and growing dataset of laws. As our first technical hire, you’ll also help build our culture and define how we work as a team.

As a key member of our team you will be rewarded with substantial equity and a great salary. We are based in the Bay Area (South Bay).

~Who we're looking for~
Our ideal candidate has:
- Extensive experience writing awesome code (Casetext is programmed in Python/Django, but if you're a Rails guy/gal we should still talk) and working with a complex back-end architecture.
- Experience building and growth hacking an online community (e.g. Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, Github, Stack Overflow, Yelp, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Experience with search, natural language processing, and analyzing large collections of data.
- Experience scaling a company and growing an engineering team, ideally as a CTO of another company.
- A desire to work in a fast-paced and challenging environment.
- A high value on shipping code rapidly and iterating.

Bonus points for:
- A belief that the making the law free and understandable has tremendous value to society.
- Being an active member of an online community (e.g. you are a Yelp Elite member, are a heavy Wikipedia editor, have a ton of karma on Reddit, etc.)
- An eye for design/UI/UX.
- An ability to communicate with both technical and nontechnical folks.
- A love of The Wire and/or Arrested Development.

~How to apply~
Shoot us an email at jobs@casetext.com.
ctrl-R in bash was mine.
Let me preface by saying: I LOVE DIGITALOCEAN... However...

For the past two days I have been evaluating a production system for my client base (which is primarily in the North Texas and Oklahoma Area. Here are my ServerBear results:

UnixBench score: 3453.0
I/O rate: 354.0 MB/second
Bandwidth rate: 24.5 MB/second
Bandwidth to Dallas: 1.4 MB/s

and

UnixBench score: 3906.2
I/O rate: 369.0 MB/second
Bandwidth rate: 17.2 MB/second
Bandwidth to Dallas: 4.2 MB/second

All in all, I decided to go with a managed Linode server. I'll be paying out the ass for it... but I think the bandwidth to my client base is more important.

EDIT: I host just about all of my other projects on DO and I love it :)
How is it hypocritical? I'm asking earnestly as I cannot understand that view point.
So what happens when this site gets popular and the owner decides to 'punk' all of the other sites by turning it into a content farm?

edit: or if they get hacked and the same happens
Ah, I must've missed that. Thanks!
Definitely. One thing I've noticed is that constant code churn causes a huge amount of instability in many software domains (cloud, desktop, phone). The problem is only getting worse and will continue to get worse as software runs more of our lives and the world. Apple is sending down updates all the time; Ubuntu is; Google is, etc. Nobody can keep track of what the hell they're running. It's a security nightmare.

There are so many components to systems now -- and not all of them need to change all the time. What I imagine, and what you seem to be hinting it, is that we have to do is factor software into processes which vary by the amount of code churn. Instead of having 1000 modules being patched every week, have 500 modules which change every 5 years, 300 which change every year, ... and maybe 2 or 3 which change every day. This would let us maintain the pace of software innovation.

Unix does this to some extent -- think about when you would have a REAL need to upgrade "grep"? Almost never. It's basically hardware at this point.

Likewise, with the architecture of Chrome and the Quark browser yesterday on HN, you could just update the rendering engine, or the JS engine, which run in restricted processes. Browser kernel updates could be separate, and verified separately.

Related paper I found interesting:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.180....

We are moving closer and closer to "ubiquitous computing", and I agree with that paper in that software upgrade has to be treated like a first class problem. Right now even the best vendors are too sloppy about upgrades and modularity. I am constantly being nagged for updates on every device, and at work I am constantly dealing with shifting sands underneath my code.
I'm not sure I see that bias. Did he ever indicate that he thought certain people were unfit for a job because of their gender, religion, etc.?
A thoroughly underwhelming post, in my humble opinion. Could have been summed up in 4 sentences rather than a whole post's worth of blogspam.
So, PubSubHubbub is not linked with RSS anymore and works with any type of data format, including JSON obviously :)

The quick win of PubSubHubbub compared to Resthook is that it has a 'security' mechanism in it, which means that the subscriber can be 100% sure that the service sending the notification is not someone impersonating it.

Aside from this, I feel like PubSubHubbub and Reshook solve the same problem: programatically setting up webhooks.
I don't think so. But it might be a great feature for enterprise BYOD/CYOD initiatives - having a two factor authorization integrated into the phone (fingerprint + application pwd) could give Apple a significant advantage here.

But what do you think will happen regarding police? If they can access your phone, they'll be able to take your fingerprints anyway. If they get access to the cloud data, there a more interesting parts in the data than the finger print hashes: Getting a few biometric data points from the cloud can be considered the same as a hash - its not the complete fingerprint that would be stored inside the cloud (and storage in the cloud would likely be optional). Some 3rd party can't even match the hashes to a real person - could be your child, significant other, ... using the phone registered to your name. Law enforcement, government, ... on the other hand have already access to finger prints (complete prints/sets) for a lot a travelers, citizens and of cause criminals.
Web Server Authentication Is Still Broken
Unless the parent is a sword swallower in the circus, your honest view will require no less than 2 Monty Python sketches to fulfill. so it is obviously sarcasm.
One of the more useful bits of ssh is not mentioned: remotely running commands.

Example:

ssh username@host "echo $HOSTNAME && sudo somecommand && cat somecommand.log"

There's probably a better way to do this, but in a pinch I can fix a problem on dozens of machines just by altering the host string.
It hasn't been released yet (still in development), but that is exactly what my employer (Knewton) is working on. It is still mostly under-wraps, but you can sign up to stay informed here:

http://learn.knewton.com/join
It happens any/every time gender is discussed on Hacker News.

There was a hackathon planned last year that boasted "women, booze & massages". Numerous threads about it were immediately flagged off the site. Same the Geeklist issue with a promo video that had a woman in her underwear.

It would be one thing if the HN community was capable of looking at these issues and having a reasoned discussion about them. But no, flagged immediately. Heroic hackers jumping on the gender grenade so the rest of us don't even have to think about it.
SAP gets serious in predictive analytics: buys KXEN
Protip, you can make emacs use mdfind with (setq locate-command "mdfind")[1]

[1]: http://emacsredux.com/blog/2013/07/05/locate/
(setq locate-command "mdfind")
dont tell people you are using freelancers, as far as they are concerned it is your "design team", make no claim to in-house people. they are coming to you as a one-stop shop so they dont need to deal with a graphic designer, web developer and SEO, they have a single poitn of contact and you are getting paid to project manage the freelancers.

whether it will scale is another question, but if you dont try you wont know and worst case scenario you drop back down to evening and weekends and little extra $$ in your pocket