skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, educate: I don’t want to die at 50. What do I do?

The first step is to think about who you hang out with.
There’s no silver bullet for longevity. I’m not gonna tell you to take a pill. If your three best friends are obese, there’s a good chance you will be. Surrounding yourself with people who don’t smoke or drink too much and who have a spiritual component in their lives has a profound impact over time. Cut out the toxic people in your life and spend time and effort augmenting your social circle with people who have the right values and a healthy lifestyle.

I don't know why, but this snippet brought Robert Greene's The 48 Rules of Power to mind: "Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky" (Rule 10). Of course, Greene's approach can be interpreted as a tad Machiavellian. But the message is still the same: watch who you're hanging out with. I've noticed that many of one's peculiar behavioral habits can be directly attributed to friends and acquaintances. It's interesting to see longevity talked about in the context of the people you spend time with.
I've been busy collecting data on all kinds of cluster file systems, this on looks like it's almost a drop-in replacement for amazons offering.

That by itself makes it an interesting development.
I think Ruby is great for writing code that reads like English and communicates its intent clearly, but when you need to read what the code actually does instead of what the author intended it to do, then Ruby is just as difficult to read as Scala.
Being part of the hive mind ...
Chris Anderson's Free Audiobook [zip]
What do you think of the user interface of this new website? Besides the server not being able to keep up with demand after today's news, it seems that there is a rather glaring lack of usability.
Yes, as long as they do so based solely on material, public information and report all transactions to the SEC.

Obviously, this is nearly impossible to police.
Great story. Thanks, sivers. Love the content that's coming from your blog; please keep it coming!
Lunar Eclipse and Total Eclipse July 2009 video | Buzz Online 24/7
This assertion is made almost entirely without support.

A good counterexample to his argument is Firefox itself.

(edit: although I do see HTML5 as being a potential threat to firefox and open source browsers in general if h.264 becomes the dominant codec for <video>, but this is another matter)
I don't think this guy was a quant at all, just a heavy-hitting programmer:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/aleynikov
I attempted to create a Wave variant with little success. The issue I had wasn't the use of XML and it's technologies like XMPP, but the fact that the strength of XML (tree-based DOM) was flatout ignored in the delta OT scheme. Combined with Javascript where I got to the point to where the only way I got it to work was recursively counting characters, recreating the demo in the IO conference video feels impossible.

This doesn't include criticisms like the weight of the protocol. Adding one character required an almost 200 character XML document. For a system of small messages like comments here on HN, it would be more efficient just to send a serialized state every second or two.
I think Chrome and Safari have both got a long way to go until they get the right mix of usability. I just switched back from Chrome to Firefox 3.5 and it's like putting on an old pair of very comfortable shoes. Chrome and Safari are definitely "designer" browsers, while IE is still slow as buggery.

Firefox hits the sweet-spot for me, and just about everyone I know (not just tech-savvy folk either). So long as they keep improving the way they have, I think that plus inertia will carry Mozilla for a while to come.
You should've called this "Yay-me!" instead of Karminator. The about page makes sense. The front page doesn't, really.
Social Security Numbering System Vulnerable to Fraud, Researchers Say
Google Will Star in Emerging News Model
I've had the opposite experience: Many frustrated friends have abandoned Firefox for Safari and Chrome. Very few of my friends ever use add-ons, either, and that's the only thing Firefox is good for anymore, what with its shitty UI and relatively mediocre speeds.
h.264 will probably just be a plugin away and just like that firefox is supported until the user reformats or gets a new computer

Firefox has good support by developers and I don't see anything changing until another browser becomes just as extensible and achieves the same developer niche. Not to say another browser won't take over the mass market though.
It's certainly interesting that mathematics created in the course of the string theory research program are finding application in the real world.
I'm sorry I misunderstood. You said "Most of the naming seems to be okay in matlab but sometimes it would be nice if you could tab and see a list of matches.", and I still don't quite see how I could have parsed that as "Mathematica doesn't have tab completion", but no matter.

Yes, the one-function-per-file rule in MATLAB is horrible. (Of course you can have one class per file and define many methods there, if you want.) As is just about everything else about MATLAB-qua-programming-language.
Betaspring
What do you think of YC clones/rip-offs? This one for example asks for 1% investment for limited legal advice and access to online incorporation papers. Do you think it's worth it?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Firefox is currently the most popular, yes, but Chrome's been growing (slightly) faster and it's still in beta, not to mention it has the full support of Google behind it. How profitable would Mozilla be if it wasn't being paid by Google? (That's not snark, that's a genuine question that I don't know the answer to.)

You can't offer Firefox as a counterargument when his point is that soon Firefox will begin to slip. Right now, it's arguably at its peak. It's competing with two browsers that really are seen as experimental among Windows users: Chrome is still in beta and doesn't support several things; Safari really only got production-ready on Windows with its latest version, and Apple hasn't focused much on promoting it yet. Firefox, meanwhile, has 6 years' community behind it, and inertia alone states that it'll spread as Internet Explorer disappears, and IE seems to be quickly dwindling.

The real thing to check is what the early adapters are using: Not the pure experimentalists but the people who are "browser enthusiasts", the people who recommend browsers to other people. Three years ago they were all recommending Firefox, myself included, and now we see Firefox is the dominant browser. Now, however, all the adapters love Chrome, and the elitist Mac snobs have shifted from loving Firefox to praising the much more native Safari 4, and for good reason. If we assume "a while from now" means 5 years, his argument is correct: Mozilla can't afford to compete with a company as talented, merciless, and rich as Google.
I think it will have noticable consequences when IKEA has to go, because this is not an isolated case. What kind of a signal does that send to other investors?
Stand back! I know regular expressions!
Cryptic error messages are frustrating, but there's no need to be nasty.

Wrong.

If you want to achieve anything then be nasty. Be an asshole. Be the goddamn pestilence. You want the two little red up-arrows in their ticket tracker, not the blue "deferred" orb icon or the green auto-responder checkmark.

You don't want to increment a number in the monthly customer service report sheet. You want the head of customer service walk up personally to his manager and wince something like "Yelp, the users are raising living hell over this issue".

There are ofcourse exceptions, some companies have excellent customer support and don't need that kind of treatment. But when dealing with a behemoth like amazon then that's the only way to get anywhere, in my expirience from both sides of the frontline.

Remember the poor helpdesk guy can not judge that this is a brown paper bag bug. A failed payment transaction should obviously provide more information than "Error. Period.". But how could he possibly know that? He can't.

So what does he do when the inquiries about insufficient error messages begin to pile up? He walks up to his manager, who doesn't have a clue about the technical pecularities either. He can only judge the inbound corpus by volume and intensity. Unless you represent a large customer your volume will always be 1. Hence your only leverage is in the intensity knob.
It's pretty well dismantled.

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html

http://www.thegreatcholesterolcon.com/The_China_Study.html
Professor Studies Social Customs in Video Games - Becomes Most Hated Player
Why is Facebook not putting on an F8 this year?
I recalled that at about this time the last two years Facebook had its F8 event, making announcements and releasing developer tools.

I'd expect that this year, Facebook would focus on the new "Twivacy" features and would hopefully release tools for developers to build for both Twitter and Facebook's public component at the same time.
Can you imagine how much cheaper the car manufacturers would have gotten off if they hadn't ripped Kearns off, and taken decades in court to fight the guy? The car companies played scorched-earth tactics with the guy, and I'm glad they lost.
You put too much of a focus on developers. Most people don't care about development within the browser, they care about development within web sites. The philosophy that the browser ought to merely be a window to other sites with as little chrome as possible has been advocated by Chrome's (and Safari's with the advent of Snow Leopard) multithreaded processes. To date, I have still seen no good reason to use extensions, and the majority of people I discuss web browsing with agree. (The biggest sticking points are Greasemonkey and Adblocker, and they're very minority points, particularly when projects like GlimmerBlocker work cross-browser and allow both extensibility and blocking.)
It is exactly because the "top x" title is a gimmick that I want it faithfully included in HN titles. This way, I know to not click on the link in the first place, as I typically avoid these types of list articles.
The title is misleading - Luna 15 has long been known about, and it didn't land on the moon before the Americans, but in fact a few hours after they landed (as both the telegraph article and the Wikipedia entry on Luna 15 show).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15
To clarify, I'm referring to an API that would be practically a carbon copy of a public microblogging API, without the need for expiring tokens, etc.

And now that Facebook has vanity urls, these I'm sure could be used as "handles".
I work for a "microsoft shop." This means that if there is an MS and a non-MS choice of technology, we'll always take the MS one. Consequently, F# is the only possible choice for a functional language at work.
-5 because he signed his comment with an initial? That's silly. He asked a question that led to a set of useful comments. Signing a name is a little silly, but I don't recall its being against HN etiquette and it's too minimal to be considered spamming.
I believe that in the past few years, Facebook has had fairly major releases which coincided with F8.

I personally think that now that the apps are mostly hidden from the main page, there are less developers focusing on the Facebook platform, so they might not have seen the value in putting on a big event like F8 when there isn't anything new to release, and they wouldn't get the PR/traffic from the event.
I didn't downvote you, but my suggestion was both rational and appropriate. Identifying the actual problem is always a good idea.

As to whether it was solicited, commenting in HN is a request for comments. That's what the reply link means.
> the more meat you eat, the earlier you die

Then why have lifespans gone up and heart disease declined all around the world in lockstep with animal protein consumption? Why do the two longest lived groups in the US (Mormons and upper upper Midwest whites) have high meat consumption?
No Rest for the Wealthy
Don't forget to write a real cover letter!
Seriously. As I get older I'm realizing that there are very easy ways to get smarter, more successful, more in shape, more active, etc., but I still find it hard to fully admit that a little hard work helps everything. It's made the "get-X-quick" industry a little irritating to me.
Could you please warn if you're going to link to a page that will launch a print dialog?

I appreciate not having to click through pages, etc. a little warning would just be nice.
Guys, I'm setting up a meetup for hackers that does this exact thing. It's right here: http://www.meetup.com/lets-build-something-together/ . Think of it as speed dating for hacker.

I'm still revising the text and doing some other things. I'm going to start promoting it soon. Please join if you're interested.
I'd love to hear your story when you've got time. WW isn't a site we hear a lot about on HN, and I've always been a little curious.
The author also thinks the birthday paradox doesn't apply to his hashes and that the assumptions an interviewer grants to an interview question can't be taken for granted. The author takes a dim view of convention.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=605126
Daniel Schmitt of WikiLeaks interviewed
From

1 1 1 1 1 = 5
1 1 1 1 2 = 1
1 1 1 1 3 = 6
1 1 1 1 4 = 2
...

you can see that an increase of 1 in the last digit will increase the answer by 5 or decrease it by 4, so it is an increase of 5 mod 9.

Similarly, from

1 1 1 1 1 = 5
2 1 1 1 1 = 8
3 1 1 1 1 = 2
4 1 1 1 1 = 5
...

you can see that an increase of 1 in the first digit will increase the answer by 3 or decrease it by 6, so it is an increase of 3 mod 9.

So the first digit is multiplied by 3 and the last digit is multiplied by 5. That rings a bell, since the last line is 3 1 4 1 5, which starts with a 3 and ends with a 5, so you must suspect that the second digit should be multiplied by 1, the third by 4, and the fourth by 1. Go over a few numbers, or all of the numbers, to check this out, and it works, so you can apply it to the last line and get the answer.
Startup job postings?
Hi HNers...I am wondering where a good place to post jobs in the startup space is. I can see that HN seems to have its job board restricted to YC companies only, so I won't plug our job posting here. But what sites would you target, if looking for a C# / Microsoft hacker (I know many of you do not work in C#, but still)?

I posted on craigslist in LA and SF and did campaigns on Google and Facebook for the job. I am wary of the big sites like Monster or Dice because they have produced a lot of crappy applicants for me in the past. There are so many little sites that I can't pick ones I think are going to work well. I considered TechCrunch but $200 an ad was just too much.

Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!
Good read, but the findings aren't surprising. We all know there are social rules that aren't set in stone but still adhered to. Being a dick online leads to people hating you. Past that simple fact, the details aren't that interesting, since hyperbole online is pretty easy. (See Kathy Sierra.)

It would be interesting to try to figure out how to handle social situations and encode them into a game. How do you stop somebody from abusing the system? The first thing that comes to mind is Super Smash Bros Brawl, which uses random situations to stop one player from being too much of an asshole. (When I play with my asshole friends, they disable items and force the level to the ultraflat Final Destination so as to be able to abuse the game most effectively - but in a more relaxed social setting, it's not as easy for an obsessive to completely mess with the other players to a point where the game isn't fun. Are there similar set-ups in any MMO?)
Guth's Grand Guess (2002)
Manufacturing Information for Software Engineers
Revealed: Self-help mantras leave you unhappier than before
Deciding whether or not to guess depends on the consequences of being wrong.
Vegetarians less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters, says study
These statistics do not show Firefox is the most popular browser as they are specific only to W3Schools which is primarily a developer/designer-trafficked site.

The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files

I'd recommend looking at StatCounter's chart of current browser stats (for the US) as of July 2009 (found this earlier today via TechCrunch): http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-US-monthly-200807...
After upgrading to 3.5 I thought the article was going to be about how memory problems are getting worse with firefox. It was using over 1gb today!
http://xkcd.com/208/
'Jackson ghost' caught on film
hehe, ok :)

I don't expect it to be close either, they're going to go skyhigh or they'll wither away, it almost has to be the one or the other. The real test is whether once they've maximized their reach they will manage to keep their users instead of go on a decline.

Every product has a lifecycle, so far there are only very few internet sites that have managed to beat that.

FB is a very good product with great timing, but for me personally it has already come and gone, it was fun for a while, then it became a distraction and then a drag.

They are still growing like mad though, but then again, so was myspace before they imploded.
If only there was actual sales data, this would be a gold mine.

If you'd just like to track the rank of arbitrary apps, go to http://majicjungle.com/news/?p=19
Last time I checked neither Safari, Chrome or IE ran on Linux. Opera is not in the Ubuntu repositories. Also I couldn't do without FireBug or AdBlock+. I am only qualified to speak for myself, but I expect I'll be using Firefox for a while still.
ok, I'll write it up and post it as a separate link, otherwise I'd really be hijacking this thread.
I think a lot of the "Man I hate PHP" sentiment is really directed at the corpus of programs written in PHP rather than the language itself. I think it's popularity and accessibility to novice programmers has left PHP with a legacy of badly thought out and unmaintainable code in production that may even be worse than Perl 4 (and Matts Script Archive) ever had to deal with.
10 Crowdsourcing Marketplaces for All the Designers and Freelancers
I'm glad to see Rackspace on that list. Not because I'm a shill for them, but because it's nice to see a more traditional technology business that's possibly the most profitable of those on the list trying to keep an innovative and forward-looking culture.
Surely you don't actually believe this isn't a hoax, do you?
Chrome is in alpha for Linux.
This is the exploit equivalent of that guy who played the perfect game (2008)
Faster MySQL Backup Restoration
More info:

* 285 MB ZIP files

* 21 MP3 files, 16 chapters

* title: The future of Radical price

I'm listening to it right now, so I don't have comments on the content yet
I've tried it, it is very useful. You get feedback within 24 hours, and the submission process is very short. Free for now.
Although the author says he solved it, he didn't; he made a guess and got lucky. Perhaps there's a subtle joke going on? (Or maybe it's not so subtle and I'm just being dim. Then again, I solved the puzzle in a couple of minutes and he apparently didn't.)

I don't think it's a terribly interesting puzzle.
It does seem to be rather fashionable to slate Firefox at the moment.

I've tried using Chrome and Safari 4 but have gone back to Firefox (on mac). It looks fine on a mac with the GrApple themes Fission and the PDF Plugin. The addons I use are few genuinely useful (lasttab, FireGestures).

Safari still doesn't even remember the tabs I had open last time.

I'm all for competition though, I just don't think that it necessarily means that Firefox will disappear. IE still has by far the largest share of the market.
Oh cool, thanks for sharing. I learn something new every day here...
I find the professor's conclusions a bit clueless. He was essentially a griefer. He saw himself as someone who was persecuted by the community for following the rules. But in something as complex as a MMORPG, the rules laid down by the developers are less important than the gentleman's agreements established by the community.

In short, people had fun doing it their way. They didn't have fun doing it his way. If what he was doing had no impact on others, people probably wouldn't care. But he was spoiling the experience for everyone he interacted with.
Why Security Pros Should Master Google
He believes it proved that, even in a 21st century digital fantasyland, an ugly side of real-world human nature pervades, a side that oppresses strangers whose behavior strays from that of the mainstream

Wait wait - so he knowingly violated all social norms, despite gentle attempts to correct him, and that proves there is an ugly side to fantasyland? It would have been more interesting if he had done something non-mainstream that did not impact on other players and seen if it would have gotten any abuse.

After all this is the essence of tolerance in real life - nobody expects you to be tolerant towards people who are shooting you; tolerance comes from a "live and let live" approach. Investigating the equivalent of that online would have been interesting, but it is not what he did here.

What he did here was the equivalent of say, farting in your face because it is "within the rules" (i.e. not illegal) and then act surprised when this made him socially excluded.
I think the article is useful, even though several of the links in the article are broken.

For example: Here is a wonderful tutorial on basic searches, provided by Google itself. should link to: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

And Here is an older CSOonline.com article that provides four searches you should run on your own company. should point to: http://www.csoonline.com/article/221133/_Google_Searches_to_...
>It’s very clear that the more meat you eat, the earlier you die. Cut out as much meat as you can.

Absolute nonsense. The only thing that has a clear relationship with extending lifespan is calorie restriction. The rest is very very unclear.

This guy finds a population, finds one thing they do that supports his preconceived notions of what makes you live longer, and then says that this population's behavior in this respect proves that this action makes you live longer.

So he finds a vegetarian culture that lives long and says OK vegetarianism makes you live longer. He finds a culture that drinks a lot of alcohol and says OK, alcohol doesn't limit longevity.

He finds a culture that eats a balanced diet, a culture that exercises a lot, etc. etc.

None if this is really any type of proof, and if you examine many different cultures, you will find his evidence is contradicted by other cultures (meat eating cultures that live longer and have fewer health problems than nearby vegetarian cultures, for instance).

Our knowledge of what helps humans to live the longest possible life is, sadly, very limited still.
<i>"It was reassuring to know the person who had fixed it was still on the aeroplane. What are the odds of something like that happening?"</i>

Between fare discounts for employees, the need to shuttle mechanics to where planes need fixing, the total number of airports and the overall popularity of the 757, I'd say pretty good.
Having A/B testing is better than not having it, and Website Optimizer is quick to implement and holds the hand of people who don't understand what an A/B test is yet.

However, because it is implemented in Javascript, the impact on page load times is substantial (download page A and assets, execute Javascript, download page B, actually see page). Since you will often want to use it on high value pages like, oh, your checkout funnel that is less than optimal.
What the heck are codes?
Not so fast, maybe relational databases aren’t dead
Very simple bot blocking utility in php and iptables