skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
4chan and Youtube comments are part of the internet. The ghetto parts, to be specific. The 4chan-style scum and villainy gets concentrated at 4chan, the Youtube-style tomfoolery stays on Youtube, and the rest of us can sit in our small splinter forums and have discussions without somebody yelling about how 9/11 was an inside job (WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!) or posting pictures of naked underage anime characters. There have always been a bunch of people in the world that you'd rather not live near, and it's the same way on the internet.

The real internet isn't HN, but it's also not 4chan or Youtube. The real internet is the internet -- the whole internet. Tautological but true. As long as there's always some readily-accessible part of the internet without troll problems, then I'd say we're doing okay.

The real progress, though, would be figuring out how those civilized parts of the internet can stay civilized. Some forums have a small population. Some forums have a strong sense of community and ban-happy moderators. Some forums have downvoting, although that doesn't seem to stop persistent trolls. If you've got a better way, discussing it would be fun.
Unfortunately, without more specifics, it's really hard to give specific advice (besides the obvious, and necessary: get a lawyer).

What do you mean when you say "I want to make sure that whatever I have done [...] remains mine"? Are you writing code? If so, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where you wouldn't you retain the rights to your own code. (Naturally, that doesn't prevent anyone else from implementing the same idea).

Clearly, you need to make sure your business plan can survive changes from the big company-- if your idea is that dependent upon what sounds like a loophole in their TOS, you're odds of success are slim indeed. How do you know they don't have a team working on an identical system now, ready to launch next week?
http://www.drunkenfist.com/304/2008/12/29/why-front-end-perf...
Tips for Web Forms
hey 20-somethings, stop complaining it might not happen in your lifetime and just pitch in. You could live another 70 years. Think about 1906 vs 1976. I'm almost 50 and I'm doing what I can. I almost definitely won't make it, but you guys have a 30 year extra chance. And if you don't, well fuck, your kids or grandkids will.

If you've had someone you love get old and sick and die, you know what I'm talking about. Get to work. It's not just about you.
There was a formatting problem with my previous comment. The statement "Nowhere near the power offered by LISP, but huge leap of convenience while writing in C++" was a footnote for "lambda expressions and closures." The asterisk got eaten when I posted the comment, :(
Can you ban or killfile him? With such a small population, the IRC channel could probably get away with blocking the whole IP address range that he could possibly occupy. You shouldn't have to put up with jackasses like that.

Seriously, bans work. I know at least one forum which has kept trolls away for years with the mighty ban-hammer, and maintained consistent quality of posts by making chronic idiocy a ban-worthy offense.
I go to a lot of tech mixers and entrepreneurship meetups in LA. Although many people who are less tech-oriented come (particularly in film/entertainment), there are quite a few people who are very hands-on.
I would have thought history started before 1987, and it would make more sense if the values took inflation into account.
"If It Feels Good Do It" : Using Neuromarketing to Go Beyond
Oursignal.com used jQuery plugins
Scheme: macros taking macros as arguments
Yeah, but I wonder if it affects your health in the long term?
Same story as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652403
more specifically still faster in chrome beta than firefox 3.5 beta on leopard
In some cases anonymous expression is preferable to no expression, in others anonymous expression is not preferable over silence.
Dirt Bike
Pit bikes and dirt bikes. Online portal to mini pit bikes, mini ATVs and pocket quads.
What made you think I assume we will use the iron only once? We already reuse it pretty well, that's not the problem. It's simply that 3 billion cars is a lot more then 800 million, and 10 billion computers is a lot more then 1 billion. No matter how well you reuse, you still have greater numbers _at the same time_.

No offence, but at this point I suspect you are not very intellectually honest. I said at the beginning I do not believe this to be a huge problem - solutions will come. But I do not understand your insistence that there is no problem at all.
This is great. "Slimy bastard users" indeed! Why did Palm leave source comments on the phone?
I think what matters most in that respect is probably whether you get enough sleep, rather than when you get that sleep.

I slept at very normal times, but nowhere near enough, while launching my first start-up on the side of a full time job, and that definitely took its toll.
Aren't people concerned about sending their code off to your servers? I know that would be a huge issue with many companies.

You're basically competing with LSF, which is well-supported but quite expensive. Maybe you should consider broadening to more languages?
This article comes to my mind:
http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm

It summarizes a model of possible levels of "knowledge", making a distinction of Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom.

So in this context:

API -> Information
SQL join, class, OO paradigm -> Understanding
Work experience -> Wisdom

I believe a job interview should mainly focus on evaluating the candidate's Knowledge and Understanding, not on Data or Information.
One can argue that by using Google long enough, it is possible to reach the upper levels, but that comes at a price (you would need a lot of time).
How faulty checking for valid email addresses can hurt you
True, how much matters a lot more than when. But is sleeping for 8 hours a day at unusual times worse than sleeping 8 hours a day at normal times?
Unless you are just playing for your own entertainment (not that there is anything wrong with that), having it as a business both provides a measure of success (users and profits) and to the extent that it is successful (that is, profitable) provides resources for its own continuation.
I can't offer the link (reddit is blocked on my computer :D ) but the WAKE UP SHEEPLE guy was one of the best and most useful trolls I have ever seen. Look for his "good bye" post - the guy was way over the average, and not just as a troll.
Second reply: Fail faster.
I'm the CTO of a startup in London.

If I went with this it would be the most expensive software I've bought. We currently use tools such as Trac, git, svn, Eclipse, Hudson, ... all are free and work well. Non-free tools tend to be editors that certain people want to buy and one copy of the full Adobe suite (which is pricey, but I only need one copy).

On the desktop and servers we use Mac OS X (which is pretty cheap).

$600/user/year is a lot of money for something that I'm essentially getting for free with Trac and git integration. As nice as GitHub is that would mean spending $9,000 a year.

This compares badly with say FogBugz at $199 per user for an outright purchase. The only thing it compares with is Perforce which runs around $750/user/year, but... GitHub doesn't give you the source control bit, that's free with git.

At that price you are getting into compiler licensing territory where there's serious value demonstrated. What value is GitHub demonstrating?
(Score:4, Informative)
Actually I'm not representing singles bars at all, I think the difference here is mostly cultural.

In Australia, we generally don't distinguish between singles bars and regular ones - in fact, I don't think I can actually name any place that would be qualified by anyone I know as a "singles bar"

Essentially, if you're single and your out in a club/pub here in the great land of Oz, your free game.
The Germans Are Finishing Bentley Continental Again
Or perhaps even GDP growth. You could sort by value in terms of working hours at current average wages.
I've been lending to Kiva for the past two years, and for me, it's been a fulfilling experience. I think I definitely feel a connection to the people I'm lending to through reading their stories and knowing what my loan is going towards. Now that it's open to US small businesses, I thought I would be on the bandwagon since there's a lot of need just on our front doorsteps. However, the current opportunities listed on Kiva in the US are a little uninspiring. I'm not sure whether it's purely psychological in the sense that these people are closer to home (have the perception of already being more fortunate), but I don't feel as though I'm helping someone overcome poverty by paying for advertising for their business. Maybe it's just a different kind of poverty manifested here at home.
someone please let me know.
In some countries you lose your life for "standing by your identity," in others you don't.

http://iranianminorityshumanright.blogspot.com/2009/03/repor...
Rails Edge Architecture (Rails 3)
It's more likely poor journalism.
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It wasn't so much disregarded as retroactively discounted on grounds of fraud. In retrospect, we aren't sure whether any of those elements have ever been synthesized (though I seem to recall reading about 115 in the past year).
Maybe because the Pre is still in development and the leaked rom is some sort of dev build used by palm.

That's my 2 cents.
My current policy on validating email addresses is to issue a warning if a given email address fails a check against a standard that covers the vast majority of addresses in use. Validating against the whole range of possible address content is near pointless. The warning simply asks the user to check their email in case of errors but allows a page submission following the display of that warning.
4chan vs. Trent Reznor would be an epic, and (I suspect) enjoyable challenge for both sides.
Because everyone who writes in Java uses JDBC? Why not ask them about core features of the language?
Such as questions about the Java API. Can YOU open and search a text document in Java without looking anything up?
I agree. If you really want something extremely permissive just go the SQLite route. Otherwise BSD/MIT (BSD is my fav). There seems little use for this license.
Or use something like:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...
Really? Turning on the camera does take a few seconds, but then it's very quick to focus and snap barcodes. I find the limitation is due to ambient light rather, once you get the camera up.
Teaching mirrors new tricks
I can understand your concern about having to get yet another license approved by the legal department. If you're interested, the author explains his problems with public domain and the BSD license here: http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
But from the article it sounds like they're on the actual phones, not just the leaked ROM.
Check out http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

The creator (or so) once told in an interview that people feel connected when playing this game successfully together.
A bit off topic: FU doesn't seem quite the acronym Facebook would want in general usage. Or perhaps they have figured it would work great on younger population...
Im not sure a comparison with Perforce is fair: they have a lot more in terms of tools to deploy per user.

In Enterprise nowadays expensive solutions != better. It's the credit crunch :) managers are under the thumb to deliver working solutions for low cost.
I was using osCommerce and ZenCart and did not like them. Then using a hacked Wordpress for webshop, and it is a delight to work with.

Your store seems to be very nice, though I don't really understand the admin interface -- I thought it is a stunning WYSIWG editor but could not handle it.

Still I'm thinking there would be interest in offering your engine as a webshop service.
A Bias for Action: Wise Startups Spend Their First Year Testing Their Hypotheses
What do you mean there isn't a technical school close that you could solicit to? What about UCLA, UCI, Harvey Mudd, CalTech???
Thanks for your feedback and positive comments. Which part of the admin interface did you find difficult to use? Are there any suggestions you could give about how to improve it or make it more intuitive?
When talking about dynamic languages speed, people tend to take into account only ruby, python, perl and javascript. Common Lisp is at least as dynamic as those, and compiles to fast binary code. Comparing V8 to Ruby is easy. Try comparing it to SBCL.
Victoire !
Would take a toll but it sounds like the way he works he could just randomly sleep an extra couple of hours to make up for it.
>But as I've learned more about the limitations of our understanding, our biology, and computers I've realized that this isn't something that will be happening any time soon without some amazing breakthroughs. I don't expect the Singularity to happen my lifetime, and I'm still in my 20s.

Did you miss the whole accelerating change thing? Assuming the models are correct, it's going to look like we won't make it until just before we do.
Nice tool. Nice reason.

"I decided to do it because I was worried about my mom. She hadn't started a blog yet, but I had this crazy fear that when she did, she'd be bombarded by spam for Viagra and think that had something to do with what I did all day."

Matt's reason for creating Akismet.

And I like the way he ends up.

"My mom started a blog a couple of weeks ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my mom to use."

Increase usability. A goal any product should try to gain.
Ask HN: Losing potential customers
Hi guys, I'm in need of some advice regarding my startup. We offer simple annual plans for subscription. We feel the price is right, as we've been seeing a gradual increase in paying customers.

To track our online sales funnel better, I've been monitoring the usage statistics via some simple Google Analytics Goals. What this has brought to my attention is that many users are looking at our pricing, landing up on the payment confirmation page to upgrade their account, but they don't make a payment. There are atleast 10-15 such cases being recorded each day. The payment confirmation page is basically a mid-way page that displays the information/price of the selected plan, and a button linked to PayPal.

Having seen several confirmation/summary pages over the years, I find that we have a simple page, so the lost sales couldn't be caused due to the layout or content. I also doubt that reflecting PayPal as our official payment processor would stop interested users. We have a PayPal business account, so that couldn't be less professional.

How should I go about investigating and resolving this issue? I was thinking of putting up a simple feedback form on the payment page (in case the users wish to share their positive or negative experience), or maybe redoing (or even eliminating) the mid-way payment confirmation page. As I see it, the only benefit of this payment confirmation page is that users can get a summary of their upgrade before they make the payment.

Any suggestions are appreciated!
Yes, I've wondered about something like that for a while, myself:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467574
After witnessing his minor meltdown on Twitter the other day I thought to myself celebrities will really need to learn to ignore the trolls. I'm sure Trent will be just the first of many Twitter celebrities to go through this.
Biggest Rumors from the World of Technology:Gossips about Gadgets and Techies
> After all, what's the worst they can do, fire you?

Fire you, and keep the stuff you made on company time.
But given that the atoms of these elements need to be manufactured with a high energy cost, using them to manufacture pure materials would be prohibitively expensive. As in, physically prohibitive : we would need Kardashev level 1 energy to manufacture macroscopic amounts. I could see an use as dopants though : this would require minuscule amounts of these elements, but it would still be amazingly expensive.
What's awesome is the root code: "up up down down left right left right" is the well known cheat code in Konami games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code
Did you see that article on microcopy yesterday. It mentioned that adding that you didn't need to have a paypal account to pay by paypal improved the conversion rate. Maybe worth look => http://bokardo.com/archives/writing-microcopy/
Ask HN: Word tips?
I use Word a lot from time to time to write big reports and it is quite frustrating. I know Latex is superior and I have started using it for my PhD work. But I still don't know enough to use it in my workplace where I don't always have the time to tinker around.

So, if you use Word to write big documents, do you have any good tips to share? I find that as soon as documents grow beyond a few pages and have lots of tables and figures, Word becomes really slow. Often, the document structure is screwed and I have to re-reference and re-format things a million times.

I'd be really grateful if you could help.

Thanks.
Swoopo is a scam - a scam which is relying on the law taking long enough to catch up that they can make a killing in the meantime. If you want to give fans a chance regardless of their wealth, run a suitably licensed lottery limited to one chance per person. If you want to give bands more money, sell more tickets. If you just want stupid people to give you their money for no good reason, then sure, Swoopo's a powerful model. Morally repugnant, but very powerful.
Mark, how come your blog's empty? Something to do with those fans?
Integration of Better Web Readability Project with Readable
The problem is that the RFC is amazingly permissive : almost anything goes in email adresses, including whitespace! A RFC-compliant regex is incredibly complex [1]. Furthermore, one would need to read not one, but five RFCs in order to grok everything:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4291#section-2.2
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1123#section-2.1

[1] Great overview of the problem, plus a PHP validator.
http://www.dominicsayers.com/isemail/
Your answer: the stupid filter - http://stupidfilter.org/main/index.php
> This has to take a toll, right?

For a while, a friend and I went on a "steal sleep" schedule. We both underslept, got like 4-6 hours per night, and then stole sleep whenever we had nothing important to do. Sleep 10 minutes in a taxi, 20 minutes on a subway ride, 1 hour between meetings when you're in the middle of the city... surprisingly, it actually works, and you can go into deep sleep pretty quickly whenever you want when you're constantly underslept.

Now, I don't do it these days, and don't really recommend it, but if your schedule is crazy enough, it might be the answer. I was full-time running one company, building another, and studying full time. Also was dating two girls and had a couple hobbies. So basically, I did stuff every hour I could, and slept every time I couldn't do something. It's crazy but it kind of works.

Edit: I didn't mention my biggest takeaway from the experiment. We waste a hell of a lot of time, all of us. Like a ridiculous amount. 3-7 hours per day at least, between tasks, waiting in lines, in transit without reading or working on anything or sleeping, etc. A hell of a lot. I kept the habit of cutting down "dead time" as much as possible now that I'm more aware of it.
Vacation and Travel Photos
Blog with photos of fantastic places to go on vacations. Also including suggestions on places to visit, things to see and hotels to stay...
Interestingly, the only troll-less social places on the internet are those who are started by, and frequented by a "guru" who everyone respects. I visit a handful of such places for different subject areas and they are completely different than the majority of the internet.
My current policy on validating email addresses is to issue a warning if a given email address fails a check against a standard that covers the vast majority of addresses in use.

My policy on validating email addresses is "if I send you an email and it arrives, your email address is valid".

Why do you need to "validate" an email address? Knowing that an address is syntactically valid doesn't do anything to confirm that it will reach the intended target.
Rom Machine Crosstrainer Review
Phrack #66 is out
I highly doubt it. I think it's more of a "if you step on our shores, you're ours" situation.

But even tho I am far from being rich enough to be on their radar, better safe than sorry. Saving $50k/yr in taxes is a bad optimization if it lands your ass in jail.
Thanks a lot for the info!

I never looked into SD... just the other ones. (I didn't even know SD had no income tax.) That might be an option for me on my next trip.

(Course, none of the "experts" I spoke to brought this up, either. Jerks. :)
There already exists Pyshell ( http://pyshell.sourceforge.net/ ). Pyshell is a lot more mature, PySh is more a proof of concept.
Was amazed by the diagrams. Then the author says the source - http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/ !!

Now - does anyone know how we can create those diagrams from state flows? e.g.

a -> b;
a -> c;
c -> b;

becomes

/---\ /---\
| b |<--| c |
\---/ \---/
^ ^
| /---\ |
+-| a |-+
\---/

I remember there being a perl library for it. Are there any other nice authoring mechanisms that don't involve intricate text crafting?
I didn't intend to sound hostile. I think we're talking past each other here :)

Also, I agree with you 100% on mental masturbation. (I also blog occasionally @ http://www.justfuckingship.com/). But I am tired of every freakin web app looking, acting, and being essentially the same.

We also define problems differently. I think it's a bigger issue that all web app are basically the same, than if a given individual sits and thinks too hard and never does anything. But that's because I have barely any problems with executing any more... because I've worked on it.

Have you heard of the categorization of failures?

Failure Level 1 - Doing the right thing, but doing it badly.

Failure Level 2 - Doing the wrong thing, whether you do it well or badly.

I mostly like to poke people about Level 2. No blog/article/motivational speaker/whatever can do everything so I pick my battles :)
Or maybe I'm just trying to keep the conversation going, and don't actually mean everything I write.

You never know. ;)
Vendors learned the hard way that to verify an RSA signature, you have to reconstruct the entire m block you'd expect to see, and byte compare it to the entire "decrypted" m block from the certificate.

Not exactly. Yes, you have to verify the padding; no, you don't have to build a decrypted signature and compare the two byte by byte.

The lesson here is "use proper padding and follow the published instructions for verifying it".
ResourceSpace: Open Source Digital Asset Management (DAM)
cma: This article was originally posted with the title used by Discover, "Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?", and Eliezer's "No" was in response to that. PG changed the submitted headline after my earlier comment below.
Yes! "Island" changed my life! That's the book that made me quit my job in 1992. Haven't had a job since. Read slowly and ponder.
That is like saying that the government should not tell us what is illegal because we may exploit the law. The way government deals with this is by allowing courts to make law.

The alternative would be what google does. Say nothing and leave no way of protecting oneself.
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