skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
8. When stuck in a meeting with clueless people debating insignificant details, throw out a critical valid technical issue that hadn't been considered and dramatically alters the conversation. This is generally easy to do if you're a hacker with his finger on the pulse of the project. It also accomplishes 2 things:

- It bolsters your reputation both as a technical expert and a team player.

- It ends the meeting by freezing everyone else's brain in an endless loop.
Well, the spies under the direction of England's SOE (special operations executive) spent a lot of their time cutting transmission lines throughout occupied Europe. This was done so the Germans had to broadcast their signals via wireless, allowing Turing and Bletchley Park to intercept and break them much more often.

I highly recommend a book called Between Silk and Cyanide, written by the head of codes (cryptography) of SOE during World War II.
UI wise I like being able to scan titles quickly, so I can skip content I'm not really interested in. Your site feels like it's just another blog, not a news site.
When the mess gets sorted out, I'd like to have a conversation with whoever's in charge at the time the car czar or whoever and say 'I'd like to run your plants, if you don't mind,' Musk said ( http://tinyurl.com/km5e4h )

Sounds like Elon will fit right in at Detroit. Run an unprofitable car company and dip into our pockets when you can't do it right.
There's a compiler for ruby on parrot: http://github.com/cardinal/cardinal/tree/master

It's not under active development, as stated in the project page. So don't expect Ruby on Parrot any time soon. There's always hope for the future, though, considering Parrot's improvements over the last few months.
It's fairly easy to do actually, if you're willing to accept the cheat I've used in the past.

You can read the input value with Javascript, so if you add an 'unmask password' button, then that button should effectively replace the input type=password with an input type=password and populate it with the values previously stored in the password element.

There are a number of ways to do this, but switching out elements was the easiest for me -- of course, browsers have come a long way since that implementation. YMMV.
The question whether the election was rigged matters for the same reason that the question of Iraq's WMDs mattered: this information is influencing Western public opinion and government decisions right now. Also, going "it doesn't matter 'cause you're bad anyway" whenever someone calls attention to the substance of your accusations strikes me as a bad faith tactic.
I got a lot of feedback on these videos (they are a year old now) and started on a new site that incorporates those suggestions at http://learn.github.com

Once I get all the same material covered, I'll probably start redirecting this site to the new one. I'm actually just finishing up a print book with Apress on Git that is CC-3.0 licensed, so I'll be putting a site with the contents of that book online soon too (then I'll have some free time to finish up the learn.github.com site).
Captured machines did play a fair part in the codebreaking!

I would say the saddest thing about Turing related to the Government is simply that his work went absolutely unacknowledged for so long. I actually visited Bletchley Park last weekend and a curator told me of a woman in her late eighties who, even now, had an ingrained attitude of "I can't talk about it". (She was a Wren working at Bletchley).

I think it was thirty years or so before anyone even knew the massive contributions this man had made to our science.
It's much better to develop a site yourself and then sell it on Sitepoint than to buy one. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is-maybe traffic has been declining, its been dropping in the serps, revenue is down, etc.
Spend that $4,000 on content and SEO, and you will have far greater returns.
Sure, drop me a line. All my contact info is in my HN profile. I might not be the most experienced, funded, awesome hacker but I can pull my weight in a few areas and answer things I know the answer to, or at least point you in the right direction.

We've all been there.
That's an interesting reaction - primarily because a sense of entitlement, to me, seems like neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for being either hip or slack. It also seems like you're suggesting that hipsters did not exist until recently, which strikes me as untenable.

Fashion takes work...too much work, in my opinion. Perhaps you say this because they both drink lattes?
Wow, for a second there I thought it said digg.com in my address bar.
It'd be far more effective if they funded Bletchley Park, one of the best memorials to Turing (worth a visit, although the information there is woefully light on him if you've read his biography).

It costs a lot to operate and won't be able to run past the next few years without funding, but the Government rejected a petition on the subject (http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/BletchleyPark/)

Support for the National Museum of Computing wouldn't go amiss either.
Useful feedback - thanks!

If you want to quickly skip stuff, the shortcut keys (J and K to go up and down) might be good for you. :)

Other than that, we've considered making a condensed view before -- it seems like that might be valuable.
It's ugly as hell. While I see what Newsbrane is attempting to do, it's failing miserably when it comes to execution.
I think this article from 538 does a much better job covering the subject than the original one, who's methodology is questionable.
I'm a fan of Munin. It's super easy to write custom scripts for it in any language. For example, here's a script written in ruby to graph Passenger memory usage: http://gist.github.com/37525

Munin is only one component of a complete monitoring setup however (good for observing long term trends in resource consumption). I also use Monit to issue alerts if a service is down, and Pingdom to monitor external service availability. Has worked well so far.
And leads to a rather tricky league table.
Do we all get a peronalised oppression page-rank?

If a one-legged Jewish lesbian punches a blind Muslim nudist veteran which way round is the hate crime?
Heh, I was just thinking about this problem recently; it played a (small) part in my decision to use random-ish strings as primary keys rather than autoincrementing ints. :)
A loan isn't exactly stealing.
Heh, that's fair -- we haven't ever hired a graphic designer or UI designer, and we definitely need it.

Thanks for being honest!
Hoo, the comments thread on this is still good. It's OK for Flash to suck, because sometimes other apps suck as well.
the Flash plugin on Windows is far more efficient and performs massively better than in the same page on Macintosh.
[jd sez: I haven't tested that, but it's reasonable -- 3D and video tools are often claimed to work better on Windows too.]
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/06/adobe_on_html5.html#commen...
No, it won't replace HN. It would need good content and less fluff to start. Additionally, it would need a way to quickly scan through the article headlines without having to deal with article content so that you can more easily skip the filler articles. In short, this might be a nice alternative to digg.
Learning new skills is hard work. But thanks to the internet - its easier now than every before. Find a good forum to ask questions. There are lots of video lectures (paid and free) on various technologies. If you want to get someone to coach you, then prepare to compensate them. That is why taking a class is often a good idea because the instructor plays the role of a coach. Ultimately, coding on your own is the fastest way to learn. But its also often the most frustrating, at first :)
(a) Musk says they're on track to be profitable in months. Do you have evidence to muster that he's lying? I'm sure he could be, but it's not very interesting just to say he is.

(b) Detroit auto companies have historically been very profitable.

(c) The auto industry is structurally inhospitable to newcomers. Legacy manufacturers have locked up supply chains, locked up distribution channels, and are entrenched in a regulatory environment designed for 12-figure industrial bohemoths. That there may not be a way to "do it right" is an argument in favor of propping up Tesla.
On-demand analytics vendor LucidEra selling off IP, winding down operations
I scroll down to bottom of these threads just to see where you've reliably complained about them.
You think that's overdue - the Greek government still hasn't apologised to Socrates!
I can't think of anything more insulting than a government that has no interest in science deciding to do a big honoring Turin publicity stunt in the hope of a gain in gay voter support.

There is also considerable doubt that his 'treatment', which had ended a year before, was a cause of his suicide - rather than a feeling that his work wasn't leading anywhere.
I'm amazed that no one has suggested the most obvious answer: a lot of developers are just plain rude!

Even if you don't want to help someone, there's a polite way of wording it. Unfortunately a lot of people in the SW dev community haven't figured that out yet.

@Rayzar:
They're under no obligation to help you, but at the same time they don't need to be unfriendly about it either.
Whoops, sorry to give you the wrong preconceptions. If you train it by voting a bunch, you can make it give you whatever topics you like, startup news definitely included. If you don't have the patience to train it, I've heard that feedback before, and that's an axis along which we don't have a good answer yet -- though hopefully we will soon!
The market may solve this problem, by punishing companies who pull egregious bait-and-switch scams. It doesn't need to be impossible to try to scam customers, just economically irrational.
Well, then, "hi!". Sometimes I'm at the top of the threads too, because they aren't appropriate:-)
Is this really the entire content of this submission?

The economy sucks, great web talent (designers, developers, copywriters, marketers, seo people) are getting laid off and freelancers are struggling for work. Let's pool our contacts! If you're a looking for work let us know. We're going to publish a blog article listing/linking these people. I'm sure we have readers or friends of readers that could use a helping hand. We need your name, skill set and a few links to your work.

Flagged.
Can the Wonks Beat the Trolls on Government Sites?
<cough>florida<cough>
Summary: We have no data about this problem, nor our proposed solution.

"In most cases, however, users will appreciate getting clear-text feedback as they enter passwords."

If Nielsen had a mockup or something that we could all clearly see was a huge improvement, then sure, let's do it. A UI change this drastic should have an order of magnitude gain to it. Otherwise, move on to bigger fish.
@davewiner just Tweeted us out. Thanks! http://twitter.com/davewiner/statuses/2295939556
The problem is it's no longer avoidable. A friend is unlikely to want to snoop on your saved password list, but can not avoid it when your password is already in the box, and they have to delete it to type their own in.

Anyway, the simple fix is to not show saved passwords in plain text.
Anyone have a non-powerpoint summary of this article?
OK, thanks.

What I'm understanding from your post is that the front page needs work. Is this accurate -- you didn't see anything you liked on the front?

(Edit: I also understood that you want to be able to scan the headlines, and that's something that I'm interested in too.)

There's lots of high-quality content in the site (we pull from several hundred RSS feeds), but you are going to have to train it for a while before Newsbrane will learn what you think constitutes quality.
I used to work as phone support for a webapp targeted at Real Estate Agents. 60% of our web + phone support requests were related to passwords. A third of those requests were errors due to misspellings.

An option to reveal the text of the password field would have a drastic effect on these support requests. It would lower calls and call times on these issues. Even if this 15-minute change only saved 30 minutes of support time a -year- this would be a net win.

You might not screw up passwords, but plenty of people do. I'm not suggesting to have it permanently visible, just the option to make it visible. This enables people with password issues to debug their own issues before resorting to a password reset or contacting support.
If you're linking to a particular post, link to the post, not the blog.
I think the fact that a lot of people feel driven to take their time to write about a tool is much more indicative that it is an incredibly helpful tool, not that it is difficult to use. If you used some tool and it was really hard and barely got the job done, would you feel passionate enough to write a post or tutorial on it? Does horrible usability drive passionate proselytizing? No.

The fact is that proper version control is a hard problem. Tracking your work quickly and simply without forcing you to conform to a workflow prescribed by the VCS tool itself is a non-trivial problem (unless of course your work is itself trivial). Git solves this problem elegantly and efficiently and the amount of information popping up recently are from users who are thrilled that a tool finally exists that does not limit how they do their work and who want to share that with others so they can work better too.

I am driven to do all the Git related stuff that I do because I love the tool and it is so much better than what I had ever used before, not because it's frustrating to me or I feel it's hard to use.
According to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_defense

Tower defense finds its roots in the strategy classic Rampart, an arcade game from 1990. The game involved defending a castle by placing cannons, and making repairs between several rounds of attacks.[6][7] By the new millennium, tower defense games began to appear in user-created maps for StarCraft, Age of Empires II, and WarCraft III.
There's always someone poorer, and richer, than you. The poorer will be angry because he can't see your problems from your perspective. Nonetheless, people have problems at all levels, and we can't not talk about them, just because we might offend someone.

I erroneously assumed you were coming from a comparable socioeconomic background to that I'm used to. I assure you, the phenomenon I'm talking about is endemic to that context. I apologise for making you feel angry. But you're obviously a smart guy. One day, you'll be a lot better off than you are now. Who knows, maybe then you'll be saying things that your current self would find just as "infuriating".
the best resource on H1N1 (and virology in general) I've found to counter the news hysteria http://www.twiv.tv/
Ha. To be blunt, I don't think most folks on Hacker News are thinking about this in good faith. If some other country this community doesn't like a priori, say the US, killed a bunch of its citizens after an election, there'd be zero chance everyone here would be rationalizing away statistical improbabilities in the election results.

> Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote.

If, for example, Broward County had come up 71% for Bush in an election, that would have been considered proof of election fraud around here. In this case, it's rationalized away. Poof.
This article is at least 5 years late. It's been ages since Yahoo! was on the top of anything. They appear to be following in the steps of Alta Vista.
@jjs, I agree, I effed up and linked to the wrong place. However I am unable to edit the url now, I apologize.

@enomar, I didn't realize the length of the post mattered. I'm only submit very wordy blog posts from now on.
Sorry, where were the killings after Florida again?
Ask HN: Learning From Failure and Iterating on Defunct Companies
Clear (http://flyclear.com) recently (and suddenly) announced the end of service, as they weren't able to reach an agreement with their creditors. Which I would expect means that they weren't paying debt on schedule, and that the creditors felt the outlook wasn't positive.

Reactions to the closing appear to indicate a positive view of the service, and a predictably negative view of the sudden closure.

This leads me to the following questions:

- What would you want to know about how Clear's business worked, or about the environment they were within, if you were going to try to move into this space and do it better?

- Are there symptoms of Clear's demise that signal another attempt to be unwise?

- More generally, how do you feel about the idea of iterating on a model that has previously failed for someone else?
I like Tesla like the next guy, but when it comes to investing, especially public money, the burden to prove profitability comes on the company.

I'm glad this happened, but the GP is not wrong to criticize this. It's still taking public funds and putting them in a company who still hasn't made a profit.
If you are more clear on what type of thing you are looking for/working on, you might get help right here. I, for one, am happy to help where I can.
Part of the "bait and switch" aspect is that in-app purchases are only allowed for paid apps. The $0.99 price of the app in the article, coupled with the $9.99 monthly fee, leads me to believe that the app developer would've actually been happier to distribute a free app with a $9.99 monthly fee - which is no longer "bait and switch", it's just a subscription.
In case you wondered what those 2 inch floppies looked like:
http://www.retrothing.com/2006/05/oddball_micros_.html
There's a hundred threads that have made me think this - but may I take a post to thank both PG and all the members of this site for successfully creating the environment we have here at HN. We very rarely have arguments that are not handled rationally and maturely. As that article states - that is a very difficult feat, and one of great value.
Well, I changed the title of the post in response to feedback that we were setting the wrong expectations.

The old title was "Rate/review -- can it replace HN for you?"

I'm still interested in answering that question, but it's not because I hate HN -- I love it, especially the community -- it's because I feel like there's a niche for personalized news.
We haven't even seen the 'question'(s), let alone the answers. We really need that too, to judge.
Ask HN: What level of traffic do you need for ad sales?
Anyone have any insight into the level of traffic your site needs before you can make decent money on advertising?

If you had a vertically focused site, say on video games http://www.quicksavegames.com, how many thousand visitors a month do you need to make $5000 on advertising? Is it 10k, 50k, 100k?
Length isn't the issue. It's the lack of anything worth reading.
While you are probably right in identifying these two groups as very intense users of such a system, I would argue that they would not be its typical users but rather the people most likely to abuse it.

This has to do with the concept of "personal online reputation", which is often used as a weasel word for "stuff people will find when they google you". This, of course, is something you can easily influence and leads to a form of digital masturbation that I am highly critical of.

If, otoh, you use a more scientific definition, e.g. "the aggregate of all opinions of other people that have interacted with your previously and that are available in a given social network", this becomes a very interesting measure. And one that is incredibly hard to work with.

But, assuming that someone figured out how to handle it, it would be incredibly useful: it would allow for ad-hoc trustful pseudonymous interactions both in situations like the current struggle in Iran, where certain pseudonyms could quickly gather domain-specific reputation and thus become effective gate keepers. The value of such a mechanism extends through all forms of online cooperative services and could be extremely valuable in fighting trolls, griefers etc.

Another potential use of this is around privacy: While I believe that we need to find many new (social and legal) norms regarding the handling of personally identifying information in the web, I also think that we will have to develop a generation of post-privacy tools that will help us deal with data that has leaked and will never be re-secured. Creating multi-faceted, rich online identities might be such a tool.

These scenarios will be interesting to more users than just marketing professionals and wannabes, although it is likely that the new discipline of reputation corruption will grow right alongside with these tools.
As a contract developer, I have been fortunate enough to find new clients here and there despite the current economic slide. Suck on that, economy!

That being said, I appreciate what these guys are doing and believe that online communities like theirs (and HN) are a great way to connect with people. Perhaps we could use this thread for that purpose...

If you need some help in your development, feel free to contact me. I work primarily with:

Ruby (Rails, Sinatra, anything really)
jQuery
WordPress (custom plugins)

My contact info is on my profile page.
I have a different take: Volunteer for the most difficult, nasty project your company has. Put a huge time estimate on it, then just chug along, but eventually get it done, and on time. This keeps you from being pestered by all the little things that come up, plus you need to focus, so working from home is acceptable sometimes, and when it's done, you look like a hero.
Best apology, yes. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice to actually say something too.
This is a pretty dramatic conclusion to draw from seeing one app that charges $0.99 and a monthly fee. If you look at the screenshot in the article, it seems to make it pretty clear that it's $9.99/month for the turn by turn directions aspect of it.
Apparently it's also a good idea for tanks.
I'm sure you read through my comment in your "Please Review" thread, so just for the reference of others - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658749

In short - if your model works, great, but I can easily see it not working due to the service not being positioned properly.
I certainly sympathize, but it isn't always black and white. Even the ultimate arbitrator of appropriateness here jumps into politics from time to time [1]. And hackers are interested in the law for at least a handful of reasons particular to our culture: 1) many hackers are outside of the social mainstream, which puts them at increased risk of majority-oriented persecution, 2) many hackers are reclusive by nature and value their ability to "be left alone," which is at odds with collectivist governments that want everyone to jump on for their latest scheme, and 3) the law is a codified set of rules and procedures, about which hackers can reason, finding incongruencies more readily than the mainstream population.

Perhaps we should pick our battles, and call out more egregious violations such as name calling and thoughtless recitals of canned talking points, rather than engaging in the sort of constant nagging that will just blend into the background noise.

[1] e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664314
You summed it up very well.

"Profitable in a few months" means you're unprofitable. We can draw up all sorts of extrapolations based on preorders and expected order rates etc., but until the past month's income statement shows green, a business is not profitable. It really is that simple.

I hope nothing but success for Tesla in that they usher in an electric car revolution (just imagine if the USA became the primary source of electric cars for the world), but until then I'd like to see some numbers if I'm paying for Elon to run his mouth.