skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was lucky enough to be staying at a Ritz-Carlton a couple of years ago and poked my head into an employee break room out of curiosity. There was a poster on the wall that said,

"You have the responsibility and authority to handle the customers problem"

I am sure they had been told that in training, but there it was as a daily reminder. Everyone starts a new job with enthusiasm, but I am sure the "I just work here" crowd have been smacked down more than once when they went out on a limb to do what they thought was the right thing.
> 4. 2 Drawer Filing Cabinet - Staples $129

Who spends 13% of their budget on the filing cabinet? Is it beyond the realm of Inc's imagination to buy something used? I think $35 is an accurate figure.

Of course, that carries the assumption that your home office needs one.
Have you ever had a spine/neck injury? There is no amount of streching or yoga that will fix it. I fell rock climbing last summer and was in serious pain for weeks. I went to a physical therapist not a chiropractor, but "cracking" your back is necessary for some injuries and it is the only way to fix it. It took a hell of a lot of force to get my spine back in line but it feels better almost immediately. After that comes the therapy to rebuild the muscles, but that takes a LONG time, and resetting the spine is done multiple times in there.
A lot of plastic recycling isn't recycling - it's downcycling. Plastic bottles become carpet becomes landfill fodder. It just delays the inevitable.

A lot of this has to do with the dyes used in plastics manufacturing. It also has to do with the limited mutability of most plastics - the quality of the plastic after one cycle of recycling (in this example, plastic bottle -> carpet) is reduced. Once it's turned to carpet, it becomes difficult to recycle this again due not only to this reduction in quality, but also because it becomes difficult to remove the plastic carpet material from the carpet backing. Attempting to recycle it again would result in a further inferior product - and it would be much more expensive (diminishing returns).

I'll say it again: Recycling as we know it is downcycling. It's good, in that it reuses the raw materials - but only for so many cycles. Eventually it ends up in the landfill.

The only true solution would be to manufacture consumables as if they're in a closed ecosystem - either able to easily be reused, or easily put into the natural ecosystem. Read "Cradle to Cradle" by William McDonough for more information (the book itself is printed on special infinitely recyclable plastic paper; the ink can be removed by boiling the book).
hey, hey...don't pick on india, they're still emerging - they'll make it through this php problem. we still have a lot of people using php here...the thing's contagious.
How about it? The large cities are all on the coast, and most people live there - it's more urbanised than anywhere else. The rest is hot, dry and largely uninhabitable and uninhabited.
That's what I thought as well, but after reading more about it, it sounds like this has been a gradual disappearance. He would show up intermittently at meetings and never commit to actually getting anything done. His answers were always "I'll look into that later" and later never came.

I still hope that he's just burnt out and sick of the project versus being unwell or worse.
Absolutely. More specifically, start your startup. Create a folder for your product and open a text editor. Immediately you'll be in the uncomfortable situation of not knowing exactly what to code first. Code a mockup page first. Don't worry- you can throw it away- just get a page that you can show to a trusted friend and say "this is how it will work". Then add in some javascript, you know, just for demonstration purposes. Then hook in some backend stuff, you know, for better demonstrations. Learn from books and tutorials only exactly what you need to push your project forward.

In a few months of this you'll learn 100x what you could learn by trying to learn generically. It's frustrating and difficult, which is exactly why you're brain will be primed to learn what you really need to learn.

At some point you'll know so much that you'll look at all your "demo" code and think- "man, this is crufty. I know enough now to do it right." That's when you build your first product (using pylons or something awesome that you've discovered out of necessity) that will be used by hundreds of thousands of people and will bring you glory and riches.

Best of luck. Did you create the folder yet? Is your text editor open with the beginning and ending html tags yet? Is your browser open to a reference to those silly thing that you feel you should know but just can't remember yet? GET TO WORK! Oh, and you're grounded from RSS feeds for 1 month until you can prove you're learning. ;)
True, I think that their ships would go at least a hundred times as fast. Oh wait...
We actually refer to the "Train Number" on any of our given projects here. The train number is the number of people that could get hit by a train before the project fails. If the number is 1 (meaning there is a single critical point for the project), then we know that cross training has to occur.
Indeed. 'Design' should be the attentive creation of a human experience.

Or is that Art?

Wait, no, engineering is what I meant to say.

I am an artist, I work in a research lab, I write sci-fi. But if the word 'about' applies to any of those statuses, then my art is about cognitive science, my research is about machine learning, and my sci-fi is about artifical consciousness. Or did I mix those up?
I don't suppose there's any way we can nip the "registering throwaway accounts to make a joke" thing in the bud before it gets out of hand, is there?
This article is worthless. It is a random selection of products whose prices sum to $1003.

(Of course, those product links all have referral codes on them. Convenient.)
Creating configurable, animated UI for Google Spreadsheets
Arthur C. Clarke presents Fractals: The Colors Of Infinity
There are not many affiliate links for used items.
I am pleased to see another organization adopting a 'standard' microformat, in this case, hNews.

Microformats are the bridge by which we're going to get to the truly Semantic Web.
My large three-drawer desk was £10 from an auction - it's in perfectly good condition, it just came from the offices of a company which had gone bust. You can get all sorts of furniture very, very cheaply from auctions.

My laser printer was free - it was salvaged from a building which was due to be demolished. Again, works perfectly. Even my laptop was cheaper than the Walmart one featured - Dell Latitude, £120 second-hand from a local computer fair and running Ubuntu. My wireless router was free with a 12-month ISP contract.

In fact, what is the point of this article at all? Norton? MS Office? An iPhone, for goodness sake? Show me your $1,000 home office and I'll show you my sub-£200 one! The most expensive thing in this place is the radio.
Had anyone else posted this story, then nobody would make such silly accusations as suggesting that another commenter responds in a particular way merely out of adoration of the author of the story.

For the record: before I started reading Hacker News, I didn't know who Seth Godin was. I've never read any of his books and I haven't read any of his blogs besides the ones linked here, nor do I intend to. I'm not really interested in marketing and I share the general adverseness programmers feel versus 'marketing types'.

All of that doesn't mean that the guy doesn't make sensible points. It certainly doesn't mean we should deride him for stating 'obvious' things in a ranting manner, where we would loudly applaud the exact same behaviour in a software engineer. Hell, we do that half the time when Linus goes batshit again.
I love the closing statement:

Linux vs Windows/MacOS, all over again. You gain Freedom by using an open platform, making life worse for yourself in a thousand tiny ways, any one of which can easily be dismissed, so they are. But it’s still worse.

Zing. I recognize exactly what the author is talking about.
Funny, that you posted this.

http://xkcd.com/603/
If I could add a follow-on question: How many designers have found work on HN?
Excellent idea, but drop that comment about holding it on a weekday unless you're only interested in college students/high schoolers participating. Some of us have jobs we can't just ignore for an entire day :-)
The firewall here does NOT like that domain. Anyway, it's a dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730664
Perhaps they roll a die [dice] to choose the colour to dye [dying] their T-shirts before they die [death]?

If I didn't a typo or grammatical error make I'll be amaized.
I think Seth has a good point here. Employees should, at least to a degree, feel a pride in the company they work for, and if they do not they should find somewhere else to work (or at least try to.)

But more than that, when you are doing something on behalf of and in the name of a company then you are that company's representative, its "face" to those you are dealing with. As such, you can expect to receive both credit and blame for everything attached to that company and you are responsible for doing everything within your authority to fix problems. That limit may be nothing more than putting the person you are dealing with in the correct department, but if that is it you should pass along the contact information (in both directions!) respectfully and courteously, not dismissively with "I just work here."

As a manager, I would be unhappy to ever hear one of my employees say that no matter what their job. If it was a customer facing employee, then (depending on the nuances of the circumstances) it could easily call for a formal reprimand for damaging the companies reputation and being dismissive to customers.
Narwhal - hello 0.1
In a twisted way, the US government, via its reckless spending, actually provides a service to foreign governments [1]. By selling an unlimited supply of debt abroad and being a black hole of unlimited consumption at home, the US allows foreign governments to keep their people both busy and poor.

[1] Note that I didn't say a service to foreign people.
So the author's intention is to have a filing cabinet but to stand up or sit on the floor?
"And lastly China is successfully and very slowly reducing it's US dollar exposure."

Disagreed - as the article and in other analysis points out, China has over 2 trillion in US dollars -slowly reducing or not adding to this huge pile of US dollars will have little impact on the near to mid term situation. China has alluded to reducing their treasury holdings but have not done anything thus far, IMO, it is just a leveraging tactic for negotiations - China must keep the yuan down in order to subsidize its exports without which they do not have much else driving their economy.
He’s Only in Field Service
Many phones pass out of exclusivity and are offered through multiple carriers. The RAZR used to be Cingular only--then, every carrier had them.
Very true and an excellent point.

Even so, I would expect a conscientious employee to at least make the effort instead. At a bare minimum, instead of saying "That's not my job." they should say, "I am sorry, I cannot help you with that, BUT the person who can is...."
In what way are credits less confusing for users? If anything I would label them as more confusing, as they're a level of abstraction on top of money. They can make good business sense, certainly, as you'd rather hold on to the customer's left-over credits. And consumers can be more likely to spend credits due to the mentioned abstraction layer.

That said, they're a firmly consumer-unfriendly model, for those very reasons. And even then, the "more likely to spend credits" factoid only comes into play once they've actually bought into the system - seeing that it's Yet Another Credit System can be a slight added barrier to entry.

Expanding on this, if every place I spend money online worked with its own "credit" system, I would have upwards of 20 idle balances of my own money earning interest for someone else. Not a very palatable future.
Yeah, I don't think I've read a development book cover-to-cover, I always have something in mind that I want to build, so I stop the book half way and code.

I always skim the rest looking for an answer, but the point is that I will almost always get the best results just by diving in head first.
Emacs Screencast: Artist Mode - ASCII Photoshop for Emacs
I don't know enough about the internals of the iPhone, but can it actually tell which recipient phone the sending phone was flicked towards?
This article is from 2008. Any updates?
Thanks, interesting link. The book in question goes for insane prices (used) on amazon. I don't understand why in these cases the publisher doesn't do another printing. Clearly there is demand for it if the used book prices are hitting $100/copy.
Television journalism may be dead in the US, but it certainly isn't elsewhere on the planet. I often learn something new from the news.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=732491 for the correct link.
North to the Future ... may B jobs
Kaminsky's mail spool over 5 years has been getting emailed around for months already. Poor guy. :-/

Mitnick is nothing new, and he is smart enough to keep all of his personal stuff off of his webserver. If you are a security professional who has any kind of a public name, that's just common sense. Who cares if your website gets owned? Just keep backups. What really hurts is having your personal life and the lives of those close to you exposed and spread all over the net.
Before I even read this article, how can you "kill the business card" with an iPhone App when the percentage of business iPhone users is less than overwhelming?
This is a fundamental flaw in communities on the net in general, they don't gracefully combine different scopes.
Same here. I am a CD professionally, but I like to hack in my spare time. I have made a few sites in Rails etc., and I find HN to be very helpful.
I'm guessing Octopart (http://octopart.com/) might've helped with getting some of the parts.
Boeing 787 wing flaw extends inside plane
Extinction crisis looms in Oceania: Study
And an empty filing cabinet at that.
Work in Photoshop, don't save in Photoshop
Health Benefits of Coconut Oil 
Benefits of coconut oil are lots more to discuss. Health benefits of coconut oil maintain your weight. Coconut oil has variety of uses and benefits. Coconut oil is natural alternative medicine
and why a wireless router?

Maybe the laptop will be used inside the filing cabinet.
Michael Schumacher comeback
I.e. Erlang + Mnesia.
I know this is supposed to be funny, but this is the FIRST thing that came to my mind today.

I operate many CentOS, Ubuntu AND Red Hat servers. Seeing key developers drop from the Linux community (which is the way it sounds) and then to see the lead project manager of CentOS VANISH is absolutely terrifying.

Here was my SECOND thought. Should I just be using MS servers for everything?

THIRD thought, maybe Red Hat at the very least.

Stuff like this puts a huge scar on open source for the nervous folks like me. I want to rely on a huge company no more than I do an open source project run by random people around the world, but I just don't have much of a choice, and situations like these make me feel totally out of control, and when this happens, I have to consider paying more so I know the company that manages my OS will be around tomorrow.

I don't have a "what if a bus hits my OS" document, and I didn't think I needed one, but all of a sudden... I think that maybe I do.
You know, the scary part is that the people who run NY Times and co seem to actually take Arrington & his kind seriously.
How about the ability to FLAG a comment as "supposed to be funny", then we can opt to show the funny comments or not individually.
There are really two chiropractices, from what I can see. There is a limited, scientific chiropractice that limits itself to physical injuries, and while its domain is not zero, it's so limited I sometimes wonder at if it's really enough to be its own specialty. Maybe it is, it just seems thin to me compared to a full physical therapy regime.

Then there's the total quack chiropractice that gets covered by things like http://www.chirobase.org/ . (I observe that they call the first type of chiropractor a "straight" chiropractor.)

It is a pity they have the same name, as if Astronomy was still called Astrology. It really messes up debates over chiropractics.
So is the source behind HN available somewhere? Would love to setup it up for other verticals...
Scoping out the Galileoscope: $15 telescope designed by professional astronomers
That's one thing that I love about working through project euler - formal/classic math meets code. I've probably bought 6 or 7 books on particular aspects of math just so that I could properly understand/solve some of the problems too.
Ironic :)

After messing with ProFTPD today to try and get it work with mysql I gave up and installed Pure-FTPD. An absolute dream to get working.
Historically people die over anything desirable. Food, land, water, gold. There's no solution other than fixing human nature itself.
ssh -vv (with more or fewer vs) is also your friend. IIRC it tells you about the permission error either there or in the sshd log, and you can also find a lot more errors in the -vv output.

You should run ssh -vvv on a normal, working connection at least once to get a sense of what normal output is.
"we could just keep canvas bags in our cars."

Or on our bicycles, indeed. Or our trouser pockets as we walk down to the local corner-shop.
Mutter — the tiny command-line interface library with lots of style~
"...they don't improve your condition"

And often they make it worse, much worse as in giving you a stoke after manipulating your neck. See http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=94 for an interesting summary.
You are right........but still a commendable achievement for a 16 year old!
It still depends on what the plastic decomposes into in the landfill. If this kid has helped solve that problem then it is still a step forward.
>I operate many CentOS, Ubuntu AND Red Hat servers

Would you have been better off if you had used a proper professional Unix from, Sun or Dec or Compaq

>Should I just be using MS servers for everything?

As long as you don't mind switching to a new OS when their marketing dept decides it's time.
Grocery bags are made from polyethylene, which is composed only of carbon and hydrogen. Decomposition would not necessarily involve nitrogen. I can't speak to the byproducts of the bacteria.
Schneier on Security : Risks of Cloud Computing
This is leading offtopic, but anyways.

What came first, Jumpstart or Kickstart? Again, Linux is playing catch-up.

Jumpstart, Kickstart? Well, I guess they were hot in 2001, yes.

All sizable solaris deployments I know today are struggling with FAI, puppet and a lot of custom glue scriptery to enable at least a basic grasp on their deployments. JET and the ilk is just not even touching a worthwhile real-world problem.

And the userland/package manager problem is neatly addressed by Blastwave.org.

Likewise I can only scratch my head over reading blastwave and "neat" in the same sentence. Have you even used it?

I'm in fact a bit surprised it still exists because most solaris admins seem to either scoff at the idea altogether and stick with the regular pkgadd, or look for greener pastures in OpenSolaris - which wisely refrained from any attempts to re-invent apt.

Well, but as said, my initial point wasn't even about discussing implementation details in one way or another. There is no doubt solaris displays great technical excellence in some areas. Unfortunately too often these are not the areas that people in the real world care about.
Several of these problems are, or could very well be hardware issues.
BackType (YC S08) is hiring an Engineer (3rd Team Member)
Rant on intuitive interfaces: Just like Riding a Bike
It's hardly a western problem. I've been to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and they have just as many plastic bags as we ("The West") do, if not more. And they're just as concerned about them as we are.
3 Steps to Lose Stubborn Belly Fat
I'm a web designer. I usually skip the programming news, but still come here to read about other topics. There's a bunch of smart people here.
Telephony is one segment that requires more competition. The big players such as AT&T are so smug they even knockout Google Voice out of the app store. This trend has to change. And, I wouldn't mind paying for a Google Voice or a 3Jam subscription service. And, as long as it helps improve competition, it benefits us in the longer run. We should have more start ups focus on telephony related apps.
What do you think?
Schneier on Security : Another New AES Attack
Many common plastics are made from ethylene and propylene, which are byproducts of the refining process and for many years were simply burned in flares.

The fact that those (formerly waste) gases are now turned into useful products is a turn for the better, I think.

Eliminating plastic would have no significant impact on the exploration and production of oil. Things are not always as simple as they seem.
Is a Flip Mino really necessary for conducting business? You're buying a $99 iPhone, might as well merge the cost of an iPhone and Flip together to buy a 3Gs if you really need to shoot yet another elevator pitch video that nobody will watch.
Hacker builds clock powered by decaying prawns
They are working with novel materials, this sort of trouble isn't unprecedented, look at the de Havilland Comet problems in 1954 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet

We didn't fully understand metal fatigue at the time and these beautifully designed planes started falling out of the sky.

There are going to be unanticipated design problems to work out, it's to be expected.
I started as a designer, now I mostly do development. Flash ActionScript was my gateway.
There is a very good reason why the aircraft industry is very conservative when it comes to introducing new materials, and their testing procedures are about as rigid as it gets.

Good thing they caught this on the ground, there have been way too many accidents with passenger aircraft lately. Losing a plane this big would be a tremendous disaster.

This is going to affect Boeing financially quite a bit as well.
We've been using CentOS in-house but shipping on Redhat RHEL. I imagine that is fairly common. I wonder if Redhat asked the guy to kill the project (for a small compensation of course), so the only available RHEL binaries are produced and sold by Redhat. We would essentially be forced to get licenses for all our testing and dev machine, which is not cheap.

This is definetly troublesome and suspicious.
> ... runs on any platform where GTK+, gtk2hs and GHC can be installed ...

That's the problem. GTK doesn't work very well on the Mac, and (AFAIK) there's no GTK+ on Haiku. OTOH, Emacs works perfectly on both platforms :)
Okay, let's not kid ourselves here. The point of HyperCard was to create animations of stick figure skateboarders going off jumps during computer class when the teacher wasn't looking.
I recognize what he's talking about too, but having given both sides a serious whirl, my life is still definitely better for free software.

Years ago Linux desktop usage was a bit of a drag. But at the time, Windows servers were so much worse that as an integrated system, you were still net ahead.

Now that my printers, scanners, and peripherals have all worked without hassle for years there isn't even a trade off. Rather, I shake my head while watching people fight with driver wizard CDs.
Um, because it's home to Ford Prefect?

Like you even have to ask.
Here we go again: another poor deluded soul who believes that today's social networking toys are comparable with the truly revolutionary technological advances of the past, such as the early electric appliances and the automobile.