skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tom DeMarco was part of the paradigm shift toward thinking about software development as an Engineering discipline. He was very influential in his day, and "The Mythical Man Month", with he co-authored with Tim Lister, continues to influence. What's remarkable about his article is that thought leaders of a revolution often go to their graves convinced that they were right. Seeing one thoughtfully recant is a rare pleasure.
The terrible thing about pot is that it makes you two things: lazy; and happy to be lazy. It quells the fire within. Pot may be fun and may feel good, but it keeps you from being anyone.
After 3 months the CAPTCHA was switched to the other CAPTCHA setting. I recorded the amount of successful, failed, and SPAM conversions for each of the 50 web forms.

Wouldn't it be a better study if instead of doing the switch once after 3 months, captcha went on and off randomly throughout the 6 months?
After 3 months the CAPTCHA was switched
to the other CAPTCHA setting.

Wouldn't it be a better study if instead of doing the switch once after 3 months, captcha went on and off randomly per visitor throughout the 6 months? This would take away unintended effects on the study due to changes in traffic pattern over time.
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Read Gary Taubes' book "Good Calories, Bad Calories".
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http://free-bollywood-movie.blogspot.com/2009/07/jashnn-movie.html
I have found that "Good Calories, Bad Calories" does a great job of pointing towards a better understanding of diets and how the body works.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509614
a modifier/a tweaker

One that explorers and executes options which were not necessarily originally intended.

When some call such figures hackers, they do not refer to any definition but rather the name as a role. When We think about what comes to mind when we think about a Hacker, what a hacker does, who a hacker is, what characteristics hackers express, what role hackers play in society, we extend the 'job title' to fill non-hackers which meet those characteristics.
I can think of two notable cases where he "changed" the news. The first was his editorial after the Tet offensive, which I already posted above.

The second is his (behind the scenes) role in taking on McCarthy as part of Edward R. Murrow's See it Now broadcast. It might still be a bit of a stretch to call it hacking the news, but it's not much of a stretch.

NPR has a piece about the See it Now episode, as told by Cronkite, on their site: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1753982
Then you misunderstand the situation. Amazon issued notice of the deletion (though did not clarify that the books were illegal), and automatically refunded money without the customers having to ask.

I think they handled it as well as anyone can handle this particular situation.
There are a couple things. One is how tight the founders are. Two of them are brothers, and the third guy is almost a third brother. So they trust one another totally.

The other distinctive thing about them is how committed they are. You can see it in everything from the design of their site to their reputation for customer service. They would be aghast at the thought of doing something in a half-assed way.
A necessary, but not sufficient condition to a successful startup.
I agree with this for the most part. Amazon doesn't publish books or make copyright law. It's really up to the consumers/voters to change the law or vote with their dollars. In this case I'm sure it's not too hard to track down a PDF copy of 1984. No real harm done except to the publisher who will ultimately have to change their ways. No justice, no peace.
"Nobody in the streets knows that you are a black belt" - Bruce Lee
Legally, it's like Amazon brokered sale of stolen goods and the owners demanded those goods be returned. People thought they had purchased limited rights to the book. Amazon _is_ responsible in some way.
Subscribe to Gary's Guide and you'll find plenty of tech events you can go to.

If you're in a tourist-like mood, DO NOT rent a car and drive around or walk forever. Get a bike, you can bike the golden gate bridge get a ferry from sausalito, go anywhere to your heart's content with the simple use of a bike.
Then I'd like to see posts on HN linking directly to such stuff discussing his pioneering. An obituary is not the best way to do that.
I'm saying that an awful lot of Perl advocacy is predicated on CPAN, and that -- since Sturgeon's Law doesn't have an exception for the CPAN -- this is basically the same sort of overhyped propaganda the parent comment was lamenting from other languages.

That in no way implies any of the statements you're attempting to shove into my mouth, however, so perhaps you should step back a bit and reconsider what you're saying?
Will you give it a rest? Someone doesn't have to be a hacker to be worth remembering here, just as stories don't have to be about hacking to be posted here.
"Perl's just gotten beat up on by fans of certain other upstart languages that want to steal some of Perl's glory."

Or... maybe there's a kernel of truth in it? Yes, all languages have weird gotchas and corner cases. But there are times when Perl seems to go out of its way to have as many as it can manage, which turns the process of learning Perl into a long campaign of trial-and-error experiments and rote memorization.

It's sort of like trying to find a consistent pattern in the naming of PHP's built-in functions, except it applies to the entire language.
I'm not asking why you work as a programmer, but wether [sic] you have a passion for the act of programming.

Ugh.

I really want to like this post, but a typo in the FIRST sentence is such a turn-off.
Please people, quit it with these micro-optimisations (images, css sprites, compression). Most websites are slow because:

1. they use no-cache headers, forcing everyone to wait for the server to regenerate the page

2. they generate pages dynamically

Most sites can and should use static pregeneration of content with appropriate caching headers.
I love programming for that amazing feeling you get after you implement an amazing new feature that works perfectly, or squash that hard to find bug.
For someone whose main preaching is a religion of caution and skepticism, you speak with a lot of moral certainty. Why should holding a very common view (which probably not a lot of thought went into) make a person a "horrible human being"? I even allow that some of the people that disagree with us might have good reasons for doing so. Should I excise a person from the company of "the good guys" because one of his family members went through a horrible experience with illegal drugs? Or should I condemn him because he lives in a community where nearly everyone thinks drugs should be illegal and he lacks the two-plus sigma IQ often needed to disagree with the whole of society?

By such standards, the world is full of monsters. While I stop short of endorsing full-fledged moral relativism, I do think a little humility in judging the moral worth of others is a (rare) virtue. This is especially true on the interwebs, where separating the sheep from the goats is a favorite pastime of each little ego.
As an aside, I'm impressed with how well we handle spurious downvotes here. I saw your comment at -3, and yet it has since been "neutralized". Good to see.
" Someone doesn't have to be a hacker to be worth remembering here, just as stories don't have to be about hacking to be posted here."

I posted this a while ago, making the same point

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=711362

In other words, I agree with you, pg ! I am all for intellectually fascinating stories on the HN front page. ;-)
Interesting read up, but graphs are seriously misleading. The first one being from 0-900 scale, and the next one a zoomed in 600-820. This really throws your off... took me a while to realize that the failures are actually a VERY SMALL fraction... (even after reading the percentages explained in text).
Regardless, Amazon should have done their homework and ensured that it was OK with the publishers before actually selling the commodity.

Its too late after they have sold the commodity to go ahead and forcibly reverse the sale. And they have to take some flak associated with this whole issue.

I do not understand the comments which say that "Amazon is blameless and blame the publisher". Sure they are less to blame than the publisher for this whole mess, but they do have some responsibility. As a large corporation, they should have checked it out with the publisher BEFORE they sold the book.

Also, they could have told the publishers that "the book is sold and we cannot reverse the transaction". Why make the world aware of the fact that they control the kindle content to such a large extent? It is simply opening a door to the publishers, who can later on make such demands in other cases also.
Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment
Really? I didn't know that.
"Books simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the kindles, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word."
Sure, but what about potential loss of sales of the kindle by more privacy conscious users?

Remember the Sony rootkit debacle a few years ago? No end users were really affected by it, but it was a huge PR disaster for them. Not saying that the current case is analogous but we cannot fortell how people will react to such sneaky behavior.
"Regardless of the position of this article, Amazon has agreed with the public that revoking these books was an inappropriate action for Amazon to take, and has said it will not take that action in the future."

I am aware of that, and indeed Amazon's ability to see right from wrong and admit that they messed up is part of what prompted me to write the article.

"In December 2008, Sony said that it had sold 300,000 units of its Sony Reader since the device launched end of 2006. Meanwhile, TechCrunch says Kindle sold 189,000 units in 2008."

Point taken. Perhaps I was biased by my own anecdotal observations. I've seen half a dozen Kindles "in the wild," i.e, not counting early adopter friends, but not one Sony Reader.

But in terms of the data, note that you're comparing Sony's worldwide sales with Kindle sales in the U.S. Besides, the numbers you quote are from Mark Mahaney, who later revised his estimates to 500k for 2008, which would mean almost a million up until now. http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090203/citi-says-amazon-so...
Hacker News is where the literate, success/money-minded bright people come. Perhaps this is elitist, but I'd bet that this community is thinner, richer, and more socially capable than most communities online. Probably younger as well, since there's the whole core of high school/college YC wannabes, myself included.
the risk of customers not buying your product

I agree that the world would be better off if this were true. But considering it's their careers on the line, I imagine they do a lot of research into customers' behavior and how it related to DRM. I imagine that the biggest competitor to a DRM-ed e-book is the dead-tree version of that same book, in which case, it's all a win-win for them.

But again, while I imagine people do buy e-books, I agree that most of them don't realize the fine print of the transaction. Morally speaking this isn't fair, in a way, Amazon is facilitating a fraudulent transaction between their customers and the publishers.

But corporate law isn't written by ethics philosophers, it's written by lobbyists, lawyers, and politicians (hopefully). And so corporations don't behave according to a human's sense of morality, but according to corporate law.
DRM is designed to favor middle men (RIAA, MPAA) as opposed to actual creators and artists.
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It seems to me like it would have been helpful to split yes in to "Yes, and I feel that it makes me a better hacker" vs. "Yes, and I feel that it has a negative or nonexistent effect on my hacking abilities." Right now the question seems a little too vague. :(
"Within a few short years, we can expect to be dealing with multi-million-thread programs running on million-core systems.

This will no doubt stress the contemporary HPC software model which was developed in a time when 512 cores was a large number."

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pa...
I can relate to what the author is saying here. Often I described my writing software as something that lived inside of me that was demanding to get out. I had little idea whether I could successfully commercialize it or not. The challenge is something like it required such a heavy up front R&D effort. So I started to see myself like an author. An author doesn't know if their book will be successful without writing it and seeing what happens. So I made my sacrifices and got the software to a good point. It's still my hope that After the Deadline will be my break out novel. Regardless of outcome, it is a labor of love all the way.
* because it offers the possibility to create an amazing experience for a potentially unlimited audience

* because it enables the incremental building of poetic, elegant architectures that involve language, relationships and mathematics (much like music)

* because i can do it any time, anywhere, on a device i can carry in a small shoulder bag

* because within it, i can spend a lifetime learning new techniques, strategies and tool-sets
I'm confused. Are you asking if hallucinogens cause sleep deprivation/fevers?
You're right. RIF. From exploit.c

for RHEL5 2.6.18 compile with:
cc -fno-stack-protector -DRHEL5_SUCKS -o exploit exploit.c
then just ./exploit
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A Calorie is the energy needed to heat 1 kg of water by 1 degree.

Given that the human body is mostly water, and produces lots of heat, a calorie is a perfect way to measure the energy content of food.
I read on reddit that hemp was banned by the lobbyists of the lumber/timber corporations, as hemp was dirt cheap to grow and process it to make paper, which of course would have killed these big paper corps. Marijuana being a cousin and seemingly looking alike was banned together with it. any truth in this?

Ok. marijuana affecting hacking abilities (in terms of driving) video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3zou4F00Ic (i think this is from channel-4 UK)

In there he says he is "concentrating more and driving slower".
In two weeks, Ev and Biz will be calling Arrington to offer him an exclusive on some new twitter feature. TC did nothing wrong in releasing the documents. If anything, Arrington was incredibly transparent over the past few days (albeit, in his usual abrasive manner).
You assume (incorrectly) that my issue is with points of fact. My issue is with points of common sense and what should happen. It's not your fault you bought a stolen car or a stolen book. It's the sellers fault. It should be their responsibility to make it right. I don't care in the slightest how it actually is.
I didn't say the customer was entitled to it. I said Amazon should offer it.
just because you can do something does not mean you should do something

But that misses my point precisely: if this was your buddy Josh, an appeal to ethics would make sense, but a corporation isn't a person. Publishers can't do anything else, just like moths can't help but fly to light. Bringing up ethics here is like bringing up ethics when your car won't start.

In most publishers, if an "enlightened" CEO decides to give up rights, he needs to justify the business value of that - and "the 0.1% of our customers who know what DRM is and care will buy paper versions of our books instead of getting a Kindle" is just not enough business value to justify it.

A CEO isn't being paid to make his company an ethical actor in the world, he's paid to maximize the value of the company. If a CEO's ethics regarding DRM don't agree with maximizing the value of the company, he'll say "I can't do my job because it's unethical" and be replaced with someone else.
I smoke pot because it helps me sleep. In any other cases I find pot to be counter-productive... Sure it might've help me come up with some interesting essay in my Philosophy class back in college but besides that I find it really hurts my productivity. I can code when I'm high but everything takes at least 2-3x longer than it would've taken me if I were sober.

Then again, I guess it affects everyone differently. Some of my friends (usually the more "artsy" type of people) find that it helps boost their productivity. As for me, well, I have trouble sleeping and I'm not interested in sleeping pills so, as long as pot will help me with that, I will keep on smoking it. In any other situation (especially any "social" situation) I avoid it as it makes me more awkward, paranoid and anxious.
"the only thing separating Y-Combinator from the others you mentioned are Hackernews and PG's essays. Both of which are of such excellent quality that I would apply here before anywhere else"

I agree, with a minor shading of my own.

In my opinion the only thing that separates Y Combinator from the others is PG (and his (extended) team - Jessica, Trevor, rtm , YC alumni.. ). Yes most of us know them primarily through their writings (PG's essays and comments here, jessica's book and so on) and their public appearances (in startup school for example) but they engender a trust that I don't feel with the more "professional VC"/investor/banker led groups that attemp to duplicate YC's model. Partly this trust happens because PG is a programmer who also groks startups. But also, we've seen PG's thinking evolve over the years and that engenders a great amount of trust and comfort. You feel like you know these people, and know that they are good people. Some random guys with money to spare who put up equal amounts of money and even duplicates the same deal structure as YC doesn't begin to match up (imo).

With a random non hacker type (which is what these clones are, from a potential founders view point) I always have to keep my guard up because I don't know that they aren't trying to rip me off, pack my company board and so on. I feel I always need to keep a background thread running to see what they REALLY want at a given point of time as contrasted to my believing PG and team will be up front. Yes this is a subjective and possibly irrational decision on my part, but that is hard for some random vc type to duplicate.

Many many people tried to similair things here in Bangalore. None really got off the ground. Everyone I know who wants YC type funding thinks about travelling to California for 3 months, vs taking equivalent funding here.

As in programming, you can clone the company structure, you can't clone the people.
When other groups are led by hackers of similar calibre who have had success with their own startups, and invoke the same feelings of admiration and trust, then they become viable alternatives to YC in my mind.

Just my 2 cents, but it may help the OP with his thesis!

Otherwise these clones , at best, provide a regional advantage (you don't have to travel to California, you can stay where you are / travel less ).
Scary-looking guy with tire iron and Barnes & Noble-embroidered balaclava, when caught breaking into your house at 3 AM: "I'm sorry, but we sold you a book whose North American rights the publisher failed to secure in time for publication. I'll just take it back now, and be on my way. Thank you for shopping at Barnes & Noble, here's your $6.95 back."

What's unacceptable in meatspace is unacceptable in DRM-space. Stay out of my computer.
> nothing I have done has been as effective and satisfying as eating "Primal"

I have a lot of opinions on this topic so I find it difficult to form a non-lengthy reply... but wanted to briefly chime in that I agree. Effective and satisfying.
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Whoops! In that case I misread.
I thought this was going to be about startups.
I was wrong.
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Actually, it works very well.

The approach outlined here is pretty similar to what Weight Watchers uses. Theirs is a little looser, tracking calories on a weekly basis and offering incentives to eat filling foods. But it's basically the same idea.

I lost 70 pounds in about a year on a system like that, and most of the experience was simply being surprised at how easy it was. There was a bit of a fiery adjustment during the first week, but thereafter, I felt better than ever. I wasn't hungry a lot. I didn't feel overly disciplined. Really, I was eating exactly what I wanted, just subject to the full consequences of the decisions. A year of just paying attention and making informed decisions saw me at my ideal weight, and my main reaction was, "People think this is hard?"

It's not a moral/discipline approach at all. More like lifestyle engineering. You have the numbers in hand, you know what you want to achieve, you know what you're willing to part with and what you aren't. I personally incorporated a weekly pizza & pop D&D night I didn't want to part with . . . and still lost about a pound a week. When you compensate via cost instead of guilt, treats are guilt-free; pizza for lunch just means soup for dinner, pie on Wednesday means no candy bars on Thursday or Friday. It's really just a question of engineering, knowing your body, and setting up the system to do what you want.

The most curious effect of the whole affair was that my appreciation and enjoyment of food went up. My initial approach was that since I could only afford a couple ounces of cheese, I was going to make darn sure it was goooood cheese. But there was a strange feedback there; good food makes you happy faster. An ounce of fancy chocolate left me feeling treated in a way five ounces of crappy chocalate never did--and of course, neither ever satisfied hunger, so the smaller amount didn't matter. Net effect: not hungry, losing weight, enjoying food more.

It really is a total hack.