skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't watch tv, exercise every day, get 8 hours sleep, read a classic novel every month, invest wisely, only listen to "good" music and never pop, never use a windows computer, never get sad, volunteer every other month, don't gossip, can live with waiting to find out which game console to buy after the market decides, never impulse shop, don't need the latest iphone, run a marathon every year, always dress in style, best friends with my in-laws, have a perfect marriage, eat the healthy choices at restaurants, never laugh at other peoples misfortunes, never send "funny" emails to my friends, always ignore spam, don't take photos of my cat...
What's lacking in CS Degrees nowadays (Part 1)
Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products

And yet they are a publicly traded company, how does "our goal isn't to make money" work with their fiduciary duties?
That's not quite a fair response. A similar response could be given to something like the Bose-Einstein condensate, and I personally find it very very interesting as well as important. "Freeze something at a really cold temperature and stuff like light moves at a slower speed than a walking pace*. Give this stuff a chance =p You never know what will come of it one day!
16 Breakthrough Laptops: From Prototype Portables to Tantalizing Tablets
Standing out in the crowd: OSCON Keynote
I've got a harness and some gear, but I have yet to find the time to begin learning how to safely use it, so I haven't gone out yet.
Video of the talk: http://blip.tv/file/2400597
Second thought- this is an awful idea. I didn't think of it in that way, and it does indeed seem like a security risk. Your password might as well be the three colors.
An unpaid developer normally cannot sue for copyright infringement, even when the work has not been paid for (unless the contract explicitly states that the IP rights transfer only upon payment, which few contracts do).

I find that surprising -- all my contracts explicitly state that the transfer of copyright for a defined work unit occurs after payment in full. Our lawyer simply included it as a standard clause. From both the contractor and client perspective, I have no qualms with such a clause -- it simply means that if I want to use your work, I have to pay you what I agreed.

The problem here is that the underlying contract was not done as a work for hire.

The legal problem was that the underlying contract did not provide for copyright ownership. The ethical and human problem was that the company's management did not keep their word and pay for the work provided, and thus greatly reduced the likelihood of an amicable resolution to the legal problem of copyright ownership.
Windows 7 in Pictures: 10 Cool Desktop Features
Family members are financially dependent on me and I am far too good at imagining all the ways in which my startup would NOT workout.
Phelps Rebounds as Suit Controversy Roils Swimming
Are toxins more or less present in the food produced by different methods?

This is a good question to ask, because most plants contain phytotoxins adapted to keep microbes or animals from eating them. Human selective breeding of plants already has made plants less toxic as human foods, and human bioengineering of plants could help some kinds of plants become still less toxic to human eaters.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109862182/abstrac...
You just work your 8 hour day job and come home and work another 4 to 6 hours

You are a better human being then me.
"Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…"

Sure - and Apple's messages to the press are also never carefully crafted for maximum effect.
"our goal isn't to make money" is not in their corporate guidebooks or manifesto, it's in their press-release. it contributes directly to their bottom-line, I say.
Announcing code.intuit.com
Senators Seek Ban on Texting While Driving
If you want bruised, overpriced fruit and vegetables, head on down to the local organic market!

Spend 10 minutes to sort through a basket of tomatoes at the hippie organic market on Maui (the only store in the village) to find the four or five that aren't bruised to hell and back, then pay double price for the privilege.

And then there's the sustainability and economic problems. Can the farms near NYC produce enough organic produce to supply the whole city? How much will a head of lettuce cost if everyone is buying organic? Given the lower efficiency of organic farming, how much more land do we need to convert to farmland?

Apparently it's already too expensive for low-income people to get fresh food--at least, we hear so every couple weeks on slow news days. Increase the popularity of organic food; it's going to get even harder for these people to get fruit and veg.

Posting this on a Silicon Valley site... thank god for the -8 point limit, because I sense many a "downvote for disagreement" coming.
Perhaps, but one result of dinosaurs mating was this new thing called a "mammal" that ended up working out pretty well...
Is the price in line with the taste?

Most of us reading HN are consumers in industrialized countries with thriving, free-market economies. For eaters in poor countries, every gain in efficiency in agriculture is a reduction in price of food for eaters who devote most of their income to food. There have to be seriously inexpensive ways to produce food in some countries for some people to eat at all.
finish the quote:

"...We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are."

I don't think AAPL stock holders have had anything to complain about for the past eight years or so.
From the benefits on the job description page:

http://alexander.letmego.com/2009/01/29/very-special-90-day-...

I see no mention of exercise, and:

* Unlimited food and beverages, including of course Red Bull and coffee.

* If interested, we will offer you healthy and balanced food. (emphasis mine)

I have to wonder how productivity would be affected if they offered an environment just as immersive, but a bit more focused on health. Healthy mind in healthy body, right? I don't think I could last more than a couple of weeks.
Yahoo committed seppuku today
Warplanes explicitly targeting schools and hospitals because they are the most demoralizing and disruptive targets

Well, the WW2 doctrine of strategic bombing was not far off. And it justified the firebombing of Dresden and the nuking of two Japanese cities, amongst others, by the airforce of an otherwise civilized country. Also, see the bombing of so-called dual-use objectives (that included schools and hospitals) in recent "peacekeeping missions" in Bosnia, Irak by the same airforce. So, nothing new there.

it's all unconscionable

It is because we were raised as such - social conditioning. You can not imagine how heinous the weapons I cited were considered when introduced - at first, their users refused them, as it was not honourable or just.

I also really hope that you don't think it's perfectly fine on a personal level.

I do not think so, but it does not matter, unfortunately. Nobody's ethical considerations matter actually. If it works, it's going to be used, and ethical judgements are going to change as soon as the winner gets their way.
B. is a big one for a lot of people. I myself I am always trying to find opportunities for cross training.
The App Keyword Surprise: Apple Makes iPhone Devs Feel Helpless, Again
Definitely agree with this. You have to know that there are enough of "you" to be able to produce a marketable product. There is also a difference between this and "eat your own dog food" software, aka using what you've built.
Interesting, but I wouldn't call the result surprising.

Other research questions: Does hurrying through a sharply time-constrained task make you learn less from it? How about juggling multiple intellectually nontrivial tasks?

Hurrying through time-boxed tasks seems to be what grad school is all about. My own experience with taking classes is that I remember almost nothing from them. No doubt there are many reasons for that: relentless lecturing is an ineffective way to teach, homework problems are usually meaningless and don't provide context to make sense of the material, etc. It would be interesting to see if the rapid time-shuffling required by college also tends to shut down learning.

This was also my frequent experience with Extreme Programming. Once a task was done, I completely forgot what we did. Five minutes later, I couldn't tell you what we had worked on all morning. That was meaningful work, too.
What's the problem with GMOs?
The fact that the company was able to hire an additional contractor demonstrates that they had the finances available to pay all or part of their outstanding debt.

The use of copyright-infringement forces the company to meet their ethical and legal responsibilities immediately, before proceeding with leveraging his work. It's not the contractor's responsibility to provide the corporation a bridge loan.
A sad day for whatever remnants of Inktomi, AltaVista, FAST (the part bought by Overture in 2003, not the part bought by Microsoft in 2008), and Overture still exist inside Yahoo.
"These visualizations are intended to show that there is no best sorting algorithm."

Thank you. Once we hackers stop debating, we can address the problem at hand.
Good list. I posted a comment there, and am copy-pasting the same here -

Ctrl + L – Brings up a dialog for a line number to navigate to

Ctrl + Shift + L – Brings up a popup of shortcuts (Handy especially when new to learning the shortcuts)

Ctrl + Shift + Up/Down – Moves the caret to the previous or next method.

[Edited to only mention some shortcuts not on the page, but those that I find handy]
LiveScribe pens.
Behind the scenes at Airbnb HQ (W09)
You're absolutely right. It's amazing how many people have jumped on the organic bandwagon when they have reaped the benefits of GMO crops and efficient farming. It's like climbing up a ladder and then kicking it away once you're at the top.
Most people just don't have a sense of scale. If you would have told a buffalo hunter/poacher (back when there were seas of buffalo) that buffalo would one day be so few that they needed to be protected you would have been called crazy. Things like that were viewed as 'impossible' to happen because there were so many buffalo that humans couldn't possible hope to put a dent in their numbers, yet it happened.

There is a saying, "No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood." Much in the same way that a lot of people don't vote because they believe their vote won't make a difference. In general, a majority of people have trouble taking in the 'larger picture' on many issues.

Talking with someone about how much CO2 emission could be prevented or how you could prevent many animals from being mistreated (or even still being alive and conscious as they go down the 'assembly line' of being chopped up into pieces) doesn't become a matter of 'what is ethical' or 'what is the best thing for the planet' or even 'what is the best thing in the long-run'. It just becomes a discussion of, "but I want to eat meat!"

All of these calls for massive change on a global scale just fall onto deaf ears. People are more concerned with their own lives and troubles than something that is arguably intangible to them.
@icefox,
(abstractly) amusing, but I don't quite get it.

Is this some kind of American cultural assumption (that everyone watches TV and is lying about it if they say they don't)? I know many people (who can afford TV s) here in India who don't watch TV. Of course there are many people who are addicted to Tv as well, but someone not watching TV doesn't seem to evoke the kind of response in your post.

oh btw
"
"I don't watch tv, exercise every day, get 8 hours sleep,.."
check, check and check. Is this so unusual?
"it reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public anyway."

I'm not sure why you find it hard to believe people when they say they don't watch TV? This is very common in SF. People just have too much else going on in their lives. Its really not as unbelievable as you think...
OP here. In short, it sounds like the iPhone SMS infrastructure is susceptible to buffer overflow attacks. Seems the guys who have found it have given Apple a lot of time to fix it with no response so far.
Though Miller and Mulliner say they notified Apple about the vulnerability more than a month ago, the company hasn't released a patch, and it didn't respond to Forbes' repeated calls seeking comment.

those new android phones are coming out later this year, right?
I prefer the debt metaphor versus drag for two major reasons. First when you talk about real physical drag, the amount of drag per object is not a value assigned by a human person. You don't choose how much drag an object has. You can change the shape of the object to modify the drag coefficient but you cannot modify it independently. Whereas with debt, it is understood that this value is something that is your choice.

Secondly, with debt comes the concept of interest, which is the most salient point. The big problem with technical debt is that you can have a small amount and there are essentially no downsides, but the longer you avoid paying for it, the harder it is to avoid creating new technical debt when you write new code, the more technical debt you will incur, and the negative effects start to compound.
surprisingly good [albeit ridiculously hard to read. grey on white? ugh] post.

I liked the aggression + innovation = fighting.
Are you suggesting that we should do anything unless we can prove it's a bad idea? I'm all for science, but it is not wild superstition to think that the effects of eating trace amounts of pesticides in all our food over the course of decades might be bad for our health. Now certainly this should be studied, but how long will it take to achieve results, and how possible is it really to isolate the variables? In the meantime should we just assume superfarming methods are all a-okay?
Student loans puts college graduate into deep financial hole
What if this only displayed one color instead? It would be much more secure against snooping, but will still provide a large portion of the benefit. Sure, the number of false collisions would go up a ton, but the odds of trying to type the same thing and accidentally typing do different things that collide would be relatively small.
This was reported earlier in the month. Most blogs' source reference is this Yahoo Tech article, that claims:

"Apple is working to fix an iPhone vulnerability that could allow an attacker to remotely install and run unsigned software code with root access to the phone."

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20090702/tc_pcworld/apple...

No details on if Apple dropped the ball or if they were actually working on it in the first place.

My best guess to the vulnerability is the iPhones new MMS capability. They probably had to punch some holes in the sandbox to get MMS media saved on to the phone.
Heh, it is a machine generated name. I am by no means well-known or a public figure, but some of the people I deal with regularly are. I have had the unfortunate experience of having people digging up dirt on some of these people try to use comments I posted to the Internet against them (e.g., an extreme example of a similar situation is how difficult it was for Obama to shake the notion that Reverend Wright's opinion was also his own). Around the same time I had to undergo a security clearance. It got me thinking about the breadcrumb trail I'd been leaving online. If I could change my cryptic alias to something more readable I would. It just so happens the easiest way to randomly come up with a username was to use the script I use to randomly generate passwords with.

I've spent the past few years SEuO (search engine unoptimizing) my personal online presence including quitting Facebook and started signing up to new services with different aliases so that people can't so easily aggregate what I say. It's kind of embarrassing how paranoid that sounds, but there's the rationale. I don't mind defending my opinions, but I'm loathe to put my friends in a position, as one was, to try to explain my opinion when they might not share it. On the other hand, it's quite liberating being able to say what I want without having to worry about the political costs associated with those comments.

From PG's essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html):

When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

My tactic online is to say it anyways but make sure nobody knows who said it :)
This also greatly improves your and your fellow drivers' gas mileage.
I dislike the logo [good name/domain though]

tab bar renders like this in FF3.5: http://emberapp.com/plc/images/jobberbase

Overall: its cool. Whats your unique selling point? How are you going to get jobs? thats the hard bit for these sites, its very much marketing > innovation.
"Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…"

Doesn't sound in-line with blocking google voice apps.
I don't know how much this might color your opinion, but grellas is a lawyer, so my assumption is that he is opining from a position of at least some knowledge.
That might be doable. One of my fellow students designed a jigsaw puzzle solver that worked by looking at the shape of the piece, rather than a picture. However, I have worked in this kind of area and if you can guarantee little rotation, working out the translational offset isn't too bad. I'll give this some thought.
Salesforce.com SOAP API JAX-WS Tutorial Part 4
Developers comment on Verizon's app store, express concerns about compatibility
What Is Your Department’s “Brand”?
To be fair, I've met more than one pro-organic person who thinks organic foods are more nutritious. These are often the same people who worry about vague things like "toxins" from eating meat.
I'm really surprised about Yahoo's market share. I've generally found it a lower quality search than both Bing and Google, and other than this deal I haven't heard anyone talk about it at all. I know a lot of people that have their home page set to MSN by default, but I haven't heard of Yahoo being someone's homepage in years.

What's everyone else's experience with this? Does anyone here use Yahoo, and if so, why?
I still think SSD is a mere diversion in storage. According to Jason Hoffman (CTO/Founder of Joyent, speaking on Structure'09), SSD under their typical workload can only last for a month before wearing out: http://gigaom.com/2009/06/25/structure-09-how-to-scale-up-wi...

Cheap commodity disks however have an annualized failure rate of 4% in Google's datacenter (according to their disk analysis paper.)
Google knows what recursion is
An alternative is to buy locally produced food, which often is also organic. It may have a shorter shelf life, but it's sitting on your shelf most of that time, not on the shelf at the grocers waiting to be bought.
When you're a lawyer every problem looks like a new law.
The UK tried this, first they banned talking on a 'cellular telephone' so as not to ban taxi or police radios.
But this didn't cover texting, so another 3years of parlimentary debate they added texting - but this didn't cover email or IM.
Meanwhile the original 'cellullar telephone' law didn't cover skype or other IP calls - or the laywers weren't sure that it would in court. So back to parliament to redefine 'cellular telephone' and 'call'.

Of course there is a perfectly good law about dangerous driving...
not everyone is meant to sit in a cubicle either. I think there are more entrepreneur types sitting in a cubicle than vice-versa any given time.
Official answer by Yahoo about BOSS (we don't know)
Ask YC: anything similar to Google Notebook or even better?
I love google notebook but its not compatible with new firefox version ... so what are my options? i like something that allows me to click the link at the bottom of browser to save the webpage... or may be even better than this feature ... i'm going to try Zoho Notebook but would like to know other better options.
My first thought was: well of course, this is just like timing your 'reloads' in various shooter games (where you point offscreen and fire to reload).
The only problem I have with this experiment is that there is no control for muscle memory.

If you compared the metabolic rate of a piano player playing piano vs. someone who's never touched one before, intuitively the skilled player would outperform the unskilled player. (There are certainly better examples.)

How much experience arm-swinging did those in the arm-swinging group have?

How much experience opposite-swinging did those in the opposite-swinging group have?

How much experience keeping their arms still while walking did those in the still-armed group have?
Gosh, plagiarism. The original: http://www.cio.com/article/495555/The_Worst_U.S._Cities_to_W...
"Innovation is all you have"? Microsoft has never innovated, not even at the beginning. Many big players in many industries have never been innovators.

These guys have something else: a strong bargaining position. "Innovation is a fleeting advantage." Cornering a market, setting up barriers to entry—those are time-tested and effective ways to make serious money.
Ferrari guy for hire :)
This deal is the most demoralizing news I've heard in a long time. It calls for some kind of ritual lamentation. Any ideas?
Not having a cofounder is why I haven't started yet. I've been trying to find one on and off for a while, but it seems I'm not very good at it.
Yahoo has been poisoned, the market knows it.
You can't independently choose your "debt" level with software! When you design feature X, it costs you interest in terms of support, refactoring, debugging, etc. If you think you can decide exactly how much that's going to cost you a priori then you should go buy some lottery tickets. Drag is a better metaphor in this case because you can have an idea from looking at the design approximately how painful it will be to support it, but you can't be quite sure until you test it in the real world (ie wind tunnel test for example). You can model/simulate it based on expectations of feature popularity etc, but you won't know for sure.

On your second point, I do agree that there is a strong salient aspect of the idea of interest payments on debt. Like I said originally, the metaphor stuck because it resonates. However, the idea of technical drag has this same exact concept; the more junk you bolt on to the car, the more it overwhelms your project, and your initial F1 racer becomes a UPS truck.

One could make a point about technical debt that technical drag doesn't have, and I'll yield it's important, is that it's pretty tough to have so much drag you can't move. Whereas debt service can flat-out sink you.

However I'd counter that if you aren't moving (ie have customers using your software) then technical debt isn't really a problem because you don't have to do much work to service software with no users. Whereas technical debt implies that you have to pay for the feature even if it isn't being used.
Thank you for clarifying. That all makes a lot of sense.
Indeed; It took me a good minute to figure out where the content was.

It's worthwhile information, but does anyone else feel like this story get pulled back into the light once every two years or so?

Telegraphically: "Overactive temporal lobe causes epileptic visions. NDEs. Meditation increases theta waves and drops parietal lobe activity. Is god real?"

I'd love to learn what actual progress has been made in understanding why or how these things work, rather than just the bare correlations. I need to find a good peer-reviewed journal of, how did they put it, neurotheology?
How about continuations and TCO while we're at it?
Steve will happily kill projects at any time if he doesn't agree with them.
Sounds like a win-win situation to me