skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it kind of naive and disturbing to read some of these responses. To the people who are telling him to "let it go", "get over it" and "move on", I ask can you really be serious? None of the experiences I've read really come close to what he went through all those years ago. It really angers me to no end when people just brush this type of treatment off as "kids being kids" and expect people to just accept it and move on.

To the people who are saying "it's been 25 years, they're not the same people anymore", how can you be so sure? Did you go to his high school? Do you know the people he went to high school with? Why is it that you assume that 25 years has made all the jerks in his high school regretful and apologetic "do-gooders"? If that's the case, where are all of today's criminals coming from? That's a bold statement, I realize and I'm not suggestive that all of today's criminals were high school bullies or that all high school bullies grow up to commit crimes, but they have to come from somewhere right? How do you know that the kid who used to steal your lunch money isn't doing a nickel for a B&E? How do you know that the jock who picked on all the small kids didn't grown up to abuse his own kids? You don't. So please stop pretending like everyone grows out of who they are in high school, because many people don't.

Let's assume tomorrow you're walking down the street and a complete stranger comes up to you, swipes your leg out from under you and stomps on your knee, breaking your leg. You've never done anything to this person, you don't even really know him. Sure you've seen him on your way to work from time to time, but that's it. He's just someone who happens to be in the same areas as you from time to time. But today, he decides to assault you - for no reason than just to satisfy some sick urge he has. He doesn't continue to beat you, he doesn't rape you, he doesn't steal your money or shoot you - he just breaks your leg, laughs it off and goes on his way. The following week he interviews and gets a job where you work. Do you just "get over it?" No? Okay, maybe it wasn't a week later - it's been a month? A year? 5 years? 10? - It doesn't matter, some things are not excusable or forgivable no matter how much time has passed. Some things you just don't get over.
"The best engineer I ever knew did."

Had a CS degree?
Hmm... you have a point.

I should have noted that myself. During the IT death, I did some bio-/organic chemistry courses for fun. It seemed so interesting to modify prokaryotes. Like the people programming logical circuits with the game of Life, but with proteins.

I got ill for a while and had to stop studying, otherwise I might be working with bioinformatics now. On the other hand, biochemical lab work was boring (organic chemistry lab was incredibly fun.)
blasdel's link above has Zed Shaw taking claim for it -

You know what’s great about the Internet? When you see something like this obviously astroturfed bullshit ad from Microsoft you can easily parody the hell out of it.

So I did and I’m pretty sure that will set the internets on fire. Again.
From the demo, it looks like you provide a subdomain per user. If that's correct, maybe you could allow paid users to assign a different subdomain to each project?

Have you talked to any of the users doing this sort of thing? Asking why they're doing something will probably point you in the direction of the feature far better than a comment thread on HN.
I know what I said is cheeky because all of PLR is going in that direction, and for good reason. COLA and similar research really extol the best from each of the dominant architectures.

But I think that we need to move away from both object and lambda architectures rather than finding ways to marry them. In my humble opinion, the "blue plane shift" is in an entirely different ocean than the ones we've been swimming in.

I'll tell you a little about the research I'm working on: All software is created directly as key-value pairs which can self-assemble into labeled, directed graphs. These are understood directly by an OS which acts essentially as a simple layer over the hardware. No programs are compiled or interpreted. There's no assembly code. There's more to it; I'll email you.
By the way, what are good landing pages you can recommend to study? Ideally, with proved above average conversions.
You know, I specifically checked that before posting. Where I went wrong is that I didn't look at the HTML page itself; I looked at the images and CSS, which I erroneously assumed to be handled by the same program.

All images and CSS for this site are served by Apache but the actual text/html request is not. However - my point still stands, as the primary request is proxied by Apache and proxy requests, IIRC, are included, or can be configured to be included, in the Apache logs.

update: I am going to have to eat my words here. I have no evidence news.ycombinator.com is proxied by Apache. All the css and images are served by Apache, but they're hosted on a different domain and a different IP at ycombinator.com. I am kind of amazed PG wrote an HTTP server but .. apparently he did. Kudos.
Startups: Start with a Problem, Not an Idea
Some cursory googling did not reveal Walter Cronkite's net worth, but I did find an article suggesting that his kids were concerned about how much he was going to leave to his girl friend compared to them. So alone and penniless does not seem to apply to Walter, either.
It's not supposed to be night vision. All I want out of a digital camera is the ability to take hi-res indoor photographs without flash. Consumer-level cameras have modestly-sized CCDs that can't gather enough light fast enough indoors, so the picture is either noisy (not enough light gathered) or blurry (exposure is too long). This aims to remedy the former by using the UV/IR photo to smooth out the noise.
I suppose the irony is I was trying to head off those OTHER people who might claim this is not Hacker News. :)
"Violated," eh? What does that mean, exactly? If it's someone starting a fight, sure, beat 'em up. But you seem a bit overenthusiastic to beat the shit out of people. You may want to take a look at calming down; you might do the exact same thing you did to your brother again, to someone else.
Ask HN: Any Geeky/techy songs you keep listening?
I'd really like to know what are the songs you hackers enjoy.
I only notice it specifically if I do reload the page. Or are you saying you have to reload more than once?
Wow, Germany sounds like a horrible place to go shopping.
How to write a book?
Mossberg responds to TechCrunch Twitter controversy
To exaggerate: How about forgiveness instead of raising a new karate kid generation?

Note that forgiving does NOT mean "it's all right that you beat me up".

Forgiveness means recognizing that "yes, they beat me; it all truly did happen back then but well, I lived" and then letting go of that old ugly shit. Almost anything in life is a better thing to do compared to keeping that stuff in your head.

If he's lucky he learned something from school. Setting his boundaries properly, discarding false beliefs that he's a wimp, or whatever it is for him. I assume that he doesn't get beaten up regularly anymore? If so then he has learned.

His classmates have hopefully learned something too. It's not an easy thing to forget, breaking someone's fingers. The bullies have all had wounded hearts already at the time. There's a lot to go through in that.

There's a saying that we're all victims of victims. I assume it fully applies. It's not so much what happens to you but how you think of and act on it.
Reignite the love you shared with your ex
Whenever your friends ask you about your past relationship give a positive answer. Tell them about the nice moments you shared, the positive attitude of your ex and what he was good at. When your ex will hear these things he will be fond of you. If you want to know more about how to get ex back then you can visit www.getuexback.com
Of course, the game distracted me for an hour.

(my results: http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/787/picture1krx.png)
Zed Shaw's marketing department of course!

Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm a fan. I'm a fan of anyone who knows what they're fucking talking about, actually.

That MS site is embarrassing to even look at.
heres a site Im working on landing page for local company - Please look it over and give first impressions ... on the landing page only...

http://okcgranite.com/redorb/index.html
If so, it's awfully prevalent.

I'm self-taught too, and so is the best programmer I know by a long way (not me, I suck).

The guy I went to uni with who did CS to completion? He's writing printer drivers for Canon. And hell, good for him. He's got a nice apartment, he has nice dinner parties, he has a nice wife. Good for him!

But all the entrepreneurial types I know are self-taught.
I don't work for a corporate moloch and I can pee all day if I want.
Kraftwerk, Computer Love ;)
This is my first impression for all sites that are left justified instead of centered: why? just add a margin: 0 auto; into a wrap and get the thing in the middle.
Argh! This article reminds me of my love-hate relationship with America.

95%: I hate you and everything you stand for
5%: You are the most intelligent and likeable people I have ever met

I never know what to say.
wish I could write this in a private message lol - it was pure lack on knowledge, now I'm on a trail to figure it out :) its been annoying me ... Thanks, please provide other feedback based on content .. while I fix it.
I think you are confusing different parts of Google's hiring process.

Keep in mind this guy started in tech support. When you describe Google as requiring a "top-tier degree" you are thinking of software engineer positions. If you want to get a job at Google doing tech support, or working in a datacenter, the hiring bar is lower.
From the parody: "I'm probably some failed art student who couldn't get a job on Cap-Hill..."

Right, because it takes such awesome credentials to land a job at the bars and restaurants in Seattle...

A lot of Microsofties are insanely passionate about the company. I used to be one, and shared their fervor for quite a while. When they say that they want to "change the world," they really mean it for better or worse.

Now excuse me while I go launder my Decemberists t-shirt in preparation for the Death Cab concert tonight. ;-)

(capitol hill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill,_Seattle)
No, they are junk. About 50% of the contents of cigarette is filler and tobacco is of incredibly low quality. I roll my own cigarettes with tobacco produced without additives. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarettes and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkTMx-1G0RQ
Inspirational “How I Did It” Stories
I think this is officially the sign of the reddit-ization of Hacker News. Pathetic.
This is why I like to hire guys with Open Source software on their resume. I can see it and know they are awesome. If someone doesn't have any Open Source on their resume, I also begin to wonder, "How much do they really love this stuff, if they only do it when they're being paid for it?"
You might be agreeing with me, and perhaps are missing my point: more people, especially statisticians, will be engaged in the programming and programming-like tasks that are required to work with ever-increasing data. Not structured-SQL data, but raw and ugly natural-language and legacy-format data. Many programming tasks in the future will be about data, and excel-like "Illustrative" programs are very well adapted, even if not Turing-complete (Interesting discussions on the turing completeness/incompleteness of even something like Excel: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ProductivityRant http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=429477 ). Illustrative programming is just dynamic programming plus immediate feedback of program results - perhaps the ability to click on a GUI element, and change its associated code in realtime, perhaps just the ability to change how a data-point is calculated. The tools will be different.

Turing-completeness will always look like Turing-completeness, but this is hardly interesting or relevant. I think that your claim about productivity is entirely false (see something like http://www.cs.umass.edu/~yannis/law.html ), but that's beside the point of my post.
Glad you linked to that, I was also bringing it up a while ago. People need to read the whole thing.

Personally, what attracts me to hacker news is not the actual hacker news. I can find that anywhere I want. It's that the type of person who would participate in a site called Hacker News is likely smart and holds interesting, well-reasoned positions on a whole lot of things that are actually not Hacker News.

I know all the actual "Hacker News". Like any serious person I am on the damn mailing list. But ... I like the people who'd be attracted to such a place. I read a lot of the comments. It's worthwhile.
Yeah, but it's here and part of the conversation, mere hours after the original -- that counts for something. True, it's not sparkling literary parody, but more like a timely snappy comeback. Sites like Twitter and HN make this sort of riposte possible, so now it's one option for making a point.
I find it amusing that the best viral marketeer I have seen says "she’s a whore because she’s in marketing".
Is Jolicloud OS an existing precursor to Chrome OS on netbooks?
Jolicloud claims to be building a "web OS for netbooks" based on Ubuntu NBR. It seems very similar in concept to Chrome OS. That's probably bad for Jolicloud, but their screenshots/alpha might give us an idea of what to expect from Google.
> What do we need to get on Ruby 1.9?

Significant whitespace.
http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/06/23/ruby-versioning-is-comple...
It's wrong to the best of my knowledge. I've never heard of such a thing and I know several people who work on free software along with what they do at MS.

That said, if you work on IE in your day job and want to contribute to Firefox on the weekends, that wouldn't fly for obvious reasons.
I don't mind the downvoting if I'm vastly wrong, but please could you explain why this would be wrong? A few people have upvoted me, so they might be interested in knowing why its wrong too.
The real reason to introduce them is tightened control not "speed" or something.
That's true. And, contractor positions are also easier to get hired for than full-time positions. It's a very common "back door" for folks who don't meet all the requirements into a job at Google to start as a contractor...I know several people who got their Google job that way. I question how readily one can move between those positions at Google, and the more rarefied positions, though.

So, maybe Zeke is an exception at Microsoft, too, and this really is just some straight up astroturfing. I'm sure one could easily find a few dozen team leads at Google that don't sport a fancy degree. But, if Microsoft doesn't actually want to hire more people like Zeke, it seems like a poor choice of story to tell.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

Look, why is it so strange that Microsoft has a blog profiling people around the company who like their jobs? Are we supposed to cut ourselves every morning because we work for the "evil empire"? I don't understand why you think the site is somehow ridiculous, evil or insane. You know, of the 90,000+ people Microsoft employs, most of them actually like what they do.

Astroturfing implies that something is not true. Are you seriously arguing that people who work for Microsoft cannot possibly actually enjoy it?
Falcon 1 Successfully Delivers RazakSAT Satellite to Orbit
You also have to note that the person will be in the dark. Their eyes will look different than they would in normal light conditions. There's no way to get pictures in the dark that look exactly like daytime pictures, only rough approximations.
Careful with the quick judgments. Credit cards are not popular in many parts of Europe, so it's no big deal. I don't have one, for example, despite being in the top 10% income bracket in my country.
A better result from a CS standpoint would have been to purchase licenses for the legit copy, eat the difference in price and improve the vetting process so that books don't enter into the marketplace until their copyrights are validated. This way there aren't blog posts in nyt about this and your customers don't suspect you of doing something dirty.

The book is 1984 for f sake. Does it have to be 451 before someone at amazon realizes this would be a PR nightmare? There were better ways to handle this issue, but they can still fix it, as they must have a record of which books from which customers they revoked & refunded.
I think it's unfortunate that a moderator decided to unkill this. It's not just inappropriate for HN due to content, but also because it's a mean-spirited hate piece with bits of misogyny and homophobia thrown in. It's fine if someone wants to rebut the article (which seemed like a pretty straightforward interview to me), but the rebuttal that gets promoted to HN should have been more civil.
http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=40&cat=re...

Highlight video of launch.
I can sort of understand this viewpoint, but there may be reasons why someone may not have Open Source software on their resume.

I have worked in finance, and I am currently working on my Master's degree in financial engineering. A lot of finance-oriented companies highly value their code. Now, yes, there are projects like QuantLib someone can contribute to, but if you someone was hired directly out of school and had never contributed to Open Source, chances are you aren't going to find any Open Source projects associated with that person. That person's employer probably doesn't allow it. With that said, the other case may be that they simply don't have the time to work on anything outside of work. Again, Wall Street is like this.
Flagging this transparent marketing crap.

If you cannot get a job where you can go to the bathroom whenever you want, here's a tip: switch countries, because the one you are in is fucked.
Bitching will not save you. Go to the new page and vote up stuff you like.
Well.. I kept collecting geeky/nerdy songs on a grooveshark playlist.

http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/playlist/Geek_Songs_CX/82493...
I'm speaking as a self-taught guy who has gone pretty far.

First of all, all good programmers have the ability to teach themselves, because this is the definition of a good programmer. People who stick with what they knew three years ago are obsolete.

So the question is whether the pure autodidact strategy is a good idea. It isn't. There are far, far more failed or incompetent self-taught programmers than there are failed CS students. Observe the "Teach yourself X in Y days" bookshelf and the kind of programmer they produce. Could they have sucked less with better instruction? We'll never know.

Also, the stuff you learn on the job is nothing like the depth of knowledge you get from taking a real course. The rule of thumb is that 3 years on the job equals one year of university. And I find that to be about right. After more than 10 years of doing this professionally, I'm vaguely the equal of a really good Stanford grad. I have many more tricks up my sleeve, but they know a few things very very well. Passion works up to a point, but part of the job is also learning the really boring stuff that nobody likes.

So yeah, I do think I'm maybe more "original" just by dint of having a different background. But there are penalties for that too.
feedback is awesome

I always feel uncomfortable when I have to write a lot of code without being able to verify if it works correctly right after I wrote it.
I agree. I flagged this article and I'm very surprised it came back from the dead. Doesn't seem to be in keeping with the usual vibe here at all.
I've really grown to dislike the American media. And no, not in the "the media is so left/right wing" way. It's just that they sensationalize the stupidest of topics while ignoring the real issues.
What gray lady?
Power struggle ends: Volkswagen to Acquire Porsche
Deficits Saved the World
Stupid ..
Ho ho. Distasteful though the metaphor puree is, though, there's a reasonably coherent thought beneath it, so if it's a Markov bot it's one that's been augmented with a pretty good AI system.
Everyone is focused on this removal of the null check by the compiler, but to me that's a red herring. The real bug is the fact that SELinux allows you to map memory to address 0! Fix that and this is much less serious.
Debit cards aren't half bad. You have to use your PIN to spend money, makes a thief maxing out your CC harder.

In most parts of Europe, you also don't have to pay %15-20 on top of every meal at a restaurant out of obligation. Tips really are only tips, you leave one based on the service you receive.

For the life of me, I really can't get over the fact that you have to leave a 15% tip by default in the US (unless there was something blatantly wrong with your meal, of course). I mean, I'm not a dick, I still do it, I just can't get accustomed to it.
When you click the graph & view it full size its pretty good, I think.
That's much less than an hour's play -- does it show your results from the N'th game of N?

I played once and got the same deltas as you (0.02 and 0%) but times consistently somewhat worse than yours. The approach I used was to ignore the phone except for the interval between reacting to each gate's sign and passing through it.

(Why anyone in their right mind would be texting while driving, I don't know.)
That is true. That will definitely get you more time to build your app. What you lose out on is the connections to the people that being in a startup hub will get you. Those connections are king for getting talent to help you build and scale your app. The other thing those connections can get you is face time with the media to actually market the app.

None of the above items are essential to building a successful internet startup, but like most things in life there are tradeoffs.
Hah I guess you can get the habit of first dereferencing and then testing for null only when writing kernel code!
I don't think pg himself used the word "astroturfing," although other people here did.

The reason this site looks fishy is because it is pretty far from the way Microsoft usually presents itself. This blog seems to be going out of its way to find people who don't look like typical Microsoft employees, the interviewer asks them non-Microsoft questions, and so on. It's trying way too hard to present Microsoft as being a place that employs cool, edgy people.
Apple now lets you restore content from an iPod, but at the time my drive crashed, iTunes would immediately delete songs from an iPod that were "purchased" by some other iTunes instance (even if it was under the same account).

For the second crash, I had way more content than the 30GB capacity of my iPod -- my backup drive died and only 30GB were on the iPod.

This is just silly considering that I've spent probably thousands of dollars in the iTunes store and I haven't downloaded any illegal content since the first day I started using iTunes years ago.
On the contrary, I think both Cronkite and Russert did exactly what they were meant to do: increase ratings and make themselves famous. It's just that Cronkite was of an era when the networks had not yet realized that faux journalism got higher ratings than the real thing.