skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A funny thing just happened to me...

Some context: This guys is severely annoyed/inconvenienced by business cards, so he wrote a piss-and-moan column about how everyone else's solutions have been inferior so far. Then he ends it by asking Apple to solve this problem for him.

The funny thing: While trying to read his column, I noticed a site-specific toolbar at the bottom of my screen taking up real estate and forcing me to scroll more than I care to. So, I moused down to turn it off. On the way I rolled over a mouse-over flash add which immediately obscured more of the article than the toolbar did. That's when I clicked "back."

Maybe this guy should write Apple an open letter about his site's usability problems and see if they'll fix them...
What you should not forget on your safari
After having taken the trouble of planning an entire safari tour, the last thing one would want is to realize while out on an African safari that they have forgotten some important safari gear behind.
When you disassemble the gif it doesn't change direction at all. It's genuinely an ambiguous image.

Different people viewing the same animation have different "starting" directions of rotation, too.
Stay yourself, be genuine. Treat people that you believe are out of your league like you would treat anybody that you would afford respect, but not too much.

I've met some pretty famous people and I think that that is the attitude that is most appreciated by the other side.

Treat them like you would like to be treated if the situation were reversed.

I know all this is common sense, so probably nothing useful that you didn't come up with yourself.

Your hard work is starting to pay off and that means that you have a right to speak, so do so, don't be shy.

I wouldn't call myself 'more successful', but I've been in that position some time ago and of all the 'famous' (or wealthy, or both) people I've met I'm pretty sure I learned more about doing business than I ever thought possible.

Keep your ears wide open, these opportunities are not going to come by with any frequency.

good luck!
Pretty cool idea. Too bad you guys aren't on the East Bay.
Are you going to get funding in a recession?
1 spot in the congress won't affect anything. To see real change in the priorities, you'd need to replace all of those old farts in congress who are standing in the way of the progress, because they think the real world is the same as it was 50 years ago.
Rumor: Amazon Wants To Rent Netflix And Never Return It
works very smooth with FF 3.0.10 on ubuntu.

I've pointed my son at it and he's been talking engines to me all day long :)

Thank you!
Couldn't sleep. Wrote some code to displays live feed of latest twitpics.
As usual, when your mind races at night, it's tough to sleep. Instead of tossing and turning, I decided to quickly bang out some code using twitter's search API that displays the latest images posted to twitpic.<p>There's probably so many places I could go with this - so, any ideas for enhancements?
There is a strong risk of losing out to anyone offering full time employment. In practice, the full time employment doesn't have much more of a guarantee with it.

This is especially true for computer programming and Business Analysts. The normal 3 month span will show you a minimum of competence, but it doesn't show anyone's final working level. The exceptional individuals will still stand out, but most companies don't have that kind of draw or the salaries to focus on them.
I have been compiling a list of useless sites to share with the world. You will need CustomizeGoogle for Firefox or your own userscript in the browser of your choice. Come to think of it, I might even create some userscripts/plugins for other browsers to go with my useless website list.

If you'd like to contribute your own lists or userscripts, let me know.
Well, won't some easily accessible electrical parameter about the phone change on a call getting cut? Voltage across the battery / speaker output / resistance of mic / something ? They can make a call after setting up the IED, they can just wait for the call to get cut for the IED to explode.
You'd be nearby looking like every other civilian.

And very few shots are fired during an IED strike unless there is the accompanying ambush (That does happen occasionally) inbound. Even Marines don't shoot randomly at things.

SOP on an IDE strike is to secure the area and evac the wounded. That won't involve shooting unless there is reason too.

All you have to do is sit there and relax.
This is really good advice. This was an essential part of developing delicious.
Ask HN: what's the best job site to post a marketing vacancy?
We need to post a pr/sales/marketing vacancy, but since we have a limited budget we can't afford to cross post to every job site, most of which demand around $350 for a single job posting. Which one of those websites would you choose if you had budget for only one shot?
So why don't they get a few planes in the air, loaded up with cellular transmission equipment, and have them "call" every cell phone in the area?

Would blow up all the hidden IEDs and all the IEDs that are being worked on. Would clear out a lot of the area, and might blow up a number of terrorists in the process.
BusinessWeek Is for Sale — Who’s Next?
Microsoft seems to think it will work for mainstream languages, as they're developing an STM implementation for .NET. It's in "incubation", which means they're not certain to productise it but they are actively working toward doing so.

There's a good interview with two guys from the tech team on Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Software-Transacti...

Worth watching if you're interested in the topic. They discuss some of the issues raised in the Enfranchised Mind post, and what they're doing about them. There are some other interesting tidbits about how STM and concurrency primitives can interact confusingly, and the way they're hooking things like SQL Server into the STM machinery so that other things besides pure shared memory access can get the benefits of atomic transactions.
Here is an example from my list, I call this the "site info" category.

http://*.aboutus.org/*
http://www.quantcast.com/*
http://www.websiteoutlook.com/*
http://www.xomreviews.com/*
http://www.statbrain.com/*
http://www.alexa.com/data/*
http://searchanalytics.compete.com/*
http://builtwith.com/?*
http://*.compete.com/*
http://www.who.is/*
Rsync.net Warrant Canary
The best kind of joke.
This is an awesome idea. But planes are not needed. Just get the cellphone company to ring all phones in the area at once, every one hour or so.
I think you're duping yourself, this is twice in the 'new' listing
I think the percentage will come down to demographics, the kind of site, the copy, and ten other variables. My wild guess is that it will be 5%+ without trying hard.

I'll probably try this on one of my sites (I've tried no masking before). Maybe I'll blog it. You can keep your $25.
IED - The I stands for improvised.

It would be pretty stupid to only have one method of detonating a bomb now wouldn't it?

For every cell-phone detonator, there are hundreds of less sophisticated weapons. Simple mines, pressure switches, springs, tripwires, etc etc.

It is near impossible to defend against a booby trap. It's far more effective to ensure survivability. This of course has the unfortunate side effect of encouraging larger bombs.

Ergo: the reason troops moved in Humvees early in the conflict; now use RG-31's (or equivalent) or when available, helicopters.
A similar sentiment should be mentioned as a developer looking for feedback from users when you have to deal with your customer's version of "tech support". The managers and tech support people are explaining what they think the problem is that the users are seeing, but when you walk through what the user is actually doing it's usually pretty surprising what you will uncover.
Secure Persistent Login With Very Little SSL
A proposal for a secure login system using SSL only at initial login, but maintaining robust authentication and defending against man in the middle and replay attacks.
How do i achieve this, for me?
Hacker News lets me stay anonymous(i think) and ask questions about me which otherwise i would not ask someone in person.

I want to work outside of my country. I have never been out of this place. And the prime reason is not money, atleast 90% reason is i want to see another country and meet people who are different from my native place.

Working abroad might not be the best experience i realize depending upon differences in language n culture etc but i am willing to see for myself.

I work as a fulltime freelancer, it brings me pretty good money, more than what most regular people of my age earn here and can have more if i continue like this. But i can't live life like this, without ever going out, seeing places, learning stuff i will never get a chance to do here in home. I am pretty much interested in Europe, as i have had great luck recently working with really nice people from France, Germany, Italy and Netherlands. That tells me people there greatly appreciate your good work. I have heard, read and seen pictures proving many european countries are beautiful. Such things fascinate me.

I don' have anything against United States, the odd fact is since i started freelancing few months ago i had more clients from Europe than from US, so my knowledge about US is only limited to hollywood movies, where i have had more chances to chat, voice chat (more recently) with people from Europe to know about their cultures better.

I wish to work for atleast couple of years before heading back home, settling with a family. This might be the time i can do this.

Now how do i do it? Should i be looking for jobs on various job boards? How can people take me seriously as a IT worker and a perspective employee worth importing to their country to work for them? (one of the reasons i am afraid to reveal my country, ppl from my region are generally not considered to be good, i know that)

And what are the impacts of recession on such type of hiring that is hiring people from far away countries?

If you have some similar experience which can broaden my knowledge about this topic, please share :)
The jamming equipment has a much larger effective range than an IED. They would go off well out-of-range. (Hopefully there are no civilians in-range!)
I'm reading them now. Thanks for the link.

The Lula software he wrote looks interesting, though it's theater-oriented and not directly applicable to what I'm doing in a UI sense. The source isn't available, though it's old enough (runs on PLT Scheme 103) that I suspect he's largely abandoned the project and might be persuaded to release it.

Many of the underlying mechanisms are probably very similar to what I'm working on. I'm glad to see that someone else has had good results in a research context.
Some of the best non-fiction writing I've ever read. This has got to win some award.
This is very badass, but who in the blazes still plugs their keyboard into their PC with anything but USB cables?

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know that there are probably still hundreds of thousands of legacy setups in constant use that are probably connecting their keyboards with PS2 cables. But if you're travelling and working in a hotel room, you're probably on a laptop, and if someone can hook up a remotely-monitored oscilloscope to your electric system and get away unnoticed, you're hosed anyway.

It's still pretty awesome, though.)

Also, this makes me wonder if the signal on wireless keyboards is encrypted. Do most of them use bluetooth? Is that safe against people dropping eaves?

EDIT: Ahh, I see. You can detect the signals wirelessly... my ignorance about electronics shines boldly through. The demonstration is very, very cool.
When I saw this on the front page I assumed a warrant had been served.
Ask HN: Send a subscription invoice?
Since a lot of people here are running or developing a subscription business I thought I'd see what people think about sending out a monthly subscription invoice via email. 37Signals products send one out while other services like Netflix don't (I believe).

On one hand, having a record of when your credit card is billed can be handy. On other hand, each time you send this out it's a reminder to someone that they are being billed and my guess is that it will increase your cancellation rate.

I think it's always best to err on the side of what's best for your users which would point to doing it the 37Signals way but I'm wondering if there are any empirical findings about what's best here.
well it doesn't hurt to remove some of their options. + with the overflight, they'd probably catch a large number of these bomb makers
classic interpretations of the Central Limit Theorem considers a sample size of n>29 to be "large"; so if this guy has 29 other friends, that's a "large" enough SS
Why Government Spends So Much on Software
Ah, good explanation! That certainly seems like the path of least resistance.
Here's a semi-related post from about a month ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658805
Flagged, dupe
> unfortunately that is also the wrong thing to do in order for the economy to recover

I know this is what the newspapers say, but it's not clear to me that it's true. Saving implies that someone out there is paying interest for the privilege of using your money, and that in your own opinion, whatever they're doing is a better use than whatever you'd be spending it on if you had to spend it. Saying you should spend instead of save to help the economy sounds like saying you should deliberately lose money (if you thought it would make more money, you'd be doing it already, right?) to help other people make it... that is, you should be a charity.
Looks good.

gpg: Signature made Mon Jul 13 08:44:56 2009 PDT using DSA key ID 7D6F806C
gpg: Good signature from "rsync.net <info@rsync.net>"
Guess they should have called it a warrant-free canary, huh.
man that would suck if the call got broken early for some other reason...

"This is cingular, your credit is 0, terminating call"
Securing the login is hard. Facebook submits to an SSL page but I suspect the rest of the time their persistent login cookie is free to snatch.
Ask HN: Caliper Test
Recently, I applied for a job and after the formal interview process I was asked to take a Caliper test. The test itself was rather strange - a combination of "rate yourself" questions, puzzles, and personality "feelers" (for lack of a better term).

My question is, does anyone have experience with this test and what it gauges? What does the report that is sent the employer contain?
What if the call gets cut off just because it's a bad line? What if the jammer takes effect 500m before the first vehicle? What if the phone runs out of battery, which it will within hours if it's active on a call? Not to mention that finding the IEDs would be much easier if they were radiating like a mobile phone.

All just guesses of course.
My guesss is - assuming terrorists aren't complete idiots - that they keep the phone off until the very last moment precisely for that reason, the 'wrong connection' incoming call that sets off their bomb. See below for an easy fix to that.
I'm curious what balance others have struck between development and tech support. I know personally I wouldn't want to be developing something and have to take a support call (or email) every 15 minutes.

My idea would be to rotate who is "on support" every week or two. This would ensure everyone does get time doing support without it becoming a hassle and interruption to getting other things done.

What are your thoughts?
I'm an American, living in Norway for about 12 years. I can definitely recommend the ex-pat lifestyle-- at least, it works for me. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Europe differs a lot from country to country. Some countries have very high unemployment rates, others (such as Norway) suffer from systemic under-employment, and generally imports workers.

Before I sold my start-up, I hired employees from many different countries, and with the exception of one coming in from Russia, never had problems with immigration papers, etc. (We eventually got the Russian in, but it took a bit of time and hassle. It was worth it, he was great.)

So, can you do it? Sure.

Now, how to do it. Looking on job boards is a good idea. Prepare a good CV in English (have a native English speaker proof-read it). Be prepared to sell yourself in a cover letter. You want to seem eager, but not desperate.

Be ready to prove your chops. Have good recommendations, code samples, contributions to open source projects, what-have-you. You need to be able to demonstrate that you are worth the bother.

If you have enough savings, and have decided on a country you want to live in, self-finance a trip to visit. Let prospective employers know you are coming. Even if you don't get a bite during the visit, having been to the country will make you look more serious to other employment prospects from that country down the road.

Finally: see if any employers in your home country also have branches in the places you want to work. They might be able to help you out.

Good luck!
Start by learning how to accept congratulations.

And after that you need to learn how to say no to friends and family.

Other than that, just remember that when you get called up to the big leagues, you're still at the bottom of a big pile. Don't forget how to be a scrappy underdog.
cell phones have this neat little 'buzzer' in them to alert you during meetings. It's a little motor with an excentric weight attached to them, when the motor spins the weight will cause the phone to vibrate

The favored method of IED detonation was just to have the attach a small spool of thread to the motor and have it pull a thread to activate something. Not sure what the favored method is now.
A pool of lava? Man, his Mom is going to be pissed we ruined her basement floor.
Rsync.net is a fantastically awesome service. Check out their FAQ:

Will you support my use of X ?

Yes. If you are using X with an rsync.net filesystem, we will support and troubleshoot your use of it, regardless of how complex or esoteric that usage or application is. All such support will be handled by a real live Unix engineer, and will never be dealt with by a ticket system, autoresponder, or first level / junior "technician".

Really ?!

Yes. We are not just providing offsite filesystems, we are providing complete, end to end, personal customer support.

I can't even get that level of support ("real live Unix engineer") at my current workplace when things go pear-shaped.
That was a pretty lucky guess then. I swear I never blew anything up, but I love to tinker with stuff. Hooking up a small relay to the motor outputs or using the motor directly seemed like the obvious thing to do.
It took the news media a quarter century to become breathless about TEMPEST?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST
CueCat.
I think you need to read the Felix Dennis book "How to get rich". He talks a lot about what you are asking about. And its pretty short, so you can read it over a weekend
Radio detonators are not so easy to improvise. So you end up buying off the shelf parts. But since there are many fewer radio controlled devices, this means your signal is a lot easier to trace. The nice thing about cell phones, is that there are a lot of them. And activation can be on a ring. How do you distinguish a hostile call before it has even been answered?
Perhaps I'm just inexperienced, but no counter examples are obvious to me. Care to elaborate?
Where all these companies just put there for their names?
Article just doesn't make sense.
There is the talk by Jason from 37signals, where he specifically talks how he does not get this obsession with failing: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1798-jasons-talk-at-big-o...
An even better option: work with the cell providers, so that the US has a back door to deactivate cell towers, but not completely -- just keep them from ringing phones. Then, the US just needs to have software that deactivates ringing of phones hear convoys. If there aren't to many convoys, then this will only be a minor inconvenience.
I once did some appraisal software for a HR department. They had this test, for their potential sales team recruits. I was told that it only had 40 questions, some company in the UK had developed it and similar to what you are saying (only based on what I was told, I tried to take a peek at the test, but couldn't) The test was taken online, and all the candidates 'cleared' by the test turned out to be exceptional salesmen.

Not sure how they do it, but it obviously works in some cases. would love to know more.
If you can get the cellphone companies to cooperate: develop a system that inhibits cellphones ringing in the vicinity of moving convoys. You can use a system that sends GPS coords to a computer, which then sends (encrypted challenge-response) inhibit messages to the towers close by the convoy.
3 seconds in google yielded this:

http://www.personality-and-aptitude-career-tests.com/caliper...

Personally I'm not a great fan of such tests and I would probably not want to work in a place that relied on them.
either my cat is stupid or he likes getting ejected from the bedroom. Although he does act like a back-up alarm clock.
H2000.nazifi@gmail.com
Do graphic designers hang out @ Hacker News? I think developers would find more responses if they branched out to sites that graphic designers frequent.
I'm not driven by getting rich, I'm driven by seeing my work come to fruition & having an impact. (I'm very driven by this, though.)

Will his advice apply? Anyway, I'll check it out, thanks.
This is pretty interesting. There are a lot of these in SF but not outside of the city.

Can you post pictures?

If any of you guys want something in the Peninsula, you can take a look at HackerDojo: http://hackerdojo.pbworks.com/
It looks to be using: http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/ . Most likely it is a wrapper around that service.
Right, I've taken a look through the Google results, I was hoping to ping someone who'd had direct experience with the resulting data.
Looks like a pretty decent law hack to me; they are going to comply with the warrant and just not update a particular file anymore.

Still, I assume a skilled lawyer would be able to convince a judge that the net effect is that users effectively obtain information about rsync.net being served a warrant quite closely around some specific date, and thus the service broke the law anyway (assuming secret warrants are lawful in the first place).
I worked in a place where devs were also top-tier tech support. This worked well, as we got to figure out what the problems were, got to help teach our users the capabilities of the system, and got to look cool when we fixed a problem in 2 minutes. This was for an in-house network appliance, so our users were pretty technical anyway, which definately helped. What did not help tho, was when the help desk got lazy and started directing tickets to us which had no place in our laps. Then it all went down hill.

In short, its balancing act.
Twenty questions about the GPL
This is for a sysadmin position, and I'd read promo material which seemed to indicate that it could help find sales people. I was hoping the test wasn't exclusively for finding those types with outgoing personalities who would fit well in a sales position.
As mentioned instructables.com I heard they were experimenting with a pay wall, but I haven't been on there in a while.
hack ikea
http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/
found some good stuff here:
http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page
Upcycling:
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/tetani/upcycleart/htmls/proj...
kinda cheesy
http://forum.doityourself.com/

knowing how things work:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/

Ready made forums are good but down a lot:
http://www.readymademag.com/forums/
Yo I want it dude! I'm a fantastic graphic designer and web developer.
hajrice@gmail.com is my mail
Ultimate htaccess Examples
How well will this scale? Isn't this setting the expectations too high and if the company grows well this promise might be difficult to adhere to.