skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I posted this the other day : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=725017

More life patterns than you can view in a week.
Tell HN: Yahoo security policies are retarded.
So I decided to go back through my old email accounts to reset my secret questions/answers to something a little bit harder to guess than my place of birth.

So Google was no problem, you can login and change everything right away.

Not so with Yahoo. Which is by far the most important account, since its about 10 years old and pretty much all accounts are linked there.

First of all you can't change the secret question/password in settings. Only after Googling, did I find out that you need to fill out a form to have a customer service rep let you change it.

2 days later, I finally get a reply from a Yahoo rep with a link to reset the secret question.(talk about a waste of resources) Great, I can finally change it to something harder to guess.

Success...or is it. I go back to retrieve my password page, and yes, it prompts me for a new secret answer. Except...what's this..."This is not my question" link. Clicking which, I get asked my dob(pretty easy to find out) and then it shows up the old secret question which I went through such pains to change.

I mean how stupid is this...they make you jump through hoops to change something that important, and then for your convenience they let you use the recovery option that you tried to change.

And if you are inconvenienced as a hacker by this password recovery option, no worries Yahoo will provide you with the spelled out email addresses which might be less secure. Meanwhile, Google will do the right thing and mask your email address @h*.com

I mean seriously, how are these guys still in business?
Policemen being upset with verbal abuse is fine. Not working as hard? Fine, too. Arresting the person who is yelling insults is not fine - it's vindictiveness and abuse of power.

There is really nothing special about the cop person deserving of more or less respect compared to other normal people. It's only the cop's mission that deserves deference and should define possible criminality of any communication initiative. For example:

If a cop is aiming a sniper rifle to kill a hostage-taker, complimenting the cop on his uniform is interference, and should be a crime - it impedes the execution of the law.

If a cop is walking down the street, hurling insults and making faces at him is not really impeding the execution of the law (uncivilized as it is), should not be a crime or grounds for arrest. Getting in the way may be a crime if the 5 seconds that took to sidestep the perp can actually impede the execution of the law. Asking for a badge number is interference, but is specifically enumerated as a trade-off worth making and not a crime.

Now, sometimes cops are obligated to work with people who are being jerks. This problem is also well-known to DOL, USPS employees and even many people in private sector. There could be a separate law created that says "if by law we must work with you, by law you must behave or pay a measured fine". Such law then could provide deterrence against verbal abuse for all people who are not able to get out of obligation to work with nasty people. I doubt that arresting the insulter would be as a remedy in such law, at worst I see 10-minute detention to identify the person's name and address where the $250 fine could be mailed to, akin to a traffic ticket. And this protection should not be specific to only police, or even government employees - an ambulance worker, or someone assisting disabled people may also be not in a position to turn away the jerk, but then they should get protected as well.

Overall I am in favor of measured responses, Powell's military doctrine should not be applied to your own citizenry.
Wow this is right on (PG and this author both). I particularly like this line (insert "product" or "release" in place of "book" and he's nailed my experience, particularly the gnawing part):

"A book is like a child who never naps, never goes to camp, always needs care and feeding, and whose presence gnaws on you if you dare neglect it."

I think it also hints at something else I'm grappling with. I work a lot and worry about what I'm working on even when I'm not working. I think this really impedes my ability to do creative things outside of work--I'm so gnawed upon by what I left at work that I have trouble pushing myself into working on other projects.
Sounds a little like "fan death", which is apparently a major concern in South Korea (and pretty much nowhere else):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
There are ways to encourage businesses to pay wages ahead of other debts, though. For example, Ontario makes directors of corporations personally liable for up to six months of unpaid wages (and some amount of vacation pay too, IIRC).
The citizen kane of bad movies - The room
Well, it is now a trending topic on Twitter, that didn't take long!
1. It does assume that users have a daily budget, however the projected daily, weekly, and monthly budget amounts are still helpful in determining exactly how much damage you're doing.

2. Exactly my situation.

3. That is a great idea. If I were to add extra functionality, it would be in a way that keeps the existing system working as is, but has extras for "power users". Your idea fits right in line with that.

I've seen way too many people who think budgeting is too hard, or they need to learn some program/web app to do it. Any help is greatly appreciated!
There already are a number of iPhone implementations of Conways game of Life: http://ax.search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa...

Reading the reviews, its not really a hit; people don't always seem to get the game.
not appropriate for HN, but this movie is indeed incredible.
acceleration does not kill either, it's variance inside the body that does (a free fall in a strong but relatively uniform gravitational field does no harm e.g., a cosmonaut on the international space station).
Those changes would be welcome, and aren't unique to the iPhone.

Apple could improve notification on the Mac side, too. Notifications aren't supposed to mean "drop everything and look at me", they're supposed to be easy to ignore for awhile. But the red numbers, and especially the bouncing icons, are extremely distracting. I am too often forced to do a "shut up, already!" click on the Dock (with accompanying unintended app switch) to quiet a bouncing app before getting back to my work.
I kind of agree but to the article's credit it does filter for voicemail.

To me it seems one option would be to remove the recent dot after viewing a voicemail.

That being said I think these two systems are independent of each other, ie there's nothing to link the voicemail to a recent call (seems the recent call is a "client" side action as opposed to the voicemail which is "server" side action). Without some sort of call id they can't really link the two to remove the dot on the recents when cleared from voicemail.

Actually the more I think about it the more I believe this is likely the case, I don't think recent calls are linked to voicemail. Anyone know?
Okay, so you're saying that Common Lisp doesn't have any problems with fractured implementations as long as you spackle over them? Common man. I'm not trying to dis Lisp. I like Lisp... well to a certain extent; it's not my favorite.

I'm just saying that if people are having a love fest on Clojure, maybe the reason Lisp never got adopted had more to do with the implementations available than the language itself.
Poll: Write elegant code, or solve problem quickly?
I really like to solve problems as elegantly as possible, while others on my team like to solve problems as quickly as possible (with less elegant code).

I know there is a time and place, and it depends, and yadda yadda yadda, but which do you prefer?
Spend time to craft an elegant solution to the problem
Hammer out code to quickly solve the problem
The whole parens thing is pretty silly. It only turns people off because they think somehow that they it's OK to be turned off by them.

Could you imagine if someone went into a C++ forum and complained about all the semicolons and brackets? They'd get laughed right out of their Usenet client. Instead, people try to make it OK that people don't like parens, by constantly bringing up the parens in hushed voices like they are some sort of evil force out to steal our first-born children.

It's bizarre, especially in light of the fact that people don't seem to have any problems with any other sigils.
So I was working for a company that stated withholding paychecks. My boss was very charismatic and we had a client or two that owed us a very large amount of money. Due to these facts I and many many others stuck around long after we should have. In the end I was owed several thousand dollars, about 6 paychecks. The company is now being sued by many people, and it turns out hasn't payed the IRS for the last two years. My advice is to get out now. It just isn't worth the risk. Possibly stick around until you find a new job but look desperately for a new job.
Both. Hammer out a working solution and then refactor to something more elegant and readable later on. On the whole, you're likely to spend a lot more time reading code than writing it.
Good to know that I'm not the only one. And not only do I highlight the text, but I just keep clicking, highlighting and un-highlighting. So I'm probably really overloading their servers with the AJAX callbacks.
Foxconn pays restitution to family for iPhone related suicide
Rumor has it that Sprint will be carrying the HTC Hero later this year. It is definitely the best Android phone to date; I will be switching to Sprint if they are the first to get it. So you may be in luck.
I also meant to add, that there are GUI panes like RCDefaultApp that provide access to the wealth of settings in Launch Services:

http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/

For example, mapping file types, URLs, MIME types, etc.
close, but no cigar.

It should be a unified, filterable timeline of calls, voicemails, and txts (look ma, a newsfeed!)

I communicate with people (often the same people) through multiple mediums throughout the day. The most important information to me is what occured in the last 10 minutes, hour, day. why should I have to manually switch between types?

Open up one screen, flip through unread messages, voicemails, and calls.
You run a lot of custom apps on your Zune? Gotten around the shared music deletion issue yet?
Note that the front page (which HN links to) does NOT have this feature -- only the article pages.
exactly. I see this non-bouncing in a dock full of bouncy icons as a pretty big differentiator and it wouldn't surprise me if the very light-weight apps begin using the code by default.
This was my reaction (though not as strong as throwing away my phone ;)

He could have stopped with the part about "don't use redundant dots" and I would've been all for it. The number is misleading, as is the annoyance of having to remove the indicator from Voicemail and Recent, but I don't think the answer is getting rid of one of them...
Parts of it are in PHP too. Not sure which parts, I never got hired there, but they were hiring for PHP about a year ago.
Why Twitter didn't conquer Comic-Con.
That wouldn't matter. After a voicemail is received, compare its attributes to recently missed calls. If there was a missed call from the same number that left the voicemail, chances are good the recent highlight can be removed.
Design an appropriate interface, hammer out something quickly, move on, revisit if necessary.
I run a lot of custom apps on my WinMo phone. In fact, my entire phone experience has been customized (of course, it's terrible to begin with).
You echo Bruce Schneier's sentiments.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/md6.html
Protip: You can write XNA games for the Zune.
I read the nVidia GPU Computing forums quite often, so I'm happy to see GPGPU programming spreading around more; in fact, I'm planning to submit an application to YC soon for a new GPGPU product I've been working on.

How does GPUmat compare (performance- and feature-wise) to the commercial Accelereyes "Jacket" product for Matlab? I'm not promoting one or the other...just curious to know!
Ask HN: Finding sales people?
I'm in the process of trying to start a small managed services company and I am completely lost as to how to find sales people. Any thoughts? I have a tech demo showing off all the great automation, monitoring and alerts to show how "we" can save you time, and keep your systems up. I even have some decent literature and presentation info, I'm just lost as to how to get it in front of people. My ideal target would be an Oracle shop with 4-64 servers. Anything can be managed but I find I know Oracle infrastructure the best.

Thanks.
Justin.tv is looking for a Product Manager
It's actually a lot worse than that. One time I tried to make a second Yahoo account to send anonymous emails from. Somehow Yahoo figured out my real name and filled it in under the account. So I went in and manually deleted my name from the account, and then in the settings changed it so that my name wouldn't appear when I was sending out email from the account.

Then I sent a test email to make sure it really was anonymous, and sure enough my name was still attached to the account. (I even tried sending test emails to someone else who had never gotten email from me to make sure it wasn't my email client playing tricks on me.)

Anyway, if I had actually sent out email thinking it was anonymous then I was have been seriously screwed. What Yahoo is almost certainly grounds from a lawsuit.
Good point. The theoretical aspects of Conway's Game of Life are really eye opening. Interestingly I have found research material that hints that Conway designed the rules specifically so that it would not be possible to determine whether or not a pattern would grow indefinitely.

It is not possible to prove that there is a pattern which can grow endlessly.
"'Contempt of cop,' as it's sometimes called, isn't a crime. Or at least it shouldn't be."

I remember the day the professor of criminal law and criminal procedure law in my law school told the second-year students, "In actual practice, contempt of cop is a crime," meaning that if you piss off a police officer, you can expect trouble to follow.

After edit:

The lesson I take from that in my daily life is what mattmaroon says in his reply,

There's a pretty wide gulf between total submission to "authority" and being verbally abusive to a police officer doing his job. As someone who is generally not a fan of cops, but would like them to show up at my door if someone broke in through it (even if its me) it doesn't seem that nuanced really.

Yes. I'm sensible enough not to get into an argument with an armed man who has legal authority to use his weapon. Maybe there is some misunderstanding when a police officer stops me (that happens very rarely in my life), but if there is, I can stay calm and explain my point of view without looking or sounding threatening. I've not had any trouble with police officers, ever.
The Courtship of Zappos
Too bad. Perhaps if it was made into more of a game, with a multiplayer aspect it would be possible.
True but its consistent with the current UX which indicates missed calls in red (if you're looking at All recent calls)
Ideally, you'd want to hire a salesperson who has experience selling into exactly those accounts. Given the current job market, it's easier than it has been in a long time.

However, be careful of con artists (also known as sales people). It's very difficult to properly interview sales people (read http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/03/27/im-a-geek-how-do-i-p... for details).

Bottom line: use references and strong recommendations, use your network, don't hire blind.
"chances are good" is a slippery slope.
I do the same. The New York Times and similar sites that have actions on highlight drive me nuts.
99% of the time, that red dot is either a 1 or a 2 on my phone.
If a USRP can be a GSM cell tower, it can probably be a phone. http://openbts.sourceforge.net/
Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
Alain,

Thanks for the link, and good advice. That's the trouble I'm having now is all the sales people I do know I would consider con artists before I'd call them good sales people.

I'm also having a hard time with compensation. Do you pay a flat % for a sale coming from the "setup fee" and then a small % of the recurring monthly fee's or just a flat salary?
any complex project that i expect to grow and evolve, warrants elegant solutions throughout the codebase where the code is expected to be reused or modified.

that said, the hammer and the forge go hand in hand.
The demoscene has a lot to do with the C64 being very much alive still as it is a coveted and respected platform for productions.

Furthermore, demosceners are still pushing the limits of the hardware; case in point, see Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design. Yes, that is a ~1MHz machine drawing shaded primitives. :)
Right, but I seem to remember something in various state laws about a contract not being a contract unless there is "consideration" involved, i.e. both parties are receiving something of value. That's why so many transactions are for $1, eg. wealthy CEOs and Arnold Swarzenegger taking a salary of $1, old school buses or old surplus military equipment being sold for $1, etc. Regardless of what's written down, the transaction isn't a valid contract unless both parties receive something.

IANAL, this is all just idle speculation, consult with a real lawyer before you actually rely on this.
Dirty prototype->Refactor->Library it
Surreal numbers where first described in Conway's "On Number's and Games." Since then there have been numerous other articles and books about them including a very nice one by Donald Knuth called "Surreal Numbers".
I don't understand why this functionality angers people. It's like people don't want their information to have context...
Where are you physically located?

I may know of some people in your area.

One option is to start with a sales person/sales consultant type, like this guy: http://www.creatingconfidence.com/ (I have worked with Randy in the past, but have no vested interest in promoting him).

Another option is to use an appointment setting group, where they do what their name implies, screen through leads to setup demos/sales sessions for you. You can (probably) handle the load at first until you get a little more momentum and a feel for the exact needs of the position.
A couple of shoulder-fire rocket launchers and some kalashnikovs wouldn't be hard to stash though, would they?

Presumably US flagged vessels are armed?
Under Linux with Firefox and NoScript enabled. Right-click "Copy" does add the link. But just a "highlight" and "middle-button-paste" doesn't add the link.
NoScript warns me of an XSS attempt when I highlight the text though.
DOE Close to Awarding Stimulus Bucks for Batteries, Possibly This Week
This really winds me up. Pro photographers seem to have a complete lack of understanding of competition.

Their industry is becoming commoditised.

The amateurs aren't going to go away, and they're going to produce better and better quality work. The only way for the pros to continue getting paid more is to differentiate themselves somehow.

It's a familiar story that's happened in many industries - they need to wake up to it.
Doesn't work with Chrome either. I copy the text, I get empty lines.
Do you pay a flat % for a sale

Most are going to want a base+commission sort of plan. You basically determine what the position is worth, we'll say it's worth $100K/yr to use a round number. Now, you determine (part art, part science) what the base vs. variable should be, lots of factors go into this, including how probable it is that the person has a decent shot at being successful. Most skilled sales people will also require an accelerator (if they exceed quota by x%, they get a y% bonus on top of the standard comp).

Then there is also the issue of recoverable vs. non-recoverable draws, if you do any draw at all (I'd try not to).

EDIT: I just realized I left this half-finished...

So if the overall comp is 100K, you might say 75K is base, paid like any regular base, and the 25K is tied to revenue. You'll have a monthly or quarterly goal, with the 25K applied in proportion to the revenue goals. Which means that they might earn ~1K in comp Jan, Feb, Mar, $2.5K in Apr, 3K in May, and so on. You can also divide the 25K by 4, set a quarterly all-or-nothing goal, or a dozen other combinations.

You'll also need to learn more about sales than it sounds like you currently know to prevent yourself from getting steamrolled by someone who knows how to take advantage of the situation.
Problem is, how do you decide what is simplest? For instance, if you can make it work by banging out five hundred somewhat convoluted lines of code now, or you could spend a while learning a framework that would make it fifty lines of simple code 500 pages of reading later, which one would you view as "simplest?"
That's pretty much what I remember from my business law class, but then again I was often annoyed by the professor's little skits and rarely frequented whole live lectures (search Robert Emerson University of Florida if you haven't had a chance to see what nightmare the students go through).
Hello. My Name Is Martin -- And I'm A Creative Administrator
Justin.tv is hiring an Ad Integration Engineer
Yeah, I love that there are still folks "discovering" things about the platform...the research into how to get (dramatically) more than 16 colors out of VIC-II, or how to playback samples on SID, for example, are simply amazing. And this stuff is still happening 25+ years after the products release.

I don't do anything fancy with my C64; it's just another musical instrument out of many (MIDI interfaces are still being manufactured; and the MSSSIAH software to drive it is still being updated regularly), but it's certainly hellafun to play with, and brings back great memories every time I fire it up.

I've read that the Sony folks made the argument that they wanted the PS3 to be a hard platform to work with, at the start, so that it would still be relevant in five years. When I first read that I thought, "That's just stupid!" I still think it's utterly stupid, but I also think that a really great platform might just get people developing for it well into the future by providing interesting technical challenges. I think it takes huge popularity, though, and PS3 will never have that. The best examples of living far beyond their useful life are the C64 and the original Gameboy...both of which were not only good devices in their time, they were both the most popular device of their class, of all time. So, I don't think the PS3 will have a scene in 25 years, but the Wii or DS might.
I know mine is not always the popular opinion on this topic, but for something so "important" as email, I don't know why people rely on free service like yahoo, gmail, etc. There are just way too many things out of your control.

My primary mail accounts are linked to a domain that I own/control. They're also on a dedicated server in a colo facility, but I will say that is overkill for most people.

I can pick up my domain and host it just about anywhere I like, in most cases for less than $5 or $10/mo if I wanted to be uber-cheap about it.
I'm in Vegas. I'm Willing to look for customers in LA, SF and Phoenix as well as here in the Vegas metro area. In reality the job can be done remotely from anywhere.

Do these appointment setting groups provide leads or are they just a mechanical turk to make the calls and set the appointments? Do I give them an Oracle customer list I purchased?

I'm reading Randy's site now, thank you.