skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly?

Does anyone who isn't themselves a "hacker" actually associate the word with anything other than person who develops and utilizes methods of breaking into computer networks and exploiting security holes?

This word needs to be retired. It's 2009 and something more politically correct is just necessary if you wish to have anyone outside your immediate sphere of influence take you seriously.
> The reason it wouldn't work in most suburban areas is because most people have these weird ecological disasters they call "lawns."

Lawns have nothing to do with their privacy failures in a urban/suburban area.

> If they just grew some natural areas with large flowering shrubs, trees,

You've got a very unnatural view of "natural area". With a few exceptions, the natural growth isn't nearly as dense as you suggest. (I now know that you haven't been to most of the US, Australia, Africa.)

> you don't see windows on the sides of houses in the 'burbs... do you? I haven't ever

I'm looking out one. In fact, side windows are actually almost universal. There are a couple of recent styles that don't have them (because they're maximizing ground use) but they're the exception even in new construction in the US.

> Besides, trailers/double-wides are typically in more rural areas, like the outer rims of suburbia.

Not really - I suspect that a majority are in parks and those aren't really "outer rims" of suburbia. (Take San Jose and Sunnyvale CA.)
Ask YC:  Creating Models
I'm starting to plan out a small online game and need to get some advice on building mathematical models. These models are definitely not scientific and don't really need to be exact, just something that is close and works as expected. I don't even think they need to be particularly large. For most of what I'm doing, there will only be 2-5 inputs.

Are there any good online guides to building formulas and how various functions can control the output? I don't have any great background in math but I'd expect that there has to be some sort of examples online that I could dissect and rearrange.
Why Waltham doesn't matter
It explains very nicely the average case. For people like the HN or TED audience and Google employees autonomy could be really effective motor. Yet among them there could be some individuals that really work better given carrot and stick.

I think one nice example in which autonomy works really well is academia. Neither there are big salaries for professors, nor they are dependent of a boss (in case they got tenured).
> However, I'm compariing between drugs and booze.

Argh! I'm NOT comparing them.
Nouriel Roubini: Threat of double dip recession increasing
RCov Reporting Enhancements
Cool! Would like to know how he made the first prototype
How I read a book
That's not exactly a good reason to upgrade by itself.

It could be if you were required by some regulation to use a UNIX certified OS. IIRC, there were little feature changes that warranted the certification.

As for myself, I have an older iMac that won't run SL, a netbook that runs Linux and I am perfectly happy with both.
Probably. People used to talk about running into quantum mechanics at about the current node, but that was due to tunneling across the gate oxide layer. This is being solved with new high-k dielectric materials. There's probably a whole lot more problems to be solved between now and 4 nm, though.

4 nm is really small. The silicon-silicon lattice spacing is 0.235 nm, so we're really only talking about a few atomic layers. I have no idea how they're going to build 'em that small, and I suspect that Intel's not really sure either.
Insanity. Before Leopard, Spotlight was a debacle. After Leopard, it just works. Also: isn't there a whole lot of software you can't install now because Tiger doesn't have Core Animation and isn't LP64?

I also wouldn't trust Tiger security on an external network.
I admit my anti-generator attitude came from experiences with Java. But even with Rails I have problems to remember all the parameters for the generators. (OK, an IDE could help - but if I need an IDE to be able to cope, I am treading close to Java territory).

As I said, it seems to work well enough for Rails, but I am also not 100% in love with it. It worked especially well for the initial "write a web app in 5 minutes with Rails" hype, but seems less useful in practice.
true, although openid can be confusing for non-tech users. Google IDs are more accepted by the common crowd methinks
It is rather misleading IMO even though it is from the article.

It is a template expansion system that also setups SCM for the “expanded” project templates — presently it sounds like there is only the template for Ubuntu projects, but that other templates could be created.
I thought AdWords was primarily CPC, not CPM?
Bootstrapping: What it is and how to do it
PHP as sexy as Scheme using lambdas and recursion
New Features Summary:

Custom CSS
Dynamic Filtering

Finally makes RCov usable.

Available now at http://github.com/Bantik/rcov/tree/master or wait a week for it to be merged into core.
After a bit of searching around I verified that there had been no activity in my GMail account since I left on Friday, so they couldn't have accessed the confirmation email to verify the Twitter account

Be sure to check your filters as a common attack is simply copying all mail to another account.
I see what you mean. I guess they provide at least some kind of service to the world by making interesting content more widely known. But overall it seems very shady, especially without attribution.
Plimus and other non-EU resellers collect VAT for a reason. See for example http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.366294.2... , http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/VAT-in-Europe-7-Steps... and http://www.ez-eu.com/eu-vat-why.html.
I recently had a similar problem with Google and my AdWords account. My quality score fell from an 8 to a 0 with no explanation and no way to correct the situation.

If Google decides not to let you play in their network you're just out of luck. It's worse than the Apple App Store process.
Pirate Bay founders win debt-collection decision
I often wonder why plug design is drastically different between North America, Europe, and Asia.
I think that the name "Hacker News" doesn't really mean anything per se - just like I don't assume that Yahoo users/employees are a race of filthy brutes. Furthermore, I resent the way this poll is set up, particularly in the final two options.

"Hacker, but have a life too" sounds as if "having a life," whatever that means is somewhat a discrediting factor. The few hackers I know all lead rich, social lives and spend far less than all of their time working directly with computers.

"Either on HN or hacking" is even worse. Suggesting that the mythical true hacker type only hacks or reads HN is very misconceived.

There is more to being a hacker than writing code.
I disagree, I thought he spoke well. And at one point he got very passionate, and that's simply the way he expresses himself. It was refreshing to see.
> What I'm saying is that there effectively exists a non-partisan international agreement to actively surpress the emergence of the free (as in speech) drugs trade.

I agree that there's an attempt to suppress. My point is that this attempt hasn't produced a significant shortage or any of the benefits that we'd supposedly get from making drugs unavailable.

It's sort of like running an air conditioner outdoors. One can feel a temperature differential if one stands in exactly the right place but otherwise it's a complete waste of energy.

> If this pressure were to let up, even in only a few of these countries, this would surely cause an economic vacuum that would be for all intents and purposes like a gold rush(?).

Legalization might change the players, but there's no vacuum.

> Just thought I had to defend my comments as something more than simply a "ohhh, terrorist'll get ya" pokey stick.

Huh?
Both? Source: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...
How to gather a Net Promoter Score for your site
You've clearly never been to suburban america. Houses are too close together for that design to work and no, natural growth wouldn't help in most of the world.
Analysis and Data from Crowdsourced Earmark Tasks
They will be added along with object databases.
The dominant "engineering thing" is tradeoffs, like "good, fast, cheap, pick two".
There's more to it than that even: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets
It's great because Apple pretty much has to license it, given how much pride they take in their power cord design.
The Cost of Not Understanding Probability Theory
You more or less said that the grandparent was wrong "just because." You were telling someone that he was wrong without any argument. Exactly what you complained about with me, btw.

The only possible response to that sort of thing is snark.
Three years. YEARS. It took them three years to figure out how to grow Fog Creek. Jesus, what a relief. This article has made my week. Thanks, Joel Spolsky.
We just finished getting the reseller license for this, actually, and plan to do exactly that once we can set the billing page up to support it. We do want to encourage people to buy and use them, because it makes them much better, so we were planning on selling them as cheaply as allowed; good idea?
I really don't understand his post. What was the point he was making about TechCrunch??
You can use Thunderbird + IMAP to keep a local backup (All Mail -> "select this folder for offline use").
1) It still has all those ugly sigils.

2) There is still a large body of "PHP coders" that don't code this way, don't expect others to code this way, and probably won't understand code written thus. The community is the language.
Nokia Unveils 3G Netbook
While I'm sure the scheduler had to be changed to accommodate it, it's not primarily a new scheduler. It's really a sophisticated thread pool system implemented in the kernel and exposed to programmers through language extensions.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_pool_pattern for the basics on the idea - which has been around for a long time.
I don't think you understand Clojure as well as you think you do. Java libraries often expect interfaces to be passed in as a parameter, and Clojure proxies are just a way of generating anonymous interfaces. This is not the de facto method for Java interop, it's just a simple means of creating the IFactoryFactory behemoths that Java tends to expect. It's practical, clean, and useful. I honestly don't understand what the nature of your objection is.
I'd say Google is more interested in customer service where you pay them (AdWords) than where they pay you (AdSense) or where they give you stuff for free (Gmail, everything else).
I hit option #4, "hacker, but have a life too", but to be honest that life is largely impacted by the other half. You know, the one where I'm leaning back at my desk, hacking away at code. Whether it's at work, off hours reading my Rails book, or taking a wild tangent to it's logical conclusion I find that it just feels right. Writing code, solving problems, and getting things done just seems to be the state where I belong.

I have some outlandish, borderline crazy goals in life. Not all of them involve a machine, and most of them do not involve business. Hopefully one day I'll manage to get one of them out there.

I like to think that we hackers are more than just programmers, developers or engineers. We have the capacity to learn, dream, and execute. The latter being a key component, but also the hardest to master.

This is what we do. Call it what you will.
> In Japan, the identical scan costs $98.

I don't doubt that the marginal cost of doing a scan (including the amortized the cost of the machine) is significantly less than $98, but who is interpreting the results?

I note that medical equipment in the US must be used under the supervision of an MD and often in a regulated environment (read hospital). If an MRI could be installed in a gas station, they'd be quite cheap.

However, increased govt regulation of health care isn't going to make that possible.
It varies by location and role, but yes, it does occur. In my last position, some of the goofs spend probably a minimum of 3 hours / day purely socializing. (You can then add on browsing and whatnot to that.) One person spent hours on their cell phone while sort of typing. Needless to say, the quality as well as the quantity of output of these people was hardly stellar.

Yet they were the social bugs, and in this part of the organization, that apparently was what succeeded. If where you are doesn't value your kind of input, then however good it is, it is others who will "succeed".

And they did "finish" things. Just in such a state, that others had to clean up the shortfall. But that wasn't really measured. I find most corporate "metrics" I've encountered akin to all the jokes you hear about statistics (lies, damned lies, and...).

Well, I've said before that I need to curb my "bitter old man" comments. But you asked for collaboration, so: Yes, this really does exist.
Well, when I consulted my theory of mind, it said that Sally would yell at Denise for moving things around and loudly demand "Where's my ball?! Where's my ball?!" without necessarily assuming that it's still in the box where she left it. Once the room has been moved around by a "hostile" agent, who knows where anything is?

But that wasn't one of the options, apparently. I'm not trying to be funny; that really is my "best guess" as to the resulting behavior. The question itself brings in the hidden assumption that Sally will see her only choices as "look for the ball in one of four places" and in the real world the situation is much less constrained; running to Mommy is likely to result.

I'm not complaining about the hidden assumption, either; all such hypothetical questions bring in hidden assumptions, and it's fair to use them here.
Just note that the site will be redesigned during the course of the beta period.
Songs in Code
The article, with stunning lack of insight, fails to mention the possibility that a published prediction could be self-fulfilling.

It's possible that when the date passed, whispers on the Internet about the prediction failing drew the attention of the rumor mill in Shanghai, leading to paranoia and a belated crash. Asian markets are pretty twitchy, after all.
The value of links split over a portfolio of single-purpose websites is questionable. SEO is a Winner Take Most game, in which having 1% more ranking ability (in general, links) than the next guy can result in you getting 50% more traffic, or more, because of how people click the highest positions in the SERP overwhelmingly more. In other words, there is an increasing marginal return on links pointed at the same domain.

Thus, splitting your links over 5 or 50 or 500 properties tends to mean you rank for a LOT less than you would have had you "put your eggs in one basket", even if you get marginally more links in aggregate to the portfolio than you would have gotten to the single site.

The only exception to this which jumps out at me is exact match domains, because they can rank with many, many less links than an identical page on non-exact match domain. (For those who are new to this concept: if your query is exactly [exact match domain], then exactmatchdomain{.com|.net|.org} and a few major country TLDs get an automatic and massive bonus in their rankability for that query and that query alone. My main domain has thousands of links, many from fairly authoritative sources like e.g. google.com. My mini-sites on exact match domains generally start with one link from my blog and outrank the main site within a week or two.)
it was about PR companies. does ethics have a place in their business? I think :)
Ugh, I am sick of seeing those 'sudo make install' howtos potentially messing with system :S

The one powerful feature of Linux distributions is the package management. Every file that you have installed on your filesystem is accounted for...

And now I'm left wondering how this guy updates to next (major) ruby version :P
Well, it's been written somewhere that the longer you work on anything the bigger the chance that you'll have a bug-ridden implementation of lisp in there somewhere...
> The only possible response to that sort of thing is snark.

Uh.. no it's not. You could respond like you just did now and explain that they "were telling someone that he was wrong without any argument."
A brilliant design. And a brilliant design presentation.
The 30-day flight
Starter's guide to VC funding in Europe
Were you actually charged twice?

Credit cards have long worked on a "authorize first, transact when all information is presented" scheme. (Quick - think of an alternative that addresses fraud.) The only thing that's new is that you can see it, and that has nothing to do with Google.
Yes, but DFW doesn't say they're not rude/jerks. He says what I said - namely, that there's a reason they're r/j.
Yes, it's like this. Depressingly so.

I used to work 3-month contracts, broken up by 9 month roadtrips, so coming back to the office I'd be stoked to get back to writing code, with months of pent-up energy ready to burst out in the form of productivity.

On two occasions, I took over projects from another developer who had been working on them the entire time I'd been away, and rebuilt them from scratch in less than a week. While it's certainly possible that I'm 100x-500x as productive as those guys, more likely is that they'd simply been coasting along that whole time.

It took a lot of diplomacy not to rock that particular boat. "Uh... yeah... it must be this new technology that's just so darn efficient. Certainly not any fault of the team or anything... Say, did you catch the game last night?"
Great post! Easy to read and informative!
The Frugal Engineer (video)
Greenspun's Tenth Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule):

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc,
informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
I remember fiddling around with PHPs recursion and having it get very bad very quickly.

Why use lambdas and recursion with PHP when there's tons of languages that do it better?
"Miss pareidolia" isn't quite as catchy as "see randomness."
There's a quote about pigs and lipstick that might apply here.
My magic decoder ring says the gist of it is that: tech crunch is really a government agency front (PR) pushing intelligence gathering tools (research) such as twitter on the unwary public (wife).
Having a life definitely was not meant as a discrediting factor, in fact I'd consider it an asset. See below in my answer to 'biohacker42' about possible alternatives.
The problem seems to be substring searching, which I guess isn't something I've ever tried to use.

I tend to think of the gmail search as being fairly powerful and much faster than my usual mail client (Mail.app), it's one of the few reasons I ever use the gmail web interface.

If anyone is curious, the docs are here http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... (I had never bothered to look them up until now).
If it were an affiliate ID, I don't see why it would matter.
Touch Traveler: London, Paris and only an iPod Touch
FYI, as of right now, they aren't passing the info from the verification screen to the cart correctly, so you have to use the fax-in form.

http://images.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/docs/OSX_HW_UTD_FF.p...
How is Twitter a Facebook killer?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+twitter.com/
* I've already confirmed that there has been no activity on my GMail account since the time I know I last used it, Luckily enough GMail tracks this and I don't access me email any other way.

* Title changed.

* I had a good look at the emails when I first saw them. All the headers look as thought Twitter actually sent them, and all the links in them point back to the real Twitter site. They're not spam/phishes...

* I already got a password reset for the account: the email it was setup with was aarongough@gmail.com, my actual email is aaron.gough@gmail.com (but we already know that GMail ignores periods in email addresses). I logged into the Twitter account after the password reset, tweeted a polite warning that they should not try this whole deal again then deleted the account.

I'm not a rube, I'm a web-developer and have a good understanding of the various points where this could have gone wrong. I'm certain my GMail accoun has not been compromised (I have SSL set to permanently on with GMail, I don't use it on open wifi and my pw is a 10 char randised Alpha/Num/symbol string)

I'm just interested in finding out how they managed to verify the twitter account without access to my email...
No. If you can predict, that does affect its randomness.
Nice. Btw, anyone know what font he's using in the logo?
Vannevar Bush and the Memex, early visions of hypertext
This position is the conventional wisdom the book tackles.
What LBJ would do (ideas for your own marketing)
And its evil twin, Mission Critical
I wish other companies would follow OpenBSD, in regard to releases, package management, etc. Their community is awesome. Abrasive at times... but awesome ;)
It's Revue Std.
This is a surprise? I think that lack of support for the PPC Mac's has been pretty well known for some time now.
Sometimes it is more practical to update a codebase than to rewrite it entirely in a different language.

From the comments here you would think it is bad that writing clean PHP is possible...
Ask YC: has anyone tried NeuroSky MindSet? What do you think of it?
Cheers, I'm very confident that my GMail account wasn't compromised, I double checked that no logins have been logged since I last used it on Friday, no mail has been sent since then either.

I double checked the filters as you recommended, nothing going on there!
Apple has a few employees working on MacPorts who, along with the ADC devs, did a great job updating it for Snow Leopard in the past few months.

1.8-rc1 has already been tagged in svn and I'm sure the final version will be ready in time :)
That, and he muses about the relationship between Tech Crunch and the PR firms because this one firm and their shady practices have now been outed. Tech Crunch hasn't done them any favors, or have they, because many PR firm's customers simply don't care how they get results.
Every security update Apple ships for Leopard it also ships for Tiger.

And I preferred spotlight in 10.4. In fact, 10.4 was all around a much better OS than 10.5, which was the first update to Mac OS X that felt like a step backwards.

Of course, I'll be updating to 10.6 as soon as I can get my hands on it. If nothing else, the promise of a 10.5 that doesn't suck is worth it. To be fair, 10.5 is much better now then when it shipped. When it shipped, it was terrible.
How desktop apps beat websites at building large active userbases
Nice. You were joking, right? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
Sea Unfathomably
The guy is an amazing speaker. Look at his body language, his build-up and his timing. A lot of people could learn from that.
Even with namespace collisions, it's usually easy enough to find software if you search for "$NAME project". The first result for "quickly project" is related to quickly, though inadvertently. In a week or two, the Launchpad page will probably be the first result.
I think you're somewhat misunderstanding the role that CUDA plays in all of this. You wouldn't need Quadros because the CUDA cards would only need to be responsible for performing the raytracing calculations, not actually rendering the image (unless you want it to). So they could have had 4xGTX295's, equivalent to 8 of the boards used in that presentation, just crunching numbers and then one workstation-class card to render textures, etc if they were concerned about render quality. If someone was still concerned about using GeForce cards, Tesla C1060's still cost only about $1K a board IIRC, and I think they'd be way faster at this sort of thing than the GTX285 used.