skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, I have literally never badmouthed an author of an article posted on this site before, but this guy is really just a major league asshole. I can't believe he characterized the Slate writer as propagating "cuntacular" tripe, when he could have just provided a few paragraphs of calm, rational explanation.

When I clicked the link to the Slate article, I was prepared to enter Delta Rage. "Wow," I thought, "Old John Welch here is really pissed off. This Farhad Manjoo guy must be his own class of ignorant and self-centered. I can't wait to read what must be a classic flame-bait article!" But no. Turns out, the Slate writer is just another frustrated office worker who--just like he mentioned--resents IT experts because he perceives their rules as arbitrary. Why does he have a silly misconception like that? Because the IT staff, like friendly Bynkii Blogger here, are too saturnine and sarcastic to actually explain things to a mere mortal.

Impressive, really. FTA: "Big old stupid IT knows nothing about your job." Never has a lack of empathy been so startlingly revealed by someone sardonically pointing it out in an attempt to say otherwise.

EDIT: You know, I feel so strongly that this author failed to express himself constructively that I want to provide an alternate version of his post. Call it a "TA;DR" (Too Asinine; Didn't Read) version:

"A lot of the harsh decisions that office workers assume to come from IT are actually made up in management, and are merely implemented by IT, who are just as upset about them. Trust me: We feel your pain. In terms of the other complaints, the IT staff would love to allow people to use any application they wanted, but every new program added to the mix creates another potential point of failure, which will inevitably end up costing the IT staff time, and thus cost the company money. Keeping a company's technological ecosystem balanced is very hard work, so IT departments are necessarily reluctant to change or expand standards."
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned college and education in the context of signaling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

A degree from a Tier-1 school and high GPA is a signal to potential employers that you are a hard worker and smart. This appears to hold well for "easy" majors who don't really use anything learned in college at work (except thinking and writing creatively) and less so for "hard" majors who do actually need to know stuff about biology, math, whatever to do well.
ECLM 2009 (by way of planet Lisp)
Beautiful code: RSA Dolphin (1999)
Don't forget that Pulp Fiction was produced while MiraMax was under Disney or just before they acquired them. They do a good job of keeping brands separate.
No One Likes To Be Left Out: VCs Require Co-Sale Rights
I didn't know the UK had a Monday Night Football. Well, with X-Men, they'll have a large pool of candidates for that 3rd announcer spot if Gruden gets another coaching gig.
Good quick read. Worth it for the line "See these telephone numbers? I need data like that. I don't care how you get it; I'm just showing you this particular representation, because you're a programmer, and we rarely understand each other."
Benjamin Polak Game Theory Lectures at Yale
That is so true it isn't making me happy at all...

The retarded behavior against people who just want to live their life in their chosen way, and which does not in any way affect the lives of others is a real blemish on our society. And I fear we will not be getting rid of this during the rest of my life.

Frankly, I really don't understand what the fuss is all about, so what if some people like other people from the same gender. Just let them be, it is their lives after all.

Just like any binary system, all combinations in the table are valid combinations, those for whom the 'bits' line up in some way or other do not get to the tell the others they can't or should not exist.
Seems like you might as well do it in opt then, since it is far less common to encapsulate things in folders in local.
Wow. You admit you don't know anything about marine batteries and then you go on about how horrible of an idea this is? Do some research before you pull the trigger there, tiger.

Marine batteries work well in this application. I've been using them for years.
Using Box.net for online storage
And yet, still no example of a useful macro.

In C++, you already have assignment. You don't need to roll your own.
And the problem is that every new application installed is something else which needs to be balanced in that schedule, and makes the entire IT job more complicated.
Actually, I just did this in Ruby (I'm the grandparent post). Still, I'd love to use Scheme/Lisp/Haskell all day.
Title is a little misleading. More like, "replace your UPS battery at home, for cheap"
Fewer Google search results point to infected sites
It's an interesting idea but there are a couple of things you should think through before taking it too much further. I don't think depending on partnerships is necessarily horrible, but what I'm trying to determine is what the benefit for the partner is. In the Stack Overflow example, Stack Overflow has to create the logic of when to award the badge, create the badge asset (e.g. what it looks like), and call your service at the appropriate time. So far they've done all the work for your benefit. What do they get in return? This is the kind of thing you might want to think about otherwise it's just a glorified/unified badge gallery, which won't be terribly interesting to many people.

I also think your example of other services limiting behavior depending on badges gained on other sites to be unlikely. From the consumer's perspective, a reputation system has a lot of value in context, but that's very different than saying that my reputation on one site has value on another. From the partner's perspective, I find it unlikely that I would build a site that depends on my audience's behavior on someone else's site.

I don't think these things are deal breakers, you just have to target it a little more precisely. Nice work so far.
Are Algorithms the Magic Bullet?
It does seem kind of crazy to those of us used to economies with fully developed institutions. However, China has large gaps in various institutions expected in the developed world. The ability to navigate institutional holes almost defines an entrepreneur in China.

Keming Yang has written academically about the topic of institutional holes and double entrepreneurship. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118763695/abstrac...

That paper became part of his book Entrepreneurship in China. http://books.google.com/books?id=FNum2rdqCUkC&pg=PA53...

I wrote a paper on Chinese entrepreneurship last year -- it wasn't all that good, because it's basically 20 pages about Chinese entrepreneurship without much of a coherent point, but I could post it if anyone is interested.
Marine batteries are deep-cycle batteries, and are good batteries for this use.
Not that I know of. In the past I've allowed my process (which was essentially a HTTP-based app server) to evaluate commands from a secure source, then built a Python interpreter that sends what you type via to HTTP to it -- so you get a pseudo shell. At another point I've set up a signal, e.g. SIGUSR2 to essentially do the code.interact() thing like in the article -- so when you need to you can kill -USR2 the process and get into a shell. The first method lets you keep running the server while the second one freezes it while you debug it.

There are also macros for gdb floating around -- you can attach the gdb (C etc.) debugger to a python process and then examine the stack through some gdb macros, but the interactivity is limited (unless perhaps someone has built it up more). That lets you break in at any moment. See http://wiki.python.org/moin/DebuggingWithGdb

In many cases where a production process is doing mysterious things, using strace or perhaps ltrace on it can give a good hint to what it is doing, together with lsof to see what files it's reading/writing.
Ask HN: why is ftse dead ?
I just noticed that user ftse is 'dead', any comments he/she makes are not normally visible, is there a record of why this is happening ?

With 'showdead' on his/her stuff appears but is blended in to the background to the point where you have to select it to see it.

I went through his/her submissions and comments and can't see a reason why there would be a ban on this persons account.
Though masked by the author's sophomoric attitude, this post does contain hints of the kind of problems IT has to solve: "Does it have LDAP? In medical institutions, what are the HIPAA risks? In credit-card processing companies, what are the SOX and PCI risks? What happens when it breaks?" So, a user reading this article could conceivably come away understanding a little more about the IT worker's plight.
save yourself the blogspam click:

"Fighting Over Money

VCs generally require co-sale rights when they make an investment. This right enables them to participate in any sale or transfer of stock to a third party.

This term enables investors to avoid missing out on opportunities to liquidate their shares. The founders or a sub-set of the company’s shareholders can’t secretly find buyers willing to pay a high price for their shares and engage in the transaction without giving their VCs the right to participate."

that's the whole article...
Is someone downvoting every single comment posted about this story (perhaps because they can't downvote the story itself)? I don't think I've ever seen a story before where every single top-level comment (at the time I write this) had < 1 points.
Sure you could do something like that, but the OP did not suggest such a practice.
Wait until Pixar gets their hands on some of that material. Probably won't happen, but that could be very cool.
Trying to consolidate a person's reputation across the web is a great idea, and one that's only going to become more important.

However, I'm glad I read your explanation here because the site itself tells me very little and without reading your explanation I probably would have shrugged and kept browsing. Put this explanation on your site, and show people an example profile.

You really do have a "chicken and egg" problem trying to get providers to see the value. My two cents would be to write some blog posts on "the reputation currency" and try to get as much attention out of that as you can, getting people excited and enthused (and bumping up your own reputation on the topic). To me that seems like the best way (short of reaching out to many partners) to gain some traction.

Good luck!
Er, deep discharge marine batteries are exactly the thing to use. They are designed to withstand repeated deep discharge, hence their name. Their current output, measured on an instantaneous basis, which is how "starting current" is measured, is often less than an auto battery. Auto batteries purpose is to work very hard for about 12 seconds.
An internal site with that code running there is probably going to be tested if any browser updates will be performed.

Upgrading to Firefox will mean that you will effectively have to perform these checks twice.

(No, you are not going to get everyone to use Firefox, it is a different browser, hence "scary" for most users.)
er... i think i understand what she is talking about and have had similar personal experiences...interesting choice there of questioning that.

no, i was speaking to the disjoint between the content of the blog article (effortless requires extreme diligence) and the example (eat, pray, love author's ted talk as "best ted talk ever").
Also Disney owns ABC television, ESPN, etc. I don't think "adult" is a problem, just perhaps "adult" content within the Disney brand.
You're assuming Disney doesn't produce/back adult titles.

Apocalypto comes to mind.
It's hard to imagine recruiters giving up on the safety net of "minimum degree in X, Y or Z", unfortunately. Even at companies where engineers may be willing to dig deeper, résumés still have to clear these basic filters.

Of course, I would prefer if a person's actual experience and education were assessed more carefully. These days, it's conceivable that someone has spent a lot of time on OpenCourseWare, or been self-taught programming through experience with open-source projects; there are a lot of ways to be accomplished without a degree. It is becoming harder to do simple filtering of applicants.
They both miss the point, I think.

Mr. Manjoo related a story about Firefox, and the crowd cheered. If there was really that much demand for it, then it was a failure on the IT department's part to know that it was wanted, and if they knew that, not at least acknowledging it clearly. There's plenty of good reasons not to upgrade.

What Mr. Manjoo missed is that there are tradeoffs to the freedom to install whatever you want, most of them related to support. A lot of IT policy is driven by how much they have to provide that support. Less money means coarser support - heavily locked down machines, aggressive re-imaging, or similar. Things that don't require a lot of people time.

The confirmation bias that both articles triggered in me, though, was that it clearly showed that in neither case is the IT department and the users communicating.

Good IT is hard, not just because of the technology involved, but because you have to make long term decisions which will permit you to react to users ever-changing needs and wants.

Remember, we're here for them, not the other way around. When I walk into a shop that doesn't live that attitude, I know I'll find a lot of problems.
Gerald Weinberg recently said something very interesting about non-makers and meetings:

"When I walk a client's corridors, I frequently meet people on their way to meetings. Although these same people have told me that meetings are boring, they often seem excited when they're on their way to one. Why?

"... what these meetings are doing is playing out an emotional drama—conflict, blaming, flirting, one-upsmanship, random outbursts, anger, and so forth. For these happy people heading for meetings, it's those the soap-opera aspects of meetings are the most exciting parts of their jobs."

http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-we-love-...
College is worth it. I think the real question is "Is spending 30-50K a year on your education instead of 10K a year worth it?". I think your average person could do quite well for themselves if they go to a state school or some other less expensive college. Most people aren't gunning to be the best in their field. If there is any difference in education between "cheap" and "expensive" schools I don't think it would make much of a difference to the average person.

I majored in computer science at a state school and spent around 40K on my education (room and board for 4 years). I feel I got a very solid education and was able to easily find a well paying job after graduation even without the shiny degree from Harvard (or some other fancy school).
I'm going to bookmark that post as a perfect negative example for students. "You want to know how your rant might make you look to other people?" (For example, consider prospective employers or colleges.) "Take a look at this..."
In a word, no. The netflix effort was many, many man-months of inspired work. And as Norvig points out in a recent paper, "simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data. ..."
Having a bit of a horror with SL today.

1) FF 3.5.2 is crashing when I click help menu

2) Bash is not running scripts that used to run (and it's not just a colour issue)

3) Macports broke and won't update itself, I've installed 1.8 over the top, but don't like fixing issues like this (especially apps that are critical to me)

Just looking at getting Ruby working now. I wouldn't advise anyone updating a work machine yet until more people have worked through all the issues.
Humming produces NO too (http://ajrccm.atsjournals.org/cgi/content/full/166/2/144). Maybe that is why people like humming?
If what you're calling "depression" is caused by thinking, then it's not depression, at least in the clinical sense used in the article.
I, too, read this and started laughing hard. Good old highschool memories of huffing whippets and laying around giggling like idiots.

NO2 makes me love going to the dentist. Huffing whipped cream to 'feel better' is lunacy. Go have a beer and give it the time you need to heal.
Nurse practitioners have a been a stopgap, providing basic care. Doctor's lobbies have been fighting against those in various states too though, sadly. They're quite powerful.
Imagine a company where information flows have to be closely monitored and/or guarded. Like say, a hospital, a bank, or a financial corporation.
Any leaking of information in any which way is going to be a severe loss for that company

So they will not just allow users to do what they want with their computers. In this case you do have to assume the worst and assume that users are stupid and will install stuff left and right.
I think this is great for Marvel. Even with their movie success the comic part of the business hasn’t managed to get back into stores in any meaningful way. When I was a kid comics were sold every place you found magazines. Now not so much.

Disney on the other hand has distribution channels that Marvel alone could only dream of.

It’s no secret that the average age of comic fans has pushed into the 20s at this point and if my childhood is any indicator that has a lot to do with comics being completely absent from your average convenience and/or grocery store.
Friend of mine on twitter listened in on the conference call, you can see his notes here (posted @11EST, so time sensitive)

http://twitter.com/wood83
For technical work, contract jobs can let you avoid the filters, and end up hired full-time in a position that has such a minimum degree filter. I did this to get into my current position, and I have "some college" rather than any degree.

For this, of course, you have to be good enough that they really want to hire you at the end of your contract.
Sure, there are exceptions and common sense should prevail.
As of a couple of months ago: the new ESPN UK has some rights to Premier League soccer.
Agreed - although Cuil's picture matching algorithm might have been a bullet to the head
definitely at 30% completion - it shows you are a 'computer scientist' vs 'a person who uses computers in his/her job'
You might be interested in this package I wrote for one of my projects:

http://github.com/cool-RR/PythonTurtle/

Check out the directory "/src/shelltoprocess".

It's a package for connecting a GUI shell, running on wxPython, to a Python process spawned by the multiprocessing package. It's documented and MIT-licensed.
As a journalist, with sources to protect, working for a publication whose very mission 'corruption fighting' is going to invite problems exactly like these, shouldn't you be using something other than Gmail?

I've never needed something like this but a quick search http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=secure+anon... leads me to believe there is a better solution.
I don't follow.

Of course you want common sense to prevail.
And I'm not saying that you should always treat users as if they are stupid. But you do have to assume the worst when you're dealing with these kinds of severe business risks.
And these business risks are not just for a small group of companies.
I've often wondered about the difference between /usr/local and /opt. Thank you for posting this.
But they also declined to distribute Kids. Disney has a line, and it's likely before some stuff that Marvel does do.
Venture Communists Reply to Hacker News Comments
While I think it would be a great idea for this guy to start approaching and talking to women, I don't think that seeking validation from women should be his highest priority. He's in a fucked up emotional state and should overcome that first. Once that's done he'll be much more relaxed and emotionally consistent when he does start talking to girls.
This is one of those things that sound well-meaning, but rubs me the wrong way.

Each person has to live in the time they are in -- and looking back from each age to the previous one, we've always thought the old ways were barbaric.

This means that everybody in those ages did things we think are awful: persecution of gays, slavery, infant selection, serfdom, Jim Crow Laws -- the list goes on and on and on.

Going back and applying our current morality to 50 years ago is silly. The people this happened to are dead. The people who did this are either dead or very, very old. Many thousands or millions more suffered the same fate and received no such modern recognition. It serves no purpose other that to pat ourselves on the back at how much more morally superior we are today. And in fifty more years? Guess what? They'll be feeling the same way about us.

We live in a world where people are still kept as slaves. Where millions starve. Where governments systematically kill large groups of people who they don't like. I'm thinking we should take real, live action against current evils in the world instead of symbolic action against evils we had no part in and did not observe.

EDIT: I'm going to rant a bit more here, because I think we've grown this generation of people who think that all of history has to fit inside of their modern mind, i.e. that history is some kind of morality play made for current moral standards. It's not. It's a complicated dance of personalities and forces that has to be observed in it's own way, by it's own lights. To retroactively expect history to fit into some kind of conception of what you think it ought to be denies all those people their humanity. </rant>
I was tempted to flag this but the traffic checks out at around 20 K uniques / day.

Not sure if this is the right venue to advertise companies that are for sale though, is there a policy on that ?

The 'specs' paragraph is a load of nonsense though:

"Just to give you an idea of the size of Blogbabel's codebase, sloccount counts 27,359 physical lines of code for an estimated development effort of 6.46 person-years (1 year for 6 developers)."

But the site only exists since 2006 and he's programmed it alone:

"The software has been written by me in Python using the Django framework, and runs on Linux using MySQL, Sphinx Search, and lighttpd."

So, six manyears of work sounds a bit over the top.

It also seems the site is down right now (at least from where I am):

http://www.blogbabel.com/
Neat fix, but wow, what acrobatics to do something that should be simple. Tsk, tsk C#.
Good to know this _process_ isn't just something I experience. I think every position I've ever taken started this way, plateaued, and ended exactly as described. Unfortunately, challenges come in the form of work load these days, and not the difficulty of the problems I'm being asked to solve. Hopefully I can get to where I need to be, get motivated, and enjoy work again shortly...
A coworker of mine is paying 50k a year to send his daughter to college to study social work.

My nephew just decided to switch from engineering to political science. So my brother decided to send him to community college for that instead of university. Same education for 1/10th the price, he says.
JQTouch - jQuery plugin for mobile web development
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To Boldly Ask IT for Development Work
Yes! best time ever. Earning potential is capped by the crappy market. If you think things will get better someday you can pay off your loan with boom dollars, which are a lot easier to come by than our current bust dollars.
"Let your actions sound louder than your words". Everybody can apologize, not many mean it or do something about it.