skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have experienced shockingly mean service in the quasi-private sector. Like idlewords said, it was something where I didn't have a choice.

At the University of Pittsburgh, Sodexho is the exclusive provider of on-campus food. The food and service have since gotten better, but my freshman year, Sodexho had a policy of hiring many ex-convicts for their food service positions. I ate at the sub place on campus a lot because it was close to my dorm and decent enough. The full-time workers there were two men 70+ in age, though maybe the hard living had aged them beyond their years. They had faded ink tattoos visible on their arms and had clearly recently been released from prison after near-lifetime sentences.

I cannot express how much these men hated their jobs. They hated their customers. Every time I ate there and made the mistake of looking them in the eye, I could tell that they wished death upon me and everyone that ever ate a sub made by their hands.

Since then, I have eaten in the private sector, and while every worker is not happy, they are usually at worst indifferent. Never has an employee wished death upon me with malice and hatred like those two sub shop workers.
I think I found a middle ground before I started my startup. I spent about 10 yrs of early career in so called big companies. And I agree with most of what you said in article. That place is no good for creative programmers.

My middle ground was to "toy with my own ideas" in my own (and sometimes on company's ;)) time. While the big company job paid me well, my sharpness was maintained by own small projects.

10 yrs later, I couldn't take it anymore. I also had some cash and started my own startup. And needless to say, I think I am doing well. I also do not think growing big is goal of my startup.
Well, I'm not him, but I'll weigh in - term limits on all civil service would probably be a good thing, and that includes changing roles/branches. Serving the country for a few years with passion and vigor is noble and heroic, but long term civil service risks stagnation, politicking, and corruption.

A Senator going out into the world to work on problems without government behind them would bolster their worldview. Perhaps after two terms in the Senate, a mandatory one or two terms off, then the Senator could run again. But definitely, lifetime politicians are a big potential problem. It certainly seems like they become more brazen and aristocratic over time.
Service Review: Slicingpsdtohtml.com
Nice interview with the SQLite author here from a year or so back http://www.twit.tv/floss26
Took me a moment to understand because I forgot that in the UK the sides are exchanged. Left = Right and Right = Left in traffic. :-)

It is the same in Germany. I always assumed it was that way everywhere.
Nitpick: "i.e." should be "e.g.".

Lose the double exclamation marks in your buttons.

It's rather weird having ingredient names rewritten (e.g., I did a search with "creme fraiche" in it and it came back claiming I'd asked for "sour cream") but maybe that's unavoidable.
Cracking GSM phone crypto via distributed computing
Check out the jenga pistol too. It's priceless:

http://woodgears.ca/jenga_pistol/index.html
As an Australian, I care.

The influence of America on the rest of the world, particularly insignificant antipodean islands like yours and mine, is massive and the death of Democratic Senator #60 (I'm counting the two independents where they caucus) has potentially large consequences for the power struggle in Washington.

That's it's Teddy Kennedy, long-time driver of Health Care reform at a time when that's either the #1 or 2 issue in the States, makes it even more so. You don't think efficiencies for Big Pharma in the US would affect our health care?

Admittedly, I'm a bit of an amerophile, particularly US politics. The US Electoral College? Possibly the greatest social hack of the 18th Century.
Well, these people even enhance the IKEA "experience":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=770127
I think every codinghorror link posted this week contained a variation of the sentence "You're a bad developer until you realise you suck". It's a bit boring, we should invent a new catchphrase for him. I do like the picture though.
Haha, the Redline EX3250 is an example of one of those 1U servers that can take a lot of load off your servers by doing all your SSL. It sold for $30,000 in 2003 - I bought one on EBay for $225 in 2007 and use it to run SSL for my site. It's amazing what people pay for "enterpriseyness."
"it's cheaper to hire a carpenter to build you furniture than it is to buy it at Ikea."

I don't think so. They rather take the design and produce and resell their own version.
This seems pretty obvious as an extension of "make something people want." Most people don't want to be at a site that doesn't meet their expectations.
Yes, WebKit apparently renders the page up to the error.

http://realtech.burningbird.net/archive/200905?page=2

I could have been a bit more specific in my earlier comment as I include Firefox in the group of reasonable browsers, even though with it, you get the YSOD. I know a lot of people swear by Opera, but I don't use it, so won't include it in my reasonable browsers list purely for subjective reasons.

Though as I said, what does it matter now that XHTML 2 has been canned.
And the hack to reform it by getting state legislatures to pass majority-wins measures isn't too shabby either.
Amazon Adds A Virtual Private Cloud
Using Co-Evolution and Neural Networks to Generate a Tic Tac Toe Player (2007)
Seo Service Provider | Quality Website Traffic | Niche Web Services
At Niche Web Services, there no amateurs but seasoned experts with track records of successful SEO achievements backing them. A team of highly skilled and professional SEO professionals looks after all your SEO needs. Well versed with the art of website promotion, they have catered to the website promotion needs of a large number of clients globally.
1000mph on the ground ...
Part of what's interesting to me about this is the openness of the project. Much is being done in the public eye, with most technical details freely shared.

http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/car/engineering_update.cfm

http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/
Thanks for the feedback!

The flag is a bug not a feature! It was supposed to display the flag of the country the user is connecting form but I messed up the geolocation api and forgot to remove it :-)
It is gone now. (actually replaced by a white image until I have time to work on geolocation again).

Having a "cool", darling of the media competitor is not so bad actually keeps me from getting too lazy.
Unless you live in a place like North Korea, no-one is forcing you to live in your country. If you don't think your government is spending your tax money wisely, then move. There are many developed nations out there that aren't accumulating huge amounts of debt.
Business which are based on restricting access to information are threatened, even in the developing world. Information velocity among, say, Vietnamese shrimp fishermen has increased in the last 10 years by an absolutely astonishing amount.
The actual term is crowdfunding.
See:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Crowdfunding
I re-read this after the fact and it comes off as being particularly arrogant/ivory tower nerd-ish. I was just trying to demonstrate to 90% of the population my system is unusable. I work in IT and everyone at work thinks it's disgusting.
I used Processing as the starting point for a recent project ( http://www.tinkthank.net/software/tiction ). Prototyping with Processing and its accompanying IDE got me up and running literally within minutes.

Inevitably I exported the whole thing to an Eclipse project because I needed more flexibility with threading and things, but for prototyping anything with a strong visual element I couldn't imagine a more perfect framework.
Sony announces Reader Daily Edition, free library ebook checkouts
I wish I had some idea what you're talking about? Can someone fill me in with some context?
Pen for every screen
The obstacle is that most major corporations aren't going to keep their most important data on some other corporations computers. Insecure transit was not the primary problem with AWS for those situations and those companies. There are many ways to securely send data over the Internet, and most don't require IPsec to be provided by Amazon.

The network isolation is somewhat interesting...but it makes me wonder why non-"private" AWS services aren't already isolated at the network layer. There's no reason why they couldn't be. They already control everything that goes in and out of every virtual machine in their data center, there's no reason the default should be for any machine to be able to talk directly to any other machine.
System09 VHDL 6809 System on a Chip
Thanks, I get confused sometimes by enterprise lingo.

My guess is the warm secure feeling will last until the new security tradeoffs of cloud computing become better understood a few months from now. But since so much is about perception, this is a clever move.
It would be nice to have an interface here to mark duplicate posts.
Hacker - Google Search
Audrey sometime (couple of days) ago joined the #padre channel with a username user6209 or something like that. The maintainer of Padre was both helpful and courteous to this user who was asking for some help/pointers without knowing that this was Audrey Tang, the maker of Pugs and a big name in the Perl community.

The guy in question here "asdgasd", did almost the same thing after reading that article presumably which made its rounds on Reddit and HN. However his/her talk was bordering on trolling unlike Audrey's in the same channel.
Nice iconset for ubuntu and Gnome
Secret Superfoods in Your Fridge - Page 2
I agree that is by far not the end of the security discussion, especially, there is always that issue of trust towards the cloud provider itself. Do you trust Amazon's VPN, privacy mechanisms, etc. or do you prefer a third-party provider? Similar to: do you trust MS Firewall or the one of a third-party provider?

But I think it is more than only addressing perception - the alternative until today was building your own VPN by hand and dealing with all those dynamic IP addresses. Very awkward and error prone...
There seems to be a difference in trucker culture between the US and UK - truckers in the UK don't seem to practise this technique.

While there are some courteous and sensible UK truckers, most of them seem to be driving right up against their speed limiters, and will tailgate then overtake anyone in front who dares travel 1mph slower than them - even if this involves attempting to overtake while going uphill, causing a wall of congestion on an otherwise free-flowing motorway.
We're a co-opetitor to Eucalyptus, I think. Or something. We don't directly target the model of Eucalyptus, which seeks to exactly duplicate the AWS API on your own machines (a valid pursuit, I suppose, but not one we're interested in). We will very likely support Eucalyptus at some point (assuming customers want it; though no one has actually asked for it, so far; it would be relatively easy to add since we already support AWS), as Yet Another Virtualization Layer. We're agnostic about that stuff.

We have built our own (much simpler to use) API and GUI for building private clouds, but it doesn't seek to clone the AWS API in any way. Though it can use AWS as one type of virtual system to be managed (among many others; Xen, OpenVZ, Zones, and vservers, with KVM and VMWare on the TODO list). Where we're particularly strong is in delegation and resource sharing amongst many untrusted parties. We're trying to help people build AWS-style services and sell them or offer them to disparate divisions within a large company. It's still early yet in that plan, but we're speeding up on Cloudmin (our product in this space) now that we have several heavier users of the product.

Anyway, private clouds are definitely something a large number of huge companies want. Amazon has no good incentive for moving into that space, since there's so much room at the bottom where they're operating now, and there's still thousands of companies that will move into the public cloud to one degree or another that have not done so yet. Actually, I guess if Amazon wanted a monopoly on the space, then they would have one good reason for moving into the space, but from everything Bezos has said on the subject, they don't actually want a monopoly or think they could maintain one. We'll see, I guess.
Push the Red Button: SysKey and the SAM
One has to wonder whether same principle can be applied to economics.

I.e. that continous and moderate spending instead of savings somehow keeps the wheels moving in the economy.
Twitter Exploit Still Works
Twitter XSS exploit from yesterday still works. They haven't done a very good job of fixing it.
You only need to see an exploited tweet to be affected!
Bol apartments Croatia
Bol apartments Zlatni Bol are located in center of Bol Croatia, just 500m from famous Zlatni rat beach.
Eco-shower
Understood. But because the commentary is so poorly written, it would probably make more sense if the conversation from the channel had simply been printed as-is. Hard to believe this was written by someone of note in the programming community.
Yes. It's amazing to watch if you're used to driving in the US. You'll get an unbelievable amount of grief if you allow yourself to be approached from behind in the inside lane. Even driving in the center lane, you are expected to move outside if there is room to do so. Try driving there long-term and you'll get fast drivers cutting you off from the passing lane just to teach you a lesson.

And no, nobody passes on the outside. Even if you're about to exit and the rest of the lanes are moving slowly, you'll still slow down considerably and look a bit sheepish as you drift past the main highway traffic.
I have expected more technical advice, but I understand your concern - the main question is how to make visitors actually take out their wallets and spend the money.

I am not sure about lowering prices since that would make indulgences less exclusive.

What do you think about annual subscription?
Or some kind of freemium model?

What are your experiences regarding that?
Ask HN: Offsite backup, BUT without local copy of the data (with catalog)?
The problem: if I have 1TB of data, I need to have 1TB of "local" storage to make incremental backups with most tools. That consumes space and disables me to store my incremental backups encrypted/signed/etc

There is obviously the not-so-space-technology of backup catalogs. For windows systems there are: backup4all and Genie-Soft Backup Manager that use those.

For linux I could not find one. The closest alternative I could come with is 'git add ./*', 'git-gc' and then storing the packfile offsite, but it's a bit unstraight method, I suppose.

Are there any free/OSS alternatives for both linux and windows, which you can tell me about?
> The requested URL /book/HypnoticWriting.pdf
> was not found on this server.
You basically put into words what I wanted to explain in the first place.
When Philips invented the cassette tape - they opened it up completely. If you called Philips they would give you designs, tell you what manufacturing equipment was required - even where to source the equipment and materials.

Philips ended up with a decent percentage of a massive market - as opposed to 100% of a niche (perhaps non-existent) market.

They took a similar strategy with the CD.
I live just down the road from a parked-up Concorde that people pay to go and look round and sit in. In England.
I don't think the scoring system is good. According to it the best behaviour would be to build all tetraminos on one side and wait for "I" tetramino to arrive and score 4.

Maybe instead of that people should try to maintain lowest possible average height of the tetris.

Also, people should be given same sets of inputs. Giving higher percentage of "I" tetraminos to some players (even if this happens by pure luck- randomly) would be unfair advantage.

Also, great idea to post some sample applications in Python and C# (thumbs up!)
An oblique link to HN - Kennedy was a senator for Massachusetts, the original home of YC.
That's strangest. I found it one of the warmest and most rewarding internet-related pieces I'd read in a long while. It made a few assumptions about your understanding of the context but, goddamit, someone is entitled to do that on their own blog!
Social technology growth marches on in 2009, led by social network sites
UK says illegal downloaders may lose web access
Since he actually worked there and experienced what they were doing, wouldn't he be a first-hand source?
It's an injustice to the victim to do anything else.

Justice is not the same as revenge, and often quite the opposite. In this particular case, especially in hindsight, I find it hard to imagine a heavy-handed prosecution and jail time having been a good idea.
Lack of context happens when someone isn't targetting the various aggregators in their post.

I find it refreshing actually. It's nice to read a post once in a while that eschews the preamble/genericity that typically accompanies posts that are designed to be voted up somewhere or other.
Idea looks good and useful.
Give some quick links in the first page. Is it possible to suggest ingredients based on the already selected? Give mouse over titles to the images that are being displayed on the right.
A clever solution would be a downvote button that behaves the same as the "flag" link ;)
Most companies blacklist interview questions that are highly publicized. Maybe companies should also ask if you've read questions online before an interview begins. :)
"Although my doctors informed me that I suffered a cerebral concussion, as well as shock, I do not seek to escape responsibility for my actions by placing the blame either on the physical and emotional trauma brought on by the accident, or on anyone else. I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately." -Ted Kennedy
I was just thinking of those events this past week as I see how the media is assisting corporate/industry status quo to fight health care reform. Regardless of what you think of the details of this current legislation (I'm not a fan of some details myself), a key thing, and HN appropriate, to understand is this is the battle ground for change of any sort, not just health care. Industry will fight these sweeping changes since if they win this battle, they feel the momentum for other change may be curtailed.

Media doesn't work for the viewer/reader, they work for the advertiser. This fundamental is mostly the same since 1968. A key difference between 1968 and 2009 is the level of refinement and completeness of this control.

Is this comment HN appropriate? Most startups talk about being disruptive. That's not so hard to do if your building a web-widget. But that's hardly being disruptive. You want to do something BIG? Be prepared for lots of opposition from industry status quo.

You want to be disruptive like John or Bobby Kennedy or MLK Jr.? You have to be prepared to die to be that kind of Hacker.
What happened to tcrn.ch? Techcrunch's own URL shortener
Couple of months ago, Techcrunch announced that it was going to use tcrn.ch as the domain name for it's shortened link. Their reasoning being that tcrn.ch will carry it's brand name in the shortened link as opposed to getting hidden in a bit.ly link.
But lately I've observed that they seem to have gone back to bit.ly? Anyone has an idea why?
How are you quantifying greatness? Everyone on this site loves to say "order of magnitude."
Excellent idea.

My main gripe is that when you get to the ingredients level I would remove the % part as it's a bit hard to read the page as is and have them grouped as "all recipes use:" "most recipes use:" "some use:" "a few use:" and have all and most auto selected and then some and a few are default not selected
The Virtual Public-Private Cloud Connection
To those who are wondering, the reference to mtfnpy means: "mtfnpy totally fucking now pwns you". Traveling to mtfnpy.com in your browser will send you back to google. Does anyone have any information on what this is all about?

It almost seems like by redirecting to a search of itself in google, and referencing itself in its own definition, it created a black hole in the interweb.
Interactive physics simulations on a whiteboard [video]
Bit.ly exploit to brand your short url
I don't know if someone has observed this, but if I append any random sub domain name, to a shortened url from bit.ly, it still takes me to the correct url.

For example, I picked up this from techrunch's tweet http://bit.ly/12V9c1. I could also create a link called http://mayanks.bit.ly/12V9c1 and it would still take me to techcrunch's site. So I get to brand my own short url.

Is this an undocumented feature or something is wrong here?
Make Firefox Faster
In that case why don't you just flag (or rather [dead]) my post instead of commenting on it and hence contributing to this boring thread?

[edit] I don't like the flag feature because it prevents people from disagreeing with me, maybe explaining why they think the article is interesting.
Want to know what journalists, foodies, and tech bloggers read?
Interesting that such a thing exists, but it's hardly the same! Hell, I'd probably visit that, I loved Concorde, and love planes (and all vehicles really) in general ..
I was taught to leave 1 car length per 10 mph of speed, which probably has about the same effect. Either way, I've been driving for a decade and haven't hit anyone yet.
It used to be a meme in the Perl community sometime ago. Not too many people used it but it used to come up in a long chatlog.
It's likely just a DNS wildcard setting that resolves everything to the same server.

Not an uncommon practice, and helps ensure that things like the random typo of ww.site.com by a user still gets them to where they were expecting to go.

So my guess is that it's not an undocumented feature but more of a clever hack that exploits something that was done for an entirely different, but closely related, purpose.
Kinda related and interesting/amusing - "This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord. Beat That, Punk.":

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/01/guy-can-get-59-m...
Voting behaviour may depend on what people have to say about the article.
Sage 4.1.1 Released
Sage open-source mathematics software released a new version.
I'm not saying politics has no place here. That's why I didn't want to flag the article. But the linked to article is plain headline news, not the kind of interesting debate you describe.
I have seen links like http://om.bit.ly/xyz on twitter. In a recent bit.ly's blog I've seen announcement about cbs.bit.ly. So I don't think it is just a plain DNS wildcard. This must have been an intended feature but looks like its not completely intended.

For example in case of cbs.bit.ly only links shortened by cbs should be valid. But try it out any bit.ly shortened link works with cbs. subdomain as well.
I avoid driving them home while drunk and then abandoning them underwater. I also try not to pat myself on the back for using my family connections to get into a position where I can spend other people's money on my pet projects.

So far, the New York Times hasn't said anything nice about me. On the other hand, I can sleep at night.
Is profit a factor for your programming projects?
If someone is "really a good person," it should not take special effort to pierce through a layer of hostility and destructiveness (even such low-level hostility and destructiveness as trolling an IRC channel).