skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really. Does anyone think that the original was an actual picture from a corporate meeting room? I mean, it may be sad, but how many meetings are composed of a caucasian woman, a black man, and an asian (?) man? Clearly the original was a setup designed to pander to diversity.

I think the real evidence of racism here is that we're so sensitive to color that we feel compelled to engineer any communications imagery to portray something aside from the real outlook. Pick any marketing slick, and you'll see something very much resembling this.

If you want to point a finger somewhere, point it at the dogma of false diversity.
As someone who's pretty happy with iTunes, I'm genuinely interested to find out what I'm missing out on. What do these other management applications do that can't be done using the tools in iTunes?

I admit, my usage isn't particularly sophisticated. I typically use the browser (with genre, artist and album columns) to drill down to music, or the full text search to quickly dig out something specific. I also have quite a few manual and smart playlists.
Confused atheists: 14% of non-believers call themselves Christians, 4% Jews
Work surfers more productive: 20% of your time on Internet = 9% more productive
The most important question in branding
Prime Outsourcing - Offshore Staff Leasing Company
Prime Outsourcing is a professional IT outsourcing and offshore employee leasing company. We provide skilled and experienced individuals to be part of your company through the outsourcing model.
You have got to be kidding me. Why the hell can't they just implement it properly, in the browser? Oh no can't do that, but you might be able to simulate having something resembling the proper functionality by installing our proprietary closed source crapware plugin! The audacity of these motherfuckers never ceases to amaze me.

Can't wait until IE is under 50%. It already is on some sites. Maybe then the team of all-star douches behind it will realise they can't play these stupid tricks anymore and try their hand at making a good web browser for once in their worthless lives.
Shocker, the people who can't stop their website from going down all the time aren't very good coders.
That's definitely one way to a better search. Or maybe keep a sidebar of links to further information about terms (in the beginning maybe just to links rather than terms) in the current page, that is automatically searching and linking to further info so they are already available if the person wants them.
Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders Meetup #4 at Stand Burger (8/27 at 6PM)
Tool of the Day: Tweetizen: Cut through the chatter on Twitter
well...even in the video he repudiates his own point by incentivizing workers with autonomy. I would guess that the experimental data has a very narrow view of what an incentive is and has a very narrow view of what the problem space is.
everything that people do is based on incentives. people don't go to work for the satisfaction of it. that some tests showed that additional task based rewards don't work well (probably because it introduces competitive behavior in a non-competitive problem space: creativity) doesn't mean that incentives don't work. they just don't work at that level. he does mention the phrase "extrinsic vs intrinsic motivators" a couple times but doesn't go into any detail about what that means.

what I'd take from this is something that marketers have known for years: you can get people to insane things (like build an encyclopedia for free) by appealing to their inbuilt biases. as it turns out these biases are a bit more subtle than "money good, me work faster", but again, marketers already know this.
There is no legitimate reason to not escape the damn output, either. Twitter has officially reached the level of satire, folks.

63 Employees.
55 Million dollars.
And twice they fail to accomplish the trivial.
What value does an empty comment add to the conversation?
Wireless electricity demo at TED Global 2009
Twitter's Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About)
I would disagree with that. This doesn't apply just to vacation itineraries but more so to projects you are either thinking of starting yourself or are being invited to join. This being Hacker News, many of us here get ample opportunities to join software projects that seem interesting. From open-source utilities to apps built on the latest frameworks, we have more than enough ways to keep us busy if we so choose. Many of the founders working on their primary startups have second or third pet ideas that they always want to work on but can never find the time to. That is what this "hell yeah!" is about.

From personal experience, I can say that in 2007 and 2008, I got into the habit of saying "ok yes" to every project that came across my way. A couple of those projects got me ample fame (Wired.com front page, TC, newspaper articles) and some even got me pretty good income. However, having too many things that needed to be done at the same time left me feeling unaccomplished, unhealthy, and frankly miserable, despite the fact that I was building some pretty neat things.

I decided to change things earlier this year and now I've stopped working on any side projects other than my main job. As side projects, I've started training for ultramarathons. It has absolutely nothing to do with computers but I find it a lot more satisfying personally than "yet another website idea." When I asked myself if I want to run one hundred miles in 36 hours non-stop, I immediately said "HELL YEAH!" So I started training.

A few months into the training, I got a bit jealous of all these startups getting funding and fame, so I thought about working on a startup again. I had a few ideas, some old and some new but none of them screamed "HELL YEAH!" Nevertheless, I bought a domain or two, built a logo/theme, and thought if I just crossed over the initial hurdle of disinterest, I'd find the excitement to continue. It never happened. I still think that one of my ideas is solid and it could work quite well. However, it just doesn't scream "HELL YEAH!" to me right now so for the moment, it is on the sidelines.

On the other hand, I'm getting more and more excited by the day because my 100-mile race ( http://chir.ag/20090621 ) is coming up soon - Sept 5-6. It has been exciting throughout the duration, though I felt miserable, overworked, and weak many times. The take-home lesson for me is that the passion doesn't dwindle though the motivation, strength, and energy might waver frequently. Once the passion is gone, so is the project. "HELL YEAH!" is passion and if you don't have that for something, don't dive head-first into it at the risk of rest of your life.
I'm surprised that anyone would think that rejecting widely accepted nomenclature is even a valid rhetorical option. I can understand why the sight of a lovely lady is going to make you want to convince her that your herpes is no worse than a goiter, but I don't think that telling her that the doctor's taxonomy of maladies is superfluous is going to make her sleep with you.
Neurotransmitters in a Can
Sorry, I am not making any comment one way or the other about the OP, simply pointing out that problem domain objects model things users care about and solution domain objects model things the computer cares about.
Do you provide an API or do I have to use your client?

Does the client run on 64-bit installations?

Are you really offering storage for $10/100GB/month or $100/100GB/year? Sounds quite inexpensive to me.

Do you also give discounts to students with non-edu addresses (e.g. ac.at = education subdomain for Austria).

How well is the data of your customers protected against hardware faults? Your website mentions a distributed filesystem that tolerates the loss of many nodes, but not how it does that? (erasure coding, mirroring, ...?) Also, do you have geographically distributed storage nodes?

If I view data via the web interface, the password needs to be on your servers. A mail provider, Hushmail, also did not store user encryption passwords, they did actually not even require the password to be on their servers for decryption, they used a Java applet. Due to a court order they had to turn the Java applet into a trojan to spy on their users. Obviously, you face the same danger (court order that requires you to store the password for law enforcement when the user logs in on your website). Do you offer a "Warrant canary" similar to rsync.net? http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
I see. I apologise for my harsh tone in my first response.
I've been reading too much focused articles, and this stood out.

I missed the reference to the xkcd meme upon first reading (my bad! can't believe I missed that :( ) and upon rereading this does make it a lot more focused.
Is There a Right of the Innocent Not to be Executed?
Lambda the Ultimate discussing object-oriented programming is like backwoods Christians discussing Hinduism. "What do them folks need all them gods for anyways? An' that one Krishna, why's he look like a blue baby? Ah guess some folks'll believe anything!"

It just seems pointless to constantly profess such dismay and amazement at how clueless other peoples' programming paradigms are. Is there anyone who really doesn't believe there's more than one self-consistent, sensible way to write code?
JQuery is on 27% of the top 1000 web sites
I'm not sure that multiple monitors is about multitasking - you can only physically focus your eyes on a limited amount of screen; peripheral vision allows for more I guess. Multiple monitors (I've only ever used 1 or 2) just make task switching easier but I didn't find 2 monitors any better (more productive, more convenient) than simply using multiple screens in KDE.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud: Roundup of Analysis and Commentary
"private clouds are definitely something a large number of huge companies want. Amazon has no good incentive for moving into that space [...]"

Maybe not directly. A year ago Amazon participated in a $12M series B financing for Elastra, a major private cloud player. As far as Amazon is concerned, more private clouds means more hybrid clouds, which means a bigger pond for the every-growing AWS fish.
It looks like exactly the same thing as http://www.twibes.com which seems to have been around a bit longer and have more momentum behind it. But competition can be a good thing.
Modern Oil Rigs Vulnerable to Hackers
How Can I Grow a Bigger, Stronger Penis
You remember that quote verbatim but don't remember where you read it? I thought my memory was screwy ...
It's not hacker news. If you want the nytimes you know where to find it. This post is pollution.
I prefer not to factor excitement into my decisions, it is hard enough to make a good decision without throwing feelings into the mix.

Should you be selective about what you do? Of course. I am reminded of this page which is what brought me to HN originally:

http://ycombinator.com/munger.html

When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, "I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you'd punched through the card, you couldn't make any more investments at all."

He says, "Under those rules, you'd really think carefully about what you did and you'd be forced to load up on what you'd really thought about. So you'd do so much better."

Again, this is a concept that seems perfectly obvious to me. And to Warren it seems perfectly obvious. But this is one of the very few business classes in the U.S. where anybody will be saying so. It just isn't the conventional wisdom.

To me, it's obvious that the winner has to bet very selectively. It's been obvious to me since very early in life. I don't know why it's not obvious to very many other people.
How Long Does It Take To Build A Technology Empire?
Text Me
The written word will maintain its position as the king of content on the Internet.
Nope; nor do I. But I think the article asks you to choose the most exciting, scary, and stimulating things available to you.

I need to eat; I can go grab a burger, or I can walk up to that red-headed girl and find out where she's eating.

And if nothing in your future is a '10' then adjust your scale.
> ... fib(40) in only 7 seconds on current MLVM (OpenJDK7 + invokedynamic and other tidbits), a five-fold improvement over JRuby's fastest mode (jruby --fast).

I was going to say, "damn, that's it? that's pretty slow" until I realized:

$ time python fib.py 40
102334155

real 1m43.363s
user 1m36.824s
sys 0m0.577s

It may be the fact that I have a ton of stuff running on my machine right now, but still.
I've been using rsync.net (http://rsync.net/) for years. With your requirement to be able to encrypt, you can use a number of means since they are very flexible. One I've used is to have some/all of my files encrypted with TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/). This won't work for large data sets though, so you can look into something like Duplicity (http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/duplicity.txt). Haven't used it myself so can't comment on it. They also support encrypted file systems. All in all, I think rsync.net is easily one of the best values of any service I use.
Cool, glad we reached some sort of mutual understanding, then. :-) hugs
"how many meetings are composed of a caucasian woman, a black man, and an asian (?) man"

I've never worked anywhere that this would be unusual at all. It's true that manufactured diversity is used in communications a lot, but workplaces tend to be pretty ethnically heterogeneous as long as they aren't in monocultural regions.
In a way, this is a signal that the Internet is a society of its own. If, in the real world, I mean, the world out side the internet, you commit crimes against other people in that real world, you are removed from that real world.

In this UK law, if you commit a crime in the internet world, your punishment is removal from that internet world. If you don't "Behave" in the internet world, you do not get to participate in the internet world.
Hurray for Argentina and Mexico. I hope the trend continues.

I give Obama accidental credit for this. I suspect these decriminalization efforts would not have been tried under a McCain administration. (And if they were tried, those countries would have been punished.)
But as they close the gap over the next 10 years, their standard of living and their wages are also going to keep rising. And at some point the gap is small enough that the extra cost of shipping it from China to the US isn't worth it.
I generally take the view that people are too hard on Twitter, and that maintaining a gigantic network like this is a lot more difficult than it looks.

This, though, as a 'fix,' is just complete incompetence.
and Bobby was at least an order of magnitude greater than that

How in hell did you arrive at that? What's next...Edsel Ford an order of magnitude greater than Henry? Is nepotism really that powerful?
As of 9:55 EST, (# pre-highschoolers == # women == meaning of life), returns true.
About 5 years ago I wrote my MSc thesis in CS on a Semantic Web related topic (searching the SW). What a mistake. At that time SW meant things like ontologies/syntax vs. semantics/RDF/RDFS/DAML/etc and the W3C kept coming out with more and more complicated specs without any big player implementing or pushing these standards/ideas. As they say, it was "academic". To my knowledge, it still is.
I think this would be a good philosophy to apply on features (i.e. add only a feature if it's a "hell yeah", otherwise don't add it). The problem with this philosophy is that it can be hard to know what features users are interested in, so one might only add features that one thinks are "hell yeah" features :)
Facebook Tweaks Design, Drops Rounded Corners
Amazon Eyes Big Enterprise Budgets With Virtual Private Cloud Service
Wow... Did some brand new intern get assigned the responsibility to "fix" this?

Like the author said, I think I'll be off Twitter for a little while too.
Twitter actually does have limits on the number of people you can follow. You can follow up to 2000 people penalty free, but above that, you need to have enough followers to justify following any more. From my tests, it seems like the ratio is around 1.1 follows allowed for each follower that you have.

I agree with the article that even 2000 follows is an absurdly high number. One person can't keep up with all the chatter. But for many business accounts it makes sense to be able to keep track of what your fans are saying (and I mean legitimate companies, not the SEO experts and marketing gurus that are taking over twitter).
Portugal has also been getting a fair bit of press lately for their ongoing experiment. They decriminalized the possession of all drugs way back in July 2000.
Decriminalizing supply is impossible under current international treaties. But hopefully the farcical nature of this situation will open up the popular debate.
Harvard, Wharton to accept GRE - is GMAT monopoly in Danger?
Ask vs Bing
Also, Michael Jackson - still dead!
Yes, my workplace has representatives of many races and cultures as well. Heck, it's owned and run by an asian woman (who is darned good, by the way).

Really, it comes down to statistical sampling. For the canonical marketing slick, you must have a woman, a caucasian (might be that woman), a black person, and an asian and/or hispanic (probably) man. If you take any random set of people from your organization, what are the chances that you're going to get that mix of representation?

The sample size is so small that it's extremely unlikely that any random sample is going to bring in such a broad mix, no matter how broad the total population is. Thus, it's obviously contrived -- and more to the point, engineered to pander to "politically correct" sensitivities.
That would be an interesting meta-question... If you admit to studying interview questions, the interviewer could interpret it as being intellectually curious, practical, or honest. On the other hand, they could interpret it as being insecure, weaselly, or simply unevaluable.
I'm not sure it's American vs non-American. As originally pointed out, this will be covered in great detail in the American mainstream media.

It was on the radio as I woke up this morning, it was on the TV as I headed out the door. It's in the NYT. It already is and will be everywhere. Thus even for Americans, what's the point of ALSO having it on HN?

The discussion? But how can any discussion on this topic be anything other then politics?
That concept is somewhere in my personal idea list. Now I can cross it out. Well done :)
Points for clever usage of HTTP for testing clients.
I'd guess the productivity increase comes from the extra hard work that results after the sense of guilt for having wasted so much time surfing. :)
People are just overreacting to a simple case of localization effort.

A multinational corporation would never be racist because when the main motivation is profit and you are serving across all demographics the last thing you can afford to be is been racist.
Ted Kennedy was a well known political hacker.
I generally follow the stated driving pattern on 95, and it works just fine.
This is a good example of what is wrong with the US these days.

In Poland people read the story, laughed, and moved on. Fact is, it is extremely improbable to meet a man in Poland that looks like the middle guy in the photo. There are black people, but they are African and look different.

But in the States people went ballistic over the story. Racism! No cultural diversity! Ethnic cleansing!

I think Americans need to decide whether they want to pay attention to race or not. You can't have it both ways. If race isn't important, laugh at this story and move on. Stop discussing it and making accusations. Also, stop asking for race in polls, stop doing selective university admissions, stop running special programs for ethnic minorities. Just forget about the whole race thing.

If race is important, by all means discuss, but then why pretend everyone is equal?
aaaaaCHOO!
3 Pillars of Job Satisfaction
It shouldn't be, but politics is a religion for many who lean left

Aw crap, you and I are now gong to start a political argument on HN. Well it's a Ted Kennedy story so here we go.

A clear majority of hackers, including me, are libertarians, not liberals. And I guess (but actually mostly hope) most of the HN readership is libertarian.

And I definitely don't think this belongs on HN. But I also very much doubt "liberals" are voting it up.
I copy the data arenas to another machine and when they are full (500mb per arena) I burn them to cd.

I us this script to copy the arenas

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/maht/rc/vbackup

It's slightly sloppy in that I could just append the unwritten bytes but for < 500mb who cares, its a 1gbe after all.

Venti dumps give me a full history of file changes. On the plan9 central server one can browse the daily snapshots for 10+ years of plan9 development. It also coalesces duplicate blocks so storing 20 copies takes as much room as one.

Venti is available for plan9 and Lunix.

i accidentally wiped $home this week, then :

cp `{yesterday $home}/* $home

got it all back
Could you post the referenced article? It's much better than this blog post. I'd submit it but I'd like you to get any resulting karma.

Thanks!
Extrapolate--> 100% of your time on Internet = 45% more productive. Woo hoo.
It would be even cooler if it allowed to search for a place where I can get the ingredients I lack. Plus it might even be a source of income...
"As for your employer argument, it's a straw-man and not at all comparable to the consumer relationship in boycotts. I reject the question because it's absurd."

How is it absurd? If my employee is trying to, in your words, "persuade people to take the other side and stop progress I'm hoping to see", then why would I want to voluntarily support that? Why wouldn't I want to "punish their livelihood before they punish mine"?

"civil rights, womens rights, and soon, gay rights. There are not two valid sides to these issues, one side is clearly wrong and will only change by force of law or force of money"

Not all issues are like this--certainly not health care reform.

I'm not against boycotts and it's a straw man attack to say that I am. I think boycotts are a good way to protest against companies that actually do things to halt progress. But if a public figure, who is the CEO of the company, simply makes a public statement or writes an editorial I disagree with, that's not even remotely the same thing. I don't think everyone is civil and fair minded, but I think writing editorials is a civil and fair-minded practice that should be responded to in kind.

According to OpenSecrets.org, Paul Graham has contributed to certain political candidates--money, not words--whose policies I oppose, and who (in one case) has personally involved in a certain armed conflict that I opposed. And maybe I'm cheesed off about one of his essays (I'm not but maybe you are). Would you join me in a boycott of all YCombinator-funded startups (and all companies that have acquired them)? After all, pg makes more money from a successful YCombinator startup that John Mackey makes from Whole Foods these days, so this is a chance to actually affect the guy we're going after. And Steve Jobs' wife donated to a certain candidate in the Democratic primary who wasn't my favorite. Do you want to boycott Apple with me? I dunno--maybe you're okay with bombing Yugoslavia or whatnot, but if you were consistent about going after every public figure who made $1 a year from a given commercial enterprise, you'd have to do a hell of a lot more boycotting.

(I'm not actually boycotting pg or Apple, but maybe you should.)