skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done quite a bit of conflict resolution in my day. I once worked as a resident assistant (RA) in the dorm and had to deal with very similar problems.

Here is my textbook answer. You want to meet with the person on their terms. Go to his/her office/room on a day when the issue is not prevalent, because neither of you want emotion to be an igniting factor. Be humble. Yes, you're pissed and it's clearly them, but trust me, the best action is to bite the bullet and see if the two of you can come to some sort of agreement.

Strike a deal. Clearly the other person has some motivating reason behind their issue. If you can fix their problem in a way that they can't, it might also alleviate your problem. In your specific case, I would talk to everyone else in the complex for him. See if you can get action items written down. "I affirm that I will keep the outside door closed at all times". Make sure these action items are clear and understood by everyone. Yes, you may have to talk to everyone personally.
WhyGoSolo Coming Offline | Incoming and Outgoing Thoughts
This is great, thank you. I was literally going to start working on a Rails A/B framework after reading HN today. Funny how that works.

Edit: In the newest version of Rails (2.3.3) and IIRC a few versions before that as well, the timestamp field is called created_at, not created_on - I was getting an error when running the migration.
Forgot Password on HN?
I'm sure there's some reason I'm missing either the philosophy or the link, but I can't find a "forgot password" process to recover my password on HN. I think I remember my user name from a long time ago. Suggestions?

Edit: Hmmm... is it possible that I never gave my email address and there is no recovery process:
Google Code Jam 2009 Registrations now open
Do programmers still buy printed books?
Not technical or new, but hitboxes, hitboxes, hitboxes. Add 5px of padding to your anchors and a rollover color, it makes a really huge difference.
Neat little trick! Also a neat little product, ideal for selling over the web.
Try to talk to him about it another time, when you are both relaxed. He's likely got himself worked up into anger over the 'other housemates' (which to him could include you) before doing something that childish.
It will be much harder for him to behave like that once you have discussed it calmly - although if he is 100% a-hole that might not matter much. Also, try to discover the root cause of his annoyance - he might have a justified complaint that just hasn't affected you yet. Good luck!
Punch him in the throat.
All three of them are very good with active communities. Kohana is a fork of CodeIgniter. I personally use mostly CodeIgniter as CakePHP has just too much 'magic'! I always prefer something lighter that I can extensively add to it rather than the other way round.
How Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and Google Think About Big Data
Excellent post hit the nail on the head. Besides the actual buying of a book from a bookstore has something of a religious feeling for me :)
which products did he save and what viral brands did he create?
A Stroke Leads A Brain Scientist To A New Spirituality
Though my main comment stresses the benefits of these bridge notes, there is no question that they carry risks and are not to all tastes - they are, after all, true loans, which means that a company can go down if it can't do a timely first funding and the bridge investors demand repayment.

Founders should think carefully before using this solution and, in most cases, unless a more substantial funding is truly anticipated not too far down the road, should probably not use it.

Part of this depends on how "friendly" the bridge investors are. You can afford to use bridge notes a bit more loosely if the investors are friends and family or angels with whom you have a strong relationship. These investors will likely team with you and adjust their deal to meet continuing needs if things don't go as expected. This likely will not be true of potentially-not-so-friendly angels with whom you have no special relationship.

Of course, creative forms of equity compensation can be excellent vehicles because they cut the cash needs of a company dramatically. There are obvious limits to this, though, as other cash needs will arise as well in most startups.
I believe the "Gram" part of the title comes from the names of other types of plots. For example, histogram or correlogram. This plot deals with dollar values in the billions, hence "The Billion Dollar Gram".

Edit: fixed italics
This is actually very simple, although the execution seems to trip a lot of folks up.

There are several stages. If you go through all of them, things work themselves out.

1) He hears you. He is able to repeat what you said back to you and not screw it up.

2) He empathizes with you. He honestly understands how you feel and would feel the same way if it the roles were reversed

3) He agrees that something must be done.

4) He is able to do whatever it is

These are sequential steps, and you can't skip to #4 without going through the other ones. I've found that most of the time the problem is in #1, although you're more likely to think it's 2 or 3. People who don't know each other sometimes have a very hard time getting a common moral/fairness foundation for value discussions. This impedes communication.

So get some friends -- the other guys living there would be great -- and start down the list as part of a group effort. Hell you don't even have to single him out if you don't want to, your problem is with the door, not him.

Most times group dynamics and peer pressure can do the work where reasoning, cajoling, and punching in the neck won't.

But dude, whatever you do, don't make your own prison for yourself. Bail if you can't fix this. It'll just get worse. If you've just moved in, then move out. Most places have a 30-day clause on new leases for stuff just like this. Any judge or real estate agent or whatnot is going to be a lot more sympathetic to you if you took active steps, was unable to resolve, and left than if you suffered for weeks or months and then up and leave. It's your pain: it's your job to take action.
Aside from the immediate issue that you're dealing with, which it sounds like others have given some good advice for, here's something for the future:

Read How to Win Friends and Influence People. I used to think it was just a treatise on how to manipulate people for selfish gain, but after reading it, I think it's really more about cultivating a genuine interest in people and developing the habit of treating people like we all want to be treated. You'd be surprised how effective this can be once you start doing it, partly because it's increasingly rare in our society.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=umhistmath;c...
The Pittsburghers that worked for Carnegie certainly did not count him one of their own.

In a local PBS special about one of Carnegie's libraries, an elderly gentleman said that he would go to the pool in the basement of the library when he was a kid. But his father would never darken the door of any place with Carnegie's name on it. The father called Carnegie a "son of a shoe," apparently a grave insult in the father's home country.
Hm. This probably applies more to HN then to Google.
This is awesome Patrick, thanks.
Ask HN: Anyone else having problems with Google Analytics?
Since last night my analytics graphs refuse to load. Anyone else seeing that?
Wasn't this show originally called justin.tv?
Yes

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737466

for people who weren't here that day to see that discussion
You are supposed to hack your way back in!:)
Ask HN: how would you A/B test iPhone apps?
patio11's A/Bingo post got me thinking. How would you go about doing A/B testing for iPhone apps?

The issue, obviously, is the app store submission/approval cycle which makes changes slow to reach users. (even without that, you probably wouldn't want to make users update their apps every day).

If the app is mainly web-based, it's pretty obvious, but what about native apps?
Came here to say the same thing. It's not even certain it's feasible, let alone put a price tag on it.
Very smart of Starbucks.

I feel that some independent coffee shops are being a little short-sighted. While I tend to favor giving my business to independent shops, one of the local ones here in SF has recently cut their free WiFi to 60 mins and blocked all power outlets. I don't really know what that's meant to accomplish, other than making me go elsewhere.
It costs less than two hours of minimum wage, dude! Aren't you in the US?
'We will of course report findings of such debate to Your Majesty'.

Please can we come back to earth?
Meet the coywolf
I prefer the aquatic monkey theory.
It's been done -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/
I know very little about iPhone programming so forgive me if this is ludicrous but just thinking out loud...

We had an app launch on launchly awhile back that was basically trying to be the iPhone version of GetSatisfaction or UserVoice. You could plug in their code into your app and it would handle feedback and bug reports for you.

Maybe there's a market for something similar for A/B testing on iPhones. If it's a tricky problem to solve, even better cause then people will pay you for it.

Initial thought w/out knowing anything about the security model is can you set up config files or even remote code on a server somewhere and then access it from your code on the iPhone using an API key? If you can then you could maybe set up multiple config files on the server and have your code load different versions randomly and report back statistics...

Of course that brings up an interesting point. What would you be A/B testing in an iPhone app? The user has to have already downloaded/installed your app. At that point there's really not any landing page or funnel to test like there is on a website. Obviously you can still A/B test internals just to improve the app which will affect ratings which can affect downloads (conversions).

Anyways, just thinking out loud here.
Having children is expensive and a lot of work. The higher the quality of life, the more people want to spend their time doing things other than raising children.
Bigger facilities than that pretty junior college on the peninsula. :-)
I have long felt that sexual selection dominates random mutations for external features. My guess is that darker skin enabled sexual selection for hairlessness. I can see where smooth healthy skin would be more attractive than monkey hair. If these characteristics appeared in a relatively isolated population, the evolution to nakedness by sexual selection could be quite rapid.

I give little credence to just-so stories like nakedness evolved to free us of parasites. Viewing human evolution as dominated by sexual evolution with a few tweaks from mutations, like darker skin, makes more sense to me. Head hair and pubic hair are purely sexual.
Sources of inspiration and interesting directions for programming languages
Great trick! Movement always catches the user's eye, even my cat reacts if she sees anything jumping! It appears it was all done with YUI. I guess moving the image with position absolute and placing it in front of all other elements with the z-index.
gfs1 is still single master, but the workload is much simpler in this case: it serves the gfs2 master bigtable cluster exclusively. Most of the documented gfs master failures are due to misbehaved map-reduce clients. Also the gfs1 master can be down for extended period of time without affecting the master operations, due to the nature of the cluster (you're unlikely to create a million files per second resulting in much compaction and splits in metadata tablets)

The quote you mentioned actually meant that if you use Bigtable on top of gfs1, the single master failure is more apparent due to the low latency requirement of the application that use the Bigtable.
I'd rather have THAT than my stupid degree!
This is a difficult problem to deal with, due to the nature of HTML and XML. They both use embedded markup instead of annotations so when you're operating on things, you're not actually operating on text, you're operating on a tree.
Her TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke...
Lose Weight in 5 Days
> Dependencies are the exact reason a plain tarball isn't good enough

If your web app needs complicated deps, it sucks. Which is kind of my point about Pinax.

It's fucking embarrassing that you can simply untar some very complicated PHP applications and they work fine right out of the box on insanely varied versions of php/httpd/db software and with something like Pinax you need to spend 3 hours chasing down bugs and asking people on IRC what the hell is going wrong.

Django was designed to make things easy, not hard.
Thanks for the bug report. I can't address it right now as I'm at an Internet cafe, with my laptop spending the night at my designer's house, but I'll fix it in the morning. Off the top of my head I don't remember anything that actually uses the timestamps, so feel free just to comment out the line (was it assigning an index, maybe?) that caused the exception.
ok thanks for clarifying
They just need to make those fights flash-y and brutal. (I have no idea how.)
stroke == brain defect
I think that the people who wrote that letter are certainly pretty high, but I doubt they have yet left earth.
You can't negotiate with terrorists (ie irrational people).

Seriously, if there's one thing I've learned dealing with d-bags and a-holes over the last decade is that they are what they are. They might eventually change, but it's unlikely that you can get them to.

The trick is figuring out if this guy is irrational or not.

First you need to read the book "Getting To Yes" about Principled Negotation. If that works, then great.

If not, you need to get him to move out, or move out yourself.
The first post is actually heavily edited from its original, last night. He cut out about 2 paragraphs where he talked about the "3 whiskeys" hey drank, as well as a problem that he has that the internet might be able to help with. (No specifics)

I'm impressed that he basically kept the same spirit of the post though instead of just deleting the whole thing. I wonder what prompted the original post though.
thanks! For some reason it didn't play in Safari. It did work in Firefox though.
I created a new account with the same username and HN somehow links it to my old username...I guess...mysterious are HN's ways
Watching the video reinforced my desire to apply to Y Combinator. I've read in the guidelines that submitting multiple ideas is acceptable, and even preferred. It's also clear the majority of accepted startups are product-oriented (I'm considering automated subscriptions to a web service a product in this case), rather than service-oriented.

My company is following the Guy Kawasaki method of offering services/consulting to generate immediate cash flow, while working on product-driven solutions in the background. I strongly believe the product I'm currently working on will succeed, though I don't believe it will ever be a good acquisition candidate for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. I'm wondering how important that is for acceptance into Y Combinator.

Even the services I'm offering have an extra entrepreneurial twist. With a nod towards Anomaly (http://anomaly.com/), I have one carefully-screened client with whom I'm essentially working for equity rather than cash. Thus far I've been impressed by his performance and contributions to the project.

In summary, I'm hoping that someone here will evaluate what I've written and respond with a convincing argument for why I should:
A. Apply with my 'big picture' vision, incorporating most or all of the above - keeping my fingers crossed that what is essentially an agency with multiple business models has a chance at acceptance
B. Apply with total focus on the app - even though it's not a good acquisition candidate
C. Wait to apply until I have a product-driven idea that is a good acquisition candidate

Thank you in advance for any light to be shed. I hope my questions possess some semblance of universal applicability.
I never had a stroke or been to a doctor for the last 28 years! However, I had a molar removed under anaesthesia and I never experienced the bliss that I felt when I woke up. I guess something in the drugs must have triggered it. When you disconnect the brain from the 'sensors' or when is 'shutting down' all these mysterious effects are experienced. I had an uncle that had a Near Death Experience, he had no reason to lie to anyone about it. He described everything that happened in the morgue (they took him there). I took the trouble to go and speak to some of the medics and they confirmed what happened.

Ever since Carl Sagan proposed that people with NDE are perhaps re-experiencing their birth, I am more awed with neuro-science. The highly logical hacker in me is always looking for a physical explanation where either my left or right brain remains open and agnostic!

The beauty of the article is that it comes from a person in the field, but so was Teller and he was duped by Uri Geller.
The hypothesis fails to explain why this adaption is unique to humans. Lice probably was just as big of a problem for other animals in similar habitats as it was for humans. The question is what element in human evolution made the benefit of not having fur greater than the benefit of having it. Sexual selection seems far-fetched.

I like the idea of the discovery and invention of maintaining fire as being that element. It is known that modern hunter-gatherers hunt and catch their pray in long distances by exhausting them, and our ancestors probably did the same. Not having fur is of great advantage in this scenario as it allows for effective cooling when sweating, while the obvious down-side is freezing at night. With the taming of fire, freezing could be avoided by staying close to the hearth, and so fur was no longer needed and we lost it.

I recommend "Catching fire" by Richard Wrangham for further investigations on how fire shaped our evolution. It's quite a good read, and a very interesting hypothesis.

[Edit: Gave the book's subtitle instead of the real title.]
It's pretty well refuted, though.

http://www.aquaticape.org/
Programmers always spent their money on books and computers and they will forever! :)
I agree. It surprises me how customer-unfriendly so many small coffee shops are... I love the ambiance at some of them in SF, but when I really need to be sure I can plug in the laptop and get a comfy chair, Starbucks is usually the safer bet.
I signed up for an app engine account when it first came out and I haven't touched it, so I think this is what I'm going to do. Thanks for the info and links!

Everyone else that replied thank you as well, some stuff that I will file away for next time. :-)
The local coffee shop near me puts out power strips to encourage people to bring their laptops and use the unlimited free WiFi. That makes it's easy for me to support them :)
the service looks pretty useful...

However the domain name is very hard to spell/pronounce so I just forgot it even though I made a mental note to use the service next time I need a logo.
"he cut out about 2 paragraphs where he talked about the "3 whiskeys" he drank"

It was there an hour ago, when I submitted this, as were a few sentences about how hard it was to hit the right keys on the keyboard with "3 whiskeys" inside him. Coupled with the note about attempting to raise some money and failing to led my comment about it being poignant.

Maybe he just woke up sober and didn't like what he'd typed when he was a little intoxicated.:-)

It was fine writing. Too bad he felt the need to delete it. (but understandable, blogging while (tending to) drunk might be too ...interesting )
I tried out Pinax last year. It's sort of like Drupal in that it gives you the building blocks for building your own community site or content management solution. It's a great idea, but unfortunately there were a lot of bugs at the time. Anyone tried it recently?
Damn, forgot to include my Leatherman...
I think that would be very much in the spirit of entrepreneurship, and what I was planning to do. :)
As of Friday August 14, 2009, FDIC is Bankrupt
It's funny that "household activities" are not labeled "work". Don't tell your wife about that.
What about the placebo effect?
I've seen it for a while but assumed it's my fault, a reload problem or something.
That's... quite an old fashioned assumption you have there.
Ask HN: How to choose the right language
I am a beginner reading the recently posted "How to be a Programmer" article and there is a section on choosing languages. The author discusses choosing the "best language for the task." That is something I see discussed quite frequently. I know there are languages that are most commonly used for certain tasks, but how do you decide between two similar languages? Like building a web app in Ruby vs. Python? Can anyone give an example like this?
Search Add-ons: Add-ons for Firefox
Some of the rectangle sizes look wrong. Compare "Walmart Profits" to "OPEC Climate Change Fund". Compare Google to Facebook.
Hubble Wallpapers
Something for your kids :-)
that's just the sandbox (http://wokheisandbox.appspot.com/) - domain is --> www.wokhei.com - but you won't be able to log-in just yet as still undergoing testing
Roll your own.

There are lots of projects (including Pinax) that you can reference to help you figure out how to do things yourself.

http://djangoplugables.com/

...is a site that lists django related projects. You can also just google stuff. There are a bunch more on Google Code and on github.
Django CMS - The new CMS for Django
There are probably two dimensions to this:

1) Whether the features and capabilities of the language match the task

2) Your familiarity with using a given language for a type of task.

There might be a third, somewhat less tangible concept of "elegance" mixed in there too, insofar as that some languages might lend themselves to very direct, elegant solutions to a particular problem, while others might require more round-about ways of doing things.

If you wanted to become good at comparing programming languages, the best way would probably be to read up on various classes of programming features. For example, type systems, object systems and other factors that generally influence programming language design. The other way would be to actually use some of the languages in question to get a sense of whether they agree with your preferred manner of problem solving. This might also give you a chance to explore library support and documentation and other related factors are that might influence your decision.

After you've programmed in a bunch of different languages, using a whole lot of different paradigms, you generally start to be able to pick the similarities and differences between languages pretty quickly, hopefully with reference to your past experience about what you do and don't like in a programming language.