skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
10 Small Business Marketing ebooks
A friend sent this link to me today. Some of the links are more advertisements than useful content but there are a few nice ones.
Step 5) Remove any text; slows the download
Canada has an opportunity not to recreate the legislative disaster that is the DMCA. Unfortunately, the current Conservative government isn't exactly predisposed to doing the right thing for the right reasons. (Last year, they tried to ram through a US-style copyright reform - Bill C-61 - that died on the order paper when the minority government dissolved and an election was called.)

The fact that they're currently conducting national consultations into copyright reform is encouraging, and I would strongly urge Canadians to participate in calling for sensible reforms that balance owners' rights against the rights of consumers to study, understand and modify their possessions; and against the public good, including innovation and economic growth, that flows from the free exchange of ideas and information
The Missing Level of Abstraction?
Run the numbers. 750K basically pays salaries for a while, pays your rent, but it's not "investment". It's what you need to keep the average small tech company alive for a while.
Its an interesting read, but I disagree with many of the points:

In the West, specialization is encouraged at early ages. While it seems to be mostly anecdotal, I tend to think the opposite, that this happens more in Asian countries than in the West. Yes, children are applauded for "knowing what they want to do", but they frequently change that, and the reason for applause isn't knowing "what they want to do" its knowing early enough to make sure that it is an attainable goal. His examples are both professions that require decades of experience/practice/training to be particularly good at, and starting young is the only way to achieve that in a reasonable time frame.

When we raise children with this bias towards specialization, they become defenseless when they enter the real world. Again, this is just anecdotal, but the children I've seen who have the most problems coping are those who were raised to be generalists. These were children who had a severe fear of not accomplishing something, they could not cope with not doing well. When a problem arose, they had to find a solution, no matter how out of their area of knowledge it was. While, to some degree this is a good thing (in fact, I would guess that this is a large driving force behind most of the people on this site), these were people who were true "generalists". Instead of falling back on a specialty of theirs, they had to do it in the way presented, and eventually would fail and be destroyed by it. While these are mainly the "advanced" students from high school finding college particularly difficult, it is little different than (say) a Python Hacker who decides that a problem must be solved with Haskell, and simply will not put it down until it is. They would keep trying, and since they didn't have that specialty (ie, Python) to fall back on to create a frame to understand the problem, they had no way of understanding it at all.
http://fastflip.googlelabs.com
We've been here before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101255

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121063

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=724524

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797723
Has anyone found the keyword for computer-related jobs? I've tried filtering on 'software', 'computer', 'information', 'engineer' (which does have results but no computer-specific ones aside from EE). Or do those get lumped under 'Professional - Misc'?
Ruby apps development readied for Android
Also, the Brain Science Podcast[1] is a worthy listen if you're into this. Dr. Ginger Campbell does an excellent job with the interviews and book reviews.

I was also following MIT OCW's 9.01 "Introduction to Neuroscience"[2] and found it very worthwhile. I scored a textbook on ebay for $14 and have been following the course for a few lectures. Doubt you can find a better value :)

[1] http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/
[2] http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/9-01F...
This is only true for properties created as new properties on the existing prototype

Which is what #67 says.

It is not true if you assign a new object to the prototype

Which is a completely different thing.
So, what would qualify as an investment in your opinion ?
Vivox to add voice to EA games, Facebook
Trang Khởi Động Mozilla Firefox
If your parents take you along on their illegal trip as a child that does not make YOU a criminal, it makes you a victim, but the system will treat you as though you are a criminal.
"Can they write a little code? Do they have enough experience to be able to deploy code somewhere? (An[sic] fairly good test we've found of whether or not somebody is a "hacker". Hackers have playgrounds.)"

I guess you could assume a negative correlation there (no playground == not a 'hacker'), but I doubt there's an equally strong positive correlation. I know plenty of people with a VPS or in-home sandbox server whom I wouldn't put in the 'hacker' category (myself included).
DrScheme (PLT scheme's IDE) automatically translates [ and ] to ( and ) where appropriate. It's very handy.
What does this mean for me? Will I get super fast wifi now? how fast?
Microsoft Codeplex: stay away
(defun square-bracket-reader (stream char)
(declare (ignore char))
(read-delimited-list #\] stream t))
(defun use-square-bracket-readtable ()
(set-macro-character #\[ #'square-bracket-reader)
(set-macro-character #\] (get-macro-character #\) nil)))
On their first post on this subject, I asked if they were going to do some response modelling based not only on the message, but on profile features like spirituality, math ability, desire for love, etc.

No reply, unfortunately.
3D Scanner Built From Webcam and Milk
I'm not sure I care about the relative package count, provided that OpenSolaris has sufficient packages to meet my functional requirements.

Having a single company in control of the kernel is both good and bad. It's good because you can move the kernel & features in a single, strategic direction. It's bad because that single company can muck it up or kill it (True64 Unix).

On the server side, we use dtrace, zfs & zones on all Unix-like servers & have been happy with the result. I'd hate to have to move to Linux & loose those features. That would be a major, major step backwards.

For desktops? I don't know & don't care, really. A desktop is a desktop, is a desktop. I freely switch between Vista, XP 7, OSX & OpenSol WinCE & Maemo handful of times per day & don't really think that one is more/less better/worse. (Except WinCE. That OS defines worse.)
Either have parentheses and format by hand or use parentheses and have the editor format the text. Personally, I like the latter best. Easier to change stuff.
from the article: the debate continues

BPA-free has always seemed like another marketing ploy to up-sell the consumer on more crap they don't need.
Those who cannot learn from history
are doomed to repeat it.

-- George Santayana:
Treat them as a friend and a person. A label as broad and misunderstood as 'introvert' will only hinder you in enjoying their company when you have it.

It's probably best not to 'care' for anyone but yourself and (perhaps) those physically unable. Just befriend the rest of us, please.
How about we have water without wet?
To be fair, you can answer those questions on the Ruby on Rails site, or through a number of google searches.

> I don't use Ruby on Rails, because -- honestly -- I'm not quite sure what Ruby on Rails means.

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration. (from http://rubyonrails.org)

> Does it mean using a Mac and TextMate like that guy in those cool screencasts?

TextMate on OS X has long been the favored Rails editor, but the classic editors are still going strong. See VIM for Rails and Emacs for Rails. For a full-on IDE, check out RadRails, RubyMine, 3rd Rail, or Netbeans for Ruby. (from http://rubyonrails.org/download)

> Does it mean Ruby, the language? I don't care about that.

It means writing in Ruby, the language. If you don't care about that fine, but the answer is clear from the get-go.

> Does it mean Rails, the framework? I don't really understand the appeal.

Yes, Rails means Rails as a framework. The appeal (from the website) is being able to write clearer code because in most cases sane defaults are provided.

The rest of your comment is specifically about your experience with one Rails app which I've never used, so I'm leaving that alone.

The point of my comment wasn't to slam .NET. I've got no personal beef, but when someone asks why I don't do current_project as a .NET app I don't know how to respond because I don't know exactly what they mean.
My Keep-Working Hack: 2 computers. One for work. One for internet. In different rooms. An egg timer. 48 minutes of work. 12 minutes of break.

http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2006/09/the-power-of...

http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html
Betting on whether P=NP
Obviously not hacker news
A lot of people seem to be missing this: clicking on a thumbnail gets you a full-size image of the article in Fast Flip, it does not send you to the original site. You're not expected to read the content from the thumbnails, you select your first article from the list of thumbnails and then fast flip between the full screen versions.
cut&paste simply does not work in the python world and it is much poorer because of that.

I think that might have made it much better!

http://perldesignpatterns.com/?CutAndPasteProgramming
I'm really glad that everyone is enjoying the tutorial! As mentioned below this is from a workshop that I gave at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC.

You can find more information about it here:
http://ejohn.org/blog/adv-javascript-and-processingjs/

Most of this tutorial is taken from my upcoming book 'Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja' which can be found here: http://jsninja.com/

I don't think this was explicitly stated on the slides but you can double click the code slides and you'll be able to edit and re-run them. I tossed this tutorial up after the talk and haven't really had a chance to improve upon it.

Sort of related: Remy Sharp built http://jsbin.com/ which is based off of the construction of this tutorial (using the run-and-show style together with double-click-to-edit).
Sarkozy to develop an economic indicator for "happiness"
Right, that's more or less what I was thinking.
Though it is encouraging, the consultations were almost all invite-only, and not transparent to the public. There have certainly been a few public consultations, though they have generally been not well advertised.
I agree with "I hope we can grow and enjoy God's love together." being a little freaky to tell someone online.
Especially if you're astigmatic.
This is actually a fairly clever and atypical approach to hiring. I agree that the meaning of "hacking" is often stretched, and maybe this is one of those cases, but it's hardly the worst.

(However, like the Microsoft/Google brainteaser interviews, I could see these little extraneous tasks getting pretty annoying if they became widespread.)
Phishing attack masquerades as MSN Messenger 'deleted contacts' feature
An interview with Jamie Knight: autism and accessible web design
Even better would be if when you tried to open a web that's a distraction, the browser opened your text editor.

I'm kinda dreaming...
The argument: America can't be the world's tech leader without immigration reform.

But even without immigration reform America _is_ the world's tech leader. So how did we ever get that way without that "immigration reform"?

Obviously someone's pushing his own agenda. This article is from the corporations' point of view; other articles take the workers' view.

Corporations want cheaper workers but workers want higher wages. The usual struggle. Nothing new here.
Poll: How high are your cubicle walls?
Just curious as to what type of environment dominates in the HN world, and what works best for people. Hopefully I've got the majority here...
5 feet tall - it's my own little world and I love it
5 feet tall - I'm isolated and lonely
Open floor plan - it improves communication and gets things done
Open floor plan - it's noisy and distracting
Team-based pods - I can't see a window, but it gets things done
Team-based pod - but I wish I had a cubicle
The best get-back-to-work hack I've ever had is to work on something that interests you. If you're able to do that, you won't need any hacks.
It is completely scalable. I did it. The second round was an estimate for a more significant 'paid' task that advanced the company's goals (i.e. real work). The third round was completion and delivery of the task (which paid just enough to keep qualified candidates interested). My time was more valuable than the cost of having the few interested candidates that got that far do the various useful bits of work.

At the end I did a few long long interviews and really got to know who I was going to be working with and they me.
My company issues offices to all programmers.

Perhaps this should be an option?
an interesting stat- 60% of attack activity is now focused on SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities.
Probably. My flatmate was still impressed, when I showed him.
Actually I find a site that requires flash is the broken part, not the OS that does not provide it by default.
Not entirely sure this is a new discovery -- I've seen that picture floating around for quite some time now.

Link from 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4200000/newsid_4209...

2008 story with higher res picture: http://www.entomologia.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=inve...
I consider myself very introverted, but I think that most of the items on the list you can learn to deal with whether you are extra- or introverted. Most essential though :

-Respect their need for privacy (yeah)

-Let them observe first in new situations (would make me more comfortable)

-Teach them new skills privately rather than in public (i would learn faster)

-Respect their introversion, don't remake them into extraverts (can get annoying sometimes)

-Give them time to think. Don't demand instant answers (OMG YESS!!)

Of course I can only speak for myself..
Yellow on black is the most visible combination of colors.
Microsoft's Zune HD launches. No firmware?
Where's the "5 feet tall - not quiet/private enough to get work done" option?
I use rescue time. It is amazing. Having fun to do work also helps. Well that is it for this comment, I need to get back to work.
Ugh, now that's just foul. Sometimes I like Microsoft and sometimes I don't... and right now it's definitely the latter. It's effectively stealing another's work legally!
3.5' walls + 18" of glass
There are few sites that provide more of a distraction than the Huffington post. Someone should code up a GreaseMonkey script to nullify their comments section. Regardless of your political views, you will be sucked into a vortex of pure mental clusterf*ck.
David Marr (father of the field of computational neuroscience)
Everybody has their own private office
5 feet tall - but not private enough
The paradox is that the better the automation, the more humans rely on the machine.

But when it fails, humans trust it too much.

Or you can make it less reliable, and cause the human to trust it less, but that has issues too.

It's hard to find a balance point, neither direction is good.

A solution from outside the box is needed here - make the automation good, but in a way that the human input is encouraged.
Done, as well as a new 'not private enough' cube option
If HN were more popular, would you bother voting on submissions?
Your vote here currently yields a lot of power and I suspect that this is part of the appeal to HN.

BTW, voting power could be reduced to enhance the quality of what gets to the front page by encouraging more people to vote on new submissions as reddit does. Namely, reddit shows a new submission at the top of the list on the front page to encourage more people to vote on it.
Apple’s fix of a security hole reveals a long-simmering flaw
That sounds kinda cool - is it good or bad?
An alarm would ruin my train of thought so much, this idea probably works better for those of us that can't control our procrastination.

I know I have used my hosts file (windows and *nix) to block those domains that server such good distractions.
If HN was more popular I'd probably look elsewhere for my news.
joe_the_user says:
"America will not be 'The World's Tech Leader' with American elementary and secondary schools in the shape that they presently are in"

Unconvincing.

Despite the current state of affairs in elementary/secondary schooling the US graduates more Ph.D.'s in most fields than can find suitable jobs Excluding occasional shortages there are more than enough excellent students in the US education pipeline to more than fill all advanced degree job openings in the US.
Intuit appears to have similar infrastructure, so they will likely move Mint.com off of Yodlee. Hopefully Mint used a modular design... ;-)
How is trying to prove that P=NP distinctly different from trying to prove that P!=NP?

Perhaps while trying to prove P=NP, you finally realize why it can't be the case and end up proving that P!=NP instead?
So, everytime I take a break and actually don't mind wasting time on reddit, I have to comment out parts of my /etc/hosts ?
Wow, I didn't realise it was verboten here to say anything less than stellar about the iPod.

When the iPod first came out it was Mac only and very expensive. I knew plenty of people with MP3 players many years before getting an iPod. Saying they had "wrapped up" the market is pointless, since it was all early adopters at that stage.

When the iPod started to get REALLY popular (just prior to the Mini) and hit critical mass, there was plenty of good competition out there. So what made the difference for Apple? These original points. Not sure why I got downvoted to -2 for saying so. I thought we reserved downvotes for trolls, not dissenting opinion?
(more details follow)

You should not hire people that do any of the things you ask. They are giving their valuable services away for free - since your company exists to make money, your employees giving their time so freely is likely to affect your profitability.

People thinking about applying - Reconsider. The company is too cheap to pay for good work - they extract what they need from interviews. Its likely that you'll never discuss pay with them since you're not going to get hired once they have their answers.

(the details)

Getting work done in an interview is a poor practice since the candidate does not know if the work relates to an actual problem or is fictional.

If an actual problem, you are asking for the candidate's time and could end up using the candidate's approach - this puts you into a conflict of interest: you have a candidate that just gave you what you need and you are in a position to hire.

If the problem is fictional, why bother? How does it help?

Besides, candidates are smart too: it's likely they hacking the interview process too. Not sure where that leaves anyone, but good luck with that.

[want a solution? hire me ;) ]
I think (if I'm not mistaken) that your vote is also weighted according to your Karma level? Which would mean that even if it were more popular, your vote could still yield a lot of power, and if you were a noob, you would have to comment and vote to improve your karma for the sake of achieving significant power. So, yes.

I think that's part of why I participate here, and pretty much nowhere else. Not to put words in his mouth, but PG seems focused on community building with HN, and every aspect of the site, from the design to the functionality seems geared toward that. Hopefully those features will stand up to popularity and not be overpowered by dumb-masses, if you will.
That would depend on how fast the new submissions were coming in. I suspect that at some level of popularity the current model would break and you would simply have to split up the site along thematic lines.

Maybe that points has already been passed, hard to tell, the line is pretty blurry.

The bigger power is the 'flag' option vs the voting, voting changes the ordering of things, flagging changes what gets to be voted on. But even that has its limits, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823567 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823568 are still active three hours after being flagged.
This was interesting:

...the question is why bankers bought those triple-A mortgage-backed securities, and the answer may well lie in the regulations promulgated by government officials.[6]

Had bankers been looking for the safety connoted by triple-A ratings, they could have bought Treasurys, which were even safer. If they were looking for yield, they could have bought double-A or lower-rated bonds. And why mortgage-backed bonds? The answer seems to be an obscure rule enacted by the Fed, the FDIC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision in 2001: the Recourse Rule, an amendment to the Basel I accord that governed banks' capital minima.

Under the Recourse Rule, an AA- or AAA-rated asset-backed security, such as a mortgage-backed bond, received a 20-percent risk weight, compared to a zero risk weight for cash and a 50-percent risk weight for an individual (unsecuritized) mortgage. This meant that commercial banks could issue mortgages regardless of how sound the borrowers were sell them to investment banks to be securitized, and buy them back as part of a mortgage-backed security, in the process freeing up 60 percent of the capital they would have had to hold against individual mortgages. Capital held by a bank is capital not lent out at interest; by reducing their capital holdings, banks could increase their profitability.

Fascinating read.
Am i the only one who likes lisp because of the parenthesis and the lack of syntax? The parens are the perfect way of representing the syntax trees, and you dont have to be bothered with remembering all the syntax and operators etc like with the other languages.
I think the only weighting of the votes is based on their age, not on the karma of the user.
This is kinda cool, but it would take _forever_. With 3D scanners getting cheaper and cheaper by the day, it's a cool hack, but that's it.
That works for those of us with two computers. I wish there was a way of routinely disabling the Internet, rather than having me manually do it.
Liberation is good - Google is good - so are privacy agreements.

A better name for the site could be "Grab a Copy of Your Data!" - much more accurate. Liberate implies that you are actually getting your data back - which you're not...you're getting...a.....copy.
I suspect the author is lead astray by his comparison of codeplex to google code or sourceforge. The better comparison is the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the FSF or perhaps MySQL. The latter two also request copyright assignment.

While I think that Microsoft should have erred on the side of more freedom, things are not nearly as bad as the author makes them out to be.
Pretty cool app I found for Mac. http://getconcentrating.com

Concentrate helps you work and study more productively by eliminating distractions.

To start, create an activity (design, study, write, etc) and choose actions (shown below) to run every time you concentrate. When ready, just click “concentrate." All your distractions will disappear and a timer will appear to help you stay focused.
All the devices out there that say "802.11n" on the box also have a disclaimer saying "draft standard". Now they can omit the disclaimer.
How about just get back to work instead of spending time on this hack? That would save you at least 15 minutes.
The only thing that can make you think you'll be fine with Facebook and Twitter behind the GFW is tor.
The difference between efficiency and effectiveness