skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all given the popularity in poker in the US and how it is viewed as a sign of masculinity it is not at all surprising that a lot of successful men used to play poker. A lot of men play poker, period. So I am not sure being a good poker player should be viewed as a precursor to success. Even if it is, it is definitely not a positive one. If it is a precursor of success it probably means that good poker players are probably good at manipulating other people and lying, that's all.

Here is what poker taught me:
- people can be bastards, and are generally not to be trusted. And I am not referring to the sanctioned lying that is accepted in poker (i.e., bluffing). There is a lot of shit behaviour in poker games outside of that narrow accepted form of lying.
- never never drink alcohol and do anything important. In poker you quickly discover that even one beer can cloud your judgement even if you feel completely fine.
"we haven't been able to find a good, dependable designer who works at reasonable rates"

I found this to be a really tough part of my project as well.. Good designers are often really hard to find and charge a shitload..
I thought about this too and what it boiled down to is who is getting the money?

If the fee is going to investors, I think it's bad.

If the fee is going to organizers for logistical expenses or heck even profit, I think it's usually fine.

1. In TechCrunch50's case, it is going to organizers.

2. I don't think TC50 makes most of its money from entrepreneurs looking for funding. They make a lot of money from rich execs and VCs. Contrast the angel groups and they make almost 100% of the money from entrepreneurs. This is a huge differentiator for me.
They are right. I've met ton's of "entrepreneurs" who knew nothing about business or even technology, but think the world owes them something for their magical idea. Regardless of how cool the idea really is, it must be very hard to work with these people without first teaching them the basics.

Obviously this doesn't apply to anyone who follows a relatively "lean startup" mentality [like those here], but there are orders of magnitude more people who do it the old fashioned way.
The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (non-fiction). Interesting history of hacking.
The government already takes a certain percentage of our income; and the more you make, the more they take. It follows logically that they should pay for our education.

Of course, as with healthcare, the rest of the world figured this out a long time ago.
In what way(s) is Common Lisp's (I assume?) object system "just plain added on poorly"?
Wow.

Anything that brings my dirty, chaotic, and often-frustrating existence closer to the orderly, bright, and shiny world of the Jetsons: +1

Can he fix my fucking Roomba next? It rolled through a stray cat turd again.
Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists
We are the same exact person. I'm in my last year of college and I'm doing intro classes just to satisfy requirements. I hate it beyond belief, since I feel like it's a complete waste of time when I could be working on my startup. When I have to do homework or study, I spend hours doing anything but my hw (for example, I post way more on HN when I have homework to do). When I'm working on my startup, I do little else (girlfriend time stays the same though haha).
If the architecture is trustworthy, I am fine with it being a couple generations past the leading edge.

When you go for leading edge you often end up with a mix of unproven stuff, assorted approaches, uneven performance and problems nobody ever had. It's fine to experiment, but you should only trust your customers' data to new technology when you find a combination that works well all the time (or, at the very least, when you have mapped all the circumstances it doesn't).

This whole disaster could have been avoided if there were no single point of failure - at the very least, three identical clusters being brought off-line and rebuilt from mirrored data for the upgrade one at a time in order not to disrupt service to users. I am astonished a telco did not know this.
sounds unpleasant
Does anyone know of a simple widget that you can host yourself that has a simple feedback form (bug/idea)?

I don't want to make my users register on another site or jump through hoops to actually provide feedback, I just want them able to provide feedback as fast and as simply as possible.

I'd love to see stats on click through rates from users clicking feedback. I expect it's quite low, especially if they ask for signup.
So is what we have now
I find it almost unbelievable that there were no cyclic backups.
I agree completely - the costs of college vs. the benefits don't line up anymore. It pisses me off to no end that young people mortgage their lives for a piece of paper that's worth very little. Employers have always cared more about actual productive skills, but the credential has been hard-coded into enough HR screens that it makes sense to check the box as quickly and inexpensively as possible. (Assuming you want a job, of course - if you're starting your own business, it doesn't matter at all.)

I'm in the midst of writing a series on my blog about getting college credentials as quickly / inexpensively as possible. Part 1 (http://personalmba.com/hacking-higher-education-clep/) covers testing out of college via CLEP examination. Part 2, which will be published tomorrow AM, covers how to graduate from Harvard without being accepted for ~25% the cost of a standard Harvard undergrad degree. Happy to post it on HN if anyone finds this stuff useful.
this happens to me all the time, I thought it was my computer
Lessons learnt from Tiger Airways' Cancellation Procedure
Development of the codebase might not have been but development of the product clearly was.

And the use cases. And the commercial viability of the market so their company had a chance to be around to support their customers. And the business understanding needed to support those customers properly.

Not all development is programming.
So a VC gets your income, instead of the bank from which you got your loan, under the current system? Doesn't sound like it would be much different from how it works today, in practice.
Shit work is definitely less painful if you "just take care of it" and get it out of your consciousness faster. I think learning to let that "lesser of two evils" trade-off motivate you to action is something that will take many years and will always leave room for improvement...

It works for me to have higher goals. These days, 99% of my shit work can be easily categorized into long term goals and desires. This does not make them quite "transformed" into something intrinsically motivating like you are asking for but what it does at least is make them fairly easy to "just take care of." It takes the sting out or something.

People that tell you "you're always going to have to do work you don't want to do" are correct but what you might not realize is that this does not have to be a significant part of your day like in high school, so this "unhappy for the rest of my life" is a red herring. You are not going to be as unhappy when you can align your coursework more easily with your interests. College is way better than high school. Post-college is even better once you find a money situation that works for you.

Which leads to some more immediate advice: see what it will take to apply to college early. I got out of high school after junior year by taking my last remaining credits at a local college over the summer. My school was not set up for this, I had to do some serious convincing to administrators and parents. Almost a full year of work avoided. And no, I did not need a 4.0 GPA.

P.S. Don't get pregnant or get anyone pregnant for at least 15 years :-)
A big problem here are the schools. A lot of degrees are just not worth the money and a lot of schools essentially trick students into getting into enormous amounts of debt based on unrealistic expectations for their careers.

I think a solution will be for the government to be more selective in which student loans it guarantees. I.e., the government should honestly survey the types of degrees that are needed for the economy and only provide loan guarantees for those degrees and for institutions that have shown they can train people properly in those degrees. If schools want to provide other degrees they can but they would have to rely on the free market.

Also, bankruptcy law should be changed to allow people to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy. I think that if a person shows (i) hardship and (ii) that they are not using their education in any way or form, they should be able to discharge their loan provided that their loan will be reinstated if they start using their education.
Good news, though: the code is open source.
Objective-C is not Apples "own" language. They (and NeXT, before them) used it to build the Cocoa framework but Objective-C is an add-on to GNU C and freely available for anyone to use. The language dates back to the 1980's at least.
10/GUI : The Video
What exactly are you saying? They should be ripped off to teach them a lesson?
If a man took 2 years off, wouldn't his career also be harmed? I'm not saying it doesn't set a woman's career back to take time off. But women's lives are generally lived differently from that of men. There are good points and bad points to each side of that equation. And time taken off by a woman to stay home with kids is generally viewed more favorably than a lot of other reasons one might drop out of the work scene for a time. (Generally speaking, only going back to school is likely to improve your career after you go back.)
The key is that in an 'equity' based program, the most successful graduates pay for the mediocre ones by having a higher salary to pay dividends on, whereas in a debt based system the integrity of the system is ensured by squeezing every last drop out of the least successful graduates.
Laurie Ave (gotta love Street view):

http://bit.ly/6fTEo
Well big chunks of the code base that they bought from NeXT were Obj-C. So there's the legacy issue. And as protomyth said, in the early days of OS X they really tried to convert people to Java but few developers got on board with it. Maybe because most people writing Cocoa apps in the early days were former NEXTSTEP developers and they used what they knew. Using Java to write Cocoa apps probably felt a bit like using COBOL to write .NET apps. You can do it, but it's probably not too fun.
Ironic that his post was hit with spam...

This was written last year, anyone know what it's like now?
What motives me is what Dan Pink calls "purpose" or wanting to make a difference in the world.

I spent 9 years building software to make the lives of telephone support workers better (by helping them create and re-use solutions to common problems).

I've spent the last 8 years building software to make the lives of network engineers better (by helping them automate repetitive tasks on thousands of network devices).

Thinking about making a difference for the user of the software I'm writing keeps me going.
I think "wait til it happens and then workaround it" is a pretty bad strategy - by the time you find out about the problem (if you even do), it might have cost you huge amounts of mony, lost business, customer's data, etc, etc.
Stretch and squeeze: a stress ball computer interface
I think you are really missing the point of this exercise...
noted, but only relevant in a semantic sense. the point is it is the highest honor in the field of economics, and is recognized as such.
> Will this prompt Microsoft to review its policy for data backups? "This was an extraordinary situation [...]. We greatly apologize [...]. We have a full team working in parallel with the restoration team to augment the redundancy and stability of this acquired service over the long-term."

That's got to be the best non-answer answer I've read in a long time. And no - redundancy and stability of the service have nothing to do with the backup policy.
You're right. That's what I meant by evolutionary suicide, and my argument (well, it's not really mine) relies on all six assumptions, more or less.

Although:

Colonizing space and colonizing space to the point where you don't need to worry about earth's carrying capacity are two quite different things. Energy and minerals might be obtainable from space somewhat soon. But we can't eat rocks or sunlight.

I don't claim population growth will be sustained into the indefinite future. I claim that it will be sustained until it stops, and that how it will stop is a question of serious concern.

As I see it there are several possibilities:
1.Population growth continues apace and, due to reproductive time lag, there are suddenly far too many people on the earth. This has a quite catastrophic domino effect and an appalling number of people, maybe 100%, die.
2.Population slows and then stops, but people's lifestyles get more and more decadent and far too many resources are transformed into far too much waste. Something, or many things, run out and disaster ensues.
3.Both population growth and resource consumption naturally find some sustainable level. Maybe that would be somewhere below where it is now. Maybe someone would invent something fabulous, say a glass elevator like in Charlie and the Great Glass elevator, and there is room for lots more consumption and lots more people.

Obviously, I prefer the third option. Maybe it will be that. I'm just sufficiently unsure to be worried about it.
Gemcutter.org as a RubyGem source scares me
What if you had an option to just put in an email to get responses to, and include any opt-out junk in the email itself? I think craigslist is a good example of how to do this. I agree with the top post: If I have to log in just to help a company out, I won't care enough to waste my time on it. If I have a real complaint, I'll send an email to the company or a real letter. I understand getsatisfaction is not craiglist, but there are some good ideas they are implementing.
Wish this article had more details than just "the backups were impacted too".

A few months ago Google had a large multi-hour App Engine outage. Afterwards (within 24 hours?) they posted a detailed technical explanation/postmortem online for anyone interested to read, with a play-by-play that even went minute-by-minute.

Microsoft/Danger owe their customers more of a real explanation.
It does have something to do with them, it's awarded by the same institution that decides on the real Nobel Physics and Chemistry.

The technically accurate name is apparently "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel"
Since XP, when an application froze the window itself would render in spite of the frozen/omitted contents. So when the titlebar got an ending "(not responding)" tag it is easily closed with one click of the close button, then another of "end now" as confirmation.

And there's always alt-f4.
I don't think so.

"source code for BitTorrent 6.0 ... will not be released"

http://www.slyck.com/story1566_BitTorrent_Addresses_Closed_S...

I wouldn't expect 7.0 to be any different.
Friendbar
More than subtly.
I can think in several counter examples:

In mac os x,
- how to show the desktop with a keyboard shortcut ?

- how to maximize/minimize/restore a window with a keyboard shortcut (on windows you can press Alt+spacebar, and then x/n/r) ?

- how to efficiently copy/move files in finder with a keyboard shortcut ?

- how is better thought the fact that when you are in finder and then you press enter, you are going to rename a file? because in order to open/execute on a file you must press command+O...

And finally, the operation you asked can be performed on windows by pressing ctrl+shift+esc, and if you are in the process tab, spelling the first letters of the procname, then press delete and confirm.
The problem is that an individual school does not get rewarded based on how well it educates the students (except perhaps for private colleges who make money from alumnae donations). Ideally, you're education tax dollars would forever go back to the school that educated you. That way the school would have an incentive to train you well.
I didn't claim it was legal. I claimed it wasn't sexist/anti-soldier-ist.
PhoNui.Org
Sorry, not even Jetsons technology can solve cat-related problems.
Some general (perhaps fictional) said something once about the useless of walls without men to defend them. (This is one of those things I can't Google easily. Perhaps someone else can give a try?)

I've been watching the "web of trust" concept since the days of Phil Zimmerman and PGP. Seems like it would be vulnerable to balkanization and cliques, just like the non-virtual webs of trust that predate electronic networks.

The only thing that works against spam is to destroy its economic utility. Perhaps, instead of a free-net, what's needed is a for-a-nominal-charge-net?

The problem with the current net, is that much of the stuff that has economic utility, like advertisements, works best against the least savvy segment of the population. It's the too-dim-to-block-banner-ads, too-clueless-to-avoid-phishing, stupid-enough-to-fall-for-spam segment driving so much of the business of the internet. I hope we find a way to counteract this tendency.
too bad there's not a transcript. however, i just watched it and would highly recommend it.

some of the highlights:

- 3 key values: move fast. be bold. focus on impact(helps attract the best people; at fb each engineer is responsible for >1M users).

- the more control you give users over their own information, the more they will share

- unless you're breaking some stuff, you're not
moving fast enough.
Well that's one I would have put on the list of "Headlines you will never see." Awesome.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. If you have a backup that CAN be impacted by a problem in the main server then you do not have a backup at all, you have, at best, redundancy.

The very reason to have a legitimate backup is that it cannot be damaged by the same mechanisms that can damage your primary data. It should be inert, if possible, or at least to some extent immutable, and it should be offsite.

RAID is not a backup. SAN is not a backup. Mirroring to a redundant storage array is also not a true backup.

Backups are hard to get right, and expensive. But the cost of getting it wrong can be monumental.
For me, there's a simpler reason: I don't have one.
well, i think i could justify it if i wanted to. but i don't want to continue down this thread, sometimes i like to argue for the sake of arguing and i think i should stop now.

i'm not really here to agree with how they went about doing things with respect to how they claim to have pitched the product.

the process that they took would work the exact same if they were completely upfront about what they were doing, though, and i think its worth learning from.
You forgot "acquired."

It was them. Those bastards we bought. I mean, sure that was almost a year ago, and most of the original employees are gone, but do keep in mind when we're talking about this that it's not a proper MS offering.

Unless you like it. Then yay us.
26K of debt for a 2 year degree is on the high end. Tuition will run around $2500-$4000 per semester if you are in-state, you're still living at home so living expenses are minimal, and the coursework is not so difficult that you can't hold down a part time job at the same time.

So I'd have to say that the self-assessment of "Years ago, I lived for now. It was so stupid," probably has some truth to it.
Original paper may be found at:
http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/staff/jessehoey/papers/zut...

"Who's Counting?: Real-Time Blackjack Monitoring for Card Counting Detection" presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS), in Ličge, Belgium from October 13-15.
This incentive does not exist today, either. To even hope to stay financially solvent enough to remain in existence, universities have to direct their resources towards research, not teaching. Having researchers teaching classes annoys the researchers and the students. But since it's the only way the system can work, it is tolerated.

There is no money to be made in teaching.
"It is likely that the necessity to pull from the outbox of every user will only scale to a limited point, however FMS is being actively developed, and it is likely that these problems can be overcome in due course."

Those are some famous last words...
> is it fair to ask "children, 17, 18 or 19 years old, to try and assess how much of a student loan debt burden they can handle

I don't know about you, but I discussed that question off and on throughout high school with my parents while deciding where to apply for college. It's not like it was a surprise one morning where I had to decide with no time to prepare or ask someone more experienced about.
Interesting that SSL is $200/month extra. I am almost tempted to create a service that provides you with an https proxy for only $20/month...
In my experience, new "policies" put in place in these situations don't really do anything. They just inject bureaucrats where there were none before, and aggravate the few people remaining who might really help. And you can bet managers will start a witch hunt, firing some mostly-competent guy as a scapegoat (which may "feel good" at the time, but ironically will only slow down their recovery and set them up for their next failure).

The smart thing would be for Microsoft to think of the employees: what management decision is likely to make working in that group least likely to suck over the next few months? If it were me, I would invest in technology and hires/transfers, not in bureaucracy. I would give that group everything it needs to build and rebuild that system twice. After all, doesn't Microsoft have the money for that?
Emacs is a 10 finger multi-touch UI. And it works very well.
Hehe, but it is!

Asking someone about their service status is done so that you can then choose to not employ that person to minimize your risk for absence, which would lead to people in the service being less likely to get jobs, which in turn would lead people to not want to be in the service because of the effect on their job prospects.

Asking women about their private life (are you pregnant, do you want children, do you have children) would cause professional women to maybe decide they didn't want any children because of the effects that would have on their job prospects, or to simply not apply for jobs. This would negate decades of slow progress in getting the workforce to be reflective of society.

So, by definition it is discriminatory to ask these questions, the effect will be discrimination, even if that is not the stated purpose of the question. An employer could, and many do, for instance hide behind arguments like 'trying to maximize productivity' or 'being worries about the children of the employee', but none of that holds water.

At the end of the day the employer is simply worried that someone is going to miss a couple of days work.

And it's true, there is a real cost to all this, if someone gets pregnant, has to take care of their kids because they're ill or gets called up for the service then the employer will have to find and train a replacement if the absence is long enough, or swallow the loss in productivity for a shorter interruption.

But the cost to that business does not trump the cost to society as a whole if we let people pick and choose on those criteria, that is why it is illegal.
As I sit here, looking at the dirty fan blades inside the cheap plastic fan we have next to our bed, I realize this man has the resources and business genius to see opportunity where I only see annoyance.
Didn't like it either.
The story about traveling in the bike with your son and the past with insanity is OK but I found the "philosophy" part terrible ("we cannot define quality, so quality is everything" or something like that - rolls eyes -).
There is always the classic test to see if the large hadron collider has destroyed the world yet.

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/