skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you've just nailed the 'how to get rid of spam problem' :)

Make them regret they ever posted their product because it will give them very bad pr. But they still get links and plenty of people will click the article without reading your comment.
Was that a tongue-in-cheek comment on Gore being the actual president? Or a typo?
Or is there some other president I'm not aware of?
Yep they have to consolidate their business there is a lot of waste there.
Wouldn't it just be easier to make a list of venues in each city that are known to have good WiFi?
> Obviously, a system like this with N users has N^2 karma scores and the cost of administering the karma system increases exponentially compared to linear user growth.

Do you imply that N^2 is exponential? Or is there another way to understand your sentence.

The rest of your post is quite insightful.
Obama has been noticeably quiet about the mess he inherited. From what I can see he's doing his damnest to raise the level of discourse, no small feat given the politics of his opponents.

No, he's not George Bush, notice also he's not Bill Clinton, nor Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter.
With source code the major economic benefit is understanding and being able to modify that code, less so the code itself.

Source code available on pirate bay is useless unless someone spends a lot of time / money on figuring out how it works. This is why people can write in scripting languages without worrying about the "openness" of the source.
I inherited a giant hideous stock-management system. It did a certain amount of automated ordering without manual intervention.

Long story short: a nasty race condition meant that it was over-ordering duplicate products from the suppliers to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per day.

On the general theme, my most frightening software experience was when I met a guy who was the star programmer for a company doing controllers for elevators. I got talking to him, and he showed me some code. It took me about 15 seconds to identify an edge case that would engage the motor while the elevator was at the top floor (thereby attempting to pull the elevator into the roof?). It took me a further hour to explain what the edge case was. The bug wasn't that scary, as I'm sure there are hardware failsafes, but the general dimness of the guy writing software to control lifts was scary.

I started taking the stairs after that.
Armed Guard Los Angeles - Security Guard San Fernando Valley
Access Control Security's core values can be summarized in three words: Customer Service, Integrity and Vigilance.
Well at least the prize didn't go to Twitter...

He still has the power to start a major war against any country in the next few years. How ironic would this be then?
I'd expect them to be handled in the same "phase" as alias expansions. See here for one example of hackery with aliases, that take advantage of their different expansion phase:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/aliases.html
Thanks for the reply. More revenue solves problems. I think the core problem isn't growth though. It's the expectation of a really high rate of return on angel investment.

I was really wondering if taking investment for fixed asset purchasing was typically done. From the general silence, it sounds as if taking out a mortgage would be the most practical thing to do.

I appreciate the consideration put into the reply. Food for thought, especially in the second last paragraph.
"To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site, right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As... from the menu that appears."

Ouch! They could at least provide an export tool.
Attn Bloggers: FTC's stringent new guidelines take effect Dec. 1st
From the article:

In new guidelines (PDF) released Oct. 5, the FTC put bloggers on notice that they could incur an $11,000 fine if they receive free goods, free services, or money and write about the goods or services without conspicuously disclosing their "material connection" to the provider. The FTC guidelines extend even to Facebook and Twitter posters. If you received a gratis novel from the publicity department of a publisher and posted a tweet about it without disclosing that the book was a freebie, you become an "endorser" in the FTC's view. It could—in the name of consumer protection—hit you with a fine. The 81-page guidelines, which also mandate stringent celebrity endorsements rules, will take effect Dec. 1.
"The only other US president to receive the honor was Jimmy Carter and he received it for his work after he was president"

Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Price in 1919 (while he was in office).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
I'm not American -- don't just assume people's nationality because you don't like their arguments.

>>I wasn't comparing them on an objective level (which I think was pretty obvious), merely stating that they are all things that will be with those respective countries for a long time.

See the note above, re that all countries I know of with terror problems thread on the limits of human rights.

>>The U.S. Administration did not declare war, and labeled Taliban troops and supporters terrorists rather than soldiers,

Afghanistan is a conflict against organized units which as standard behavior do terror attacks against civilians and misuse civilian dress.

Anyway, it is continuing military operations since the invasion 2001, where the term is used in the standard press.

I don't have a problem with the Afghan invasion -- and neither do neutral countries like Sweden which send soldiers there.

If you harbor terrorists which attack other countries' civilians, you might get invaded. I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing -- it is an incentive for countries to not destabilize other countries.

>>So, do you waterboard people in your US prisons ? Do you torture them ? Desecrate their religious objects ? And far worse than that ?

Check spr.org. How popular do you think these people would be, if put in US prisons?

Second, I do honestly think the judgment on US here is harsher than e.g. the British and their handling of IRA, etc.

Third, desecrating religious objects isn't illegal in civilized countries. (And is it really documented?)

Fourth, lots of the stories coming from Guantanamo prisoners are certainly made up. There are innocent people incarcerated (all prisons have that). The guilty are in the terror business -- which is more or less the propaganda business.

Edit: Grammar, sigh.
One bug in Daylife's API tester's javascript. It just never worked in IE for some stupid reason. The solution was surprisingly simple.

After some analysis with firebug, I just figured out that the variable's value wasn't being preserved after a particular point. So I just had to take it's value and assign it back to itself.

It's in this file: http://demos.daylife.com/api_tester/js/daylife.tester.js (lines prefixed with comments "IE Fix")

[Full disclosure: I was not and I'm not a part of Daylife. I only participated in a contest they once conducted and was asked to try solving their problem by one of their staff.]
This is why I always hit my wife when I don't think she will understand something.
This war is already lost for copyrights protectors, the question is when they stop bother us.
The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
Wired Science News for Your Neurons The Human Genome in 3 Dimensions
Thanks. My post was no accident with some of the repetitive SEO keywords in it.
most embrarrasing:

" #define INTERVAL 10 * 86400 "

read the above 'C' statement.
Yeah, there are no brackets surrounding the '10*86400', INTERVAL was being used in some calculations.i wasted a lot of time debugging this crap.
A batch run of only a few thousand items was running all night long, rarely finishing and causing all kinds of problems when people logged in in the morning. The users had been complaining about this for years.

I was given the ticket and found a "SLEEP 10" (causing a 10 second pause for each item) in the 10 year old BASIC code, put in by the original programmer for debugging purposes, and never removed before it was promoted.

I removed the "SLEEP 10" and run time went from 12 hours to 23 seconds.

The users loved me, but my boss was not pleased. He said, "You should have changed it to a SLEEP 5 so we had something else to give them the next time they complained."
Now, there is a crater made by "human hands" in Moon´s surface. The Earth is not enough, we also need crash Moon.
Every since time there is a memory corruption on a games console it takes hours and hours of tedious detective work to find.... shudder. Glad I don't do that any more.
About Clinton. That's what I thought at the time, too. But it turns out to be absolutely false.

http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/conason/2003/07/30/terror...

> "CIA officials went to the White House and said they had 'specific, predictive, actionable' intelligence that bin Laden would soon be attending a particular meeting, in a particular place. 'It was a rare occurrence,' Clarke said. Clinton authorized a lethal attack. The target date, however -- August 20, 1998 -- nearly coincided with Clinton's deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Clarke said that he and other top national security officials at the White House went to see Clinton to warn him that he would likely be accused of 'wagging the dog' in order to distract the public from his political embarrassment. Clinton was enraged. 'Don't you fucking tell me about my political problems, or my personal problems,' Clinton said, according to Clarke. 'You tell me about national security. Is it the right thing to do?' Clarke thought it was. 'Then fucking do it,' Clinton told him."
Same here. I'm guessing that the link only counts the number of accesses, and pg didn't think that people who either didn't get the acceptance email or didn't apply to go to the link above--hence filling up the count queue.

So those of us on the east coast probably woke up to acceptance emails and rejection rsvps.
Ask HN: Voting on comments broken ?
I've noticed that I can no longer upvote whenever the upvote button is there. It looks like the vote goes through, but after refreshing the page you see that the vote hasn't been counted but now the voting buttons do disappear.

Is this just me or is it a common thing ?

And if it is by design then why not simply remove the vote buttons ?
I just upvoted this post and it is working for me.
It's on comments only as far as I can see. For example, I just upvoted you but your comment shows as '1 points' after I refresh the page.
Of course, Jimmy Carter also won a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush.
I just upvoted both of you and it seemed to stick.

Karma-whore!! (j/k)
Hahha
Interesting, I'll upvote you and see if that sticks.

yes, that one did work.

This is weird!

It looks like it is related to where you are in a thread relative to the things you comment on.

So if you haven't been active in a thread yet you can comment on anything, but once you are active your voting options are limited, but it doesn't show that by removing the buttons.
Perhaps it was intentional on the original programmer's part... but he never got round to reducing the sleep time - http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Speedup-Loop.aspx
Insight into the man if he accepts it.
that's interesting -- that makes it even more of an anti-bush statement. when i think of it that way, it actually makes sense.

too bad he hasn't lived up to the promise.
That sounds like the most logical explanation since it sounds like some people who received acceptance emails saw the acceptance message and then later were seeing the rejection message. I really hope that acceptance emails weren't sent out to people who were rejected.

Either way, I'm sure it'll all get cleared up today once the west coast wakes up.
A neat piece of software calculating the prices for customers Had a hierarchical pricing model for different contracts with large corporations. But the hierarchies were not separated. You started in one hierarchy and ended up in another one. While trying to read the tree from the bottom up you could end up reading the whole database for calculating a price with conditions from every customer.

I must not state the accuracy of that price...
Enough arbitrary regulation, and everyone becomes a criminal...

The distinction between "news organization" and individual also makes very little sense to me. When someone contributes original work via twitter or a blog, why is this any less "news" than the writings of some large media company? Perhaps some (many?) blogs admit a significant reduction in "quality", but this seems a less than compelling argument. Just read the editorial section of an arbitrary newspaper...
Is this relevant to following by any chance?

http://karma.nucleuscms.org/item/101
That happened to me about two weeks ago on all browsers and on two machines. But a couple days later it was fine again.
Define "worst". The most costly? The hardest to diagnose? The one with the most stupid cause?
Android gaining momentum in smart phone race
Did you even find out the cause ?
Did anybody who got the acceptance letter end up at a page denoting that they were accepted? Or is everyone who got the acceptance email getting to the rejection page?
Reminds me of back in the old days writing integer assembly language (and later) C apps for microcomputers. As FPUs started to become available, users complained they spent all this money on an FPU and got no speed improvement.

I half-seriously suggested adding FPU detection and intentional delay loops if no FPU was present.
How to Create Your First iPhone Application
The iPhone has created unprecedented excitement and innovation from people both inside and outside the software development community.
Take your pick. Whatever works for you. For me the definition would probably be the hardest to diagnose, but I'm sure there are better ones that lead to more interesting stories and lessons to be learned.

Bugs are a great learning experience.
I suspect the presentation was a reflection of the company culture... from the previous post in the series: "The culture and work ethic of Convergent had earned it the title the Marine Corps of Silicon Valley. (Not until I was older and wiser did I realize that this was not always meant as a compliment.)"

And "My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies..."

edit to link Convergent and Ardent
re-edit: can't spell
Aliases are handled differently though, before e.g. file glob expansion. I would have expected history to be handled similarly.
View and Print Portable Document Format [pdf] files with Adobe Reader
On this same note though, there are some jobs where you do indeed have the option to avoid legal credentialing. In fact, the nuclear industry, the industry with the heaviest regulations, will let you work at a plant if you can pass their tests, these tests are open on a government website and anyone may take them (this is according to my uncle who is indeed a nuclear engineer working at a plant).

Edit: No, the above doesn't fall under the: "You don't have an option avoiding legal credentialing", because I don't want people who are under qualified working in the nuclear industry, but the fact stands the opportunity in the MOST regulated field in our nation, has entrance paths for those who did not get an engineering degree formally.

So there is a larger level of freedom than you make it out to be. The biggest regulator is the taxes. I don't have any formal credentials and I'm not finding any roadblocks keeping me from a greater quality of life or making millions.
It happens if you refresh too fast. It's been like that for ages. While a minor inconvenience, a good thing about it is if you catch yourself making a reactive vote or misclick, you still have a second to hit refresh to null your vote.
It sounds like frisco did on at least the first try - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870866

The most logical explanation I've seen is that the page was counting all views towards the total instead of only accepted RSVPs or something - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871201
JS Wars
Worst software bugs, in increasing order of severity:

An ASP.NET app that didn't consume it's record sets before closing it's database connections, thereby breaking IIS's connection pooling and causing hundreds SQL server login/logouts per second. Lots of interesting side effects on that bug.

An obscure page latching problem on a high volume SQL server (hundreds of transactions & thousands of queries per second). The SQL server would spend all of it's time waiting on page latches, response time would grow exponentially. An eleven hour phone call with MS support finally identified the problem.

Oracle 10.2.0.[1234]
Nice write-up from Ajaxian here
http://ajaxian.com/archives/fun-friday-mullets-and-space-bat...
Someone else mentioned that US presidents are probably automatically nominated.
I'm curious to what CAD programs you are using that are multi-windowing because the only one I can think of is ADAMS by MSC but that UI is a big pain in the ass.
ASK PG: Got an acceptance email to Startup School, but confirmation was rejected
I received an acceptance email to Startup School 2009, but the confirmation link says the application was rejected.

Maybe there is glitch that my HN username hasn't been entered into the accepted list or incorrect email was sent out.
VMware Fusion 3 the Best Way to Run Windows on the Mac Pre-Order Now
Of course it could. You/your svn/ftp could be hacked, your code could be decompiled...
BREIN is the organisation that puts inane 'Downloading is theft' (which it a simple lie, as any lawyer can tell you) commercials at the start of movies in the cinema and on DVD - not possible to skip them of course! Talking down to their paying public like they do, it's like they really WANT people to stop paying for movies and pirate them.
The main problem is, that's not the end result, only the immediate result. The end result was likely that people were scared to express opinions to the CEO, and a culture of disrespect and hostility developed in the company. Ever heard of Ardent before? Me neither.
Just tested it, waited for 10 second before refreshing the page, same result.

So that's not it.

Also, that wouldn't explain the vote button disappearing (after the refresh the vote button isn't there), which after all means that a vote has been registered.
No, I thought I was "kicked out" for some reason and then it just started working again.
Jimmy Carter. (Technically, a former president at the time he won the award.)
That first one is actually two bugs, one in the application, another in IIS for expecting applications to behave nice.
Hard Hack: Gaza zoos hacking donkeys to look like zebras
So was GeoCities the FaceBook of 1999?
I was going to respond, then looked at your history and realized you were a troll. Good game. Shame on whoever upvoted you.
I am curious what was his first sentence when he has to speak to that boss again :)
Is this because he's not Bush?
There are still wars going on that his country is involved in.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870796 (same thing happened to me and other folks)
I completely agree! If you want to help us make sure this happens, please check out the multidb branch, give it a spin, and report any bugs: http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/branches/soc2009/mu....
Worst: c/c++ pointer memory errors, duh. Especially when there are thousands of pointers and don't know which one is overwriting memory that it shouldn't be overwriting.

Second worst: linking c programs when some of the symbols are duplicated in more than one library yet are defined differently, Nobody mentioning this to the developer made it all the more exciting.
The most memorable bugs are the ones that cause physical damage. This was mine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7i2KkYYulI

Damage: Blown tire, dented rim, looking like fools in front of our peers.
I'm happy for the guys behind pirate bay they are making a killing, every time an article like this crops up on pages like this or digg/reddit its more marketing.

start-ups take note- controversial is king!
One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.

This one doesn't.

So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them. Hence this post.

That alone made the article worthwhile. More ISPs should act that way.
I don't know why people hold the Nobel Prizes in such esteem. It's like people complaining that Radiohead doesn't win enough at the Grammies, or that people let Slumdog Millionaire win the Best Picture Oscar. Prizes aren't some objective reflection of how good a person is. The Nobel Prize has long been controversial. Why do people still treat it like a prize where its failures are worth criticizing?

In this case, I understand the motivation behind the prize. Politically, with the Nobel Prize behind him Obama gains a lot of capital. People will be less willing to argue with him, bad press against him quiets down, and he's freer to do what he wants without the insane hostility he faces today. I'd like to think this prize will help lead to the eviction of the Republican Party even more quickly than it was already.
When I read the title, I thought it was a link bait, until I clicked.

may be, the Nobel Prize association is under new 'management'?
I thought the Nobel prize was given to accomplishments rather than ideas. I really like Obama, but isn't it bit too early?
After helping to end World War I and having done his utmost to secure a fair and lasting peace in Europe, including being instrumental in founding the League of Nations.

I like Obama, but what has he done so far to compare to that?
I'll gladly do so. Thx for the link.
"By tainting the Nobel Peace Prize the others get devalued as well, it is one institution."

That's just a part/whole fallacy. The badness of what some priests did to boys doesn't devalue what Mother Theresa did by virtue of them both being Catholic.
Sun Labs Lively Kernel, Smalltalk like programming using JavaScript
His Mother sums it up:

'Janis Sharp said no other country would offer its citizens to the US so readily "as sacrificial lambs" just to safeguard the special political relationship.

She said: "To use my desperately vulnerable son in this way is despicable, immoral and devoid of humanity." '
It's disappointing that so many people are downvoting this comment just because they disagree with you.

I think the truth is more nuanced than that, but you have a perfectly valid opinion.
Note that the original is gone from Photoshop Disasters as Blogspot (google) apparently automatically takes down posts upon receiving a DMCA takedown request.
Experience the Benefits of Yoga
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871073

Just wait until the West coast wakes up and it'll be cleared up then.
YouTube: We’re Bigger Than You Thought
Politically, with the Nobel Prize behind him Obama gains a lot of capital.

Not really. I just had a look on the BBC's comments page and the overwhelming reaction is ridicule. Similarly my Facebook newsfeed is full of people wondering WTF.
Their other designs are also innovative, "why didn't I think of that?" stuff. It really shows the power of being present during your daily interactions, and observing the things you do over and over.

Take their twist on the toothbrush: http://www.amronexperimental.com/BRUSH_AND_RINSE.html

Simply brilliant.
As a person with disabilities (100% color blindness) I have to call foul on this one. One of the most out of the box solutions for A11Y is build into the Dojo toolkit, a JavaScript framework. By the flip of a style class an entire application can be adapted to a person with a specific disability. Ajax done correctly makes targeting persons with disabilities simpler not more complex.

http://www.dojotoolkit.org/developer/a11yStatement
are you using chrome? the latest build? It has been happening to me. Switched to firefox - works as mentioned by lionhearted