skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. I would not mind paying for movies, but the studios won't let me. My computer runs the wrong operating system, my HDMI cable is not the right kind, the movie isn't for sale in my country, etc., etc. OK fine, I will just download it instead. All that anti-piracy protection gave me no option but to pirate the movie.

Oh, the irony.

(I could "just do without", but why should I suffer for the studio's mistakes?)
The first comment to the story is worth more than the story itself, which is either humour I don't quite get or unmitigated whining. Regardless, there's nothing in here about "how Zappos ruined HR", more aobut "how Zappos ruined HR conferences for the rest of us, who now feel like we're at the little kids' table the whole time".
Maybe we need to define "On-topic" submissions more clearly. It's fairly vague as stands:

"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
found you, was unsure of the username[:-1] though.
Upvoted just for the slick obfuscation.
I would say you can't have mastered a language without significant knowledge of its standard library (if any).
Obama chose to accept the award when he had ample opportunity to decline it (and earn plenty of PR points for being magnanimous in the process). He accepted it, so he should get an equal share of the criticism.
How many trivially easy questions do I have to answer before hitting the hard stuff? There either needs to be a way to adjust levels manually or some sort of learning system to put you at an initial level.
My first thought on going to the site:
"WTF is a Kart?" Spent about 30 seconds looking around trying to figure it out and left.
Were you using GCC's __attribute__((__packed__))?

Anyway, the standard way (to handle protocols) is to parse the thing not making any assumption of the struct layout.
You can take a look at the public waves by typing with:public next to the "New Wave" button. There's way too much going on for me to find it useful.
I take it you don't like this new development? It is perhaps the most requested GIMP feature. Are you saying startups shouldn't listen to user feedback?
It's like looking at the public timeline on twitter.
A zoo in Gaza has found a novel way to get around Israeli restrictions on the importation of animals

And food, and medicine, and text books, and building materials, and clothing ..
Can open source stop navel gazing and get real?
From the blog post linked in the article:

The news also revealed an interesting but previously rather anonymous group of people: multi-window zealots despising the idea of a single-window mode in their beloved multi-window application. I suspect they don't realize that single-window mode is going to be optional...
How to optimize AV technology in the classroom.
The Circular Periodic Table of Elements
I understand the frustration, but the purpose is competition (typeWAR). You'll get there.
Except that they didn't know I would like it, and I would have written the follow up no matter what my experience.
Mostly he just comes off as jealous. As his italicized bio notes, he's been doing HR for 15+ years. Then out of nowhere these new guys come in and beat the pants off what he's been doing his entire career and now he's tired of being reminded.

Edit: Also, if that was really Tony Hsieh that had the first comment and not just someone signing as him, that absolutely makes the groaner of a post worth it. Hilarious.
Run it on your workstation and see how fast it is. You should get comparable speed from a dedicated server.
I'm a fan of homebrew, but it is very, very far from being a package management system. At this point it's basically an installer.
At around level 7-10 it gets reasonably hard, but you have to login with a twitter account to get past 5.
I like the idea, it's fun, addictive. Well designed.
But it's too easy if all the questions are being answered correctly by 95% of users... I'm at Level 5, 75 points, and all the questions (save one) so far were aced by >95% of players. (For that one question, which 45% got correct, I had to think pretty hard though).
And it would be more challenging with more fonts. And up the challenge -- compare more sans-to-sans and serif-to-serif for instance.
The largest difference in performance between a VPS and a dedicated box is Disk I/O (much better on the dedicated).

Given that, I think it's unlikely that just switching to a dedicated box would help significantly.

A useful baseline might be to use YSlow to compare how long it takes to load your page in Rails vs. a static version of the same.
Agreed - too easy. I didn't miss one and got up to level 5, 93 points. 3rd-4th level should be comparing sans-serif to sans-serif, not serif to monospace. IMHO. Make it harder! Cool site, though.
If you like wearing more than one popped collar, move to north beach. Otherwise, live in the Mission, Lower Haight, or Soma.
Oberon. Because I have implemented it several times.

I am not even close to mastering anything else. 16bit x86 assembly maybe, but that too is sketchy now.
Not a bad suggestion, just make sure you're running it in production locally.
It's possible he has needed to stay for his stock to vest, right?
There's also an issue with his myMethodValue. It's actually a global variable (try alert(window.myMethodValue). He should have used var myMethodValue within the function definition.
As you get to higher levels you get more fonts unlocked, plus lower case letters, and other challenges. It gets harder :)
exactly. thanks for the blog post link.
The user doing something that the system allows him to do is dangerous??

You guys are insane.
This is the first startup school that I didn't get into =/

My coworker, who I told to apply since we're thinking of branching off to our own thing, got in and he's never even heard of yCombinator.

At least it will be on justin.tv!
I agree. However, it definitely reflects multi-tasking in a quite realistic manner.
What we really need right now is for Experian to come out and present the real report - or to publicly refute that any report was ever requested.

If Experian can testify to the tune that Brein falsified the report, then they're in for a real ride.
So sorry to ruin your idea. But I guess its better in the long run.
Pandemic Payoff from 1918: A Weaker H1N1 Flu Today
Building capabilities into the language would go a long ways to providing security.
JSON Parsing Speed Comparison (Obj-C): SBJSON vs YAJL
level 5 is very early in the game and we wanted to err on the side of starting off very easy
I worked on the communication middleware for an early Windows tablet. My part sat between a VB6 GUI app (that we customized for each customer) and a RS-232 device and handled all the communications.

One customer had intermittent communication failures that we couldn't identify for weeks. I finally went on-site and hooked up a serial port logger between the tablet and device. After an hour of testing, I finally captured what caused the communication failure. It was some debug message from the GUI app, somehow coming across the serial port. I called back to the office and had a guy from our group go over the the VB app team and ask which genius was logging stuff to the serial port. Sure enough, some guy had been using VB's remote debugging feature with a null modem cable and left it turned on in the shipped app.
Votes still get registered, even if they don't effect the current score of the item. So it is not quite the same, functionally, as taking away the buttons. Plus if I took buttons away, users would lose the visual indication of what they'd voted on.
Still, but I'm on level 7, have answered all 150+ questions correctly, and I haven't gotten any questions that involve type families other than Helvetica Neue, Times New Roman, and Courier New.
The worst bug is always the one I'm currently working on.
I am trying to do that
AJAX Frameworks Comparative Study
we're going to experiment with having easier pairs come up less often. we just need more data first.
Might I suggest always alphabetizing the order that the two family names appear in? It's disconcerting to get the same options two questions in a row, but to have their locations swapped.
And if there isn't a server involved... what's the point of using a browser then?

Why can't you involve a server? I think this is about the client-side experience. That doesn't mean you have to eliminate the server-side.
Although it is helpful to the very junior developers at my company, the techniques are by no means "advanced." I suggest he change the title to "Javascript Basics Everyone Should Know."

It's not a terrible article, and he doesn't have bad advice, but as someone else points out in another comment he makes some pretty rookie mistakes (new Objects() instead of {})...
Several Tech Blogs Worth Exploring. Oh Yeah, All by Women.
I've heard nothing -- no acceptance nor rejection. Nothing in Spam. Anyone in the same boat?
The most expensive bug that I can talk about publicly that I've encountered:

I used to work on software for a very expensive (started at 70k) DNA/protein analysis hardware solution. This was in the late 90s, and our GUI was a couple million lines of MFC code. I was responsible for an analysis package written in cross platform (linux and windows) C++, but the main UI and all the complex interface was MFC.

My then boss was a unix idiot who hated Windows. Which is fine and all, but a Windows product was paying our salaries. So one day he decided to rewrite my (well tested, though not unit tested) file handling code written using the win32 API and port it to posix. Not to accomplish anything different, mind you, and not to add it to the cross platform bits since it was useless in isolation and, oh yeah, we had multiple millions of lines of MFC so nothing was ever getting ported.

In any case, during this "upgrade", he found a function called DirTouch, which was intended to make sure certain directories existed during the normal course of saving data. Well, this gentleman subtly changed the semantics from "create the directory if it doesn't exist" to "create the directory if it doesn't exist, but if it does already, then silently delete whatever is there". This wasn't the whole bug, but this change of semantics to a destructive function was the root cause.

This change got shipped. One of our customers killed literally more than $1.3MM worth of data, since each machine run might cost $100K given lab time, reagents, prep, etc.
The Lisp machines did this. Smalltalk was designed first as such a beast. If you look at really old Smalltalk images, you can find the vestiges as four primitive hooks: one for lifting the drive head, one for putting it down, one for moving it in, the other for moving it out.
I guess the competition is going to get a lot stiffer now that its out of alpha. I wonder what the world will be like now that so many more people will know the difference between Didot and Verdana.
GWT Compiler - Compiling for one browser and also supporting hosted mode
Yes. The other structures all packed correctly.

If I am understanding what you are saying, we really couldn't do that, as the server sent and expected to receive binary blobs of data; the only way to know what was what was to have a map of where the data elements were.
Nice, did you make this? I could post it to a typography Facebook fan page I run (12,000 fans).. if it's ready for wider exposure / lots of traffic.
they are deliberately ordered randomly
From the minutes of a GIMP developer conference meeting not too long ago:

The user scenarios would be written down in advance. These scenarios should not be changed afterwards because it would lead to too much discussion. The goal is to cut down all this discussion. The product vision is to be used as a filter. For example: If someone comes with the request that the UI of GIMP should be like Photoshop, we can simply state: We are not trying to be like Photoshop, because we have a different product vision.

http://developer.gimp.org/gimpcon/2006/index.html

I think defining their software in terms of "not being Photoshop" hurts their software. Photoshop is free to add any features which they think will help users edit images, while the Gimp limits itself to the features that Photoshop has not already chosen.
i'll investigate but by level 7 you should be seeing 6 different typefaces
They got one of the most important things they wanted from Geocities, which was to remain the #1 (= most unique visitors) web site. That counted for a lot back then. Competitors like Lycos were pulling all kinds of tricks to jack up visitor numbers, like getting the NFL to put the Super Bowl web site at superbowl.lycos.com. One could argue that Yahoo overpaid to remain #1, but it was worth something.

That was practically the only thing Yahoo got from Geocities though.
Obama, Imma let you finish, but Kissinger was the worst pick of all time!
A great review of the prize committee's choice @ http://technopolis.blogspot.com/
For example, a function might be inlined at some call sites and not inlined at others. Inlined versions might carry 80 bits through the result, but non-inlined version are truncated to 64. So in:

double foo(double x) { return x*3.3; }
double bar1(double x) { return foo(x); }
double bar2(double x) { return foo(x); }
void t_bar(double x) { assert(bar1(x) == bar2(x)); }

t_bar can fail depending on how bar1 and bar2 are compiled.
Thanks, good idea !!!
I've been thinking the same thing.
Indeed.

The thing about "don't be evil" is that once you do something evil, saying you follow that rule is extremely cynical.
The site was made by Eldarion, primarily coded by James Tauber (jtauber on here) and Brian Rosner.
Ok. But it feels inconsistent to see an integer vote count, that goes up when you vote, but after a page refresh those votes are all gone.

Maybe there is a way to at least show them to the user that voted ? That way that feeling would be gone.
b.ghose@gwave.com
You're right about the name, Poiesis.

I finally got around to buying Ramp Champ the other day after seeing the 2-dozenth person on Twitter compliment its design and from knowing of IconFactory from their icon and other app work.

Only after I started playing it was I like, "Ohhhh, Ramp Champ, I get it. And, hey, the icon actually makes sense now..." I thought it was different carnival games, not just different skeeball environments.

The game is beautiful and challenging (though my fingers get oily and make accuracy annoyingly hard) -- but the name, icon and website (they only have one screenshot of the actual gaming environment buried in a slideshow on the Media page) don't do enough to explain it IMHO.
>The Nobel Prize has just devalued considerably.

It's an attempt to manipulate the price of gold!
I'm on in the evenings as: clint.laskowski
Apparently you can also use this as a video output for routers with USB ports running OpenWRT: http://sven.killig.de/openwrt/slugterm_dl.html

Pretty awesome.
At least, when you have the same pair of typefaces twice in a row, can you make sure the positions are the same? If I get two questions in a row with the same choices and with the same answer, then I should be able to click in the same place!
I think your opinion reflects a view of HN that I don't share. You seem to see it at as just another place on the web.

But I, and obviously others like me, see it as a community of people who I enjoy interacting with. As such there are going to come rare times when I want to seek that community's opinion on a certain topic because I value the opinions here so much.

So for me, it's not sufficient to say "go somewhere else" because it's the community here that I want to interact with. And I don't see anything wrong with that as long as its done in moderation.

Based on that conclusion I personally don't think this is a discussion worth having. PG has shown he's willing to kill topics if he feels the "off topic" level is too high. So as long as people who get their items killed don't take offense I think we have the perfect ecosystem to keep off topic items at just the right level.

(Though I personally wouldn't object if an "Off Topic" section of HN was added either)
I scored perfectly and got to the 5th level (didn't feel like registering).

I don't understand how people cannot tell the difference between these fonts! Even Arial and Helvetica I find are easy to differentiate if you look at the angles.
This is really cool. My only comment so far is that the first 9 levels are REALLY slow. My patience was sorely tried in getting high enough for more fonts to appear.
I like that article. But I actually get designers to construct UITableViewCell in Interface Builder. It works out better than creating cells programatically and leaves the design work to actual designers.
Mobile software (e.g. iPhone apps) is another big category for recent startups. Personally I'm working at a startup developing mobile software that may be distributed along with hardware (through an OEM or other partnership with a manufacturer).
Either I'm a huge font geek or this is too easy.

Loads of geeky fun; I hope some more typefaces are thrown in there at some higher levels!
some letters are easy, like R or G and some (as you mention) you can tell from the angles of the terminals but there are some that are pretty much identical
a new typeface is introduced every odd level
Nit: you put "perl" in the list. Nobody ever masters perl, you just get less confused and sucky at it ;)
We don't steal stuff, we share stuff !!!
What should I do with 'Oh Yeah, All by Women' ?

Is it supposed to make me curious what they look like so I'll click ?

Look at the content in a different way than if it were all by men ?

Isn't the content strong enough to simply stand on it's own, as in 'Several Tech Blogs Worth Exploring' ?
by all means post to the fan page! (do you have a link? I might join)
Or what about something more brick and mortar, a physical product or a service that must be carried out in person? I am becoming increasingly critical of the immense value we put on things that exist strictly on the web.
They are both fairly mature implementations of Unix. It is expected they shown little difference in feature set.

In that case, how has the GPL and Linux's "business friendly" license made a difference?

Why would you have to donate all of it? I can donate parts of a program to any project I want.

The GPL. The usual "if you don't distribute it, you don't have to GPL it" argument is disingenuous given that all but a few real-world use cases require distribution.

The case for Juniper is that they can simply adopt an OS, customize it as much as they want and give back to the developers that gave this to them whatever the developers they paid wrote that is not part of their secret sauce.

Yes, and this is the case for many other businesses that rely on software -- not services -- to cover their bottom line.

I think for IBM the case is to make it easier to sell xSeries and zSeries servers if they run Linux better. As for the p's, I think they prefer to sell them with AIX. I don't think their service organization benefits much from their involvement.

Fine; add a third category -- hardware vendors. Like service providers (which was IBM's primary reason for supporting Linux) hardware vendors have generally limited reason to care about the license of the operating systems they support, unless they're interested in protecting details of their hardware implementations (eg, see nvidia binary linux drivers and the regular claim that they are GPL-incompatible).

In other words, the GPL isn't business friendly, it's just something that some businesses can be agnostic about.
At the current count 4 people disagree with you :) I wasn't one of them.
we're working on some primarily SIP-based service where web app plays relatively small (although still important) role — a kind of an admin UI
At Viaweb, my careless use of $_ in Perl led to the name of every credit card shown in the merchant UI being replaced by a secret auth key. I didn't see it because that particular auth check was bypassed for admin users like me. It wasn't a serious security hole, and we changed the auth key afterwards. But as it happened, I was in a cranky mood when I created the auth key and it had some bad words in it, so it was a little embarrassing.
Honestly, I think that's true with all programming languages.
It doesn't sound like the problem is a VPS or specifically a Rails problem. 800ms is a lot, and 300-400ms for a view with fragment caching is a lot. I have a completely unoptimized app in development with 20-item paginated lists of partials containing partials running on a VPS (linode) that renders the uncached view in 130ms. And this is with Haml, which is slower than erb, especially for nested partials.

I don't know what could cause the slow-down off the top of my head. Are there slow helpers? Also, IIRC, iterating over a collection to render each partial is slower than using render :partial => @collection.
Sales Lessons from a 6 year old: It’s all about the cash
I invite you to do a web search for "Bahá'í Iran".
Link to original post: http://www.spotify.com/blog/archives/2009/10/08/overnight-su...
You seriously need to take a look at minimalism. As all others have said, I couldn't understand what your site is about. But best of luck, it seems you have put a lot of effort on this. It looks nice too.

These guys sum it up nicely what I want to say.
http://commandshift3.com/about.html

>>I was going to write a sentence about why this site exists, but when I asked, Darrell said "If it's not self-evident then fuck off." Feisty.
The fact that you can (and frequently do) copy a the .app component out of our .DMG bundle into your /Applications/ directory means that any attempt at package management will be half hearted anyways.
I don't believe its on the Iconfactory blog, just the blog of one of their developers. Here's a link:
http://gedblog.com/2009/09/28/losing-ireligion/
Ironic that he brings up HR's "reputation of not adding value"
Thanks. The original content is much preferred over a rewrite on a site throwing 20 animated ads in my face.
Just posted it: http://www.facebook.com/typography
By the way, if you've got any other projects in the works, definitely think about setting up some related (non-branded, such as typography, music, etc) fan pages now. Great way to drive traffic to a new project.
Don't kill them, simply drop them off the front and the new page. That way the discussion can continue if it is deemed off topic.
Runaway robots at Anybots have caused:

- 2 holes in drywall
- 1 bent bookshelf
- 1 dent in concrete floor
- 1 frightened Jessica
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkenIInV9rI

The last one was fun because I have logs showing packets from the PC/104 computer stack (running FreeBSD) connected to the robot while it was in midair.
I'm also from NYC; my partner and I are starting to look around to see what startup-related meetups / discussion groups / networks / etc there are in the city. Any recommendations for particularly good ones?
The "Trail of Candy" Design Pattern
Is Pure Digital's Reign Coming to an End
LCROSS Lunar Impact - watch NASA footage of impact
I wrote this just before the new iPod nano came out. Do you guys agree? How are they going to compete with Apple especially with the nano at $129 and in every major retailer.
A comprehensive guide to alcohol, from industry facts to advertising myths
Well. It is nice that is shows success rate of other people, and it's quite sad, that most of questions really are trivial (helvetica vs. times new roman), those with > 90%, and some are basically undecidable (50% -- that is as good as random).

And there are just not enough interesting questions, you are just choosing between courrier and times new roman, even at 9th level. It's boring. But with enough data, you could choose just the interesting ones.