skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dealing With an Escort That You Don’t Like
At times, it can happen that when you book an escort for the evening, the escort that turns up may not be to your liking. So what do you do in such situations? How do you handle it?There may be two situations here: The first situation is that the escort agency did not send you an escort that match the requirements that you conveyed to them. May be you booked a brunette escort and the escort that turned up was a blonde. Or the escort does not turn up in the requested costume.
Sam Ramji leaves MS for Sonoa Systems, a CloudServices Startup
Thanks.

I'm stealing that one. (grin)
I always wonder about about the "difficult" employees who balk at signing the bog-standard silicon valley employment contract that the other 499/500 employees have signed. Are the contracts perfect? No. Are they designed to screw you? Probably Not. If (Big IF) you are working for a reputable company, and the contract looks reasonable, should anyone other than a principal (Senior VP and above) bother to negotiate their employment contract? No.

Every line-employee I've seen who has tried to negotiate, modify, or change the contract has just been told "That's the contract that you sign to work here."

Seriously though, the "All you create are belong to us" clause is pretty much a requirement for a company funded by the major VCs, who are clearly concerned about their IP going out the door.

Now, termination contracts - that's where you have a little leverage, particularly if the company doesn't want a stink and/or they think you have grounds for a lawsuit. That six week severance can quickly turn into eight, ten, or even twelve weeks if you know how to ask right.
(They're named palantir, after the crystal balls in Lord of the Rings... so hence that shirt)

I also have the shirts too. Good addition to the collection.
WebKit can easily scale an image down using the canvas element. Native UI can also be replicated pretty much perfectly in WebKit (e.g. you might be surprised to learn that iTunes and the app store are displayed with WebKit). Sounds like the speaker just didn't do a very good job.

The only things that aren't suitable for WebKit are things that require heavy CPU usage or access to iPhone features that Apple hasn't made available to WebKit yet, like OpenGL (incidentally, WebGL has recently landed in WebKit, so OpenGL access will no longer be a problem).
Check this out: http://github.com/atebits/SimFinger

I have used SimFinger and SnapzPro to record the screencast. I didn't have access to Adobe Premiere, so I used Keynote to add the titles. I created a slideshow the way I wanted it and then recorded it with Keynote's built in recorder.

Unfortunately I can't show you the result yet but it's almost identical to the style Apple uses.
The Synthesis of Cyclic Combinational Circuits (2003)
Sad to see this modded above zero.
There must be 85 ways to visualize your music
That... is ... fascinating! And fascinatingly practical.
I thought that this looked a lot like an iBook. Considering that the Cell microprocessor in the PS3 is from the same architecture as the CPUs in iBooks and PowerBooks, one might consider this the realization of an alternate history (where Apple never went Intel).
EyeBrowse: Record, Visualize and Share your Browser History
If you have read all the other books "completely", you are not ready for LiSP. It's one of the most demanding Lisp books out there. It took me a year just to grok the chapter on denotational semantics of Lisp. Quinnec is a PL insider and writes[1] for a crowd of his peers.

CQ's style is not mainstream lisp style by the way, he is an academic and the books finds it hard to shake that.

--
[1] LiSP wasn't "written", but collected from his lectures and other publications. You can assemble it yourself from the Quinnec papers, though you will be missing a lot of the style.
I contracted on-site in Cupertino for a year. They have 35,000 employees, so if you're looking to join a tiny start-up where everyone is 23 years old and best friends, you're not going to find that at Apple. Actually, I used the large crowds of employees to my advantage and basically "snuck" into the offices every day for the last few months I worked there when my security badge stopped working (long/uninteresting story.)

I've never worked for a big corporation, but working for Apple is probably like working for any other company with that size of a workforce. Some people love their job, some people are bored and a lot of it depends on which group/department you're in. I was a little turned off by the cubicle/office farms in some of the buildings, which are probably setup like that due to security.

I saw Steve Jobs a few times at the cafeteria. But he did not yell at me. Or anyone else.
Twitter to replace RSS?
Cheap Gazebo
Gazebos for sale to your backyard. Enhance your landscaping with an outdoor gazebo. Information and resources on backyard gazebos.
and basically "snuck" into the offices every day for the last few months: In the unlikely event that you haven't already read http://www.pacifict.com/Story/, you should. As should anyone else who doesn't immediately know what story that is from what I just said. It's simultaneously inspiring and horrifying. (More of the former.)
Lead-gen makes a lot of sense as a secondary revenue stream. If you can't make the transaction, you can still sell a qualified lead. Once you hit big volume, this becomes a significant source of income.
I don't see any serious need of having a brand new idea for a startup. But yeah surely it is the implementation of the idea that finally matters much.
Supposedly, someone on my mother's side of the family invented those gas station bells - the one with the hose attached that makes the bell go 'ding' when you drive over it. And didn't patent it/sold the idea on for 100$ or something else that looks pretty bad in hindsight.
(Yes, it really is "implantation", not "implementation"; the word apparently means both "setting up" (think "planting") and "implanting". Looking through the sample first chapter, I think "implantation" is probably the standard French equivalent of "implementation"; can someone who knows French better than I do confirm or correct this?)
There is one really annoying thing about those loading graphics: When people do not provide a <noscript> that does not show them. Also they are useless as progress indicators. Countless times I looked at them while there was nothing happening (be it a non-responding server or a simple bug).
Could this be used as an alternative to the AWS Message Queue?

[Edit] Now that I am having a little coffee, I realize that you would have difficulty knowing what the keys are to the queued messages. I guess you could use a set of known keys, and cycle through them looking for messages, but why be a cheapskate.
China celebrates 60 years
"So, if not for that, I'd be very rich right now."

Or perhaps not born.
I especially like the seventh picture. The guy should probably also put a bubble level on their heads.
I watched it on TV. Highly impressive, perhaps more impressive than the opening ceremony of the Olympics. The pictures actually don't do it justice to the marches.

I wish my code was as neat as this ;)
The title should be "the ruling Communist Party of China celebrates 60 years in power". China, a sovereign entity, existed for far longer than that.

Still, a magnificent show and an epic display of might, the likes of which only China could pull off.

[edit:
Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwi_2GCthx0

]
A good example would be Skype, who have defeated reverse engineering of their protocol, and benefitted from that temporary monopoly. (I'm using "defeated" in rather broad terms, since the protocol was eventually reverse engineered).
The article never said we couldn't kill, only that we prefer being kind. Ever seen video of the US soldiers in Iraq petting the stray puppy?

There are people who don't care about others, but the most of them either never really grew up or they end up with psychological issues because of it.
Company that is renowned for its brand-centric business practices uses branded paperwork.

It must be a slow news day.
If you look hard enough, you can get rent down to $400-500 a month. If you have a kitchen, food isn't expensive (rice and beans). And thanks to the good public transport, you can do without a car (unless you have to go to Sand Hill Road every day).
The Story of a Beautiful Failure
UOL Tecnologia
Myths about Managed Code
Surgeons offer eyesight tailored to an individual’s life and career
You may be right, but I seriously doubt it. If I recall correctly, Rick Falkvinge said that research represents 15% of the costs of pharmaceutical firms, and that 2/3 of it (10% of the total) are actually dedicated to the patent system. That leaves 85% for the rest, which is mostly marketing (couldn't they cut that down?).

Now, what kind of drugs pharmaceutical companies will do research on? Cure for rare illnesses? Cure for illnesses widespread in poor countries? This is good for their image, but not their wallet. Far more lucrative are cosmetics, and widely useful medicine in developed countries. Just see the ads, they are likely to match their sells.

I may be wrong on each point, but if I'm right, pharmaceutical companies could reduce their costs down to a third of what it is now, while remaining just as useful. Get rid of patents, and the costs could go down further.

Now if pharmaceutical companies really can't survive in the current world without patents, this still isn't a reason not to ditch them. Specifically, nothing prevents direct state intervention (like spending some of the taxpayers' money). If you are against that, remember this is already happening (at least in the EU), and that patents are a quite intrusive form of state intervention.
A loss to Baidu should be expected, people will generally switch to a native language program to search. While I believe French, Spanish and the like can be adequately made even solely based in NA, but you have difficulty with languages that no Anglophone will typically have had the potential to learn in school.

Chinese and Japanese are not only complex languages, but they're hard for Anglophones to pick up not only because of distance, but also because of a lack of community integration.
Sketching in hardware is changing your life
Just days ago there was 'boomtango' here, written by a bunch of HN'ers, it works pretty good:

http://boomtango.com/
AWS products are pay as you go, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. This will be free until you cross the limit.
1 page cheatsheet:
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/downloads/pomodoro_cheat_sh...

45 page book:
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/resources/cirillo/ThePomodo...
Er BTW many people need a visa for a short-term visit to the US. Now even people who previously could visit short-term either have to jump through hoops or have to apply for a visa. A significant amount more post-bush need visas than did pre-bush.

Because of decent negotiating on the British part, most Britons still apply for the visa-waving program (mostly because the British government said if the UK loses its Visa-waving program to the US, the US will lose its to the UK). This happened only a couple of years after the whole mandatory machine readable passport thing (which the British government again said that US citizens have to do it too).

Ironically the US was trying to ban British Pakistani's from entering the US, however the US never even attempted to prevent the entry of the IRA when they were purchasing weaponry from the US for terrorist purposes. I suppose the US's whole anti-terrorist stance is hugely different when they terrorists are helping your economy, not trying to destroy it.
Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams Selling $1.5 Million Penthouse
Airplanes, oxygen and the media
Course: The Google Technology Stack
The only alternative is to work harder
My father-in-law was a mid-level Communist Party official (photo editor of the People's "Liberation" Army newspaper) who knew Mao personally. Years later Mao's people threw him in a concentration camp for "rightists" because he had made a joke about the Great Helmsman. When they ran out of cooking oil they would cook his food in used motor oil. The man they tortured and forced to rat him out never recovered from the shame. My wife and I had dinner with his daughter in Beijing two years ago. She still carries the shame for her father, even today. A little gift from Mao that keeps on giving.

They were the lucky ones, of course. The consensus estimate is that 70 million human beings have died so far during the CCP's reign of terror, mostly from starvation. My wife spent much of her youth hungry. She and her friends used to pull the stingers out of honeybees to get a bit of sweetness in their lives. The things little girls do, huh?

Not much terror these days of course, unless you're Tibetan, Falun Gong, or an enemy of the state. The strange thing for me, when walking around China, is that the monster's face is on the money. Statues of him are still common. He's the worst murderer who ever lived, and you have to look at him when buying a rose. Isn't life interesting?
Life is a Canvas
Artist's musings on Art, Life and Living.
The FriendFeed Room for the course:
http://friendfeed.com/lecture-course-on-the-google-techno
This makes me remember a passage I read in Nexus by Mark Buchanan (good book, read it!), where someone did an experiment to try to find the root of "the rich get richer". They construct a simulation of an economy, seed the participants in it with a random amount of money, and let it run for "a long time".

They end up with a distrubution of wealth that is very similar to what we see in the real world. The moral of the story: random chance will create the structure we're seeing in real life; being rich isn't proof that you're "better" than everyone else (supply your own definition of good), it's just as or more likely that you happened to be at the right place at the right time.
Marvin Minsky - AI pioneer
Programming Flex 3 (book review)
The only reason I made that post was because I've used their services in the past and never had a problem with it.

I certainly do not have any affiliations with "marchost" nor am I his sock puppet for anything (I've never even spoken to him/her).
At first I thought the title meant that he was selling $1.5 million Penthouse (magazine) photos. I thought "these should be worth looking at".

I have a dirty, dirty mind.
Using Atom 330 with server applications
Stomp.com.sg - Directory
Office building in Noida, commercial property available, 
Nehru Place stands as a major retail cum office complex dotted with allied small business joints in the strategic south Delhi junction, for quit a significant time. People running retail showroom here are doing good business and remain successful in there venture. Still it is far behind in comparison to other world class business centers situated elsewhere, that are renowned for more organized and conductive environment.
Predictable Rainy Days
Perl 5.11 released
A Harvard Skirmish in the Copyright Wars
The OC's point was that Google didn't and shouldn't have responded to Cuil, Wolfram Alpha or Search Wikia because they were only covered by small tech blogs. Both are wrong and them flaming out doesn't prove his point.

They flamed out because they weren't sticky with users, but it wasn't for lack of original coverage or eyeballs. IIRC, Cuil managed to get covered in pretty much every major news outlet, which converted into about 3M uniques on their first day! As I alluded to in the post (and better described in the posts I linked to), Google did their best to take the wind out of their sales with timely released and announced features (longer snippets, bigger index, in this case).

In retrospect, it seems that they were going to (at least initially) fail on their own, but Google didn't know that at the time. And the point is that they were paying attention and responding. They took the competitive threat seriously, as I think they should.
The kafkaesque style of Google communication
See also these:

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.0/pod/perl5110delta....

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.0/pod/perlop.pod#Yad...

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/10/why-perl-5110-matt...
Thx. I will definitely be adding this to Duck Duck Go.
Natural Treatment For Breast Cancer - Is it Effective
> The consensus estimate is that 70 million human beings have died so far during the CCP's reign of terror, mostly from starvation

Yeah, but it's hard to imagine what China actually like in pre-P.R.C times. It's not "end the war, install democracy and go prosper" that easy for an ancient civilization to turn modern. Mao has his faults, and underestimated contributions, but what's more important is whether current and succeeding politicians will learn from history.
This is a fantastic story, it deserves its own HN thread!

I doubt that this would be possible in today's Apple though...

If FSJ commented on this, he would probably mention dispatching Moshe in a time travel machine :-)
The irony of the Empire State Building being lit in red and yellow in deference to the commemoration is not lost.

In 2009, China is Maoist and "Communist" in name only; in fact, much of the awe-inspiring artifacts and sophisticated technologies on display in the parade are principally features of a >= Deng Xiaoping environment - well, maybe starting with Hu Yaoban.

Meanwhile, in 1949 when the authentic Maoists seized power, the US provided entirely nontrivial military aid and financial assistance to the retreating Kuomintang (nationalist) government, and did much to try to suffocate the revolution in its cradle after the PLA did seize power.

Now the US salutes them (and warmly encourages them to maybe continue buying Treasuries... please?), and meanwhile there is nothing in the faintest bit "Communist" about the establishment, save for the nomenclature and iconic imagery of the incumbent power structure.
Gmail - Boîte de réception (76) - b.schombe@gmail.com
> much of the awe-inspiring artifacts and sophisticated technologies on display in the parade are principally features of a >= Deng Xiaoping environment - well, maybe starting with Hu Yaoban.

Sorry, but most of the ass-kicking weapons were from Mao's.

Deng? He buys foreign things and never make ones themselves.
Because many of the researchers became obsessed with the new information that they were observing from Chimpanzees. In fact its often stated that Bonobos and Chimps are basically our Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

In fact, despite been genetically further away from us, Orangutans are actually seen to be our closest relative in behaviour and by far in intelligence. Bornean Orangutans may actually live an existence similar to early hominids in that they travel far on the ground, however Sumatran Orangutans show more of our social instincts including tool use and group learning (they actually teach each other, opposed to the Chimp method of watching from a distance when new behaviours are exhibited).

The other reason for the radical changes is that Westerners had less access to the middle eastern countries to study the Asian primates (that like Orangutans can show us traits that were common before the divergence of the groups). Also the interest in Chimps is decreasing as they're increasingly being seen as predominantly over aggressive, which is actually an extremely uncommon trait amongst our close relatives (Orangutans and Gorillas are most dangerous to humans, not through aggression but through fear, where as Chimps are dangerous through direct aggression).

Orangutans are known for calculated reciprocity, a behaviour only exhibited in Humans and never exhibited in Chimps despite them being better studied and closer related. It shows an ability in Orangutans to track individual relationships in a group over long periods of time and to gauge how they should respond to individuals. Basically if you bought me a $30 gift, I'm not going to go out and spend $300 on you, and Orangutans do the same.

This leaves many questions like is it a second evolution of a similar behaviour, or did our common ancestor have this trait and the Pan and Gorilla genus both lose this ability. Either way it makes Orangutans a very important animal to study, because potentially they are our closest relative by means that they might be evolving along a similar path as humans.
Damn he's really struggling.
I bet everyone's saying, if only I applied this simple idea of twitter first.
I'm sure San Francisco is a fine place and that this will be seen as a retarded comment, but if I had $1.5m, there's no way I'm spending that kind of money on immovable assets near a fault line or on the Pacific Rim. I'm just not. Just out of principle.
The march _is_ neat, but not very creative, I wish my code were more creative than that ;)
Exception throwing.
Somehow I don't really buy it. Seems to me it is more a management problem. Looking at sports, I suspect simply running 10 hours more every week than the competition won't automatically make you the winner. Rather, there is a system to getting the best effect from training (when to take breaks, what muscles to train when, what to eat, ...).

If you are stressing out with working harder and harder, perhaps you lose the time for having inspirations and seeing the important things to work on.
"First, they can't easily make drastic changes to their results pages."

Maybe they can't change their main page, but they can easily launch variant pages that look like whatever they like. They already did so in several cases.
In the spirit of providing equal and opposite cheap advice:

Except for the alternative of taking a break and thinking about your life, and perhaps choosing to focus on something where your hard work is more likely to pay off or where working harder comes more natural because you love what you're doing.
Most Evil: A Book on Serial Murders by Steve Hodel
Steve Hodel has contributed to Most Evil: The Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hodel as an author. Steve Hodel spent nearly twenty-five years with the LAPD, where, as a homicide detective, he worked on more than three hundred murder cases and achieved one of the highest "solve rates" in the force. He lives in Los Angeles.
Monitors usage and reports grocery list based on projected consumption.

Provides coupons for purchased items. Or competitor brands.

Social ranking system for recipes. As well as flavor profile so that people who prefer similar recipes as you affect a recipes rank more then someone with opposing tastes.

Can send pre-order for packaging to local grocer or order hard to get items from the web.

Can be integrated with a personal chef service to allow them to know what you have on site.

I have a million more on this one. If anyone does this let me know. I would love to chat about my ideas no strings attached.
Well, exactly. Similar regimes have been holding mass parades like this since the 1930s.

Still, I suppose it's nice to see tanks in Tiananmen Square without anyone getting killed in the process.
I agree -- my point is that everything else being equal working harder pays off. Once you have determined what to do and if it is what you like to do, putting in more hours will do harm to no one but probably increase your chances of success.
"What do you do if you feel you are born unlucky? What do you do if you feel that the whole world is conspiring against you to make you not succeed? And, what do you do if you feel you have less intellect, less resources and less everything to succeed?"

Just a word of warning: There are many people who will default to feeling this way, whether it's true or not. Don't rule out mental illness or anxiety.

Turning yourself into a workaholic is not the solution if what you really need is to talk to a therapist. I've known several people who learned this the hard way.

Before diving head-first into work, do a quick reality check and ask yourself whether your feelings are reasonable, and be honest with yourself about what you're giving up in order to get those extra few hours of productivity.
One page: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/nyregion/04chang.html?page...
ScreenFlow. Awesome.