skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've noticed that my concentration tends to lapse after spending 12+ hours in front of a computer.

Then you're normal. Your body is telling you to get up and take a break. Listen to it.

Not satisfied? Check out this thread from earlier today:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869034
Apparently you have not been bitten by a filename expansion bug when shell scripting. This kind of thing is fairly common with bash and some of the other ones when dealing with files that have spaces/newlines/whatever. It boils down to learning and knowing your tools and how to work around their limitations.
Finally the day I have been waiting for! I can't stand the multiple windows, especially on the Mac OS X version in which one initial click is required to focus the window and a second to click a button or begin using a tool.
Repeat post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868239
Traditionally Unix filenames can contain everything except for / and null (aka \0). This is why the find utility provides a facility for printing null terminated filenames (-print0), when used in conjunction with xargs -0 this is a fool proof way of iterating over files in the shell.

For example, to delete all .o files in the current directory and its subdirectories:

find . -name "*.o" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f
The Simple, Quick, and Small jQuery HTML Form Validation Solution
This is a tutorial on how to write a validation script for HTML form inputs using jQuery. There are plenty of these out there already, but in most cases I found that they could not be applied quickly. 9 out of 10 websites that I develop need nothing more than a simple validation to tell the user when an input was left empty or filled in improperly. Once you’ve gotten the hang of this script, it will only take you a couple of minutes to reapply it to each new website that you’d like it on.
All you’ll have to do is type in a list of what fields are required, and then change the CSS style of a class to suite that particular website, and that’s it!
"ls *.c" is not dangerous. The pipe is dangerous.
Whether you choose to spend your time at home programming or doing something else is relevant to your day job how exactly?

I'm not saying that external work and side projects can't lead to experience or knowledge that would make someone a good candidate. Someone might be qualified because of the work they've done on the side. But they can't be disqualified because of a lack of it.
NSA website defaced
Ask HN: book recommendation for data visualization for beginners?
Book should teach both analysis of data and presentation, at the beginners level. I've only worked with Java, Ruby and PHP, so it would be great if the book contained examples in any of these languages.
Solving Serial Problems with Parallel Computation
In about:config, do you have browser.search.suggest.enabled set to True? I have a firefox right here and it's working fine.

(since that's probably obscure as the joke is old, that's a reference to the ancient copied at http://www.ahajokes.com/lig069.html )
In this case, if you're not an expert with bash, a good rule of thumb would be to pipe your glob-expanded list of junk into perl -nle 'print' (or echo, or... etc) before running something destructive.

Every time. Until you're an expert.
It doesn't sound like much fun to just buy something for $20 rather than create it yourself. Obviously if you're going to buy it, you don't consider creating it to be fun. Some people like to create things for fun, and that is their activity or hobby. I'm not sure why doing what you do professionally can't also be your hobby. Why is buying something rather than creating it the "adult" thing to do?
Am I the only one who thinks that scripting is a "Dirty Job"?

I have not written nor seen any bash script that is neat, clean and fairly clear. It all seems like a very shady hack that someone think is smart.
Click Forensics: Bahama botnet stealing traffic from Google
Blackra1n - All In One iPod/iPhone Pwning Utility By GeoHot
GeoHot has now announced a single jailbreaking utility for all Apple iPhone range of devices from iPod Touch to iPhone 3G/3GS; dubbed blackra1n the jailbreaking utility is expected to get launched soon.
Personally I bought a MacBook because when I tested other competitive laptops they felt like pieces of junk. One $700 Sony laptop that I tested had a screen that flexed diagonally if I closed it with one hand.

Another medium grade laptop (I think it was a Dell) had a body that flexed inward if I laid my hands on it between typing.

In contrast my MacBook feels sturdy and dependable. I can throw it in my backpack without needing to cushion it in a bulky laptop bag because I know it can take it.

And I am confident that over time my MacBook will pay for itself in lack of need for repairs. As far as the single mouse button goes I just plug in an external mouse and work away. But over time you do get used to the two finger on the touchpad right click.
Wow, THANK YOU. I actually had no idea why multi-window interfaces in graphics programs even existed, but that's because I've been an unlucky single-monitor man forever!

Now I do NOT want the single-window interface, I want another video card and a second monitor.

I have a feeling I stand alone in the Geekiverse on this one.
Of course, the ratio of work-done to at-work is going to down as at-work goes up, even if work-done remains constant. This is why you should go home at the point where work-done equals at-work, so the ratio remains at 1, even if work-done and at-work are both less than 8. Most companies don't like people working significantly less than 40 hours a week, however.
Specifically who would be considered "an appropriate professional"? Just go see my general practice physician, or is there someone more specifically I should go to instead?
The first four are good general advice. The fifth and sixth are good ideas some of the time, the seventh is a bit platitudinous but possibly good advice some of the time, and the eighth is more like "a guide to writing like Kurt Vonnegut".
Yeah the Mac UI is designed for the widescreen format. And I don't believe there has been a widescreen netbook yet, am I right? I think a few months ago someone posted here on HN about a "Hello Kitty" looking netbook that had very impressive screen resolution but even it didn't have widescreen format if I remember correctly.
You ask "Why is it your day job?"

Because I spend the largest part of my life at my day job, and want to work on something I am passionate about during that time. However I am also a person with many additional interests and desires, such as playing sports, reading, art, and music and since each of those are deep areas of interest themselves, they all occupy parts of my non-working life, while being balanced with my family.

There are plenty of people who feel this way. They are well balanced individuals who are effective at their jobs, and passionate about them. But there are only so many hours in a day. Working isn't just about time spent coding. It is about working well in a team, and relating with your customers, and understanding social issues as well as technical ones. Someone who only codes is simply more likely to be underdeveloped in one of those areas.

It is just a stupid qualifier. If you are hiring a marketer, would you only hire someone who telemarkets from home on their off time because they enjoy it? That's just stupid.

Someone who has side projects at home -might- be a more experienced developer. Or they could be a poorly rounded individual. Someone who doesn't work on side projects at home -might- be non-passionate. Or they might be very passionate and effective, and simply more well rounded. To say you would always require one or the other is just dumb.
I still think it may have been all a joke made by someone who had never tried one before.
In new york different neighborhoods vary greatly and most people have a very specific neighborhood they are interested in looking. I personally love living in soho and would not be interested in looking at a different area to live, even greenwich village which is just 3blocks from me I would not be interested in. I know I'm not alone in this as most of my friends all have a specific neighborhood that they want to live in. I think being able to break down the results to more neighborhoods is a needed feature.
I was just working on this last week. I found out after a week of coding and designing, that the fundamental flaw in my implementation design for parallel computation of serial problems, is that it takes as much work for a "forked thread of execution" to undo what it had computed. I'll write up a blog post about it.
That article was -- to put it bluntly -- masturbatory.

First, let's get some numbers out of the way: the newspaper industry still has massive amounts of ad revenue, although those numbers are declining. [1] To put it into some perspective, it eclipses aggregate web advertising revenue ... which is also declining. [2]

Newspapers -- and magazines -- have a couple of problems, and the web isn't really one of them. Their first problem is that their revenue model relies most heavily on both subscriptions and advertising. In the case of advertising, a market saturation is probably in effect, with advertising revenue falling for multiple industries and media. People are spending less right now, so advertising is less effective; however, people are also getting sick of being bombarded by non-relevant ads on billboards, bus stops, magazines, the newspapers, their mail, their email, and their websites. (Hey TechCrunch: by the way, could you possibly fit a few more jumpy/blinky/changey ads on your site? Thanks.)

Subscriptions are down too, and this is where the web does hurt them: they're expected to put their content online, for free. So, why should consumers pay for a newspaper if they can get the same items over their computer for free?

Attempts so far to carry the subscription model over to the web have been, if not unsuccessful, then not successful either. Large numbers of people balk even at the New York Times' registration requirement for much of its content.

The web isn't nearly as de-centralized as this article would like to dream; although there's plenty of political news available from Wonkette or Daily Kos, the bulk of current events journalism is still funneled through publications which have the resources to pay for journalists. Although the quality of investigative journalism can be debated, its cost cannot: it is expensive, beyond the reach of most bloggers or content aggregation startups.

Readers, meanwhile, are definitely pushing for more interactive content -- the ability to leave comments on news stories, for example -- as well as the ability to concentrate their news feeds to select subjects or other criteria, as a natural result of the information overload that some people are suffering from.

So, news publications need a new revenue model, and they need to improve their services for readers. Readers want more up-to-the-minute content, better quality in their content, and narrowed to certain subjects or other interests, and they want it for free.

And advertisers need something that consumers might actually want to look at once in a while.

[1]: http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/newspaper_industry_ad_revenue.p...

[2]: http://www.dmnews.com/first-half-web-ad-spend-down-53-to-109...
They switched their version numbering scheme and release process after being acquired (IIRC). What used to be called 6.0 is now 5-point-something.
Agreed. Very easy to setup. Easy to use. Call quality seems pretty good. Would recommend.
This site only offers games released under Sierra's older game interpreter (AGI).

The games from about 1989 onward, including QfG, used a different interpreter (SCI, which was very advanced for its time: an object-oriented VM platform with a complete GUI toolkit, running on top of vanilla DOS, years before Windows 3.0).

The SCI games can be played under ScummVM or DosBox, if you have the original binaries.
This issue is solved fairly easily with a superior window manager.

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Image:Screen-ohmega-tab-gnome...
I like the inlinks option :)
The follow up also has a short how to on getting and building the new version http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/10/gimp-single-window-instal...
10% of the company owned by a random con man would be a big red flag to any real investors in future funding rounds.
in the video the number he gave was 3.5 years...was something like "had no idea it would get that big, 3.5 years when this was still in the idea stage"
Over the years I've read about agile...it's more like a religion now, really.
Wait. What?

1) Is he implying that launching a perl interpreter is somehow a more lightweight operation than launching ls and having it stat() half a dozen files? Having ls check if a file exists 99% of the time won't even touch the disk. If you're working in that directory, those inodes will probably be cached. Running stat() on a cached inode is hardly more expensive than a system call. Read: cheap. Now perl launching will probably load a few libs and check a few files before even getting to his one-liner.

2) Am I the only one, who in my ~10 years of running unix-like operating systems have never created a filename with a newline char in it? Like even when opening obscure filesystems, never.

3) Does he think unlink() skips the check for the file's existence?

4) If he wanted to overcomplicate things and make sure everything's kosher, why not:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.c' -delete

Whenever I see anything piped to a perl one liner, 4 times out of 5 it's some sort of hack that can be done with standard utils.

It also grinds my gears when people take longer to think of making something more efficient than the amount of CPU time they'll save in their lives of using that 'more efficient' solution. So he spent a minute coming up with this and ten minutes posting about it. Now, will he save roughly 11 minutes of execution time in his life while running this "superior" command (also count that it takes longer to type)? If not, he wasted his time.

From his sig: "Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting". When you have a large-enough hammer....
Regardless of the end result here, yelling and intimidation are not healthy forms of communication or modes of professional social interaction. If you can't make your point without yelling then you probably don't have a good point.

Yelling and intimidation shuts down communication. It raises adrenalin which, more often than not, shuts down brains (quite literally). When people feel threatened, by the CEO of their company no less, their bodies activate a flight-or-fight response. Part of this response includes shutting down blood flow to the more rational parts of the brain, leaving the primitive parts with control. The result is that people tend to either enter into highly emotional shouting matches devoid of reason or logic (fight) or they shut down, stay quiet and try to ride out the "attack" (flight). Neither of these are healthy or contribute to worthwhile discussion.

The CEO yelling at employees in a business meeting is as sure a way to shut down rational discourse and profitable interchange of ideas as an entry level employee pulling a gun.
Ice confirmed on asteroid for first time
Torment is definitely in my top 5 games of all time. Hard to believe it's been out for ten years.

If you haven't played it, I highly recommend "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura", developed by Troika and published by Sierra in 2001. It's very similar in depth and mechanics to Torment, Fallout, and the other Black Isle RPGs.
And they need to explore the studio space more.
http://musopen.com/ is a pretty decent archive of classical music. Not quite what you're looking for, but a useful resource if others are interested
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870033

Q: Are we notified if we aren't accepted to Startup School?

A: Yes, we'll email everyone. (PG)
Craigslist Expands Legal Battle Against Spammers
The linked blog post is about the learning experience a guy had when he said something pointless without thinking among a group of people who would prefer to be using their time and energy more productively.
The linked blog post is about a lesson a then out-of-touch marketer learned from an insightful but admittedly abusive boss.
For those interested in indulging in some Sierra nostalgia:

SierraGamers (http://www.sierragamers.com) is a lively forum maintained by Ken Williams, original founder of Sierra.

Quest Studios (http://www.queststudios.com) is a great site dedicated to the music of classic Sierra games, and also has a pretty good forum.

ImagiNation Revival (http://innrevival.googlepages.com) is a reimplementation of the ImagiNation service, which can be used with the original INN client (under DosBox with the serial port mapped to telnet).

And since this is Hacker News, The Ultimate AGI & SCI Web Site (http://agisci.classicgaming.gamespy.com) is a site dedicated to reverse engineering the old Sierra game engines. It's relatively old, but contains, among other things, IDEs for developing games that run under Sierra's AGI and SCI interpreters.
This is great. No idea. Found out some of my old songs are apparently advertised as ring-tones...:P
Yep. Though I don't think I've ever seen an actual legitimate use of this capability. I mean really, what's the point of an embedded newline...

Actually the Mac uses (or at least "used") a hidden files named "Icon\r" (yes, an embedded carriage return) for its custom folder icons. I'm still not sure that counts as "legitimate".
> I am not a lawyer, but I believe that judging a job candidate based on their outside-of-work activities would actually be considered discrimination and illegal.

Discrimination is legal except for the few specific cases outlined in the various civil rights, equal pay, and age discrimination acts. Might as well take two minutes to research before making these types of posts.
The quoting rules in the Plan 9 shell rc are much saner. Bourne and C shell quoting rules are a recipe for trouble. Sloppiness (e.g. leaving out quotes, using the wrong kind of quotes) works about 99% of the time which leads you to think your code is correct.

The big difference is that rc does not expand the result of variable expansion. I've been planning to write a rc derivative that had job control for a long time now. So far, I've never had enough spare time.
Breaking the dependency on proprietary software
Drives me nuts too.
1) stat() is a system call, so one system call is bound to be faster than two.
2) Sneaky users do this; they create files like /dev/shm/...\n-rf\n.. and you'd better know how to delete it correctly.
3) ???
4) -delete is a GNU extension.
Google wins business customers in Japan: report
Ask HN: Any intro guide to creating text-based games?
I know next to nothing about text-based games where you rob a bank, shoplift etc. But I am interested in dabbling with it. Anyone know any guide that provides a psychological perspective of well-received text games?

If you've already made one, I'd be interested in chatting with you. I may have an offer you like.
Which textbook are you talking about?

I have a moderate hatred for most entry-level physics textbooks, which manage to pad about 100 pages' worth of information into a thousand-page tome full of glossy photographs in order to justify the $100+ price tag. So if there are any good free texts that would be great.
1) Just the system call overhead is not much compared to what the system call actually does, so it depends on what you're calling. Two system calls versus one with identically-cached information, sure it's slower. I'm just saying perl will also probably stat() and if not perl, the unlink() system call would perform the same function. When you're modifying files and flushing it to a drive, especially while using the shell interactively, the sys call overhead is completely negligible. All I'm trying to say is claiming the first command as inefficient is groundless; you execute it as a human and once -- it won't feel any slower.

2) If cleaning up after malicious users, sure why not. Doing this in your source tree or during normal usage? I don't know.

3) He mentioned ls stat()ing files as an inefficiency since the shell does it and ls does as well.

4)

FIND(1) BSD General Commands Manual FIND(1)

NAME
find -- walk a file hierarchy

...

-delete
Delete found files and/or directories. Always returns true.
This executes from the current working directory as find recurses
Ask HN: Best PHP unit testing tools?
Looking for unit testing tips & tools.. PHPUnit? SimpleTest? Others? What do you think?
What about related ones? If I'm designing a page, I might want my image browser in sight so I can choose and then drag and drop images. Or if I'm writing an article and it takes a lot of research, I'll want a web browser to share the screen equally with the word processor.

The multi-window aspects of Macs makes them more usable imo, especially because of the deep support for drag-and-drop interoperation. In the physical world, I mix and match media as suits the task, and the Mac mimics that. I don't fill my desk up with a notepad, then hide it and take out a calculator, then hide it and set up my easel.
Wifi at conferences problem
It sounds like you have two separate problems:

1. Your company is growing slowly, and you don't know how to accelerate the growth.

2. You live in your office and don't have a way to change the situation.

Approach the issues separately. It's hard to get into specifics on either one without knowing more.

Could you move the company out of your apartment by finding cheap shared office space? Could you find a roommate situation to exact yourself at the same time? Can you just bite the bullet and get a mortgage?

For the first one, it sounds like you're not confident in your ability to grow due to larger competitors. How long do you want to bootstrap for? Sit back and figure out how to make a bigger move. Ask people you trust for help. Ask them to refer you to people they trust and find thoughtful. Look at your market from a different angle. Look at different markets. Make a plan that you believe in and use it to get investment. Don't be afraid of money.

It's going to be tough to explain to someone why investing in real estate for you is better than investing in real estate just for themselves. Tackle the issues separately.
Sorry for the late reply; I didn't see your response. The reason I say a transition away from oil is needed is precisely topical, and I disagree. It does matter whether or not we are dependent on oil domestically. Currently oil runs through our economy like woven thread. You raise oil prices and that causes immediate inflation because production and delivery of products depends on oil. With an economy that is 2/3 dependent on consumer spending you don't want steep price inflation. That's why it would be a benefit to not be as reliant on oil domestically. The value of the dollar could fall, yet domestic product prices wouldn't reflect it (as significantly) and as a consequence choke our economy.
I wonder how many files with a name containing \n are in the wild. And if you encounter such a file, does it really matter if you accidentally delete it?

Waisting brain cycles to save CPU cycles (in the wrong places) is shameful, insulting and boring.

It would be amazing if there weren't tons of other, much more significant, things that deserved attention in the relevant script, system, or the developer's life. (sign)
more examples of this technique here:

http://ablinger.mur.at/docu11.html#qu3
The JRuby developers have spent a lot of time doing performance measurements, implementing optimizations and trying out different approaches. You're just throwing in your two cents based on second-hand knowledge of an obsolete language implementation...