skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
isn't it enabled by default? I know that disabling Guest is one of the first things I do to a new Mac/PC/Linux machine.
Nice read! I used to love this game on Amiga and then later on PC.
I do the show thing too. I'm not sure how healthy it is, but I always feel great after doing it.
The unbearable lightness of being - Milan Kundera

Candide - Voltaire
We may want to move discussions about the daily rantings of Joel Spolsky out of Hacker News.

Joel has his opinions about a lot of programming matters (TDD for example) and combined with his witty way of presenting stuff those opinions should not be given any seriousness than it deserves.

I personally like Joel as a writer and I do listen to his StackOverflow podcasts and I think he is being misunderstood as having strong feelings against multi-threaded programming or TDD while the fact is that he adds these superlatives for an added effect in his talks and writing. Just ignore those and you will be fine.
Apple and the Future of Publishing : Part Two
>>Anyone who claims a magical way to do this without human input is lying, or at a minimum talking about situations far too simple to fit any real use-case.

I think that is correct, but hope it's wrong. (As you probably do, too.)

Anyway, thank you for making such a strong statement, so it will surely be well tested. :-)
There are code examples at http://www.bestbrains.dk/frogdotnet/.

I wasn't able to find a list of features or comparisons to other ORMs.
I remapped my keyboard to avoid some common wrist-wrenching motions. I bound Shift-space to _ (underscore). I also changed the backslash/pipe key into a modifier key called Woot, then bound Woot-[ and Woot-] to ( and ) respectively, Woot-- (minus) to * (asterisk), Woot-0 to & (ampersand), Woot-; to | and Woot-/ to \. I also used Woot to add some greek letters like lambda, just for fun. It took a bit of getting used to but was well worth it.
Google Wave And The Dawn Of Passive-Aggressive Communication
It's just Joel doing the "Joel 'Thang"--namely effective, but disingenuous, attention marketing. Examine the context of his original statement.
On a related note, where did you meet your co-founder?
That's incredible - friend of mine and I did exactly that, but in Australia rather than Texas.

We rather over-specced the reflux column (it was about 1m tall, copper, and ran a water jacket pumped from a swimming pool) and we even asked a friend to put samples thru a mass spectrometer to make sure we weren't drinking methanol.

Never thought of it as a hack though, just a cheap way to get booze.

We flavoured it with oak chips and watered it down. Great hackers think alike? :)
This looks interesting but I'd like to see screenshots or a video prior to trying. The home page design is nice but I want more info prior to starting.
True, I've been yelled at in Amsterdam for not jaywalking.
Yay! A taboo!
you should probably try guns germs and steel by jared diamond, it also is a different way to look at history and how and why it has spanned the way it has over different geographies.
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (first part of the Gormenghast trilogy), because of the wonderful flowing prose.

The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, because once I truly understood the full text of aphorism 125 (The Madman, with the famous line 'God is dead'), I felt liberated. It's an extremely powerful aphorism and 'God is dead' is a poor summary.
Yeah, it's been so long that I've heard "self-posting" used to mean the latter that I had forgotten about it. Isn't that a redit thing?
Majority of Asian girls, be it Chinese, Japanese, Korean don't like to be tanned. Having light skin is seen as beautiful. I guess this could be related.
1984 and A Brave New World
Men have darker skin because of higher levels of hemoglobin (partly due to not bleeding every month). Maybe that makes the skin in the face more ruddy, decreasing contrast with the lips and eyes.
Dear PR people... send me stuff
In C, parallelize with OpenMP, do large scale concurrent work in processes and small scale concurrent work in event loops.
Ok, so that dilutes the 'pure' of the functional part. I know that in practice functional programs have an if to force termination, but the lambda calculus deals with abstracts. Anything evaluating lambda expressions then has to deal with that or you'd have to expand the syntax of the calculus to contain a termination function which 'magically' decides that enough is enough.

According to the definition all functions are unary functions, an if would have to be a binary function wouldn't it ?
Metaphysics is more akin to "world view" although one's epistemological opinions/beliefs are certainly informative of their prevailing ontological stance.
Yeh I get what you mean; something simple where you can say "I want a 4 hour block here - divided into 30 minute segments - so that people can type in their details and select a block and brief out what they want to discuss".

We had a similar system at uni for booking tutor time - but as you say it was overly complicated.

I'll have a mull over :D
We're going after a lucrative niche opportunity that requires significant industry specific knowledge (apparel industry in this case).

I've seen plenty of niche/vertical opportunities like this - mainly because I enjoy interrogating people who work in various sectors about their jobs and pain points.

These opportunities will not be on the radar of someone who doesn't have in depth knowledge of the sector in question. For us, the key was personal experience and knowing potential customers. We worked with them to build the product from the beginning.

As the article says, it's about having a team with complementary skills. That's often a product guy (either a business person or just someone who knows the sector really well) and some tech guys.
On securing financial future
I read through what they had, and their main reason for making Frog.Net was that they didn't like some other popular ORM, but after a quick glance at both, I couldn't even tell them apart.
Big surprise: blanket statements are often inaccurate!
The point of an OS is that it abstracts away these details, so that I don't have to bother about them. I just want my OS to work, regardless of whether it's open source or not.
IBM Generator Failure Causes Airline Chaos
Sigh... The minute I read the word synergistic, I had "Promote synergy! Like a boss!" go through my head. Needless to say, I couldn't finish the article after that.
Your work, however, suggests that you are not actually human. Seeing some of the things you have produced makes me think that you are inhumanly competent, and hence Joel's remarks do not apply to you.

I think Joel is using a limited form of the word "impossible" and a limited form of the word "human", in a similar way that 2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2 and sufficiently small values of 5.
Send Mail using SMTP and PHP.
>It is nicer to find bugs by reading the source code instead of logging into your account and finding all your data gone.

And yet, having the source open did nothing to prevent the Debian SSL-cert bug from happening.

Perhaps it got patched faster because the source was open, but the bug was in there for quite some time before it got caught.
No, guest login is disabled by default.
The unbearable lightness of being - fabulous novel with some deep wisdom
No, it's disabled by default - at least in Snow Leopard.
Depends on what you're doing. Subsonic is great, but it's not terribly flexible. On the other hand you have NHibernate which is really flexible, but is a total pain to get up and running with.
Flippant comment, but there’s some serious truth in this. Data you haven’t backed up is data you don’t want. Time Machine makes backing up trivial to the extent that it’s a zero button solution. I plug in my external hard drive, it recognises it as a Time Machine backup and automatically syncs any changes since the previous backup.
Franz Kafka - Metamorposis

Roald Dahl - James and the giant peach
I submit my own stuff, but I also submit other stuff at a 10:1 ratio. IMO, It is a little tacky to use the site as another traffic generator. The nice think about HN is that is a real community and as such I try to add value rather than just pimp my posts. There are a few sites I know that only self post their stuff, never comment, and as a result they rarely get upvoted.
Some interesting ideas, and I love the conciseness, but..:

[:title_x60, :text_60x10]

.. made me throw up in my mouth a bit. I like some of the ideas but this is the sort of janky Ruby that unfairly makes other people go "See, this is why Ruby sucks." Nothing that couldn't be cleaned up, of course :)
+1

In particular, I think Joel does have a point here. Yeah, so maybe he's exaggerating by saying it's impossible. But I would imagine that multi-threading in C (like most things in C) is really difficult. Especially compared to more modern languages that make it much easier.
Canvas is a bitmap drawing field. The browser actually has to do less work with fade turned off, and performance won’t degrade with time running.
Web hosting services- Boon for your company
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I think Joel's point is that for the following two statements:

1) You can do multithreaded programs in C

2) You cannot do multithreaded programs in C

the common belief is 1, and it leads to much suffering. If everyone believed what Joel is saying, 2, most everyone would be much happier.

He's trying to reset the center point of the thread folklore. And I praise him. Doing concurrent systems in C should sound as absurd as building web apps in assembly - there's probably a case for it, but its almost certainly not the one you're looking at.
Blog Copyright Considerations (use of creative commons licenses)
Cursed is the Peacemaker - Boykin. Excellent biography/narrative of an American diplomat working in the Middle East.

Sirens of Titan - Vonnegut. Not my favorite of his but my first. I've been hooked since then!
I agree. As you point out, you're destined to fail if you view HN as another way to get traffic to your blog.

On the other hand, I've gotten some really great insight by posting things I felt were relevant to HN.
This doesn't really seem like it belongs on HN...
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Factorial Algorithms in different languages (in one source file, 5 languages)
I'd probably replace 'Get started now' with 'See plans and pricing'. On the 'plans and pricing' page, I'd write something like:

"We're in private alpha now, so there are no pricing plans yet. But we'll try hard to make it fair and affordable! If you'd like to participate in our alpha test, get in contact with us. Here's how: ... " (Offer some incentives here, if you want to: 'FREE' during alpha, cancel any time, '3 free tips by our conversions experts that you can test right away', 'Get our FREE white paper "How to increase your conversion rate by up to 143% with behavioural targeting"'... you get the idea.)

If your private alpha/beta tests takes longer and you expect to get some traffic meanwhile, you may also like to consider a notification form at the end of the page. It may get some additional leads when you're ready to launch.

I understand that too much jargon scared off your potential target audience. On the other hand, someone has to integrate and use the service after a prospect signed-up. Why not make something like "Documentation" somewhere on the site? Maybe, instead of 'Resources'?

I agree with jlees: It may still be too much jargon.

Btw, I've just visited the page for a second time. It's funny to note that I didn't see the Twitter link on the homepage, because I immediately clicked somewhere above the fold. :)

Overall, I think you are quite close. It's just a lot of minor details that may improve the impression of the site.
Elements of Style, is well written and thoughtful, but it should not be taken as an prescriptive authority - as it commonly is - on grammatical minutiae. Or in other words Strunk & White, a.k.a Drunken Shite (only when discussing grammar rules!!).
Don’t Trust Fake IDs
StackQL - query the stackoverflow dataset
TDD is not test-first. TDD is specify-first and test-last.
Agreed. The OP might also consider a longer trial than 6 days. I'm not sure I can really evaluate the system in that time.
Diabetic Exchange Diet Foods - Can They Help in Treating Diabetes
No it wouldn't. The first word makes the point clear right from the start.
A Farewell to ORMs
Given that the business models are largely the same, I doubt it.
New hires were "...told to play Lemmings for a couple of weeks to get the idea"

So awesome. That was a great game.
A guy at party who was totally off his face on amphetamine told me this while juggle 3 balls. He said the skill synchronously activated both left and right side of his brain. He was defo on the right lines and since inspired me juggle too.
The anti-if campaign
The only thing that didn't change? Taxes...
Ask HN: SaaS peeps, what's your charge approval rate?
I run a time tracking service (http://letsfreckle.com) and I've been digging into our statistics lately, since a surge of traffic has doubled the number of paying accounts (yippee!)

I noticed that the approval percentage for charges -- that is, actual monthly billing -- is only 84-86% (varies by card type).

On the other hand, we've had 0 charge backs. But we only have about 250 paying accounts at the moment.

What's your experience?

Is that approval percentage normal, or is it low? It seems low to me but I've got no prior SaaS experience.
How to Eliminate/Prevent a Skin Infection and What It Means
International Kindle Crippled at Launch: No Web Access Outside US
The key question then is what happens if you had enabled it in Leopard and then you install Snow Leopard as an in-place upgrade.

It looks like Apple meant to have the setting revert, so that guest logins had to be reenabled. Instead, you let your friend login to the (still-enabled) guest account and then...
sweet memory
Agree that liability is important.

In past "delete all user data" issues (I know there was at least one prior case with Mac OS, but I don't remember details), Apple paid for hard drive recovery service for those affected.

You can't always trust 'em (they're a big company after all), but they've behaved honorably in the past.
Exactly. Regarding the "passive voice" see Victims of Page 18:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1485
The mythical BPUF (Big planning upfront)
Some languages are structured so that the hardest parts of concurrent programming are solved for you by language features. C is not one of those languages. That is Joel's point.
Brings back memories of interviewing game artists around that time - pretty much any one who had been near DMA (and sometimes even Psygnosis) included the lemming animation in their showreel.
Most consumers understand that the company is going to try to barter with them. I don't think it's necessarily _screwing_ people. Are you screwing Grocer 1 because you bought apples from Grocer 2, who was selling them for less?

That's what this is. You send them your gold for their inspection, to see if they want to buy it from you. They look at everyone else's gold and make an offer for your gold. This is an opening offer and is of course going to be very low, but most people take it because they wanted to get rid of the gold anyway.

Most used places are like that. My parents operate a used bookstore; they'll often have people come in and plunk down a box full of books, and my parents will usually make a low offer, something like $5, and the people usually accept it. Not because anyone's getting screwed, but because those people just want to get rid of those books and they're happy with pretty much any exchange. If someone has books that're actually worthwhile, they look up the going rate for that book and price accordingly (which is always significantly below the lowest copy listed so that they can make money off of it). Is this a problem because the person who dropped off the books might not know the item's going rate?

Are used bookstores screwing these people by offering a low price for their items? What about junk car places that will buy your old car for $100 and sell the parts for 6 times that or more? Why is it so different with a used gold place?
Gelato Machine | Blast chiller Tecnomac | MEC3 Gelato
Blast Chiller Tecnomac - Creative Ingredients is the Creative Partner for the Artisan of Excellence, provides Bakery Equipment Melbourne, Australian Bakery Cafe and Catering Equipment Supplies in Australia.
Few reasons why texting is popular in China.

1. SMS is cheaper than calling.

2. China is LOUD, there are times I don't hear a phone call because there are so many people and their cellphones around.

3. And yes, you can fit as much info in an text as an email.
PROTIP: How to Run Programs as a Domain User from a Non-domain Computer
HN Feedback: Shortcuts bookmarklets
Hey HN,

I've written these bookmarklets called Shortcuts that give you a way to really quickly look at all of the keyboard shortcuts for your browser without interrupting your work.

You can get them at http://scottjackson.org/software/shortcuts

Shortcuts are currently available for Safari on OS X and Firefox on OS X and Windows. Thought they might be useful to some here, since the HN crowd seems like the kind that would use keyboard shortcuts. Any feedback, leave it here or email me (my email address is included on the Shortcuts page).
Office space for startups, updated
Dear Hacker News,

Last week I sent out a comment about our new tech startup office hub in New York, and I just wanted to let everyone who was interested know about our new website and cheaper prices. We were able to negotiate a better lease with the landlord.

Large Bay - 300 square feet - $1,095 - 7 people
Regular Bay - 150 square feet - $795 - 4 people
Half Bay - 75 square feet - $395 - 2 people
*New option: Virtual Office - 1 desk - $15 per day

The site: www.sohohaven.com

We've met some awesome people and everyone who has taken space is really excited to get the place full, so if you're in NYC come on down and be part of the action.

Thanks,

Chris
Before you start making stats you need to take in to account the time that it can take before chargebacks and credits start to come back to you. This can be up to 6 months depending on the IPSP and the processor as well as the card company.

So unless you are already operating for a long time you really shouldn't say that you have '0' charge backs. If you manage to keep that up though you have a very good thing going.

The approval percentage is fine, it is basically a function of how much fraud you would be seeing, if you continue to see '0' chargebacks in the long term then you could think about relaxing your conditions for approval a bit. But don't make any drastic changes there, change, and observe over some longer period.

That's because if you do mess up on the approval side and there are a bunch of chargebacks in the pipeline you could easily go over the maximum chargeback rate that will terminate your account (typically 1%, but this varies as well).

Another thing to keep an eye at it credits, these are usually higher than chargebacks but strongly correlated. So more credits -> more chargebacks. If you also have '0' credits then you should count yourself very lucky and hope the situation persists.

Personally I think 250 signups (which is about two months worth on my site) is a little low before making the claim of 0 chargebacks. I'd think you need at a minimum 8 months worth of data and a thousand or so running accounts before you can do the stats.
There is a difference in detectability of "all my files get erased" and "a number isn't random enough". The second one is easily missed by a lot of people. If Windows or OS X has a similar bug, my guess is that it will never be found.
P.S. my email is dickson@atmanetworks.com, pictures and contact info are on our website www.sohohaven.com

Thanks,

Chris
An alternative to ProxyCommand is ssh -t, as in "ssh -t gateway ssh inside_machine". ControlMaster is definitely the way to go for the original problem w/ the OTP setup. "ssh -t" is usable on arbitrary terminals for places where gateway is password accessible (and handy when you have to pay per static public IP).
Leaving gaps on the iPhone helps a lot
I think he is getting at the epistemological problem of first premises. If the only fact of epistemology that I accept is "I exist", the statement "Objective reality exists" cannot be proved.

I'm sure there's better formal language for this, but we could benefit by making a distinction between "facts in principle" and "facts in practice". Let's say a fact in principle is derived from a priori knowledge, whereas a fact in practice is one that we have accepted and depend on in order to make pragmatic decisions and survive. In principle, I believe that I exist but that I cannot prove objective reality exists. In practice, I accept that objective reality exists and that if I stand in front of a bus I will be hit.
This is very cool, I plan to check it out next time I'm in NYC. The $15/day virtual desk is perfect, in the past I would just work in a conference room at our lawyers' office, but the environment was kind of, well, lawyerly.
Funny, we do have Product documentation and a tutorial: http://www.wingify.com/product/documentation/

Actually, looking at all the comments I think at this stage using the solution requires a lot of interaction with us - for product usage and implementation, consultation. That is good because then we are accountable for the ROI and that is bad because it is somewhat hard to scale
It's only hard if you have the wrong primitives

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/thread
Lessfs deduplication filesystem for fuse linux
Oh good, so I'm not the only one. I cringed reading that book, especially the bits where he is being highly condescending and un-understanding (can't think of a better word) to a 10-year old.

Maybe it's because I had read enough of the "eastern mysticism" nonsense that I just didn't get that book. I still don't understand why so many people love it.
Just to play devil's advocate, it's worth noting that if Wall Street collapsed there wouldn't be any money available for public health campaigns in the third world. Having said that, it's still a good rant and provides an interesting perspective on the financial crisis and the priorities of the world's governments.
I didn't say 250 signups, I said 250 paying accounts ;)

About 170 of those have been around for over 3 mos. We have been growing very slowly (on purpose). We've been billing >100 customers a month for over 10 months.

I'm not saying there will never be chargebacks, but I suspect a lot of the initial accounts are people who know me from my blogging, speaking, etc., and so are a lot less likely to initiate a chargeback. Yay, social ties.

If we have a 15% charge failure rate (to put the approval rate backwards), that's normal, you think?

Historically speaking, how many of your charge failures have been due to things that get fixed -- expired cards, maxed out lmit -- and how many are signs of a fake/worthless account?
And you even provide your very own reason not to do this:

"This would save me the trouble of actually carefully digesting what my fellow HN readers have written before voting"
Yes, and if you have a good amount to say please make a blog post (even default wordpress/blogspot/posterous layouts are fine) just so you don't have to squint at the grey text.

edit: didn't notice kyro's comment which adds better points