skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The charge only hits people without the data plan. (Even if you have their crappy data plan, you'll have enough monthly allowance to eat a few kb of mistakes without seeing specific charges for it)

The reason people consider it 'scammy' is precisely because there's no way for normal people to avoid the charge(1). They can't remap the key. They can't just not get a data plan. They can't even block data service (technically they can, but they still get charged if they hit the button and it sends back the block message). etc.

Sure, if you hit End fast enough you don't get billed. But does that make it unreasonable to say "I should be able to turn this off altogether"?

(1) I suspect you can deliberately 'break' the data connection settings in the admin menu. This should prevent you from ever completing a data connection and thereby avoiding charges. Though I don't know if that's still possible on current versions of Verizon's crappy phone OS.
StupidFilter - Detect stupid text
"Everyone says your GPA doesn’t matter when you’re finding a job." Uh, maybe for a second job- but when you are still a senior in school your GPA is one (admittedly crude) measure of how well you were doing at your last occupation (student).
Clojure tutorial: fetching web comics
Google keeps amazing me. Chrome OS could mean many different things, but if it really means a polished, complete OS it will have huge impact.

We have brilliant manufacturers like Asus creating cool netbooks. But they can't really compete with Apple because they don't have a world-class OS.

And making such an OS is an enormous project.

They have Windows and Linux. Linux is great on servers. Linux is great on my workstations. But OSX outshines it greatly in completeness and polish.

This could ignite a wave of competition and innovation. Asus should be very excited. Apple should be nervous.
EU approves new law requiring users approve all cookies.
Usually headlines asking a question can be answered "No" and the article skipped. This is an exception to the rule.
Exactly my thoughts too. That would be an ideal server side programming tool. E.g. imagine a webserver written in Go with long polls, and the applications on it in GoScript. Or an XMPP (Wave) server. Or a distributed Map/Reduce engine.
I agree with the sentiment (App Store review shouldn't exist) but if the goal is producing, do the App Store policies logically enter into it?

It seems possible rejection would only be an issue to people who were consuming; or those looking to supply them with the 'parade of ever-fancier toys'.
I'd never buy an iphone for that reason, and as for the kindle, I'd buy one but only to use it as a reader for open format text files.

The DX isn't available here though, so I guess even that will have to wait.

The reason your 'typical' consumer and the HN audience approach this in a different way is probably because a consumer usually isn't aware of the exact moment they are locked in, they only find out to their regret much later.

But by then it is too late, and the price to switch is too high.
Programmer who worked for Bernard Madoff is arrested by FBI
As usual, the need for a punchline ruins it.
Two weeks is the outside for me. A big problem is that even sitting in an airtight container, the stuff still ages.
Really nice explaination! Now I'm trying to resist shopping for a home coffee roaster, right this second...
Any tips for backpacking? Is there a rule of thumb for getting the right water temperature without measuring? I'm planning on grinding before I go, taking a french press, and packing the ground beans in ziploc bags.
Yea that's probably an artifact of a C code. The correct way to handle this in go ( i think, i'm a beginner like everyone else ) is to pass around a request struct that contains an error channel and have the main connection handling gorutine select on this.

That's at least for bigger picture errors. On the method level you should use multiple return values to indicate erros (usually as last return value).

So r, err = write(y) { if (err!=nil) { request.errors <- err; return } }
This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see.

I don't honestly think they care.

A revelation that other products are selling well doesn't diminish the legality of their argument whatsoever. And doubt regarding the morality of their argument (let alone their methods) hasn't found one bit of leverage over the years.

All the chart really does, is serve as a statistical reminder that the potential end of a business model has no necessary effect on the underlying product or service.

But the only industry arguments that data refutes, are the hyperbolic arm-waving PR nonsense that everyone had long since tuned out.
Black Friday Tech Deals Now | TechJaws.com
Unlike most posts, I don't think you should be a founder at this point unless you're prepared to do a bit of growing up and dealing with many issues that don't involve building cool stuff.

Find a way to observe a business from the CEO spot and reconcile that POV with an employee's situation. How will you get top engineers to enjoy working for you? How do you maintain a sense of fairness among your team? Are you OK with giving talent equity at your personal expense? And about 100 other issues will need to be addressed that kinda suck if you're someone who likes to "do".

Sounds like you have the skills to build cool shit - keep rocking while developing the softer side of being a successful (and cool) person to work for/with.
awesome, i'd love to hack that and see what the government is really looking at :)
I've had some of the best homemade coffee by using (1) fresh beans (2) a French press.

My secret to a good roast is http://www.stumptowncoffee.com/ - you can't go wrong with a good roast there. Not only that, but you can order the specific coarseness you'd like the coffee ground at, and they roast it and grind it after you order and send it to you with priority mail. It's nearly as fresh as it gets, anywhere in the US.
Wow. A slashdot link in many months on HN. Telling.
I think power management will be an issue. Personally I've never had an acceptable experience with Linux on laptops. Not sure how much progress has been made here over the last few years. It definitely helps that netbooks use such similar hardware across the board. If OEMs can be bothered to do some QA testing when the bundle Chrome OS it should be fine. Installing it on "unsupported" hardware could be more of a problem.
That web still exists, if you can keep your eyes off the flashy pretty stuff.
Tandem (now HP) made good money because IBM stuff wasn't always up.

I've worked for a bank and have seen two serious mainframe crashes. They're rare, but they do happen, and when they happen you can bet that the vendor will get involved because it really isn't supposed to happen. Unlike the PC world, where if a machine crashes it gets rebooted and nobody bats an eye. I blame the 'we're not to blame' culture around PC software manufacturers.

You're spot on about the IO, that is the place where big iron really shines.

The place where I worked had both Sperry and IBM stuff (we got 'bought' and had to move all the software from the Sperry machines to the CICS environment on a 4381).
So they want web developers to create an opt-out option on each web site? That's completely redundant. The people who don't care are going to ignore the option (or click ok on the popups if it comes to that), and the people who do care probably already have their browsers asking them whether or not to store cookies from a given site.
Great diagrams! How did you draw them? Tablet?
IBUYPOWER Launches Battalion 101 W870CU Laptop, 17.3 inch Core i7 for Gaming
I started watching it, but then stopped when she started going through the "corporations are evil" bit.

She deliberately chose to paint government as good and corporations as bad even though they are both only composed of people, who are just looking out for their self-interest, trying to get money from other people, who are also just looking out for their self interest.

It's a intellectual shortcut to paint corporations OR government as evil, and not accurate or meaningful at all.
It only grows if you have the wrong mindset. I love open spaces with less stuff!
No payday, no offers, and at this point, I'm losing money.
No payday, no offers, but overall I'm ahead of salary world.
I actually lost money, compared to working for someone else.
I actually lost money on multiple startups, compared to working for someone else.
$0-$100K profit.
$100K-250K profit
$250K-$500K profit
$500K-$1mm profit
$1mm-$5mm profit
$5mm-$10mm profit
$10mm-$25mm profit
$25mm-$50mm profit
$50mm-$100mm profit
$100mm-$250mm profit
$250mm+ profit
The Simons publish their work freely, and go to a lot of effort writing their papers well so that their work spreads beyond Microsoft. And as far as I know, their code is all open source.
Nike Chalkbot creators offer a Mobile Artist Residency program
Fed Slaps Curbs on Overdraft Fees
this book has a cheesy title, but it's wildly helpful for learning how to deal with people (e.g., bosses) and get what you want without being a jerk: Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people"
When a user opts out, how do you remember they did opt-out? Using a cookie?
Thank you for sharing your experience/opinion.
It's highly recommended that we all watch every single documentry by Adam Curtis, including "The Centuary of Self". His stuff is gold IMO, opinionated, but gold.

If you want a taster check out the latest series running on his blog about the history of Afghanistan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/09/kabul_city_num...
Are you going to offer some kind of rental service? That would be an interesting business model...
Agree. You just defined the heavyweight BBC-type documentaries that led to this series.
The new legislation does offer an exception for when a cookie is "strictly necessary"

Apparently.
"Cookies, small programs that can be used to track Web movements, ..."

And the masses stay ignorant.
See also
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931596

where there is already much discussion
Awesome, thanks. I never knew the different roasts had an explanation behind them.
This is because the default 'make(chan int)' creates a synchronous channel
Try submitting YouTube comments to the demo. This is shockingly accurate.
For backpacking I find that even a french press is too much weight. I use an ultralight drip that attaches to any mug:

http://www.mec.ca/Products/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Ep...

As for the proper temperature, as soon as bubbles start to float to the top (but way before rolling), I find it's about right.
Check out one of our first residents T.Foley at locallytoned.org
That is very cool. The video of it's obstacle crossing mechanism reminds me of some sort of insect... It's not going to be long before robots like this are running and jumping around like animals...
Thanks. I looked for a post on this already and didn't find it.
By hand on an old Nokia 770 internet tablet.
The grind especially matters, and burr grinders can pay for themselves, if you're concerned about the rising cost of good beans (places like Stumptown, Ritual in SF, Victrola in Seattle etc. are doing coffees pitched - and priced - more like wine than coffee). Take a look inside your blade grinder sometime - odds are you'll find entire halves of beans still kicking around in there. That sure isn't getting you maximum value out of your beans.
The wireless 'Copy and Paste' mouse - click a file or highlighted text, click a 'copy' button on your mouse and the data is transferred to an SD card in the mouse... point the mouse at another computer and click the 'paste' button on the mouse to transfer the data to another PC ... imagine how much time would be saved instead of uploading/sending files/data using MSN or Skype to send something to the guy sat next to you... GENIOUS, I should probably patent this...
Philip Rosedale: The web needs to be more lifelike
No problem - I remember things like this and knew the search terms. Then http://searchyc.com/ is your friend.
I am not a patent lawyer, but is there any evidence that Microsoft is even trying to protect this particular IP?

AFAIK, the Simons publish research papers freely, and GHC is licensed under what amounts to a BSD3 license (by the University of Glasgow... not Microsoft).
These were just questions for a position as Associate Product Marketing Manager. During my senior-year interviews with Google for a Software Engineer position, there were 3 rounds, each getting increasingly harder, chock full of nothing but technical questions: some trivia (name all standard network port associations), some implementation (design a chat server), some theory (what is the big-O runtime advantage of doubling an array size upon copy over just adding new entries linearly), etc, etc...

Each time they said "this interview will take about 30 minutes," but each one ended up being around 1.5 hours.

It was grueling, but fun. I'm not sure what happened because I didn't hear back after the 3rd interview. It was at least a nice feeling to know that all of my classes in school had helped me with the answers.
Why would you let common sense get in the way of a perfectly useless piece of legislation...

They're so hopelessly behind with this stuff it is amazing.
Indeed, and part of the job of an exceptionally good developer is to avoid having the masses have to know about things they shouldn't need to know about. Don't laugh at people's ignorance when the whole point of User Interface/Experience Design is to ensure that people don't have to know how things work.

EDIT: coverdude in his/her reply to my comment makes an important point that I missed - it's not the masses being laughed at, it's the "journalist." Yes, point taken, the author really, really ought to know better.
Sorry, mate. I didn't notice that.
What's the lesson here? :) (you should work on theirs too?)
(I was sure I put a comment here earlier explaining - wonder where it went?)

I got this in an email from HarperCollins today, from the Lemony Snicket Mailing list. Written in classic Snicket style, saying everything opposite:

"Dear Reader,

Something terrible has happened.

The entire text of THE BAD BEGINNING, the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, has been made available online. For FREE. Open to anyone. Including horrible villains, innocent readers, and you.

PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS LINK TO FRIENDS, FAMILY, OR PEOPLE WITH COMPUTERS.
SHARING THE UNABRIDGED FREE VERSION OF THE BAD BEGINNING WITH SOMEONE WHO HAS NEVER READ IT IS COMPLETELY IRRESPONSIBLE. "Completely irresponsible" is a phrase which here means "no one will be able to prove you did it."

The sudden appearance of the uncoded text online may be a horrible mistake. Hopefully, it will be corrected as soon as possible.

With all due respect,
Lemony Snicket"

There's a video to go with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9F0OpJenLA
"The Century of the Self" in 4 parts.

http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0

http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPar...

http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPar...

http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPar...
Creative Japanese Barcodes
Hacker News | Submit
how can i break my college's wireless network's firewall?
I wouldn't really say nightmare per se, although it probably felt like that at the time. She just wasn't very practiced at estimating and making reasonable assumptions.

Back when I was in my final year of uni I interviewed for a set of blue-chip graduate recruiters who threw similar questions at me. I distinctly remember sitting in a Data Connection office somewhere trying to work out how many petrol stations were in the UK. I was terrible. But there are ways to get better at this and it's really no secret that Google asks these kinds of questions. I think they reveal two things about the candidate - how good they are instinctively, and how well they prepare.

Obviously Google asks candidates who get past a certain point to sign a NDA, but there's still a surprising amount of information out there. I was recently helping a friend (and have previously helped an ex) with interviews and preparing for the logic and theoretical comp.sci. parts was actually quite a lot of fun. Maybe because I didn't have the pressure!
This video is great, I wasn't aware something like this existed. Thanks for posting the link.
If I didn't know how cookies worked, based on that statement I'd be against them and for the law automatically.
Interesting idea for an app - is there a huge market for this? The biggest parking lot I ever have to worry about is Disneyland or the airport, and I always just snap a photo of the lot ID. Before I had a camera phone, I just wrote it on a slip of paper and put it in my wallet.

So for a 'novelty' app with no marketing, it doesn't seem too bad.

I also just got the Droid, and I'm seeing a lot of "updated for droid" or "not compatible with droid" comments. No doubt the Android platform will open a much broader market, but like the PC, you have to worry about more hardware.
When cloud computing is a fit (and when it's not)
I think there's some confusion surrounding the SMS feature here. When someone sends a text to my GV number, it's forwarded to my phone from an arbitrarily assigned (406) area code number. This number is picked out of a pool of such numbers owned by Google, and it is permanently mapped to that person's number for my GV account only.

The reason this is done is so that I can then send texts to this newly assigned 406 number, and it will appear to have originated from my GV number. The GV system checks which phone the text is coming from, and says "okay, the phone sending this text is assigned to GV number X, and for GV number X, this 406 number is assigned to other person's phone number Y, so forward the text to Y and show it as coming from X."

It's complicated, but it ends up working out pretty well in my experience.
I laugh at this author's ignorance because cookies have been small innocuous pieces of text for the last decade and a half. No one could have clued this guy in? He writes for the Wall Street Journal for Pete's sake.
Murdoch to hide content from Google 'within months'
I hate to say it but doesn't this make print advertising all of a sudden far more relevant again? Is there any possibility that this was helped along by gentle lobbying from the newspaper industry?
Anyone up for StupidGolf? :-)

My entry: "haha... lol" (11 chars)
LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon
Another good article, with excerpts from the actual law is here: http://www.out-law.com/page-10021
I can't get the thing to detect any stupidity whatsoever. I tried:
-dude that was pretty funny lol
-dude thats a funny one! lol
-ur a ghey lord!
All passed as not being likely to be stupid.
"We are ecstatic," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water."
Wonderful area for hackers to contribute, especially if you do not like military robots for ethical reasons. It's great that industrial robots develop more and more, hopefully making our life better.

I wonder how much a startup could achieve. Could a startup disrupt the line maintenance industry ? Are power companies too conservative to work with startups ?
I win.

"!" (1 char) is likely to be stupid.
Also, you can find the same documents on Google Video. I share the search "google video the century on the self" on Google. http://tinyurl.com/yb7kluz

The Google Video link: http://tinyurl.com/yd5ptt6
From the FAQ:

Do you really expect to be able to detect and
filter anything that's conceivably stupid?

No, of course not. You'd need real AI for that,
and beyond a certain point it's simply subjective;
after all, a sufficiently advanced AI would probably
filter out the whole of human discourse, which
isn't the idea.

I have to admit that I laughed pretty hard when I read that...
Her last answer really did her in, I think. She said she was "wishing [the number of graduating seniors] was higher" since she was amid a job search. That would mean more competition for jobs. That indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.
Yes. I am serious.

If you're asking me to comment on what I think might or might not have happened a hundred thousand years ago based on a few TV shows and books and classes and such I've had? My answer is going to be something like "That's a nice color. I like brown"

There is no right way to respond to these articles -- there is no frame of reference, the topics are imminently debatable, and to some degree we'll never know. So any answer is as good as any other. In fact, the tendency is for internet pundits to run on at length, taking on airs of expertise when in fact they're as lost as the next guy. If you asked me (you didn't) 99% of internet comments are people talking way out of their league. In this case, I don't think anybody in the world is able to do anything but idly speculate.

I decided not to do that.

And it means you do not like brown.
this is a good practical example of clojure
It does matter to people. They have to read it and type it all day, and as decades of language wars make clear, people care what their code looks like.
Whatever happened to Big Banjo restaurant? (story of great serial entrepreneur)
NASA says it has discovered water on the moon
lmao!!!
Browsers already approve all cookies based on the user's wishes. A website can only send you a cookie and hope you send it back--it's completely up to the user if they want to return the cookie. Not to mention you'll have to set a cookie when someone says they don't want any cookies. What a mess.
You have to be careful how you use them. Many green-threaded runtimes convert blocking I/O to non-blocking, but it appears that Go does not. If you have N goroutines blocked on I/O, it looks like Go will use N+1 pthreads to support them; thus a goroutine-per-connection model with blocking I/O is basically the same as the old thread-per-connection model (as used by Varnish or the Apache thread MPM).

This stuff isn't entirely clear to me, so maybe someone from Go land can clarify.
Too much scores for a bunch of generalizations.

Just try to :,$s/your nerd/kid with autism/g and :,$s/project/game/g
NASA Ames Scientist Develops Cell iPhone Chemical Sensor
As a hiring manager, I'll take internship or side-project coding experience over GPA anyday.

Sure, a good GPA is good. But if you back it up with experience, you are ahead.
Are you a "music artist?" It's pretty clear that "music consumers" fare better when you can get everything you want for free.
The questions mentioned in the article don't seem particularly odious. They sound like standard "think-on-your-feet" case-based questions that management consultants and bankers also love. Demonstrating creativity and problem solving grit is more important than producing a correct number.
BillionaireXchange - Online Luxury Auctions
This is why unelected officials shouldn't try to make laws about things they have absolutely no idea about.
Or maybe I should say the ideas of Adam Smith and others on the pursuit of the self interest leading to happiness and wealth are an appealing and interesting notion, but difficult to work "out of the box"?
I tried single letters but didn't think of that.
The Hardest Thing We Do in Business
> I'm sorry but if you think that Gmail earns only

She qualifies it with "a real number?" comment and I think she was wondering if they wanted a "solid number"

> I suspect not at Google though.

I dunno but it's a big corporation now. Anyone can float through such a place without really working hard if they can find the right niche. I don't see why google would be magical or special about this.
Thank you! This is a perfect post-introduction resource.