skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nah, not buying it.

Were the reddit devs aware that they were making those posts? I'm guessing yes, but I'm guessing that easily 50% of those "posters" over at O'Reilly Overflow have no idea what they've been up to.

Were the reddit devs selling their books by posting? (Yes, I understand that Reddit sells stuff, but the posts are not directly linked to selling what they're posting about. That's what makes the O'Reilly site astroturfing.)
PlayClaw: Special free version for Modern Warfare 2
If you're talking about the dark blue part of the graph, that represents currently active oil fields only, so of course it's going to drop starting the day after the graph was made because it's defined to exclude new production capacity!

The light blue apparently represents the expected production from known but untapped fields, so the dark and light blue combined represent current known oil reserves, and don't show any spurious drops.
Would the result still hold for single threaded applications? If so, it is related to something other than locking during sync. It would be reasonable to think that you should get better throughput by batch syncing, as the disk head would trash less.
Interesting that the site is called "Man vs. Debt" and then tries to convince you to buy a guide on how to collect frequent flyer miles. If you are fighting debt, you could just not fly until you have money...
If you define them that way, yes. If instead you define them as:

Delete files in the application's working directory, read files from the application's working directory or public areas, contact websites, read keyboard when this application is the focus, send email.

It isn't nearly as dangerous. Sure, you've still got the computer contacting webistes and sending email, but that isn't a terribly large risk. There is still a need for blacklisting that sort of activity. As far as reading sensitive information, however, as long as working directories are categorized well, and used by any applications dealing with anything sensitive, it isn't a problem.
I fail to see how following the published rules of a frequent flyer system is "hacking it". It is, in fact, the whole point of said system.
Typekit launches
Correct. Or make healthy food taste good. For some reason telling people they can't eat stuff they like and they have to waste an hour a day on a treadmill just doesn't seem to be working.
Forgiving the poor grammar, just let it be known that nearly every point mentioned in this rant against .Net is untrue.
I thought there was value in Stack Overflow until I accidentally visited the site with Adblock turned off.

Now I don't answer questions there anymore.
Apple Breaks Hackintosh Netbooks with Latest Update
Article author seems to be under the misconception that acceptable performance always requires a fully-compiled application (and seems to make decisions by comparing mature battle-tested versions of X to early/initial versions of Y). I don't honestly know what specific domain he's working in, but I do know that the number of domains in which that's true is increasingly tiny.
Google Runs Another 'Ad' On The Home Page For Free WiFi On Virgin America
Agreed. StackOverflow provides tremendous value to the tech community.

However, the idea of charging participants in that community $100 per year for the privilege of having their resumes searchable by employers seems like a bit of a slap in the face.

Especially since the Careers site doesn't even seem to try to distinguish between employers and recruiters.
Here in Austin, TX -- anything is possible. Keen engineering, Waterloo Labs!
Your Coffee Shop Doesn't Use Two-Phase Commit (2005) [PDF]
You could always turn Adblock back on. I think it's fair for them to make some money to support the site.
When Apple f's up - 12 Apple products that failed
Apple Rejects Bobble Rep App
I'm saving up to buy one someday. I'm going to print all kinds of plastic knick-knacks: covers for the tops of my chairs so they don't scratch the wall, an iphone car holder, missing chess pieces, legos, and enclosures for arduino projects.

How about you guys? What would you print?
>> Just because the device says it's a keyboard without "looking" like one, doesn't mean it's suspect.

You forgot the part about its fake USB DEV/PROD ID (masquerading as an Apple keyboard) and the part about trying to send local data to some "masked" URL.
It doesn't seem that bad at all. I don't see any ads actually.
Interesting timing with Copenhagen looming. I'm usually the first person to talk about the potential risks of the oil crisis, but I think think this article is geared more towards the climate change talks than a serious analysis of the oil issues.
I have great respect for the Palantir team, they are bringing an interesting approach to the space, but this post is nonsense full of buzzwords (Operating System, Ontology, Abstraction, and then polishes us off with chit chat about the information age and a non-sequitur graph of the internet from 2003) abused so badly that they ultimately mean nothing in the end. It may as well say "Palantir: a new kind of physics for data analysis" or "a new kind of medicine for data analysis"
There is no such thing as running out of oil. There is only oil becoming more expensive to extract than alternatives.
LabView was used by city ordinance.
You (and Joel Spolsky) are tone blind
In Win95/98 an autorun CD would defeat a password-locked screensaver. We had loads of fun with that...
Paying to post your CV is a fantastic filtering service to provide to companies looking to hire. Resume spam is even worse than email spam. See also Local Bacon for more evidence on this approach.

While they will make money from the people that post CVs, much, much more money will come from the companies that pay to search those resumes. I'm sure they set the price at wherever they expect the best filtering to be. If you value your time at $50 and SO careers saves you 4 hours of job searching every 2 years, it's worth it. If it finds you a job that pays you $.05 more an hour, it's worth it. It's underpriced because CV owners aren't the primary customers.

About the decoys, the $99 regular price isn't a decoy. They're offering the $29 plan because they need a critical mass of CVs to make it useful to companies looking for talent. They're sharing $268 of their value to early adopters as recognition that the first people in make the service more valuable. Once they have lots of CVs they're in a stronger position and don't need to discount anymore. Simple business economics.
He had a follow up.

I kid 'em, but I truly am super-happy for "Shit My Dad Says."
Seems disingenuous to front like YOU wouldn't be thrilled by the same offer.

http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/status/5590745881

I think he is correct that the tweets are somewhat fabricated, but also right that this is cool to see a twitterer get a tv deal.
Cross-platform I'll grant, though most of the malicious things you'd do with a keyboard are not cross-platform.

A CD most certainly can pretend to be a keyboard, though. Autoplay is arbitrary code execution, and arbitrary code execution can do anything.
Wonderful! My stupid first-gen EEE pc with XP finally has a use other than coffee cup coaster (Because it gets so damn hot it can keep my coffee warm.)

On another note, Amazon apparently just gave me a free Kindle. Sweet. Does this mean that they actually had no intention of making money on the device itself, it was all about selling books without having to stock and ship them?
Yep, not news unless they have the exact same contract that I will if I sign up.
They wouldn't have made it if they couldn't make a living off of it. Relax.
Merlin is actually correct about the Beatles. Yoko's behavior is identical to someone who wanted the band to break up. She was obsessed with Lennon for years before they hooked up. And, her art is shit.

Following his tumblr, I'd say he celebrates beatles awesomesauce at least as often as criticizing Yoko.
The Zombie Game Experiment - Story Panels and AI
sockpuppet alert:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=insomniamedia
The screen was clear enough. It had a field for username and a field for password, then the word "OR", then a field for the code. I did the right thing the first time, except for mistyping the code.

I agree that error-correcting the code is needless and probably even a bad idea. But a correct error message ("Your prepaid code is wrong") would have been easy and foolproof.
Isn't Iran free of immaterial rights laws?
Ah, okay. That context makes it seem more nudge-and-wink. Thanks for following up!
They aren't TOTAL idiots; they learned their lesson from Ehrlich's bet with Julian Simon.
A patent is a privilege.

I have a right to make a living and there are finite ways to do so, if my right to make a living is blocked by others privileges then we don't have much of a free society.

Privileges are directly opposed to rights.
Either we have all have rights or some have privileges.
The real argument is about what kind of society we want to have.
There's phpmyfaq which looks more like the specific tihng you have in mind, but I really think a wiki is a better idea.

Mediawiki is the best choice if you don't need to do funny stuff like setting up closed groups.

But like jacuesm said, the trac wiki is also nice but only if you intend to use the other trac capabilities IMO.
Are you suggesting that a society without patents would immediately devolve into something like Iran ?
Yet another SO clon.
Spolsky has said that every job that gets posted requires the company name, ditto for companies using Careers. Ergo, it's no use to recruiters because they can go around the posting straight to the company. He (correctly) believes that recruiters destroy value for job seekers and companies and keep markets from working.

About the slap in the face, it's necessary to filter out bad developers who won't get value from posting their CV. The best price isn't always free.
3 valuable lessons from a startup that didn't make it
>I think, however, that it wouldn't be too hard to come up with some practical solutions rather than encourage subconscious intentional failure.

Your hubris knows no limits!
Are Google employees being discouraged from using Python for new projects?
Gonna have to disagree with you there. I'm a fan both of Yoko's art and her music. Lennon wouldn't have reached the peaks he did both as a later Beatle and as a soloist were it not for her avante-garde influence. Plastic Ono Band owes so much to her. And her music is brilliant. Even her latest stuff, in her late 70s, is raw and piercing and occasionally beautiful.

Meanwhile, she gave Lennon peace and happiness for the last ten years of his life. She was the one who mended his more tortured aspects, calmed him down, gave him a reason to live. People call her a she-devil, but she made John happy. Even if she did nothing else of value, that alone made her role a meaningful one.
Apple's not impervious to failure, believe it or not
How good can support for FREE software be?
Avoiding upfront costs helps lengthening the startup's runway, even if total cost until time=infinity is higher.

Building fault-tolerance (like S3/EBS do) is a HARD problem. That's worth paying for.

Once you move your data to the cloud for reliability, you almost have to move the processing close to the data to get acceptable performance.
I'm mostly against top-down regulations like this. They rarely solve the problem and make other problems.

But HTTP cookies are a horrible hack mostly created to by-pass the problems of stateful sessions with a stateless protocol. HTTP needs fixing or perhaps something on top of it. The current state is a disgrace.

It's not OK advertising groups track people's internet use around the world with 1x1 pixels and all those tricks. And never mind the evil Adobe tracking people with Flash, those are even worse and much harder to delete from your computer.

There are just too many poorly implemented web services using ridiculous amounts of large cookies. People run into problems because of the 8KB HTTP header limits in Apache and 16KB in IIS. Also I've worked for a large dotcom using multiple J2EE technologies running out of cookies in IE6/7 (20 max) and losing sales as people couldn't add a check-out/basket cookie.

Programming a cookie-based website preventing session hijacking is quite hard and even major sites had issues. How can you expect people less competents like mom-and-pops shops and banks to be secure?

This problem needs a proper solution from standards and browser vendors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#Drawbacks_of_cookie...
Typekit is an excellent service. It allows designers to accomplish some awesome clean looking designs.

Example: http://bobulate.com/
Consuming XMPP PubSub in Ruby
Jeff, Greg and Ryan (3/4s of Typekit) spent a year redesigning Analytics after Google bought Measure Map.

Jeff once said that -- using the Analytics APIs they had access to -- Greg and Ryan basically prototyped a fully working version of Analytics as we know it today in a/b a month. It then took the remaining 11 months of them working with Goog engineers, PMs, etc. to get the thing out the door.

They're an amazing team and I'm looking forward to following along w/ the success of Typekit.
Cool video. I can't tell if it's fake or not… On one hand, I don't see how they would risk a Formula 1 car with that kind of stunt.

On the other hand, well… there isn't anybody in it! (and it's probably not a big deal to develop for a Formula One engineering team)
From what I've heard through some channels, if Netflix accepted the deal of delaying 30 days on a DVD rental, they'd be making those rentals available on-demand from their website immediately after that 30 day waiting period. If this is true, it sounds like a reasonable deal to me.
thanks - that looks really promising.
Sure, it's great for companies filtering out resume spam but how about individuals trying to avoid recruiter spam?

And beside, really good engineers are never short of good offers.

It's standard operating procedure in our industry that when a manager or even a dev leaves, they always try to take the best engineers from their past job with them.

If it's not your first job out of school and you have to rely on throwing your CV in a black hole like SO Careers or Monster and hope to get offers from strangers you're doing something very wrong.
…several orders of magnitude faster (5-7 times) – which leaves one wondering if he doesn't understand the term, or doesn't realize that most people use base10 arithmetic.
Agree! Sometimes you won't get that good performance with compiled applications. C Programmers really have to know how the machine works to get good performance in a real-life project. On the other hand, JVM is great at optimizing and its performance has been improved very well over the last few years.
SEO Best Practices - Correlation Testing
I had to think about this paper a bit. While it does describe some interesting ideas, nothing mentioned here will get past properly escaping input. That is, if you use DBI's quote method or parameterized queries in Perl or PHP's mysql_real_escape_string function or whatever is appropriate in your language and MySQL library then you'll be okay.

Does that seem correct?
We have used http://kbpublisher.com/
It's pretty clean and powerful.
Good startup ideas
Recently I posted the question "What is your best startup idea" on Hacker News. I combined most of the responses plus a few I found lying around the web and put them in an easy-to-read format. If anyone has any additional suggestions for startup ideas, please put them in the reply, and I’ll add them manually, either on Hacker News or my blog entry.

Also, if anyone wants to put any of these ideas into fruition, there are two hacker-style events you can go to:
3 day startup - http://www.3daystartup.com/
Hacker codejam - http://www.meetup.com/hacker-codejam (this one is my personal meetup)

And if you can, please help spread word about this in the hacker community. IE: facebook/twitter/email/blogs/whatever . I’m trying to gain some grass-roots momentum for my meetup.

- IMDB, but for government - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/imdb_government.txt

- StumbleUpon for iPhone Apps. - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/stumble_upon_for_iphone.txt

- GPS + Digital Photos - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/gps_digital_photos.txt

- Social network for chance encounters - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/social_chance.txt

- Wikipedia for genealogy - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/genealogy.txt

- Online dating site, but from a different perspective - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/online_dating.txt

- Community problem solving - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/community_problem_solving.txt

- Open source credit scores and history - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/open_source_credit_scores.txt

- Reverse Ebay: Want to buy XYZ - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/reverse_ebay.txt

- Facebook + Craigslist - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/facebook_craigslist.txt

- Who looks like ME? - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/who_looks_like_me.txt

- Website for sharing startup ideas - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/website_sharing_ideas.txt

- Touch screen restaurant menu - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/touchscreen_restaurant.txt

- Location based gaming - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/location_based_gaming.txt

- Top-Ten List - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/top_ten.txt

- Dynamic podcasts for reading material - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/podcast_for_reading_material.txt

- Website for selling websites - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/website_sales.txt

- Real estate aggregator - http://www.tripperjones.com/stuff/startup_ideas/real_estate_aggregator.txt
The server's falling down, but that looks beautiful, and quite useful.
In my experience, you can never rely on everybody knowing something. Every piece of assumed knowledge is a stumbling block for someone and will result in lost sales.
See another comment of mine on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933490

Plus, if you're resume isn't remarkable, you might have to do some crappy work to build it up. Life's rough, but if you want something, there's no better way to get it than to earn it.
How exactly does willingness to pay $100 correlate to developer ability?

Edit: and it's funny that Spolsky would complain about recruiters when that's exactly when he's trying to become on a larger scale.

A middleman by another name would smell so foul...
Ask HN: What was your pre-launch/launch experience like?
For those of you who launched websites, what was your experience like?

I'm looking for something like: "about a week before the launch emailed a bunch of blogs, out of the 100 we contacted, 12 wrote stories on us, those 12 stories brought about 12,000 users over the course of 1 week. Out of those 12,000 users, 1,000 ended up being permanent users.
Saul Klein talks on Seedcamp’s present, past and future
Verizon Droid Sells 100,000 Units At Launch
I don't believe anything in these articles says that peak oil isn't a reality, they only push back the peak. The only thing that could refute peak oil is confirmation of abiotic oil production. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

Off topic: [E]ngineers at Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) have applied for a patent on a new method of extracting shale oil cheaply and cleanly.

How is this different from granting a patent on software that extracts data cheaply and cleanly?
If she accelerated the breakup by even a month, her artistic worth is net negative. But let's agree to disagree on this inappropriate forum.
Geeking with Greg: Scary data on Botnet activity
It's true the original GC for .NET was amazingly bad, so much so that the project I was on at Microsoft deliberately used indexes into big arrays of structs (rather than real object references) for long-lived server state. But surely they've been working on it. GC even has the potential to be faster than manual heap management simply because any number of dead objects can be reclaimed in zero cycles.

I don't understand why he's rejecting C and C++ as unsafe yet using Delphi. Doesn't that also have pointer arithmetic and casts and dangling references?
I'm a startup guy.  Are you?
->"About the slap in the face, it's necessary to filter out bad developers who won't get value from posting their CV."

The willingness to pay $100 to post your resume could just as easily correlate to lower ability since someone who can't find a job through any other avenue might be willing to pay for additional exposure to employers.
Open Innovation Marketplace - marketplace for challenging problems
Having a fake relationship with someone on flickr, a tutorial.
...Yet both Delphi and C# were designed by the same guy (Anders Hejlsberg), and thus much of the learning from Delphi was able to influence C# (and the CLR).
I don't think headers scrolling off the screen is a significant problem for anyone; all you need do is hit the HOME button and you're right back at the top.

Actually, a bigger problem is wanting to follow a link in the middle of a long story after you finished the story. Maybe people should copy links that appear within a story at the top or bottom of the page so a reader doesn't have to go scrolling back through the story to find it again.
The terms "introvert" and "extrovert" are very misused. It just measures how much you like being around other people.

I know many introverts with very good social and emotional skills. Likewise, I know many extroverts who are terrible in this regard.
Trivially true, but not necessarily helpful. No one is suggesting that dwindling oil supply means we'll be going back to pre-industrial technology levels (well, no one sane, at least). The concern is potential economic shocks due to large increases in the relative price of oil and, by extension, oil-derived goods including anything that requires long-distance shipping.

It's a legitimate concern, but probably overblown. With a sufficient range of alternatives, the inevitable price increases are likely to be gradual and steady, giving plenty of time to adjust. Anybody heavily dependent on cheap transportation is probably still screwed in the mid-to-long term, but at least they'll have time to fail gracefully rather than crash and burn overnight.
There is also oil which requires more energy to extract than it contains (beyond which you'd only do it because you need some energy stored in liquid form).
My antivirus is that I usually boot my MacBook to Ubuntu. For both Ubuntu and OS X I stay up to date with security updates. And hope for the best.
Yep. Unfortunately, this is becoming more and more true. Typical computer users just don't know the difference between "safe computer use" and "unsafe computer use."

It's the same as human viruses. If you do things that are safe, you dramatically reduce your chances of infection.
Cell size and scale
This was a magnificently interesting article when first posted, but note that it is now over a year old.
> It's no different than top executives at public (public as in stock listed, rather than gov't owned) having to disclose their compensation packages.

Except it is different in that _all_ employees are listed by name with their salary. A lowly Programmer Analyst II has no ability to determine anyone's salary, much less his own, yet is listed by full name.

Granted, I have worked in government and seen first hand that when leadership changes, suddenly there are a ton of new hires (all the friends of the new leader), so this kind of tool could be useful to make sure these new hires aren't paid over-generously. It seems like that duty could be handled by an internal auditing agency, which would have access to individual names, whereas the public would just see the range/mean/stddev for each position title.
Hmmm... can you give some arguments?