skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh. There are social signals that are important, and then there are ones that we should really be able to strip away once we've mutually acknowledged that we're "switching protocol" to a version of socializing that doesn't require it. Many things can be included in this, from saying "god bless you" when someone sneezes, to buying one another birthday presents. As long as you realize that you've already communicated the knowledge that the social signaling mechanism was supposed to convey, you can drop the signal itself.

Of course, this is for the nerds who tend to over-analyze social situations for fear of screwing them up; there are also the kind who just have no idea what is considered "normal" behavior in the first place, so they don't have enough information to even choose to obey or disobey social mores. In the latter case, I'd advise "critical people-watching" to figure that kind of thing out; your nerd will then likely transition to the over-analyzing type once they have this large, novel corpus to pattern-recognize over.
The Google Android of the Smartgrid: openPDC
The original story (which I came across a few days ago on a mailing list; even the link in the article is a redirect through macnn.com to groklaw.net... ugh):
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091111094923390

To be fair, this isn't a patent on sudo. It's a patent on elevating privileges when the requested action cannot be performed at the current permissions level. sudo does not do this to my knowledge.

If I run 'rm -rf /' as a normal user, sudo doesn't interject itself into the process and say, "I see you're trying to perform something that needs root privs. Please enter an admin password: ". Though there is probably plenty of prior art for such a thing (e.g. MacOSX).
I've always felt that as an engineer I don't know how to handle or maneuver through office politics.
No, they didn't. I'm not even going to bother digging up the (slightly) better Groklaw article (and its HN thread) that this blogger is simply editorializing; I'm just going to tell you that it exists, and flag this article.
There was a similar effort in the US in the summer of 2001.

We all know now what happens when a plane crashes.
59% sounds quite high for a trial with so few conversions. How long do you think a user will take to run out of trial?
Google has proven that a company can succeed by innovating and being nice to customers... why don't more be like them!? Well hopefully Google drives them out of business.
"Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

-- Saint Francis of Assisi
As outcasts, they had to lower their need for social contact.

In the days of my youth, nerds often were trapped in a high-school society that had no need for them at all, other than as targets. Many nerds only recognize the grown-up version of society as a continuation of this. To many, it's all just a system of oppression. The "cave" that they construct around them at work is just a refuge in the storm.

Note the highly escapist nature of many nerd pastimes. For many, programming is itself of of these.

I think the nurturing of a nerd to sociability has to do with power relationships. I think the problem is releasing a nerd from his enclosed "cave" into a larger world of social interaction, without unleashing his/her potential for tyranny. It's like contacting a race of fierce equestrienne nomads.

Do: Open trade relations. Mutual exchange & benefit! Gradually.

Don't: Open a breach in the wall and have the barbarian hordes pour through. (The charge can happen in both directions!)
New Dropbox Features
BTW, there are also a number of other differences - below is a quick list:
- Type of data: One of things we do is combine a number of different datasets (16+ M businesses, points of interest, intersections, etc...)
- Query type: You get very powerful expressiveness in the types of queries you do. You can literally make a request for 'Japanese restaurants that are within 1 mile and that are open at 10pm.'
- Media layers: For most entities, you can get media layers such as Twitter and Flickr. For example, you can get tweets around the mission (http://api.geoapi.com/v1/e/mission-san-francisco-ca/view/twi...). We're adding more layers as we go.
- UserView: Each developer gets a private namespace into which they can add information and run geo queries on it. Basically, you can annotate the world with close to zero effort.
A rule of thumb I think may actually work for helping tech people evaluate stock options:

Take the percentage you probably think you're worth, and divide it by 10.

Is 5% a "good" number? Well, YC takes 6%. If the company had to choose between you and YC, would it be almost a coin-flip?

That said: the number one rule of stock options valuations for employees (not founders) of private companies:

The numbers don't mean anything. The company can succeed wildly and still ratchet you back to any level they'd like. Every round of funding is going to rewrite the terms, and so will the acquisition. The exceptions to these rules occur mostly in cases where "employee #2" stock options are so clearly and inherently valuable that you won't care about the specific number.
They're definitely on to something with the eyes. I don't scare easily, but any vaguely hominid-shaped creature with big eyes gives me a visceral feeling of fright. The vertical slit has an affect, too. I think most people have this same reaction.

Another example of this which I don't think they cite in the article would be modern alien abduction mythology. Most of the renderings and conceptual drawings of them portray beings with enormous black eyes (also slanted in the same fashion as the rendered neanderthals in parent article).

Having said this, there are also many modern animals that, when shown snarling in the same manner as they portray these neanderthals, would be equally terrifying, I think.
as someone new to HN (signed up earlier but started to heavily use recently), this is not the type of article I come to HN for. But i find myself attracted to them because they are easy to comment on and build rep on. and a kind of rep waterhole forms. So I am being incentivized to participate in something that lessens its value to me so that i can participate more in it.
I made a very significant amount of money in the '90s on a startup acquisition where I had not a whole lot more than this person did. I think:

* Very few people, founders or otherwise, really make a lot of money on startups

* Single-digit percentage equity grants are actually huge, regardless of how small they look when you write them down on paper.
JQuery and Google Analytics Event Tracking
I wouldn't limit it to homeless people. Babies, really really old people, and other all-around uncool people still do not possess iPhones. And it's good that way, I wouldn't feel so exclusive with my iPhone if my baby sister had one too.
Well, myspace had traction and users.
My girlfriend is also a nerd, but she's an Alt-Folky/Literary nerd. She's as different from me as we both are to mainstream people. We are both shy in many ways, though. It's kind of a miracle we got it together at all.
Links of london, Links London Silver Jewelry
Not in the popularly accepted definitions.
True - but, what seems to be a pretty common (almost universal) thread amongst successful startup entrepreneurs, is that unlike us employees, they don't always have the luxury of being ivory-pure. They push the limits.

And, if you notice in the story - the entrepreneur delivered - his mouth wasn't writing checks that his (coding) fingers couldn't cash. He came through. So, in my books, he _was_ an iPhone Cocoa whiz.

Great Story!
Developers vs iphone
They don't do this because customers have proven that they will flock to subsidized phones with unfavorable contracts. Verizon needs to protect itself from people who might sign up for a nice phone, then try to drop the contract, netting them a new phone for up to 100% off.
What If You Could Recreate Live Performances By Dead Artists On A Computer?
What is so special about Google Go?
I hear what you are saying, but I dislike that it often seems normal and expected for entrepreneurs to be unethical.
there are also many modern animals that, when shown snarling in the same manner as they portray these neanderthals, would be equally terrifying, I think.

In person, yes. But in a picture? That's unusual for me.

I thought the snarl was overdone. Just the big eyes and vaguely human (yet alien) form was enough

I intuitively like the idea that another intelligent tool-wielding species put pressure on humans to evolve. I have no idea of the likelihood of the claim, but it would explain the sudden changes in our species in the last 100K years or so.
Definition of a "Gentleman Computer Scientist":

A man who knows how to write a new programming language
But then doesn't!

Definitions applying to the female gender left to other posters.
The point of Emacs and Vim is that they are programmable. If something is annoying, you have not programmed one correctly yet.
I think methane hydrates had a lot to do with it:
http://www.amazon.com/When-Life-Nearly-Died-Extinction/dp/05...
Why I'm not very excited about Go
You have to go pretty far out of your way to have an OS update render your user data inaccessible.
Also thinking out loud (out type?)

I agree with some of it... you'd need to keep track of the the location of each player on the x-axis and y-axis, momentums, etc... Additionally you'd want to keep track of the "visible" actions. For example, if the human hits the soft punch button, you can see the fist cocking before the punch. Similarly for other actions.

This gives you various points in the state space. The way I see doing this is:

1) Make the continuous variables discrete. You need enough granularity to have good responses of course...

2) Use genetic programming to pick reactions in each state. However, the reaction in each state is not a single action but a probability distributions over various actions (move left, move right, jump, punch, kick, etc...).

The randomness is key. I spent some time talking to a guy who plays in tournaments and he said that the absolute worst thing you can do is get into a cycle or become predictable.
Geeks get things done. Bill Gates for example, is a geek.

Nerds are introverted losers and don't do jack squat. They're a bunch of nobodies with no social skills and don't have what it takes to be successful in today's society. So, the only way the can adapt is to isolate themselves in front of their computer screens posting their worthless opinions on message boards and the like to avoid humiliation.

Oh yeah, and the people that insult me due to this (fine) post are just insecure.
SPDY: A new web protocol in the future?
I'm talking about unpopular business practices, like purposely making it so easy to be charged $1.99.
My sense of self-esteem is tied to who I allow to take exploit me. Which is really just a proxy for wealth.
However, in practice the language itself is not worth much outside academia unless it comes with a solid library

So you have to become popular enough to get a large enough community to broadly implement lots of libraries. This means the language can't be too innovative. It has to be Blub++. A lot of the old baggage of the older languages will be carried forward due to cultural expectations.

Isn't this just how human beings work, though? Isn't this exactly what we should expect given how people work?
The internet is becoming a market place, that's been accepted for a long time. Rules and regulations don't follow far behind in any market, either they're imposed by a seller consortium or by a government.

These rules usually cause problems to innovation in one way or another (usually by increasing the cost to enter the market), however they inevitably end up appearing.

Personally I'm unsure if they'll be for better or worse, but ultimately I see it as inevitable. Although I also believe they'll likely only ever be applied to large companies, so there will always be potential for scams just as organized crime manages to money launder through legitimate small businesses, there'll be many shady things performed with small online companies.
In that case you don't need YC, YC needs you!
Right. Well, I'm real sorry you decided to get married early and have children, but don't take it out on those of us who know what's really going on in this world.
Clojure has a few different concurrency mechanisms. Agents are useful for asynchronous manipulation of mutable state while refs allow for coordinated synchronous changes. Atoms allow uncoordinated synchronous access to state while vars act as mutable storage locations on a per thread basis.

Between these, you get four different strategies for dealing with concurrency. Depending on your problem, you can choose the most efficient mechanism. Rather than shoehorning you into a particular strategy, Clojure gives a you a toolbox for dealing with concurrency and lets you chose what makes the most sense.
bad title, I know - and you mangled it further, but still, +1 from me.
I guess I got that sense from this excerpt from the transcript:

I really hated that the comparison to Twitter. I think, if I were to do a new start up or a different company, I would pick it in an area where there wasn’t such good competition, determined competition. I think there is definitely different levels of start ups and Twitter was definitely (laughs) a good start up, and it's really hard to compete or be compared to.

I don't feel like Twitter was anywhere close to a sure thing at that point - Twitter was having tons of scaling problems, people weren't sure that 140 characters would be enough (files? links? other metadata?) and there were loads of competitors that were looking like likely takeovers. Pownce would've been in the running had they run with it; I distinctly remember looking at Pownce and really liking it, but the desktop client experience was poor and I pretty much ditched it after the first few days.
Because people are stupid and Facebook gets thousands of page hits by the same people daily, generally by morons who barely got past typing "face book" into google. Techcrunch users have likely been around on the internet for a long time and know these things are scams without being ripped off.

There's thousands of warnings about spam scams and phishers, everyone who read techcrunch or similar sites likely knew they were scams on the first email they ever received of the nature.
I'm fully with you on that one. I think the most interesting part is going to be creating a usable state space and reactions.
Muchas gracias por esto. Puedo practicar mi español mientras leyendo uno de mis blogs favoritos.

Pero, yo espero que Ángel no se traduce los posts sobre los Yankees. Puedo vivir sin ellos. :-P
Geeks/Dorks get things done. Bill Gates for example, is a geek.
Nerds are introverted losers and don't do jack squat. They're a bunch of nobodies with no social skills and don't have what it takes to be successful in today's society. So, the only way the can adapt is to isolate themselves in front of their computer screens posting their worthless opinions on message boards and the like to avoid humiliation.

Oh yeah, and the people that insult me due to this (fine) post are just insecure.
>The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site.

If you don't want the character of the site to change then don't allow new users to vote. It annoyed me on StackOverflow at first, but now I see the wisdom in it.
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I think I misread your post a little. I was thinking of it in the abstract -- is the choice between self-actualization or misery -- and that seemed too extreme.

But you are right, the OP is in a lot of pain right now. And I myself have the same fears as the OP, and even taken the route that the poster wonders about, of taking time off to do some wildly impractical and creative things. It taught me a lot about myself.

I don't have a family at the moment, so it's a lot easier for me. I'm not sure what the solution is, for him, but it could just be downshifting rather than a clean break. Or, maybe he thinks he needs to do something radical.
Warren Buffett: investor extraordinaire
It is great fun to use CouchDB and knowing more about the creator is great and makes it better. That was a great one. The honesty in the story was amazing and it was one of the most inspiring things I have seen. Damien Katz you are victorious.
Someone else already wrote that, so it's not my problem.

If you want to use C for your "type I virtual machines", great. But stop writing music players and web browsers in it.
Latest Hot US Issues: Doyenne Define
Cdecl: C gibberish English
Versioning MySQL data
A pretty bad idea for a contest. Mass-scraping twitter gives a clear advantage for those who know the right people and an awful waste of time for everyone else. The last one was cool. I want to do the last one again.
Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans
The Perfect Crime, the perfect alibi: My Facebook Status
About 90% of the time in the better Smalltalk implementations, you can tell the debugger to forget the last few stack frames, or jump back to the "start" of the current one. Nearly unfettered replay-ability is almost as good as stepping backwards.
How Engineers Should Interact
Hey, I posted a little bit before in response to someone else, where I criticized someone else for overdramatizing the problem. But, don't get me wrong, I totally understand your problem and am wrestling with it right now.

Five years ago, I got imported into the Valley from a distant land, and I jumped at the chance because I thought I'd be doing something significant. As of today, nothing like that has ever materialized at the workplace. I'm not totally embarrassed about the things I've worked on, but I'm not really proud either.

Instead I found real satisfaction in side projects and in things which were utterly terrifying for me (building physical objects, also leading a project doing same). It did teach me something about myself and set me on a modified path. But it's still a huge struggle.

I have no formula, but I have a partial method.

Try to get yourself in a state where you can listen to the little voices in your head which want to do certain things. No matter how impractical. Your frustration is, in part, being caused by your automatic rejection of these ideas before they even become fully conscious. Use long showers, Bach, favorite ingestibles, whatever it takes. This might take years if you do it on your own; maybe someone else can help with this process. Guided meditation or something.

Wait for the ideas and visions to present themselves.

Consider, without passion, the reasons why you could never, ever do those things.

Then figure out the thing you're most terrified of and try to do that. It can be something limited in scope, but you have to hit the essential problem head on.

For me it worked like this. I had always defined myself as a geek who could not lead or inspire others. I'm not charismatic at all, quite the opposite. So I naturally shelved any plans which I couldn't do on my own. But I found other ways to lead a project. It turns out that at least some people are willing to get on board with a good idea, as long as you're executing well, even if you aren't Brad Pitt.

That was my mental block, fear of social inadequacy. What's yours?
Am I misunderstanding that video, or is Pincus admitting to distributing malware and spam? On camera? In front of an audience?

Do these guys have legal advisers, or are they just winging it?

That's a serious question by the way, I am not trying to be a smart ass. Aren't there lawyers that tell them hey, you are not allowed to distribute even solicited malware?

As an aside, about 8 months ago I was party to a conversation on the subject of investing in a Facebook social gaming company. One of the investors made a snide comment that I didn't really understand at the time. He said he'd save his money to invest in an internet company that was in a more respectable industry . . . like porn.

This guy is in a fairly conservative investing circle, so you can imagine what a damning comment that was. I'm starting to get an idea of the research that led him to that conclusion.
Votebox seems to be an innovative concept, seems to be much better than systems used by for example Google communicating with users/developers. I'm speaking from experience as a developer, it would be nice to see this concept applied to API development/feature requests.

Also, nice use of the word janky.
I sent the link to my wife before I even finished the article.

Should be good for my marriage - I think.
The Hidden Health Benefits of Massage
Me neither! And I'm a pretty technically savvy person. What a disgrace. Where in the universe is it written that certain industries (mobile phones, used cars, health insurance) will be overrun by sleazebags?..
YouTube playback in 1080p HD
Its great to see such a large-scale site offering streaming video at such a high resolution, but people seem to be forgetting about bit rates. As a result, the "HD" nomenclature loses its meaning.
Myspace appears to be fading for us all...but what is taking it's place.

Please lern hau two spell you're vary furst sentince.
You mean you think someone could take significant users away from Facebook? It's hard to see how Facebook can lose out, this generation at least. People seem to like using the internet that way, and all their friends are there.

Maybe the next generation, who grows up watching their parents using Facebook, will think of it as boring and passe, and there will be room for someone else. What happened when people starting liking Japanese cars, and American cars just started to seem big and ugly and crappy.

Unless Facebook screws it all up (still could happen I guess).
Experiment HN: Idea Day Results
Alright folks. Idea day deadline has finally been reached, so let's hear the three (or more) problems/frustrations/annoyances you experienced/overheard/observed today with possible solutions!

This is in reference to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937032 for those who are confused.
Running Google Analytics with no javascript for a mobile site, powered by python
It's sort of a sparse, more formal takeoff on meta.stackoverflow.com.
Ask HN:How many LOC is/was your simplest useful application?
Ask HN:How many LOC is/was your simplest application?
German paper claims to be blocking iphone based browsers to force app purchase.
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/europes-biggest-newspaper-decides-the-iphone-browser-isnt-welcome/

Im torn. A part of me thinks this is quite a smart idea, yet the rest of me thinks this is quite a stupid idea. I guess it is a fine line.

Curious to see what others think.

1) I build a site.

2) I then build a iphone app to integrate into the site.

Would it not be best, to perhaps have a page explaining limitations of the web app for an iphone user. ( ie mouseover events )

Personally I think they could have done this better, yet I do to a point like where it could lead.
If you don't have the background in it, I suggest you begin to educate yourself in market cap projections and break-even analysis.

You need to know 1.25% of what. 1.25% of a 50,000,000 company is $650,000; nothing to sneeze at, but not a massive pay day by any means. Especial with taking the risk of 1/2 salary for an extended period of time.

Second, you need to know the projection on when you will level off on salary to return to market. If it is a year no big deal, but what if it is five years.

You need to weigh this level off period against the percentage of market cap projection and see if you are comfortable with the numbers.