skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it right to call yourself a Hacker?
Ok, so someone comes up to you and asks you these seemingly simple questions: "So what do you do? What are you?" Oh boy! You think about it for a bit. Software Engineer? Well, you're a programmer and you write business apps, but you've also played with assembly and know what O-notation is... so not quite. Computer Scientist? Well, you also know a lot about computer networks, and you've modded your computer on multiple occasions (you've used a soldering iron)... so not quite. You also know your way around a Linux box. So what the heck do you call yourself, without being self-limiting or bombastic about it? I want to reply, "Well, I'm a hacker" - because the term is somewhat all encompassing (and the term "geek" makes me think of someone with no life outside of computers). But isn't it kind of pompous to claim that you're a "hacker?" Is it a term you should self-apply? What do you guys think?

"Now, 'Dude', there's a name no man would self-apply where I come from. But then there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense..."
'For example: contra the article's claims, "affect" can be a noun...'

Technically true, but...

http://web.ku.edu/~edit/affect.html

'"Affect" as a noun. Forget it; you're in journalism, not psychiatry (though you might wind up in therapy). "Affect" as a noun means an emotional state as contrasted to a cognition. "Affect" is a dimension of behavior rather than a separate segment of it. "Affect" is thus experienced at the same time that perception, performance and thought are going on. (See, I told you to forget it!)'
Interestingly, I'm told one reason Goldman survived the crisis and came out on top is that their IT is excellent [1]. They invented their own dataflow programming language, which they use in most of their trading systems.

When the crisis hit, various higher ups were able to see their risk profile, run various scenarios, all in a matter of hours. I.e., the CEO could say "what if X happens", run the global system, and he would see the combined impact of X across ALL divisions.

In contrast, Citigroup simply does not have access to that information.

[1] Another reason is that their focus on short term profits meant they were not holding many bad assets at the wrong time (most mortgage products have long maturity times).
The Death of the PC
21 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade
For key-value stores, probably. For document stores with richer functionality, probably not.
Anal? It's the damn close button! I'm all for bending and breaking UI guidelines if it's useful - but not when it comes to something as fundamental as a close button.
It's not just Twitter. http://twittercism.com/twitter-growth-nov-09

Is it "Social Networks"?
CYAEngineering is just good sense in some places, though I'd rather say, "When the shit hits the fan, make sure you're not standing in front of it."

Strategic Helplessness Development - where someone can't do what they don't want to.
Can't talk for the other NoSQL players, but for Redis this is more or less impossible since the key-value business is something like 10% of the current API. How to cover the other 90%?

Maybe in the future Redis may be able to listen in another port to talk the memcached protocol, but this is not an high priority feature for now.

What I think people should do is to abstract the interaction with the DB in their code. So that it's just a matter of writing adapters to support new KV stores, and this adapters can take advantage of peculiarities in specific stores.

For instance if using Redis one can use Redis Sets to take the list of friends. When using something different will serialize data as JSON, and so forth.
IBM and Oracle make a lot of money providing services around products that are <i>mostly</i> open source.
Google’s Big December Code Freeze
Centuries-Old Planetary Mystery Solved With Cassini Data
Possibly, but that's not the only way forward.

The emails talk about shareholder investment; if that is the case they can pre-sale while they are building the first batch on investor money. This way they get a share of the Xmas market rather than launching in the January sales (always a bad move).

With all that said nothing about DG has shouted "marketing sense" :)

We sell units like that.
Americans take in 34 gigabytes of information a day
Well, yes. But the question was specifically about key-value APIs.
Getting media coverage for your startup: making the pitch
That is the worst description of the halting problem I have ever seen.
T.rex 'little cousin' discovered
Has anyone been Approved for more than $200,000 with EZUnsecured.com?
I used them and got $175,000 but I was hoping I could have gotten more. I saw the Videos on their Website and it looks like some People have gotten more than that - If you got more than $200K please let me know how you did it. My Business is 4 Years Old and my Credit Scores are all over 700. Below is a video I found on them - Just FYI
I thougt it was "Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants" but that could just be my bad memory.
I guess you should normalize for the amount of information that reaches the brain. That way you would get a useful and interesting metric.

That still wouldn't be all that meaningful because we get much more information out of texts than out of a photo or video of the same size.
Happenings at a multinational petroleum firm:

One process writes something to a database table. Another periodically queries it out of a table. This results in an email with a text attachment being generated. The text attachment is then retrieved from the inbox and FTP'd to another server, where a polling process retrieves it, does some processing, and ends up saving something into a database table.

I am not making this up, one distributed system was really put together like this. What's more, this Rube Goldberg monstrosity broke all the time, and when it got fixed, the techie doing the fix was lauded, since he was ensuring this link, which was vitally important to the business, continued to work.
ING to Repay Half of Bailout in Coming Weeks
The only lies about autism and vaccines are coming from the people who fear vaccines. Autism is definitely not something for which risk increases if people are vaccinated. That is about as replicated a finding as medical science has.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2962
Who said anything about autism?
Like many here, I remember when people would eke out all sorts of crazy demos from relatively anemic hardware. I still love the demo scene. All of it, really. From the die-hard retro-grouches with their 68ks and z80s that scoff at all things x86, to the people throwing unadulterated polygon insanity through the most advanced graphics accelerators.
THIS. Or writing raw machine code to a diskette.
This is pretty much par for the course for new drugs and goes a long way toward explaining why we're such an overmedicalized society:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244
The Truth About the Drug Companies
ADD at day job for sure!
The network/distribution architecture.
The link

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=894903

you submitted earlier and just linked back to above.
More specifically, this appears to allow for more general model-checking, as most programming languages do not explicitly work on transitions (some declarative languages can be exceptions).
To Sue or not to sue, that is the question (and is it even possible) iPhone/AT&T
Interesting discussion happening on reddit r/iPhone regarding the possibility of a CA lawsuit against AT&T and Apple
Ask HN: is it ethical to copy ideas from a similar site?
I need the advice of the HN community: a few days ago, a site similar to ours came up with a much nicer web interface and flashy Ajax. It made some shortcomings of our site very clear. So we re-implemented our key page, clearly inspired by this other site.

You can judge for yourself: the site that inspired us is http://www.builditwith.me . Our old page is here: http://fairsoftware.net/publicProjects and our new implementation here: http://fairsoftware.net/startup-ideas-find-co-founders.

I initially tried to contact the author of BuiltItWithMe to see if they would like to share or discuss, but didn't hear back after several days.

I believe in transparency and openness, but I'd really like to hear the opinion of people on HN. What is the right thing to do? I wouldn't want the other guys to believe that we are stealing from them (I'm pretty sure that we aren't, legally speaking). I don't think there should be any hard feelings. Am I just naive? Where do you draw the line, when you hold yourself to higher standards than just "anything goes on the Internet as long as you can get away with it?" Asking for permission doesn't seem practical. What else?

Thanks! (I'm somewhat optimistic based on the recent comments on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989120)
"Computer" used to be a person as well.
Free classified ads in Assam, India
Free classified ads search engine in Assam, India. A free, easy and fast way to find or to place ads in Assam.
I noticed that too, but the author explicitly links to it from his papers section.
It's a big part of why Mac applications are so consistent compared to Windows and Linux, which is a big part of what makes Macs more usable than those other platforms.

So those users might, indirectly, be part of the reason you are using a Mac now.
A 2006 Cochrane review of Tamiflu came to similar conclusions -- based largely on a paper that looked at ten studies, all of them funded by the company [Roche].

This kind of reporting annoys me. It's a logical fallacy that having a stake in the outcome makes your research invalid. And who else is going to fund a study? Nobody without a stake is going to foot the bill.

If the drug is going to be used to prevent death, it seems reasonable to ask whether or not its potentially deadly side effects are outweighed

Quite the opposite. If the patient is likely to die anyway, then side effects be damned. It's time for a "Hail Mary" play. Get the patients past the immediate danger, and sort the rest out later.

The answer may lie in the politics of disease.

Sorry to be political here, but this is exactly what you'll be getting more of when the government starts to dictate how much will be spent on what kind of healthcare. When lobbyists or constituents are pushing for something to be covered, even though they're ignorant or are just interested in profits, the politicians will tilt the rules toward the squeaky wheel rather than rational science.
I remember my first internship. That was in 2001 and we were already talking about how great thin clients were.

Don't forget that in most cases they are still more expensive than regular PC (eeebox at 250 bucks comes to mind). Because you need to have big terminal servers. And Wyse terminals don't come cheap.
The word 'gullible' implies that the ads are meant to take advantage of the user; I think that's an unfair assumption.

Perhaps 'receptive' would be more accurate?
Mostly true. Dead wrong on maps. GPSes are not nearly advanced enough to make maps obsolete, and I'm not sure they ever will be. Maps allow you to gain an overall understanding of an area. Directions will get you where you're going, but you'll never be able to navigate intuitively unless you know the whole area. I still greatly prefer maps to GPSes and often to directions.

Sure, GPSes can provide maps, but GPS are much smaller than any reasonable map, which defeats the whole purpose of getting a wide view of an area.

Also, until GPSes are nearly perfect, there's still the issue of them being wrong or of a road being closed. Maps are very rarely wrong. If you're heading South, you're probably getting further South on the map, but I've had a GPS tell me to head South when the destination was miles to the North, eventually leading to a dead end no where near the destination.
So my startup uses Twitter as an extension of our news aggregator, as another way to distribute links that "go popular" with our users.

Since June, we've kept up our same tweeting frequency and the quality of the stories has even shot up a bit.

But referrals, click-thru's and retweets are down to about half of what they were in August. We were scratching our heads about this for a while. Maybe a lot of the folks living on Twitter over the summer, retweeting our stuff moved on to some shiny new toy once fall hit?
A Gazillion Ways to Test Landing Pages to Increase Conversions
How to form a new business entity
As far as I remember the waterfall model has been taught to us in Software Engineering class in CS undergraduate degree as one of the most effective. Even at that time I felt a little uneasy with it being so highly structured and inflexible. In contrast I have not seen it being used even once where I work. I feel duped.
I only see one sexist comment in this thread - he tries to say something good, but it's obviously paternalistic. (It shouldn't take much reading to find out which one.)

But that's all that I can see. What else has been said here that "pooh-pooh's" female contributions?
Nobody seems to know...
"Of the seventy-eight drugs approved by the FDA in 2002, only seventeen contained new active ingredients, and only seven of these were classified by the FDA as improvements over older drugs. The other seventy-one drugs approved that year were variations of old drugs or deemed no better than drugs already on the market. In other words, they were me-too drugs. Seven of seventy-eight is not much of a yield. Furthermore, of those seven, not one came from a major US drug company."

This is an interesting observation if the claim by drug companies is that they innovate, while the claim by critics of the companies is that they don't innovate much. The source cited in the submitted article appears to be the most reliable source for such an observation. I wonder what a longer time series would look like: was 2002 chosen because it is the most recently reported year (could it be, in 2009?) or because it was an unusual year? What would a longer span of years look like in this regard?
Obama vs Bush foreign policy
Very interesting and exciting. I'd like to see some numbers on lag though, as it seems that WebSocket uses just about the same amount of bandwidth.
Well, it's more than "technically true" if you are writing at all about psychology (and not just psychiatry).

In fact, I just finished reading (a few weeks ago) a lovely book that was largely about affect: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.
So did she prescribe the drug anyway?

Doctors are pressured by patients to prescribe pain killers, anit-biotics, etc. But isn't it up to the doctor to say yes or no?
We had to pay £30 for a change, if I recall correctly...
Outside of Adsense, the great majority of ads I see are ugly Flash banners advertising weight-loss treatments with dubiously verified effectiveness. I don't think it is an assumption, I think it is an observation.

As to the data they collected, that doesn't seem very surprising at all. Firefox users like their Adblock, and Chrome users mostly complain that they don't have Adblock yet.
From the Fallacy of Consumer Choice to Modular Innovation Champions at LeWeb
Why Apple should keep a closer eye on prolific iPhone developers
Indeed I think it is the best analogy, and I have an entire spiel involving how to bake billions of cupcakes with multiple ovens in multiple houses that covers most of the important concepts in high performance computing.
Maybe he just counted syllables.
An toàn thông tin chưa được coi trọng tại Việt Nam
Since a lot of these different data stores have fairly different semantics, I'm not sure how much value there is in trying to create a common set of abstractions in your code.
Again, the DOCTOR prescribe the medicine not the patient. Why would the doctor prescribe unneeded/unnecessary medicine?

I understand the social pressure etc. However, when I go to a doctor I expect him/her to prescribe something that is necessary not just write a script to get me out of the office.

Can much of health care problems be pinned directly on the doctors? I know its unpopular to criticize doctors, but I'm beginning to think that we can only address the health issue by directly confronting the MD's.
Ask HN: Anyone is using a comment system?
I am looking for better management of comments on a current project and I am thinking of integrating either
http:js-kit.com/ or http://disqus.com/ and I am wondering if anyone has any feedback.
Popular Youtube Video Downloading Extension Comes To Google Chrome
I don't think its unethical at all.

I think you did more than most would in trying to contact the buildItWith me guys and that is certainly commendable.

I also don't think there is any confusion between the two products(From a look and feel perspective) so no harm no foul. The internet is filled with people taking "inspiration" from other sites and products. This can be evidenced simply by the number of websites that look like http://www.campaignmonitor.com .
Hi Jeremy, I'm the author of the post. The tests were not conducted locally, but over a real network, albeit a low-latency one. Latency is definitely a key factor, so I'm planning to run some more tests under different network conditions. Thanks for your feedback.
So basically...GTD
Right, I don't believe nor have I ever believed that vaccines cause autism. What I do believe is that the systemic design of the CDC makes it impossible to trust what they say for various reasons.
Honestly, I think your (original) site looks better.

It (updated site) has a similar layout, but that's about it. You didn't copy their look, maybe their layout. But if you asked someone on the street, I doubt there would be any confusion.

edited: in parentheses to clarify
Unfortunately, the weight-loss ads have invaded Adsense too.

I agree that the data isn't surprising, but I don't think the headline should frame it as a slight against IE users.

Also, I think that people overestimate the influence of Adblock, even among Firefox users.
I agree that a comprehensive test would include the optimized scenarios that you mentioned. In this case the intent was to show that even when comparing two extremes - a very unoptimized page and a super-optimized page - the results were not as disparate as we'd expect. Scenarios involving sprites and domain sharding we'd probably expect to fall somewhere in the middle. Thanks for your comments.
Actually this touches on something that I've been thinking about. How do you guys make pretty charts and graphs? I use R to do statistical analysis, but nothing from R ever really looks that good (same with Matlab). Whenever I want to make a pie chart or similar I always end up using Mathematica or Illustrator. Is that normal?
Check out Infochimps - they have a big Twitter data dump.
ClojureQL - SQL DSL for Clojure
Viagra is probably the most heavily marketed drugs in Canada, beside the fact they cannot legally say you need it or even describe what it fixes unless it's in information handed out to your doctor. It doesn't stop it being in prime time adverts that make zero sense and being plastered around sporting events.

Honestly, I don't remember cigarettes being marketed so heavily to the public, which disturbs me greatly about what the pharma companies are intending with viagra and other identical drugs.
Google's Terrible Hiring Question: The Document
Psychiatry Transcription Service
From a philosophical standpoint, I don't think you were wrong to borrow interface ideas.

(I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds to say though, that while copying some of their better ideas, I think you may have also copied some of their worse ideas. The way scrolling works on both sites is very confusing -- your original site was better in that regard. )
The neat thing about this discovery is that it's the discovery of a new species, older than the infamous T-Rex.

Another (slightly more detailed) article: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/print/705350658/Dinosaur-...

"Little cousin" from the bbc headline is probably an inaccurate description of the Tawa Hallae . . . more like 15 million year-old ancestor of the T-Rex.
When other people call you a "Hacker", then you are a "Hacker".... until then you are a "Software Developer".
Ultimate Edition 2.5 - Ubuntu with Extras has been released
Why not do more, much more, with mashups? Patapage's raison d'être
This is fascinating.

Why didn't TC & these guys set up a legal person in which to jointly conduct their business?

Or was TC just effectively the marketer for this company?
It would be helpful to know what sort of ad network was being used, in terms of the content of the ads (teeth-whitening vs. mainstream advertisers) and what sorts of targeting/segmenting (if any) was done based on variables like domain/location, browser and OS type, etc.

As for whether Microsoft users are more gullible, I think the limitations of IE and the demographic profile of its users relative to Firefox and Chrome could explain this trend.

My hypothesis: Microsoft users are more likely to be using older flavors of IE, which do not have as good ad-blocking support or extensions to disable rich media ads.

Even on new versions, users may not know how to find or configure the pop-up blocker. In IE8, it's under Tools>Pop-up blocker>pop-up blocker settings. This generates an options window whose first field is for personal whitelists. That's followed by two checkboxes and a drop-down menu listing different levels of blocking. That's not the kind of thing my mom would spend much time digging around for or setting up if she used a PC (I set her up with a Mac mini years ago to reduce the number of tech support calls).

For those users who do have PCs and are using IE, I believe they are more likely to see these ads than a Firefox or Chrome user, and therefore are more likely to respond to them, simply because they can't or don't know how to disable ads. In other words, it's not so much about gullibility, but rather how tech savvy they are relative to the people who search out and install Firefox and Chrome.
Search Me
It's fine to steal interface ideas. However, I think you took a step backwards in doing so. Yes, what you had wasn't very good. However, what you have now is even worse. Your original implementation was on the right track and just needed some refinement.
I call myself a computer programmer because I program computers. Administration, Theory, Hardware, Engineering, those I consider supporting skills, not the main attraction.
I agree about the scrolling problems. I can't see the entire description for an app because I can't move anything in that panel on the right. I can zoom out to view all the text, but then it's too tiny to read.
Question about a business plan
I am writing the exit strategy for my business plan. The exit strategy for the VC is that it is the intent of the founders to buy out all principle investors after a negotiated period of time. I am just not 100% sure how to word that. If anyone could tell me if what i have is ok, or can help me word it better i would appreciate it. This is what i have so far:

As the founders of X, it is the ultimate intention of Y and Z to buy out all investors of their investments. While it is difficult to put a date on this transaction, we do understand that all principle investors in X would like to make a profit as soon as possible. At a point when the company is capable of showing solid profits, it will be possible for Mr. Y and Mr. Z to line up the resources to pay back the investors. This can be accomplished either through a business loan or through a direct buyout from Mr. X and Mr. Y. The amount of this buyout is clearly negotiable with the primary investors.
I'm wondering what differentiates this service from http://hosting.couch.io/. Is it about extra GUI management options? Both seem very interesting services, because as an existing CouchDB user I can absolutely see the benefit of having an external database to replicate to.
"Actually, you were asking me to design a logotype which would have taken me a few hours and fifteen years experience."

While the whole chain is hilarious, that point is really worth remembering as a contractor.