skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IME, extremely well, but see my previous comment on the general professionalism of Virginia police. I've had no personal experience with potentially litigious/confrontational law enforcement encounters outside of VA.

By immediately asserting your rights, the officer in question knows that they are not dealing with a person of "legal ignorance". As with communication in all social interactions, an assertive (but not aggressive) carriage, posture, positive eye contact, and tone helps a great deal.

Keep in mind that, in most contexts, when I see the triplet of a badge, an open-carry gun (the gun is key), and a police uniform, my default assumption is that of a PERSON who's sworn an oath and, consciously or unconsciously, respects SOME sort of legal authority given their avocation (though it may not necessarily be true).

FWIW, if you have any doubt, it's worth asking CLEARLY if the presumed officer in question has "sworn arrest powers in <insert municipality>". Police are allowed to lie, but they're not legally allowed to "assert police powers" such as arrest and/or detainment unless they have truly have them. In most U.S. state codes, there's a clear delineation between what constitutes a "lawful" and an "unlawful order" by law enforcement. Asserting police powers without being a sworn law enforcement officer is also usually a felony.

At worst, you may be severely inconvenienced for an "officer's safety" by being handcuffed and/or temporarily detained on-site, but you've preserved all of your rights under the law. Fighting temporary detainment is a "sticky wicket" and generally ill-advised unless you genuinely feel that your life or the lives of your family are at immediate risk (e.g. driving your pregnant wife to the hospital, etc.).
A new approach to China
Very cool. I use SurveyMonkey a lot and it was high time that someone should make a similar tool for the phone.
Also, Lisp-Flavored Erlang:

http://metajack.im/2009/01/09/lisp-flavored-erlang/
India Developing 'Kill Vehicle' to Knock Enemy Satellites Out of the Sky
Indigenous to the Net - Early Network Music Bands in the San Francisco Bay Area
Forban - a simple link-local opportunistic p2p free software
The irony is that his site is now offline. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://alan.blog-city.com...

Cache: http://alan.blog-city.com.nyud.net/has_amazon_ec2_become_ove...
Rack-A-Node
"Their story will be featured on BBC Two's Newsnight on Tuesday 12 January at 2230 GMT and in the documentary Guantanamo Reunited on BBC Radio 5 live on Thursday 14 January at 2200 BST."

Hopefully this article is just some sort of trailer.
Seems there is more to come.
Yes, the Scunthorpe problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
People have been talking about "augmented reality" for years.

I'm usually a cynic about "a big thing is going to happen soon" puff pieces ... but I'm convinced.

This time it's for real.

Exciting times!
> it would be easy to assume clothes bearing that logo are actually a North Face brand

I really, really doubt it. If you believe that, you'd presumably also believe Spinal Tap were real rock group, that Spitting Image was real, and that The Onion is real newspaper.
It's a yet-to-launch product from google. GMail accounts have grown significantly in size since release and were invite only for a fair amount of time. From what I've read GDrive is open to everyone, not an invite only, so the small size on release is likely simply to work out stability issues.

I won't be surprised if in a year the free storage offered had already quadrupled.
If true, does this sound like Amazon is violating the terms of use? I thought they guarantee to provide a certain level of service, such as CPU percentage, regardless of your neighbors.

I am not a virtualization wizard, but I always thought Xen and other hypervisors have CPU usage caps. If you're not getting built-in protection from noisy neighbors then VPS becomes just a crappier version of good old shared hosting. True? False?

P.S. I've been Slicehost user for 3+ years and all instances I've ever had there exhibited pretty much expected performance.
Lean Startup Resources
This is great. Graceful and useful tool. Best of luck!
Yeah, uh. Companies like Socialight (http://socialight.com) have been doing this for years. Admittedly google has a higher chance of succeeding given their already popular maps application, but it isn't world changing...
Zappos' Tony Hsieh on company culture and locking in employees
Indeed. Ugly syntax is such an obvious thing to complain about, but ugly semantics and ugly design are a bigger problem in the long run. (I really like Erlang's programming model, but find the syntax a bit scruffy.)

Erlang's syntax seems a lot less weird if you're familiar with Prolog, FWIW. It was a originally a DSL built on top of SICSTus Prolog, but seems to have accumulated some extra syntax along the way. Same with a lot of its other quirks.
We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Wow.
The problem here is that large companies face little cost in launching unfounded lawsuits against individuals or small companies. And it's often in the interest of the smaller side to back down, because if they don't they'll be ruined, and even if they win they won't get anything.

I think this could be remedied by requiring that if the big company loses the lawsuit, it has to pay substancial sums to the smaller entity (maybe an amount could be decided by the jury based on how outrageous their claim was).
Yeah, I think at this point we have reached a consensus. :)
Google to uncensor search in China, may shut down if deemed illegal
They shouldn't have even opened an office in China. What the heck did they expect to happen?
It's easy to shut down the site when you are losing the search game to local competition.

In any case, even though I find freedom of speech to be necessary and encouraged, I do not think that Google is right to imply in this blog post that the Chinese government is behind the attacks.
nice - I like the way the results are shown. super simple & easy to understand
This is incredible. This is the first time, I have seen a LARGE company

* Putting its users above profits

* Stand up to Chinese Government.

Since accounts of human rights activists were targeted, this operation was clearly done at the behest of Chinese Government. I'm disgusted by the levels to which the Chinese Government can stoop.

It is time the world stands up to China. If a corporation, whose main aim is to generate profits can eschew it and take a moral high ground why can't the government do it? Are the cheap goods from china so necessary that it is not worth antagonizing China ?

EDIT: Additional details from Enterprise blog post http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/keeping-your-da...

It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical

This is clearly an act of espionage by the Chinese Government. The bigger questions is whether these are the only companies targeted or the only ones discovered. This is not the first time, the chinese have tried something like this.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7970471.stm

The researchers said hackers were apparently able to take control of computers belonging to several foreign ministries and embassies across the world using malicious software
No problem, I sent the logs now (at least I think so, I got no confirmation). I'll be waiting to hear from you.
They expected to do business, of course. It is, after all, a 1.32bn audience base.

Quite glad they're opting to take the ethical route this time, though.
My old 3 phone used to constantly roam in 3's own broadband area. Ka-ching! Of the VHA brands Vodafone is the better of the two.
A helpful oversimplification is to say OO "prefers dumb code and smart data", while FP prefers "smart code and dumb data".

This makes a lot of sense, but it seems backwards in a way: FP is as much about the realization that code is data as it is about any specific way of doing things. Your list of functions for "actions a player is allowed to take" certainly seems like "smart data" to me.
Go Google, Go!

This is what the world needs more of. Mega Multination Corporations standing up to dictatorships, human rights violators and all around douche bag governments.
Every once in awhile their Don't be evil motto reminds us that it still exists.

Reading in between the lines, it seems that they must feel that the Chinese government was involved in the attacks on the user accounts. Otherwise, the first portion of the post re: cyber security has little to do with the latter portion re: dealing with China at all. This is a fairly clever approach to conveying such a heavy message without stating it.
But who else would want to garner information from emails of human rights activists in China?
It really bugs me that Amazon rarely admits the many faults that go on within their cloud. The status page just shows all green with no notes, even when you see multiple major sites drop off the web, report problems on Twitter, etc.

Numerous times I've had EC2 and EBS go out of contact (or simply have huge network latency, essentially the same). Since my instances run off RAID arrays of EBS volumes, essentially everything dies until EBS reappears.
I thought they guarantee to provide a certain level of service, such as CPU percentage, regardless of your neighbors.

If they guarantee X performance but all along they were providing 2X and now they're only providing X, customers will complain. There are different ways to configure Xen so it's not clear exactly what Amazon is doing.
Falsification
The point of the exercise is to see if the candidate can code their way out of a damp paper bag. This is the kind of pedantic bullshit that's all about showing how clever you are at the expense of understanding what's going on.

If you're clever enough to know that "copy a file" is an incomplete description of what a user actually wants or needs, you should be clever enough to know that "point out as many edge cases to confound a simple interview coding question as you can think of" is not what the interviewer actually wants or needs with that particular question.
I do not think that Google is right to imply in this blog post that the Chinese government is behind the attacks.

Unless they have evidence to support that implication...
> and wouldn't make me think less of their products.

I'm sure their clothing woulsd be the same quality. Nevertheless, I choose not to buy from arseholes; otherwise you cause there to be more arseholeness in the world than would otherwise be the case.

North Face (and all other corporations) should make money by making things people want. When they choose the route of legal shenanigans instead, they are not conducive to the public good.
When I interview people, I'll often ask open-ended or incomplete questions because I want to know if the person I'm talking to has any critical thinking capacity. If someone started down this road they wouldn't get very far before I wrapped the interview up.

The business of software development very rarely comes with a full set of instructions, I'm not sure why this guy has such a problem with being given an open-ended question (and one that should be very easy to interpret).
Yes, the author is snarky and makes a mountain out of a mole-hill. On the other hand, the basic point is valid -- interviewers often don't choose suitably specific questions for on-the-fly implementations.

That's what I got from the article. Can you be a little more specific on why you think that it's not worth reading?
The ability to work hard seems to be even more talent-based than being smart. Executive functions [1] are supposed to be highly heritable, more so than the intelligence [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions

[2] http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2008/05/99_ge...
It's hard not to imply that.
"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]
Music of Tunisia Cha3bi Mohamed el Nasri موسيقى تونسي شعبي محمد نصري
> We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn

Kudos to Google!

Amazing.

You work for a great company, Googlers!
Ya, true. Perhaps there is some other hand at play behind the scenes investing treasure in obtaining information on outspoken China human rights activists.
Reading between the lines, that's exactly what I saw.
The targeting of Chinese human rights activists' email accounts don't seem Suspicious to you? Exactly what /private/ group would have motive for this?
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Something tells me that as far as acquisition offers go, Dropbox guys are doing fine. Probably just haven't found a perfect match/price yet. :-)

My personal needs/habits don't quite fit their model, but as a technologist and entrepreneur I absolutely love Dropbox technology and their business model. And it's always a pleasure to point people to their website and inevitably get a warm "THANK YOU" back via email. Making people happier through software, even if it's not mine, has always been my reason to be in this business.
Sorry. I thought the cheaper N1 was locked and under a contract. But apparently only the later is true.
Nobody does data mining better than good 'ole Google. If they went public with this post you can be sure there is more to it than what you're reading.
In case you didn't know. Google is not a charity, but a business organization.

It would have been silly for them not to do business with China - when most western nations and companies does it. Some level of censorship does outweigh the benefits of having google.cn. But google being google, and perhaps the only company that has the balls to do this, will most likely pull out of china if they don't get their way.

I can't think of any other company doing this, the potential for business is incredible in china, which has more internet users than USA.

This is BIG.
Google Docs FS implementation (FUSE)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GhostNet
Yeah like beofre the iPhone developing for mobile was such a blizz.
I think the idea is not to increase the number of people who can, but to increase the number who want to.
HN long term change
There's a ton of people on the net using UStream and Justin.tv to restream live sporting events.

Check out http://atdhe.net/
Is a troll another name for devil's advocate? That's the way I see it. You don't know sometimes if the person or the presenting attitude is that of troll or not.

Is to troll to be deliberately malicious? Does this really help the debate? Digg and Youtube have just become a forum for immature witticisms and derogatory put downs - trolls.
Well,the decision could also have been made along with the fact that they don't have a large user base. I am guessing "Baidu" is still pretty popular there. I wonder if they would have done the same if they had a 60% penetration in the Chinese market.

EDIT:

Why am I being downmodded ? I thought we are supposed to have open discussions here. (I did find the actual google mkt share in the TC blog later, but I was presenting an alternative reason along with the fact that their site was attacked)
Maybe, but a lot of interviewers ask questions like this because they love being smug about catching people out for not asking about requirements before starting.

I was in an interview where a couple of the interviewers asked me to do something, and I asked some basic requirements. After a few questions they just started grunting non-comittally and indicated I should get on an answer the question.

The feedback from these interviewers? That I didn't ask enough about the requirements/details before diving in to answering.

So I have sympathy for this guy.
Google threatens to end operations in China
that's incredibly naïve. Plenty of organizations would find that information useful.
Visual evidence of Amazon EC2 network issues
Google standing up to the Chinese government re: human rights? This is huge.
Coming up on news.yc:

"Why \"Why Functional Programming Matters\" Matters" Considered Harmful

Why "\"Why \\\"Why Functional Programing Matters\\\" Matters\" Considered Harmful" Matters
Call me suspicious, but could this pull-out have anything to do with Google getting beat up by Baidu?

Maybe getting beat isn't the reason for pulling out, but it at least makes the decision much easier if you aren't the market leader in the country. Another big company, GE, will shut down businesses where they aren't 1st or 2nd in a market.

If Google were dominant in China or making a lot of money, this decision might be a lot tougher.
You are witnessing "Don't be evil."

This is amazing.
needs a registration to read.
Dyn Inc. Acquires EveryDNS
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048873
Ask HN: Get Full HN RSS feeds
Hi,
I wanted to try an algorithm in filtering HN stories. I prefer to use the RSS syndication since it made it easier for me.

The problem is that I don't find how to get it. The "http://news.ycombinator.com/rss" gives only the home page, I want to get at least the latest 200 stories.

Are their parameters that can be associated to this RSS syndication so I can tune the number of outputted stories.

Thanks
Super Mario Galaxy, the Chinese plagiarism version
I hope this increases the pressure on other search providers to do the right thing. It will be interesting to see how the Chinese govt responds
What you say is true. Yet is this move in any way inconsistent with how Google has generally been running its business? To me that is the most remarkable fact in the whole affair.
I think it's probably a pretty sane life, to be honest. There's always some technology that's more interesting than what I'm currently using. The times I'm most productive are the times I haven't worried so much about that and worried more about how efficiently I'm spending my time.
First Patch Tuesday of 2010
Major kudos to Google. This is an outstanding outcome.

We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today.

How sad that they had to specify this, or a few of their Chinese employees would risk their freedom, or worst, their lives.
The price and quality of communications in Australia is absolutely ridiculous. I mostly blame the monopoly/biopoly (Telstra and somewhat Optus) but the competitors aren't much better either.

It's also just going to get worse with the new "cleanfeed".
I look at shows like Firefly -- any decent scifi really -- the masses aren't interested, people like me will only do on-demand (even if it is downloaded etc), and will buy merchandising. This can't work in most current network models. But in something like we are discussing, there is room for it be profitable -- maybe not insanely so -- but profitable nonetheless. This is why I think "good content" will flourish in such situations. People will still watch jersey shore, but people like me can get good content too.

An interesting thing has been going on lately anyway -- there are a lot more 12 episode seasons. And a lot more summer seasons. Content producers are starting to experiment. The syfy show Sanctuary started out as with a "pay for webisodes" model. Things are starting to move in interesting ways already.
>>I realize that it is 2am and I’m exhausted physically so I should go to bed, but mentally I feel on fire.

This doesn't happen to very many people.

It happened to me before all the time. But for some reason I can't do it any more. Now, I have to force myself. Does it mean I wasted my talent? I hope not. This laziness started when I took a year off from writing any code or doing any job and was just having fun with my friends I haven't seen a few years, travelling, etc.. I guess, the only way to get back on the track is to practice.
And I think that most people had this flow when they could work for 30h/day, if so to speak.
Even if they have 5% market pulling out of china is huge. They currently have ~17% market share in China. No profit-making company in their right mind would pull out of country with ~17% market share.
Regardless of what the intent is, you cannot control people and there are people here who have publicly stated they downvote people for reasons like "I was downvoted and I'm upset about it". Which is why I remarked on the fact that I upvote articles to meet my own needs -- to "save" them -- and I don't know how you would make the comment voting intrinsically related to what people value rather than just opinion, momentary bad moods, etc.

I raised two gifted-learning disabled sons and if there was a way to either misunderstand the rules or find some loophole, they would do so. I am a firm believer in designing the system so it does what it is supposed to do and not counting on people seeing the world the same way I do, having the same values I have, "agreeing" to a particular set of rules/ethics/social mores...etc. I don't know how to get there with the voting system on this site but I don't think making it public how people vote would be an improvement.

That's just my 2 cents, of course.
Very good news, my guess is that the Obama administration may be backing this aggressive move to push China towards more openness without directly going at them.

Hopefully this will pan out top changes in China, but having worked there for a year, I would not get my hopes too high.
I've done a number of these tests, and typically they consist of unconventional pointer arithmetic, designed to catch you out. Despite having been writing software for the last couple of decades, I probably don't perform well on these paper and pencil tests. My typical strategy is not to sit and stare at code to determine bugs by intuition alone, but just to compile it and see what happens in a much more interactive way, and I also make extensive use of reference materials including the internet, books and previous code which I've written to do similar things.
The Dropbox guys have done a hell of a job and I use it everyday. I could see Google, maybe even MS buying them. The flip side is Google has more than enough resources to make it themselves and they could make it fit natively into G Apps. DropBox also has a lot of expanding to do - sharing other folders, etc. and it may be wiser for them to continue growing. I think a more flexible payment structure could make them a lot more money too.
The economics will certainly be disrupted, but I don't think it will be as rough as it might be. Apple's recent negotiations for a cable subscription package show that content owners might actually make more money per subscriber:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/21/apple-tv-kill-cable/

"Another part of the report has Apple paying $2 to $4 a month to the major networks per monthly subscriber, and $1 to $2 for a cable subscriber. "

It's eventually going to grow from a small percentage to the majority. The question is what will the end result look like and who will be the casualties along the way?