skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The president is said to have been made keenly aware of the problems illegal downloads pose musicians by his supermodel-turned-singer wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

This may explain why the French first lady's producer, Patrick Zelnik, was tasked with leading the commission, which came up with the proposals.

Wow, no conflict of interest there.
Useful Tactics for Paying Back Technical Debt
"Nor is it possible to distinguish between 'numerical' and 'nonnumerical' algorithms [...]"

But I guess it is possible to distinguish "seminumerical" algorithms (vol 2)!
Take a look at pylons. It's like django, but it offers more flexibility in choosing which components you use. If you think you would be better off without the ORM or template engine or form library, it's easy to just not use it.
Unsecured Financing Miracles - Jade Rock Enterprises LLC - PPMP Group 
If you need any Unsecured Business or Personal Financing, the way is EZUnsecured.com - They are the best Unsecured Financing Consultants still in Business and they helped me out big time last month when I needed a Loan of $35,000. I was looking for some Reviews on them and this is what I found that explains a little better since I don't have time to sit and write. http://www.reviewon.com/ezunsecuredcom-start-up-loans-unsecured-financing-made-easy.html
I think it's partly because the game market has segmented by console; you might find more high-quality non-violent games on the Nintendo Wii.
I agree, and the problem isn't the necessarily the number of questions or even the types of questions per se, it's that the choice of questions and the ordering demonstrate a lack of coherent thought. To exaggerate:

"What web frameworks do you use?"

"Django"

"Ok, so what languages do you use?"

or perhaps:

"What is your development process like?"

...answer...

"Do you use any agile methods?"

In both cases, the second question should at least be largely hinted at by the answer to the first. Somehow, people think they should ask certain questions so they do, whether or not they really understand the answers.
I kind of disagree with you on #2. While I agree that it is important to walk away from the screen, social networking can tell you in which direction you should walk. There is no substitute for mingling in the flesh, but it helps if the place you are mingling at is a place visited by people potentially worth mingling with, and there online networks can help a lot.
matthew and mseebach,

Thanks for the comments on Untitled Startup! The 99 designs competition was from 3 weeks ago. Since then we've started narrowing down our goals, products, and interests (check out the whiteboard in the first video from 1/6/10).

As we progress and actually start really formulating them and going in a direction, we'll be focusing on sharing that with everyone.
Same story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1037097

No comments so far ...
Your numbers sound really low.

I spend 1700$ a month on a nice 780 SF one bedroom apartment just outside of DC. If I want an hour long commute each way I can drop that down to 1200$ a month. (More if I move to a sketchy area.)
It's amazing because it's done in the browser, and with no plugins (Flash etc.). The data is collected with a native JS API, and all the processing is done locally.
Why should good people have keep watch over these kinds of criminals? Isn't that barbaric?

The time and the labor could be better spent elsewhere. Every guard we hire, every prison we build, is a hospital that couldn't be built, a teacher who couldn't be hired. I feel this is barbaric towards those in need who've done no wrong.
Manzi's error
It would be a lot better to use a strategy that defends against all attacks we know to be possible, and not just the ones that have already been tried.

I dont think that's what he's saying either.

Effective security comes way before the departure gate. If that is our main line of defence no amount of security will foil the inevitable.

I think what he is saying is we should look on these as successes; ok a guy got onto a plane with explosives. But it was a desperate move, with little chance of working - and it failed.

Yet actually it succeeded because now the TSA (and others) are running scared again.

It would take a brave politician to turn round and say that this time the system worked. The heightened security meant a desperate mechanism was employed and the "last line of defence" (passengers) were utterly effective.
Indeed. Most of the US's growth in GDP versus say the Euro 15 countries for the past while has come from population growth. On a per-capita basis, the US doesn't seem to be reaping much of the supposed benefit of its allegedly pro-business system, though as you can tell I think there's a lot of meddling in the US system too, with what appears to be legalized bribery of government under a different name.

A blogger for The Economist had an interesting article today:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/01_0

(On HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038226 )
The principal programming paradigms[pdf]
I don't think we ever let the market decide EVERYTHING. See: airlines, military contractors, banks (before this crisis as well).

I'm not even sure we're in a period where this is more pervasive than usual. That said, I agree that in 99% of cases corporate welfare is a terrible idea.
An interesting way to deal with cross-browser compatibility issues.
Disclaimer, I started at Google this week.

Looking at the incoming orientation group there is no shortage of really smart people just starting. Including Theodore Tso. (The ext4 maintainer for the Linux kernel.)

There will always be turnover, but Google doesn't look like it has any trouble attracting really smart people.
My friend and I tried something similar. It was a site that started off blank, and then we'd only build some subset of features that users requested.

It didn't turn out so well. I learned that it is a lot easier to request a feature than to build it, so you get a lot more requests than features that you actually build, which gives people the sense that you aren't really doing anything. People would come and request a feature. If it didn't get built in a relatively short amount of time, they'd never come back and you'd be building a site for people who don't come to the site anymore.

Also, as anyone in a customer facing role knows, people don't usually have a well formed idea as to the feature that they want or the problem that needs to be solved.

But I wish them good luck!
I'd also like to add the Intellectual Property rights were originally supposed to expire a few (7, I think) years. The idea was to give innovators a chance to profit, before letting society follow and help improve the situation. Now, Intellectual Property is practically permanent, which I think prevents innovation.
Senator Demands IP Treaty Details
I'm still not understanding where your criticism is directed. GNFS (see? no typo this time. Do I get a cookie?) is quite clearly outside of PTIME, though I'm not sure to which definitions of SUBEXP and EXPTIME it belongs. Thus RSA remains an algorithm which is infeasible for tractable key sizes, even if the early guesses of 512-1024 bits turned out to be wrong.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make anymore; I don't believe I've ever (let alone in this thread) said anything that goes against: Ultimately every rewrite, new feature addition, feature change, etc. has the consequence of pushing back the release date.

I only specifically mentioned CJK because A. you mentioned it and B. I remember from other discussions that it happens to be a feature that you want. It could just as easily have been "a shiner way to parse text in order to theme it for display" or #{random-feature-x-that-we-don't-know-of-yet}.
> But there's absolutely no reason why it can't be, aside from the inelegant, weak, and opaque abstractions we're using.

Would you rather build a web app in assembler or in an "inelegant, weak, and opaque abstraction" such as Django or Rails?
It must be really aggravating spending 100 days breaking a long key, only to find a short one-time-pad message dropped into the middle of a long string full of 'neenerneenerneener!'.
Wasn't the parent's point that it's cheaper to imprison for life than it is to execute?

http://www.nyadp.org/main/faq#0
First, make sure your own responsibilities are under control so you don't become a drain on society. Next, volunteer your time - maybe as part of an open source project, something you think is valuable.
Bah. Check out Hewlett & Packard's goals when they started a company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard

Fred Wilson famously says that about 2/3 of the successes in his portfolio radically change when business they were in between funding and exit. In short, it's great not to get too attached to an idea.

I don't think these guys are being stealthy because they are defending their brilliant ideas (almost always a stupid reason to be stealthy), but because they are waiting for their ideas to gel into cohesive vision.

(disclosure: I know both of the founders but have no clue what they are working on!)
Exclusive look at how Microsoft's Project Natal works
The problem is wrongful conviction. The ability to repeal, in some small part, punishments due to wrongful conviction is worth far more than your personal need to know someone has been killed.
I would stick with a framework especially during the initial phases of the Project, especially if you are new to Python. I am also fairly new and I found that I learned more by peeking my head in Django's codebase than any other book! Agreed it has a rather steep learning curve but is worth the effort.

You can incorporate double metaphone or soundex for partial search based on phonetic similarities. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Metaphone) there are links listed in the entry including python routines.

You can also try http://www.alchemyapi.com/ for named entity recognition (free for up to 70000) requests and peanuts for more.
Ask HN: How to apply for positions that require government clearance?
I just finished reading the post on Lockheed; ironically I'm currently working on my resume to apply for a position there doing embedded software development. It's an entry-level position posted in the section for new college grads, but the applicant is required to qualify for Top Secret level clearance. I have a couple friends who have gone through the clearance process, but not for any level that high. Is there anything I can / should do differently than I would with any other potential job?

I know that it's not standard related, but IIRC a few posts here have mentioned doing work that suggests that they've been in this position before.
On the other hand, a social network can help answer "should I {start a company, have babies, hang out} with X".

(Full disclosure: I work for a social network).
Cleaning Service
When you are starting a cleaning service there is something that you must always keep in mind, you are offering a service not a product. When you start marketing remember to market your business as a service which is different than marketing a product and it is much harder too. Part of a good marketing plan is to convince the customer that you have a way to solve their problem. So, how can you go about doing this correctly?
Without any suggested strategy that would defend against all possible attacks, though, it's not much of a suggestion. The current strategy may be the best one available. If unreliable two-component powder+syringe underpants bombs are the best option currently available to potential aircraft bombers, then that's definitely something.
I guessed it was most likely SETI as well, so hardly another brick in the wall of mental illness. Applying my (ex) journalist nous to the story, however, I think it was only included so they could run this quote in full (my italics) later in the story:

"In her mind, he was perfect," Cox said. "She's tapped out. He has lots of money. He doesn't know anybody. He lives behind closed doors. He's trying to communicate with ET. Who would miss him?"
The tax is to be levied irrespective of the (major) search engine used.
Typically people pay if they have a desperate need and.or if you provide almost exactly what they need, but not quite. So #1 and #2 might work if people have a need more just a little more information... but why would they? Answer that, and you find out what you can sell.
Brain-scanning based lie detectors with high accuracy.
Boxee Box internals revealed. NVIDIA Tegra 2 FTW
I am interested, thanks for the pointer.
Not when your neighbors, your delivery guy, and anyone passing by on the street knows the exact address at which you got your expensive package delivered. If you're lucky and the package wasn't just left outside your front door with not even a knock, earlier than expected (happened to my 24" cinema display). I religiously go out of my way to recycle conspicuous boxes and packaging away from home too, because seeing that kinda box sticking out of your recycling bin isn't a great idea either.
Reddit is down super-often for me. This very minute, I can't log in or use the site logged in, it just serves me 503 errors.
I don't know if ordering online is necessarily safer. The first time I ordered something from Zappos, I heard the doorbell, but I wasn't dressed, so I just saw the delivery guy drop off the box through the blinds. I went to put clothes on and go get the package. By the time I went outside it was gone (maybe 5-10 minutes later). Apparently someone was following the delivery truck around and just taking packages...
Interesting. I had always just assumed, obviously speciously, that executing somebody would be a lot cheaper than feeding, clothing, housing, and guarding them for 40+ years.

The source isn't unbiased, of course, but it's made me want to re-check my assumptions.
Did you read the article?

What you're saying is analogous to saying our govt't taxing of telephone calls will lead to us reverting back sending smoke signals from Manhattan to DC, or using carrier pigeons.
Web Startups to Watch in 2010
> The mere title (but the article as well) begs the question

I don't think that that phrase means what you think it means

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
So I work in the power grid space, and talking to some collegues about this, turns out the behaviour in my speculation is actually VERY illegal. There are many regulations about keeping groups that handle these types of data and operations very separate. Otherwise it is essentially collusion.
An excellent point.

People who treat their homes as investments should remember that, should the investment completely lose value, it's reasonable to cut their ties and take the loss, not continue to take losses on it indefinitely.

That is to say, it is an investment, and should be treated appropriately as one.

If your house is a home rather than an investment, you can ignore this suggestion ;-)

Disclosure: I have a mortgage, but it's not underwater and is doing just fine.
An EBS volume has the performance of a ~10-disk RAID; it's hardly desktop class. It would be nice if they offered wide-striped volumes, but Amazon's strategy is to not do anything that customers can kludge for themselves.
As much as I think poorly of much of the "soft science", there's no reason that there can't be such a thing as management science.

I think that we in the news.yc culture all agree that the following is a good approach to take to assertions and thesis floated about how to run a company, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

Elements of scientific method

* 3.1 Characterizations
* 3.2 Hypothesis development
* 3.3 Predictions from the hypothesis
* 3.4 Experiments
* 3.5 Evaluation and improvement
* 3.6 Confirmation
I believe that the taxes on phone calls are to pay for the Spanish-American War and not to subsidize the smoke signal industry. If the taxes on phone calls were put into place and the revenues given to the smoke signal industry, then YES I emphatically say that the objective is to lead us back to smoke signals.
I am a co-founder of http://ridewithgps.com and we have been intending on integrating OSM support into our route planner, as well as figure out a way to funnel mapped routes back through to you all. We were thinking a cool way to vette cycle routes would be a heat map of sorts.

We have some more business related priorities (payed accounts and the like), but this is up there; I'd love to see those map tiles cover the entire US.
You hit the nail on the head as to why I'm looking into a physical DB server with RAIDed SSD's instead of hopping onto EC2. I would love to use Amazon and not have to deal with the potential headaches of managing physical machines, but the stories (maybe FUD) of having to raid EBS instances, spool up 20 instances to find the winners and kill the rest, etc etc really kills the appeal.

If they could promise me consistent database performance on par with a really nice physical machine, I would gladly fork over 500/month for it.
Just in case anyone knows.. why are mortgages in the US structured in this lax way? In the UK, if you don't pay your mortgage, you're still entirely liable for the debt even after handing the keys back. If you can't meet the difference between what they make on a quick sale and the owed amount, they will, and do, bankrupt you over it.
Another thing you're forgetting is peoples new reaction to hijackers. In the bad old days as you called them if you where on a plane that got hijacked people assumed that they had a good chance to make it out alive if they just kept their head down and mouth shut (and on the whole they where right). So crowd control wasn't really a problem and weapon needs where minimal. These days anybody on a hijacked plane will assume they're dead if they don't stop the hijackers and will thus take them down or die trying. This change in attitude makes it dramatically harder to hijack a plane and is probably the main reason for the drop in hijackings.
Not etherpad, but I found it worked better for me on a bad internet connection with a slow processor.

http://moonedit.com/
"Funny Boys": The New Yorker on CollegeHumor (2005)
"Tightass" companies typically don't get to fast growth, either.
I don't think they are being stealthy at all, which is a good thing. Most businesses make big changes as they evolve, which is also a good thing. Just seems a bit strange to me announcing that you are starting a company, but not really knowing what you are going to do.
I see...thank you for correcting my false assumption.
Aren't they just simply proposing to tax online advertising revenue? What's the big deal?
Who is the smoke signal industry in the French online advertising tax case?
But the money is still being used to prop up a market that cannot support itself. If it was a vital service (like maybe a utility service) then I could understand. But we are talking about the music industry!
As anyone who's been there knows, the great majority of teachers volunteer half the time they spend working anyway.

Bashing unions is a popular right-wing ad hominem, but there are two equally recalcitrant partners in education equally to blame for educational deficiencies: school boards and parents.
The problem is running any kind of controlled experiment. There are oodles of variables involved.

Granted, there are probably a few situations where something useful might be gleaned, but I just don't buy the idea of management as a science.
Right, there are non-investment related values to a house for most people. Kids friends in the area, nice neighbors, the landscaping you did last year, etc. So even if you couldn't sell and recoup your mortgage, doesn't mean the value of your house is worth walking away from.

On the other hand, investment properties are almost entirely dollar based. Which is why (in theory), banks require a higher down payment on them - to get you invested.
It's largely economics of scale. The linked post says that New York State is spending vast sums of money just to house twelve inmates on death row, so obviously it would be cheaper to throw those twelve inmates into the existing prison system for life.

On the other hand, if we were to execute a thousand prisoners per year then it would start to get a whole lot cheaper. For instance, I'd be in favour of executing the scrote that stole my bike.
He was talking about the "creative industries hurt by the digital revolution" being the ones propped up by this, not the poor search engines.
Also in France we have a tax on CD-R, DVD-R, hard drives, mp3 players which is given to the music companies to compensate their losses from pirating (you pay that tax whether you pirate or not. And still haven't the right to pirate after paying it).

The ISP also give 1% of their income to those companies.

So yes I think taxing the search engines is the logical next step.
The big deal is that they're planning on using the money generated to support creative industries that are harmed by digital innovation. ie, the music industry.
The Skiff is even larger, with an 11.5" screen. http://www.skiff.com/skiff-reader_tech-specs.html
But the music industry gets taxed on their revenue, no?

If so, shouldn't the search engines be taxed on their advertising revenues?
Wow. I remember reading something about that a while ago but I didn't realize it was that bad...

The next logical step is that the government forces you to listen to 4 hours of music a day, and pay for it, so that flagging creative industries are supported...
I disagree. I think it's a nicely succinct collection of relevant guidelines that, if used by a beginner, would yield a more aesthetic result than if they just winged it. I'd rather someone read Bringhurst (there's a cool version of the book applied to the web here: http://webtypography.net), but unless a person is serious about getting into design I doubt they'd spend the time.

I'll concede it's not the best - but most of it is decent advice. The only real exception I take is with his suggested practice of underlining text for emphasis; obviously that's a no-no, especially on the web.

Also, I think we can reduce the author's assertion that one should use Fibonacci numbers as a model for type size down to something more basic and useful: choosing to use a mathematical sequence to inform structural design decisions can assist one in creating work that has stronger internal relationships. If there's a rhythm and harmony to type size that is congruent with the spacing of the underlying grid, I think the work will tend to feel tighter and more elegant than if there's no underlying intelligence informing those decisions. Not to say that one can't shoot from the hip and win a few, or that a little chaos isn't beautiful - but using a regular system will tend to produce more regular results, particularly if it's one (like Fibonacci numbers) that are visible in the world around us and have been informing art for hundreds of years.

Common sense says that a culture's views on what is aesthetic and acceptable are largely informed by its environment and history. I don't think we necessarily need a study to tell us that the Fibonacci/golden ratio thing has a certain inherent beauty; the evidence is out there in all the art that's been produced using those numbers as a foundation.