skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is that round-trip? I looked on Kayak and a round-trip flight tomorrow is at least $300. I don't think the busses and trains get so much more expensive at the last minute, but I could be wrong.
I don't really see this as a big deal.

Think of how horrible it would be if he did something wrong. The average American knows that if they mess up 1 box, as long as all the final numbers come out to about what they should (which is easy to check), it's likely no one will notice.

But someone will notice if the IRS commissioner messes up his taxes, even if it's just forgetting to initial a box, and it would look horrible. Can you imagine how much fun John Stewart would have with it? He'd probably be able to avoid resigning, but his chance of being nominated after Obama's reelection would be basically 0.
Read the following:

"Google said that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human right activists, but that the attack also targeted 20 other large companies in the finance, technology, media and chemical sectors."

The question I have - is were these companies' infrastructures being run by Google? And, if so, could this reaction be the harbinger of a revelation of an attack on their managed services business?
Yes. You can find a lot of stuff like this at the Haskell mailing list. The hard solutions are usually better, and people like Heinrich Apfelmus explain it all.
It's not that amazing. Amtrak is a quasai-governmental entity; airlines face a lot of competition. Planes fly longer distances and have no alternate way to get online. People on a 3-4h train ride might be satisfied with a Blackberry or iPhone.
Honestly, you shouldn't waste too many brain cycles on trying to decode Zizek
From Maciej:

As for 1, Aaron Swartz sent us both this quote the first time you and I had this argument, and I'm surprised you've forgotten it. It's from Graham Larkin, curator of the National Gallery of Canada, whom he asked to adjudicate your claim:

""By even the most conservative standards (which your buddy seem to be applying), you'd need to go at least a few decades further, into the High Renaissance. Julius II's didn't even start commissioning Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Vatican Stanze (School of Athens &c) didn't start until 1508. These works don't exactly represent a decline, except by Preraphealite standards which would judge them as over-sophisitcated and lacking in primitive simplicity.

(That's IT: your friend's a Preraphaelite! Well history is not on his or her side; such Victorian predilections are a mere blip in the history of Western aesthetics.)

The generation after the giant Raphael (and the giant Durer in the North) is a much better candidate for cultural and artistic decline--a story complicated by Michaelangelo's inconvenient longevity. Historians have often pointed to the 1527 Sack of Rome as a downturn in artistic ferment, or at least in the unparalleled ascendancy of Italy. I would add that Western painting of around 1500 can scarcely be separated from the other visual arts, including the still-young (to the West) technology of print, brought to incredible levels of sophistication by Durer and others in precisely the post-1500 decades. One wonders whether your friend meant "1500" or "like, 1500.""

I don't know who got the better half of the argument but I'm unprepared to respond to the curator of the National Gallery of Canada, enjoined to resolve an Internet message board argument, by suggesting that Maciej simply wrote copy that made sense to people who know nothing about art.

Again: I have no idea who's right or wrong in this "debate", but I find it fascinating, and I found Maciej's "essay" a joy to read. It was stylish, it was fun, it got me to buy that Minnaert book for my wife which earned me huge relationship points, and now I can at least tell you who Hals is.
> I am so proud of Google right now.

I am too, but I think we should remember that China's citizens were and still are being censored, killed, and tortured on a daily basis. Google was fine doing business with them and even assisting in their censorship. Only until Google found itself on the receiving end of China's baton did it finally decide to change their relationship.

They deserve kudos and a pat on the back for realizing that it's not good to bow down and comply with a government that tortures and locks up its citizens for speaking their minds, but they don't deserve any sort of hero worship.
Clickpass just killed my HN account?
I just tried logging in to HN using clickpass, which I do all the time, except using a different google account. I stopped the browser, which was spinning churning, and logged into google with the proper account.

So then I try logging in to HN with clickpass again; HN returns "bad clickpass account" Hmm.

At this point, I gave up on clickpass and just logged in using my HN id and password. And... my account came up like it's brand new, except for the number of days I've been on the site. My 500+ karma points are gone, as are all of my comments and submissions.

Help?
> When a "glastnost" comes to China

I think it's more accurate to say: If a "glastnost" comes to China. There's no rule of thumb that something like that is going to happen in every undemocratic country.
Pinboard’s Dead-Simple Bookmarking Service Is Still Going Strong
Well, you save some time taking the train: no going through security, or going to a giant airport 10-20 miles outside of a city.
May hackers do as their conscience!
愿黑客们按照良心做事!
They did use to block google regularly before Google came in China... And Baidu is quite a bit more popular with Chinese people than Google so I'm not sure if that will be the problem...

What might be bad for China though is all the investment Google made on research and the PR disaster (and the chinese government is very concerned with face).
Twitter观光团前来支持！

@chenshaoju
At any point this hypothetical sequence could have been put back on track by the interviewer saying "look, I just want to see that you can write simple systems code, and I need to see you write a basic file copy". People laugh at the interviewee, but in fact she's clearly crushing the interview.

I'd disallow the interviewer from doing that job anymore, I'd have someone better question the interviewee, and I'd probably hire her.
This is the operative quote: "I don't write the tax laws. Congress writes the tax laws so that's a whole different discussion."
I use http://Alertra.com
fuck Dang
There has to be a real strategic serious reason they're doing this. Something along the lines of self interest. I just can't believe that a 187 billion dollar US company with millions of shareholders would just go out and do what it appears it is doing.
Were he the _author_ of the tax code then this would be deliciously ironic. Since he is the commissioner of a large federal agency, I'd imagine (indeed, hope!) that he has better uses of his time than preparing his returns. Like fixing <your least favorite thing about the IRS/>, for example.
给GFW干活的程序员生孩子还能有屁眼吗
Fuck GFW, Fuck CPC. Fuck so-called China!
Of course in this case it is about events such as citizens being run down by tanks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...

"Currently, due to strong Chinese government censorship including Internet censorship, the news media are forbidden to report anything related to the protests. Websites related to the protest are blocked on the mainland.[94] A search for Tiananmen Square protest information on the Internet in Mainland China largely returns no results, apart from the government-mandated version of the events and the official view, which are mostly found on Websites of People's Daily and other heavily-controlled media.[95]"

If Google was hiding links to US websites that blocked international traffic, fair play. But we are talking about sites that are blocked by government mandate.
oh! That's even more interesting. The security community spins lots of FUD talking about the "insider threat," but there's very little real data to back up the threat.

"Credible data describing the scope and impact of unwelcome insider actions are hard to come by..."

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Salvatore J. Stolfo, "Addressing the Insider Threat," IEEE Security and Privacy, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 10-13, Nov./Dec. 2009, doi:10.1109/MSP.2009.146 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MSP.2009...
According to CNet at least Adobe was also impacted.
Link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10433538-265.html?tag=news...
In some jurisdictions, especially TEXAS, a person appealing a verdict once had to post a bond equivalent to the settlement. Thus being able to fight and being able to settle were linked. I don't know if Texas still has this stricture in place, however. It seems really dodgey but it is perhaps one of many reasons the state is a favorite of patent trolls.
Technology is listed twice in the legend?
HiSeq 2000 - the $1000 genome gets closer
My high school US history teacher said this (during the ramp-up to the Iraq war): "Posturing for war can be very good, actually going to war is NEVER good."

The parallel here, in my mind, is that Google has an opportunity for accomplishing several things while "posturing" for war with the Chinese government:

* Put pressure on the Chinese government to change. This is the public-facing goal of the campaign. The cause.

* Make up for any negative press about privacy by reinforcing the idea that their users' accounts are meant to be completely private and secure.

* Align themselves with human-rights causes, garnering trust amid doubts about trustworthiness and projecting a policy on censorship.

Posturing for war will likely prove very good for Google, and may result in the Chinese government caving. But if they actually have to go to war, it will be painful.

In my mind, it would be ideal for Google to posture for as long as they can, and as loud as they can, and see if they can't get the Chinese government to back down at all. Any significant win, without going to war, could be cause to not go to war, for it could be wrapped up as the government "cooperating".

Never attribute to goodwill, that which can be more adequately explained by good marketing.
One great feature would be the ability to mark/bookmark threads as favorites and then to view them listed under my avatar. I can use browser bookmarks for this, but this would really help IMHO.
No, but you get way faster access times and full control of your data and how you use the storage space.

Cloud storage is neat, but quite frankly "the cloud" still has not proven, to me, to be reliable enough for my personal tastes yet. Layer on top of that the fact that Google isn't really earning high marks these days for customer service.
The graph also needs better labelling. For eg. What is X-Axis? is that snapshots over time?
The Prospect of Cancer Does Not Worry Me
What were you trying now max?Social Engineering people to downvote you ? :-) JK
I would also add "protect their brand" to the list.
Be careful there, your commitment is no different from the conviction of a nationalist approving one's government's actions no matter what is done.

You being critical of Google is the only thing guaranteed to keep them in check.
I never thought I would want to tunnel into China, but it appears from the few proxies I've tried that filtering is off.

A few very dubious free proxies with mixed functionality may be found here: http://www.hidemyass.com/proxy-list/China/fast/show-planetla...

Edit: Screenshot: http://imgur.com/8nDXo.png and IP: http://imgur.com/0o3Am.png

SOCKS5 using 122.224.33.4 port 80 on Firefox is a quick way to mess around - though this doesn't take into account DNS resolving locally. There are discrepancies between the two searches still, but searching for "Tianamen"[sic] yields many more of the protest images.
Are we? Is there a study that compares a sophisticated climate prediction model with a trivial model (one that simply adds the delta from the previous two years, for example) and demonstrates that in comparing each result to the real temperature the former gives a statistically significantly better result than the latter? That's the only way to know if we're any good at predicting climate. If you can point me to a study on this (or some review study) I'd really love to take a look.
The Damage of Card Rewards
If he forgot to initial a box, John Stewart would have a laugh at his expense and it would underscore the notion that filing is complicated (and should be simplified). But that's about it.

The salient point here is that there is no right answer to even moderately complex tax filings. Ralph Nader did this experiment a while back. The same relatively simple tax filing was sent to something like two dozen IRS offices. Each one checked the filing and weighed in on the correctness of the form. Every office said that the filing was wrong but they all came up with different and widely varying figures for what the "correct" figure should be. I suspect a large part of the reason this guy uses a preparer (software in this case) is so that even if "errors" are discovered, he can plausibly claim that he did the best he could and can expect leniency. (Timothy Geithner, white courtesy phone please.) Think you can just ask the IRS for instruction and/or definitive rulings? They get it wrong, a lot. (http://www.treas.gov/tigta/auditreports/2005reports/20054014...)

Bignum hours and dollars are spent by individuals and corporations attempting to do taxes correctly. The time suck and opportunity costs are massive.
Erm, sex tips for male geeks.

Here is my sex tip for the day: do not have sex with Eric Raymond.
Even if Microsoft leaves, consumers will easily find pirate copies.
Controlling will buy you some time before you can really fix problems. However I failed to see much possibility the current government will ever be able to fix those "stability" issues. The pressure and tension just accumulate until one day it breaks. Then you see either 1989 once again, or you see revolution. I'm expecting it to happen within the next two decades.
Also:

"gossip inside google China is gov hackers found infiltrating google source code repository; gmail attacks an old issue." - @wikileaks http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7688415363

"China has been quietly asking for the same access to google logfiles as US intelligence for 2-3 years now." - @wikileaks http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7689072081

"Should be noted that Google keeps secret how many user's records are disclosed to US intelligence, others." - @wikileaks http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7689142127

"correction: the time of the Chinese requests/demands are not exactly known and are possibly in the last 12 months." - @wikileaks http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7689422772
Actually, I think Google very definitely declared war on China by making very public, very damning accusations.

The Chinese government could not possible allow itself to be seen caving into a single corporation and Google now cannot allow itself to be seen going back on "Don't Be Evil".

This is the end for Google and China.

War should be avoided at most costs but not all costs. Right on Google.
Links of London 2010 New Arrivals, Favorite and Cheap Links London Jewelry
> I was saying Rand espoused a fascist philosophy.

Nice attempt to try to move to something defensible. I'll quote your first attempt before following you. "To say that if you think things Ayn Rand thinks are bad, you're essentially killing yourself? We call that fascism."

> People endorsing Objectivism are endorsing a line of thought that's fascist in nature.

Oh really? Where in Objectivism do folks use the power of the state to control others? Where in objectivism do folks assume that the state will take care of their needs? Or, is the connection that you think that objectivists dress better than standard leftist totalitarians?
It just sounds as if once they realized they were under attack, they shared some information with other companies in those industries and then these companies discovered they were under the same attack.

Or more likely they shared the info with the US government who helped discover that other companies were under the same attack.
It says a lot when Google isn't even willing to store any source code in China. Hard to argue with that decision at this point, though.
In my experience, Amtrak is almost always more expensive last-minute than flying. I remember trying to go from Chicago to St. Louis once, and was quoted $600! Needless to say, I took the $130 last-minute flight instead, and saved myself several hours in the process.

I used to always price Amtrak out for my various domestic trips, because I think the train is cool. But it was always way more expensive than flying. (The only people I know now that ride Amtrak are those with irrational fears of flying. And I say this with great regret, because I am a huge railfan.)
I don't understand. Are you talking about some revenge hacking? Because the only hacking I've heard about is the attempted hack of Google.
I think patents are tried in federal court so state regulations don't apply but if it did that could be a major problem.
Now I know about it, thanks :)

http://flippa.com/auctions/82518/PubliciTweet---Online-Twitt...
> This is actually a textbook difference between Climate and Weather. We're better at predicting the former than latter.

According to the text book, warm days are climate while cold ones are weather.
Earlier post and discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047798
Christ, from Eric Raymond?
FYI, I didn't know about flippa but just listed it there for $5,000 :)

http://flippa.com/auctions/82518/PubliciTweet---Online-Twitt...
That's probably because people who do have revenue are much harder to negotiate with, and demand higher price.
Ask HN:  Why doesn't nasa.gov get its url to work?
Is it not ridiculous that well-funded high-tech agencies like nasa don't have their direct @ url working? I can't access or ping nasa.gov, yet www.nasa.gov works. Are they being lazy, or is there a deeper reason for why they would do this?
What's so wrong with saying the same thing in two different conversations?
I'll take your word for it then.
The correct time to criticize organizations to keep them in check is when they have done something worthy of criticism. On the other hand, when they have done things worthy of praise, celebrating them is at worst a no op.
Speaking from experience here.

With the right tech group you can get a really good laugh by pointing out that, "Someone should tell Eric Raymond that he isn't God's gift to women."

In my experience this works best with a group that includes multiple women whom Eric has hit on. This kind of group is unfortunately easy to locate.
It's rather ironic that this quote is coming from someone who advocated doing as little as possible as president, refused to run for a second term because he felt he would be elected for too long, and very arguably contributed to the Great Depression that happened the year after his term ended.
"PS The source for the site is open once again."

http://github.com/al3x/downforeveryoneorjustme
I'm curious.

Suppose that you're AT&T and you see these packets crossing "your network" to provide cell coverage to folks who are not AT&T cell phone customers.

Are you going to resist the temptation to add some jitter or packet loss that will degrade said cell service? Assume that you can do so without degrading their browsing, torrents, and so on.
Total speculation, but source code and private keys would be especially useful if you wanted to crack gmail and track down dissidents or generally read people's email.
Dunno why you consider that cynical. It's just realistic, and it wouldn't even indicate bad faith on Google's part or anyone else's if that was the reason under the covers.
Our nagios monitors to our ec2 servers regularly run into periods where they will timeout due to ec2 latency.
The programmers who work for GFW ( China Greet Firewall using to Prohibit Chinese people access to sensitive political information) will give birth to children without anus
Open source man, OPEN SOURCE!
My website isn't public yet, but I want some people to see it so it's sitting behind a simple htaccess login. downfor tells me my site is down.

I guess I'm outside the use case, but saying the site is down doesn't seem right either.
Exactly what /private/ group would have motive for this?

Possibly a human rights activists' group, which knows the implications of such a hack ?

Notice that only the subject line of the emails were accessed, not the contents.

I am not saying that it is the case, but your question brings forth this possibility.
I agree with all of what you've said. The skeptic in me thinks that Google is using this attack as an excuse to offset the PR disaster when Schmidt said the if you have something to hide maybe you shouldn't be doing it speech.
Holy cow, there's more if you go up a level. From The Art of the Pickup:

The next step is touch. It's very easy to touch a woman intimately (even a woman you've just met) if you bear two things in mind. One is that you must not fear the consequences of touching her...When you touch her, relax and enjoy it -- moderately

and

We're animals. We mate mostly with hindbrains and glands and bodies, not with our frontal lobes
Inklet Trackpad Tablet
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Seasons 1-7 DVD Boxset US$49.07
They must have heard you. Works fine using nasa.gov

EDIT: using firefox. What browser are you using?
Last time I checked, the Chinese didn't need Google. They have communist party approved Baidu.
Although a smaller scale, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has the same problem. bom.gov.au doesn't resolve to anything.

For what it's worth, Firefox will change nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov.au but won't do the same for bom.gov.au. Internet Explorer won't do this at all.
I think that's your browser adding the www in. Try it in Internet Explorer or try pinging nasa.gov
Hackers ! if you are the true hacker, you should unite and destroy the GFW ! GFW force the 1.6 billion Chinese people to stay outside the gate of information society , GFW is not only the enemy of the Chinese people but also the enemy of all mankind !
Baidu, the Chinese search engine, has a little over double the market share of Google. If Google leaves, Baidu wins.

Also, just because someone else has done something, doesn't mean you too should do it. The potential for business should be weighed against the ethical decision to do business with a totalitarian government. But I guess this is the West and we have no problem dealing with dictators and oppressors and their like anyway.
Google is not very big in China anyway, the Chinese gov't doesn't stand to lose much.
FYI, here and in your other post above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049046), I believe the word you are looking for is 'wary' not 'weary'. But good point nevertheless.
HTML5 means whatever you want it to mean
顶
Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil
Google has one of the best M&A strategies IMO.

On the same note, Yahoo probably has one of the worst.
Video demo of "lambda lists" programming language
I hope this increases pressure on other COMPANIES in general to do the right thing, especially in regards to China.
I have a feeling this is why reddit feels slower nowadays.
The list of games written with OpenGL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs

Notable games: Doom 3, Far Cry, Max Payne, the Quake series, Red Faction, Runescape, Second Life, Spore, Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Star Wars: KOTOR, Unreal Tournament, UT2004, UT3, Warcraft 3, WoW.

Most of the big-name ones default to Direct3D when they're running on Windows though.

I have very little idea of how D3D and OpenGL work (I've never written anything substantial with them), but I'm very interested in the idea of an open standard for rendering games. That portability story in the post is great.

What's the deal with D3D? How is it better than OpenGL?