skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My guess was that it was some kind of count of the number of messages passed between the different chrome processes - but it probably grows way too fast for that to be the case.

I found this post: http://www.sorcerers-isle.net/article/goats_teleported.html which does take a look at the source code. Although that doesn't reveal the intention behind the counter, my guess is that it was perhaps done to test the updating of the task manager.
> Do your techniques allow you to measure the trend of people complaining about the site deteriorating?

No, especially not because plenty of those get flagged and die.
Christmas cheer and New Years optimism going cheap
The profit source is the user generated content. Free content = $$
The more I think about it... How do we get from security breaches and human rights activists to "we'll shut down unless we're uncensored"?
After you mentioning the merchant accounts, I found this article very helpful. http://danieltenner.com/posts/0006-how-to-get-a-merchant-acc...
How can I redesign my business model and at the same time not put myself in the higher risk category? These are the things I want to achieve:

1. I want to make sure the buyer is authentic and has the available funds

2. Once the merchant wins the auction, buyer cannot back out and the deposit authorized earlier goes to the merchant.
Also, there cannot be a merchant account for all the merchants because initially I wont know who the winning merchant is going to be.
Is this article a social experiment?
I just got an email about this. I assumed that it was a scam that Gmail had missed. Huh.
> I want to make sure the buyer is authentic and has the available funds

Now you are getting into 'escrow' territory, which is yet another level of difficulty.

> Once the merchant wins the auction, buyer cannot back out and the deposit authorized earlier goes to the merchant.

That sentence makes absolutely no sense!

I think you have 'merchant' and 'buyer' switched in the first part.

The normal way this is done is that the auction requires the buyers to put up a 'can execute' before the auction.

For online auctions this is rarely done, the more common method is that the #2 gets it if the #1 does not perform.

His/her bid then counts as retracted and they're banned from further bidding.
You got TechCrunched: http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/12/down-for-new-owner/
This is one thing I don't like about our legal system as it stands. Skype cannot come out and say, yeah, we probably shouldn't have done that, because it could be used against them some day in the future. So instead they have to pretend that, or at least publicly declare, that they think the plaintiffs' claims are meritless, which any idiot can see they aren't. It's legally mandated suppression of honesty.
The correct solution in this situation is to contact South Butt, and offer them a license for a nominal amount. Now presto "The Fourth Ace" issue stops being an issue because you raised the issue with South Butt and made them get a valid license.
This whole incident seems to have put the fear of god in them.
That does not make any sense at all... merchants don't win auctions, buyers do.
Instant Bazinga
Maybe. There are some technologies that if discovered could probably be effective against any type of cancer. But it's not clear that those will be developed in the next few decades, or whether it will take longer.
can we get past the tablet before we attack the next iphone rumors?
I agree 100% with everything he wrote there, better take it to heart.

Note that there is some confusion between 'gateway' and 'IPSP', a gateway is one level above an IPSP and most merchants will not connect directly to a gateway.

If you do then you will have to take care of all the fraud control and certification issues, this is a major headache.
David Drummond on CNBC said that the value of the Chinese business was "immaterial either way". I don't think 600M is immaterial for G yet, so something's not right.

And given that the gigaom article incorrectly says that google has already stopped censoring, I'm inclined to believe they're randoming making shit up.
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Its actually a different kind of auction where the buyers role and the sellers role are switched. Maybe I could explain the business model to you in detail over here: http://etherpad.com/FhFO67ihv2 ?
For quite a few years I was under the impression that there was a verb "misle" whose past tense was misled. [even though I wasn't home-schooled]
It could be completely coincidental. Their China blog post suggests that unauthorized access to Gmail account was gained through phishing and malware - something https, sadly, does not protect against.
Accountants need to eat too.
I like this idea though, indeed I like the idea of the web being https by default.

Where I find it funny in relation to email is that email passes over the internet in plain text and without Google adding PGP or something to Gmail the benefits for this aren't great.

Considering the current incident with China, and the hacking in December. https for gmail will prevent snooping of gmail, but wouldn't prevent the email being intercepted if sent to or CC'd anyone on any other domain where the traffic crossed China (ot it could offer low-hanging fruit in other countries as relays may not be as secure).

It does help increase intra-Gmail security (as using the web to author would author it being visible before being sent) but it wouldn't wholly secure the entire transaction end to end which surely should be the goal.

I'd love to see Google take steps to offer a public key encryption system for Gmail that could secure the email even as it passed over other systems and to recipients in potential hot-zones.
L3R.net - best sources for IT experts
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049617
Maybe he meant that war is always evil, even if it is the lesser evil.
Top 10 Incredible Self Surgeries [2008]
That comes up blank for me.

But I get what you're saying, you get buyers that want to buy stuff from merchants, they deposit some amount of money with you, then the merchants can go in to a 'reverse auction' (that's what this model is called), the winner is the one that puts in the lowest bid.

You really should make such stuff clear up front when you ask for advice.

This is yet another kettle of fish, with its own associated problems.

You really don't want to be in between here, after all the chances of rip-offs increase enormously, or you will have to go through a lengthy accreditation phase with each merchant where you verify that they can deliver the goods.

In a normal auction the bigger problem is the buyers not being able to pay up.

If there is a performance related issue (such as work for hire) then you have even more things to contend with, such as deadline management, fallbacks and so on.
This does not look like a highly credible source but it is referenced in Wikipedia so I assume most of those must be true

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-surgery#External_links
Also got this in my inbox. Haven't seen any news articles from legit sources referencing it though...

Edit: found http://www.bjtlegal.com/classactions/barker/Barker_Complaint...
This is interesting - I haven't heard this expressed explicitly, but it describes pretty exactly how I feel about "programming".

I've also found that almost all the interesting stuff is in the stuff upfront where I'm sketching out ideas on a notepad - roughly how things will work together, what the running time of different approaches will be and how it will scale, the user flow and interaction, and getting down the trickier algorithms to become reasonably sure that the main idea is feasible.

The rest really is just plumbing and brickwork. It seems like a lot is written online about the different ways to lay bricks, but I've never really felt that that was very interesting, except for resulting reductions in time spent bricklaying. Sometimes it's fun playing around to make extremely abstracted code, or some other challenge, but for the most part, it's pretty repetitive.

Thanks for expressing it, I didn't realize that the cool part used to be a distinct profession.
That is a real problem. I think that that has mostly to do with the speed with which new articles are being submitted.
Same question raise and answered http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049298

Google has stood up to US govt. too
I don't remember an instance of Google responding to the Chinese government request of information.

They did follow the government guideline and censored their results but that's a very minor problem compared to the good Google did by just giving access to better english based information than Baidu for example.

All of this is not question of black and white and I respect Google a lot more than Yahoo based on the way they behave (Yahoo did help directly to the arrest of a political activist in China see: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/technology/19yahoo.html)
What is really interesting to me (i live in china) is that now that they have made this public it is impossible for them to continue doing business in china. Due to the social rules here if they wanted to save the situation in any way it should have been done privately. Given that they are clever people they know that announcing this will kill the china business. It is in essence a "slap", "we're out of here".
Me too, actually. I haven't put my information in yet... still waiting to see if I can corroborate the story. The whois on the site seems to check out though. It's registered to a "Rust Consulting", whose website talks about class action settlements (http://www.rustconsulting.com/).
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Hunting Fossil Viruses in Human DNA
Ask HN: Possible fix for the 'lost' submissions?
There is a big problem with submissions (good ones!) falling through the cracks.

There are countless examples of really good stuff that got submitted and that scrolled off the new page without getting votes. These are then stuck in limbo, they can't be re-submitted no matter how good they were.

Most people seem to monitor the new page but do not make the click to the 'more' link a the bottom.

I can see several ways to fix this:

- put up a little blurb of text on the new page
that explains this and invites people to
go to page 2 and beyond to 'rescue' the
good stuff that is under threat of being
lost

- a small code change the increases the
length of the new page based on the
age of the oldest item, say the oldest
item at the bottom of the 'new' page
should always be at a minimum 5 hours
old (if it doesn't get enough votes in
that time then too bad).

- Randomizing the 'new' page across the last
200 submitted links so that the 'new' page
is a sample, rather than a sequence
You really don't want to be in between here, after all the chances of rip-offs increase enormously, or you will have to go through a lengthy accreditation phase with each merchant where you verify that they can deliver the goods.

We have sort of solved that issue. The only issue left to be solved is authorizing a deposit against the buyers account before the auction, and then transfering this amount to the merchant at the end of the auction. This deposit is not only going to be part of the price of the merchandise. Any idea on how this model could be improved?
They don't have an A record for nasa.gov. For those who don't have dig (or don't care enough to do an actual DNS request and would rather trust some other, lesser tool):

$ dig nasa.gov

; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 <<>> nasa.gov
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 40211
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;nasa.gov. IN A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
nasa.gov. 300 IN SOA ns1.nasa.gov. dns.nasa.gov. 2008043229 10800 1200 3600000 14400

No A records.

$ dig www.nasa.gov

; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P2-RedHat-9.6.1-7.P2.fc11 <<>> www.nasa.gov
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22541
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 9, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.nasa.gov. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.nasa.gov. 300 IN CNAME www.nasa.gov.speedera.net.
www.nasa.gov.speedera.net. 120 IN CNAME www.nasa.gov.edgesuite.net.
www.nasa.gov.edgesuite.net. 21600 IN CNAME a1718.x.akamai.net.
a1718.x.akamai.net. 20 IN A 64.81.79.72
a1718.x.akamai.net. 20 IN A 64.81.79.70

Looks like the whole site is served through Akamai too.

What's a "direct @ url" ? Now we're overloading the @ for something else too?
You could use a 'pre-auth', but that only works for 3 to 5 business days, after that the pre-auth is revoked by the issuer.

Longer terms you will have to simply charge the account and then do a refund.

So this very much depends on the timing of your auctions.
"Because, worst of all, Google is effectively walking away. A human rights situation that they could have had a voice in is abandoned."

If the firewall entirely blocks Google, what more could they do? From what I gathered, the Chinese would have to effectively make it impossible to access Google, and at that point, what more can the company do? Sure they can try and invent ways to circumvent the firewall, but do you expect them to do that? If not, don't call that walking away.
Authorize.net has "Authorize only" transaction types, and you can "Capture" within 30 days. But how do I transfer this deposit to merchant without putting ourselves in the higher risk category?
Come on. Don't upvote to 36+ a comment that just copies part of the article with "wow" after it. I'm not saying it's wrong and should be downvoted, but still...
Intercepting email between SMTP servers is a much harder problem than intercepting email to and from the mail client, even if both are unencrypted. The latter requires only that the ISP or the LAN of the user to be compromised. If you ever connect through an insufficiently secured WAP then all of your email could be compromised.

However, using a secure link from the client to the mail server cuts down on the area of vulnerability significantly. Now your personal system needs to be compromised, or the backbone internet links between mail servers used by people who contact you need to be compromised. This is a significantly higher bar. Granted, if you want to maximize email security then public/private key encryption is the way to go, but the simple step of using https between the client and the server is a very significant improvement.
Avoidance of security breaches maybe? It's been rumoured/suggested that some attack started within google chinese offices at least.
It strongly depends on what part of the country you are in. Amtrak routes and delays south of about DC, for example, are pretty miserable.
I hesitate to wade into this dispute again, but what this curator says doesn't contradict what I wrote. In fact, I agree with him. What I wrote in H&P was

"The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed."

I didn't say that nothing after was as good as the work of that period, just that nothing after was better.

I thought carefully about that sentence when I wrote it. If I'd meant to say that the fifteenth century represented a peak no one since had attained, I would have written that. I didn't because (a) it's probably not true, and (b) that wasn't the point I was trying to make. If you go back and read the part of the essay where I said this, the point I was making was that in some fields, some of the best work is done very early on; that instead of the slow buildup you might expect, people are so excited about the new possibilities that work in the field reaches "cruising altitude" almost immediately.

To refute what I actually wrote, someone would have to produce something made after 1500 that they were willing to claim was better than everything made between 1430 and 1500. Not just as good, but better. That's not what our curator is claiming, and I doubt you could find any art historian who would.
CES Rundown: 5 Sweet Gadgets
Charity Auctions – Selecting The Right Products
Do you want to raise funds for your non-profit organization? Are you looking for the quickest way of raising funds? Charity auction is one of the best and the fastest ways of raising funds. If you want your charity auctions to become successful you should have the right products in your auction. Without the right choice of products it is not possible to get people to buy them even if the proceedings should go to charity.
Accepting (and using) your confounding between copyright violation, plagiarism, and theft, most moral and legal system make exception to very minor infringements. The oldest I know of is the Babylonian Talmud, which grants exception to "injury less than a perutah in value" [1]. I challenge you to show any value in this "theft".

that's saying that it is ok to steal dollar bills but not ok to steal 100's

Precisely! That's what I meant by "borrow a pencil" without returning it: I'm saying it's OK to steal a piece of paper (or copy a comment), but not a dollar (or copy his blog post), and not a 100 (or copy a chapter from his book), especially if it serves another purpose (comparing replies to a popular comment in two communities).

1. http://www.come-and-hear.com/sanhedrin/sanhedrin_57.html
I love the idea, and I'm sure it will improve once more people join up and contribute, but I put in "portland, or" and it told me to go to the zoo.

Thanks, website.
Nice one jacquesm. Do you mind sharing the data? I'd like to play around with some graphs too.
I'd like Thomas Ptacek to Apologize Please
Have a look if they are pre-auth or actual charges, that's a huge difference (both to you and the buyers).

For instance, if there are no 'takers' then you end up having to refund but the charges are gone.

A hard to catch fraud angle here is a person laundering money putting charges on cards for deposits, then having a 'white' merchant receive the deposits with ridiculously low bids.
Ask HN: Why China is the Future (of Business)?
I consider of writing a blog post, but second thought, why not post here and ask for why?

Everyone who is talking about Google's decision of pulling out China operation will say that this move will damage its long-term growth.

But is China that important at all? It is a country with huge population indeed, but most of them will become too old to work before 2020. And the social structure will become a few youth to feed large population of old.

Is China rich? Maybe.

Is China large in terms of land? Chins is as large as the United States, but half of the land is inhabitable.

Is China resourceful? Probably not. China imports most steels, oils, woods for production.

Now, why everyone tells me Chinese market will be huge in the future?
Become a Gmail Ninja
Looks pretty.

Graphing libraries are sort of a "the more the merrier" kind of thing, since which you pick depends on your aesthetic sensibility, a very long list of features that may or may not be implemented ("Can you do custom tooltips for individual points on the graph? Because I'd really like to do that. Oh, and I need Javascript callbacks to do data rescaling via AJAX."), whether the data abstractions meshes well with whatever you're using to generate the data, and what client side technology you favor.

To date I haven't been very impressed with the Javascript solutions I've used. My favorite for accessibility (and least favorite for implementation) is the Google Chart API: with a competent server-side library that blunts some of its numerous sharp edges, all your client needs to be able to do is load image URLs. I use this for pages I intend to be accessible from my cell phone and it works like a treat.

For generic charting, I seriously love OpenFlashChart 2. It has a modern aesthetic and I've yet to find a place where it couldn't be coerced into accommodating my needs.
I give up.

Someone else want to give it a shot?
To me the real joy in programming comes when you integrate these two phases. Writing and debugging code should provide you the resistance of the medium to further shape your concept of what is it that you are implementing.
Monsanto corn linked to organ damage
Scientific Journal Article: http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm
Ask HN: What do you use for bookkeeping?
Quickbooks, spreadsheets, some fancy web based solution? Do you like it?
If comments are a problem you can use a display:none textarea or a dozen other things. The important bit is that steve has found another way to decouple the HTTP loading from the Javascript engine parsing/loading. That's a fairly significant result.

If something goes wrong it's probably fixable / avoidable. This kind of extreme tuning may not for everyone but a 100msec saved is a happier user.
> But by trying to pass the thing off as 'green' and 'carbon-neutral', it's easy to give them a free pass,

Their approach _is_ green renewal energy and their goal _is_ to go carbon-neutral; they are not trying to "pass" it as such or being pretentious about it. This _is_ how they are approaching it for real.

Please read the interview link I provided.

There is nothing altruistic and humanitarian or pretention about their intention; its just good business. Good PR is icing on the cake.
I've said that programming in Ruby is like building a bicycle out of mud. (And I like Ruby.) This article reminds me of that sentiment in a very real way. Nothing is ever the wrong size or shape. Nothing ever doesn't fit.
"debated taking PG to task"?

Why don't you just say what you disagree with, no need to make internet drama or necessarily get pg to respond to you. I have studied quite a bit of philosophy and I like this essay a lot, so I would be interested in reading a good criticism (please, please do better than idlewords, it is clearly personal for him).
// See design doc at http://go/at-teleporter for more information.

I believe //go/... is an internal Google URL. The plot thickens!
Should Bill Gates let an aid install Windows 7?

Do you think Larry and Serge have a team of people to do all of their web searches?

How do you think Jeff Bezos does his holiday shopping?

This man should be doing his own taxes or he should be lobbying for tax code reform.
Google... hardening...

This is old news for people who know (or care) about https. But it is new news in terms of the Goog vs. China cyber war. The winners in all this will most certainly be Google customers outside of China because Google will continue hardening their defenses which will make computing with Google safer for the end user. Will it help users in China? Time will tell...
To me top 10 SEO tips for bloggers is not about technology at all, it's about marketing. This is the category I feel is growing and it makes HN less interesting to me.
> I like the idea of the web being https by default.

So that proxies become useless, the connection gets slower, data traffic increases, firefox users are plagued with warnings because people don't have proper certificats etc.

At least 95% of the web-pages people are viewing are pointless bullshit anyway. It's not as if the casual internet user were using the potential freedom of the internet for anything good.

Messaging and similar services should be private of course.
"OpenGL is an abstraction of 3D concepts with many vendor-specific extensions to enable performance. Direct3D is an abstraction of the most common implementation of real world 3D hardware. Game developers did, and continue to, unambiguously ask Microsoft to produce the latter."

Quoting myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038982