skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm tempted to create some kind of site that checks the 1 pt submissions automatically. Not sure how much semantic analysis but even minimal keyword checking could flag possibly good articles. Hidden.HN
Gravity as a holographic entropic force
CNBC interview with David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google, who discusses the Internet giant's reaction to an assault by hackers who sought to penetrate the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/01/12/business/124746651...
The old benefit of Amtrak is that you could count on your arrival time into any major large city, as opposed to buses, which were often late due to traffic. Lately Amtrak has been failing this with repeated track delays, washouts due to rain, and other track problems. For me this has removed a great deal of its benefit, at least in the northeast corridor where I usually travel.
It would be nice if they preferred to buy my startup...
For unspecified, possibly could run the unspecified URLs through bit.ly to get the meta description/keywords.

Example: (Is Amazon EC2 oversubscribed)

http://api.bit.ly/info?version=2.0.1&hash=83VrYk&log...
"I'm sorry but couldn't he have achieved the same with a threaded email client?"

I would agree... but I've yet to see an email client that never breaks threading when handling emails between X number of other email clients, some of which are not threaded, some of which strip attributes, and some of which rewrite attributes.

Emails need a better, unified threading control, and clients need better, more powerful organization tools. Once that's done, sure, a proper email client would do the same thing, though with significantly increased duplication (5 replies == 5 emails to each person in the conversation, or a single highlighted thread in Wave(-like) apps).
> a long way towards an xbox360 port.

"The Xbox (name derived from "DirectX box")"
Reddits
Hey, sharp eye ! I must have mis-spelled it at some point and then the 'matcher' then used both labels.

Those two should be summed, but the misspelled on is used very rarely (fortunately).

I'll re-do the graph tomorrow when I'm awake, it won't affect any other rows or the shapes though.

There were many subcategories as well, but I've used only the top level of the tags to make the graph legible.

In total I used about 200 different tags.
I'm actually surprised that Microsoft has not yet made a "skydrive" drive in explorer that natively and seamlessly integrated with this service.

From a perception standpoint, I hesitate to use this because it seems that MS doesn't yet have full faith in this service.
Set Your Home Windows With a Certain Light Intensity - Bismillah Slamet
Having ulterior motives doesn't necessarily make something wrong. Even if Google had business and other reasons to stop censuring and get out of the market the lasting effect is to focus peoples' attention on Chinese human rights violations.

Sure- it might in the end help Google too, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth applauding.
Most of the time Google just wants the engineering talent. And, as a secondary advantage, additional technology that they can incorporate to their products.
Windows being the de facto standard was bad. It held the web back for years, because Internet Explorer remained stagnant.
That's actually a piece of cake to do.
What's crazy is that not once, but twice in the past month, I've been on a train from BOS-NYC that has broken down at some point in CT or RI. The first time they sent a new train (we boarded it using planks laid across the tracks) and the second time they sent a new engine car.

Otherwise, yes Amtrak has been more reliable than Megabus/Boltbus =)
Apart from the settling down period in the first year that is my conclusion as well.

Even the cyclic nature that edw519 referred to in the 'new years exchange' seems to be mostly limited to the voting, it has nothing to do with the actual submissions.
I totally forgot about Limo Liner. I'm thinking of taking it this Thursday morning.
I'll build another graph tomorrow that is weighted by votes, that might give another perspective.

There seems to be some confusion about how to interpret the graph, the Y axis is 'per post', the x axis is per block of 1,000 posts.

The graph would have been harder to read at 138x1000 pixels so I've stretched it a bit.
Really loved this article. Only 3 points though? This is why I stopped looking at the "Top Rated" HN articles.
Is a law that a person cannot understand, legal?
Legislators write the tax code.

Their primary incentive is re-election. From that perspective, an unfathomably complex tax code has three points in its favor:

1. It allows legislators to avoid accountability for any tax increases. It also complicates revenue accounting, so they can propose changes to the tax code and call them "tax cuts" even if they don't change revenue much overall.

2. A complicated, arbitrary, intimidating tax code makes legislators powerful. They can grant favorable treatment to their friends and twist the arm of powerful entities that get in their way. They aren't held accountable for this behavior because of #1.

3. Accountants and tax lawyers are small groups of people who will all lose a lot if the tax code is ever simplified. They also have money and connections, so they can inflict a lot of pain on anyone who threatens their business. The public at large is too big and diffuse to force political action over its losses to tax-related friction.

A complicated tax code has one major point against. Voters don't like it. But then, this is a tax code we're talking about. Its purpose is to take away voters' money. No matter how it's organized, they aren't going to be terribly happy about it.

So is the tax code we have today really all that surprising?
My friend Michelle just started learning guitar. She thinks it's all about getting the basic chord patterns and fingering down. And only way to do that is to practice chording every day. Good luck!
...how many blogs does this man read? Blogging =/= tech blogging - the simplest search would bring up hundreds if not thousands, of blogs about people's life stories. Including, yes, that of techies.
+1 for remention of this Ira Glass video
I'd make 1/300th of a dollar on it every month.
I don't think there is anything I could do to make a difference. I guess I can give a few people a free US VPN. Email me if you want access.

Google could bring down the GFW by massively disseminating free VPN access to Chinese people. However, doing so could get Larry and/or Sergey assassinated.
the individual on reddit may have very well stolen your comment

I did, thought of it more as a social experiment than theft, though. Apologies to boundlessdreamz, if he cares...
Dodgeball is a famous Google acquisition because it got purchased and died. However, it's founder started foursquare post-Google.
Tips to Article-Writers
I'm not exactly gushing about this but I'm happy google changed their stance.

Let's keep in mind that before they stood up to the Chinese government they first collaborated with them, and apparently it was the hacking (attempt) that caused them to go about face.

If someone steals your car and the next day he doesn't that doesn't make him a model citizen yet.

Google would be a model citizen if their stance had been like this when they still thought they were going to score big in China. This is in part a statement of principle and in part one that is motivated by PR.

Google has gotten some reasonably bad press recently because of Schmidts' ill thought out remarks regarding privacy, this will go a long way to make everybody forget.

So, keep your eyes open, let's give them the benefit of the doubt but let's not right away forgive and forget the past until some time has gone by and we can re-evaluate how much change there really is.
If a law is too complex to be understood by the majority of people, then that is a form of injustice.
Storing Javascript in comment tags and later eval'ing it
Google Threatening To Leave China Over Hacking, Email Leak
> Because, worst of all, Google is effectively walking away. A human rights situation that they could have had a voice in is abandoned. The only losers in this debacle are the Chinese people.

So far they've actually only done the "voice" part, not the walking away.

But I agree, Joe Zhongguo is probably the loser either way.
by Ezra W. Zuckerman, MIT Sloan School of Management, 2008FEB ~ http://web.mit.edu/ewzucker/www/Tips%20to%20article%20writer...
Baidu stock +7% after hours.
Andreyf is active here too, but afaik not under that uid.

This is his:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andreyf

So you may be right after all.
I'm not sure they can just block all Google services all of a sudden. What about mail. What about docs. What about turning off your Google Adwords account.
How To: Build & Launch a Design Centric Web App
Orlando vacation homes
See the text in the article about the 'unspecified'.

As for the scale, it doesn't get much more precise than this, the only concession to legibility is to stretch the graph horizontally because otherwise it would be only 138 pixels wide, vertical is very close to one posting per pixel.

As the volume of postings on news.ycombinator increases due to increased traffic to the site the graph will stretch more further to the right.

This could be counteracted by changing the algorithm to 'bin' more posts to the right hand side to get for instance one month per bin, but in practice the outcome would be the same, you'd just have another weighting to do to get the Y-axis of the bins to line up.
I've read from various mailing lists that the technical specifications of the Erlang VM are kept internal at Ericsson as well as "in the minds" of the language's developers.

Personally, I'd love to get a hold of some documents that clearly describe the finer details of BEAM.
That's just insane... do you really think the two are comprable?

1. Google is not withdrawing from China. They are merely deciding not to implement additional censoring measures to curry additional favor with the government.

2. They have been losing market share to an inferior but government approved search engine Baidu.

Why do you think Google China's Kai-fu Lee left after a few years in his highest position to make a relatively small startup when his track record shows he prefers large corporations like Apple, SGI, and Microsoft? Google knows they are losing ground and he was probably abandoning the sinking ship.

Another year of lost market share to government supported Baidu and the recent espionage was the last straw for Google to know that their current methods weren't working.

3. Why are you comparing them then? It's not like Google decided to make this happen so they could publicly denounce the Chinese government.

Considering their past practices with China, I would have expected them to keep silent on the matter. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the Schmidt incident influenced the scale of their reaction.

If you think Schmidt's quote did not make a big impact , that's your opinion, not fact.
I downvoted you for your unsupported claim that "In the neo-liberal era, this approach is no longer given any credence". I also downvoted you for complaining about a downvote, which probably gave you more sympathy upvotes than you deserved.
That's pretty low.
I thought that was weird. Nowhere in the post do they say that the attacks were done by the Chinese government. We're all just assuming that is the case.
Google down 10 points, Baidu up 30 in hour after "new approach" announcement
Thanks Ryan, your essay is very interesting. I like this:

We ARE "losing something important" by training our brains to act as indices (or creating personal habits, as you suggest) instead of the libraries themselves.
Remember folks: "Google prefers to acquire pre-revenue" is not an excuse for your startup to have no business model.
If these allegations are true, and really, I don't expect anyone to be better than Google at tracking who's doing what on the internet, then this is the right choice. It's refreshing to see a corporation back up its beliefs like this and the authorities in the mainland have seriously crossed the line.

But I feel compelled to point out that it's unfortunate that it's come to this. I don't agree at all with posters saying that Google was initially doing the wrong thing by being in business in China at all; as several other posters have already pointed out, Google was at least making sure the censorship was obvious, which, really, was bold already.

Moreover, the bigger point; how wrong is it for international corporations to do business in China? Yes, there are human rights abuses. I get annoyed when people seem to just enjoy using the PRC leadership as a moral punching bag without trying to understand the historical lead-up to its creation (and, really, the West helped create the conditions in China that led to its current authoritarianism to begin with). But, what is really going to be gained by corporations outright stonewalling the mainland and its business opportunities? If you really want to help people and be pragmatic, then I think you would have done as Google originally did. The potential economic opportunities created for the millions of very poor Chinese by having international business in China is not something to take lightly if you can manage to at least not worsen the position of human rights activists in China by censoring and not outright handing them over (something which I think Yahoo actually did). And, by working with the PRC, you can at least get yourself into a position where you can affect change without outright confrontation.

Again, I do agree that the hacking attempts change the game entirely and is the point at which all international corporations doing business in China need to reconsider things, but just stonewalling China for confrontation's sake is just trying to encourage another Cold War, and we don't want that.
Play, Roo and a little of Django
Furious Google throws down gauntlet to China over censorship
Malcolm Gladwell on Entrepreneurship
Huh? To cross-post a comment from news.YC to reddit? Why?
Book Online at discounted rates with cusco-hotel.travel
Zed Shaw: I'd Like Thomas Ptacek To Apologize Please
If it was your own comment that would be fine, if it is someone else's then I'm afraid that it is beyond me to explain to you why it is wrong if you do not understand that by yourself.
pg, are you around to look at the voting patterns in this thread? I'd like to hear if you see any accounts being used to attack the comment score of anyone expressing anti-Chinese sentiment.

(I've seen this happen before on sites I've run, even ones on a much smaller scale than HN)

I'd also like to applaud Google for this. I hope people who helped influence this decision can see how many people appreciate what they're doing. It's not falling on deaf ears.
The size of China magnifies the significance of their changes, but there has been little real change over the last 10 years. Their economic growth pails in comparison to what South Korea or Japan went though over a similar time period. The government actively limits economic growth and has been using the limited economic growth to help quell political unease. China is a highly corrupt and protectionist society and the powerful have been using their influence to meddle in business for thousands of years. While there size may elevate them to supper power status in time, I suspect they are going to have limited impact over the next hundred years without significant political and economic reform.
does anyone have a copy of the full article?
join this facebook group to show our concern on Chinese network human right and push Microsoft to show its influence.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=250019583195
Would we be outraged if we learned that the CEO of Ford sends his car to a mechanic for oil changes and tune-ups?
That's the slightly cynical view. Another is that they want the team.

Yet another that seems most plausible to me is that pre-revenue probably means pre-baggage. If they want to shut down the service & use the technology in some new or existing Google service but some users have already prepayed for two years, how do they get out of that?

A variation of your suggestion is that they aren't really interested in your revenue so they don't want to pay for it. Most of Google's products are not directly revenue generating. That makes some sense to me. They don't want 200 $5m businesses. They want to add another billion to their existing businesses or build a new billion dollar business.

Look over these acquisitions. In which case was google out to 'buy a business' in the revenue/cashflow sense?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google
I dont see how even earning good will by the rest of the world would help. With China being such a large country, being #2 is fine. Maybe they perceive themselves losing market share and on the way down?
That's absolutely true.

When this is all done I'll make all the data available so that people can mine it for what it is worth.

A fair amount of work went in to this little project, not all of it automated (unfortunately), a lot of time went in to making sure the tags would be somewhat relevant.

If there would be any major trends that I could not explain by looking at samples of the data I would have certainly investigated.

I hope that if there are such trends that I missed that they will come out in the follow up (weighted by votes, see above), if not then the analysis will have to be much more detailed, and that will probably mean a lot more handwork than what went in to making this graph.

The 'good news' for me is that there is no unbounded growth of the 'unspecified' category, that would be a fairly large indicator of trouble.
3. Not caring whether the laws are just, but being willing to enforce them?
Consumermate.com - revolutionizes online comparison shopping experience
You mean free millions of potentially productive hours from useless paper pushing to some sort of endeavor that actually improves the lot of humanity.
It would make more sense to use a constant time x-axis. Also, how did you do the article labeling/clustering?
My perspective from Sweden, where filing taxes is _very_ easy is that filing taxes in USA must be difficult because those who oppose taxes there don't want it to be simple.

Would it be possible to streamline taxes in USA? Would it not be interpreted as "making it easier to collect even more taxes"?
That is not my reddit id and even if it was what is wrong with doing that ?
Losing and Gaining confidence for my game idea
I do care about it a bit because that comment contains personal opinion/commentary. If you had copied only the "data/facts" there would have been no problem.
I think you are probably partially correct in the sense that a company as large as Google is not comprised of one single personality. The decision making voices in Google could well run the spectrum from those advocating a moral line in the sand all the way to those bottom liners that were convinced that an action like this could well have enough PR upside to offset any potential losses in the Chinese market.
LEGOs, Play-Doh, and Programming
There used to be two professions that we call programming today:

Systems Analysis

and (unsurprisingly)

Programming.

Arguably the systems analysis bit was the more interesting of the two, it is the one that I would equate with architecture, and to some extent (but certainly not as much as some would) art.

The other part, the programming part is best equated to engineering and construction.

I find I go through exactly those two phases when making something new. The first part I love to do it's where all the interesting bits are, the problems get solved.

By the time I hit the second phase, the joyful part is over, from there it is just typing stuff in and realizing the vision that I already have in my head and debugging stuff.

Rarely (but it does happen occasionally) do I get back in the 'fun' bits while coding something. That would mean I've made some terrible oversight during the analysis phase.

The analysis phase sometimes also includes some programming, it is where you come up with nifty little programs to test your assumption and where you let your inspiration go wild in order to see if you can solve the problem in an interesting way.

That is the most joyful kind of programming that I know, it is on a white piece of paper without any kind of connection to the real world of data processing. This is were algorithms are born. I love doing that.

The rest is just plumbing and brickwork.
Profit Of $52 billion in 2009
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."

You had a history teacher who said this?!? Doesn't the period of history he teaches include the United States war against the Axis (World War II)? Yes, the United States delayed entering that war about as long as any country could, but it was on the right side of that war, and it was better for the world that the United States went to war in that case. (Similar points could be made about other countries in other wars; I mention the United States only because you mentioned a teacher of United States history.)
Actually, Baidu is down 14 points, Google 10. And Google is at 590, while Baidu is at 386. Did you actually read the data behind the links that short blog snippet provides, or do you regularly submit things totally blindly?

NASDAQ is not a measurement related to human rights, anyway.
According to GiagOm "if the Chinese government bans the search giant, then Google could be walking away from about $600 million in 2010 revenues."

http://gigaom.com/2010/01/12/how-much-will-it-cost-google-to...
A single person can take one action for two different contradictory reasons. How much more so a company of thousands. This neither negates the good reasons nor washes away the bad ones, but nevertheless, we applaud because we approve of the action.

Besides, look around. How many companies would even pretend to do this for moral reasons? We've legally mandated moral cowardice in our corporations (by mandating that they must increase shareholder value above all else), and to see a company even pay lip service as a reason to something else is refreshing.

(Though if they don't follow through and either provide an uncensored feed or truly leave soon, it will just be lip service.)

Those who still say that Google's hardly an angel here, I refer you to my previous statement about how we've mandated moral cowardice; is it really a surprise that this step could only be taken in addition to other "ulterior motives"? It would be illegal for Google to just pull out of a market because they were offended, and they could face shareholder lawsuits. In the end they must still believe this is a profitable move. (If only to contain losses caused by espionage...) But they have other options, "suck it up" being among them, so there is still at least a smidgen of courage here.
I tried it once round trip. WiFi was so-so, a bit spotty at times, seats weren't bad, but at the end of the day it's still a pricey bus. The bathroom was decent, meaning I didn't get the typical $5 of negative utility penalty when I have to use a bus bathroom.

My NYC->BOS leg I was in the left aisle (single seat, no neighbors on either side), which was a much much more enjoyable experience than the BOS->NYC leg when I had to sit next to neighbors in the back-right of the bus.

Oh yes, unlike the Chinatown buses, I don't recall the driver talking on a cell phone the entire time.
Zynga Tiptoes Back Into Offers
I needed a copy of the book in order to be able to translate it. It was more convenient to see it on my screen while translating than holding it in my hand.
How about buying some Alsthom gear and laying high speed rail across the USA ? the country is pretty much made for it, and it would save a bundle of fuel and money.

Also none of that check in business.

If it would just be used to connect the clusters of major cities within the cluster itself that would already be a pretty good thing to have.