skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most revealing thing to me was that you can buy an SSL certificate for as little as $30 these days (GoDaddy). It's been a while since I've had to order one for my company, but I seem to recall it costing several hundred dollars the last time I did it.
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Cheques should be reintroduced in Europe so that the US. can't ocpy all the transactions as it does right now with SWIFT.
You're joking right? The majority of agriculture in the western world is produced directly because of the Gulf Streams warming effect, look at any agricultural output maps and you'll see North American and European production is squarely centred around where the gulf stream contacts the continent and increases local temperatures. As the global temperature increases vast amounts of land will be moved into the range of arable crops, specifically the two largest countries in the world (Canada and Russia) have very low percentages of arable land due to the vast amount of taiga, as temperatures increase the arable land will increase exponentially. These two countries could easily feed the world at present production densities. [Edit: Canada currently has less than 5% arable land, and presently only uses ~0.6% of all land for agriculture. Russia has about 7% arable land, but only uses ~0.1%. The prairies account for ~80% of Canada's agriculture land, and these very prairies are expected to grow exponentially as temperatures increase]

Incidentally your claim that the Sahara is expanding is quite frankly laughable, when all current evidence has been showing it is presently shrinking due to increased rainfall. Expectations are that if this trend continues it will turn into the 'Green Sahara' of 12,000 years ago. This would turn the Sahara into the biggest pasture land in the entire world . . . that's if you believe the global warming models being used.
I assume this is a reference to the use of the GIL by a Python line such as “a,b = b,a” which swaps the value of a and b.
As I understand it, this code invokes the GIL to ensure the atomicity of the operation. The code looks innocent though.
The software industry moves fast and here it just looks like Best Buy havn't moved their business practices at a comparable rate - which is typical behavior for large companies.

In my opinion it's only worth taking out an extended warranty on computers if you're a non technical person and need that kind of support. In real terms computing is so cheap these days that such warranties are barely worth the expense.
Paying by cheque in France is very widespread. It is a lot more common that paying by bank transfer.
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I want to point out that the above plot seems really silly. When I read the synopsis on Amazon, I didn't want to read it. A friend, who is also into Richard Morgan, read it and highly recommended it. So, I gave it a shot. It was a very good book. I was pleasantly surprised.
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so you think a huge corporation like rackspace, would want to take a risk with a company run by a single person? Yes remail is a good app, but the fact that it's a one man show, no doubt raised questions for Rackspace, and the fact that he had YC backing no doubt helped eased them.

why would YC put a bad taste in the mouths of companies?
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Not the original commenter, but here is my take on it on Snow Leopard: I use QuickTime X a lot for its h.264 hardware acceleration. As of now, that's the only option you have if you want to play 1080p on Mac. Coupled with Perian, I think it solves the majority of playback issues with a rather simple user interface. Then I use MPlayer OS X Extended for its better support for MKV, subs, DTS, AC3, etc. And it has a very simple interface like the original QuickTime player (< X). So really, there's much less need for VLC on that platform...
btw you have a bug on the http://rubyrow.net/ index page(probably other sites too) when javascript is disabled. The footer is fixed height, with the photos appearing below it.
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Would be useful to know who has a mouse wheel. That definitely makes a significant difference in my perception of "the fold" when there is almost no effort involved in scrolling down.

The donation button for example would be seen by me almost 100% of the time even if off the page because scrolling down maybe 50% of the height of the window is just habit when I come to a new page to throw the heading off the top and only show the content.
Having an unencrypted video broadcast on a military drone is just a dumb idea by whoever manufactured it. Encryption would seem to be the most minimal requirement for such an application.
If all of the data is positive, but the mean - 1*sigma is negative, the gaussian approximation probably isn't very good....
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This is also an apt description of the relationship between the FDA and large pharmaceutical companies. Also, the USDA and large food companies. There are likely many more examples. It's a systemic problem of our structure of government.
Can I ask why? My theory is because it's hasn't grown to an active technology community yet.
Plurk should settle down, Microsoft helped them! Microsoft gave Plurk a lot of free marketing and exposure from this incident and Microsoft has pulled their product and won't be competing now.
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Not quite right. Nothing will be in HTML5 as a final recommendation unless it's in 2+ major implementations. There's plenty in the current drafts of HTML5 which has not yet been implemented.
Totally agree. This is the first time I have heard of them. And They could use this publicity to good use rather than hanging on to the issue.
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I agree. The new American dream... I hope that I am a victim someday... er... wait, according to society we are all already victims... let me start over. I hope and dream that someday I am the victim of a wealthy perpetrator so that I can sue them and become rich.
Anyone figure out what the lines in the background are for?
So, What do you guys want microsoft to do now?. Can you tell us what is the ideal response you expect from microsoft ?.
tl;dr this guy needs to shut up about halfway through
it's art.
Microsoft did not steal the code. an Employee or contractor did. They, the individual(s) that stole the code is who is guilty here. As soon as Microsoft was made aware of the situation they pulled the offending code/software immediately.
No need to shoot down a stealth bomber; they fall out of the sky on their own.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZCp5h1gK2Q

According to Wikipedia, that is how you turn $737M into smoke.
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Manna chapter 1 - interesting take on AI & robots
http://searchyc.com/traffic+light+snow

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998252

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994801

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=999978
I think this vision is overly romantic. I would say the Purpose is to make money. And if making employees happy is a way to achieve it, then they'll do it.

I don't think employee happiness always necessarily equals more productivity. may be true in creative work.
Stop being a jerk. The Plurk guys got hosed. I agree that this press release is a mistake, but I can see where they're coming from.

"wait for someone to create an accident and take advantage of it by suing the pants off of them"

That is in no way what Plurk did.

"Your company is worthless, so you're going to sue Microsoft to make your millions?"

Obviously the company is not worthless, or presumably MS wouldn't have bothered ripping it off.
Description of high-risk third-party payment aggregation and why its not just PayPal that has a problem with it:

http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/high-risk-mech...
Have we already forgotten of "pirated cable (video)"?
It'd be nice if they could include in a SP to IE 6, 7, and 8 considering half the planet is still on legacy browsers.
it's not necessarily our structure of government. regulation (using the law to prevent certain economic activity rather than economic incentives) is always prone to falling under the influence of those it is trying to regulate. I believe it was taleb who compared financial regulation to a chess game between regulators and the regulated.
I know it's an obvious comment but that's only if you sell online :)
You actually have to look at Microsoft as part victim here. The company at fault is the subcontractor, and Microsoft handled it quickly and appropriately once notified of the issue. Plurk could have handled this differently from the start, but chose the publicity route and it got them noticed. Now the publicity train has left the station and they have not realized it, but soon they will see the goodwill they gained can be quickly lost if they push this too far.
MPlayer. I had some videos that wouldn't play with VLC that would play with MPlayer. (They were encoded with Nero Recode.)

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html
Under the Green Canopy
They say there's "no evidence" that they were able to take control of the plane's in flight. Since nobody bothered to encrypt the video feed, and they're saying there's "no evidence", it sounds to me like they also didn't bother to encrypt the control signals. Nice...
The 15 Blown Tech Deals Of The Decade
The UK enjoys free banking for people - free transfers, direct debits, automated payments, etc.

Possibly not for much longer, it was all possible because of overdraft fees etc that people are trying to weasel out of paying. In most of the rest of the world, you pay a monthly charge for even having an account and getting an overdraft is a much bigger deal.
I've read horror story after horror story of houses burned down.

I've been living in one for decades without any problems.

Factoring in anecdotal evidence like this (or mine) always has risks.
Is it? I've never heard of this before... and yet have had to comply with a range of other laws on the web.

Do you have any links about this? I don't like to think we have clients unintentionally breaking the law.
It's apparently very hard to scale any exchange system to exclude fraud and prevent false positives in a humane manner. AdSense, Paypal, Google Checkout, eGold, and Prosper.com have all failed to figure out how to do it reliably. You can throw fancy machine-learning techniques at the problem and isolate most of the unusual activity, but the problem then is how you filter that between fraudsters and the genuine good guys.

The basic problem is that if you're a low-margin Internet-scale transactional business, the marginal cost of distinguishing fraud from unusual non-fraud is higher than the marginal benefit from letting the transactions through. And if you're Paypal and you get the float on a bunch of locked funds without the need to following banking regulations, it's definitely not in your best interest to do.
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In real close-to-mid-range combat, this matters even less (unless you're a marksman). It's rare that you'd have time to properly line up the sights and take one really good shot. What really matters in that situation is knock-down power, reliability, and the shooter's training.
I don't disagree with any of the above, but there is a small problem.

During the state transfer, the climate might change fast (there is some evidence for that happening before), which will (over a few years' time) make farming ... well, problematic.

It might be good for the world/humanity, but it sucks to get caught in the middle.
Get off Hacker News. You are draining society of the inherent value we could obtain by melting your body down and using you for fuel. Your meats will be used to feed farmers, who are producing the only real value this world has seen. We're meat, so IMO abolish society and get on with cannibalism. I understand that's and (sic) extreme view, but its (sic) still where I stand.

/s

Man, you can't take the stance that there's something worthless about what other people do just because you say so. That's stupid and hypocritical. Unless you want to go the nihilistic approach and deny everybody everything but the most savage of existences, at least have the courtesy not to be a twat about that which you don't understand.

I said already: We are not going to argue about music on Hacker News. I don't know you well enough as a user, Retric, to be able to make any judgment about you specifically, but I have a certain dim outlook on how we as a whole treat the arts, and I'm not enough of a martyr to waste a lovely winter Thursday trying to explain to you just how valuable a part music plays in greater society. Suffice it to say the average working musician produces far greater value than the average burger flipper, leads to more people being employed, has a wider audience, and gives more varied a product. It's not about business. It's about art. The business only exists because enough people think financing art is worth more than you do.

I switched from a computer-heavy major at one college to a more artistic major at a full-on art school, and I can say that I have absolutely learned more of value here in four months than I did spending a year learning to program.

Finally: You think math is productive? Math is the most whimsical of all the arts. No practical value whatsoever beyond the first few months, save the delight of having such freedom to think and play.
I agree. My first thought when reading the article was "WTF? No encryption?". Would be interested in learning more about the company that makes these, and how something so obvious was not done.
There's certainly legitimate causes to doubt AGW, but the Petition Project is not among them. Frankly, I'm shocked to see Randi engage in such a blatant appeal to authority, and an irrelevant authority (that is, scientists primarily not in the climate field) at that.
That was thrown out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2009/nov/24/bank-charge...

Thankfully they ruled that if you go over your agreed overdraft limit, the bank can charge you what they like.

Sanity prevailed.

I also do not buy the 'that's why bank accounts were free'. Consumer banking has always been free in the UK. Before consumer overdrafts/charges were common.
I believe it's more than covered by the cost of business banking.

I think it's a much better system - consumer banking free, business banking paid for. The original freemium business model.
Can you imagine people reading as a pastime? Or watching movies? Or watching sports?

Music is a technical display wherein people each create something and, woven together, it becomes a song. You can't imagine being riveted by five instruments each weaving around one another, by the various techniques each one employs, by the editing process required to create each sound? It's just like watching fourteen people run a ball around on a field, but the movements are planned ahead of time and the execution is key.

Maybe it's not your thing, but I'd hope you can at least understand the appeal to other people.
It's worth noting that Benjamin Wachs (main author of the SFWeekly piece) is pretty right-wing, even for the somewhat conservative SFWeekly.

Nothing wrong with that, but a lot of what he is talking about is simply a promotion of less left-leaning government style.
Nationwide BIS Outage Reported For Most Carriers
Augmented reality goes mainstream with mobile applications
Interestingly enough, it was just yesterday I was reading an article on Robert Gates reviewing the military senior mentor program. http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-12-16-gates-mento...
'Everyone is an artist', another point re programming-is-art discussion
And I'd like you to point out the law that says all contracts have to be written. With a few specific exceptions, they don't.

Sure, you should get them in writing and signed to cover your ass, but an email contract is still perfectly valid in most cases. Just like a "handshake agreement" can be legally binding.
It's hard to see how that makes sense. The selling point of WinMo is that you can "take all your Windows stuff with you", and that developers already familair with desktop Windows can easily reuse their skills. Microsoft is all about spreading the Windows ecosystem all the way from the datacentre to the living room to the pocket. Why would they introduce an incompatible product into the mix?
I moved to the US in 2006. When I was opening an account with WaMu the teller was very excited about the "online" bill pay service they had just launched. I became very confused when he was demonstrating it, because there was no field for the recipient's account number or sort code. I was even more confused when he setup a payment to me. It turned out that the system just printed out a paper check and mailed it.
There are still 450 Minuteman III missiles deployed!
I use both PayPal and Fastspring as our payment processors (Fastspring is there to give customers an option besides paypal). Fastspring is excellent customer service, and their "springboard" interface is very nice. Fees are a bit high, but they do offer additional services on top of what you can get from PayPal.

I've built merchant processor plugins for several different systems (2checkout, worldpay, alertpay) and NONE have as nice of an API as PayPal (both regular IPN and their PayPal Pro NVP API).

We've been selling through PayPal for 7 years now without issue, and we usually process from 2 to 3 hundred transactions per month.
Of course, "fast" is very relative. A quick test with 'openssl speed' on my laptop (two years old, power-saving mode cutting performance in half, using one of two cores) shows OpenSSL is roughly a hundred times faster than this library on Firefox.

Which is not to say that getting to this point is not an achievement; JavaScript isn't exactly the best language to implement cryptographic algorithms in.
1. the solution to a tragedy of the commons is not always to privatize the common resource. Private firms have historically continued to harvest their privately held resource until gone (e.g., privately held old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest) because they can use the resource (the land the forest once grew on) in some other profitable way.

As long as there continues to be some means of profit from the resource (in forestry, replanted pine tree farms for wood pulp where formerly redwood was harvested; in fisheries, aquaculture or harvest of other species) there is little or no incentive for the private firm to preserve the original resource.

Here, with menhaden, as long as the private firm can continue to harvest something profitable they will have no incentive not to overfish the menhaden till the stock collapses.

The reason is simple; the resource that is publicly beneficial is live menhaden, filtering the water by consuming algae. The resource that is privately beneficial is dead menhaden, pressed for oil and ground for animal feed. This is why public protection is sometimes necessary; because the public good cannot always be made to coincide with private profitability.

2. Fish farming is unlikely to be the answer for the simple reason that farm raised fish are not fed a diet consisting mostly of algae (the primary source of the sought after omega-3 fatty acids). Farm raised fish are, as a result, lower in these beneficial fats than their wild counterparts.
The drone recorded footage of the insurgents drinking grog and cursing landlubbers.
Maybe. I guess it's possible there's a EU guideline that has to be implemented by the member states, but hasn't been implemented yet e.g. for me in Belgium.

Here's the guidelines (in Dutch):
http://www.vbo-feb.be/files/ondernemingsnummer.pdf

So the website needs to contain the company registration number, the way it's incorporated and a bunch of other stuff, but not the bank account number afaics.
Though the bank account number does need to be displayed on invoices.
If they were first deployed in the 1990's, the technology was developed in the 1980's. Easily deployable software to grab the signals out of the air was probably outside the realm of what seemed possible then.

Why it hasn't been fixed since is shocking!
(I know this isn’t possible, but bear with me. It’s a “thought experiment”.)

Theorizing too much about the impossible is a risky activity, like deliberately practicing bad rhythm. You can train your mind to fall into patterns of misguided thought. You can wind up being deathly afraid of shadows that do not exist. Abstraction can be good for a while, like training wheels on a bicycle, but try to respect the limits of your abstractions and spend a healthy amount of your time in the real world.

I don't remember which lawyer -- might have been Lessig, might have been Moglen -- made the obvious point that copyright law can't be adjudicated by computer. Here are fifteen words taken from a copyrighted work:

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

A computer can detect that these words are from a copyrighted work and censor them. But it can't figure out that in this context -- a brief educational example as part of an essay -- my use of these words is obviously a case of fair use. That's for a judge to decide. Judges are not run by algorithms that we know how to duplicate.

If quotations that matched previously copyrighted work were literally "completely impossible" human thought would grind to a halt. Just read the Spider Robinson short story, which will tell you everything you need to know about this counterfactual, and then worry about something more subtle but actually real, like the problem of corrupt judges, or selective enforcement of unrealistic laws, or the fact that fair use could end up being so expensive to defend that only rich people can exercise it without fear.
Ouch, I hope by about 1000 you actually mean under 974. You're losing another 10% of your audience to gain 26 pixels if you design for 1000.

It's incredible how quickly the userbase drops from 974 to 1050... 10% of users see a horizontal scroll at 974 then it climbs to 50% once you get over 1050... Hope those extra 76 pixels are worth it for anyone designing sites that wide.
Smart conclusions.

I'd add to the Lisp-vs-release-management problem: The "I live inside the image" approach discourages delivering stable tested code changes, as it's quite hard to isolate them. I agree using a REPL is great for prototyping, but if one never builds from scratch, he can create the unmaintable code which doesn't work outside of a few specially crafted and hacked Lisp images.

Luckily Clojure doesn't seem to hold this legacy. People usually seem to inject code into the repl when they code but then switch to builds using ant, maven or by some layer above them (see Leiningen). I do it as well, compile inside a repl as it's quicker, then compile from scratch before a commit. It seems to be a sane compromise. It's also good you can't save current "jvm image" so there's no temptation to never leave it. I have a sad observation that sticking to "live inside the image" actually produces lone-ego-superstar programmers not willing to cooperate.
Is there any chance the problem is technical? Encryption increasing latency (at least for the pilot's view), anything like that?
Back to the Future: Lisp as a Base for a Statistical Computing System
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Does google even have non-automated solutions if you ever get in trouble?