skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, he doesn't get off that easy.

I sympathized with that line of reasoning much more before reading Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government. Now I'm convinced that he should either resign or be held as equally complicit [1].

http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

[1] He should either be willing to defend the current system, or he should stop being its agent. Enforcing a law brings the same moral responsibility as writing a law.

Timely, in another thread we are celebrating Google for ceasing to be an agent of the Chinese government. We should never allow moral actors to absolve themselves of responsibility by pointing to a far-away law.
Is the Venture Capital Business Broken?
If the regexp:

([^\s]+)\s*[Aa][Tt] *([^\s]+)\s*[Dd][Oo][Tt]\s*[Cc][Oo][Mm]

matches text in an exemplar, it's worth checking out as a possible email address (assuming one is a low-down, good-for-nothing spammer)

Yours is no harder to pull out automatically than the examples in the original article, and the above regexp took me under 2 minutes to write and verify. It's not your "obfuscation" that's saving you, it's gmail's spam filtering.
i believe the layers (stacked lines) and legend are in the same order.
I read that "EasyDNS" and just about had puppies. Whew. Crises over.
The Wrong Story About Depression
If it's an attack done by the Chinese government, then Google's withdrawal from the country would be welcome by them. It would increase the market share of Baidu, the local Chinese-based earch engine.

It is time the world stands up to China. If a corporation, whose main aim is to generate profits can eschew it and take a moral high ground why can't the government do it? Are the cheap goods from china so necessary that it is not worth antagonizing China ?

It's been time to do that for a very long time...cheap goods aren't worth it at all.
As a semi-frequent traveler on the Northeast Corridor, I want to be excited about this, but the upcharge for the Acela on top of already expensive Amtrak tickets adds up to quite a bit more than the upgrade is worth IMO. The regular Amtrak trains are convenient and comfortable, but I still always feel like I'm overpaying whenever I take one. Busses aren't glamorous but they're definitely the best option for the budget-conscious traveler in this neck of the woods.
How do I get in on that? I can't exactly call Google and say "hey, I'm willing to sell my pre-revenue startup for $FU_MONEY"

(that offer is for real, btw, if any Googlers are reading :-) )
The Python interpreter is some pretty clean and educational C code, IMHO. Why don't you join python-dev, find some bugs in the issue tracker and start hacking? http://www.python.org/dev/contributing/
I love that CNN's app on the iPhone immediately sent me an alert to let me know when Brittany Murphy died whereas 3 hours after a real story like this broke I still haven't gotten any sort of notification. Uninstalling CNN's app right after I post this.
Terrible Boston highway signs
You would think that Techcrunch would understand that even if uniques visitors to twitter.com may have "stalled" many users are moving away from twitter.com and to api services.
I'm with CoCo
Support Conan!
I once heard someone say that curing cancer is like curing infectious disease; it's an entire class of problems that requires a variety of tools.

In the past couple decades, there are particular cancers that have gone from being uniformly deadly to being usually survivable, or at least much more survivable. Others have remained unsolved. But the point is that even once we make giant leaps, how you get treated and what your outcome looks like is going to vary a lot from cancer to cancer.
Interesting. I wonder how Google would react if the American government did the same thing.
I used your site many times over the years. Its amazing how much it comes up.

I stopped using it when I found out it was tweeting my inputs. I often checked my own sites, and didn't like it broadcasting that the site was down, much less without permission. Just my .02.

Kudos on the sale.
We definitely need more granular flags. People shouldn't need to be downvoted for expressing a dissenting opinion, but I agree that in the current HN climate it was inevitable.
sometimes hackers hack for money
Release Deferring Agents
This is especially funny if you're a climber, because South Butt is actually meaningful (in context, it's common to abbreviate "buttress" to "butt"). Many of the world's great climbing and mountaineering routes are on S facing buttresses.
I hope google buys http://www.tineye.com/ they could integrate it into image search and make it awesome.
They can spin this easily. Google is showing porn images in their search results or some other bullshit story. They would do that, and it would make their local search engine Baidu look very good in comparison. They could also spin it as Google not being able to stand the competition and "look! Westerns can't help us, they don't know anything about us!"

They aren't ignorant of PR and they know when to apply force and when to hold back.
Google's Iron Curtain: Are Chinese Government Hackers Responsible?
Seems like the proportion of articles actually focused on hacking have decreased, but everything else is pretty consistent.

Also, what is "as khn" and "as kyc"? It looks like one replaced the other.
I thought this was worth upvoting because I was stung by how the author views programming. It's worth remembering that "hacking" is typically ill-liked, even by some of those claiming to practice it.

Start with purpose. With the exception of art software projects (which I don't believe Graham has in mind here) all computer programs are designed to accomplish some kind of task.

I suppose this guy is a Java programmer?...

No one cares how pretty the code is if the program won't work.

...that or Perl.

Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do.

#%$hole...

PG could have alluded to the similarity between Math and hacking. The thing that I feel both share is that there is an underlying beauty to a well-crafted result. Truly beautiful results (like original self-printing program in Lisp) withstand the test of time, like a universal truth. Thus a program is not like an egg made by a chef, or even a Porsche made by an engineer.

The flip side is that there's no "way" to write a program. There actually isn't even really a notion of truth. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The only constraint I have as a programmer is to (1) not run out of memory and (2) not run out dough (which would force me to quit hacking and get a "real job"). There are some people who think that obfuscated C is art, and there's FP folks like me who would fire someone for writing anything in that godawful language (Which might be unfair. People should only be fired for writing Java on the job). I think this is pretty strong support in favor or programming as an art.

The other piece of evidence I cite is that the academic form of hacking is called Computer Science and we know what they say about anything that has the word "Science" in it...

Basically, the only premise of idleword's argument that holds up is that artists get laid and programmers don't. I will resist fighting fire with fire on this point.

But maybe PG should allude to poets or composers next time. Apparently some painters are real jerks.
I'm pretty sure the number on the x-axis is the amount of weeks past the founding of HN.
I believe it's just the text formatting gone awry. They are:

ask hn (ask hacker news) and
ask yc (ask Y Combinator).

ask yc was obviously more popular in the early days.
I wonder if tracking just the number of flagged posts would provide similar insight.
It's unclear whether Microsoft leaving the OS market would actually affect things -- the majority of Microsoft software in China is pirated, and it's not like Microsoft can flip a kill-switch and take down every Windows machine.

Still, if Bing follows in uncensoring, that be impressive, especially given the kerfuffle Nick Kristof raised a couple of months ago over Bing's filtering.
I think "as khn" is "Ask Hacker News" and "as kyc" is "Ask Y Combinator".
Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting your question. I believe it should be "Ask HN" (Hacker News) and "Ask YC" (Y Combinator). I haven't been around here for too long, but I have seen many Ask HN threads and none specifically addressed to YC. Those threads about the Y Combinator process are usually of the form "Ask PG: " (Paul Graham) or "Ask HN: YC Founders, what do you think about X?"
I LOVE the interaction with the homepage value proposition, but the calls to action aren't obvious unless you're a click feind.

Small "magical" moments like the natural language time field are very nice touches.

I'm going to play with this more, you've captured my attention at least.
What I would love to see would be if Microsoft started bundling "dissident-friendly" software features into its products -- e.g. encryption.
You have to launch first. Don't call Google, they'll call you.
I'm not sure you can call the collection of taxes unjust. Obviously the system needs a lot of work but the overall idea (collecting revenue to fund government and shared services/infrastructure) is a sound one and integral to the operation of a modern democracy.

Plus if he resigned they'd just hire someone else. This isn't a position that would be hard to fill and he'd have accomplished nothing.
Linux is notorious for that sort of thing. Look at the Linux Documentation Project. The installation how to was written in 1999 and has not been updated since. I use Debian and know enough about it from use over the years to do most anything, but when I have to have an OS with top-notch documentation, I turn to OpenBSD or FreeBSD. Both of these projects blow Linux documentation out of the water. Very high-quality and accurate. Their man pages are awesome.
Link Building For Online Success
Today many new strategies have come into the SEO industry to help websites get good ranking. It is very important that you or your search engine optimisation company makes use of the latest strategies in optimising your website online and in promoting your website online. Though many new strategies are introduced, one of the basic elements that has not changed despite several changes in the SEO industry is link popularity. Even today Google places a great value on link popularity.
Google's strategy: Acquire pre-revenue for low valuations so that they can make money down the road with the startups most valuable resource, the founding team.

Google's strategy works because they don't often acquire the startups for the startup's business. They acquire businesses for the people working on them.

Acquiring talent, as opposed to businesses, is cheaper and provides a ton of value and wealth creation for the company down the road.
You could always start upformebutdownforeveryoneelse.com
From Prediction to Emergence
Web Searches with a View: In Search of Images Worth 1,000 Results
better to learn one language well in 2010.
If this person believes in the value of the Chinese government, it is their right to defend that opinion, just as it is your right to argue against it. Of course, the fact that they have a dissenting opinion by arguing that China should be allowed to suppress dissenting opinions is certainly ironic (from the linked post).
That's really no different than degrading VoIP. There's a risk that someone will notice and then the FCC will fine you.
Great Post!

Code Forrest! Code!
The Socialist State of ThoughtWorks
Ask YC: What language is most popular among YC startups?
What programming language is most popular among YC startups, especially in the SaaS market?

Not trying to start a "language war", just wondering which one is most popular at the moment for web development.
I know, but the other 20% is where the soul of a hacker resides. :)
And it started. Major news sites in China start to filter out this news which has been heavily reported several hours ago. I expected all Google service will be blocked by the end of today.

Edit: maybe not that soon. A second thought, current news block may be interpreted as a "saving face" for Google. China high officials may have that kind of thought and think it is for Google's own benefits so that they can still discuss with Chinese gov. Otherwise if it is spread, there is no room for discussion.
Can someone give me a mirror for this article.... I'm in China and blogspot is blocked (among other things).
That doesn't jive with my experiences with EveryDNS. Only recently based on a random tweet (not directed at him) David contacted me offering to bulk change the master for a stack of zones.
PushButton Tutorial Series - Loading Levels
Luckily, the regulars on IRC can tell the "good" assholes from the "bad" assholes and act appropriately :-)
> surely after making $5,000 and receiving the notice from North Face you should be prepared to stop trading?

Why? If people are continuing to buy their stuff, they are obviously making things people want.
if that happened they probably have to fix the problem ;-)
The x axis is the rank number of the posting divided by 1000, so that's a constant sampling interval in blocks of 1,000 but more compressed in time towards the right because of the higher posting frequency.
The binoculars they use are the size of their head: http://cryptome.org/info/usss-hands/pict2.jpg

Any optics geeks know what type they are, or how much they cost?
No.

Those are only available to logged in members directly from HN.

I agree that that would make it a lot better.
The Filibuster is Unconstitutional (NYT Op-Ed)
You're correct. I don't know why the plot headings did that, in the tags they are correct.
I'm not sure the app is (was) a pure image browser. The dev said: "There is currently over 100,000 pics spread between 15 categories with much much more coming soon." The "categories" thing makes no sense unless the app was able to associate specific sites/boards with certain categories ("blondes, brunettes...") somehow, either by linking to the boards directly or by detecting a "known" categorized board/subboard when the user browsed to it.

Bottom line is that if there were any nudity/porn sites included in the URLs that enabled the "category" feature, the takedown was probably justified.
With all the excitement regarding Google's new China approach it might be interesting to look at another company which makes an explicit virtue of (proclaiming its adherence to ) "socialism".
Google, Citing Cyber Attack, Threatens to Exit China
This could be due more to Google not responding to take down claims than lifting bans altogether...
Mainly talking about his "lifelong user" statement.

Companies are fluid entities, constantly morphing and changing. Praising the action is where the focus should be, not the company.
Here is an interview with Google's David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/01/12/business/124746651...
Chromium is the open source project, not the browser.
I recall a time (late '90s) when microsoft.com was similarly afflicted. Seriously. That was back when everyone instinctively typed "www," though.

In this case, I'm sure it's a temporary glitch.
Ignores employee theft of cash, transportation costs etc. In many cases using CC cost merchants less than using cash.
This was a scorched earth move, aimed at buying Google some good will in the rest of the world;

If true, it sure seems to have worked.
Blogs written by geeks are boring and too topical (2004)
I don't think they really ignore it.

Quote from article:

Merchants who handle less cash, meanwhile, bear fewer costs for counting it, calling the armored car, and theft by employees or armed bandits.
Notes on the Erik Naggum comp.lang.lisp archive
One thing this graph can't account for is the quality of submissions. A technology article about 8051 assembly language is a lot different than a technology article about the top 10 SEO tips for bloggers.
FWIW, yesterday I submitted a link to the history of Waite Group publishing by Mitch Waite himself. It was an awesome piece on entpreneurship, failure, and the history of personal computing and it's still sitting at 1 point:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047482

Meanwhile less topical, but more sensational stories shot to the top.
Make that 90% as of tomorrow.
If so, it sounds like they are basically just hiring with a larger-than-typical signing bonus.

I wonder if the teams being acquired in that fashion view it that way?
I think this is interesting, but wonder if the change people talk about could be more in the quality of discussion than type of submitted articles?
It looks like there are too many "unspecified" articles to learn much from this visualization, other than a moderate decrease in the number of articles in your "startup" category, supplanted largely by "ask" topics--a trend that largely leveled off early in the x-axis on this graph (which would be dramatically more useful if it had some amount of real-time benchmarks to give some sense of scale).
Steve Jobs Owns a PC
Harvard and foursquare team on mobile app
Thanks, did not know this existed. On further digging around, I see that Office Web Apps are coming soon. Looks like Microsoft is pushing back hard against its competitors.

The SkyDrive still needs a native client to be as useful as DropBox, but it's a step in the right direction.
Not sure where you are finding that he claimed that it was unjust. His stated objection was that it was too complex, which is far from unjust. I agree with your point that if he felt it was unjust he should resign or take specific action, but that is not his objection.
lawful? you mean like this: http://www.eff.org/cases/hepting
The funniest thing about this is how many of these signs are within two blocks of each other near Charles Circle. The photographer must have spent the whole time driving in circles.
I just buy prepaid Internet. If I use too much data, all they know is that some guy with cash used up his quota.

(I would like to do this in the US, but nobody will sell me prepaid 3G or WiMax.)
Crushing the interview, but failing the interview badly by failing to see the reason for the question. I'd end that interview early, not because of lack of tech skills, but because the interview is an ass.
Yes, but "No way, that is, unless merchants started giving us all discounts for using cash instead of cards." This assumes using cash is cheaper and in many cases it is not. Merchants don't have to accept credit or debit cards however, most prefer it for a verity of reasons.

Edit: You can't just take the direct cost while ignoring the opportunity costs of the other solutions. As for the cost to consumers of all the card use, the National Retail Federation figures that the so-called interchange fees that their members pay to accept Visa and MasterCard alone cost an average of $427 an American household in 2008. Do you think amazon.com would have lower costs if you had to mail in cash to pay for your order? Also, without the protections a CC provide I would never buy anything from an online store that did not have a seller reputation.
Ask HN: What android apps do you use?
Just got my first android (2) phone and while I can see the potential, there's also a huge amount of chaff to sift through on the market. What apps are worth your time? Thanks!
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.

That's just insane... do you really think the two are comprable? Google would lose more customers by withdrawing from China than people who know, much less care in the least, about that quote...
Did they make you sign a non-compete? :)
On Google and China: Am I Missing Something? Why all the high fives?
I agree with Scoble on this one. This is about business, but it's not just about Google not being number 2 in China. It's about China not being a safe (or fair) place to do business.

http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/12/why-now-google/
Obviously not the same kind of thing, but here's what happened when the Bush administration got too grabby...

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/060119-060352

(Disclaimer: I work at google)
I agree, WiFi is not going to save Amtrak. It's almost always the worst possible transportation option available in terms of cost, quality, comfort, time, etc - for any and all start and end points, not just NYC/BOS.
Servicio Tecnico Celular
Since it says "each tab has to teleport a certain number of goats to operate," I speculate that it has something to do with monitoring the performance of the tabs, or maybe just the tabs reporting their memory/cpu/traffic back to the master process.

If mdm truly knows what the code does, and if a browser _has_ to do it, maybe if a browser doesn't send it's statistics back, or poll the main process, then it is declared unresponsive.
If the tax codes were simplified it would obliterate the revenue of the tax-help businesses.

Seriously, that is why it hasn't been simplified.
The Chinese government aren't attacking Google. They're merely using Google to attack activists.

No doubt they do that to Chinese companies too, it's just that the Chinese companies will never complain publicly.
They censored results, yes, but I was always intrigued by the way they did it. In case you never looked into it, they implemented a system similar to what they do in the US with DMCA complaints: remove the offending results, but provide a notice saying that some results were removed.

Which is really a pretty bold step; rather than being a simple invisible removal, it was an in-your-face "your government didn't want you to see the results for this query" approach.
The Future of Add-ons at Mozilla Labs
And the most important of these? Accountability. It happens that the Amtrak Downeaster line (http://amtrakdowneaster.com/) is unique in having WIFI, but it wasn't Amtrak that set up the service, rather it was the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority. That is, a local authority, which is more directly accountable to the riders of that line, a far cry from Amtrak's "accountability" to Congress.

Likewise, the other decent line I've ridden, the Cascades line (www.amtrakcascades.com/) is largely supported by & accountable to the Washington and Oregon state governments.

Amtrak is a decades-old failed experiment. Here's to hoping private & state-run high-speed passenger rail authorities show the way forward. My money is on Texas: http://www.thsrtc.com/
They were much of a muchness. Like a lot of things Microsoft, the early versions of D3D were pretty poor, but they listened to feedback from devs and so on and iterated it up to a worthwile competitor to OpenGL, which stood still for many a year (extensions notwithstanding).

Also early on I think driver support was an important factor in D3D getting traction, as proper OpenGL support was mostly only in the blindingly expensive workstation graphics market.

Nowadays I think on the PC most games are D3D because that gets you a long way towards an xbox360 port.
I will do just that. First glance at the issue tracker gives me the impression that most of it's over my head, but this post has me inspired: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048202 . Time to learn! Thank you!
I think he got to be the IRS commissioner by either 1: believing the laws are just or 2: being willing to enforce unjust laws.
Affordable domain hosting supporters
Looking for the best domain hosting
A company like Google saying that it isn't safe to do business in China has to at least annoy them to some degree.
It's not the collection of taxes that is unjust, but a system so complex that most well educated professionals can't do their own taxes without paying more money. Almost all the tax preparation costs are a pure drain on society which directly relate to the complexity of the tax code.

PS: I happen to pay a little extra taxes each year as a combination charitable donation and audit protection. As an added benefit I spend less time doing my taxes, but most people seem to dislike the idea. Multiply that savings across society and we would have both lower taxes (on average) and more free time.