skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, thanks. I was gonna say "only 6 comments!?"
Good advice!

I also think you managed to include every cliche and metaphor known to man in that reply:)
Assuming that your predecessor acted in a professional manner, then I would probably contact the individual after I'd had a chance to take a look at how everything had been laid out.

Non-profits may not have a lot of money for technology, and the recent economic disruptions have really hit them hard due to the drop in funds they get from corporate/other giving.

I would expect to run into a lot of older equipment all duct-taped together in a non-logical fashion. This isn't something that you should blame the predecessor for, sometimes we have to make non-optimal choices given the constraints we work under.

As an aside about working in the non-profit sector, I've been employed as the only IT person for a smaller nonprofit (~30 users or so) for almost 4 years. You may have heard the phrase "the smaller the stakes the more fierce the fight" from academia, it also holds true in the non-profit world. (and I suspect in any human organization, but my experience has been mostly in the academic/non-profit sector thus far.) Expect to run into budget issues, and nasty personalities.

Fortunately, on the budget front organizations exist for IT software/hardware giving that can really help out.

One that I've used: TechSoup.org

Many major software vendors offer discounts for non-profits if you look around.

Plus you can always use linux/freebsd/openbsd/etc on commodity hardware to help keep costs down. At the cost of time depending on your skill set.

I expect you may have already heard a lot or all of the above, so feel free to ignore it!

Oh, and if you get the job, Congratulations!
Of course you should contact him, and/or anyone else you can reach that has relevant information for you.

I wouldn't ask him for inside dirt on the HR admin's tryst in the conference room, but questions about the job, the organization, and the people are charge are certainly fair game. Unless they are trying to hide something or lie to you, and in that case, it is still the right thing to do for you to investigate.

People seem to have this belief that potential employer or employee should only contact a small subset of officially sanctioned information channels. A prospective employer shouldn't do something like call your current boss with reference questions without your opinion, and similarly you shouldn't seek information from sources that might put the employer at risk.

Take whatever knowledge you gain from contacting him and weigh that against what they have told you. Go back to them and be upfront, tell them the former employee told you X,Y,Z and that you'd like to get their response. A good organization will respect your thoroughness. A bad org will panic and be defensive, and that should be considered as well.
Actually, I was using CPActiveRecord for some time on my application before writing CR (I even contributed a couple of small things to his library). However, my application's needs outgrew that library and as I spoke with Nick he stated that it might take a rewrite on his part to facilitate them. That is when I decided to write a separate library.

There may be one or two lines of code borrowed, but more importantly I borrowed a lot of the good ideas Nick included (specifically, the notification system). I also borrowed ideas from ObjectiveResource as that project has a very similar goal.
Hi! I'm a developer for ING Direct, and I'm pleased that you speak so highly of your experience here. I wonder if I can help out some with the concerns you still have. You mention not having branches -- which is true, but we DO run the occasional internet cafe complete with trained ING barista/bankers (no... I'm really serious!). You say you live in Hawaii, so consider stopping by 1958 Kalakaua Ave, Honolulu HI and saying "Hi".

You also talk about the trouble of mailing a check 5000 miles (it's closer to 4000, but who's counting?). I'm sympathetic: what kind of system would you prefer? For instance, do you think you should be able to scan the check at your PC and enter it that way? Would you rather have a payments system so that you don't need to use checks at all? Nothing will happen magically tomorrow, but I'd be very interested to hear what HN readers think, and I'd keep it in mind as we work to improve our systems!

Starting a bank is HARD... I wish you luck in your endeavor, but it MAY be easier to find a "good" bank (different people may have different ideas about what that means) and support them. You are certainly welcome to pass on your good ideas to someone like me.
Google's security team eventually managed to gain access to a server that was used to control the hacked systems, and discovered that it was not the only company to be hit.

This appears to be new and interesting information.
I wonder whether Google has figured out/decided that China is a one way flow of intellectual and strategic resources, and that it does not serve their long term business interests -- which depend heavily on the free flow of information -- to have a significant portion of their activity captured by a regime not just repressive but with its own, over-riding agenda that brooks no competition.

The current events are troubling, but I imagine the decision makers at Google are also looking at the long term implications to their business.

That is to say, even without the current crisis, China as currently governed and managed may be a poor long-term bet for Google. Both in isolation and as part of a world economy still in the process of being defined and subject to influence by decisions such as this.
That was sort of the point :)

Practicing my language skills.
Suster Keramas Youtube Review
A corporate spokesperson giving an interview on television is nothing but an exercise in avoiding saying things that are not "allowed." It could just be that the times when you see tension is that those weren't scripted questions, and he had to come up with a response on the spot. The questions where he was more relaxed could be questions they anticipated, and had already formulated answers for.
The Data Decade
In terms of the actual article, while black holes might account for most of the bits of information in the universe (I don't really understand the logic behind this)

If the universe were a computer simulation, every single atom (or higher-energy particle for that matter) would have to be included for the simulation to be able to run accurately, probably represented as objects of some kind with associated state. (lets just ignore possible optimizations, shall we? :P )

Every single one of these would consume resources, or bits if you like.

Where would you expect to find the biggest amounts and concentrations of objects and bits? On a planet which has so low gravitational mass that it can only wield its will upon a small moon or a black hole so massive that not even light can escape it?

Where would you expect to find the biggest amount changes and activity? At a small planet where normal laws of physics and energy reign supreme, or in a black hole where the energies are so immense that even space-time ceases to exist?

I'm putting my money on the black hole.
China suing Google for libel-now that would be rich.
Usability Study: Shopping For Bedsheets – How Hard Could It Be?
It sounds more like a private version of Google Dashboard, which indeed only shows subject lines as the hackers apparently managed to obtain.
Hm, the article seems to jump between "Adobe was attacked" and "Adobe software was used as attack vector", in a way that inspires the least of confidence. sigh
Onion Infographic: Highlights of the Consumer Electronics Show
Agreed, the amount of tight lipped cautiousness with which all parties are proceeding is mighty fishy.
As an aside: I was in Iceland shortly after the bank crisis, and it was REALLY weird to walk by large banks downtown on a Monday afternoon and see them all closed.
freshbooks
You can bet that there is a lot going on under water that will never ever reach the press.

I wouldn't be so sure that the roles are as clearly defined as it seems at this moment.
WrongRoom
I'm not sure Google were wise to be all that public about this either. If China decides to bear a grudge, things could get very nasty for them.
Even if he were especially tense during those moments (and I'm not seeing it, relative to his tension throughout the interview), your interpretation is a huge stretch from a tiny piece of data. There are many alternative explanations. The moments you cite are exactly those where he's laying down google's gauntlet. He was on national TV, claiming that it is no longer possible to do business with a powerful nation because its representatives have been suppressing opponents to its totalitarian policies with highly illegal and unethical tactics. I would be pretty tense under those circumstances, too. Every person of Chinese descent I met after that, I would be wondering what they think of me.
Which can is just as bad.
Sorry, I could have made my original comment clearer. I don't think there were any other IP addresses accessed.

The "other industries" that were involved were using Google Apps, so Google has access to those records. That's why they have to inform the other companies their security was breached: the traffic did go through Google so they're the only ones who know about it.
Perfect example of stupid people working in IT being a part of the problem
The time for google to make principled stances on that subject is long past, they already let the $ go before their principles.

You can't turn around a couple of years later and sincerely say that you want to make the principle now your paramount reason for a move.

The time for principled stances is when things happen, or when they come to light.

The whole human rights thing is just so much window dressing and PR spin.
That's the six hundred million dollar question in my mind.

How exactly did Google know that those other institutions were under attack?

Unless the attack resulted in rooted Google machines that then attacked outward, or all those institutions were running on Google Apps.

Major institutions running on Google Apps seems unlikely (Are any major institutions outside of academia running Google Apps hosted by Google?). And attacking outward from a rooted box inside Google's network seems careless, unless the attackers were leveraging some dedicated pathways that made their job easier. Which suggests the breach was far more serious than indicated.
geppa.dee at that mail system owned by google
Crowdflower uses mturk as its main source of workers (they have some other interfaces as well), but I'm not sure that it being a crowdflower job is even shown at mturk (I'm sure some mturk workers will recognize the layout etc).
I haven't compared the prices, since I haven't run the jobs directly on Mturk, but we are quite happy with our current pricepoint.
Heated Furniture to Save Energy?
MBTA Data Hackathon
You can use the same system to convert between British Pounds and US Dollars right now too.. :-) It's been hovering around 1.6-1.62 for a while.
Ask PG: Can you please fix the connection resets and / or explain them?
I see HN refuse connections many times every day without any clear reason on my end, I've asked two other people to test, one had the same problem for the other it worked fine so it is a bit flakey.

It's usually accompanied by HN slowing down and returning a page in 6-10 seconds or so.

My guess is (but I really am poking in the dark here) that it has something to do with the accept queue overflowing and the network stack sending out RST packets (I've seen those using tcpdump so they figure in there somewhere).

Alternatively the 'listen' gets dropped.
Google's security team eventually managed to gain access to a server that was used to control the hacked systems, and discovered that it was not the only company to be hit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1050300
I should point out that the State Department does not wiretap Chinese citizens phones so that they know which little old lady to beat to death. That is China's job.

Returning you now to your regularly scheduled moral relativism.
If I were to setup a tv/boutique best buy type shop I would set it up with at on of couches, free food, and HTPCs. People could come in whenever they liked and enjoy themselves. Sort of like that friend whose door is always open. If they wanted to buy something, they would know where the sales reps were.
Could you change the original title's construction? It currently suggests Google initiated an attack.
Wireless Operators Struggle to Deliver Broadband
The transition to 4G service may be less than smooth for wireless providers.
A bit like Branson did with this first record store? Great concept then, and great concept now i guess ;-)
Productivity Hacks
I think most people in most companies feel similarly. Unfortunately they don't have Google's cash, so "keep the lights on" becomes a more important consideration than "don't be evil."
Time to dust off the Wii!
You are working for Google and you have evil motives. You have access to Gmail's data, search logs and Google Documents (among other things). With this information it's pretty damn easy to hack anyone that uses Google products - - as users and companies hold a lot of sensitive data in emails and Google documents - - especially on Google Apps.

This could have been done from Google offices in China, but why not in other countries?
American Companies Capture Less than Majority of 2009 U.S. Patent Pool
"The researchers used a radioactive tracer to be sure that the slugs are actually producing the chlorophyll themselves, as opposed to just stealing the ready-made pigment from algae. In fact, the slugs incorporate the genetic material so well, they pass it on to further generations of slugs."

That is simply mind blowing. So essentially the case is made that DNA that you eat ends up in your genetic lineage ?!

That means that there might be serious repercussions from ingesting genetic material.

I find that in some way bigger news than the slug that does photosynthesis, mind boggling as it is.
I.T. Phone Home...Buying Small Business Technology
If it was government, why would they risk hacking more than one company from the same machine?

Edit: Seems more likely that the anti-hack claim is bs, as other comments are suggesting Google employees did the hacking from within the office. This would suggest the attacks against the other companies were on Google-run apps used by those companies.
I assume that the investigating scientists familiar with the project have reasons to conclude that the bacterial fossils definitely originated from Mars, given that:

> The stones are known to be from Mars because gases trapped inside them match those in rocks examined by probes on the red planet. They were blasted out of its surface by asteroid impacts and then drifted around the solar system for millions of years before falling to earth.

I would tend to more conservatively conclude, "some meteorites resembling Martian rock have been found to contain fossil evidence of bacteria."

i.e., it is also possible that the rock was contaminated while in space, or that it didn't even originate from Mars, but from conditions which simulated Mars.

I'd love to hear definitive proof of life, or former life, on Mars.
Looking For Work? Here Is How Much Tech's Top Companies Pay
http://pyroom.org/
or, vim fullscreen?
They were definitely attacked: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/01/adobe_investiga...

Both could be true
The thing that will ultimately undermine the chokehold put by repressive regimes on their oppressed citizens will not be Google as a company nor the U.S. government as a countervailing political force nor the U.N. as a supervening agency nor human rights advocates as a principled opposition - though all these forces are helpful and necessary, they are not in themselves sufficient.

It will instead be the sheer wearing force of progressive technological advances that make it harder and harder with each passing day for such regimes ultimately to suppress the free flow of information and the spur toward freedom promoted thereby.

With its dramatic action, Google has demonstrated that any given company wielding sufficient power relating to the free flow of information has the capacity to make a big difference in moving to help liberate countries such as China. That company has to show some guts, which Google has done. And it needs to have some core principles, which is really at the heart of being able to act with courage and conviction as Google has done. But none of this would be enough, even if it is backed vocally or sub silentio by the force of the U.S. government, the U.N., and rights advocates. Repressive regimes like China's have gone for decades on their oppressive path in spite of vigorous opposition from the west (remember the long stretch when the U.S. would not even recognize the existence of the Chinese government) and have scarcely changed their worst policies over that time.

The change, then, ultimately has to come from within and it is there that the free flow of information makes all the difference. Knowledge is power, and that is precisely why oppressive regimes always seek to suppress free speech and to control thought through massive propaganda mechanisms.

It is the technological juggernaut that is progressively, albeit slowly, undermining the thought-control historically imposed by the Chinese government upon its citizens, and that government will be fighting a losing battle on this front as it becomes virtually impossible, in an exploding information age, ultimately to choke off the free flow of information so desperately needed by oppressed peoples.

In this sense, Google's action serves as a proxy for the technology forces that are having this salutary effect. But none of this happens in a vacuum. It takes real people to make real and difficult decisions to bring about the change. And it takes courage to stand up to authoritarian forces. Bravo to Google for taking a tremendous step in the right direction. I hope they stick with it to its logical outcome. It will not be easy.
I work for Best Buy and I believe some of that's been tried probably not to the degree to make it comfortable enough...

My thought after reading this was how do we enable his Dad to sell a new one out store stock (maybe via mobile device) and get some sort of affiliate pay thus decentralizing the whole concept... seems very possible by APIs Best Buy can create only a need to make it easier to use in any living room by anyone.
I'd almost think of it more like buying an employee from another company out of his/her contract. In this case the contract would be the founder's obligation to his/her company.
Actually, I was rather surprised with how forthright they were about it. They could have easily said "he left to peruse other opportunities" and not leave me thinking about any budget problems/disagreements, beyond the standard "non-profits don't have a lot of money".

Where I was unclear, and where I didn't get a lot of follow up information, was on what the disagreements were about. Did he think they needed an expensive XYZ hardware solution when he could have done with a cheaper and/or open-source one? Or was the organization requiring him to do the impossible without giving him any resources? It sounded like whatever it was, it was pervasive through their relationship.

My interviewers were non-technical, and so after some prying I decided to save it for our next meeting.
http://oneframeoffame.com. It's a pretty catchy song as well!
I'd donate towards an SSL certificate for news.yc
Gary McKinnon extradition delayed again
Apart from the tool tracking, there's doesn't appear to be anything it can do that a regular laptop with 3G connection can't do better (and cheaper). And since their liability concerns mean that it's inaccessible while driving, the guy in the passenger seat can't do any work while traveling between sites, while he could with a laptop.
In very high latency situations new connections are too expensive. Say you have 300msecs packet latency, which is common in mobile. That means in worst case, that XHR will take at least one second just to the DNS lookup and establish the TCP connection to start downloading the file.

It's not the volts, it's the amps that kill you. So to speak.
I thought I saw something posted before that this is basically a bug in the ARC code that runs the site, or the underlying server daemon. I filed it in memory (wet) as roughly a memory leak. There is a process that HUP's (something) whenever it happens.

My impression is that it's a known issue, and in the priority queue, but probably still ranks right behind other more pressing issues like deciding what's for dinner.
IT Networking UK
IT support London, UK team is available round the clock for your IT issues and solutions.
Google's China Threat Jolts Internet
The giant hole in usefulness of banks that I see is that doing bank to bank transfers of money aren't easy on a customer. For example, I have my checking account at one bank, and my car loan at another. In order to pay my car loan, I drive to bank #1, withdraw cash, drive to bank #2, and deposit.

EFT is mostly inaccessible to customers. Checks work, and would avoid the bank #1 in my process, but take extra time to clear. Wire transfers work, but would charge me a decent sized fee every time.

Basically, it shouldn't be so difficult to transfer money between banks at the customer's level. But I also understand that interbank coordination is done at a higher level than any one bank. So ING for example can't just say "here's a new interface" and let people go for it.

I suppose my question is: how do we advance the banking system in areas that require system-wide simultaneous upgrades?
I would like to see this be the top thread under the parent comment, however.
Errr ... I don't get the point you're trying to make.
Erm... don't take this the wrong way, but this is one of those things where if you have to ask, you probably shouldn't do it. You'd probably be much better off finding a cofounder who has experience in banking. There are a lot of regulations that banks have to comply with, and every time you miss one of them (which is almost unavoidable), it's a potential lawsuit.

Still, I hope you're successful. I'd love to see better banks.
Coke drops campaign sites in favour of social media
Do VCs have Expiration Dates?
Hey, thats a very smart idea. I might just get my dad to think about this! Thanks!!
Conan fiasco will lead to a stronger definition of branding. Here’s why.
The technology also makes it easier to monitor citizens.
I assume the link is wrong?
As a happy ING Direct customer, here are my comments:

- I'm extremely jealous of USAA's Deposit@Home feature. Depositing a check just by snapping a photo in an iPhone app? Yes, please.

- I've received an answer about the required linked account before, but I still don't like it. ING really can do everything I need from a bank - dealing with another one is just annoying.

- It sounds like you two are talking about depositing checks into an ING account by mail? I didn't even know that was possible. The only thing I use my linked checking account for is making deposits and then transferring them to ING. Why isn't this option mentioned in any help topics regarding deposits?
Or perhaps clear up that whole "Extraordinary rendition" debacle and press charges against those that set it in motion.
App that prevents phone loss
It's been that way for as long as banks have existed. The only difference is that prior to the 60s, people were passing around notes that represent theoretical gold somewhere, some place.

And the bank also has to find real money when you withdraw it.
Chinese gov't seeking clarity, expert casts doubt on Google intentions