skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember reading about a theory expounded upon in the last chapter of Stardust (by John Gribbin), where he claims it's possible (although he urges you to think of it as a thought experiment) that Universes are born from black holes and that if that were so, there would be a sort of evolutionary pressure that would lead to Universes becoming better at creating black holes. This, in essence, explains away the curiously specific and precise numbers that are the foundations of our universe. They have evolved to support matter and energy in the form we are accustomed to seeing it, because that is the most conducive to the birth of black holes and baby universes.....

/me takes it all with a pinch and a half of salt
Terence McKenna on Bohmian Non-Local Radio With Intelligent Aliens, and A UFO
Converting Unix time to human time (and back)
Nice find, it's interesting that MS has all of these cloud storage and syncing solutions and no home-rolled OS integration and virtually no buzz or visibility.
Because the Europeans conveniently decided that ingenious populations didn't own anything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius

Ok, so that's more "how" than "why". The "why" was because they wanted it.
I think more people should be worried about the janitor with night time server access and a big Vegas debt to pay than the government of Iran, to be honest.

That being said, point taken. While both are important variables to address, one is just plain bad practice.
[Safari 4, though I would expect Chrome to fare well too.]
The future of secure password handling is feeding browsers javascript so they can attempt to encrypt passwords?

I thought we got the future something like 10 years ago. It was called "TLS".
The site looks nice. Logo, however, could use some work.

I also wonder about speed. Having the developer connect to you guys, which in turn connects to us, just seems like it would be super slow. And API's are generally all about speeeed.
Interviewing for a Unix sysadmin position
Actually, I'm using Dev build as well.
Is your implication that smart, clueful people are never evil? Of course, you can always find an apologist who will explain that any given regime wasn't or isn't evil, so how would you test that?
See Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (which some disagree with, but an interesting book nonetheless). He says that the key factor was the large number of animal species in the old world that could be domesticated. So Europeans all had constant contact with animals and their diseases, which led to (1) more diseases, and (2) greater resistance (among those that survived). While in the Americas, with their relative lack of such species, the people had both fewer diseases (so they were less of a threat to the Europeans) and less resistance (so the Europeans were more of a threat to them).
I've been wondering this about Twitter apps lately.
Yes, all this black-or-white talk about genocide misses a lot of the subtleties. How about a nuanced analysis of the Jewish Holocaust? Nobody brings up enough the fact that Hitler built some damn good roads.
this is exactly the type of thing you would build a facebook application for, though. if the Page uses a tab, when someone clicks the application tab on their profile, facebook requests a page on your server and just puts it in the tab.

so, while you still wouldn't be able to use JS on the tab load, because it was just requested from your server, it could show the last few images on their account.
When can a comma cost you $2 million?
google.cn has already unfiltered results concerning the Tiananmen massacre

Are you claiming google.cn has already changed their filtering though? Just fwiw, from what I understand you would need to use a Chinese IP address if you wanted to properly verify that.
>Anybody who lives in a civilization with private property, contract law, medicine, literature and art is living in a better place, and in a better way, that somebody who doesn't have it.

Any want about the people who didnt get to live? None of this excuses genocide.
We don't sell anything directly on our websites, but I've been fighting a massive botnet of click fraudsters who come to the site off an ad and then visit a bunch of random other pages and submit any forms they encounter with gibberish.

It's quite annoying. In addition to paying for bogus clicks, it throws off all the analytics. And there are thousands of IPs involved (mostly in Asia).
Just mousing over it causes all my Chrome tabs to crash, consistently. Using release(not Dev) build.
You're missing the point. It's not that genocide is sometimes good, it's that civilizations that commit genocide also do good things.

The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science, which indirectly led us to the space program, satellites, and a big chunk of our modern communications network.

Does this excuse genocide? No. Does it make it difficult to label German civilization as "all good" or "all bad"? It absolutely does.
cool! i'd be interested in performance numbers compared to Unladen Swallow ... perhaps this is faster since it compiles to pure C++, but Unladen Swallow is probably much more robust and handles many more edge cases in Python's dark corners since presumably Google wants to actually deploy it on production code. nonetheless, this is a commendable project for one dude to be undertaking!
A truck's harder to lose or steal than a laptop, and it won't run out of charge in 3 hrs. And as a part of a truck, there are more financing options available.

Also, there's now plenty of space in the passenger. Even for a laptop.
He addresses this issue right at the start of the talk.
Actually, google.cn filtered results for everyone before - so yes, it's possible they've only disabled filtering for foreign IPs, but I fail to see why they would.
That's just how humans roll.

Precisely. History is littered with examples of the imperialistic tendencies of man (if you want to see some grade-A imperialism, look into how the Aztecs built their empire, hint: it wasn't by having lots of babies).
> It's quite possible for the Native Americans to have been savages, and the Europeans to have been savages (with better weapons), and for one group of awful people to have murdered another group of awful people.

I don't understand what do you mean with that. I don't think there's an absolute good or bad. But according to the fact that Europeans are the ones who came to America and slaughtered the Natives, they are the bad ones. The Natives did not something bad by defending themselves. In that situation and if you value human life over material benefit you have to admit "Europeans bad!".
Hacker News dataset?
Coming out of lurking to ask if there is any archive of all the HN submissions from the beginning. I can get the newest ones from the Google Reader RSS archive - but I'd like to look at the older ones. There were a few posting of the dataset a year ago, but the download links have expired. I'm grateful if someone can reupload those datasets or a newer up to date one if it exists.

Thanks!

P.S. Is there any guidelines on how to crawl news.ycombinator.com in an approved way.
You know, my first thought was like davidw's, that we've seen this before. But you're so right, he is a very energetic speaker, funny, and the message is well supported and presented. It's just a great talk and one that has really stuck with me since I first saw it.

"You don't need to be an f'ing genius to make any of this work..."
I can think of a lot of exceptions to this though: x,y,z,i,j,t,dt,dx,in,out... all standard, least-surprise variables. In any software that processes images you just know what x and y mean, more clearly than if they were called column and row. Same for t and dt in anything that involves physics simulation. And a function like Vector add(Vector x, Vector y) really doesn't benefit from being called Vector add(Vector firstvector, Vector secondvector) or such.

I think the divergence in opinions may simply come from working in different domains. In business software, I imagine the types of data may be a lot more varied than in DSP software and such, so a longer variable name may help keep track of things.
This link is much better, because you can see the slides in parallel with the talk:

http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...
He was head of science club at my high school and also preceded me into the same college program.

I really admired his talent and drive. This is terrible and sad news.
> "And I guess I'm okay with that. If the Cebulons show up, I'm going to be first in line learning to speak Cebulonese, watching all the Cebulonese TV shows, and taking my kids to Cebulonese high schools."

Not everyone wants to be a traitor to his own people, or as it will most likely turn out for humanity in your scenario, a brutalized, ghettoized, subservient class.
>The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science..

You get into trouble by saying that in Germany my friend :)
Wait seriously? They're giving that big a finger to China?
I have the same experience with Chrome. Mousing over the animation crashes not only the active tab, but all of the tabs in the window.
Not true. I've refused signing several NDAs and never once lost the deal because of it.
"There is no right or wrong, only popular opinion"

Tyler Durden, Fight club.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 soars past $1 billion in retail sales
I would have loved to see the slides instead of David's body language.
You know, their crime rate is amazingly low. Seriously, if you compare their numbers to the US, your first instinct is to assume that they moved the decimal point over. So it seems that these "accidents" are rare, there.
Don't have any datasets but http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt is your guideline.
I’m staying away from pretty much anything thats not directly from the ground. I am also taking several brain helper pills to increase the uptake of seratonin, improve concentration and memory and keep me feeling alert 24/7.

What is a brain helper pill? The author says he is 'staying away from pretty much anything thats not directly from the ground' so I guess that rules out Adderall, etc.
True, and the article is a little simplistic on that front, but a modern communications network does not morally justifies the holocaust. Neither does making lots of money & whatever else the Unobtainium was going to do justify wholesale slaughter & genocide of the Na'vi.
I Quit My Day Job.  Thanks.
That is Patrick (patio11) of Bingo Card Creator.
No, not at all. My implication is that analyzing encrypted email traffic is probably the last place you should be looking. Trying to break encryption is almost always the hardest way to acquire information. Physically intimidating people, targeted client-side attacks, or a number of other things that you can do will be much more effective and easier than breaking crypto.

On the flip side of your statement, I think evil, oppressive regimes hire very smart and talented people.
Let's be very clear about where NDAs are appropriate and inappropriate - An NDA is very appropriate in class (A) where it concerns the protection of the content of the Intellectual property. Signing Tables, Certificates, Source Code, Research Studies, etc... Without an NDA of some form, either in the form an employment contract, or explict "NDA", an employee would be free to tarball 500 Gigabytes of intellectual property and take it to their next employer - walking away with all the hard earned IP of a company that may have spent millions of dollars, years of effort, and entrepreneurial capital in developing it.

An NDA is completely inappropriate in class (B) when it comes to protecting ideas/concepts/market sizing/future growth that will be exposed in an employee interview, investor pitch, or press interview - all of that is typically just brainstorming by a few smart people over a week or two, has no more or less value than what might results from any other smart people of the same caliber brainstorming.

Depending on whether you are in class (A) or class (B) you should, or should not sign an NDA.
MacBook Pros With New Intel Chips Could Arrive Soon
Eurasia was a cesspool. The Americas were not.

Eurasians/Africans evolved an immune system capable of fighting infectious diseases because for thousands of years they lived in close quarters with domesticated animals and other people.

American Indians had few domesticated animals (only Llamas and Alpacas, I think), minimal over overcrowding and hence had few infectious disease. This caused them to be tall and healthy by contemporary Eurasian standards, but also made them prone to illness.

For much the same reason, I got food poisoning twice in two weeks in Egypt but my (Asian) Indian girlfriend came away unscathed.
There is a definite wrong when one group directly benefits materially from the exploitation of another, no matter how you spin it.

The practice of rape, pillage and plunder is without a doubt a bad thing.
Ah, no variable name ...

Sure, that makes sense.

Don't know if it makes a top 20 though. ;) Seems like it could be a bit hard to manage beyond a local module scope.
http://mashery.com ?
Unlikely. The photos we have already are almost good enough to definitively say if those formations are biological, right? What are the chances that some given biologically formed nodules would be right at that size threshold?

Besides, I've talked to geologists who say those rocks look perfectly non-organic to them.
Because the idea underlying of private property is to acquire more of it.
You missed the point, and then made exactly the error I was pointing at. And you did so in a way that gets very close to Godwin's Law without quite invoking it. Nicely done.

I'm not suggesting that Hitler's good roads made the holocaust less bad. I'm suggesting that the Holocaust didn't make the good roads less good.

Things aren't either all good or all bad. That includes the Conquistadors, Hitler, the Nazis, your children, a puppy, the Na'vi, the Native Americans, and everyone else.
Not only do many Twitter apps send your password in the clear, many of them automatically give your Twitter username & password to any Twitter-specific photo/video hosting service you use with them.
FT.com / UK - Iranians spark China cyberwar
Almost all form factor.
Wikileaks: "Several rumours from google sources that China accessed google's US-gov intercept system which provides gmail subjects/dates"

I'm remembering recent news about convenient gov't web portals to telecom records...
Here's how I get through 12-hour days: I don't do 12-hour days.
But that's exactly what I said. It doesn't excuse the holocaust. But it also makes it hard to say that Germany in the 1940s was an evil regime that contributed nothing to the world. Both are true: they were evil bastards, and they gave us rocket science. The real world is tricky like that.
I'm not defending rape, pillage, or plunder.

I'm defending rationality, and criticizing the all-or-nothing cognitive distortion.
What are some of your secrets for combating work overload?

My single biggest secret for continuing to get things done, often working 12 hour days and 6 day weeks, is to love what I do.

I do not think of it as "work", as something to "get through", or as something difficult, unusual, "overload", or temporary. Quite simply, I sit at my computer 12 hours per day, every day, because I want to, I love what I do, and I can't imagine doing anything else. I have been working like this for years.

In fact, I feel sorry for anyone else who doesn't feel this way. What a sad life to be spending so much time doing something that you have to force yourself to do.

Some of the things I have arranged in my life to enable me to do what I love:

I eat similarly to you. It's a great idea no matter what your circumstances are.

I also exercise regularly, 20 minutes, 3 to 6 times per week. I mix it up and only do things I love: 5 rites, pushups & pullups, jogging, swimming, heavyhands, shovelglove, bodyweight exercises, and even a day or 2 at the gym on their machines.

Breakfast at my desk, lunch away from my desk, dinner and Jeopardy with my SO every night without exception.

At least one date night per week, with an extra beer or two just in case it's a chick flick.

I never text, tweet, blog, IM, or facebook. I do respond to voicemail and email regularly. Everyone I know understands this.

Ipod, radio, and 3 cats keep me company. Occasionally I bring a small TV into the office for football games (I'm getting more work done now that the Steelers have been eliminated :-(. )

I like to work in 48 minute bursts, with a 12 minute break each hour for email, internet, snack, or anything else.

http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2006/09/the-power-of...
>It's no worse than the Romans, or Gauls, or Saxons, etc.

Or the Nazis?

If they had won WW2 I'm sure some people in Germany today would be calling the Holocaust "an unfortunate but necessary part of human progress" and would tell us all about the backwardness of Jewish culture, I'm sure while also being "sympathetic to the plight" of those victims too.

That doesn't mean that one group of people have the right to wipe out another culture to benefit their own, no matter what the consequences are.

I'm really shocked by some of the comments here.
That may be true for most emails.

But I guess that large webmail providers can band together and ensure that e-mails between their systems are encrypted (i.e. all messages sent by gmail to other gmail addresses or hotmail addresses are encrypted).

Then users would just use HTTPS to check their mail and everything would be encrypted.

This is not perfect, but it is at least a stopgap.
Wow, congrats Patrick!
Actually, if you search for "Tiananmen" you do still get filtered results.

Searching "Tianamen" (note the missing "n") is not filtered, though. I wonder if this was a purposeful loophole in Google's filtering, or an engineering mistake.

http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&um=1&sa=1...
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&um=1&sa=1...
Do you have more doubt about 'life on Mars' or 'this year'?
Google talks about maintaining their users' privacy and the security of their "sensitive information".

Random MegaCorp says "your call is important to us".
Let's say there are two murderers, Frank and Bob. Frank murders Bob. Is Bob therefor less bad than Frank?

What if Bob had murdered 1000 children, and Frank wasn't a murderer until he murdered Bob?

Does being a victim cleanse your sins?
Played with shedskin a while ago. Great product, great community. Really exciting to see them moving forward.

I don't think comparing to Unladen or other JIT tech is appropriate. The real use for ss (in my opinion) is to replace the prototype-in-python, optimize-in-C++ workflow. Now it's prototype-in-python, optimize-in-python. Yes a few edge cases need handling (esp if you want the real speedup; avoid things like lists with random types) but the end result should be greatly improved productivity and code readability.
> Some cultures are demonstrably better than others, like it or not.

I'm having a really hard time swallowing this one. If people value different things, how can you even make such an argument?
Measuring the speed of light with chocolate and a microwave oven
Examples:

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=fal...

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen+square+...
Google Turns on Gmail Encryption to Protect Wi-Fi Users
I guess there are 2 types of NDAs that I encounter.

Type 1 is the paranoid startup who thinks its a good idea to NDA everything for fear of someone "stealing" their idea. 9 times out of 10 this kind of startup is simply too naive to realize their idea isn't that original. I never sign an NDA to hear an idea, usually its a waste of my time because the NDA is typically hiding a BAD idea.

Type 2 is the legit NDA. When you're working with a large organization, or being shown very sensitive documents. Or occasionally a stealth startup that has a celebrity team or mega funding, something that would instantly get publicized should word get out. I'll sign these but usually these types of orgs are comfortable enough to give you the gist of what they're protecting and why first, and often its accompanied by a contract which seals the deal regardless.
Haiti and the Psychology of Giving
One of the estimating tricks I use the most is the Rule of 72 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72 ), which tells you how long it takes for a number to double (or halve) given a yearly interest percentage (or inflation). Just divide 72 by the interest rate and you get the number of years it takes for your money to double. E.g. at a 3.6% interest rate (above inflation!) it would take about 20 years for your investment to double.
also ask the guys behind searchyc.com
If people had any idea this was coming down the Google PR pipeline this would have been a huge money-making play... BIDU is up 13% today and BIDU options are set to expire 3 days later... JAN420 calls are up 7000%... Game over, time to retire.

And don't even mention "insider trading" because we all know the SEC has its head up its rear when it comes to knowing when it's happening.
It's contingent on getting it, of course. Ideally from the planet itself.

There will have to be something to test, though; if there is no biological material to test for anything I'm going to have to lean in favor of unknown-but-non-life process for generating the images I've seen so far. If the structures had visible complex structure I'd buy life (clearly a skeleton, no matter how mineralized by fossilization, was not produced by a purely unliving process), but I'm logically concluding they don't have any more than what we can see in the pictures or the scientists would have (correctly) already announced it was life.

Small amounts of biological material can't conclusively prove origin from Earth, but might conclusively prove non-terrestrial origin if for instance all the chirality were flipped. (That would both prove biological processes were at work, since randomly created amino acids have random chirality, and that it was non-terrestrial since our entire ecosystem works on only one of the two forms; anything that exclusively used the other would satisfy me as alien.)
> I'd say emergent, especially intelligent life would make the stats pages.

Perhaps most such life exists near black holes.

> I'd say it's even possible we are one of the first, if not THE first, intelligent lifeform ....

Or maybe the first that isn't near a black hole.

(Just a couple of thoughts)
Significant Drops in Small Businesses in 2009 (US down 24%)
At least one South American civilization was committing human sacrifices, calling them "good people" before the Spaniards showed up is simplistic. At the same time suggesting the Spaniards were a "good people" simply because they replaced one set of barbaric behaviors with another is also simplistic.
Appeal to history. Just because a lot of source code is littered with GOTOs doesn't mean that approach is "how hackers roll." Imperialism's just a phase; it's already generally considered harmful.
Well, it is interesting, and occasionally practical for small numbers where you might have the Fibonacci sequence memorized. But, I also found it rather odd that the article seems to seriously suggest the technique of finding sums of Fibonacci numbers to total arbitrary numbers you want to convert. People who have difficulty multiplying 100*1.6 probably don't have the Fibonacci sequence readily at their fingertips either.
Degenerate cases are often not as interesting.
Awesome! Been wondering when you'd get to that point, since you've been growing BCC at such a steady pace, with what seems like a limited time thanks to your day job.

Also, your comments about the way things are in the Japanese workforce make me glad I don't work over there ;-)