skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I know its fun to rag on public officials on Internet forums. But most of the ones I know have been fairly decent people who are just doing their jobs.

This could be said about a lot of people who did incredibly horrific things. Virtually no one, no matter how evil they appear to everyone else, really thinks of themselves that way. They always justify their actions in some way (e.g. "The world will be better off without this race", "no one else is smart enough to see what I see, so fudging a little bit is completely justified. They are too simple minded to understand anything else", etc.).

In regards to rule following, people fall into one of two categories: "Rule followers", people who follow what the rule says, and people like myself who follow the sense behind the rule, not the words specifically and even then only if it makes sense [1].

People from e.g. your TSA example are clearly "rule followers". Here is an article that outlines some of the issues with following rules to this degree: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6433397/The-Authoritarians

Basically, if you can get people who will blindly follow rules you can accomplish just about anything with them. It's also a very handy justification for highly antisocial behavior. Of course people in my category can also use shaky justifications to engage in poor behavior but I can't claim "I was just doing as I was told".

I have plenty of "rule follower" friends (whom I constantly annoy with my heretical suggestions that rules are just guidelines). But at the end of the day we can only judge people's actions based on what they did (rule follower or not). Not how friendly they are doing it. Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbors thought he was nice enough.

>and they risk losing their job when they deviate from it, even if they personally believe the rules are stupid.

If everyone would avoid rules that are, from a common sense point of view, stupid then their job wouldn't be "at risk". They couldn't be replaced with anyone who wouldn't do the same thing.

>Same with the private sector. Companies that have the best reputations tend to be those that empower their employees to solve the customer's problem, like Virgin or Nordstroms. Companies with the worst reputations tend to be those where the employees can't do anything but follow the playbook, like most telecoms.

Interesting point.

[1] e.g. I don't stop at a stop sign if I can clearly see that I can go without impacting anyone else. For me stop sign means "the other people have the right of way, don't impact them". I find following the letter of the law "all four wheels to a full and complete stop" irritating, insulting and of little or no value.
I think it's fair to say that Git is going to be a major tool for software archeology and cultural studies of our little subculture. I can almost imagine someone reading through Rails commits in 30+ years who will have no idea what a LOLCat is.

(Although I guess it's valid to wager what will last longer: Rails or LOLCats. IMHO, Rails has a slight edge.)
The first issue is why do you want to store them, just for the record or do you need to do something with them. Do you need to store that actual number or would a hash of the number be acceptable (for comparison purposes).

Databases are commonly compromised by SQL injection attacks that reveal the contents of the database. Some databases, MySQL for example, have functions that allow the database to display the contents of files off the filesystem. But on the whole, if someone has gained access to your database it does not immediately follow that they have access to your code. Only that you need to tighten up on security.

An alternative to hashes, but somewhat more expensive computationally, would be to encrypt the CC number into the database using the public key of a Public/Private encryption scheme (PGP for example). So even if they got hold of your database and the public key they could still not, realistically, decode the CC number. Providing the private key is held securely on another server!

It all comes down to what you need to do with the CC numbers. Long ago I worked on some software to track CC fraud for a major store (was a CC number used in store A also being used in store B, it was likely that the card had been cloned as most customers only shopped at their local branch), we used hashes of the numbers. We didn't even need to know who the customer was, everything was driven by electronic till receipts and hashed CC number.

Do you need the actual CC numbers or would a hash be equally as usable?
Oh, and on a related note- the "quick summary and then return the question" method works for more than just introductions. A lot of times people will ask you a question as a way of introducing a topic they want to talk about- "How was your weekend?" can mean "Something really exciting happened to me this past weekend and I want to talk about it". If they actually want to hear about your weekend then they will give a quick summary and then prompt you to elaborate on your answer, in which case you can go into more detail.
Actually, I think you missed my point. I was talking about the historical reasons that publishers came into existence. At that point in time, it was (and still is) a huge expense to run a printing press and book bindery. Then, they took control over the distribution channel. These are huge costs- Lulu doesn't get your book into B&N. I was speaking to a future where bookstores are as rare as record stores as one where those costs are not significant.

It is just a historical accident that the people that control the printing presses control the rest of the process. It used to cost quite a bit. With on demand printing, there is little need for their services.
Hi. I agree it's not the best example.

But it's not an automatic reply. It's happened a few times with different people signing the mail but most importantly, the e-mail address is verified, it just wasn't the address connected with the specific billing enquiry I made.

Also, the original mail was sent to their generic support address, as requested on their site (last paragraph):

http://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/
I'm going through the same process right now.

I've just bought a Mac Mini + Magic Mouse + VGA Adapter + AppleCare for £700. I've got a decent monitor, KVM switch and keyboard already.

I'm going over my K&R book at the moment, running through all of the exercises — especially pointers.

Once I've finishes with K&R my plan is to go through 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' by Hillegass. Aiming for a completion date around the end of March. After that my iPhone development begins as I should have a decent foothold over core Mac programming and will, hopefully, only need to fill in a few blanks using the online references.
Why I don't think Microsoft has 'lost it'
Has the Time for Mobile Ads Finally Arrived?
Does this really make sense, instead of just coding your application in C/C++ or even Go? Seems like you have to rape your Python source code pretty totally.

Or how about implementing the performance-sensitive parts as native C modules for Python.
Problems faced by the denizens of this site are more likely to be well-served by what already exists.

Try asking people in industries that rarely interface with the tech world. That's where you find the big, underserved problems.
Isn't that called Startuply.com?
Are you sure you wont get that regardless? I guess my perspective comes from just seeing the US government as a failed experiment at this point. It has so many problems and those problems themselves prevent any solution (e.g. how are you going to get politicians bought by lobbyists to ban lobbying?). Given that, the only option is to make it harder for the government to enforce their ridiculous legislation.

Sort of buying more time for the hero to make his appearance and fix everything.
Twitbit for iPhone Might Just Be The One
It seems like I am reviewing a Twitter app every day. Between the growing Android market for Twitter apps, the race to the top of the BlackBerry App World, and the never ending stream of Twitter iPhone apps, there are a lot of options from which to choose.
Interesting. Looks more mac specific than I was thinking.

My musings on interesting areas:

* I don't care about IMAP/POP/all that stuff. Mail comes in via SMTP, goes out via SMTP.

* Messages go straight into postgres

* There's gold in them thar messages headers - there's a lot of structure hidden in there that gets ignored, it must
be possible to do something interesting.

* GTD motivated one-message-at-a-time, file/reply/mark to reply later.

* There must be something interesting you can do with automatic email classification.

* Only client is webmail.

* Unashamed focus on people who need to manage 500 messages a day.
I think that its easier to relate yourself to the situation when you feel the body dynamics of the pictured people, and elbows probably the least we need to be able to do that.
I have a big procrastination problem. An effective tool/strategy/app for reducing this procrastination could be massively useful to me.
>> Not sure how many people actually watch the Grammy's

~ 20 million in US only?

"The 3 1/2-hour music awards show on CBS was seen by 19.05 million US households (in 2009), compared to 17.18 million in 2008, according to early data from Nielsen Media Research."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/4...
DoGood: Replace ads with "Good Ads"
You seem to be assuming that git will still be around in 30 years, and that git-hosting sites will still be online with history from repositories that old.

I'm not sure I'd bet on that happening.
I wish someone (or I) had posted something like this when I was looking for an internship couple of years back...

Regarding the HN job postings, Can't we have a quarterly "Who's hiring" thread as a permanent fixture. A quarter seems like a good enough time for a company(even a startup) to look/plan ahead for hiring decisions.
I think you really underestimate the desire of people to not have to be bothered with this kind of stuff. No matter how insane things get people tend to say "well, it could be worse. We've still got beer and football".

I would, for example, never consider moving to the UK with their surveillance, etc., but they obviously have a large populace that disagrees.

Trying to force people into doing something they just don't want to do never works.
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The article was written by a woman (Chrissie Brodigan).
Payout.py - A Startup Equity Simulator
Just to clarify: by "they" I meant the NIF folks who are trying to make fusion happen using lasers. Other people have of course had fusion (well below breakeven) for ages.
I have been using Stan's Python Editor (SPE) for quite some time and am very happy with it. Easy to install on my Ubuntu box, no big application+kitchen sink package, no magic customization files and free to boot.
My problems? Okay, I'll try to list them honestly. Try to build some startups from this:

1) It's too cold in Moscow. The gray sky sucks.

2) I fall sick easily. Now slowly recovering from a brutal case of stomatitis.

3) I can't easily find new people to play music together in a casual setting. I'd do this every couple days if it were simple.

4) Whenever I have >1 concurrent girlfriend, I have trouble separating them. Shutting off the phone sucks. Three girls at once give me so many worries that I wonder why I even bother.

5) Getting visas to foreign countries sucks, and air tickets are too expensive. Okay I can live with the ticket prices - my salary is high enough - but the visa humiliations are too much for me. You Americans have no idea.

6) The Flash platform is really poorly documented around the edges. I'd love to see something like quirksmode.org for Flash.

7) I can't seem to wake up early.
This is a part of the problem. You are not going to see an improvement if you don't face your problem. Stop seeking an escape strategy and come to grips with procrastination.
That sentence was for illustration purposes: I was wondering if NoSQL databases acted on the same level as ORMs (and I was apparently wrong). I am very well aware of ORMs (actually wrote my own in PHP: http://www.getdorm.com).
'Why should I care about privacy, I have nothing to hide" is one of the most harmful, narrow but yet common arguments put forward for this.

I strongly recommend people with viewpoints on either side of the argument to go read D. Solove's essay on the subject over at http://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/courses/pet/F07/cache/solove.pdf - it's quite short and a great read.

His "Understanding Privacy" work is a fantastic book which develops this and his other essays, and provides a great methodology for understanding the scope of - and breaking down the harm inherent in - modern privacy problems. I studied it for my Master's in Cyberlaw, and would highly recommend anyone with an interest in IT / cyberlaw / philosophy to track down a copy and read it.
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Privacy-Daniel-J-Solove/...
You should be using a separate database server than your web server if you're going to be storing credit card numbers. The database server should not be accessible by any machine except a small whitelist of IPs that you've specified. That way when your webserver gets compromised, it will require some looking around to realize the database containing credit card numbers isn't there.

Most server compromises that I've seen have stayed local to the server - I'm not a security pro; but generally I've seen the server that got knocked over get messed around with, anything on that server was fair game.

Beyond that, I'm sure there are other things you should do to protect the database that contains the credit card numbers; but seriously - keep them off your web server.
Accelerating Your (Secure) Ride to the Cloud: Get in the Fast Lane
WIkiLeaks whistleblower site in temporary shutdown
I love how you can refer to this url as well, so git like - http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/2ebea1c02
What Do You Test, and When Do You Test It? Steve Krug on Usability Problems
Personally, I have no significant problems that can be solved with technology.

However if you look around, there are far better places to go looking to solve problems then HN. The recession is plush with opportunity. Not just opportunity to help someone with some insignificant problem, but to truly help someone live better. Personally, I am doing pretty well but when i go back to the place where I grew up everywhere I look I see unemployment especially in young people in their 20's. I've spent a great deal of thought towards analyzing why this is. I've come to many conclusions, but in the end I think its an education system that prepared a large body of students for work in industry that was lifted up and handed to computers. So now there is at least one town (and I would imagine there are more) where there are young people eager to find a job. I feel like the internet is a great solution, the local economy may be devastated but the global economy probably still has something for them. Sites like etsy are one step towards this direction. I think if you can find something more specialized, with the principle of self employment. you have something special.
You should look up what is recommended by the PCI DSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Secu... / https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/).
"If you look at another and think "he is better than me at x,y,z" and you feel jealous..."

If you look at another an think of how that person being better at x,y,z would make them a huge asset to your company, you just might be an A player.
I's say it's reasonable to think that it will always be around as long as someone has the code and the ability to compile it. It probably won't be the VCS of choice in 30 years, but for people with that kind of interest, I'm sure it'll be available.

And hey, storage is cheap (and only getting cheaper). Even if Github, Sourceforge, etc are gone, barring a major calamity, I think it's safe to assume there will be a backup of those somewhere, even if it's offline.
The Alexandria Project, Chap. 3: I just HATE it when that Happens
I'm in the exact same boat, sans the party. Lone entrepreneur building a few projects, with a few live and the big one not quite ready for people to start using it yet. I have told people about my projects but so far I haven't really thrown myself out there. I like your title because it encourages us to take a risk, and to not fear failure, but to face it head on, and hopefully avoid it in the end.
I'd recommend starting with the PCI DSS. That standard is required by pretty much all card companies, and compliance is enforced by a self-assessment checklist and/or security assessor. If you plan on storing card information, you must be in compliance with this standard.

PCI DSS Standard: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_...

More info on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Secu...
My problem is time. I am still a student in India where you have one exams after another and all on completely different levels. I want to do what I love with programming and be part of projects which interest me, whose products I use (best example would be Ubuntu), but I know if I start, I will only be able to do it for a couple of weeks and then its back to studying something totally unrelated. This on and off sessions keeps me totally out of shape for programming as I am not able to get good practice. I eagerly wait for the day when I am free to do what I love indefinitely.
The other way to do is to pass general 'catch-all' laws. Something like the 'obstruction of justice', or 'looking suspicious'. Combine that with total surveilance and selective enforcement and you have a perfect police state.

It gives the state the power to come and arrest you at any time, for any reason, as they will probably find something in your history to convict you of. Yes, most of the time they won't bother, just like insurance companies won't bother checking your illness history for discrepancies, until you become 'inconvinient' to them then they can find any reason to arrest (or deny coverage in case of insurance companies).

In general, as applied to any institution, the rule is to make complicated processes and regulations, such that any particular individual the institution controls, has a very high chance of breaking some of them. That makes it very easy to selectively enforce laws and the institution can choose to enforce based on any reason, legal or not, since there is always a legal 'cover' -- the 'official' broken rule (law).

EDIT: changed "rate" to "chance" in last paragraph
I don't think it's unlikely at all. Git might be succeeded by something, but certainly some projects will be around.

For example, the Emacs repository (the git clone at least. I haven't checked bzr) has commits dated before my birth. Some of the history is certainly lost due to lossy conversion. RCS and CVS never were very good at tracking it anyway. However, any conversion from git is going to have to retain full history. (why would you convert to something inferior?)

Furthermore, as git is distributed, the history of a project is fully contained within countless clones. I doubt any sufficiently popular open source project could just disappear from the internet. That's why the hosting sites don't matter either. If one goes down, it's trivial to migrate to another host.
You have just described me too... Countless ideas started and very few completed or even got to a launchable status. I know exactly what's required in every case but struggle to wrap things up.

Funnily enough, I think I'd make a solid startup/side-project coach and it's exactly what I need, also. Would love to see a small group work together to motivate each other, like an online version of the YC dinners (going by what I've read of them on here).
ya learn something new every day.
Are we responsible for our own erectile dysfunction?
Unfortunately even when we know of a law being stupid, against the will of the people and against its own initial intent- we still continue to enforce it and ruin people's lives. Hoping for understanding judges isn't a good answer and if they strike down a law many will say they are "legislating from the bench" and bring politics into it.

You don't have to look further than the cases of teens currently being branded as sex offenders for sending each other photos of themselves.
I had similar speed issues in an evolutionary computing class last semester. I took it as an opportunity to learn Haskell and Scala, and noticed that in addition to getting dramatic speedups, I also had a lot more fun writing the code in the first place.
Worth checking out pysco as well http://psyco.sourceforge.net/

Though in practice I find that if performance really matters using numpy or writing a C extension module usually works out the best.
Whenever I have >1 concurrent girlfriend, I have trouble separating them.

I have a vision. A vision of the first screenplay ever to be based on a bestselling iPhone application.
Google hiring process has some of this as well. You get to take their personality test and then they send you some messages via the email. I replied but it turns out I was talking to an email bot. It was kind of dissapointing.
Install my browser extension! Each page-load will save a patch of rainforest! :)
Yeah, I do a whole lot of ironic things. Including using Gmail, Google Reader, etc. If only Google didn't make such good products.
This brings an interesting twist to the question: "is blocking ads on a website denying the owner their revenue stream and therefore wrong in some way?"
Free mobile map app 'shut down by' Nokia
"Three girl(friends)s at once..."

This is a problem? :-) There are actually several web applications to help people get into that sort of situation.

Seriously, doesn't caller ID help this situation? Maybe you could convince them all to download a location-based app so you can track them and see when two are headed to your apartment at the same time.
Thanks to a habit of bad posture I'm very limited in how much work I can do. But terse code is often incomprehensible and English can't be compressed too much either. I want a way to reliably code/write without using my hands, and/or to minimise the number of input gestures I need to do.
The Present Value Of Future Cash Flows
The NYC tech scene is exploding
Which industries would that be? What is a good way to get in touch with them without looking too opportunist or ruining yourself? (genuine question)