skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It humors me when people speak so confidently about events that happened 400 years ago, and yet if you asked them to explain in detail the events of their own life a year ago would have trouble remembering.

I went to an exhibit once with real photographs from a native indian population taken in the late 1800's. The photos showed a population that looked, quite frankly, very savage and violent. These people didn't look like Pocahontus or the friendly blue creatures of Avatar.

I'm not going to state an opinion either way about the early colonization of America because frankly I have no clue about it and don't really care.

However, I do have an opinion that raw life is a brutal thing. Always has and probably always will be. It was particularly brutal back then, for both the Native Americans and the Europeans. I'd hate to have to live in either time period. The depictions we see in movies are far, far removed from reality.
FWIW, Wikileaks is saying that they were 'infiltrating' the Google repos: http://twitter.com/wikileaks/ (and specifically http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7688415363 ). The NYT is simply parroting Google, so I give Wikileaks more credence.

(Colloquially, you can be 'stealing' something while haven't yet actually absconded with it yet, and be foiled if discovered.)
I think that title belongs to "God" (http://god.rubyforge.org/)
He only has one book as the reference for all the “history,” which makes me doubt most of it. Certainly, the claim that everybody (except Aztecs and Incas) was “peacable” (sic) is nonsense. The Apache tribes often raided each other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_indians), and the legendary Apache fighting skills were certainly not a result of living peacefully for centuries before the Europeans arrived.
Ugh, Milton Friedman started perpetuating that particular falsehood around 1970 and now everyone believes it, so much so that they expect to get raped up the ass by big corporations.

Why do we have an economy? It's because ordinary people need goods and services. If we didn't, we could all stop working and stop buying things and live happily ever after. Most of us aren't shareholders in any significant way; if we actually believed that businesses existed to serve shareholders, let's get rid of them!

The reason company officers should act as if they're beholden to shareholder value is because there's no economic check on their resource consumption otherwise. It's easy to satisfy consumers: simply take lots of money from shareholders or the government, and give it to the people (a la AllAdvantage.com and several other dot-coms). But that's not economically efficient: there's no check on the resources consumed, so there's no incentive to be efficient, and you eventually run out of money. The profit motive ensures that businesses consume as little as possible and produce as much as possible, so as long as they act as if their goal is to maximize shareholder value, they maximize efficiency throughout the economy.

But over time, acting in the best interest of shareholders has been confused with the goal of the company is the best interest of shareholders. The former is an instrumental goal; the latter is an inherent one. And the inherent goal of corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, it's to provide useful goods and services as economically as possible. Google gets this; most other companies today do not.
What I've found most interesting in this news article is the oddly strong role that Google is playing in global politics. Corporations taking a strong line negotiating with nation-states.
Happy Hotel Growing on Facebook – the Start of the Next Big Social Game Genre?
Of Web Browsers and Humanity
Scheme from Scratch - Bootstrap v0.9 - Environments
I tried getting the Nexus One subsidized but I was told I'm not eligible. I still have about 9 months left in my contract which started when I bought my G1.

I know a lot of G1 owners looking to upgrade but unfortunately, we can't unless we pay the full price.
google.cn has already unfiltered results concerning the Tiananmen massacre.

So the government may block access to google.cn if it hasn't already.
Interesting. Somehow dup checker didn't catch it.
If you're really into something, going into business selling that thing seems like a good deal. I know a reputable used car dealer in my hometown--he and his family go through cars at a pretty fast rate, too. They just keep the dealer plates on them and use them until they can get another one wholesale and sell the old one. I don't know if he's made any sales that way, though.
I think you're actually agreeing with me here. I am saying that this project Gordon has appeal for folks that may want to do something like display a SWF in iPhone Safari.
It means "Google: a real, [upstanding -- implied], man"
If Europeans had already developed the idea of private property, then why did we find it necessary to take the land of these ingenious populations?
You're missing the point. It's about survival, not feelings. 10% survival is better than extinction.
Maybe you should have read the rest of it. He's not advocating some wishy washy point of view how, because of our technology and culture, we're oppressing some other culture and creating an anglosphere by giving them pennicillin and the internet, blah blah..

He's talking about genocide. Not accidental genocide, "bring me back 100 scalps" genocide. This isn't in the realm of "theoretical cultural conquest".
Someone managing to slip malicious code into the Flash Player or Acrobat Reader installers is pretty much a worst-case scenario; the possibility of someone working for the Chinese government doing so is even worse. I don't think that's actually likely, but the idea that someone might have been trying is sobering. It's nice to see some degree of openness from Adobe about it.
Can one reliably check domain name availability via DNS query? Wouldn't you need to do a whois lookup?
Maybe they already are--what other purpose would there be for nonsense spam?
Probably cause I am using the Dev build. Oops, time to submit a bug report.
You can still analyze that Bob emailed Cindy and that Cindy emailed Marge, even without knowing the content of the emails. IIRC, the FBI has some sort of software that does this with telephone communications to identify 'networks' that was originally developed to combat the mafia.
Demos posted here: http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/
Blah. The colonies had a problem w/ their indentured servants going native. Presumably, Indian ways were more appealing than whatever colonial society had to offer. Thus the early American emphasis on freedom and liberty to counteract the drain.

I imagine a real Pandora would have a similar effect on society today, were transportation available.
I think this is a good move. Turning https on is a case of sensible defaults. Users generally won't think about data security and others being able to intercept their HTTP traffic.

I do wonder if there are any numbers comparing performance with http with https. Should be too hard to measure.
Well, thanks for that, but I did read your entire comment and it was an honest question. Your third paragraph, for starters, includes a lot of "should" and handwaving.

In what ways were the starting conditions different?

Earth underwent radical changes in its environment in its early history. Did those changes -- from a methane to an oxygen-rich atmosphere for example -- result in radically different RNA or DNA sequences for the bacteria from each epoch?

Why should different starting conditions result in different forms of basic DNA anyway? Wouldn't the basic problems of evolutionary viability be the same?

There is indeed lots of stuff in Earth's base DNA catalog -- including some terrestrial critters that would do just fine on Mars, which would suggest that they could have independently evolved there. Tardigrades are one such popular example.

Your very last sentence is, "Truly independent life should have made at least some different decisions", but there's that word again: should. So, again: why?

On a completely different side note: this is part of the reason that anti-intellectualism is so rampant in America today. Those that have the combination of both ignorance and intellectual curiosity too often get met with sarcasm and indifference by people who then complain that nobody takes their opinion seriously.

So thanks for that.
I'm objecting to the bizarrely flippant tone of the post.

"You can say goodbye to a lot of what people think of when they talk about human culture"? More like "You can say goodbye to a lot of humans". But that's nothing to worry about when the remaining humans will be part of a 'better culture', right?
OpenOffice.org in Internet cafes threat to Microsoft
Yes, but that big Flash site you just finished with no budget for an iPhone version just got a lot cheaper to re-target.
This article, and many of the comments here, hint at a deeper and more interesting phenomenon: the need to have things be either all good or all bad. That is, either (A) western civilization is good, and the things it has done were good, and the things it values are good values, etc., or (B) it's bad, and the things it has done were bad, and the things it values are bad values, etc.

Once this dichotomy is accepted, any evidence of goodness is proof of A, and any evidence of badness is proof of B. If A is accepted, then nothing can be bad, and if B is accepted, then nothing can be good. You get one guy saying "Medicine good!" and another saying "Slavery bad!" and they shout at each other forever.

In fact, A and B are both all-or-nothing cognitive distortions.

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.

Losing doesn't make someone good, and neither does winning.

Having nice things today doesn't mean that genocide 400 years ago was a good idea.

Being good doesn't mean we came from good people or entirely good traditions. Neither does being bad.

Having some good traits doesn't mean we have nothing left to learn, or that we can't get better. In fact, good people can even learn things from bad people, or good cultures can learn things from bad cultures. Even if modern western culture is, on the net, much better for humans than aboriginal American culture, we can still probably learn a lot from it.

There's a lot of richness between these blacks and whites. Perfection is not required for goodness.
Unless you aren't starting from scratch, as you said ("legacy Flash code") in your other comment.
Yes, whois is slower but potentially more reliable. It might be best to do a DNS query first, and a whois for confirmation. I did double-check a sample of the results with whois and did not find any that were inaccurate.
How do you expect to sequence fossil bacteria's DNA? I don't think DNA is preserved.
I'm not sure if that says more about the poor optimization of the Mac Flash plugin or the great optimization of your browser's (Safari? Mac Chrome?) JS interpreter.

Probably both.
Why didn't it work symmetrically? Shouldn't the diseases going the other way have wiped out Europe? The only major disease I can recall coming from the Americas was syphilis.
Doesn't this misconstrue DanielBMarkham's argument, though? There's no attempt to justify the act of genocide, merely to point out that Monbiot's response to it ignores substantive differences between the relative merits of Western culture versus Native American culture, and what's more, does so willfully in service of a particular political agenda.
Getting into freelance web design
It seems that there is a large amount of freelance web designers / developers out there. Looking at various sites such as cssbeauty, almost every other website is from either a freelance web designer or from some sort of an agency.

Does it make any sense to get into that market if your skills are not "top of the line"? Are there any designers out there working in some specific niches?

Would like to hear your comments.
RIP Sam. You will be missed.
Search for Google's "New Approach" post, get locked out of baidu.com
The US was just as much in hock to the PRC in 1996, when Clinton decided to sail a few aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Straits. After that, the PRC lost their taste for attacking Taiwan.

The reintegration of Taiwan will happen through a political arrangement between the CPC and the KMT, not through war.
Conheça os interiores do estúdio Midia Effects
Qual profissional da área de web nunca sonhou em trabalhar em uma empresa com bons profissionais, que seja reconhecida pelo bom trabalho e ainda de quebra tenha os ambientes modernos e ao mesmo tempo descontraídos e acolhedores? Se você é um desses profissionais irá gostar do post, afinal, vamos falar da Midia Effects.
More Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud
I did read the article to the end, and I find no fault with what I said.

They haven't decided to pull out completely from China yet. They simply said they might, and their main focus was to stop censoring as much as they can "within the law".

I am really surprised that you have been voted so highly as though you and many other readers here mistakenly interpreted this as an absolute sign that Google is going to withdraw from China.
Meet Apple's sole skeptic
Having lived across the street from the Delancey St. Foundation for a while, I've had the privilege of enjoying their many services. Deeply impressive organization. If you ever find yourself in the SoMa area, go eat at Crossroads Cafe or the Delancey St. Restaurant. Great food, and by far some of the best service in SF.

Great writeup!
Sam was a prominent contributor to the field of machine learning and given his young age he held so much promise. He will be missed.

http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2010/01/13/nyu-computer-scienc...
>Plasma TVs are ridiculously high on power consumption

This seems to be an urban myth. Cnet's test (link below) show that for a 42" TV, the yearly cost is roughly:

LCD $25 - $40
Plasma $40 - $50

Fractionally more power consumption, not ridiculous.

Assumes $0.11/kWh, on for 5hrs/day. Ranges eyeballed by me. See full data here: http://reviews.cnet.com/green-tech/tv-consumption-chart/
It's the GET params (i.e. the ? and everything following it).
When discussing genocide, pointing out the merits of those who conducted the genocide vs. those who were slaughtered constitutes an implicit justification of the act.

Imagine if descriptions of Nazi concentration camps included lengthy treatises on how Jewish culture was backwards and savage, while German culture was refined and noble. Would you find this appropriate, or even relevant in any way?
this is key for me, too. you do the work of figuring out what is secret or not. Not me. and if you mark every communication secret, well, maybe you're not the right client for me?
12  Tips for Event Planning
Never gets old..
I saw a tiger head for about a second. I said, "oh cool". Then Chrome said: "Aw, snap!"
Sure.

If you have the variables TodayYYYY, TodayMM, and TodayDD in your program, then you cannot also have a variable named Today, because it's fully self-contained in another variable. Why? Because it screws up global find and/or replace in a simple text editor.

Lots of people have told me that this is unnecessary with a good IDE, and lots have given me lots of common examples of violations of this rule, but I still like the rule (guideline). I like my source code to be portable, easily reviewed by even the simplest tools, and I like the common tasks (reviewing every instance of a variable in a program) to be easy.

One of the hardest things I ever have to do when reviewing someone else's code is to identify every use of a variable to find a bug or understand something. Violation of this guideline is the biggest culprit. (And violent, painful death to anyone who writes a 1200 line function wrapped with "for(a=b;a<c;a++){...")

This is also why all variables must be 3 characters or more, or it would be very difficult to adhere to #12.

(FWIW, my list comes more from many iterations than from any theory or philosophy. We can debate these forever. I just like to do what works for me. Use what you like, ignore the rest.)
We've seen this before (two years ago). The secret? "Sell something".
7 Major Sites that Send Passwords Unprotected, & China's Deep Packet Inspection
Any statement Google makes in 2010 is much stronger than any statement Google could have made in 2006, when they first went into China.
He's ignoring the point that 'rule of law' didn't exist in the Americas. Maybe private property and rule of law existed in Europe and made for a better society there, but the conquistadors that came to the Americas acted like the rule of law was "whatever I want to do, I get to do." Ideas like private property don't excuse things like slavery and murder.

You can't say, "I claim this piece of land for my own. Oh, look! There are people living on it already. I guess I get to enslave, rape, torture them." This has more to do with brutal people being the first people to encounter the natives in the Americas, and deciding that since there was no European justice system or society to condemn/jail then that they could do whatever they felt like.
Definitely David's best. And he had a lot of great talks in the past.
For the curious, below is the list of sites that DON'T send passwords in the clear.

The curious case was Zynga. They don't have a login form. (!)

Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Windows Live, Blogger, Baidu, MSN, QQ.com, Google, Twitter, MySpace, Amazon, Wordpress.com, Ebay, Rapidshare, yandex.ru, mail.ru, imeem, Flickr, IMDB, Craigslist, LinkedIn, AOL, Blogspot, deviantArt, PayPal, Alibaba, Ning, Hulu
Maybe his results are skewed because they spent more time watching the Plasma TV.
Then don't double click it.
The point is not that it is practical. The point is that it is interesting (even if only by coincidence).
And by your own admission, it was through his own inaction that he let the Fed run amok. Also during his term, trade tariffs went up.
Had never been to Baidu.com before. Wonder where they got their inspiration for that UI...
100 Best (Free) Science Documentaries Online
That's reddit bait if I've ever seen it.
High-level developer perspective on virtualization
I remember him from grad school.
I'd prefer we focus on sites that still store passwords in the clear.

Yes reddit, I'm looking at you. Of course any other site that can actually mail you a forgotten password is in fact doing this too.
1) Writing blog posts instead of going home early
Too bad the name is already used for a flash decompiler
http://www.futurecandy.net/
A way to make money online. There are many viable ways.
Maybe there were more diseases in Europe? It's not like diseases never hit Europe from other places (e.g. The Black Plague).
How to make cash from blogging
By this logic, why do business in a plethora of other questionable countries?

Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.
4C is the temperature at which H20 is most dense, so it makes sense use that temp when defining a mass in terms of a volume.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_water#Density_of_...
How to Get Your Tech-Startup Taken Seriously by a Big Company
Wow, it's the first time I am taking a look at baidu, and the UI seems to be so familiar ... very much related to google!

Maybe this is one of the reasons people are unwilling to shift to google from baidu, both seem similar to them, nothing new in google !
Test Your Professional English - Business Intermediate
If one were to set out on such a path and accomplish the goal out of hobby or desire to learn a new language, or for whatever reason, how long would something like that take? How long did it take 37s to build ROR? How long did PHP take?

I'm just curious...
> You can also consider Singapore (which is basically Victorian, and basically paradise on earth for law-abiding people).

It's interesting that you need to preface that with 'law-abiding people.' What happens when you are accidentally on the other side of the law?

Update: Maybe I should be more specific in what I mean. In Thailand you aren't a 'law-abiding citizen' if you criticize the king. What similar laws does Singapore have? What happens is someone doesn't like me and decides to set me up for a crime I am no guilty of (e.g. deface some property and then claim that I did it)? The only problem that I have with harsh justice systems: What happens if you're an innocent person, but that system believes you to be guilty?
Microsoft open sources .NET Micro Framework
Yup, the future is clearly client side hashing. I wonder if we could get the latest and greatest from that field built into the next jquery etc so people become more likely to use the routines. ...

That said states like Iran might be more likely to garner the most passwords through sniffing, which is a passive activity, than hacking the sites that store passwords insecurely.
I think if China actually goes for a whitelist crackdown, it is going to set off an unprecedented international effort to crack the Great Firewall. It would be an enormous mistake for the CCP; it cannot possibly end well.

To those that emailed me about the VPN, I should have it up within 24 hours.
Good point ;-) I'll keep this in mind for my own future purchases. Thanks!
.... and you're posting on hacker news when you could be "dealing with that mess".
because they didn't...
In simple terms, the Old World had a larger human population pool, with a longer history of settlement, and more domesticated animals (i.e. vectors for disease).

Or in simplest terms, Old World germs were way nastier. (Contrast: African settlement.)
A few memories of Sam from a Toronto machine learning student:
http://blog.smellthedata.com/2010/01/sam.html
Because that would be stooping to China's level.
I think you guys have fallen off in the weeds somewhere.

The point wasn't that somehow Europeans were "right" in the way they treated the natives, any more than the natives were "right". My thesis is, given any two sufficiently distant cultures, any interaction between them, no matter how principled, will be traumatic to the lesser culture.

That doesn't mean I approve of the side-effects of interaction, or that I'm a believer in social darwinism, or that we should kill a million people in order to make drugs to extend the lives of the billions of other humans. These are all extreme positions that I do NOT take. I'm simply pointing out the patterns from the past, which I fully expect to continue in the future. My personal opinions have no bearing on this anymore than whether or not I like the beach has anything to do with the migratory patterns of sea turtles. It's an observation, not a value judgement.

Even when I say I would send my kids to the schools and such, what I'm saying is that we must do what we have to in order to survive as a species. Not that I approve or somehow would be complicit in it. I'm saying that the personal attitude of survival and not moaning over things lost is what makes us able to move forward no matter what position we are in.

The more interesting question would be if the aliens arrived with all sorts of goodies, much like the Europeans did. What if we could eliminate death? Eliminate suffering? Live more fuller lives? But what if the interaction was bound to kill 90% of the population no matter how well it was handled?

I'm not in charge of making decisions like that and I quite plainly refuse to do so, even in a rhetorical sense. I'm much happier describing my personal reaction to such an event than trying to figure out what's best for an entire species over the long run. That's way above my pay grade.

But it's not a matter of me good, them bad. It's more like "some cultures are better than others, and when two cultures get significantly far apart mixing them becomes extremely traumatic to the lesser one"

You want an answer to the Fermi Paradox? I think it's right here.