skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Translation:

"Why doesn't America create an anti-GFW project. You block people in China accessing websites outside of China, so I give you your own medicine, block China from accessing some key websites, such as technology IEEE, education, medicine, and other famous websites, then China would genuinely become a local area network. Then webizens within China would genuinely go mad"
I personally took this to mean "Don't assume that you know everything, you could miss a learning opportunity."
How to innovate using existing technology
It would sure make freelance work a little more pleasant. How many times have you heard "This was supposed to be a 3 week project...that was a year ago"? You'll probably never hear something like "Well, we thought it was going to take 2 years and require a mainframe, but we banged it out in 6 months running on Postgresql."
The Chinese should free them by their own hands
Gmail stores the last IP that accessed your account - it's shown at the bottom of your inbox:

Last account activity: 14 minutes ago at X.X.X.X

My guess is they used that.
You could argue that those last two examples were suffering due to a country "actually going to war". Once that happened, there was more war to be had to return to balance.

I believe also that a large number of the slaves who ended up in America pre-Civil War were captured during tribal wars and sold, so you could argue that in fact all of your examples were caused by at least one party engaging in active violent warfare.
I'm not sure the Wii qualifies any better than a macbook. Struggling to do 480p, which you concede could possibly be the highest resolution it will output, does not make it better than a macbook IMO.
Need to send emails from node.js to an smtp server?
I think for about 1/10,000,000 the effort of starting a bank you could locate a more user-friendly, local coop.
You really shouldn't have.
One theory: people like subsidized phones.
Reddit handles this one pretty well by displaying a random new story in a box at the top of the page. That way lots of new stuff gets some exposure.
Top Reasons to Invest in Digital Conversion for Documents
The US is not too far away from China in terms of human rights violations (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/Tables/4_col_tables/0,,258330,00.h... ) - Will Google pull out from other countries having similar issues? I doubt it. The reasons and consequences behind Google's decision won't be obvious, if ever, for a while.
Yes - and my experience is it works quite well.

Like everyone else though, I just wish the streaming catalog were larger. I'm hoping that's what the recent deal with Warner Brothers will result in.
The One Problem Cloud Can't Solve. Or Can It?
I tried. No, really, I tried. Back when the whole etherpad is dead thing happened, I spent about a weekend trying to write a clone in Erlang. Erlang seemed a perfect fit for a comety backend server.

First off, I found info saying that yaws wouldn't work because it has hard coded timeouts. Then I found erlycomet. But none of the samples worked.

Moving on, I found nitrogen. This was the one true diamond in the rough. It works, it has real documentation, and it's pretty well designed, at least according to my one day experience in erlang land.

Side note here that both these projects use mochiweb, which is like the new hotness apparently. But documentation for mochiweb? Ha, forget about it.

Once I got the basic page up, I decided to go with couchDB for a backend. You'd think that with couchdb also being written in erlang, there'd be some good client libraries, but the situation is pretty much a clusterfuck. erlang_couchdb was the best I found, except none of the examples in the README actually worked. And there's not much in the way of documentation. The main problems stemmed from there being different ideas of what should represent a document. Some functions used a pattern like {json, { wawawa }} others used a pattern more like [{json, [wawawa]}] and so on and so forth. The document get and put operations used different forms! put(get) crashed!

Primary conclusions I drew:

1. erlang web development is just too immature yet. Half the libraries you need are just random code dumps in github or google code. There's piles and piles of blogs and articles like this that tell you all the choices, but don't do much to explain why you'd want one or the other. Piecing it all together is very frustrating.

2. erlang as a language has the lethal combination of dynamic pattern matching. Pattern matching in a static language like ocaml? Awesome. Dynamic types in language like python/lua? Qualified awesome. Those features together? MOST ANNOYING THING EVER. Everytime my app (and by my app, I mean the example code I was running) crashed with a "oops, I didn't find the right pattern" error, it was unfuckingpossible to determine who/what/why was at fault.

It's not the syntax or the functionalness or the strangeness of erlang that killed me. It was dynamic pattern matching and the difficulty of figuring out what went wrong. I'm avoiding it like the plague from now on.
I feel like there is a lot my bank could be doing but isn't. Most of it relates to technology.

First, I think a decent web interface for my money would be nice. The bank wont let me have 20 checking accounts, but it would be nice if I could have the appearance of that many accounts in a web interface. One account for bills, one account for the new computer I want to buy, one account for food, one account for random transactions (i.e. where my debit card pulls from). Then, when my direct deposit paycheck comes in, I want to be able to have it automatically be split up into these bins. I do all of this mentally any way, but if I could see it on screen then it would make things much easier.

I also want there to be text message alerts for things, especially overdraft. I got $720 in over draft fees for spending something like $150 last fall, this is absurd! If they had sent me a text message or email, or anything I wouldn't have had to skimp on Christmas presents. Of course many will say "this is how they make their money: fees." I would reply, "this is capitalism: have a better service and make your competitors bend to your will, or let them go bankrupt."

I have come up with other ideas on what a bank could do, and would like to be updated if anything happens with this.
Cappuccino on Rails
That is a reasonable argument. (You'd make a great banker!) However, realize that in today's world the message coming from banks is spend-spend-spend.

Furthermore, a huge amount of overdraft fees comes from the practice of auto-enrollment in overdraft protection. If consumers need education, having transactions go through at the point-of-sale despite having an empty bank account is a recipe for trouble.

Last, is the issue of check ordering. (Considered a "courtesy" by most banks!) Today, most banks clear all debit card purchases (and checks) at the end of the day, after sorting them from largest to smallest. The idea is to run your account into the red as quickly as possible, saving the small $1-5 charges for the end. This simple greedy algorithm (no pun intended) maximizes the number of overdrafts. The typical rationale is "big checks tend to be rent and other important payments, which you would prefer to clear under any circumstance" -- laughable when the majority of overdrafts are on small, card-based debits.

So while I agree with you that consumer behavior needs to change, the people that need to save and not spend are exactly the ones that banks are (intentionally) targeting, and they have gotten exceedingly good at doing so. Check order policies and automatic enrollment in OD protection only complicate the issue.
This post remember the Thomas Alva Edson's. He said: "Genius was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration"
I don't think you could ever mine a chief council's interview for much information. However, human rights activists are certainly targeted but you are way off base to suggest companys are not.

I am in a rush so I can't pull up a story I recent heard about where a foreign business man was brought into custody. A large portion of billionaires in China are children of party officials that were installed in those positions.

The party very much wants to stay in power in China and they are not only worried about idealistic, which I am sympathetic to, and not so wealth opposition. They are worried about business leaders and all evidence indicates they are keeping an eye on them as well.
Virtual DOM Events
How Winning Can Mean Losing — in Poker and in Life
Voted for McCain? Your Testosterone Dipped
How to Sell Ads Online - Let the Market Determine the Price via an Auction
Matt Logue's "Empty L.A." pictures
Check out Matt Mullenweg's take on it http://ma.tt/2009/08/starting-a-bank/
I listened to a radio programme a few months ago which concluded that to set up a bank in the UK would cost £100,000,000 to comply with regulatory requirements.
The title is misleading. Shouldn't it be "open-source platform for developing Rich Desktop Applications in OSX"? The fact that it's Max OSX only seems to contradict the internet aspect.

This seems to be a part of the alarming trend of calling any development framework or platform, an RIA platform.
Saying something is never good doesn't equate to saying it never happens. And saying something can be good doesn't imply that it always is.
You might want to try using a spaced repetition (SRS) flashcard app to help you practice. ( Personally, I use http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/ + dropbox . It's crude, but it works well for me)

I know... it sounds dumb. But I'm serious. It really helps.

1) When you learn, say, the C Major chord, make a new card that says "play the C Major", with the answer being the fingering chart for that chord. It will then keep track of how well you remember that chord and ask you to play it less often as you get better and better at remembering it.

2) When you learn to play a particular song, set up a card to remind you to play it. The answer to this one should probably just list what book + page number to find the song. (That's just for the early stage when you might not remember it at all.)

3) Finally, set up a Seinfield chain ( http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se... ) for the task "practice my guitar" where the task is simply to work through the guitar flashcards for the day (there's often surprisingly few of them).
http://www.joesgoals.com/ is a particularly good tool for something like this.

Good luck with your foray into the world of music. I hope it becomes a real passion for you.
I agree that their decisions are often a good indication of what not to do, but from a practical perspective it is a good example of why page rewriting needs to be done cautiously, if it must be done at all.
I look at this the other way; assaulting the bastions of banking is probably pretty difficult and could take years (though it might be a bit easier at the moment).

But if we can brainstorm/think of other ways to modify individuals behavior - to help them manage money better, avoid over spending etc. then the banks are a bit screwed and would have to adapt.

Actually better idea: we'll meet in the middle. :D
Leak-o-nomy: The Economy of Wikileaks
Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off His Wi-Fi
People hardly ever go out of there way to make a fuss when a company has good customer service or handles a support issue well. Sometimes the negative minority is just the most vocal. For instance, most people have PayPal accounts with no problems for years but the few that have issues write long blog posts about them and start sites like paypalsucks.com.
Interesting that there has been no response from Beijing yet. We're all waiting for them to add the now-unfiltered google.cn to the firewall, but doing so would be in some way accepting Google's argument - making them look weak. I guess their best option would be to make no formal response to Google's allegations, leave the site unblocked for a few weeks until everyone loses interest, and then block it on a routine batch with a load of other sites... ideally when something more important has just happened in the rest of the world.
Microsoft's hidden XP 'patch'
I'd be surprised if the answer wasn't latency - this kind of server load would be easy to scale with their engineering resources and they're big on the competitive advantage of user-perceived performance.
The real winner this generation is Netflix. They now have streaming video on all three consoles.
My Favorite Product from CES is a Ford
Meh, I cant speak for the rest, but I'm real. I actually have a previous account, but wanted to switch for my startup's sake.
nytimes.com sent out an email alert as soon as the story broke.
I don't know how true this is (I suspect at least part of that will be money you need to have on hand rather than spend as such) but I do know that Virgin have just bought an existing bank because it was quicker and easier than starting from scratch. It would apparently have taken 6 months to jump through all the regulatory hoops.
I think the point to be taken is: Let go of the ego. It won't serve you well -- in fact, it will work against you.

Therefore, having concern of anyone being 'best' is simply a waste of time. Besides, 'best' is purely subjective, anyway. So, a pursuit of finding the 'best' is absurd, and wanting to consider one's self as 'best' is ego (or simply narcissism). It's also a sign of youth, and is to be expected.
Does your PC have HDMI-out? This is another easy solution for getting Netflix streaming onto your TV in HD resolution.
So does PS3, and many Samsung Bluray players. My experience with both is: if you have a decent internet connection they work pretty well.
What is the “right” level of funding for theoretical computer science research?
"More broadly, how would one go about determining how much money “should” be allocated to any of the different sub-areas of CS?" -- from Random Bits by Katz
Keep in mind that much of netflix content just isnt available in HD -- because it was never made as such. For this stuff it doesnt matter as much and is very nice.
I paint and I code, and this made me laugh:

* Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.

* Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

It's funny, and maybe a little ironic, to look at this and see both a hacker's cynicism and a painter's habit of looking at things objectively.
Indeed, they were coy in the press pre launch. They didn't do a massive dry ice launch. Jobs announced iPhone with

"Today, we are introducing three revolutionary products."

Compare that to

"One question we asked ourselves some time ago was what if we work even more closely with our partners to bring devices to market which are going to help us showcase quickly the great software technology we're working on here at Google," Mario Queiroz, vice president of product management at Google said. "We've done just that."
The banking industry in the UK is very different to the US. Virtually all current accounts (checking accounts) are free to operate in credit, yet come with full ebanking capabilities, a chequebook, debit card and so on. I'm surprised that the retail banking environment hasn't crossed to America; it really does seem to be more customer focussed and yet still highly profitable.
Was your motivation to go through another intermediate on top of mturk because Amazon does not deliver its mturk service to European companies or for another reason ?
I think you're after a "call for perspective". I didn't catch from the article exactly what the "Google half truths" actually are.
Yeah, this guy's been watching too much TV.

I've trained with Ekman's METT and SETT programs, and I didn't interpret his facial cues the same way. Those expressions looked like anger and sadness to me.
Hey - thanks for the links. Look interesting.

If you planned to open-source it, go for it, but I won't use it if it's just between you and me.

I'll either use an open-source implementation (good support + community) or create it myself (just what I need).

Thanks though!
Why No One Will Sign Your NDA
Banks are indeed incredibly frustrating. I recently posted a rant on Chase bank which I'll link below. They really do make it unbelievably difficult for you to monitor your balance properly, which is why I don't rely on the bank to tell me how much money I have - I keep track of it externally and the bank is more or less a verification. If there is ever a conflict, I go with what my tracking indicates as it's almost always the lesser amount.

A relative works in the banking industry as a branch manager and they literally have goals on how much they're supposed to collect via fee's, especially overdrafts. These goals alone can make or break quarterly bonuses and yes, they do indeed make a LOT of money from them.

I realize that overdrafting is in almost all cases the customers fault, but in my mind a bank should be loyal to its customers in the same way a customer is loyal to the bank. If I've been with a bank for 10 years and I overdraft 30 cents, cover it for me or at least reverse the fee without question if I call and ask about it. Often times, the banks are also meeting quota's on how many reverals they're allowed to give per day, month, quarter and per account. Call them at the wrong time and your plight won't matter, they'll just deny you. It really seems like customer service is no longer a top priority in most banks, perhaps not even in the top 5.

Unfortunately, as much as I'd love to see progress and change made in this area, I simply don't see myself ever giving my money to a bank or credit union that isn't well established unless I have some expendable income that I could test the waters with.

http://wesleyjohnson.posterous.com/chase-bank-sucks
Using Fibonacci Numbers to Convert from Miles to Kilometers and Vice Versa
If that was your goal, your reference to "google half truths" was a big distraction. If what they do with their cn properties is less signifigant, then don't devote so many words to them, and instead focus on your message.
"In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty."

Yeah, through slave-like conditions. Well done.
Good that it's still possible to turn it off. In Iran 2-3days before and after each political event government restricts access to only :80. No IMAP no POP3, and no :443.
This is part of a really old host-naming convention from when a domain name's usage wasn't 99.999% web. So people would relegate their world wide web servers out to www.<theirdomain>.
I wouldn't be surprised if the root cause of this patch was a deal that Microsoft made to bundle Flash with Windows 2000/XP which expired in 2010.
Yes, the situation is absurd on its face. However, it is clear that the plaintiff is truly ill, though not for the reasons he thinks he is. In the end this very sad story does not strike me as fitting for HN, though I'm still pretty new here so can't say for sure.
I created WriteRoom, take my comments with a grain of salt if you wish. Maybe it's just sour grapes...

Ommwriter is fun and cool. But "pleasant" where WriteRoom is not? Maybe I just don't get it, but for me having just my text on screen without distraction is a good thing. WriteRoom could certainly be better, but the idea of improving the writing/thinking process by adding a new age soundtrack that responds to your keystrokes seems odd and a little wrong to me.

Ommwriter is fun software and has it's place for brainstorming, but I would change the title to "Ommwriter, a better demo then writeroom".
while mochiweb isnt documented officially, it has an incredibly concise api, and pretty much everything is a short google away.

mochiweb_http:start(Options)

and

Socket = Req:get(socket),
inet:setopts(Socket, [{active, once}]),
% Send message to comet handler here
receive
{tcp_closed, Socket} -> ok;
{error, timeout} -> send_timeout(Req);
{msg, Data} -> send_data(Req, Data)
end.

are pretty much all you need to get a working comet server going.

your 2 complaints are valid, for web development erlang certainly doesnt have nicely documented easy to use libraries, but they are coming along.

and as for the "dynamic" pattern matching, I think this is more down to experience, erlangs pattern matching is very simplistic and although when something doesnt match when you expect it to, its incredibly annoying to find out why (by incredibly annoying you just print it out before it attempts the match, then look to see why it doesnt match)

but this happens very rarely, at least in my experience.
I can't wait for this. For the most part, I don't care about the quality of it (at best 480p). As long as it's not choppy, I could care less if Burt Reynolds' mustache is pixelated.
The video is actually really impressive.
It's mostly because Crowfdlower does some additional filtering: they have an algorithm that rates workers, and bases it's trust in the worker on how well he does compared to others.
It also does some magic on resubmitting a unit as long as the results aren't clear yet.

Also you can set some "gold" units: assignments you have done yourself, so you know the right answer. This can be used to test if the workers are actually trying, instead of just clicking random stuff.

While I could have built all that myself, Crowdflower already does this, and has a bit simpler API to boot, than Mturk itself.
Im of 2 minds on this.

1. It may be our own fault -- A lot of things have known solutions, and if they aren't simple we haven't created good enough tools/abstractions. This doesn't apply to truely new stuff, but I could argue that a lot of stuff isn't that new.

2. Absolutely, but so often its like the old kung fu movies jokes. The chinese being spoken is 3 words, and the translation is 3 lines, and the inverse. It makes a naive sort of sense that it should be a simple to do if it can be described simply. (of course karma can be built by letting hte user over describe some things and having them done realtime, some are then more likely to beleive you if you say "its harder than it sounds")
State Department Makes Statement on Google Operations in China
Since it seems that most of your complaint is centered around orverdrafts, perhaps it would be more beneficial for you to start a service that helps people avoid them?
Most of Netflix's films were filmed on 35mm film, which in most cases has a similar resolution to HD.
At one point I was customizing software for contractors, and they would all inevitably ask about getting computers in their trucks. As long as it is easy to use, it should sell extremely well in that niche.
Why 'assault the bastions'? Why not just chip away at the edifice? A smaller bank with clear customer service pledges that rigidly controls costs through as much automation as possible. Keep most transactions online. No large physical locations with drive thrus and corresponding staffing...smaller loan centers with loan officers paid by some sort of commission structure based on loans given out and repayment rate.

Lean and mean...except when it comes to customers who will be treated with the dignity they were used to 25 years ago. Make money with the bank's core services instead of an abusive fee structure. Doesn't seem terribly outlandish to me.
Aside: Does anyone here see value in an image resizing web service? I think it could be useful, particularly in environments where imaging libraries are in short supply (i.e. shared hosting).
Research into verifiable languages for embedded systems
I didn't want to 'hurt' WriteRoom at all with this title, but after all pleasantness is paradigmatic.
I am a fanatic user of WriteRoom and after writing a day in Ommwriter I see charms in both apps. The aesthetically pleasing background and interface gave me the feeling of a pleasant alternative to WriteRoom.
Yes but how do they get the other IP addresses that had been accessed without having that traffic go through Google?