skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spammers could get around by registering click-here-for-my-awesome-blog.com though, if they really cared enough to spam the news.yc forums.
Ya looks like it

http://news.ycombinator.com/best
Laptop to Load balancers: Chart visualizing scaling needs of your website
A simple chart visualizing a configuration, page views, approximate monthly cost.
This looks pretty good, I like how it structures out.

You should write an example pastebin or some other simple web app that could easily be done in PHP.
An email to the authors of JSCrypto
Do you have any evidence for this?
What scheme would allow for that, though? Except for public key cryptography?

Seems to me storing hashes and nonces does not work, because without the original password the server can not create new hashes and nonces. So the client would still always send the same thing, which would be equivalent to a password.
California does have tremendous wealth and vast continuing productive capacity, given the talent, resources, and opportunities extant within the state, and the author correctly characterizes any doomsday scenario as lacking credibility.

The problem, though, as seen from the view of one who has lived here for 40+ years, is that the powers that be in Sacramento had too much of a good thing during the boom years and, having raised public spending by large amounts when the tax coffers were full and exploding, don't want to make any systemic changes to spending levels now that receipts are way down in fear that this will short-change their pet programs when good times return.

That is why spending is strained to the limit even though fundamentals are still pretty good. The assumption all along, though, is that nothing can kill the golden goose and, while I agree with the author of this piece that extreme problems aren't imminent, that doesn't mean that the state can't ultimately wear itself down through fiscal irresponsibility. Only time will tell in the long term on this point.
Making a Space Invaders clone with PushButton - The player
I don't understand. That Time article is very clear about how beneficial European rule was. It goes on and on--about the mines and the industries and the shops and the general sense of law and order.

Did the Belgians just find a country like that, and take it over?
Today's Germany is a fictitious entity, a comedic prop setup by a philosophe prankster.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22685.html

In 2005, Californians paid out $35.9 billion and received back $31.2 billion. That's a gap of $4.7 billion. That's a lot.

Do you think the amount of money the state receives indirectly from tech companies run by Americans educated in out-of-state colleges exceeds this amount? The figures for this are much harder to come by, but I suspect that the state makes back at least a same-order-of-magnitude amount of what it pays out.

According to wikipedia, there were 386,000 tech workers in the Bay Area in '08. If we assume that half of them are Americans from out of state, then they'd have to pay about $5000 in taxes a year to make it worth it, assuming that there's also a multiplier of 4 due to workers in other industries being hired to serve them.

Of course, all this assumes we're running on a "we pay you taxes in exchange for your nerds" model, and it may be more complicated than that.
Another entry in the ever-expanding Catalog of Mushy Hacker Metaphors. Joining the classics (painter, rockstar, poet) and newcomers (ironman competitor, marathon runner, martial artist) is 'farmer'. Looking forward to 'pterodactyl' and 'balcony'.
This would explain the extraordinary prevalence of Lebanese hackers
Not quite in the same league but a British delicacy has been my hacker fuel for years: Beans on Toast. The name is the recipe, just try and get the proper tins of Heinz beans for true authenticity.
I can't find hard numbers on China's violent crime rate, but Mexico is around #6 per-capita in the WORLD. Might have something to do with it...
I'm talking about the fund that he used to buy BH with.
Investors/mentors are not cofounders.
I'm not sure about that. If I remember correctly from the handful of biographies I've read, I believe they met personally later than that.
Video from office during Arcata earthquake: dog sensing it before anyone else
The legal jargon is the first grievance, which I obviously have to just accept as part of the game, but the ambiguity of it is what I have difficulty accepting. Does this clause prevent me from pursuing my own ventures during this time? Is everything I do during this time claimable by them?

rising out of, or in connection with, performing the Services

This bit seems to limit it to whatever I happen to be doing for them, but as this story, currently on the front page of HN shows, even lawyers have difficulty nailing it all down.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1050952

For example, if I come up with some clever little bit of javascript that does something interesting, does it mean I can never use that for any purpose ever again? It's terribly ambiguous and limiting. I don't expect to take the job because I am currently working on my own projects and have no concrete way of defending myself against them claiming all of my work.

The second problem I have is this phrase:

Consultant also agrees to promptly make full written disclosure to the Company of any Inventions...

WTF does that mean? Even if it is limited to the "inventions" I "invent" for them, does that mean I'm supposed to immediately write some kind of disclosure after I "invent" something and give it to them? It's ridiculous. Let's assume this refers to my existing "inventions", not developed during the contract term, which I don't think it does. In that case, how could I possibly expect to protect myself? What if I forget to list one of my "inventions". They can claim it? I honestly don't think all of the doubt is even worth the time and effort to nail it all down.

I should pay a lawyer to go over it, but I already know I will require some lines to be removed, which will probably negate their interest in hiring me and thus make paying a lawyer a complete waste of money.

I understand the motivations for these kinds of contracts, but it puts all of the burden on the consultant and gives the overall impression that they can bend you over on a whim and screw you royally. It's basically making me not interested in the job, especially since I have my own things I want to work on. Initially, I recognized that my particular skills were exactly what they needed and it would be a pleasant job, but the "pleasant" part is quickly disappearing.

I'm probably just too uptight about this kind of stuff.
Yes, and now we're back to the "huge stretch" I claimed before.
Sending manufacturing to China and other SE Asian countries is far cheaper than even Mexican labor. While 1 day's wages of a median Mexican assembly worker is less than 1 hour of a median domestic US assembly worker's wages; 1 day's wages of a median Chinese assembly worker is cheaper than 1 hour of the media Mexican worker.

There were some articles last year (or maybe it was 2008) about textile manufacturing in the US, and how the Chinese were subsidizing them to the point where even if the US workers worked for free, the US plants could not compete on price.

To understand how much manufacturing changed, I recommend reading The Box. The shipping container totally changed everything by reducing shipping costs by about 98%. A lot of cities that used to be manufacturing centers (such as NYC and Detroit) withered, and a lot of cities that used to be shipping centers (such as NYC and London) also shriveled up because they could not support container traffic.

http://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy...
It says Arcata (that would be California) right in the corner and the date is January 9, 2010.
The bulk of the data shows that errors due to sleep deprivation are less than those due to context switching to a new doctor. This is the reason for the intense schedules, not sadism. If you're aware of studies that dispute that I'd be interested in reading them.
I had no clue of the prevalence.

A couple of us are here http://answers.yallastartup.org/.
Could also be titled: "Effects of Homeownership on Savings".
Haha, that's an awesome name.
Seriously? I found Accelerando (same author) to be incredibly forced, written in the style of a Wired magazine puff piece.
Cape Town Hotels Accommodation - Cape Town Tours
BerliOS compromised
Animal that photosynthesizes
In many major depression cases though it really IS a permanent problem. You can sometimes manage it with therapy or drugs but for many people the depression will last their entire lives. There is often no 'cure' and therapy / drugs will not always help.

Calling it a 'temporary problem' is not fair.
Actually, I think that this style is readable. The problem, though, it that it is hard to modify. Which would be a real trouble for code that needs to be maintained.
Haitian Quake Person Database (Scrapes Victims/Missing/Survivors Info)
A few friends threw this together today. Right now it's pulling in info from the following sources:

* http://www.familylinks.icrc.org/haiti/people

* CNN iReport

* #haitimissing twitter tag

* koneksyon
Note that you'll also get blocked out if you type in:

http://poorlytyped.blogspot.com/2010/01/haskell-ray-tracing-parallel.html

from which one can conclude that the Chinese are being kept in the dark from Haskell's enlightenment.

All blogspot websites have been blocked for at least the 6 months that I've been here, and I doubt that Baidu has anything to do with it. There's nothing new here. There's also a ton of workarounds. I just use vtunnel.com.
It's true many western enlightenment thinkers wrote wholeheartedly against slavery. However, they rarely, if ever, were actually referring to the actual slaves in their midst. Instead most of the intellectual discourse surrounding slavery concentrated on rights for those who could vote (often a small section of the population). Was European morality at work when Leopold II destroyed half the population of Congo?
Go easy. For many people depression comes in cycles. While the threat is always there, I think the parent poster has a good point.

Yes, when someone is in the throes of depression, it's all-encompassing. However, when they're feeling okay, they might well have a hard time even remembering how or why they got so close to the brink. That's what I understand by the parent poster's use of "temporary problem".

One can't un-suicide, but one can potentially endure until a brighter day, although if one is truly suicidal, it doesn't seem that way.

I.e. The depression isn't temporary. It's the crisis point where suicide seems like the only good alternative that is temporary.
Telling time with open realtime data
1) Charles Stross (cstross) reads and comments here on HN, so be nice :)

2) That was the whole point of Accelerando.

That said, I really liked Halting State and Saturn's Children, but not Accelerando as much (it was too crazy for me).
He might have many points that I agree with (the past doesn't matter, etc.) but it's SO HARD to take someone seriously when they CAPITIALIZE words in sentences to EMPHASIZE them.
This article requires me to login :(

Murdoch needs to get with the program.
Hilbert Visualization of IP address space
I am pretty sure I saw this video before the Haitian earthquake. None the less, it's still an interesting video.
yeah, I know what you mean. I do think it's solvable though.

one time during undergrad I was talking with Hal Abelson because there was this big stink about the new research building (Stata center) requiring rfid's to get around. Richard Stallman et al were making a huge ruckus about the privacy implications of not having physical keys.

I mentioned some desired attributes of a protocol to let people in without logging it, and started worrying about the implementation details / feasibility. he said "oh don't worry about implementation. this building has people in it who can implement anything." he had this smirk about him.

so give it some experts and time and they'll figure it out.
See my post above. The depression may well not be temporary, but the span during which suicide seems like a good option often is. It's not unfair to point this out.
EverQuest 2 Gold/Platinum& EQ2 Gold/Plat
Sad. I was at U of T before his time. What is it about (Toronto) AI researchers?
Download BackTrack 4 Final PWNSAUCE
Tim BackTrack rupanya masih fokus dalam pengembangan sistem operasi yang berorientasi pada sistem keamanan, hal ini di buktikan dengan adanya versi Linux BackTrack 4 Final.
My rebuttal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall#IBM_dealings

Short version, for those unfamiliar with the story: IBM approaches Digital Research to license CP/M, Digital Research refuses to sign a fairly standard NDA, IBM licenses DOS from Microsoft instead, Bill Gates now richest man in the world.
Send a $10 Donation by Texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999
How to edit PDF text?
PDF format is not easy to edit. This tutorial will show you how to edit PDF text without Adobe Acrobat.
Let's flag this deceptively labeled thing.
Have you looked at http://prefinery.com?
There was miscegenation for sure, not only with native people but between Europeans, Africans and everyone else that came here.

The racial traits are different from african to american natives. It's clear the difference between Brazil or Cuba (where most slaves were brought) and Mexico. And remember I'm writting of average,

About the word "extermination" it seems you're using it to describe killing of many individuals. I would keep it to refer to something like killing 99.99 indigenous population.
I've followed this story from its beginning. Some university publishes a study and a scare headline about genetically modified corn.

But other researchers aren't able to replicate the research and in time the university withdraws the report.

http://www.scidev.net/en/editorials/butterflies-gm-crops-and...

Its becoming a huge problem in science where researchers begin with a political position on something and then try and conduct research to prove something is bad. To no surprise they get the results they were seeking.
If you just search Google for "A Heated Debate at the Top" and then click the link you should be able to see the full text.
They'd probably just block blogspot. If Google really wanted to, they could cycle through practically endless different domain and IPs, but the firewall could probably just pull the current ones out of the pages as they were loaded, if necessary. Or, yeah, just block Google. If they did something like that, it doesn't seem unlikely.
It's the nature of depression that he might have even thought he was doing his family a favour.

Suicide is often a reaction to a set of constraints that are perceived to be unsolvable. I.e. I can't fail, but I'm gonna. I can't let my loved ones down. I can't stand to face my friends after doing X. The pain is unbearable, so I'll just save everyone the trouble...

Imagine a warrior who commits suicide rather than admitting defeat, because he can't face the shame (quite possibly imagined) of failing in his duties.
Doom 1993 code review
Please teach kids programming, Mr. President (2009)
Don't copy it here, just use this link:

http://www.google.com/search?q=A+Heated+Debate+at+the+Top
Holy shit, that's awful!

My wife and I are new parents, and the one, one thing that kept us sane some nights was the hope that one day we'd be able to talk to our daughter and see her grow up healthy and happy.

A friend of mine described parenting as: "the highs are higher and the lows are lower". Sometimes a lot lower.
I had not. This is a little different from what I had mind. Also, seeing how many people view my invites and how many people request invites doesn't really live up to the "powerful analytics" they promise. I was thinking more along the lines of a product in which first-adopters sign up generally, and list their interests. Then as sites sign up, beta sign up pages are produced (ie. everything that is going on at prefinery) as well as bringing in some ringers who might be interested. Then you can gather feedback from participating members, and if they give feedback, we give them more betas to try.
has this method of collection been tried before? if not I'm guessing this is an untapped goldmine for the right entrepreneur: set up charities with simpler donation vectors.
I don't think largeness is the problem in itself so much as the decline in quality and civility that usually accompanies it. If we can avoid decline we're ok. This is mostly uncharted territory, but I'm hopeful. I'm going to be working this year on tweaks to encourage people to be more civil in comment threads.
Why now Google? (scobleizer.com)

Would the extra comma have cost him $2 million?
Caught this question only after a few days, sorry for the delay. We actually are using Oracle (we have a site license).
I got the same emails and DID make a call and sent an SMS text like the directions said and my credits expired anyway. I remember being irritated. Were they actively deceiving the public?
California actually paid out $289 billion and received $242 billion for a net outflow of $47B.

[EDIT] Colorado was the state the paid out $35.9 billion and received $31.2 billion.
"Odds are high Google could be left largely on its own in taking concrete steps to confront the Chinese government."

Just a random thought, but wouldn't it be cool if the US had a hacker military branch?
Unless they're getting a deal on their payment processing for being a charity, I'd suggest taking the extra minute to go to their website. Credit card payments will cost them less than fifty cents of that $10. Cell phone providers charge much more.

Also, while charities love to use current events to drive fundraising appeals, their current disaster is almost universally paid for by funds they collected months ago. If you're going to give, give smart. (Relatedly, this is why sending non-monetary goods after a major disaster is perhaps less effective than you might wish it would be.)
There is: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/technology/11cybergames.ht...
Out of curiosity, do you have any idea what cell phone providers DO charge for these types of payments?
Stacey - A file-system-based CMS
Yes but it still hurts people trying to legitimately find it.
>I think it would have been a much stronger statement.

To who are they trying to make a statement? If to "the rest of the world" then your statement makes sense. However, if they're trying to make a statement to the Chinese population it's probably better that google demonstrates their services worth then pulls the plug.
I'm pretty sure "text FOO to ##### to give $n" has been done before, I think as far back as Katrina.
I'm not an expert on energy. But my impression is that Thorium is the current front runner for a) being able to meet our energy needs and b) having enough to last hundreds or thousands of years.

Using the sun cannot be plan A, because as far as I've heard, solar panels barely output enough energy to pay back the energy it takes to make them. I hope that technology will improve, but it's by no means certain that solar power's EROEI will ever match the 5X of nuclear power, or the 10X of fossil fuels.

Energy is by far the most limiting constraint. With sufficient energy, you can alleviate other constraints. For instance, if you have enough energy you can desalinize ocean water and use it to irrigate crops to feed large amounts of people. You can always convert energy into other resources, such as food or steel. But if you don't have energy, you get Max Max.

Finally, the real problem is not necessarily hitting a constraint. If the U.S. reaches a point where we cannot continue to grow our resource usage intensity, that's not a catastrophe. The disaster is when you hit a constraint, but your population keeps growing, because then each person will face a declining standard of living. The other disaster is when you max out a resource and then it grows more scarce, as again, you'll face decline.
are you certain that they aren't figuring in costs and billing you for $10+rates? while that would mean the end customer pays more, it does mean they would be getting more than a paypal donation.
That depends on your agreement, locality, and what provider you're doing business with, but if you're thinking 30 ~ 50% you are probably in the right ballpark.
The problem with California is not that it is taxing too much, but that' it's spending too much. The fact that it's taxing isn't much above average indicates the huge disparity between the two which caused the debt.
I worked for a site where we were considering going through an intermediary for AdSense because we could earn a greater percentage of Google's take per click than dealing with Google directly! It turns out that major partners can cut such a good deal that they can pass on a better percentage even after taking their own cut. Perhaps Google should consider reducing intermediaries by paying out more fairly, even if doing so increases administrative costs.
I was more curious about the business of the middleman in this process, and I looked into it earlier today. This particular short code operator, mGive (http://www.mgive.com/) focuses on charities and was launched 2 years ago. I'm guessing this is their first big exposure.

Wikipedia has the basics of setting up a new short code: "Common short codes in the U.S. are administered by NeuStar, under a deal with Common Short Code Administration - CTIA. Short codes can be leased at the rate of $1000 a month for a selected code or $500 for a random code." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code)

More info here: http://www.mmaglobal.com/shortcodeprimer.pdf
Using Group Policy to Disable JavaScript in Adobe PDF Files
Well, think that one through: if your advertisement says "Text 12345 to 45678 to donate $10 to the Red Cross", and you do so, and then your itemized cellphone bill says "Red Cross: $20", what is your reaction likely to be?

Merchants foot the bill for transaction costs to encourage transaction volume. It is the same reason I quote my prices as $29.95 not "$29.95 plus whatever your credit card costs me to process."
Cell phone providers charge much more.

100% of your $10 donation passes thru to RedCross for Haiti relief. Your cell carrier keeps nothing.

http://twitter.com/RedCross/status/7720590281
We do PC repair and hardware retail, custom built PCs, etc. in a small town of about 20k (half of which are college students). I also pick up the occasional web design project through there, but it's rare.
How illustration class taught me about advertising
Nicely executed this one! Is it me, though, or has writing cross-language compilers become a sort of open source fad in the last 12 months? There seem to be a ton popping up lately. It'd be cool to have a list actually..
I remember reading some sci-fi involving a treaty so complicated it had to be machine-verified.

Too bad about that Gödel guy, though.
Also confusing "then" and "than". Not to mention the general abuse of commas.
i've already seen a non-red cross ad for the exact same thing, except $5 for hati, and the ad specifically stated transaction and standard data rates are added on top. looking for the ad now.

edit: http://twitter.com/RedCross/status/7720590281
edit2: beatten
Canvas prints for your Valentine
As we are just gaining momentum with our regular tasks after the Christmas holidays and after that great struggle to find the best holiday gifts for our loved ones, we are forced to think of some special gift for our lover, wife or partner as the Valentines Day is just round the corner. For some of us finding the right gift for Valentines Day is no easy deal.
>> Even AES 256 is breakable

Can you elaborate on this?
Reading this is another reminder that I was not cut out for computer programming...
Wikipedia used this to raise donations for development on their new mobile friendly site. I don't think it's a new/"untapped" type thing.