skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I never knew if they wrote the system or what happened to my design, but it never sat well with me. I always wished I could have went back and not provided them with the information.

This is the least favourite part of my job too. I have a couple of uncomfortable memories from university days when I ran my mouth about some little ideas.
I never was a fan of Star-Wars, but after watching the prequels my thought was that the Jedis deserved their fate for not taking prophecies literally or not knowing basic math.

Obi Wan to Anakin: "You were supposed to bring balance to the force!"

Dude, two Jedis and two Siths sounds pretty balanced to me.
Akamai: World internet speed increasing except for US
I dont think this is true

there is redraw and reflow, absolutely positioned elements trigger redraw, but should only trigger reflow on child elements, z-index has no effect on positioning, it only cares during redraw stage (which is as far as I understand, relatively lightweight compared to reflow)
Exactly, certain ideas seem perpetually "futuristic" but never seem to catch on: voice recognition ("Imagine dictating your letters!" => Really annoying to make corrections), gestures ("Imagine waving instead of using a mouse!" => Gorilla Arm), video chat (I want to wear my pajamas and not pay too much attention), and so on.

That said, I don't want to discount some new innovation taking over :).
Basically that paragraph is praising Google's decision to stand against the Chinese government and pull out of China (thus "return to the mercy of the Lord"). And the author is really celebrating and congratulating here (instead of mourning its possible absence in China due to government restrictions).

The last sentence is very poetic. I get the idea, but since I'm not Christian, I'm not so sure about the exact analogy. Anyway, the real meaning is that eventually freedom of speech will come to China, and at that time, we (the author and the Chinese people) will celebrate Google's return.

P.S. I cried a little bit after the paragraph. I guess I'm moved.

P.S. 2. Machine translating is never good at this kind of stuff... I'm native Chinese.
I think it's more the the way that opinions are expressed than the opinions themselves which creates blowback (unless one is expressing something truly polarizing, like singing the praises of racial hierarchy). So, if you pay attention to the tone of communication you can express controversial opinions without defensive blowback and have a higher chance of people understanding your ideas.
API > Shared data store, for most cases.
> It is unfair to categorize the problem of Depression as temporary [...]

I'm not. I explicitly addressed this.
Every link from mixergy.com seems to follow that same format, too. "How [Someone Just Like You] Made [Large Sum of Money]". Why make your site sound like a late night infomercial? Maybe there is decent information about starting a successful company in these interviews, but I never bother reading them because the titles are lowest common denominator.
"you just build what you can afford and you're done with it"

So if you can't afford a 2 story townhouse with earthquake and hurricane proofing you build a one-story that does have proofing and live in 2 rooms instead of 4 but have 2 rooms that are likely to stay standing. If you go for the 4 rooms then the consequences are yours to live with.

There are provisos, if earthquakes and hurricanes haven't ever happened where you live for example.

This sounds incredibly harsh and I, like most, would probably go with the group and build whatever anyone else was building assuming the worst wouldn't happen to me.

God have mercy.
Out of interest, and I hope you can answer this despite the NDA, was 'sci-fi like' what you planned to achieve from the outset, or did it come about as a result of you designing a UI?

(i.e did you start designing a UI and end up with something sci-fi like, or did you take a sci-fi interface and try to make it useable?)
If you encrypted or otherwise obfuscated the payload of the attack, it would make log analysis (particularly on the network level) difficult, and may help get around things like an IDS. It'd also make some forms of forensics much harder.
I wonder how they combine rest args with keyword args. Here's how I do this in my arc macros:

(paginate '/search' 10
;; optional keyword args
nextcopy "Next &rarr;" prevcopy "&larr; Prev"
:do
;; body
(preprocess docs)
(each doc (cut docs start-index end-index)
(render-doc doc)))

More details: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10692
Dang, I'm usually good at spotting jokes/sarcasm–my bad. I'll definitely look you up.
I guess poetic sentences are always hard to get right, if you don't really grow up in that culture, just like I have a lot of trouble with some essays in English. Well, if you keep learning, eventually you'll get there :)
Coincidentally, this is though to be one of the reasons why the Industrial Revolution occurred in the West.

Because of the excess of cheap, expendable labour in China and India, there was never really any push for mechanization and automation and associated development of technology and methods related to mechanized production.

Of course, the ascendance of the science in the West also contributed substantially.
When in doubt, just keep going
More than enough.

I run a Django-powered site on a 96meg host on an over-loaded Xen host built with ancient P4 Xeon servers (No VT instructions). I use nginx and sqlite to cope with my tiny amount of available memory. With that said the site sees little traffic (<500 hits a day, peaks ~60 hits in 1 hour), but I've never run into issues.
Not all of them. I know some independent (possibly secretive) Christian churches. But those "official" ones are usually penetrated ...
That is wrong. What this law says is that content providers are directly responsible for what users publish or upload. The reason to this decree is that one year ago Mediaset (Berlusconi's TV group) sued youtube for publishing a lot of copyrighted material and asked for 0.5 Billions ( see http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/italian_tv_company_medi... or google "mediaset yotube").

If this new bill will pass (and it will) then youtube will be deemed responsible for copyright infringement. This has nothing to do with users asking for authorization.
There was a similar thread on here regarding abuses of downvoting. One idea was to do the following:

1) Earn points by commenting and submitting.
2) Earn points by being voted up.
3) Spend points by voting someone down.
4) Loose points by being voted down.
AP Network flaw causes scary Web error
Total votes as well as up and down votes are just as interesting a metric to determine interest in a comment or post.
I wonder how many people who should have received votes didn't get them either?
This is true for any advisor, your expectation should be that they will make you aware of the likely consequences--some of which you may not have foreseen--for a course of action that you are contemplating. But they cannot make the decision for you.

There was a great quote in a 2006 Fortune profile of Larry Sonsini (the Sonsini in Wilson Sonsini) when they asked TJ Rogers why he valued Sonsini's advice:

"I don’t take orders well," says T.J. Rodgers, the founder, chairman and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. "But taking advice from Larry Sonsini is easy. He’s professorial. He’s nonjudgmental. ’You can choose to do this, you can choose to do that, and these will be the consequences.’ So you realize you’re not being forced or pushed into anything. He explains to us why the sometimes frustrating, arcane and inefficient system we have makes sense, or at least made sense at one time, and therefore should be followed."

The full profile is here: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/...

I blogged about it here http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/11/30/larry-sonsini-profil...

Three related take-aways for entrepreneurs:

1. The best attorneys present options and make you aware of the likely and potential consequences of different courses of action, but understand that the business decision still rests with the client.

2. If you allow an attorney to invest (and then re-capture his dollars in (possibly deferred) fees) you may find it difficult to fire or replace the attorney. Make sure it’s someone you want a long term relationship with: there is no such things as "free legal advice."

3. Work with advisors who are willing to be transparent about their fees. If you were a prospective WSGR client, the answers that they gave here should be unacceptable. Understand why the code of ethics for accountants prohibit similar fee arrangements.
You are, in the winged words of Lrr, confused and infuriated. For one thing, this is a talk - not a detailed essay or a class. It's meant to be brief and engaging rather than a technical deconstruction of others writing. He isn't going to offer detailed alternatives or examples because he wants his audience to stay awake.

He has contempt for her writing because he has contempt for her job.

He never said such a thing. He does, rightfully, have contempt for her writing because it is bad. It is bad as writing and it is also bad as a 'sentimental, idealistic sales pitch'. Are you saying a sales pitch must be written badly?

Should we really declare one approach to a subject "better" because it results in punchier prose?

Not punchier, but better, more evocative, more accessible to a wide audience. The sort of prose a journalist should write and Zissner is, after all, speaking to future journalists. You insist on interpreting 'better' in a strangely literal, obtuse way - it's a fairly common little flourish (yes, English has them too) - and makes sense in the context. We say things like that -'the artist conveys the sense of grief/longing/joy/whatever better than any neurobiologist/psychologist/etc' all the time. It obviously doesn't mean poetry can replace the sciences.

Now he's just being lazy. He laments that people talk using "the working vocabulary of their field." Why shouldn't they? It's his job as a writer to produce the working vocabulary of his field

He's being lazy? How is he being lazy? He's telling his students that they will encounter this kind of speech and it is, indeed, their job to translate it to something better.

His whole talk is very much patterned after the stylistic advice given by Orwell in Politics and the English Language. Read it if you haven't. You might find Orwell a bit of a prick too. Or at least prickly. He's also right.
That's amazing to me that somebody can have more than 65% of their votes be downvotes.
The fact that the employees in China would lose their jobs was the first thought/concern I had when this story broke. But, the world is not a fair place.
Considering that youth is often worn as a badge of honor in the tech industry, I doubt it was taken this way.
You're over egging it a little - if they didn't even have building materials to try and eat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagy ) then they wouldn't have buildings that could fall on them.

A mud hut may fall down in an earthquake or blow away in a hurricane but is less likely to kill you when it falls over then a brick or concrete building.

Isn't this more about living within the societal means than simply about poverty: If where I live all cars crash or blow up because we lack resources to produce quality cars then one must accept a bicycle or horse and cart for family transport or suffer the consequences, no?
Rephrase this as "Berlusconi government composed of stupid ministers" wants to officially apply ...

As part of Italy really understand how stupid is this, and is just praying to see this unqualified junk to go away from our government.

Also don't worry anyway as our laws are rarely applied. For instance we had for some time, a few years ago, a law that "forced" every web site owner to print the content in A4 paper and sent it to some government address. Not sure if I should smile or cry.
Companies like Google try to make their employees happy. If someone prefers Windows XP they are aloud to use it.
Each of the programs listed are geared toward very early-stage companies and provide many different types of support functions. Each program (I believe) offers grants or loans, office space, and mentorship. At its current state, the Techarb is more of a conventional incubator with outside entities providing financial and mentorship functions, however it is intended to be grown into a full accelerator in the near future by U-M (it was created only a few months ago and just getting off the ground). I'm less familiar with the SmartStart's program (I only visited once), however I believe it offers a full range of early-stage startup assistance.
TSA Logo Contest
I think that my personal problem is that the semantics of voting are usually more related to popular/unpopular instead of quality/poor quality. Not that I have a particular problem with popular/unpopular as the semantics per se, just that that seems to be the way the community uses them (myself included most of the time).
Helpful feedback.
I've heard this name Pat Robertson a few times on the 'net. I assume he's in the USA? Can anyone give an audio/video link to his talk where he suggests Haiti's slaves shouldn't have overthrown their French masters as they did?

---

Oh never mind, found it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59NCduEhkBM#t=0m48s on a show called The Young Turks (TYT).

If you listen to what he says, rather than the commentary, then here is the progression.

1) Haitians were under the heel of the French colonialists

2) Some Haitians [in 1804] made a deal with the devil for release from slavery

3) They were cursed because of that deal

4) Bad stuff has happened to Haiti since, including this earthquake

Note, he doesn't say it's the Haitians fault - though I'm sure he would say it was the fault in part of whichever small group made the pact in (1) 200 years ago. Nor does he say they shouldn't have revolted; just that they did it wrong. He seems genuinely concerned to me. He rightly notes that DR is a lot better off and they share the island with Haiti. This last point makes the tragedy of Haitian poverty as much about politics as anything else.

If you don't believe in the Devil then you can ignore his statement as it will be nonsensical to you. To the TYT guy I'd say that he shouldn't be too shocked - people do "make deals with the Devil". Robertson may also be using it as a metaphor for rejecting the Gospel.

Edit: there is actually some evidence to support Robertson's claim, eg[...]

Edit2: cut and pasted to my blog, http://alicious.com/2010/haitian-revolution-devil-pact/ as is OT here.
Jobs of 2030
I would like to clarify that at least personally I'm anti Chinese government and not anti China or the Chinese people. I love the country for many reasons and don't fundamentally wish it harm.

When someone points out something bad about a country it's silly to say they can't say that because there's bad things about their own country. There's bad things about every country, it doesn't make them beyond criticism.

And that sir is why you get my downvote.
"Citing sources in the defense contracting and intelligence consulting community, the iDefense report unambiguously declares that the Chinese government was, in fact, behind the effort."

OK, good. It's not yet been proved in court, but at least it allows us, in further discussion, to comfortably assume that it was in fact China.

Some time soon I'd like to see: an end to end trace of the attack, identifying computers, their physical locations and ownership/control; a broad and coherent description of the of the crime itself, including how they first got in and how they operated while in; and a description of what was taken or changed. I'd like the analysis to be unusually forthcoming and direct.

This is not to force the Chinese govt to fess up. They know they did it, they know we know, and they'll deny it forever, even if we find a picture of the chief general of the PLA crouching over the disemboweled corpse with blood dripping from his teeth and a deer-in-headlights expression.

This is for US citizens and the rest of the world to see unambiguously what the Chinese have done and how much effort they put into it, and the cost. As such I'd like to see it first in a popular magazine, maybe a special edition. After that I'd like to see the same information dragged back and forth in Congressional hearings.

It's one thing to vaguely assume in some sort of hip, jaded way that "of course the Chinese are spying on us." It's quite another thing to see the (I assume) enormous extent and effect of what they're actually doing.

"The servers used in both attacks ... are currently pointing to IP addresses owned by Linode, a US-based company that offers Virtual Private Server hosting. ... "Considering this proximity, it is possible that the two attacks are one and the same, and that the organizations targeted in the Silicon Valley attacks have been compromised since July."

If the report's findings are correct, it suggests that the government of China has been engaged for months in a massive campaign of industrial espionage against US companies."

SON of a ...
I find that living in my parents' basement provides a dramatic reduction in monthly expenses.
Quite interesting, though it seems that more than a few seem to be extrapolations of current fads.
Videogame Strategy Inspires Teen’s Amazing Diet
In a satellite channel (broadcast in english by the Italian) I had once watched a program where it was reported that the chief cameraman in Italian parliament had a salary more than (or in a comparable level as) the Prime Minister! It was all demonstrated by the numbers and I was shocked. So when I heard the news that Italy wanted to put such an obstacle for the Internet, I'm not particularly surprised.
tput setaf 2 makes your prompt green

tput setab 0 makes the prompt background black

The rest displays random letters A-F and numbers 0-9 on your terminal.
Real Live Search
At those prices, it's cheaper to buy music legitimately.
Tweetdeck to allow users to communicate even when Twitter is down?
20 inspirational and original comment form designs for your blog
Not living in NYC is a great way to save money. If you don't need to be there you can live on less than $800 a month in some places.
You're criticizing US past, mostly. That's key: it's the past. No one is criticizing foot binding here. If you want to provide examples of the US being immoral, make them current.

Now, I have no doubt there are dozens of examples. On the other hand, at least US laws allow the rest of the world to know about these examples when they happen.

And yes, if China is 100 years behind, it may be a significant. Is there any reason that the suppression present should be endured? The more pressure is put on China and other countries that devalue human rights, the sooner they'll have to change.

Personally, I would love to see more indignation at the United States as well. Some of the stuff going on with this country is just plain unacceptable for a first world country.
From the article: "The fancy shmancy argument is that dominant design repels most attacks. There are lots of bad ideas that were adopted first, became dominant, and have been impossible to shake. The DVORAK vs. QWERTY keyboard debate is a canonical example. It doesn’t matter if DVORAK is actually 5x better that QWERTY, the cost of relearning is perceived to be prohibitive, so most people never have the motivation to try, and there are huge reinforcements of the status quo (e.g. people who teach typing classes). Metric system vs. English in the U.S. is another good example. A particularly retarded example of dominant design is electric plugs. Studying why the world has 50 different plugs and voltages explains much about resistance factors against innovation. Or world peace."

This is a actually a favorite nitpick of mine. I don't really buy the argument that established standards dominate even after they've been proven to be inferior. First of all, the Dvorak vs. Qwerty situation isn't as clear cut as it is commonly made out to be -- while there's lots of anecdotal evidence, the few independent studies (i.e. those not done by Dvorak himself) aren't very conclusive. At the very least they don't show a 5x improvement.

The cost of switching to the metric system likely isn't as great as commonly believed, and there's no harm in running both side-by-side for a while. There are many precedents for this from other countries. While as a European, I consider the imperial system to be clearly inferior, I think the real reason why the U.S. doesn't adopt it has more to do with emotional attachment and xenophobia than with cost. The point here is, if Americans genuinely consider the imperial system to be better, switching would not be an improvement.

The electric plug situation is rapidly improving, in part because of homogenization pressure, in part because electronic devices don't particularly care what kind of voltage you feed into them. (Be careful with adapter plugs and hairdryers though, you might start a fire if the voltage is too high.) Also, this is a case where none of the existing standards is inferior to any other, so it's not even an example of a bad design becoming dominant.

In short, my point is that if a new convention is clearly better, it's usually possible to switch gradually, and that this is usually done. The effect of "dominant design" is greatly exaggerated.
You make a good distinction, I agree (between government and country).

Also, I think he doesn't deserve that downvote. He contributed his own thoughts, which were in no way rude or trollish, and seemed more or less educated. They also sparked a bit of interesting discussion. Anyway, my upvote balanced it out. ;)
I used to run a create-your-own-quiz django powered site with 6k uniques/day(in the last few days), with no cache, and it barely touched my 360 vps. You can see some nice graphs here: http://slig.imgur.com/linode
To be fair, the only thing that image proves is that Baidu's owners are too greedy. I don't think you can say a company is not Chinese just because it is registered on fiscal paradises. Hell, then I guess most of the Fortune 500 companies would be from the Cayman Islands, the new economic center of the world and emerging superpower.
Long live TD!
If Salinger had decided he never wanted any of his books published and no one should ever read them, that's his choice, not ours.

Absolutely. Until Salinger hits the metaphorical "publish" button, his books belong to him and no one else. But the minute he decides to share them with the world he enters into the realm of copyright law, which is (at least originally) designed to create a good enough bargain to incentivise him to publish, but which ultimately results in all these works entering the public domain.

There is no such thing as intellectual property - merely intellectual licensing agreements.
Good thread guys. Couple of things:

The specific rant was aimed mostly at desktop. There's lots of energy to move i-phonish UI to the desktop, but it will mostly fail there for ergonomic reasons.

Sci-fi movies are horrible predictors of future, especially when it comes to UI. Fun and inspiring which is good, but using it as something to copy is ridiculous.

The 3rd world argument is a good one. If people can skip past our desktops they dodge the dominant design issues. But then it also has to be cheap. Cell phones are a great story - cell phones are the first phones much of the world has ever had. Cell towers are cheaper than landlines.

> jorsh wrote:
> I'm paying attention to the applications,
> not the OS windows.

He's totally right, You rarely need a paradigm shift to achieve whatever it is you imagine the effect of your work to be. That was my point at the end.

-Scott (www.scottberkun,com)