skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said."

What possible sane school policies could exist at the "Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School" that the student could have violated? Don't do anything with what we're teaching you outside of school?

I suppose there might be a rule of "don't bring in anything unless you get it screened first", but ... geez. Given the level of screening they considered necessary for this device, that doesn't sound likely.

I'm really glad I went to school in the 1970s; heck, for my 2nd year in JROTC teaching unit (my senior year in high school), where we went beyond writting a lesson plan to actually teaching a lesson (in anything we wanted, didn't have to military related), I used a page from the Ranger Handbook to show how to build an improvised booby-trap, with a bottle rocket as the thing which went "boom" (mounted in a 2x4 block of wood; much better than a firecracker, makes a lot of noise building up to the boom without as high a single impulse).

The instructor was concerned for a moment until he remembered who was giving the lesson ^_^. If someone tried that today they'd probably end up in jail (then again, I suspect my home school district isn't this insane).
I don't think Shirky is a "feminist-apologist" so much as that this kind of thinking has become a bit of "received wisdom" in liberal, especially academic, circles.
"He was very shaken by the whole situation, as were his parents," Luque said.

Well that will teach him to be interested in electronics. It's a good thing that there's an overabundance of kids going into science and engineering, otherwise this sort of thing could become a problem.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056341
Facebook's Version Of Retweets
My parents had the same problem in the 70s.. a student was seen with a metal box with wires all over. They got the kids out and called the bomb squad.

At least that case was cooler.. IIRC, he was taking over the PA system to play rock music the final day of school.
Somewhere in this rant is a good point, but the author has piled on so much bullshit its hard to find. For example:

"It would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact fuck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on."

This drips of sexism to me. It paints women as patently timid and naive, which is a costly mistake.
Dalat Flower Festival closed 
After four days, the closing ceremony of Dalat Flower Festival 2010 with theme “flower street and wine” took place on January 4.

Later in the evening, a wine testing ceremony was held near Xuan Huong Lake in the city.

Visitors were free to taste the three biggest wine labels in Dalat City, including Vinh Tien, Beco and Langbian, plus 7 famous wine producing countries from around the world such as Italy, France, the US, Australia, South Africa, Spain and Chile.

In addition, 10 new Vietnam’s records recognized in the festival include the largest flower tortoise tower, the longest flower dragons, the largest flower Bodhisattva statue, the largest flower cup, the largest street flower festival, the first vegetable festival, the first peach-blossom valley in Southern Vietnam, the largest flower showroom, the largest picture all made of flowers and the first man who study successfully flower preservation technology in Vietnam.

The festival drew 85 businesses and flower and plant associations from all over the country as well as abroad. Over 10,000 floral creations and nearly 2,000 kinds of flowers were displayed at the festival. With a total of 23 activities, the festival had drawn over 43,000 visitors and local people, said the Vice Chairman of Lam Dong Provincial People’s Committee Truong Van Thu.
In yesterday's NYT: Vigor Quest

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/magazine/17antiaging-t.htm...
Charts & Graphics: 10 excellent books
That reminds me of the guy that was seen using a commandline window on his laptop and got immediately suspected of breaking into the network. ("normal people only use GUIs")
Confession time: I also knew of concerted Chinese attacks "before Google" and kept mum. For the past few years, day after day, countless phishing and spam kept arriving in my inbox with .cn URLs but I kept it to myself.
gvim hates proportional fonts:

E596: Invalid font(s)

I just can't bring myself to use emacs.
"... But none of that wisdom has prepared me for this. Eric warned me that running low on water during a 12-hour run in 85° heat would be crucial, and now, with my pee the color of convenience-store coffee, I know I'm too dehydrated to finish. ..."

Not very bright. Dehydration means approx. 10% loss of performance and potential for damage. Isotonics work well in this situation. But 12 hours of water. You cant carry it. It has to be a refill about every 2Hrs.
Yahoo just rolls over and takes it. The sad thing is, when China is a profitable enough market, and companies who sucked up to the regime are ready to capitalize on their presence there, Yahoo itself will not be around to reap the benefits.
My kid is in 6th grade, which is middle school in these parts. He did his science project over the Christmas break, which involved a Daniels battery (zinc, copper, copper sulfate, zinc sulfate).

Although his science teacher had agreed to take the solutions for disposal before the break, I was still cautious when I brought them in first day after break. I left everything in the car, went to the office, asked them to call the teacher to get his permission, and then brought the chemicals in, all the while trying to look like a straight citizen as I walked by the sheriff parked out front as usual. I had exactly the OP's scenario in mind. No sense pushing things when the world is nuts.
then again, that's probably the most obsolete recommendation in PEP8
Strike a strategic deal with the International Banking Cabal (HQ: Basel, Switzerland), whereby they move production capacity from the West to China and China agrees to continue the Ponzi scheme affectionately known as the "International Monetary System" by buying the bonds of the consumers of their products.

The cartel hope that in the process the Communist China will transform and become integrated in the political control system before the scheme comes crashing down.

The Chinese hope to acquire sufficient technological and industrial base to mount a credible defense/attack which will inevitably occur when the scheme crashes.
Garbage. You've derailed the argument to one about sexuality. This is about professional advancement, not courtship.

The author is comparing men's success in impressing an authority figure of an unknown gender against a woman's success in the same. Yet, you've at once implied that the authority figure is necessarily male, and that any male/female relationship is inherently framed by sexuality.

Not only do I think that's bullshit, it doesn't relate to the author's original argument.
That's a fantastic way to encourage kids to go into science and technology fields: make them think it's criminal activity and then send them to counseling. I love the irony that this happened at a science and technology magnet school where one might, by some off-chance, presume the teachers are better informed. Way to go, educational system overlords.

Imagine if Jobs and Wozniak had lived today during this sort of thing. They'd be sitting in Gitmo.
Options for Parallel Compression
Staying connected in post-earthquake Haiti
Moscow police were sold fake CCTV cameras, streaming recordings.
It seems pretty shocking to me that the boy's home was searched. Was there any reasonable suspicion of anything?

To be honest, it's a pity we don't know the name of the student so we can start sending him presents consisting of subscriptions to Make, electronics books, chemistry sets etc.
Adaption to the Shifting Economy
This article is quite sexist. I don't think it's even appropriate in this forum. If you're going to make far reaching claims about differences between the sexes you better back it up with data, otherwise you're just broadcasting your own bias and helping perpetuate whatever problem you're identifying.
Everything I need to know I learned from D&D
"a lot of American geeks just don't work very hard"

Another perspective could be that (most) Americans who work hard don't become geeks, because the rewards aren't commensurate with other professions.

If you're interested in reading some support for this position, you might check out a recent RAND study that concluded that "cience and technology performance, but said the slow growth of U.S.-born technical workers "will change when the earnings and attractiveness of S&E (science and engineering) careers improve."

A summary is available here:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-science-engi...

The full RAND study is at:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241/
Howto: Mac OSX on KVM
This reminds me a story from my childhood. I was brought up by my mother, who is a very smart, independent and strong woman (and a hacker!). One day, when I was about 9, she asked me who, in my opinion, is usually more intelligent, man or woman. Without hesitation I answered that women are. It was the first time I learned that most of the world probably doesn't think like me. We're all biased, there's nothing to do about that, but publishing and broadcasting your bias is dangerous because it helps make it real.
When I was in British middle school I got into trouble for bringing a small tape recorder to school. A teacher saw it, it was confiscated and I was in deep trouble. When I tried to explain to the deputy head that it was a tape recorder and not a radio (which was specifically forbidden by school rules) I was told to "shut up" and that I didn't have the "right to speak" because I had broken a rule.

In the end my parents went to the headmaster and gave him an earful.

The good news is that the school's behaviour had a lasting impression on me: people in authority act like assholes because they are in authority.
The new title is indeed much better, but it's still linkbait. Bigotry is very hard to mask.
"were sold"
Don't get me started on 80legs. They took down our servers earlier this week. We couldn't even identify them based on IP address because of their regular-computer-using distributed system. If anything, 80Legs is the ultimate DDoS machine.

I mean, they state that their crawl average is 1 req/sec and can be modified if you contact them. The problem is that other people can modify the crawl rate (somebody set ours to 4/seq).

And remember, that's just the average. The distributed nature of their system means that it's ridiculously spikey. Furthermore they don't respect nofollow tags that we put in place to keep bots out of bad areas, so their crawlers got into very unoptimized areas of the site.

Overall though we turned it into a positive by ramping up our analysis tools, and creating a much stronger robots.txt. Still... I really don't like 80legs and bristle when people reference them as someone doing 'good'.
ugh, syntax highlighting

this is what I use, it's available for Lunix too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

Available for Lunix (Linux / Unixes / etc)

http://swtch.com/plan9port/
FUD. People can always do something bad. Hiding information from them so they cannot do something bad such as recreating influenza from 1918 is a horrible idea in my opinion, and intuitively seems like an impossible task anyway.

"The invention of spiked clubs, triremes, longbows, gunpowder and all the other military technologies can be traced to the discovery of new information."

Well, I am splitting hairs here but it isn't really a "discovery" when you wake up one morning with a monolith in your front yard, a monolith that somehow helped you kick your neighbor's butt.
fixed, thanks :-)
No feminist would have ever written an article like this. It is strongly biased and doesn't support women's struggle to reach the same status men have in any serious way.

The problem (according to feminist doctrine, not sure I subscribe to it myself) is exactly that most of the people on top are men. Since the population is split 50-50% between men and women you should expect the same balance to exist at the top. In some very modern societies (Sweden, for example) this is, in fact, the case.

I'm not sure what it is you're tired of, exactly. Except for those few cases where the rights of men are compromised in the name of feminism, how could you sensibly object to a school of though that wants to gain equality for women?
For the reading impaired:

Analysts say many foreign multinationals in fact may occasionally bend over backwards to appease Beijing, coveting the vast potential market in what will soon be the world's second-largest economy.

Since Google reported the attacks, only Adobe Systems Inc, Juniper Networks Inc and Rackspace Hosting Inc have acknowledged experiencing similar incidents. But the majority of victims have remained silent.
YelpSquare
That's not true. Being overtly self-aggrandizing to women is a turn off. It makes sound like you are trying too hard to impress her. (Cockiness works, but not overt boasts).

Men do need to be more aggrandizing in professional life. Men do not carry a baby to term and nurse it for years. All they bring to the mating game is wealth, status, and genes. Thus, professional success is much more important in order for a man to attract a mate. Thus men are much more aggressive and do whatever it takes to rise the ladder.

On the flip side, when a women is self-aggrandizing it is quite a turnoff to a man. It much more actively harms her reproductive success. So women learn not to do it, and that rubs off in professional life.
And the guy (maybe the same guy?) who actually had a warrant served to search his dorm room and seize his computers, based in part on the fact that he had been seen using a command line.

The warrant was later quashed, don't know how or if the case concluded.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/05/mass-sjc-tosses-calixte...

The comments on Schneier's blog are interesting. I was surprised at the number of people saying that the warrant was reasonable.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/04/boston_police_...
A global fiasco brewing in Japan. (Will the US follow?)
Open Source Entrepreneurship
When I drink espresso, I usually feel the effect immediately. At least some of the caffeine must be resorbed in the mouth.
Ok, I don't actually see any example of people being arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks in this article. I see a lot of relatively minor risk-taking behavior.

Saying 'my drafting is fine' when it really isnt, is a risk, because you could fail the class. Putting yourself out there and saying 'Come look at my work, its awesome', is a risk, because it could get flung back in your face as not awesome. Giving yourself the positive assessment that you would hope for is a risk, again because it could be rejected.

But none of these things strike me as examples of being a jerk. They are examples of taking little risks that help to optimize the chances of a positive outcome. Sometimes these risks have no little-to-no-downside.
There is also a python implementation on milw0rm:
http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/8080
I like this idea. Are there similar follow-on plans for video? It looks like 7Digital is currently only music.
We could send the subscriptions to his school! Imagine how traumatized he must be, now. He'll need counseling just to deal with the stress--not to overcome his 'problem' making electronics.
Assigning the value 0 or NULL to a pointer does not necessarily set it to address 0.
Net neutrality and the economic value of the internet: lots of people
Japanese programmers of my acquaintance react about as well to DST (which does not exist here) as Americans do when I tell them that any program used in Japan will eventually have a bug report filed against it titled "His Imperial Majesty has passed away."
U.S. Dethroning Russia as (Natural) Gas King
I can't find that anywhere on NPR's site. Got a link?
Not a good article. I have been around the Tarahumara. The women are friendly but very shy, the men are not to be seen when outsiders are around. My guide told me that they have a 50% infant mortality.

However, their history is very cool: when the Spaniards were enslaving everyone they could catch in northern Mexico for a short and harsh life in silver mines, the Tarahumara did not like what they saw, and headed for remote areas.
Will it be available worldwide or only in a few countries (I see 15 on 7digital.com)?
its like taking the greediest best out of communism and capitalism. china implements a wonderful new beast - "commu-talism"
How The EFF Lost Its Way By Defending Hate Mongers And Tunnel Rats
I'd also add this one by Gary Taubes doing a lecture at the Stevens Institute of Technology "Big Fat Lies": http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149#
Recursive Regular Expressions
Quem devo seguir no twitter?
Você tem apenas 140 caracteres para expressar um sentimento! Use bem cada caracter deste. E veja uma lista de indicações de quem você deve seguir para que sua home fique recheada de conteúdo "inteligente".
I'm not sure I'm smart enough to use it, much less understand it. I can understand that it's mouse based though, and I can't grasp how that would be more efficient for the way I code. I am intrigued by the idea of no built-in commands, relying instead on making external commands easy.. I guess I should look at Oberon again too.

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/
The second comment on the post:

Of course proportional fonts can be read faster. That's not the point. Programming uses lots of non-standard glyphs, has meaningful syntax (eg. parens, brackets), and often meaningful whitespace. You can real _words_ faster in proportional font, but (arguably) not _code_.

I agree completely.
So.. we usually get comments like this on webmaster forums, and I usually just let them go, but since HN is "my" forum, I feel like saying something.

1. We identify ourselves as user-agent 008. The proper way to track a bot is through user-agent, not IP address.

2. We never say that the average rate for all sites is 1 req/sec. Many sites have higher rates. We do a best guess on what load a site can handle based on a mix of Alexa/Quantcast/Compete stats.

3. We always respond to requests from webmasters to reduce the crawl rate. Within 5 minutes of getting your message, we did this. What other bot does this? Oh yeah, none of them.

4. The nofollow tag is not a standard way to tell bots to not go to a link. That is what robots.txt is for. Nofollow was implemented for Google specifically and has caught on as a (not as common as you think) tag. Robots.txt is the right way to talk to bots.

5. You know what happens when people don't use 80legs? They figure out some way to get the information they want and soak up your bandwidth anyway. A webmaster is fooling himself if he thinks he can stop people from crawling a site. It's going to happen. At least with 80legs the webmaster has a responsible company with real people to talk to so that the crawl can be managed.
Seriously, any company still forcing IE6 on their employees should be reported to the government and taxed. These stupid corporate IT decisions are impacting everyone, and there needs to be regulation. Its no different than if the company was pumping toxins into the air.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994064

The title and link are different, but the page is the same. This duplication would not have been caught by the system I suggested some time ago.
Fred Wilson: The Quandary
That's not what nofollow is used for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
Javascript Regex Cheat Sheet
A business opportunity - an efficient input device/method for mobile devices?
In my experience, proportional typefaces only work for code if the IDE/editor is using a pretty-printer that uses word-processor style indentation. (That is, it uses tab stops as opposed to just inserting spaces/tabs in the text.)

The only IDEs I've seen work this way was the old THINK Pascal from the 68k Mac era, and its predecessor Instant Pascal for the Apple II. Anybody else seen a more recent example in the wild?
I think this is the only thing I can be fanatical on, I am hard pressed to devise a theoretical piece of information I would not wish to be exposed to, no matter it's nature. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, and information can't kill you.

Well, directly, anyway. :)
I'm so excited about Twilio, by the way. I have a few pages in my notebook of ideas to try implementing on top of it, but haven't found one which meshes well enough with my skill set to make a go of it for my next application. (In particular, the ones that I'm best equipped for don't have good marketing angles jumping out at me.)

If they supported Japanese, though, I would be over disaster management like white on rice.
Im really confused. Are you telling me that in America, teachers are so ignorant of their students, that their first assumption would be that the device is dangerous? Didn't they bother to actually ASK him what it did? I imagine an 11 year-old wouldn't intentionally himself up with his classmates.
You believed that's the way things worked when you were 19, because it did. And now when that you're 30+, it's different. You're not smarter, things have changed.

For men, the late teens to mid-twenties is the period where most mate competition takes place. This is where testosterone rates soar, as do accidental deaths as a result of risk-taking behavior http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep026685.pdf

No one you knows fits that description because like you said, everyone you know is in a relationship. What I described happens when people are trying to compete over mates. When everyone has a mate, i.e. past their mid-twenties for most part, they become much nicer.

Well, except for the occasional 30+ yo that likes to make cheap shots about folks over the internet via an implied link between maturity and intelligence.
His book is really worth reading. I suspect his editor wanted it to be a self-help book and sometimes it reads that way, but it's strongly based on years of observations and collected evidence.

http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csik...
Me too. This was my primary resource while learning the language and I highly recommend it.
> the iPhone still requires syncing

True, but for how much longer? Already the Cocoa Touch platform supports application installs via WiFi and can use MobileMe for syncing info via "the cloud" instead of a hosting computer. The only bit left is the media library... (and you can buy the smaller stuff like songs and music videos via the phone/iPod even then.)

> Apple has great design skills, but they're still in the desktop era.

As a Mac user for two decades now, it seems to me that Apple is in the process of leaving us behind. The current OS X desktop UI is made more for Windows switchers, and Apple's may-or-may-not exist tablet is expected to continue distancing itself from the desktop flavor of the OS. (I've been doing experimental development for Cocoa Touch over the last couple of months, and I can tell you that despite the "same" language and API, the programming and security enviroments are completely different from the historical desktop experience.)
Hopefully the counseling will include skills for coping with ignorant authoritarian bureaucracies - essential for tech innovators outside of tech-savvy settings.
after her first example i'm wondering if i should read the rest of the article:

"""
Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.”
"""

"fixed", "money" and "problems" are -- afaik -- what she calls latin words...

oooops!