skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see that this article is off the front page despite having around sixty up-votes. It has been replaced by an essay informing us that Bill Gates is on Twitter. I didn't submit this article, but I'm posting this in case you personally catch it tptacek, because I'm disappointed you've succeeded in shutting down discussion. And I'm also disappointed that a third of all comments made on this thread to date are by you and are focused on preempting discussion and accusing others of being off-topic. In most online environments that would count as trollish behavior.

Downvoting and flagging is one thing and I think you're certainly in your rights to use those tools to sculpt the sorts of discussions you want to take place here. Coopting interesting and informative threads by launching trollish attacks on the relevance of the material is another. Most of the replies to your post were perfectly civil.

As someone who is personally running a startup outside of the United States, I find that US policy on the War on Terror has a much stronger effect on my business (particularly through regulations affecting international money transfers, credit card processing and air travel) than a host of other issues including things like start-up visas or security vulnerabilities and other subjects you presumably consider much more on-topic given your own business. Articles that touch on these topics are on-topic to me.

So even disregarding the most interesting and relevant thing about this article - the fact that military censorship of communications technologies and then FOIA blackouts apparently kept this story away from the popular media for four years - it is not irrelevant as a policy issue for a lot of people who are not you. In the future, if you want to shut down a discussion by all means flag it, but don't ruin the discussion space for those who are actually curious what others think.
Doesn't work with curl either.
The thing is, the Chinese are fiercely nationalistic - it would not surprise me at all if many of these attacks are being done without government sanction.

I would tread carefully on news like this - it's easy to read too much into it, and it's too easy to manipulate, kind of like blaming all communists because one of them set fire to a building.
I had a long-standing interest in psychology, but haven't found a single book worth crap. Psychologists seem to obsess over fancy terminology and say-so stories with absolutely no conception of anything remotely like a controlled experiment. The one exception I've found is this blog:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/

Although most of his posts just complain about the lack of quality in medical and psychiatric publishing. That, and his definition of narcism (creating a persona and acting it out) is without doubt the most insightful model of the psyche I'd ever stumbled on.
Structure? The Flatter, the Better
Just so I understand this right, you have separate, customized installations of your application per customer? So, that you have individual release-* branches for each customer (or at least for those you've customized things for). It sounds like you're just adapting to your own particular needs, which are for a single release version of the product in the OP's case. Different strokes for different folks. It goes to show the incredible flexibility of Git. It's too awesome :)
I'd say that would be one feature useful here, I don't think it would over complicate the simplicity of things. Maybe it could be factored into the display order so things that are new since you last looked at a submission move to the top.
I wonder what AbInitio, Informatica, et al think about this patent, is the HN community aware of their claims to similar IP?
I installed it when reading HN's RSS feed inside of netvibes, because NYT articles would decide that they didn't want to be framed and take over the hole page.

Then I decided that I liked noscript better than addblock+ and kept it instead.
More discussion here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382899
I use NoScript, but I have "Temporarily allow top-level sites by default" enabled (Base 2nd level domains). Basically, if I visit http://foo.example.com, any script hosted on example.com is allowed to run. Then, on pages that seem to have stuff missing, I'll go ahead and allow scripts from certain sites to run (e.g. akamai.net, aolcdn.com, autotraderstatic.com, googleapis.com, yahooapis.com, youtube.com).

The main point is to limit exposure to XSS attacks. There are still sites (and I'm sure even some linked on HN) that allow comments without properly sanitizing input. This makes it possible for a commenter to embed javascript in a blog comment which would cause a cookie for that site to be sent to an external site, or which takes advantage of a browser vulnerability.

Another reason is to deter a lot of forms of tracking. By not running scripts from the likes of google-analytics.com or quantserve.com (two sources for scripts in this submission), my browsing activity is not followed quite as closely as it otherwise would be.

Finally, I use it to block Flash, Java, and whatever else ads, which only add annoyance and CPU consumption to my browsing experience.

Regardless, the submitted site worked fine for me. The effect is neat but I don't think it really adds a whole lot.
My guess is that in your 7 years of domaining you've pissed off more people than you've made happy, overall.
I would instantly disqualify all of those reviews while reading them, even subconsciously. So either 1) I am smarter than Yelp users, or 2) the lame reviews are actually more subtle and believable, or 3) this just isn't a big issue.
The work you do while you procrastinate is ...
About Britney Spears Info
Estonia?

Canada pays 55% of a salary for a year in the form of Employment Insurance for maternity leaves that can be 1 year for a mother and up to six months for a father.
Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice is amazing. It is almost a perfect mix (at least, in my opinion) between rigorous (citing studies) and accessible (using anecdotes, etc).

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Practice-Robert-B-Cialdini/d...

Unfortunately, most of the best information I have received for psychology came from the two classes I took (Social Psych, and Behavior in Organizations). I learned a tremendous amount, but very little (if anything) from the other books.
It sounds like government in Cameroon is effectively organized crime, but I imagine most criminal organizations would run the country more efficiently and more profitably. Would the government do a better job if it stopped mimicking the institutions of high-functioning countries and was frankly exploitative?
I think you gave up the rhetorical point of being able to cite the guidelines by making a comment saying that you flagged the story. I disagree with you because the guidelines themselves are intentionally fuzzy. There is no litmus test for what gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

The new trend here is not torture, but that several men are now known to have been tortured to death.
Full tip: "The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life"
Here's an older article which basically says the same thing from someone who lived in Africa.

http://www.theothersideofkim.com/index.php/essays/36/
The risk profile of different markets are not all the same. Bill Gales made silly amounts of money by having great connections, getting lucky, and executing ruthlessly not just working hard. A contractor can leverage capital and risk to make money, where the average consultant only risks his time (which can still be worth a lot). This would not be important except we tax different types of earnings in a different manor. We don't ask a retired auto worker to pay SS taxes on his pension.

Now, as a rule a single employee company is probably a glorified employee working for someone else, but there are a huge number of exceptions to this general rue. For example someone who manage real estate is more like an active investor and the tax code should probably treat them as an investor rater than a working stiff who happens to make whatever they happen to make.

Also because people are involved in the loop, an auditor can probably tell what is going on will minor issues. If you are subletting your basement after the kids graduate from collage != managing a burger king != owning a burger king.
How dare Yelp steal Foursquare's idea. Once somebody has an idea, nobody can ever try to do the same thing. EVER. Hopefully Foursquare has already patented their idea, so that nobody else will ever be able to let their users check in at specific locations and earn rewards for those check ins.
"... why is this being down voted w/out any counter argument? ..."

The point of the timeline was to try and highlight developers who worked on browser projects during this time and highlight the differences in both company and individual responses. IE might have been an OK browser, MS made large sums of money but compare the difference Andreessen and jzw from Netscape have made to users by releasing the source code for Mozilla in the long run.

I suspect because I'm perceived in attacking the author by proxy criticising MS and IE. The thing I don't understand is why Scott needs affirmation? Just getting into MS at this time and working on the core product marks him as an above average developer. But lets not mince words. MS and the IE team did harm the Web and their customers needlessly during the periods of '95 to 2000. And being on this team with influence doesn't negate some responsibility. It would be good to get some sort of view of this from the author.

"... i'm not surprised that IE was managed by a rejected undergrad/frustrated closet writer? jk :) ..."

As for being a "rejected undergrad", credentials matter less in tech companies than ability ~ http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html that's why Scott was hired. The description of "frustrated closet writer" doesn't do Scott's contributions at justice.

If only HN was filled with writers of his calibre ~ http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/how-to-be-a-free-thinker/
I disagree. First, you need both attraction and comfort. Comfort basically means showing a woman that you're interested in more than just sex. At the very least, this present does that. Furthermore, I think this particular present also creates attraction by demonstrating positive value attributes of the guy like intelligence, curiosity, playfulness, etc.
Testing one shoe with my standard double knot and this secure knot. I'll update with the victor.
Google maps has some good photos, you can even see the white van mentioned in the story in the woods.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
I first saw this done on the CSS Zen Garden a number of years back. Its still live here: http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://www.timpelen.com...
"A knowledge of algorithms doesn't teach you to pick the right problems to solve."

That is true. To create a application, one needs a Use Case. A Use Case will provide the most abstract solution to what the app will be doing. Then you can take the top down design approach, by dividing the Use Case into a several abstract sub problems. That is known as code architecture and belongs to System Engineering. The System Engineer needs a domain-expert help to identify what problems that needs to be solved.

Then..

Programming is carrying out those abstract sub-problems (interfaces) to become a concrete solution using a specific programming language. To complete such a task, one needs a person that knows his/hers algorithms design techniques, sorting, searching, string processing, graph problems, combinatorial problems, geometric problems and numerical problems. And lastly, the analysis of the respective algorithms.

Once you know what to solve, its just a matter of being able to carry out the task.

I think you might have confused the programmers job with the job of actually creating the entire software - which in general terms is non-sense. To sum up:

The software engineer (the project lead) takes care of identifying the sub-problems, after creating the Use Case with the domain expert (often the customer).

The programmer solves those sub-problems bottoms up, by focusing on creating the atomic parts as efficient as possible.
Well then I REALLY don't get it. I can branch and merge all day in my scm if there aren't any conflicts. Is all the hype over git just because maybe the branch and merge commands are slightly simpler?
Portland set to dismantle, donate abandoned Wi-Fi antennas
Are you kidding me? Take a look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_gSasJPs1Y. Chinese Plain-Clothes Officials Block CNN Cameras With Umbrellas In Tienanmen Square. How low can the Chinese government goes? They operated like a gang, no less.
You'd think. But actual organized criminals like bootleggers are/were generally not terribly efficient either.

Here's one way to look at it: very, very smart criminals should do much less damage to their victims than they seem to, just for reasons of self-interest. This is primarily because the first world has made it more individually profitable for very, very smart criminals to go legit, either in business or politics. This leaves actual visible criminal activity to those not smart enough, or not disciplined enough, to take that route.

Don't shake your head at how awful it is when a high-up executive at a major corporation turns out to be a complete sociopath. Marvel that society has gotten so much good out of that clever, ambitious sociopath. And be glad that crime is emphatically not as good a career path for him.
Embedding rar files in images is an old 4chan tradition. Under windows:

copy /b in.jpg + in.rar out.jpg
Is that a good trade? Potentially being able to recover a lost phone versus Apple (and whomever can subpoena it) knowing where you are all the time?
Amazon WebPay takes on paypal.
Someone should write a graphical frontend for git where you create and manipulate a graph like that.
Yelp :(
Latency Arbitrage: The Real Power Behind Predatory High Frequency Trading
That's actually pretty interesting. I wonder if it was hard to do a subpixel rendering system for fonts (like ClearType)? I don't have a Nexus One so maybe the pixel density is high enough that they don't need to render fonts like that.
Traders owe self-employment tax on their gains as well.
I watch movies/read HN while I procrastinate ! :(
Well, I can tell you how Dunning and Kruger did it--they borrowed a bunch of jokes from various sources (famous comedians, joke books, &c.), then had some professional comedians rate the quality of the jokes. The assumption was that making a living in comedy probably requires being able to recognize when something is or isn't funny.

We created a 30-item questionnaire made up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. (...) To assess joke quality, we contacted several professional comedians via electronic mail and asked them to rate each joke on a scale ranging from 1 ( not at all funny ) to 11 ( very funny ). (...) Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable ( a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian's ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = - .09). We thus excluded this comedian's ratings in our calculation of the humor value of each joke, yielding a final a of .76. Expert ratings revealed that jokes ranged from the not so funny (e.g., "Question: What is big as a man, but weighs nothing? Answer: His shadow." Mean expert rating = 1.3) to the very funny (e.g., "If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'probably because of something you did.'" Mean expert rating = 9.6).

http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/unskilled.html
Is there any way to turn 'watching movies' or 'read HN' into some kind of work ?
People were tortured to death in Abu Graihb.

I think it's time to revisit the guideline about "not posting about inappropriate comments".

I don't think it's time to revisit the guideline about not posting about politics and crime.
Are Webhosting companies serious about security?
The concluding remarks from Dunning and Kruger's paper make me chuckle:

In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.

I put the link in another comment already, but here's a copy of the paper in html format for anyone interested: http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/unskilled.html
API for requesting/reporting info on missing persons in Haiti
The military has censored communications since time immemorial.

I've been a factor in a lot of discussion on Hacker News that I haven't managed to "shut down".

What's shutting down this "discussion" is that there isn't anything to discuss productively.

We could continue trying to provoke a fruitless discussion by extrapolating further and further from the story; "the US is evil", etc. That might pick a pointless fight.

Thankfully, I think Hacker News is largely innoculated from discussions like that.

The fact of the matter is that this isn't an article about how the War On Terror affects startups, and it isn't an article about censorship. If you want to have a discussion about those topics, write a blog post.

It will be relevant to Hacker News, and I will vote it up.
"The new trend here is not torture, but that several men are now known to have been tortured to death."

Sadly, that is not a new trend:

In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse...
I can be upset and angry and still participate in a rational discussion. What will we do when an issue is both important and divisive? Will we avoid it because it's divisive and may upset people? Is not being upset more important than the free exchange of ideas?

This is Hacker News. Maybe I am projecting something here, but I thought of us as explorers of ideas. Do we want to prevent, to silence, discussion?
Pros and cons of IP aside, the fact of the matter is that American companies have the money and talent to do high quality R&D. Most Chinese companies simply don't have the capital to do R&D to the standard of a developed country, and most talents go work for western companies that have the money.

If IP laws were enforced in China, Chinese companies would be further kept at the bottom of the food chain, making cheap products in sweatshops at very low margins. The IP policies in China is meant as way to jumpstart domestic companies by letting them compete in higher-margin value-added goods when they don't have the ability to do their own research. The policy-makers know that they suck at most things, especially as a venture capitalist, so they go with the least-interfering approach.

Of course, eventually they'll have to enforce IP to sustain their own R&D, once their industries mature.
Gives an interesting overview.
Anyone know any other related articles/papers? Thanks!
Can't load this article in Chrome on Ubuntu.
I couldn't see a link to the reddit clone working - is there one?

BTW: reddit was originally in lisp (they switched to python, for libraries and hiring).

- their blog: http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

- Pycon Keynote question: http://brainsik.theory.org/.:./2009/why-reddit-uses-python (wow, bizarre directory name)

- web.py author: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

I can't help but think that beginning in Lisp, and especially being familiar with lisp ideas, helped them a lot.
That's what I am searching for while reading HN
Isn't this just basic frontrunning? The scheme works because you know about an order that's going to move the market, and you can exploit it better because you have an HFT infrastructure, but the unfairness is still based on being able to predict orders.

I'm genuinely asking, not stating. The problem of being able to front-run block trades is a really old one.

(Wow, googling "front-running" is all HFT now.)
Synonymy is by far one of the simplest kinds of tasks that are relevant to making computers understand language, despite its awesome usefulness. The Wordnet database (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/) actually has a wealth of synonymy and other word-word relations (probably significantly more extensive than Google's). In the future I can imagine that companies like Google with start to use things like syntactically related phenomena (e.g. syntactic "synonymy" between sentences like "The dog bit John" and "John was bitten by the dog"), in place of the simple word-word relations, and probably eventually even tackle things like answering questions based on the semantic content of the query + websites. There's actually some interesting work done by Phil Resnik (http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/) here are UMD trying to do "sentiment analysis", whereby you essentially can detect spin/bias in a document by mapping grammatical structures to semantic features, and then analyzing that. Quite an interesting future. :D
You mean like Github's network graph?
I don't know much about S-Corps, but don't they just spend excess revenue on stock buyback while giving $1 a year (Steve Jobs style) employees generous stock options taxed at 15% capital gains tax?
It sounds like we have both had very different experiences with other designers.
interesting... do you think the view-first model of Java frameworks like Scala/Lift would make it more attractive ?
This is a chapter in The Undercover Economist, a book that I just finished reading last week: http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Exposing-Poor-Dec...

It's a great introductory economics book for the layman.
I don't really understand some of the assumptions made here. It sounds like someone making $60k a year is simply not eligible for programs designed to help people making say $35k a year. Is that wrong? $60k/year is a pretty good amount of money. Opting out of a better job to avoid paying taxes on your increased income is a really bad career choice. All of the tax rates level out. So maybe $100k isn't a great spot to be in but you're not going to get to $150k by opting for the $60k/year job are you? This article just spews out entitlement. I can't stomach people making $60k+ year crying about how hard their life is. Try living on $20k/year and see how that works out for you.
The reason for outlawing the first syntax is that it isn't a legal javascript literal in the case where the key is a javascript reserved word (if we change 'foo' to 'for' in this example).
Ah, that seems like a more reasonable analogy.
Well - you're on track, then :)
Especially when there are a variety of similar countries in the vicinity with a variety of governments but with similar levels of poverty.
Heatmap of predicted probability of homicide in Philadelphia
NASA's Puffin Is a Stealthy, Personal Tilt-Rotor Aircraft
Toppcloud is riding on top of libcloud and should in theory work with anything libcloud supports. Rackspace is currently the only tested environment though.
Not for just visualization but for control also. You drag and drop and point and click to branch, merge, etc.
about time, that space could use some competition and amazon has been executing well. I really look forward to this