skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://elfarolitoinc.com/
From Tumblr's TOS:
"Tumblr reserves the right to remove any Subscriber Content from the Site, suspend or terminate Subscriber’s right to use the Services at any time, or pursue any other remedy or relief available to Tumblr and/or the Site under equity or law, for any reason...or for no reason at all."

Just because they can, does it mean they should have?
It doesn't seem like a fair assumption that the account is abandoned if there are a few posts form the past year, especially when Tumblr didn't contact the user (assuming they did not).

It sucks, but you get what you pay for.

I can't say that the original owner has made the best case for himself. Throwing around terms like "libel" and "exercise my right" is off-putting and makes it hard to empathize with him.
Edit --> Preferences --> Javascript --> Uncheck "Enable Adobe Javascript"
Can you imagine what would it be to have an A380 flapping its wings?
Wikis are awesome. All they do is store text and allow it to be edited. It is the very fact that they don't have a structured model of ACLs and posts/comments/pages/votes/whatever else on top of them that make them flexible and useful, and allow projects like Wikipedia to come into being.

Shell scripting is awesome. All it does is allow you to run C programs that write to one another's IO streams, but with this, you can chain pre-made processes together in any way you wish, without having to compile a single new line of code.

Forth is awesome, Lisp is awesome, LEGO is awesome. (Can you see where I'm going with this?) The awe is not inspired by what the thing does on its own; the awe comes from what the thing enables you to do, and how simple the solution is that solves so many different problems.
They're adding two new AP1000 reactors to an existing site. Each reactor produces 1.1 GW of electricity, reliably, for 60-80 years. While the building cost is large (about the same as wind, on a per-average-megawatt basis) the operating costs are low, and the power will become cheaper than coal over time as the initial investment is paid off.

There's been some misunderstanding about the government's involvement in this, so let me be explicit: this is not a loan, nor a subsidy. This is the government insuring the loan in case the company building the reactors defaults on the loans they got from private investors. Unless disaster strikes, the government will actually make a profit on this without paying a dime.
For some reason I found myself laughing silly at most of this presentation. Those guys are brilliant.
I think the genius of Google isn't the stuff they build
(which is really cool) but the fact that the entire company
is built from information essentially available to everyone.
Thank you for telling me that.
Ahh, users. Can't live with them, can't live without them. After we've had our little venting, can we get back to ways to make it easier for them to pay us money?

I have a screenshot on the front page of my website. The screenshot has buttons on it. The buttons are, obviously, not functional. This is a difficult concept to grasp for a sizeable portion of my user base -- you should see the CrazyEgg heatmap and the big red dot right over the "New" button, or the emails I got about how "I tried to use your program but none of the buttons I clicked on worked."

There are productive and unproductive responses to that. Telling users "Look, doofus, that's a photo. You can't interact with elements in photos. You should know this by now." is an unproductive response: it does not help your user or advance your business goals. Having the site actually do something when someone clicks on the photo, to clue them in to the fact that it is in fact not the program itself, is a productive response. It will cut > 90% of support requests of that nature and increase your sales at the margin.
Where are you getting 7KB/s? Did it start that way, or decelerate after a while? I usually get ~700KB/s, at least.
1. Good/difficult programming books, the more theoretical the better. Blogs are full of windbags and echo-chamberism; after a certain point, you'll just waste your time reading them. I've kind of exhausted what I can read from my local Borders just sitting in the cafe, unfortunately, and it gets fairly expensive to buy niche stuff.

2. New languages, new application domains, new concepts. This could mean "closer to the hardware," or "further from the hardware." They both have uses. I have a lengthy list of languages I want to get around to learning...but have no compelling immediate use for, which is a strong discouraging factor. Hence application domains - if you're doing coding for small embedded processors, you're forced down to a few language options. If you're doing web apps, another set of options. If you're doing compilers, a third set of options. Et cetera. Find the app that lets you learn the language.

3. Cycling between "research" coding(a tool, algorithm or data structure that might do something cool and useful) and "production" coding(bang out the app). If I did only the latter, I probably wouldn't learn anything! But the former lets me lay down a strategy for "this time, I'll be more efficient by doing x...." and then I try it and find out if x worked.

I would also note that commercial programming work is likely to limit your growth unless you're working at a hardcore tech company. (I'm unemployed at the moment, going into indie game development, and I've been consistently emphasizing the use of technology to automate more, tighten the iteration cycle, and wring out more quality in less time, so I have few limits other than "make it good enough to pay the bills.")
I would imagine that some of the results for people searching for fully qualified domain names mentioned in the article may be due to something that trips me up all of the time:

When I work on other people's computers, which are invariably slower than my Linux boxes, I hot-key to the address bar, start typing a FQDN and hit Enter, only to have my focus shifted for me sometime during this process to the search engine box on the page from a slow firing page load script (thank you msn.com, yahoo.com, etc.).

I have to retrain myself to open a browser, get another cup of tea, THEN hot-key to the address bar and start typing.

Okay, well, yes, a cup of tea is an exaggeration, but I think you get my drift.
My daughters got "Junior TSA" stickers at the Burbank airport:
http://img124.yfrog.com/i/ts1q.jpg/

Dream big!
Has anyone had success with using a SEO company? If so, which one(s)?
The title says it all. I am just curious if anyone has had solid success.
Many such exploits are in-browser, and require no action on the part of the user apart from visiting a highjacked/fake web-site.
If someone is dumb enough to use their own cc then I hardly think they have the wherewithal to proxy the requests through indonesia.

Rereading it maybe your right; it shouldn't have gone so far.

Maybe you don't realise it, but you come across as amazingly blasé towards this miscarriage of justice. There is no "maybe" about it. And it shouldn't have gone anywhere at all. The state has fucked this guy's life up for no reason other than its own incompetence.

I get the feeling that those in law enforcement are so brainwashed as to the monstrous nature of their "enemy" that they rationalise away "collateral damage" like this guy as a necessary evil.
"Irish Need Not Apply" was a common sign to see in America when there were a lot of Irish immigrants (Irish Potato Famine era).

> Has there ever been a group that was shunned where it wasn't codified into law/sponsored by the government?

What comes first though? The government is made up of people. So people have to have these attitudes first and foremost before it becomes codified into law. If the public violently disagreed with said laws, then they would be repealed as wildly unpopular.
Speaking as an ex-Catholic

I can understand where you're coming from. The majority of my friends are Catholic (well, ex-Catholics), and to hear them talk about church almost pains me. I could not believe when they said people would show up at their door demanding tithes/money, some of the requirements for attending church, etc. To be honest, hearing all about how Catholicism operates, I'd probably have been an ex-Catholic myself.

I'm a protestant Christian though, and the root of my belief has always been that we are "justified by faith" in the midst of our depraved, imperfect nature (see Romans 3:23-24 and Galatians 2:16). My faith is not a set of demands that I am obligated to perform to get into Heaven, nor does it operate out of fear of Hell and punishment. It's a faith that is rooted in a love for Christ, knowing that I can never do enough good deeds to justify myself before a perfect God.

When you know that by faith - simply believing - you are justified, clean, and in God's grace, there is no basis for fear.

It's an awesome concept, but if you were to examine the New Testament, you'd conclude that Christ didn't come to instill fear (or condemn) the world, but to save the world (John 3:17).

If you're really curious, check out "Classic Christianity" by Bob George or the latter parts of "Mere Christianity" by CS Lewis. Both books do away with the needless junk that is the basis for many sects of Christianity and get to the core of what Christianity and the Bible really means.
Bottom line- who here will put anything they care about on Tumblr now?

Exactly.
Google is donating $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation
Even the old technology has been getting more efficient. Those reactors have been producing ever-increasing amounts of electricity for those past 30 years as they upgraded the systems and figured out how to reduce downtime.
Having family in the UK (and living there for a time myself), I can assure you that whatever Thatcher meant to say - that unspoken implication was (and remains) that society is whatever the BBC says it is. The fact that the people collectively formed an opinion outside of that propaganda state just goes to show how wrong she was.

Here again, the 'majors' are feeding you propaganda, telling you what (it thinks) will be the way forward. Strangely, though, we keep seeing a common thread amongst all new music delivery models... lower prices to the consumer. I say, that is the future of music!
Texas to challenge US greenhouse gas rules
The screenshots were from Google Reader. Meaghan has indicated elsewhere that the posts had been deleted, and the GReader posts are simply a history of what little activity there had been there.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kxyamehQd51qajoo8.png
Have a look at those posts. One from March 14th says outright that it's not being used as a blog:
DONT FOLLOW ME
I AM NOT A REAL TUMBLE BLOG

That guy has an active blog on Tumblr as Tumbledore. He clearly was using that account as an alternative dashboard, which is legit, but certainly doesn't need a special domain. I could see being put out a little bit about losing the domain, but his histrionic proclamations of oppression are a severe over-reaction. They have the smell of self-entitled internet personality.

I have little doubt that Tumblr exhibited more diligence in investigating this matter than was due Tumbledore for taking back a domain on their service. That domain a) had only been used as a convenience account, not for publishing anything, and b) that only in the distant past. Add to that c) it was occupying a subdomain that matches the trademark of another customer whom had requested it, and d) they gave him a reasonable opportunity to appeal. 72 hours does seem unnecessarily brief, but in this case it's immaterial.
It's not binary searches and merge sorts that are broken, it's the INT data type that is "broken" (and I put "broken" in scare quotes because they aren't really broken, they just don't do what you want in most cases). People tacitly assume that INTs model the integers, but they don't. They model the integers modulo 2^N for some value of N. If you code as if INTs were integers and you hit the 2^N limit you will lose.

The algorithm as given would work perfectly well on a straightforward translation into a language with a real integer data type like Python or Lisp.

And you can lose in the other direction too: if you're doing crypto, for example, the algorithms are often designed to use arithmetic operations modulo 2^N, so INTs (and NOT integers) can be just what you need.

But this has nothing do do with binary search or mergesort.
Rolling your own solution isn't too tough, provided you have a server somewhere that has the correct ports open. Just takes a bit of work: regenerating device profiles and setting up the PHP script (there's some code floating around out there that will do what you want), but once it's setup, it's not a problem to maintain.
Well, you could argue in this case that the crime he was accused of was purchasing child porn which encourages and supports the producers though I have a feeling that the author just mean 'child porn' (in general) when he wrote that.
Ask HN: On what sites shall I register to reserve the name of my business?
twitter.com
aboutus.org

What else?

UPDATE:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017586.html

* Digg
* Delicious
* Twitter
* Plurk
* Linkedin
* Flickr
* Facebook
* YouTube
* Gmail account
* Yahoo Profile
* MSN profile
* FriendFeed
* Bebo
* MyBlogLog
* MySpace
* Netscape
* Pownce
* StumbleUpon
* Niche social sites (aka Sphinn)
Robots To Remove WWII Era Mines To Clear Way For A Gas Pipeline
There are a few different questions here; I haven't worked with an OpenTable system yet, so I can only guess at some of it. But:

> ...it seems what restaurants want to do is increase profits.

Yes, but -- based on my experience and dealing with restaurant owners in my area, anyway -- they're not interested in things like metrics or VIP programs. VIP programs don't convert as well as you might expect -- pretty poorly, in fact, given the effort that it takes to manage them -- and restaurants are typically run by chefs or foodies, not by numbers geeks.

Restaurants are really hurting right now, so anything that doesn't immediately get butts in their seats is going to be a hard sell.

Daily P&Ls are already built into the reporting functions of the POSs I've seen so far, and they have some functions for reporting on popular dishes, although that's usually more clunky. But, the line cooks are usually the ones that tell the boss what was popular that night anyway.

> Is OpenTable too big to fail (e.g. restaurants will continue to pay them annual maintenance because it is a legacy system)?

Yes and no. Once a restaurant has committed to a particular POS, it is very, very, very hard to get them away from it. First, it cost them -- at a safe ballpark estimate -- $10,000 to install it in the first place, so they're going to milk it for as long as they can before paying for anything else, even if it costs them more money that way in the long run.

Second, change is really scary for these folks, because if they're trying a new POS, and it crashes on its first evening, they're going to have a lot of pissed off customers and that translates directly to empty seats. It doesn't help that every single system that they've tried -- or that their buddies in the industry have tried -- have been buggy, problematic, and prone to crankiness.

It doesn't matter if you know that you're selling the best system in the world at the cheapest price; the owners are still going to be really gun-shy about converting.

> Can OpenTable's database be cleanroom reverse engineered so that it can be migrated to a new competitor platform?

In theory, anything's possible, but I would feel pretty safe guessing that OpenTable isn't going to make that easy. They're probably using something pretty funky. On the plus side, they're probably not encrypting it, they're just relying on security-through-obscurity. So, you should be able to figure out the basics, like item description, pretty easily. Figuring out sales or quantities might be a lot harder, not to mention figuring out links between items (like, add-ons for a particular dish).

To be honest, you might be better off committing staff to manually re-entering the restaurant's menu in your POS, rather than trying to convert OpenTable's (or anyone else's), and then just roll that into your price. This is not as horrible as it sounds; most restaurants have only a couple of pages of items, with a variety of add-ons. I've done this by myself in under a day, so it's not too bad.
40 percent in US lack home broadband
Hey Andrew, I really like the way you conduct the interview and the research you and your team does in the background.

For a change, I would like to listen to your interview regarding how you started your career and what were your experiences. If you have given interview previously please provide the link on your website or on HN.
> why did he have to have his life ruined before being 'cautious' (a.k.a. exercising common sense) about online shopping

It's not even 'online shopping.' A couple of the huge cases of stolen identities were by employees at credit card processors, so it didn't matter how respectable or secure the stores themselves were.
It makes sense to me. The Wikimedia foundation greatly enriches the quality of Google's search results for the majority of users. I almost always want the Wikipedia article when I search for something.
great article. I love when people put together in depth posts on businesses you've probably never heard of that do really well + had specific insight (mixergy excels at this in the form of interviews).

the picture of the hamachi homepage has the graphic of the guy writing something on a glass board. what is it with everyone using stock clipart with random people writing random things that are supposed to look really smart on a clear board? ITS EVERYWHERE.
Open source, hackers giving charity to rich companies
I've always wondered about an iPhone or web-app for a given location that just showed what was open right then and how soon they closed. Quite often I'm in an area at 10pm with friends wondering what our dining options are. Would obviously need the cooperation of the restaurants themselves though.
It actually started at 0.9KB/s and a couple hours after it increased to 7KB/s. The fastest it has been in about 4 hours has been it 10KB/s.
Maybe it will be easier to build extremely intelligent, consistent, rational AI than to get the nuanced emotion and irrationality that regular people have.
Global Warming Can Mean More Snow
The plan is to remove 70 mines. The remaining mines (of which there are around 150,000) will remain untouched for now. Removing each of the 70 mines takes two days.
Wow. That is painful to watch. Too much work went into that.
Linus Torvalds on git (video)
You are confused, that guy is not the blog owner, he is the Founder of Pitchfork, and obviously he has no reason to lie. The fact that the Tumblr version blatantly contradicts him only makes it that much obvious that that Meaghan person is the one lying about the whole thing.
How to Pull Your Google Buzz with jQuery
I worked on this problem for about 6 months, I had built a simple hosted solution, for restaurants in this case, that the operator could build a mobile version of their site that was viewable on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. The first few places I told the idea to loved it and so I thought it might take off. Unfortunately (fortunately?) for me I happened to talk to two restaurant operators who actually used social media and 'got it'. When I started doing more market research with other operators and restaurant marketers the basic reaction was simply this: operators are too busy to be bothered with frivolous things like websites, and for some even email addresses. They're just trying to get through the month, the week, the day without closing the place up (obviously a lot of turn over in the industry).

My personal take is that the next generation of operators will likely be more receptive and will see the value in using different forms of media and accepting that people get their information in very different ways than even 5 years ago. I think there are other ways to make money in the restaurant industry, if I was someone looking to do something in this industry I'd start making some connections with the US Foods and the Syscos of the world, alone you'll be lucky to even get face time with an operator, let alone convince them to use your product.

If anyone is interested one of the restaurants that used the service was here http://www.edinagrill.com, access from your iphone/android/blackberry and you'll see a mobile version vs normal browser.
> I get the feeling that those in law enforcement are so brainwashed as to the monstrous nature of their "enemy" that they rationalise away "collateral damage" like this guy as a necessary evil.

I'm sure that on some level they feel bad about it, but they find ways to rationalize it away so they they can continue their job, and the politicos in the department try to keep everyone hush-hush to avoid lawsuits and a PR storm if someone were to admit to a mistake.
By the way I just ran this speed test:

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?flash=1

My network downloads 4MB/sec

The computer has a fresh install of snow leopard and everything else is fast.
A school where everyone is the same, there can be no cross-race friendships

I appreciate your reply. I did a forehead smack on myself when I realized I had missed the obvious exception to your edge case the first two times I read your reply. A school pupil can form friendships OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL, irrespective of where the pupil goes to school. And that happens. Sometimes it is easier to form friendships outside of school than inside school. (I lived in one place just more than one year, spanning parts of two school years, in my youth, and the best friends I had there were neighbors or friends from my Scout troop. I liked some of my classmates quite well, but I made friends more rapidly and more deeply in non-school settings. And this, by the way, is why I emphasized "voluntary enrollment" above, because young people make friends better in voluntary rather than compulsory activities, and is also why I was unafraid to homeschool my children. My children have always had friends--and friends from many "races" at that--but they have never attended school (except university-based classes for my oldest during his last few years of secondary education).

Race does not exist, except in the mind of the racists and those upon whom they exercise their beliefs.

Fully agreed with you here. When I see those annoying forms that ask my "race," I write in "human." I prefer the designation "human," but I can live with the designation "postracial" if need be.
You're right, it is refreshing to see someone flat out lie about company business in public on a personal blog. You don't get to see that every day :)
Browse Hacker News daily and remind yourself how little you actually know.
I think, yeah, if I overtly state the account is no longer in use in the single post made over the previous year, and I've never used it for its proper purpose, I probably shouldn't expect that Tumblr are going expend company resources just to be extra, extra nice instead of following the letter of the ToS, especially since if I know full well that it's a desirable domain.