skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did it not enter your mind that this video comes from Dubai security services and not Israel?

The real question is the motivation of Dubai in making and releasing this video. I highly doubt that it's as an advertisement for the mossad (even if it may end up coming off as such).
http://www.allstatespublicadjusters.com
As far as they're concerned email, facebook and twitter are all for "old" people.

She's well informed. Technically, Twitter and FaceBook are for over-18s only and e-mail hasn't proven portable enough to appeal to most youngsters. In ChatRoulette's case, that's certainly a good thing, with perverts only a click or two away in most cases :-)
They were all independence and walled garden and network neutrality back in July of 2009 when their official Google Voice App was denied by Apple.

But how hypocritical can you be when they are now doing the same thing to 3rd party apps trying to access Google Voice from other mobile devices. They are not only not releasing an API like they have done with every other Google product out there, but they are implementing byzantine security to actually prevent 3rd party apps from accessing the same functionality that their Android native app is capable of or their new mobile site is able to access.

http://www.allstatespublicadjusters.com
A long time ago, all submitted pdfs were redirected to scribd, iirc. Now you just get an optional link.
Did anyone else see this and think "I wonder if it was a job?"

Maybe I have too much Reddit in me, but damn.

RIP and respect.
I did something similar when I needed to write a lot of fiction, except that my solution was a monstrosity hacked together from emacs, LaTeX's memoir package, org-mode, and a couple of Python scripts to convert from my own text-based format to TeX, and handle daily word count goals. It works great, despite being hideously ugly. And it was fun.

The Bean guy is right that it can be rewarding to make a word processor that works exactly the way you think. Even if it's not strictly necessary.
Hotels are full of security cameras these days. That's perhaps why the assassination victim thought he could travel to a hotel safely even though he surely had deadly enemies. The story, which is worth discussing among hackers, is how the assassins circumvented the security cameras to operate in what was, as it appears, a foreign country for them.

After edit: this quotation from the submitted article, "The door on al-Mabhouh’s room was latched and chained from the inside, and there was no blood evidence," shows more tradecraft than I have for leaving a modern, secure hotel room and ensuring that the assassination scene will yield little evidence and not be discovered at first.
A fair number of innocents get caught in the crosshairs of the Israel. A targeted assassination by Mossad killed the wrong man [1], Palestinian civilians have been used as human shields [2], Amnesty International found that Israeli military checkpoints are a "key cause of high rates of unemployment and poverty" among the Palestinians [3], and a UN report concluded that "there was strong evidence to establish that numerous serious violations of international law, both humanitarian law and human rights law, were committed by Israel during the military operations in Gaza" [4].

To be clear, I'm not taking a side on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Crimes are being committed on both sides daily. The above evidence is presented only to debunk your claim that the Israeli approach "has no collateral damage and only a minor amount of innocents get caught in the cross hairs". That's a rather audacious claim given how messy Israel's struggle with Islamic militants is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/02/israel1

[3] http://www.amnesty.no/Web.nsf/e94cc2698ef66716c1256a03006a4d...

[4] http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32057&Cr=pa...
I forget exactly why, but attempts to connect get ignored when MzScheme is in the middle of GCing. I'm going to start tossing old stuff back out of memory, which should mitigate the problem, but I've been too busy with YC lately to work on HN.
Reuters Reporter Assaulted Outside Apple's Chinese Supplier
Israel is interested in self-preservation, the United States is interested in imperialism. This is the root difference in the strategies; we stay in Iraq or Afghanistan because our leaders want to establish friendly governments there. If we left, the people would reject the sham governments we've installed and resort back to something that provides their needs, fundamentally, stability and security.

It's a privilege and a responsibility to live under what's considered a "free" government, and not everyone can handle that. You can't just waltz in and apply it universally across the globe and expect it to work, especially if the people of these other countries feel it was forced upon them. In these cases, there is too much contention and tribalism among the groups in the constituted nations to allow for a peaceful, useful democratic co-existence, which is one of the main reasons these governments do not form spontaneously in the area. The people there just can't handle that kind of system as it is, whatever your opinion on that system is, either for unwillingness, resentment, or inability, and forcing it only makes the problem worse.

You can't take a newborn and try to force it to walk. All that will do is harm the baby physically and harm your relationship psychologically. The capacity just isn't there. Even if you spend lots of money on harnesses and things that keep the baby in a bipedal stance, and cuffs and strings to lift his legs, it's not the same thing, and doing this only stands to worsen the situation overall. If you allow the child to develop these capacities naturally in his own time, everything is good and happy.

We have to allow the natural growth of these things. Our puppet governments don't work because the people don't accept them, and they especially will resent anyone who invades their territory to impose a "better way" on them. How would the US feel if China invaded and said, "This is for your own good, so that you can learn the glories of Communism, so that you are free from your oppressive corporatist leaders."?

Do you think, even if China is right there, any American will accept that? We would vow ourselves to destroy the invaders. Those in the Middle East do likewise.
No, I manually restart it when it gets slow.
Great answers to the questions I've been wondering about. I might have to give Heroku a try.

How's the database performance?
Shibumi - is beauty that makes an artist of the viewer
Study math or physics. You should be able to get a programming job out of college, if you still want to write code. I knew a really good programmer who studied Latin in college. Getting an entry level programming job with another degree shouldn't be too difficult.
Huh? You think they were knocked off by big oil companies?
By leaving sql you're foregoing the ease of development aspects that it has. It's like leaving python to program in c. Memory is cheap these days, for anything but the largest websites it makes more sense to use a relational database with all data in memory (and this will be as performant as any other solution you create).
>"I was something of a PHP hotshot in high school."

That's not at all what I mean to imply. I wasn't trying to come across as "I'm cocky because I know a few things" so much as "I'm depressed because I'm learning even less than what little I learned on my own in highschool"

>"We'll teach you Java syntax! This is how you do a variable assignment! Study that for the next week and we'll do complicated stuff like doing two variable assignments!"

Exactly.

>You're probably a good candidate for a double major in CS and a field which will teach you something useful. This is a good strategy for future employment prospects and, trust me, you can find something interesting and challenging. I did Japanese and it changed my life.

I've already started on that route.

>Think you know programming? Build stuff. You'll find out how much you have yet to learn.

I agree completely with you on this. After doing so, I really do realize my limitations, and I know that there is so much more I have to learn. It's just that to learn anything in any useful depth requires mostly self-study (since school is slowly-paced and bent towards getting you a low-rung C++ job when you graduate), which I enjoy more anyway. But when you realize that, you wonder what the courses are there for.
Just got my invite! It's a thing of beauty.
Hm, maybe I just got lucky with the server my DV is on (or maybe you were unlucky). Regardless, I think they really need to get their GS act together, though... it was by far the worst hosting experience I've ever had.

But my original point was that it's sad that my MediaTemple DV is a better value than Slicehost now... MT is not exactly a value host.
Ask HN: When to stop obsessing over conversion
I've read that for web products, maximum conversion rates are around 1%. Is this true? If I have a 1% conversion rate, and I'm having trouble getting more, should I stop worrying about it?
Retarded move. I have a public profile but no longer wanted Buzz. I had to re-create my profile after getting rid of Buzz.
Safety In Chat Rooms
Spending one’s free time in the chat rooms is one of the interesting pastimes for many of us. If you have not been using online chat rooms, it is high time that you started trying online chat to find friends and to keep in touch with your existing friends. However, when you go to online chat rooms you should take into consideration your personal safety. Though you do not have to be paranoid about online free chat rooms, you must exercise caution in your interaction with the other members.
go to local meetup groups for some of the technologies you are looking for.

if there aren't any local meetup groups start one.
Expanding into non-CS fields I believe is a great idea, as CS is a science, lots of great cross-polination of knowledge could be amazingly helpful one day. Pick something you find interesting and go for it. Even if it is not science related, many fields are in need of good programmers to move them along to the next level, and the more you know, the more valuable you may be.

However, you mention that you aren't getting the high 'A's anymore. If all your classes are so trivial, why not? I assume you've spoken to your professors, or the dean of CS? If not, i'd do so. They may be willing to bring you into some more challenging environments if you show an interest and the capabilities.

I dropped out of Uni, and have absolutely no regrets. But you sound like you would be really into it if it were more challenging, so maybe stick with it.

Is there a local tech company that you find is doing interesting work? If so, before dropping out, you might be able to work a program where they bring you on as a co-op with the University. That way you get the challenge along with true work experience, the business gets a deal, and gets to see how you work, and the university gets... I have no idea what the universities get, but in Canada, co-ops are pretty common, I assume they are in the US too.
if i were in your shoes, this is what i would do:

1) do the due diligence and research to determine if the CS classes got harder. see if i can test out of or just generally skip some of the classes, if it isn't too late. talk to your advisor.

2) consider taking on a double major while you're wading through the terrible CS classes. math, physics, engineering, philosophy, etc.. something that interests you. if CS ends up getting harder, you can always trim it back to a minor.

3) do more stuff on your own time. college affords you tons of free time, especially if you're coasting through easy classes. build a startup. start a business. contribute to open source projects.
Ecommerce Event Site: Designed and Coded by Founder
This is something I've strongly considered, but I know nothing of how 'difficult' it is to land such a job. There are so many neat things to do, but I can't really tell how many companies only care about skill and knowledge as opposed to having just "BS Computer Science" on a piece of paper.
I imagine a word processor's equivalent for a painter would be the easel, or maybe the brush handle, not necessarily the paint, the brush bristles, or the canvas.

It affects how the creator works, which indirectly affects the resulting work. However, it doesn't directly affect the actual output.

The novel, when printed, could be laid out and paginated differently, printed using different fonts, with no trace of the word processor used to create it.

A painter mixing paints could be to achieve a specific color or texture. The equivalent of that for a novelist could be studying word origins or creating a new language or new words (Tolkien?).
Yea- we've got a guy working with us now that lives only in Photoshop. He doesn't do illustration, he doesn't do animation, he doesn't code- just Photoshop and design. I'm not 100% certain that this is for the best. Many of his designs are difficult to implement and I feel that a stronger understanding of the code would help his designs a lot.
5 Reasons You Should Be Scared of Apple ?
This is hugely important. I wish I could +1 you 10x.

Understanding what you can do in CSS and what will require an image file or javascript to work is pretty important in designing an efficient site. I've seen designers with pretty looking ideas that are really difficult to implement. They say, "but you can do it right?" and it can be done, but they don't realize what they are asking for.
You do realise that college/university isnt so much about being spoon fed information but learning how to figure it out for yourself.

Keep up your grades (they will be worth more to you then you think later on) and start reading the papers your professors are writing. Ask them about them. Understand them. Doing this will open up all sorts of doors. I landed a job writing code for a Doctoral student by doing this.

Not only will you be learning more you will stand out in your professors minds because you took the initative to learn what they do outside of teaching students "for loops". This is the point of being there. Learning for learnings sake, not just to get a piece of paper at the end.
I've read that for web products, maximum conversion rates are around 1%.

This statistic needs slaying. It. Is. False. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930571
What happens to Sun's open-source software now?
It's been reliably fast, our DB response times are typically between 3 and 4 ms, though at the moment our DB is overpowered as we haven't yet transitioned our truly DB intensive stuff onto it quite yet (we're on a Fugu, which is a High CPU Medium, and the dataset we're using easily fits in memory).

That being said, working on Postgres has been noticably faster and more pleasant than MySQL. Complex queries in MySQL didn't benchmark as well as they did in Postgres.

As far as the shared plans go, we use a cheap shared (koi) DB for our staging stuff, it's been snappy enough, even when re-syncing it with our production DB which obviously puts on a massive write load, but I couldn't really extrapolate much from that, and I have no idea how variable the performance winds up being with multi-tenancy on the DB.

BTW, one of the joys of heroku really is db:push and pull. I can easily do:

heroku db:pull #Pull production database onto local machine
heroku db:push --app mystagingapp #Push the local DB onto the staging heroku db

Just be sure to do this with a script, the last you ever want to do is push your dev DB to the production site.
>However, you mention that you aren't getting the high 'A's anymore. If all your classes are so trivial, why not?

Because I look at the fact that we've done the same type assignment for 5 weeks now in CS class and decide I just don't care. Normally you'd think "Oh, it's easy, just finish it up!", but after the third of fourth time of doing the same thing, I just can't make myself do it. "Write a class that contains 3 variables name x,y,z. For next week, make sure they're named pizza, ham, eggs" and so on.

>"They may be willing to bring you into some more challenging environments if you show an interest and the capabilities."

That would really change my outlook. I'm not normally very outgoing, but I guess I could go ask a few of the professors.
Good article. While this was almost surely gov sponsored, it would be cool if this turned out to be a literal "killer startup". I'd love to see a startup that killed terrorists as a service. They could probably pull in decent revenue, and if they keep their alliance to the western world, would be serving humanity quite well.
Why Finding a Development Job Online Sucks
>You do realise that college/university isnt so much about being spoon fed information but learning how to figure it out for yourself.

If I came of as wanting this, then I apologize. In fact, all I really want is challenging, fast-paced course where I can do just that. Instead, I take courses where what you haven't learned in class is 'illegal', and what you actually have learned is very little.
True. There are a couple of good papers published on the concept of digital/computational wear, which is the basis for social filtering, that deal with document navigation.
Any chance that was At-Ease? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease

Such fond memories :)
What technology is necessary to gather that much video so quickly? Is that video feeding into a central hub? This is Dubai, a relatively tiny country. Did they build this technology themselves or did they license it.

The technology is CCTV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television. It is imported from all over the place and is probably not feeding into a central hub. In most countries UAE included it is found in all hotels, airports and Shopping Centers. The assassins for sure knew about it but because of their modus operandi did not worry about it. If you notice the end of the video says the hotel staff opened the room 17 hours later and that the latch was locked from the inside. They made the murder appear as a heart attack (other reports at the time) reported it as electrocution - probably killed him by inducing a heart attack via electrocution.

The team scattered to different places and all the names and nationalities mentioned are probably false. They also probably had multiple passports and on leaving Dubai appeared in another country with a different name.
I'm having trouble with Techcrunch loads as well. I'll click through a link (usually through HN), and the header will load. But most of the rest of the page hangs. (I call it "the spinnies," in honor of the small animated spinner in Chrome).
I refresh usually gets it working OK.
Great idea to find local talent with the right passion.
Great point - most of the best folks we've hired have been through personal referral but this time around we're looking to hire in a satellite office so much of it has had to be digital.
Someone screwed up in the backend. They'll figure it out because that is bad (or a deterrent ;-) ).
Do spies and assassins really wear fake beards?
> Please link this email then?

You're claiming familiarity yet are unaware of one of the passages quoted most often?

Google is your friend. (I missed the phrasing a bit.)

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2009/1128/as-copenhage...
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5AP3NI20091126

> > They can't produce it, so what definition of "not lost" are you using?

> They cannot personally produce it, but they can list where they got it and then you can do those sources.

You're backpedaling. Unfortunately for that position, they were the source of their "adjustments" and they've admitted that they can't reproduce those. And, it's not clear that the original sources still have the data.

> Now that physical observations are starting to replace pure models

You're rejecting them. In addition to rejecting the temperature data, you're rejecting the hurricane data. http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/

> I'm pretty sure the glacier datais not "overstated", anymore than time lapse photography with accurate scales and a simple chart of ice changes can be.

The question isn't whether some glaciers are shrinking. It's whether glacier changes as a whole are somehow different since 1934. They're not.
Ah I see. Remember that the course is designed that way so that everyone is on an equal footing (which makes marking easier).

In your case I would say stick with the course. University/College isn't about learning things from the subjects (you will find later most is useless) but it proves you are willing to stick it out and finish which does mean something to an employeer. If thats all you want then fine. However it seems you want to learn for learnings sake. In which case as I said, find out what your professors are doing and learn from them. Its the best place to learn.

Perhaps use your time to learn something you know nothing about. CPU design? Compiler design? AI? I spent my spare time learning how to Decode Captcha's because I thought it was interesting and looked like magic until I learnt how. Thats the point of being there.

Best of luck with it! Having been in the same situation I can understand the frustration. I found improving my social life and learning on my own projects helped me a lot in the first year. Then I did as many here have suggested, branched out and took Chinese Language (in China) which challanged me and kept my focus.

You can also take harder courses (if possible). Taking things like Theory of Computation and Algorithms and Data Structures were some of the harder but more satisfying courses I took while a student.
On LinkUp, we put together a search engine that searches job openings with all YC companies (http://www.linkup.com/lists/Y_Combinator_Startups). LinkUp only searches company websites for job openings (purpose being to keep out duplicates and scams), we use RPXNow to let people login and UserVoice to get feedback from our community.

Beyond use, jobseekers are hanging out on Craigslist, Dice and Indeed. They should be spending as much time on LinkedIn, because its the networking that lands 70% of all new hires.
It has to be phrased "wuz robbed," ie. "Damn, man, they stole yo' DVD player! You wuz robbed!"
It's not that impressive if the tapers knew where the suspects were going before hand.
I think the x2,...x9 were declared just as "documentation". Really early C didn't have any types that would get passed as anything but a single word on the stack, IIRC.

(as I was going to add before getting noprocrast-blocked)
> (and Google won't host video in Theora, as the video is too big at acceptable quality levels)

Chris DiBona of Google made that claim about Theora on the WHATWG mailing-list, but it turns out that Theora can produce nicer video than H.264 at the bitrates YouTube delivers:

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

Of course, it's quite possible that Theora is more processor intensive than H.264 for an equivalent bitrate, but in raw quality-per-byte Theora is perfectly usable for YouTube-quality video.
I think you're mistaken, because he said that he did take that into account, and the few random checks I did confirmed it.

For example, starting with the first card in the first example he has

A 10 4 2 K 9 8 9 8 10 8 9

A 4 is one hand, 10 2 is the second, K is burned

989 is the flop, 8 gets burned

10 is the turn, 8 gets burned,

9 is the river.
> That said, if your site is always going to be small, you'll be able to do a lot of database queries much faster with MySQL, Redis, or what have you than with App Engine.

If your site is small enough, you may be able to host for free on AppEngine. Even if it's not that small, AppEngine doesn't charge for availability, just for usage. In other words, you don't pay for idle time.