skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've personally dealt with "help vampires"; they're not rare, and they tend (in my experience) to fall into two groups:

1. People whose attitude is "I will remain as ignorant of as many things as possible for as long as possible". Try to point them to documentation which covers broad/fundamental concepts, or explain them yourself, and the reply you'll get is "I don't need to know all that, I just need to know how to do X". Learning enough to find your own way is, I've been told, simply a massive waste of time. Of course, later they'll be back with "now I need to know how to do Y", and again stubbornly insisting that there's no need to learn generalities...

2. "plz send me the code" -- people who won't even learn the specifics of a task at hand, but just keep badgering until someone hands them fully-working code. Point them at appropriate documentation and, nine times out of ten, they copy/paste the first code sample on the page and come back to say it didn't work.

I see, on average, about one or two of these every day on IRC and mailing lists. Unfortunately, these behaviors tend to be successful in the short term: sooner or later someone will step up and give the vampire what he wants, and the cycle will start all over again. Long-term, I don't know; I tend to be liberal with the /ignore, and I don't keep track of whether these people later evolve away from these behaviors.
Previously submitted:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821360

Also mentioned in this discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931273

It's also related to all the threads deploring that fact that it's nearly impossible to "tinker" with things these days, since things are so complicated you can't actually see how they work. Everything is a magic black box.

I sympathise with recent requests by pencil (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pencil) for a path to enlightenment in physics/math/electronics. How do we get from intelligent but unknowledgable to being able to understand and perhaps build computers?

It's a long road.
William Gibson's prescience continues to frighten me. Unless the causality goes the other way, then it frightens me even more.

"Chaos, Mr. Who," Lupus Yonderboy said. "That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick."

Or, in the parlance of our times, they do it for the lulz.
For the multi-block conditional, there is this idiom:

def assuming cond
Thread.current[:last_cond] = cond
Thread.current[:last_value] = (yield if cond)
end

def otherwise
if Thread.current[:last_cond]
Thread.current[:last_value]
else
yield
end
end

def alternately_if cond, &b
otherwise { assuming cond, &b }
end

def how_big x
assuming x < 3 do
"small"
end
alternately_if x < 7 do
"medium"
end
otherwise do
"large"
end
end

10.times {|z| puts how_big z }

Seems a bit sketchy though. It could be made cleaner by making them methods of an object that holds the state, but I guess that is starting to defeat the purpose.
Is that minified/compressed?
I don't really use social networks a great deal. I'm outside your target market.
In the demo, they actually showed you that in Google Buzz you can put GPS at work and it will tell the best possible location and only after you have pressed "OK" it will make it your location.

Google Latitude lets you update your status manually and I tend to put it at city level.
It's time to kill off the Dotcom Hero CEO
People think you need your right leg to walk but it's the left leg that's really important.
It's an unexpected change for me at least, because I've posted on blogspot blogs in the past from my Google account, which makes the comments link to your Google profile if you have one. I expected that the result would be (and it was) a pseudonymous comment with just my first name, which linked to a blank Google profile. If Google sticks my real name and my friends lists on my Google profile without warning, those old comments are retroactively linked to my IRL identity, which wasn't what I expected when I posted them years ago.
In the default theme, the disabled checkbox and radio buttons look too much like the enabled ones, especially when they're arranged like on the landing page, i.e. enabled / checked / disabled. Otherwise, sexy.
So the author opts-in to share her location information, then complains that Google is compromising her privacy when Buzz uses that information?
I avoided Twitter for a long time, and Facebook for an even longer time, and eventually settled on using them in similar-but-different ways:

* On both I only friend/follow people I actually know and like. I use both primarily to keep up with/talk to my actual friends. But it's a different circle of friends on each service.

* Facebook is locked down (insofar as that's possible), and I keep that down to people I knew in my college days since that's where they all are. I have 26 Facebook friends, and I'm quite proud of that.

* Twitter is my "public face". Mostly I'm following people who live here in town, plus some tech-industry friends scattered around the country. Pickiness about who those people are, though, has left me with a rather lopsided ratio (following about 90, and somehow followed by around 900).

The biggest difference is that public/private distinction; if you try to send me something on Facebook (assuming it lets you), I'll just ignore it. On Twitter I do pay attention to mentions and @-replies, and often that's an easy way for people to ping me when needed.

LinkedIn I still haven't made my mind up about, but probably because I'm not currently looking for a job.
TV Gorge Brings Location Restricted TV Beyond the Barriers
Google Wave in action: Real-world case studies
Highly doubtful if Adobe will ever come out with a clear answer, meanwhile - wanted to point you to this comment exchange on another Adobe blog:

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/01/sympathy_for_the_devil....

Quote:

Your comment is extremely interesting because it
seems to be the first time Adobe has publicly acknowledged
that the real reason for that DMCA takedown was the
encryption scheme NOT *potential* copyright infringement.
Meaning that Adobe deliberately mis-used the DMCA and mis-led
the entire community about the real reasons for the takedown
right?
Coming Soon: Opera Mini for iPhone
If he's added 200 friends in the last month and has a bunch of friends that he doesn't actually know (since by his own admission, he doesn't turn down any friend requests), then he's using Facebook incorrectly and it's no wonder he doesn't find it useful. Facebook is at its best when you can see what's going on with your actual friends. If you have hundreds of non-friends cluttering your feed, that interest evaporates.
No problem; It's a great interview and I figured other people were looking for it. :)
No offense, but you dilute the term 'terrorism' when you use it so wantonly. The point of attacks like this is to be generally annoying, disruptive, and maybe embarrassing (to government officials in this case).

TERRORism is about using terror to affect an outcome. Suicide-bombing is a terror attack. Kidnapping people and beheading them is a terror attack. Running around with a bunch of AK-47s, holding small villages hostage (raping,murdering,etc) is terrorism. Crap like this barely registers.
No, it's stupid because a 10 line program isn't the least bit representative.
Maybe because politicians obsess on selling the features of their "tough on crime" policy versus the benefits of the rehabilitation such as lower re-offending rates and cheaper execution. It's an easier sell and doesn't take much explanation.
Uses own "theme creator" instead of plugging into jquery's unparalleled Theme Roller :-/
> I removed $200k value from our software

That sounds like a bad thing...
Blackboard to be removed in favor of Moodle at San Jose City College
They may have the whole 'we are everyone' thing going on, but there is no mastermind or organization. There are countless ideas such as this floated, but the only ones that actually happen are the ones that get a critical mass of people interested enough in them to participate and recruit others to participate.

Besides, the whole "we are everyone, don't fuck with us" thing was unrealistic. Do you really think that a government official wouldn't just notify the authorities in such a case?
The Rank Amateur
They could also do what 3 have done in the UK with Skype - all their new phones have a 3-produced Skype app preloaded which appears to work just like any other installation of Skype.

Behind the scenes, updating your contact list and sending / receiving IMs are done over the data network - however, when you make or receive a Skype call it's routed over the voice network and simply not charged.
Kudos for watching The Power of Nightmares, but did you miss the part where they pointed out [b]that these organizations are largely fictional and used as a tool by governments to appear more necessary than they are[/b]? The government isn't working on how to deal with fictional "flat, loosely organized and decentralized groups", it's working on how to make it look like we need government protection from the ultimate boogie man.
I hate the fact that Google have decided to put the social networking feature into my email utility. Noone should mess with my email! I want just email. I really hope there is a way to disable that feature.
Well, in this case anon is the botnet.
Programmers never start an article about web programming with "First, we're going to need a web server. No problem, though, because we can quickly whip one up using..." (Well, maybe if they use Lisp.)

Here's my Design 101: OSS web design exists (StyleShout for nice web2.0 stuff, oswd.org for the rest). Dirt freaking cheap web design exists. (themesforest.net or any of a thousand competitors.) Spend five minutes, grab something you like, get back to solving problems for customers. If you want to do something more pretty later, you can always pay a real designer and then tweak the view layer a bit.
Is Ken Hayworth Building the Instruments for Uploading Brains?
Ask HN: What gaming console should I bye?
What do hackers prefer when it comes to gaming consoles? Do hackers hate XBox the way they do Windows?

Is nitendo Wii is really fun to play? From what I have seen in malls the graphics looks to tiny winy.
I see no reason those XHP templates couldn't just be cached as regular old PHP. It's a nice tool to have during development only.
Amateurs are a useful check on the system because they will never submit a grant proposal to the committee chaired by the co-investigator of the paper they're reviewing, and hence can make aggressive, confrontational demands of his code like running it.
"Just because Google cant find it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist" - Albert Einstein.
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They'll find something/anything they can on the kid's computer to charge him with a crime. Maybe a thumbnail of a kiddie porn image in his web cache because he happened to click the wrong link or view the wrong page?
It's different, and that's the point I wanted to make. A botnet owner could use tor to hide his own computer's address, and let the bots flood freely. Even if a few were traced, he doesn't care. Tor gives him privacy (for his master computer) without compromising his attack potential.

A 4chan poster can't do the same thing. He's attacking from his own computer. Either he attacks through tor (slow) or he doesn't (unsafe). Hence why I thought the post above does not make sense for anon's case: he can't hide his traces without channelling the attack through Tor itself.
There aren't really any "hardcore games" on the wii. Those that are are mostly single player and don't take much advantage of the wii remote besides the pointer. You also won't find many online games (which is broken anyway due to the friend code restrictions).

Most casual/social games have simplified or too forgiving controls. They're nice at first but you'll grow tired of them soon. And unlike what you may believe, there isn't that much quality casual games either (besides from nintendo). Heck, even the mario/sonic olympic games are waggle fests.

They then introduced wii motion plus, which is supposed to give you greater control. It does. But there's hardly any games for it.

Anyway, there's a rumor of a Wii HD console.. Nintendo has a conference somewhere at the end of february. Might stick it out if you want.

Xbox 360 or PS3 are pretty much even. Most games come out on both platforms. They both have some interesting tech coming out this year. (Natal and the ps3 wand).
An odd post from a Website that depends on many games being released per year to give people a reason to go back there.
You don't? You're on this site so I imagine you dream of having your own start up some day, no? How would you like it if every single idea you have ends up with you working it to 80% completion only to have Google release a free version of it. Every time. Not freemium, not pay-as-you-go. Totally free. Would you like that?

If you say yes then I think you need to take a step back and consider the possibility that you've been brain washed.
Thanks for the blast from the past. I remember Keith Ohlfs and his Pixelsight project, but had no idea he used to work at NeXT.

His site was definitely one of the major influences in my learning about programming for the web, learning Perl by example, and going on to get a degree in Computer Science. So, kudos and credit where credit is due.
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What happens to your data when you die?
I think that it's more of an interesting piece because he found something that he excelled at while he was behind bars. He was even able to be productive while still in prison.

Not many people will really find a profession that they click with the way that he has regardless of whether or not they are in jail.
Interesting service. Ironically, when I try to 'Open an account for free' IE8 (standard employer issue) reports that the certificate is untrustworthy.
There's probably some quirky British humour going on there, and actually acts to remind people to visit more to keep up with the huge amount of stuff being released.

As a non-game player, I was under the impression that there was only one or two big games released a year, based on the adverts I see on the tube. It's quite amazing how my internet is so different from a gamer's.
What about cables? How does it handle that kind of obstacle?
I think this is false. I think a determined CEO [well, founding team, but the CEO usually gets the headlines] is the rock solid foundation of any company. The team and advisors build upon that foundation. The founding team is the key factor in terms of success.
It's not, but a lot of the size comes from a PNG sprite which is 30K. With yuicompressor (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/) and pngcrush (http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/) I got everything down to 37K.
"The most effective people at finding errors in scientific reasearch are scientists: it was professional glaciologists, after all, who exposed the error in the IPCC 2007 case study of Himalayan glaciers." To exclude the amateur is to deny a large part of the history of science.

Well, he's not saying that a scientist is always right and an amateur is always wrong. He's just saying that a scientist is more likely to find errors in research material, which I think sounds reasonable since they're supposedly trained to do it. Then there's e.g. the good ol' "seeing what you know is there instead of what's actually there" effect which works against those who've spent a lot of time with something.

Good find on the bad data, btw! Real science is in the numbers, not in the propaganda surrounding them.
The explanations in the articles are several decades out of date. Nowadays, parents and schools have other focuses than the intricacies of bowing, and companies routinely hold classes on this (and, more importantly, "keigo", the formally polite grammar and vocabulary) for newly-hired graduates.
There is a very easy and obvious way :)
Define "barely adequate".

Because "adequate" can have vastly different meanings, depending on what you use your GPU for. I use it mostly for eye-candy at the GUI level. I play a bit with Google Earth and that's about all. My Intel GMA can do that just fine.

If, however, I were into heavy gaming, I would find this setup unusable (down to the fact I don't run Windows).

I am not sure how well an Intel GMA would fare if it were used as a number cruncher. I suspect it wouldn't excel, but, compared to x86 vector hardware, even a lowly GPU should hold it's own well.
I can think of a few more reasons too:

1) Rehabilitation and its benefits can't be as simply explained. In politics, where the other side will be scrutinising your every word for something they can twist out of context, simple = good. You want a simple message and you want to repeat it endlessly.

2) There are powerful interests that benefit from the current prison system - private prison operators and prison guard unions to name two.

3) Rehabilitation won't always work. If you endorse it, and even one prisoner gets out and rapes/murders someone your opponents will drag your name (and career) through the mud. "Person X would still be alive today if not for Candidate Y!" sort of things.
On the other hand your users will lose flexibility and choice if you force some property. If you are unsure of your design, why not follow the users preference then instead of forcing something you guess looks nice. Specifying serif/sans-serif is always somewhat ok, but I don't see the need to be more specific.

edit: what I meant was if you aren't going to put any thought on actually selecting some nice font then I don't see any point in specifying some generic fonts (like arial/verdana in the example) just to not use the default. You end up looking generic anyways, but when using default fonts (serif/sans-serif), then you look at least the way your users prefer.

edit2: bit unrelated; I noticed that the example specifies font-size(and other properties) in pixels (px). I'd think that's bad practice, as I try to promote resolution independence.
I do agree that that quote doesn't tell the whole story, if you read the professor's entire letter you'll see what I'm talking about.
Btw, I found this hack on Google Wave. It is a simple phishing attack, but could be serious as it is triggered from inside Google Wave...
More details at http://blog.nparashuram.com

Demo : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luHo8gz_o48
Just imagine setting up a beowulf cluster on a TV-store using nothing but a remote ;-)
Google is a better MS in the same way that MS was a better IBM. And for me personally Google is synonomous with NIH. I mean, a search/ads company making their own Phone? Operating system??? Router?!
Site down?
"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire

Look, this saying is by Bill Gates, should have been made in the last 30 years, it returns three pages of results, and yet none of them are mentioning a source. Some are referencing each other, and some are also including the '640k should be enough for anyone' legend. Yes, it's not 100%, but the indications are not good. The ultimate counterargument of course would be a source.
Interview with startup founder Derek Johnson of Tatango
Belgian advertising agencies: using multi-page flash applets to deliver black and white, 16pt text in Verdana.

They could have done the same editing the stock "It works!" page in Apache.
RIPE NCC Membership Growth
VB DataTable Sort
Very cool. I'd guess you still want to reboot every once in a while to clean up memory, but since you won't have any security updates pending you can schedule the reboot at your leisure.

The pessimist in me says to wait until a botched patch causes systems worldwide to crash and burn, though. It would also be interesting to find out more about Ksplice's own security as they are now in a position to create the mother of all DoS attacks.
Good point. I hadn't thought of it from that point of view. The article is certainly more effective as a hint to visit more often, than a cry to the gaming industry. Come to think of it, they did publish this under the humor section.
I don't think it will be such a big hit. Current IGPs from Intel can decode 2 full HD video streams (http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/quick-reference-gui...). The next generation is supposed to have 2 such (or better) GPUs side by side on a chip (http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17576/1/). These IGPs will be enough for even higher number of people than today. How many people need to play games in uber resolutions, anyway?
Disclaimer: I'm a scientist, so maybe I'm biased. But then again, I'm often a vocal critic of the system myself, so maybe not.

Science is actually admirably egalitarian. That's not one of the things I think is wrong with it. The heavily politicized branches might not be egalitarian; I have no experience with them. But in general, you don't need to be a member of any professional organizations or have any other credentials to submit your work to journals and conferences (which is how we transact our business.) Many journals employ double-blind reviewing, in which case even unintentional discrimination based on credentials is unlikely or impossible.

Nevertheless, scientists might often give the impression of not wanting to let amateurs into the 'club'. Why is this? It is simply an issue of bandwidth. Think about this: for each amateur, like the author, who had something to contribute, how many do you think thought they had something to contribute but were mistaken? If you guessed a hundred thousand you'd be in the right ballpark. I've seen it in many different areas.

For example, the number of people trying to submit "proofs" of P != NP, (or worse, P = NP) is just ridiculous. Some are well-intentioned although ignorant, and others are just cranks. Some fields of research attract more amateur claims than others, but whichever field you look at, the amateurs greatly outnumber scientists, and the vast majority of them are mistaken.

So what do we do? We use a simple filter. If you speak our language, we'll listen to you. This is what appears to the lay public as anti-amateur. But it's not, really. All you have to do is to learn some simple definitions and terminology set forth in a straightforward way in previous papers, to prove that you've done your homework. Then write up what you have to say and we'll be happy to give it a read. Sure, like every heuristic, it's not perfect; sometimes there are false negatives. But there really isn't an alternative. Without a filter, all we'd ever be doing is debunking crackpot theories.

I acknowledge that much of this probably doesn't apply to climate change "science," which is a special case. But there's been a lot of criticism of science in general, and I wanted to set the record straight. It's important to distinguish between what's really broken and what appears broken, otherwise we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The Temp Life
comedy, temp, job, webseries
Amateurs scientists are still scientists, using similar methods and acting in a constructive way. If nothing else many eyes effect makes them useful - particularly in astronomy.

Journalists attempt to generate controversy to increase page views. Myles Allen was correct that corrections to climate models have come from scientists amateur or otherwise not journalists writing copy.
I'm pretty sure Einstein had a PhD (I believe it was on Brownian motion). Hardly a rank amateur. Patent offices don't hire Joe Soap to review patent application.
Thanks, this clears things up considerably.