skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm coming late to commenting on this, but I have to ask whether the cultivation of a sense of place is really a good idea. An "idea economy" functions best as an urban economy, preferably one composed along the lines proposed by Jane Jacobs; but the author of this work, as far as I can tell at least, has a "neo-agrarian" outlook that thinks in terms of villages, not cities -- if the defining characteristic of a village, including a "cluster of villages city" like Somerville in Boston, or Tokyo in the Edo period, is that one is fundamentally rooted to the village and unwilling to leave it even to pursue greater opportunities. Geographic immobility is not the friend of intellectual enterprise; just ask Paul Graham, who requires all Y Combinator startups to move to Silicon Valley (IIRC) for their initial stage.

So I think this proposal would make things worse, not better; it would be better to cultivate the "moral roots" of the final stage of the Freudian model of psychology (or of Zen, if it comes to that), which permit the individual to function well whatever his environment and whatever his social group or acquaintances.

Let me also point out that highly rooted village life encourages clannishness and asabiyya (the nasty variety, the type condemned by Muhammad, which includes nationalism, racism, and xenophobia), while rootless, urban life discourages it -- in favor of either purely personal selfishness, or objective moral standards. Obviously, the second, not the first, are what's to be pursued; but objective standards are much harder to attain in the village model of life.
The Great Q&A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014 (Aardvark, Hunch, StackOverflow, and Quora)
I'm sure this will go up once they start offering the Nexus One for Verizon.
It's when you downshift your bike, pedal hard and fast, and say "woooo!" in a high voice.

(I just made that up.)
The great advantage of the JVM is it has tons of libraries. This means that any competitor such as HLVM will have to fight very hard to gain traction.
Bastards. That's not without risk, if you had fallen your sprained knee might have turned a lot worse. Reflexive response to a fall is not something you can overrule even when injured.
I don't think anyone sees something wrong with Pitchfork here, just Tumblr.
Were the labor market closer to a true market of equals, that might work.

But it isn't and it doesn't.
Customer Acquisition & Monetization: Keys to a Successful Business Model
I'll now proceed to go off on a tangent from something that's already just barely topical for HN...

Our brains attempt to create heuristics for us, we have to actively work to supplant them with logic.

I generally agree with this. The benefits of civilization make most of these heuristics unnecessary, and more of a liability. But I wish that people advocating this would see its application in further areas.

In his The Fatal Conceit, Hayek talks about how our evolution within small tribes gave us the instinct to be compassionate with others, but that in today's wide world, that instinct just can't scale far enough. This is another area where we need to reject the emotional reactions that are pre-programmed into our brains, and think more rationally about whether what the little voice says really makes sense.
Sometimes I think MG Seigler is inventing things just to write an article.

So Android has a problem because it is innovating faster than the competition? Android is doomed because there are too many good phones?

The HTC Desire is not better than Nexus One. Sure the hardware specs are almost the same but Desire has the Sense UI. This means that it may have Android 2.1 right now but it will not have the latest and greatest version of Android right away.

All the latest updates on Android reaches Nexus One first. That is the big advantage. If you have a Nexus One right now, you should not be disappointed.
More likely: Be aware, your identity is easily assumed and 'bad people' may ruin your life very casually.

He's had an object lesson in the consequences, it lost him a ton of money, you really can't fault the guy from trying to recoup some of his losses with his new-found knowledge.
How we built Secret London in a weekend
Congrats to them. I really like dropbox myself have it on most all my computers.
Genetic code 2.0: Life gets a new operating system
I wonder if the hundreds of people wanting to log into Facebook via the Read Write Web search result are an artifact of Google just having such huge traffic.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126659
I don't want to give away the specific device we are using, but it's something that does everything in custom hardware and sits on the edge of the network.

Believe it or not, we've had botnet attacks that took down $100k Cisco routers. Nasty :(
My argument still stands: the hurdle for anyone serious about cloaking is easy to work around.
if it turns out the consumers are using your tool for a different purpose, it is in your own interest to understand this new use and optimize your tool to fulfill that previously unnoticed problem.

Amen! That last bit is quotable!
A Year in the life of a SaaS accounting web app – Numbers and Strategy
On the Morality of Global Warming Criticism
What the public doesn't know is that more people die annual from the radioactivity released from nuclear plants

Did you mean coal plants?
This is one of the other points I think is confusing. What exactly is being shared out of reader? I use reader, I've got it linked to my profile, but when I view my profile as an anonymous user it just says no shared items. I never used the sharing feature of Reader before, so I really have no clue what it did previously. Is that was was shared automatically on enroll? I definitely don't see any way for anyone to see what feeds are in my reader.
>more people die annual from the radioactivity released from nuclear plants than have died from every nuclear plant accident combined.

you mean coal plants i presume?
Anyone else marginally entertained by this being written on Buzz?
"... to help build the first US nuclear power stations for 30 years."

Shouldn't that be the first US nuclear power stations in 30 years?
Homosapien Metacity Customizer - Costumize and download your theme online
Google Buzz API: AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, WebFinger etc
Yes, thank you for catching that, made the edit.
Awesome work, guys. I propose that, at least in HN circles, the official plural of Dropbox should be Dropboxen.
It'd do good to subtly suggest what parts of this typographic info-graphic are tappable.
As long as the US leads in suburbia, we will follow in last mile bandwidth.
Envisioning decentralized @replies and notifications with WebFinger
if you read the stuff that accompanies the chart and data (sources, etc), you'll see that the maximum time limit is the exact same, or however long it takes the police to reasonably investigate an incident.

however, if you're not formally arrested, you're not allowed to be kept unwillingly. if you ask to leave, they must either let you go, or formally arrest you. or, if they ask you to stay and you say yes, they can do whatever, up to the max time period.
I just looked up a 6502 CPU at Jameco.com for $5.95 and I know they are available on the surplus market even cheaper. Buying from surplus dealers you should be able to find everything you need. My WAG is that you could probably build an Apple ][ for about $50 - $100 without a keyboard (I haven't priced a scan keyboard in years, but you can build one from discrete pushbuttons if you needed to). I don't know if you can find source code for the ROMs though.

Google/check library for a cheap 1980's "Introduction to microprocessors" type book and find the Apple schematics online somewhere. It's a learning experience, but not particularly difficult once you get started. You can get some basic CPU/ROM/RAM/blinkenlights handwired and running a basic POST in a weekend if you already know 6502 assembly. A week if you don't!
As much as a frog enjoying a bath with slowly rising temperature, I am definitely amused.
The word "pitchfork" is not something that can be trademarked

Actually, it is a trademark. Just like the words "Apple" and "Java".

I'm not sure if that's relevant to subdomains, though.
>That’s because Tumblr stole my subdomain and gave (sold?) it to Pitchfork Media Inc. Keep in mind that the word “pitchfork” is not a proprietary name, it is a noun dating back to the year 1364, so they had no legal right to the word or the subdomain. It clearly wasn’t a case of impersonation as none of my posts had anything to do with music. If there was some kind of content quality threshold that failed to be met which led to my blog’s demise, then 98% of Tumblr should now be blank.

FWIW this is poor reasoning. Whether a word is a noun, in common usage or of great age is not relevant to it's use as a trademark. A trademark has to be distinctive when used to indicate the origin of a specific category goods/services - pitchfork is distinctive in the field of music (I'm not sure which NICE class that would be) and indeed in most fields except farming AFAIK without specific research.

The only way to determine if Pitchfork has a legal right to prevent others using this subdomain commercially one must inspect the TM records in the appropriate [geographical] domain. Pitchfork certainly can't demand to use the subdomain but they could prevent its commercial use.

I expect this was well within the T&C of Tumblr.
In case anyone else was curious about the difference between unlawful and illegal: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1609/whats-the-diff...
TSA is killing tourism to, from and through America.
Five Ways to Improve Your Company's Efficiency
has dropbox gotten acquisition offers? i feel like if I was microsoft I'd be chomping at the bit to integrate this into windows as a major selling point.
"Rubin writes that the TSA, in its apology, said Ryan should have been taken into a private area and swabbed for traces of explosive materials."

How is wearing leg braces probable cause for terrorism?
It'd be interesting to benchmark this trick against commercial grade systems.

The hardest part of finger print analysis is not the matching but figuring out if the finger is still attached to the body that it originally came with, and then if the print is still attached to the original finger.
Little bit of adjective inflation here? I mean, it basically just uploads and downloads files.
1) High-res voice and video over IP.

2) Streaming HD movie rentals

3) All-services-in-the-cloud - store even my larger chunks of data (like music, movies, etc) on a cloud service.

4) Taking this one step further, if the bandwidth really is that cheap and plentiful (and reliable), this may obsolete the concept of having your own media... Why bother keeping tens of gigabytes of music locally when any song you want can be downloaded in a tenth of a second when you want to listen to it? Why keep even more movies when you can download whatever you want instantly?

One of the consequences of this would be to make storage a whole lot cheaper by demolishing the demand for it. Only big cloud providers would bother buying hard drives anymore.

5) Why not stream the entire OS experience? Turn every computer into a dumb terminal that just displays images sent by a server that never crashes, never has slowdowns, can scale in parallel indefinitely... could make most applications instant. Never wait for a photoshop filter again. It would turn the OS licensing model on its head.

6) Obsolete TV for good - with that much streaming content being that ubiquitous, why would even TV stations bother with broadcasting on the air waves? HD content with personalised ads for everyone.

Edit: Note that I am assuming a high-quality 1gbps link - i.e., 50ms latency or so. Not some crazy hack with huge buffering in the ISPs that means that while they technically deliver 1gbps, they only do so for static content downloaded by a lot of people - I don't call that a 1gbps internet link, I call it a TV.
Looks beautiful, but I don't see a Hacker News icon anywhere in their list of available sites.
It would be great if Safari (and the others) had an option of either the page content (which is what they do now), or just a nice image like fav4.
Agreed that's how it should work.

Sadly reality never works that way; hence laws :)
Hacker news is lame, and getting lamer by the minute.

I get knocked down for questioning the pricing model for a single server? For a three server setup, it's $612 a year.

Nagios isn't that hard to setup or maintain. At $612, at $50/hour, you can't setup nagios yourself in 12 hours?
An apology in this situation is like giving the kid a towel rack. Giant corporations apologize to cover themselves, that does not make up for what they did and it's not going to change the way they act in the future.
"Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are"
- Richard Feynman

I doubt Feynman's reaction to the boy's letter would have been:
"I also see the making of self-righteous, arrogant know-it-all....Seriously, he's telling scientists how to do their job".

There's not a single thing in the boy's letter that is factually incorrect. It's merely a statement of opinion accompanied by some supporting data.

The child's name is in my comment. If you don't like something someone says then critique their opinion but try not to be personal and rude, it only makes you sound bitter.
What evidence do you have of that? (I'm genuinely curious)

Anecdotally, while agree that they are a complete joke, I certainly haven't flown any less recently.
Ah, but all of those 104 reactors are at least 30 years old--if modern reactors aren't significantly more efficient, I'll be sorely disappointed.
You'd think so, right? It's a little more than that though. Dropbox is useful to me for the following reasons:

--It is an easy way to share music with a couple friends who aren't tech savvy. Installing it was easy for them and I was able to say "just drag it from iTunes to your dropbox folder" and it worked. Other ways of sharing were too complex.

--It keeps software that doesn't have built in syncing synced. I use it to sync 1Password and more importantly (to me) PersonalBrain between my home and work computers. It works fast and flawlessly.

--It's an easy way to transfer files from home/work. Sometimes I'll download an app or something that I know I'll end up redownloading again at home. With dropbox I just throw it in there and when I get home I don't have to find the download link and wait for it to download, I just open the folder and there it is.

--It keeps a few files I use all the time available from anywhere. Mostly ebooks, a couple videos and a few documents and templates (resume etc.).

Overall though it's the ease of use and reliability that keeps me using it. Even if it could do all that but was a pain to use/install I'd probably still be searching for other solutions.
The HLVM implementation is for everyone to see at http://hlvm.forge.ocamlcore.org/ . There is a public mailing list at https://lists.forge.ocamlcore.org/pipermail/hlvm-list/ and I am sure Jon Harrop would be more than happy to discuss all technical details there.

Mono OTOH might be okayish for C#, but for instance F# so far has no open source implementation. Also Mono is lacking w.r.t. TCO and GC, so its not even close to a decent VM for functional languages.
> Couldn't that describe anyone that was planning on moving, working, or doing business (as in making deals with companies there while operating in the U.S.) there?

Yes, it could.

Short of perfect intelligence, we can't know who is planning to do something bad on a plane.

Suppose that we had some markers that were more common among folks who were more likely to cause problems. What should we do?

I've often thought that there should be a statutory payment to anyone who gets searched, wiretapped, what have you, regardless of the outcome of the search or the reason for doing it. Since those searches are for "our" benefit, why shouldn't we pay the folks who are being inconvenienced?
As it stands, it seems the only real demand for ultra-highspeed (40Gb/s+) is in the data centers of the facebooks and googles of the world trying to shuffle around all the data between their own servers. I don't think the average home user really cares about moving around petabytes of metadata around a network so I can't really come up with any ideas based on exisiting needs for such speed.

Other than multiple HD streams and telepresence type stuff I am at a loss for ideas that don't completely ignore efficiency of the traffic. Certainly, I can saturate a 1Gbps link, but I can typically do the same with less bandwidth. You'll probably see a lot more of consumer cloud based computing and such assuming the latency and whatnot is also solved in the process.
Exactly. People seem to take this 'law' business much too serious, we are discovering nature, we deduce the laws, and when our deductions are imperfect nature teaches us by showing instances of laws being broken.

Relativistic effects break classical mechanics, but only because of previous imperfect understanding. It all boils down to available evidence, as long as there is no evidence to the contrary a law is considered 'solid', less perfect but still practically usable even if there is a better one.

When computing how long it will take an elevator to crash in to the basement of a building you won't need relativistic effects accounted for. You probably don't have time for that anyway ;)
I mean, it basically just uploads and downloads files..

You've just gone to the opposite extreme.
I'd put it this way: If you find yourself spending significant time inside a debugger, you should probably rethink how you (or your teammates) have been developing code. Time is certainly better spent preventing bugs with unit tests, asserts, thorough documentation & thoughtful design.

That said, on the occasion when a bug does crop up (which will hopefully be rarely), the debugger is usually the fastest way to find the problem. A good programmer will be sure to root cause the problem rather than fixing the symptom. Debuggers are indispensable tools for working up the causality chain.
Would be interesting to know what % of those users are paying any money.

I really hope they get their API sorted soon, i've been holding off looking at alternatives because it's always "close" but now i'm starting to consider other options.
Fixed, thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I'm 1024 days today too!
Viewing the mouse tracks you leave behind
Microsoft does already have Live Mesh ( http://www.mesh.com/ ) which is a very similar product/service. Live Mesh does per folder synching and you can invite other users to share or read only on an individual folder basis.
It is indeed a great read! I've been reading a lot of books by Peter F. Hamilton lately, if you like Greogory Benford I think it's likely you would love Hamilton!
Ask HN: is foundrs.com a good domain name for my startup?
I had such great success with the feedback from HN before that I'll do it again: do you think foundrs.com is a good domain name for my startup? You may know us under our current name: fairsoftware.net. We allow people with startup ideas to find co-founders and offer them virtual stock-options, backed by a legally binding contract similar to the GPL, except it's for profit.

It's just that everyone keeps making fun of our .NET name, and also of the fact that people think we do software. We don't. So maybe a change of name is in order.

We came up with a few ideas, and one of them is foundrs.com. As you know it's hard to find any .COM name that is still available. This one was. We had other ideas that I won't share so I don't influence the discussion too much.

Thanks!
But surely dark matter would evolve complex systems the same way that normal matter has... It would probably just be very different to the things we are used to...
I didn't provide any evidence because I haven't got the research to back my claim up. The only way to gather real data would be to publicly proclaim some random blocks of calendar dates to be TSA free and see how much tourism changed during that time. I'm sure it would be interesting to see how much terrorism changed over that period (any effects would probably be exaggerated).

I can tell you it affects my personal travel plans (I try to avoid a stopover in the US on the way from NZ to London for example) and it makes me feel more negatively about the US overall. It doesn't take much to tip the balance from "I'd love to go" to "I'd like to go, but xyz location seems easier / more fun"

Since I live outside the US, I have an actual choice - if you lived inside the US you are pretty much forced to tolerate the TSA whenever you fly. I read a lot of horror stories online, and I don't like being near people with sidearms.
But unless its some kind of weird reverse psychology, it seems pretty strange that an actual terrorist would want to bring attention to himself by carrying cards with the words 'bomb' and 'terrorism' on them. It just doesn't seem like a very realistic situation to me.
Yeah, it basically just uploads and downloads files.

Except I didn't have to teach my mom how to use it.

Except that I never have to worry if it's working correctly.

Except that it works on every platform I use.

Except that it's just a folder on my computer.

These aren't features you put on a retail box, but they are the features that set Dropbox apart. "Just works" is incredibly easy to say but incredibly hard to engineer.
1) High-res voice and video over IP.

Yes. And by high-res, I want fully immersive experience: the feeling of being there. I spend so much time on skype or on the phone talking to people remotely: it's BAD.

2) Streaming HD movie rentals

This only requires 20 Mbit/s tops. It's already available today in several countries. I don't need 1 Gbit for that.
For sure. And really... as staggering as the hundreds of comments were on RWW, a few hundred people is not really a large percentage of the FB user base. It's an incredibly small percentage.
it basically just uploads and downloads files

You obviously have no idea just how many things can go wrong in that apparently simple process. With dropbox, it just doesn't go wrong. That's what's awesome about it - flawless, works every time, and quasi-instant.

It's 20x quicker, if i want to give a file to my cofounder who's sitting next to me, to put it in our shared dropbox than to use any other method of sharing. Every other method of sharing takes at least 10-20 seconds or more. Dropbox takes half a second. (only exception being, of course, very large files, where usb sticks still help)
Information overload over the ages.
You mean you haven't heard about the new wave of disabled child terrorists?

This is so sick it makes me pretty upset. That poor kid has a lot in life to deal with already, these people have turned a brief rest from those issues in to a nightmare of humiliation and fear.

A letter of apology ? After a year ? And only because of media pressure ? Disgusting.
somebody who is really happy with his wheelchair
Acumen Reading List "to foster empathy, self-awareness and a business mindset"
Wonder if this will disincent private sector innovation and investment.
Facilitating TOTAL User Control of ALL Internet Content
A player set their username to "Google" - What should our policy be?
http://ispyapp.com/profile/google/

This is the first occurrence we've had of a player setting their username to an obviously trademarked term. Considering the recent Tumbler controversy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129450) and this community's insight into these types of issues it seemed appropriate to ask for some feedback. Thanks.
Especially since they said "I'm sorry, we should have done xyz demeaning and frightening testing in private instead"
I have, I have tons of friends stateside but I've vowed to stay away until normality returns. If it never does than too bad, there are plenty of countries where I can go without being insulted every time I have to deal with the authorities.

I'm not a masochist.