skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend of mine travels to the US from the UK about once every six to eight weeks (he works for a consultancy so goes to see one of their clients regularly). He always flies to the same airport, and every time he arrives, he's detained for 4-5 hours. He's a tremendously relaxed guy so takes it all in his stride, but I think a lot of people in that situation wouldn't have the attitude of 'oh well, it's only my time that's being wasted'.
Because more will be available in the registered version once the freemium users have thoroughly tested things?

Because they're harvesting the data and want to ensure that even less popular pages get some ranking data?

Couldn't quickly think of any other reasons.
Glad to hear you're actively doing something about this. It's been discussed a lot here, and it seems to be a real problem.
This only requires 20 Mbit/s tops. It's already available today in several countries. I don't need 1 Gbit for that.

Unless you happen to have more than one person living in your flat, in which case any single member of your household could be doing something different... the MBit/s do add up fairly quickly.
This is basically what the blank 'new tab' page in Chrome is. (Except that that shows eight links instead of four.)
Nice story of an entrepreneur in training.
That makes sense. MacRuby is using the Objective-C runtime as the common denominator but I'd love to see other languages do that same.
there's no obvious connection between this symmetry breaking (handedness) and faster than light travel.

you could argue that limitations for ftl come from translational symmetry (conservation of momentum and energy), but that's not what was broken here, as far as i know.
I'm really curious how the Distribution of singles by age is about the younger people being more comfortable with the Internet. Being 24 I know that I belonged to the last generation that had to discover the Internet, unlike my twelve year old brothers generation where it's something that's eternal and has always been there, and definitely unlike my mother generation that seem to have mostly been taught the Internet from the younger generations. (In Sweden anyway)

I'm amazed OkCupid a free dating site has a 11:9 male:female ratio, I would've thought the males outnumbered the women by much more. I'm happy to see my prejudices invalidated.

The author should've pointed out that one possible reason for women getting less interested in marriage and more interested in casual sex with age might have to do with the ones there are interested in marriage and something serious end up in long term relationships. While the ones that are less interested in something long term keep being single and thus registered on OkCupid. Rather than it seeming like it's only about a change in the female mentality with age.

I really hope they redo this OkTrend (and others) in the future if the site is around as there's such a great opportunity to discover changing mentalities in society towards sex and dating.

( Unrelated, I get to tell the wonderful girl I met on OkCupid that shes in the zone of greatness. :D )
I would do what I have always wanted to do. Write a small scale search engine as a hobby. I have run crawlers before but always ran out of bandwidth long before I could get any sizeable portion of the web.

Huge amounts of bandwidth would solve that issue for me.
In the enterprise sector we need to assure that our applications can be used as intended by a teenager as well as a 65 year old CEO.

Seriously? I mean seriously?

Enterprise applications are the worse offenders for UIs I've ever seen in my life. I've had to use a number of these programs throughout high school and 2 colleges. I've used enterprise level bug trackers and I have to say most linux GUIs manage to be easier than these products.

The product you are working on may not be a sin against humanity but there is a reason "enterprise" has a bad rap.
Fair enough. I suppose, being already inside of the US, that I don't really have a choice in the matter if I need to go somewhere. I certainly haven't thought twice about flying instead of driving, in fact I'd definitely prefer to fly if it's more than a couple hours drive. Being a fairly frequent flyer, I guess I've just gotten used to their "process".

I'm reminded of a post from a little while ago about Israeli airport security. Highly recommended if you haven't seen it before - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024850
Agreed. Dropbox is one of those rare examples of a product that takes no explanation and just works perfectly all the time, every time. It doesn't do a lot, but those guys have their core product down to an art.

Whenever I demo something that I've built that seems mind-numbingly simple in the demo, I have to remind myself that things that work well should seem simple.

"That's it?" is a sign of success.
I'd imagine at most only a third of those comments are from people actually trying to get to facebook. The rest are trolls.
Predicting the End of the World with Mathematica
DOE report on Facilities for the Future of Science
I'm not trying to emulate Feynman, and what I wrote wasn't a reaction to the kids letter, but to your comment.

I'm not criticizing the child, I'm presenting an alternative scenario. I'm not saying he going to end up like that, but I am saying that it's premature to conclude he's going to be a particularly employable based on that letter.
Side note: does anyone know what visualization tool was used for the dropbox-client-data-traffic-globe-thing video? I've seen that same visualization all over Google's campus in various buildings showing the location of their searches. Is it an open-source visualization library?
I really really want to see someone do something like Aardvark JUST for shopping. Here's how it would work:

I put in product+brands I've purchased and feel comfortable answering basic "shopping" questions about: iPhone, macbook pro, apple, vizio, volkswagen, jaguar, french connection, ipod, linksys,etc.

Someone comes in and asks a question just like aardvark such as: "What iPhone should I buy? 16gb or 32gb?" "Did your linksys router give you problems?" It sends me or someone else that has purchased that brand/product the question and I give them some practical advice.

Attach affiliate links at the bottom (not sure how you'd do that yet but it's doable).

If you're making this, please let me beta test.
They should have to right to fire him, but first they should ask him:

- Did you do it?
- Do you have any evidence that you are innocent?
- What is the evidence against you?

They should think about whether they believe he did it. In some cases that will mean firing people who are only accused and that won't be immoral.

In this case, if they just talked to him for a bit and gave him a few days to investigate and gather evidence, they could have avoided firing him.
I thought he created Corbis because he wanted to corner the digital art market for picture frames and wall displays.

The technology didn't catch up so Corbis became a stock photography house.
>You should be able to fire someone for any reason.

I disagree. You shouldn't be able to fire someone for being Jewish. You shouldn't be able to fire someone for not voting how you want them to. You shouldn't be able to fire someone for not having sex with you. There are a lot of things that you shouldn't be able to fire someone for.
I'm naive too, but apparently there are use cases for TCO for state machines where the tail calls are between various functions, not necessarily in a simple loop.
I always laugh when people bring up Quora as if they already won. They haven't even launched yet.

The thing with Q&A is that Q&A is a commodity, a user doesn't care if the answer comes from Quora, Stackoverflow, or Hunch. All they care about is getting the answer after typing their question into Google.

The Q&A wars have already passed and the winner is Yahoo Answers. They dominate the results for most Q&A related questions.

Q&A traffic is 90% search engine. And search engines love older sites and Yahoo has a 5 year head start in ranking, a PR of 8, MILLIONS of active users and billions of pages.

I mean seriously, the Q&A market right now, is all about picking up scraps that Yahoo left over.

And I say that as someone who runs a Q&A site.
Morality doesn't come into it. Morality is just a different set of laws. If they are just laws, they should become laws of the land; if they are unjust - and a lot of "morality" is intrinsically illiberal - then they should not be. That's why we have rule of law in the first place, rather than rule by church and theologians.
> My (admittedly naive) understanding of TCO is that it involves turning tail recursion into a loop

This is close, but not the full story.

TCO turns tail recursion into a GOTO (well, a goto-with-arguments). In the case of a single function which tail-calls itself, this becomes a loop, but for multiple functions that are mutually recursive, that's not the case.

Note that the issues with the lack of TCO boil down to efficiency: there are ways of faking TCO atop a runtime that does not support it (meaning deeply tail-recursive code will run, rather than overflow the stack), but they come at with a runtime cost.
I think he just wants to emphasize that he did not register mcdonalds.tumblr.com or cocacola.tumblr.com but pitchfork - a rather generic word.
Yoono Social Dashboard Blows Past Seesmic, TweetDeck
Levenshtein distance: 9
TSA distance: 0.
Affiliate Marketing Mind Map
fairly sure you are describing http://www.imshopping.com/

granted they don't have the exact formula you described, but they seem to be heading in that direction
There is a project called VMKit which allows one to build a JVM or a CLR using the LLVM framework.

http://vmkit.llvm.org/
Flash and Acrobat: more reasons to just go to open source.
The most widely accepted recognition is when the systems centre of mass (barycentre) is outside of the primary planet's surface. With Pluto and Charon the centre of gravity is outside of Pluto's surface.

However Asimov made a very interesting point, and a definitely more future-sighted point. He said that the measure of a double planet is of the tug-of-war between planet, satellite and star. With the Earth-Moon system, the Sun is winning the tug of war, eventually the barycentre will exit the Earth's surface and eventually the Moon will break free of Earth's orbit. This would make the Earth-Moon system a double planet. However Pluto is winning the fight in the Pluto-Charon system, and eventually Charon will impact Pluto's surface.

I personally prefer Asimov's definition. It's only a matter of time (maybe longer than the sun even) until the barycentre leaves the Earth's surface. IIRC ~600 million years the day lengthens by ~2 hours. This means that likely by the end of Earth's habitability (roughly 2 billion years from now) the day will be ~30 hours long at the present rate (it's considerably speeding up).

The vast majority of planet-satellite systems are arranged in a way that the satellite will eventually collide with its host planet. Those that don't will eventually hit their own classification as a planet or dwarf planet along the way, especially the Moon.
Voice over LTE is supposed to work using IMS - but will require a fairly expensive upgrade to the network. Operators are keenly aware of the pitfalls of over-the-top voice losing them revenue, but this is an experiment to see if they can do away with IMS altogether. That, and the fact that someone else may try it first...
Spolsky Switches Teams: Raising VC for StackOverflow in Light of Q&A Competition
I have already submitted it as site suggestion.
For what it's worth ($125 a year) founde.rs is available... on 101domains or any of the other international domain providers.

Edited to say, having the full name with a foreign extension sounds better to me than eating a letter... YMMV
sounds too dot com bubblish.

Just do the usual

____founders.

BlueFounders, WidgetFounders, FounderMix
This is a little longer than I'd normally post, but it's relevant and I use it to make the point often.

An American tourist was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.

Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The tourist complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, "Only a little while."

The tourist then asked, "Why didn't you stay out longer and catch more fish?"

The Mexican said, "With this I have more than enough to support my family's needs."

The tourist then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life."

The tourist scoffed, " I can help you. You should spend more time fishing; and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat: With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor; eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York where you could run your ever-expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all take?"

The tourist replied, "15 to 20 years."

"But what then?" asked the Mexican.

The tourist laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."

"Millions?...Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."
I'm still under the impression that WordPress themes have to be GPL'd (because WordPress is).

Is this not the case?

Regardless, it's impressive.
Chinese, Russian Universities Claim Top Spots in ACM Programming Competition
Actually, I'd say its that they haven't learned how to lie ineffectively. Crackpots are usually deemed to be cracked-pots when they no longer make enough sense to pay attention to. They argue by a self-standard of usefulness instead of adapting.
Good point. But I'd also be interested to know the experience level of users involved in Nielsen's study. My own anecdotal experience suggests that people less accustomed to the web are far slower at discerning what is an ad and what is content.

On a related topic from that link, I don't think I've ever come across a banner ad made to look like a dialog box that has been good enough to fool me. But again my experience seems to suggest that those with less computer experience are far more easily fooled.
Make sure you turn off javascript within acrobat.
You're assuming that I'm some humourless hacker news minion, however that is false, please see my previous comment before this exchange.
Remind me again how profiling for people that have BOMB and TERRORISM flash cards is going to weed out a potential attack?

Economics enters into everything, including law enforcement. Every dollar and hour we squander on idiotic checks like this is one less spent going after the real bad guys in a productive manner. There are much more informative signals than passport stamps and flash card contents that we should be investigating.
The Fable Of Market Meritocracy
You can't fire people based on race, creed, age, or gender, and you can't fire them for not having sex with you. There are laws against those things, those things specifically, and almost exclusively those things.
The Q&A wars haven't even started, and I say that as someone who runs a Q&A site.

Yes, Yahoo has tons of traffic, but 1) they're already being overtaken by answers.com 2) SO identifies Software as being underserved by existing solutions. Software is a 400 Billion dollar industry. Who knows how many other industries aren't being served by Yahoo Answers.

The author is right, we're at the model T era in terms of technology. Relying on Google to find the appropriate question is a good short term tactic, but will be beaten in the long run by other approaches, and doesn't work now outside of the consumer internet. Areas underserved now: B2B anything, corporate tech support (because they don't get much google juice), technical but non-web 2.0 areas like law, accounting, medicine.

Simple upvotes will eventually succumb to the slashdot/reddit phenomenon. Upvotes don't matter when popularity is not a good indicator for the answer you're trying to find. Think music preferences. "What music should I listen to?" is a terrible question for anything based on upvoting. A better system would take into account knowledge about the user, or knowledge about people with similar tastes to the user.
TSA seem generally more professional and less power trippy than they did about six years ago. Border patrol is another story altogether.
Scott Adams: Replacing Yourself
I'm not convinced that Buzz isn't just a flash in the pan. The data generated in Buzz seems qualitatively different than the data Google earns its revenues indexing and I don't really see a direct path to how that's going to change.
from what I remember from the interview the themes are indeed GPLed, so you can get it for free if you want. You just don't get the support. Or something along those lines.
StartupList intro results in funding
The users by nationality statistics are interesting. Australia has a population of about 21 million whilst the Netherlands has about 17 million, and yet the former doesn't rate a mention whilst the later does — why? My theory - bandwidth:

http://xs4all.nl - € 29,95 per month for 4M Internet.

http://internode.on.net - $49.95 per month for 1.5M Internet; 50 gigabyte cap - downloads and uploads are counted.
Where by "world" they mean "disk space."
If you don't like Jewish people and it's your company you shouldn't have to work with them. It will only hurt you as you are limiting your labor pool to non-Jewish people, and this is the same for any other form of discrimination.

The only place that should not be allowed to discriminate is the government since they represent all people.

Freedom of association is the key hear, you should be able t o associate with anyone you'd like to and vice-versa. Now I'm of course not advocating any sort of discrimination, but I do think it should be allowed. Just as I don't advocate hate speech, but I think it should be allowed.
Gotta love de virtual credit cards I use to buy stuff online (since I don't have a credit card, that's the only way I can buy online).
Then again, there are some perfectly cromulent proprietary PDF readers: Preview.app and Foxit.
I suppose flag is a form of voting, but I think you underestimate the value of HN culture. Angry arguments and spite have rarely been tolerated here.

It appears PG didn't ban a blog entry, but rather a domain, and one which had previously been a source of useful content. If we apply this same standard we ought start banning entire domains left, right and centre: first cab off the rank should be techcrunch.com
An entry into the social sports market
If you haven't already, I recommend reading a book called Mister God, This is Anna by Fynn - http://www.amazon.com/Mister-God-This-Anna-Fynn/dp/034532722...

A whole book of learning and wonder and beauty. If it doesn't make you cry, read it again.
The US only has 300 million people[1]. 100 million households is a big chunk of the population. Some quick looking around online reveals that currently only ~29% of the US has broadband[2]. Not everyone needs broadband, etc etc. So this seems to actually be pushing for a sea change in the availability of internet connections in the US, and that, I think, is a much bigger deal than any sort of numeric metric.

1: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
2: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1001/
Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute (PDF)
This is outrageous. Callous, self-righteous, and mocking. I can't believe someone would take this position against a user of their service.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...

Maybe this?
I love it. I think it's really great, and I'll tell you why.

First, simplicity. I think websites as a whole suffer from information overload and the simpler something is the easier it is to use, which makes it accessible to everyone.

Second, the design. Its great, why not have favourites as icons? Every website now has a logo which marks their brand, we've become accustomed to viewing them everywhere so its easy enough to look at it and know exactly what it is. Its brilliant, visual and the kind of steps others should be taking in terms of UX.

Third, its on the web. Safari, firefox and chrome start pages are in your local browser, but we dont all use the same machine everyday do we? I switch between 2 or 3 as I'm at work, then at home or at a friends.

My only thought would be, I want to see more than 4 icons without ruining the visual. If you can achieve that then I'm sold.
I completely agree. I didn't mean to say that enterprise products do a good job at this. I was just trying to point a case where it is really important to adapt to all user groups.
Yes, it's 'open' -- not arguing that, nor would I dispute that Mono is far from perfect. [1]

But, like so many FF projects: is this the cart, or the horse?

In other words, this feels more like a promotional project for the consulting firm and its pay products than it does a 'real' project. I freely admit this judgement has some external bias; Jon H. has a reputation.

[1] footnote: (Of course, neither is the linked project... 128 bits for each and every pointer on a 32-bit architecture? Does that mean 256 bits per pointer on 64-bit? Yikes!)
No, they didn't. The first result (and the one you'd get from I'm Feeling Lucky) was still the actual Facebook Login page. The RWW article was in the Google News results, which appear above the search results on the Google results page.
Well let me break down what I meant. The average adult who argues that Pluto is a planet honestly just wants Pluto to be a planet, but he knows that's not a good argument and knows to manufacture another, more convincing argument in its place. He even convinces himself that his rationalization is really the reason why he thinks Pluto should be considered a planet. He lies to himself, in other words.

Kids aren't necessarily clever or knowledgeable enough to think that far. But kids can and do lie, and they're not always effective about it.
I agree. But does this actually follow the definition of lucky? A person could deem herself lucky without that actually being the case-- it might just be that she has personality traits that make her successful. Luck, by definition is not dependent of one's actions. I guess the article is saying that we can make ourselves feel lucky by working on certain personality traits-- but does that make us actually lucky? I am just being philosophical here.
oh awesome. thanks vaksel.
I have used it and in my opinion, horrible implementation. The concept maybe the same but it doesn't work like dropbox.
Because that's the domain they could get? :)
Anyone else notice that Dropbox globally indexes files? If you upload a large file already elsewhere on their servers (Linux distro ISO, scene-made TVRip or DVDRip, etc), it "uploads" instantly, and will begin downloading immediately on your other linked Dropbox machines.

Makes me wonder how hard it is to download a file by hash (via the Linux client, parts of which are open-source), without having the file, or how easy it would be for HBO or some other media company to say "here are the hashes for scene rips of The Wire--please furnish matching account emails, thanks".
they are GPL'd. you still have to buy them tho. so essentially you could buy it then distribute it,etc.,etc. but that's not happening.