skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a semi-recent example, we actually seem to react by making it an internet meme and national joke, and printing up snarky t-shirts.

ex. http://www.bustedtees.com/donttasemebro
Google digital library faces outcry at NYC hearing
Go mow some lawns for a couple weeks... A few hundred dollars isn't all that hard to come by.
> And the kid originally being disciplined at school for something he did at home.

This is pretty standard practice. Schools have all kinds of 'code of conduct' things that can get you in trouble for things that didn't happen on school grounds.
Keylength - Cryptographic Key Length Recommendation
Songkick (YC 07) lays its claim on the music events crown
Enjoy Bakugans on YouTube
Will Google's "acquisition" strategy give current Google employees a greater incentive to leave the company and start their own? For example, some top engineers might have an idea for a product and will be incentivized to leave, knowing that Google will buy them as a talent acquisition.
I wonder what offense the child committed at home that got him in trouble with the school?
Why not just turn that question around - shouldn't we, and this reporter in particular, be held responsible for continuing to buy Chinese made products while criticizing the companies we buy them from?
I tested this in FF 3.6 and MSIE 8 and while it kinda "works" in MSIE 8, it does not work as in Firefox. The picture continues to scale up beyond 100% and doesn't stop there, which I thought was kind of the point behind all this.
1. Clicking yes/no at the splash screen didn't disable/enable buzz (for everyone), it just showed or didn't show the tutorial. I clicked "no" and buzz was enabled.

2. The subset of my contacts that clicked "yes" became exposed to the public. Are you claiming my address book was previously public?

3. Didn't Google make the public profile for me? I sure didn't. You make it sound like that was a steep barrier to entry to buzz?
The div element?
Cheating In Computer Science Classes Worse than in other classes
If I want to surf the web seriously

What does this mean, exactly? How would this be distinct from un-serious browsing? Is this something that a netbook is capable of?

...now I have to carry a bag around with me to hold the thing and keep track my bag while I'm out...

Millions of people do this daily without issue, whether backback, briefcase, messenger bag, or purse. It certainly hasn't held back netbooks or the Kindle. Why do you think it would be different for the iPad?
Unless the courts take the approach that the school is 'in loco parentis' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis), that is they have similar rights to when the kids are under their supervision.

They can claim that since laptops are not tracked via GPS so it is hard to know where the kids are (at home or at school). So they can just brush this off as an 'oops' or demand that all laptops have tracking chips in them. Or they can always blame the sysadmin and just say "we told him to spy only when kids are at school, but he goofed off, so we'll just fire him" basically scapegoating one person.

Now I am not defending them, as this is a completely outrageous violation of so many rights. I am just thinking of what lies they might use in court to justify this.
Well, a lot of them were confused. You have to have a public profile for any of your buzzes to be visible, and in order to have a public profile you have to fill it out.
I know; but in his own home! It's psychopathic.
That sounds a lot like trying to solve a small problem by creating an even larger problem.

Translation: whatever the problem, it's unlikely the solution is using more Flash on your website.
If there are rules, the only plausible reason not to announce the rules is so that you can change them without having to give notice. This assumes that the rules haven't been announced, of course; maybe they have.
What a load of rubbish, why is it that this side of the argument is never vociferously argued by people with perfect GPAs and a record of academic excellence?

I've got a pretty decent GPA and a record of academic excellence, and I make this argument.

Most of the current educational system is based on learning to repeat the teachers password (http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/). I teach students with good grades at a top university, and they routinely resist doing anything other than repeating what I tell them.

This isn't because they are morons, it's just what they've been trained to do. Indeed, in the past, they've been punished for doing things differently.

Guessing the teaches password does establish a minimum level of intelligence; a person who is sufficiently dumb will fail at this task. But once that minimal level is established, it's hard to really care. I'll take a kid with grade inversion [1] and a cool side project over a straight A student any day.

[1] Grade inversion is the phenomenon of a student who's grades are directly proportional to the difficulty level of the class (inverting the normal relationship). Calculus, literature, CS 101: C. Topology, Operating Systems, Quantum Mechanics: A.
Agreed, this post doesn't really say anything or point out what the tradeoffs really are between durability, scalability and performance. Battery-Backed RAID has nothing to do with the scalability/durability tradeoff of a sharded system for instance.
Of course, making already public information available in more places is quite a bit different than exposing private communications.
Unused ram is wasted ram, always do more caching.
It's unlikely to be the chipset's fault unless it's a very old laptop - it's the BIOS' job to trigger the "hoisting" of physical memory that overlaps the PCI address space so it lies above 0xFFFFFFFF once ACPI etc. have been initialised.

Laptop/motherboard makers pay notoriously little attention to the BIOS, so features like this often stay disabled. Have you checked for a BIOS update? Interestingly, this also means that any memory that already lies beyond the 4GB barrier will be visible to the OS (64-bit or PAE) even without hoisting (so you'd see 7.3GB of 8GB) - unfortunately, upgrading to >4GB is expensive in Laptops at the moment. (4GB modules cost over 4x as much as 2GB DIMMs)
In my opinion, this article fails to draw a crucial line: the limit between what a user has to know and what he can ignore.

Speaking of cars, users have extensive knowledge of it. To the point that no one can legally drive a car without a driving licence. This represents dozens of hours of specialized learning and training.

And I was talking about a single purpose device. Computers have many purposes. No amount of user friendliness is going to hide this essential complexity. No matter what we do, users will have to know basic things like the difference between a computer and a program, between a browser and a the Internet, or between the address bar and the search box. If they don't, they could lose their privacy or their money. Just like driving left without looking can be lethal.

Many computer users lack this kind of knowledge. The only way we can give them a "great experience" is by teaching first. Until we do, they will stay dependent, helpless, and happy. (At least as far as computers are concerned, which is further and further, these days.)
or Grails
Where do they get the apartment prices from?
Oh, I agree. Just don't think this is a one-off kind of thing.
If I'm reading graphs right, there were about 300k publications from the US in 2009 and about 10k from Iran, so, about 3% the output of the US, or about 14% adjusted per capita.

(This naturally doesn't argue your point -- I was just curious what the real numbers were.)
"The subset of my contacts that clicked "yes" became exposed to the public."

Not on your profile.

"Didn't Google make the public profile for me"

It didn't. If you never set up a google profile or a buzz profile, Buzz displays a placeholder profile to your contacts with the sentence "This person does not have a public profile." where the name usually is. If you had a Google Profile, your contacts are shown a placeholder profile with your name and a link to your Google profile.

Certainly in the latter case and maybe the former, your following/follower lists are displayed to you on your placeholder buzz profile, but these are not displayed to anyone else looking at the profile.
Measuring the amount of papers is questionable as well. One paper with a ridiculous breakthrough (cold fusion, etc) could outweigh all the others.
This is such a "let them eat cake" attitude. A few hundred dollars is a lot to come by for some people, especially at that age.
A computer magazine scooped on technical detail by a Jeff Atwood post from four years ago... and I thought I was having a bad day.
You do have a point about TFA not showing the Good Parts, but I disagree with the following ...

> highlighting the JVM as a strength of Java feels weak since most of his argument focused on a call to arms to get people to host more dynamic languages on top of the JVM. This is hardly a strength of Java.

It is a strength ... the JVM is state of the art. And when using JRuby or Closure, you have the advantage of dropping to Java for bottlenecks / use Java libraries ... and this is huge.

> while he mentions that open source really mattered when it came to Java's evolution ... Java is in many ways falling behind direct competitors like C#

The language yes, but the open-source ecosystem around Java is definitely a huge advantage that can't be balanced with the goodies of C#.
Have those "code of conduct" policies ever seen a direct court challenge?
Amusing and possibly telling that the one screenshot that includes the battery indicator shows it in late-orange to early-red territory. I'll give Adobe the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it wasn't fully charged when they started the demo.
Totally true -- as I see it, in the year 2015:

The big problem isn't HTML5 itself, but what people make in it. Most of the crap HTML5 sites out there are made by graphical designers who have no knowledge about programming, and typically only test their creations in isolation on their own machines. When that thing is then released, it is actually displayed on some webpage together with lots of other HTML5 elements and other HTML5 ads, and the whole thing slows to a crawl because none of it was optimised.

A good HTML5 programmer can make very good HTML5 movies that don't perform like crap, but good HTML5 programmers are very rare.

A lot of people hate HTML5 because of all the low-quality crap that is made with it, and shoved down people's throats through websites, but if you replace HTML5 with something else, you can bet your life that there will still be a lot of low-quality crap, made by non-programmers, that will be shoved down your throat and slow down your browsing experience.
Agreed.

An arm of the government inserting hundreds or thousands surveillance devices in people's homes without their consent? I can't imagine getting more upset.

In fact, the story is almost too perfect. It wouldn't surprise me to find out either it's bogus or big parts of it have been left out.

But if the skeleton of this story holds true, somebody needs to go to jail. Not get fired. Not get fined. But go to jail. For a very. long. time.
The article is too much anecdotal. What is a "better programmer" compared to the average Joe developer? How do I measures this?
Reading their emails is okay? WTF?
These are people we are talking about. Inexperienced people true, but still people!
Yes, I did assume that was the case. However, once you've started adding indexes aren't you already losing some of the advantage of NoSQL. An index is a well defined set of columns.

In your "Most popular" example, you're still iterating records locally (and sorting locally) to calculate the results rather than having it done on the server. You've also presupposed that you have normalized data -- which in authors example, you do not.

My point about having the RDBMS optimize your query still stands. Your code and your SQL statements are not the same -- the SQL is a description of the result but your code is the actual process. And you've over-simplified the process; in reality it would be much more complicated.
The real problem is that these courses often teach a specific operating system or a specific office suite in an extremely facile manner. They're glorified typing courses. That means when Microsoft changes the locations of buttons in Word, students' knowledge is obsolete. Even programming courses in high school (and many colleges) are tied to specific programming languages, not general concepts. A good course teaches a mix of theory and application, but most computer courses can't even handle application right.

This bothers me a lot. Not only are lots of "computer literacy" courses teaching stuff that will one day be trivia, but lots of supposed Computer Science education is over involved with particular programming language trivia. Heck, a lot of hiring nowadays is over-involved with such trivia.

Contrast this with stuff that kids do with eToys in Squeak. Kids using an "Object-paint" program to simultaneously explore vector algebra, programming, and robotics, without the words "vector" and "robots" even needing to be mentioned.

Get the mechanics out of the way so our minds can get on with the essentials.
How clean is the electricity you use?
Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation
I understand that you can have indexes -- which, in my opinion, seems to defeat the purpose of NoSQL in the first place. You take your unstructured data store and structure it.

Also, in the authors example the items are properties of the order. How exactly would you index on those?
While I half agree with what you did, I think you're a step away from perfectness (see bellow) :)

I actually had the exact same problem and I was recently speaking to a friend from google and asked him to implement this as part of their search engine (i.e. just like the calculator, but for time zones) -- he didn't see the need for such a thing.

Here is my use case which doesn't work: conference deadlines. Please tell me what this:

Thursday, February 4, 2010, 11:59pm Eastern Standard Time (GMT −5:00)

translates to in my local time. Note that entering the date in your app does nothing, even if you split EST from the rest.
Ask HN:  How would you convince your company to start using version control?
I recently started working at a fairly progressive marketing company with a small web development team (5 people). Up until this point, they've managed the multitudes of sites that they have done by creating a "dev" folder on the web server, and then editing those files directly. After everything looks great, they just do an rsync to the production folder and call it good.

Obviously there are a number of things wrong with this. For instance, rolling back changes in the event of an error is difficult. As someone who uses Subversion even on personal projects, this disturbs me greatly.

My question is: How would you convince your company to start using version control software? I'm not particular about the software, because at this point, something is probably better than nothing. Also, the lead developer is the one who came up with the "dev" folder system and seems hesitant to talk about version control with me. How would you go about dealing with him?
What I find kind of funny is that both major JVMs (Sun's and IBM's) were both originally Smalltalk VMs that were basically abused (crippling them with Java's security model among other things in Sun's case, not too sure about IBM) to run Java.
I was about to do this, actually, so I can have a 40GB "system" partition and put my "data" partition in "My Documents." But I still get the joy of seeing my "C:" drive in XP.
Why the Windows Registry sucks … technically
The guidelines are linked in the footer:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A thin post with no useful detail.
Twitter (or Failover Twitter) runs on Google App Engine?
Having gone through graduate school, I've seen my share of nonsense papers created just to have a topic for a thesis.
This reminds me of the strip search story from a few months ago. A young girl was searched by school officials. As it turned out, she was only carrying prescription drugs.

While the Supreme Court found that the search had been illegal (amazingly, only by an 8-1 majority) they also ruled that the officials concerned could not be held personally liable. This was because it supposedly wasn't obvious to the officials at the time whether what they were doing was illegal or improper.

Now, while I can understand that as a matter of law any court can only rule on the specific details of a particular case in context and they have to worry about a suitable burden of proof, I have to wonder how anyone could think it was OK to strip search a 13-year-old on some vague suspicion about carrying drugs.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/25/national/main51125...
I have serious concerns about any parent that decides to routinely and casually invade the privacy of their children by reading their e-mails or tracking their web browsing. Children raised in such an environment are being taught that they should not expect to have privacy and that they should will not be treated as human beings in general. That kind of casual violation is precisely what justifies infractions like those documented in the article.
I have the same problem currently (Lenovo T60, 4gb ram, only 3gb usable, x64 OS). In my case it's not the chipset's fault per se but rather a design limitation put in place by Lenovo. it's very annoying and certainly reduces the chances that my next laptop will be a Lenovo but on the other hand it's not exactly the worst thing in the world.
The only thing I don't believe is how a school district could afford to develop such sophisticated software.
Indeed. Perhaps (hopefully) any outcome from this will spark off a review of such policies.
Ubuntu launch single sign on service
Hmm I would like to know on which number is he actually zooming on :)
Bad taste.
RIM switching to open source WebKit
2 words: Query Optimizer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_optimizer

If you think you're doing exactly that an RDBMS does, you're kidding yourself. Even if you do, you're still wasting effort re-coding something that already exists.

The fact is, running the query on the order and filtering on the product may not be the most efficient way of getting the data. It might be faster query on the product and then filter based on the order. RDBMS's make those sorts of decisions all the time.
Jungle of e-books. Lots of Them
I think Eric Schmidt doesn't really understand the average user and apparently the large user base who don't give a damn about status updates.

The whole strategy to impose Google Buzz was disaster. First things first, you shouldn't really play with one of your favorite product unless you have full faith and knowledge that it will complement.

They should have employed the Google Wave strategy to release Buzz or just made Buzz as an opt-in feature and then geeks could use. The change of any kind is intimidating for the normal user and Google should have taken that into account.
Why People Start Businesses
This guy is damaging Google.
Recently submitted:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133928

Comments already there.

This search found it trivially: http://searchyc.com/unique+visitor?sort=by_date
2011 CADILLAC STS V6,V8, PHOTO GALLERY
Most of the sites being discussed are mega sites, and while they get a lot of traffic they don't necessarily provide the best answers. The niche Q&A sites will ultimately become the best of Q&A. Not as high profile, but much better.

I'm biased because I'm the co-founder of YouSaidIt. We provide niche Q&A sites... but with a big difference. We focus on expert Q&A as well as the community. Our Q&A is more like a "town hall" or "expert roundtable". At one site, The Stranger (Seattle's biggest alt weekly) we have had the Mayor answering questions, Dan Savage giving advice, Paul Constant giving personal book recommendations, and candidates running for office.

We haven't even begun to see the places where Q&A will go.
I think that cheating is fairly common in any undergraduate class. In my experience, business courses had the most obvious cheating. Perhaps learning how to work the system is all part of a business degree.
LEGO Robot Solves Any Rubik’s Cube In Less Than 12 Seconds (Video)
I'd love to read a blog post about this as well.
You work 60-hour weeks. Should your employees?
MongoDB also uses update-in-place with mmap rather than versioned data, which means that a kick-out-the-plug error is very likely to trash data even if you get the database to successfully repair into a usable state. IOW, they're a bit iffy on the C as well as the D of ACID. As a trade-off for this, you get speed and non-garbage-creating updates if all you're doing is changing an existing value.
Very interesting read. Fighting game cheats has always been difficult and it's fascinating to see how far both cheating and anti-cheating techniques have come in all this time.

I must admit it was also especially gratifying to read that someone finally acknowledge the following truth:

Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.
Nice strategy but exposed to forex risk. Some got burned when the JPY rose by 30% compared to USD and so did their USD-denominated-equivalent debt.
Everyone who even knew about the computer webcam spying should go to prison. The fact that this could have been used as spying for child pornography- should be treated as an attempt of attaining child pornography.
Given the role that schools have played in destroying the lives of some children by getting authorities involved in "sexting" cases, it would be especially ironic if this spying program produced child pornography charges. After all, in many cases, intent isn't required-- people have been arrested for having malware download child porn without the user's authorization or knowledge. Given that precedent, doing something like this and accidentally gathering child porn by taking an irresponsible and already likely illegal action would seem to be enough for the courts. Not being a lawyer, I don't know if this intuition is correct, but it would be an interesting precedent, no doubt.
Microsoft's new pitch: 'Every .Net developer is a Windows Phone developer'
Why doesn't this app work for you in that scenario?

Say you're in PST: put on the right hand side 11:59pm and EST --> 8:59pm that same day.

Say you're in, oh I don't know, Nagoya: same thing on the right hand side --> 1:59pm the next day (the 5th)
Actually in my analogy changing "Sales Team" to "Writing Team" would be a better analogy. What I said still holds. Giving the writing team incentives will increase the quality of some of the articles, but if the editor and art department still suck the magazine is going to suck.
TeX line breaking algorithm in JavaScript (and HTML5 Canvas)
High WIN on Texas Hold Em' Poker (Facebook Zynga) | Fachak
Is that a joke? I tried about 5 different ways of getting it to answer what the current time in my time zone is in another timezone, and it failed for all variations.
That's the reason why I wrote "But only up to a point."
It's okay to spy on your kids by your arguments at best.

It's not okay for anyone to spy on anyone else's kids though.
REthinking the WORKplace: An interview with 37signals' Jason Fried
Anyone else starting to get sick of this guy?

I still like Google all around, but the privacy comments were insane.... And the Buzz thing really pissed me off.

They are damaging their brand with him being the face of Google.

It OK for Google to make mistakes (or what people might perceive as privacy infractions), but at least sound apologetic when you do... Least you could do.
Wait till a school administrator gets the bright idea of doing the same thing on school-issued iPhones and other mobile devices.
> reople have been arrested for having malware download child porn without the user's authorization or knowledge

Do you have a citation for that, out of interest.

It's considered something of a myth within LE and I wasn't aware a case like that actually existed.