skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I had one of those in high school. It would have been fun to crack it :)

Actually I probably would have gone after the remote administration server too.
Ah yes, sorry for that. I was mixing Malthus up with the Club of Rome that revived his ideas and published the limits to growth. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome)

Thanks for catching this :-)
honestly I don't think the nukes are as huge deterrent as they once were.

I just don't believe that in the last 20 years, noone invented anything that can take out a nuke in mid-flight, especially with all the trillions that went into the DoD in those years.

I mean just look at how far wireless technology has moved in the past 20 years. At this point they can probably hack a nuke out of the sky over a wifi connection.
I would imagine a Cold War is by definition NOT a shooting war. But where does one draw the distinction between "cold war" and "healthy international competition"?
Regardless, it still happens all the time.
My recollection seems to be wrong: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/02/the-austin-p... (HT the Instapundit.)

Then again having lost my job I didn't care that much about the details, which weren't particularly available in that pre-real Internet period.
I think he was talking of a scenario where the option to disable it did not exist, in which case I completely agree with him. But if there was an option to turn it off, I think we can all agree that most users would choose to and facebook would probably be saved.

Facebook relies on the user having a positive experience with the site. It aims to smooth social interactions. God knows how many girls I've "stalked" (I dislike this term but that's a different point entirely) and I've used the information I gained from anonymously browsing their profile to chat them up. Call me a creep but us primates like using tools :)

Believe me, most people stalk others. I firmly believe Facebook is where it is today thanks to the privacy that enables us to do so.
Ask HN: Alternative to Exchange for Email Server System?
Hi, I'm looking for recommendations for an email server system. I work with an institution that does alot of communication through email, and as such it's a crucial part of their tech infrastructure.

The requirements are the following:

- Availability is essential

- It doesn't have to be open source, as long as it's not outrageously expensive. Also, it can be windows or linux based.

- An API access for email retrieval would be good, but if there aren't, what's the best choice between POP and IMAP?

So far, we've glared into Zimbra that seems to be very recommended and looked into some other solutions such as mailenable and icewarp.

Thanks in advance.
Not to be too cynical, but after several years in web marketing I've found that in this case "we" definitely do not outnumber "them." Not by any stretch of the imagination.
A little tangential, but when in China I actively sought out McDonald's because their bathrooms were generally cleaner (and had TP) compared to the average establishments.

But I once got kicked out of the McD's just for taking a photo of a China-style McD's menu. Go figure.
The Day Lord British Died
I wasn't really "defending" anything, but whatever. You're the one saying that someone (the privacy advocate in this case) should be able to unilaterally violate someone's privacy, not me.
Here is a link about how search monetizes when compared to content sites (~ 30 to 1!)

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007053

As an extension of that, sites which get most of their traffic from search often have the highest ad CPM values because the ad targeting is so relevant on the AdSense ads. And this is true even moreso now that Google is also using the referrer for ad targeting

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/02/better-contextual-matchi...

Scraper sites do quite well on the ad revenues front because most of the traffic is search driven, and because the content ends up so bad that the ads look all the more appealing.
Just looks like Gaussian noise to me.
But he DID invent the electric chair.

And tested it on an Elephant to prove the danger of his competitor's products.
There's plenty of news & not much analysis
No, it DOES NOT qualify them as experts by the definition given by this latest 10k hours craze.

Sure it does. The computer science curriculum at top schools like Stanford probably requires about 30 hours a week of time devoted to computer science. At 52 weeks per year, this puts the number around 6.5 years. After 4 years undergraduate computer science and his master's degree and Page's statement that he got into programming/CS at around 12 years old, we can deduce that 10,000 hours is probably a completely reasonable amount of time.
Matt Cutts says Mahalo spam is off limits? (is this the real Matt Cutts?)
But a $40,000 mistake? I can't wrap my head around that number. With a little forethought and a few days research you could have been ready with those kinds of questions before meeting with a lawyer or an accountant. Especially when your intention was to seek funding.
But, doesn't Demand only occupy one slot in search engines result pages for a certain keyword search? Even if Demand would create billions of articles, one for each conceivable search term, other nine spots in first 10 search results are still available for others, aren't they?

All in all, I still think this is primary a Google problem, not Demand's. They can publish anything they want, it's their right protected under free speech. It's Google which should be concerned about quality of their pages.
Very impressive. This is the first example I've seen that made me think functional programming could actually work for games.

I'm still not convinced but the approach described here is really neat and helps me think about the problem in a completely different way (which is what FP is best at).
Is there something similar to it for vim?
No, different datacenters will show different results... sometimes very different. It also matters if you are visiting Google.com or one of the country variants.

According to what Jason said in another comment, however, all of their pages are listed in their xml sitemap, and all of those are listed in a master xml sitemap index located here (warning! huge files if you follow the links in the first one!):

http://www.mahalo.com/sitemapindex.xml

Based on what I saw 2 million+ looks like a huge overestimate, if what Jason said is true.

Edit: My bad, frederickcook's answer was the right one. I didn't realize you were doing a regular text search.
Chatroulette: A Temptation Worth Resisting
This kind of change can make a huge difference for two big reasons:
1. Fewer RTT means lower page load times, which are outlined above. Users notice this stuff, esp. when you have a keepalives off, and each little chunk of ajax/css/js/img requires this to all happen over and over again.
2. Shorter time from open to close on the http socket connection means fewer connections open; if you are running Apache prefork, this makes a big difference to your memory footprint.
p.s. Use Nginx ;)
The industry learned its lesson. Instead of continuing to use unsafe languages like C, they switched to safe, statically-typed languages. The tiny speed hit that checking memory bounds before accessing arrays required turned out to not be a big deal, and the improved programmer productivity more than made up for the need for slightly-more-expensive hardware. And, of course, the number of lives saved was more valuable than a few extra microseconds of execution time and the larger EEPROM needed to store the smarter runtime.

Oh sorry, that was me daydreaming. Of course nothing has changed, people just "try to be more careful". Since people never make mistakes, even when pressed with tight deadlines, this has worked out fine. Asking the computer to double-check your code is just not necessary.

(Hmm, I think I got that backwards. It's just not my day today, is it...)
Reasons leaders fail
In my mind there's a big difference between costs caused by things that would be hard for you to do (build and support a reliable cross-compiling Obj-C development environment on Windows) and costs caused by things that are easy for you to not do (SDK charges).

The former I'll overlook even if they are two and a half times as much as the latter. ($500 second hand mac mini every two years vs $100/yr.)
It looks like he's unable to comment at the moment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143911
So they compare one mega-corp food outlet to an even bigger mega-corp food outlet? WalMart is built having a better supply chain than anyone else. They can buy the same stuff as whole foods, for less, because they buy more and have the best distribution system around.

How about comparing WalMart to your local food Co-Op or a famers market. Or focus on eating things that are actually in season and locally sourced. If you start looking at the carbon impact of your food, that's one WalMart and Whole foods will lose every day.
More info and screenshots here:

http://www.birdinforest.com/blog/?p=193
Or, you could just not pay those fees, and operate as a sole proprietor initially. If you don't have large savings, there's not really much risk; if you lose your $10k, declare bankruptcy and start over.
They do often play whack-a-mole at the lower level too...but they also take human reviewers into account so it is not so expensive on engineering time.

And at the higher level they absolutely do penalize people individually to send a message. Watch the opening of this video if you think otherwise
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-08-n14.html
Actually, a lot of people complain that non-local food doesn't taste good. Local food is usually picked closer to being ripe and usually arrives in the store or market sooner after being picked. For both of these reasons it should taste better.
I agree with this. I've read so many 10-15 page papers that could have been explained more succinctly and clearly in an average length colloquial blog post. Researchers come up with some dumb unoriginal idea and dress it up so it looks complicated and new. Getting your paper accepted is not always about quality.
I doubt this is the real account, created 37 minutes ago..
Uh what? Are you saying some like "X has problem Y, why should anybody study problem Y"?

> and memoryhungriest language in common use today

I think you've never heard of Perl.
a year on, maybe not so crazy now eh? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485618
Absolutely right.
No I doubt its normally a 40k mistake but he didn't elaborate... he said it cost the business 40k, he didn't say they paid out 40k.

Both Sachin and his detractors are speaking in overly broad terms here. Sachin's getting hammered though because he's taking one case and extrapolating general advice from it. Some of the points against his argument are fair and some arent.

The confusion here might also have something to do with the blurred semantic differences that are occurring these days between traditional business and start-up
You frogot the search engines; search results quality is lowered (at least until they work against it).
Fair point. ;)
Sequoia Capital backed both Google and Mahalo
Presumably, doing something like that could be considered grounds for punishment, based on the school's track record.
The #1 search result gets about 40% of all organic clicks. And Demand Media has more than one property (eHow, Wikihow, Cracked, livestrong.com). So I wouldn't be surprised if there were some searches for which Demand Media got more than half of all traffic.

You are correct about this being Google's problem. These guys exist to exploit an arbitrage opportunity: Google's search algorithm picks them, and the average searcher's which-engine-do-I-choose algorithm picks Google. In the long run, one of these things will stop being true.
The motivation for it was to increase real world performance so the research, conclusion and implementation were guided by this fact. This was done on a real site with considerable traffic 50 to 100 php pages/second. This has been in production on the site for at least a year.

So in the real world, if a user click on a link to your site, the time to complete the load of the full html page (lets say a 22k page) is reduced to a single RTT instead or 4 RTT.
To test that it's doing the correct thing you can verify with a packet analyzer or you can even see the results on something like firebug. Even if you consider RTT times of 50ms to 100ms it is still considerable difference to have the page complete the load in 100ms vs 400ms.
Especially if you have script at the bottom of your page (say google analytics and such) this means that these requests start that much sooner, the page completed rendering sooner, etc.

In addition to the faster loading time there is another benefit to this.

In a busy server your best friend is the ability to process connection quickly. If you have to have a connection open for 4RTT vs 1RTT that starts to make a difference. Implementing this you release the process and connection to TIMEWAIT right away instead of tying up a valuable php process.
FSF Urges Google to Kill Flash
Can't you just see Matt Cutts, sitting in his office, connecting to sites like HN through multiple proxy levels creating fake Matt accounts so he can leave truthful comments without his bosses at Google finding out... and when they question him he can just say, oh, of course that wasn't me!
heh - thank you :)
I didn't realize that Perl was memory intensive compared with Ruby (or other comparable languages more generally).

Any links for that? (Not trolling: I use both Perl and Ruby day to day, and I'm curious. I certainly haven't noticed significant differences in memory usage. Speed certainly - Perl being faster in many cases.)
It's strange, but a simple text file always served my needs for TODO lists, even including notes and other information related to the TODOs. It is not pretty, but I do not have trouble finding my TODOs amidst the rest of the noise, since I am consistent with my left-side "start of a TODO line" and "start of a subTODO" symbols. Sometimes I think that having a neat, pretty TODO list program would be nice, but I learned that I find my text files much more portable (Notes on iPhone, a txt on Mac, txt in linux, txt on my Windows desktop).
Ah! thank you. The open source part I suspect is a big differentiator.

I thought you were going more to a strange sort of fix the code that was not completed by an elance contract, or something like that.
The Underbelly of Silicon Valley: VC “Finders”
Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of Internet video
My problem with the last couple minutes is one of framing. I feel like there's probably some real name for this, but the scenario he dreams up can be easily presented favoring either side with minimal actual changes.

On one hand, you have the grim, over-commercialized future where you're being watched and tracked all the time and everything you do is only to accumulate soulless omnipoints that mean any number of things that don't necessarily improve your quality of life. HOWEVER, there's a potential for positive behavior modification through ubiquitous tracking.

On the other hand, we have a wild and fanciful future where you never have to read a bad book because everything you've read and watched has been tracked, logged, and analyzed by incredibly accurate recommendation engines. Everything I encounter is tailor-made to maximize my enjoyment specifically - and all for the small price of embedded ads. HOWEVER, I can no longer finish playing a game and trade it for my friend's finished game because, unless I register the game, I can't earn points. And, of course, my friend registered it because, without earning points, why bother playing the game?

Bottom line is it's a brave new world and we can't really tell where it's going to end up. It may be oppressive and commercial, it may be a utopian, pleasure-maximized dreamworld. But it will be based on the millions of decisions made along the way - so just try and be mindful of the consequences, I guess.
Plotting Map Markers Dynamically Using the Google Maps API, jQuery, PHP, & MySQL
No, I said that a privacy advocate should be able to "unilaterally" sneak into a privacy conference for the purpose of exposing government invasions of privacy.

If someone sneaks into the private homes of Verizon executives to spy on them, that's rather different. But that's clearly not what happened here.
If the Taiwanese are so against unification, why do they keep voting for the Kuomintang--which is the party that has been negotiating with the Communists for reunification?

Taiwan can remain a democracy under the PRC. The real question is whether the rest of China will become democratic as well. I imagine that's the real reason the KMT wants reunification--not so the communists can have power over Taiwan, but so the KMT can have power over the mainland.
It's a backhanded compliment, or spin. The real meaning of that phrase is, "and the iPhone is simpler to understand." But he doesn't want to say it like that, so he marginalizes the statements potential backers by implying that they're non-tech savvy if the find the iPhone easier to use.
Heh, got any stock picks you want to share? :)

Nice call.
Search "site:mahalo.com"

Simply "mahalo.com" lists every indexed page with that text on it, such as this one.
Obviously depends on crop and circumstance. What you say is often true. That said: if it's early spring and I have the choice between an Oregon-grown apple and a flown-in New Zealand Fuji (or Chilean/Peruvian asparagus, often available and yummy during the winter), there's really no contest.

Does that make it "good" to eat the airborne food? Certainly not by many measures. But you can't just pretend that "local == better" if you want to win arguments either.
Want a job? Get a computer science degree
It might cover you financially--to an extent. But they'd still be suing you, personally and not your company. As an owner/partner in a corp or LLC you have full legal separation from your company (so long as you are running it legally) and can't personally be held liable.
Until you avoid expulsion only because there wasn't (yet) a policy saying you couldn't jailbreak it, according to someone claiming to be a former student: http://www.saveardmorecoalition.org/node/4216

(Of course I'm wondering about the physical security on the hard drive (e.g. an unrepairable seal); an obvious thing to do is to image the drive and proceed from there. Although I'm sure that's explicitly against policy and that they're looking for tool marks and so on.)
We might be able to take out a couple of nukes. An entire barrage from a nuclear superpower will get through.

Also, ballistic missiles have no means of communication with the outside world. No guidance, even. They're "ballistic"--you put them up and physics determines where they come down.
I think it's safe to say that mcutts is an impostor account. As far as I can tell, the actual Matt Cutts is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MattCutts
I think they must have bought some people over from ASDA in the UK - a chain they bought a while ago.

I used to go to Walmart in Texas every now and again and it was not a good experience. Now the ones I have been in are starting to pick up elements that look suspiciously like they were lifted from ASDA - especially the produce section. The local produce product line has been running for a while in the UK (both buy-British and buy-regional) for example.

It seemed odd at the time because the UK grocery market seems to be a pretty bad business to buy into with 4/5 large and reasonably evenly matched competitors that are so close to saturation point that nearly all areas are served by 2+ big and 3+ small stores.

(Equally the UK Walmart stores are getting more like the American ones in the non-food section.)
My answers are yes, yes (everyday gets opportunities every day, but as Edison observed "too often they are dressed in overalls and look like work"), mix of ability and practice, and I agree that people are different and different teams get different opportunities.

But it sounds like relying on luck and innate differences is an excuse for not learning from your mistakes. This is a "Random Walk" model for startup success where you begin at a random point (your innate abilities) and wander buffeted by luck in some kind of entrepreneurial Brownian motion.

Clearly luck plays a role, but I believe, like Pasteur, that "inspiration only favors the prepared mind." You have to know what you are looking for in advance. And it turns out this skill can be learned as well.

Reasonable men may differ, but I think there is considerable evidence that experience helps startups differentiate beyond naive ability or luck, and that deliberate practice prevents you from experiencing the same event over and over without learning from it.

For another take on this see Carol Dweck's mindset model at http://www.mindsetonline.com/ which documents research that folks who believe that effort makes a difference learn faster than those who trust to innate ability.

What's most pernicious about this belief is that it can lead you to manage people in a way that doesn't admit of their ability to improve.
Please, punish me for putting tape on my laptop at home. Please. Pretty please.
YouTube API Blog: Announcing the YouTube SDK for .NET
It didn't happen, because the person who would have gotten screwed instead bought hosting as an LLC.
How science is destroying everything you know and love
Is the Bloom Box the next Segway type bomb?
I don't follow. Jeff wrote two books and derives personal wealth from the success of the iPhone platform. How is that not exactly the same incentive as working for Apple in this case?

My point was that the whole line of argument is dumb. Tell me what one author got right or the other wrong. Don't spin one as "biased" and then turn right around and in the next sentence tell me to believe another without evidence.
You're the one claiming releasing a quote by Sprint's "manager of electronic surveillance" about how the _company_ Sprint releases private personal information, a statement which the company also confirmed publically on the record, constitutes a unilateral violation of the personal privacy of said "manager of electronic surveillance". Absurd.
One Person Profitable (In defense of single founders)
I'm compiling a list of founders who have achieved OPP. There are the obvious ones like Markus Frind and Gabe Rivera, but I'm sure there are many HN readers who have also successfully bootstrapped as single founders.

Anyone know of a verified one person profitable startup? Have any YC founders accomplished it?
"In 2005, he(Eric Schmidt) threw a legendary hissy fit when CNET's Elinor Mills, in an article about privacy, published some details about his residence, his finances, and his politics that she had uncovered through Google searches. Google infamously cut off all contact with CNET for a couple of months. Schmidt didn't seem so casual about the value of privacy when his own was at stake."
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/other_peoples_p.ph...
The top physics journal is Physical Review Letters, which restricts submissions to 4 pages. That presents a number of difficulties in presenting results, especially if you need to include a lot of plots/graphics/tables. If you are publishing the result of research that took years and dozens or hundreds of people, things must be greatly condensed. It's not Scientific American.
That's not the real Matt Cutts
I don't think it would be worth the effort to try monetizing. These things are a dime a dozen and they get blacklisted quickly. They can also be expensive to run because of the bandwidth usage. Also, some hosting providers don't allow proxies. My biggest problem with them is that I wouldn't want my server IP address showing up as accessing pedo sites or other types of illegal sites because of the users. Even worse is that some proxy server software caches sites by default (and can even get spidered.)

Good luck, but I think your efforts would best be spent elsewhere.
Are the laptops school property? I'm sure they could do something if they were.