skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a little taken aback by the tone of some of the comments here, so I thought I'd offer a few points of clarification.

* For the longest time we mostly stuck to doing the math. We certainly didn't call for the contest to be cancelled, and we had nothing to do with the lawsuit. But when some people implied that we were responsible for the mess that ensued, we were kind of pulled into it. We posted this as a way of explaining our point of view and reaching out to see if there's a possibility of collaboration.

* The sadness we expressed is genuine. The reason we brought up Netflix's response to our paper wasn't "snark" or "gloating." Rather, we were pointing out that the cancellation of this contest was rather needless, because if they had acknowledged the privacy risks back when we published the paper, they would have had more than enough time to deploy an opt-in system for this contest. I think it is really unfortunate that that didn't happen.

* Someone wanted to know exactly what I thought of the "greater good" argument. Well, I'll tell ya. I'm vehemently opposed to it and I think it's a dangerous slippery slope. I think this point of view is enshrined in the ethos of this country -- "better let ten guilty men walk free than to convict one innocent man," etc. I don't think anyone has the moral authority to decide that the privacy concerns of a few can be sacrificed.

* There is a specific reason we chose the open letter format rather than communicating with Netflix directly. Acutally, two reasons. First, there are many data privacy researchers who are at least as qualified as we are for this role. We wanted to make sure the community had the opportunity to participate in whatever ensures, rather than just us.

Second, I'm sure there are many companies other than Netflix who have a similar need for privacy preserving data mining. If Netflix doesn't take us up, perhaps one of the others will. Bottom line, since there are multiple parties on both sides, and we don't really know who they are, we felt it is better to have this dialog in public.

* Finally, it is understandable when something like this happens to want to find someone to blame. But think twice before shooting the messenger.
Open letters are about communicating a message, they are also by definition political, and it's really helpful to our social systems when they are based on logic.

Analysis of motives is of course valuable. But it's not an argument against the matter at hand. It may not have been clear that I was being facetious.
Argh. #00aaaa here, and I've even seen this rant before. Just didn't think about it.
I don't know if this person's complaints about the way Amazon treated his negative seller review are representative. If true, it's very shortsighted because it will hurt Amazon if their customers find that highly rated sellers consistently give them bad service.

However, he should also ask for a refund directly from Amazon (under their A-to-z Guarantee). Amazon is very good about giving refunds, even from third party sellers, and doing so would probably put more pressure on the seller as well. The guarantee specifically says:

"If a seller has clearly misrepresented the condition or details of an item in a way that affects its value or utility, it is "materially different." In such cases, that seller should be willing to offer a refund or exchange when contacted within 14 days of receiving the item."
> country of origin is NOT a reason why some people remain poor. Carlos Slim Helu is SOLID PROOF.

This is probably obvious to everyone here but I'd like to point out that one case out of a 100-million population is statistically completely insignificant. He is not a solid proof of anything.
As someone who's played with sheet music, I can pretty confidently say that functionality would be extremely annoying.

Imagine reading along with a marquee. Yeah, it's that annoying. I'd much rather it flip virtual pages than scroll along.
He said that computers have caused this in movies, because now every frame can be manipulated separately.
Rather doomy for my taste, but I think we are heading towards a complex future something like this - closer to cyberpunk than to Star Trek. Even though the current recession is a temporary affair, there are good reasons to be concerned about growing technological unemployment and its effects in the next few decades, especially upon white collar "knowledge workers".
The attack on angel financing
"I'm going to try to paraphrase your concerns that the privacy fears are overblown and we're just losing something valuable, I hope you don't mind, please tell me if I got it wrong:"

"I'm going to just rewrite your argument" is not a valid form of debate. Please don't do that, ever.
http://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors

Mine is b0a0d0
I could not understand the purpose of this site. :( Googling with operator filetype:pdf is better.
You're trying too hard. Stop. Go for competant and boring.

Switch to Blueprint. Get everything layed out on a grid. Things should line up with each other. This takes programming, not design talent.

Use Blueprint typography. You have no discretion in font sizes anymore. Just let it do its thing.

Stop setting background colors. On anything. They aren't your friend. If they were an ice cream flavor, they'd be pralines and dick. If you lay your site out on a grid, you won't need the background colors to distinguish elements.

Work with three colors: black, grey, and an accent color:

* Most things will be black

* Things that aren't important --- like all your timestamps --- are in grey. Look at the header on this comment. Metadata fades into the background.

* For very important things, use an accent color sparingly. Maybe it's the most important comment on the page.

* Count the number of ways in which any two pieces of text differ. Bold vs. not bold: 1 point. Grey vs. black: 1 point. Big vs. little: 1 point. Things should differ by the minimal effective number of points. That means don't set <h2> text in accent red.

Just do those things and, instead of springing for a designer, you can go to 99designs and ask for a $250 logo. That'll be money better spent.
"We've been having this [really easy to diagnose and solve] problem and haven't been able to use your product for 3 days."

"I'm in the middle of doing a demo at [big prospect] and had [obscure problem] when doing [something nobody's tested]."

"Why didn't we do [proposed solution that was argued at length for weeks before choosing the current one]?"

"Thanks to [list of everyone except the guy that really did all the work] for working so hard on this release."
United States Census 2010 Form Questions
Very impressive! I am a cooking-obsessed hacker too, but I haven't attempted something this ambitious.
I can't say enough good things about this event. Great people, great food. Let's do it again! Or at the very least, let's all keep in touch and meet for a beer or coffee sometime soon.
There are a far few novels that cover this - for example: Fast Times at Fairmont High/Rainbow's End (near-future) and The Golden Age (far-future). The latter is interesting because covers the automated mediation of the interactions of people experiencing different realities.
It's a concept of "entitlement in time," implicitly embedded in many cultures. You are first subordinate to your parents, then to your teachers, then to your boss; then you become one of those things and "get to" treat others as subordinates. It's very hard to get away from, even in start-ups (which you'd think would be a breeding ground for creative company organization schemes.)
Why not just add tracing code to the source and recompile? I don't immediately see an advantage to this kind of hot-patching in this case.
I go to Thailand in just over 4 weeks, after Indonesia last year ive got exactly the same bug. Though I think my anti love of commercial epicentres was further developed by the fact we spend 3 days in Dubai on the way back home..seriously everything that is wrong with anything is there! Nasty...Rant over.
Simply links to a PDF, sans any analysis:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimiza...
Winning the Firefox Mobile Add-On Challenge
It's actually a big problem. You do not want a 'buyer beware' type of issue to come out when trying to promote your product. At this point, the mobile carriers should be pushing out phones only with the latest release or clearly indicate the version of Android supported by the phone. I'll actually be in the market for a smartphone in a couple of months, and very glad I saw this article. I'm still leaning strongly to Android, but this type of issue could change my mind.
Noted on this online guide is that categories of "race" have been asked about on the decennial census since 1790 (although the categories used on the Census have changed over the decades).
I agree. Ever notice how the media always treat a stock market rally like a sunny day? Too many sunny days bring a drought, which in this case means no chance to buy value at a good price. Short sellers are like rain.

My main complaint is that investors are information-starved and our public policy is to blame. All this outrage about people gaming the system is a distraction. We need to fix the system, starting with the banks.
I play music too and would like the scrolling score. Maybe it's more of an issue of it's less comfortable now but far more comfortable later.
Conversely the bank is losing money because the money repaid is worth so much less than the money lent. Bonus points for anyone that figures out why the banks aren't lending

Except that the bank isn't really lending its own money. It lends its depositors' money, amplified through fractional reserve banking. They can also borrow from the Fed, making their own bundle on inflation, as a debtor.
This is great news. I love people getting to work on something they love and it being open source. I'd rather use a OSS product made by VMWare than Oracle any day.
Microsoft shows off Windows Phone 7 Series dev tools at MIX10
What's your definition of a home-run.

1x return a success or multiples?
and in what time frame?

Invest in me :)
When will Apple unlock the iPhone?
I should have been more clear. The rants are interesting because they highlight things that have been subtly bugging me, but I don't know why.

In this case, I scroll through and look at all of those pictures, and I know something is wrong. It takes someone with talent and experience to talk about the color balance. That gives me something concrete I can look for when I try to put together designs -- don't just go and get yourself complementary colors and then just go nuts with the contrast.
Heck, you can take this to the next level and make it a guitar hero game for real instruments. A lot of music teachers wouldn't have jobs anymore...
If the inflation was kept under control (not too low, not too high) then they would not do anything other then usual.

They of course monitor unemployment but only because unemployment rate (which is currently 12.7%) can influence future behavior of inflation rate.
Really? What can the consequences be? I'm not being flip-- I think it's easy to say that but its harder to pin down dangerous scenarios.

The increasing fact is that the more Google knows about you, the better they can serve up search results (and ads, of course). I think most users would NOT opt-out given the chance to do so (if it meant harming their search quality).

Related quote from Matt Cutts' blog:

"It’s a long article, but an example useful fact is that if X is the number of people who visit the Ad Preferences page and opt out, 10X people don’t opt out and 4X people actually edit their categories to improve the targeting relevance of the ads they see. Let me say that again: four times as many people change their settings to make their ads more relevant than opt out of interest-based targeting. I think the Ad Preferences page is a good example where users get more transparency and control regarding their privacy."
Ask HN: What is the best way to get an unavailable but unused twitter name?
I need to open several twitter accounts for several projects I'm working on but these accounts have already been registered however they are all inactive accounts without tweets or followers.<p>Is there anyway to get that twitter name that you want but that unfortunately somebody registered and never used?
I actually like the effect.
I'll admit to being a major Perl hater. However, this Coro library looks great! Perl threads are horrible pieces of trash, and the Coro library author not only admits this but does something about it by implementing threads the way nature intended them to be. If I'm ever forced to code in Perl again and need or want threads, I will turn to this library first.

The way the Coro author implements Perl threads, by the way, sounds similar to how MacRuby and Rubinius are attempting to remove the GIL in ruby by copying interpreter state so that multiple OS threads can run simultaneously.

edit: after reading further, it turns out these threads are cooperative in that only one can run at a time. Also, it looks like they act more like Ruby fibers in that one must give up control explicitly or make a blocking call that implicitly gives up control. I'd rather the core scheduler be able to preempt threads directly. What if one of the threads takes a long time or ends up in an infinite loop?

"This module collection manages continuations in general, most often in the form of cooperative threads (also called coros, or simply "coro" in the documentation). They are similar to kernel threads but don't (in general) run in parallel at the same time even on SMP machines"
This stuff is just epic. I love it even though I'll never have a use for it, and don't see the point in the first place.

God bless crazy hackers, I live vicariously through your insanity.
It is true, colour grading has gone crazy in today's movies. I find it so amazingly distracting. Fortunately there are still some tastefully graded films being made. Even Avatar was pretty nicely coloured.

Like all fashions, this will change with time.
I voted him up because I'm taking him at his word that his goal is to paraphrase, and that I wasn't very clear in my initial writing. If both speakers have equal opportunity to respond, saying back in your own words what you think you are hearing is a great way to reach understanding. If nothing else, it made me reread what I wrote to see if I could state things more clearly.
Exactly. If you light the actors with warm light, the background would become blueish. These days you just set the right color balance, before they used corrective filters (slightly blueish in this case). The result is the same.
Indeed. Post 2.0 is redis-cluster time!
This article is too rooted in the middle class perspective for my tastes. To me the education system isn't failing these kids -- it's the other way around. They goto pretty good/safe schools and simply don't want the education being offered because they think they can beat the system. Probably many of them can because they have a safety net that allows them to reconsider their options down the road. It's the poor minorities who have dramatically higher drop out rates we should be considered about. If you don't have many opportunities in life you should maximize the "free" public education you can get and make the most of it.
I don't think that this is a conspiracy theory. Just observation (fairly obvious, although I am not sure if right in that case) that selfishness can sometimes lead to actions that harm economy and the people.

Greed is (not always) good.
One paragraph of 12 was about a company, and given the particular company, it would be like writing an introduction to advertising on the web without mentioning Google. The rest was about the new 'branding' for the semantic web community.
> Would you like to see a code check-in by Paul Krugman?
I'd gladly welcomed code check-in from 8 year old if it nailed the problem.
Perhaps, but think of it this way. There's a reason typography focuses on line length in written text - it's easier to read something if you have a decent reference point [1]. A long line makes it easier for your eyes to get off track.

The same thing happens in music. Dividing things into measures and lines allows our brain to "chunk" it. Part of the chunking mechanism is returning your visual focus to the beginning of the next line.

Part of reading is the connection of eye movement to new information. If you no longer need to move your eye to get a new measure/phrase/note, it's patently more difficult to notice the change. That's why marquees are useful for short lists of phrases that repeat often - and not entire articles. Maybe scrolling music might be decent for karaoke or games like guitar hero - but the information encoded into one bar of classical staff is orders of magnitude greater (and one of the reasons I despise, say, piano rolls in most digital audio authoring software).

Disclaimer: I have only been reading sheet music for two decades; this may or may not qualify me to comment on the benefits or detriments of an autoscrolling marquee of sheet music instead of paginated sheet music.

[1]http://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/em/
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/ask-com-to-offer-...
HN-ers are most defnitely welcome!
There is a really annoying one that used to haunt me when being forced to enjoy watching football (soccer) with my dad: ALL video replays had the exact same audio on it. It really used to grate on me as it was really obvious once you had got used to it, but my dad could never hear it.

Just a little anecdotal evidence of my experience on this fascinating subject. Perception, attention and information are very interesting facets of psychology!
At least you get the descriptive "internet".

Lots of times I just get "I'm locked up"...

My favorite "I'm locked up" is when somebody else logs on to the workstation that the user normally uses. "Locked up" means "there is a different user name in the user name field that mine!".

Another favorite is when a user types their password wrong enough times on our iSeries system. It does something called "varying off" (disabling the terminal until I re-enable it)...so they keep trying...at all the rest of the terminals. Pretty effective denial of service attack if you ask me!

I remember one user who was furious with me because he had worked for the company for over a year, and WHY THE HELL HADN'T I SET HIM UP WITH AN EMAIL!!!?!?!

I had...the trouble was that he had to click the icon (which is on his desktop, and on his start menu) labeled "email". Oh joy!

Also, don't get me wrong, I love my job :), sometimes the users screw up, but it's generally pretty low-impact :).
I think the truth is somewhere in between.

Yes, there are a ton of failing school districts, but it's not as if kids are clamoring to learn all they can and being told no. Kids aren't really motivated to learn the stuff (not that they ever have been in the history of education), and those schools aren't doing any motivating. It requires both parties to try.

I think the idea of fixing schools has, and will continue to be, examined to death. What no one seems to examine is the other half of it. How can we as a society stop perpetuating the "learning is uncool" myth? Maybe it's because a math competition will never be as exciting as a football game, maybe it's just part of human nature to be skeptical of intellectualism as a defense mechanism for the ego... I don't really know. But I don't think you can "solve education" without paying attention to that part as well.
Not meant to be a thread hijack, but I guess it is anyway...

I put up a blog post last night with some troubles I was having in Gambit (my site with the post: http://etherplex.org) I'm very new to non-JVM hosted languages, so I'm not yet sensitive to where the performance pitfalls are.

Essentially, a professor of mine gave me a program in C that boiled down to a for loop doing 144 million iterations with a check inside of it, and an increment if the check passes. The C program runs in 1 second, and the straight port to Gambit I attempted runs in about 8 minutes.

I posted code, in hopes someone might spot my error. Are nested do statements or let statements particularly expensive, or did I make some bone-headed mistake somewhere when I ported it over? It's not meant to be functional (yet), I thought I'd just start with an imperative implementation and go from there, since that was what the original code was. Thoughts?
That pretty much means that most Amazon ratings are bullshit.
> Honest question: is there a purely event-driven I/O framework (no threads anywhere)?

You might look into a continuation-based framework. With continuations, you can do purely event-driven IO written in a direct style: the framework can grab the "callback" itself by snagging the continuation of its slow IO functions.

You still run into the same problems with blocking (non-IO, or non-framework) code taking up more than its fair share of time, however.
Not a great article. Might be more productive to play around with DBpedia (http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess) a bit. Semantic web tech is good for mixing data from multiple sources but be prepared to do some manual work.
I wonder if it's patched for Y2K. I remember at school, there were a couple of databases we were afraid to ever reboot because we weren't sure if they would turn back on.
Hang did a great job of cooking. The food really was astoundingly good and would have been impressive even if he was cooking for a smaller group in his own kitchen.

The company was nice too, so I don't think less ambitious cooks should be scared of hosting their own HN dinner party. It turns out that HN readers have a lot to talk about!
I can't disagree with you enough.

I don't want anything else to decide what order my code runs. I want it to run in the order I decide.

Once you move away from the stupid "I want these 100 things to run at the same time", and realize that's impossible unless you have 100 CPUs, then you can start to move forwards and learn a better way.

Event based / async programming is simple once you get used to it, it's hugely liberating, and _extremely_ efficient. It reduces code complexity, and means you _know_ what order your code will execute in. Something that I kinda like knowing.
The new GarageBand does that via a MIDI input..
German Publishers Question Apple’s Rejection of Nudity
China's Property: Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
Got Roof? SoCal Edison Leasing Warehouse Roofs for Massive Solar PV Program
We've seen this story before with Windows Mobile, and it doesn't end well. People who are bothered by the idea that their phone is running an older OS version should buy a Nexus One. Google has a motivation to ensure their flagship phone stays up-to-date, whereas history has shown that licensee handset manufacturers don't.
Free Mobile App Maker Snaptu Funded By Sequoia
I believe that it's no longer possible to get names freed. I wrote Twitter support recently about releasing a name that was created over two years ago and used once to send a single nonsense tweet (twice in a row). It's never been used since.

The support person was very clear and wrote back quickly to say, and I'm paraphrasing, "We don't do that anymore." She added that they have some plan to reap unused accounts maybe ever somehow, but it was very vague. Vague enough that I'm not hopeful they will ever do it. (You will find a number of discussions online about various methods that used to work for getting a dead Twitter account released. It seems they got enough requests that it was more work than it was worth. That's my guess, frankly.)

If you have luck somehow, please write back to say how. It's really a shame since so so many names were taken and just lying there unused.
Crazy in the USA: Psychologists per capita, Stress and Drinking
Perhaps the author considers non-middle-class people to constitute (significantly) less than 30% of the population.
Amazon sidesteps questions on China business practices