skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is the question serious, or is it meant as a joke? As a riposte to the earlier thread, it is fantastic. The user writes "privacy is dead" and here, on Hacker News, and also on jacquesmattheij.com, you have a thread with a lot of intelligent people trying to figure out the person's identity, and failing. Therefore, the user's original point is disproven simply by starting this new thread. If this was deliberate, then this was genius.

This earlier thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197027

Contains this sentence:

"this thread highlights a fundamental property of a networked life: privacy is dead, there is only identity management."

but then this contradicts the original thesis:

"If harnessed properly, these things can be useful, but it requires a mindset and workflow not entirely dissimilar to those of spies or high-end criminals - controlling information by selective disclosure, identity segmentation, disinformation, anonymization, etc. - not for sinister purposes, mind you, but simply to guard what we traditionally call privacy."

I'd say the current thread offers proof that privacy can be defended. After all, here we have all these smart people, failing to identify the earlier user.
Interesting how the Mozilla Suite split messaging and e-mail out into separate components, and now Firefox is slowly bringing those pieces back into the browser.
Edamame from China, Spinach from Mexico, mini-pizzas from Canada... almost everything in there is from another country.
Congratulations Dan. Looks like you have created a useful, highly polished little app. I'd buy it if I had an iPhone.

Have you considered making the keys on the keyboard start off a lighter shade of blue and fade down to dark blue as they are held?
Your "you've got bigger problems" then translates to "you should have capacity for at least double your normal traffic".

Capacity planning is complex enough that I wouldn't make such a blanket statement so judgmentally.
How does one buy yuan?
Psychopaths among us
The styles are similar.
> Either the author is pretty obtuse, or he's deliberately misrepresenting Bray's comparisons between the web and the iPhone app ecosystem. I thought it was pretty clear in Bray's original post that he wasn't try to say that Apple was censoring the internet, [...]

Bray was trying to say that, I assume, but not exactly clearly. These quotes easily cause confusion about what he is describing:

"The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what."

"Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other."

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Go...
Tell HN: Flounder now on the App Store, group chat on your iPhone
Comparing Ruby and C#: Equality
Exactly! That's the whole idea here, I was quite surprised that my first solution (with a very high correlation) failed, even more surprised when the second one failed as well (especially since that person had been commenting in the same thread and had a very high correlation as well).

Elsewhere in this thread someone is jumping up and down to stop trying to identify the poster, the funny thing is I think he/she is in no danger at all of being identified, at least not without his/her cooperation.

The only person that could identify this user is PG, and maybe alaskamiller, and I'm pretty sure that our secrets are safe there.

edit: and if that person is the original poster then they're not helping themselves by increasing the sample size :)
Cooking with John von Neumann
JScrambler - protect, compress, obfuscate your JavaScript source
Dijkstra - Why numbering should start at zero
The appears to just be for an Amazon referral link, essentially. There's virtually no content, and it's little better than an ad. Keep this off of Hacker News.
The word in Shanghai circles has been good times through the 2010 expo; uncertainty thereafter.
ANSI SQL Hierarchical Data Processing Basics
Cyber-jihad threat?
JQuery plugin to create rich animations ( works on iPhone )
Spritely is a jQuery plugin for creating animations in pure HTML and JavaScript ( therefore no Flash plugin is required ).

Resulting animations also work on iPhone.
Actually, I feel there's one other non-novelty use of QR codes: Android apps. Most sites with Android apps have a QR code to the market in them. If you're browsing on a computer/laptop/not your phone, you can just point your phone at the screen and be taken instantly to the app's Market page. It's a case where the URL problem can't be handled by teh user, and where typing in a URL seems odd.

I agree that QR codes aren't fully useful, but I have seen some decent use of them. They certainly have more potential in my opinion, although the augmented reality demos of them I've seen are pretty cool.
Some pieces of the Running the Numbers series are currently on display in the Museum of Science in Boston (which is otherwise a joke except the probability machine in the math room which is really cool :)).
Bad Password Management Will Stop You in Your Tracks
It's digital sheet music, not audio.
That would be this great magazine piece http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?... written by Michael Lewis.

If you're looking for the quote about the three it is at the end of the article, and is made more interesting by the context of the 'lucky' shot. Briefly - Kobe misses 86.3% of long 3 pointers heaved up in the final seconds of games. The Rockets knew this. Quoting now: 'It was a shot Battier could live with, even if it turned out to be good. Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never could control.'
> The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure.

That would be more convincing if it weren't hosted in a web page supported by an ad about half an inch away. The only failure was the market's ridiculous valuations for startups that would have been viable businesses if kept smaller.

As for on-page interactions vs. pageviews, yeah, that's one of many drawbacks to releasing a crippled javascript-only application instead of semantic resources that have URLs and actually become part of the web.
Like http://fretwar.com/ , but for piano instead of guitar?
Great idea, poor hardware choice.

Really - this would be an amazing app for an aspiring musician but the iPhone screen would make this experience much less enjoyable than it should be.
Currently 6 months into learning the piano again, downloaded the app to give it a whirl.

Very first impression, but the Continuous scrolling seems to be a little jerky in places.

Edit: it's synching up with the notes as they scroll by which is your design choice I guess. Smooth continuous scrolling wasn't something that seemed appropriate?
I know I'm paranoid, but why on earth does this page load a hidden java applet? It took forever to display, i was like wtf, and then I see the java console application appear and then I was like, even more wtf??

There's been an increasingly aggressive trend toward tracking user behavior and it's disturbing. I don't know what that java applet was for, but it was invisible, which makes me feel uncomfortable with rww.
FCC Outlines Public Safety Network -- FCC -- InformationWeek
The Davis Square area is certainly very nice, I lived in it for the last half-dozen or so years of my stay in the Boston area (late '80s-very early '90s), but there's no way a family is going to fit into a $425/month apartment that's anywhere near it.

For the criteria of taxes, cost-of-housing, congestion, state debt and general cost of living the Boston area is just plain bad and as far as I know getting worse.

Commuting from southern New Hampshire isn't a great option either, the cost of living there is still pretty high and unless you can do it off peak it's very congested. And there are a lot of tasty startups in Cambridge, you'd need to have a commute to there be practical.

While I believe there's a big separation from the Boston area to the next largest startup areas in the nation, I think Daniel's criteria that rule out SV also rule out it, although not as strongly.
Ooooh, I'll chip in.
One of the links in this post is a paper that explains how NaCl is implemented on x86-64 without segmentation.
Looking for a Co-Founder?
A friend of mind runs this, and I think it would benefit a lot of people looking for cofounders.

--

Ready to Meet Your Co-Founder?

FounderDating brings together super talented entrepreneurs with different backgrounds and skill sets to start innovative new companies. We help you find co-founders with complimentary skill sets. This is NOT a meetup, it's an invite-only event so the people and the conversation are high quality.

Next Event is April 6th, Deadline to apply is April 1st. www.founderdating.com
Would like to remind fellow readers that the original iPhone was shipped without the iPhone SDK with Steve Jobs pushing for web-based applications, yet Apple was roundly criticized for it.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iphone.html
It looks like a nice app but does it actually do anything that is different from the multitude of desktop apps in this genre?
Custom usb- Promotional USB- Toyota car-QQUSB.COM- Promotional Electronics
An Interview Question That Prints Out Its Own Source Code (In Ruby)
I think that we're all treating this as a game, under the assumption that if we figure out who onetimetoken is he'll tell us, as it supports his point that privacy is dead. Also, it wouldn't be fun if we assumed that he will deny it if identified. Never underestimate the importance of having fun.
you should look at everything... my personal order of importance:

(1) Unique visitors
(2) Aggregate Visitors & Pageviews
(3) Stickyness (this is avg TOS, bounces, %new vs %returning etc)

numbers are all relative as well.. ie, who cares about a 99% returning user rate if there are only 10 visitors per day.
I robbed a bank last week and I liked the money so much I decided to get a job.
We have serious problems to fix: like the pile of garbage the size of Texas that is sitting in the middle of our ocean.

I couldn't find a good article, and I am petty sure the wiki-has some incorrect data displayed, but I'll leave it to the curious to research =p

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
However, as I tried pointing out (in a seemingly dead thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200091), identity management is something that only the technically savvy can pull off. And even they are likely to stumble apart at some point, because being perfect in every way is inhumanly hard. And so, as it stands, privacy is dead in this age.
"I'd say the current thread offers proof that privacy can be defended. After all, here we have all these smart people, failing to identify the earlier user."

Imagine the hassle of creating brand new identities for every action taken online. If privacy isn't dead, then it sure as hell is tough to maintain (and to do so would not be very practical).
This should be an interesting battle between PayPal and Square. PayPal has the brand and Goliath sized resources.

Square has backwards compatibility with how credit cards are currently used and a fast, innovative team.
We have been using phonebooth.net for our 4 geographically distributed work-at-home offices (Pittsburgh, Dallas, Austin and Denver), and it's worked pretty well so far. They worked (and are working) hard with us to get out the little glitches, and we got to deal with their actual developers, since it was (still is?) a beta test situation.

They don't handle faxes, though.

Pretty good deal, though: $20/month/line, 5 line minimum. Cheaper than POTS, and much more flexible.

(I just dragged my Polycom IP phone out to our farm and plugged it in for the first time, and I'm up and running with my phone line with no obvious issues.)
After listening to the following TED talk, I feel that your store could do with some Chopin.

http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passio...
Github is a full-on game-changing company. They seem to be doing most everything right.

By charging developers money to host non-free projects, they've aligned their interests with developers: their customers. This means you get a no-bullshit interface which is exactly what I want from my project hosting.

I pray that google doesn't buy them.
When I was in elementary school (even though I have not developed any musical talent), my favorite part of music class was when the teacher (who was a talented pianist) would sit down and play at his then-state-of-the-art keyboard towards the end of class. His actual notes would show up on a huge keyboard display where keys would light up, just like in your app. It was fascinating and mesmerizing to see the visual patterns of some songs - and that some complex songs weren't that complex.

Thanks for the beautiful app and memory trip.
thanks. what sort of growth is desirable? i literally have 50% new users, 50% returning. is this good? or is it considered too slow?
They keep building lots of unused housing and buildings. This would be a bubble in a western country, but I'm not so sure in China. Because they have 1.3 billion people, and the majority live in the countryside and are not even allowed to move to the cities yet even though they want to.
Looks like learning the workings of LLVM is moving only up and up on my todo list.
I'm Jon Harrop. HLVM is a hobby project that I work on when I can find the time. If I could commercialize it then I would but there is no short-term way to make decent money from a VM/language that I can see.

I suggest you think carefully about when HLVM's fat references are a disadvantage compared to the alternatives and why. The real reasons are not at all what you're thinking (or what I thought for a long time).
That clamor just ruined Harvest Moon by a real musician.
I'm sorry, but this post is utterly pedantic.

The proof by Daniel Levine is absolutely "logically sound." The idea that what was shown was the conditional, "if y=y then x0=0" and not "x0=0 is true" simply ignores the fact that the first proposition in the proof was NOT an implication or derivation - it was an axiom.

Because it is an axiom, we are guaranteed that the argument is sound (and the conclusion true under whatever interpretation allows proposition #1 as an axiom) as soon as we prove that the argument is valid. Which is exactly what Levine set out to show. Logic 101.
Cool because I had never heard of a quine before (so I guess I would probably fail the interview question).
On /. posting anonymously is as simple as checking a box, even if you have an account.

Plenty of people have done so over the years, checking a box is nothing that only the 'technically savvy' can do.

If you do that rarely then I think your anonymous words are reasonably safe. If you do it regularly then you are open to the kind of attack that I attempted, and then it will have a better chance of success.

Privacy is dead in a general sense, companies like facebook, google and twitter facilitate identified communication and in that sense every letter you wrote using the old postal system was just as revealing, it just wasn't open to be read by the public.

People are slowly coming around about all this stuff being visible online. I can see that with the 'reocities' project, on average two people every day ask for their old account to be wiped because of privacy reasons. That's not much, but it still means that 1,000 non-technical users per year that I happen to have backed up a few pages for realize this. So if you extrapolate that to the internet at large I think that the number of users that are wising up to this is much larger than you'd expect at first glance.

Time will tell if there will be enough support for this, the 'think of the children' and 'war on terror' people seem to have the advantage for now, but laws that are enacted can in due course be repealed.

I've never bothered to hide my identity, there is nothing that I have to say that I wouldn't put my name to, even if not all of it is received equally well, that doesn't bother me (maybe it should).

There are people in positions that are sensitive that have stuff to tell us, in such cases (which are rare) anonymity really serves a purpose and I think this little experiment shows that without at least access to some log files these exercises get a lot harder.

edit: your thread definitely isn't 'dead'.
They're also running some javascript that pings a tracking server every 10 seconds you're on the site. If you have Firebug installed, you can watch it go on the net tab.
I bet it's better than elance or craigslist, but how is it different than a more traditional staffing agency? I've talked with other companies with models similar to this, where you ask for semi-skilled talent, and they provide it for a cost. Then they handle all the junk associated with employing somebody.
I too would prefer totally smooth continuous scrolling (like ddr when the notes are played as they hit the line).
See simplechord (Also by this company) for mac : http://wonderwarp.com/simplechord/

Get it free here: http://etudeapp.com/tweet/
Absolutely great article.
Totally agree! Mercury and other heavy metals make it potentially dangerous to eat much fish anymore.
Why would 'super talented entrepreneurs' need this to find co-founders?
Woodprint was probably "good enough" to enable widespread book distribution, especially since it enabled (from the author's point of view) a superior financing model:
http://www.froginawell.net/china/2009/12/china-where-the-fut...

I think the real problem is that the necessary books weren't being written in the first place (or were suppressed more ruthlessly), not that the cost of printing them was too high. The massive character set meant that becoming literate required a huge investment of time/money. And so, at least in China, all the literati went into civil service jobs, and had little incentive to publish books which would shake up the status quo.

You may be interested in the book Asia's Orthographic Dilemma by William Hannas.
The referral link is obviously copied from kk.org - Winer isn't making money from any clicks here.

That's not to say that the post is interesting. It isn't to me.
Why theatre was the most important class I ever took.
Flowroute now supports inbound t.38, not sure about outbound support. Makes faxes work over ip!
Check the options menu. I've only watched the demo movie, but it appears that there are two options for scrolling: page turns (like traditional sheet music, seemed "jerky" to me) and smooth scrolling.

I think the option is already there, you just have to pick it.
Nobody cares and everyone here is happy your site is banned. Stop trading on Mixergy's good will and brand, and go build something valuable.
From conversations I've had at their drink-ups, I get the sense they're pretty disinclined to sell the company, for reasons of personal freedom. Naturally, enough money will tend to push that sort of thing aside. I just don't think they're actively looking to get bought out, unlike some.
Does Pomeroy's beat Vegas odds? Has any model beaten vegas odds?
"In real life the probability of one team beating another team is independent of what happened in the past."

This sentence seems under-specified, but no matter how I slice it, it's not true. In sports, past performance is indicative of future results. Even in college you'll have correlations brought on by relatively stable (across decades in many cases) coaching staffs. The correlation isn't anywhere near perfect, but it isn't 0 either.

(In your statistics courses, everything is independent for your computational convenience. In the real world rather a lot of things are not independent.)

Consider what it would mean for past performance to say nothing about future results. It doesn't match reality.
I've wondered why people believe things about science which just aren't true. The author wrote "science is a repeatable act", but that means astronomy isn't a science. For that matter, nothing can be repeated exactly. I personally blame route memorization of "The Scientific Method" in school.

(Not that my comment here has anything to do with what the author is trying to say, which is more like 'if people don't give your startup money then it might not be because your idea stinks - perhaps you just don't fit the expected pattern and you can change that pattern', with extra ... philosophy ... added for flavor.)
The Green Guide - For Everyday Living
I'm really interested in human-readable grammars. Thanks for your work.
The better for you. I can't juggle but I don't think that will exclude me from any jobs worth having.
How to Encrypt USB Drives?
Worry about security of your USB sticks? This article explains how to encrypt USB drives to keep your vital data safe and secure on USB drives.
This post is full of inaccuracies. Some that leap out:

* Ruby isn't weakly typed

* C# value types are described as being allocated on the stack; but fields of value types, and boxed value types are on the heap.

* Re C#: "there is no need to explicitly release or allocate memory, unless the programmer wants to do so" - there is no explicit way to release GC memory, apart from manually invoking a GC.

* Worse: "Object.Equals [...] Is used to test reference equality in reference types and bitwise equality in value types" - This is completely made up. Object.Equals is a virtual method, it does whatever the descendant specifies it to do; it is resolved dynamically, at run time.

* "Operator equals (==) Is, basically, a synonym of object.Equals, same rules apply" - completely incorrect, it can be overloaded and is resolved statically, at compile time.
Pop the clutch wasn't an option?
One extra hit per pageview is not necessarily double your traffic, it's probably below a 1% increase a lot of the time.
I love Rapportive and Etacs, those plus a couple of other lab features make of Gmail a killer product. It was great before but these addons are definitely helping the business use of it.
Sounds like you guys need to install ghostery (a Firefox anti-tracking plugin) http://news.ghostery.com/

Though it blocked 6 of the 7 different tracking scripts on that page, it didn't seem to kill the Javascript one. (I have whitelisted Google Analytics)
Wow they suck
There is an excellent video of reporters from VBS.TV going out with a researcher to visit this place. Very well worth watching despite its length:

http://www.vbs.tv/newsroom/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3--4
I view any sort of advocacy of git over hg or hg over git as borderline ridiculous. Any differentiation between the two is so far out in the margins as to be irrelevant.
I think what your stats and the comment you replied to is showing is that America has gotten better, but there is a growing class divide between the haves and the have nots. I'm not talking about the super rich or the wall street guys, but by and large the knowledge/new economy/professional workers and then everyone else.

I believe most(all?) people on HN would by default be in the haves. They are educated and understand what it takes today to be successful. They may be broke, but rarely poor. Then there is a large group of people who are not only uneducated in these matters, but they are also poor and have no means or understanding on how to change their situation. The problem is that the gap between the two groups is growing larger and larger. How we get those on the have not side to make the jump is a growing challenge.
http://readwriteweb.com.woopra-ns.com/ping/
cookie=7TJHFV2SOJLYOHJB639M6X41J97LGFW8&alias=readwriteweb.com&
idle=22&ra=YHOOX4E81XHRKT8KVFHW0MPHJJ3L6Q0G

Woopra tracking how idle (amongst other things) you are on the page.
Guitar Hero against other people online with real instruments could be an epic music education tool.