skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'd be interested to see what happened with free speech during the civil war days."

Lincoln greatly expanded the power of the Presidency in the name of War time expediency, but there were people within the Union who fiercely criticized Lincoln and his government and its policies till the very end of the war. Very different from the situation in China. (Just try criticizing the Party 60+ years after the Revolution!).

Besides, any flirtations with restrciting Freedom Of Speech lasted hardly 4 years, not half a century as in China. But then the USA had a very strong tradition of Freedom OF Speech wheras such a concept was alien to China. That said, Hong Kong seems to be relatively politically vibrant, in spite of being ruled by the MAinland. I suspect once people get used to thinking for themselves and having the freedom to express their thoughts for a generation or two, it is hard to eradicate completely.

Coming back to the point of freedoms during the US Civil War, see http://www.etymonline.com/cw/habeas.htm

Excerpt

"the full question of whether the Constitution gave the president a special power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during wartime never got to the Court. In large part that's because the administration made sure it didn't. It had a valid fear that the Court would rule against there being such a power under the Constitution, and such a ruling would undermine the war effort. On the other hand, by keeping the matter away from the Court, the administration could largely accomplish its policy.

Opposition, especially in the press, clamored for a test case to settle whether the arbitrary arrests were legal. Secretary of War Stanton thought it would be wise to do so, too, but Attorney General Bates talked him out of it. In a letter of Jan. 31, 1863, Bates wrote to Stanton that a Supreme Court decision against the habeas corpus policy "would inflict upon the Administration a serious injury," and would do more good to the rebels "than the worst defeat our armies have yet sustained."

Bates said he would support a test case if he thought it had a chance of success. "I confess to you frankly, that, knowing as we do, the antecedents and present proclivities of the majority of that Court (and I speak of them with entire respect) I can anticipate no such results." This was after Lincoln had appointed three justices to the bench. Bates had intimate contact with the justices, and his judgment of their likely verdicts was well informed.

"Many loyal men deny this power to the President," he wrote to the Secretary of War, "and, however confident we may be that he possesses it, it is no imputation on the loyalty of the majority of the Court to presume that on this point they agree with their political school."
Bacteria Bots Build Tiny Pyramid (with video)
I notice that if I have lots of HFCS items I suffer from semi-diabetic type symptoms if I go too long without food: an urgent desire to eat, cold sweats, the shakes, blurry vision, etc. It's usually not too bad, but sometimes can pretty much take me out of commission. For years, before I figured out it was HFCS, I tried to deal with it by constantly eating which made me very heavy.

About a year ago I figured it out and have systematically gone about trying to eliminate HFCS from almost everything I eat, which is easier said than done. In the U.S. at least, it seems to be in almost everything from Soda to Bread to Ketchup. I also notice that when I travel overseas, I can eat with relative abandon and not suffer any of the typical ill effects I have from HFCS loaded food in the States.

I noticed within a week of doing this that I could actually get hungry again without getting "sick" and go thus go longer between meals. In the last year, I've lost about 15-20 pounds by just eliminating HFCS from my diet but not making any conscious effort to change my diet or exercise habits.
Yes, but how long have the researchers themselves known about these flaws? All that time an actual villain could have discovered the same flaw and exploited it. But instead weeks or months have gone by and for what benefit?
Ask HN: Python's bidict - what's a good use case for this?
Ask HN:  Why is Dubai saving 'The World'?
I'm just confused why they are going to spend 7 Billion dollars saving this waste of space? Reminds me of 'Stiltsville' in Miami - a city built on sandbars off the coast... destroyed and epic failure.

What are they thinking? Whats the rationale? Anyone know?
Not true, from the usage docs: Up to 1,024 locations may be queried within a single request.

"Note that on any given query, you may request elevation data for multiple locations, which count as separate queries."

Approximate! No need to do a lot of requests for flat land!
Ubigraph seems to do something like what you want.

http://ubietylab.net/ubigraph/
With the SSL-subversion boxes mentioned in http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/packet-forensics/ , I don't think it matters who's on the list (though I'm sure China is). A small company selling devices to intercept SSL means that the whole concept is dead. Even if no one else can acquire their devices, the whole world (that cares to find it out) now knows that such a man-in-the-middle attack is possible, so it's just a matter of time before they become much more common.

Worse yet, the company that makes these boxes advertised them at "the world's largest gathering of North American, Caribbean and Latin American Law Enforcement, Intelligence and Homeland Security Analysts and Telecom Operators responsible for lawful interception, electronic investigations and network Intelligence gathering." Any Mexican drug lord worth his cocaine money (or, of course, FARC) will now start bribing or scaring some suitable official into handing over a box or two.

Hopefully we'll discover an alternative approach to ensure online security. Just having fewer, more reliable CAs would be enough -- although, as I pointed out elsewhere, the measure of security is ultimately boots on the ground, not code in the aether.

Update: You're right, there's a trusted Chinese CA. From the Wired article: "[w]hen Mozilla added a Chinese company, China Internet Network Information Center, as a trusted Certificate Authority in Firefox this year, it set off a firestorm of debate, sparked by concerns that the Chinese government could convince the company to issue fake certificates to aid government surveillance."
Very nice indeed. I'm not a programmer, but i'd love to take it a step further, by getting the flip action to 'flip' and then 'expand' to the size of the whole canvas. Personally i think that would be neat.
Very true. Drupal is like Microsoft Word... it takes initiative to do things you may not have asked for.
> from urls that exist out in the wild from 6-10 years ago

From a glance at their archive, The Onion is still hosting articles from ten years ago. What in the world makes webmasters think it's okay to fail to maintain their mappings between URLs and live content?

Cool URIs don't change: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies at the university have noted an alarming increase in the rate at which sea levels have risen over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal.

Until 2000, the sea levels rose about 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) a year, but over the last decade they have been rising about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) annually, he said.

This is obviously bad reporting. Simple arithmetic:

5 mm x 10 years = 50 mm (2.0 inches)

For 30 years

3mm x 20 years + 5mm x 10 years = 110 mm (approximate 4.5 inches).

There is no way that an island would disappear because of 2.0 inches of water. Low level islands disappear due to erosion very quickly (especially volcanic ones). I actually remember reading in the SA sometime back of a case near NZ or Australia.
Doing Consulting on the side is a given, no?

Anybody who is an expert or authority in a domain should have no problem handling 1-2 contracts a month. Above all, it's a solid method for building reputation and network. mobility is a plus as well!
Edward Tenner: Unsung Inventors [pdf]
The Economics of Perfect Software
This seems more like a DailyWTF than a sweet optimization to be reminiscing about. I'd love to hear more details about this. I mean a single video is about the equivalent of tens of thousands of 404 pages.

I'm not sure which is more mindboggling... Spending 66% of their bandwidth and 50% of their CPU on serving these trivially cacheable pages or the fact that they didn't correct the problem when they were serving more than 5%.
Which you can fix by storing an unsigned long at the front of the string which holds the size.

If it would overflow, you just set the long to the max size, byte the bullet and read the entire string. If you are using a dynamic language just throw whatever InfinitelyLargeNumber class it has in the size column and you're good.

If you're worried about ram that much you can just use plain strings when you need to.
In this case it would fall under the "court order/legal requirement". The article in the opening paragraph of the story actually leads to a Fox News story from 2006 about Air America declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Under Chapter 11 they wouldn't be legally able to sell their mailing list.

But in January they declared Chapter 7 and that's just plain liquidation. That's "game over". In fact, even without the caveat in their privacy agreement it's possible they'd have been able to sell the list in Chapter 7 (I know Chapter 7 voids corporate legal agreements because a company I worked for went Chapter 7 and that voided my non-compete clause)
Not a GUI, but tig* is a fairly sexy repository browser in ncurses.

* http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/
My favorite author on the subject of Unicode is Mark Pilgram in his book Dive in to Python 3 (it's relevant for any language):

http://diveintopython3.org/strings.html

"Some Boring Stuff You Need To Understand Before You Can Dive In."
The ability of the human mind to rationalize anything if the rewards are great enough has been proven time and again. If you give someone enough incentive, and ease them into it slowly, a person will be able to justify anything to themselves.

The more they're challenged, the more justifications and rationalizations they'll come up with to defend their choices, and the more entrenched they'll be in their new position.
The failure of private firms to account for network externalities is one of the classic examples of coordination failure. So yes, the fact that the US government stepped in and built ARPAnet probably accelerated the emergence of what you and I call the internet by a decade or more.

I agree that private innovation almost always outpaces public innovation. But it took massive government to get the ball rolling in the first place. You need to keep this in mind next time you make silly overgeneralizations like "all subsidies are bad."
Sovereign lending relations don't work quite the same way as they do for you or I.
Sure, I don't have a bunch of time but I can try and reiterate some of the economists' positions that I have read (I am not a professional economist). It seems that one of the primary reasons for China's purchase of such a large share of US Treasury bonds (a little over 10%) has been to artificially lower the price of the Renminbi as compared to other currencies. This has become almost the cornerstone of the Chinese manufacturing economy -- because the Renminbi is artificially deflated compared to Western currencies, manufacturing is very cheap in China and their export status increases greatly. One of the problems with selling those bonds is that the reverse would happen: the Renminbi would shoot up, devaluing Chinese exports greatly. In contrast, the United States would experience massive devaluation of the dollar. This would produce negatives and positives, the positives being a large increase in the value of US exports. In addition, dumping U.S. assets would cause the value of their own dollar holdings to decrease, causing further problems.

Simply enough, the amount of U.S. Treasury bonds/securities that China holds at the moment is enough to bankrupt its own economy if they decide against it. In other words, China holds a good bargaining position right now, but cannot fully backup the threat without destroying their own reserves and manufacturing base.

I don't have time to find the links right now but some very interesting economists on this issue are the Brookings Institute, Paul Samuelson (MIT), and Paul Krugman (Princeton).
On my poor little 1st Gen MacBook (Yonah), performance of the Canvas based graph in Safari is significantly faster than the old Flash based solution.

\o/
Sluggy.com has been using MongoDB in production (with Python as it's main API interface) since ~July '09.

We haven't had a single problem with Mongo or API interfaces. This replaced MySQL + Memcache and was a MASSIVE difference in system load and performance.

Your mileage may vary, but it's very, very rare that I can say I haven't had a single real problem with a third party package (especially one as complicated as a database-type system), more so with early adoption.

(I'm still using Memcache for a few legacy pieces, but in general things I was having Beaker stuff in Memcache such as sessions and Pylons template caches are going into the Mongo Beaker plugin I wrote - http://bitbucket.org/bwmcadams/mongodb_beaker/ )
The NASA Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) has provided digital elevation data (DEMs) for over 80% of the globe. This data is currently distributed free of charge by USGS and is available for download from the National Map Seamless Data Distribution System, or the USGS ftp site. The SRTM data is available as 3 arc second (approx. 90m resolution) DEMs.

http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/SELECTION/inputCoord.asp
Partially. I was also trying to deliver the gravity of the holdings involved in this case. $1 trillion is economy-shaping money -- no country can simply "drop" $1 trillion dollars. China's economic future is now inexorably tangled with the United States'.
Original here. http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/03/the-latest-directives-f...
Yes, exactly. I heard DHH speak and asked him about the importance of the 37s blog and their books and he said "If you can't out-market, out-teach."
I like running with only one leg; it works well. But I'm too stubborn to try with 2, even if professional athletes keep telling me it is better for many reasons.

IE6 works well for me by the way. And I play piano without black keys, it works well for me. Oh, and you know what, I always study the night before my exam, it works well for me.
I think he's complaining about the other direction--- other people's feeds being shared with him, polluting the "All Items" view with items shared by his Buzz contacts, while he'd rather just see his own subscribed feeds there. Apparently you can't turn that off without disabling Buzz entirely.
This is a very helpful blog post from about a year ago. We implemented something similar to a Wilson score to power the default sorting for the millions of reviews we have at RateItAll. In general, with a system like this, the items with the most reviews are going to rise to the top. This might not be what you want. You can easily see this effect with something like our "Events of 2010" list: http://www.rateitall.com/t-2987869-events-of-2010.aspx
Sweet, I am installing it right now on my MacBook (I always have it running) and if everything looks good I'll also install it on my 2 MongoDB servers. I really like MongoDB for its ease of use with Ruby and its rich query support. I am unlikely to ever need the scalability of Cassandra, and MongoDB's features fit my needs. The new geo location support looks good.
Who else paid immediate attention to the overly-staged photo?
That was nice. Although, the interviewer just talked too much. A good journalist knows how to get out of the way.

I have a question for pg, if he is reading this. You said that about 70% of the companies exit YC with funding or do not need further funding because they are already bringing in money. Do you usually return your investment at this point, or do you wait until a later VC round, or do you generally wait to the point where the founders cash out to return your investment?
I think you ask an interesting question... But it's important to consider that during the civil war the US was still largely pre-industrial and there was very little Federal power.

I think a good example of the general trend I mention is from WW2 when the US decided to set up internment camps for peaceful Americans of Japanese descent.

We did the same thing immediately after 9/11 but this time the victims were mostly immigrants who were minor immigration law violators.... but the spirit was the same.

In both cases our values go out the window the minute there is the smallest amount of pressure.

Many of the criticisms of China that I've read seem to entail that Chinese citizens are dully unaware of the benefits of free speech, or that they are hapless victims of their government. Neither is a particularly flattering picture of the Chinese as human beings... and I'd argue such criticisms amount to dehumanization and early beating of the war drums -- we never go to war against people who are our moral equals after all, and thus we must first dehumanize our enemy by reducing him to the status of a morally deficient, diminished pawn of an evil state.
Since I thought about writing a similar script I can tell you why it can be useful:

- for one thing, as you said, you would need to do it for all the apps. I haven't tried the script but it sounds like it would hide all the apps besides basic Facebook stuff (status, pictures…), without you doing anything more.

- there are some things that you can't hide like new friendships, or "likes", "fans". ("Cindy and Mark are now friends", "Dufus became a fan of Marshmallows"…) If you were to hide these, you actually hide everything from that person.
I noticed that I seem to be getting fewer of the "This graph is out of date. Please wait while we update it" messages. Is that related to the Canvas switch? If so, major props.
US has free trade with China.

Sudan and Iran are "axis of evil" states anyway.

China has close trade relations with both.

No government can be blindly trusted no matter which one it is!
Take a look at http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/

It seems that Princeton's press release greatly overstated the results of the study. It also seems that there are some valid questions about the methodology of the study.
Everything he has ever done for FOSS is a waste of time. Bonobo and Mono are utterly pointless. It might not be a direct bribe but taking MS' money via Novell and pissing ten years on it is exactly what I expect from a developer of Miguel's caliber [sic].
I've read a couple of books on typography/design but none of them have been deep at all, just very basic on what different kinds of type styles are good at. I've got "Designing With Type" and it's very basic http://www.designingwithtype.com/5/home.php I've been wanting deeper material. Thanks a lot for the book tips they look like very promising -- added them to my tobuy list.
You need to substantiate your claim that ARPAnet accelerated the internet by a decade.

Why didn't we see ARPAnet get huge in the early 1980s? The real bottleneck to internet adoption was the lack of computing power (memory and CPU), which were necessary for the rise of graphical interfaces, which were necessary for lots of people to be able to use computers. These things were developed rapidly, and privately. The limits that were pushed to do this were not government edicts, but physical constraints (heat dissipation, die shrinks.) Remember that Xerox PARC was a private research lab!

The "lead" you're talking about sat idle for twenty years until cheap computers got good enough to help normal people. Therefore that "lead" was essentially wasted according to any sensible economic theory.

(I think that ARPAnet was technically great, and TCP/IP, sockets, Unix, etc., are all fine technologies. All I'm saying is that we're at no loss economically if technological development is paid for in a moral way, rather than the way we do it now.)
HFCS makes rats fat? A counterpoint.
The RideWithGPS people appear to do this:
http://ridewithgps.com/trips/22776

Though if you're somewhere very hilly (ahem Pittsburgh) it appears that slight issues with the GPS track will throw in a lot of extraneous elevation data.
I skipped over SVN on my way to Git from CVS, but I've heard the handling of branches in SVN isn't much better than CVS, and there it is absolutely horrible.

So, if you don't use branches it is understandable why you are happy with SVN. If you want branches, you'll need Git something like it (HG).
More context for the actual quote, from Miguel de Icaza's own blog:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Mar-25.html
MyTown Hits 1.5 Million Location-Based Gamers; Ups The Social With Version 3.0
The number of CAs doesn't matter. The essential flaw in SSL is that once you trust a CA, you trust it for all sites. This is what makes a MITM attack so trivial for someone who is well positioned in a network, and these appliances just make it that much easier to deploy if you don't have all the skills yourself.

Another problem is the sheer conceptual complexity of the system. It wouldn't take much to convince your boss to let you purchase an "SSL proxy" to fight viruses and commercial espionage, when all you really want is to steal all his passwords.
It's entirely possible to support one's government overall while disagreeing with many of the things it does. I support the US government as a whole, but I think many of it's policies concerning Iraq, Guantanamo, the "War on Drugs," immigration, etc. are despicable.

I think the same holds true for most of China's citizens. Most certainly realize that the government does bad things but this is far outweighed by the good things that it has done for the country in terms of economics development and stability.

Remember that a majority of China's population remembers a time when starvation was a very real risk and most were resigned to a future as subsistence farmer's living in a commune. Then realize that for someone who has lived through that to where China is now in terms of economic opportunity, free speech is just not that big of an issue.

Edit:
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that there's a necessary trade-off between economic development and free speech. My point is that most of China's population is too busy celebrating the miracle of development to care about free speech. Instead of taking for granted that economic development happened, they still remember the very real prospect that it might not have happened and still see improvement's that can be had there.
Depends on the bribe.
In both cases our values go out the window the minute there is the smallest amount of pressure.

I've always had a problem with this line of reasoning. While I understand that flexibility is given to the executive during times of war, I haven't seen total tyranny by any means. The founders understood that one of the roles of the executive was to take temporary extraordinary powers in time of war. That's one of the reasons for the office. This internment camp example seems especially flawed.

I want to see if I understand it.

During wartime, the national government has the ability (and uses it) to forcefully conscript people and send them off to fight and die. In addition, warring powers have the ability to (and do) use explosives, fire, and all sorts of other means to kill civilians. Furthermore, the government has the ability (and the obligation) to move parts of the population around depending on national need.

Given this, you think going to live in an internment camp seems like tossing our values out the window? Like to tell that to some poor grunt storming the beach at Iwo Jima? The next war where the world loses 60 million people or more, can I go live in a camp without harm for a few years? Hell I won't even complain about it.

EDIT: I'd like to add that I consider Lincoln to be an American tyrant. Having said that, there is simply no comparison with the Chinese examples in this thread.