skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless I am misunderstanding this http://bit.ly/c4NFgO it appears that this article misrepresents the changes in a couple of important ways:

1) Facebook says this is opt-in:
Opt-in to new connections: When you next visit your profile page on Facebook, you'll see a box appear that recommends Pages based on the interests and affiliations you'd previously added to your profile. You can then either connect to all these Pages—by clicking "Link All to My Profile"—or choose specific Pages. You can opt to only connect to some of those Pages by going to "Choose Pages Individually" and checking or unchecking specific Pages. Once you make your choice, any text you'd previously had for the current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests sections of your profile will be replaced by links to these Pages. If you would still like to express yourself with free-form text, you can still use the "Bio" section of your profile. You also can also use features and applications like Notes, status updates or Photos to share more about yourself.

They reiterate this further down the page: "If you don't want to show up on those Pages, simply disconnect from them by clicking the "Unlike" link in the bottom left column of the Page. You always decide what connections to make."

2) If you choose to opt-in you can control whether your friends see the connection on your profile by using the privacy settings.

So, it is opt-in, there is a simple way to remove yourself if you change your mind, you can control the visibility on your own profile, and if you don't want to faff around with the connections, you can just list this stuff as text in some of the available text only fields.

What is the issue?
Because there is nothing Firefox can do to prevent it. I suppose Mozilla prefers they do it with a documented interface rather than modifying the Firefox install directly.
If you want to prevent applications from installing plugins into each other, then you need an operating system that sandboxes each application (difficult), or use a package manager that is run by a trusted party (Linux).
I learned to program on an Apple IIe, so I have mixed feelings about this.

The more sensible part of me says that the iPad isn't my kids only option for getting their hands dirty with code. Last count, we have around 12-13 computing devices in the house, including iPhones, iTouches, iPads, MacBooks, iMacs, and Linux servers.

When I coded on my Apple IIe, that was it. I had access to some TRS-80s at school, but the Apple was the only computer in a radius of 5 miles from my house.

If Apple were ever to even half consider locking down my desktop/laptop, I'd lead the revolt right to the doors of One Infinite Loop. I doubt they do it though. Hopefully.
When I was investing in public companies, this metric was one I used to decide where to put my money. I think it is many times companies settle for hiring as many people as possible to get their profit margins slim. This MO produces companies with a lot of fat who need to lay off employees when the inevitable down turn arrives. They often times over promise and under deliver.

Most public companies I researched had revenue/employee between $100,000 and $200,000. This simply isn't high enough to provide any cushion.

The reason here, that Craigslist is at the top, is because they outsource information management to the community through flagging and karma assignments. Most of the work of the employees is handling the exceptions to the algorithms, which usually result in the form of an email to craig or a post to the feedback or help topics. These may result in a kind email from craig or banning of a spammy account.

They are so good, they already have phone based account validation. None of the other companies on this list have that. CL focuses their employee time and energy on what is important -- stuff only humans can do. The rest is done by computers and this is a brilliant sign that they are doing it right.

Most companies handle exceptions with bureaucracy, filling up revenue with salaries until the boat sinks.
One doesn't even have to agree to use the term "GNU/Linux", in order to have some respect for the man who made a huge impact on a community and culture we all benefit from. We owe him a great deal of respect. That doesn't mean we have to use the exact same language he uses. I don't call Linux "GNU/Linux", for example, but I would never hurl insults at the man who made so much of this possible. Humans have a strong sense of "other" and since RMS has decided to be so other-ly from mainstream society, he gets a lot of flack. That judging is a failing of the people doing the judging; weak egos attack others to try to make themselves feel better. RMS is following his beliefs, completely and without reservation, which is something few of us have the guts or gumption to do. I respect him for that, even while disagreeing with him on a few things (like the name GNU/Linux).
Here is another insane solution:

Instead of running the car on top of the train, why not run it along side? You load up all the passengers getting on the train into a car, the car drives alongside the train at high speed. Some passengers hop on, some passengers hop off, red lights flash, and the car drives away.

Less dangerous: only 2 things to keep track of. because of the parallel tracks, nothing can crash.

More dangerous: Limited time to do the transfer, until the "access road" runs out.
DVD to Final Cut Express Converter - How to import dvd into FCE
I agree it isn't that informative, but it does seem timely in conjunction with discussions around Adobe monetizing Acrobat Reader with the intrusive Download Manager:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281569
How is CL misleading? They make a shitload of money with very few employees. Saying they were lucky isn't even relevant to the argument. Based on revenue per employee, they are fantastically efficient.

MSFT was "lucky" enough to become the de-facto standard in their market, yet they aren't as efficient as CL.
Well, with sports it's a lot of repeating things to perfect them. This speeds up response time. With, say, something intellectual, it's stretching the mind -- so to speak -- to do entirely different things. Not slamming sports. Just questioning applying the term "genius" here. Agile, yes. Expert, yes. But genius?
Suicide or Psychedelics? The last-resort option for cluster headaches
Stack Wars Begin?
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

http://www.gannettonline.com/e/trends/18001162.html
What I've learned the past four years networking in NYC
Thanks for the downvotes! How can you simultaneously acknowledge that I'm being sarcastic and claim I don't understand what I'm ridiculing because I'm not defining it correctly? Of course that's not what the hagiographer meant by "moral autonomy" - but I thought it was funny.*

As far as understanding - I've never read any of his academic (linguistics) stuff and only one of his political books at the recommendation of one of my profs who is a big fan. I've read enough oped style commentaries in the local left wing indie paper to have a passing familiarity with his style and substance, however, to know that the revelation that the US is now close to Weimar Republic conditions isn't exactly a new thought for Chomsky.

* Posting purely political articles to HN definitely calls for sarcasm. Sarcasm and downvotes - I love that this place is still a refuge from reddit's endless political sniping and would prefer not to be commenting on a story like this...
A funny little bit of snark hidden in the middle, following some decidedly unpythonic code:

If u cn rd ths, u cn gt a jb in fncnl prg (if thr wr any).
That's probably true, but there's also the fact that the majority of the mass of the star escapes as gamma rays and neutrinos, so mass isn't (locally) conserved in these events.
I have a funny feeling devs are waiting for the 4.0 release and/or new hardware. There's also a bit of a price dichotomy going on too; the race to the bottom is going a lot slower than with the iPhone. Once 4.0 hits I think we'll see a lot more innovation in the App Store across both hardware platforms.
You're kind of darned-if-you-do, darned-if-you-don't with content creation for certain audiences: text is rarely remarkable because it is quickly consumed and (if you're lucky) maybe retweeted, which produces nearly no value for the business. Video is harder to duplicate and might actually attract some links, and is easier to consume for the average Internet user than text is (oh goodness, if you collect stats on online attention you might as well start popping Prozac now), but it doesn't fly with the group that wants to get in and out of your article in 45 seconds or less.

Decisions, decisions.
sure. I can do that :) I'll let future guests decide if they want to be excluded from a clean feed as well.

I really want guests to be comfortable to talk and say what they want. The clean feed is mainly an accomodation for people who want to listen to the podcast at work or on car trips with kids in the car who don't want to have to be careful.

If it means some content will not be available, that just the way it goes. I can't keep everyone happy, but I'm willing to give a little here and there.
Another problem is that some ISP DNS servers will redirect you to one of their landing pages when you mis-type a URL.
If I wrote that code, I'd be pissed off.
Not as much as you'd think. They are just more expensive to maintain as they age, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine.
Funny story barnaby...the machine I was installing XP on...actually had a flavor of Ubuntu. These people are not fully tech savvy and they begged me to re-install their original XP back to it - because of software compatibility problems - driver problems for some obscure webcam, etc.

So yes, for some people Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux run nicely. But for others, it can be just as much of a pain as Adobe in this case.

Just my $0.02 :)
These supernovae are counter-intuitive in the sense that normally people think of anti-matter as "bring it into contact with normal matter and it will explode". Here, it's the production of anti-matter that robs pressure and triggers the collapse. But the thing that always baffles me is how something that is collapsing inward like that can explode without leaving a remnant. You have to somehow get all the mass out of the potential well, and it's not easy to take 10 solar masses of material falling inward at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light and turn it around and shoot it out...
as wmeredith replied below and I'll elaborate here:

Facebook has only one product, information. When companies want to grow, they have to produce more product. Facebook can produce more product in only three ways: getting more users, getting users to add more info, or sharing more of the info they've already added. There is no other way.

When new user accounts plateau, when users are content with the amount of info they've added or the additional value of that data declines due to signal-to-noise, the only method they have left is to share more of the information they already have in the form of greater public visibility.

Remember, Facebook's customers are not the users, they are the advertisers. If you want to establish a relationship with a company designed to make profit, profit should be the foundation of the relationship. Facebook's users do not profit. They provide labor to improve the value of facebook with no compensation in return, so the relationship is unbalanced. Even factory workers are paid, albeit not much comparatively, but someone else somewhere is making less and will migrate to the factory to fill jobs people quit.

In facebook's case, turnover can't be filled. The people won't come back and there is a diminishing quantity of new users to pick from. Eventually, users will stop joining because the knowledge we are sharing here will reach them before they do and they'll have lost their naive innocence -- a requirement of any sharecropper.

Why more sharing of information will make more money is because money is made through the information. Basically, advertisers can better target ads. By treating users badly, I mean in an increasingly selfish manner by doing things their users don't appreciate. Users don't want someone unilaterally deciding how much of their, what they consider, private information is shown to third parties -- millions of other parties -- like the FBI, Police, IRS, potential employers.
Very interesting. I occassionally get questions asking for advice about what to take in school (from nieces and nephews and college students), and I always say I wish I had more math. It teaches people how to think and develop your brains. Its more than just about getting a job.
It appears you're right! I can't find a date on Norvig's site but here's a link to it from 2001: http://www.brokenrobot.org/archives/000427.html
that's a good point, two syllabries + kanji + furigana for non-joyo is a finite set, whereas chinese is a open set (virtually).

some spoken languages are known to be simpler than others, as measured through their phonology, morphology and syntax. trade languages, creoles, pidgins, etc.

mandarin is a trade language/pidgin of sorts, with resulting simplification of its phonology relative to other dialects. bahasa indonesian is another well-known example.

fun factoid: while the number of Chinese characters throughout history number in the hundreds of thousands, the working set for any one writer at any time has been shown through textual analysis to be ~8000 for a well-educated person, with an upper bounds under 20K.
"Our modern societies keep working toward very efficient and accurate ways to kill one another"

We could always go back to the less accurate ways of killing each other like a good old fashion Viking raid, barbarian hordes, firebombing cities Dresden style, concentration camps, and let's not forget Fatman & Little Boy.
I wish this had support for offline editing.
Yeah, I tried that. Didn't work.
Tell HN: Our iPad Typing Trainer Featured in MacWorld
I can't summon any indignation about this any more.

I actually think its fine that the app got rejected. The iPad and iPhone are consumer devices.

If kids want to tinker and explore, let them do it on a Real Computer. Plenty of options are there.
What’s the Secret Success of Groupon?
Do we really want our lives to mirror video games like Farmville?
Yes, agreed. I'm on BT Business and their DNS is terrible. With normal browsing the slowest part of a page load was the DNS look up. Doing anything vaguely automated - even when being nice - would result in loads of timeouts. I've since switched to openDNS (free, non-member) and it's been excellent.
It's still relative but when you tip 40+ BMI you still have a significantly shorter life expectancy.

On average, obesity reduces life expectancy by six to seven years:[2][27] a BMI of 30–35 reduces life expectancy by two to four years,[21] while severe obesity (BMI > 40) reduces life expectancy by 10 years.[21](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity)

PS: I have a BMI of 34 so I want to know just how bad it can get if I let myself go any further. There is a lot of misinformation out there but being overweight has real negative effects on your heath.
Yes, it's a throwback to a bygone era, pre-open-source. The Smalltalk vendors shot themselves in the foot this way.

How can Franz not realize that they're guaranteeing their own obsolescence by stubbornly sticking to that model? The new generation of Lisp hackers cross them off the list immediately because of it. I don't get it. Perhaps they just make enough money the old way and don't care.
Time Warner occasionally sends me to their stupid "landing" page even if I get the address correct. Their DNS service is definitely sub-par.
If Google bought them, would they force ITA to rewrite their C++ / Lisp engine in Java?
This stuff is interesting, and we should add more companies.

I took this table from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_global_tech...), put it in a spreadsheet, and added a column for revenue/employees. Anybody can edit, so feel free to update with more recent figures and add other companies.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqI3DInWs2nKdDdMcXlL...
Half of iPad users use Windows (assuming you trust the study's methodology)
Do people who force their kids to listen to tech podcasts in the car really exist :)? And why would you not use headphones if listening to a podcast at work?
BBC News - Zeus banking virus is back warns security firm
A remarkably clear summary of the CDO/CDS fraud by a CS person.

The second part is particularly interesting and clear even if I already understood the CDO/tranching part and what a CDS was. Basically, for banks to sell all those crappy CDOs by tranches there where edge funds that where buying the "bad" tranches and gambling that the "good" ones would also fail.
Kind of cool?

What determines the notification animation/display? Could Growl conceivably intercept these and display it's own notification window?
"Efficient in terms of generating revenue" (per employee), sure, but that isn't the usual definition of economic efficiency. In particular, there's no real reason, when looking at a company's efficiency, to look at only a raw count of employees, and not take into account things like how much those employees cost, and what your non-employee costs are. A company with half the employees but orders of magnitude more infrastructure costs and lower profits, on the same revenue, isn't more efficient, even though it would rank better on this metric.
I think this is A. Big. Deal. Probably much more so than most other UAV news.

Having a silent sniper sitting at 3 thousand feet just below the cloud deck with the ability to pick off targets up to a mile (making up some 2nd generation specs, but bear with me) is a total game-changer in all kinds of ways. Ideally a blimp would be better than a freaking expensive helicopter, and satellite/laser modes of operation would be better still (perhaps)

In World War II, the Japanese sent a balloon barrage across the pacific to set fires up and down the West Coast. It was such a success that officials put a lid on press accounts for fear that the Japanese would realize what they were on to.

Now imagine hundreds of these suckers, small and silent, moving across a city while camouflaged against the sky. It would be like the apocalypse. The only recourse I can see is for the entire population to live inside and underground.

Amazing.
These numbers are interesting, but using them as a ranking method is absurd. Revenue/Employee punishes vertical integration. Let's say that Facebook, instead of developing Casandra in-house, decided to use millions of dollars worth of Oracle RAC. Their revenue/employee would go up, presuming that they could have avoided hiring those good developers. But, their profits would likely be lower. What's the revenue per employee of a private equity firm? Isn't Chrysler an LLC wholly owned by Cerberus? Revenue per employee must be well over $10M!
They pay their engineers REALLY well.
ITA had some pretty interesting open problems for prospective engineering applicants a few years back while I was looking.

The problems were definitely google-esque.
Portland introduces CivicApps: contest promoting usage of their open datasets
Unreal hormones: males treat games as social competitions
Big fan of Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). Great product, great UI.
Superfeedr now supports ActivityStreams
I've always been a fan of Urban Airship http://urbanairship.com
EVERY page? That could finally solve all my hard drive space problem. Store the images on a photocopier!
Direct link to the contest (I thought SF had a better explanation of what it's about): http://civicapps.org/
No. It was just as terrible a book.
Which Types of Businesses Will Be Affected by Net Neutrality (And How)
I think it is many times companies settle for hiring as many people as possible to get their profit margins slim.

Do you have any insight about the motivation to settle for slim profit margins?

This seems counter-intuitive, unless by shrinking margins, they make a significant increase in the bottom-line. (i.e. they would rather make 1% of 40 billion than 20% of 100 million)

Is this sort of trade-off common? Does it work out favorably often enough that it can be backed by something other than managerial fashion?
Daemonizing bash
Hmm Facebook's previous attempt at something similar (Beacon) did not go over well and then there is Google Buzz, which after a month and half I turned off. Found Buzz to be annoying(especially all my IM status updates being made public and being saved in my sent folder) and my friends did not use it
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Instead of hunting for a public DNS server to use, you can just run your own. djbdns, for instance, comes "out-of-the-box" with a working cache. This puts some marginal extra load on the DNS roots, and so it's probably not a great idea for Microsoft to build it in as the Windows 7 default, but it's perfectly fine for one-offs.

In some limited testing, I find Google to be faster than 4.2.2.2, both to be faster than OpenDNS (which you shouldn't use, because they suppress NXDOMAIN), a local cache to be competitive with OpenDNS, and all of these options to be faster than AT&T's DNS, which is simply appalling.

(I test with nsping, which is a goofy program I wrote in the mid-'90s to test the resolvers at an ISP I helped run).
Sadly, yes :( I am such a creature that inflicts my techiness on my younglings! If they get to listen to some kids radio play on a long road trip, then I get to listen to my fav stuff for part of the trip (I'd wear headphones, but it's illegal here in Canada to wear them while driving).

I'm a sad, sad man :( Aren't you glad I'm not your dad :)

As for headphones at work, that's what I do. I do know that some like to play stuff for the techs around them, but it's the managers who have a hissy fit if someone drops an f-bomb or a crude joke. Personally I wouldn't want to work at such a place, but there are more oppressive, bureaucratic work environments out there than there are cool places like 37signals.
Yes, genius. Learning to write a poem is a lot like learning to throw a ball. In both cases, mastering a skill requires practice - whether you call it "a lot of repeating things" or "stretching the mind." The fact that physical skills also require physical capabilities (muscle strength, flexibility etc) doesn't diminish the mental aspect of it.
I hope not and I doubt that would happen. One of ITA's biggest assets is their employees. Those employees are there in large part because they get to use lisp on the job.

Also ITA deals with incredibly complex problems and has very complex software, rewriting it in other languages would be a serious undertaking.
And this explosion had a centre that you can find after the fact. The `centre' of the big bang was everywhere.
Ghassan Haddad on "How Facebook Makes Crowdsourcing Work" at WMR in DC
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Audrey.
No, but in the real world of deadlines, collaboration with teams that have their own different schedules, priorities, etc., they very often need a one week window not constrained but instead opened such that they can actually get something done about items in the important but not urgent quadrant.
Experiences Sending 14,000 Emails
Norvig did some curation over the years, however. One of the answers mentions that the ternary "if" expression is scheduled to appear in Python 2.5, which is information from around 2006.
NMAP and NESSUS Cheat sheet
This StackOverflow answer has links to the relevant Chromium API and design docs:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2271156/chrome-desktop-no...
However buzz-worthy something may seem, sometimes it's best to move on. The future is so much where you should be investing your energy, rather than trying to score points off someone for whom you have lost respect anyway.