skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295315

submitted just today.

I find it interesting, pg, that you latch on to certain news stories that are based largely on researcher press releases to announce medical research results. Do the stories that catch your eye seem to have more start-up potential than other medical news stories, or do you use some other screens to decide which medical news stories are of most interest?

My own posting behavior reveals that I like medical news stories too, but I especially like those that are more cautious in drawing conclusions about clinical importance, and that bring up issues of research interpretation,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

as it is well known that many initial research findings in human medicine are never replicated.
He's on fucking video holding the thing and personally returned it to Apple, there is no doubt he was in possession. The cops didn't care what they took, they just took any available piece of tech.
I just use Nautilus (the default Ubuntu/GNOME file browser) and it works fine with xmonad. Are you having a specific problems browsing files?

Actually, it would be better to post this on Ubuntu Forums or on an xmonad list:

http://xmonad.org/community.html
Do you really know if this is a fact or just hearsay?
I bet you don't.
"The site is currently not available due to technical problems. Please try again later. Thank you for your understanding."

:-(
"Relentlessly Resourceful hacker" -- Reminds me of something PG would say :)
do you have a better idea on how to prove that a non-working iphone in a case that looks like an iphone 3gs but has some differences is in fact the next iphone?
Congratulations to the 7 Google Summer of Code / Haskell.org students
I don't know why people keep throwing around the $5000 figure as the value of the phone.

Surely, it was worth more than that to Gawker, as their gains from the story.

More than that as a prototype it's arguably worth much more than that to Apple for competitive purposes.
This is one area where technological developments gave the police vastly more power. Before everyone used computers most they could do was seize all your documents. That’s bad enough, but at least they couldn’t seize your tools (typewriter, telephone, fax and so on). That’s pretty much what they are now allowed to do when they can seize and keep your computers for months.

I think the law needs to be changed. Allow the police to, say, seize your computers for one or two weeks in which they have time to copy the drives. Or time to pull all the drives out. Then they have to give your computers back.
This seems like a useful synopsis of the seminar: http://sourcesofinsight.com/2009/01/14/precision-questions-a...
How To Wreck Your Reputation: John McAfee Edition
Apparently he recalled it well enough for Gizmodo to ID the Apple employee and make him (in)famous. So the finder or the Gizmodo people could have used another computer or smartphone to get in touch with him...it's not as if the prototype was the only internet-capable device in silicon Valley :)
Common sense is what tells you that the world is flat.

In this context (and in most others), what we actually should be thinking of is the scientific method, with a little basic human decency.
Stupid Business Decisions: Apple Fires Steve Jobs
From Wikipedia:

"In Lovell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 (1938), Chief Justice Hughes defined the press as, "every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion." Freedom of the press, like freedom of speech, is subject to restrictions on bases such as defamation law."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_S...
They open sourced the traffic server which is responsible for request routing. However the traffic server came from an acquisition (Inktomi) and was always intended as a commercial project that could run on other people's systems.

I'd wager that the real issue is dependency on some of the core Yahoo libraries: there is a whole number of them and they're often so widely used that lot of ex-Yahoo engineers are surprised to discover they're not open-source. The reason they're not open source is that some of these would not be useful outside of Yahoo and create maintenance problems e.g., features that were once missing in FreeBSD, are available in recent versions of FreeBSD as well as Linux but had to be ported forward to preserve API compatibility.
It does not remove the ability of law enforcement to serve a search warrant and carry your computers out the door, nor does it remove the ability of a judge to plant you in a jail cell until you cough up the passwords. What it does do in create an incentive for anyone who does serve a search warrant upon you to look very, very closely at the contents of the drive once you do provide the password -- if you thought the inconvenience of full-disk encryption was this important then they are likely to think that they will find some child porn or tax evasion documents buried in there somewhere.
Lessons Learned from Devver
I see, good point. Yeah, I didn't see the article where they profiled the phone like it had been released.
Or what your friends give it, or your friends' friends, or anybody else that can tag something that relates back to your profile... see the problem?
I believe in the US you can still be legally compelled to give up the encryption key(s), and simply held in contempt (indefinitely?) until you do.
You supply it, of course. But having the drive encrypted buys you time. The cops have to take the machines into evidence, nominally send them out to the lab for processing, and only then do they run into your encryption key.

They then need to go back to the judge, and get a court order to compel you to supply your encryption key. By which time you've gotten a lawyer, and can fight back.
There are. The Kinesis keyboard has four thumb buttons on each side of the keyboard. The biggest, closest one on the left side I map to CONTROL. The other big left thumb button I map to ESCAPE.
Does the 5th amendment not apply in this situation?
The whole issue is a tempest in a teacup, IMHO. I've never heard of the nut cases (from NY I believe) prior to this incident. Jackasses making veiled threats and TV networks obliging the jackasses by censorship.

There may have been a slight issue if South Park was singling out Islam, but they have not. They have gone after everyone and everything, many times in bad taste, but that is their appeal and that is why I sometimes watch the show.
If he's savvy he can turn this into a launchpad for his career. One of the hardest parts of moving up the chain is getting noticed by the right people. He's been noticed more than anyone could ever reasonably expect. If he's as talented as I've heard he should have no problem using that to his advantage.
The gent who found the phone said it. You can look up the quote easily online.
Five reasons the iPad will fail in Australia
There's no way to legitimately acquire a 4G iPhone prototype. So if the seller said "I've got a 4G iPhone here" then it sounds like he was basically admitting at least theft of trade secrets.
i would, there is no one on the planet who would be less likely to ever loose anything of importance again that belongs to his employer :-)
Interesting article on Longform that also links to his favourite articles - http://www.slate.com/id/2251794/
Adds detail, but misses the main thrust. PG's essay illuminated, for me, the social dynamic common to prisons, schools, and Victorian England: when you take away consequence, people build a 'cruel and stupid world' for themselves.
I disagree. See my post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1296381
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that's quite the mission statement :).

Google: "Organize the worlds information"
Facebook: "Change societies views on what is private"
Courts around the world have ruled that the sex lives of celebrities is in the public interest.

I personally don't agree with this, and you may not either, but that doesn't matter.
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That's the thing: Gizmodo didn't need to "prove" anything. IMO good faith would have been returning it to Apple without blogging about the device.
Clojure's Approach to Polymorphism
If a company can't keep its own secrets it should be their problem. We give protections to patents and copyrights for a reason.
USSR et al have never needed drugs other than alcohol, which is still abused today in incredible volumes - please look for numbers yourself. Still, plenty of poppy crops were destroyed after 1985. Hemp was and still is popular in the southern parts of the Soviet bloc.
Unfortunately, everyone is guilty of violating some law at some time. So it's best to ensure that your computer is not going to be testifying against you, especially when that is just one checkbox away.

You can always decrypt your drive when asked. But you can't encrypt it after the police take your computer.
In reading the comments I gather that there is a bias on HN when it comes to higher education. Namely, most of the people here seem to think of places like the University of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, University of Alabama, etc. when thinking about higher education.

Community colleges teach around 1/3 of all higher education courses. The typical higher education institution is not in division I sports and is not a research university. Sports are a financial drain for all but a handful of universities. Almost all TV revenue goes to division I teams and a large division I teams do no pay for themselves.

Even a division I school like the University of Oregon has to dip into the general academic fund. This dip comes from not repairing or funding needed expansions of classroom space. At some universities, like FSU, students are required to pay an athletic fee. Students are then able to attend games for 'free'. Thus this money is counted as part of the attendance revenue when it shouldn't be. There are all kinds of tricks when it comes to funding university sports.

Furthermore, institutions of higher learning are increasingly using adjunct labor. One university wants to outsource its grading to China. I idea of the typical higher education teacher being a professor is no longer true.
According to http://law.onecle.com/california/penal/1533.html:

"Upon a showing of good cause, the magistrate may, in his or
her discretion, insert a direction in a search warrant that it may be served at any time of the day or night. In the absence of such a direction, the warrant shall be served only between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m."
The line of thinking is that pictures/drawings can lead to idolatry (i.e. person kneeling before an image of a prophet/saint and asking for this and that).
Steve Novella reviews pg's Why Nerds are Unpopular
37prime's argument is that this guy is lying to protect himself.

But personally, I doubt the story is false. A drunk guy forgetting his phone is something that happens every day.
Agreed. If he's lying about trying to return it, I hope that's revealed and he's punished. In the meantime, I won't condemn him without evidence. I hope anyone else wouldn't either.
What do you mean, "non-toxic"? Hemp is toxic.

But then, so is alcohol, tobacco and other legal drugs.
No, because you are commenting on something that was already public knowledge. There's nothing to suggest that the innards of the phone were discoverable by the public until Gizmodo threw up ~20 pictures of them.
Sorry 'this' as in the south park case.

The result of the South Park episode will be various official (and unofficial) rulings in TV companies that if you put a Muslim character in a show there might be trouble.
It doesn't have to be a picture of the prophet it just has to be a muslim character who isn't perfect, or is a sunni/shia and you get threats from shia/sunni.
Safer to just leave them out - soon they will be as rare as black characters were in the 50s.

Now do you think you would have a black president if the majority of middle americans had never seen a black person in the flesh and the only ones on TV were on America's most wanted?
Hmm careful; those are civil laws. You can't be arrested for them.

(which isn't to say they are correct - just not related)
True (and upmodded) but they had more space (impressions) today and hence sold the extra space.
And that is my main problem with the story. I do not have a dog in the fight since I have a feeling that the whole story has yet to be told. But if this was anyone else cell phone, there would be no cops kicking down doors.
"...there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down."

This may be the white space behind the type.
"And learn that 'checkbook journalism' just flat-out doesn't count. Even when they're paying people for interviews, instead of buying hot goods."

Why is this?
Guru Meditation: XID: 294194655

Classy hat-tip to Amiga.
Yeah, I thought as much as well. It was said more in jest. I know a guy who put tonnes (3 or 4 I think) of slate tiling in his stern end and it only dropped it down half a foot or so in the water. Narrow boats usually have a flat bottom and weigh a huge amount, so they are pretty resillient... still, gyroscopes are interesting
The basics of 3D image acquisition
But they can't punish you for not giving them the combination.

Yes, they can. If the judge has reasonable grounds to believe that you are withholding evidence or the knowledge necessary for law enforcement to collect this evidence then the judge can hold you in contempt of court and place you in jail until you agree to provide the information. While there have been a couple of aberrations in the general flow of case law to a standard consensus on the matter, the general consensus (at least at the federal level) is that being compelled to provide an encryption key is not covered by the 5th amendment's protection against self-incrimination.
I had a boss (years ago) who would scream (!) at me if I came even 10 minutes after 9am.

I would also occasionally notice him standing behind me looking at my monitor over my shoulder (he was a 'hands on' kind of manager).

He was really surprised when i quit after a few months.
nor does it remove the ability of a judge to plant you in a jail cell until you cough up the passwords

It's true, encryption doesn't remove this ability. The reality is that the Constitution never provides this ability in the first place, and specifically prevents the government from passing any law that would provide this ability.

Refusing to testify against yourself (without a grant of immunity, anyway) is not a crime, it's your right.
How much income does it take to hit a post-tax target?
how much money do you need to earn pre-tax, to end up with a target amount post-tax? i had fun with this little puzzle, and included some lisp code as a solution. do you have any fun puzzles like this?
> " Why would we do something boring"

Because, surprise, that's what people do. Do you really think all those "normals" really like Brangelina, Eminem, and Kobe Bryant? Hell no. In the "real" world everyone learns about things, and talks about things that do not interest them for the sake of socialization. Nerds seem to think they're the only ones who find these things dull and pointless - but here's the trick: so does everyone else! The difference is that normal people are willing to suck it up for the sake of staying in the social graph, while nerds don't. "Normals" acknowledge that in order to participate in this society, there will be a mix of shit that interests them vs. shit that doesn't.

The extension of that...

> "just to get the attention of a bunch of kids who like boring stuff?"

... which proves my point. Nerds lord their intelligence over other people, while being generally clueless as to how "normals" operate. They're not people, they're kids who like boring stuff. I'm such a unique snowflake, only I can see how boring all this celeb gossip is - clearly those dim-witted normal people actually like this shit. If you actually took the time and participated in society at large you'll know as well as everyone else that socialization is a great deal of give and take, and that what people object to isn't your boring interests, it's your complete unwillingness to participate in their boring interests.

I've had the opportunity to talk about things other people are interested in - the general rule is, if you show interest in what they're doing, they will reciprocate. A lot of the hostility that nerds get from the world at large is simply a direct reflection of the hostility they show the rest of the world.

> "Why not do stuff we find interesting, like math or reading,"

Surprise: the rest of the world does these things too. Especially reading. Like I've said above: their acceptance of your weird/boring interests is positively correlated with your acceptance of their weird/boring interests.

If nerds in general would just stop behaving as if they're kings of the universe, better than everyone else, they would ostracized a lot less. In fact, there are a large number of nerds who have figured this out - I know more than a few hackers who fit into society just peachy.
It's the case for almost all schools. Sports does not lead to increase in enrollment, generally speaking. Sports do not pay for themselves except at a few schools.
"Android's app trajectory is insane"
This applies to so much more than just programming. Almost any skilled production job has the same properties. Quality of output should be any manager's highest priority, and when it isn't, you've created a lousy work environment where the only people who will be happy are people who don't care.

(Just to clarify, I'm not saying punctuality is unimportant. Something that isn't in on time to be useful should not be considered high-quality work. That that's different from requiring a specific set of ass-in-chair time.)
This sounds like everyone that was still at IBM when I left.
Everyone is debating the whole "Good Faith" thing again. Here's a suggestion: Ask how it is "Good Faith" to "find" something in a bar? This isn't your house, your place of work, or a public space, it's somebody else's property (a phone) inside somebody else's property (a bar). Since when do you leave a bar with something that doesn't belong to you unless it's somebody else's spouse?

Long before we get to the question of how hard the so-called finder tried to return the phone to Apple, I think that wrongdoing occurred the moment he left the bar with the phone in his pocket.
Sorry here - was the UK. In an area with enough of a Sikh community to have people to protest but still a minority.

Somebody said, you know you have reached equality when it's ok to portray you as the villain!

Ever wondered why Brits are always cast as the bad guys in Hollywood movies. Can you imagine the press if you had a black/female/gay/disabled/minority villain.
I think you should have sought remedy in the civil courts. For $20 (or whatever), you probably could have at least gotten a default judgment against the guy and sold the case to a collection agency.
I'd like to point out that Mark Hendrickson, CEO of Plancast, was previously a TC hacker. If you have a half-decent idea, expect the TC brand to help you get networked. Oh, and you're guaranteed to get multiple hits of positive coverage if you leave on good terms.

I'm sure jkincaid will pipe in here at any moment to sell you all on this amazing opportunity.
Yeah, I think this sounds like a good idea until you actually use it. People scan pages in a somewhat orderly fashion and this is too chaotic on the eyes/brain.

Maybe if a designer created a layout with this 'chaos' factored in it could work. But as a general layout plugin I don't think this is an ideal solution.
I've always loved using this quote to give perspective to how much Apple's grown.
http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
that's what I was going for :)
Truecrypt supports plausible deniability: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability

I don't do anything remotely heinous enough to warrant a court order to reveal my encryption key, however.
If you backup to a hard drive, you can simply swap your main and backup drives every now and then. If you have three drives, you can always be using one as main, one as local backup, and the third locked up offsite as the "house burns down" backup. Then swap the offsite and local backups every month.

I'm just starting to do this and it feels great. I thought about the money I pay for renters insurance, and then I realized that something much harder to replace than my furniture and other physical possessions was vulnerable not only to fire/natural disaster but plain old disk failure.
Oh, I completely, totally agree. But don't think that will stop the grandstanding and martyrdom.
Why's that?

You don't think that they would be interested in having records of email correspondence? It's not unreasonable that people running a site like gizmodo would run their own mail servers to increase privacy. Even if it wasn't a mail server (probably wasn't I'd think), there could easily be evidence on it.
In addition to the distractibility for which it is most known; ADHD folks are often capable of super-concentration for periods of time. This is why you often find them in occupations that benefit from this capability... programming being chief among them.

Self medication with mild stimulants like caffeine is also common.
I had to laugh at her complaint that the search warrant didn't authorize a night search, and her argument that they violated the terms of the warrant because Jason Chen found them in his house when he returned at 9:45pm...even though Chen's description of events reports them as saying they had been there for several hours before he arrived.
These are still being made? I can't even recall the last time I've seen one.
On the other hand, if you left all of your things abandoned in a bar, and someone working for the journalist picked them up...
The Art of Innovation from the Hackers Perspective (video)
Not if he committed a crime (like receiving stolen property) because if it did, all criminal hackers would get press cards, or stash their data on computers owned by journalists and be able to conceal evidence of their crimes that way.

edited for specificity.
They received the best traffic in Gizmodo's history, but at what cost?

http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm7gizmodous&r=3...

They will probably milk more traffic from this new iteration to this drama.

Whats the worst possible scenario for Gawker? Will they get fined or will the editor go to jail?
Perhaps this is related to an industrial espionage issue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Espionage_Act_of_199...
You can also look into importing a Japanese keyboard for more thumb options.
> Since when do you leave a bar with something that doesn't belong to you unless it's somebody else's spouse?

Since you're a good person who wants to call the owner and give it back the next morning before someone less scrupulous steals it? What do you want them to do, leave it there? Give it to the bar staff who you don't know? Give it to the cops who'll simply tell you to contact the owner yourself?
I got a kick out of this:

"These are Jason Chen's computers"
http://topherchris.com/post/551530253
As a Muslim, myself, I don't understand the stances these fringe groups take.

The RevolutionMuslim guy explains it in great detail here, http://revolutionmuslimdaily.blogspot.com/2010/04/clarifying...

I have to say, from the POV of a true Muslim he makes a pretty airtight case. If you can't make yourself agree with the idea that Trey and Parker have to be killed maybe it's time that you start questioning your beliefs in this religion.
His legal obligation in California is to turn it into the police, where it will be kept every bit as confidential as a Mel Gibson drunken tirade.
'inducing a misappropriation of trade secrets' - see reprint at http://gawker.com/5448177/update-apple-wins-the-first-prize-...