skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading this I felt a deep sense of pity for RMS.

Even if he was only referring to his perceived lack of belonging, openly fantasizing about suicide is not the sign of someone in a healthy emotional state.

I hope very much that he has grown past this point his life.
Shame on PWC for not upgrading to Vista or Windows 7. A firm that large should have more foresight in IT planning.
A hard drive could be cheaper than the amount of RAM required to store 20 pages of uncompressed scans.
Agreed. The simplicity and elegance of the API is really great. A lot of sites have status updates + commenting + liking + feeds... and this essentially gives you a lot of that functionality for 'free'. You don't need to worry about the hard problems in regards to friend visibility, scaling the push model, etc etc. All the difficult data processing is handled on Facebook's end while a site becomes more of a lens/context/perspective on the data.

Of course the cost of this is that Facebook gets your data. It's a bit of a Faustian contract (hope I'm using that reference properly). They'll save you engineering cycles and promote your content to your user's social graphs, you just have to give them your data.

Sites really now have 3 options:
1) Ignore FB to their own risk
2) Embrace FB and give up control of their data
3) Use FB as a data mirroring and distribution mechanism - but still give them all your data.

Choice 1 is a difficult decision to make... if FB becomes THE standard and you're not providing your users the experience they expect, maybe they'll go somewhere else. Of course this could be like Beacon where users hate it. Or it could be like Facebook Connect where it's cool and some sites leverage it really well, but hasn't change the landscape of the web THAT much.

If you choose Option 3 you're still giving your data to Facebook. So now you're left with, is it worth the engineering cycles to ensure you don't get locked out of your own data. I think most people on here will say yes, but a surprising number might not.

Now after thinking about it for a while, this will cause an uptick in Facebook Connect usage and integration, but I don't think it's going to fundamentally change the way sites are designed. Maybe in a year or two if Facebook continues its growth current trajectory.
You read Hacker News, which means you probably know more about computers than at least 99% of the population, and far more than 98%. Seriously, consider that.

Take something you don't know about. For me it's cars. If prevailing wisdom was that unless you bought some $40 item for your car, it could easily be stolen, you'd probably buy it right?

This is what people are told: Windows is insecure and anyone with a clue can just steal your credit card number. I know that if I just don't install crap from the internet, and have a reasonable firewall, I'm not going to get a virus. I haven't had antivirus in over a decade, though I've run some web-based ones on occasion to check, and have never had a problem. I know that, and you know that. My dad (who is much closer to the other 98% of the population) doesn't know that.

(As for corporate use, you answered your own question. IT staff installs it for no reason other than to be able to prove to their boss that it isn't their fault when stuff goes wrong. )
The financial markets have always been rigged. Men don't go into business without some assurance they'll come out on top. The more money that is involved, the easier it is to convince the watchmen that your edge is a requirement for good markets.
upvoted for the quote
Check the link: no trains, just a lot of little pods.
The Open Graph Protocol
If done properly, this could be part of an awesome XKCD.
But that's totally meaningless!

Think of it in another way, at any point in time you have x number of virus that you are likely to come across through whatever means. If all those viruses are in the 0.2%, then the catch rate isn't going to be 99.8% it's going to be 0%.

So being able to catch 99.8% of 3 millions viruses when new ones are released all the time is a pointless comparison for efficiency.
It's cool how many of these kludges are fixed in more recent Pythons, especially Python 3 (and its features backported to 2.6 and 2.7):

Q3. Polymorphism, and the lack of sequence and number types -- there are now abstract base classes for Iterable and Number types, etc.

Q6. printf function -- print() is indeed a function in Python 3

Q8. object syntax shortcut -- collections.namedtuple in Py2.6 is similar, acting something like a factory for anonymous classes

Q9. syntax for updating objects -- in recent Pythons, this works: obj.__dict__.update(foo=1, bar=2)

Q10. dictionary with default values -- collections.defaultdict

Q13. abstract base classes -- hilarious, but now there's a decorator in the abc module that does the right thing

Q18. missing queue types -- collections.deque is a good double-ended queue, and the heapq module can turn a list into a heap queue.

You can also see how many of his other wish-list items came true, especially via the itertools module, in his personal 'utils' module:

http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/python/utils.html
I didn't forget that I can login to OpenDNS and fix my settings every time my IP changes, I just think it's ridiculous.
I'd also note that "consensus" is not a word you find in real science;

As someone who has done real science (albeit in quantum mechanics, not climatology), I call bullshit.

We use "consensus" all the time. There's also an understanding that consensus has historically opposed better models, which suggests we all need to keep an open mind. That doesn't change the fact that often, scientists mostly agree on stuff.
The original post you're replying to was deleted, but, this comment interested me enough that I went and looked for the paper. It isn't up yet, but here's a writeup of it from the Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/04/11/....

The paper (Please Continue to Hold: An empirical study on user tolerance of security delays) is by Cormac Herley and a few others. All the other papers on Herley's page (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/cormac/) are up, so, I'm assuming that this one will be too, at some point in the future.
Well, I'd rather sacrifice HTML than the desktop integration in such visually important part of the desktop. In fact, desktop notifications spec (for Linux desktops) allows (very) small subset of HTML, which should fully suffice for any reasonable bubble-styled notifications.

Making custom themes to match the style of the desktop would be ultimately painful, and even impossible for quite (too much, maybe) sophisticated KDE's plasma notifications. What a pity.
I don't have the time to double check this hypothesis, I'd feel fairly confident that after reviewing the titles of the journals that these articles were published in, that the bulk of the authors are not climatologists, but rather have expertise in other fields such as biology, meteorology, or agronomy. And that their work speculates on the impact of "climate change" on their respective fields, and that they rely heavily on the work of a few select climatologists.

I think it is also very important to remember that we're likely seeing a very large selection bias with respect to what kinds of papers get published. There are very few institutions that will give research money to a scientist who thinks that everything "will be ok". The people who are yelling that we're all gonna die and the earth will be destroyed (unless you give them money), are the types that get funding.
The Really Big SEO Checklist
Well, I'm not impressed. Try http://www.bravofly.com/vg1/flights.do . I believe it's the best for trips in Europe
It's the first I've ever heard of it, and I've been around the things and dealing with the tech side of them (networking etc) for years.
Given that Google does rewrite the code of many companies that they buy, it wouldn't be surprising if they did rewrite the ITA code.
They don't. I still maintain my U.S. citizenship along with my (now eight-year) Canadian citizenship. If I were forced to choose, I know which one I would choose—but I am, at this point, not forced to choose.
Yeah, but comparatively, Apple is still less open. Android supports all those things, and development with any toolchain you like. So long as it's a runnable APK, you can install it.
I'm not that into ruby, but I loved the intro song.
Freedom is shabby and inconvenient
FCC Plows Ahead With Broadband Plan Despite Comcast Ruling
Copiers saving potentially (very) sensitive information to enable features most people don't use. Seems like a poor choice of default...
I heard you like walled gardens, so I put a walled garden in your walled garden.

As if Facebook didn't have enough lock-in, privacy, and data integrity concerns, they now want me to add this 'docs' thing to the equation, so that literally all of my important information is in a walled garden I cannot make private backups of.

Yes, I can make individual backups of the documents, pictures and messages, but I can't view them in their original context, so they're worthless outside of the garden.
Wow, that's pretty cool. I wish I had this when I was doing some fundraising not long ago. I had to use docstoc, which seems the best of the web-based ones at not mangling a powerpoint but is still kinda sucky.
but only for a static ip. If you use OpenDNS on your laptop, and go use coffee shop wifi, unless someone else has disabled NXDOMAIN from that IP, you will get their NXDOMAIN landing/redirect page instead.

Which limits its usefulness to desktop systems on a static IP.
I thought about doing this a while ago, and started watching to see if I could find any way to predict stock prices based on tech news. I saw nothing I would put money behind. The stock price wont change based on news until after that quarters earnings are released, and for a big company one technical glitch won't effect those.
I wonder if the value of the total things stopped by McAfee, in all its time, outweighs the purported damage of this incident.

I'm thinking no.
The 99.8% includes a known test set for historic viruses from the 80s and 90s. The stuff you really care about are the new things that sweep the web (Blaster, Slammer, Code Red, etc.). AV is inherently reactive, and that .2% you miss is likely the latest stuff.
My (amateur) understanding is that it is illegal. You raise reasonable points about the ethical question of informing the buying public about available products, but I think that legitimate journalistic purpose has limits. Exposing the internals, to the point of revealing construction and identifiable components, goes beyond that limit, as does holding the device hostage to confirmation. And I share the view of many other HN readers in feeling it was unecessary to make a public spectacle of the engineer who misplaced the device.

There are definite prohibitions on exploiting such information for commercial gain, even the indirect gain of internet traffic. Consider the benefit to manufacturers of knockoffs from such a detailed teardown - that undermines Apple's future sales and imposes an extra burden on US customs officials charged with enforcing prohibitions on fake devices entering the domestic market.
Some of us like to be in control of our data and/or not pay others for what is essentially free.

Also, I am not sure how third party email sending services can avoid having me setup a SPF record — as for the PTR record, it’s a good thing to have even if you do not plan to use the IP for sending emails.
Not just your theory. Read up on the marshmallow test--it turns out that people with higher levels of self-control do better academically than people with higher IQs.
"Before prototype, mootools, and jQuery etc., JavaScript frankly sucked."

Proto, mootools and jQuery are written in JavaScript. So your statement compiles to "JavaScript sucked until people figured out what it could do."

(Which is essentially your larger point, but still.)
Or you could just install the free AVG, the cost is zero (if money is what worries you), the impact on performance is negligible (I do photo and video processing, the antivirus doesn't seem to make Vista slower than it already is), and it's definitely better than nothing (caught a few cockroaches trying to sneak into my system already).

But what do I know, my laptop is running Ubuntu, my primary desktop has always been Linux since 1997.
Chinese Savings and the Wealth Effect
Their top menu looks very similar to scoutapp.com's
Seriously, it's time for MS to just buy Facebook. I really don't get why they didn't snag it a year or two ago. They tried to spend 3x as much as it would have taken (probably 2x now) to buy Facebook in order to buy Yahoo. Even if Facebook never monetizes as well directly as Yahoo (which it quite probably will) it'd be worth more in the grand scheme of things.

Facebook connect is everything that Passport tried (and largely failed) to be. Yahoo+Bing is still only bordering on relevant in search, FB owns social networking.

Put it this way, MSFT shares would rise greatly on the news of a Facebook acquisition.
The Sling Blade Runner puzzle is my favorite. Been hacking on and off on it for the past three years. Every six months or so I come back and spent a few weekends on it. So many different ways to approach the problem. Genetic algorithms, graph simplification, splitting, and pruning algorithms, graph key node analysis, all sorts of different traveling salesman approaches, not to mention creating super small/fast brute force, there is always something new to try against it. Even generated various images of the graph with dot just for kicks. If anyone is looking for a problem to try this would be one I recommend to try. Going by number of movies you should have no problem getting more then 200 in length and with something better (or luck) over 300. Have something really good and you can get above 320 :)
It seemed to work pretty well on my Ubuntu system without having Silverlight installed. But there was a little notification that said documents would load faster if it was installed. I'm always up for a good laugh and was wondering how I would run that Silverlight .exe file on Linux. Well lo and behold there is "Moonlight" which is available as a Firefox plugin that I'm guessing is a way to allow Silverlight apps to work in Linux. Well now that I installed it and restarted my browser, I can't open up any of the Word docs now. Oh well, guess it's back to running Word in XP in a VirtualBox window.
I can't tell if that's sarcasm or not.
I did this from the start.

Facebook: Friends. People I actually know in real life
LinkedIn: Work colleagues and acquaintances
Twitter: Random geeks who want to follow tech stuff
I'm not sure how I feel about content being tailored based on my social graph's likes. In some cases it could be good, in others not so much. My friends list on facebook has enough of people from my small town high school days thanks to our upcoming 10 year reunion, and believe me -- we have nothing in common. Maybe I'm being cynical but I loved the internet when you sought new and exciting things without the group think.
Amonix Claims 39% Cell Efficiency for its Concentrating Photovoltaic Panels
Because I have friends and family who ask me all kinds of crazy questions about how things work, and I'm guessing the experience I had on FB this morning won't be enough to let me dodge those questions. It's a personal opinion, but one I think is pretty well grounded in my own experiences.

What isn't opinion is that opting out results in wiping out almost everything from your profile. That's a fairly punitive action to take against someone who doesn't want to opt in to an "opt-in" feature.

And saying that "Facebook actually tests the UI" means pretty much nothing to me. Do they publish the tests and the results? How confusing can a feature be before it's scrapped? Does the importance of the business function the feature supports affect that threshold? On top of that, given FB's history of privacy screwups and subsequent rollbacks, why should I have any faith in the company at all in this area? FB has always seemed more than comfortable with the "ask forgiveness rather than permission" model.
Flash is a horrible nightmare on Windows too, it just is even worse on Linux and OS X.
What ? Adobe Flash for iPhone OS is an open platform ?
I must still disagree:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/genius

This is like people calling skills "artistry."
Accidental loss != abandonment, especially when the item was disguised as an existing model. Gizmodo knew, or at least hoped, that they were getting a prototype of an unannounced new iphone.
The fact that you're here means your computer is working, but just in case anyone you know needs the instructions to disable McAfee:

Boot the affected client into Windows Safe Mode with Networking (Hit F8 During the system boot phase.)

Disable the McAfee McShield service by opening the Registry Editor (regedit.exe), and set the McAfee McShield service to the Disabled startup type: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\McShield\Start=4.

Once you've rebooted in to normal mode you can rollback definitions from the McAfee gui.
Haha - indeed.
Centaurus Energy (TX based hedge fund) would amount to $88.2M per employee.
Awesome, I hadn't heard of that. Thanks!
Thanks, I'd read a writeup as well, not the original.
http://xkcd.com/694/
Depends on how the survey question was structured. I can imagine

Do you know that photocopiers store image on a hard drive?

would get very different response rates than

Do you know that photocopiers store image on a hard drive permanently until manually wiped?
Unlikely. ITA's codebase is probably really, really, really huge by now, and I get the impression that they consider their use of Lisp to be important to their success.
Today's Six Hottest OSS Projects
Bluetooth Low Energy?
By far the most important aspect of this potential deal has been totally overlooked in the articles and comments I've read so far.

ITA powers Kayak & Bing/Farecast and has the direct relationship with the airlines. ITA is foundational to travel search in a way that Kayak or Bing/Farecast is not.
If you're going to be showing another ad, you could show another ad from another company. So, you're still losing that money if you decide to put your own ad there.
> They pay their engineers REALLY well.

Really? Not in my experience.
Already pinged one of my clients about integrating this into their online store. I think this looks awesome.

What I think this will allow us to do:

On each product page there will be a Like button (if you're logged into FB), which users will use accordingly. Then when a new user comes to the site they'll be able to browse all the products their friends have liked.

Privacy concerns aside, this is going to be great for business.
I'm not quite so sure share price would rise if they bought FB. Why? FB is in no way related to any of Microsoft's core competencies. They would be much better off buying companies that make online collaboration tools in order to capture lost revenue from lost Office sales. How would FB help their bottom line? Ad sales are nice, but at the end of the day MS is a company that makes software - specifically Windows and Office. They should be focused on buying companies that complement/replace that revenue stream.
There are different types of controversy. Examples of good controversy are arguments over technology choices, approaches, etc. Bad controversy (IMHO) has to do with people arguing over use of profanity or content that violates cultural norms (like the infamous Couch/Porn incident.)

Good controversy advances the state of the art. Bad controversy doesn't. Lately I've been trying to be more purposeful about the type of controversy I personally get involved in.
Yo dawg, I see you like lockin, so I put some lockin in your lockin so you can be locked in while you're locked in.

Seriously, though - collaborate on documents via Facebook? I don't even load Facebook at work. It has no work value. It's like if you added Flash games to Outlook. It just doesn't fit.

I hope this doesn't catch on. I don't want somebody to say "I shared this crucial document with you via Facebook."
Excellent point. I wonder if that could create regulatory/antitrust problems for a Google acquisition of ITA?
Old (meaning a year or two) viruses are still around, and can still do a lot of damage. A large part of the reason they don't is because people run virus scanners that catch them, and stop them from spreading.
> "JavaScript sucked until people figured out what it could do."

Actually yes. Do you remember any amazing JS apps from 2002? IE6 has been around since 2001 and even on slow machines, it can still run most of the JS apps (provided you make the fruitless effort to support it). Where were the JS apps in 2002? Only things people used JS for were form validation and annoyances.

I know these frameworks are written in JS. What I meant to say was that very few people had actually used JS to its full potential and capabilities till just 5 years ago when protoype/scriptaculous/RoR and apps like Google Maps started to show up. I wrote an Ajax-enabled app for IE6 in 2003 and it was so much more work than $.ajax({url:foo,callback:bar});
"Go west, young man!" - Mean population center of the US
um, pretty sure this is the least insightful document+facebook "mashup" possible
_meta - Info roundup: McAfee kills computers worldwide
I was just talking about this with my friends. It really needs to integrate with friend lists in some way. Ideally, there would be a way to "devalue" a friend so their activity isn't as highly valued as other friends you have. Even more ideally, this information could be filtered automatically through a learning algorithm that increases the value of recommendations from friends you match closely. That would avoid a UI nightmare of trying to get everyone on Facebook to basically rank their friends in terms of value of their opinions.
> If prevailing wisdom was that unless you bought some $40 item for your car, it could easily be stolen, you'd probably buy it right?

Oh, you mean "The Club", which slows down a car thief by about 10 seconds ;)
Well, sure, but why wouldn't you count their retail staff?
It's behaving a bit too much like the desktop version: http://ugg.is/docs.com.fail.png
Ask HN: Don't we have any news other than Apple, Facebook or Google? 
Nowadays HN has news only related to fb, Apple and GOOG. Don't we have news on other innovative startups anymore?
Please list down your startups here and what do you do? I want some fresh air.
Thanks - that explains it well. As I understand it, anyone can set up objects for anything now and be the "voice" of that object. Seems crazy after all the trouble Facebook had with unofficial facebook pages.
If you are looking for something with a web front end I have been working on a little project called GitHaven http://githaven.com/ and am looking for some beta testers for feedback. It has a web interface for managing users and repositories. It is a deb package so easy to install. I hang out in #githaven on freenode if anyone wants to discuss it.
I assume you mean Chrome but not Safari? Presumably it needs to display the notifications using operating system APIs, so it needs cooperation from the embedding browser.
I had this same problem with AVG on my parents' PC some time ago: it deleted an essential system file, making the computer unable to boot even in safe mode. I then did what they said that I should do, thereby fucking Windows up completely. Luckily I was able to recover important files via Ubuntu.
I'd be interested to hear how the deals actually end up working out for the businesses in the long term. Sure, they get people in the door, but at a 50% discount plus the significant cut Groupon takes, they're not left with much. Plus it seems like most purchases are one off visits, as there are plenty of random acupuncture/restaurant/massage/etc deals to never have to repeat a place.

Also, the collective buying power part doesn't really exist as far as I can tell -- I can't say I've seen any deals not get the minimum amount of buyers in the past year or so.