skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Love this article. If you're going to start a company because you're confident in your technical ability, you can start a consultancy easily; tens of thousands of devs freelance, running single-person consultancies instead of taking W2 from a single company. A small consulting company is a better starting point for a new business than a full-time job.
PBS?

When the journalism is good enough, people want to make sure it survives.
137 Years of Robotic Fascination
This can be handled by 301 redirect or it can be built into the protocol. When moving a profile from one provider to another, the standard could require a response indicating the location of the profile for a minimum period of time (such as a week or a month).

A standard such as this would be crawled on a frequent basis by the social network apps built on top of it, as well as the search engines. They would all update their canonical profile addresses and that would be that--an organic, self repairing network.
For law students and lawyers, there's a "top 14". This is because the USN&WR top 10 has varied over the years, but the USN&WR top 14 has been stable for practically forever. The same is true of 17, 18, and maybe a couple of other integers.

So "top 14" is the meaningful distinction due to this observed property of 14 in the rankings, which could be an artifact of chance. But it has become self-perpetuating at the prestige drop between #14 and #15 is enormous. Also, law as a profession cares obsessively about where one went to school. Attending #14 means you went to a "national law school"; #15 makes it very difficult for you to get a good job more than 200 miles from your law school.

I wish I were making this up. I'm not.
This article makes a bunch of assumptions. The most important assumption is that they guy who found the phone didn't make a reasonable effort to return it.

Just because the phone says "Apple" on the back, doesn't mean Apple owns it. My phone says that too, but I wouldn't want it sent to Apple if I lost it. Also, my understanding was that the phone was bricked remotely. Not much you can do to find the owner of a phone that doesn't turn on.

It would seem to me that this assumption must be proven true before police can take action against Chen, since unless this assumption is true, there is no cause to invade his office.

I don't know what the facts are, but the they need to be set straight in this matter before we declare anyone guilty.
I would assume that debit would encourage risk-seeking behaviour. But, outside of real estate speculation, which, until recently has been seen as not very risky at all, I haven't seen it.
It's not when I'm limiting my use of the phase to al-Qaeda, where they indeed used that argument ... and found out that they were fantastically wrong

AQ seems to have calculated pretty well actually. What you're missing is that the US acted precisely as AQ wanted them to act. They wanted the US to go nuts and overreact which would cause them to overreach, and that's exactly what we did. We wasted trillions of dollars on a pointless war in Iraq. Our pointless war killed a million people and turned another 3-4 million into refugees. That screamed to the world that the US is an irrational self-absorbed state that kills lots of people without caring. That has repercussions for our ability to get intelligence in the future.

In the process, we also convinced the entire world that we were much weaker than they ever thought. Think about it: the world's most powerful military was completely sandbagged by the remnants of a third rate army in an impoverished state for years. All our fancy technology? Most of it worthless. US soldiers getting killed one and two at a time every day for years. Our impotence made manifest.

We gave AQ exactly what they wanted. Many people in the Islamic world used to think that AQ was a joke before 9/11; we made them into our nemesis and thus elevated them to our level. Rather than saying "these are a bunch of criminals and we'll bring them to justice, just like any other criminal gang that kills innocent people," we convinced the world that there was a global movement which AQ represented and that we were going to destroy it. And then we failed at just about everything.

As for the general proposition, at the highest level, do you think weakness encourages or discourages attack?

I think anyone asking the question needs to go read some IR theory and history. Look, organizations make decisions based on their capabilities and their own internal dynamics. Was the US strong or weak in 2000? It depends. There is no objective answer because the question is ill-posed. So anyone can justify any answer. People in AQ who wanted to act convinced themselves that the US was weak. If the facts had been otherwise, they would have twisted those facts into justifying attack as well.

What you're talking about here is signaling theory and you really should read about it. Historically, governments have been convinced that by taking various actions, they were "signaling" or "sending messages to" their opponents. But years later when historians looked through the opponents' archives they discovered that those opponents never got the message. Or that they interpreted the message in ways that suited their own internal biases. Showing resolve and demonstrating strength sound good to people but are fundamentally misguided actions.
There aren't more terrorist attacks, because the classification as "terrorist" is a false classification. In reality the same mindset, motives, situation, that allegedly drive "terrorists" drive the people who are committing murders of their friends/family/coworkers/random-people every day. When an act of violence is carried out by a Muslim-named individual with an ostensibly political motive, you classify that as terrorism, whereas the underlying psychosis that leads to the crime is the same as most other acts of violence. The manifestation of that psychosis has circumstances and external justification that are irrational, random, and individual to each person.

So this question is like asking, "Why aren't there more 5'7", 11 shoe size, blue sweater-ed murderers?" The fact that there are not more "terrorist attacks" is proof that the classification of "terrorist attacks" is an unnaturally narrow one, based on arbitrary features of the perpetrators.
This case illustrates the dictum that "hard facts make bad law."

In essence, the court went out of its way to try to do equity in what it viewed as a case of an opportunistic founder who tried unfairly to stick it to his co-founders. It is at best a mercy decision and an aberrant one at that (a legal outcome that turns basically on the idea that startups are "different" rests on pretty weak legal reasoning and is likely to remain a one-fer decision).

Founders are often are ignorant about who owns IP as it is created in these sorts of loose, early stages. Very important to get this right (see a piece I wrote on this issue here: http://grellas.com/faq_business_startup_015a.html).
> I'm willing to be the next step would be embedded memristor blocks in a human body,

I think that's more than just a little while off, that sort of enhancement, if it ever comes to pass.

Ok, finally found it, posted it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1322135
Facebook opening an engineering office in Seattle
"And Chicago is still super cool. Did you know that we have the largest water filtration plant in the continental United States? Great city, can't understand why people wouldn't want to move here, but whatever..."

WTF? I'm sure glad that Chicago has such a persuasive spokesperson.
This is a tough one. It depends how I feel.

When nostalgic I love:
Youssou Ndour "Bayekou", Phil Collins "True Colors".

When I want to feel good sad:
Coldplay "Talk", Garry Rafferty "Right Down the Line".

When I am in party mode:
Tupac "Still balling",Ludacris "Southern Hospitality".

When I want to feel gangster (Yes, I said it):
Clipse "Gangsta Lean" and sometimes, sometimes Blue Magic "Jay z".
Yes it's not a tech issue, the issue goes much deeper than that. It will mean a major change in architectures and languages, and that's going to require some killer applications to gain adoption. I imagine the tech will show up and languish -- while the rest of us try to figure out how to get our heads around it.

Even after adoption, there will be major friction from the corporate and governmental sectors -- lots of money has been invested in doing things the old way. Early adopter consumers in 12-15 years. Rest of the world? Perhaps a good bit longer.
Default, Devaluation, Or What? - Paul Krugman
I wish my professor gave us this in my CS Theory course. Would have made it ten times as much fun, and much less dry.
Tell HN: Rapportive makes using Craigslist better
Rapportive is a nifty little gmail add-on that pulls in a photo, brief bio, and latest tweets for anyone who e-mails you. I read about it here on HN, installed it, and checking it when I get a new e-mail has become a part of my routine. Excellent stuff.

Today I just posted up an add on Craigslist looking for a new roommate. Usually this is pretty hit or miss. You get e-mails from random people asking to come over to your place to see the apartment etc. It's a real hassle.

I just received my first response a few minutes ago, and Rapportive showed me a photo of the person, 3 recent tweets, and a link to her MySpace page.

I can't tell you how helpful this is. Now I know this is the sort of person whose public persona is centered around sweaty nightclub photos and can make a more educated decision on whether or not I'd want her as a roommate.

Win.
I'm sure that Facebook looks on it's users much the way that Archer-Daniels-Midland looks upon soybeans, to be fed and watered and destined for harvesting.
DVCS's are Nice, But There's No Shame in SVN
In July/August 2001 (before the 9/11 attacks) I visited some friends in Israel for a vacation. I was pretty broke so I didn't get to do a lot of sightseeing, but we toured around Jerusalem for a bit, visited the old city, and went to the Dead Sea. Very relaxing trip.

Israel has a very practical and realistic approach to terrorism, at least in my mind, because it's dealing with an entirely different type of terrorism than the US is; for that matter, the UK's issues with the IRA are more similar than the US's.

Everywhere we went, we had bag checks. They were always quick and painless, and everyone just took them for granted. At the entrance to a large store or mall would be a security guard; you'd show them the inside of your bag, and off you went. Likewise, there were soldiers hanging around in various spots; just like you'd see girls in skirts or guys in shorts, you'd see both in uniform, holding assault rifles. Most of the time they looked bored, and I'm sure they were. It wasn't like every street corner had a special ops team on it, but I saw them enough to get used to seeing them around.

Most telling, I think, is Israel's approach to airport security. There was a fascinating article in the Toronto Star about security at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, vs. Toronto's Pearson International airport, detailing why Israel has had no major terrorist attacks originating in its airports, which I strongly suggest anyone interested in anti-terrorism or airport security read through: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744426
Propagation Networks, A flexible and expressive substrate for computation
It's a proof, but not a formal one. It doesn't define the notion of "program", for example. It's somewhere between an informal proof and a proof sketch (a correct and valid one, of course).

A formal proof is a sequence of statements where each is either an axiom or derived from previous ones via a set of derivation rules, and wherein assessing the validity of each axiom statement or derivation can be done "typographically" (mechanically and primitive-recursively). It's nigh-impossible to write a human-readable formal proof of anything interesting; the vast majority of mathematical papers published are informal proofs.

(Of course, this diversion doesn't detract from the matter of this proof-poem being very cool.)
I'M A RUNNER: BIZ STONE
I wonder why is there so much talent in Seattle that Facebook can't afford not to go? Or do some of its California people want to move north? Or does it want to raid Microsoft? Or something else altogether?
Well we're already embedding RFIDs in people, so chips with limited radio potential and some rudimentary processing power are a done deal.

The question becomes how these embedded processors will change over time. I don't think it's too unreasonable to imagine the memristor tech being used and adoption rates going up. The neural interface, of course, was extremely speculative. But the rest of it seems trivial. At least to me.
"From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters."

If you are prepared to put money on that, I think that you may end up poor ;-) Bullshitters are, as a class, the most successful people in history, I would guess. Politicians, high-ranking clergy, business men, aristocracy, etc. would mostly fall under that umberella, and have managed out society since it started. The last 100 years or so have been the most meritocratic we've ever seen, and I would be surprised if we don't slide back a little soon...
Introducing Luz (a pure-Python MIPS-alike simulator)
Fair warning this is a very long PDF, but it is extremely interesting reading and possibly a glimpse of the future of computing.
For every idea you come up with, there are probably ten other people in the world executing that same idea.

This just may be true. It's best to use this to your advantage. When you think you have an utterly original idea that will open up a new market that nobody is working on acquiring, you can become complacent. But when you know you have a competitor who is doing almost the exact same thing, it makes you work that much harder to beat them.

I recently had the experience of finding my first serious competitor in a market I didn't think existed yet. But this just pushes me to get out there ASAP with a better product.

If you have a startup, finding out about competition may be the best thing that could happen to you.
Someone tried that at my office and was actually told by management that they weren't allowed to have it, as there was a concern that if she were to fall off it and hurt herself, she would sue the office.

Strangely, her counter-argument that it's no more ridiculous to think that she would sue for spinal problems relating to sitting in the standard provided office chair wasn't given much attention.
I totally agree. I bought a Toyota the other day.
What Ted seems to ignore is that Ubuntu's company is a barely profitable one so they just can't afford (yet) to have lots of well paid kernel developers.

Canonical does not make billions unlike Google and even Red Hat. It was funded by a guy who gave money from his own pocket and a lot of it and managed to make Linux popular, so kudos to him and I'm sure they'll get lots of kernel developers if they ever manage to be very profitable.
I have heard similar opinions on Haskell. I am definitely attracted to the convenient function currying and composition, but I realized I could do similar in CL and make it look like whatever made sense to me. I find the ability to create my own look and feel to supercede accepting someone else's look and feel.

I have no issues with Scheme, except that I have chosen to use CL over Scheme because it does feel like something of a batteries-included system.

On the other hand, I was annoyed by what I felt was inconsistent syntax with Haskell revealed in Real World Haskell chapter 13 (unfortunately my only experience with it) when they showed this function definition:

mkFuncRec :: String -> (Int -> Int) -> FuncRec

vs this function definition:

simplify :: (Num a) => SymbolicManip a -> SymbolicManip a

The =>, previously used to instance types, confused me here (they never explained how this definition differed), and I was having a hard time keeping up with all the various times I needed to use each special symbol. Of course, I tolerated it through C++ and perl, so if I ever decided to try a project, I could probably get used to it.
I've read an article that states that there are total of 11 people patrolling Oregon shore. Just land in Oregon.
One big thing: it doesn't seem to have much in the way of off-site ads/analytics: almost everything on the page is from allreciptes.com.
My parents would just banish us outside for the afternoon if we got noisy.
Top Secrets of Effective Liars
Looks like ASP.NET from the .aspx file extensions

See Netcraft:
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://allrecipe...

Presumably this is some of the hardware they are using:
http://www.f5.com/products/big-ip/

Content Delivery Network for media (images, css, js):
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://images.me...
http://www.limelightnetworks.com/

You are correct, it is quite fast.
They probably are in a habit of paying money for devices which look interesting and aren't easily available in the US market. So if somebody comes to them with a next gen mp3 player from China and they like it from the looks they probably gonna pay good money for it.
I think Facebook is a lot more defensible than Google. I think you seriously underestimate how inertial the relationships it now harbors are. Someone just has to build a better, cheaper, Google, and it will slowly start to leak market share. It's a lot harder for Facebook to spring a leak, because I'm not interested in jumping onto something where only 10% of my friends are going to follow me.

Facebook is the first thing, the ONLY thing, that's gotten hundreds of people I know (I mean, really know) to all be in the same "place" at once.

I abandoned Friendster and MySpace long before Facebook showed up. Neither of them ever truly reached the critical mass that Facebook did IMHO. If you remember what Friendster and MySpace were like in earlier days, you kind of just friended people and sat there. The engagement on Facebook is MUCH higher.
It seems to me that the rest of the article is premised on the claim that the USA's manufacturing production has not only ceased to grow quickly, but has actually fallen. This is crucial to establishing his point that "the country is worse off"; isn't it?

The article is interesting, and some of his other points about engineering, law, banking, academia, and compensation are interesting; but I wonder if the factual basis for those points is as radically wrong as the basic premise.
With your comment, we've left my technical understanding in the dust.

That said, would it be possible to get research universities to act as the network? I assume people would be trusting of that.

Or is there a way to encrypt data or split it up in ways that makes it meaningless to any individual without the right password/signature?
Python Decorator Library
Homem de Ferro 2 Download
Com o mundo agora ciente de sua vida dupla como super-herói Homem de Ferro blindado, o bilionário inventor Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), enfrenta a pressão do governo, a imprensa eo público para compartilhar sua tecnologia com os militares. Dispostos a abrir mão de sua invenção, Stark, juntamente com Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) e James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) ao seu lado, deve forjar novas alianças – e enfrentar inimigos poderosos.
There was a frontline episode last night on Education, Inc. (i think it was called) and I think it presents a dangerous trend -- though not for the reason Frontline said.

Our country is broken.

Many of the for profit institutions (like university of phoenix) are being sued because the people who got educations there aren't getting jobs, though they are still saddled with tens -- even hundreds -- of thousands of dollars in debt, much of it from Federal Loans. They can never escape this debt. Frontline basically argued that the colleges were accepting people into their institutions who wouldn't be able to get jobs that would enable them to pay off the loans. How could they decide something like that??

Whose responsibility is it to get a graduate a job? If a college graduate can't get a job, I believe it is largely the responsibility of the student. There are no guarantees in life and the dangerous trend we see is one where we are requiring companies to protect people from themselves. We are removing responsibility and accountability from individuals and putting it on corporations who sell them things. The same thing is happening with home loans people took out, but can't repay.

People are being raised without the critical thinking skills needed to make good decisions and why should they? They aren't being held accountable for those decisions either -- the tax payer pays. And really, why shouldn't they default -- they get a free home, a free education. The derelicts are being rewarded! Why aren't we rewarding those who make good decisions??

Our society is broken, because parents are failing. Schools are failing. Greedy corporations are prospering. Whose fault is it? Is it the parents, the schools, and the individuals -- or the corporations? Is society to be a parent for people like this?

In computer science, technology is changing so fast, it's almost impossible to teach kids what they need to know 4 years from now. Memristors? Cloud Computing? Mobile apps? NoSQL, who knows? My university didn't teach me anything at all about databases, but yet employers want universities to teach kids how to code in Ruby which didn't even exist when curricula were set years ago.

Point is, it's a dangerous trend to absolve the individual of the responsibility to think for themselves. The U.S. was founded on individual freedom, but when you don't have individual responsibility and individual accountability -- you lose individual freedom.
Which one has caused the waste of more manhours(and by extension, lives)?
I agree, but with the recognition that people have differing capabilities of critical thinking. As an example, I get extremely fed up with people that use computers with no understanding of even the basic principles underlying their use, to the extent that they cannot troubleshoot the smallest of unexpected behavior; but I guess the majority of people fall into that group, and that's why I spend so much time fixing computers for friends and family ;).

In Islam, there are well-defined requirements with regards to the amount of knowledge a lay-person is required to attain. On the matter of beliefs, theology, cosmology, etc. the criterion is something like, "the subject must be studied sufficiently to be able to remove the doubts that are a person is capable of understanding". So for example, an illiterate Muslim bedouin is only required to understand the analogy between footsteps in the sand that indicate on the presence of a person having walked and the wonderous creation indicating on the presence of a creator. On the other hand, a Muslim that has a Ph.D. in philosophy has the responsibility to study deeply the cosmological and other rational arguments that justify every level of belief.

The bedouin can't be faulted for not studying to the level of the Ph.D. and the Ph.D. can't be faulted for not accepting without question the reasoning that was sufficient for the bedouin.