skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, but 'joking' about blowing up something ANYWHERE in 2010 that is in earshot of another person (either physically or digitally) will likely get you at least a mild amount of attention from the authorities.

My question however is did the authorities have someone report this to them, or were they proactively monitoring twitter for such? In my interactions with federal level law enforcement, it seems that their proactive monitoring is poor at best.
NSFW: Facebook Breached My Privacy, And Other Things...
See also Constructivism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(mathematics) . And the concept of "computable numbers": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number

That said, I will point out that math is essentially a game played by certain rules known as "axioms", and there is no one true set of axioms. If you choose one set, you get infinity; if you choose another, you don't (but you will pay for that). You can't say which is "more right" or "more wrong" without bringing other subjective standards into it, each of which may have their own utility. While "corresponds to the physical universe" is definitely one useful such standard, it is still not the only one.

Do read up on the limits of computable numbers though; they are interesting, but it's not a free lunch.
Private schools, by contrast, have no obligation to accommodate disabled students

That depends on your jurisdiction. For example, you've indicated you live in Massachusetts. Two minutes of Googling found that 151C (e) makes it unlawful for private schools to refuse admission to the blind, deaf, and students requiring use of dog guides. That is one law. I would not wager it is the extent of regulations on the matter.
Thanks. I posted this same comment to the OP's blog, and the formatting was left over from there. Thanks much. I'll edit that now.
One of my clients has 2 windows instances. I will need to look at the windows tools to see if there is something equivalent there.
Good old socialism-for-the-rich.
From 86 to 2006 it was run by Steve Jobs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar
Thanks for the intelligent comment. Finally!

I am not against intelligent critique of GS, the government, whatever. In fact, such critique is required to ensure the proper functioning of the system, closing the feedback loop and providing the required checks. What I am against is Pavlovian unintelligent critique, and one sees a lot of that when the topic is Wall Street. And even though a lot of HN'ers are deeply knowledgeable about Finance, the majority is clearly clueless. This is HN, after all, not NucPhyn.

I am no GS'er, nor am I their useful idiot. They are merely maximizing their utility through whatever means necessary. The one difference between me and you guys is that I don't claim that I am a saint who would be uncapable of doing what GS is doing if I were on their shoes. It's easy to be full of virtue when one does not have the chance to do any evil. Business is hard, but the players in the financial market are voluntary participants. If GS has an information edge and rapes everyone else on a regular basis, maybe the prey should leave the market. It's a winner-take-all scenario, whether we like it or not.

Change the regulation, they will find a new way of gaming the system. Increase taxes, and they will find a loophole. The only way of taming these hyper-motivated people is by eliminating all economic freedom, and I oppose that on ideological grounds. So, I am happier to have a market where GS pillages their counterparties than to have the alternative scenarios. No one said that the best of all worlds was ever attainable. It sucks. One could try to change human nature, but we all know how that worked in the past...
A More Powerful, Stealthier and Uncommon ARP Poisoning Technique
Important to remember that we're talking about threads and IO in one specific VM case, etc. The same assumptions won't necessarily hold in, for example, a .NET case, as the memory cost of a thread is more significant (in some qualified cases).

Fundamentally, most of these points have so many caveats were you to want to extrapolate them to general programming technique, that you're much better off simply saying "benchmark your actual cases and try the alternatives".
The Incumbent's Curse
Get Your Organizational Wheel of Fortune Spinning
I came back to studying after a 12 year break where I hardly used maths. I bought the Students Survival Guide and found it very useful and easy to dip in to after work:

http://www.amazon.com/Maths-Students-Survival-Self-Help-Engi...

It takes you to the level needed by most Science/Engineering undergraduate courses.
Although it was perhaps understandable, your cognitive bias has led you to avoid a useful modern programming language. C# works in Linux with Mono, and so although Microsoft controls the language, you can reap the benefits on a platform without the Microsoft stack of technologies, if desirable. Personally, I love C#, and use it at home for hobby programming, but not professionally.
Most of what you want is on the web. But I would suggest an intro to Boolean arithmetic and see if that sparks anything. Just basic operations. Then look at how those simple operations can build bigger ones. It uses math, sure, but is a whole different world from general math. Of course you'll need some algebra in order to program in C++ but not too much. That's sufficient for 1st year CS classes.

You'll want Geometry to understand graphics, and you'll want some basic trig and a dash of differential calculus in order to animate.

Look around on the web and you'll find all of it.
Right. I was about to comment that that's because you're assuming an infinite domain, but the above definition becomes useless unless you do.

The point, though, was that the behavior characterized by the notation is perfectly reasonable even with finite domains (even if the specific notation is not, which was a fatal flaw).
Facebook's privacy bait and switch
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of named parameters, either. Seems a bit superfluous.
Teachers do not work 50 hour weeks. On average, teachers work 38 hour weeks. That's 24 minutes less per weekday and 42 minutes less per saturday than the average professional. They do this 9-10 months/year, the other 2-3 months a year they work dramatically less.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Additionally, while their wages are low, their fringe benefits are excellent. They often get defined benefit pensions, earlier retirement than other professionals, tenure and 2-3 months vacation.

http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...

Incidentally, while it may be the case that private schools don't educate everyone, so what? If they can educate students in category X better than public schools, but schools can educate category Y better than private, isn't it best for everyone if private schools take the X students and public takes the Y students?
I have 64-bit Flash running on a daily build of Chromium on Gentoo, which is relevant because you can't pre-build a binary distro for it the way you can with Fedora or something. (That is, you can certainly provide a binary that may work, but you can't test it on all Gentoo setups in any reasonable way the way you can on a normal distribution.)

It's been working fine for weeks. I think it crashed once, but then, it does on Windows too sometimes. (And in Chromium it doesn't take out the browser, so I'm even less concerned.)
Tips for startups and small business: creating a presentation
The site should detect iphone/ipad/ibad and display something like:
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/11/03/iphone.flash....

It does not make sense to provide a link to download flash on these devices.
Humble Indie Bundle adds Samorost 2, teases source code release
I have Jon Skeet's "C# In Depth" for C# 4.0 on pre-order. It's not out just yet.
Things to love (and hate) about the Nokia N900
If you want to keep the easy thread-per-connection model even with 1M connections you might have a look at Erlang - it takes the best of both worlds (threads and async IO) via its processes (so you get a process-per-connection). I read somewhere that the overhead of a process is just about 300 bytes.
> It was literally months before any editor looked closely enough at the situation to realize that this might not be fully kosher.

It is fully kosher. That's not to say it is something that the Foundation may decide not to host - but from a legal perspective the image is absolutely fine.

(to put it into context if someone caught you with 500 or so similar images on your computer then you might get a slapped wrist - depending on whether any could be viewed as "sexual").

EDIT: is there a request for undelete link now? Or could you point me at the original MFD thread (privately if you like) and perhaps I could put in an "expert" view (if it would be useful).
The Dream essay
A private school can’t refuse admission to a deaf student, but if (for example) the student requires a sign-language interpreter to participate in class, the private school is under no obligation to pay for one. A public school in a similar situation would have to hire an interpreter.
While there is no general screen recorded software available for iPhone you can always modify your app to record what's going on the screen.

Now, recording user's fingers and face - that's a challenge. I do wonder if the rumored front-facing camera will help with that.
It should be noted it's $25 million profit per day for 63 days, or $1.575 Billion for the quarter. To put it in perspective, that's not very far from Google's quarterly profit (~1.9B)
Let me Duck Duck Go that for you
Listening to someones needs and then deciding what is best for them is not democratic at all. I think that you are really stretching here.
I think you misapprehend what the market tells us. People invest in the market in order make money: if they expect that there's a greater amount of money to be made they'll invest more; if the amount to be made is lower, they invest less. If people are trying to get into the market (i.e., they think more money is to be made), prices rise; if the opposite, prices go down.

So the movement of the market doesn't tell us that anything is "good" or "bad", it can only tell us if investors believe that it will lead to an increase or decrease of investment income.

In the case of the USA, it should be obvious that the government pumping billions of dollars into businesses (banks, GM, Chrysler, etc.) will lead to people invested in those business getting more income, so prices of those investments rises. That is despite the fact that this money is earned (after the final accounting) on the backs of taxpayers that aren't invested. Thus, the bailout is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

That said, the markets are hugely chaotic. Anybody who thinks he can say that a market movement is due to one particular piece of news is talking out of his butt. The market is a huge, distributed computer. When it's reasonable to believe that a single piece of news is so significant that everything else is just noise, then maybe we can guess. But the normal day-to-day news reports that attribute gains and losses to specific news items are pipe dreams.
Please review my iPhone app (icons recognition)
I tried http://lmddgtfy.com/foo and I got this message:

Unhandled Exception
An unhandled exception was thrown by the application.
I agree with this part:

"I believe there's a healthy balance all programmers need to establish, somewhere between...

1. Locking yourself away in a private office and having an intimate dialog with a compiler about your program.

2. Getting out in public and having an open dialog with other human beings about your program."

...but I'm not really sure I see the point of the rest of it. Jeff points out that most programmers are introverts (which I have my doubts about, but that's a different matter) and that #1 is no problem. So then why is he spending most of his time talking about upping the amount of time we spend on #1?

Personally, I'm of the opinion that we as programmers do too much. It's fashionable to complain about people who talk and think more than they do, but we forget that it's also important to take time to reflect on what we've done so we can learn to do it better. Whether that be in the form of group discussion or introspection is another matter, but the moral of the story is not to do too much.
Ask HN: Survey on diversity in founder teams and its influence on success
Dear Hacker News,

for my Masters Thesis I am currently analyzing if diversity in founder teams is influencing a startup's success.

Now I need data to confirm my Hypotheses and am therefore conducting a survey. If you are the founder [1] of an internet startup [2] I would like to ask you to help me by filling out my survey. If you have founded more than one venture you are welcome to fill out the survey more than once.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/founderdiversity

Thanks for the time you take to help.

Marcus

[1] A founder / co-founder is defined as someone "who has an interest, both financial and otherwise, in and commitment to the venture's future and success; whose work is interdependent in the pursuit of common goals and venture success; who are accountable to the entrepreneurial team and for the venture; who are considered to be at the executive level with executive responsibility in the early phases of the venture, including founding and pre-start up; and who are seen as a social entity by themselves and by others."

[2] Internet startups are defined as "new businesses which offer a product or service that is mainly distributed through online channels such as a website."
The only concern I would have with BuddyPress is that it is based on Wordpress.

As a codebase WP tends to have quite a high rate of exploits (or it is a popular exploit target). Right now that's not a huge problem - but for a social network where we want to encourage non-techy types to be involved it could be explosively bad.
Has anyone tried this? Can you vouch it is spyware, malware, and adware free?
The worst part is the moral hazard. We're signaling that there's little reason to be responsible, because there's always a bailout to fall back on. We're thus increasing the need for such bailouts in the future.
Or they could just change their name to something people would take seriously. Just a thought.
It looks like the URL should be http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=foo&v=

Although, yes a lot easier to remember your way.
You are right. Freedom of speech is hard to gauge in matters like this, really, really hard. (when is the "line" crossed, and what is the line?)
> Bullshit I am afraid. Fortunately the law doesn't work like this. Also, CP charges are hard enough to make stick at the moment for all sorts of reasons - it would fall apart due to impracticality.

I'm more referring to the idea that the guy 'got off' because they couldn't find any child porn, so they charge him with anything they can find (e.g. unpaid parking ticket).
Ask HN: Massive vulnerability on Twitter?
It seems that you can make anybody follow you by tweeting "accept username". Does it work for you too? This looks like an awful vulnerability to me.
True. Still an unhandled exception does not sound good.
Excellent piece. I think the main challenge for UX architects is breaking the hiearchical model that users are used to.

Tags are the ideal solution for organizing like items but few have mastered the UI. Sure, it's easy to to build the refrigerator model but users get freaked out when everything is lumped together (that's why websites still have nav bars.)

If someone can master the art of the tag UI, then we're set.
Theoretically, they are finding inefficiencies in the market and eliminating them through a better allocation of capital (and of course profiting from the effort).This is the role of any trader/speculator in a market. Some will be right in their analysis, others wrong, and all known information gets reflected in an asset price. Not having a single down day an an entire quarter basically means that at the end of each day the aggregate of their bets were on the winning side. Given the presumed stochastic nature over small time frames of the markets, that's quite a feat. That said, given the other headlines they've made recently,I strongly emphasize the first word of this reply.
A lot of the money they make is on high-speed passive market-making, and they value of this is far tighter spreads on stocks. Compare spreads on the NYSE now to twenty years ago. (Moe, we have to stop meeting like this.)
I agree with everything in the above post except the one unevidenced claim: that teachers' wages are low. Teachers' wages are not low in the United States on average.

Quoth the BLS:

Median annual wages of kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers ranged from $47,100 to $51,180 in May 2008; the lowest 10 percent earned $30,970 to $34,280; the top 10 percent earned $75,190 to $80,970.

You can scroll down the list of occupations and see some folks who get paid less than teachers. It is an eye-opener in some cases (firefighters make less than middle school teachers? Really? Whoa.)
Next Lisps
If you're a producer of content ... you care about files.

If you're a consumer of content ... you don't.
The only way of taming these hyper-motivated people is by eliminating all economic freedom, and I oppose that on ideological grounds

speaking of ideology, the premise of Free Market is that government and society at least try to prevent fraud.

I'm myself not sure that GS is fraud, but maybe that's how their business of front-running and "intelligent market-making" will be defined by their former clients and society in few years from now.
Liquidity, mostly.

They are 'market makers'. If you're a big {pension, real estate, rrsp}fund and want to make a trade, say a purchase, you need to call your trader directly. The trader will sell you some of their own (if they have it on their books), or will contact other people who they think may have extra supply on your behalf.

They are the 'grease of the economy'. In theory, it makes markets run smoother, which leads to greater efficiencies for everyone, and makes the world a better place.

(in theory)
Well now there's a few thousand tweets about blowing up the airport -- are they going to arrest everyone?
I am curious. Is DDG running their own web crawlers or are they a front-end to search results from some other engine?
Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter
Stuff like this keeps me super-motivated. Thx Mike for making it!
> Once upon a time there were four smart women named Louise Sivy, Helen Braun, Ethel Rew, and Patricia Troy who saw a need for an independent early childhood and elementary program offering small classes and a challenging multi-faceted curriculum. They had been colleagues at Wroxeter-on-the-Severn School and opened Chesapeake Academy in 1980, with just 36 students. They held classes at a space previously occupied, believe it or not, by a beauty parlor. The next year classes were held in a local church before moving to our present location in Arnold, MD just a few miles from Annapolis.

> The four smart women were resourceful. Moving from the beautiful castle-like school building at Wroxeter they found they were in need of basic furniture for classrooms and bartered for desks and chairs with local schools. They were conscious of fiscal needs and worked with generous families to administer the school’s financial resources.

> They wrote curriculum, taught classes and worked with their faculty to lay the groundwork for the individualized curriculum and the active learning philosophy Chesapeake Academy champions today. The four smart women were visionary. They embraced technology as an educational resource, while Apple® computer company was just finding its' way into the school marketplace.

http://www.chesapeakeacademy.com/podium/default.aspx?t=10367...

Patricia Troy is the mother of Dave Troy, a local entrepreneur, and she did exactly what you're proposing.
There are two possible things in the deep-frying that can be bad for you: Frying in transfats, and the batter. If you don't fry in transfats and are really gentle with the batter, instead of slathering it on, I actually don't see much reason to be concerned about deep-fat frying, under this theory of nutrition.

That said, I tend to just saute or steam. Deep-fat frying is a lot of work for dubious reward.

The rest, yes, assuming you mean full-sugar/full-HFCS soda. (Diet sodas may be bad, but I find the theories behind that to be a bit more theoretical than the I-think-proved danger of the full-sugar sodas.) You'd think in some sense that "easier to digest" would be a good thing, but it really turns out not to be. And you'd be surprised what all has sugar and HFCS in it.

(I'm ambivalent about whether HFCS is worse for you than sugar or not; to be honest, the evidence for both is such that you really ought to almost entirely cut them out of your diet. As both meet that threshold, I consider arguing about which is worse to be mostly academic.)
I went to NYU. If I were back in NYC, I'd start a meetup just for startups and student hackers to meet. The NYTechMeetup is becomming an institution - any students reading this in NYC should regularly attend.
Hmm. Probably not to be honest, fortunately most police aren't really like that.
The Biggest Job Creator You Never Heard Of: The Patent Office
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm thinking Flash bashing has pretty much reached dead horse status. Possibly even "red smear on the ground" status.

Worrying about what the pundits say isn't going to help us execute, unless the pundit is someone with hard-won expertise and experience in what you're doing/building. Just pick the right tool for your product and market and run with it.
Groupon was doing its thing in Chicago for a solid year with people thinking it was weird before all of a sudden it wasn't weird anymore.
Checking it out now.

Thanks Mark.