skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a tricky issue. The TSA does seem overdone. However, if terrorists are allowed to pull off the same stunts over and over, then the US will look very foolish and ineffective at protecting its people. So, I don't blame the US for being cautious.

It is the terrorist's goal to make people afraid of flying and distrustful of the US government -- so in a way, making the TSA visible (their visibility being a "feel-good" defense) is in fact counter-terrorism. People do seem to trust them (and hence the US government) with their security.
>But how am I supposed to enjoy a holiday when my journey starts with my other half and me being virtual-strip-searched by sometimes dubious characters we can't even see and ends with having biometric scans taken to go into a database as if I were a criminal?

Just enjoy the bit in the middle.
The last book makes me wonder if the story is told just by Harry's point of view, as in no omniscient narrator. It could make things interesting.

This article beats the superhero's schoolbags by far.
I agree with this. While I don't find the current tab system particularly wonderful - back when I used arch linux I think I just used ratpoison /w windows mapped to numbers, this solution means that the user would need to either understand the current mode the task switching program is in at any given time or actually interpret the order of the programs. Yes, it minimizes key-strokes between the most used windows, but it also means that each window might have a connection and behavior that could change at any time. It might work, but I'm sure there are better solutions.
Wish to contact Ron Conway - SV Angel
SV-Angel is looking to invest in "real-time data that help people share what they're doing instantly." I am shopping my concept which is a killer app in this dept. I have scads of previous start-up and development experience (see work section of art4brains.com) but I have been out of the game for some years and am no longer connected. SV-Angel wants referrals from known quantities, so I could use a connection either directly to Ron Conway or to a trusted colleague of his. Thanks. Scott avg.citizen@gmail.com
Google has a bit of a secret weapon here: they're using search/display history to personalize ads. This is in a quiet, limited "let's see if we can boil the frog" fashion.

What that means is that, if I search for "airfare from Nagoya to Okinawa" (which is a wonderful example of purchasing intent, incidentally), Google is going to try to get a second bite at the apple by biasing my AdSense ads to travel agents even if the site I am currently viewing is not about travel.

Facebook has some nice demographic information (a/s/l), but in terms of interests, your search and browsing history is much more accurate than your self-reported interests on Facebook. (Which is, after all, merely the self you want to describe to your friends.) Granted, your recent search/browsing history is not nearly as good as what you typed into the computer 1 second ago, but it will almost certainly perform better than Evony ads and other backfill garbage.
It uses the Objective-C runtime, including "native" objects (strings are NSStrings, hashes are NSDictionaries, etc.). It generates native code (using LLVM) rather than interpreting. It has a more sensible syntax for making Objective-C method calls. (And more.)
Well I've bookmarked this thread as I get my Android phone (Droid Incredible) tomorrow. Verizon surprised me with a ship date earlier than expected.
I guess you weren't the only one who didn't understand that you could disable all notifications from a particular app in two clicks.

Not sure why they couldn't separate spam in your feed from direct notifications...the later were 95% relevant for me once I hid everything from Mafia Wars and people sending me stupid presents.
A flaw in this argument is quantifying this statement:

"A significant portion of Google’s $27 Billion in revenue this year will come from their publisher ad network"

The most recent data I was able to find is that AdSense brings in about 1/3 of Google's total REVENUE.

And Google must pay publishers a substantial portion of this revenue which means it's nowhere near as profitable as the core Google.com property.

http://www.123jump.com/earnings-calls/Google-Earnings-Call-F...
Also might be worth noting: MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9, not 1.8.x. Any benchmarks done should be compared against YARV, not what comes with OS X.
I've implemented something like this before. I ran into a lot of performance issues though. A match against a known person seems quite fast, but when you multiply this against even a medium sized network of people the speed becomes problematic.

This was in the 90s though, I'm sure it's much faster now - I just dont know if it's fast enough to be useful.
yes. and hotcocoa is a wrapper for cocoa that is more rubyish for making native cocoa apps in ruby.

Also: The “Compile” target in Xcode allows an application to be ahead-of-time compiled to machine code, allowing the developer to avoid including the Ruby source in a shipping application.
No, it's an alternative implementation of Ruby 1.9 that allows you to interface directly with native OS X frameworks.
What exactly is a copy-book, and how did it teach you these things differently than, say, a high-school or college textbook?
There has been work on performance; in a lot of cases, MacRuby is faster than YARV. Just, not in this case, with strings. Thats mostly because strings were just redone to use NSString's internally, so there hasn't been as much work done on them as there has in other parts.
Wow, "dwarfs" bank robbery? That is quite amazing.

How many "Intellectual Property" Guards were injured during this giant crime spree? What's that? Not that kind of tort? Well in that case, I hope the songwriter's didn't notice that their comments would be public. How embarassing for them!
Just so you know you can get rid of the free books by moving the clicking thing to the left (or maybe right) on the book you want to delete an option will come up. I think it is also a menu item as well as being able to remove it by usb. (So long as you are talking about an actual kindle and not on apple things as I have no experience there.)
Show HN: Switcheroo, my Emacs-ido-mode-inspired alt-tab replacement for Windows
The only app I miss from my iPhone is Amazon Kindle. I really hope they make an android version soon.
Clickable link: http://bitbucket.org/jasulak/switcheroo/wiki/Home
As another article recently linked from HN pointed out, even if you can get a basic understanding of CDOs and credit default swaps in a few hours, if you went to actually invest in one of the things, the legal documents defining your actual relationship with your counterparty were hundreds of pages long and filled with jargon.
Good news! For you! Maybe less good for others!

http://www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/ -> "we currently hold over 60,000 stories"

The search page must truly be seen to be believed: http://www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/storytype.php Metadata search as you've never seen it before!

Sturgeon's law is in full effect, of course, but don't forget its fuzzy-logic contrapositive: 10% of everything isn't crap. I can't say I've drunk deeply from this well, but I've read a couple of things that makes you wonder why the author bothered to "steal" the setting at all, when they could quite clearly make their own. (Though it also shows the value of editors and their mighty Red Pens of Cutting Out About A Third Of The Text.)
> it's also the fact that the ecosystem is richer for that chipset anyway

Well, it's richer mainly because that's the platform Windows runs on exclusively (or near-exclusively; there are probably a few non-x86 Windows installs out there still) and thus dominant. If you had more competition in processor architectures I would expect that you would not have such an unbalanced chipset and onboard-hardware ecosystem.

Also, I'm not really sure why things like webcams or card readers would depend on processor arch; most webcams (even built-in laptop ones) that I've worked with interface over USB. Same with most recent card readers. It's not like they're plugged right into the FSB or anything.
Thanks! I'll check it out. I will be living pretty close to Davis Square :-)
Cool! Thanks for the links!
I'm on Windows, and I've rolled my own solution that uses incremental search, sort of like Emacs ido-mode buffer switching. http://bitbucket.org/jasulak/switcheroo/wiki/Home

Not for everyone, but I like it.
> The problem is lack of a standard, compact bytecode format for Javascript,

IE can embed javascript bytecode

<script language = JScript.Encode>#@~^EQAAAA==C^+.D`Et+^VK~CgBbgQUAAA==^#~@</script>

save the above line to 1.html and open it in IE (version<9)

it's not standard, though.
Will Android kill Australia’s iPhone obsession?
Don Reinertsen: 2nd Gen. Lean Product Development: From Cargo Cult to Science
About time someone (now that corporations are even more "people") takes this point of view, and acts on it.

Should simplify security issues, too: just cut off DHCP for any computer that gets detected spraying spam or ARP spoofing or whatever. That sort of thing is probably already in place.
Image and video manipulation, alternate widget sets (which nowadays tend to require at least one of heavy image manipulation or OpenGL to really work correctly), 3D applications that actually work and aren't just static models rotating (because now you can actually afford to manipulate vertexes with some intelligence). Online games that use a combination of these techniques. Apps that grab video from your webcam and do something with it. (Mozilla demonstrated that: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/mozilla-demo... ) The dream of doing distributed computing by just visiting a web page could come true (like for X@Home). An OS in your browser would become not-a-joke. Native VNC instead of flash. Native encryption run by the app instead of the browser, possibly permitting ssh-in-the-browser. Actual typesetting could be implemented (surprisingly computationally expensive) allowing actual competition in the Office space.

You rather proved my point, unfortunately. Web apps are not about "DOM manipulation". They are about delivering no-install applications over the internet. They have historically been about DOM manipulation because that was all they could afford to do performantly (and that only barely at times). As that changes, so does the web. We're getting a ways along this path anyhow (http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/ ), just with increasingly fast JS and other tech, but it's only going to grow more.
So he's suggesting Beacon, only on every site you visit instead of just Facebook.

Given that Facebook users freaked out over Beacon, I can't imagine that working.
Was anyone else hoping for a discussion of how or why browsers almost completely ignore MRU for alt-tab? Only Opera supports cycling through tabs in both MRU and tab order (configurable).
You think HP care about the customer experience!!!!!!!

HP has been the graveyard of a lot of OSes - VMS, HPUX, Tru64, Compaq, Tandem now BEOS and WebOS
Is that the part where I have to take off half my clothes for real so they can put the belt and jacket outside the metal detector and the shoes through whatever that other machines does, the bit where they throw away the bottle of soda I was enjoying and make me buy a new one, the bit where someone glares at me over the top of my passport while heavily armed guards look on, the bit where the staff on the way onto the plane mess several passengers around because they don't like their tone and have a "zero tolerance" policy, the bit at the other end where I queue up for ages only to again have someone glare at me over the top of my passport in the presence of armed guards, or something else?
Stolen: da "inci's the Last Supper: released as torrents
Some website has released da VInci's the Last Supper at 500dpi, or at least parts of it. Word on the street is they plan to print full size copys.
Excellent work, I like the HNish simplicity.

One suggestion I do have is with the name... personally, I love it, but I am not sure how well it will fly with your primary target audience, which may not take the term 'Hacker' well.
<script language="JScript.encode"> is an obfuscation mode for raw JS source, not a bytecode format:

http://www.virtualconspiracy.com/content/articles/breaking-s...
Really, don't be such a drama queen. Airport security isn't fun, but you're being silly about it.

(And no, by "the bit in the middle", I meant the holiday.)
If you enable browser.ctrlTab.previews in Firefox's about:config panel you can get MRU tab-switching with thumbnail previews.
US discloses size of nuclear arsenal
No. The suggestion is for an implementation of ECMA CLI, which is not owned by Microsoft.
C++ Lesson: Dynamic Memory Allocation
Do you know of any good nutritional science resources/explanations? I wish I knew where to find a readable overview based on careful research.
One thing that's actually extremely common, however, in C code is using ints for bitmasks. I'm not sure how operators like &|! would be implemented with doubles, but they'd need some fancy software implementation.
Well this should be in the related articles:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-governmen...

Losses from piracy are grossly over estimated. One download of pirated content does not equate to a lost sale.
Hyperbole dwarfs reason, drowns rational debate.

Also kills thousands of fluffy kittens and happy clowns.
It's from David Carr's NYT op-ed: "... and regardless of how the law shakes out, the optics are horrible for Apple."
So I think in that context it means "how it appears" vs. "how it is".
This is from a Nova science documentary (Becoming Human): some scientists believe that humans evolved larger brains in response to a rapidly changing ecosystem. They've found evidence of a ginormous lake appearing and disappearing many times repeatedly over a few thousand years, in the Rift Valley, near where early hominids started evolving larger brains. The theory is that the rapid adaptability afforded by a larger brain was what selected for it.
A computer can basically do four things: Load a value from memory, store a value into memory, add two numbers together, branch to another list of instructions if a number is 0.

So, if you understand those operations, you understand everything about computing, right?

The problem with the financial world wasn't that they built on incomprehensible primitives. The problem was the incomprehensible structures they built with them. Just like programmers and programs. A basic understanding of the primitives is necessary but not sufficient in either case. And the programmers have an advantage that all the source code they are running is in one place; to understand the financial system technically would require access to the whole, which you can not have.

(If you want to quibble with that list of primitives: Fine, just pretend I used your list instead. It won't change my point.)
It depends entirely on pricing. Most "coal" plants switch between coal and natural gas based on current market trends. And even if coal is burned, the fuel to get the coal to the plant is petroleum-based.
There are a lot of complexities involved. Of course, working in the natural gas industry, I only have limited knowledge. :)
I wouldn't blame him. He's got a right to take profits.
Ask HN: iPad 3G Radiation
Do we need to be concerned about radiation from 3G even when in Wi-Fi Mode.
For children is it better to get Wi-Fi model
"People recommend fruits, while fructose is probably one of the worst things you can eat." -- fructose is bad for you. Much worse than glucose. However, the amount in fruit compared to anything with HFCS is not even in the same ballpark. Also, fruit is fibrous and mostly delicious. Avoid fruit juice that gets rid of the bulk, but feel free to eat fruit freely (unless you are pursuing ketosis, obvi.)

I think all of the studies show that most people don't keep weight off, and that the slower you lose the weight the more likely you are going to keep it off. Also, running is good for the brain as well as the body.
I guess MS went back up, but Apple had pulled ahead at one point recently.
i am an overweight jogger. of course, i have lost 20 lbs since i started jogging, so we'll see how long that lasts ;)
Also, chock full of images (O'Reilly with glasses in 1988) and ads http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1315614
Incidentally, I think it should be illegal for any public official to send his/her child to private school or to receive care in a private hospital.

We have unexpected agreement on that.

On the rest, my experience of Canada says that the culture is not very different than the USA. The political culture does have some significant differences, but the people are more similar than not. If education works better in Canada than it does in the USA (my experience and international comparisons suggest that it does), then it can work better in the USA as well.

On the religious point, that may be a real factor in the difference. I ran across the one figure in The Homework Myth but don't have the level of detail to break down private schools by type. Another factor that I suspect is that there is a large gap between the factors that parents will see as quality, and factors that actually affect student learning. Private schools that offer a lot of extracurriculars and make good presentations to parents will attract investment, whether or not the students are truly getting a quality education.

Personally if I could afford to, I would sidestep the whole mess and home-school. But that is not in the cards any time soon. :-(
In the past year alone, several of my friends have been literally strip searched (not just the virtual one) for no apparent reason. Sure, some people don't care about being seen naked, but a lot of people do and this is a deeply embarrassing and unpleasant experience that will stay with them for a long time.

Members of my family have been left stranded in a foreign country when an airline refused to carry them because one of them asked why he was required to show the same documents for the third time in rapid succession. (The airline's excuse for this absurdly disproportionate response changed so many times afterwards it was hard to keep track, and I won't say any more because as far as I'm aware legal action for compensation is still pending.)

Hundreds of people from my country have recently been held in hotels under armed guard because after a diversion to a different country's airport due to the ash problems, they obviously didn't have visas, so they couldn't even get a train home. I'm not sure why anyone in a country these people never wanted or expected to visit would consider them such a security threat that they couldn't leave and had to be held at gunpoint, but there you go.

These things are not trivial, and I don't think a single one of those people would consider objecting to this sort of security theatre "being silly".

And you fail on the "bit in the middle", because all the unpleasantness that I described in those earlier posts happens on a single flight.
Ive been using HighCharts( http://highcharts.com/ ) with great success, it support ie6 and up and pretty much all other commonly used browsers. There is a demo gallery so you can check it out and try the demos in your target browsers.
Ice cream parlor near M.I.T. soon serving 'Internet-flavored' ice cream
Introduction To Online Payments - TL;DR: It's A Total Bitch
Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes
If Arrington did sell TechCrunch, how would that affect events like TechCrunch50? Would be interesting to see what he would go on to do next...
Presumably they will ban bicycles

http://www.thisisfyf.com/2010/04/happy-fucking-earth-day-hun...
Next Is Now: An Awesome Video On The Power Of The Internet
I regularly see gently used Aeron chairs on CL bay area for $400-450. Those of us who spend significant computer time every day really need to take care of our bodies. Prevention is much easier than repair. Consider upgrading your work environment before upgrading your box or getting an iPad...

And to the parent: If you like your Aeron, you should seriously consider the Embody - lots of time and money went into making it a significant upgrade worthy (imho) of the premium price.
Ah, I think the pithy one liner perhaps applies more to institutions.
I didn't say reaching for authenticity is inauthentic.

In fact, I explicitly said these ideas are worthy and should be pursued.

Rather, you can't just invoke well-worn phrases because they've been misused so much that people don't know what they mean anymore. You have to do the thing, just say it in a new way.

It's a shame, just like it's a shame that the word "gay" can no longer just mean "happy," but it's a fact that you have to deal with.
Can you please add an item's publish date (<pubDate>) to the RSS feed? It's seriously low-hanging fruit. Just whatever the date in the DB says is fine - there must be a 'created' timestamp in there somewhere. Format it as RFC822 timestamp:

def _format_date(dt):
"""convert a datetime into an RFC 822 formatted date
Input date must be in GMT.
"""

# Sat, 07 Sep 2002 00:00:01 GMT

return "%s, %02d %s %04d %02d:%02d:%02d GMT" % (
["Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat", "Sun"][dt.weekday()],
dt.day,
["Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun",
"Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"][dt.month-1],
dt.year, dt.hour, dt.minute, dt.second)

-Russ
Youtube to host live sports, including Indian Premier League
people opt-in to google when they use it to search - they want to find something, and if an ad helps them do that, ok!

people opt-in to using gmail, gdocs, gchat, because they want to be more productive, and if an ad eventually leads them to do that, ok! Ok maybe this isn't so true but come to think of it, I've never once seen an intrusive non-textual ad in any of those services ...

people are not opting in to facebook in search of services or to be more productive. They are there to hang out with their friends. Nearly any ad in that context can be labeled as "not wanted".

Let me ask you something, do google text ads really bother you? what about facebook ads getting added to the stream?
If yes to either; why?
Warren Buffet has said he doesn't understand CDOs. If he doesn't understand them, I think most people can be forgiven for not understanding them.
Microsoft has Secret API???
Can you name a single product which benifitted from it???

Let me remind you its Apple which didnt allow access to GPU to flash dev.
For this summer? Don't wait until the last minute or anything dude. Seriously, any corporation looking to hire lots of technical interns filled their quotas two, three, more months ago.
However, that doesn't make it right for them to fuck you. That's ethics.
Anyone know if there's a rails open source HN-type project?
I'm surprised no one mentioned evernote. They released an android app a while back, very useful. I use it a lot for keeping track of receipts for invoices and various things I want to take a picture of and return to.
Honest question: how is this 15 year old girl going to search the web using facebook? Do you search the web using facebook? How is this possible? Does anyone search the web without ever once querying a big-time search engine?
Can somebody explain what technical reason prevent me from using any scripting language to write my web-app's client-side code?

The way I see it, web-apps today are downloading javascript code that calls back to the server from time to time and outputs a DOM tree. Any scripting language can do that, right? Why can't I write my client-side code in Ruby, Python or PHP?