skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lack of privacy was the foremost reason I quit Facebook. But I'm not sure any of these alternatives are any better on that front.

It would be nice to have some sort of verifiable guarantees that these companies don't use, sell, share, or give away any of the information they collect from me and about me and my circle of friends.

It would be even better were they mathematically incapable of collecting any of this sort of information at all. I'm envisioning maybe some combination of Tor (or maybe anonymous remailers) and social networking, where not even the owners of the network know who's talking to whom and what they're saying (at least that's how it's supposed to work in theory).

The problem is that many of the value-added features that social networking sites provide rely on knowing something about the participants and who they're communicating with. And the more of this knowledge the site has, the more useful/fun services it can provide.

So it seems that social networking sites and real privacy/anonymity are diametrically opposed. So I'm not sure how useful a completely anonymous and private social networking site would be.

Still, no doubt there's lots of room for improvement from a complete privacy-invading site like Facebook. And some sort of happy medium might be reached where a site is much better than Facebook on many privacy-conscious fronts and yet not be completely anonymous and privacy-respecting in every conceivable way.
The link goes to a different essay from the book. The actual titular essay is here: http://ry4an.org/readings/short/student/
Actually, just to clarify, all the transactions in the 'fail window' are going to be cancelled.

no-one makes anything.
Arbitrage-exploiters do the worthwhile task of removing arbitrage. Putting arbitrage back into the market, visible to everybody but which everybody will sit on their hands until it becomes worth the 25 cent fee to exploit, seems like a way to create more instability.
A listing of social networks without a column for number of active users misses the point entirely.
Two problems:

1) Acquiring a company worth $100mm pre-tax?

- After tax, the cost just went up to $125mm.

2) Global competition

- Foreign exchanges would under-cut domestic exchanges, attracting many US based companies to list there and if the US attempted to tax foreign transactions by domestic persons, then foreign investors would end up with an unfair advantage.

The idea of disincentivising short-term investments is a good one. Changes to existing capital gains rules or a progressive per transaction tax may be more feasible though.
Only the most ignorant. And even most of those could be talked out of it once somebody explained the downsides to them.
The only discernible point of this essay is that you shouldn't travel back in time to 1969 and enroll at Cal State LA.
Crazy. Imagine what this would do to any stock hovering around the $4.99 mark.
and then shorten with a single, known URL shortener on the way out

Which should be Twitter's own built-in shortener.
You say "any changes would have to be carefully considered". So, are said changes being considered or are they not?
> While our crawlers do of course follow links through redirections, the inclusion of modifiable redirects in the stream, and our analysis of the preponderance of spam attempts via these vectors have made it necessary and appropriate in some cases to block the URL shorteners.

Why not do as tkaemming suggests and follow the redirections to link to the final endpoint URL?
I'm still confused as to exactly what problem he thinks he's solving here. That one-off weird glitch that happened for the first time in history yesterday and will probably never happen again? Or perhaps just sticking a few billion dollars extra into the gaping maw of the US Treasury?

And at what cost? Driving businesses out of the US? Severely lowering the attractiveness of listing a company on the US stock exchange? A billion other unforeseen consequences which neither I nor he is smart enough to see?
For those who looked quickly and didn't get it, the error line shows a password in the clear.
We always consider ways in which to provide the best level of service to our end users and API users, while preventing unintended side effects. There are pros and cons to every approach, and they have to be evaluated with care.
The interviewer has an uncanny ability to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. Probably a symptom of nervousness..
In a way I think you answered your own question: it's quite different because (obviously) auto accidents do happen every day. If you asked someone who works at an insurance company what do they do, they could tell you that they decrease their clients' risk, or that they sell them peace of mind. The insurance company guy doesn't look down at clients who haven't totaled their cars.

But I agree you have a point: if the insurance company doesn't believe that event X is likely (leaving aside the question of whether X is actually likely or even possible), they might charge a premium that's way too small. Then the client cannot have peace of mind because there's no way the insurer will keep their word.
The intent behind the very statement you quoted was to convey that we do precisely that. However, also mentioned was the fact that in a number of cases, modifiable destination redirects are embedded within the chain. In those cases, unless the redirect is crawled on every clickthrough, the integrity of the chain is difficult to assert.
Interesting concept, and shows the fallacy of the "dime a dozen" axiom.

Bad ideas, sure, I'll pay ten cents for a dozen mediocre ideas.

The truly good idea, the novel and meaningful, that can go for so much more.
Ah, that makes sense; at least the title now has some relation to the content.

The content still doesn't make a helluva lot of sense though:

Students, like black people, have immense unused power. They could, theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make academic freedom bilateral. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love and admiration, rather than fear and respect, and to lay down their weapons. Students could discover community. And they could learn to dance by dancing on the IBM cards. They could make coloring books out of the catalogs and they could put the grading system in a museum.

The words "misplaced idealism" spring to mind. So do the words "Drugs are bad".
I have to agree. He lost me at the part where we should let people decide if they should learn to read.
Bit.ly could check a link to no_malware_here.com, which thereafter adds a 301 that redirects to your_computer_now_has_aids.com.

I think it is misleading to display that message based on the possibility of a redirection. Any page can do that, not just xrl.in.
It can add instability though, if the arbitrage-exploiting is too large a proportion of the market. If 95%+ of trades are trades based on statistical market patterns, which are themselves created by those same 95%+ of trades, you get weird feedback loops that have more to do with chaotic systems and attractors than with supply or demand.
I just checked the breakdown with sloccount.

C: 20%
ELisp: 78%
I thought the same thing... also shooting at the egg right next to his computer, not a good idea, what if it splattered on the keyboard.

Also, where do I get one?
Made this jaded bastard smile.
It looks like this: http://coastalmoonwalks.com/db1/00033/coastalmoonwalks.com/_...
Looking at prices of any given share for any day other than Thursday (was it Thursday?) would you say that such instability and big feedback loops are a big problem?
Someone write a bot that takes the top 1000 sites, and mashes up combos in the format "site X for Y" where X is a random site, and Y is a demographic.

Wikipedia for students.

YouTube for grandmas.

etc.
In case anyone missed it.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/361483/configuration%20error%20shows...
I was a founder at consecutive startups years ago and I recently got my MBA. One thing I can attest, if I had my MBA in the past, it would have helped to run the startups more productively and efficiently.
I think the point was to remove all of the intermediate redirects and point all click-thrus to the bit.ly link right at the final destination. That way spammer reconfiguring their middle-man URL to point somewhere else will have no effect.
Maybe you're misinterpreting me, because the linked post suggests that bit.ly isn't actually doing what I am suggesting.

My proposal is this: when a user submits a link to bit.ly to be shortened, bit.ly follows the link through 0..n redirections until it finds the final endpoint URL. This final endpoint URL is then stored as the bit.ly link.

Of course, this assumes that you don't care about the modifiable destination redirects in the chain, which maybe you do. In this case you would only follow redirects which match a whitelist of followable domains (other link shorteners).

Maybe (probably?) there's something I'm missing that makes this infeasible, but it seems like the most logical solution to me.
Web hello world with MochiWeb and SimpleBridge in Erlang (and Efene)
I have to agree with the author, this is ridiculous. They even do this to tinyurl:

http://bit.ly/cGLU0o

Tinyurl was without a doubt bit.ly's #1 competitor, especially when their service launched, and they know you can't edit a tinyurl. Seems like a pretty convenient time for an URL shortener to suddenly get preachy about the dangers of URL shorteners.
Thanks, both of you. :-) The version up there now works with 10.5, according to holygoat (thanks to the magic "-mmacosx-version-min=10.5" compiler flag).
By jove, site #1,374,282,333 to suffer an embarrassing security issue; my intellectual curiosity is surely gratified.
Starwisp - hypothetical unmanned interstellar probe design
In much the same way that we don't frame links, or permanently remove flagged links, we would never return a short link that pointed to anything other than the link requested by the API, or by the user via an interface. It's a simple, deterministic API. The downsides of the proposed approach are far more extreme than any potential upside.
That's a lot of indirection there. He's asking about your current status (i.e. "Are there changes being considered right now?") and you are responding with a comment on the openness of your process (i.e. "We always consider any changes that might benefit our customers!").

I realize that this is just marketing double-speak (as far as I'm concerned) and that you may not be able to comment on the current status of things internally, but it might be better just to come out and say that.

"I can't comment on anything specific that we are doing, but we always are open to new ideas..." sounds a lot better than answering a question that wasn't asked and hoping that it satisfies people. If you don't come out and say, "Sorry I can't comment on that," or, "I'm afraid to comment on that because I like my job," then it looks like you're trying to talk people in circles and hope that they get dizzy enough to walk away feeling satisfied.
7 Simple and Useful Command-Line Tips
Great, thanks for filing that. We will look into better presentations of the bottom toolbar.
I'd love to see a list of the ideas he gets with ranking and ability to vote them up/down.
I'd be cagey about building one of these; that little charge of gunpowder may well be enough to inject that little ball a nontrivial distance into me.
Although I wonder if half of them are going to be along the lines of http://www.halfbakery.com/
If you believe that a benevolent God would leave puppies and kittens behind, does hiring an atheist to look after your pets bespeak a certain lack of faith in God’s plan?
"Well Mr. Moore, your background check came up with some problems."

"Oh..well I uh..."

"Yes, we see you have been convicted of rape, sexual molestation, and kidnapping..."

"I can explain, I--"

"Well despite that impressive resume, I'm afraid we found a copy of your high school yearbook, with a picture of you in the Bible Study club. I'm afraid we won't be able to hire you."
It only has to display 'link' in SMS. I don't necessarily think that it has to still say 'link' outside of SMS. It makes more sense to just strip the links when going through the SMS gateway, and count all URLs as 4 characters in the '140 characters' limit.
Cool thanks, works fine! :)

Also good to know about that compiler flag. :)
Here's an idea Mr. Cuban might like- a 99% tax on people who sell their companies, retroactive.

It's easy to suggest taxes that don't affect you personally.
I've contacted bit.ly about this issue 4 months ago. Got the same answer - "Page is under review". Maybe its an indirect attack to the competitors?
Or "beta", "theta" and "zeta", which I would rhyme with "beater" but Americans would rhyme with "data".

Except I'd rhyme "data" with "garter" rather than "dater" anyway so that's a bad example.

Wow, Barbie was right -- math is hard!

(Err, maths)
The madness of the market seems to stem from the tight feedback loop. Want to really make a difference? Pool it by hour. All calls have to be in by a millisecond before the hour, and after resolution no more transactions occur until the next hour. Now everyone has to cool off for a bit before making a trade based on changes to the market, and algo trading is relegated to stocks that don't matter. Any transaction worth making will have a human thinking about them for an hour, and it regulates the top speed of a crash.
This is posted in "general community". Is he even asking for business ideas or just any random thought?
Sounds like a good reason to be cagey about firing one of these.
3) Google beat you to it: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-voice-for...
New York Times Joins the Obnoxious "Autoplay Audio" Ad Club
So x-axis is actually days of usage, not absolute dates
Replacing Happiness with Pride (Rugged)
Interesting point. "Brave" is usually considered to be a virtue, and people don't want to attribute virtues to scoundrels.
While I see what spohlenz is saying, I think what you've described here is the right way to do it. Once you start changing the target from what I submitted, I would personally be suspicious.
I think he understands it just fine. Implement a tax that requires people to actually buy stock for reasons other than its price. Make it too expensive to trade millions of shares every second to make small fractions of a return. Make people buy shares because they want to see the company succeed, not to make a quick buck.

Back to basics. I kind of like the idea.
Why would the users need to have a URL over SMS though? Couldn't it just say 'link?' Then the user could view the tweet later through another interface to get the actual URL.
Trapping giant Rydberg atoms for faster quantum computers
The Future of Bay Area Commercial Leasing
Samsung Corby S3653: Price, Features, Reviews
I loved this movie when I was a kid!
What do people think of that technique?
Meetup?
"Occasionally, a class is unbelievably faithful to the traditional seating plan. They sit mournfully facing an empty altar and they sprain their necks trying to see me and the other students. I curse and mutter but they hold firm. It's almost as though they're saying:, "Screw you, you bastard, you're going to have to tell us to move." And I swear to myself I won't."

Oddly enough I couldn't help but think about Jacob on Lost when I read that paragraph.

In general, I agree with the themes, but, you know what, I'm really happy someone taught me that a mole is 6.0210^23, and that G is 6.6710^-11. I appreciate being able to write a complete sentence, and feel sorry for those who can't communicate in written format.

So, if that makes me a slave to the system, so be it. What the author fails to appreciate, is that perhaps some of us will have a happier life being lead through a system, not everyone is going to be an entrepreneurial learner. We certainly do lose some freedom, and to some degree propagate a system of enslavement - but it serves some of us fairly well.

I realize the author is writing on a higher plane, but it's also interesting how some of his thoughts compare to PG's: "It would be well if we stopped lying to ourselves about what compulsory schooling does for our children. It temporarily imprisons them; it standardizes them; it intimidates them. If that's what we want, we should admit it."

I thought it was a good read, but maybe that's because I'm listening to Eminem's "I'm not Afraid" on repeat. :-)
Gee, how about we stop acting like we need to limit things to 140 characters? This isn't SMS you know. We do have the bandwidth to actually exchange useful information and real URLs. Twitter, bit.ly, et. al. are all pretty damn silly.

Even back in the days of 300bd modems and BBS's we weren't this dumb.
In Tweetdeck, when you paste in the URL, you can see it turn into a bitly URL. It's not as if you don't know that's what's going to be posted.

There is a checkbox next to where you compose your tweet for "Auto Shorten URLs" that you can uncheck to disable this behavior. It's right there in plain sight, not buried inside preference dialogs.
For the people that survived, of course it went well. And it is just a movie, but you have to agree that some would likely resort to violence if they had to save their family and there was a bunker that would allow them to do that.
FCC Lets Hollywood Turn Off Your Output Jacks
I could see this for parties, as in, you hit play and all it spits back is Pop and Techno and Raggaeton for hours on end. That would be really nice. I would pay $10 for four-seven hours of it if it did that well.
This particular proposal isn't very well thought out, but plenty of other people have had similar ideas, going back at least to Keynes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_transaction_tax

http://news.google.com/news/search?q=%22financial+transactio...
Chavez likes talking in hyperbole. 200 people probably equates to a junior staffer spending a few hours a day managing his account.
Ruby Ncurses Forms and Widgets Library
How to Use Term Paper Information Successfully
The best term paper information that students could get would be available from their tutors and advisers, as they can guide students to write a research paper, which meets the prescribed requirements.
Heart Rhythm as Password (Apple Patent Application)
I think people like the grandparent are looking for technical reasons to allow this sort of marriage under the current statutes. Of course anyone should be able to marry anyone else -- but the legal framework doesn't exist for that yet.
List Of International Soccer Friendlies This Summer 
Once again the U.S. and Canada is the post-season and pre-season destination of choice for the top European and South American teams. We have put together a list of all the friendlies this summer.
"Every time markets crater, there is never a lack of liquidity."

To me this just reeks of misunderstanding of what happened last Thursday. The 20 minute nosedive was largely due to a lack of liquidity--bids just disappeared in most markets (hence trades that happened at 1c).
Ah, socialism.
Unfortunately, offering itself as the best alternative to protecting links when setting a warning page for already shortened links doesn't seem very "indirect".
Not very feasible for the most part. I don't use twitter, but it does have a large following. This is somewhat along the lines of saying "So? Stop using facebook", although I understand where you're coming from.
Traffic lights in Bangkok have numerical count downs - not as elegant but still awesome.

I think they're actually more beneficial on green lights.
What about quadru(oo)ple?
There's a lot of shares worth less that $0.25 (edit: I missed the thing about smaller tax on low-price stocks on first reading...but IMHO that'd just feed pump & dump schemes). I'd prefer a small per-transaction tax which would cut into the margins of HF traders a bit. People object that that would reduce liquidity but the market does not and should not depend on speed trading. Frankly I'm not a fan of algorithmic trading strategies, I really feel that trades should be human-executed at all times.
I wonder what how/if the ATF classifies these. I want one.
" Please work with Adobe and do something. " -- as if Adobe would be willing to port it for free or spend so many hours that.

Btw wine runs Photoshop 7 perfectly, might run new apps too in future.

"Ubuntu can never be a worldwide OS with major applications not running. "
Well, world-wide users wont have a majority as power users or developers. It runs a browser - that really enough for the 50% or more of "world-wide" users I think.

Looking at mention of OS X :P

People who can't buy a Mac run Linux.
People who can't install Linux run Windows.
People who know what they're doing - ride anything the way they want.

Ubuntu == The linux you can run on grandpa's desktop ?! :)
And how is removing an incentive to save for your own retirement (vs. relying on "social security") a good thing?
Problem: God is going to take 20-40 million people and your pets will be left behind.

Solution: Atheists

Business Model: $100 per every ten years. Approximately $10 revenue per user per year.

Underlying magic and technology: Heavenly power of God will take people away. The transporting of animals is just basic transport.

Marketing and sales: We plan to primarily use fear. We will also market our services through the tens of thousands of congregations around the world.

Competition: Google may enter the space as a way to get churches as advertisers. They could house the pets in the googleplex.

Team: One of our cofounders is God. He's been the founder of numerous startups including First Life.

Projections: We predict 50 million in revenue by the time of the Rapture.

Status and timeline: over 100 customers. Rapture hasn't happened yet.

Call to action: We need approximately 3.2 million dollars to further market the service and reach God fearing Christians.
Hold up, there is something wrong here. Yes, he did set up the page as "just a fan". However, this page has been in existence for a few years and it's a page that got really popular. So, Facebook only "enforces" their ToS when there's enough popularity there to "monetize". It's bullshit and it needs to be publicized as much as possible.
Re-read. You're right.
I have a slightly tangential question. I am writing a tutorial for a [library](http://rbcurse.rubyforge.org/tut0.html). I'd like the tutorial to have a proper format with Previous and Next links on top and bottom, a TOC, perhaps Index.

Is there some kind of simple tool that generates these ? Or do people write out the whole thing in HTML.
Let's see:

- crash and let a supervisor restart you

- isolate components via specialist processes and systems

- keep schema/types flexible

- be stateless

- cache & denormalize

- be redundant

- let other processes handle non-realtime tasks in the background

Sounds like he spent a long time learning the hard way that reddit should have been written in Erlang in the first place :)
That's not bullshit at all. Upload a music video of a little-known band to Youtube and nothing happens; band goes big, video gets 5 million views, is removed for copyright violation.

Facebook can't possibly police every page, so they stick to policing those that are largest or fastest growing. Get popular enough and you'll enter the radar.

It's unfair in a way; but it does make sense.
Exactly. That might merely seem embarrassing, and one could say 'use incognito browsing' for obviously personal stuff. But what if you're interested in politics and your employer strongly supports a different party? Or you have health worries of your own or for your kids, and an employer doesn't want to see health premiums rise? Such concerns seem abstract until they begin affecting people's livelihoods, by which time it can be hard to undo the ill effects.