skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sounds like entrapment tho buddy

Since I'm not a LEO, it can't be entrapment.

> I've personally seen a few conversions (in a different country, but same principles) so I know they exist and can be done.

I've no doubt that readily convertible guns exist. My point is that they're (and the relevant parts) are regulated as machine guns in the US.

The "principle" is that the receiver doesn't accept the parts or the parts, and possibly the receiver, are regulated as machine guns. For example, M-16 parts don't fit the semi-auto AR-15 receiver.

I have no idea how such guns and parts are regulated in other countries, but wouldn't be surprised if the laws were different elsewhere.

After all, some other countries treat silencers as good manners they're strictly controlled in the US. (Yes, I know about the plastic bottle trick. It's hard to ban duct tape and a plastic bottle, but it is a single shot device.)
Two mathematicians were having an argument over dinner, about the knowledge of the general public. While one went to the restroom, the other called over the waitress and offered her $20 if she would reply "one-third x cubed" to a question he would ask. When his colleague returned, he asked "excuse me, do you happen to know the integral of x squared?" She paused for a moment and said "one-third x cubed" to his colleague's amazement. Then she walked away, pocketing the money and smirking "... plus a constant."
3D Desktop for Google Chrome OS? (w/ video)
Most of those details are hashed out at a daily "stand-up" meeting of roughly 10 people, held at 4:07 p.m. (Google co-founder Sergey Brin once estimated that it took seven minutes to walk across the Google campus; it's now company tradition that meetings end on the hour and new ones start seven minutes later.)

Um, what? This isn't something I've heard of.
My college physics professor did a similar experiment, but walking on burning coals:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/04/28/...

It certainly was fun to watch, but I didn't really remember what it was trying to teach...
No offense to Scribd, but what is wrong with viewing a document in your browser using something like Safari? I realize that not all machines are capable of this, but they could pretty easily. Someone asked the other day, "Why doesn't Windows have a native PDF reader?". Surely it's possible for all browsers to quickly and properly render a PDF, with easy controls to navigate.

I understand the added benefits of being able to comment, discuss, share, etc.. your documents with Scribd, but honestly why the need for HTML5 or anything at all? PDF's are viewable just fine in a simple PDF viewer.
I get it, we'll ignore the fact that Scribd makes the web a worse place when the founders are in the thread.
Yeah, but have you seen the percentage of users with > 1280 pixels? Certainly not the majority.
On the profile yes, but on the page, no! Which is the problem in this case.

The chances are small, but there is a chance as demonstrated in the article. Consider this profile (random, and I'm not connected to him) http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1189567657 where all his profile info is public and linked to "pages". It wasn't the case earlier.
New life for old PCs using pre-configured Linux appliances
There's a problem if the only way to stop your webpage from emitting noise is to close the tab. Neat idea though. Lost interest after refreshing the page for the 10th time. Use shorter audio clips or please implement a pause/stop.
> So insurance is 25% of our rent.

And your transportation and food costs how much?

> And that doesn't cover anything until we've each paid 2700.

And your car insurance has a deductible too. If it included maintenance, as you seem to want from health insurance, it would be far more expensive.

> We're doing a startup, and it's a big part of our monthly expenses.

Umm, your personal expenses are shelter (including energy), food, transportation, healthcare, and entertainment. Do you really think that any other than the latter can be small?

Look - I want to be subsidized too, but changing payers can't make things cheaper.

Before you say "govt health care" or "single player", I'll remind you that the US govt already spends 8% of US GDP on healthcare and only covers a fraction of the population. The UK, Canada, France, et al also spend 8% of their GDP and yet manage to cover the vast majority of their population, and their GDP/person is significantly less.

In other words, the US govt spends far more per person than other countries on healthcare.

If you're going to argue that the US govt can provide healthcare for less, I'm going to point out that it doesn't.

When you fix govt healthcare, then we'll talk. (And no, you don't need universal to fix things. Those other countries have private systems that co-exist so accounting isn't an excuse.)

Yes, I know that the "overhead" category for Medicare is a smaller fraction of the total than the "overhead" category for private, but much of what we'd call overhead isn't counted in that category wrt medicare. For example, fraud.
Luckily we also have exponentially more individuals to help out.
throttling is effectively slowing the bits down. in comcast's case, they have been shown to block p2p transfers entirely via packet forgery (comcast pays sandvine to do this).
The Fans box on the Page has always been the way it is now. When you fanned a Page, there was some small chance that you would appear in that box, and the users who appeared in that box are random on each page load.

I'm not convinced that the article demonstrates anything yet -- it doesn't really explain how this targeting was done, just vaguely claims this is because of some "new" changes in connections privacy. My whole point is that there isn't anything new about the way Page connections behave.

What is new, as you said above, is that the plain text boxes where users put in their favorite movies etc, are now links to Pages. Previously, these movie strings were actually links to a search for users who mentioned the same text. What has changed is the target of this link -- it is now a Page instead of a search result. And as before, you can still control the visibility of these boxes on your Profile.
I've heard that on multiple occasions from Googlers.
Well, they don't. Not currently anyway.
http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/stats

I was somewhat amazed by those stats: I thought Americans would have contributed the most. Is there something I should know about Germans and Giraffes that I do not know?
I don't think I'd say infinitely more valuable. I'm sure that she was willing to spend infinite amounts of resources to prolong them if she gains nothing from forgoing the more expensive outlandish treatments.

Let's say I got a terminal illness. I have a one year old son. Would I prefer to spend every last drop of our savings and go into debt to hang on a few more weeks? I hope not. Life is valuable, but delaying death is only one thing we can spend money on. At some point it has an incredibly high marginal cost.

Making the patient more aware of these costs would make it possible for the actual interested parties to decide whether pushing 3 months to 3 months and a week is more important than the survivors being financially better off.

I think this ties into the article as well -- the reason we don't create real wealth is because it's more lucrative to find ways to game the system and siphon off value. Think of lobbyists, the root cause of the problem and one of its most obvious examples. They create nothing. They just get their preferred regulations into law. So millions are spent on both sides to argue over whether we should mortgage our children to pay for prescription drugs for todays elderly.
> If you're not, you have to go out of your way to prevent people from leaning on you

How do you do that? That's a serious question. How about two different ways to "prevent people from leaning on you"?

Did Ning ever promise reliability for free?

Are there any free and reliable services? If not, isn't "free" an indicator of "not reliable"?
Anti-Portfolio - Bessemer Venture Partners
I'm reminded of Mike Rowe's TED talk: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509172
Will this not lead to a lot of spam? Maybe not on the scale of automated botnets but still someone spamming their friend list everyday.
There are times when I realize what all of humanity has been building towards.

Having built machines that could compute billions of cycles per second and then having connected them with networks signaling each other across the planet at fearsome rates, I have wondered what the next step for our people would be.

Now I know. Now we might all gaze upon representations of giraffes and if we are worthy, we might contribute our own representation in a symbolic joining with the whole of the great human project.
In the UK I think that network neutrality will 'be left to the market and contracts'.

They are willing to do this because every home has 10+ services on offer and switching is trivial. That has happened because of regulation of the physical infrastructure.

When it comes to natural monopolies if you want a functioning market you have to make one through regulation. I think the UK approach of regulating how the infrastructure is shared is better than the US one of regulating the resulting monopolies but if you do nothing at all then you will end up with $90/mo connections that can do nothing but display disney.com
Your post expresses valid frustrations about the way the bailouts were handled, but in this case I have to disagree with most of what you're saying.

Think back to the way things were when GM was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. The housing bubble had just burst, unemployment had shot up, etc. If you had allowed GM to go under in those conditions you would likely be facing a full-on depression in places like Michigan. So the reasons for this bailout weren't all political. At least in the case of the GM bailout the taxpayers got something in return for their money - they got control of the companies, which wasn't even an option politicians were willing to discuss during the bank bailouts.

Yes, GM's arrogance is frustrating, but in this case the people are in a position to do something about it if they felt strongly enough. You are the majority stock owners at GM - write your senator and make sure GM's behavior is aligned with your interests. One thing I would suggest is pushing for GM to be heavily involved in the expansion of the US railroad system - something that will happen, but is currently a job that's mostly going to be shipped out to companies in Spain. That's probably more important than the ad.
Just as Facebook can be an important vehicle for positive change, they are, like most technologies/services, a double-edged sword. One can argue that Facebook is just contributing to further awareness that such harassment takes place. But in reality this draws attention away from such issues because the central theme then becomes "Facebook is evil... Facebook makes it easier to harass", etc. Such conclusions are unfair--these things will happen with or without Facebook. That is, the key take-away from this article is that they're making themselves a bigger target with their senseless privacy policies and their unreasonable comments about privacy.

They're playing with fire and they will get burned.
On a side note, what is the origins of the tradition in business magazines to enclose the stock ticker symbol after a listed company's name? (Inc. magazine is another one where I notice this quite strongly)
My thoughts on improving education system (Part 1)
Good? No. But making a living writing code, maybe even important code? Far more likely than you'd like to think.
It's weird to flip it, I agree, but it's at least a reversal from an incorrect to correct position: the original decision to classify ISPs as not providing a "telecommunications service" was pretty hard to support.

The Supreme Court nearly said as much in 2005 in the Brand X case: they ruled in favor of the FCC's classification, but essentially only on the grounds that it was plausible enough that under existing agency-deference doctrine it could stand, even if wrong, as long as it wasn't totally insane. And even that only got a 6-3 vote, with 3 members of the court thinking the classification was so plainly erroneous that it shouldn't survive even a deferential review. And one of the six who did vote to give its rule deference, Breyer, admitted it might be "just barely" plausible enough to pass. (And it wasn't even some sort of pro-regulation liberals who dissented; Scalia wrote the dissent, on the grounds that the FCC's decision was simply plainly wrong, by the text of the statute.)

So it seems overall we've at least gotten to a more plausible interpretation of the statute, which should've been the one the FCC adopted initially.
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An online poker website is not really a competitive poker website unless they have some sort of promotional program going. The most common type of promotion that you will see from an online poker website is the signup Coupon. This is a Coupon that they give to people that make deposits into real money accounts on the website and it usually a way for the online poker site to thank the player for their business.
Horribly disappointed in you.

J
Do you really not understand it?

You've created publicly accessible aggregations of members expressing interest in a potentially limitless set of categories (whatever you may choose to call them). You've taken previously private profile information and pre-emptively linked it to these public categories. Even where some of this information was previously publicly visible, it wasn't so conveniently publicly indexed; someone would have to visit individual profiles in order to turn it up.

By the way, religious and political views do not only express themselves in the fields you mention. What disrespectful soul there decided to take my "Favorite Quotes", with access previously restricted to "Only Friends", and plaster them -- without so much as a warning -- all over my public profile?

I've been pretty cautious, and there was nothing very incendiary or damaging in them, but it still caught me out.

For me, it was the last straw. I hope FB, or at least its current Management and, ahem, "policies", follows MySpace into a death spiral, taking their accumulated financial equity with them before they have a chance to cash out.

I hope HN will pardon a bit of unusual vehemence from me, but Facebook has come to be, simply stated, slimy. I guess I write this comment in the vague hope some fraction of the message might get through whatever reality distortion field they're currently running in-house.

Finally, as a few commentors have started to point out, as Facebook continues to publicize their members' data, those members more and more tightly control their expression. The result is that the site continues to become blander and blander, less and less "personal". There's only so long people will continue to find novelty and interest in generic updates.

Control over privacy. Personal expression. What brand-building feature are you going to kill off, next?

I remember when "everyone" was on AIM. Even if you preferred another platform, you used AIM because that's where the bulk of the general (U.S.) population was, for IM; they'd "won" the IM platform war. I don't think I've even signed on to the thing in a year or more.

A lesson for any "winner".

P.S. As for fanning being public, it used to be someone would have to seek your ID out on those different fan pages. Then, around the end of the year, Facebook decided to (pre-emptively, again) display that information in aggregate for each user on their public profile. Maybe googling might have exposed some or all of it previously, but you sure made it a lot more convenient. (E.g. for that HR staffer looking for a quick means to winnow a stack of resumes.) And I'm not even addressing the publication of everyone's friends, etc.

If you've read this far, thanks for taking the time to consider my response. It's not meant to be personal. (Well, except against those setting these policies at Facebook. Even then, it's the policies that elicit the response; the people I don't know personally.) It's strongly phrased to emphasize the points, and the frustration they cause.
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Are you good at programming?

If so, nothing else matters. The industry is not in a position to pick and choose based on how long you keep your jobs. If someone can get a year's worth of good work out of you, then that is a great deal for everyone. Because 99% of the people that interview for programming jobs have absolutely no clue about programming.

Ignore the "job hopping is bad for your career" hype. Those people are not interested in hiring good programmers, they are interested in having "headcount". You don't want a job like that anyway, so there's no loss to you. There are plenty of companies that actually want good programmers, so work for those instead. They won't care how long you were at your last job. (I wouldn't anyway...)
I don't like the new look.

http://i.imgur.com/Uw2ry.png

If I wanted it to look like Bing, I'd use Bing.
Internet Marketing and Website 
If you want to launch a new idea, or build your existing business just having a website created is only one piece in the puzzle. You need a way to get your message out there and what better way than with a video to captivate your website visitors and the start of social media marketing campaign to attract new visitors and build traffic. Instead of buying each thing from different vendors you can save money and get a better end product by buying a bundled solution.
Taking the plea bargain counts as a conviction.
A provider of retail last-mile internet service is much more like a provider of retail last-mile telephone lines, though. Often it's even the same physical line!
Banks Scam Consumers Out of 38 Billion
Overdraft fees are one of those annoying facts that millions of consumers with very little money currently have to deal with. Everyone needs an ATM card so that they can do things like buy online, etc. Everyone needs a bank account for the convenience of deposit; so they live with it. But its so destructive to people who are struggling. And the banks profit mightily from it.
I've got close bonds with friends, and I didn't need to sleep with any of them! I'm sure most startups have managed that too, even if some of them may have benefited from it.

Monogamy, too, is natural, and may be a contributing factor for domestic violence, crimes of passion, an incredible divorce rate, and patriarchal oppression.
Half of flat panel TVs to ship with Internet connection in 2013
Facebook Privacy Policies Draw Criticism by 15 Consumer Groups
I'd be happy to bypass Comcast and AT&T and run my own lines. Can you tell me what the process is by which I can dig up the street and run my own ethernet cable down it? Oh, I can't, because Comcast and AT&T were granted a local duopoly.
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<i>I'm not convinced that the article demonstrates anything yet</i>

Sorry, nothing personal against you, but then that is the same line taken by the upper management in FB who say that there is no real loss of privacy. And yet, I ask you to just do a time bound google search/YC search and you will see HOW many people are raising concerns with FB's recent changes. And this hasn't even gone to instant personalization yet or the forced opt out instead of opt in (I'd really like if you actually addressed this opt out policy if you choose to respond to this comment)

<i>And as before, you can still control the visibility of these boxes on your Profile</i>

Please tell me how? The privacy options themselves have become so convoluted that I am not sure if it is set as I desired. And I have no way to check it as well. You know why? Cos my profile URL shows a 404 if I'm not logged in to FB. Check it out: http://www.facebook.com/anantj - Try with your logged in browser and another which you've never used to login to FB.

Why is it that I can't have free form text at all? Why _must_ it be linked to pages? At least give me an option to prevent that for movies, tv, religion etc
I'm just not convinced that enough people actually care about that.

The largest cell phone market is the one for generic simple phones that just make calls, regardless of the smartphone hype. The reason that IE is so ubiquitous is that a huge number of people don't really care, as long as they can get on the internet, and go on facebook and youtube and maybe a few other sites, thats enough for them.

Hell, even look at dropbox, people only started using that sort of service when it went into the cloud and became dead easy. They didn't care that they were locking all their data into a hard to leave service.

Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great if there was a way to recreate facebook in an open software setting, I just don't think any social network where the average user would have to either install a complicated app or pay a fee will ever get off the ground...
Is that true? Pages were not always public, were they? Didn't that happen last December[1]. Before that becoming a fan of a page meant getting updates from whatever you were becoming a fan of. Now it means announcing on your public profile that you like it. I have had to un-fan myself from so many pages...

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/handy-facebook-english...
Vodafone VF 150: World's Cheapest Mobile Launched in India
Vodafone Essar, one of India’s leading cellular service providers, today launched Vodafone 150 (VF 150), the most

affordable handset available in the country with a basic price of only Rs. 799/. With the launch of this mobile phone,

Vodafone aims to increase mobile technology accessibility for millions in India.
" Even where some of this information was previously publicly visible, it wasn't so conveniently publicly indexed; someone would have to visit individual profiles in order to turn it up."

Previously, the text in these boxes was a link to a search result for users who mentioned this text. Now it is a link to a Page where a small, random set of the users who mentioned the text are displayed. You can still control the visibility of these links on your profile. You'd still have to either visit a lot of users' profiles (and they'd have to have set their interests to be visible), or you'd have to reload a Page a lot of times.

(As for "Favorite Quotes", I will look into what is going on with it).

Thank you for your detailed feedback, btw.
Childhood Nightmares and fears photography by joshua hoffine
It looks like this started in Europe. A mainstream American website usually sees a 1:2 domestic to international ratio while a niche/startup website usually starts out with the opposite (actually more like 10:1 I would guess.) This follows that pattern except the U.S. is part of the international piece of the pie.
Can I just go ahead and ask, since you've been doing a LOT of commenting to (poorly) defend Facebook lately, what your title is?
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We create basically the same experience across browsers, but use the latest tech that the browser supports. For instance, things will render much faster in Chrome than in IE6.

However, the documents will basically look the same across all of our supported browsers.
> what if Mac becomes the standard

The only way that can happen is if OS X can be licensed to third-party computer manufacturers.

Most computer users just browse the net or read/write documents and spreadsheets. Why would they want an overpriced Mac for doing that?

That's partly the reason why I once thought that Linux will overtake the market, because of its price. But apparently there are other forces that keep Windows dominating, like familiarity and compatibility with existing apps (your free or shiny OS doesn't mean shit if I can't run my apps on it).

> 'Mac is back' by Paul Graham

I'm pretty sure Paul Graham got disappointing with Apple by now. Read "Apple's mistake".

Why in the world would you substitute a control freak for another (even worse in some cases) control freak?