skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Close to zero? Tell that to the people that paid to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary to distribute all those Kindle books. A team of people to maintain an online storefront, the manpower required to scan all those books, servers, bandwidth, a wireless deal to distribute those books, etc... It could be less than shipping dead trees all over the place, but it's nowhere near zero.
yes, I agree! when you think about it, letting in highly educated people into the U.S. is a form of foreign aid, except it's directed towards to the U.S. The other countries use their resources and capital to educate the individuals, and America reaps the benefit from their knowledge!
I think _why has much bigger vision than just programming. My personal theory is that he realised that he had reached a plateau, diminishing returns had kicked in and it was time for him to move on. I'm sure he's out there somewhere now working on his next little revolution.

I think the only lesson he's trying to teach us is to take things less seriously, to accept transience and impermanence, to realise that nearly all of us are just making pictures in the sand. Almost everything we do will one day disappear without trace. We might as well get used to the idea.

Chunky bacon.
because most of the products China exports to the United States are labor-intensive goods U.S. manufacturers stopped making years ago, the U.S. would only have two choices: buy the products from other countries or from the Chinese.

The 3rd option would be to tap America's dormant manufacturing capacity (e.g. mothballed auto plants in Detroit) to produce these products domestically. With a savings on shipping, the cost could be competitive with higher prices from China or other countries, and it would create much-needed jobs in the US.
Website Hit Counters
Does writing blog posts making fun of people who get crypto wrong count as a hobby? ;-)

I believe that's more of a public service. :)
If each citizen is not Bill Gates, it is because they are the victim of circumstance.

He has done some amazing things, and aims to do more, but he did also come from unusual circumstances.

http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
Hey anyone get the feeling that we are being played by the media. There might be some legitimate privacy issues, but is it this bad or over hyped for an upcoming movie? Let's be critical.

I have posted a time-line of diaspora success: http://chegra.posterous.com/time-line-for-diaspora

What I want to do next is to investigate their dna. Who are the people that first got this going? What are the connections? Did readwriteweb have a connection with them. How about the nytimes?

I could be paranoid, but my intuition says dig deeper.
Poll: Gauging interest for an emulation book
I've been working on a book on emulation for some time, in hopes to get a good source of info on how emulators in the real world are structured and developed. However, until I saw "How do emulators work and how are they written" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350343) come up here, I figured that the market interest would be slim to nil; it's a very niche field, after all. But now I'm curious as to what you guys have to say on the matter. So here's the question: would you purchase a book on emulation?
Maybe, if the price is right, it gets good reviews, etc
> If each citizen is not Bill Gates, it is because they are the victim of circumstance. Other people held them down, the system failed them.

This part of your otherwise insightful comment is a bit ridiculous. Most people's success is determined by how much money their parents had and what schools their parents could afford to send them to. Circumstances have a pretty huge impact, and if our system is intended to minimize the effects of circumstances, it is failing many people.
Google mistakenly collects private data from Wi-Fi networks
Yes Google Tasks seems nice. But ToDoLess is more for people who manage lots of projects. It also has gantt-style Timelines which can be useful for visualizing the time-sensitive tasks.

I didn't think about a desktop version but it could be an idea.

Thanks for the feedback!
good one.

the reason utilities are regulated, as I understand it, is that it costs a lot to switch. there's a lot of infrastructure and digging involved.

but the last time I switched social networks, I don't think there was much digging involved. and I don't think my neighbors were affected

even if something is regulated, coercive regulation is not necessarily justified. people in an area or building can own their local infrastructure together and bargain with competing providers. and such arrangements would be very common if government weren't handing out monopolies
That won't fit on the back of a business card. Let's stick with Ignore Everybody.
Better beginning preparation can bring up a whole national average to about the "gifted" level in the United States, in several countries that were formerly poor and backward,

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf

and several aspects of primary curricula in the United States are KNOWN to be suboptimal,

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

so there is surely still a lot of room for improvement in the United States.
This is why my first premise is important. I’m asking you to accept that Windows could have been better without serious harm to its success. I’m blaming Gates more for things like security and usability than for an approach to hardware platforms. If you disagree, I’d be interested to know why.

Basically, I recognize the huge benefit to society that Microsoft was involved with. What I’m asking is whether they used the huge opportunities they got (by hook or by crook) as well as should be expected.

(“Third world”, incidentally, originally meant countries that were unaligned in the Cold War, and has no clear meaning when it comes to poverty or human development.)
Apologies if my previous post implied China law and justice was better than the U.S. The two systems aren't easily compared. I was attempting to provide a counterbalance to my parent post's hyperbola. [ADDED]: I should not have said the China system is more fair and congenial than the U.S. What I should have said is I was disarmed by how fair it was compared to what I was prepared to experience based on my prejudice.

As to what your client went through...all I can say is there are bad people everywhere. Rule #1 for me in China is "Don't do business with shady people or in market segments dominated by shady people". I think you can apply this rule anywhere.
Exactly. Also, I think it errs by treating all colleges as equivalent. Since the government subsidises educational loans there are many colleges out there that do not provide much of an education but mostly exist to siphon off those subsidised loans.

I think there are many colleges out there which are just not worth going to. Mind you, I am not an ivy league snob, I am not saying go to a top 50 school or not at all. There are many great schools that are ranked much lower.

But all of those for profit colleges that advertise heavily are mostly a waste of money. If you want to learn something, go to a school that is either public or private but set up as a non-profit and has an established reputation of supporting scholarship and research. Just forget about the ITT techs and universities of phoenix. Community college would be better than those.

I think the government is just too loose with the loans it subsidises.
I sent one to your gmail account (I assumed is your gmail account). I hope I got it right and didn't fire an invitation into the ether.
The Psychology of (Video)Games: Why We Do What We Do When Playing With Friends
Very good presentation exploring the psychological reasons for why people cheat or act unfair in video games.
Also suggests what to do against it.
I don't really feel like he said much. He certainly didn't sell me on not using LegalZoom.
Put me down for a pre-order :) If you can publish something half as interesting as the programming-heavy "Chasing the Beam" (a history of the creative programming techniques and people that stretched the Atari 2600's commercial lifespan well through the 1980s), you'll hook a lot of geeks.

I think you might need some focus though, are you only thinking about video game systems and saving old games from stagnating on dead hardware, or Apple's two processor switches and how they dragged their users with them, or why cranky mainframes run Linux? etc.
The question I'm asking myself: will this system crumble under it's own cost? If looting is made easier than producing that will happen at some point.
Introducing, Braintrust, my bootstrapped lean startup
This isn't Reddit. While it may have been funny, comments that only contain comedy are generally looked down upon here, it would seem.
Not in quite the same way. Because all you need to do is compete with a local firm too well, or piss off the wrong person, or cause problems by not working in the accepted way.

There's the crucial difference I feel.

(though on the other hand it's not as bad a picture as some people like to paint. You just have to be sensible and keep your head down)
A public utility can still harm you, even if they aren't competent enough to make any money off of you. If anything, Facebook is so desperate for revenue that they might be willing to "push the envelope" in a way that directly harms you.

Anyway, I don't care, because I don't use Facebook. But a lot of people are being strung along in ways they don't understand, and that's generally a bad thing. (It's also bad for me -- if everyone is willing to give up their privacy in exchange for pictures of their friends drinking beer, it means it will become socially unacceptable for other people to want privacy. And that is bad for me -- someone who does want privacy.)
Although i did not mentioned the pricing on the site, i would like to have your feedback about it:

I was thinking about a Free plan for 3 projects, a Standard plan at 7$/month for 50 projects, and a Premium plan at 12$/month for 500 projects. All plans would have unlimited users (invited).
The primary focus is on game consoles, if only because it's what I know best. However, the book is platform-agnostic; the goal is that by walking through the book and working along side it, you can go from nothing to a working (for some values of working) emulator for whatever platform it is you choose. Along with this, I'm going to be building at least one emulator along side it, with full source available (marked by chapters) so that at any point in the book, you can flip over to the source and see how I tackled things there. I don't want everyone in the world building Yet Another NES Emulator (TM), as fun as they are, so I'm really trying to make it as flexible as I can.
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk ~/downloads/django-trunk

.bash_profile:

export PATH=".:~/downloads/django-trunk/django/bin:$PATH"

export PYTHONPATH=~/downloads/django-trunk/
"5 times per second"

and

"The tiny possibility that you were sending sensitive data, multiplied times the tiny possibility that it wasn't SSL, multiplied times the very small possibility that it was grabbing enough information to get a full frame, let alone a handshake seems very unlikely."
Ask HN: Why do people not like news personalization?
Like many I am a bit of an information addict with my main sources being rss, twitter & hackernews/reddit. It takes a lot of work to extract the decent information from all of these sources (probably about 10-15% of the information I receive is any good). The obvious solution to this problem seems to be applying a learning algorithm to create a personalized feed of news items. However I know there have been a few sites which have done this in the past with little success. Can anyone suggest any reasons why they have failed? Is it the implementations or that news personalization just doesn't work?
Water, electricity, natural gas, and Facebook? I just don't think we can classify Facebook as a utility (in the sense suggested in the article), no matter how useful it is to so many people. We don't pay for it and we don't need it.
Google Marissa Mayer on how speed affects usage
Confidence Game: Is Asperger’s syndrome being used as a false front?
No doubt, it's unsavory. There is censorship to a certain extent, though - clearly illegal content does get deleted, and people get banned all the time.

I'd have to say, though, it's a unique community and when things are going well, and you understand the millions of in-jokes, it can be hilarious. People on Reddit joke about how Digg is the front page of Reddit two days ago, but the joke memes on Reddit increasingly are what was funny on 4chan last week.
you're correct in some ways, but it's not that easy. plugged into the usb hub are:

keyboard (could be replaced with wireless)
external hard drive - time machine. i prefer it this way than over wireless
iphone dock (hidden underneath macbook)
speakers - they are usb based

the second power board is simply there because i may need it in the future.
Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programming as art") is precisely the opposite to that which I generally advocate ("programming as science"). I (and others) often suggest that the former approach is actually harmful to software quality in many cases, particularly within teams.

Fundamentally I think my objection is to elevating a slightly odd-ball programmer to messianic status based on a mildly creepy fandom that manifests primarily as people vastly over-stating the contributions of this one guy in HN comments.
The fifth season is mostly awful. The seventh season picks up a bit, but with the things they did to Toby's character, and with the incredibly lame "live" episode, it's hard to pretend it lives up to the first four seasons (each of which won the Emmy for best drama).
The ultimate would be if Adobe's CEO used an iPad to post a message on Facebook which was leaked out because his privacy settings were changed when he wasn't looking, and then Steve Jobs replied.
Facebook about to try to dominate display ads the way Google dominates text ads
The standard of living is much, MUCH better in China than in Hong Kong. HK is stressful.
Political analysis is often hard because you can't control all of the variables. However we can look at very similar groups under different modes of governance.

Hong Kong. British-derived institutions and law. 12th on the Corruption Perceptions Index. 1st on the Index of Economic Freedom. Outranking the USA in both.

Taiwan. Democracy. 37th on the Corruption Perceptions Index. 27th on the Index of Economic Freedom.

China. CCP rule by many names. 79th on the Corruption Perceptions Index. 140th on the Index of Economic Freedom.

Regarding your experiences of the people not caring, perhaps the locals know what happens when they disagree and have become passive (as well as knowing that there are career damaging aspects beyond outright oppression)? You know they did fight a civil war over many of these issues and the rebels went to Taiwan? Public debate gets very heated in Taiwan on many issues. There are still protests in Hong Kong on the anniversary of Tienanmen Square massacre.

There are many countries throughout Asia that use an "Asian values" cultural argument to deflect criticism from the West. I would just say that where people migrate to when given the opportunity is highly suggestive.

N.B. The IEF draws from the CPI for part of its ranking, but includes a lot more than that.
I think you nailed it.

I'll add to that though. often, when people die (and _why did in a sense die), people view everything they did through rose colored lenses. I'm with the majority in HNers in this thread so far, still in awe of _why, however, let's not forget the tough lessons his disappearance taught us.

While I greatly appreciated everything _why did for the community and think he truly was an amazing person, it's clear in my mind that the way he left the community, without notice that he would take down his sites and code, was irresponsible. He had the right to do what he did, but that doesn't make it ok.

I'm not angry at _why, more sad. I assume, given his eccentricities, that there was no malicious intent behind it, which is why I find it merely tragic. However, his leaving was a powerful reminder of the responsibilities open source software authors have. If you make code free, you should make sure it stays available within reason, and if you use free software, you should take _why's disappearance as an object lesson.
Kayaking and mountain biking, nothing extreme, just a way to be closer to nature and admire it in all its grandeur.

My dream would be kayaking the glaciers at banff national park, alberta canada. That turquoise lake is just a feast to the eyes, and the soul.
If you're interested in seeing (another) emulator implementation, the Computer History Simulation Project (simh) package <http://simh.trailing-edge.com/>; emulates various boxes.
Is Your Startup Too Geeky?
_why's view on messy code is drastically under-appreciated.

One can imagine how much energy is wasted revising commits and over-massaging code just to make the author look smarter.

I'd love it if the culture were more accepting of ugly code... It has its purpose too.
Danah’s previous article on Facebook: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1348599
I would have guessed the opposite - that your friends with B.A.s would be the ones not working in their field of study. Interesting.
There's no reason for so much complexity. I'm talking of course about the core of facebook, not the third-party apps. Sure, asynchronous loads of certain content is nice, but it hardly qualifies it as a "web app"? Which parts of facebook are you referring to?
An advertisement. Yawn.
Electromagnetic radiation and its effect on the brain: an insider speaks out
One problem with both of those: PHP

Also, I seriously tried to use Doctrine for a PHP project and though it seems great at first, I ended up going back to raw SQL. I have used Django and it's ORM, and I had no desire to do raw SQL.

Symfony seems way over-engineered to me, and the horror of the PHP syntax really turns me off (though I'm quite familiar with PHP). If I'm going to use PHP, I'd rather just do what it is best at and get straight to the point.
I've been watching this pretty closely; the multi-db in 1.2 alone makes it worth the upgrade. It's about a 20 line backend router to get round-robin RODB usage, which is very welcome for sites under high read loads.

A lot of systems have been redone to take custom XBackend classes (like the CacheBackend before it, EmailBackend and others are now available), and in my experience this is a good level of access for customizing parts of Django.

Lots of applications aimed at Django are already 1.2 compatible. They've really spent a long time (a few months after freeze) making sure this release is going to be solid, so I have high hopes.
He was sort of like a contemporary one-man open source Beagle Bros. Unfortunately there is no place in current programming culture for people like this. Programming is not art. It is certainly not whimsical. It is fun, but only fun like preparing for a rocket launch or hostile takeover is fun. Programming is science, it's engineering, it's methodology, it is bureaucracy. More importantly it is Serious Business. Programmers like to imagine themselves as simultaneously being as potentially intellectually important as Einstein and as rich as a Rockefeller. There is no place in that world for cat cartoons and goofing off.
I've been using Teamviewer for a month now and it's pretty incredible compared to my past experiences with remote desktop tools. It's basically Remote Desktop + Skype (it navigates firewalls, has VOIP, etc.). No chat though. Highly recommended.
Switching social networks by definition “affects your neighbors.” That’s why so many people feel trapped — the value of Facebook is the connections we have made there over time.
Central Command Turns To Twitter To Solve The Gulf Oil Spill. Uh Oh.
Programming as science: not consistent with reality IMHO. My argument is that it's pretty simple to build a good computer scientist: take a guy with good IQ and put it into a good university. But there are zero guarantees that you'll end with a good coder also, as coding is a matter of taste, tradeoffs, design decisions, creativity, ability to think out of the box, and so forth.

The problem is that most of our industry is not ready to accept this news. There was no so important economic process like IT in the past where creativity and art had the same impact as it is happening with programming. Check the software and the sites you are enjoying every day: are they made by great scientists? The big majority are not.

But at the same time, the reverse is true. If you have good scientists you can create any complex program or system without problems. Look at all the PHDs at google, the result is a wonderful piece of technology, from the search engine itself to the cluster and other stuff they are running. But this is an engineering problem indeed, so it is a perfect fit for them.

But not everything is like that in our field. This is why for instance a big company like Google is not having a big impact in programming itself. If you see the reality most of their products for the masses are not working well, Ruby on Rails was not produced there, and so forth. It's not that I've something against Google but it is the perfect example of "company of scientists".
The government should start regulating MySpace. Social networks are only useful in proportion to how many of your friends are on them, so there's no possibility of MySpace ever being dethroned from the dominant market share it's held in the US for most of this decade. They could make their service as awful and morally repugnant as they wanted, and nobody would ever leave because no viable competitor could ever exist.
As opposed to thinking of yourself as Van Gogh or Warhol? Without any financial considerations, thinking of what you do as a scientific or engineering activity is much more conducive to the creation of good software. I'm suggesting that glorifying programming as an activity is a bad idea. I'd prefer programmers thought of their programming activities as no more important than any other kind of skilled labour (clerical/administrative, plumbing, whatever). Get your fun an enjoyment from the obviously creative parts of creating software. Or take up a real art form as a hobby.
As a sales channel, you could perhaps point your friends to Fifobooks? http://fifobooks.com
See what I mean?
I like your idea - sort of wave-esque. The way you addressed the encapsulation of topics in an uncluttered interface is definitely important. You might want to put some thought into a logo redesign since it looks so much like Ubuntu's. Aside from that, congratulations on the launch! I'll be taking it for a spin later this weekend.
Those are not costs borne by the publisher/author.
Why does it have to come tumbling down? Can't you see a way forward where things improve without violence? There isn't one ruling class. I've seen government power change several times in Shanghai and at the national level over 10 years. You sound very pessimistic. What are doing to make the world a better place?

Here are a few suggestions:

* If you are a Chinese national, go home and become a member of the party, vote, and get involved in making your country better.

* If you have a method to fix one of the many problem in China (pollution, energy, etc.) you should go show it to the person in the Chinese gov that handles such policy. If you've got a great solution, I can get you touch with people that will listen.
I remember reading a comment a while back (I think on HN) about some running joke in one of his books about a cat (or maybe it was a dog?) and how _why had actually created this whole blog to keep the joke running outside of his book. It was hilarious and impressive, but I can't find it - anyone know what I'm referring to?