skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: I didn't know how badly mainstream media covered technology until now
The TV was on with News here in Hong Kong. The way they were describing ebooks was crazy. They described how a big threat to ebook sales is that, "People can 'jailbreak' their smartphones and then hack in to online bookstores to steal books."<p>The whole 7 minute segment was like that. "Publishers have a copyright called a digital rights management that restricts what you can do with books you purchased." They describe how publishers can restrict copy/paste on devices, but they make it sound like it's illegal to copy out even a paragraph to email to people. No, it doesn't have native copy/paste out of the book, but you can absolutely type it up just like you would a book.<p>If you're like me and don't watch TV, you might not realize how badly technology is covered. This was a bit of a wakeup call.
Full of porn?
S3 is missing one feature for web hosting
Yeah, I hike up the fort most days for exercise. If you go through the fort, there's a beautiful view of the harbor on the other side.

Unfortunately I fly to Saigon tomorrow, so heading out of Hong Kong. Sounds like a cool event though, godspeed and enjoy.
Unfortunately, our perception of bias is heavily influenced by our personal biases. My recollection of the Bush years was very different, the anti-Bush sentiment are much more prominent in my mind.

It would be an interesting technology project or site. Do a sentiment analysis of major media sources. Search for how often a particular phrase is used. e.g.

Immigration: "Illegal Alien" or "Undocumented Worker"

Abortion: "Pro-Life" or "Anti-Abortion"

Something that could update in real time. It is unavoidable that every news site will have some slant, but an objective number based on rational criteria would be a good tool ala the nutrition facts labels on food packages.
I have lived in a US-sponsored military dictatorship. There is strong evidence the US trained torturers and interrogators. Many dissidents disappeared in prisons.

Remember the Iran-Contras thing? Extraordinary rendition?

Don't tell me governments always play by the rules, because they don't.

Specially when they can play the "national security" card.
I think it's both Liberal and Libertarian. And Ron Paul is quite popular there.

Also, there's still a difference between something that happens there and what the Digg Patriots are doing in that they are conspiring to game the system. There's no such equivalent thing going on at Reddit.

Edit: I think we see the natural split of progressive v. libertarian on reddit, and both parties are represented very well. Perhaps there's not a neo-conservative/fox news voice, but I would not be quick to blame that on some sort of conspiracy as much as I would on the difficulty one has reasoning with these sorts of extremists. They are not there to engage in dialog as much as they are there to poison it.
Really though, the math is pretty unsurprising isn't it? Optimum sleep time is usually considered 7 or 8 hours, we'll say 7.

If you sleep 4 hours a night for 5 nights, you wind up 15 hours short. Why would one expect to make up for that with 3 "extra" hours?
On the other hand, America is much more statist/socialistic in some regards than they like to admit.

E.g. the state gives lots of support for home ownership, including government sponsored mortgage guarantees. Or the power of all those crazy unions. Nominally more social-democratic Germany or Scandinavia look tame by comparison on those aspects.
> Whenever I've tried to get teams I have worked with to use a wiki or other collaboration tool I see a fall off in usage after an initial rush.

It's the "paradox of the active user" at work:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/activeuserparadox.html

Your collaborators fit the definition of "active users" very well: they are in the middle of a project, they have specific goals, and they don't perceive the effort put into learning to use a new piece of software as being beneficial to accomplishing their goals within the project. They view it as an extra bit of unrelated piece of work and responsibility to go under, with ambiguous potential benefits, if any.
Somebody should go to Vulcan point in Crater Lake and pee so we could have the largest lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island :-)
All the more so if you are in the UK
Stress : The Frontal Cortex
It says:

Sorry, needs a decent browser:
(firefox 3.6+, Chrome 4+, Opera 10+ and Safari 4+)

But I run "Chromium 6.0.484.0 (54673) Ubuntu 10.04".

I feel that it would work perfectly on chromium 6, and you are a little bit too strict in your user agent check :-)
Thanks for that link, though I've observed this never came across this concept.
Just lakes and islands, all the way down.
Here in Hamburg you don't need a ticket for the bicycle. Busses also may transport them. Ferries are free, too.
Well said. Seems like I remember a while back (several election cycles) they did a poll not on how reporters voted but on who they donated money to. Where something like 90% of most media organizations reporters/staff/etc donated to liberal candidates, at Fox News only 75% donated to liberal candidates.
May I suggest the use of the word archangel instead of super-angel?
Behold the Gomboc: A homogeneous mono-static body
There's absolutely no way for your claim to be true unless the information is only found on blog posts. Decently crafted Google queries easily return the primary source (which is not a blog post).

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aw3.org+href+...

During the discovery process, just replace "hypertext reference" with whatever you suspect HREF to stand for. The grandparent post is absolutely correct in criticizing these types of blog posts.
Well, what do you know. They just hate everything. Nice.
Cambridge, UK, also has lots of bikers. There could be more bike lanes etc, but the car drivers are quite forgiving.
Craft An Irresistible Price By Focusing On Your Users
Pure lake and island oriented.
Hi5 hot charming gorgeous girls
There is another one: http://www.day32.com/MySQL/

But it throws error on my Ubuntu box.
I must have seen a million of these "benefits of exercise" posts by now - everybody seems to think that exercise is a good thing, but making another post isn't going to change anything, people are still not going to exercise; making a drug that simulates the effects of exercise would change everything.

So why aren't people working on that?
Most people in the West are way higher up on Maslow's pyramid than people in the developing world. There's no arguing with basics like availability of clean water, food, clothing, healthcare. After your basics are covered it's up to you to decide whether you work your ass off improving yourself or settling for the status quo of luxury that living in Western society provides.

Whenever I come back from a developing country I think "We're fucked & we deserve it". People in developing countries are just as capable & ingenious; they are more likely to work hard because they see a path of progress in front of them. In the West we have become so accustomed to our luxuries that instead of working harder, we settle for the status quo far too often.
It was not Wikileaks that exposed Manning. Adrian Lamo did, after Manning exposed himself to him.

That was pretty dumb, IMHO. Like I said a couple weeks back, leaking sensitive information about recklessness/corruption/incompetence in a military operation is very serious business and you a) cover your tracks very well, b) tell nobody about it (not even family) and c) don't brag about it to a crazy stranger.

You may consider leaving a sealed letter to be opened after your death. But you'd better hide it well. I am not aware of any governments that would honor a seal in a matter of national security.
I find lots of strange laws (or just rules / contracts) much more acceptable locally, where you can choose to live in this community or not --- than would be acceptable on a larger scale like a nation.
ugliness is also about functionality and not only style, and IMHO there are a couple of usability aspects in HN which which can be considered as problematic, just from the top of my head:

1. lack of search
2. "expired links" when clicking on "more", without any description of what is going on
3. "expired links" when you are commenting and take much time to submit your comment
4. no hints during comment reply saying whether there are any formatting rules/conventions which can be used (like quoting, lists etc)
5. no possibility to do comment preview

I agree that at least for some of these there is some rationale behind, but still it's far from being "simple because perfect".
Classic example of where records are set down to the point where the definitions get hazy.
> But very few people outside of the right wing fever swamps would draw a direct equivalence between Assange and an active, productive member of Al Qaeda

It all hinges on pissing off the wrong person.
This is anti-technology bigotry.

Where did you get that from? It's nothing to do with technology per se, it's about the sedentary position we adopt when making use of that technology. If anything it is decrying the insufficiently advanced technology we currently possess, which requires us to sit in from of a little screen in a certain position to use.

I don't know why you bring up reading books as if that somehow strengthens your claim. Reading books is wonderful for the brain but does little or nothing for the body. You need to exercise both.
I live without a car in a rainy area. I've showed up at work a handful of times simply drenched. Not fun, but it actually happens a lot less than I thought it would. It doesn't bother me particularly in other situations, like on the way home from work or when going shopping. But, yeah, showing up at work drenched kind of sucks. Of course, as others have mentioned, how you dress matters so with planning this can be ameliorated if you travel by foot or bike regularly -- which seems to be an alien concept to folks who are very dependent on their cars.
> I think history shows Americans want fundamental fairness for all who are just like them. For everyone else: if life is not fair, that's tough.

If anyone is bored and wants some insight onto the results of political shifts, make a list of your estimates of the most powerful countries in the world in 1700, 1800, 1900, and 2000. Note the positions of European countries on the list, particularly Great Britain, who I'd rate at #1 in 1700, #1 in 1800, #1 in 1900, and in 2000 ... somewhere between #5 and #10? This trend is both fascinating and seems to be accelerating.
In my experience sleeping "extra" 1.5 hours in two night in row is much more helpful than sleeping 3 "extra" hours in one night.
What do you want to tell with the tale about the sidewalks? We also have some concrete sidewalks in Europe. And pouring new concrete isn't too bad. You can even re-use the old broken down concrete for some things.

The trend even seems to be to make Autobahnen out of concrete. (Although that's not very relevant I guess, because Autobahnen are rarely digged up.)
It’s official: I’m an entrepreneur
How to text without a cell phone
Ask HN: What hosting do you use?
I use nearlyfreespeech.net and while I like their cleanliness and honesty and low cost, I find the lack of Django/Zope etc and perpetual php safe mode to be annoying.

Could you recommend low cost hosts who are honest and will let me run what I want?
Message passing doesn't have to be hard to reason about at all. Each Erlang process is just that: a process that receives inputs and sends outputs. This is its "interface". Why would reasoning about this be any harder than reasoning about e.g. a REST service your application depends on?

The advantage, at least with Erlang is that the system can do things under the hood to make this as efficient as possible. Today, Erlang might actually run all the processes in one thread of execution and basically just share the data between threads. It can do this since the data is read only. Later on, when we have too many cores for this to be the fastest way anymore, it can do something else without a change to your code.

STM is still locking under the hood and when we're talking hundreds of cores, that little bit of locking is going to end up putting all your threads into a nice wait queue.

Further, the real reason that manual thread management is untenable is the same reason that manual memory management is untenable: composability. You can't compose functions arbitrarily when you every function has it's own expectations about who owns the data and you can't compose functions when you don't know what locking they have. I'm not sure STM solves this completely. Does it ensure that one transaction block can't depend on another in a way that causes an unresolvable deadlock? If I write a massive framework, do I need to worry about how many layers of isolation blocks I'm building up? I know they say this is supported, but what if it's 20 layers deep and the layers cross compilation boundaries?

Message passing, on the other hand (like unix processes) doesn't have these composability concerns (though personally I think futures probably have the most potential since they're the most high level).
I guess you have to have lived through a car phase to discover that you can do without and be better off.

Here in Brazil people are currently enamoured by their new wealth and I see cars getting bigger and bigger.
Aug. 6, 1945: ‘I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds’
It's quite simple: the iPad is Steve Jobs' second attempt to create the UberShiny, after the Macintosh, which was version 1.0. (Ignore the Newton; that was not a Jobs program.)

It's got the same core ingredients as the Mac: utterly, shockingly new user interface paradigm that is easier to use, a machine which at launch is locked down tighter than a bank vault (and dismissed as a toy by people still wedded to the old paradigm), plug-in-and-go computing.

This time, he's added a couple of new twists: the app store (so Apple can veto apps that don't mesh with their vision of where the platform is going, the smaller portable gizmos (phone and ipod touch), syncing to a mothership for backup.

I expect in the longer term, (a) the sync hub will migrate from the (dying) Mac platform to the cloud and/or Apple's MobileMe service, and (b) we'll eventually see some opening up of the platform -- I'd love the iPad equivalent of the Mac II, but that's probably a couple of years away.

For now, Apple have got their pure and shiny platform back, better than before and not liable to being cloned by Microsoft in the short term (unlike the Mac platform, which was visibly losing its UI lead over Windows with Win7 and facing parity as of Win8). I don't think this one will keep them ahead anything like as long as the Mac did, but it's got to be good for 5-10 years.
how is this relevant content for Hacker News?
The past three years have seen the economies in both countries contract violently because of shenanigans by financial speculators hiding behind the legitimacy of our banking institutions

Typical BBC revisionism - you would think that the deficit didn't exist prior to 2008. A deficit created by people who believed "fair" meant "some people work and the rest live off them".
If your plan is for the company behind the platform to buy you, you need to consider carefully the kind of cash they have for acquisitions and how often they do talent acquisitions. The chance is much higher with some companies than others (assuming your product is worthy).
This is slightly off topic, but why do people do things like this? I don't understand why anyone would go to such lengths to do something like this. I just don't get it.

I see people around me fighting over parking spaces. I see people holding conferences on how to fight over parking spaces (that guy is muscling in!). I see people do the same for roughly every damn topic in this world, and sometimes it gets really messy. Why?

What's in it for them?
An aalib-based X server (2005)
over 40 people think its relevant
Iomega debuts Exciting Products in India
If everything in life were relevant, it would be a boring existence. How SMS could be a relevant business for a podcast company??
That's just brilliant. Lets give people who have more money than they can spend a mechanism by which they can (a) remain wealthy and (b) get out of paying taxes ever again. That will be especially good because the top, say, 30% probably pay more in taxes than the remain 70% have.

You're not under some silly impression that if the government suddenly had less money that they would cut spending are you?
My first thought when reading the question was "Ooh, shiny!". But I didn't think anyone would get it and it would get downvoted as smart-assed. More eloquently: I think it falls under "anything engaging" (or whatever that phrase is in the guidelines).
Or, the deficit created by people who believed financial instruments of service economy is a better route ahead than genuinely productive society.
I'm not exactly sure that is true. If they have a brake mount and at least one brake, they are street legal. Do you have a source for your assertion?
Tablets – Just A Few Years from Now (Video)
Here's a video of what tablets can do in the future.
True, but I bet over 40 people think it's irrelevant, too. Without downvoting, the number of votes does not imply relevance.
This used to be the case in earlier versions, but now it only issues a server level write lock for atomic updates, reads can still happen.

It's not ideal, but it is an improvement.
Bizarre instances of real-world recursion are always relevant.
How Fast Will Your Internet Be In 2020?
You are a product of your times.
What are you talking about?

The structural deficit in its present form existed prior to 2008, therefore anyone who says it was caused by the bank bailout is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. What was the deficit in 1997?
I went to Stanford thinking it would be the best decision. It turned out to be a terrible decision, and set me back years. The best-laid plans...
It's circumstantial really. If your a small company than hiring and firing makes a lot of sense. Plus you don't have a lot of assets so you are a small target. Big companies on the other hand don't have that luxury. You don't get fired individually at a large company they wait until layoffs.

Reason is that if a person is fired than you are a huge, rich target for a lawsuit. Each and every one of your employees is now a liability. Someone say an off-color joke or do something that can be even remotely considered discriminatory and you're on the hook. I've had colleagues get rightly fired for doing incredibly stupid things. They lawyer up and bring a suit about some manager being racist, sexist, or religious insensitivity. They know the company would rather pay a few thousand dollars than have to pay $500/hr for a lawyer.

If your company is viewed as discriminatory towards employees (doesn't matter what the facts are) you'll be paying more money to recover your reputation. So severance and settlements are much cheaper to the bottom line then trying to convince people of your story.
And the most upvoted message from them: lmgtfy.
"Fair" is "if you don't work you don't eat" but that isn't what people actually want...
I use rackspace cloud. ~11$/month. Run as many websites as I can fit with virtual hosts.
Use the Wordpress theme that top bloggers are using
I was still impacted by this yesterday and was surprised they couldn't mitigate the attack better. I like Posterous as a platform but am concerned about keeping my stuff there at this point.
This proves how often we think that things that we use often means. Since we are get used to it we don't think anymore at it's meaning
But then you'd have to use 3 ferries to get there.
America has better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
> I live rather close to my job, and it would still take
> me 1-2 hours to get there by bicycle.

Funny, I live as far as is bearable from my job, and it would take me a bit more than 1 hour to get there by bicycle (and 35 to 45 minutes by car). How your scales can be stretched by motor vehicles :)
And then throw a pebble in the puddle for N+1 goodness.
If there was, I haven't heard it. The idea it was about securing access to oil is laughable. The oil isn't in Baghdad, the oilfields are out in the middle of nowhere. They could have been taken and held without going anywhere near the cities.

Plus there is the small matter that we already know how to get oil from Middle Eastern countries... We buy it.
Or use the add-on feature as a path to a larger product. I.e. a twitter client could be expanded to aggregate updates across different sites a la seesmic.
Apple Introduces us to the Smart Bike
Personally I don't think wave failed to solve a problem for people, rather it solved too many problems for too many people. Like the article says it was hard to define. Google said it was email if it had been designed today, but email which is used for so many purposes (letters, discussions file transfer, chat, SMS, advertising, authentication, correspondence chess...) grew organically over a long period (I remember years ago email bugged me because I felt it purpose was unclear). Google needed that kind of organgic growth accelerated. But who knows, it might still happen..

Incidentally I can see something like Dropbox picking up a few of Wave's features.
Hm, this is pretty cool. I really like how this generates test cases by code inspection.

However, some of the puzzles are really obscure. For example, Im talking about that one which has an int x as parameter, which has tests like 0 -> 0, 1 -> 0 and 769 -> some really arbitrary number. Those are just not fun.
What if I had a dream of a larger island in a lake on an island in a lake? What if I dreamt I had a dream...
Tim Daly on Lisp in Industry
Viral Resume [video]
Eben Moglen on Bilski, software patents, and big pharma
How Apple Could Kill Google’s Holiday Buzz
Are You Wasting Time With Test Driven Development?
My personal experience is that outsourcing success or failure is highly dependent upon writing of the original software spec. The second most common failure is that clients run out of money as they did not realize how much it would take from the start. Vendors are at fault too as they tend to "do what it takes" to get the job but don't carry that attitude to complete it.

Barry Rickert
http://www.The Creative Buyer.com
http://www.Studiobuzz.biz
Sounds like someone channeling Dr. Seuss
Interesting. The glossary at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_2.html#GLOSS19 defines hyperlink as

"a relationship between two anchors, called the head and the tail. The link goes from the tail to the head. The head and tail are also known as destination and source, respectively."

So what we have is "Anchor Head REFerence" when we should simply have "Link DESTination". Think about it when you next design a world changing markup language.
Open Source continues to make gains
Fractal Food
Ob-romanesco:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/images/Romanesco/
In my opinion, threads are in a similar vein like goto and eval.

It is true, that a good, disciplined programmer with the goal of a performant application with simple and good code can use gotos in a way which enhances the code, and he can use threads to enhance the performance without bringing all living hell down on people around him.

However, it is also true that a lot of people who only consider themself to be a good programmer want to use threads, gotos and all these powerful constructs, and because some dude called tetha said that good programmers can use them well, they will use them. But since they are not good programmers, a mess will happen.

Thus, strongly advocating against threads -- while wrong -- is still right in my opinion.

Granted, I don't want to go off-topic too much, but I cannot talk about the GIL too much, because the matter is too delicate and complicated for me. Sometimes the GIL enhances performance, sometimes it degrades it. Live with it, and if you really need parallelism, use the libraries out there for it.
Kaspersky KIV/KAV Updated Keys – 6th Aug 2010