skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People ask a lot of questions here that -could- be answered elsewhere. I always assume they're asking here because they want to know what this community in particular has to say about the issue.
Private peering/caching/CDNs/etc are, in fact, the example that gives the lie to ISP claims that they can't charge for premium networking services: they absolutely can and already do.

Trick is, that sort of premium service requires an outlay of capital. Equipment may need to be bought, fiber lit, configurations made.

Blocking Net Neutrality, however, would allow the telecoms to enforce artificial scarcity on a per-protocol basis to increase profit disproportionate to any increase in capacity and with almost no capital outlay.

The actual issue isn't whether or not it's wrong for an ISP to accelerate content from a given provider. The issue is whether an ISP should be able to artificially constrain already-promised supply based on largely-arbitrary definitions they control and can game for increased profit.

As there is no Net Neutrality requirement, the ISPs could --today-- create agreements with terms that explicitly lay out QoS based on protocols. There is nothing stopping them from doing so, except for the fact that they'd be required to communicate those terms to the public and that they'd be taking a gamble that some upstart would break ranks.

This squeeze only works if they all agree on the QoS policy and, industry-wide, the peering agreements all change. (If the peering agreements build in QoS, a consumer-side network can't effect a lack of QoS. Everything will have already been throttled upstream.)

This is a horizontal collusion play in plain site.
Google is facing the same accusations in Germany (they've been cleared in the UK) and in other countries, I think the raid may have to do with them stonewalling investigators like they did in Germany. After all, the Korean police can read the news just fine and they must have tried to get a feeling for how google would respond if they asked.

The not-so-smart element here is that I presume google learned a lot from their previous encounters with the law in Italy, France, the UK and Germany and would not have left any relevant data lying around their offices for investigators to find.

What bothers me about googles' behaviour in all this is that they behave as though they're above the law in terms of privacy and on top of that they had no business collecting this information in the first place.

Saying you're going to photograph the streets but actually adding a wardriving module to your data collection vehicles is not something that you can claim you did 'accidentally'.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0515/google-streetview-vans-acci...

I find that extremely hard to believe and I think google has some public explaining to do about how such a thing could ever happen 'by accident'.
Sometimes, you can also go to a local university, open up your laptop in a cafeteria (or library), search for any open wireless network, and bypass those paywalls completely.

I have a wonderful one just across the street from home. With a Pringles can I could do it from my bedrom ;-)
Author Doubts Google's 130 Million Books Count
Why Public Employees Are the New Welfare Queens
I use:

- pathogen (for keeping bundles nicely separated)

- pyflakes-vim (highlighting errors in Python files on the fly)

- slime.vim (sending text in the current buffer out to a screen session)

- scratch.vim (an easy way to make a scratch buffer, great when used with a REPL in a screen session and slime.vim)

- ack.vim (easy way to use Ack instead of grep)

- NERD Commenter ("toggle comments" is the only function I use from this, but it works great)

- PeepOpen (much prettier than FuzzyFinder TextMate, and actively developed!)

- NERD Tree (for when I need to add/move/rename files [I do all my opening with PeepOpen])

- rainbow (Highlights pairs of parenthesis/brackets in their own colors. Great for LISP, sometimes useful for other languages as well)

- snipmate (TextMate-style snippets. I'm still building up a decent set of snippets I use often.)

- sparkup (like Zen Coding, but just seems to work more smoothly with vim)

- surround (modify surrounding brackets, tags, parentheses, ets)

- repeat (just for repeating surround actions)

- yankring (awesome yank/paste manager)

My dotfiles (including the vim stuff) are on Bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/
This is a problem, sure. But what about pennies? No one needs or wants those.
My question is how much difference will there be between job posting here and on other niche boards. I searched in Chicago and everyone on the GitHub jobs is also on the Joel on Software's job board. Maybe the results are better for other places that have more good software jobs.

Are there too many job boards chasing the same quality listings?
Part of the reason dynamic exists is to integrate with dynamic languages like Iron* in a saner way. This allows you to use C# for what it is good for, Ruby for what it is good for, and cleanly integrate the two.
I think I can see a business model where you stick a cheaper paywall in front of theirs, and you proxy requests through your pringles can :)
What's the best strategy to get the other party to put out a salary figure first?
Argh! At the end of the video, he says "if you wish to try an early demo of stackvm, just visit stackvm.com", but there's no demo available -- the website says "In a few months, we'll start rolling out a free private demo. Sign up below and we'll send you an invite code when we're ready to launch."

I suppose the statement in the video technically correct. :-)
Have you tried http://www.paymo.biz/
I'm using it, it has a desktop version and a web version, works very nice.
Why does a Real Author write "pass-time"? Isn't "pastime" the actual word, and "pass-time" just a weird homonym? Or is it actually "accepted" as a real word?

I realize natural languages don't have binary contains() functions for words, it's just something that I tend to stumble over as a non-native speaker.
I agree with the sentiment, but the source is suspect. Being an editor at Boing Boing gives him a vested interest in people building art projects that make you go "oooh, shiny!" for thirty seconds.
If I were spending millions of dollars sending cars + drivers out on every street in the world I would want to collect as much data as possible. I imagine they had cell radios, wifi radios, probably even FM and AM radios all collecting data in conjunction with highly-accurate GPS readings.

If their software to collect WiFi signal strength was based on a packet capture system (perhaps by interfacing with Wireshark or one of its libraries), I could see how it might be a mistake to save this data while attempting to collect other data.

However, I imagine that they simply wanted to collect as much data as possible, including WiFi traffic (that should really be considered public, anyway...).
Yeah, Steve Russell was a graduate student. Also, this is what McCarthy said during an interview:

Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today....

(Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html - not really surprising)
FreeBSD Project Adds East Coast Data Center
Consumers now owe more on student loans than their credit cards
KDE 4.5 Released
Oops, I wanted to say "If you wish to try an early demo of stackvm in a few months, visit stackvm.com to sign up." :)
When somebody provides that many instructions, they've forgotten how they did it in the first place.
What, me study? Why so many colleges are education-free zones.
How we implemented Continuous Integration on Engine Yard Cloud
Bad video. :(
> for the sake of making the storytelling clear.

It would be perfectly possible, given the technology presented, for Picard to command the Enterprise from his bathtub.

That would make the screenplay... innovative.
Our engineer Adam Doeler set up CI Joe on an instance of Engine Yard App Cloud and we'd thought we'd share with you the steps. He ended up writing some custom chef recipes to make it easier for you to get this working on your own.
Overwhelmingly, I have found that the thought process I use to solve technical problems is utterly crippled by any sort of interaction with other people.

When I've tried collaborative sessions of this sort, they have become prolonged debates over some mediocre solution. Often, a superior solution starts to take shape in my mind, but I'm too distracted by the conversation to develop it. If I bring my unformed idea into the conversation, I'm bombarded with questions that I can't answer yet, and I'm still too distracted to do the actual thinking I would need to answer them. Whatever solution comes out of this, I will inevitably end up improving it dramatically when I have a chance to reflect on it in solitude.

My realtime creative thought process just does not scale to multiple brains.

However, I can certainly collaborate in non-realtime. That is, through email, or some other asynchronous medium that gives me unlimited time for solitary thought.

I don't want to seem like a megalomaniac, but this really is how it works for me, based on a decade of experience. And I don't think I'm an anomaly among programmers, at least not good ones.
Make that a bitter lemon on my end.
For a good book on the topic see "how to make $1000 a minute". Some of the techniques are dated, but overall the principles are solid.
The way I understood the controversy they were trying to build a DB to help geolocation by mapping SSIDs / MAC addresses to GPS coordinates. Depending on how that's implemented, I can see it logging more or less data (perhaps depending on diagnostics flags) as it trundles by.

Frankly, I'm not in the least bit concerned by the allegations by Google here.
Young World Revolution - Youth, Technology and Business with Rob Salkowitz
He's claiming that he's somehow better than all of us because he takes walks with no purpose. I really doubt that there's any additional benefit to doing so over say, walking your dog. I hate when people try to tell me the "right" way to do something, especially when its benefits are more a superiority badge than tangible.
It's all above board--I wouldn't do this without having them fully aware. It's a good way to get into SaaS too, a lot of companies have an easier time justifying monthly fees than up front.
Why It’s Not Healthy To Be A Stealthy Startup
If I were going on holiday or on business to a city, it would be incredibly useful if I could see a public/free wifi overlay (showing the radius of a decent strength signal) on top of the city map. The only way to do that of course would be to scan and record all available wifi networks at every step and then group the signals based on the ssid. That will obviously hit all networks, but if it cant access anything what is the problem?

If the ssid is visible and your network is available then everyone with a wifi card is doing what Google did every time they turn their laptop or smartphone on anyway.
Oh well. I'm only griping because it looks really neat, and I want to try it out. How come you don't want people playing with the current stackvm? Is it because you're going to add a lot of features, and you expect people to be disappointed by the current feature set, because it's not currently stable, or because of something completely different?
I think they just wanted to see in general what google is doing and this was as good an excuse as any.
Re: yesterday's "Why I'm not hiring" WSJ op-ed and why it was poop
Searching and skimming code
You did not read all the books not written about millions of people who did hard work and were not successful anyway.
You are also mixing different things there — success ant intelligence.
Do you feel you are smarter than us saying we are full of BS?
Is that the best argument to support your point of view you can get?
MetaMirror & The Future of TV
People who have the stamina to finish a big project are already, by that measure alone, 'special'. Not that many people can slog on for so long working on something with an ill-defined goal and no clear steps to perform to get to that goal.

Apart from that I still don't think you're right. Take an extreme example: someone with a mental deficiency. I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's possible to find people in a home for the disabled who are, intellectually, in absolute terms incapable of getting a degree. With that as the 'lower' value, intelligence of others is a sliding scale all the way up to the geniuses of our world. Somewhere along this line, there is a cutoff point at which it becomes possible to get this degree. So, it must logically follow that there are a number of people who are not capable of getting it. One can debate on where that cutoff point is. I think it's over the median iq of all people, and that's a prudent estimate. That would mean that 50% of people (I'm not saying this is the cutoff point, I think it's higher, just to illustrate the point I'm making) are incapable, in absolute terms, of demonstrating the intellectual capacity that is needed to get this degree by today's standards.
Suppose I am at the other end: a blogger looking for stuff to write about. Where would I find the hottest press releases? I have heard about press releases before, I just can't imagine how they work.

Are all press releases of the world just being dumped into a big stream (maybe using telex machines), where millions of interns sift through them to find the interesting ones? Or how does my press release get noticed?
I wrote this: http://stufftodo.dedasys.com - although it's currently undergoing a major overhaul. If you're interested in hacking on it, improving it, selling it for a cut, or whatever, feel free to write.
" . . . isn’t Vernon Hill, one of the bank’s founders, tempted to build an IT system of his own? I hate programmers, replies this dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. They only cause trouble."

Spoken like someone who's been there on a few projects.
I think he is not mixing it up... I think the main point of the article (no matter if you agree or not) is that the philosophy behind the net neutrality, e.g. the idea of maintaining a levelled field, are already history.

The author suggests that already now a company like Google can use money to set up a "parallel" Internet. Because it's closed, they don't need to uphold any regulation. But they can use them to shorten the number of hops a package has to take to travel between two computers.
I was shocked until I re-read "birthday suit" as "bathing suit" ;)
Loved the reference to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZAoMv_QnAU
Ask HN: Terminology: differentiating a project and a startup
I'm increasingly seeing the two words above used interchangeably, or more accurately, a project being referred to as a startup. Am I out of touch, or is this correct terminology? I've always loosely characterized a startup as being a company (pre- or post-documentation), intent on producing a product(s), full- or part-time, with an exit strategy. On the other hand, something done for fun that might make a few dollars on the side (with the potential of turning into a startup) would be considered a project. The reason I ask- when I hear someone say "I'm on my 8th startup," one of three things goes through my mind: "Wow, you've been at this for 40+ years," "In 4 years? I wonder if this is really your cup of tea," or "I don't think you're using that term correctly." Yay or nay?
As requested: downvoted for complaining about downvoting.
Syntax Highlighting:
vbnet.vim
svndiff
vim-rails
vim-haml

Other:
taglist
Nerdtree
matchit
zoomwin
dbtext
sorry, cannot make it this time. have fun!
I voted up, but I'm going to breach HN brevity protocol to comment that that Gladwell article is really, really worth reading. E.g.

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that "knowledge workers" use the physical space of the desktop to hold "ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use." The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to "recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay" when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.
It's not that CLEAR to me. Native apps are popular on iPhone because Apple promotes App Store heavily. App Store is on every iPhone screen, in every iTunes copy.

From technological perspective superiority of Cocoa it's not that clear either. In my "native" application I've used WebKit views in many places, because it was easier for me to create complex layouts in CSS rather than Cocoa views.
I've yet to find a decent free offering, so I just use a spreadsheet in google docs.
I did the following two times. They were the only times I tried and I was successful in both cases:

-I researched how much I should be getting and brought that data to the meeting with my boss. It's usually a little tricky because most data is one-dimensional (e.g. salary per years of experience) but it also opens up more ways to interpret it to your benefit. I insisted on comparing to the market and not to my co-workers.

-I always highlighted what the company or my boss was getting with my work. Never what I needed for myself. Also think about how much it would cost them to replace you.

-I highlighted how my work was changing and how that change should be reflected in my salary (e.g. more responsibility).

-I was open to creative solutions, such as getting half of the raise now, half of it a year later.

-I was prepared to leave if he had strictly refused without good reasons (e.g. a strict company-wide freeze on raises).

The last time I did this, the raise was 33%.
> "you aren't escaping properly ... re-eval"

eval(eval(escape(string))) ?
This really creeps me out you know. Money has a first person ontology. Paper, metal, gold or bits are money because we believe its money. But if the reported numbers for the bank’s exposure were regularly billions of dollars adrift of reality then now can I believe that what I have is not going to disappear in a glitch or is created because of a glitch.

Disclaimer:I am not an economist nor do I earn anything right now. So if this is an uneducated or miss educated comment please fill free to give references.
Programatically uploading to blobstore in python
It's because we don't have that much hardware.

But you can try to get it running on your own. If you pull my current 'chat' stackvm branch [1], it's the one we used in the 2nd demo. You'd need qemu, node.js and a few node.js libraries.

[1] http://github.com/pkrumins/stackvm/commit/162bca6eba35db815f...
Isn't this what record and bookclubs were? (are? I haven't seen hide nor hair of one of those in a long time)
I don't know why you are being downvoted so I upped you.

Off-Topic

There is a bad tendency that people just downvote when they hear something they don't like or disagree with. I hope this will pass, this is not reddit!
Not at all! The reason we haven't rolled out our demo yet is because hosting virtual machines takes a lot of server power to do. All of our code is up on github, so anybody can give it a spin for themselves, provided they can get it all running.

http://github.com/substack/stackvm

http://github.com/pkrumins/stackvm
The relationship between kids, TV and crime?
In Galicia (just north of Portugal) we produce a great deal of Spanish electricity, from both renewable and carbon fossil resources. We bear landscape degradation, health issues, and unreasonable risks (we have a gas unloading plant too close to a city). Yet most energy companies pay their taxes in Madrid.

To add insult to injury, electricity service here has bad coverage and is unreliable in small towns (of which there are many over here; Galicia has about 8% of Spanish population, but over 50% of municipalities). I see wind turbines everywhere I look in the mountains around, but I'll have blackouts in winter if there is --ironically enough-- too much wind. I can see how those folks at Alto Minho and Alentejo feel about their environment being raped to provide electricity to Lisbon without getting any much compensation. We could use a lot more consideration for externalities.

There is a mountain range at the north of Madrid, but you won't see wind turbines there because they'd spoil their landscape. It's better to spoil much more valuable landscapes and ecosystems a few hundred miles northwest, then dissipate a significant share of that energy in transport.
Parole Board wants to forecast who will kill again
Windows Media DRM uses ECC.
Hilarious timing by Yonhap (S. Korea's public news agency) --- they reported this morning, just as the raid was about to begin: "Google ranked #1 as foreign company people want to work for" (in Korean):
http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/economy/2010/08/10/0302000000AKR...

"According to the results of job portal JobsKorea's research on 814 university students on August 10, the foreign-invested company most desired to work for was Google, in first place with 23.1% of respondents. Afterwards were 9.0% for Yuhan Kimberly (a Kimberly-Clark JV), 5.3% for Citibank, 4.8% for IBM, and 3.2% for Sony."

As for this incident ... well, Internet privacy in Korea was always a crapshoot anyway, seeing as you have to send your citizen's id and real name to sign up for social networking sites, random forums, online shopping and games, or to verify your age so you can search for "breast cancer" or "genital warts" on Naver.

Not to minimise the very real concerns over what the hell Google is doing, but this raid smells of some ambitious young public prosecutors who want to make a name for themselves by taking on a big foreign company (and ignoring all the domestic companies whom I highly doubt have been entirely on the up-and-up about what they do with their 100% personally identifiable data about the members of their own sites). Incidentally, remember that last year, Google explicitly chose to disable Youtube comments and uploads from Korea rather than comply with the real name registration requirements ...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/162989/google_disables_upload...
Gladwell says that people who have mastery all put in at least 10,000 hours to get there, not that everyone who spends 10,000 will be a master.
One of my advisors liked to bring up this quote:

The first time a teacher teaches something, the teacher learns. The second time a teacher teaches something, the students learn. After that nobody learns!
Coming up with a fine Research Paper Topic
Selection of the research topic must be done carefully because the quality of the research depends much on the topic. It should suit the competence and the interests of the student. This short article shows you how you can select an interesting topic.
Here in England:

Public sector workers earn 7% more on average than their peers in the private sector, a pay gulf that has more than doubled since the recession began.

Official figures show that staff employed by the state are enjoying bigger pay rises, working fewer hours and receiving pensions worth up to three times as much as those in the private sector.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sect...

An important factor is, if the public sector faces a cash shortfall, it can just jack up my taxes. If I am short of cash, I don't have the option not to pay my tax...