skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rating boards aren't exactly impartial and scientific, as the "hot coffee" GTA incident showed. It would take exactly one report on Fox News about how young kids can be exposed to nude pictures while playing "SexCraft" to get Blizzard in trouble.
Sorry, that sentence was wrong. I corrected it. The list is not a list of missing things. It is a list of things I want in my ideal editor.

And to copy and paste: yy and P are not what someone would expect when starting a text editor. Shift+Cursor to select text, Cmd+c/Cmd+p to copy/paste, Cmd/z to undo. Those are the system defaults on my Mac and my editor should use the same keyboard shortcuts.
Why Windows 7 Tablets Won't Kill iPad
We don't know details about the sexual harassment case and I wouldn't judge based on that, but that's not really what it was about. He admits to funneling company money to a close friend's consulting company… I think it's normal to lose respect for the guy.
No probability distribution has been defined for the amount inside an individual envelope

I don't understand this assertion. It seems to me that both envelopes have the trivial distribution:

P(x=A) = 1/2, P(x=2A) = 1/2, P(x) = 0 for all other x.

and that this is clear from the phrasing of the question. Extracting this distribution from the text is no different than solving any other problem not stated in rigorous mathematical terms. With this distribution, with A properly defined (see the next point) upfront, the whole paradox disappears.

--

Nothing is wrong in the math [..]

I think the statement in the article that

4. If A is the smaller amount the other envelope contains 2A.

5. If A is the larger amount the other envelope contains A/2.

is wrong, because it tries to define A twice with different concrete values and goes on to treat them as the same value. If your point is that saying 'A is the quantity in the envelop you just chose' makes A ill defined, then I guess you are right, but that doesn't mean that A cannot be defined properly and it doesn't mean the intended problem can't be solved.
Any way this could be done using vlc? I am trying to watch it on vlc but cannot forward it.
It sounds interesting but I wonder about the focus only on Iran, while other countries notoriously suffer from censorship too. (China, North Korea…)

Also, from the FAQ:

7. Is Haystack Open Source Software?

No. Although we sincerely wish we could release Haystack under a free software license, revealing the source code at this time would only aide the authorities in blocking Haystack. In the future, however, we would like to find a way to reconcile our Free Software ideals with the necessity of frustrating the efforts of those who would block Haystack.

They sound sincere and it seems that they've really thought about that aspect but it seems to me that by being closed-source, users have to trust that their intentions are good (looks like it's the case, but who knows?), but also that they know what they're doing and that connections are indeed undetectable.

I'm not saying that's not the case, but I feel like the target users are exactly the ones who can't be as willy-nilly as many are with Facebook for example.
> For better or worse, there's nothing like working at Microsoft ... I would never work there

Dude, those 2 sentences contradict each other ... you either worked there and know what you're talking about, or not.
PayPal is just poison for your business. They do stuff like this with such regularity that it's nearly impossible to run a business on their payment system.

Any minor change you make exposes you to their review process, which often means they'll simply shut down your account while you jump through their hoops. In the meantime you can't pay your bills or collect payments or otherwise use your account the way you've been using it for years.

They're coming out with some truly interesting services that I would love to use, but frankly I can't afford to expose my business to the risk associated with their review process.
* Sorry, that sentence was wrong. I corrected it. The list is not a list of missing things. It is a list of things I want in my ideal editor.

Oh. OK.

* And to copy and paste: yy and P are not what someone would expect when starting a text editor. Shift+Cursor to select text, Cmd+c/Cmd+p to copy/paste, Cmd/z to undo. Those are the system defaults on my Mac and my editor should use the same keyboard shortcuts.

Hmm. Well, I'm not really trying to defend vim - I have no stake in it - but the key sequences you describe are not what I would expect as defaults. Not least, I don't think anyone who comes to vim for the first time would expect h, j, k, and l for movement, or their upper-case friends, or key sequences like e, b, etc.

The key on vim are different. If you want to set up defaults to match what you've used in the past, and what you think people will expect, then you can.

I personally find the key sequences you describe for cutting and pasting enormously slower in bulk that the ones I use in vim. They are what people have become accustomed to in other editors, but that doesn't mean they're faster or more efficient.

There is a trade-off. We actively prevent people from overly customising their editors because we have less time hacking out code than we have collaborating. We lose in straight efficiency of writing code, but we gain in being able to sit at any console and work immediately.

Recognising that there's a trade-off is most of the battle. Deciding where to draw the line isn't easy, but is the minor part once you know there's a line to draw.

And vim isn't really a "text editor". "Word" is a text editor. "vim" is a tool for producing code. Its interface is occasionally user-hostile and is completely undiscoverable. If you want something "more standard" and "more discoverable" then it's not vim.

On that we no doubt agree.
There seems to be a consensus on HN that it's very important for startup founders to live in the same location. Face-to-face time is considered so important that VCs say they will not even consider investing in distributed startups. The same theme is strong when describing the hassles with outsourcing.

Yet a lot of people completely ignore this for education. Suddenly there is no value in spending time with classmates/teachers. It's all very strange to me.
I don't believe that he's stealing. He has legal access to the card, he's just being dishonest.
You could satisfy his objections by saying:

Use only the x.x version of python, only these (x) approved libraries are allowed, and you must publish any data you use.

True, he is only pointing out that the SEC requirement has a flaw, but it seems easily fixable to me.
Visualizing failure, day 2
I've been doing this long enough that its is easier,
clearer, and faster for me to understand

However, are you also the only one reading the code? If not: is it also easier, clearer and faster to understand for the other ones? On the one hand, they may learn fast when reading code that uses these constructions. On the other hand: perhaps it only sinks in over time and they won't learn fast enough to properly maintain such code.
I gather from the FAQ that this software consists of a client and servers (both closed-source). The servers are operated by the Haystack people in safe countries. The client appears like an HTTP proxy to the user's web browser, but then it encrypts the user's web traffic and hides it among innocuous traffic, some or all of which goes to the Haystack servers.

I still don't get how the client traffic is supposed to look unconspicuous while still most of it goes to Haystack servers. Do they pad their client-server traffic with ten times as much Google searches for cute kitty pictures? If not, what keeps the suppressive government from installing their own Haystack client on a spare computer and blacklisting every server the client connects to as an illegal proxy?
Wow.

If any of the guys who designed it are around; if it's possible can you please explain how it works?

Do you have a plastic sphere with 2 racks inscribed on it inside with a central assembly that has the motors and shifts the COG? Or is it something more beautiful than that?
Probably has to do with the background of the board of the organization making the software: http://www.censorshipresearch.org/board/
I just hope they don't get interpreted as offering "business information services": http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2080-haystack-is-now-sortfoli...
Myth About Online Appointment Booking – Does it generate new clients?
Looks like the $425 million figure was wrong (probably due to it being a sweep account as mentioned in the previous thread). How could such a basic mistake be made? According to this article, the business had $50 million in revenue the past 10 years, with $21 million in postage costs alone.
[Album] Kesha - Kesha (2010)
Alleged RBS worldpay hacker extradited from Estonia to US
Didn't they have to refund the money because they haven't shipped the product yet and Paypal has a time limit on transactions like that... I don't really think its Paypal's fault that they took payment for something 9+ months ago and the members still haven't received it.

I'm a bit user of Paypal, it allows me to sell easily to almost anyone in the world, I'd argue that Paypal makes it easy for anyone to get started with a webapp be it for payments, donations, subscriptions.

Sure they have there issues but I've always being able to get them on the phone and sort it out.
Also, the JED editor has an extension language of that name. It was my editor of choice during the late 90s, and I also used Slang as a scripting language in my youthful attempts at adventure games.

http://www.jedsoft.org/jed/
I really enjoyed reading and re-reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach". Looking at the course/lecture page at MIT, I especially liked the following part :

Grading
There are no grades for this course.

You can't grade such knowledge. This is so universal...
> According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses

As much as I hate Russia^, this is total BS. I can speak of Moscow, S.Petersburg, Perm, Ryazan. It could be anywhere between 0-60%, but 70-100% simply does not match reality.

^ - I'm allowed to, I live here.
Ask HN: How to find like-minded people?
I've been a solo programmer since I started programming, and I don't usually get much feedback on my ideas or projects because I just don't know enough people who do what I do. My question is, how can I find people who are interested in these things and are willing to listen?

For example, I'm working on an experimental Ruby framework at the moment (http://github.com/Twisol/dishes) , but the programmers I do know (who don't use Ruby, sadly) aren't very knowledgeable in that area, and it's always a pretty one-sided conversation. I'm not part of any Ruby or web-dev social circles and I wouldn't even know where to begin. It feels like I'm working in a bubble.

Any advice? I feel a little incompetent for having to ask this question at all, heh. ^_^;
Wow, thanks for that, what a great read. Definitely considered the finest HN thread I've seen. Maybe if we get enough of these, we can have a top 10 list..

My favs:

mrcharles' reply to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387339

w1ntermute's call for patio11:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1574895
I'm leaning towards the possibility that the whole article is computer-generated. It feels like Shurdlu (landmark AI project).
I honestly wasn't expecting this announcement for a long time. Many people had requested this functionality, including additions to the base S3 APIs, and I knew that the easy solution was to extend only CloudFront functionality without breaking the S3 API's backward compatibility. I spent some shower-time recently trying to think of workarounds for future clients. :)

My guess had been that Amazon was stalling to prevent a flood of low-volume AWS accounts simply to host dirt cheap static websites.

Now, if your website doesn't require server side scripting, you can literally go from paying a few bucks a month for cheap hosting to spending only pennies using Amazon S3 and CloudFront to host your entire site - reliably and quickly. I'm not familiar with other cloud file providers, so if this was possible before Amazon's latest announcement, I'd love to know.
According to Mr. Gates the best University level education will come from the web in five years. But K-12 still has to suck.
The system ain't great, but it doesn't excuse the lobbyists.
No, it feels real to me. I think the writer is not a native speaker of American or British English, and much can be forgiven. I just think the author needs to decide what his point is, and tell and entertaining story while getting there.

This feels like it was written without editing.
What on earth are you on about? He said they did not save during boom times, so it is a human mistake, not some collapse of empire ( I didn't know America is an empire btw, I thought it was a country.)
University and high school is a way to employ people who study and obey rules. If you dry this fountain and this job get outsourced, less people will get incentives to study. A society without universities would be a very disrupted society. Power is university supported.
This is probably the key point:

Also, Jason Zander runs the Visual Studio team, which IronRuby, IronPython, and the DLR happen to be a part of, and is a big proponent of these dynamic languages efforts

Sounds like they are collateral damage of senior management turf wars. This can happen at any company.

How do you think the Pink or Copland guys felt at Apple when their project was canned? Or the Google team who worked on Wave or Orkut...?
To be followed up by "Why dogs won't run over cars"
Haystack hides traffic to any from the internet at large inside traffic that looks like perfectly normal web connections to innocuous sites.

I don't get it. How is "hiding" this traffic amongst other innocuous traffic going to defeat, say, ngrep looking for connection to the haystack servers.

At some point you're going to have a tcp connection from client to haystack server...
The Death of Meta Tags
@RiderOfGiraffes The write-up is about a bottom-up approach in making organizational decisions. Most of the decisions as we know are made right at the top, with minimal understanding of what people on the ground are actually thinking about.

Once you start listening to your people and pick your organizational directions from there, the whole decision making process gets more efficient.

Keep the floor open for different kind of discussions. Keep looking at what discussions are catching heat (more people talking about it). Pick your directions from them. That was the intent.

Eg. Which technology is the most popular among our folks? What kind of clients are liked by our folks? What kind of work do our people prefer? etc. etc.
Just because others are worse does not mean we should follow their example.
This could easily be read that EY was acquired. Not many people quit their job and announce they're buying a house unless there is a liquidity event in their personal timeline.
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Bay Area loyal to Apple iPhone, Mac
The Delancey Street Foundation is an organization that has recuperated thousands of people who have hit rock bottom. And they do it without any government funding (they're self-supporting). One of the best examples of social entrepreneurship out there.

http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/

And if you're interested in the details of how the organization operates, I did some research and wrote about the organization on my blog:

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/mimi-silbert-the-greatest-hacker-...
You can still use many of these techniques if you're programming a dynamic language like Python and don't want to add the dependency of a C extension yet. I've unrolled loops, reordered assignments, etc., to good effect.
I would give a robot doctor to those that considered education as a simple fact. You should have time to consider that your "doctor" is not so nice as a real one.

So when your "robot doctor" is acceptable to you, then I should consider your consideration for education.
What about talking to other people implementing the same things ? Talk to the ramaze people and the padrino/sinatra people etc
Could be a start perhaps?
Even Emacs Lisp can implement them:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ThreadMacroFromClojure
By one man, do you mean started by one man or started and still run by one man?
IronRuby was never supposed to make c# obsolete
"misery"
Need of Car Headrests in Collision
The unconscious mind is a millenia old idea and psychiatric medicine is roughly as effective as having a chat with a random untrained person.

His work on curing heroin addiction was interesting, even took the remedy himself and found it really perked him up. Cocaine really is a wonder drug.
Indeed, they help you get off the ground in a hurry.

The big issue I have with PayPal is that they don't let you set up a new account for a new bank account. They tie everything you do to a single SSN or tax ID, so there is no way to separate one product from another.

As a result, if you put a new product live, they'll review it when it bills its first credit card. And often that means they'll freeze your account, thus killing all your businesses dead until you resolve it. Worse, if they decide to shut down your account, it's permanent. For you. As in, you as a human being can never set up another PayPal account. As in, you quickly need to reimplement payment for every one of your products. And figure out a new way to pay your overseas suppliers.

It's just not worth the risk.

It's a shame too, since they do make some cool stuff. If they let me set up a new account to try it out, I'd definitely do so.
Computer Science is closer to a branch of Math, it's relation to physical computers is a historical accident. I believe you are talking about a branch of Engineering. I followed more like this, but I had programming in the first semester - probably because we were supposed to be able to use the machines we were being trained to design... I'm not a computer scientist and I seldom think like one, but I am an engineer - and I think like one all the time.
? why the downvotes?
OK, just a couple of points and I have to go.

* Why didn't you write that?

* For these sorts of decisions, why not empower the employees to do things without requiring decision/dictats from on high?

* Most "chat" in forums like the ones you seem to be suggesting are a genuine, complete waste of time, and ...

* Most proposals from "the floor" have been really, really poorly thought through, and just won't work.

Now, let me say that I agree with what you're trying to accomplish, and that your comments/thoughts have some merit, but as they stand they seem poorly thought through and unimplementable in practice. I'd really like to see you have something more concrete and practical to suggest that solve the problem you think you've seen.

I manage a company with around 30 employees - not real big, but the sort of shop where your ideas might be relevant, especially to implement them before we get any bigger and change is harder. However:

* Which technology is the most popular among our folks?

We let them use whatever technology they want, provided they can then justify their decision. We empower our people to make decisions and stand by them.

* What kind of clients are liked by our folks?

We don't have a choice as to our clients. We have multi-million dollar contracts in a fairly small market.

* What kind of work do our people prefer?

I don't understand how that kind of question can be made relevant. Our database people work on database stuff, our embedded people work on the embedded stuff, our user experience people work on user experience stuff, and everyone talks to everyone else, because all of the software modules talk to all the other software modules. If a database programmer wants to work more on the embedded side then he studies up on his own, asks for some tasks, gets given some tasks under supervision, then his skill set is bigger and the task allocations can be more favorable to him.

In short, it sounds like you're sounding off without really thinking about how things really work. I'd like to see a better, more thought through presentation.

Finally, it might sound like I'm attacking you, or picking on you, but I am genuinely interested in any ideas on how better to manage. I'd hoped there was something interesting in your article, I feel like there's a hint of something interesting in your article, but then it all went away and feel like I was left with nothing.

If there's more, write it better.
Killa Appz
You denote with A two different things, and this is not correct. Suppose you have a bag with two animals a dog and a fox. You choice an animal A ten times, and then another animal A ten times, so you have 20 A. The question is: Do you have twenty dogs or twenty foxs?
The article is a bit too well written, if theres such a thing. I got about halfway without pausing.
Followup: http://scripting.com/stories/2010/08/07/visualizingFailureDa...
Can you explain why you say "it doesn't provide any security against malicious users"?
If the same number of women engaged in the same kind of risky activities as the men injured in this specific hospital, the lack of women could be explained by men being less competent in these risky activities. It would be as sexist as the above answer. Could also be that men are more fragile.
It makes sense to have Paypal as an option, but not to be the sole method of payment.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. I think many people will want to both tweet and having deep conversations online.
I don't see much of a drive for more firewomen, female dock workers or, BTW, more male kindergarten teachers. Let's close those gaps too...

Or we can face the fact we are different and cherish it.
Actually, your probability of choosing the right door is 2/3 if you switch. I agree though that this problem is not the same, it just reminded me of it -- I guess you could say it's a similar class of problems.
Zoom.it - new tool by Microsoft
My blog added as an example... but I can not find a real use for it... can you?
My blog added as an example... but I can not find a real use for it... do you have some ideas how to really use it?
PSD To HTML Service Provider – SEO-Semantic-XHTML.com 
Over the years, I have realized that two things are very important to be successful in this profession. First, the expertise which ensures your quality of work and second, the network you create or your contact base. These two factors help you in building a reputation in the industry and brand building is vital for anyone to succeed and excel.
I think he meant that IronRuby was supposed to replace C# in his company.
Here (Celeron 550, XP SP3, Chrome 5.0.375.125 beta) Chrome is on 100%, too. No problems with clipping though. Firefox 3.6.8 (on the same machine) was too slow for the real experience.

JS is a new Flash? Joking aside, it's impressive what you can do in 1k JS. And, let's hope all browsers will start to utilize the GPU as MS has demonstrated in the IE9 preview.
I think all he meant you don't have to invent something brand new, but you said you should take advantage of the new tools, technologies, social graphs, etc. that were not previously available. It sounds obvious, and maybe it is, but it's a good reminder and he put together a great list with great examples. Hat tip / thank you to Jason.
> what's wrong with women.

Nothing is wrong. There is no wrong. People are different. I like to say I was born an engineer, that's some neurological condition I can't escape. Is there something wrong with me? Of course not!