skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What effect would a Faraday cage have in this situation?
I think it is just wrong to assume that social security exists because people are so good in their hearts and like being taken advantage of. Probably many (the majority) thinks so, but in reality, it is simply a form of insurance. Also, I pay up to keep the beggars and robbers off the street. That is a purely selfish reason - I think solid political systems should be based on selfishness.
Wanted: Cars that Use Collective Intelligence to Improve Driving
How is Australia not an island? It's way bigger than Greenland.
Worst prediction - ever
Rails Database Default & Alternatives
Reminds me of how some people review music. They start to focus on some things which were minor decisions by the recording artists, requiring no special talent (the reviewers themselves think they could have done better), like say the sequencing of songs on a CD, and then attach the same importance they would afford the quality of songs themselves. It's sort of like they devise a number of criteria and then naively give each category equal weighting. Videogames reviews are also bad for this.
You are either wired for functional programming, or you're not
Reliance on the finance sector existed before 2008, how that contradicts what I say?
No, but I often wonder how a thinly veiled personal attack gets multiple upvotes.
No truer words have been said.

Buying software if you are not a coder, makes you very dependent on trust and thus makes your hiring decision very important.

I always start with some simple project.

Barry Rickert
http://www.studiobuzz.biz
http://www.thecreativebuyer.com
Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible
I don't like that landing page either. I put it up because people who sell online advised me to and I thought it was worth a test. I'll change it up when I get a chance.

As for charging, check out the looks on the faces of my interviewees who sell instead of giving their stuff away. When I ask them why they charge (even when I ask in an intentionally provocative manner), there's a look of peace on their faces.

The founder of Line2 was on yesterday. His iOS-based phone service has a monthly fee, even though a few phone apps are free. Charging gives him revenues to invest & improve his product + it lets him sleep better at night + it eliminates the freeloaders who take up time and cost a lot to service.

Finally, you know how the guys who switched from blogging to email say that it gives them a more intimate relationship with their audience? Charging multiplies that by 100.

Try it. Seriously.
Yes, but telling people that you don't have it is another matter all together. It's quite okay to show off your defenses, but it's a completely different ball game when it comes to showing off your weaknesses.
I absolutely agree with (1). In fact - now that I think of it - it's probably why products like SuperDuper still sell well after Apple introduced Time Machine.

And that perhaps suggests a corollary: 3. Build something that the other company will never build (even if they could).

E.g: Apple will never make blogging software/a powerful, dedicated feed reader. It's not in their DNA to do such things.
Hey rlpb,

Sorry, I tried to reply to your post about 4 times yesterday, and it never went through for some reason. I agree with what you're saying about self-signed certs being not necessarily broken. Maybe I mis-read your original message, but what I was objecting to was the idea that a site that apparently has the same content available over http and [broken] https is not a problem; I'm saying that broken is broken regardless of the content it's protecting. As to what constitutes "broken" ... I think we agree - that would be SSL. :P
Not really - if over 40 people thought it was truly irrelevant, it would be flagged to death.
Don't tell me I'm going to have to RTFA?
Gregg Pollack: Lessons learned building Envy Labs into a successful consultancy
This is not a gremlin – it is the world's smallest monkey
What the hell is Wave for? I'm a reasonably technical person, I can build crappy webapp servers from scratch(none that I've published, like I said, crappy) and even webapps on decent app servers and I STILL had no idea of what wave was for.

As a side note, I did have a dream a few months ago where I realised Wave could be used to add a huge number of really usefull features to my site, wrote it down after. At the time it seemed really profound but now I'm not so sure.
California Judge Reverses Prop 9: Discovers New Right
"I think solid political systems should be based on selfishness."

This can't work, because there's no end in selfishness. If you're more selfish
than others, than you will have an advantage, as long the others are a bit
less selfish.

At the end selfishness harms itself.
Ask HN: Studyinamerica.com
Hello everyone,

Since I received such valuable feedback from my first post, I wanted to try again. I am trying to put together a report on studyinamerica.com

It's owner is a great advisor, and he is very new to the web business. He is trying hard but he doesn't have a technical co-founder who can help him with the website.

So, I offered him my help(for free). I told him I would put together a report on how it could be changed for the better. Even though I am a new graduate and I don't have much experience yet, I am doing my best, but I can really use a fresh pair of eyes.

I would appreciate it if you can share your initial reaction, and general thoughts.

Thank you!

note: If you are interested in contacting the owner of the website, please PM and I will gladly help.
In a Video Game, Tackling the Complexities of Protein Folding
In Freiburg, you can only take them along in trains, not buses or tramways, and it costs an unreduced adult ticket most of the time on most of the lines. You can't even buy your bike its own monthly pass. So while the city itself is bike-friendly, its public transportation is at most bike-tolerant.
Furthermore, as far as I understood, it would be impossible to change the Linux kernel license today because of the large number of people involved (also because some authors are dead now).

Relicensing linux is not an option, whether you believe GPL is good or not.

There are solutions to this, but you have to act in advance: for example if you want to contribute code to the clojure open source project, you have to sign and send by snail mail a contributor agreement (http://clojure.org/space/showimage/ca.pdf) which regulates the ability of the project funder some freedom in relicensing.

btw, this formality, especially the printing and snail mail thing, actually stopped me from contributing my code to clojure-contrib. You know, I just wanted to quickly share a bugfix, I don't know in advance how much involvement I will have with something which starts only as a side effect of my job

furthermore since I made the contribution during my daily job, my company itself would have to sign that contract etc etc, licensing some stuff with GPL is one thing, granting unrestricted sublicensing right is a different issue ...
In the english speaking world we refer to Australia as a continent, but I just saw a kid's encyclopedia from France which refers to Australia as an island.

There oughtta be 7 continents; without Aust there'd only be 6 :(
A long time ago I read an interview with Charlton Heston. He said during the filming of Planet of the Apes, the costumes took so long to put on and take off that they left them on during lunch. One day he looked around and realized: all the humans were sitting together, all the gorillas were sitting together, all the orangutans...
5 Journalists (Who Gave Everything for the Story)
Here are five people who paid the ultimate sacrifice for reporting the truth.
Apple Criticism
Google Maps. http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=14.0090...
...Because you're weak

Because you can't stand the pain.

Because you would like to end up with 10% of the company after working 14 hour days.

Because you need someone to complain to after every setback.

Because you don't have the money or patience.

Because you don't know how to hire the right employees.

Because you're not an entrepreneur.
perhaps because it has it's own tectonic plate and thus is no longer just an island?
I certainly can't disagree with the factual points you make. And it is my dear hope that people who have done various improper things are dealt with someday in a swift and stern manner. The management of U.S. foreign policy over the last decade or so has been piss poor and has done quite a bit of harm on a great many fronts.

I believe that Governments should play by the rules, and that there are even pretty solid rules governing actions in places like Afghanistan that have not been well followed. I also agree that Governments have not been playing by the rules post 9-11 and would like to see that change.

But there's a high degree of speculative cloak and dagger fantasizing going on around here (often called conspiracy theories) by people here who are probably too young to remember Iran-Contra yet think they have a keen understanding of the complete capabilities and limitations of the ability of NATO nations to conduct a war and apparently have decades worth of foreign policy experience. The amount of absolute nonsense spewed out here regarding expectations of everything from intelligence capabilities to the ability of us to negotiate with loosely non-aligned states with no government to the ability of a military operation to contain collateral damage is not just unrealistic, I've seen statements here that are beyond absurd.

There seems to be a body of people here that think that not only is absolutely perfect security possible (in the sense of the ability of an intelligence apparatus to contain secrets), but that NATO possesses magic super weapons that can not only automatically determine who terrorists are in a civilian population, but can strike them down with pinpoint accuracy in a crowd of people without mussing the hair up of the guy sitting next to the target drinking his chai while teleporting out the tea-house owner and his family who let us know that some Taliban asshole was sitting in his store plotting to rape, murder and intimidate the local townspeople into following some misguided plan to install a global Caliphate. And that all this can be done in a half-hour time block with commercials.

And then, based on this fantastical narrative, when these absurd expectations aren't met, think that it's a massive failure on the part of NATO and that they should just throw in the towel and let Afghanistan fall back into governance under the Taliban because obviously the whole thing has been a big failure. Clearly the "good guys" have chosen not to use their super weapons and teleporters to secure the battlefield and there must be some vast conspiracy why that is.

I'm sorry, but I simply can't entertain this kind of moronic nonsense.
Early History of HTML - 1990 to 1992
Why do you think so many apple article makes it to the front page? What do they get out of it?
what's the point of trying to "control" digg? Does it really make a difference for anybody? Did they call themselves the Digglluminati?
I'm not sure how anything that you've just said has any relationship to what we're talking about. If you like I suppose we could have a sidebar communication on the influence of Buddhism in Afghanistan pre-Taliban and on the influence of the Greeks before that.
What sucks about facebook? That I can't stay away from it and I waste at least an hour or two everyday on it. Someone should ban facebook. I'm not even kidding
But the article states at the bottom that "the USA fairs very poorly when compared to European countries".

And the Guardian showed the USA does worse than most OECD economies:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst...
Gaming digg? It's a game, they've got time for distractions. Digg is like a sandbox, it doesn't matter much, you can't get punched over the internet yet.

Parking spaces? Because they want to park and people can be intimidated by violence into giving up a preferential space.
Ballmer may never get it.
409600% if compounded!
One of the great things about riding your bike into downtown (or into town) is that parking for bikes is easier to find and closer to your destination than that for cars. For years, the only way I'd go to the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin was by bike.
I'm still convinced if Google Wave could send to email it would not be dead (dying) today

I’m absolutely convinced (as one who wanted to early adopt wave) that something as simple as allowing it to send and receive email would have saved google wave. And could do so even today.

If I could send and receive email with it, I would have switched to it completely from email and then slowly begun to wave with people as they too made the switch. It was never a viable option for communication because it was ANOTHER form of communication that could not mix with the old.

Today, if Google Wave allowed sending to and receiving from email accounts I could make the switch.

Google’s biggest (not only) mistake with the best piece of communication technology in years, was this. And it can still be remedied.
So given that it was an obvious problem 3-4 years ago, do you think it might be possible that Digg, Inc. might have recognized the problem and done something about it?

And that this whole right-wing conspiracy might amount to a bunch of people pumping up their egos while basically spinning their wheels?

Just sayin'...
The documentary, Helvetica, is worth watching to see various typeface designers' love/hate for the severity of the minimalism implicated by Bauhaus.
Oh I see, you are asserting that services aren't "real" economic activity. That's not actually true. It is true that the financial services sector accounts for a higher proportion of our economy than it does in other EU countries (still less than 10%). But it's also true that it is far more diverse than just subprime mortgages, and also true that most of its revenues are earned overseas.
Questions and Answers on the iPhone jailbreakme vulnerability
The problem is that you're talking to customers, not the general public, not the children. Of course your clients are going to love your product. That's why they're buying it. It doesn't mean they're right, however.

The other problem is that social acceptance (i.e. your anecdotes about your clients) != social acceptability. Society can agree on some really terrible things to do to people, as history can attest.

Another problem is the fact that you're potentially dealing with minors here who are being coerced (through being given an iPhone) into using this system. Even if it's by their parents, this raises serious alarms, since it's a severe power imbalance against kids who can't necessarily think through the consequences of accepting it in a rational manner like adults can (or should be able to).

The other other problems are related to the information the app generates, the potential misuse of that information, and what other commenters before have said about phones being mislaid, hijacked, etc.

Did you actually talk to kids at all? Or just their parents? If not, why not? They're as big a stakeholder, if not bigger, than the parents involved!

I'm not trying to say you're not a great company or good people. I'm just trying to point out some of the serious ethical issues with the product you've put out.
I like the headline idea, but still wonder when you say:

: If 9/11 happened in 2010, how much different would it have been? It took forever to know what was going on as the channels of TV and Radio weren’t fast enough. The web wasn’t ubiquitous and the ability to publish as fast as today was not there

I was watching it on TV and hanging around on the Ars Technica forum, but I can't really imagine my life would have been much different if I hadn't heard about it for a month.

Similarly, location based services - there seems a huge limit to what kinds of software could be much improved by being location aware.

Is this me being unimaginative or are you just picking interesting sounding things and saying they must be futurestack components because they exist?
Not all users can flag, and flagging is more to deal with spam and trolling. (The guidelines mention offtopic posts as well, but community consensus is that flagging is not downvoting.)
It looks to me like something I would go to Reddit to find. It is interesting and I would upvote it on Reddit, but it is certainly not what I would expect at the top of HN.
The United States is a nationwide experiment in designing car-friendly infrastructure, and it's a complete disaster. No matter how many lanes the freeways have they're still stop-and-go at rush hour.
http://www.thelocal.de/society/20090630-20291.html

http://bikeportland.org/2006/07/28/judge-finds-fault-with-fi...

Indeed, mounting at least one brake seems to satisfy that particular judge.

http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/10251/Riding_Cool_fi...

So, yes, again, you can mount 'a brake' and be legal in some places but not everywhere, the whole thrill here seems to come from not having all that 'stuff' on the bike.

If you've ever done any serious bicycling then you realise that the fixed wheel bike has no other place than the track.

In traffic you'd have to be an artist to safely ride one and the problem with them being in traffic is not just that you'd have to be an artist but also that circumstances can determine what is safe and what is not.

Brakes are used for normal reduction in speed, in such cases a fixed gear will do, after all, all you're doing is removing energy from the 'system' (bike + rider) in the same way you put it in, through your leg muscles.

But brakes have a second function as well, which is to react to traffic conditions, things outside of your control. And you may find that you need to remove energy from the 'system' a lot quicker than you originally put it in.

For a bike with a fixed gear (one without a freewheel) this will mandate you to continue to make pedalling motions while you are using that other brake. If the reason why you need to brake stops you from doing that you are now in deep trouble because you will find two nice sized hammers roughly where your pedals used to be that are pounding the crap out of your legs, which can easily cause you to completely lose control of your bike. If you happen to be unbalanced a pedal can strike the road with incredible force and if your foot happens to be between the pedal and the road that's really bad.

So, where-ever the legislation hasn't caught up yet with fixed gear bikes being outlawed because of the 'trend' will sooner or later do so because they're simply not as safe as bikes that have freewheels.

It's a pity for the few people that started this trend and that know their stuff and are only endangering themselves, but now that the masses are flooding in and are copying the couriers legislation seems to be the answer taken by the authorities.

In the Netherlands, bicycle country #2 after China I believe they've been illegal since 1950 or so.
Generally good advice - although I would say that there are things that haven't been built today that could have been built yesterday and that could be the building blocks of tomorrow. Facebook and YouTube are two examples that weren't built using state of the art technology, that could have been built a few years earlier. I think their success was in their execution not the conception of the ideas as they weren't actually original ideas but well polished ones.
Using this logic, Eurasia could be considered an island as well. You have to draw the line somewhere. They're all empiric definitions anyway.
As a Canadian, I wish I could say we're as far ahead as this dated article allures to.

As it stands today, we have telecommunication (mobile, land, data) rates and deployment equivalent to third-world countries.
I think you've said something like that here before, Jon.

I have too much respect for your work to blow off your comments.

I'll just accept that not everyone will like what I do, and give you my email address in case you ever want to elaborate: mail at awarner dot com
Well a few things:

* The tragedy would have been the same. By no means (and i don't think you are implying that I am either) saying tech today would have prevented it.
* The zero delay of information flow would have made things a lot less hectic for everyone. At the time the towers fell there was a massive panic of finding where everyone was and if they were okay. I could imagine a popular hashtag emerging such as: #imokay . It wasn't possible to broadcast to all of your friends in a matter of seconds if you were okay in 2001.

*I think we've scratched the surface of how locational context can improve most things. If we can organize and provide context to information in the real world, the same way we have to the digital world, that will be big.
Lately it seems that every article I read about web technology is about scaling techniques. This stuff is fun to hack on but I have to agree that it's very unlikely that it should be the focus of any small company. I spoke recently with an engineer from a small but profitable and highly visible specialized e-commerce site. He runs their site quite comfortably and inexpensively on two machines.
Sorry for not being clear enough.

No, services are indeed an economic activity. Just that I don't see service reliant economies as sustainable in the long term. They are all in debt, and always were working into debt, unlike traditional industrial societies, which have better track record. And along those lines, it is unfair to complain about high degree of welfare dependency: not everyone can work in the City, and there's only so much pipework to be fixed for plumbers.
" Also, I pay up to keep the beggars and robbers off the street."

More social programs just create a lower class that has a lifetime dependence on the government for money. It also doesn't seem to lower the crime rate. Detroit is a good example of this. There were more social programs and money pumped into that city than any other, yet the murder rate is #2 in the US.
Which, perhaps surprisingly, are still alive and well to this day:

http://www.mudconnect.com/

Incidentally I was an advertising major until I found MUDs in 93 and practically failed out of the program. I switched to CS so I could learn to make my own, and here we are 17 years later...
Don't forget Vint Cerf!
If you have previous experience with Lisp . Then probably yes. The book seems to assume familiarity with clojure already .
For those who are interested in size comparisons, here's an interesting projection of the globe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion_map_unfolded.png
I once worked for a start-up that had a grand vision of lightweight real-time messaging. This was 1996, and we were going to broadcast in real time, to zillions of clients, the events of the Summer Olympics. We had "push" stuff that worked really well, we had permission from IBM to do periodic scrapes of their event database, and we came up with a scaling system for handling feeds to massive numbers of clients. This was going to be a fantastic demo for potential customers. The publicity was going to be great.

We got everything ready, rented some co-lo space, got a bunch of servers set up (I think each miserable little Pentium 90 server could handle tens of thousands of clients), and . . . our top was maybe a couple dozen concurrent users. We could have run the thing out of our offices on our worst sales person's crummiest laptop. While that sales guy played Quake.

[Later, our /best/ sales guy had a patter that went like: "Well, we did this real-time monitoring app for the Olympics, and it scaled to ten, twenty thousand clients on a machine. You know how many we got? THIRTY."

Start-up was eventually bought, and then transitively bought, and I wound up with some shares of Oracle (spit).]