skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And who do you think pays these people to ddos sites like slideshare and posterous? (both of whom have been my customers during massive ddos's from China). I'm sure there's like one posting somewhere on Posterous that someone in the Chinese government didn't like, so they paid their team of script kiddies for time on their botnets to bully Posterous around. The same thing happened to Slideshare a few years ago.

It's about China bullying people around and trying to censor the internet.
Topics discussed in this article: 1. Building New Colonies

2. Why draconian laws hinder progress.

3. How Britain out-smarted China with Hong Kong

4. Who really controls Cuba
Ah, but like cake, threads are also a lie.
Not guaranteed-short messages, collected in a merged timeline, with interruption (via SMS delivery) as a common/easy option.

There is a dimension on which blogging and Twitter are similar. That's why they share a row in the table! But the added constraint, and the possibilities unleashed by that constraint, are a crucial part of Twitter's success.
I believe the Go language gets most of the effects of ducktyping in a statically typed language. The compiler is smart enough to figure out if an object adheres to a specific interface without having to explicitly tag that object as implementing the said interface.
So this basically means if you have a method which just calls 'read' on it's argument, you can define a 'read' interface and it will accept any existing type that responds to 'read'
I obviously don't know what's going behind the scenes, but I question the wisdom of ousting someone who makes such a mistake.

Constantly pushing the technology/design envelope as Apple does seems prone to the occasional snafu. Having engineers and managers on board that have personally experienced such problems and solved/triaged/otherwise dealt with them seems valuable. Firing them runs the risk of creating a chilling effect toward risk taking, as well as lobotomizing some valuable experience from the company.

Now, maybe the executive was let go because he knew about the antenna problem beforehand, misrepresented its severity to Jobs, and launched the product anyway, in which case, yeah let him go. I recall some speculation that Apple knew about the problem before hand.

But for honest mistakes, with no deception involved, that hurt in the short term but are solvable and no more than a blip in the long term, maybe that's not so wise.

Thoughts?
I've only written a few small programs in Haskell; one was a basic parser.

The pattern matching syntax made a lot of things trivial to express that would require switch statements or if/else chains in just about any other language, so I loved that. Actually, once I got used to the function definition syntax, I like that too and felt it was very concise.

I like the flexibility that strings are lists (arrays?) of characters, which was incredibly useful for implementing a parser. I'm sure that would come in handy in just about any project.

The type system...eh. I did a bit of fighting with it which apparently is normal for newbies, and I can see the advantage of having it during the compilation stage from a performance perspective. It just didn't grab me by the collar like the other features did.
The minimum wage makes it difficult to hire unskilled workers. If it didn't exist, there would be a lot less unemployment for young people just starting out.
Your social circle as determined by Google is currently a blank slate. – excellent.
It looks like you will be competing directly with Facebook.

That's Facebook. ;)

But okay.. if we assume that many people only have time and energy for one main social network, could you briefly tell me what your site offers that other networks don't (especially FB)?
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
I found that frustrating as well, so I wrote a browser extension (available in Safari and Chrome) that highlights new comments:

http://hckrnews.com/about.html
Probably nothing. The 'Worldwide Loyalty Team' was at best a hyper exaggerated version of reality, at worst a complete fiction used for page views by Gizmodo. Ask anyone who works at Apple...although perhaps they'll just deny it because they're worried about the Worldwide Loyalty Team ;)
Indeed, also, to play devil's advocate:

What if the renegades had been misguided, incompetent programmers who continued to come in to (inadvertently) insert bugs into an ongoing project? One begins to see the point of enforcing physical security policies.
ByDesign 2.5 Releases – Questions and Answers
There is something /very interesting/ there. I think organizations work in spite of themselves because people like this are sometimes willing to stand up and fight to do something good/cool outside of their own self-interest.

how do you inspire that? Was it just that apple had a large enough platform that it was worth it to continue developing it for the apple vs. releasing freeware/shareware/open source? was it that apple just hired the right people, people who valued releasing something cool to the world over months of their own time?

It's hard for me to understand just 'cause I'm too mercenary. In their case, I'd release the product freeware/open source/something and figure I'd benefit from the reputation boost. it wouldn't occur to me to push it through as a skunkworks project where it was likely I wouldn't get any credit /or/ money.
If the rest of your company cooperates with inserting bugs and shit software the way the rest of apple cooperated with these people, physical security is the least of your problems.
Your theory makes sense, but if this is true, he fucked up the iPhone and man, even if letting him stay would create a better executive, increase value to the entire company, etc., I just flat can't see Jobs letting him stay in any manner at all.
Two books I recommend

1) Head First Design Pattern

2) Effective Java (Joshua Bloch). The principles in this book can be applied to almost any programming language not just Java
I'm enjoying the comments about the lack of data in the linked article. As a tech person who works in the music industry, I've stopped reading most music business centric news as there always seems to be a lack of data driven analysis. So much of the music business is driven by a "vibe" or a "feeling" which can be great for deciding which artists to be in business with, but pretty terrible for most other important decisions.

Considering how many iPods the iTunes Music Store helped sell, I'm not sure it can be referred to as a failure. Perhaps it's a failure for the major music companies in terms of the revenue it drives for THEM (and I assume this is what Lefsetz is saying), but that wasn't the reason for creating the ITMS any more than the reason Apple launched the App Store was to drive revenue for App Developers.
Sorry to barrage you with self-links, but I felt the same thing recently and I've started working on an (open-source) tool for addressing exactly that: organizing my music collection correctly and painlessly (i.e., as automatically as possible).

It's called beets and the idea is this: just throw new albums at it; they get tagged correctly (from MusicBrainz), copied into a directory structure you specify, and catalogged in an sqlite database. Let me know what you think: http://beets.radbox.org/
So basically the fallacy is in counting gains only, without counting opportunity cost [of the switch].
meetup.com, Yahoo Upcoming, Linkedin, eventbrite
Thanks for the feedback.

Jamafriend is a social networking application that displays your location and your friends' location on the Google map with links to current weather, headline news and current events as long as valid locations were provided. To protect people's privacy, Jamafriend doesn't automatically geolocate your location. It's up to you if you want to provide your location and manually enter it on our system. Another thing is you can choose a design for your photo album and can change it anytime.
As a fan of oulipo, I totally agree the shortness constraint has powerful positive impacts on Twitter's adoption. It changes how writers write, how readers read, and how groups converse in various permutations.

The 'ONE:ONE'/'ONE:MANY' and 'LONG':'SHORT' dimensions are not the only ones in which Twitter colonizes a new part of the possibility space, just the easiest ones to label. (We may need new words to describe all the hybrids of communication styles enabled by Twitter.)
Is that true? My understanding is that classical economic theory predicts this, but empirical evidence has been very mixed.
By definition, someone who wants full-time work but is unable to find it is "underemployed". It's not really a value judgment about whether they deserve more employment or anything, just a statistical category tracking people who cannot find a full-time job (much like "unemployment" is a category tracking people who cannot find any job at all).
I'm currently playing it.

It's "Lego meets virtual reality."
When the Screen Goes Blank: The Good We Might do if We Turned Off Our Sets
I'm in the US and can only get 1 bar to drop. Overall the i4 signal is much much better than the 3GS though. AT&T uses 2 different frequencies from what I understand so I'm wondering if one is more impacted than the other?
If you follow a few links you'll end up here:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

This is the chapter on Analysis of Competing Hypotheses
in Richard Heuer's book Psychology of Intelligence Analysis.

"Analysis of competing hypotheses, sometimes abbreviated ACH, is a tool to aid judgment on important issues requiring careful weighing of alternative explanations or conclusions. It helps an analyst overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult to achieve.

ACH is an eight-step procedure grounded in basic insights from cognitive psychology, decision analysis, and the scientific method. It is a surprisingly effective, proven process that helps analysts avoid common analytic pitfalls. Because of its thoroughness, it is particularly appropriate for controversial issues when analysts want to leave an audit trail to show what they considered and how they arrived at their judgment."
+1. That's exactly how I view Twitter - as a modern version of "away messages." I remember looking forward to the always-on Internet connection in college dorms as a way to set long-lasting away messages so friends can see what I'm doing or some witty remark I thought of.
Minecraft is interesting in so many ways. Obviously there is the impressive sales and user numbers. And we have a solo-developer, Notch behind it all.

Then there is the impressive fostering (and support) of the community around the game. People really are passionate about this game, as demonstrated by the youtube videos and general fandom for it (I found out about it from a fan of the game).

For a game I'd say the technology choices are pretty unconventional. Java on the client and server side.

The game itself is part of a genre of crafting games, which seem to have a whole cult appeal in themselves. But it's a genre (or subgenre?) that is getting pretty mainstream. Games like Little Big Planet on the PS3 and the forthcoming Forge World mode in Halo Reach, show that people's desire to mod and create in games has not diminished at all.

And of course, Minecraft is a product of an open development platform. Whilst I love some of the closed platforms (consoles, iOS) for their slickness, I love the fact that stuff like this still comes from the PC world.
That was an excellent quote.

I also found this to be a great quote: "My skunkworks project was beginning to look real with help from these professionals as well as others in graphic design, documentation, programming, mathematics, and user interface. The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends."
key is "can you show me how good you are" if you can overcome that hurdle, yes. you are right, where you came from no longer matters.

However, this is different from just getting your first job. Lots of people under perform. Sure, if I'm hiring sysadmins, I have a pretty good idea who's good and who's not. But if I'm hiring outside my area? I can't tell a good physicist from a bad one. hell, I can evaluate basic C proficiency, and I can search for kernel patches, but if I was hiring a kernel dev, while I could probably filter off the completely unqualified, I wouldn't know the really good from the mediocre. In those cases your school still counts, especially during the early parts of your career. (in the later parts of your career, the prestige of previous companies you have worked for takes some of that.)

Generally, hiring outside of your area is a bad idea and best avoided, but it happens. Some of that is necessary. I mean, I /need/ an accountant for all the same reasons why I'd be bad at evaluating an accountant.

Now, even then, school isn't the be-all and end-all... I chose my accountant because she ran a free question-and-answer blog[1], and seemed to know what she was talking about, and as far as I can tell, I chose well.

Still, I think that if you are going to school for the 'accreditation' value of a diploma, a diploma from a top tier school is worth rather a lot more than a diploma from a place I have not heard of.

[1]http://www.biztaxtalk.com/
Link to the Gizmodo article about the Worldwide Loyalty Team http://gizmodo.com/5427058/apple-gestapo-how-apple-hunts-dow...
I realize her argument was not a cut-and-dry evo-psych narrative, but she came close, and this paragraph in particular felt suspect:

>For thousands of years, men look for beautiful and young-looking women to bear their children and women look for powerful men who can well protect themselves and their children. Such an instinct has been imprinted into our unconsciousness.
I wonder if, long term, DDOS attacks will be to net neutrality as spam was to nice-and-easy e-mail setups. Now ISPs are running spam blacklists, blocking entire other ISPs at times, and it's a nightmare to run your own SMTP server and deliver mail reliably without jumping through hoops. If DDOS attacks become more and more annoying, they could be used as an excuse to violate net neutrality.
[Single] Linkin Park - The Catalyst (2010)
“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have”
- Thomas Jefferson
http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/...
Unless the impact is "material" (an accounting term of art: "Information important enough to change an investor's decision" http://www.ais-cpa.com/glosa.html) then they won't be reporting it. It could be big enough to sting, and more importantly big enough to do intangible brand damage, without it being material.
How is a compiler supposed to figure out if I've added a method at run time?
>It seems like a world w/o patents would simply strengthen MS and IBM.

How so? One company off the top of my head is TomTom that would benefit to Microsoft's detriment (VFat patent litigation; TomTom lost, MS won.)

IBM's hegemony is largely predicated on its mainframe-related patents. If anyone could write a clone they'd have their lunch eaten by FOSS same as Sun and the other big Unix vendors.
> we made everything retroactively legitimate by licensing the software to Apple for distribution

Does it mean that they were eventually getting paid for that successful project?
You can add a 3rd person to your analysis. I've had the iPhone 2G then the 3GS and now the 4 and the 4 has the best signal of the 3 by far.

In my experience all the cell phone companies in the US suck. Go to any of their message boards and you'll see the same complaints over and over. The nature of Apple tends to draw a lot of hype from both sides and that certainly spills over to AT&T. Personally, I had zero problems with AT&T when I lived in the south east. When I moved to Denver I just happened to move into a dead zone and would lose calls constantly. I used the mark the spot app and complained a few times and they apparently did something on their end to the point where I can't remember the last time I dropped a call now.
Knowing how hot geo is and googling around for a few minutes, would it be logical to conclude that FB adding geolocation features is both likely and major risk to your venture?

And not familiar with Facebook's TOS, so maybe this isn't even possible, but would it make any sense to investigate taking your innovations and developing a FB App or integrating with Foursquare's API somehow?

Not trying to rain on anyone's parade, either. :)
Twitter solves many problems.

If you want just one, than "celebrity-fan communication" / "brand-consumer communication" is a good example. Twitter is really the leading solution in that area.
Lowering the minimum wage, the theory states, will open up more unskilled job hours, and thus decrease underemployment, if you define underemployment as people who work part time, but would like full time work.

the idea being if one guy with one of those parking lot cleaning trucks can clean my parking lot in an hour and it takes, say 10 man hours to clean my parking lot with brooms, if the guy with the truck costs $50/hr to clean my parking lot and a guy with a broom costs $10/hr, it's cheaper for me to hire the guy with the truck. If I can get guys with brooms to work at $4/hr, suddenly it makes sense for me to hire 10 guys with brooms (assuming I need it done in an hour, and the work scales that way) rather than one guy with a truck.

On the other hand, if you hire 10 guys with brooms, you just eliminated a higher paying job in favor of 10 low paying jobs. this will tend to increase the number of people taking work that is beneath their skill level. so one could say that a high minimum wage is a subsidy on skilled labour.

I mean, even my company. right now, most of the provisioning is done by hand... this is because I'm able to obtain fairly cheap (well, quite a bit over minimum wage, but still, cheap by the standard of such things) SysAdmins who /can/ provision people by hand. If the job market was better, I'd be forced to pay much higher rates for my sysadmins, and my current mostly-manual situation would be untenable. Granted, either way, automation is a high priority, but with current market conditions, 'just do it by hand' is an option, and that simply wouldn't be the case if the job market was in better shape.
When I say the literal homelessness problem is mostly solved, I don't mean that everybody gets what they want. I mean that anybody with the basic ability to work, who is not insane, who is not for some reason simply unable to function in what we are pleased to call civilization for whatever reason, is able in a first-world country to put a roof over their head, even if that means accepting charity, or government handouts, or taking a roommate or three, or quite possibly moving away from where you are to go somewhere else and do some combination of the above. The current economic issues do make that challenging at this exact instant but on the scale of time I'm considering it's still just a blip. And the trend line remains clear; for instance, I'm pretty much ready to call this a Depression, yet it is of a different character than the previous ones, no soup lines, and there are many and good reasons for that, mostly revolving around the generally higher level of wealth the whole society has, even if you feel poor right now.

It is very tempting, whenever considering progress, to look ahead at how much work remains to be done, all the more tempting because it is a valid viewpoint, after all. But I think it is also helpful to honestly consider how far we have come, too, without constantly self-flagellating about the fact we haven't gotten to perfection yet. The problems you describe are not of the same order of magnitude of the problems that buro9 described.
That sort of thinking is really stupid, and much as I dislike Apple I do believe their management is smarter than that.
if you mean calculus as taught today --no-- newton did not invent that calculus -furthermore- in newtons book known as -principia- newton does not use -calculus- in any shape or form to -calculate- orbits - newton uses only proportions -- but feel free to downvote me for daring to -question- such a cherished -myth- instead of reading -principia- for yourself
I'd sooner we port one more feature form Reddit: The ability to know when someone has replied to one of your comments. This will make it much easier to carry on discussions, the main interest of this site, even when they're attached to old articles that most members have forgotten about. Otherwise you might as well be speaking into an empty room after a couple days, regardless of how enriching the conversation would have been.
it's not difficult to control where malware spreads. directly attacking specific ranges is one easy method, as is coding the limitation into your bot or only sending commands to the ones in a certain range.
Haha, I was going to make the same comment. However, for the HN audience, I wasn't going to add any commentary. The comment, in its entirety, would have been:

Reached on his cellphone, Mr. Papermaster declined to comment.
People need nutrients, shelter, and a few creature comforts. Everything else in life is a frill. If all we did was solve problems, there would be no culture and no civilization.

The most important inventions are the ones that nobody "needs": rain dances, the bible, symphonies, television, the Internet. All those little problems that need solving are the gaps created by these frontiers. There are straightforward opportunities in those gaps, but don't expect to find the most successful ideas there.
The GFW of China has a known vulnerability to amplify a UDP traffic to 2x to 3x as much.
Time for some privacy apps.
I've been wondering how many of these jobs are just gone for good due to higher efficiency and permanently increased productivity? We assume most of the unemployment & underemployment is caused directly by the recession but I'm not so sure about that. It seems possible to me we had sort of a jobs bubble where companies were overstaffing and the recession just exposed this. If you lay off 20% of your staff and magically the other 80% pickup the slack what incentive is there to re-expand by 20%?

My theory is modern technology and communications have just made certain positions inherently more productive. I can think of a time not that long ago where I may have lost an hour a day driving back to my office just to check my e-mail. Now I do that throughout the day on my SmartPhone while working on other projects. For a less skilled job I look at how grocery stores now scan products by UPC. There goes the job of the 19 year old tagging every can of corn with a little price tag sticker. When you run out of corn your computer inventory (tracked by UPC) knows about it. You spend 30 seconds re-ordering more through a computer instead of 15 unproductive minutes on the telephone waiting for the supplier to take your order. If these scenarios are being repeated in different ways all over the economy I think we need to consider that the rise in worker productivity is permanent and these jobs are gone for good.
If the job market was better, I'd be forced to pay much higher rates for my sysadmins.

Wow, now I know why it takes a week for my machines to be rebooted.
get akamized. you can also build traffic limits into your web stack or OS or network gear if you're afraid of traffic ramps hurting your wallet. like tptacek said, a good DDOS looks like normal traffic, so this could happen if you got slashdotted by 10 different news sites.
Not every start up follows the solve a problem idea. Many that don't are the biggest and most popular on the net. Twiiter, Facebook are good examples.

What they provide are platforms that allow us to communicate and connect in unique, fun and more efficient ways.