skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ...yet it seems like people think of it as a very high crime area. I wonder why.

from wikipedia:

"Bayview-Hunters Point is predominantly African-American. The neighborhood has a population of 20,322 and is roughly 60% African-American, the highest concentration of that ethnic group in San Francisco."

The article on the community is quite lengthy and interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayview-Hunters_Point,_San_Fran...

I've never lived in San Francisco and don't know whether this community has a bad rep. because it's mostly black or if it really is as crime-ridden as its reputation.

I think we can all agree that this kind of data analysis is really important though, to understand where we live and shape public policy.
H.R. 5741 - Bill to Instate Mandatory National Service (Draft?)
I've read a couple of books on an iPad (most recently Shogun, which is >1000 pages, and several smaller novels). I've also had an extended play with a Kindle. The Kindle is kinder on the eyes, but not to the point where it makes a practical difference to me.

I think people might look at a laptop display and from there decide that LCDs are awful for reading from (this was my opinion). But the iPad is a significantly better reading device than, say, a laptop, because you get much more control over where the display goes in relation to your face. This sounds like an obvious thing to say but it does seem to make a big difference.

To relate back to your reading experience: I was reading Shogun in 2-hour sessions (or longer) and didn't notice any eyestrain.
so what were the security permissions requested by this app at the time of installation? i have to imagine that if it was taking web browsing history that it would have needed more permissions than just "uses network data".

android's fine-grained security permissions, where the author has to explicitly request each type (network use, prevent the screen from turning off, etc.) and the user is shown the list of permissions requested before installing, is good from a security standpoint, but i think it's ended up being like windows vista. users either don't read, don't care, or don't understand what is being asked of them and they just click whatever is needed to continue. even an advanced user can't tell the difference between a free app requesting network access to download advertisements and a malicious one using it to upload private information.
Ask HN: Best practices for keeping cloud server secure? (linux)
I'm able to take a basic linux distro (stable Ubuntu Server) and install everything I need to get my web apps up and running. (Django, Rails, PHP etc...) But after all of that I would appreciate some advice on security.

Here is my current checklist:
1. Change the root password assigned to me
2. Add admin user so I don't have to log in as root
3. Change ssh port to something random I make up and require SSH Key
4. Set up iptables to block nearly everything except (80, my ssh port, and maybe a couple of others depending on requirements)

What now? How do I keep the server up to date? I really don't want to have to read the ubuntu-security-announce mailing list daily I just want to build web apps.
This actually reminded me of Apple...
I look at swap as a parachute. Yeah, most of the time, you don't want to use it. But especially if you are going up in a rickity old plane, or trying to save money by giving yourself /just enough/ fuel to get there, a little extra swap can make your landing, if not comfortable, a lot less painful than the crash that would have happened if you run out of ram without swap.

Now, much of this problem is caused by Linux's /really aggressive/ default memory over commit policies. Besides, swap gives you a free out if you are running programs that load up unnecessarily large libraries.
Section of interest:

SEC. 109. CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION.
(a) Claims as Conscientious Objector- Nothing in this title shall be construed to require a person to be subject to combatant training and service in the uniformed services, if that person, by reason of sincerely held moral, ethical, or religious beliefs, is conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.
(b) Alternative Noncombatant or Civilian Service- A person who claims exemption from combatant training and service under subsection (a) and whose claim is sustained by the local board shall--
(1) be assigned to noncombatant service (as defined by the President), if the person is inducted into the uniformed services; or
(2) be ordered by the local board, if found to be conscientiously opposed to participation in such noncombatant service, to perform national civilian service for the period specified in section 104(a) and subject to such regulations as the President may prescribe.
Fair enough, I was just going on the description given in the article. Yours sounds a lot more reasonable -- I should have checked it out first. That said, everything I said about optimization still stands (and my comments on the VM layer are still correct).
It is arguable that some people develop addictive relationships with their religious and/or political views, seeking reinforcement like an addict seeks a drug.

But, yeah, the other examples qualify as phases without being as toxic as drugs.
Absolutely, or as much of a walk as you like from it (e.g. Ball Square was fine for me). And the point about living on the other side on the Green Line is spot on, I did that for a couple of years and really regretted it (and then moved to Davis Square and stayed there or a bit beyond until I left the area).
Isn't Squid like, 5 or 6 years older than any other open sourced proxy cache? That would make it more popular for the same reason that Apache is more popular than other open sourced webservers: name recognition? I remember that for a while, the Squid was the only proxy cache of which I knew. and the only one I had ever attempted to install.
Guys, take whatever upvotes you were going to give to me for my next 100 comments and give them to this line:

It is a mistake to think that she is buying a product when she orders invitations. She is buying a story presented to her as marketing that she can share with her friends. For her to buy cheap invitations that she will spend time to create manually herself, there better be a cool story she can share with her friends why she made this decision to go cheap.
If this is true, I'm disturbed by the fact that:

1. Google has failed to tell any of us this,
2. I don't even know if I had any of the vendor's applications in the past, as they have been removed entirely, AND
3. Google has failed to tell any of us this!

I mean what the hell, at least send us an email telling us that because we downloaded AppXYZ, our data has been compromised by some low-life(s) in China. I'm going to end up being a lot less likely to download random apps now, not only because of this really sketchy incident, but because of the lack of transparency on Google's part.

Damn.
Those are awesome pictures. It's interesting to see how crimes "fall" downhill from a center.
Self-service is great for buying gas, and getting cash at an ATM, and for booking a flight. My favorite, uh, 'restaurant' over here in Japan is 'self-service'; you punch in your order at a vending machine, hand a ticket to the staff, and they bring you your meal.

Self-service sucks when you have a problem that needs to be solved, and it sucks worse when you have a problem that needs to be solved now.

Because, more often than not, you have a problem because you stepped outside the bounds of what the company 'normally' provides, be it rescheduling a flight or getting a refund for a weird-tasting hamburger.

It's exactly at those moments where you want to talk to a human being who can (a) understand the problem, and (b) fix it.

This is the reason my company, Mad Wombat, exists. We do an email-based helpdesk application designed to remove every possible barrier between 'the customer having a problem' and 'you fixing that problem and making them happy'.
"Those on the right, like Milton Friedman, argue that the shareholder-wealth-maximization requirement prohibits firms from acting in ways that benefit, say, local communities or the environment, at the expense of the bottom line."

Uh, citation needed. This is a pretty harsh statement, especially with its present-tense reference to a man who is no longer around to defend himself.
Ask HN:  How did you quit smoking?
I know this is a little off the topic of how to make a great start-up but I figure it's on-topic for mutual support and for an issue that prbly effects many of us stressed out types. How did you quit smoking and is it a complete fantasy to imagine getting it down to like, 7 or fewer per week when starting from an accidental habit (roughly half-pack / day, in my case).
Instant chat, instant email, a person on the phone, a singing telegram... anything is fine, as long as I can talk to someone who can fix the problem.
Steps to a minimum viable product
Maybe that is precisely why you didn't want to use it -- google's street view interface was not right for you.
Spend the money on entertainment, probably.
I just made a bunch of regular expressions that capture phrases like "http://twitter.com/foobar or "I'm @foobar on twitter", etc.
Our company is using Azure Table Storage - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing - $0.15/mo
It's great if you can live with it not being relational.

SQL Azure is their 'SQL Server in the cloud' and is a bit more. But the sharding possibilities are great. You can programmatically turn on/off db instances on demand.
I smoked a pack a day for about 5 years. Tomorrow is my last day of using the Nicoderm patch. I've been using it for 10 weeks and I used their 3-step program. It was rough because the patch kicks your ass physically, but it's been well worth it. My chest doesn't hurt anymore and I can breathe easy. I suggest using the patch.
I have both. I've had iPads for about a month, and a Kindle for about 2 weeks. I assume you are asking why it is better specifically for reading since comparing the two generally is like comparing a notebook and an MP3 player. They're just not analogous in general, but for reading purposes the Kindle is vastly superior to the iPad.

I actually read the same book on both this past weekend flipping back and forth. The iPad has a slick UI for books, though the page flipping can be a bit finicky,but it's still a back-lit LCD (albeit a nice one) which is just uncomfortable for long reading. It's the same uncomfortable feeling you get from staring at a monitor for a long time.

The Kindle is also much lighter, which is nicer than you'd think when you're holding it for a couple hours at a clip. The iPad is surprisingly heavy, which is such a common complaint that I imagine Apple will address it in the next generation.

The Kindle's battery is good enough that I suspect you could read a few books on one charge if you kept the wireless antenna off. You could go on a weekend trip without taking a charger, which is nice. The iPad's battery is actually pretty good for what it is, and is probably why the thing is so damn heavy, but you'll still be charging it every night.

The iPad's screen is AMAZINGLY smudgy. I can't describe how bad it is in that regard. The smudges add a slight blurring effect to text which gets annoying. We have 5 of them in the office and everyone has complained about it. I got an Invisible Shield screen protector for them, which helps a lot (and I could also take a key to it without scratching) but adds its own annoyances.

E-ink is really unbeatable for reading. You would love a Kindle I think. How many books do you read a year?
Totally. I read 2.5 books in my first week of owning it. I'm only even on the net tonight because I accidentally left it at work :(.

My wife wants to use it, but every time she comes near I snarl and pet it and call it my precioussssessss.
"(Also note, I believe Windows is only more popular on the desktop; Windows has never been a majority player in terms of webservers and other public Internet infrastructure, unless you count private intranets. in the public Internet server space, windows is fighting with sun and apple for the scraps. Linux is the big player here. )"

No, you'd be surprised. Windows, (running IIS) actually has about a quarter to a third of the public webserver market share:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/07/16/july-2010-web-s...

ASP.NET is actually very popular.
Crush Your Thirst for Soft Drinks
Sure, if you don't need it. The bulk of my JEE work is somewhat more complex than "dinking around with the odd corners of the servlet API".
Considering I've spent my career in the opposite position, I've never fully understood this mentality.

But America is littered with over-educated, under-employed people for some reason. I recall working service jobs as a student with unhappy coworkers - career waiters, cooks or store clerks - in their mid 30's with Masters degrees and that was back when there was no recession to use as an excuse.

I'd attribute it to entitlement, maybe just a personal disposition of not being very driven, and the fact there are many people who's only real talent is excelling at school...
Firefox 4 Beta’s Incredible Speed
When I quit it was cold turkey, I'd keep saying to myself, 'You only _think_ you want a cigarette' to stay reminded that really I don't.
Plus, a couple years earlier I watched my father die of lung cancer, although he never smoked- so as bad as that was, it helped to an extent.
I assure you, it's NOT how you want to go.
Thanks for the updated edition! As about comments, I personally think the DjangoBook website has gotten it right somewhat - it has a comment facility wherever one would want to http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter01/
I got on of these for $149 (NZ) and it does the trick. Same display technology as the kindle anyway.

http://www.koboereader.com/
You don't think the Onion is funny?
OP should have simply done something interesting in the extra 5 hours per day that his employer was paying him to do nothing. Read a book, write memoirs, work on a side business...
just curious: is it not possible to have some form of unrolled-linked-list to mitigate this effects somewhat ? or perhaps you have already tried it, and it doesn't really fit the bill.
This is very innovative. Great development in user interface and visualization. Something good came out of MS Research.

The general idea can be adopted to different use cases. Hope they don't patent it to dead.
The analogy goes even further. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/11/18/study-revea...
Why 37signals’ advice is irrelevant
I turn the backlight down as low as it can go and read in 30min-2hr chunks. I haven't tried a Kindle for any real length of time because of the page change slowness (has that improved in recent models?) Anyway, i didnt find the eye strain to be bad, but I spend all day staring at a monitor so what is normal for me might not be normal for others.
“It's the same uncomfortable feeling you get from staring at a monitor for a long time.”

— I don’t get that, your mileage may vary. (The Kindle is probably still what you should get if you read a lot.)
So he expects people to submit an idea for a chance that it will be made fun of on youtube? Its easy to bash, he should also share which company he thinks was the best.
Life without language
"For context, Congressman Rangel has introduced this bill many times in the past. Each time, it has received very little support, and Rangel knows it has no chance of being passed."
We already have the draft, we lost that battle a long time ago. This is mandatory service for 2 years, Israeli and PRNK style.
In the 1970s, Stanley Kubrick sent a photographer out to take thousands of photographs step by step along London's Commercial Road. The result was somewhat like Street Slide: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...

Kubrick's boxes - hundreds upon hundreds of them - were receptacles for millions of details about films he mostly never made. One contained photos of Commercial Road in London, taken over the course of a year by his nephew, Manuel Harlan. Harlan stood on a 12ft ladder to photograph every building on the road and laid out the results for the great man to examine in his lair near St Albans. “Sure beats going there,” said Kubrick, delighted.

Kubrick would have had a field day if he were still alive.
Groupon Launches Deal Personalization, Opens Door To (More) Explosive Growth
Please review our prototype - Gourmaide
It's a rarity to see any Android app that doesn't require half a dozen different permissions. I just installed the Google Maps update and it requires 9 including the ability to read my phone call logs (??)
What you say is appropriate in some use cases only.

My desktop has swap. The servers I use do not.
Irrelevant and unhelpful ... to you.
Just out of curiosity, when an android app is updated, how are permissions handled? Do you receive a prompt to allow new privileges, or does it assume you approve of it already?

You bring up an astute point on the vague "network access" permission, but there's really not an easy answer to this. How would you fix it? Ask the developer to simply say what the access will be used for? In an malicious app, they'd obviously just lie. Short of actually displaying what data an app is sending, I don't see an easy answer.
The majority of start-ups are social web oriented. They operate in a consumption-services market.

That line strikes me as both wrong and missing the point.
Perhaps then the majority of start-ups should consider a different service to sell.
HN accounts for 12% of Social Bookmark referral traffic
Note: I work on Woopra projects :-)
Squid's ancestor (a caching component of the Harvest project) was the first web proxy cache, period. One of its developers (Peter Danzig) went on to NetApp and produced the NetCache, which was the first commercial proxy cache. The Open Source option predated the commercial variant by a couple of years.

There have been numerous proxy caches that have come and gone in those years, and there will likely be numerous that come and go while Squid continues doing its thing.

"That would make it more popular for the same reason that Apache is more popular than other open sourced webservers: name recognition?"

Do you really believe name recognition is the only reason Apache is the most popular web server?

It doesn't have anything to do with the huge array of capabilities that Apache has that no other web server has? Or the broad ancillary tools support? Or the huge pool of knowledge available for it? Or that it is proven reliable? Or that it can safely be expected to exist and still be a viable option in five or ten years?

But, to answer your question of whether I think Squid is popular for the same reason (or reasons, as I believe is the case) Apache is popular: Yes.

Squid is popular for exactly the same reasons Apache is popular. It is a reliable product that serves a wide variety of users very well. It is well-maintained and has a long history of being well-maintained. It is well-understood by a lot of people, so it's not going to be neglected or a source of contention if the IT guy moves to another job. It is fast enough for a lot of uses. It is extensible via a number of scriptable access points, so developers can easily make it do what they need it to do. And, despite the accusations of horrible design, it has proven itself to be quite resilient. The number of security issues in Squid, for example, has been truly miniscule in the past decade.

The funny thing is how many people are acting as though Varnish is going to somehow take the place of Squid as soon as people realize that Varnish is "better". For one small subset of problems for which Varnish is specifically built, it may make sense. But, for a huge array of other proxy and caching problems, Varnish isn't even a contender.

I should maybe explain that my first company was a web caching proxy company, building products based on Squid. I deployed Squid several thousand times over seven years. Varnish would have worked in maybe a few dozen of those deployments. Squid solves a ridiculous array of problems, even though it solves none of them as well as a purpose built application could solve any one of them. Varnish solves its handful of problems very well...and does nothing for all the rest of the use cases.
"... One of the best ways to find interesting people to follow on Twitter is to look and see who other smart people are already following ..."

There's could be a scientific explanation for this. It's been noted in fish, crustacean populations that behaviour is influenced by the predators. [0] Random choice appears to be non-optimal making decisions.

Following other HN twitter users might seen as a more optimal way to select ideas/technology worth exploring or avoiding "dangerous" time wasters.

[0] "Behavioural response of Crayfish to a fish predator", Stein, Magnuson ~ http://www.jstor.org/pss/1936188
Hmm... There's only one of each, so to know whether I like it, I have to watch it. How are views going to indicate what people liked?
nyt also has a kindle subscription which is basically their rss feed in a nicer format. it's like $2/month. i liked that one better because i found it difficult to navigate their full subscription version and never read all of the articles anyway.
Handwaving at a problem and declaring it's just an "engineering problem" doesn't actually do anything to solve it... hey, wait, are you my manager?

The power problem is actually a big deal and shouldn't be minimized. Take the hotel situation; what happens when the hotel loses power? You can't have the locks fail closed, you end up with people trapped away from their stuff. Failing open is of course a bit of a problem, too. Locks by their nature tend to congregate around things that are actually important so you actually have some serious problems with a lock that is "down" even five minutes a year.
The author does a good job of identifying who will find the business model advice from 37 signals unhelpful. The title certainly is sensationalist.

A short summary:
37 signals is a B2B. The economics of the B2B model do not translate to a B2C model.
I switched to an e-cigarette All the sensation of smoking without the carcinogens and smell. More info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette

And here's where I order my gear from:

http://www.puresmoker.com/
If you view your scheme on a variety of LCDs, as tuned by their individual users, you'll probably find some where even you find the contrast too little.
Read the second-half of the sentence you quoted: "as my application's primary scheduling mechanism." Using O(requests) threads leaves the OS in charge of scheduling CPU tasks, just as using VM leaves the OS in charge of scheduling I/O.

> Using a thread pool is doing it yourself from cross-platform primitives that work on even the shittiest UNIX-wars-era platform, and an event loop using epoll/kqueue is the modern pure OS abstraction.

You are very confused. First of all, epoll/kqueue are just optimizations of select(2), which first appeared in 4.2BSD (released in 1983). No standard interface for threading on UNIX appeared until pthreads was standardized in 1995.

But all of this assumes that my argument has anything at all to do with history. It does not. The question is whether you are leaving the OS in charge of scheduling decision or not.

With select/poll/epoll/kqueue/etc, the OS wakes you up and says "here is a set of events that are ready." It does not actually schedule any work. The application gets to decide, at that moment, what work to do next.

Contrast this with O(requests) threads or VM. If several threads are available to run, the OS chooses which one will run based on its internal scheduling policy. Likewise with VM, the OS is responsible for scheduling pages of RAM and when they will be evicted, based on its own internal logic and policy. This is what makes them higher-level primitives.
Yes, if an update requires new permissions, it must be explicitly approved again and cannot be auto-updated.
Gosh, I had to upvote this just for the crustacean research citation alone.