skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His position that "politeness would make no difference", combined with other remarks he has made, suggests to me he simply doesn't know how to be genuinely polite and respectful of others. He reminds me of a woman I am passingly acquainted with who insisted that when things began to go south in business negotiations and other social settings, there was nothing you could do to stop it. Well, maybe there was nothing she could do. That doesn't mean it can't be done. (From observation of her, her attitude seemed to bring a lot of her troubles to her. She was quite combative, high-handed and so on.)

I'm all for not setting foot on the slippery slope. I am a firm believer that acting to protect your rights before there is a problem is the best policy. But assuming an adversarial relationship does not mean one needs to go out of their way to ensure that the relationship is as adversarial as possible.
I disagree. How are people expected to learn from the mistakes made in OpenSSL if we mustn't be negative?

OpenSSL is, by any sensible code quality metrics, a bloody mess. It is a miracle that this code has not caused more disastrous problems than it has. It is not only legitimate to criticize it: it is essential that we do and that we articulate what mistakes were made so that others may learn from it.
Interesting question... but we are not exactly petitioning Google for anything here. We just point the problem out and maybe they care enough about it and will fix it. otherwise we'll just have to live with it, or leave to other platform... I think we would have done the same if it were for Apple or MSFT
That's pretty cool.

I've gotten interested in stack machines again because of 'brick computing' (re-usable components with a tiny VM in them) and 'fabric computing' (networks of such components, either identical pieces or a variety of them).

It's quite amazing to see how little code you need to get a Forth like environment going on a piece of hardware.
404 error page wtf?
For us in Germany, these "more teaching, less research" universities are actually a separate kind of institution.

While "regular" universities are mostly research oriented, "universities of applied sciences" have only a small bit of a professor's time allocated to research. Most of their time is spent giving lectures, preparing material, managing student projects and talking to people from the industry about possible collaborations.

Both universities have bachelors + masters degrees. PhDs are usually only available at the "regular" universities, not the "applied science" ones.

I actually think that being a professor at one of the universities of applied sciences must be a fun job. You get to read about new stuff, play with it and teach students. From time to time, there is a small research project or a conference you can go to...

Something interesting, at least at my university (an applied sciences one) is, that one of the prerequisites for being a Professor are at least ?6? years in the industry. I was part (the student rep) of a commission that selected a new professor. They're basically looking for a Senior Project Manager from a research and development department that is fed up with the way the industry works and loves his craft (this was in CS)
By making sure failure is fast and cheap I become unafraid of trying things. Each thing I try, I try to work out why it will fail. As I explore options some things really do fail fast, others are more difficult to make fail. Some simply refuse to fail, and as I push them through, they succeed.

There are corollaries.

You need to have things try, so you need ideas and the means to pursue them.

You need to be sure they'll fail - it's important to understand that I'm not giving up on things because they seem hard (although that happens too), I'm exploring hard, testing hard, stressing hard. Only when I'm convinced it simply cannot succeed (which includes being too hard to implement for the calculated return) then I turn to the next idea.

I usually use this in the context of the research division of my company, but the same has worked for me as starting a business, and for friends in other contexts.

As with all the "Silver Bullets" it takes work to make it work, and it's not suitable in all contexts. But perhaps you can try it and see if you can make it fail ...
You're missing what I think is one of the primary points he's trying to make - answering any of those questions instantly puts him at risk of lying to a federal officer, which is a criminal act.

In order to be polite, you have to risk being a criminal. Ergo, it makes more sense to be a little rude (and being silent isn't that rude, _particularly_ to a federal officer - for them being silent is simply one of a series of acceptable responses) and forgo the risk of criminal charges. Are you being a douchebag to a police officer when you refuse consent to a search?

He also lists a number of countries in which Customs and Immigration believe their job is "Customs and Immigration" and _not_ getting historical biographical information.

There really is a fundamental privacy issue.

True Story:

I was crossing the border from Canada into the United States in 2003, and was with a friend (an attractive blonde, Canadian, that I had declared our relationship to be "friend") at a ground crossing (Peace Arch, in BC) - we were pulled over for secondary, and went into the Immigration office. They asked us a number of questions, all of which I answered to be the best of my ability (I have neither the courage, nor moral fiber of the author - wish I did) - and they were preparing to let us go. Just as we were packing up our passports, and leaving, the Immigration Officer pulled a "Columbo" and said, "Oh, one more thing - are you still dating that Red Head, Marjorie?" I was a little floored - I had crossed the border _once_ with a (red headed) girlfriend in 1999 - that information (that we were dating, the color of her hair, her name) was clearly in a federal file on me, and they were using it to get a reaction from my companion (who, thank goodness, was actually a friend as I had described her).

So, from a privacy perspective, just be aware that as you answer all of these questions, they are going into a federal database, that certainly can paint quite a detailed pictured of your life. If you are willing to remain silent, then they have less to enter into their database.

It's interesting how when people buck the status-quo, even just a little bit, they get tagged with the "douchebag" title. God bless them.

EDIT: As a follow-on, I should note that as a Canadian, I really have no excuse not to answer all questions asked by American Customs and Immigration, but, very ironically, as a TN Computer Systems Analyst, I am almost _never_ asked any questions _whatsoever_ by American C&I, and the rare time they ask me anything, it is always the single (very reasonable) "Who are you working for". Returning to Canada, on the other hand, is an exercise in what did I do in the US, where I'll be going, what I'll be doing, who I'll be staying with, for how long, etc, etc...
Yeah, I see them as just one tool in the randomized-optimization toolbox. It's not entirely clear to me why many people see them as the only or the first tool (perhaps the appealing biology metaphor?). In particular, I tend to like a complexity ramp: first try the dumbest thing, like random instances, then move on to randomized hill climbing or a variant like simulated annealing, then add more complex stuff on top of that, whether via GA crossover, or something that learns/exploits a statistical distribution, like MIMIC, if the simpler methods didn't work and you need to exploit the structure of the space. And with purely discrete things, I also like considering whether completely different approaches, like constraint programming, would work instead (instead of optimizing a numerical fitness/cost function, you give a list of things that must be true about any desired solution, and ask it to find one meeting the constraints).
What is more, I actually find annoying the lame state of search in Gmail, given their all-mighty web counter part.
Pretty slow, in general. No caches. No query expansions. No query suggestions. No nothing more than simple operators (and, or, in:, label:, after:, before:, and others I don't remember) and thats all.
It would be awesome if clicking the videos would open an embed on the right side of the browser, and optionally, auto-start the first video.

Great job :)
his notion of having an inalienable right not to answer questions, though

/His/ notion?

Can border police arrest you, detain you for long periods of time, and book you for crimes that you may in fact be convicted of? I worry that the answers to this question aren't as crisply aligned with this guy's libertarianism as he hopes.

He seems more the kind of person to make the answers align with his view, rather than hope they already do.
Check out our tech blog:

http://codeascraft.etsy.com

We post fairly often in detail about the technical challenges we've had to overcome while growing the marketplace.
I actually assumed the right we were talking about was the right to remain silent, which would require a constitutional amendment to repeal. I am not so sure about the right to reenter one's own country.
Thanks, I figured it out the installation in Ubuntu (it has both SS and Sunflow packages, I only had to give Sunflow parameter to use more memory in the launcher/Java heap)
That's definitely true, technically it could be done, similar to some plagiarism detection software used in academia to tell the level of similarities between publications. But I still think tweaking on the client side would be a more cost-efficient solution... but I agree, they are Google, they should always have free servers and cpu powers to throw in :)
How certain are you that you haven't just violated a law with that answer? And, how certain are you that response won't be used against you in a criminal case?

I'm actually serious - I don't have the legal background to understand whether your response ""I do not want to answer this question, because I'm not required to." would put me in legal peril.
No, he hasn't been arrested or accused of anything.
Actually, wasn't there a case recently where someone refused to speak, but because he didn't say that he refused to speak, the judge ruled that he had not exercised his right to remain quiet?

Yeah, it really was that stupid. Because he had not specifically stated that he was using that right, they kept badgering him. The judge declared it legal since he didn't protest it at the time.
Using the word 'sir' when talking to someone you're not familiar with is generally intended simply as a gesture of respect. It's not some sort of submissive term.

My occupation puts me in positions of authority over strangers from time to time. I pretty much always default to '"sir" and "m'am" in those cases.
It's so true! That's why I use a catchall email address for unimportant websites.
An experienced traveler friend used to always reply "tourism", no matter what the purpose of her visit, with good results. YMMV.
There are packages for Ubuntu 10.04 and for the upcoming 10.10, yes - the last SS version is from 2009 - now spankin new, but not outdated, and the packages are always kept fresh.
Based on much of the discussion here, I'd definitely say that the only person that can give you the correct answer is an attorney that you trust.

If you can't find such a person, then the next best answer would be to respond exactly as Paul Lukacs did, since he's a Los Angeles attorney (and author of a couple of articles in reason.com).

Following any layman's advice is probably a good way to get yourself in trouble.
The author is a lawyer and states that ""None of your business" is a legally safe response, and does not open you up to criminal charges. Can you walk us through how you believe you might have violated a criminal statute with that specific answer?

With that said, "Hello, how are you" sounds fine (to me). But "Business or Pleasure" is a question that is fraught with legal peril.
I don't get it. They were using Map/Reduce as a way to build the index, which they were able to query in mere milliseconds. This article claims that in order to facilitate Google Instant, they had to ditch the Map/Reduce-oriented updating of the index.

How are these mutually exclusive? If you look at quotes like these:

"Goal is to update the search index continuously, within seconds of content changing, without rebuilding the entire index from scratch using MapReduce."

To me, this seems as if this change has nothing to do with Google Instant. This has more to do with being able to respond instantly to new content, instead of being able to query the index quickly.

It sounds like they added support for distributed stored procedures on top of BigTable, which reminds me a bit of the way MongoDB implemented Map/Reduce. But I bet that they in no way at all have dumped Map/Reduce.
Interview with Hipmunk (YC S10) Co-founder Steve Huffman
This is one of those libertarian "25 laws you break in the process of squeezing your own orange juice in the morning" principles that is fun to argue about but not very useful in the real world.

The reality is that while personality flaws and broken power dynamics may (but almost certainly won't) cause border police to charge you with some crime if you misstate "business or pleasure", absent any demonstrable intent of comitting a crime, you're unlikely to see the inside of a courtroom on such a charge, let alone be convicted. For instance, in the original post: saying you were in Antwerp for pleasure isn't going to get you a "Bureau of Prisons Number" without the satchel of smuggled diamonds.

I don't want to be misconstrued here; I'm glad we have crazy douchebags like this guy to stand up for our rights to refuse to answer questions, especially dragnet-style questions explicitly intended to trip criminals (and whatever collateral innocents come with them) up at the border.

But having said that, there's an element of the social contract at play here. The exact same logic this guy is using suggests that he also shouldn't answer the questions of police investigating crimes in his neighborhood. "Have you seen this man? We think he just shot up your neighbor's car."

Our society doesn't work if the police get absolute authority over us, and our protections against authoritarianism will degrade if people like this guy don't occasionally stand up for them. But society also won't work if everyone routinely refuses to cooperate with the police, who are dependent on our support to get the important stuff in their charter done.

I highly recommend "Cop in the Hood", a sociologist's writeup of a year spent as a Baltimore East Side patrol cop, for insight into all the crazy dynamics at play here.
(though the article makes it very clear, the vaccines did not cause autism, they aggravated an existing condition that brought about the autism)

Did they really show that? It doesn't sound like it. From:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1721109,00.ht...

'That decision, however, comes as a surprise to experts on mitochondrial disorders. In response to the Poling case, the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation has released a statement saying, "There are no scientific studies documenting that childhood vaccinations cause mitochondrial diseases or worsen mitochondrial disease symptoms."'
Hmm, I'm not so sure. "NUM" is not a one size fits all solution not least because many applications require atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability of a database management system.

Node's API has changed frequently as it has developed, breaking older code, so don't be surprised when a genius piece of code found on Github that exactly solves your problem doesn't work with your new build of Node.

Most web app developers typically don't explicitly deal with any concurrency model. There is a significant difference in aptitude between the typical HN reading coder and the average peon level developers, i.e. the majority of developers worldwide. Asynchronous code is non-trivial, especially with TDD and beyond the level of expertise of the peon level developer.

Huge PHP codebases also exist, and many companies will not have the resources or the inclination to make such a change.

This article is also based on the assumption that most web development in the future will be real time web apps. That's quite a big assumption, ergo although "NUM" is an interesting prospect, I doubt it will become the de facto platform for web app development.
Ask HN - are there any good web-based RSS readers apart from Google Reader?
I currently use Google Reader as my RSS reader. I love that it's web-based, because it means I can read my feeds from any PC, without having to sync my "already-read" lists.

But I'm not always convinced that having everything run through Google is the wisest choice. Are there any good alternatives I should take a look at?
Hehe, funny slip, eh? I wish HN would let edits happen after 15m. I caught that too late!
They didn't hold him for refusing to answer. They held him because he was suspicious. That's their job. When everything checked out and they couldn't find anything wrong, they had to let him go.

He was only there for half an hour. 30 minutes. That's not an unreasonable time at all when you've done something suspicious like answer routine questions rudely.

Don't get me wrong. I think our airport security is absolutely useless at this point. I haven't flown on a plane for a decade because I won't submit to that useless idiocy. (I might do so if it weren't useless, despite the 'freedoms' lost.)
Funny, I feel the exact opposite. I'm horrified that people would consider this asserting his rights rather than being a douche.

Asserting your rights is not moving to the back of the bus because your skin is the wrong color. Not just telling some customs guy who gets paid $12 an hour to answer questions mandated by Congress the answer to some insignificant questions is just being a douche.
Apache or PHP certainly can't last forever. While I don't know what will take their place, or when, or who will benefit, I do think we will see some trends going forward:

More and more server code for web applications will be written in Javascript, as WebGL enables web-based gaming platforms, as offline applications share code between client and server, as Javascript becomes more popular as a language, and developers realize the benefits of concentrating language knowledge, and the performance gains made by Javascript engines.

More and more server code will be evented, in order to use WebSockets and maintain connections. Programmers will come to terms with the fact that the theoretical efficiencies of threads over events are not likely to be realized anytime soon, non-blocking IO will eventually be accepted on pragmatic terms. Programmers will learn to see problems as streams, and as streaming interfaces converge, it will become easier to pump streams from one place to another.

As it becomes easier to write efficient networked applications using programming interfaces which mirror the underlying activity, the duo of nginx/application server on the same machine will converge towards just application server.

As systems become more distributed, as the efficiencies of disk storage change, and as memory becomes cheaper, programmers will move from thinking about disk storage, to thinking about global state storage. In-memory caching, disk persistence, and sharding will be managed by the same service. Programmers will move from thinking in terms of SQL, or noSQL, to thinking in terms of data structures: strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, trees, and so the database will become a persisted data structure service.

While I think that Node, and Redis have head starts in these departments, the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to them all.
This isn't quite true anymore. Over the last 2 centuries the President has little-by-little become more like a King. What I mean by that is that he has gained more powers that an absolute authority, like a King, would have. For example, the President has the power to write executive orders, which have the effect of law.

While true that these orders can be challenged by congress, they normally aren't likely due to human nature (it's easier to say no to an idea than to stop somebody who has momentum). The end result of this is that the President now has the power to basically write laws. If he is not happy with Congress's opinion, he can take matters into his own hands. On most issues he gives deference to the law-making body's authority, but the power is always in his hands to act; in other words politically and practically he is held in check on most issues by Congress and is obviously not a King (ie he can't act unilaterally), but as time passes he gets more of the power that a King would have.

Edited for clarity
Yes.

"And finally, the court's conservatives used their 5-4 advantage to rule that suspects must break their silence and tell police they are going to remain quiet if they want to invoke their "right to remain silent" and stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100802/ap_on_go_su_co/us_suprem...
"As we move from the PC to mobile devices"

Well.. this is rather amusing. Did I just see an MS evangelist show us how wonderful their software can run on mac/iOs????
You have doubts against my answer - which is ok of course. Yet, you don't question "none of your business", which is demonstrably worse in at least two ways (social interaction, perceived aggression). Can you show why? Even for a non-lawyer like me it shouts "verbal abuse of staff".

> how certain are you that response won't be used against you in a criminal case?

If there is a way to use that answer against me, I've already potentially lost any and all cases against me. If such response can be used against you, why do you believe your law to not answer will be honoured? You'll make a lot more mistakes of saying something wrong while proving you're right, since you will have to speak many more times. It is simply not a realistic scenario. You'll have to assume some things are not a work of government against you, in order to even begin fighting for freedom of not answering a simple question.
The rant to end all rants about the "Ground Zero Mosque"
The fallacy here is the assumption that they know who is law abiding and who isn't.
It is fraught with theoretical peril in this guy's exposition, but I haven't seen any evidence that it's actually fraught with any practical peril. Many millions of citizens are asked this question every year, but "business or pleasure" does not appear to be a significant vector for criminal convictions the US.

This notion that answering "just visiting" to that question is some kind of pernicious legal tripwire seems like a fantasy, especially considering the fact that the border police can search you without provocation or cause if they really want mess with you.
Unlike your Map Instant, this one seems more usable and practical to me. Good job. :)
How would anyone here have any idea?
> ...if someone was rude to me and I were a cbp officer, I would certainly go the extra mile to stick it to them.

Precisely why you -- and most people -- shouldn't hold positions of authority over others.
Can someone post Houellebecq's book on Wikipedia so I can see what we're talking about?
Hmm, I don't agree prima fascie, that giving multiple vaccinations at once is a bad idea. Empirical evidence is almost always necessary when dealing with clinical questions such as this.

(Occasionally, overwhelming logic will suffice. E.g., sure, I agree that there is no need for a clinical trial on parachutes for those jumping out of airplanes.)
If you really feel that strongly about these questions the correct response is most definitely not what he's done. In the end he's only hurting himself. I don't know who has the power to actually change this, but I'd be willing to wager they'll never even learn of his existence.

All he ended up accomplishing was wasting his time and the time of people being paid by the tax payers.