skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true that any internet anti-censorship efforts, even if completely successful, wouldn't have nearly as much real world impact as some armchair enthusiasts like to believe. It’s also true that reality is much more complicated than some “us against them” narrative.

And perhaps to your main point: it’s also not like the Haystack project would have succeeded if only its members had a bit more technical know-how, or if they had just had been willing to open their source, etc. The challenge in thwarting the Islamic Republic’s censorship measures is almost impossibly enormous.

However, this challenge could conceivably be met. Perhaps another Phil Zimmermann might come along one day and revolutionize steganography to bring us a step closer. Unfortunately this becomes less likely with a consummate self-promoter like Austin Heap publicly claiming to have already solved the entire problem.
Without a citation, it's impossible verify your claim, but even with one, I'd be dubious about a 'piece' that purports to 'point out' (read: make an authoritative claim as proof) that... well, let's just say I don't think you read an article that was grounded in verifiable facts.
You really seem to ignore the context. Sometimes, (the ability to be able) to do wrong can be "cool". Why do you think young people smoke?
iTunes - the item you tried to buy is no longer available
Nokia N810. And it does flash.

Granted, things were getting a bit sluggish in terms of web browsing on this device with the native (Firefox-derived) browser but Opera Mobile 10.1 beta version for Maemo in Turbo mode (using Opera proxies) has given this device new life.

Cheers
Really? Personally I'd guess Zuckerberg will never even read this story... and if he did I doubt he'd care.
Preposterous.
Haven't these been circulating for years?
If you plan to have no redundancy, you probably aren't building anything valuable enough to care about losing some data anyways. The extra hours of my life I get back due to productivity from using mongo over something like mysql is worth it x 100. Not a big fan of the single server durability argument.
Remind HN: Diaspora to open source code tomorrow (Sept 15)
Bonus points for spelling "kernel" wrong.
I don't want to come off as someone who is obsessed with noting the ethnic background of people in different parts of the city, but what you've said just doesn't square with my observations. I live near the outer mission (near the excelsior), and it is definitely not mainly white (nor is the excelsior). Then you're on mission as you pass the YMCA toward St Mary's park? Nope. Then as you go past Bernal... well, maybe a bit more, but not mainly. Cortland, sure, but not Mission. And then you go from Cesar Chavez through around 16th street, and no way. 16th street maybe a bit, but that's really more from Valencia through Church, not mission and south. And then beyond that, you go past the armory, right? And then becomes south of market...

Well, guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
I haven't asked Zuck personally if he made these comments. However I can say that after working with him on privacy and photo related issues that these comments definitely don't characterize his approach to the subject. He seems like a pretty normal guy just trying to make the world more open and connected.

I agree with jacquesm...this is a great lesson. Don't email, IM, text, etc anything you wouldn't want to read on Valleywag.
Even if optionally disabled, hiding the resource location seems very dubious while the breadcrumb structure isn't applicable to all sites. I would much prefer that sites be developed with good REST techniques, with the goal of making easy to understand URLs. Over time I think more sites like Amazon will get on this and make cleaner URL structures.
That comment was about the NoSQL community's hostile reaction to his criticisms of MapReduce, and it does indeed show that they're not interested in knowing about databases, because they read his criticism in the context of an imaginary (or only-real-because-people-think-it's-real) SQL vs. NoSQL struggle. Instead of seeing it as an analysis of the shortcomings of MapReduce (and being curious about the perspective or needs that might make those shortcomings important,) their simplistic reaction was that he was fighting for the wrong side and needed to be discredited.

One of the comments on the blog exemplifies the reaction perfectly:

Technically, I agree with much of this article ... <snip> ... But none of that matters. It’s all about hearts and minds, and if the DB industry adopts the attitude in this article, it’s back to what I said at HPTS back in 2001: We Lose.

Screw content, screw technical judgment, it's about attitude and "winning" the struggle "against" existing database technologies.
I'm not an expert making the Google Bucks. If the people they hire are so triple-verified awesome, they should be able to figure this out.
The idea should be that you are picking the right tool for the job. Just because you could just use Postgres, doesn't mean that another data store wouldn't be better suited for your problem space. Could be Mongo, could be Cassandra, it very well could be Postgres, but you should be doing some up front analysis and research before you make that decision.
strings tied to the money, which has left me wary of VCs

I am very interested in hearing about those strings, whether in private or public. Impressive karma rate you've got there!
Here's to the Next 3 Years (Yehuda Katz Moves On)
What jacquesm said. It depends on the kind of analytics data; our data is not as important as someone else's analyitcs data. For us it's more important writes are of reasonable speed, that we can store the data in arbitrary structures in a schemaless way, that we can define arbitrary search indexes and that the data can be horizontally spread across multiple servers.

Website visit counters are a great example. I don't think many people care if a few visits get lost once in a while.
Why We Have to Raise Taxes on Small Businesses
Phil Zimmerman failed repeatedly while developing PGP (best example: ADK). Fortunately, PGP wasn't life-or-death for anyone known to have been using it at the time. PGP has now had about as much peer review as most SSL stacks --- and we still find vulnerabilities in SSL stacks.

Nobody smart enough to solve this problem would have the hubris to release it to the public on their own.
You really can't fck with the fckin writing on the Wire. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQbsnSVM1zM
Thanks for pointing that out, it's been fixed.
Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche leave Engine Yard to work on SproutCore
All very good points. I admit I was expressing my grief rather than offering something constructive. My sympathies re: Dexter season finale.
No, not really.

I was just pointing out that Schmidt's comment has some credibility to it. The only reason it doesn't apply to Zuckerberg specifically is because of his powerful position, however the situation is the same.
I was going to point out both books. The Corner is one of the most soul-crushingly depressing books I've ever read. I could only read a few pages at a time. The knowledge that these were real people made it feel like I was actually watching these people's lives either fall apart around them, or get even worse than they already are.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4981425631/in/set-721...

Red dots are white, green asian, orange hispanic, blue african-american

The data is from 10 years ago, but honestly it's very apparent that the mission is mostly latino.

Sure...the areas around mission, valencia, guerrero and 16th are the trendy white hipster hangouts. Everything else, especially the 24th street corridor, is very latino.
Remember the JooJoo tablet? its still a player, just not fully playing
This whole response is a strawman. I never claimed the author should not be upset at copyright infringement. I never claimed that giving away copies is fine. I merely claimed that they may be different than theft. The ethics of the situation was never in the realm of discussion.

The russian roulette analogy you make is doubly vile, and reeks of the worst type of intellectual dishonesty. First is based on the assumption I shot down above. Second, it has an emotional load and severe connotations which are not appropriate. (seriously, suicide games are in no way emotionally close in content to a song download, no matter how you spin it). Finally: a declaration of safe vs (presumably) not safe is a declaration of degree (of risk in this case), my declaration of theft vs not theft is not of degree, it is a declaration of category. Your analogy does not hold.
The line between comfortable and uncomfortable can change based on one's perception of the company holding the data. That perception is highly subject to the perception of the guy running it.
Race and Ethnicity in American Cities (2000 census data)
I think the zero-button approach was present before Apple introduced the iPhone.

http://tech2.in.com/media/images/2009/May/img_144492_p800.jp...

The future was already here. It's just that it was not evenly distributed.

BTW, you could get rid of the buttons - I used my P-800 without the buttons for most of its long life.
True. I was mostly suggesting that you should drop the quality distinction but trying to leave you an out in case there was some clever way to normalize this. I think that in general people would find an accurate average more useful because then they could perform any quality discounting on their own using the known basepoint.
Oblig. oatmeal link: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony
I'm a nice guy, but honestly, if I was a kid with that much power, I probably would have acted the same.

That might be true AND still not excuse a given behavior.

If I had vast power, I too might do a number of unpleasant things too... It's up to you to folks stop me... AND I'm OK stopping someone else at the same time...
Speaking with no authority besides that of annoyed Canadian, I think the "After the US" is the key issue. Most of the laws I'm aware of tend to deal with the stereotypical Canadian things (Media/Canadian content, natural resources). I can't offhand think of many things that are available in the US and Europe, but not in Canada. It appears to me that the extra effort to set up international sales just for Canada is rarely undertaken until the home zone (US/EU) is taken care of, and then Canada is included when they go 'worldwide', if they do.
Most of the potheads I know are reasonably successful in life. The only pothead who seems to be going nowhere was going nowhere before he smoked weed.
Did you have any contact with the producers of "The Social Network" movie coming out soon?

I'm just curious in the event that I get pulled in to see it.
Love that show! the entrepreneurs here would truly appreciate Stringer Bell and perhaps, Marlo Stanfield, but everybody'd love Omar!

Just one course? the fans of "The Wire" know that there's enough complex storylines and richness of characters for somebody to do a PHD thesis on the show.

--
Avon:"the game IS the game...Always!"
Well people like him and I love to spoil the fun for everyone else.

By the way:
Bruce Willis is dead.

Soylent green is people

Kaiser Soze is Kevin Spacey.

It's been 2 and a half years since the end of the wire. I don't think he owes you a warning
Firefox4 is faster than chrome here on ubuntu lucid x86_64 on an i5 with 8g of RAM.

Results for firefox 4 beta7:

http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...

Results for chrome 7.0.517.0 dev:

http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/results.html?%...
Bing Overtakes Yahoo as the #2 U.S. Search Engine
This is asserted as a truism, and perhaps in Google's case it is, but if the difficulty in the hiring process dissuades enough people who have other options from applying I can see it hurting the job pool.

If you were to get 100 applicants, and you were only interested in hiring the top 5% (5 people), and 3 of the good people decided to accept decent jobs they could get without giving blood samples and their first born, and 20 of the less capable people decided not to bother (Incompetents don't know they are in competent and have less choices), then now you have 2 good people out of 77.

Now what if one of those two is a false negative?

Google is attractive enough that good people go through all the trouble anyway, but is this always true? Since we are able to fire people easily in this country, is a bad hire really so ruinous?

I don't actually know the answer to the question, but I am skeptical of your statement. Maybe the assumptions in my numbers are wrong (they almost certainly are), but what are the real numbers?
Want to get into details as to what kind of "snazzy technology" or "amazing code" you guys are involved in? You don't have to give me corporate espionage secrets, just vague general topic.

Is it a flashy OMS/EMS/reporting/risk/quotes front-end? What kind of technical problems do you guys encounter? In terms of concurrency, security, message processing, bandwidth/latency? What kind of business problems do you guys encounter? In terms of smart-routing, risk calculations and compliance. Just curious what programmers in GS are generally involved in.
Sure. My point is that as far as I can tell, Postgres would be better suited to the application, but they want to use Mongo because it's new, regardless of the fact that data integrity, not sheer performance, is more important for this application.
Well, the MongoDB docs make the same points really clear. Run master slave, or replica set. Do reads from the slaves, writes to the master. If you do this, that about covers it. In my blog, I call this MongoDB "good enough practices."
SRE (Site Reliability Engineers) according to Tom Limoncelli (a Google's SRE) is a kind of sysadmin, I doubt that this would ever be the case.
Absolute power corrupts more thoroughly and more quickly when applied to someone with a lack of ethics.
TIL Strong bladder is a prerequisite doing pair programming with RMS.
Not entirely true. If I can't get a license, I have to buy off the black market; meaning I have to go through dealers who traffic under the risk of arrest and prosecution. That creates the premium price that drugs have today, everywhere. Thus it makes sense for a drug dealer to charge more than the price available legally, because buyers without licenses have no choice.

However, there are also demand and supply side things going on that we might not know about that is affecting the price.
> You can't know that without knowing where I live.

Yes, I can. It is an absolute measure. Yours may well be well above the average for the region or even the nation, but it is still not good. Mind, slightly tongue-in-cheek since estimating actual required level of service is a bit tricky. I meant it mostly in the sense of "do not let the telcos tell you that is 'good enough'".

Personally, I would put the "reasonably good" barrier for this day and age at about 20/10Mbps. (I pay about 40€ for a nominal 100Mbps - which, in a quick test right now, gives me 24/13Mbps to/from the UK, over Wi-Fi LAN).
What a disgusting website. Well done for encouraging drug use.
TurnKey Linux Create a Smart Backup and Migration Tool
Anyone up for sharing their Twilio projects? I've always been interested in the platform, but I've seen relatively few applications built on it.
I would say that there isn't really a "Django slant" when it comes to UX and interaction design.

Good UX and interaction design is completely independent from the framework you choose to work with. It's about psychology and human behavior and completely independent of the language or framework chosen. On the other hand, your choice of Javascript framework will probably have an impact, since they determine what UI elements you have in your toolbox.

I would check out sites like A List Apart, 52 weeks of UX, Smashing Magazine, Boxes and Arrows, NetTuts, etc. to learn about UX design.

That being said, it is my understanding that Django generally requires more configuration on a lot of things than Rails does. As a learner, this means that you may be spending more time on configuring Django for your app that may be better spent learning and applying UX concepts. Most UX happens at the HTML, CSS and Javascript layers of your program.

On the other hand, I've heard more advanced devs complain that the conventions in Rails sometimes gets in the way of doing something different and that this isn't a problem with Django.

If you already know Python, by all means stick with Django, however if you are learning the language at the same time as the framework, Ruby and Rails might be a better choice because of the company you will find yourself in.

In my experience, I have also found that in general the RoR community is better with UX and UI, however I also get the impression that the Python community, at least in the US, is taking a lot more interest in excellent front-ends these days. It may be that the community in general is priding itself in UX or it may be that more startups are realizing that you can't have the Asylum run by the Inmates and are hiring full-time front-end developers from the beginning.

Here's a list of UX Tweeps to follow:
http://www.luminanze.com/resources/uxtweeps.html
Young, Not Small, Businesses Drive Job Growth
Twilio is not currently able to hand off a call to another carrier, so you have to pay for the outbound minutes when you call out with <Dial> or the REST API to connect another party
I find a massive difference between mac and windows, I believe that's mostly thanks to exposé.

On Windows I have 3 monitors (of varying sizes unfortunately) and think I couldn't have enough of them (one for a full-screened version of each app I use). On a Mac I seem more comfortable with just 1.

But I am coding .Net apps on the Win box (with a seperate VS solution for server & client), whereas the Mac is more web development. Maybe that makes a difference too.
Actually worked with would be http://benrady.com/, http://grack.com/blog/, and a few other people who don't have online presences.

Seen in person but not worked with would be http://twitter.com/venkat_s and http://www.nealford.com/.
Ok, fair enough :)
So at what age are you old enough to be held accountable for what you say? Maybe I'm old-fashioned, living in a world before the term "Emerging Adulthood" was coined and people were expected to be reasonably mature by the time they were old enough to graduate from college.

He deserves EVERY single piece of negative response he gets for those comments. Even then, he was being trusted with people's private information, a trust that he not only disdained, but he openly expressed a desire to abuse.

If that were the only insights into his personality, I'd agree that "context, age, blah, blah, blah", but when taken with everything else about him, it paints a picture of a guy that I would want nothing to do with.

The real question, though, IMO, is whether interacting with Facebook is really having anything to do with Zuck. I wouldn't want to actually have business dealings with FB, but, at this point, to what extent could Zuck "fuck them in the ear" (to use his eloquent phrase)? I think the answer to that is not so much (I do have an account) but enough that I'm not going to go overboard (minimal status updates; photos are backed up not stored on FB; no use of places or likes; etc).
do you know mark zuckerberg? have you spent any meaningful time with him?

"a sociopath with zero ethics" is a hell of a label to hang on him when you only know him through a few articles you've read on the internet.
marihuana smells disgusting. You inflict that on everyone around you.
Um, that is readability. Everyone goes through it. Basically, "Do you know the Google style guide, and can you be trusted to know when code does or does not follow it?"

In a large code base it is important to have a consistent style. There are a million reasonable style choices. And knowing a tremendous amount about the C programming language tells us squat about whether you know what style choices Google has settled on.

I don't think Google's policy on this is unreasonable. (Disclaimer. I work at Google.)
Consumers, experts, or admins?
Way to be ignorant of fact and close minded.

Also, there's absolutely nothing about the site that encourages drug use at all. Implicitly or explicitly. Feel free to show me if you find something that does.
I wonder what happens if you want your U.S. citizenship back (not reversing the renunciation).
"I have almost no problems with people who smoke weed every once in a while, just as I don't have problems with people who go to the pub sometimes or with people who drink the odd coffee. I do sincerely have problems with people who smoke pot every other night, or every time they hang out with people, or every time they get even a little stressed."

But why do you have problems with that? It appears to me as if have problems with other people who don't fit into your personal view of how one should lead its life. Or is this the only thing?

I personally can completely understand that you don't see the added value for yourself, but I don't get the part where you have an irrational hatred of smoking. It seems like you want to restrict others the choice of leading their lives the way they see fit, without harming others.

Do you have this irrational hatred in other areas too? What do you think about lazy people, for example? Or people who have other religious views than yourself?
How is heroku any different from your or my business? Because they are mildly successful suddenly they are the bad guys and everyone is is good until proven on hn? Double standards really piss me off. The OP needs to take responsibility.
Video capture adapters are pretty cheap these days.
Yehuda's post on his leaving graciously tells the tale of his work over the last three years and gives plenty of nods to the folks who have worked by his side.

http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/14/heres-to-the-next-3-years/
I still wish there was a popular, easy way to send large files directly, without using 3rd-party bandwidth.

This requires the file to be available on http. If my grandma wants to send me a large video clip, she's not going to know how to put it on a web server. (Also, a web server is 3rd party in this case.) IRC direct connect and AOL's IM client are the closest I can think of, but neither are at the level of popularity/ease-of-use for my grandma, not to mention the technical hurdles of firewalls (and the security concerns firewalls are addressing.)

As far as I know, this is an unsolved problem that has created a work-around market (dropbox, rapidshare-style services.) But perhaps the work-around market exists for a reason: there is no revenue in letting users directly connect to one another.
Adopt A Hacker: New York City's Hacker Ambassador Program
Yes, HN can be pretty harsh. I've been here since the beginning and lately I'm coming here less and less :-(

The previous comment was ironic (kind of. He's mentioning a movie (film) they are releasing now based on Zuckerberg's college days and apparently it's pretty negative towards him. "People forgot to delete their FB accounts" is making fun of the people that criticize FB but don't still use it.
Where is the confirmation? IMO, he would have to admit he did it. Maybe I missed that in the article.

IMs are not PGP signed or anything like that. It could have been someone pretending to be him. Maybe he left his laptop unlocked and a roommate or friend typed those words as a joke. There are hundreds of things that may have happened. Zuck may have nothing to do with it.

Don't rush to judgment. Anyone can pretend to be anyone on the Internet.