skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On one hand I agree that it's important to stand up for your rights, even it might seem like a trivial thing to argue at the time. Especially with how the TSA/Border control is evolving into less of a means of security than into an interrogation theater, it's important for us to know just how far an officer can legally question/search us and not to let them overstep those bounds. Once those bounds are crossed, it's hard (impossible?) to go back.

On the other hand, the guy kind of acted like a jerk. He could have done the same thing without seeming so short and unfriendly. Even the most power-mad officers are still people with a basic job to do.

Edit: having read his follow-up post, he makes some good points on the politeness issue. I guess I'm just happy there are people like him to have to the balls (and time to spare) to remind enforcers that they too must follow the law, even if it means a huge inconvenience for him.
I know what I'm playing with this weekend...

For the same thing, in 2D: http://www.contextfreeart.org/ -- make sure to check the gallery.

Ditto, in the browser w/ canvas (full disclosure: I wrote this): file:///home/dan/proj/my-langs/cfa-js/cfademo.html

(Also: http://azarask.in/projects/algorithm-ink/ which pre-dates my version.)
They missed embedded systems programming - writing software to control physical or electrical devices or calculate measurements from sensory apparatus. This would include PLC programming, microcontrollers, motion controllers, kinematics, control theory and so on. This area of software has features which are somewhat distinctive from the other types mentioned. Increasingly embedded systems are everywhere, not only in mobile phones, and there are multiple such systems in modern road vehicles.
It would be better if rotating the screen adjusted everything except the orientation of the board, so you could turn the screen around to look at the board from another angle.
OpenStreetMap - 300 000 users
Tips for working with Lawyers
Ask HN: when is Google Instant coming to my GMail search?
Show me my matching mails real time a la Google Instant. This would be very useful.
>> I was told at a graduate visit day at UMD that they don't accept credit from MS programs other than their own

I don't know how common this is.

I know lots of people (probably most) that get their Master's at a different place than their BS, but don't know any that got a PhD at a different place than their Master's - maybe because as you say the barriers to moving are too high. People that aren't happy where they got their Master's don't get a PhD at all.

(My experience is with the U.S. system)
He addresses the politeness issue in the follow up by saying, quite rightly:

To the authoritarian mind, there are only two responses to a demand: submission or defiance, and anything less than total submission is defiance.
Thanks! That's a great help.

About step 11), any recommendations about learning 3D graphics? I'm just doing this for a little fun, so I don't want anything too heavy... just a kind "Graphics 4 dummies" if it exists.
That might be true, but it's irrelevant. The right question to ask is, "what will make me better off after 7 years? 2 years exp -> PhD or PhD -> 2 years exp?"

I suspect PhD -> work is better, since the 2 years of industry experience will probably be at a higher level.
How hack password on facebook (jpeg)
I would recommend David R. Hanson's book C Interfaces and Implementations. It is an extremely well documented library and shows you how to design APIs properly.

http://www.amazon.com/Interfaces-Implementations-Techniques-...
I simply provide a non-answer. I used to say "business" but lately they've been asking 5 minutes worth of follow-up questions about what type of business I'm in and where in the visited country I conducted this business and with whom. Now I say "to visit friends and family". This answer ends the questions instantly. I haven't gotten a follow-up yet. They seem to have a checkbox for this answer and that's that.

I'm glad that there are guys out there doing this sort of thing. Its important. But for me, who just wants to get through as quickly as possible, I try to remember that even though its interface is human beings, its really just a poorly constructed machine. Give it the right tokens and the turnstile spins.
I think we should applaud someone for having the courage to stand up for their basic rights.

I don't think you should always take the path of least resistance.
How specifically did this help you succeed?
I agree, would it have killed him to just say "business" when asked about his trip -- he reveals exactly nothing by saying that.

He got away with this only because he is a white, native English speaker.

You have remarkably few rights at a border crossing. Four to six hours detentions have been ruled by courts as ok as routine searches, and invasive body cavity searches can be performed without a warrant with the vaguest suspicion.
Here is a well researched report on what courts have ruled are your rights when crossing the border.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL31826.pdf
Google Images Instant (inspired by Youtube Instant)
Although if you could get people to order their search queries by most important to least important, like regular search, it would probably work fine.
Nonetheless, to the human mind, there are plenty of shades of grey. If you're trying to convince (both them and the blog-reading public), you'd do well not to act as if everything's black and white. see also: Stallman.
I think lying about your activities can get you into some actual trouble - so this could be risky advice if they follow up on who you were visting.
I guess politeness can be one of those grey area kinds of things, but when somebody replies "none of your business" to a question of mine, I usually find it a little rude. Alternatively he could have explained his reasoning for remaining silent instead of just doing so; that might have educated (sadly) some of the officers as to why he was acting that way while appearing polite and retaining his rights.
I'd love a job on the Google Maps team.

Psh, Google, you need janitors? Yeah? Call me.
I heard through a New York Times article that the data they use to calculate life expectancy is from the census (which is accurate), while the missing elderly are in other records. So it doesn't appear the life expectancy figure is in question.

NYTimes: Japan’s Elderly Count Was Off by 234,000
http://nyti.ms/cim254

I apologize for the shortened url, I'm on a mobile device.
What you say about single founders rings true indeed. I'm one myself and, though things are going well, am somewhat jealous of founders who have access to such excellent peer networks. Like johnrob said, it sure looks like the networking you get from being a YC-backed founder is even more valuable than the money investment itself. Thanks for sharing! Very much looking forward to the next post.
It was the start of the day at work, I was loading the truck to go install a videoconferencing system. My boss was watching CNN on his computer, and a few of my co-workers had stopped to watch over his shoulder. I noticed people gathering & stopped to see what was going on. As soon as I saw, I called a friend in Queens, she had overslept and was late to work. Her office was close by, that was her subway stop there at the towers.
Really sorry about that. When I moved it to my CDN, the error happened a lot less though. I do have plans to add a buffer between searches, as well.
Google's Colossus Makes Search Real-Time By Dumping MapReduce
This is awesome stuff.
Montaigne is also cool because he gets credit in most English deptartments for inventing the "essay" - at least in it's modern form. Kevin Kelly at kk.org is a good read for tech thinking.
That is possible, but when I was making this, I didn't want to use server-side technologies (php) because I wanted it to stay fast, which would have been necessary to determine your approximate location and get the GeoID prior to page generation.

It is easily possible, however, it just would have been soooo slow in comparison.
I wonder if anybody noticed this date and what you will do during that time. Party?
Contrarian viewpoint - you're dealing with humans with emotions, and they deserve some respect on that human level. If you want to take a moral stand against encroachment of civil liberties, I respect that. But why not be polite? "I apologize, sir, but I'm morally opposed to answering questions beyond what I have to. I'll comply with the legal requirements to enter the country, but I don't answer questions I'm not legally required to on principal - I think it's no good."

You're much less likely to have trouble that way, and it explains why you're doing what you're doing, which makes it more likely to have a positive impact and get the officers to re-think why they're doing their job and what it means. Stonewalling them is your legal right, fine, but it seems to be a sub-optimal choice on a principals/ethics level and on a practical level. Now before anyone replies, "You shouldn't have to bow and scrape to get into your own country" - yes I agree with you, but being rude doesn't accomplish anything additional than stating your principals politely.
He answered to all of your points in the follow-up post, which was prominently linked to the top of the post submitted here.
I sorda forgot that in there when I made it, then it got copied over to the CDN. So changing it was a little difficult. But I did ultimately change it; it now redirects you to a different version of the page with a fresh API key and a different IP address.

While it hasn't fixed the API limit issues completely, it has helped significantly.
Barely..."it's gone down hill a bit"
He discussed the problem with this in the follow-up post, which was prominently linked to the top of the post submitted here.
How was this first-to-market advantage???
It wasn't your fault. Unfortunately, it's a combination of no buffer between queries and a lot of people using it at the same time.

I did remove the alert window, but it will take time to propagate to my CDN.
All the more reason to exercise them as fervently as possible.
In fact, in this case (412 divided by 17) what you did is exactly what the long division algorithm would have you do -- try to divide 41/17, which is really 410/17, and take the closest-without-going-over multiple of 10 -- 20 in this case, then recognize how much you actually "used up" -- 340 -- and then divide into what's left.

So it's even worse than you imagined with your ignorant teachers -- you were doing long division after all and they didn't recognize it.
In fact he specifically mentions that in the follow up point.

What is extremely worrying is the comment that 'they have a checkbox for that'.

What the hell are they doing recording the reasons for movement of law abiding citizens?
I've got a part time job on campus, and as such I've got an office with my 24-inch iMac in it (not to mention a 10,000 core supercomputer that I'm a sysadmin to). We've got plenty of linux labs (I used to admin those as well). I definitely could survive without my macbook pro. But at the same time, there's something nice about having my own private dev machine. A cheap machine on craigslist couldn't handle 5 hours of class without being plugged in. I couldn't build iPhone Apps in Xcode instead of paying attention in my CS classes. Also, I doubt a used laptop from craigslist could survive a trip through my windshield (happened last thanksgiving when my car rolled 4 times.) And an old machine is not going to have backlit keyboard, which is very useful for 12-4am coding sessions. At the same time, I'm pretty sure my wife (History Teaching major) would do fine on a used machine.
Thanks, I missed that link somehow. But I think he's wrong about this:

> 5. Politeness Would Make No Difference.

That's not true at all in my experience. After lots of international traveling, I've found the optimum is, "Good afternoon officer, how are you?" while handing my passport over. Maybe ask about the local sports teams. They're much friendlier and cooler when you do so. This is my empirical observation on my part after dozens if not hundreds of border crossings - it does make a difference; the author is mistaken. I respect his principals, but I think adding politeness would be more pragmatic and serve his goals of establishing civil liberties more effectively.
I did make an Instant Google Image Search.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681775
There is a part in the article where it says that some children feel long division is a pointless chore. I still feel like that. When I had to do this long division stuff in school, I'd split up the numbers into chunks in my head, and calculate the result with these small chunks (27x43 = (27x40) + (27x3) = 1080 + 81 = 1161); just to be sure.

My head could not get around long division back then. I can now, but it would feel like a pointless chore – why do that when I can just chunk it and sum it up in my head?
I thought I had problems when travelling to San Francisco's Web 2.0 Expo this year but I never thought customs officers would make you as US Citizen problems. Crazy!
Cool but I see

function(a,b){return new c.fn.init(a,b)}

as a description of a lot of videos.
I have to agree that a routine update to security features hardly qualifies as front-page news. No wonder the Ruby guys think Python is no fun!
I didn't realize there was a link to a follow up post until you mentioned it. The color of the link is nearly the same color as the rest of the text.
I didn't modify the default events. It could perhaps be a bug with the Google Maps v3 API. I will look into it, and report a bug if necessary :) Thanks!
Well, they also had 3 bad CEO, they tried to sell too many computer models, were spread too thin, had terrible stock management, almost killed themselves with the cloning program, attempted a rewrite that got them stuck in an old OS for ages without a plan B, and there was no internet at the time.

On top of that add that Microsoft was making a lot of money from their OS and Google doesn't...

I don't see why you need to see the world in terms of easy patterns. I'd say that enough variables have changed since then that any prediction based on analogies is very uncertain.
Suggest a feature for Gmail: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=suggestion...
Some of the comments for this are interesting. A few people said that bandcamp was making the wrong decisions and that they were becoming more like the big labels.

I think what many people don't realize is that to run a service like this (without losing money or collapsing because you can't pay for bandwidth/servers), you need to charge for it.
It works on iPhone and Android. :)
The pragmatic civil libertarian might choose to open with something like "Respectfully, I don't believe I have to answer that one. We can discuss it with my attorney present if you disagree."
I don’t think many people would be very impressed by HTML5 Reversi.
I'd second that. Beyond just getting a good code base, it's quite likely that you get some good ideas for APIs and algorithms.

Beyond that, Tcl/Tk is a large-ish codebase that's still quite manageable, especially considering its age and the many rewrites.

For a more idisyncratic view, I once went through Rob Pike's sam editor. No header guards, sparse comments, short variable and function names. But you could still figure out what's going on without any problems. That was the old portable sam, don't know if the current plan9port one is still that good.
Forth-like systems do get used for larger projects - we just call them stack-based virtual machines, and compile to their bytecode rather than writing it by hand (and letting the compiler handle the tricky dataflow issues, eliminate superfluous stack manipulations, etc.).

Forth makes sense to me in embedded (or otherwise tightly-constrained) systems, but otherwise, you're spending mental energy on being a human compiler.

I agree that the concatenative languages are interesting, but the APL family is probably a better example. (Joy is also cool, but much less practical.)
My skills are pretty typical: I'm versed in the web technologies, C++, and .NET. Notably I'm not familiar with XNA or Flash, but the underlying technology isn't really important to me.

I just want to do something creative that is "interesting". If there's a novel idea for a game, or a utility, or a visualization, or something else entirely; I'd like to hear it.
"and the look and feel is the same across all platforms"

This is why you fail.
See point 4 in his follow-up post (http://knifetricks.blogspot.com/2010/09/10-brief-responses-t...)

"You say “business” (because you were at a conference) but the stamps in your passport indicate that you’re returning from a tourist destination like Bali. Now the officer can argue that you have made a false statement, have engaged in an attempt to claim improper business deductions under the Internal Revenue Code and have broken any other federal criminal law -- there are more than 10,000 -- which he can mold around the circumstances."
- http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tag... check out these samples to allow users to zoom into a point when they've found it, eg: http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tag...

- Great to see business listings too: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/mapsearch/reference.html...
http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/mapsearch/boot-complete....
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2...

Good work so far.
Complex code is never good for security. In 2006, a small change was made to the Debian port of OpenSSL to do something like remove a few compiler warning messages. Unfortunately, it had the side effect of making the random number generator predictable. This security flaw wasn't discovered for over a year and in that time many weak keys were generated and used. See here for more info: http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys
I wonder how "personal reasons" would have gone over. Nondescript and a lot of people will assume sensitive personal reasons and not ask questions.
fixed. thanks for pointing it out.
Proving, once again, that the secret to power is money. In fact, I think the most useful way to think about money is to think of it as virtualized power.
Announcing node.ocaml (OCaml + Libevent = Fast Fun)
I'm very good at getting to them when they're looking for bingo, but not very good at reaching them otherwise. Also, candidly speaking, after four years I'm sort of ready for an audience with new challenges and, ahem, a higher dollars-to-crisis ratio.
Bing in html5 on Safari
Wonder whether there is any code of the kind "if (platform1) doA() else if (platform2) doB() ..." in there.
He's right that is is deeply flawed. In no particular order:

1. It violates the FSF's "Free Software Definition". Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program for any purpose. They explain this as:

The freedom to run the program means the freedom
for any kind of person or organization to use it
on any kind of computer system, for any kind of
overall job and purpose, without being required to
communicate about it with the developer or any
other specific entity. In this freedom, it is
the user's purpose that matters, not the
developer's purpose; you as a user are free
to run the program for your purposes, and if
you distribute it to someone else, she is then
free to run it for her purposes, but you are
not entitled to impose your purposes on her.

If I, as a user, wish to run an AGPL program as a daemon on my system to generate forms that get presented to customers and that processes the input the customers type into the forms, I'm the user. AGPL requires that I communicate about the program with the customers. This violates Freedom 0.

2. It seems at odds with #10 of the OSI Open Source Definition ("No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface").

3. It prohibits something that is allowed by copyright law. Pretty much every other free/open license is based on granting permission for you to do things that would not be allowed under copyright law, without requiring you to give up any of your rights allowed by copyright as the owner of a particular copy lawfully made. To put it succinctly, AGPL is a EULA.

That the FSF accepted AGPL shows a major breakdown in their idealism.
Bloglines will officially shut down on October 1, 2010
One of the tools: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=514412
The largest thing I wrote was a clone of the parts of "curl" that I use, modifying it slightly so that I can just write JSON to describe what I want to post to a website, rather than the URL-encoded string. This included supporting DELETE, GET, POST, and PUT, and allowing downloading the response only, headers only, or both. I want to add a progress bar and a (admittedly totally unnecessary) GUI, then I'll throw it on GitHub and get feedback on my coding style. I'm enjoying seeing how far I can figure things out without outside help right now, though.

The second largest thing I've written, which I did in a much earlier version of Factor, was to clone enough of Fog Creek Copilot's Reflector that I could use that for testing/developing the Mac versions of the product. That was buggy, disgusting code with piles of stack manipulation, though, and is part of why I quit working in Factor at the time. I wish I still had the code; it'd be interesting to know whether my change of opinion is due to more experience with stack languages, or changes in the language. Probably some of both.
Soldiers tear apart, rebuild a jeep in four minutes (Video)
> I agree, would it have killed him to just say "business" when asked about his trip...

...and, again, answered specifically this point in the follow-up post, which was prominently linked to the top of the post submitted here.

That makes at least three HN commenters that weren't bothered to read the second post, so far.

As for,

> ...and invasive body cavity searches can be performed without a warrant with the vaguest suspicion.

I followed your link and read portions of it. I especially found this section chilling:

"For example, in United States v. Forbicetta, the court found reasonable suspicion to exist where Customs officials acted on the following objective facts: the suspect (1) arrived from Bogota, Colombia, (2) was traveling alone, (3) had only one suitcase and no items requiring Customs inspection, (4) was young, clean-looking, and attractive, and (5) was wearing a loose-fitting dress. These factors taken together matched the “smuggling profile” for narcotic carriers in that area, and thus, the court concluded there was a sufficient basis to conduct the search."

I looked up the case. In this case, Forbicetta was indeed smuggling an appreciable amount of cocaine under her dress. I will also grant that in this case the CBP showed a high degree of professional training and accurately profiled her.

However, I am extremely unsettled that the factors listed, taken together, represent a legal basis for invasive search.

As a more practical matter, whenever articles from guys like Paul Lukacs come along, and some part of my brain says to me, "this guy is tilting at windmills", I find myself soon reading something else that supports their crusade altogether.
Yeah, there are some links hidden in his body text too. Hate it when web authors do that.