skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Twitter is building a realtime communications platform that is exponentially more complex than, say, the telephone system (which is a one-to-one system, as opposed to many-to-many)"

Talk about not having a clue.

So writing a software program is "exponentially" harder than developing a working telephone, running a system of wires, inventing a way to switch calls automatically, the entire touch tone system, running cables under the ocean etc etc etc. Not to mention the telephone industry came up with some of the best inventions in computing - they weren't doing that for their own fun, it was useful because telephones were HARD.

Is Twitter hard? Yea, it has some good tech behind making it scale, but the basic functionality is pretty simple.
Does HN have guidelines for submitting links that are behind a paywall? I ask because I don't have a WSJ account and couldn't read the linked article - then realized I can't remember the last time I got stuck at a paywall dead end on HN. I checked the guidelines and didn't see anything. Are we supposed to flag these or just leave them alone? Thanks.
Ask HN: Monetizing your brain (without writing code)
Hi HN,

I'd like to raise some cash but I'm not sure I want to do contract work. Writing code for money can be a big commitment. More than that, it's often just not fun. Few clients have interesting problems to solve and I'd rather build things for myself. (Besides all that, the offer letter I signed for my current employer makes me run any such projects past them, which is annoying.)

Have you had success in selling your skills, technical or otherwise, in a way that doesn't involve project work? Are these transactions fun and rewarding for you? Is teaching/tutoring the right direction? How did you fill your client pipeline?

I've only been in the Bay Area for eight months, so I don't have the strongest network to lean on. Thanks for your insight.
Accept them and don't worry too much about karma.

I am aiming for 6502, but won't be sad if it takes a while...
ESR might not be "hard core" enough for you, but he's been studying hackers for decades. He's an established authority on hackers and hacker culture.

I love zen koans, especially hacker koans,

This is a validation of his authority.
Yes, that's how unionization works in the U.S. However, you've said nothing about educational outcomes, which is what I'm concerned with.

In addition, you're a bit off on the facts. There actually are three states that expressly prohibit collective bargaining with teachers unions: North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. In a lot of these right-to-work states, the unions have been able to get work rules and the like codified in state law as opposed to within collective bargaining. Again, the PDF I linked to has a lot off good data and cites, and yes, it does comes down pretty harshly on the unions.

Look, I've been actively engaged on this subject for the last six years of my life. It's clear that I'll never convince you that simply eliminating public sector unions won't magically solve our education woes. But I can show you the facts that the circumstances that would allow for that to happen haven't happened.
The linguistics of the term "assassination" here is interesting.

In the old days, we'd just bomb whatever place we thought the bad guys were hiding, and anti-war types complained about the civilian casualties.

So we got better and better at avoiding civilian casualties, and now we can pick off the specific targets we know we want. But then anti-war types call it "assassination" and it actually winds up sounding even worse.

Of course when we do actually capture them instead of killing them, anti-war types will complain about the prisons we hold them in. Put 'em in a military prison and it's inhumane, put 'em in a civilian prison and that's inhumane too. As soon as we get around to trying them, they'll mount a legal challenge that the terms of the trial are unlawful, causing the trial to be abandoned while we think up a new legal framework under which to try them... and then they'll complain we're holding them for so long without a trial.

What I'm trying to say is that instead of complaining about the targeted killing of specific bad guys in foreign countries that we're not at war with, perhaps you should be grateful that we're not declaring war on the country just so we can bomb the crap out of it.
I don't buy newspapers and I canceled my cable when they started (in addition to putting commercials in my shows) putting audible bugs over the shows I was trying to watch.
If you use Firefox, I highly recommend the SenSEO plugin (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9403/). This comes in handy big time for me almost every day in addition to this SEO cheat sheet from SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...).
I somehow got frog blast to run twice. Closing the tab only killed one of them, and I got a "the following pages are non-responsive: Kill/Wait" dialogue with no pages listed. When I chose wait, it still tied up one CPU. When I chose Kill it killed the rogue mystery process
Yes, I thought you were implying that but I wanted to make it more concrete.
There are plenty of examples of the opposite though.

The creator said the Segway would change the world and it certainly hasn't.

I think people pull up these tales too often, those stories are famous because they are the exception, not the rule.
> the discussions below about using AdSense to monetize a website dedicated to profiting off non-consensual pictures of people is quite interesting.

Yeah, there are a few sites like this now ("People of Wal-Mart", some content on "Look at this fucking hipster") and I've always wondered about the same thing.

You're usually in the clear if you're just creating one-off works of art or news/editorial commentary -- and not primarily seeking merch sales or ad revenue... But these sites are pull wholesale exploitation of public photos for ad revenue. (Although, "People of Wal-Mart" claims to honor takedown requests and I haven't heard any hub-bub about them pulling a stunt like this one. And since most of the photos on that site are indoor, within Wal-Mart private property, there's that issue they could theoretically put up with.)

In my mind, sites like these could be a lot harder to police than copyright infringement (on say, YouTube or elsewhere) since the onus of litigation is on an individual being photographed, rather than a large multinational rights-holding company. (Personally, I really don't have the time to go looking for photos of myself that others may have taken of me.)
You should be able to "Google+I'm Feeling Lucky" (GIFL) that and get it with one click for free, if you would like:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

(Note--not positive that the above link will work. If you google the title of the article, the WSJ story is the first result, and clicking through should give it to you for free from there.)
Just to amplify, the climate and expense of getting licensed is going to vary by orders of magnitude depending on the location.

Here in DC the actual license is a few grand (by the books), but I heard it could cost up to $100k when you factor in all the lawyers you'll need to actually get it approved.
Of course, 'stevejobs' can ignore this advice. I'm just letting him know some people will take him less seriously if the name collision isn't resolved or explained. Usually, such pseudonyms are from pranksters.

I think Kevin Fischer's choice of the handle 'rms' for HN was unwise, as well. That he clarifies that he's not RMS on his profile mitigates the faux pas a little. But why squat on such a famous handle? If someone without the initials P.G. could beat PG to registration of the handle 'pg' on some new hacker/startup website, and then use that handle as their own, would doing so be a good idea?
Yes, I went to Akihabra to "buy a bunch of shit to bring home with me". That's exactly why I went. Well, and to just take in the spectacle. And yes, I'm not really into Anime and plastic figurines but capacitors and old oscilloscopes do fascinate me.

> That Apple has a store in Ginza but not Akihabara says a lot I think

Actually that Mac Store is in Akihabara (here's a video I found randomly on the net of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmmmaR5lAxY) - perhaps there is another one or it moved (that photo is from a few years ago).

> That sweet netbook will be awesome for a Japanese person but you're about to enter a world of pain

Yup, I used to own a sony vaio netbook that I bought in japan way ahead of the netbook craze, and yes all the keys were in Japanese. I managed to get it working though, but I've since moved off of Windows completely.
1. What an uninspired story

2. This submission is a duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1715295
That's fine. I'm just warning you that many of the awesome developers and best Perl shops out there will put a strike against you for getting it wrong. But if you wish to hurt yourself, go right ahead.
It is if you're okay with it.

Functioning and even prospering in modern society requires you to be plugged in and socialize. You can live fine off the grid and being an outsider but with each option you have the advantages or disadvantages.

Do you and what makes you happy.
That's the thing: I almost feel like POPT is pulling this (legally risky -- commercial use [via ad revenue] of likeness, possible harassment, etc.) stunt to grab attention to their own site.

While POW is still in the same grey area (regarding commercial use of likeness), at least they seem to honor takedown requests -- or at least, I gather this since I've never heard a single complaint about it and their site is still alive and kickin.
The last time he tried to contribute code was more than a little embarrassing.

He managed to be on the ground at the right time for the whole free software and hacker culture thing, but as far as actual coding goes, he's nothing special.
Hermes Birkin 35CM Togo Leather Bag Jester Pink
I like DFW, Infinite Jest, and The New Yorker, but I question the increasingly regularity of this kind of content on HN and would like to gently recommend metafilter.com.

Here is this article posted there:

http://www.metafilter.com/79589/David-Foster-Wallaces-unfini...
"they are more likely to be microbes than anything intelligent"

I'm curious what the probability is that this statement is true. Alien species that have been around much longer than us may view humans as microbe-like in intelligence.
If you're still in Edinburgh you might be able to chat to him at the next Ed Lambda (meetup.com/ed-lambda). He attended the last one.
I would say that there's no need to learn how to gel with people you don't like. I'd consider trying to learn how to like others, though, which actually is different.

Find out what others like the way you like things. And talk to them about those things. This will give you something to chat about, teach you something about a subject you didn't know about before, and possibly earn them some respect in your eyes.

But beyond that, just seek out people who do share your interests. There are plenty. Me, for example. There are too many people out there who you will get along with great instantly to stress over those who are basically asleep.

But when in a pinch, it's good to try and get them to talk about something they can teach you about.

Good luck to you. And if none of that works, ping me at daniel@danielmiessler.com, and we can chat physics (I'm an amateur) and metal (old school).

Cheers.
Yes, it is OK. However modern business tends to select strongly against introverts. So my advice would be to look for some classes on public speaking, or possibly look for a nearby chapter of Toastmasters.

http://www.toastmasters.org/

When you get out into the business world, you'll find that standing up in front of a group and giving presentations is an important skill. It might be for something as simple as explaining why X is the wrong direction and Y is a better direction. You'll need to be able to sell yourself when it comes to business - after all, that is what a job interview is.
Thanks a lot mate :)
Google Instant Blacklist
Non sequitur. Your second statement does not follow from the first. First you state what medical care is not, then as an example, state something else medical care is not that appears unrelated to the first.

More constructively, saying that medical care cannot help with obesity is unnecessarily restricting the definition of medical care. Further, obesity is a factor in life expectancy, so measuring life expectancy is a reasonable proxy for measuring obesity, and to some extent, vice versa.
I've you've never read Techcrunch before, how did you form an opinion about their reporting style?
There was a great piece whose identifying information I'm blanking on that explained how we stumbled into drone warfare. Basically, we tried doing snatch & grabs with commando teams for a while, and that kept generating one negative externality we weren't willing to tolerate. Illegal acts? No. Media pressure? No. Collateral damage? No. Diplomatic reprecussions? No. Prisoners.

Prisoners are a real handful. What are our options? Let them go? Well, no gain there. Put a bullet in the back of their head? Americans won't go for it. Try them in a civilian court? You get to expose sources & methods, they might walk anyhow (evidence tends to be testimony of equally unsavory characters plus something classified to the nth degree and not worth burning on Mook #473), and the successful outcome is they go plot their next terrorist act from a federal penitentiary. Try them in military court? All the fun of a civilian court, and the New York Times editorial board will make it sound like you took the bullet option anyhow.

You know what has never once happened as a result of a Predator drone strike? A live prisoner in US custody.
Out Of the Tar Pit (2006) [pdf]
Pick up First, Break All The Rules to learn the difference between talents and skills.

Being extroverted is a talent. If you're an introvert, no amount of willpower is going to make dealing with strangers more fun. That said, you can be good at it. Some of the top public speakers and sales people are introverts. But when they walk off the stage, they need their space.

That said, my advice is to find ways to be happy with being who you are. And you're hardly going to be alone out there. I've seen figures indicating that about 3/4 of programmers are introverted. There is something about interacting intensely with a computer that does not appeal so strongly to extroverts. So, depending on what you want to do, being an introvert could be an advantage.
This resulted in some rather humorous questions at the press event, when a reporter named "Slutsky" pointed out that she wasn't getting any instant results when she searched for her name:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/google_instant_black...
This whole conversation is way off-topic but the operations happen with the partnership of the Pakistani government (so the bit about "...in a country we're not at war with" is irrelevant) against military targets who are not fighting under any nation's flag.

The days of two armies lining up at opposite ends of a battle-field are gone.
I'm sure the people at http://www.exopolitics.org/ will have a field day with this.
This is almost amusingly irrelevant--if contact is actually made with an alien intelligence and this guy tries to step up and say "I'm in charge of this", there's no doubt someone more powerful would try and take over.
Its sad to hear he struggled so mightily to write more novels given the incredible power of his essays and short stories. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", about the pleasures and distractions and ultimately the "despair" of a 7-Night Caribbean cruise (which he helpfully abbreviates 7NC) is both the funniest and one of the most stark and cold works I've ever read.
It's supposed to be a better Dvorak. The keys are less of a departure from Qwerty than Dvorak's are so it's easier to learn, and it makes a few improvements over Dvorak. More on their website:

http://colemak.com/

From the site:

> Ergonomic and comfortable – Your fingers on QWERTY move 2.2x more than on Colemak. QWERTY has 16x more same hand row jumping than Colemak. There are 35x more words you can type using only the home row on Colemak.

> Easy to learn – Allows easy transition from QWERTY. Only 2 keys move between hands. Many common shortcuts (including Ctrl+Z/X/C/V) remain the same. Typing lessons available.

> Fast – Most of the typing is done on the strongest and fastest fingers. Low same-finger ratio.

> Multilingual – Allows to type in over 40 languages and to type various symbols, e.g. "pâté", "mañana", €, em-dash, non-breaking space.

> Free – Free software released under the public domain. You don't have to buy a new keyboard, just install a program.
I wonder who gets the cash when these cases are settled? Does the money go back to the original authors of the software in question?
I think this is just the pendulum swinging back and forth. you'll get these cycles, as first, we innovate on basic tech, and then polish it and tighten it up, before innovating on basic tech again.

Basic tech is still there. I think it's hard to know where to look, because like I said elsewhere, things that significantly change our lives in the future start off looking like toys, and not all toys end up significantly changing our lives.

It only seems like we have no basic tech because we're either not looking there, or we're writing it off.
I own a bar, and am using it to fund a new business. It's a great business, if you can get into a popular spot.

Only caveat: it takes a lot of discipline to manage large amounts of cash. If you have a problem with drugs or prostitutes, you will fail. It's not your cash... it's next week's payroll, liquor order, rent, etc.
Yeah, right...
Hollywood is about wasting time in a fantasy story. What is innovative about it? Plays have existed since more than a couple centuries.

Zynga games have never really been played on a scale such as this before, leveraging social reciprocation as a way to entice the user to keep playing. I think if they're smart about it, they can find new game mechanics on this scale that wasn't available to games before.
Indeed. Human arrogance I would say.

If an alien civilization was to find and visit us (by means other than microbes riding an asteroid...) then their technology is at least a few hundred years ahead of ours.
Ah, but this is just a consideration of the data as it is stored in the medium itself.

What about the weight of all the electrons necessary to do a read-state of the internet wherever it might be encoded or, perhaps better still, the peak transit rate of the internet in regular use - how many bits are being transmitted and what do they weigh as they actually move, rather than relying on arbitrarily chosen storage media as our determinant.
I don't know your background but one of the things that I do is expert witness for intellectual property litigation and tech relates legal proceedings. The going rate is about $300hr and it is a pretty good gig. I do not do it on a full time basis because I like to build stuff, but I do pick and chose cases that I find fascinating it accounts for 10% of my work but there are enough cases out there than I could probably scale that to 50% if I wanted to. It is challenging work with high stakes involved but it can be very rewarding. I don't know if you could fit it into a day job schedule though. Many times you have to pick up and go for proceedings on fairly short notice. If you employer would allow you to use personal time or leave without pay for it, it may be an option.
Yes, you did. You said that not allowing GET requests to change data on a site is commonly covered in network security books. It's not a security issue, it's a behavior issue. GET requests are supposed to "safe" in that they don't result in changing any data on the site[1]. Breaking that expectation can result in all sorts of unintended consequences, such as unintended changes caused by link prefetching.

The article is also subtly wrong. GET requests can be protected from CSRF attacks. There just isn't ever a reason to do that if you're doing things right.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html
Sorry, didn't realise it was behind the paywall.

Here's the open link for the story:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142405274870408210...
> A faulty component in the UAV doesn't necessarily mean that the weapon lands off target.

Someone on reddit pointed out that even if it does, it doesn't matter. If the kill radius is 20 yards, and the bugs mean that it has an error of up to 5 yards... that's not really significant.

edit: Unless, of course, you happen to be bombing something next to an elementary school, a mosque, or a hospital.
Almost everything is an object (and everything is almost an object)
It's sad how many of those words I had to look up.
Ask HN:  I hated buying a house, how can we fix it.
Hi all-

A close family member was recently in the market for her first house. The process, with which I was designated helper, pretty much sucked from start to finish. Agents make some ridiculous fee, which totally sucks for sellers, and in turn, might inflate home prices. The whole bidding process kind of sucks. Finding out how much you can afford is also fairly obtuse. In sum, I would love to have had a nice "Mint-ish" website to help me along with the whole deal. Is there any market for this kind of app, a sort of "marrily" meets "mint" for home buyers? If so, what type of functionality would be useful?
Concurrency is not much of an issue, you write concurrent JS apps like you write them in other languages.

There are three types of applications, and two are easy in JavaScript.

The first is something that is well within the capabilities of one modern CPU core. This class of applications includes every program that's currently running on your machine. Servers that only do IO (message queues? memcache? SMTP?) can also be included, in many cases.

This is easy to handle because there is no concurrency. For IO, you use an event loop, of course.

The second class of application is something like Facebook. One machine will never be enough to handle it, so you design for it to be as distributed as possible. Each app is "shared nothing" and passes messages to communicate with other components.

Obviously, JavaScript will do fine here. Each tiny component runs on one CPU core, and then you run a million copies of the app on 250,000 4-core servers. Easy. Need to double capacity? Just buy more servers. Wonderful.

The third case is the Enterprise Application. This is something like your company's HR portal or your online bank. It's an application that's the swiss-army-knife of applications. It slices, dices, and reads email too. Just compiling it is a week-long process involving 10 engineers and 4 consultants. For maximum SPEEEEED, everything happens in its own threads, which share 100% of everything with the other threads. (How could you read email and RSS feeds and check your paycheck if there weren't threads!?)

This type of app can only ever run on a single machine; if it's too slow, IBM and Oracle would be happy to help you out with a marginally-faster box for a few million more dollars. Since everything is shared, once you hit the most expensive hardware, that's the best you can ever do. If you wonder why it takes 120 seconds to load your bank account balance... this kind of app is why.

And no, you can't write one of these in JavaScript. Shared-state threads are not implemented. What a loss...