skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comment doesn't justify any sort of spying. It's not a threat, but a seemingly true observation. Schneier has said essentially the same.
Also unclear why they need it, if you've got $60 mil in revenues, 400 employees, and not a lot of non-employee costs, then why do you need an additional $80 million in investment?

Same reason political campaigns to - major advertising blitz. I see their tv ads all the time. They are probably going for a brand household name.
Career internships
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Build your bright future.
The PeopleWeb | Mark Pincus Blog (March 2005)
Yelp is not fluff. It solves the problem of information asymmetry in the marketplace.

Since Yelp makes it easier to tell lemons from businesses that shine, it makes the market more efficient. This means your money goes further. Which means you have more of it to spend on education, health insurance, etc.
I wrote the post, and I assure you there was no jealousy, anger, or confused thought involved. This particular community lacks critical discourse in any way, and this post was an attempt at creatively attacking that problem. If you read through our backlogs you will find a great deal of well thought out and comprehensive discourse on personal development and lifestyle design.

While using a few images of "real people" in this community may have been a bad move, this is the only criticism that I've seen of it yet.

And no, I did not go out of my way to find a specific video type of Ferriss, that was actually the first one I looked at.
Yeah, think on it a couple of days. Then it will all become clearer.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

After reading your post I think you will find yourself guilty of this too.

Lifestyle design is an ugly industry, and this is satire. Satire can be ugly. Get over it.
Microsoft acquires AVIcode
I don't know how many left because of the outages, but I think it's safe to say that very few, if any, left because of the honest explanation of their cause.
It's amazing to see all the action that is taking place all of a sudden, largely sparked by a sensationalist documentary and a Department of Education contest (Race to the Top).

I'm very curious to see what will come out of it. A lot of harm can be done in periods like this. What I'm afraid of is that the teacher role will be turned into an even more mechanistic role and will kill teacher care and passion even more than it already has with even more endless teaching-for-tests motives. It may increase student learning, but probably only a minuscule amount to what is possible.

Here's one teacher evaluation guide that is being implemented in DC: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2010/10/ok_and_it...
Any links? I am curious how they would go about prosecuting for this if they did indeed destroy the device, which would presumably be the evidence.
"One of the agents produced a printout of a blog post that Afifi’s friend Khaled allegedly wrote a couple of months ago."

Is it really that easy to tie up so many federal resources? They knew everything about this guy and dedicated a team to him just because he was the blog posters friend (edit: a Reddit commentors friend). Amazing and inefficient.

The real terrorists can drown themselves in noise by flooding the intel agencies with fake posts from real people and real names. I wouldn't be surprised if they are not already doing this.

Dedicating entire teams to follow all the friends of every semi-threatening blog post doesn't scale.
Adobe & Microsoft, sitting in a Tree.
There's also a number of HN people that wouldn't be able to participate due to not having Facebook or Twitter accounts and thus being unable to have a Quora account.
High technology is a little like some pacific islands, that are formed from magma swelling up from the depths of the earth. At first, they are desolate and empty, but life quickly colonizes them. You can live in paradise, eating the fruit, and riding the huge waves, serene and zen-like or yelling righteous! righteous!

As others come, some set themselves up as kings, living in grand huts, riding the people and telling them what to do.

Until one day, the earth opens up again and molten rock flows out, destroying the works of man, destroying whole islands and creating others.

I want to be absolutely clear on this next point: engineers in no way control or direct this wave of lava. They surf it.
This is shallow thinking.

Facebook and the various other social apps do in fact address serious societal problems and needs.

There's been a trend for several decades of people in modern society growing further apart. It's been lamented at great length in numerous studies and publications. It's a natural consequence of the other choices our societies are making, becoming more mobile in both work and home. People move more than they did, they change jobs more than they did, and thus they change social circles more than they did.

Social Networks compensate for all that. They do in fact bring people closer together than they would be otherwise. Certainly much of the interaction appears superficial, but if you think that indicates it's meaningless, that's because you don't understand social interaction. Even casual, seemingly superficial interactions bring us closer. They help us define our communities.

On Facebook I'm friends with people I haven't seen in 20+ years. Yes, most of our interactions seem superficial. But they aren't just that, they're tying us all closer to where we came from. And sometime it's more than that. That friend of yours from high school struggling with cancer? It means something to them that 50 people post well wishes weekly. It helps them. It's meaningful.

I lost track of many people in my life, without really meaning to. It's just how things work. Facebook et al help me correct that. They keep me in touch. Sure I have my "real-life" friends, but it's also nice to have the extended group.

I lost track of these people. My 13 year old niece will never lose track of someone unless she wants to. Think about that. Tell me that's not transformative.

Shallow thinking.
Nude Japanese slide show at PornoXO
The reason is the world does not need so many mediocre designers.

With internet and social media, companies can interact with designers much more effectively and fewer designers are needed to do the same amount of work.

So the supply side from designers is high, while the demand side is low. So the consumers can pay arbitrarily low rates.
Once the not so good designers and designers who do other things just as well (high opportunity cost) move to other streams. The supply side would start having a higher say.
Windows XP has a broken security model. Age has very little to do with it (aside from the fact that support ends in 2012, so it's only worth using for another couple years.)
If you find yourself nervous during the interview, try focusing your physical attention on some object. Whatever you're taking notes will do. It can help you get out of your head and stop thinking too much.
I think it's inaccurate to say most designer's work process is to "just sit down and muck around with fonts, shapes, etc until they have something that fits the bill". Of course design is a process but all those "lovely theoretical things" tell you where to start. If you're quoting by rolling the dice, you're not quoting effectively.
Two of the angel investors in Angie's List teach at Ohio State University, where I go to school. Anecdotally:

-Both have said it's worked out as a great investment.

-One had about a 20% stake when it was first started (not sure where his stake is now).

-The other had the most interesting story. One of the people (based on the prof's story and the article, I assume it was Bill Oesterle) went to my professor pitching for the funding. After the pitch, my professor wrote Bill a check and Bill responded back with something to the effect of, "Are you ready to lose this money? Because you're never going to see it again."

It's had a happy ending for everyone I know who is involved.
But there are bright minds working on new antibiotics, energy efficient cars, cheaper building materials etc. Some of the best and brightest minds are also smashing atoms in particle accelerators, charting the cosmos, composing symphonies, educating new minds, and, yes, pushing the limits of computer connectedness to make many lives on this planet just that much nicer. There are different ways to contribute to the world. Some leave a more significant mark than others, and in different ways. People do what they are drawn to, and I think that allows them to reach their fullest potential.
I'm a grad student right now, so I'm using tools for a different purpose, but thought I'd list them anyway:

Dropbox - backup and sharing with research group and collaborators

Mendeley - cloud based article and citation management (great for bibtex)

Google Code with Mercurial - OSS projects that are tied into my research

EC2 - large scale, distributed simulations (data stored on S3)

Remember The Milk - trying to manage my tasks
I've worked for healthcare and education startups. These are very, very hard markets for a startup to tackle. They combine the slow, expensive sales cycle of a large business with the regulation and bureaucracy of essential government services. It's a long, hard slog that most investors won't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Programmers start companies that solve their own problems because they understand those problems. Few programmers understand the problems in health care or education, and it's not a market to screw around in when you don't know what you're doing.
Reviews on Yelp are anonymous, which provides opportunities to game the system.
Ad Hoc Synchronization Considered Harmful
This research paper appears in OSDI 2010. It thoroughly studies ad hoc synchronization from many real world applications and concludes that ad hoc synchronizations cause all kinds of problems, including bugs, performance issues and misleading concurrency bug detection tools. It also finds that ad hoc synchronizations are implemented in many various ways, thus very hard to be recognized. Because of this, the authors developed a tool, called SyncFinder, that automatically annotates ad hoc synchronizations in source code.

The full paper can be downloaded from http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Xiong.pdf. It's from the Opera Research Group at UCSD (http://opera.ucsd.edu/).

Should we stop using ad hoc synchronization? Do we need better synchronization libraries? What's your opinion on this?
I'd like to see someone on here try this, ala JetBlue's Unlimited Flights for 30 days. It won't be me however...
I'm jealous :-/
HackNY is this weekend
Religion Essays| Religion Essay
Realize why religions essays have been a difficult task for the students. Unveil the way to handle your religious essay questions by going through a few examples with their answers.
They should add a guideline making the obvious observation that the age of any given account says nothing about the length of site use by the account holder. Maybe then we could can the typical "semi-noob illusion" junk.

There was an imgur link on the front page a couple of days ago. I believe that was the first time ever. Now the Costco Cavalcade (http://www.reddit.com/domain/costco.com -- these SEO clowns have learned that they can grow an account legacy by posting this Costco garbage constantly) has made its way here. Yay!

Protip -- Someone should post that TIL that Costco Sells Caskets! Instant front page!
The OP is talking about getting "work" done, like solving cancer. The "togetherness" stuff can be defined as entertainment. Watching movies and playing games is meaningful, as is staying in touch with friends, but these things don't make the trains run on time.
Google TV launch hardware looks to be expensive, clunky
I understand the feeling, it's one articulated by people around the world every day. But look at the commonalities between the things she mentions as real problems. What is the shared thread? They're all about people who can't afford certain things. There are some businesses built on serving these markets, but they aren't typically internet technology businesses.
Yelp reviews aren't exactly anonymous, as they require you to use your real name
I find it really difficult to read such an argument (whether I agree with it or not), if it doesn't come from someone who is actually out there trying to solve these problems himself or herself.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Arena

Edit: at least the gladiator image in the post is apt :)
Awesome. This is what Codeplex should have had from the start.

I tried to get started building something similar a couple of years ago, but the VS extension API kinda defeated me.
The service in there that surprised me was Google's. While the chrome shortener extension has been out for a while it wasn't officially announced until last week.

Given that the big value add (beyond white labeling) that is being provided by these services is analytics tracking I'd be deeply concerned about a new URL shortener run by the same company with the dominant web analytics package.

It's only a matter of time until goo.gl stats are displayed within Google analytics and when that hits I wonder how many will stay with the current shortener services.
I wonder how many addictive, self-referencial and narcissistic tweets it took for the author to convince 16,402 people to follow her on Twitter.
New Media Rockstars
Nano-Gyroscopes Will Let Cell Phones Navigate Indoors, Underground
There's updates and there's updates. If an update automagically installs itself and restarts your machine because you went to the kitchen to make yourself a tea and a sandwich and you lose work, that's one thing. Same if an update forces you to wait for it to download and install when you really need to get some work done. Bonus negative points if you are on a connection where you pay by the kilobyte with international roaming. If an update asks for consent, installs cleanly without breaking things or making your machine unusable for the time, and does not destroy your work if you aren't paying attention, that's another thing. There's a good reason people dislike updates. The correct thing to do is fix them, not advocate them.
You guys are lame - you obviously haven't seen: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/
Home Loan
On the Reddit post they were repeatedly asked to get a lawyer or go to ACLU.

I am not sure whether they did that or if it would have made a difference.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dmh5s/does_this_...
Tech is the major part of the solution to every problem.

For example, homelessness can be solved to a large extend by the ROR hacker. For a start, a webapp for the health practitioners, volunteers etc. to better organize would make it all more efficient - let's say by 20%. Webapps that create greater efficiencies in the housing market add another 20%. Add in a webapp to organize homeless advocates to lobby politicians, and you've gone a pretty large way.

Software creators don't realize just how much of an impact they can actually have on the world.
Economic incentive is how we allocate resources. Expecting big brains to defy what the market currently wants is not only a huge personal sacrifice but it may even prevent them from succeeding. Organizations (mostly governments) that want betterment of the world should be paying the market more to efficiently deliver it.
http://goto11.net/youve-got-30-minutes-to-write-a-python-scr...
Is there seriously a "general doomsday fear" in the US? I see small hints and mentions in news items that suggest a lot of people have their backs up, but what doom exactly are they expecting?!
Write the software and sell/rent it on to businessfolk who can navigate the regulatory hurdles.
i still seem to want to host everything myself (email, dns, backups, etc). old habits die hard.

the only saas i use is Corduroy (http://corduroysite.com/) for invoicing, writing checks, downloading bank transactions, and receiving payments. but i wrote and host that too.
Nagios/Cacti/etc. are indeed overkill for a few servers, but Munin is dead-simple and has notifications:
http://munin-monitoring.org/wiki/HowToContact
Nothing against communicating via Facebook, if that is your thing. But it is definitely not childish to not communicate via Facebook. Boycott is too strong, perhaps, but if you simply see no use for it.

Personally I am just old fashioned in that way, I still run my own email server. I don't feel too happy about my communications belonging to some mega corporation.

Also, I don't like having to log in to FB to get my messages, and in turn to be trackable by all the sites that partner with FB.

That's just my reasons - but I don't boycott it. If somebody messages me on FB, I usually reply. I just don't initiate communication on FB.
If it's anything like here, any one engineer's task list is essentially a weighted list of fires to put out and technical debt to pay down, in addition to the features to be delivered next day / week.

Guess more extensive monitoring just got bumped to the top :)
Filezilla bug that exposes cached plaintext username and password
take the .gov to task for this kind of shenanigans

Easy to say that sitting behind a keyboard.

When the FBI knocks at your door and screams "terrorism" to your shock, all you want to do is want that moment to disappear forever and hope your family is ok.

Taking the gov to task is pretty low down on the list of to-dos.
"A curious inconsistency."

I don't agree - availability is a totally meaningless property if you are allowed to occasionally return "no, I won't process your request". Such a response communicates nothing about the state of the atomic object you are writing to or reading from, so you can always return it and trivially satisfy 'availability' if we define it this way.

To your other point - be aware that I didn't write the article, so I'm not speaking for the author. However, I think you're right that the article makes it sound a bit like a single failure or message loss will cause any protocol to immediately sacrifice availability or consistency. This isn't the case - all CAP does is establish that for every protocol, there exists a failure pattern that will force it to abandon one of the two.

For quorum systems, this means that a permanent partition causes one half of the partition to no longer be the majority, and therefore can no longer be consistent if it responds to any requests. Paxos is another example.

So you're right, there are particular patterns of partition that stop a protocol from functioning correctly. And many that don't - hence the term 'fault tolerant' has some meaning.

Avoiding these patterns, in practice, can turn out to be surprisingly tricky. High-performance systems can't afford to have too many participants, which means that the probability of a problematic failure is higher than we might like (five participants in a consensus protocol is already a lot for high throughput, but now we are susceptible to only three failures). Failures are also often correlated, so independence assumptions don't hold as much as would like. Machines crash. Networking gear fails.

There's no abuse of statistics here. The probability of a particular failure pattern can be engineered low, and at that point you must weigh the trade-offs of the cost of loss of availability / consistency vs. the effort you make to minimise the chance of occurrence. We are talking about edge cases here, and the implicit assumption is that the cost of hitting one of them is huge (and it often is). However if you run a cluster large enough, you hit edge cases all the time.

(Although you mention partial synchrony, note that most of these results are mainly applicable to asynchronous networks in the first instance).
Eppendorf Pipette
So you're saying OP isn't allowed to point out that the emperor wears no clothes, or that roger ebert is useless.
Ask HN: prepaid cell w/ data for hackers visiting US
Hi, any cell phone recommendations for hacker-entrepreneurs visiting the u.s. who visit regularly but not enough to justify having a monthly contract?

I'd like to play with the latest mobile apps etc while using a local #, and without dealing w/ data roaming charges etc.

Previously I've done T-Mobile $100 prepaid for 1000 minutes for a year -- just voice. But I would like to have something I can use w/ some data plans (e.g. messing around w/ iPhone/Android apps) when I am hanging around w/ Silicon Valley friends...

Anyone else in a similar situation? What's worked for you?
Inside Pivotal Labs, the Agile Force Behind Twitter
Is it true that Lift is a lot faster and uses less memory?
I concur wholeheartedly. Great post.
Oh, and it's creepy as hell, too.

I went and did a little searching for a plumber. A day later, someone called me and asked if I ever found a plumber. I said no. Then they asked if I felt like reviewing my doctor.

At a time when search engines are dinged for possible privacy issues, I felt this was way beyond the pale.
Its similar to something I have thought before - this isn't only a problem with tech startups, its a problem with the majority of businesses in the world.

I half-joked about it with friends before, saying that people should only be allowed to do jobs that weren't "bread and circus" (to borrow a phrase) from 5-9, then after work hours could do what they pleased. Realistically though, this poster probably contributes to the bottom line of many bread and circus businesses. And so do I.

Today I bought a box of hot tamales (the candy) and a cherry coke - these are all bread and circus and only serve for my enjoyment. I ate a steak dinner on Saturday night - totally bread and circus, as I could get my nutritional value through better methods. The people who work to produce these things could be put to work doing something better, while the government provides a tasteless, odorless, white paste for all our nutritional value.

Some of the most enjoyable parts of life tend to be surrounded by bread and circus. But if they were never invented in the first place, I guess I wouldn't know what I was missing.
Multithreaded? Maybe, but then exchanges are mutexes.
I don't want to truly trivialise it, but I imagine a lot of it is brainstorming, thinking, and gut feel than direct conversations with customers, market research, etc.

And I have to disagree on the dice. The best situation is a client giving me their budget and me telling them the best way to spend it (often, not all of it). So, when the budget is not disclosed, instead of spending hours trying to guess their pricepoint, I just randomise the approach and then fill that budgeted time in the best way possible.