skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that project's choice of name, web2py, drives me apeshit. i much preferred it when it was called gluon.

web2py both (a) sounds way way too much like web.py, which predated it, and (b) it sounds like it's a successor to it -- which it is not, and (c) sounds like it's a conversion tool of some kind (following the whole "foo2bar" pattern in program naming).

Whereas 'gluon': some small thing which binds the universe together. And it has personality!
There's no real unrest in El DF (Mexico City) since it's far enough away from the U.S. border. All of the unrest in Mexico is either far north (Narco terrorists) or far south (Zapatistas). Mexico's an awesome place with a lot of culture, amazing food, cool people, and plenty of stuff to explore. If you're avoiding it because of the press fear-mongering I would urge you to reconsider.

(I'm an American who's been all over Mexico on several trips, most recently three months ago)
Whatever social web browsers were supposed to be has been superceded by the next generation of smartphones.

With Android, IOS, WebOS, Symbian, et al. anybody can get up to date notifications about anyone's location, feelings, and opinions aggregated from their favorite sources - no "computer" required.
Did you have a link?
Its an AP chest xray of what appears to be a google sign.
PG's knowingly permitted people to scrape the site for a long time [1]. This site has been redistributing HN content through their unofficial API for a couple of months now [2], and PG was also aware of that [3].

I agree that it would be nice to have a concrete statement about the copyright status of content we post, but this isn't a large step from what's fairly well-known to have already been done.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694049

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1702399
Browsers should use two kinds of notifications: "encryption on" (green or red) and "certificate is present" (green or red).
Websites that do banking or handle sensitive information should be green/green (SSL-on with verified cert), while ordinary websites could be green/red (SSL-on with self-signed cert).
It is a pity that the API does not have a way of getting what appears on the front page. I was planing to soon create a script that scanned the front page, and then applied pg's algorithm from "a plan for spam" to remove links that I think are off topic. Actually turning that into a desktop client would be rather cool, or maybe a Firefox extension as that is more my kind of thing.
If you were right, then someone else will realize there's cheap/good labor available, and poach him at $3x. Then, someone else will steal him at $4x. And so on, until he's making close to what the American dev makes.

Tech hiring is extremely competitive. If there were easy-access to a large, skilled labor force for one quarter the money of the currently available labor market, don't you think tech firms would jump on the opportunity for cheap labor? I know when I was hiring I would have.
Good to see I'm not the only one who uses assorted stackables for an impromptu standing desk.
I think you should not ask the users to fill in so much details in your form. Just ask for email first.. Let them confirm it first, then follow-up with a request for more details.
Too many syllables in my opinion, which will be particularly frustrating for you down the road after saying and typing the name a few thousand times :)
Myspace used to make money, actually - so that is not so dumb an acquisition as you might think.

Really the others where just money loosers - and if you run a big company, you risk loosing a large amount of money.

IBM licensing DOS, that was stupid.
Half of Milgram’s subjects told him to take a hike
Stephenson's Diamond Age theorizes on what happens nation-states develop nano-drones. Funky stuff.
IMHO the difficult part is seeing the commonality of those edge cases. That requires firstly knowing about the edge cases, and secondly seeing the problem (the commonality of those cases). The final step is a solution, which is where the maths comes in (or might).

Anecdotally, it seems fairly common that maths is independently re-invented by people applying it - famously for relativity, IIRC. That's because the maths guys don't actually know about the applications.

It's a truism for our industry that if a new approach really is significantly better (eg. x10) in practice, it will be adopted. You don't need to convince people; you just beat them. OTOH, there's a common wish to over-automate: to spend a week saving a second, and then it turns out to not handle the very next case. So, some people don't like to use frameworks because they are too constricting (don't handle all the cases in practice); and some (Alan Kay) even say if you can build your own infrastructure, you should.

Mathematical ideas usually only work on their own assumptions - a difficult part is matching those assumptions to an application. Though maybe this isn't a problem for the generics example.

There's also incidental practical issues, like the need to ship, then of back-compatibility, resulting in a current Java implementation that can't express List<Circle|Rect> (you need an explicit Shape interface/superclass). Although *ML has proper algebraic data types, does C# do it properly? I don't know.
That was easily the most misinformed article I have ever read on tc. I'm not even sure where to begin. About the only thing that is right is that services will be moving to the application layer in the long run because there are benefits the abstracting the network. But the idea that the people providing the data link upon which every service you care about depends on are becoming irrelevant is so absurd it makes me laugh. Where would apple and google be and where are they going without them?
The Great Mobile Cloud Disruption
Sure, to some extent. However you have to remember the following points:

- Not all employers want remotely based staff

- If the wages are significantly better than local jobs, the developers may compete with each other by offering lower wages

- It may be harder to find remote staff than local staff

- While it's easy to say "pay him more and he'll move to us", it's worth remembering that workers in any industry don't always chose jobs based on salary alone.

- If companies continue raising salaries to poach staff, what happens when the cost becomes equal to that of local workers? They chose local workers. So while the salary may not be as low as it might be, it won't reach the same levels as local staff.
Agreed, message-passing seems to be such a clean way to communicate, both between different parts of your program and with the world.
>I don't think anyone is advocating jail time for egging people.

I am. I don't think a fine effectively gets across the point that battery and vandalism are crimes, not minor violations like jaywalking. $200 is a speeding ticket, and to some upper-middle class teenagers, little more than pocket change. Three days in jail (or juvenile detention), on the other hand is most likely a novel and frightening experience that's actually likely to discourage similar behavior in the future.
>(Also, it's odd to blame Rolls-Royce for the failures, when the engines are both owned and maintained by Qantas in Singapore.)

I'd say it's much more likely that there's some bug in the A380 RR engine than Qantas doing a maintenance job crappy enough to cause a 2 year old engine suffer such a catastrophic failure. You should be able to do the shoddiest maintenance job in the world and not have an engine fail in a way that causes the wing to be pierced.
We always leave some payment upon completion. If they are expecting payment, bug fixes and other issues won't fall totally off the radar for them.

It helps ensure incentive alignment.

And if the provider is adamant about not taking some portion of payment at completion, I'd wonder (and IMO, I'd walk away)
I am currently in college for my bachelors degree in computer science.
What if you could really understand why others have failed, and honestly evaluate your ability to overcome those difficulties.

He notes the higher-quality flash player, proliferation of broad-band and digital video cameras, and growth in blogs that wanted to embed video. If you were the Youtube founders, and were able to correctly asses the situation, then you COULD have foresight.
If they're going to throw around words like "safe", I wish they'd be clearer about whether this is long-term damage or just something you stop doing temporarily if you decide to have a baby.
Caching is an interesting case, or rather, several interesting cases.

If it's not a faithful representation, i.e., if it does not reproduce anything exactly, omits any part of the material, adds additional material, or is out of date, then I'm not in favour. It's not really a cache at all at that point, and such flaws are obviously potentially damaging to both the visitor and the original host service/content providers. The only likely reasons I can see for not reproducing faithfully are incompetence or active leeching. (I note in passing that I have never seen a cache or archive web site that actually did reliably reproduce content faithfully. All of the major services, including heavyweights like Google Cache and archive.org, failed badly on this criterion last time I checked them out. But real cache proxies tend to pass, as long as they refresh at an appropriate frequency.)

If it's faithful but continues to make content available after the original host has pulled it, then it's potentially valuable to visitors and probably many hosts/content providers would have no objection, but I think it should be opt-in. Not respecting a service that puts content up for a while but then chooses to take it down again for whatever reason could have a chilling effect on willingness to put the content up in the first place, and could undermine business models that would otherwise be useful, reasonably fair to all parties, and financially viable. (This point doesn't really apply to sites like HN, though, as they typically publish posts indefinitely anyway.)

If it's faithful and timely but still robs the original host of valuable meta-information (notably real server logs that have at least two legitimate uses: helping to optimise the site based on real user behaviour, and supporting claims made to third parties about site traffic) then this could also be harmful to the host service, but on the other hand, it's not clear to what extent such meta-information should ever be relied upon anyway given the architecture of the Web today. Ideally, I think we would have some sort of standard proxy notification so that caches and such could forward relevant meta-information to the original host in some sort of digest form. That way, this one becomes a non-issue, as long as any cache/archive service implements the appropriate notification to be fair to the original host.

Basically, I think cache/archive services can be widely useful and probably many hosts/content providers would have no objection, but given that they can have significant downsides, they should always be opt-in and ideally we would have simple conventions based on something like robots.txt to indicate this.
If your industry is being disrupted by technology, all resistance is... futile. You should hope or work toward getting a tech company to help you monetize your content before it's too late.
Interesting idea - Any sense for how many startups on TC get more than 1 article?
There are already over 60 plus apps are being made on top of HN as a data source. Almost each and everyone is trying to either make their lives better, code up an experiment or give back to the community. Usually they try and do all three. Some used fixed scrapes other are actively scraping HN daily.

Really I am not sure what the fus is over, like what profit making?

I have personally visited each and every app. I could be wrong but I don't think I have seen so much as a single Adsense ad on any of them. Think the only one that is making money is the iPhone HN app.

Isn't this over reacting a little?

Today on a post I released my App list. Check all the apps your self
https://spreadsheets7.google.com/ccc?key=tCo5BIN61ciUkDjS2aL...

For this project three hackers got together and saw that we had a common need and that many people hacking together apps too. We wanted to help save everyone the trouble of scraping HN. We did this after speaking to other people and each other asking each other if they had the data. We were trying to make things easier for people in the HN community creating mashups and figured would save Paul and YC some bandwidth. Ronnie already has been donating his time and server for http://api.ihackernews.com/ and Joseph has been running http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/ "To learn more about large-scale NLP + machine learning techniques". I have been getting the data because I have been running analysis/status of HackerNews that I want to share with the community.

Do you have a problem with all the HN mashups out there from mobile apps and twitter bots to search sites?
I think the legal issue could go either way. If it is some private entity spying on me on my own property, I don't think any jury would convict me of knocking it down, and maybe even keeping the parts. Clearly, if the interloper was doing something illegal, they might choose to abandon the property and pretend it didn't belong to them, you know, in hope it would make it difficult for me to press charges against the offending party.

If it was a government drone, though, I'd be in a bit more trouble. Now, if private usage of drones for celebrity spying etc... is common before the government starts using them to spy on US citizens, precedent could be established; but if not, well, I bet it'd turn out at best like that kid who posted photos on the internet of the clumsy car-tracking device that the feds stuck on his car, which is to say, the FBI comes and takes it back and maybe doesn't arrest you. I mean, the kid didn't break the thing, and that might make a difference. Government drones are not going to be cheap, and, I mean, someone might forget about a hacked-together $300 drone, but if it's three million? Yeah, secret technology aside, I think they are going to want their toy back.
How to read POP email accounts on Thunderbird 3.1 (Ubuntu and Windows tips)
Very good point. I actually use NearlyFreeSpeech.net for my personal site (a pay-what-you-use host), so I'm not actually using S3, but I plan to in the future.

CloudFront apparently supports the root document, here's an article that explains how to do it:
http://gothick.org.uk/2010/10/26/serving-websites-using-s3-a...
It does: http://api.ihackernews.com/page
I have one of these desks. I built a custom top for it so just bought the frame. 500 dollars for the frame is a lot, but it's one of the only frames I was able to find that had a large range of adjustment.
Underbelly Project: Hidden Art Show in Abandoned Subway Station
Right. Users never do that!
and not have an engine fail in a way that causes the wing to be pierced

I think this is the bit that is more worrisome than any possible maintenance issues. Jet engines have lots of turbine blades spinning at hellacious rpms. The one catastrophic failure that modern engines are supposed to be designed to prevent is having the blades leave the cowling; this is the sort of failure mode that can result in the failure of a single engine taking an entire plane down (c.f. UAL 232). This is not supposed to happen on modern engines. Ever
I don't think Jobs is concerned about retrospectively predicting the successes he had. Rather, I think he wants to emphasize their inherent unpredictability, together with the assertion that such unpredictability doesn't matter. So it's not quite hindsight bias.
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Just because there is a reasonable reuse of the content doesn't mean that all reuses of the content are reasonable. Also search engines and archive.org preserve the context and content.
First, value and lightness are synonyms in this context. The name value comes from the Munsell system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell near the beginning of the 20th century, and the name lightness is what color scientists finally settled on a few decades later. Unfortunately the terms’ usage in the HSL and HSV models doesn’t have terribly much to do with the human-vision-relevant definition.

It’s too bad that the author of the linked-to post claims that chroma and saturation mean the same thing though. They don’t.

Anyhow, thanks, I’m glad you liked the pictures (I drew many of them). If there’s anything about that HSL/HSV article that could use improvement, feel free to comment here or send me an email (or you could of course leave a message on the wiki talk page).

For what it’s worth, I don’t think HSL is very intuitive. It’s basically the same thing as RGB, just tilted on one end and squished a bit into a cylinder shape (as shown here e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hsl-and-hsv.svg). For some discussion of why, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Disadvantages but the short explanation is: HSL is a model designed for the hardware limitations of 1970s workstations, and much more perceptually relevant models are computationally cheap enough today.
What is it at the moment with people posting websites with silly names with just the name as the title?

Hey people, HN already displays the domain name - put something useful in there please!
love it. moved up to mountain view about 6 months ago and met the people that go to every tech event in SF and the valley, everyday. They say they are entrepreneurs but I still don't know what they're doing.
The "The web is considered 'public domain'" argument seems to be said by people who have personal interest in that statement being true.

The "When it's out on the internet..." is more a statement of inevitability. The person making the statement may not participate in taking the content, they are just pointing out that it's inevitable that other people will.
"Always look on the briiight side of life..."

Sure, it was about 50 times more than they expected. But on the bright side, at least it wasn't everybody...
That sounds like a very difficult business to me.

There is some sort of version for toys though. Just found http://mybusybucket.com/ Not sure if that's a dominant player. I don't have kids...
Do most of these examples work in Postgres?
> I agree that it would be nice to have a concrete statement about the copyright status of content we post, but this isn't a large step from what's fairly well-known to have already been done.

(a) I've checked everywhere I can find on the site, including the sign-up, and the copyright status of posts seems very clear: it remains with the poster, and no-one else (including HN/pg) has the right to authorise redistribution elsewhere.

(b) This behaviour was only "fairly well-known to have already been done" if you happened to see that discussion a few weeks ago, and in any case wouldn't apply retrospectively to earlier posts.

(c) This isn't really about the legal status anyway. Assuming this is all based in the US, anyone who wanted to register their content with the US Copyright Office and then record evidence of redistribution by this service and anyone else hosting the torrents could theoretically hit each party with a $150,000 lawsuit for each post they copied, with bonus points awarded because they've even uploaded it to every copyright lawyer's favourite service, The Pirate Bay. Of course, that seems rather unlikely. It just seems really disrespectful to me to take content that many people have volunteered their time to contribute to HN and share/reproduce that content elsewhere without permission.
What scares me the most is the possibility that they can be used for assassinations; at present drones are not fast enough, manuveable enough or stealthy enough, but thats a technical limitation that isn't likely to last for that long.

The main fear with this is that those who are going to be protecting other people are very unlikely to see this coming, nor to be especially prepared for it. The secret service (who are not the only ones who do protection, or even the main ones, but no doubt the best) are really good at closing of every attack route that they know of, but even so it is widely known that it is impossible or nearly so to stop an assassin who is willing to give up his own life. With this technology, this may become true of any person who can get an internet connection (until drones become able to navigate autonomously) and is willing to sacrifice a drone -- which is going to be a larger number of people that those who are willing go sacrifice their life.

I sincerely hope I am wrong, because I wouldn't like the kind of society that would have to be created to prevent somebody from doing this, nor the kind of surveillance methods that would be required to prevent somebody from building a drone (if your are going to kill people, you don't care if building a drone is technically illegal).
Indeed. I remember seeing pictures of engine testing for the 777 where they explosively detonated a turbine blade to test that no pieces would leave the cowling. Engines are literally designed to explode but keep all the pieces inside.

With engines this young, you would have to look at design factors to at least check there is no problem. That's why Qantas has grounded the fleet. Remember, Qantas is the oldest airline to have never suffered a fatality. It's part of their brand equity, and I don't think they want to change that anytime soon.
Notebook:
- 15" Macbook Pro, 8GB ram, hybrid HDD, antiglare (matte) display.
- Quicksilver
- MacVim
- SMCFanControl to control MBP Fan speed and cool it down.
- gfxCardStatus to force use of Intel GPU (increases battery life to 10hr max)
- Lastpass & Xmarks for cross browser sharing of passwords & bookmarks.
- iTerm, gnu screen, irssi, zsh with a 500 LOC .zshrc, macports, VMWare
- Time machine for backups

Server:
- Colocated Sun x4100, 16GB ram, runs 8 VMs using Xen
- Costs $40/month: 500GB/month bandwith, remote shutdown/reboot via LOM
- Duplicity + S3 for backing up each individual VM

Others:
- Stand Up Desk (at work)
- Airport Extreme + attached usb printer for network printing.
- No external keyboards or displays to streamline work process.
I initially thought that too, but dropped that thought very quickly after some deeper thinking. If three syllables is too many, than the only options are one and two syllable names. One syllable is damn near impossible to achieve, leaving two syllable names as my only option. Sure, plenty of the big guys have two syllable names (yahoo, Google, Facebook, twitter) but these are difficult to find/register, and there are just as many websites and growing startups with three syllable names (posterous, delicious, amazon, etc).

So I'm sure I'd be okay with a three syllable name, but I think I can gather the creativity to come up with a two syllable name.

Edit: on second thought (or third?) I'm sure I can muster up even more creativity for a one syllable name. Looking at others helps.
I don't think the larger fan blades did leave the cowling. Based on the couple images I saw of the failed engines (e.g. [0]), the smaller, hotter blades farther aft [1] were the ones that punctured the cowling. These have less protection because the wing protects the passengers from flying debris whereas the compression and intake fans stick out far enough to require separate cowling for passenger protection.

[0] http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/img_up/QantasEngine250.jpg

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jet_engine.svg
Groupon Said to Seek New Round of Funding That May Value It at $3 Billion
Ray Tard Jr.: The Best Tech Blogger to Happen in the Philippines