skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could any of this questioning have occurred without aggression?

Why is the aggressive tone necessary? Would the conclusion have been any different if the questioners had been more civil?

EDIT:

Personally, I think the process of reviewing whether a person is a security threat, should be a much more sombre affair. Level headed pragmatism is necessary to make informed, sensible judgements. It sounds very much like the security staff were living up to the clichéd machismo of their TV or film-based counterparts .. and it leads me to think that intelligence is being supplanted by each staff member's personal desire to project authority.
Huh. So a clip is a bunch of cartridges with something connecting them, whereas a magazine is an enclosed box of cartridges.

Or at least, that's what I got out of the link. That one is (still) legitimately confusing to me. It didn't directly help (I didn't notice what was strange / funny about the image until I followed through to the "Gun Zone" link).
This is great in the long run, but seems to be loose loose for google. Either they loose, pay for legal fees, and the goverment continues buying Microsoft, or they win, get a payout from microsoft, and still don't get business, because Microsoft probably won't buy enterprise software from the company they were just sued by.
Ask HN: Resources for becoming great at Google Analytics
Howdy HN,

What resources would you recommend to become better at Google Analytics?
I've passed job ads and headhunter calls that require resumes in Word only or just ignore it and submit in pdf/html/text.
Does that "3x to 4x more" figure take into account the associated costs of handling 10GigE drops versus having your stack on AWS? (Routing/switching gear, server hardware, rack space/power, network engineers, etc.)
Really? Those two regions train individuals to terrorize Americans? How many such attacks have there been? What percentage of the population is even anti-American let alone involved in terrorism? The people there are trying to kill ALL Americans?

I don't think it reflects the reality of the situation there. Your comment is basically an admission of giving up personal rights and liberties because of a blind fear.
The VLC-iOS license dispute and how it could spread to Android
Ask HN: Would you rather work at Google or Facebook right now?
I'm a college senior that happens to have full-time offers from both of these companies. There's been an awful lot of news recently about this subject, so I was wondering if I could get some insight about which one to accept. Obviously, this will be one of the most important (and difficult) decisions of my life!
@colinhostert agreed #newgrammar
I'm not going to pretend that I am qualified to judge this, I just wanted to point out that the article did offer an explanation.
They are warming to it, especially when it is offered by solid companies who can provide the support. The 'services not licenses' business model of a lot of OS suppliers actually works quite well with Govt IT. The downside is that the existing players are huge (due to large contracts) and hard to dislodge. It is getting better though (I spent some time building http://apps.gov if you want a sort of overview of the type of 'free market' that is trying to be provided to federal agencies here).
Gah. I thought I was used to the whole "loose" vs "lose" mix up that so many do.

But seeing it 3 times in rapid succession feels like fingernails on the blackboard.
Here's an idea: why don't they pick on people who have actually done something wrong, and then use that wrongdoing to put legal pressure on them? Justice is built into the system: do something wrong, and you'll have an unpleasant experience. Don't do anything wrong, and you won't be yelled at and intimidated and possibly made to miss your flight. In addition, instead of using empty threats and just hoping that a criminal or trained terrorist will be so unnerved by your bullying that they voluntarily incriminate themselves, you will have a credible threat of consequences and therefore a real incentive for them to cooperate.
"The only lesson I can think of here is don't finance a project that's going to cost a lot and take a decade to implement, because there's a good chance that technology will make it obsolete by the time you launch."

Ever consider working for the DoD?
I think an important part of what made Graffiti so effective was the fact that you had access to a complete range of alphanumeric and punctuation characters without any need to switch modes. There were actually quite a number of onboard programming tools for Palm devices, so I could easily write little scripts in BASIC, Forth or OnboardC to pass the time or quickly try out an idea. It made the device feel more like a computer and less like a toy.

Most of the touch-based keyboards I've seen on modern smartphones perform acceptably when you're composing a message made out of English words, but you can just about forget coding on one. Even Lua, which is well-known for having a sparse syntax mainly composed of alphabetical keywords, is torture on an iPod Touch.
Vagrant for DevStructure: local and remote dev environments
I'll be working on a beta release of ScheduleHQ, an employee scheduling app:

http://schedulehq.com/
Why Finders Are Losers
Apple has always wanted to make Quicktime a proprietary interactive platform with a scripting language, UI elements, etc. It used to be used heavily to make CD-ROMs, where Flash would be used today. Apple just lost that battle.
This reminds me an awful lot of a system presented [1] in lectures on accessibility research a couple years back that was/is an alternative gestural input method for people with motor impairments. It's cool to see similar concepts cross over into the mainstream...well, sort of mainstream, anyway.

[1] http://depts.washington.edu/ewrite/
As long as you're clear in your mind on what you can't say to him BEFORE you meet with him, I think it's a very good idea.
VLC and the App Store
excellent list, cheers for sharing.
"What about collaboration and working with developers to incorporate their knowledge of sound programming structure and data architecture into the site?"

Assuming you've hired a good coder, be clear when explaining what the requirements are and what needs to be done but don't tell him/her how it should be done. Coding and design is where their expertise lies so give them the freedom to use their professional judgement.

You may also find Joel Spolsky's "Field Guide to Developers" article interesting, in particular the section entitled Independence and Autonomy http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...
Google, they are further ahead of facebook when it comes to being a company / organization.
I can learn a lot from them and then proceed to work on my own startup.

Facebook is a good choice too but learning, there, will be different.
Ughhh....the internet needs to get over itself.

Colbert literally acknowledged Reddit and Alexis and thanked him for the half-a-million dollars they raised.

Jon, too, while he did not grovel at Ohanian's feet, he was thankful for the work that Reddit did.

He was being reasonable, cut him some slack.
And what's wrong with that? Just mention your job details and then agree with the contractor on payment and platform.
I just figured they're going off an average object size stat. Data size can be equally meaningless - a single bit of data loss might be catastrophic in a 10 GB file, or it might not be noticeable in a 1 KB file.
In the last couple of months they also created new 'Micro' EC2 instances, billed at 2-3 cents/hr. They also had a recent promotion to give annual access to a single Micro instance for free for a full year. It seems like price wars will be on the horizon for 2011. Great news for startups using EC2 (like myself).
Are you looking for unpaid volunteers, or if not, what kind of salary range is included ?
The "US Government" (fed, state, local) employs over 20 million people. And that doesn't include contractors. http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=228

Put in comparison, that's the population of the 18 smallest states, and about ten times larger than WalMart.

Now, I'm not sure if this person was acting based on the rules of the State Department or not, but it's easy to see how not every employee of the government might be acting according to policy 100% of the time.
the people that are leaving google to join facebook are doing it mainly for the same reason they joined google in the first place: status.
I think that's good advice and aligns with what my gut is telling me. You never know what one thing will lead to, and its certainly nothing personal, so why not.

In terms of the number of customers we'd poach, there are definitely some. One nice aspect to this startup is that the goal is to bring new customers to the market, rather than poach customers.

Apologies for not divulging more details, and frankly they are pretty relevant in this situation. But it seems like this is a common issue and something that lots of people might have experience with.
Ways to let prospects sample your brilliance
DevStructure is a great way for me to sandbox my dev environments and work on projects quickly.

Being able to use DevStructure on a VM makes a ton of sense as I don't always want to burn CPU cycles on a cloud server.
I don't know. I appreciate the transparency of it all, but my take away was that his halloween sales smashed revenue despite his promotion efforts, not because of them.

Looking at the promos, it looks like he got 15 (mini site) + 15 (email) sales, which appears to be around $700+ in revenue. Percentage-wise it seems notable, but in absolute numbers, I wonder if the time could be spent better in other ways.
Can someone please explain what the intended purpose of this rally was? I still don't understand what it was about.
I'm not one to defend either the government of the United States or its toadies, but the argument that "this guy disrespected my beliefs so I should start killing innocent civilians" is, in my opinion, horseshit. Anyone who goes that way has deeply troubling issues that cannot be explained away by pointing to some uniformed dick on a power trip.
This person seriously has a screw loose.

When asked the question, Colbert jumped in and preempted the answer to thank Reddit for raising half a million dollars for Donors Choose. Both Colbert and Stewart said the Internet support was nice, validated their idea, and they were thankful for it. Colbert in particularly clearly knew exactly who Reddit was.

On the other hand, both of them independently said that the rally was in planning months before anyone on Reddit brought it to their attention. Reddit wasn't instrumental the rally. Get over it. Glen Beck and Louis Farrakhan were also able to get hundreds of thousands of people to the national mall; Farrakhan doesn't even have a top-rated TV show to do it with.
It was The Daily Show and The Colbert Report On Ice; a traveling live version of the television show.
Power and responsibility. Greenpeace’s latest smear campaign | Social Media NZ
as my own mother put it (here on the eve of our second): with one child, your world is turned upside down, but it's still essentially you're world they're living in.

when you have 2, you live in their world.

this is going to be fun. :)
I'm going to launch http://achievabl.es/ which is basically going to be a SMART goal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria) setting community.

I find that often I am too ambitious in making my goals and if I can have a bunch of other people look at them and give me feedback it would be very beneficial to me, and hopefully others too.
That's my point. Do we really expect to merge iOS and desktop apps someday?

We've created a new class of direct-manipulation apps on the iOS devices that we just can't bring to the other machines without using a mouse...or turning them into iPads.
Or find some funding and/or bootstrapping projects.
A really good reply to the first would be "If I wait until it it is a little bigger I would get a large signon bonus" (that is you would be aquired).
While I suspect you are generally right and a guy appearing "alpha" is very important when women rate attractiveness, I don't see my not-too-serious A/B test fitting into the story here. Dressing sharp, being an assertive jerk, all that was actually eliminated on account of this being a simple online test where all other factors besides the optics of the face were pretty much equalized. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but it also means in addition to the "dog pack psychology" ranking there is probably a facial attractiveness criterion at work here that is just as important to women as it is to men.

On a darker side note, if we take it for granted that both sexes prefer attractive people in equal measures, there appear to be crass differences in other expectations that depress me somewhat. For example, what I find attractive in a woman:
- good sense of humor
- being nice and constructive
- intelligence and wisdom
- adventurousness and a sense of wonder
- creativity
- good sex and a sense of intimacy

...contrasts pretty sharply with what women want in men:
- assertiveness and dominance
- always puts himself in the best light
- money and good clothes
- adherence to tradition / gender roles
- perceived aura of success

Well, it may be polemic, but you can see the different qualities at work here. The worst thing is, I'm beginning to see my past relationships through that lens and I honestly cannot tell anymore if it's just the resignation talking or if this is actually how the world worked the whole time.
Glenn Beck got < 90,000 to the rally, if I remember correctly.
As a non-American who works in the US and crosses the border often, there is more to this.

Sure, if you just came back from Afghanistan/Pakistan, are carrying sketchy items in your luggage, etc, I wouldn't be terribly surprised that you had to go chat with a friendly customs agent just to be sure you're not trying to blow anything up.

That's not what happened though - and despite the fact that this is purely a one-sided telling of the story, I've had sufficient dealings with CBP to suspect that it is most likely entirely true.

The author was harassed, verbally abused, and treated in an entirely unprofessional manner. The customs agent was out for blood/witches and gave up all semblance of professionalism and reason. This is extremely typical of my experiences with CBP.

The most hilarious thing is that most customs booths I've come across have had a big "we promise to treat you with professionalism and courtesy" poster from DHS emblazoned on it. I've never seen professionalism out of that organization - it's either complete and utter apathy, or (if they smell blood), complete and utter belligerence.

The fact of the matter is, CBP agents treat every single traveler as guilty before being proven innocent. Every slight deviation from the norm is treated as proof positive that you're a terrorist. Every denial and scrap of evidence you have is merely treated as a smokescreen from your true guilt. I swear, to work as a modern American border guard probably implies complete sociopathy - I'm not sure how it'd work otherwise.

CBP is an embarrassment to America. If all we ever saw of American was, well, the first people you meet at the border, I'd never want to visit. As a non-American I'm certainly not in a position to fix this, but for the Americans out there, please fix this. This is one of the many reasons why America enjoys such a dubious reputation abroad, and needs to be fixed. The author here is an American citizen - the treatment foreign nationals get is considerably more blood-boiling.
Keeping Kids Safe Online - What Are Best Practices for Webmasters
I run a reference site similar to Wikipedia that has content that is both family-friendly and non-family-friendly ( http://wikitorrents.org/ ). I'm trying to implement ratings on a page-by-page basis.

I started my research with the ICRA, which is now out of business: http://www.icra.org/ . I proceeded to research FOSI, which has very many links: http://www.fosi.org/north-america-webdir.html . However, most of those links are designed for parents and the kids themselves.

As a webmaster, I would like to keep my site safe for kids on a page-by-page basis. My hope is somethings along the lines of meta tags or something I can put in headers on a page-by-page basis.

Does anybody here have any good specific suggestions for implementing site ratings in this way?
I was mostly referring to the use of email as a medium to reach signed-up but otherwise unengaged users.
Comedy Central employees taking themselves rather ha-ha only serious-ly.
One of these days we'll get to the point where the terrorists are so good at blending in and being 'un-obvious', they are going to have to start interrogating people for being too ordinary rather than too islamic. You catch people on their slip-ups, but the ones we should fear the most are the ones with no slip-ups, so we are left with no other option!
> It should decimate most Protoss players unless they scout..

It should (annhilate|destroy|overwhelm|<etc>) most Protoss players unless they scout...

FTFY

That usage of decimate is as grating to me as it is common. :/ I don't blame you, I'm just shaking my fists at the heavens in impotent rage.
Well, it's possible that you were undergoing weapons training and stupidly forgot you'd left a bullet in your pocket before packing up. And it's also possible that a child gave it to you as a gift. This guy wasn't arrested or jailed - he was treated with not entirely unreasonable suspicion.
do you think that the 0.5Kt test in North Korea was a success of a small nuke, not a failure of a bigger one :)
What scares me most is the withdrawal symptoms, nicotine made me appreciate the dangers of addiction.
At least not by email?
Honestly, the graphics may be better, there may be new units, and balance may have improved or whatever else, but the UI improvements are the thing I love the most.
Usually when the first three arrive, they don't have a sentry yet (The first three are about 15 to 20 seconds ahead of the next 4). If they do have a sentry, and they block, then you fall back and then attack with all 7. If they don't use it, you can usually use those three to start killing their units, and the next 4 come in and finish the job. If they are rushing an immortal (high level players often do this vs Zerg) then you can usually snipe the pylon. If there is more than one pylon powering the building, then it's tougher.

In 1v1, a variation on this strat is to go all-in - send your queen after you spawn larvae, and then when the second 4 come out send most of your drones. With 7 roaches + drones + queen, it doesn't matter if he gets out the Immortal, or infact what he goes for. Only thing I've seen is a hard cannon wall, which then commits him to a single base Void rush - which is easily countered.

So yes, this strategy is very unbalanced. Played 22 games tonight, 7 losses. 2 of those losses where on 2v2. Last 10 games I played? 9 wins, 1 loss.

I hope Blizzard fixes this soon :( it's going to make Terran and Toss very susceptable early game.
This type of thing isn't all that uncommon in municipal purchasing; the Microsoft-centric spec or the lawsuit. Our startup does a lot of business with city, county, and state governments in the purchasing space. I can't tell you how many times we receive a spec that is written to fit a specific product from a specific vendor. It's the latter part that gets them in trouble. Our product relies on a competitive bidding environment with multiple qualified vendors, so we do a lot of specification consulting. This usually means working with managers to pound department heads over the skull with the changes for a few days before they cave in and allow the changes. This happens in the private sector as well, but no one can sue if they aren't allowed in the bid, so the incentive isn't as strong.

I have a certain amount of sympathy for the government employees in these situations. Imagine you have a staff full of people with a specific skill set -- a bunch of MCSEs, for example -- yet the law says you must write your specifications in such a way that any vendor can answer the RFP. What are you supposed to do with your team? There is often, but not always, a change management factor applied to bidders where significant changes are required, but managers don't always accept these facts. They don't understand, for example, why the guy who was trained to fix John Deer tractors can't readily switch to servicing a fleet of Kubota tractors without taking technical courses on the new product and changing out some tooling. These things cost money that may not be made up by a short term savings on capital expenditure. The problem is, "that's the next guy's problem".

I just hope that the result of this lawsuit is what's good for the US Government, not just what's good for Google.
TaskList | http://gettasklist.com (11/29/2010)

A task management web app originally built for my own team, now opening it up to the public. Aim is to reduce missed/forgot tasks which is a problem associated with task management via email.
How would you go about firing at somebody without exploding in your face? Can it be done?
I am absolutely not anti-intellectual - more like the contrary in fact. However, I don't see any intellectualism here.

As I said, point me to serious research that shows coffee and neural stimulants are just as harmless as each other and and I'll side with you. I don't have to provide you research that shows they are vastly different. It's just so freaking obvious.

I suggest you read this about Ritalin and you tell me if it reads like the description of coffee:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000606
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylphenidate

Finally, I am very familiar with these medications since I took several neural agents as a younger guy when experiencing epilepsy. I am not against them, I am just surprised about so much talk of self-medication and I think it's plain wrong for people to think this harmless. But this is free world, so why don't you just ignore me and keep popping instead of getting all flustered about my comments, if you are sure of yourself that is.
The UX Design Education Scam
I'm going to be launching my new ActionScript 3 API and JavaScript/HTML5 API, and as an unexpected bonus the antique ActionScript 2 - one of my users back-ported it for me.

Aside from that ... keep working on new features, had a cool idea today to build some reports and let portals tap into some of the collective data I have so they can identify sites they should be getting their games on and whatever trends emerge for the various categories of games... with luck (or more data) it might even identify what kind of games they should be building/licensing.
More people are leaving Google to join Facebook than the other way around. That could mean two things:

1) Facebook is cooler, go there now. Or:

2) If you join Google and you find it's not for you, just catch the Google-to-Facebook bus.

Personally...I'd rather work for Google.
What Will Happen to GNOME Now?
Normally it's at his natural, like the open forward expansion on Delta Quadrant. I lost a game just today where I had a huge macro advantage over the Terran because of that PF. I even had Broodlords but I wasn't good enough to micro them against the SCVs repairing the fortress. I ended up destroying it with banelings, but by that point it had eaten up many thousands of minerals worth of my army.
One of the advantages of this is that it gets you feedback, I've reported security flaws to a number of companies before (including Google) and one of the most frustrating things I've found is if the report just goes into a blackhole and you hear nothing back. Even if they fix it quietly, it's nice if a company gets back to you even just with a thank-you note.