skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, only in the United States. In any other country the response would have been: "wow, what a terrible accident", case closed.

If children that are 4 years old can be 'negligent' then we had better lock all of them up because children are - literally - without brakes and will get up to stupid stuff.

If you, as a 87 year old are so fragile that you can not partake in normal street traffic without the risk of injury because you can no longer escape from a four year old or sustain the impact of a small kid on a bike then you have a problem anyway. All it would take is one out of control dog that is happy to see you or a shopping cart rolling in to you and the results would be much the same.

So, do we really want to live in a world where everybody sues everybody else and the term 'accident' no longer has any meaning?

If there are no playgrounds where they can play safely kids will ride their bikes on the sidewalk, and 87 year olds had better watch out when they do. Presumably given their age they are the wiser party.

I'm really sorry the lady died, but remember the kids never intended to hurt her, break her hip or mean to kill her, that's what it being an accident is all about.

Idiot judges bug me, idiot supreme court judges bug me even more.
I know about that and pointed that out. Anyway, do you mathematically see a good reason to keep advertising a service from the sample it does not work in?
to add to this ..one more info..it is deck of 103 slides...
If this is the type of case that goes to a jury I think the lawyer should insist on a jury of her peers. I'm sure there's a 1st grade class somewhere that could take a field trip down to the court house for jury selection.
I found the advice on focusing sound but pretty standard. What I found interesting was that Identified with the author's problems, but still he was able to produce a fine and concrete piece of work. Having played his game, I found his story inspiring.

pd: btw, I really loved his game trainyard.
This seems like hyperventilating.

The policy this post is talking about appears to be the so-called "blue pencil" rule. What it says is, if there's a bad clause in your noncompete, a judge can say "that clause is broken and irrelevant" without invalidating the whole contract. It's the norm in most other states.

The author of this post clearly opposes noncompetes in all forms. That's a position I can respect (but don't agree with). But he's being disingenuous by implying that Georgia is playing with some radical new subversion of noncompete law.
tons of stories and links.. google around.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Cellular-Memories-in-Organ-Transplan...
One day while driving just outside Chigago I stopped in front of a traffic light and the guy behind me bumped in to me, very softly. Before I could even get out he was outside my window pleading with me: "please don't sue me sir, please don't sue me".

I got out, looked at the back of my car, saw it was only a scratch and told him not to worry about it. He looked utterly stunned that I would not take advantage of him and call my ambulance chasing lawyer for the pain in my neck that suddenly developed.
Perhaps a gentle warning built into the voting system will suffice. I like the concept of downvoting to express disagreement (rather than cluttering the thread with replies), but I don't think anyone should downvote a comment into negative figures unless it was actually abusive. That creates bad will, which breeds more bad will, et cetera. So what about a little message that pops up saying

"Are you sure you want to downvote this comment? Doing so will push its karma into negative figures. At HN we don't encourage this type of downvoting except in response to abusive content. "

In my experience some people just don't have a clue how to behave online and it's not even expected of them in most places. HN is different.
The best sort of manager acts like an administrative assistant. When managing creative people like developers, you don't need to "manage" them in order to get them to create; their natural state is creating things, and this only changes when some obstacle gets in the way. A good manager makes sure that obstacles -- needing to get paid, getting approval to travel to a conference, purchasing a new computer, finding people to test code, irritating users with bug reports which are too vague to be useful -- don't intrude on the developer's time.

The best thing you can do to make yourself attractive as a non-coding co-founder (short of learning to code) is to say "I'll take care of all the non-coding muck so that you can focus on doing what you do best".
Nessus Through SOCKS Through Meterpreter
Scary Mathematica Movies for Halloween
We also measure average comment score. It's the avg field on the profile page.
Discuss HN: How to solve the wifi insecurity problem
A couple days ago, people posted a story going around about session cookies being transmitted via wifi, allowing anyone in the vicinity to hijack a facebook account or something else as sinister.

It was suggested that sites don't just use ssl for everything because it's too computationally expensive, or something. Is that true?

I started thinking about solving the problem using pure HTTP connections (after doing the login using https, of course) and it seems to me that there are many possible solutions.

One would be to generate a seed for a sequence of "one time session keys" that would be invalidated when you log out. You could store it in localStorage, or in a cached javascript resource which was originally retrieved with ssl. You would, of course, reload this resource on the next login.

You could use cookies to store the index number of the "one time session key" that should be used next, and increment it after every request.

Seems simple enough -- does anyone have any comments about this scheme? I might implement it in my own site.
We also measure average comment score. It's the avg field on the profile page, and it's displayed along with total karma on the leaderboard: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
USB3 also uses more power than USB2. It might not fit the strict power requirements on many of Apple's machines.
When you sign up, a page that explains the community guidelines (before you're moved into the site) might help a little. I for one have actually never seen/found them, and I've seen plenty of comments asking if something was appropriate.
facebook has 500 million users and is likely on their way to one billion. is it possible for them NOT to be hugely profitable with 1 BILLION users?
We love Sifter...

www.sifterapp.com

It's beautifully done, the only drawback is that you
can't send it e-mail.
By the Book: How telephone directories transformed America
They're not always right, but they usually do things for a reason. Like how they've stuck with Core 2 in the 13" MacBook, 13" MBP, and MacBook Air.

Most other companies throw every new interface and bus in their machines without much thought. There's a reason most other computers are larger and have worse battery life.

edit: It also depends on the crowd you're in as well. If you ever read any overclocking and general hardware enthusiast forums you'll see that Apple is always wrong and behind. It's all about perspective, and different people care about different things. I used to want to upgrade everything all the time, tweak this and that, etc. Now that I want a machine that's more like an appliance I see more value in Apple products. I'm not going to buy an Apple desktop to overclock for a gaming rig, but I wouldn't consider any other notebook at this point in time.
The judge disagreed, ruling Juliet's lawyer had presented no evidence she lacked intelligence or maturity

Um, such as being four years old?
Vintage Star Wars Travel Posters by Steve Thomas
He didn't say it was easy. It took him about 8 months of work, and he actually had access to the machines in question.

And note, he is talking about stand-alone ATM machines (the kind you see here in the US in out of the way stores).
Amazon Web Services offers Free Usage Tier
Jumping the shark
From the article:

"The court heard that Bedford ignored the product's recommendation to take no more than one sixteenth of a teaspoon and instead took two spoonfuls of the powder -- ingesting a level of caffeine 70 times more than is usually found in a high-energy drink."

He also washed it down with an energy drink!
I think The Stand is one of his best novels. It is also one of his longest novels (almost 1,000 pages). It is also one of his earlier novels, so maybe it's missing "the fat."
This paper dates from 2003 but the issues remain and the analysis still applies.
This was the type of answer I was hoping for, thanks.

Some of what you referenced and further reading here:

http://www.gao.gov/search?search_type=Solr+(Beta+1.0)&o=...
Seems simple enough -- does anyone have any comments about this scheme? I might implement it in my own site.

<tptacek>Do not use homegrown cryptography to protect your website. Seriously. Just use SSL. The problem you mention of SSL being too computationally expensive? That's a Maserati problem.</tptacek>

In all seriousness, I agree with Thomas's standard opinion in this case. There are theoretical ways to do this securely, but the odds of anyone actually doing it correctly are low to zero. Unless you really really know what you're doing -- and if you did, you wouldn't bother coming to HN for advice about it -- you're much better off just using SSL.
There is an online advertising bubble (10+ years) that will be self correcting soon. The reasons are:

- Down economy. When ordinary people are going further and further into debt, they will differentiate products on price and not brand. They will cut back on all things save the necessities.

- Consumer startups are dying/getting smaller. Techcrunch recently mentioned venture funding drying up in consumer space, instead the money is flowing more towards enterprise. Therefore, those startups won't have massive budget to advertise online anymore.

- Big corporations will be scaling back on paid advertising. They can use free platforms like facebook pages and twitter to do the new product rollouts and announcements, which is becoming more of the norm.
Ask HN: Voice recognition software
Anyone here have experience working with voice recognition software, and have any recommendations? I'm looking for something I can run on a local PC, paid or not. (Also, is there someplace other than HN I should be asking this?)

My end goal is to be able to hit a key and then speak a note out loud, and have it added to a queue for my GTD-based organizational system. The only step I'm sure I can't cobble together on my own is the voice recognition part.

(If there's interest, I'll post it here when finished in case someone else could use it.)
Why was this downvoted?

See dalke's reply to me below for an actual response:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852670
I don't think it's useful to punish users with low or negative karma ... because they can just get another account. Karma will only make you invested once you've accumulated enough.

Maybe a nuclear option would be good. We certainly had success with Operation Erlang I & II. Maybe a nuclear option would consist of locking out access for 24 hrs to all but the old guard and then requiring that for the next week or so that new accts must be active for more than 24 hrs before they can post.
The original Unix crypt(3) password scheme invented (and coined the term for) salts.

Incremental password crackers, like John the Ripper and Crack, take a single password hash, and an actual dictionary, and hash each entry in the dictionary looking for a match. They take days to run instead of seconds, and until people started wanting to break into Windows boxes, they were the only way people cracked passwords.
This is certainly interesting. Surely, some conclusions could be drawn from transplant recipients even today. Being a matter which could cause significant controversy in the medical community, I wouldn't expect to see any non-anecdotal data on this, but it would certainly be welcome.
Yes. I think you should ignore rainbow tables. People using salted MD5 hashes in their PHP applications are also creating a real threat.
I've got some LED fans that beg to differ.
As Shirky says, "handles you can invest in".

One way to invest in handles would be to add more social features like points you can give to awesome comments (you can only give 1 point a day or something), etc. Then again, all these social mechanics are complex and easily gamed.

Another way would be simply to promote handles more: make an easily searched HN users list etc.
I feel exactly the same way. Should I find myself with an extra million in the bank, it would not change the feeling. There is a particular rush from making your ideas into reality.
a). it is a tradition
b). they want to keep the tradition
c). they like building the ladders to ensure safety for their fellow firefighters
d). why even question whether they should keep doing it or not. leave them to continue their traditions and handiwork.
How to Create a Sitemap for WordPress
I said "where it's too big to cache" -- that means too big for RAM, aka >50GB or >200GB depending on what kind of server you have.
I have become a lot more circumspect since I've been on the receiving end of things. I used to slam books I hated having read on Amazon, but after being published, I realized how crushing something like that can be.

Just because I think www.linttrapsforsale.com is a dumb idea doesn't mean that there wasn't a team behind it that thought they had a great vision, emitted blood and sweat in pursuit of it, and hung their hopes and dreams on it.

Short of replying to things that are actively malicious (bigoted, etc.), I try to rein in my online 'road rage' and let other people take things to task. There are so many of them out there willing to do it, in any event...
After thinking about it, how about adding a 'flag' link next to the comment headline? You can see it individually when you reply, but not on the main thread page.
I've had to close a large-ish site of mine due to meanness. Things can get very nasty online, it's hard to really understand until you've tried running one of these.
Lunch with the FT: Bill Gates
You pretty much have to have never pushed a serious amount of caffeine before in your life to make this mistake; I used to take caffeine pills during high school, and minor overdoses would make me sick for days. I feel nauseous just thinking about a spoonful of caffeine powder.
From the interview:

"When we came to L.A., we had our script in one hand and this DVD in the other hand. People liked the script, but they loved the DVD. As you quickly find out in Los Angeles, everybody’s got severe ADD. Reading a script is fairly boring—it’s a nightmarish task. Whereas people loved to be able to put the DVD in..."

I used to be in a business similar to the film business where everyone and their brother had a winning concept, but the people that hand-built a prototype in their garage got the meetings. People are visual creatures, reading about a concept isn't the same as actually touching it.
Why assume that everybody that upvotes now would take the time to "me too"?

If anything what I see again and again is that some comment takes a quick lead in upvotes in a topic and dominates the conversation afterwards, despite being often followed by more interesting comments.
500 million users and many use it on a daily basis and spend more time on the site than most others.
The telescope that ate astronomy
Twitter Added 30 Million Users In The Past Two Months
Apple doesn't "control" the A4 in any way they didn't "control" all the other Samsung chips they've bought and put Apple logos on.

They've now bought the design team that worked with Samsung on it, so we might see something interesting come out of that, but it's not the A4.

The rest of your post is entirely reasonable so it's a shame to lead off with a regularly debunked misconception.

It is however fun to speculate about why Apple puts so much effort into misleading people about the provenance of this fairly standard chip. It's clearly worked on some people, but what have they gained from this deception?
Crashed Safari/Snow Leopard 3x, after zooming the processor like Flash on steroids. NRFPT.
How long till... (Google suggest screenshot)
I had to redirect traffic from my WP installation to posterous. My server was not able to take the load. Thanks HN for the interest in my humble thoughts.
If a metal ladder gets hot enough to fail structurally, there are far bigger problems afoot.
PayPal Beats Google Checkout To The Local Payments Market But Will It Work?
CSI: GUI interface using Visual Basic to track a killers IP address
The stay focused chrome extension has worked for me.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmip...

I would like to have a bit more granularity. Like having several rest periods during the day.
It's a deterministic finite automaton (state machine) for dividing by seven. In effect, it's the graph expansion of a regular expression.

http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2008/12/30/Regular-Expr...
"the ninety hour workweek is the talking parrot"

Sweet metaphor. Thanks.
Obsolescence in File Formats and Software
Google isn’t polluting the Internet, the world is polluted already
Every forum says "don't feed the trolls", but there are always people who do.

If you can identify troll-feeders, you might be able to stop them from feeding the trolls (just a text reminder above a comment field might be enough), hence create less incentive for trolls.

Not an easy problem to solve though, I've tried myself and didn't succeed. May try again.
Techcrunch recently mentioned venture funding drying up in consumer space, instead the money is flowing more towards enterprise. Therefore, those startups won't have massive budget to advertise online anymore.

Can you point to the article please?
It's a similar risk to using a file sharing network though. It depends on the type of files you're downloading, of course, but lots of people don't check an EXE before running it.

Although you often have the wisdom of the crowd when downloading files; if 1000 people are sharing/seeding, then the files are probably* safe.

* Possibly a terrible assumption.
I did search before commenting. The most charitable discussions called the idea pseudoscience and not based on facts.

Also highly ranked on google were discussions like this:

http://skepdic.com/cellular.html

I don't know enough about skepdic to judge whether or not they're a valid source of information; but so far _nothing_ has appeared to have any real facts about this. Frankly, it strikes me as a fairly ridiculous notion, but if there are some actual facts out there to be considered then it would be great to see them. Hubpages is a glorified blogging site from what I can tell.

As far as I'm aware, the only organ that can store memories is the brain; and I couldn't find anything that was willing to argue against that fact with any form of scientific rigor.
Anything that ties into GitHub well? We just switched from SVN+Trac to GitHub. Considering still using Trac but wondering if any good alternatives exist.
It really depends on what you're looking for and looking to do. I personally prefer Ubuntu's LTS releases for day-to-day use, but for the production servers, I prefer stepping out of Linux and into FreeBSD. I've found it to be much more robust, while at the same time not holding you back to ancient software versions (like CentOS/RHEL).

Yet, it really comes down to your preference.
Sure, I can empathize with that point of view if it's a "just because I can" type of power situation. But if it's a standard (assuming necessary) security procedure does it still carry the same weight?
Top Most Expensive Houses of the World | Horizontal Image
Did I just hear you call me insane?

I don't seek to reduce risk all the time. Sometimes I actually enjoy taking a risk. For instance, when given the opportunity to leave this house to go shopping I take a risk that I don't need to take. After all, I could get mugged, driven over or any other one of a thousand things that could go wrong on a trip to the shopping mall. It would be much safer to mail order everything in.

And that's not counting my decision to maybe do it on a bicylce, which we all know is less safe than my car (but I enjoy being out there). And I might not even wear UV protection risking skin cancer. And not wear a breathing mask to enjoy the not-so-fresh air.

Life is risk. Sane people (or at least I hope they are the sane ones, if not I'll be off to the funny farm tomorrow) will balance the risks they take against the upsides and will not seek to reduce risk per se.

Entrepreneurs are not unique in this respect, everybody does it, all the time.

Increased risk and knowing how to balance risk is a requirement for a normal life.

And that's not getting in to things like skydiving and bungee-jumping yet.
This data should only be available to pg.
We're drifting into semantics here, but it boils down to whether you have to take something on faith or not. Taking anything without a "scientific footnote" as true relies on belief, because it cannot rely on proof. That makes it an article of faith, which is a synonym for religion in the sense I believe the OP used it.
Maybe he has no problem with the company that built the application, but the company submitted the application to the App Store knowing that the App Store's conditions would violate the GPL.

You cannot force GPL down Apple's throat. It is their application store. If their terms are not compatible with your license, change your license or live with it. By picking the GPL you are excluding some distribution venues.

In the meanwhile, the VideoLAN project is still endorsing the iOS application on their website. So, they are sending copyright infringement notices, while at the same time encouraging people to buy it?

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html
Pick either Vim or Emacs and you'll cover 99.99999% of any possible raw text editing scenarios you can think of.

Here's some F# highlighting for vim: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2162

Jedit is ok, but I found it quite slow compared to vim. My own personal favourite is vim (as you can probably tell) but Emacs has some interesting extras that make it worthwhile learning too (such as org-mode).
VP8 Codec SDK "Aylesbury" Release
In the case of strip searches, if she's young I would object because I don't want her growing up thinking strangers touching her naked is acceptable in general. I would require some level of maturity first to be able to understand the moral difference between a strip search performed by a TSA officer on duty and one performed by her 4th grade teacher.

In the case of scanners, under the same assumption of completely professional conduct, I see no problem. She would probably be more emotionally scarred by a visit to the doctor.

Kids generally don't have any problem running around naked. It's the adults that feel self-conscious.
Flattr fascinates me, but it has this big problem. A site like the one I work for isn't going to use it because the Flattr user base isn't big enough to make it worthwhile. They need big sites onboard, though, or they'll never get the coverage necessary to make it worthwhile.

I think the title for this could be "Flattr doesn't work because there aren't enough Flattr users".
Ah, ok, that makes a lot more sense. I was imagining removing comments that had been downvoted; not removing the link to downvote.

I generally agree with that, but it reminds me of another problem. The Karma number is now an ever-growing and meaningless figure. I think it should be harder to improve your karma as you get higher, and it should be easier to lose it. That it actually has a meaning.