skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook prepara un evento especial de móviles
every time i see one i will smash it with a hammer
How to Communicate the Value of Your Website Instantly
Divisibility by 7
Really? What's sales tax there for?
This is to figure out what Apple plans to do before they do it, right?
Very good post, Martin.

My co-founder and I recently made a decision regarding a partnering with another company in a somewhat new field. We made our decision pretty quickly, and it wasn't until I was later asked why we made the decision we did that I went back and considered what had really led us down the path we took:

A mentor who works at a big hosting company talked about the way they go about choosing open source technology is not by looking at what the best technology at the time is, but at the quality of the community contributing to that technology, and make a bet that that one will "get better faster" than the others. Without thinking about it, that was the primary criteria that led us to make our decision: the company we chose isn't currently the best at what they do (which is why I had to give this some thought when queried about the decision), but they seem to have set up some systems that (we believe) will let them "get better faster" than their competitors.

It wasn't something we considered at the time of making the decision, but in hindsight, that anecdote was the "vector" that gave us the reasoning that probably contributed the most the decision, without us really being conscious of it.

Edit: Thinking more about this more now, these incredibly well-built-up and well-tested transfer functions that experienced entrepreneurs and investors have built up is what makes YC and other mentor programs so incredible. This is how Ron Conway and Jessica Livingson judge entrepreneurs so well from just a simple conversation.

It's nothing that can be taught, but through books like Founders at Work, or simply sitting and listening to an entrepreneur tell their story, and recall the tough decisions they made early on, one can probably build up pieces of this transfer function. It's what makes Mixergy interviews valuable: there's not a much traditional educational value to them, but just hearing the story of what decisions were made, when, and why, helps build these functions for the viewer.
I'm against the TV licence, but your points are flat out incorrect. The TV licence costs £145.50 (about $233) per year and gets you approximately 50 TV channels (some in HD!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_terrestrial_tel... (all those listed as "Free to view"). The BBC's output is typically high quality (BBC 4 being nearly entirely high brow documentaries) and is commercial free.

You're certainly welcome not to pay the licence fee and not watch TV, but spreading lies about how supposedly bad the British TV system is is disingenuous and perpetuates a silly North American myth similar to that about British food or teeth.

Now, I'm off to clean myself as I've just defended the licence fee, something I'm not entirely keen on myself ;-)
The Accidental Astrophysicists
The article seems to contradict this: "An abbreviated handshake saves the server performing an RSA operation, but those are cheap anyway." Given that they are performing aggressive session caching, perhaps that 1% is mostly symmetric crypto.
Thats a great point. All the Model Ts still rolling have incredible longevity but millions of them have been gone for many decades.
That mysterious J in emails
A Code of Work Rules for Consultants
On top of the £12/mo licence fee, we pay £49/mo for Sky TV (the main, Murdoch-owned premium TV service in the UK - cable is not so big here) with all channels except sport.

I'm just about to downgrade it to the minimum (but still keep Sky, terrestrial reception here is crap) but not for the reason all these examples provide. We've got a kid. And 99% of the time, the TV is stuck on CBeebies (the BBC's under 5's channel) so there's no need for all those other channels ;-) I never thought a kid would lead to lower expenditures in some areas..
Google closed 40 Acquistions this year, 37 of which under $17M on average
Shame these are all Eclipse based, but in my case it'd be Cmd+S, clearly putting me in some sort of "paranoid" group ;-)
Interesting topic. if only it was as easy as Barnaby describes, wouldn't all the different banks use different hardware/software configurations? also consider CCTV recording, dye technology, etc.

In Australia, physical ATM attacks are preferred apparently

http://www.smh.com.au/national/move-to-thwart-atm-gas-bomb-a...

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/701017/explosions-at-two...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/13/2654709.htm

as I was searching for those old articles I also came across:

http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Crimes/InPerson/atm_scam... - ATM Cash-point Scams using "Lebanese Loop" Plastic Sleeves / Skimming Devices (which I initially thought was a joke) and

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/programming_at... - from Schneier which is a good read.
Does the university's workstations have publicly accessible ip? Do you have admin right to run vpn type of service on it? If so you can run OpenVPN in p2p mode (with no remote option it just listens on a given lport). All application traffic (rdp, freenix, tightvnc, etc) goes over the tunnel.

Mac http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick
Windows http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/downloads.html#late...

As far as the slowness is concerned it might be due to the software that you're using to look at the remote screen. I know tightvnc can go across cable modem type of isp connection well. But don't expect it to be superfast. UltraVNC is good too, but it's not interoperable with tightvnc and it is Windows only.
http://www.croowd.com/

A search engine that allows you to check-in and comment on sites in search results -> can you be the future mayor of hacker news? Essentially Google + Foursquare. Suggestions welcomed.
Done. I added a 2nd table. Reload and scroll down to see it.
Being an aspiring novelist, I've read my fair amount of this 'how to write' stuff and invariably find it useless. King is the only person who actually makes it plain and simple and gives no bullshit.

There's little point in trying to be a liked writer, if you never publish anything for anyone to like, and there's even less point if you can't make money off of what you do publish to ever release enough material to get noticed enough to get liked or disliked.

My favorite thing of King's advice, and John Scalzi reiterates it in his own way: just get on with it and do the writing.
Ask HN: Recommendations for books on China's history & growth?
I was recently reading an article that told the story about how China used a province/city on the outskirts of Hong Kong to flirt with this experiment called Capitalism.

That experiment yielded significant success and upward mobility for the residents of that province. As a result of that, China decided to apply it to the mainland. 20 years later, we are seeing sustained fastest growth of large economies in the world.

Does anyone have any good recommendations (books/eBooks/articles) that clearly explain their history, the choices they made, the results and the effect on the people?

I guess, generally what I am looking for is substantial, tangible evidence about how capitalism raised millions/hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty. So you don't have to stick to China alone, although they are the most obvious case study.

Thanks.
Your argument works from extremely scant evidence and weaves in generalizations. Given how little we have to go on, you may have done an excellent job guessing the most likely circumstances for him. However, it is unnecessary to guess at his circumstances, since a professional could simply ask him. Also, you go from a guess as to his circumstances to a diagnosis of his problem.

I don't see the connection, and even if there was a clearly articulated connection, it would again be guesswork. Unnecessary again since a professional could simply ask him the right questions and diagnose rather than make the best guess given insufficient evidence to have confidence in the answer.

I'm sure you can guess what I have to say about the right therapy for him. It is not necessary to prescribe a "likely" course of action based on a diagnosis based on scant evidence. Even if your chain of reasoning follows the most likely path from evidence to prescriptive, there is no need to work at low levels of confidence.
Thiel Fellowship applications up -- no dropping out required
You could make a 5-minute trailer and put it up on YouTube.
Well, yes, that's probably ultimately true in a lot of cases, but if you approach it constructively, you have a much greater chance of success than if you just assume laziness.
one more url i found interesting: http://www.bankers.asn.au/Default.aspx?ArticleID=610

"Even self-service banking is expensive to provide. An ATM costs cost on average $40,000 and it then has to be installed, maintained and stocked with cash."

a little OT I guess, meh :P
The official rules say that one of the requirements is that the recipients "Forgo other employment or educational enrollment during the two year Fellowship except as approved by the Thiel Foundation."

Thus, they can go back to school after two years if they really want to.
A recurring problem with the creative media industries is that the path from initial concepts to audience awareness is quite lengthy and convoluted. Even great creative products tend to have a preferred niche, and rarely is the marketing information available to nail down niche audiences for a big launch day.

But these industries are still mostly focused around big launches, because they have to completely reorganize with smaller budgets to attack the long tail. Music, comics, and writing have all made some progress towards this reorganization since both their production and marginal costs in digital form are low, so there's a great opening for the non-pop genres. Games are a bit less so, and video probably the least. But what's slowing this process down the most right now is that a niche audience has to be built from scratch, on a per-creator basis.

So either you work within the system and hope for a big door-opening break, or you go completely indie and bootstrap your entire business model, customers, etc. from nothing - which effectively means that even if you are indie, you still need to find a bandwagon to jump onto, or you'll probably never get a critical mass of interest.

I suspect that there's a business in providing aggregation mechanisms for untapped genres; I've just started building something along these lines in the last few days :)
Microsoft hands out 90k Windows Phones to employees and PDC attendees
Not only haven't I seen those shows, I've never even heard of them before.

Based on the titles, though, I would hazard a guess that they would trigger my Crap-o-meter.

But as another poster pointed out, "crap" depends on your goals. If eyeballs and ad revenue are the metric, maybe these shows are models of quality.

Discussions on "How to be Successful in $INDUSTRY" really need to clarify the meaning of "successful."

For some, the prospect of selling scripts so long as they are in the realm of low double-digit-IQ appeal may not be considered a win, while others might see that as hitting pay dirt. Either way, you should know before following someone's career advice where it will lead.
i work in London for £300-£350 a day for 3 months and then come back to Edinburgh after the contract is over.

How do you make the living arrangements work on that?

For a while I was going to London and doing training gigs for £400 a day but gave it up because it was either too expensive (staying in London itself) or too much of a headache (staying outside London and getting the train in).
You're not paranoid if they're really out to gat you.

(They in this case being your hardware, the network, and your co-workers fooling with either.)
I hope someone does a Clojure page too.
I suspect world-changing companies tend to be worth a lot to their VCs, Napster notwithstanding.
Despite its previous bad reputation for Unicode handling, Ruby 1.9 deals with using Unicode in syntax pretty well. At one of the big conferences a cpl years ago, he showed off using Unicode symbols in syntax during his keynote, stuff like using the lambda symbol for lambdas, etc. It never caught on, unsurprisingly.
Ha, this is true. And that's why git commit -am "whatever" and git push are quite close behind Cmd+S ;-)
The advice looks familiar to W. Zinsser's "On Writing Well", which is the best book on writing I've ever read (even for writing academic papers). http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-25th-Anniversary-Nonficti... I try to recommend it to everyone, especially if they're not a fan of bullshit, since it's a book on writing that's written exceptionally well.
There's a weird thing that can happen to ADHD individuals, and its actually considered a symptom: the ability to 'hyperfocus' on certain tasks. It's very similar to The Zone, but it's random and difficult to predict when it will manifest: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocus
You don't have assign high probability to hard takeoff to support ethical/friendly AI research. The consequences of a hard takeoff are so huge (potentially destroying humanity) that even a low chance is worth making lower.

Humans have been running on the same hardware for several thousand years. Just our improved knowledge and culture has been enough to keep us growing at an exponential rate. If our brains were end-user modifiable and had APIs, we'd be able to increase our growth rate even faster. An AI could do even better than self-modification. It could buy or hack enough computers to give itself thousands of times more processing power.

I don't assign high probability to that sort of scenario, but it is high enough that it's worth ameliorating.
Toxic Orders Can Predict Likelihood of Stock Market Crashes
Seriously this unsubstantiated rumor is front page news? I have a feeling that some up votes didn't click the link.
Jerry Pournelle also spent some time on it in Birth of Fire. In most SF, though, it is not treated or only implicitly.
Years ago I bought Stephen King's On Writing and it looks like he echoes a lot of its points here.

Missing is his hatred of adverbs; To King's mind "He screamed angrily" is a terrible sentence because it uses the -ly construction to say what should be clear in context. So with precious few exceptions he scraps all the -ly's and lets his characters' actions do the talking.
He did a bit more then emptying an ATM though, didnt he!
The problem is that even if you cache sessions, you still have to do the math to encrypt every packet. Encryption cost is a cube of key size. Please, contradict me. If you can, many cryptographers and mathematicians will thank you... :-)

Say what you will, but the difficulty of brute-forcing decryption is based on key length. You might be able to optimize the encryption using a certain length, but the key will still be vulnerable if it is only 1024 bit (as the article suggests).
I've always liked Stephen King. One piece of advice, first said by William Strunk and reflected here, has stayed with me: omit needless words. Now I take out all unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, which are most of them. I like to think my writing has improved. A quote cited in his book, On Writing, was also a revelation:

"I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short."
-- Blaise Pascal

My friend and I used to laugh at this quote because we thought it wasn't true. Now we laugh because we know it is.
Stephen Fry on Free Software
Show Off Your Halloween Costume On DailyBooth
Speaking from personal experience:

1. Seriously consider getting your own place or room. At minimum find somewhere you can go to be by yourself and not worried about being judged.

2. In the US (don't know about India) grades mostly only matter when you're first out of college. For a bachelors I think good internships can partially make up for it.

3. Take fewer classes at a time and you will have more time to learn and succeed.

4. Maybe consider starting / joining a study group for your classes. You get some socialization and there is a clear topic for discussion.

5. Along those lines also consider joining clubs for any interests you have. Again, already having a shared interest means you don't have to fish as much for something to talk about.

6.Failures fade as time goes on. My guess, though not knowing the culture, is that nobody is likely to bring up the F you had 10 years after you graduate.

7. Your life can change a lot after you graduate. Moving somewhere completely new can give you a completely fresh start -- that's what I did. Perhaps go as far as starting with all new possessions.

8. This is conjecture and something I am going to try myself, but break down big tasks into short tasks you can complete in a couple hours (perhaps answering 2 homework problems.) Write down your successes in a book. It will add up over time.

9. Given finite energy and time, I would spend more time on the classes for now. The classes will go away before people do.

10. Lower risk relationships, such as people who you could simply never see again if something bad happens, may be easier to deal with.
The main advice I took from this was 'Use less words'.

I'd expand on that, but realize that's a bad idea...
I only read one King book, and it prevented me from reading any more. It was so needlessly verbose!

It was called Gerald's Game, or something similar.
You want to know a dirty, filthy secret about the entertainment business? It's a business. Nobody wants to buy "good" scripts, because some abstract sense of quality doesn't pay anyone's bills. What the industry wants is commercial viability. They want safe bets, stuff that will be easy to market. They want sequels, spin-offs and derivative ideas that are familiar but just novel enough to be acceptable. That's what sells advertising, gets the viewers and puts money in the bank.

What writers don't understand (and what they'll rarely be told) is that paying your dues is largely a process of disillusionment. To put it kindly, the industry wants sensible, informed writers who understand how TV is made and know how to write scripts that are easy to shoot and suit the medium. To put it less kindly but more accurately, the industry wants cynical, desperate writers who will write whatever cheap nasty dreck pulls in the viewers.

Paying your dues is like a gang initiation, social proof that you're willing to crawl through Albini's trench of shit to get your script into production. Every menial chore that you perform, every late night you pull, every arse that you kiss entrenches you into the industry, further investing you in the payoff of getting commissioned. The longer you've been a dogsbody, the more confident a commissioning editor can be that you won't argue when they bring in a script doctor, when they ask for a few "tweaks", when they decide that a page one rewrite is in order. They know you won't argue over the casting or ask for too much money.

Entertainment is a shit business, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svCA3DJRgfI
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 97
Apple can only confer redistribution rights for patents they own. If they - or any other gcc contributor for that matter - mistakenly or deliberately reproduced an invention patented by someone else (IBM, Microsoft, Intel...) and contributed it to gcc, then the clause you mention affords you no protection whatsoever.
That's fairly good default advice I think, but there are adverb-heavy writing styles that also work. For example, Edgar Allan Poe uses a ton of them everywhere.
Google Cache as the link is currently down:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4qYMp-t...
I don't see any reason why you couldn't. It seems like a 1280 bit key should be secure for at least a few more years.
Another interesting post on the same topic, by someone else: http://squid314.livejournal.com/2008/07/29/. squid314 concludes some of the same things as this post, but also some things not mentioned in this post.
The chart shows Edubuntu fading off, but the project is still alive and strong: http://edubuntu.org/
Tobacco sales would go through the roof over night if it started shipping with MJ in it. I've never been able to get a good high off of a bong or pipe, but mix it with tobacco and I'm set. The interesting thing is that tobacco has no effect on me at all, I've smoked cigarettes and nothing, I often smoke a cigarillo when I'm social drinking with friends who do smoke but my body doesn't seem to get a response.

My parents both never smoked, my paternal grand parents didn't smoke (AFAIK) and my maternal grandfather liked the occasional pipe (literally occasional, I never even knew as a child). As far as investigation has gone in my family, no one smokes. Aunts, uncles, cousins, no one.

However virtually everyone in my wife's family smokes, my wife doesn't, but if she does have a social smoke I know she struggles with not continuing. The few members of her family who don't smoke have quit.

The bizarreness here is that my wife's family tried strongly to stop their children smoking, but my parents didn't try at all. They found out I'd bought a pack of cigarettes one time, but I didn't get them taken off me, I didn't get a lecture, I got nothing. They simply assumed they weren't for me, and they genuinely weren't, my friend asked me to pick them up for when we went out drinking.
This is really, really important. Not getting enough sleep will just make any problem worse.
I was personally hoping this would be a vim vs emacs joke when I saw the first set of hand images.
It's so true that because it's Stephen King you listen differently and more carefully.
Not sure what you mean by handle the reference. List it on your resume openly and honestly. I wouldn't put the "jerks who screwed you for money" down as a reference. They are unlikely to say anything nice. If you don't have a lot of work experience and need a reference perhaps a co worker who you are friendly with could do it instead of your boss.
Apple fires patent suits back at Motorola
Its important to be honest, however you really need to learn how to frame those issues a bit better. Rather than "I'm not good at dealing with people" something like "Sometimes, I can have some communication issues with colleagues" or something like that.
Microsoft buys 3D chip maker Canesta
Spitzer telescope finds that space buckyballs thrive
Congratulations, lunaru.

They would not appreciate publicity, but I have some buddies who could lose BCC in the petty cash drawer. A couple of them make products which don't sound all that much more lucrative than bingo cards.

There are a couple of self-made software entrepreneurs running around HN, too.

If you want to hear a lot of stories like this, come to Business of Software 2011 and ask anybody there what they do. The most common answer is "founded a software company which now employs X people and has revenues of Y million." (That crowd swings B2B more than my buddies.)
I was hoping this would be an actual analysis of the way people type. :-(
First Human Liver Grown in Lab
Innovation: It Isn’t a Matter of Left or Right
There's more than a grain of truth in this.

In an interview situation I will judge programmers largely by observing how they play their instrument.

Watching how someone gets from $Problem to $Solution, using his own tools and methods, usually speaks louder than a prolonged Q&A session to me.
What part of Apple becoming belligerent on patents they own didn't you get? Obviously no FLOSS license will protect you from patents the contributor doesn't own.

In you example, if IBM, Microsoft or Intel contributed their own patented tech to GCC, they wouldn't be able to sue any user of the GPL'ed code.

My doubts are about BSD-ish licenses - if contributing your patented tech to a BSD project doesn't put you in position to sue downstream users that didn't receive the right to use it directly from you.
Or the VAT
Retailers' Annoying Habits
Shift-Delete: and nothing of any value was lost