skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see a lot of comments here about (autonomous) drones, but this video was made with old-fashioned remote control. The laws are different. I think the only novel aspects of attaching a camera to an RC vehicle are (1) the fact that cameras are now cheap enough that you don't care if it gets destroyed in a crash, and (2) OMG terrorism.
The proper link is:
http://launch.is/blog/2010/12/3/how-to-name-your-startup-and...

thanks for posting.
Everything old is new again. Joel Spolsky's Lord Palmerston on Programming, from 2002:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html
Interesting details missing: how does one run a marathon in Antarctica anyway? Firstly, how do you get down there? And secondly, where do you find a good place to run (ie somewhere where you won't slip on ice or fall into a crevasse?)
Op4j 1.1 released
Eyes-On With the Blackberry Playbook: Rough
Earlier today, I was lucky enough to catch a too-brief glimpse of RIM’s 7″ Playbook tablet when David Neale, VP for Special Projects quickly demoed the device at an event in Toronto.
Though the time that we got to see the device was limited, what is clear is that, though the tablet is definitely in a rough, unfinished shape, it is shaping up to be quite impressive.
I also disagree with this convention. I find that print versions lack many images, diagrams, and additional media that add to the depth of a story. Also, whenever I read a print-version, I end-up having to resize my browser window to make it narrower so the content is actually readable.

I feel for you having to download content over a GPRS connection, but whenever I see a printer version of an article, I try to find the original.
"it could mean that the plane crashes if the communication was some sort of emergency time-critical maneuver."

You don't need a very quickly-responding plane to have a large impact on military tactics.
Hedy Lamarr, Inventor
That's where the autopilot comes in.
I think the 22k people who subscribe to the newsletter might disagree.

Just because I'm highly successful and I share the techniques I used to get there doesn't mean I'm trying to compliment myself... I'm trying to show folks how it is done so they can do better themselves.

I don't get paid for doing these emails... I do them because I love helping other entrepreneurs.
These planes can fly for miles as did this one in the video. The owner isn't going to be running up to anyone after a crash because he'll have to get in a car first and drive over.

If your going to be flying something though the air that has a large range and can seriously hurt someone or damage property, it's not to much to ask that it be registered somewhere. Simple registration number so we know who the owner is.

Edit: The remote can also lose contact and the owner wouldn't know where the plane crashed to cover property damages.
Far more difficult than deactivating/destroying the cell network.
Near Field Communications SIM Card Hack
I still don't exactly understand why he did that. Maybe PTSD as you suggested. And I still can't believe someone would steal from an open bar. He was laughing all the while. It really looked like playing tag to me so I played along. Then he became weird.

Anyway I posted that anecdote to push the message that sometimes we build rationalizations about other people behavior. The article is enlightening - as someone else said, others articles reeked of feminism. This one looks quite serious to me. It made that anecdote flash in my mind.

Now I do not care about the reasons why people do something or something else. In a tech conference, you do not threaten other people. That's wrong. Our mistake is to let such persons get away with that.
I would define a good programmer in part as someone who can quickly learn new languages and frameworks.

Granted you could define a good problem solver as one who could easily learn how to program if necessary, but I think it takes a lot longer to be become a great programmer than it does to learn another language once you are one.
How Dead Is the Web?
Right. That's why "for a Roman, mental multiplication was exceedingly difficult". The representation didn't lend itself to mental calculation.
Nothing at all. Assuming that NASA is ok with replacing human astronauts on orbit with cardboard standees in hard vacuum, since none of these craft have life-support capabilities.
The TOP BAR OF HER WEBSITE, that is to say, THE VERY FIRST THING YOU SEE when you go to her site, is a series of glamour shots of her smiling, laughing, nibbling on her glasses, staring into the camera, voguing all over the place - all while wearing what could very well be a black dress, with bright red crimson lipstick on.

And that's perfectly fine if she wants to trade on her appearance this way, but the minute someone suggests she may be doing so, suddenly they're "sexist." How does that work?

"Find a picture of a man that you think qualifies as "His appearance suggests to me he's open to the suggestion of initiating a romantic relationship with someone suitable."

I, for one, would not be terribly turned on by a guy wearing red lipstick, etc. That's just me, being straight and all. Men and women have different signals, that's just how it is. If the pictures where all of an aquiline Abercrombian staring off into the distance with his shirt off, casually slung over his shoulder, showing off rippling pecs and abs, well....what would YOU say he was doing?
How do you know you were dinged for these silly reasons? Did they actually tell you that?

I wouldn't be surprised if there are programmers out there who ding candidates for silly reasons like that, but in my experience they are the minority.
1) Set up a plane to Puntas Arenas, Chile.
2) Coordinate with group of other crazy people to fly to Antarctica
3) Bring LOTS of warm clothing.
4) To run, be very careful. Mostly shuffling.
5) Find big ice sheets to run on

- Travis (the guy running the marathons)
I worry that we're talking past each other, because I don't think the US thinks he deserves the same as people at Gitmo either.
This seems like a great way to request a new feature just because it gets you talking about it.

You are going to tell your team, friends, and other users this story. Just by telling them about this a-hole customer is immediately going to bring the feature into the conversation. What if everyone you told snaps back with 'Well, he may be a dick, but thats a great feature' or 'That feature sure is stupid!'. This feature request just got more attention than any of your previous users requests.

The best feedback I get is from my asshole customers. They are vocal and upset. Something didn't go their way and they are unhappy. If I can fix that I get more happy customers.

Also, my polite customers are generally too happy/polite. Its hard to get feedback when they love your product. They'll put in pretty good feature requests and talking to them is always easy. It makes me feel really good when people love my product, but its really hard for them to tell you how much feature xyz sucks. Generally, we have to look at the logs to see what people are using/not using when it comes to happy/fanboy customers.

Of course, it is not ok to act like a dickhead. Being well respected is usually the best way to get things done.
The AWS console runs entirely over SSL, so it is secure. E.g. https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home
For some reason though, flying around unmanned drones with weapons attached over sovereign countries (Pakistan) even when Pakistan's government request them not to do this is perfectly ok. Even if it means killing nearly 700 civilians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan
Why I’m Investing in CardMunch
Sadly, I agree HN was the one place where you did not see the standard technical dick waving contest. It was a place where you could go and people would brain storm with you. Support you and encourage you, it does seem more and more that it is becoming a venue for non-constructive criticism. When I found HN I was amazed to find a tech related site that had a positive tone as they are so rare. I really hope that it is an ebb and flow trend and those that have nothing to offer but criticism will get tired of getting down-voted and move on.
Wicked leads
I don't believe Factor ever ran on Squeak. It generates its own native code.
Ok my bad, I was thinking in relatively recent western history.
Have a safe trip and a safe race. :)
I've tried all kinds of combinations for coding over the past 10 years. The only combination which didn't start to hurt my eyes over time was a light grey background with dark text.

http://jlongster.com/media/images/screen.png

I absolutely love this scheme. It may not look pretty at first, but it's very very easy on the eyes, and also very clear. Colors are easy to make out and there's no glare anywhere.
Yes. Vote/Time Elapsed
To be fair, sometimes proficiency in some framework or CMS or vertical skill area does matter a lot more than you think it does. Remember now, the problem isn't that they get candidates who don't know $whatever_niche_topic, it's that they "don't know what they don't know", i.e. they have no inkling that the general "depth of terrain" in that area is much greater than what they were able to size up from their casual acquaintance with it... or that they think they can hit the ground running on a project that a serious heavy hitter with 5-10 years experience in that "niche" area been working on, when of course they can't.

That said, if your interviewers are doing their jobs properly, they should be able to filter for (or simply ask about) that level of skill awareness during the phone screen.

More likely, when you get told post-interview that "we need someone with more experience in X" it's usually a polite way of saying that they just weren't, you know, all the into you, and are trying to save face on both sides by pointing to something dry and objective, rather than things that actually matter. Like you know, the fact that you were underdressed (or overdressed), all those awkward silences you had with that second or third guy you interviewed with (remember, the one who announced his presence in the room by slouching in a chair and saying "I'm hungover"), or that you seemed to exhibit a slight latency in your recognizing some technical term that's common coin in the circles they run in (and so therefore, you just don't have enough chest hair), etc.
Convenience.

Before I was making money it was more convenient to pirate. Time was plentiful, money was scarce. Lots of free time on your hands means you can afford to sift through garbage quality files, convert to different formats, etc.

Now that I have income and little spare time it's far more convenient for me to pay for something I know will be of great quality.
These people need to get into a LOT of trouble. This is not legal, and for good reason. I say this from the perspective of having designed, built and flown RC fixed-wing and helicopters for well over twenty years. As neat and sophisticated as they might look, these things are still toys.

They are not built to the same standards as real aircraft. Single failure modes abound and they are, in most cases, catastrophic.

I have seen model airplanes loose a horizontal stabilizer in flight for no apparent good reason. Or simply fall out of the sky like a brick when one of the cheap electronic parts inside fails. Figure out the kinetic energy of a 8 to 10 pound object travelling at 100+ miles per hour to understand the lethality potential.

The airspace he covered is flown by full-scale aircraft. Imagine being a tourist taking one of those NYC helicopter flights (done that) only to plummet to your death because some a-hole decided it was OK to take his $300 toy on a joy flight.

Beyond, that, imagine if this was, in fact, legal. Would you like to see 100 of these things flying without control around an airspace such as NYC? Bad idea.

They need to get into a LOT of trouble. This is definitely not something anyone should emulate or replicate. It will ruin the model aircraft hobby in the US forever.
Anyone else find the social media dropdown that appears after you scroll about halfway down the page incredibly annoying?
That it contains offices is of secondary importance.

That is a huge assumption on your part.

Our cost for power in Manhattan is only negligibly different than in Texas.

The consumer cost may be similar, but any smart company building data centers will try to find deals that reduce their cost well below what consumers pay. Those deals tend to be easier to find in rural areas.

The quote about rural areas with cheap power has nothing to do with the importance of being at 111 8th Ave for peering.

Google's only interest to date in this building is that it houses a growing number of employees, and is currently at 2000. Google is not in the high frequency trading business, and so is unlikely to have too much interest in the advantages of the location for peering. There is therefore no reason to believe that Google cares about anything other than the advantages of being their own landlord and guaranteeing access to enough co-located office space for their needs.

(Note, I am currently employed at Google. However I have no inside knowledge about this deal.)
Rejected by YC? Keep trying anyway.
I'm disturbed to see the top post on Hacker News being a non-commentable, non-downvotable job posting for a YC company with a snobbish title by an anonymous account.

Not cool.

Perhaps it is the terse bluntness of title, or maybe the affront to my sensibilities - that perhaps, /perhaps/ those people who were rejected by YC were only in it to get accepted by YC - I'm not sure what it was that initially pissed me off.

What I do know is that I'm disappointed that the community is not being given its normal tools to discuss and filter it.

Why is that post different?
I agree vehemently. If I am a candidate, the employer's reaction to my answer is part of my employer test. I would experience a certain measure of glee if the employer -- who is testing my technical skills -- had enough technical know-how to ask those kinds of follow-ups.
18 Sites for Finding Startup Jobs
Netflix - Why We Choose HTML5 for User Experiences on Devices
I'm sure NASA would be just fine sending up a couple of their Robotnaut modules. This could actually provide a viable alternative for satellite/space station repair in lieu of manned shuttle flights.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yadj3asTyc0
You do that today. Because you're used to the mouse.
I noticed that this morning too:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966201
Deactivating AT&T's 3G network just requires more than 10 iPhones in one room :)
Didn't realize this usage of singular they was correct-thanks for pointing that out!
:-)
I've dealt with my share of reverse-chauvinism-disguised-as-feminism, so I know where you're coming from, but consider what you just said:

"if I say something to someone and did not mean any offense/harassment, did not consider it to be offensive/harassing - and someone else still wants to cry about it, then f-*ck them"

You are the only one who gets to decide whether your actions are considered offensive? Really?

I bet that the conference organizer who hired strippers didn't consider it offensive, nor the presenters who show slides of bikini babes "to get everyone's attention". That doesn't make those actions not offensive.
I think I'm kind of introverted but I can still interact with human beings. A good programmer should be able to communicate with other human beings, and a presentation (which in this case I believe is "Tell me about a project you've worked on recently?") isn't out of line at all. I talk about what I'm doing at work pretty consistently; you're basically being put in the same position during the interview you would be when having to explain your work to a CTO or someone in a similar position.

And the problem with coding interviews is that they filter out other good candidates, and I've seen plenty of companies complaining that "They can't find any qualified developers."

I would not blame the developers for this, I'd blame their selection process for focusing on things most developers don't really touch or care about when they're working on a project.
My company is currently in the middle of a lot of college recruiting. Most college students/recent grads have very little to show. If you're lucky they had the forethought to save some of their school projects and post them online.

Even a lot of industry people don't have much to show. Plenty of decent programmers don't have serious side projects (or aren't comfortable releasing them to the public).

As for regurgitated answers, I keep my eye out for those. You can usually tell if someone has seen a similar problem before. If I think they have I ask them. I sometimes ask a different question to see if it was raw ability or familiarity.

They do tell you a lot. They tell you whether the candidate can actually write basic code or not. I'm not trying to see if you are a great programmer, I'm trying to see if you are a bad programmer. It can be really difficult to spot a great programmer, but it's usually very easy to spot a bad one.

Anxiety is a real problem however. I try to take that into account but it affects so many people in so many different ways.

Personally I think resume's are worthless. I think the best form of application would involve some form of code submission - either a simple "screener" problem or perhaps a personal project. That might still be followed by an on-site screening interview (people lie and cheat all the time).
What module are they talking about? Could someone give an example? For instance, the following doesn't work:

import math
math.sqrt(-1)
China has already added some Chinese-language top-level domains to their DNS namespace.

The underlying problem here is Zooko's triangle: nobody has demonstrated a global namespace that is, in Zooko's words, secure, decentralized, and human-meaningful. Centralized systems inherently have central points of failure. Approaches like dot-p2p and Telecomix do not tackle this problem and will therefore not improve the situation.

There are a number of projects trying to tackle the problem by means of petnames, using non-human-meaningful identifiers in the global namespace (so they can be secure and decentralized). Git is probably the most prominent, but others include Freenet and Tahoe-LAFS, and there are quite a number of similar projects that are not yet public. Unfortunately, none of them are currently a replacement for the World-Wide Web, a problem I wrote about at some length in this unfinished essay in 2006: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe...
Everyone here realizes that businesses exist to make profits. That isn't something anyone here is in the dark about - our point is more that with all channels that enable free speech going through SOME business intermediary (in this case Amazon), there are few places left to actually exercise that right when everyone just falls back on the catch-all excuse of profits or appeasing investors.

Also, you are making quite the assumption when you say "...in a country that isn't negatively impacted by the leaks."
Perhaps I was unclear. When I say an agency can issue a subpoena, I mean exactly that: rather than requesting one from a court, an agency can issue one under its own administrative authority - within the limited scope authorized by statute. The IRS can subpoena your bank statements, say, or the EPA could subpoena a suspected polluter's freight delivery data. Many agencies have limited powers to investigate and then prosecute or impose financial penalties, otherwise the court system would need to be considerably expanded. After going through any dispute/appeal process of the agency, then a matter can be heard in state or federal court as appropriate. It's good to get proper legal advice and do everything in writing from the beginning, or you can waste several years fighting the inevitable!

The 'preferred method' mentioned in the Hotwatch briefing does involve going to a judge too, but that's for the separate purpose of getting a secrecy order to avoid tipping off the suspect. The government did get a lot of new powers to investigate things under the PATRIOT act. Though some expired or were amended later, civil liberties were a low priority in October 2001 when people were still feeling panicked about terrorism.

I agree that the DoJ should call back and say 'we're looking into that, give us a few days' - but you know, people would find a reason to be paranoid about that too. Newspapers used to say 'had not called back by press time,' but with blogs that might mean anything, such as waiting only an hour (I consider Wired a responsible news source in this respect, but I still don't know how long they actually waited, and would sort of like to). Remember this Hotwatch powerpoint is 5 years old, and agencies are being told to tighten their budgets a great deal lately; press & public relations departments are often the first to see cuts because they're considered 'fluff' expenses compared to the core mission of a department.
Doodling in Math Class: Infinity Elephants (& fractals (& computation))[video]
Agreed, but, for me, it has to do more with the fact that syntax highlighting seems more highlight-y on a black background and I depend on syntax highlighting to guide my eye. Somehow dark red vs black on a white background doesn't "pop" as much as red vs white on a black background.
The credit card companies will charge you a fee to use credit cards as an authentication mechanism and using prepaid gift cards can get around this. You can buy prepaid cards in bulk. Other authentication schemes are too expensive. Even if you could make it free, it still doesn't keep people from indefinitely registering domain names they don't use. I might be convinced to along with free domain registrations if it wasn't a finite resource, but it is a finite resource. If I have a legitimate reason to use and own a domain, it's worth $100/year. Otherwise you end up with our current situation where $5/year domains have made squatting a feasible business model.
But you already decided: "most likely we will end up with something like Freenet"
thanks for answering my question! maybe i was indeed confusing with non-competes.
Lowendbox.com is a great way to get cheap VPS service, and anything <$10/mo is hard to complain too harshly about.. but my caveat to using companies from there is to make sure you have decent backups, handle email/DNS somewhere other than your VPS, and try not to care too much about 100% uptime :)
How to start a SOCKS proxy on localhost:12345 proxying through your account foo on bar.example.com:

ssh -D 12345 -N -f foo@bar.example.com
Lessons learned after 21 weeks at a startup
How did you "catch" him? If you grabbed onto him a certain way it could have been a trigger for PTSD behavior from a similar thing someone did to him in a fight or something.

I encountered a person with very similar behavior at a party once. There was a bunch of horsing around in a mosh pit sort of thing and this other guy grabbed onto him from behind. He flips the other guy over his back and slams him onto the floor so hard the other guy's ankle literally breaks in two.

Be careful with doing things that may potentially be seen as aggressive to other people, your story could have turned out worse.

For the record, the guy with the broken ankle wasn't angry about it, and there's now a pretty cool photo of the broken ankle on the Internet (I mean it literally got broken in two - his foot was fully separated with the bones sticking out). I talked to the PTSD guy about it later. He was defensive and wanted to kick my ass at first, then he also told me about the rough things that happened to him, and then we shared some drinks. He was on ok guy otherwise.

In your case I'm not sure trying to get the guy kicked out would have been the right thing to do. It would have probably escalated a situation that he didn't intend on creating and wasn't consciously responsible for. Handling it so that the guy would have calmed down instead of threatening people would have been better for maintaining decorum and for helping the guy get over his PTSD.