skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clickable: http://www.apinbox.com/
I agree. While the inverted pendulum is fairly straight forward to implement with a PI controller, the 2-link pendulum is quite an accomplishment.
Hindsight is always 20/20, the reason I write out this stuff is to make sure that others can learn the lessons without having to pay the price.

Of course I could have done all those things, but what happened here is that after running the site for 12+ years I thought I had a good grip on this data and could bypass the measurement step. We've had a clean site policy before (until the .com crash made it impossible to afford people to oversee the site 24/7) and it worked reasonably well, I though I could simply turn back the clock on that but had missed out on a shift of the core demographics of the paying users.
Surprised this isn't yet in Google Analytics.
Show HN: My weekend project visualizing 108,394 deaths in Iraq
Simple code examples with glaring security holes are a great way to teach people how to write insecure code. If you show usable code in a tutorial it will make it into a production environment somewhere.
It may come to that.
Just a bit of promotion for my side project, I hope no one minds.

Visit www.hackerlunch.com

I built the site to help hackers meetup with one another without having to set up large(ish) events with fixed dates.

Sometimes a one-on-one lunch with another hacker is as much a great experience as a larger gathering.
National Security vs. The First Amendment: The Ultimate Showdown
I think this was linked a while back, it's a Japanese automated bike storage system. I couldn't find the original video (which had an interview with the designers), but this shows it in action:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/nov/05/bicy...
So how much would it cost to build one of those robots?
"Products" which start on Unix tend to get ported, but there's still a lot of projects that are mainly used by Unix users on that list, e.g. git and Perl.
I'm wondering what patio11's answer is to the passage saying that SEO makes you platform-dependent, in the same way that iPhone apps make you platform-dependent on Apple:

"In my opinion SEO is the same way. It's an ever-shifting landscape of shit you chase without ever really knowing what the rules are. If you're doing SEO as one of ten tactics to get people to show up to your site, that's great. If you're betting the entire business on getting traffic through search results, at any moment a competitor or the platform itself could oust you."
I'm VP for new product for Mendeley. We don't have the ability to follow a specific author, yet. This is something we are working towards, and will hope to have available in an upcoming release.
Letters between Wikileaks and the U.S. Government before the leak
4QB.NET might be good for a fantasy football site
How To Bootstrap Your New Social Network
This is a side product of the actual act. The primary purpose isn't to cause fear, it's to get the money or prisoners or whatever. That as a side effect fear is generated is irrelevant.
JSMentors.com - The Mailing List to Learn JavaScript
This is cool, you could also use S3 to help you seed if you don't want to keep your computer on all the time. S3 allows you to use torrents by adding ?torrent to the end of your urls. The data transfer is treated the same as regular S3 data access.
> You're getting some criticism here

That's a pretty normal state of affairs :) I'll try to mine the criticism for useful bits that give me more insight than I currently have. The collective wisdom of HN far outweighs my own and I'm very much open to suggestions at this point.

> but deserve kudos for being willing to let product decisions come from someone you recognize as better suited to make them for the customer base you've reached.

I think that's a very logical step, after all if you could not possibly be a user of your own product you are likely not the right person to determine the direction because a lack of affinity will cause you to make the wrong decisions.
This is something we've been working on for a while now. We had a pretty big shift in focus a couple months ago from developing player stats, scheduling, etc to online player registration.

We did this for two reasons. One, because this is what the leagues we talked to were telling us they needed.

And second, to be completely honest, because we need to focus on revenue generation. We are bootstrapped. We each maintain a 9-5'er to pay the bills. And we are both passionate about getting this off the ground. But to do so, we need to generate revenue.

With that said, we love feedback and we love introductions to potential customers and people who can help us move forward.

Thanks for reading.
Why do New Yorkers keep electing this chump? Someone with such a lack of understanding of the basic tenets of our Constitution should not be elected.
The whole idea of summarizing something is to actually read it yourself first, I think you missed out on a bunch of stuff that probably should have made it in to your summary.
You can get the data if you're signed up to google webmaster tools. Have been able to for a while. And that includes info on times when your page appeared but wasn't clicked on.
Agreed, it's hard to understand this making any financial sense. If you're looking to do substantial seeding there are low cost unlimited bandwidth vps' that specialize there. If you're simply looking for a delayed but fast torrent download there are services that essentially transfer torrents to files on their server for you to download. And if you simply want to download things fast & on demand, there is always nntp.

Imagine if someone failed to set a max seeding amount and forgot about their EC2 instance for a few days or weeks. It'd be easy to transfer hundreds or thousands of gigabytes (1TB out = $150)

AWS is one of the most expensive ways to buy bandwidth out there. To do worse you have to look at high end dedicated & managed colos and bad deals at big CDNs.
"While it is entirely possible for one experienced and resourceful hacker to take down a site — even a fairly large one — by a DDoS attack on his own, it’s not easy to prove whether the Jester is really behind the attack and, if he is, whether he was working on his own or if he had help."

Pretty much any moron with a credit card can buy access to a botnet and take anything down, it's not a big accomplishment. Also, there are some hints of a nice personality disorder here in his/her mission statement:

"obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys."

...and again with the self-aggrandizing me-too agenda:

"The Jester hints of having obtained some sensitive information about Wikileaks itself, but said he decided not to upload it on Wikileaks as he doesn’t believe the information would see the light of day. He then provides an encrypted file of his own, claiming the information is contained within — again, as “insurance.”"

That might impress media types, but somehow I just know this is merely a lonely guy sitting in his basement who hasn't been taking his medication for a while and somehow believes himself a righteous paladin fighting the forces of evil at the front lines in an international game of mystery and intrigue.
I just bought "Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript", went to the the download page, and found out that it is available online for free:
http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596805784/index.html

WTF, O'Reilly?
> You will eventually be known as a porn site.

Charles has some interesting ideas on how to avoid that fate.

I think he may be able to deliver, time will tell. 90 days carte blanche, that's a bit of a risk to take but I've gotten to know Charles and Jan very well over the last couple of months and I fully trust they will not do anything that would embarrass me.
As long as it's only 2, you should be able to use orthogonal polarized filters.
You are getting very close to my most optimistic scenario.
Neither. Would it make sense that they did this intentionally?
Given the data available at the time, yes. But now we have more data, and much as I hate the conclusion I can't seem to escape it.

edit: Hacker News, the site where when an article you wrote is posted, where you are asked questions you can get downmodded for answering them.

Really guys, what's wrong with you? Can't you find it in you to even tell me why you think that answer deserves your drive-by-scorn?
Well then what would be the point of outsourcing your code? I thought the whole point was that it was cheap.
That's quite a hack. It took me a second to realize it was C#. I'm sure it would scare off your average enterprise code monkey.
yeah thats a max figure for sure. scary isnt it? i was trying to be conservative :P
Well, I'm a 'tard designer who hangs out here, and I've played with B and Splay trees, but I've never heard of a Linked List.

Kinda like that.
I wonder what percentage of the founding of America was done through "terrorism".
Supreme Court agrees to hear Microsoft challenge to i4i patent
[FROM OP:] The specific question the Court will decide is: "Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that Microsoft’s invalidity defense must be proved by clear and convincing evidence." (From http://www.scribd.com/doc/36934612/Microsoft-i4i-Cert-Petition-patent-2010.)

For more about how cert petitions work, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certiorari.

Hat tip: Stanford law prof Mark Lemley http://www.law.stanford.edu/directory/profile/38/
I take your point but unshift is still correct. One of the reasons PHP has a reputation for being insecure is because there are so many tutorials lying around that show the wrong way to do it. When newbies Google for solutions, they copy + paste what they find, they don't (bother | know that they should) look through it to see if there are any potential security holes.
My webapp: Guitar tabs as they should be
Agreed.

Also, one thing you absolutely must do is make sure they can program!

Have them solve some simple programming problems and maybe design problems. You can use plenty of flexibility here, even give them some time alone to do it if they have difficultly doing it in an interview context in front of people on a white board, but be sure to do it.

Search on fizzbuzz for one modern approach to this: http://www.google.com/search?q=fizzbuzz

In the bad old days of C/C++ a general approach was:

Write code to reverse a linked list. Very common, tests knowledge of pointer use.)

As a warm up, perhaps write code to compute the factorial of a number. You can test knowledge of recursion this way and the mathematical function is so simple that shouldn't through the interview for a loop (e.g. computing Fibonacci numbers is too complex for an interview in my opinion).

And show them a block of code/a small function that's got some deliberate errors etc. in it and ask them to find all the ones they can.

You aren't looking for perfection in this sort of stressful situation, but you do need to know if they can program their way out of a paper bag. Many if not most self-described "programmers" can't.

As for design, there are many ways to approach this, and I like doing some of it interactively, i.e. talk with the candidate as they are doing it or after they've had a little while to think about it, scribble on paper, etc. You want evidence of their design thinking, not a perfect or complete design.
Deconstructing Invite Media's success story
- Use the STL algorithms more. There are way too many "for" loops in this code which are trivial std::accumulate or std::transform calls.

Pre-C++0x, that's not a clear tradeoff. Since pre-C++0x does not have lambdas, you would have to write one-off functions or function objects. In this case, I think that would increase the number of lines of code.

I do a lot of work in C++, and I prefer using the STL algorithms to explicit for loops. But I have often written code that uses the STL algorithms, then reverted it back to a for loop because I had to introduce more code at another level of scope for a marginal gain in clarity - a voice in the back of my head tells me I'm being too cute. Now that C++0x has lambdas, this should cease to become an issue as I can assume compilers support them.
interesting, congratulation for your release. I do think open-uri reads better than net/http in examples though :)
As far as outsourcing, I have some info on how to communicate with the developer, not get ripped off, etc. But what about IP? Should I assume that any code that is outsourced has come from other projects and/or the code that I'm paying to have developed will be used by others in the future? Is there any way to control this (especially when dealing with a dev thru a computer screen)?
IMHO, Exactly this kind of abuse is something will lead to closing evaluation period provider by amazon.
Well, there's cheaper and -cheap-. Maybe the sweet spot for outsourcing is below the cost of an in-house developer, but not bargain bin.
Non-exhaustive list of court-recognized exceptions to the First Amendment:

(1) Defamation
(2) Causing panic
(3) Fighting words
(4) Incitement to crime
(5) Sedition
(6) Obscenity

I don't know what leads to you posit that the congressman doesn't know about the First Amendment. It's very well possible to limit certain expressions of speech, by 'the press', well within the boundaries of the First Amendment.
Bill Moyers is a respected journalist.
I agree.

Systems are going to have to change. The advent of Google damaged the concept of personal privacy; and the subsequent popularity of services like Facebook and Twitter accelerated the effect.

The fluidity and freedom that information now possesses is obviously changing our lives on a personal level, but the effects of this change in privacy operate on a spectrum; with personal privacy at one end, organisational and governmental privacy at the other.

It's only logical that organisations and nation states will feel the effect of this change, just as we're all affected on a personal level. Even if Wikileaks was prevented from releasing this information - a similar breach would have been inevitable sooner or later.

The US (and nation states in general) have been operating according to a paradigm that's no longer compatible with the way the world currently functions. They've obviously continued to operate in the same way that they were operating in the 50s and 60s - even though the technological constraints of communication have almost entirely changed. We've arrived at social and technological cusp - and it's pretty much impossible to turn back now.

Any transition is difficult - but the perhaps (optimistically), the effect of this change might be a new era of openness. Perhaps the something good might come out of this?
Interesting, but even if your goal lies elsewhere, why else would you choose to hijack a plane if it wasn't to at least present the appearance of some fatal outcome? And that's ignoring the very real secondary dangers to passengers that can occur during a hijacking.

I think it's still safe to call anyone that hijacks an airplane a terrorist.
Big Challenges for Implementing DNSSEC
Conrad also has a few brick-and-mortar stores. They are like toy-stores for grown-ups (and not-so-grown-ups).
Speaking as someone who's been working on NLP, sentiment and semantic analysis for two years now, I've come to the conclusion that sentiment as a product is useless. There's no actionable conclusion from sentiment alone. You need to dig deeper, apply part of speech tagging, and determine the underlying intent.

We, too, use SVMs to determine sentiment (in fact, we built a web-based API to create, train and deploy your own SVMs) but if you're goal is to make money, then you need more than just "this tweet is positive/negative/neutral".

Marketing folks need to sell an actionable strategy. For example, "People are speaking positively about your product because they love the packaging" or "People are speaking negatively about BlackBerry because they can't figure out how to configure their work email accounts". Both of these give much more insight than just polarity.
A very important and effective technique in teaching others (regardless of the subject) is to never write or display something that's wrong, because it's often the only thing a student will remember. This is obvious when it comes to language, but it applies to pretty much anything.
If your grader was aware of the indent program, it wouldn't be an issue.
Principles of copyright as (skillfully) debated in 1841
Steve Jobs, romantic
The Curious Complexity of Being Turned On
PHP has methods for URL parsing. There's no need to approximate them with regexes:

$query_string = parse_url($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"], PHP_URL_QUERY);
parse_str($query_string, $vars);
$term = $vars['q'];
$rank = $vars['cd'];
$url = $vars['url'];

Correct code is even shorter.
There's bike vandalism to watch out for, too. It's not very common, but few locks protect against it. Locks handle a much more common occurrence, that people want to steal a bike for material gain, not only for the detriment of the bike's owner.
If you'd like to follow the publications of a certain author who's on Mendeley, just add him as a contact and you'll get a notice when he adds new items to his publications list.
I wrote this much in the same vein as http://lystener.com, as just an easier, better and prettier way than other guitar tab sites. Let me know what you think! :)

Edit: For people wanting more info, I wrote a blog post too: http://kilianvalkhof.com/2010/css-xhtml/guitar-tabs-as-they-... It has invites to the hosting platform I use: http://djangy.com, a very cool "Heroku for Django"
I guess there's a reason this wasn't invented in the US.
I'm not finding fault in anyone. My point was that talk of labeling Wikileaks as a terrorist organization or something evil are baseless when one considers that leaking these documents doesn't change anything. It's almost comical that the U.S. government raised a stink about this when the fact is that people don't care enough to demand change.
Most of the content that is worth pirating can't be brought at all. Many US tv shows are two or more years behind outside the US.
Ummm. Perhaps you forgot about the part where you claimed, without citation, that "nearly two in five deaths in traffic accidents are caused by speeding in Germany". So it would seem we're both guilty.

The difficulty in providing any kind of documentation here is that there are many orthogonal factors at play, making it difficult to say much of anything without very carefully defining terms. For example, (http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=5309267 )

The bad news is [between 2000 and 2008, in Utah,] 110 people died because they weren't wearing a seat belt, by far the No. 1 reason, outranking things like speed, fatigue, DUIs or distractions.

Clearly, not wearing a seat belt is not a cause of an accident. It's an aggravating factor, making the results worse in the event that an accident does occur. I submit that in most cases, speed fills the same role.

Consider the wikipedia article at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Traffic_fatal...

# That the evidence shows that the risk of having a crash is increased both for vehicles traveling slower than the average speed, and for those traveling above the average speed.

# That the risk of being injured increases exponentially with speeds much faster than the median speed.

# That the severity of a crash depends on the vehicle speed change at impact.

# That there is limited evidence that suggests that lower speed limits result in lower speeds on a system wide basis.

# That most crashes related to speed involve speed too fast for the conditions.

A close reading of this reveals that it's not generally one's absolute speed (e.g., the fact that they're going 80MPH), but their speed relative to most other drivers, irrespective of the speed limit. So if the speed limit is 65 and I'm going 75 along with most of the traffic, my risk is minimized; slowing to the posted speed increases risk.

The third bullet seems to support my claim. It does not say that crashes are more likely at higher speeds, but that the severity of a crash, when one does occur, will be worse.

Finally, the last bullet again references speed relative to conditions. Thus, on a given road in given weather, visibility, traffic, etc., 80MPH may be just as safe as 65 under other conditions; and in winter conditions, even 40MPH might be more dangerous than any of those. It's not the speed as such, particularly with respect to any particular posted one-size-fits-all number, but the speed relative to actual conditions. But the laws regarding speed limits do not recognize this at all.

So again, for a meaningful debate, I think we need to separate the discussion into causes of accidents, aggravating factors for accident severity, and the way in which laws address these issues.
Agreed, we can worked that in the future and we are working on a gem to make things easier.
[FROM OP:] The specific question the Court will decide is: "Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that Microsoft’s [patent] invalidity defense must be proved by clear and convincing evidence." (From http://www.scribd.com/doc/36934612/Microsoft-i4i-Cert-Petiti...)

For more on the presumption of validity in patent cases, see http://271patent.blogspot.com/2009/08/revisiting-presumption...

For more about how cert petitions work, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certiorari.

Hat tip: Stanford law prof Mark Lemley http://www.law.stanford.edu/directory/profile/38/
That's awesome! Definitely gonna update the post with your code.
Ask HN: Directory listings for US retailers
Hi,

I'm wondering where I can source directory listings for US retailers: shop name, address, url and so on. Can these be bought cheaply? I have been told that this data is "open" in the US and it'd be OK to scrape from other sites. Is this true?

Thanks
obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys

And there, in plain sight, is the entire problem with his(?) approach. The terrorists say that the US is an oppressive regime and that they're the ones obstructing the bad guys. The Chinese government employs hackers to break into computers. Hacktivist vandalism blurs the distinctions and makes it harder for people to sympathize with your aims, not easier.

This especially true of Wikileaks. I will keep my own counsel of what I think about Assange's activities, but I will point out the obvious: That extrajudicial attempts to quash Wikileaks give the appearance of attacks on freedom of information and freedom of speech. This appearance is at odds with the freedoms that the US used to champion.

Vigilante efforts like this do more harm than good even if you sympathize with Jester's appraisal of who is a good guy and who is a bad guy.
"That might impress media types, but somehow I just know this is merely a lonely guy"

You sure have a lot of certainties. You seem like an individual with deluded self-aggrandizing views about his psychological insight aptitude. Seek professional mental help fast.
It should be on par with the current state of the art, and we are working on improving it.
I guess that's hitting the target avoiding the obstacle (text) without consuming all the fuel and crashing to the ground

Perhaps also avoiding bounces gives some bonus
I'm pretty skeptical of this report.

$2.5B is 2x the $1.3B post money valuation they got just six months ago.

Groupon is supposedly looking to close a new round, acquisition rumors can't hurt that process.

I don't see vator having an exclusive like this, let alone broken on a sunday night.

Twelve hours later and few "legit" news sources have picked up the news. Everyone who has is simply re-reporting vator. If google really had a $3B deal in the bag, the WSJ would have been able to get enough off the record confirmation to run it as a rumor. IMO they've had enough time to look at this so they've passed on reporting on it.
How does this constitute abuse?
Android audio latency
The Men Who Stole the World
IT skill sets in demand for 2011