skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've made me realize what I think is a startling bit of irony.

Many people -- WikiLeaks, in fact -- are protesting US action in Iraq. They are particularly upset about the "collateral damage" of civilians being caught up in the violence.

Yet here, those cheering for the DDoS attacks in support of WikiLeaks are just shrugging off the collateral damage that this attack is causing.

Addendum: the quick, reflex downvotes are really annoying. If you think I'm not contributing to the discussion, please at least take the time to explain why. It seems to me that there's a patter for these. I lose a few points immediately, but then as more thoughtful people actually take the time to think about it, the score climbs back up into positive territory. That suggests to me that the down-votes are just readers being petulant because I disagree with them.
I have accidentally tripped the "indiscriminant flagger" detector, so I can tell you about what happens.

I can't type well or much these days, so I rarely post and spend nearly all of my time reading. When PG was kind enough to reset the password on my account, I ended up with an ancient account but no karma due to simply not using the account much (never logging in).

Given my situation, I thought I would try to help out the quality of the site by both up-voting "good" stuff and flagging obvious spam. In trying to be useful and helpful, I obviously tripped the "indiscriminate flagging" detector on the first day of flagging spam. It only took a flagging a few (under five) articles, and the "flag" link disappeared. I can no longer flag anything.

I believe the detection code incorporates karma of the account due to the low threshold I've seen compared to the experiences stated by other high-karma people (jacquesm, yourself, ...).

It would be better if the abusive flagging detection code took into consideration whether or not the post/article was eventually deleted or marked dead, then reverse the "damage" to become a "benefit" to the person who flagged something (i.e. you actually helped in identifying something inappropriate).
you don't worry about having such a large cache of personal information in such a weakly protected storage location? Would you even be able to detect any ongoing intrusion?
So you think you can solve a cosmology puzzle?
When making the comparison between batteries and gasoline, it is often useful to note that converting gasoline into mechanical energy is only about 35% efficient. This gives batteries a 3x operational advantage.
Haha, yeah, and I liked this quote: "But, as that old saying goes, 'A quarter million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A web startup which makes the apartment rental process happen online.”
Unless his head gets stuck in the ground :)
As I'm sitting on the sidelines of it all, I wonder how a bunch of LOLcat loving, technically savvy people can bring down billion dollar multinational's, points of technical exposure.

What amount, if any, preparation can guard against a cyber mob-rule attack? It seems that unless a machine is unplugged from the network, you're up shit creek without a paddle.
So he's Tim Ferriss Jr?
No. You assume that those that would be donating today will never come back. But it's reasonable to believe that many/most of those people will try again next week.
This disagrees with my personal learn-as-you-need-it mantra.

(works if you're already fluent with programming fundamentals)
How many billions has this guy given away again? I'd wager that he doesn't really care about an extra few million in insurance company profits.
You might very well be among the first!

I assume Google didn't ask for an NDA with this (did they ?) so I'm looking forward to the future un-boxing videos, screenshots and blogposts about this little device one can't buy (until it hits eBay ;) ).

I couldn't use it fulltime though until I'm able to code in and run Java code on that thing.
I did:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/09/cr-48-chrome-notebook-deliv...
U.S. Government documents cannot be copyrighted.
Those developers generally make a big distinction between "work I do for free because it's fun or intrinsically rewarding" (like helping a charity) and "work I do to make a living." They will try to get maximum pay for the latter, partly to enable the former.

So I think a better statement would be "if you don't ask for SUFFICIENT money for what you do SOLELY FOR PAY, then you're saying your work isn't worth much."
Also from Wikipedia:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen
UIPopoverController does not retain itself and will cause a crash shortly after that release. Both the iOS SDK and the Cocoa SDK are fairly inconsistent about which presentation classes require retaining and which handle that themselves -- UIAlertView does not require it, for example.
Hair Styles Photos | Hair Styles
Are you looking for inspiration for a makeover or hairstyle and just feel that it is time for a change within your style.....
Nobel Prize could protect WikiLeaks founder
Thoughts on Bitly News
Ask HN: How do you dive into a new codebase?
I recently started working on a non-trivial 3-year-old codebase (~50KLOC, mostly python, developed in-house, plus a dozen or two 3rd party dependencies) and I'm not sure how to ease my way into it. The developer I replaced as well as most current developers on this project are working remotely and the main way of communication is chat and email; they don't even use Skype for voice chat.

As for documentation, although there is some it seems kind of unstructured and random; it's hard to see the big picture and how each piece fits with each other. Plus most last-modified timestamps are from 2008/2009, which from experience makes me question how relevant to the currently working system are the docs.

So direct communication and documentation aside, how should I start learning about the system and the code on my own ? Should I go for a top-down approach, i.e. start from the top directory and try to figure out what each subdir is responsible for down to the actual files ? Or rather pick a narrow subtask and drill down to it, ignoring everything but the absolutely minimum required to complete it ? Any insight will be much appreciated, I feel kinda overwhelmed at this point.
Ask HN: Examples of great start-up job adverts?
Hi, I'm looking to hire a couple of local compsci students for my start-up and wondered if anyone could link me to examples of some of the best, unique, clever, fun etc. job adverts? I would also be grateful for tips of what [not] to include? Thanks
The original article was strange in that it got a whole lot of things wrong, but was sufficiently technical that you would actually have to have been an iOS and an Android developer in order to discuss it. This is why the comments were so content-free on Hacker News.

(Just one example of the things the article got wrong: The Android emulator actually defers a lot to the host OS and its own implementations to the point where I have never seen an OpenGL ES app that runs the same way on the emulator as it does on real hardware; the Android emulator also runs at full speed: it's just slower because it's doing more.)
The submission app asked me to play with it an talk about it, so kind of the opposite of an NDA.

So tonight I will sing its song from mountaintops and, well, take it apart.
The author didn't do a clear job explaining Obj-C's memory management. Apple on the other hand does:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...

--------------------

In simplistic form:

A) If a method "begins with" alloc or new, you must release or autorelease.

B) If a method "contains" copy, you must release or autorelease.

C) For every retain message you send to an object, you must balance it out with a release or autorelease (e.g. malloc/free).

D) If a method returns an object to you, and the method name did not match with the "A" or "B" rules, you have received an autoreleased object. This object is guaranteed to exist for the remainder of its identifier's scope.

E) To make an autoreleased object live longer than its identifier's scope, retain it (ensuring to release/autorelease it when finished).

--------------------

There are a few edge scenario's too (described in the link), but that's the gist of it. Also, whenever you put an object inside an NSSet/NSArray/NSDictionary, it's sent a retain message. When said NSSet/NSArray/NSDictionary gets deallocated, it sends a "release" message to all of its members. A lot of other objects act similarly (always documented well by Apple).

At first it's a little challenging to grasp. But after programming for a little while in Obj-C using the Foundation or Cocoa API, you get the hang of it and it comes quite naturally.

In general I've found learning Obj-C with Foundation/Cocoa is difficult at first, mostly from trying to grasp the design patterns Apple has used with OOP. For example, delegate methods, bindings (using KVC/KVO), the responder chain, etc... But after you've learned them, you go "ah ha!!!" and get it. Then things become much easier to code.

On top of that, I have nothing but good things to say about other Apple coders. From bloggers, to StackOverflow users, to IRC; everybody is extremely helpful and pleasant to deal with. :)
Ask HN: which (web)framework should I focus on?
I'm currently work on a few new projects that are in a early, me being the only coder (with some friends occasionally contributing), stage. These projects are all web focused (with iPhone/Android apps in the feature pipeline) and I'm having a hard time deciding on what framework I should commit to.

The current code-base is a straight forward ajax->php->mysql system. I'm trying to decide wether I should switch to a ruby-mongoDB, python-mongoDB, java/scala-mongoDB, node-mongoDB or couchApp/CouchDB or stick with php.

The data I'm using right now is well suited for a document based database so that isn't a problem (at least at the moment), I know all the languages but scala well enough for this.

What I'm wondering about is how resource demanding the non-apache servers are and basically if stability will be a problem with them? If anybody has any experiences with managing a project in those frameworks?

Also which framework you would recommend learning for the future (which one you'd like to know/hire someone who knows)?
Revenue figure comparisons are not meaningful if the gross margins are not similar.

For most grocery stores, the profit margin is around 2-3%. In other words, if someone steals a pack of cigarettes they have to sell $200 of groceries to make up the loss.
Personally, I don't trust the folks at Dropbox much more than I trust a random hacker. (No offense, of course. I just don't know them.) It's not even a matter of a security breach. Can you really be sure that one of their interns can't gain access?

So I would never put anything more than mildly sensitive on Dropbox unless I could encrypt it locally at each computer I use before I sent it too them. Yes, I guess it would be somewhat better than the current situation if they encrypted it on their system using a key I sent every times I wanted a file, but I'd still be trusting them to properly destroy the key, etc.
Also, in many cases (eg. this one) the duplicated content even links to the original source, so even simple pagerank should put stackoverflow significantly higher than its duplicates.
get a card that pays 1% back in cash and don't bother with points.

better yet, get a card that gives you 3% when you buy gas or 5% back when you buy stuff at a store you shop at anyway (Target does this, for example).

if you're clever, cash can be amazingly flexible. its easy to redeem and accepted in most places.
Mine just showed up while reading this post! I didn't get any confirmation email. I applied using the prompt on the "new page" tab (running dev channel build) during the live OS launch. It came in a UPS truck 9:40am CST. Sweet!

EDIT: The box it came in was pretty cool, and they had fun writing the copy for their instructions card. I uploaded a scan of the instructions card to my site http://tdupree.com/2010/12/09/got-my-chrome-os-powered-cr-48....
Two Days After Unveiling, Cr-48 Chrome Notebook Already Showing Up On Doorsteps
"There really isn't that much money in ad revenue these days unless you can control the market and have truly massive (ala Google's 400+ million searches a day)"

Backflip studios makes really popular games like Ragdoll Blaster and Paper Toss, and according to their CEO, they have anywhere from 15 million active monthly users. They say in-game ads make them about a half-million a month. Granted, thats is a gigantic install base, but it could scale down nicely to 5 million evernote users, if that is an active monthly number for them. Perhaps they hit the six figures monthly from ads, which is nothing to scoff at, by any means.
You appear to suffer from conformation bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Unfortunately, it's very hard to discover how much minor decisions like this cost you.
Your response seems to assume that if the government is "right" in its action (apparently as determined by your criteria alone), then the action of force somehow doesn't count. That is, because BP did evil, or because consumers might be protected, government action somehow doesn't count as force that asserts power of corporations.

Even if you're right, it's beside the point. My argument was that government holds ultimate power even against the biggest corporations.

It is true that they're not always able to wield their power, as in your BP example. That's a good thing, because it demonstrates that the government is at least constrained to operate predictable (i.e., the rule of law). If the government were able to spin anything as a righteous stand, and do whatever they thought they could get away with, then business (and indeed any freedom) would be stymied, because people could not be certain that they'd be able to go about their business -- the fear from uncertainty would inhibit all sorts of activities.

And the fact that ATT and IBM are doing well now really doesn't enter into it. The simple fact is that these were giant, powerful corporations. Yet the government still had the power to tear them apart. That simple fact demonstrates my argument; the "goodness" of the action is besides the point.
A vast majority of the installations with these types of vulnerable firewalls don't allow outbound traffic on port 843 which flash needs to be able to communicate on to get raw socket communication permission.
Stack Scripts: Library of Linode Deployment Scripts
China Nobel Peace Prize
I've been a big fan of Flask over the past year, or so. It's a light weight framework for Python. http://flask.pocoo.org/

My "go to" tech stack, when working on fresh projects, is:

nginx, gunicorn with gevent workers, flask with jinja2, mongodb / redis, Celery with RabbitMQ, if I need a task queue
Google Experiments with 'Search Without Search'
I'm just saying that when you're young, and you've had your head buried in work, hearing sage advice from mentors, advisors, and board members, it's possible that now isn't the best time to make that sort of decision. I'm not condemning it, and if it's what he wants to do, who am I to stop him, but something just doesn't feel right about it. That's just my .02
Copyright primarily. Fair dealing/usage doesn't protect commercial use except in fairly limit circumstances. Generally search engines get away with it because of "implicit licensing" and the fact that content owners want to have their content indexed.

When you're using the content of someone who doesn't want to be indexed, there's no real legal defence for creating a derivative work.

(IANAL but I took a couple of courses in IP law at uni)
No I domean emitting radar. Now a radar gun obvoisly doesn't need a license and that emits detectible radar.

To make my idea legal how about building a combination radar detector/radar gun. Officially the purspose of the radar gun is to get a second estimate on your speed when you may be in proximaty of a trap.
Seems like right now target is Amazon. See http://twitter.com/Op_Payback
Sounds more like a communication problem rather than an email problem.

Startup idea: Email request box. An email account that logs everything that comes in. The sender can check the status of their request and where they are in the queue. You can simply "deny", "block", "answer later", send a pre-formatted answer or "reply".
If they don't fix the spam problem, all the redesigns in the world won't help them.

edit: here's a page of a google group I used to read, with all the spam highlighted: http://img.skitch.com/20101209-8rkh5ar3miuhgp3qeh2pj3x9tn.jp...
What about gmail?

+ nicer writing facilities
+ accessible from any computer/phone (like evernote)
+ searchable (like evernote)
+ can save any filetype (but they aren't searchable...)
+ 7GB storage

- not collaborative (maybe google docs?)
- can't search handwriting (v. cool - but is it often used?)
This is already on front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item
VCloud Express Beta - It's on like Donkey Kong
You can actually preview it by just going to one of the groups as it seems live now (at least for me). I am guessing several people from the gmail team worked on this as it has that same feel and works nicely. I don't use groups very often, but seems like a big improvement.
Since you work in education, would you be more likely to be able to call them up and work out a custom license than a business would? I don't really know how that works, but when I was in school it seemed like tech focused educators and other district staff were able to pull off crazy deals and licensing situations at least with some companies.
thats not exactly what i mean. for example, last month, i could've earned about 5000 more points by eating at different restaurants, instead of the ones i actually went to. would've required a bit of planning and a bit of effort. and eating food that i might not have particularly wanted to eat at that point in time, but the time/effort spent doing so wouldn't have amounted to much in the way of freelancing or volunteering.

point is, min/maxing is possible with rewards points, and people do it.
WikiLeaks documents expose US foreign policy conspiracies. All cables with tags from 1- 5000 [Kindle Edition]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004EEOLIU?ie=UTF8&am...
Sorry I don't get it.

My position was that a vendor that treats a small one off customer with respect and generally tries to help is going to do the same for a large purchaser. I don't expect more than that, but I do expect flexibility as this particular pieces of software would for all intents and purposes be part of my solution, it would reflect on my orginization. Having a non-flexible vendor limits my ability to be flexible, a situation I have no interest in being in. When large portions of money are involved people change, but that does not mean they will stay changed. There is a likelihood that they will revert back to their standard culture on support. By evaluating their support of the smallest purchase and a fringe case, one gets an idea of what the support will be like once the luster of money has worn off. Quite honestly if the developer had politely declined my request, I may have still went ahead with the purchase but when he took a dismissive tone, without critically analyzing the request, it became apparent that he would not provide the level of tact and attentiveness that I would need to make an OEM purchase and use the product in my solution. Again, totally his prerogative and I hold nothing against him for doing so, I expected nothing from him and did not feel that I was entitled to a discount, but I have to defend my companies reputation and vendor selection is a big part of doing so, that being said, I look for vendors that go the extra mile, because I do the same with my clients, and by proxy their ability to support their software in every facet reflects on my organization once it becomes part of my organizations provided solution.
Microsoft: “Yeah, We Tried To Acquire Facebook.”
You can look at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper... from some useful tips from the wisdom of Joel Spolsky
I'm currently reading Drive by Daniel H. Pink on recommendation, http://goo.gl/UB9MC
But then it would be the 'evil bacteria' that was attacking 'innocent humans.'
Brain’s Visual Circuits do Error Correction on the Fly
My thoughts exactly. Gmail has one of the best spam filters I've ever seen. Google Groups has no spam filter at all as far as I can tell. How has this oversight gone on for so long?
Ask HN: (What) do you use (for) automatic DB migrations in PHP?
So I finally wanted to organize things better and handle DB migrations in more automatic way. I did some research and surprisingly didn't find what I was expecting to find.

I'd like a tool which can create migration files automatically basing on actual DB tables. Let it be aware of previous DB schema, examine new DB schema, create diffs and put them in a migration file.

I found many great migration solutions which handle managing revisions, executing migrations up and down, but all of them require you to manually write code for DB changes. There has to be something better than this.

What do you recommend?
IV is reviewed with some reverence in SuperFreakonomics. If I remember correctly Bill Gates is an investor. They're portrayed as a fabulously noble corporation, populated with the bright and best selflessly attempting to solve some of the world's most pressing issues - climate change, hurricanes and so on. Whether true or not I don't know, but it's disheartening to hear they're actually just a huge patent troll. Leaves a sour taste in my mouth re superfreakomics too.
neat question, thanks for asking.

i like to figure out what roughly what:

- the major modules are,

- the communication paths between different pieces of the system / different servers -- Drawing a picture is really helpful for this

- key objects or function libraries

And then start with a very small upgrade; sometimes as simple as a little html/view change.

hope this helps -- good luck!
I disagree. The rich are often demonized, at least to the extent that the non-rich feel the rich have an obligation to give their wealth away in order to subsidize the less fortunate. Those that don't, like Gates in his early career, were often treated with disdain.
Basically that document just isn't very good or relevant.
do you get to keep it?
I assumed the same Vijaya
Whitepixel breaks 28.6 billion password/sec
EasyDNS.com mistaken for EveryDNS.com over Wikileaks, but now are backup DNS
Well, software for generalized decision making already exists so I can certainly see a market for more specialized versions.
UPS arrived about an hour ago. I had the "apply" tab in Chrome.

It runs Wave without much issue, and that crawls on a lot of non-traditional PC devices. They dropped the function keys but the keyboard does have a row of accessorie keys at the top, just without the F numbering.
FYI, this is the first game built with Rocket Engine (discussed here previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1663544)
What do you do after you make a ZILLION dollars?
Predicting Christmas sales with real data
Interviews are not illegal and they are typically a very important part of the hiring process, so I don't see this as a problem.
Yet another sensationalist headline.

Actual content - The gene MAOA-L has to do with neurotransmitters and there is a correlation between presence of the gene and the risk-aversion of 83 men in the study.
Awesome concept, but from the pictures it looks to big to rack along with normal cams - are there really that many routes with flakes?
it is easier to compromise windows, but better distributed tools on linux. tough choices even for ddosers :)
Why Amazon AWS's Wikileaks excuse scares me; social sites don't own content
Just two days ago, I think.
A great way to hire good looking people!
Ditto. I'd love to use a shared Dropbox for my videogame programming students to collaborate on group projects, but my total yearly budget is $1000.

Sigh.