skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting point. I currently do some work for a different federal government which involves some security clearance. I may need US security clearance in the future, and the conflict is something I hadn't considered until now. However (and I usually try to avoid ideological soapboxes, but), I believe that government should exist for the people, and not the other way around. I'll take my chances.

Sincerely though, thanks for pointing that out. It may have more immediate/drastic consequences for others and should certainly be taken into consideration.
I don't think that's true, if you control for time. Can you think of other examples of startups that turned down acquisition offers in or around 2006 and are now regretting it?
Can encryption be parallelized? With block cipher chaining modes like CFB, each block depends on the previous block. You can parallelize encryption if you use ECB but that's known to be insecure.
See, it's only with hindsight that you get to know that it was simply embarrassing information. Before it was released, it could have been a myriad of things all of which could have easily been treason because it may have aided our enemies.
I don't think you really added anything to the thread by posting that. Would you care posting why you thought it was patronizing and how you would improve it?
Except that countries differ in their legal definition of what a child is.
Generally useless article:

1) Misleading title
2) There's at least 10x more iPhones in existence than WP7 phones.
"Treason" is not the same as "wrong".
Agreed - I was expecting some sort of test to see which phone toddlers find more visually appealing.
Computing, Rather Than, Absorbing Novels
For those interested, this is a torrent for a mirror of today's website: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6009610/Wikileaks_Offline_Mi...
I wouldn't want anyone who doesn't want to work for Jason Calacanis, working for me, either.

We're small and we need to crush it, or die trying. Weak people can go work for a big corporation and be comfy.
As I noted in a different reply - I agree with you, but I think the wrapping paper is very important for a large segment of their audience. Believe it or not, I know many people who grew up with computers and yet don't know what a torrent is or how to use them. Beyond seeding torrents, I would like to make sure that people know how to find the information.
You can 'allow flash for this site' anyways, I turned off now to see what happens and oooops :)
Ask HN: In what ways do youth living in disadvantaged areas use the Internet?
I assume that Internet usage by young people in lower-income areas is - in general - lower than by young people in higher-income areas. Specifically:

* Less social network, search engine, email, and instant messaging usage
* Much less blogging (regular [a.k.a. "macro"] - not "microblogging") and web design as a hobby

However, I remember reading a while back that mobile Internet usage is higher among low-income youth - specifically mobile web browsing and email.

I'd like to know more about this subject - e.g. use of tools like Google Docs, online shopping, video watching, torrent usage, online dating, etc. And of course, corrections of my assumptions.

I've just found the Pew Research Center's website (http://www.pewinternet.org), which I'm reading through now. It has a good deal of information on this topic if you're interested.
That's much more useful ... I can't take any of the "historical" reviews that don't bother to mention SixDegrees, CollegeClub and a bit later the CommunityConnect sites.

Both Friendster and Myspace are very close to Asian Ave / CommunityConnect's platform and UI.
Math1337
This is immediately what I thought when I read the title as well.

Misguided puff piece.
You can tell that legalists helped Huang prepare the slides he shows in this article. Everything has a (TM) or an (R) on it, to the detriment of readability. Only "IP" lawyers do that sort of thing so very consistently, I believe partly to try to slip the idea that mere words or ideas can be owned by some corporate entity.
Roads are by no means public goods, as it is very possible to exclude people from them, e.g. tolls.

A good example is a dam. If you live in a valley that floods every year, the government may well come in and say, "we're going to build a dam." But by its very nature, you cannot exclude people from this -- the dam will hold back all of the water, not just for some of the people in the valley.
Comcast disagrees on how much that port costs. I haven't done anything close to backbone-y stuff since 1996, but back then, the equivalent port wasn't cheap.

But that's besides the point. I keep asking this question:

Stipulate that L3 isn't actually an ISP in this scenario (whether you agree or not). They're instead an agent for Netflix; they are literally Netflix's outsourced network infrastructure.

If it is the case that Comcast should reasonably be expected to give L3/Netflix a free interconnect...

... then for whom shouldn't that be expected? Why are YC companies paying for bandwidth? Because, as I understand it, they do pay for bandwidth; significantly.
No, the legal ramifications only come into play when the government officially declares something a terrorist organization. In the USA, this would be done by the State Department, which has yet to issue such a proclamation. All this folding by American companies until Wikileaks is actually branded such is (depending on your POV) pure cowardice or generous cooperation with the present interests of government.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_or...
You can make the same charge against WikiLeaks, and indeed, the US government has been making exactly that charge.

Both untraceable, anonymous communication (what Tor provides) and the public distribution of previously confidential documents (what WikiLeaks provides) are controversial in this way; but it is far from clear that they "help the bad guys [as much as] the good guys".
Jason, I respect you and your work ethic, am a massive fan of TWiST and have been a Jason Nation subscriber for a long time.

BUT, personally I don't believe this HR ethic will work long-time with the emergence of better angel funding. You're looking for the mentalities of founders to become employees, and when someone can partner with someone in university or down at the local coffee shop and apply for Y Combinator, work the same hours and put the same effort in on their own company, instead of grinding in an already established company, I'm betting the best minds will do the latter.

Correct me if I'm wrong on that, there might be a wealth of super-talented, super-dedicated workers who aren't confident to run their own company yet, but I would imagine that anyone willing to work crazy hours, solving complex online problems, with the low cost of launching a product nowadays, they're going to try that (at least first).
I was thinking of the Ghettysburg Address when I wrote that statement:
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/get...

This wasn't written when the United States came into being, but I would like to think that Abraham Lincoln had the founding father's heart when he spoke it.
It's fair that the founders get a return on their investment when the investors do. Nothing despicable about.

I do agree that letting founders cash out can be good though if it helps them aim higher.
مسلسل غربة امراة الحلقة 77
It is a form of advertising --- an expense already built into virtually every small business plan in America --- that (a) pays the business money and (b) puts the business into direct contact with the target market.

Behold: a link! http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/doing-the-math-on-a...
The problem is inadequately defined.

Basically it depends on whether you expect to have to record more than 32000 / 14 = 2200 or so values, in which case simply keep a sorted list of the actual integers using a sorting/insertion algorithm of your choice, or you expect to receive fewer than 8 occurrences of a given integer, in which case use a 10,000 x 3-bit deep bitmap, or you don't care how many occurrences of each integer there were, in which case use a 10,000 x 1-bit deep bitmap.

In any event the unintelligible and buggy proposed solution doesn't seem like a good choice.
Studer. How do you run your company? Or are you an employee? I put this online for feedback and help.
EFF: Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary
You hurt me with you whining comment. See how being hurt can be subjective?
Who upvoted this crap?
Minecraft is the best example of this so far I think.
I do actually live by that myself, but there's also people who just can't give anyone a break ever and want others to defer, defer, defer to their whining and complaining. I allow myself to draw a line too. For every time there is a season. :)
The title of the entry put me off to the overall premise, which, I think, even the author may have missed.

Basically, the article should've been titled "It All Changes When The Startup Is Making A Lot Of Cash". Supposedly Groupon is making nearly $2 billion a year in revenue. The decision to turn down an acquisition has more to do with "we're a real company making a TON of cash and we don't need to sell" than the founder thinking about their legacy.

What's the point of an exit? Mostly it's to get a gigantic payday. If your startup-turned-cash-machine is already making a ton of cash every month, the founders are already getting a payday... all the time.

If you're already making FU money from the revenues of your business and someone offers you more of it, the benefit of the FU money is you can say FU to the offer.
The cable goes on to quote this person as saying that the hacking of Google “had been coordinated out of the State Council Information Office with the oversight” of Mr. Li and another Politburo member, Zhou Yongkang.” Mr. Zhou is China’s top security official....But the person cited in the cable said he did not make that claim, and also doubted that Mr. Li directed a hacking attack...

You can rest assured he also will never be making any further claims or providing further sensitive information to American diplomats. Not after this.

I don't mean that as a good-bad thing. It simply is a statement of how things are -- and how they have changed. Draw your own conclusions.
Twitter, or a phishing proxy?
Roads are neither non-excludable nor non-rival. So they are in no way public goods. Therefore, they are irrelevant to the comment you were replying to by "thefool".
nice try :D
Without Cable TV For One Year
Become a bridge then! https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges Help fight against China (and others) attempts to block connecting to tor.
Are people really blaming Amazon now? I sympathize with the business decision, having politicians breathing down your neck potentially threatening the amazingly liberally drafted terrorist laws.
it's a great point ... one of the great things about this is the chance to do something positive with the money. so maybe a "boycott" isn't the right way to pitch it. other suggestions welcome.
I think of the underlying faults with that point of view on liberal arts education, one stands above all others. As holder of an engineering bachelors, I'll anecdotally attest to the widely known problem that

Undergraduate engineering degrees actively discourage building communication skills.

This above all else is the heart of that linear thinking problem. Many graduating engineers in the US are communication challenged. They can't perform a principled arguments, write evocatively, perform convincing. They lack the skills to perform critical analysis of other communication, any sort of eye for subtlety, and flat out lack the appreciation of good writing.

It's often explained away as if there is this single choice people make when they're young that they'll either be good at math/science or literature/history. Once you've made that choice, you're stuck socially, psychologically, practically. But that's okay, goes the argument, specialization is necessary and everybody is one-sided, really.

So despite wide knowledge of this problem, schools combat it by deliberately watered-down english classes designed to not damage engineering GPAs. My alma mater required two english classes, both of which I got near perfect grades in by skipping class and writing half-minded, fantastical leaps of literary analysis on books I'd skimmed. I got perfect scores and remarks like "This is the best paper I've ever read". Literally. It also required a single semester "technical communication" course where we were introduced to business letter etiquette and the definition of genre.

As a firm believer that writing something down is the fastest, most powerful method to clarifying your thoughts, I find it despicable that engineering colleges don't provide these challenges. I find it corrosive that the dominant societal perspective is that it's ok if you can't write because you're an engineer. I think this directly leads to the sort of creativity rot I saw, all the time, in classmates.

My experiences may be anecdotal and localized to my college, which is one of the top engineering colleges in the US. I hope it is, and that this disgust is misdirected, but really I think it's larger than that.

---

tl;dr? I'm completely convinced that a dreadful number of engineers are missing something central to anyone who wants to deal in complex ideas entirely because it's considered a liberal arts speciality. They're weak at techniques to critically and clearly articulate or analyze ideas aloud or in writing, the art and science of human communication.

(I'll also note that so far a huge part of the advice of how to survive graduate school is learning to write. People tell me it with the look in their eyes that says they've seen so many people fail miserably because of this sudden, new expectation. I'm know my writing needs a lot of improvement, but I know that of many of the people in my graduating class, many would require a near complete literary reversal before they could actually publish.)

</rant>

(Edit: made it more clear that I'm not arguing with what sudont said. Written communication is hard.)
Groupon Is Said to Spurn Google’s $6 Billion Acquisition Offer
Nocturne by Chopin accompanied by animated graphic showing interval type
Because most TechCrunch commenters have a pretty basic understanding of such things.
Referencing this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969732
The article referenced:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969699
You can't do a bitmap in general b/c random integers are really, really big.

If there is a compression algorithm that works on 10% of data sets, and does massive harm on the other 90%, you can use or not use it, at the cost of a small amount of header information and a bunch of CPU time, and it doesn't matter that in general, on average, it's quite bad. All that matters is whether the times it's good beat the header info cost. I think. I'm not sure this is helpful but it doesn't require a compression algorithm being a net gain on average.
From Ars:

I was initially a bit surprised that Google chose not to use the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler framework—it has a lot of LLVM expertise internally and is using it extensively for their awesome Python optimization effort. Pike says that LLVM was considered during the early stages of the Go project, but its compile-time performance was judged to be inadequate.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/go-new-open-...
And how will WePay's board like this idea?
It's absurd. It's public knowledge now. They're trying to threaten the bourgeois intellectuals. DOn't give into this baseless (Baseless in precedent I don't know how much they get to discriminate based on politics) threat. Also if State et al. don't hire anyone interested by the cables I think we might be slightly screwed later.
This was posted here about a year ago. (I think it is the same title also)
Yep. It uses JavaScriptMVC. Looks like it's model, view, and controller.
Tell HN: What consulting for enterprises look like. What to do next?
So my university requires me to have 3 months of work experience to graduate. I was also jobless. Out of the blue someone from Hong Kong offered me a job at his consulting company for 3 months. I accepted right away; it meant I have my
1. work experience.
2. I can be with my relatives for an extended period of time.
3. The company consults for huge companies, so I thought I can see how
inefficient enterprises really are.

even though there were these disadvantages:
4. ridiculously low pay
5. enterprise development is likely to be inefficient.

Anyway, I've joined, and we're currently doing projects for like the top ten largest firms in Hong Kong. In only a week 3 of 5 above points are changed radically.

3. The consulting company is ridiculously inefficient. We write forms by hand,
error validation by hand, write SQL commands in code with *zero* protection
form SQL injection, use *no* version control and merge the code manually, not
even a diff tool.
4. I have ridiculously low pay not because they want to take advantage of a
jobless student, but because in this setting, I am *ridiculously
unproductive*. It has taken me a whole week to program 3 CRUDs for 3 SQL
tables.
5. See 3.

I asked them to change to use a web framework and they said no because it's the client's requirement they use their current methods. I then wrote some half-baked model and form classes to use myself. But they were half baked, although my models worked okay (and my boss very impressed, as he's never seen models or MVC development before), he didn't like my forms because they were buggy and told me to keep doing form validation manually..... And there are dozens of forms.

The programmer in me wants to disregard his instruction and just keep refining the forms; If I pull it off I can save a lot of time, but I'm risking it... if I cannot polish it to be bug free then we cannot use them. If the project is delayed the company doesn't get paid.

Oh joy.
The founders personal problems have nothing to do with the business. Venture capitalists are investors, not life partners. You are rewarded for success, not effort.
It's a Twitter proxy, likely used for someone to subvert the Twitter IP-based ratelimiting. This is probably why Twitter ends up blacklisting AppEngine outgoing IPs so often.
A different NYT writer wrote about Oregon and their speed offense 2 months ago as well: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/sports/ncaafootball/02oreg...

Another NYT article about an innovative coach, Mike Leach, who is mentioned in the above:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04coach.html?page...
Hacking a Google Interview
Not quite a PayPal alternative, but I am currently developing a client for Open Transactions.

Here's the wiki: https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki
100 MIPs FPGA-based CPU in under 200 lines of Verilog
One nuance that I would add to your thinking. In the VC's eyes "right for the business" really means "swing for the fences." In a VC's eyes, taking risks that will kill a business 85% of the time but give 30x returns the other times are probably doing "what is right for the business" because of the structure of how they invest. In VC land, the big big wins pay for everything else. In that case, I would argue they should be strongly in favor of cashing out founders nicely when a business takes off. It is much easier to swing for the fences when you're not worried about striking out.
Heroku for PHP
To a certain extent, I actually agree with your point. I think it is important for governments to be able to operate within varying degrees of secrecy, and I think that despite Assange's insistence to the contrary, some of the Wikileaks documents place "innocent" civilians in serious danger.

My counterpoint is twofold: maintaining secrecy and security is the responsibility of the government(s) involved. Chasing Wikileaks after the fact and twisting the arms of those they do business with only lends credence to the fact that the parties involved failed to protect classified information. If Wikileaks was able to get it, so would anyone bent on causing harm. The mere fact that Wikileaks released it exposes serious security flaws. Punishing them for that is akin to punishing hackers who expose a Windows vulnerability instead of selling it to the highest bidder - enormously foolish in my opinion.

The second counterpoint is maybe more important: the fact that the US government chooses to silence Wikileaks by making them the pariah of internet business sets an extremely poor precedent, should the internet allow them to succeed. I think most HN users agree that net neutrality is a good, important thing. I suspect most of us agree that internet censorship on the scale of the Chinese firewall is damaging. (Note: I and probably many others agree that things like child porn are a good thing to try to keep off the internet, and the distinction in my opinion is that society has a responsibility to protect children as much as we can.) So then why would we allow government and big business to shut down a website that is holding them up to a journalistic standard they aren't used to?
It didn't occur to me that some HN readers might not know that Wired 4.02 was published in about 1996, but you could be right.

Linking, however, is not on shaky moral ground. If Wired didn't want the print version to be linked to, they wouldn't put it on the web.
J/w Have you ever taken angel/VC money and poured your soul into your company? I suspect not because regardless of what rationally might tell you - it's all VERY personal and any investor worth their salt knows how much stress you're under and that reducing that burden, even in little ways, helps so much. I've lived this and have given even a little more a month to good people because they needed to pay off bills, etc. Just FWIW...
Do you think we make our lives easier by only making the "hard part" of a job easier?

Look at the number of little webapps people here make. Do you see absolutely no value in also being able to produce native apps at the same time, with dramatically less additional work, using the tools and languages you already know?

Facebook's native client "syncs just fine" because they did extra work to make it so. Why is it bad wanting to get that functionality for free?
Facebook, Qatar and the World Cup
I'm finding the degree to which the political establishment is clueless as to the actual hard technical details of what is happening with this entire episode quite interesting, for example a quote from a recent article on the arab press response to the incident;

No one knows the truth of this WikiLeaks thing. Is it plausible that the United States with all its greatness, power and valor, cannot stop WikiLeaks and its millions of documents? Or have these documents been leaked by the Americans themselves to achieve a particular goal? Or has America simply turned a blind eye to the leak?

China's paranoia and amusing conclusions about the "fundamentally controllable" nature of the web also betray a lack of understanding of how this all really works, and a lot of the US response seems to fail to grasp that the game is already over and wikileaks has already won regardless of any action they take from here on in short of turning off the internet. And even the effectiveness of that is questionable, disregarding the fact that it simply will not happen.
What if your $1MM site was giving you like $10K/mo and was still growing?
Slightly off-topic, but if you want to see a true "hacker" operating in a different field, check out Gus Malzahn. He's the offensive coordinator for Auburn, and no one has found a way to stop his offense.
In my mind this should even be on termsheets. Especially when VC is involved as it increases the incentive for an entrepreneur to go for the biggest possible exit instead of settling for something in the 10's of millions so that he can fill up his bank balance which is tending to $0.