skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My email fields are usually varchar(128) - which seems like a nice round number to me.
What is Homomorphic Encryption, and Why Should I Care?

http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2010/03/18/38566/
How to Remove DRM from WMA
Do you actually get charged more in merchant fees for that specific card? I thought the charges for Visa were the same for all Visa cards.
Care to explain more on your view of Rand's message? Or at least provide pointers?
Wow. I'm sorry if my tone was off-putting, but what I said is true. End users won't get their devices for free and won't be forgiving. Sugar coating doesn't help the product succeed, which is what I want.

Flash performance matters. Right now it's not possible to watch web video (save for sparse HTML5 video content which works), or video chat in Gmail. I want to get a ChromeOS device for my grandparents, for video chat, and if it ships like this I can't.

Fonts might just be my personal weirdness, but I notice them and care a lot about them. I even installed Calibri on my Nexus One, and have replaced most of the fonts on my Ubuntu Maverick installation too. Linux font rendering has never been fantastic, but it's OK now. My issue is that no open source fonts I've seen shipped with any Linux distribution can compete with OS X's or Windows 7's shipping fonts.

I've been using the device and I like it a lot. I've even filed a few bugs to try and help out. I won't pretend their aren't problems, and I won't be useful to Google as a tester unless I'm honest with myself, them and others.
Is David Pollak trying to take on DHH for the title of most inflammatory framework creator?

If so, well played.
Tracing Leaks in Python: Find the Nearest Root
"Yes, there's been some development, but using Emacs on TOPS-10 or ITS is an awful lot like using it under Linux in 2010."

That's a huge stretch, and kinda like saying that using Linux is an awful lot like using SunOS 1.0. Sure, the basics of use are the same, and someone who used an ancient emacs version could pickup using a modern version reasonably easily, but syntax highlighting, auto-completion, X and GUI support, windowing, multi-file editing, etc. have been added over the years (and that's just stuff I know of, off the top of my head, and I don't even use emacs). The emacs distribution has grown by several orders of magnitude in size since those TOPS-10 and ITS implementations.

My point is that Emacs is every bit the editor that Visual Studio editor is, and contains pretty much all the same features, and a lot that Visual Studio will never have. And, more importantly, the most productive developers I've ever known used either emacs or vim...I can't think of a single great developer that uses Visual Studio (I'm sure they exist, but I've yet to meet one). It's just idiotic to claim that emacs is an ineffective tool when the evidence is so strong that it is extremely effective for millions of developers.
FB App for Bannering the new profile...
autossh + rscreen
Google is organizing similar event aka Google Code Jam ( http://code.google.com/codejam ) for years. Facebook Hacker Cup feels like a clone of it.

Similarities:

1. Annual algorithmic competitions.

2. Various online elimination rounds.

3. World finals at headquarters.

4. Prizes: 1st place = $5000 USD, 2nd place = 2000$ USD, 3rd place for $1000 USD and $100 for 4th through 25th place.
Wow, thanks, this is the answer I was looking for. So do the colors still look mostly the same in bright sunlight, or does the screen become more B&W?
So? More money (or free tshirts) for idle programmers I say :D
The problem with companies building frameworks boils down to one simple fact. If a company is unable to differentiate and disentangle it's goals from the goals of building and maintaining a generalize and useful framework.

Companies can build frameworks around solid principles and know when to let them go and develop into community projects. Rails certainly developed in that manner. Likewise, Sproutcore developed for a while under Apple's care, but has also split off, as Apple's goals diverged with sproutcore's.

If you are going to build a project for developers, make sure you have the developer's goals in mind, and not your own. Same is true of building an API.
Just a little something I whipped up to make it (a lot) easier to coordinate your five recently tagged images on the new FB profile. I didn't come up with the idea, but I made it so everyone can do it. Oh wait... was that dumb?
These are hard problems to solve, even approximately, and nothing we're doing is original. Like quantitative finance, a lot of the original research comes from outside the field (ie. "quasi-clique detection in protein-protein interaction networks"). For those that are interested, there's a lot of information in recent public or easily-available research papers. A weekend spent programming a good idea from a paper is well worth it.

For better or worse, we don't use any graph-specific heuristics beyond general assumptions of the graph's structure (which may or may not be correct, but that's another story...). We're dealing with a massive sparse graph whose vertex set, but not edge set, fits in memory (RAM). Embarrassingly, the edges are stored in a database in MySQL; we might be running the world's largest graph on MySQL, but I think we get better performance from MySQL than we could from any other products. Needless to say, we're not using anything relational. Like a lot of graphs (the Web, social networks, etc.), the number of edges is several orders of magnitude larger than the size of the vertex set, so we plan accordingly.

Perhaps my use of the term "partition" above is incorrect; these aren't perfect partitions (they don't exist, except in theory), but are what's known as "quasi-cliques" (the field of graph theory is rife with jargon).

We're happy with what we've come up with; contrary to most, the limits we face are mostly due to limited storage capacity rather than limited computation time or network capacity, which is essential for handling growth.

Sorry if all of this has been too general; there's not too much I can say specifically without revealing our "secret sauce". :D
Copyright Troll Demands Drudge Report Domain Name
Actually, this is ironic.
Still waiting on the "send as" feature in the mobile version.
Damn, I thought I stumbled on a way to cheaply convert foreign currency into US dollars, but their website only accepted US addresses, and now I realize, probably only US currency, too. :(
Ask HN: Anyone hiring marketing interns?
I'm posting on behalf of a friend who doesn't (yet!) have an HN account. She has some traditional marketing experience, having worked with Sony Music and Yamaha for a couple of years. However, she is looking for an internship from Jan - June 2011 with a slightly different slant: she would love to learn B2B or B2C marketing for web/mobile/SaaS products, especially ones involving music or other facets of the entertainment industry. I suggested Zencoder and Pandora but I know there are others!

If you'd be interested in talking to her, please sound off with your contact info! As far as I know she is able to relocate anywhere.

She's at http://www.midoriwada.com/
Based on their engineering puzzles[1], I'd maybe expect problems geared more towards approximation/heuristics. The GCJ problems always require exact answers.

[1] http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php
Disclaimer: I've read quite a bit of Postman's work: Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Disappearance of Childhood, How to Watch TV News, and part of Technopoly.

I do agree with Postman's observation that much of our society is moving more towards a BNW distopia vs. 1984. However, I really have a hard time coming to the same conclusions regarding the cause of the problem, and solutions that he seems to present. Overall Postman ends up coming across as a whiny evangelical who seem to conclude that the prudish victorian era was the height of society, discourse, and learning, that we should all strive to recreate. I feel that for someone who claims to have drawn on the ideas of McLuhan, he rather seems to have missed McLuhan's main points. If Postman had observed McLuhan's message more closely he might have seen that the only way around the issues with TV and modern media are to embrace it and actively take time out in public education to demonstrate exactly what it is, why it captivates us so much, and what tricks are used in the media to try to deceive us. I still believe that is our only hope for overcoming the issues American society faces with satiating itself with media and gossip.

Even though the tactics in place are changing, thanks to the BNW approach to appeasing society, the majority seem to be blind to the 1984 tactics that are being setup around us.
Your math is just backwards. You have left them with what's taken away, rather than what they keep. A 1M on 2M pre deal would leave the founders with 66%, not 33%.
Burett Replica Watches,Cheap Replica Burett Watche
If it hasn't already been tried, the IRS would tie it up in litigation for so long that the principal would be consumed by legal fees.
My impression is that the Stanford project is the first (or perhaps zeroth) phase of the Google Fiber for Communities project. They can probably learn a lot rolling out "minimum viable fiber" to ~100 homes before they try to do thousands. It wouldn't seem to make sense for Google to have multiple competing fiber projects.
> It cripples upward mobility for the rest of society

How?
If the reason your not offering someone a job is because they messed up technical questions, I think its a good idea to give them candid feedback on the spot. Its objective. If you are having to choose among several qualified candidates, then I think this is asking for trouble, since there isnt an objective clear reason for the person not getting the job.
Most opponents of stem cell research are being rational. If you take as an axiom "fertilized eggs are people too", it's not hard to conclude that stem cell experiments are immoral.

Fertilized eggs can divide. Is it rational to believe that a person can divide? Is each twin 50% of a person?
Ah morality. Complex topic.

I've got an example for you: should my neighbor be able to walk up to my house and demand a percentage of my income at gunpoint to pay for his attendance at university?

And even if such a gunpoint demand is allowed, I'm curious what you would say about the morality of an unapalogetic libertarian that attends university with just such a subsidy.
Not only that, he probably did do what he's accused of.
Sadly some programmers today still laugh at that idea.
on the other hand, it would be really neat if chrome or some 3rd party app let you split screen two windows
I've seen as low as 64 and as high as 254. I tend to err on the side of spec vs. performance when it comes to this sort of thing.
Default max length of an email field in Django is 75 characters.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/ref/models/fields/#emai...
Long-Term Planned-Handoff Startups
What are the opinions here about funding scientific research? I have been coming back to the idea every few weeks and thought I would mention it here to see what people think. Why not fund some research that has an expected long term payoff, and then rather than expecting a product after 6 months, expect to have enough promising research progress to hand it off to another investor after a year or two, and then they plan to do the same thing, until after three or more stages the startup would finally launch. Until it launches all the research would be kept secret of course.
He certainly does well with agreeing (with himself) that his work is great.

A great possibly purposely-obtuse example from the blog piece:

> Testing, What does this mean? Does it mean Lift isn't well tested... I beg to differ. Lift powers sites like Foursquare and Novell Vibe. You can see the Lift tickets and find all the tickets opened by Novell and Foursquare... not a lot.

Right. When people mention testing in a framework, they must be talking about testing the framework itself and not the framework's ability to help them test their own code. Sheesh, the ego.
Nah, Chrome OS is not designed for touchscreens. There's Android for that.
A new version -- hot off the servers -- now shows all of the classic HN info: points, poster, time, and comments. And there's also a "Loading..." message.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! It's fun to do same-day development.
cheaper than the recruiter fees, i'm sure
Looks like fun. Some of the people commenting on that page don't appear to understand the intended meaning of the term hacker in that context. But then, they probably aren't the target audience of the competition either. :)
I'm with the press. I was given the computer without having to apply.

I tried to install Twhirl out of curiosity, to see what would happened. I didn't expect it to work. It didn't. But it was interesting to try. Sometimes you discover things that way.
War is usually business though.
I wonder if running lift / scala on GAE jvm would be worthwhile; if you could hack it to work with the channel api for all the comet stuff...
That'd be great if their Gmail app was more useful, it's in ability to configure what labels to sync (aka IMAP sub folders) is a big drag, and why I switch to K9 mail.
I see. I should probably watch more Youtube before I start asking obvious questions about it.

Thanks!
WikiLeaks Saga the Animated Edition
Actually, Google thinks it will, for many people. Just got off the phone with them about that, follow-up article tomorrow. But my review points out they already position this as a replacement computer for many people.

External monitors increase productivity. Plenty of people use them, and use them with laptops. Right now, this can't run both the internal and external monitor. Google tells me that will change.
But..but, they "liked" Facebook Engineers!
You might want to use only one site if checking both sites to respond to comments would take too much time.
Startup looking to raise $1BN for charity in 3 years [Software Engineer]
We're a Winter 2011 company looking to bring on our first employee. Wooohooo!

Who we are

We're a team of 3 (Switzerland aka 'The Money', Greek Salad, Minnesota Hick)...2 computer science dorks and 1 high school dropout...trust us, it's a recipe for success:) We’ve already raised money from some of the best investors in valley.

What we do

We round up all of your credit card purchases to the nearest dollar and allows you to donate the difference to the charity of your choice. It's the easiest way to give to charity!

What you do

Use VIM commands to navigate your nightly build of Chrome...but on a more serious note:

-Wrangle python code

-Dream A/B tests

-Shower with MySQL

-Eat financial data

What we will do together

Be the first startup to raise $1BN to help solve some of the world most challenging issues.

Compensation

Great salary and equity

Location

We are located in the SF Bay Area

Interested?

Ping me: anemitz@gmail.com
This isn't a mobile device. It's a laptop. If I can take a laptop right now with Chrome on it, break off two separate windows, why on earth wouldn't I be able to do that on a Chrome laptop? The answer is that they haven't implemented it yet. I expect they will.
BREAKING NEWS

Facebook valued at 12 billion gallons of milk in private exchanges
Yes, Google is positioning them as the future of computers and replacement devices for millions of people. Also, I'm not a sysadmin. I was just trying to write a blog post using it, actually. To get a picture from my phone and into the post, right now Google wants me to upload it from the phone to the cloud, then down to my machine. Sneakernet also works -- might be nice to support that, too. And it'll come.
The screen is described on the OLPC site: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display

As I understand it, it is a standard(?) trans-reflective (like half silvered mirror - it reflects front lighting, but also can be back-lit) black & white LCD.

In color (backlight) mode, the backlight shines strips of color, so the pixels gate the colored light rather than having a white backlight and color filters on the pixels.

In B/W mode, the backlight is turned off (saving quite a bit of power) and the LCD uses the reflective qualities of the LCD to reflect the front light for the lighting source.

The interesting thing is that front lighting will overwhelm and wash out the color from the backlighting as the front lighting gets stronger.

I have an OLPC, which is the predecessor display, and it works quite well. My opinion of the display is that the compromise was visible but not bad: the color definitely isn't as vibrant as a traditional color LCD or OLED, but the daylight view-ability was very good vs. a traditional backlit LCD that becomes poor or unreadable in bright sunlight.

There are some pictures on the Groklaw article, although I was focusing on size rather than the display when I took the pictures. In retrospect, I should have focused on the display more than the size. :-/
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080128171935946
We're actually seeing the exact opposite on blip.tv. Average video length on our site of popular content is about 13 minutes.
Ask HN: Question about Contracts
About 18 months ago I started working with a startup, I was 18 at the time. I worked 80-100 hour weeks for no pay and no equity. I signed a contract before I went to college in the fall saying that I was owed $10,000 and 10% of the profits in 2010 (due at the end of the year). I ended up being paid the $10,000 about 8 months late. This summer, I went back and was hired for $6,000 a month. The company ended up making $1,000,000 with ~$400,000 in profit, and when, while in the process of leaving the company to return to school, I asked for the 10% of the profits, they claimed that the contract that I signed for the Summer contained a clause that superseded all previous contracts. My question is, did I sign the previous contract under false pretenses, never intending to sign away my right to the 10% of the previous profits, and is that clause even legal in this case?

It's just incredibly frustrating as a college student who can't afford a lawyer to feel like other people made a ton of money off of my work (I was one of 2 developers, the other ended up leaving and suing for $130,000 for a similar amount of work) and I'm getting screwed. Any help would be appreciated, thanks a lot.
Why does the font size change randomly throughout the article?
I bet they'd tell you to get stuffed

I would be willing to take that bet. I imagine that I would get a polity worded decline of my request. Unless I sent it directly to Jobs and if I received one of Job's dismissals I imaging I would make the same decision based on the tone. As I have said before, he would be within his right to do so, but I am also within my right (no matter how flawed my decision making process is) to decide to go elsewhere. It seems that I have not been clear in the fact that my decision was not based on whether or not I received the discount (I did not receive the discount from the alternate vendor) but rather the manner in which the request was handled.
I can't describe how helpful this is for some of the open source projects that I contribute too. Sometimes it's hard enough getting folks to review patches, etc, but getting people to write docs is like pulling teeth at times. This makes it way easier to tweet or announce in IRC that a doc is being edited and in no time you can have 4-5 people working on it and it's finished in a fraction of the time.

BTW, Etherpad was released as an open source project (https://github.com/ether/pad seems to be where the development lives) as part of the acquisition and there are tons of clones out there if you still want to use something simply with no sign-in, etc.

Check out: http://piratepad.net/ep/search or http://typewith.me/
Did you read the article? So many fundamental equations become more elegant when pi is redefined in this way. Isn't pi/2 = half, pi=whole more direct?
that's part of this update too... as long as an email address is set up to send mail in web-based Gmail, you can use it to send mail from the new Gmail app
For all of the idiosyncrasies having to do with being a video host with robust player technology, $100/month sounds cheap to me for your own thing.

Disclaimer: I work for blip.tv.
You forgot one:

d) If X doesn't have competition, they will point out that there's clearly no market desire for the product or someone would have built it already.
Needlessly complicating the "report spam" function
Could you recommend some of these other writers? Because I quite liked The Alchemist, though I'm dubious of some of Paulo Coelho's philosophical ideas at times.
Reversed: Is signing an NDA which blocks your free speech valid?
Good question. In general, what happens to this setup when two programmers use different editors, say vim/Emacs/TextMate?
I hate PC revisionists. This is a book from the 1930s and as such there are aspects of the book that don't reflect the mores of today's society. However this will be obvious to its high school student readers and don't need to be "protected" from this sort of material as they're old enough to place it in context.

An example of where the line I think gets blurry is the Golliwoggs from Enid Blyton's Noddy which were removed in the 1980s. I don't know if there is any evidence for or against negative racial stereotypes affecting children's long term views but I won't be exposing my kids to such material.

I would hate to have my small child point to a dark skinned person on the street and say "Golliwogg!" for a start.
I'm not sure if it's appropriate to ask personal questions like this, but I don't have a ton of options, and I apologize if I offend anyone.
That's not the impression I got from War and Peace. Wasn't he broken by the occupation, sacking and disorderly retreat from Moscow in Winter?
Playing a game on Skype. See the demo.
Android 2.3 to use ext4
Also recommend reading C Traps and Pitfalls.

http://www.literateprogramming.com/ctraps.pdf
I probably will. I just think it's funny that even picturing it my head gets my palms sweaty.
All of my backend work is currently in Scala. I evaluated Lift for a while for my frontend, but I was turned off by it for a few (probably stupid) reasons:

1. The documentation is poor compared to other frameworks, and there's not anywhere near as much collective knowledge around it on the web as with kits like Django or Rails. That isn't entirely bad (you don't have to wade through tons of people who have no idea what they're talking about), but it is frustrating to feel like you're the only one who has ever tried to do something with the code.

2. While they're good about keeping their internal libraries well-factored and independently usable (and I do use a few in other projects), overall, I find the project to be downright overwhelming in its scope. There's just a lot there. They've currently got 131 branches going on github. They implement their own json library, their own actors, their own version of Option, etc, etc. This isn't bad, and for many I'm sure it's actually welcome. For me, though, I value feeling like I 'get' a project, that I understand its scope, what it's providing for me, where it's going, and how to extend it safely myself. I never felt that way with Lift.

3. I don't share their vision on state, or at least the vision they had for a long time. I understand that 2.2 is going to be a lot friendlier for stateless development, though, and that might send me back for another look.
I'm usually 10x more productive using frameworks that I wrote.