skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great suggestion. Here's a few ideas off the top of my head

- probably the most important: talk with your friends and family about the issues and try to get them beyond their fears.

- if you've got a few $ to spare, contributed to groups like EPIC (who's leading the lawsuit against the TSA scanners), EFF, BORDC, and ACLU.

- call your congressperson's office and let them know that these are important issues to the country, you expect them to take an active role, and it will be affecting how you vote in 2012.

- specifically on the TSA, adjust your habits to reduce (or even better eliminate) flying. when you do fly, take educational material with you to the airport, talk with people next to you in line, and opt out of the scanners.

- and track what's going on; there are likely to be some intense activism campaigns once Congress gets back into session, and plenty of opportunities to get involved online or off
I had a Chinese girl lecture me on how I was taken in by propaganda by believing that the Yuan/RMB was not pegged to gold. I had proof that it was pegged to the US dollar from 3 independent reliable sources but she wouldn't believe any of it.

Banning skype is simply an ineffective attempt to protect the propaganda misinformation machines in the people's republic of China.
Redirect rickroll... that's an awesome way to make up with a website. Gotta wonder how what his traffic looked like once he did that.
Can you help me understand how this helps with scaling? I prefer this url format myself and noticed it's used rarely by the big guys. If there's a scaling advantage it provides, however, it's not obvious to me.
Very fair point, we feel like the amount is fair for the work we do and it is free money. What number would make you signup and feel good about it?
Yes, I am. I don't consider it wrong to discuss any particular topic.

And, while I haven't read into this particular book, the author says that the title is simply a troll. More investigation would be needed from either side to determine if the book is any good or not, but I don't really care if it is or not.

As the author points out, Amazon already caries a litany of materials that describe and depict other immoral acts in graphic detail, including rape.
Rate my Startup: Quicklyst, a note-taking application
Hello HN. I'd like to thank you all for the sheer amount of resources and discussions available on this site that are just a search away. They're great for helping make decisions.

I just launched Quicklyst in the spirit of "launch a product you're embarrassed about" and "launch early." Tell me what you think.

http://www.quicklyst.com/

It's a note-taking app that has an outline-style textbox. It has automatic Kindle delivery for notes (yeah, I copied Instapaper on that one), printable study guides, and a DuckDuckGo zero-click info feature. I tried my best to keep the interface simple, but I have explanations of the features at:

http://www.quicklyst.com/guide

And one question: Should I go freemium? I figure it's easy to switch to freemium, but hard to switch back.
¨...a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest¨ -Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
The ongoing mess of Android’s app store fragmentation
When I was briefly a tech journalist, my boss showed me a great trick: Go to the lobby of the hotel during a conference and just listen. It's amazing how many people forget that others can hear everything they say into their bluetooth headset.
That wasn't a long rant at all, and in fact, quite insightful. Truth be told, I'm actually rather happy that you managed to get out of your predicament and hope I can do the same soon.
I couldn't imagine using my old Canon point and shoot (PowerShot A530) without CHDK. If you load it onto an SD Card with a "bootable" partition flag and enable the write-protect tab before you insert it into the camera, CHDK automatically boots up when you power it on (and it still writes to the card just fine)
Oracle Owed Interest by SAP in Infringement Case, Judge Rules
Piers Corbyn, two weeks ago:

For NE/E USA we predicted (12-12-10)
Very Major snow and blizzard events will strike NE & E USA in a double hit centered around 25-27th & 29-30th Dec; One of the most significant snowfall/blizzard periods in NE & east USA for decades.

http://www.weatheraction.com/displayarticle.asp?a=286&c=...
Skype's been deemed illegal, but that doesn't mean it won't work in China (like so many other illegal things there). As the story says, no one is sure how the government will enforce the ban yet. This is likely a stall tactic to allow state run competitors to play catch up.
There's a flaw in Kevin's argument: the odious measures don't actually reduce the chance of a plane going around to terrorism. In fact by diverting resources from more effective security measures (e.g. focusing on cargo) they actually increase the chance.
Great question, Andrew. We typically do inform people they'll be removed for hidden text for 30 days. We also tell people how to file a reconsideration request to come back in sooner. I did the query ["hidden text" 30 days reconsideration request] and here's an example email from the #1 result: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020315.html

You can read the whole message that we send, but the relevant part would be "In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from somewifi.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-.... When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=e... to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration."

As infractions get more serious and we believe that the SEO/site owner is more willful, we give less information to the people who do spammier things.

Hope that helps to answer your question.
high frequency trading C++ programmers at investment banks. A senior level position with 3-4 years experience can get 200-300K
Online Sharing With StumbleUpon and Gmail Is Outpacing Facebook
Only according to this list. I totally understand how incomplete and random this metric is to measure the real impact.

Regarding "buying brains", being at Y!R is a great experience for me and it matches all the perks of being in academia (you can publish almost anything, work with students, teach at universities if you want, etc).
At one point I debated fabricating my own and had some constructed by a metalfab, but, for splitting racks, if you're using a standard cabinet:

http://www.middleatlantic.com/rackac/security/security.htm

Several manufacturers sell half-cab cabinets where you have 2 individual locks. Of course, you might need to negotiate with he.net to get them to put that in prior to your start.

Raritan makes a power strip that is a little costly, but, allows you to control power by outlet, set triggers, see what the power use is by outlet, interfaces nicely with several stonith profiles. Individual web access by port (if I recall, we don't use that feature)

The highest density/power efficient box we've been using is a Supermicro 512-L, X7DVL-3, dual quadcore xeon, 24gb RAM. At load, .9 amps.
perhaps two types of options -- a % cut for all packages, and monthly flat fee programs that have quotas (but overflow of quotas hits the % cut). gives the perception of control, and could be worthwhile for the right type of client.

edit: regardless, i passed it on to some ecommerce retail friends
I found the condescending attitude toward the CSR to be completely out of line. Clearly this person no decision making capacity at Samsung. Why would you be so rude to someone that has done nothing to you?
China's Beijing and Tianjin at Night
The article is little more than spam, so presumably this is getting pushed up in order to sell advertising.
Most iPod Touches do not have a microphone =[
I'll let someone else detail why having a comprehensive business plan isn't necessary, but a good primer for you is the Pitching Hacks book (PDF) by Venture Hacks. It's $9 but worth more than the sproutbean catfart health wrap you'll otherwise spend that on. Some of the things you raise here are brought up in their book -- which is actually more like a guidebook than a "book," per se.

http://venturehacks.com/pitching
If you liked the article, you should also read this blog post: "How to keep someone with you forever" - http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html

It's written from the opposite point of view and goes into more details - ie if you were a manager, you can do X, Y and Z to encourage Stockholm Syndrome and keep your employees emotionally bound to you. It's a pretty scary 'how-to' guide!
I just left a job that afflicts Stockholm Syndrome on employees. Thankfully as a systems programmer in a research firm, I avoided the worst of it, but most people weren't so lucky. Here are some management behaviors that were effective:

Never thank people for finishing something on time, on budget, and to the project specifications. Instead, heap attention on those who finish in an all-nighter that ends in the final demo. Heroic measures are sometimes necessary and deserve reward, but being part of the process is a big red flag.

Never set expectations or milestones, just expect the project to be finished on the due date. This had an interesting effect on the work pace. Due to Parkinson's Law, individual workers finish days before the deadline, but that's not enough time to test integration. Major problems are discovered late, and everyone works ridiculous hours to fix it. Thank everyone for making it work at the last minute, rinse and repeat!

Tell employees to work weekends and nights for projects that could be unnecessary. Make these individual efforts to maximize the time one person wastes. When burning the candle on both ends, it's satisfying when you're done and the work was needed. After all, you took on the impossible, and here it is! But when days or weeks of your life are thrown away with a laugh, you would find another job if you actually had the time.

The Perceived Threats were the Bad Things that would happen if our demos failed. Funding lines would dry up, the company would be in trouble, etc. So everyone pitched together to keep the system going. Everyone became so focused that they stopped realizing that it could be done another way.
Two circuits per rack, with half of circuit per customer would be a lot better. The price would have to go up, but 3a in 10u isn't enough better than individual machine colo to be worth the price.

I have friends that are putting something similar together and might be very interested in this as a starting point.
Reading your post, I feel like you're me, except I haven't worked at startups. Addressing your first two points:

* If I don't like a situation, I will leave it. After all, the easiest way to change your environment is to escape it.

I feel conflicted with this one. While what you say is true I can't help but feel, when I try to apply to certain situations in life, like I'm quitting... or that I'd beat myself up for "being a quitter who didn't try hard enough to make things better" at a particular job or relationship or something of the sort. There's something to be said about the potential payoff relative to the amount of effort involved in making things better, of course.

Your second point is something I've been personally stuck in for awhile, mostly given the economic downturn and seeing friends go unemployed for quite a long time. Still, I probably have to make that jump sooner or later.
The situation to me seems comparable to a book writer and a publisher. The writer is the one who is writing the book, he has the copyrights, and earns from selling it. The publisher spends on marketing, printing, etc, and gets a cut, but, the publisher is reliant on the writer. If the publisher want to sell the book without giving any revenue to the writer, then they would have to pay for a license. Otherwise, they are in breach of copyrights law.

So, if google wants to host other people's videos, they need to pay for them, unless people give the videos to google for free, as the video's are the creator's and thus copyrighted.
So wait, you're bitching that programmers were forced to think and to proof-read?

1. On any given day, how many times does a compile (or interpretation) of your work fail?

2. On any given day, how many times does a test run of your program give anything other than the most desirable result?

If your answer to either question is less than 2, then you're either (a) not working enough or (b) the greatest programmer in the history of the world.

I was not "bitching". I was pointing out that in those days you usually got "one shot per day". Think about how this one little fact affected everything you did.

There was no such thing as "Release early and often," "Ready, Fire, Aim," "Iterate, iterate, iterate," "Prototype," or "Get User Feedback ASAP." The existing technology simply didn't permit it. When you got one compile per day, you damn well better spend 6 hours per day proofreading. How many hours per day to you spend proofreading? If it's more than .5, then you're wasting your time. It is your morale imperative to use technology to do that for you.

We laugh at those pictures and those days, but forget how hardcore you really had to be. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Respect.
You're right about that not being clear. I meant that it's traditional for guys to interact in that way, regardless of gender. Their emotional language may be patronizing, but the content is the exact same as if they were meeting a male hacker for the first time.

I'm more of a design-world person, so I generally don't see the explicit sexism, since women designers are equally respected.
One would assume that most people of working age would speak at least English, which should be enough to get started in many countries.
>Ad Hominem

That doesn't mean what you think it means.
>The discourse around HN is generally of a pretty high level

Yes, I agree. The people here are generally very intelligent.

>it's disappointing to see people just blindly accepting the party line: software patents bad

...Have you considered that they've applied this intelligence to the topic? They've all come to the same conclusion because it is the most logical one? I wouldn't be so quick to jump to "everybody is stupid because they don't agree with me" on this. Maybe you're the one who is wrong about it.
Do seed-stage entrepreneurs need business plans?
The point of the article I linked to is not that she is a virus writer, the point is that the article is about her hacks. If the article were about a girl who wrote an information retrieval system, a video game or a database, it would similarly highlight a female hacker.

This wired article is about a bunch of girls who get together and whine about men asking them what distro they run.
Nintendo Japan says no 3DS for kids under six
Agreed. I spent several years shackled to the Microsoft tool chain, exhibiting multiple symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome. I'm grateful to be free.
It is so weird being in the commercial world now where people basically don't seem to care about things like this. I never do anything on airplanes or in cafes except read books, watch movies, etc., or other public-source material. Even personal/social email seems too personal to have on a screen in a shared environment. Open plan offices shared with people outside my company are just as bad, but at least then it is sometimes possible to hide in a corner or telephone closet. I've often ended up going outside to sit in my car to make phone calls.
I absolutely agree there. They have this policy of doing admin work for free as long as it takes less than 30 mins -- and I've never asked for a fix that took longer than 30 mins, these guys are quick.

Everything from debugging connection issues (possibly hardware problem) to fixing a breaking build of apache for me from source in a few mins.

Great group of folks.
I can echo a lot of this, having lost 30 pounds as well, though that was through the Ideal Protein diet. But the info about how to maintain weight after the initial fat burn portion is invaluable. Cut back carbs and sugars (it's amazing how many things have sugar...), processed grains, etc. For this diet, lots of veggies, lots of protein (un-fried).

Absolutely agree about the energeticness, focus, and confidence. Went from 215 to 180, and it's a huge difference.

Good post!
Thanks for both your comments.
Yes, the TSA is part of the Executive Branch, so it ultimately reports to Obama.

On a related note, you may wish to read Friedrich von Hayek's book, published in 1944, The Road To Serfdom. He covers many subjects in this book, but one of them is the danger that arises when the legislative branch delegates wholesale powers to the executive branch, or, as you say, "has congressional oversight, but its actions are not laws. So who do we complain to?" Hayek worried about this separation of responsibility from power.

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

Hayek was, in part, looking at the British system, which is Parliamentary. They have some advantage there in that there is a clear separation between the head of state and the head of government. The USA is the only democracy that has ever tried to combine these two offices. The fact that no other country has ever imitated this aspect of American government (whereas most other aspects of the American Constitution have been imitated) says a lot about what a bad idea this is. In most democracies, the people are free to show their respect and veneration for the (usually powerless) head of state, and the people feel free to show scathing disrespect to the (powerful) head of government. In the USA, the people often have mixed emotions - when you criticize the head of government, you are also criticizing the head of state, so people typically pull their punches, and use language that is more respectful that what typically gets directed at a head of government in other democracies.
Apply and Awesome Light Ray Effect in Photoshop
This tutorial will show you how to make light rays to create a mystical effect on a photo. The light ray effect is perfect for pictures or shots of scenes with lots of clouds or landscape.
What do angels expect in a biz plan for an Internet startup in the early stages?
Are you going for venture capital or an angel investment? The level of documentation and requirements will be similar, but at the angel level the chips are stacked more in your favor as far as getting meetings and investment. Angels are not going to expect a minimally viable product or traction as much as VCs will.

A few sites to check out:

http://www.venturehacks.com
http://www.markpeterdavis.com/

Every VC is going to be different in what they want and don't want to hear/see. Remember going in that the odds are against you. To increase those odds you can show traction in the market, and at minimum a working product (even if it is not the final product).

Angels and investors are going to want to know about your background (i.e. school, previous work, and any startups you have done in the past).

Essentially it is a dog and pony show where you have to prove to them that you can execute on a product and make a return on their money. While a return is not always going to happen, the more comfortable they are with you, your product, and the chances of making a return on their investment the better off you are.

Get a lawyer, one who is experienced in raising outside investment. There are laws that you must follow when seeking outside investment and having someone familiar with the process is essential. Be ready to spend some money on the lawyer (most lawyers will work with the intent to take their fees off the top of the funding when finalized).

The final thing is it takes time. Keep working on your product and unless you absolutely need money focus on your product more than raising the funds. It could be as short as a couple months or as long as a year or so before you see any funding. Work your connections. The best way into a VC or angel is through connections. Cold calling/emailing is a one and a million chance of getting someone to meet with you.
New Tutorial Site Teaches Both Development and Interface Design
DNS is much easier to scale out than HTTP. By having full FQDN for users, you have the capability to easily scale out without needing a load balancer in front of say, threewords.me.

So in your DNS zone you can tell it to route all accounts that start with the letter 'a' to server with IP 1.1.1.1, letter b to IP 2.2.2.2, etc. Server with IP 1.1.1.1 will not only run a headless web app but also route SQL queries to a db shard (all relational data for users starting with the letter a).

This level of "user" partitioning can be deeper. So it's not just the first letter of the user but two or three more letters/numbers. So joe.threewords.me would be on a different server than j4mes.threewords.me (That's j.o.threewords.me vs j.4.threewords.me).

Regards

Joe
Risks worth taking in 2011
Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live
When I was there it was standard practice to use a privacy screen when at conferences or travelling, and they were delivered to your desk for free if you asked.

Some people just don't use common sense though.
Congress has a couple of opportunities to step forward. The TSA wants a bunch of money in next year's budget for additional scanners, and with the small government attitude of the incoming Congress this is a great opportunity to stop them. Also, with Jason Chaffetz taking over the House subcommittee with oversight, and an general sense that TSA isn't real popular right now, we might see some more assertiveness in general. So #1 on the list of people to complain to is your Representative and Senators.

If you're a frequent flyer, call your airline. The airlines are a powerful lobbying force and we we need to get them more engaged. We've talked to them a couple times after driving/training (instead of flying) and one time we got a very sympathetic CSR who told us they're getting a lot of calls and very concerned about their business. Even if you haven't changed your travel plans yet, let them know that you're thinking about it. Reassure them you know it's not their fault, but ask them to weigh in with DHS and Congress to get things changed.
The whole Froyo on the Galaxy S debacle has been nuts. It was promised in September. Since then it has been plagued with deployment problems and is still in purgatory for the US users.

That said, I have become a big fan of Samsung's hardware.
It's also tough for people who are actually not in much debt, aren't underwater, aren't in financial stress. Because they can only make do with a few months unemployed. That's a small margin for failure/experimentation/following your "passion".
Well, that may be. But almost all of the posts you see around here decrying them are just steeped in ignorance. Titles like "Microsoft has patented <whatever the title of the patent is>. Software patents have to go." When the reality is that they have merely applied for a patent (not gotten one granted), and it's actually something really narrow if you read the claims.

Stuff like that does not fill me with humility and make me think, hey, maybe these folks are right and I'm the one who doesn't know what he's talking about. Because I do know what I'm talking about. There are defensible arguments for why software patents may not be a good thing... but you don't see them here. You don't often see anything well-reasoned, just a bunch of groupthink.