skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You haven't begun to establish people want it "solved".

I think we'll all agree that "people" in general (NB: not us) don't even understand the problem, so it's a little premature to claim a problem based on not wanting it solved. At this point I see it largely as an education campaign.
Someone took an interesting stab at it:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2281693/is-it-a-good-idea...

Sadly this is one of the reasons I still write shell scripts: pipes are so explicit and compact. Python seems to gather more of a practical functional crowd these times around.
"I found it easier to have a list of 2 or 3 actions ready near the bed or the desk. So when I wake up, I know what I have to do."

Isn't it possible that this change is the one that made him more productive rather than a change of schedule?
Was the database instance on that box?
Those that downvoted: was this too critical? Is it a mistake to be concerned with the quality of posts? I'm still new to HN and learning the culture: please forgive any trespass or offense I may have caused.
Ski masks?
I found that in studying Latin (and Ancient Greek at the same time) that they really helped improve my English (I'm Irish, so it's my native tongue). There really is a benefit to learning such a language, its structures and grammatical intricacies as it does give you a better understanding of your own language.
At least they have standards bodies
"Hello it looks like you're trying to take the subway, would you like help"
I find that making myself wake up >1hr before my kids is a giant boon to my happiness/productivity. All bets are off if one of them didn't sleep through the night for some reason, though.
Perhaps I'm not thinking malevolently enough, but in what situation would the search terms that I used be enough to invade my privacy? Presumably, the content of the site is related to whatever you searched for (otherwise you wouldn't click on the link).

If you are willing to click the link and go to the site, the site will most likely have some idea of why you are there, and what you are interested in, regardless of the referrer headers (because, you know, the site is hosting the content that you are reading).

It seems that if I am willing to visit the site at all, I should also be willing to disclose trivial information like this. So I'm not sure why I should care.

Saying that this is not disclosed also seems a little disingenuous. Referrer headers are pretty standard. If you have a problem with Google doing this, you also have a problem with pretty much every other site that uses hyper-links. It seems that there is a lot of useful semantic information that could be gathered by being able to identify which documents reference your document. Eliminating referrer headers seems like it would be a net loss (pun not intended).
If they break the way HTTP_REFERER etc work, I would stop using them and find something else.

Stop trying to spin this as "something that needs fixing".
Best Practices to Make Your Gems Easier to Hack On
Its not hard to imagine FB could become the primary virtual currency for everything within a very short timeframe.
If someone publishes via ACM, IEEE, or one of the other places papers go to die, it just ensures that their work will be unread, unused, and more or less ignored.

Which is sad, because the individuals publish there in order to move up through the academic ranks. By moving forward in their careers, they are also marginalizing their own work.

The incentives are perverse, and it will be a very happy day when all CS content is freely available online, as it should be.
Google Releases "Do Not Track" Extension for Chrome
I fully agree. But in the original post the commenter is insinuating that DDG is bad because it is "just a hack using APIs" in stead of a search engine based on the work of a "legion of brilliant programmers".
Which results DDG is also using.
Just to pile on: mobile processing generations are gated more by power limitations and process technology. Unless nVidia chips are going to be exclusively printed on a 'generation-ahead' process, have access to a 'generation-ahead' battery, and/or be paired with a 'generation-ahead' display, they can't be a 'generation-ahead' in general performance when they wind up in a device. Extra bells and whistles that provide theoretical performance, performance that the device ultimately can't leverage, are routinely excised from shipping designs.

You don't have to look any further than the routine underclocking to see that mobile chip roadmaps are simply not as relevant as desktop or even laptop chip roadmaps.
Being able to load gems into namespaces would rock! You'd never have to worry about incompatibilities between transient dependencies. I quite regularly get stuck with gems that have the same dependency but with different major versions. At the moment it means forking them, if they could each have their own namespace there'd be no problem.
cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=...
Privacy is dead.

People are posting intimate details of their lives on the net. Sending naked pics around their phones. They killed privacy off themselves because it gives them freedom in other ways.
Isn't it time for Godaddy to take the password box off their unencrypted home page now?
I don't think it's necessary for a promotional campaign to convince people who don't want your product that other people do. Your comment could point to a flaw in DDG's advertising, or it could just mean you're not their audience.
Of course the government monitors Facebook. A lot of the stuff activists are posting publically on Facebook anyhow, so it's not like it's any big secret. For private communications, not sure; I'd have to think through the risk model of a Facebook group vs. an email-oriented Google group.

> I never mentioned "work email" either, that's probably a silly idea. But everyone has a personal account too.

Maybe, but not everybody knows it -- for a lot of current and former colleagues, I just have their work accounts.
This is why mixed content warnings from browsers are an oh-so-important annoyance.
same thing here - I live a bit North of Atlanta, and work at home most of the time. When I do go into the office, I have a lot of flexibility to determine my hours. I find that I get up much earlier in the Summer, and much later in the Winter.

I deal with datacenters around the world, so my work schedule is not a rigid 9 to 5 (or 8 to 6), so doing this doesn't seem to cause any problems at work. Especially when I have early AM concalls (EU), and late afternoon calls (AN/NZ).
The iPad newsstand that works
Adjusted for inflation, I'm pretty sure Avatar is about 19th on the list of all time movie gross.

Your relentless drumming of this point -- i've seen you post similar comments to this at least once before in this discussion --lacks merit I think.
"Google doesn't track you. Your browser sends a referer header..."

that's missing the forest for the trees, i think. while it's true that the browser is what sends the referrer, Google has some say in 1) what the referrer is (ie, what url is sent as the referrer) 2) and what Google itself does with that information once they (Google) have received it.

Google could have a stated policy of discarding or anonymizing referrer data. to my knowledge, they do not (i will gladly be corrected on this). they could also structure their results pages urls in such a way that the search terms are not sent as part of the referrer.

for the record, i think that Gabriel has seriously messed up here. i think he's approached this issue in entirely the wrong way, that he is going to lose a lot of good will over it. however, that Gabriel has done something foolish does not detract from the technical merits of either his search engine, or his argument with regards to search leakage. either they're sound, or they're not.

i don't use duckduckgo (yet?). but his argument with regards to search leakage seems to be sound, even if his ad campaign is not.
The implication in my comment is that you do want to do the thing (or that there is some expectation, either personal or external, that you have to do it ex: studying for a course that you need to graduate).

Wanting to do something, or realizing you need to do it does not remove your personal barriers that lead to procrastination: maybe it seems too difficult, you don't know where to start, you're afraid of failure, or maybe you're suffering analysis/paralysis. You're still "motivated" in the "I want/expect to do this thing" sense, but you lack the motivation in the "wow I can do this, get to work" sense that you need to push through and get moving.

This is where "motivation follows action": you start small, identify some easy steps that will begin moving you towards the goal, and do them -- and through this action, motivation often follows.
> It's a bit like how phone calls from land lines, unless
> they're international, aren't charged on a per-call or
> per-minute basis (in the US, YMMV elsewhere).

It's somewhat off-topic to your main point, but I'm from the US, and I don't think this is true. While there are flat-rate calling plans, these are new and more commonly associated with VOIP lines. I think that most people in the US still have plans with very complex rates based on destination and time-of-day. For example:

---

What are AT&T basic rates? What is the AT&T basic rate plan?

They are the standard long distance rates charged to customers who are not enrolled in an AT&T Long Distance calling plan. There is a $4.95 monthly recurring charge associated with the state to state direct dialed basic rate plan (sometimes referred to as the basic rate plan), which applies each month whether or not a customer makes a call. The current per minute state-to-state basic rates are as follows: 42¢ Peak (7 AM - 6:59 PM, M - F), 36.5¢ Off Peak (12 AM - 6:59 AM and 7 PM - 11:59 PM, M - F) and 15¢ on Weekends. In-state basic rates vary by state.

https://www.customerservice.att.com/assistance/faq/qa.jsp?fa...

---

Incredibly, due to federal telecommunications regulations, the in-state rates have historically been higher than the state-to-state rates. What you say is true about local calls though, where "local" is a complex term of the art rather than something simple. And times are changing --- for all I know, no one buy my family members are still on the traditional plans.

With regard to apps, I think I see it opposite to the way you do. Previously, most small apps would be directly accessed as free websites with no metering. Now, more of these micro-services are moving to becoming paid apps, free-loading on top of the public web sites. Would you be comfortable with the NYC metro deciding not to put up a public information site at all, and offering only a paid app? I worry this the direction things are headed.
I would not say that that's a well-defined problem. What does "run smoothly" mean? Do you mean frame rate? Do you mean lack of discontinuous motion of objects in the game? What does "unreliable connection" mean? How unreliable do you want to allow the connection to be and still have acceptable behavior? Are we talking about surviving continuous packet loss or about short-ish, bounded periods of no connection?
Stopping search terms leaking to 3rd parties is not 'breaking the HTTP_REFERER', after all doing a POST instead of a GET already does that.

The referrer was meant to indicate the source of a click, not to indicate the terms a user used to search for content on the web.

Stop using words like 'spin' when you simply disagree with someone.
I have access to probably everything you want through a university VPN; if you really want a given paper, email me a link to it and I'll email back the PDF. I can't scale this solution, but I figure I'll do what I can.
Does anyone know how foursquares make money?
NASA Launches Android App
That better not be clippy saying that :)
Looking forward to some posts from you on improved UI, removal of infinite scroll, and improved search results :)
Hot on the heels of Firefox' "Do not Track" announcement* ... momentum is building.

http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news-fire...
Georgia will forever be ensconced by the schoolchildren of the nineties as the best font to subtly enlarge Times New Roman, lengthening a school-paper, without actually changing the point size.
This is not exactly true. Universities subscribe en masse to these things for presumably exorbitant fees, but the result is that everybody in the university has access and doesn't notice the evil in these institutions, and continues to publish in them. So what it ensures is that your work will be ignored by everyone outside the ivory tower, which is arguably worse, since it gives the impression that your work is important, when anybody who might actually do anything useful with it is screwed.

Probably the one vector that work does have from the ivory tower to the real world is via people, when they transfer from one to the other, or have one foot in each side, and can transfer ideas and PDFs from the ivory tower to the real world, and can transfer motivations for new ideas from the real world to the ivory tower. Bridge-people like these are some of the most admirable people in academia, in my opinion, and also in my opinion produce by far the best papers.

(I am therefore trying to be one of them, sort of, although I'm not really interested in actually writing papers, since to get it published (and therefore have it count officially as a 'paper' instead of a PDF talking about what you did) you have to write a variable amount of obfuscatory bullshit.)
Same here... all Mac and Solaris here for the last few years, with VM's for the rest.

Linux boot/utility disks are still really nice to have around though, and my routers and other embedded devices run Linux.
I'm going to disagree - I love having the dead tree edition. I'm also a member (granted, at a student rate), but love having a physical copy of something to read when I don't feel like pulling out my laptop just to read some articles. Plus typically, if I pull out my laptop, I have work that needs to be done.

Students are given the option of buying the print magazine though - I think they just need to extend this policy to everyone, rather than making it a print or nothing affair.
As an Ubuntu user running the exact same hardware he describes (Dell XPS M1530), I don't understand his frustration, since literally everything in Ubuntu Just Works for me on it. I haven't had a single bit of trouble on that hardware in all the time I've run Ubuntu.

But then, Ubuntu has made tremendous strides in recent years on that front, and I wouldn't be surprised if other distros haven't kept up (though he doesn't say what distro he'd been using).
4 months of emergency funds + 4 months per dependent is my rule of thumb.
With something like 1 in 3 North Americans who use Facebook, creating this ease of use can really make the difference between engagement and not.

It's definitely important to put the user first, especially if you're running a business and looking for conversions.
Digging deeper into programming
Japan has industrial factory tourists
The Dilbert Black Swan Portfolio: a skeptical/practical guide to investing
How processor intensive is the scrapping and machine learning? I guess how well do you think it could scale.
For me, it's continuation of an era: Still Linux Desktop at Home (for 17 years--thanks Slackware 2.0!)

The good news, for me, is that Linux apparently doesn't seem to care if its popular on the desktop or not. If my choices were Windows and OS X, my life would not be nearly as easy.

At least that's my takeaway from this article. When the author wrote "Error establishing database connection", I'm pretty sure that's what he was talking about.
A question about a question
I'm turning to HN for some advice, but before I do I have a question.. to make the most of the actual question I want to ask :)

I'm looking for a mentor/advisor and I am preparing some material about my startup. I'm detailing everything I have with a video demo, 2 page PDF with an overview and my CV.

My plan was to lay it all bare at HN and ask for advice about the content. But before I do I want to know if that sounds like a really stupid idea, basically telling everyone everything about my startup?

Are there pitfalls to my approach?
Nvidia takes on the tablet and smartphone market
I'm currently a student member, and the only reason I'm still subscribed is the print magazine copies. I could probably get them from the library, but having it show up on my doorstep every month is convenient.

Plus, I believe I need to be a member for the ACM ICPC anyways.
I think the title "fantastic beats efficient" doesn't accurately reflect the main point of the article, since there's no reason at all why you can't be both fantastic and efficient.

I think a more accurate (though significantly less snappy) title would be "Don't be afraid to do something fantastic just because the business model doesn't look lucrative at first glance."
Don't send requests to domains you believe are mining your data.
Transfer of copyright ownership sounds harsh. It should at least be copyright sharing. There must be some huge benefit involved for people to transfer their ownership.
The author's problem is with the academic publishing industry (which all pretty much operates in the same manner), not the ACM.

Because academic publishing is deeply intertwined with the process whereby professors are awarded promotions and tenure, there is very little impetus for reform here. It will take a generation or more for this problem to go away.
I'm not sure about this - first-century London was about the size of Hyde Park!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_London#First_century_AD

Edit - also, it appears that prior to the fifteenth century, the Welsh tended to use a patronymic naming system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_surnames
> He's saying the things that people like Chua value (math, science, arts, literacy, etc...) are the easy things -- the things not to be valued.

Again, he is not saying this and you are also leaving out the quote at the end which is:

"I wish she recognized that in some important ways the school cafeteria is more intellectually demanding than the library." Emphasis mine.

Please read this article from him and then come back here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/opinion/10brooks.html?ref=...
I think the 30% concern is largely from people who see this growing into a paypal sort of service. 30% to sell virtual cow-feed is standard. 30% to sell a book or some jeans is not.

Whether Facebook intends to go that way or not, people seem to be assuming it will.
I had a similar thought this morning when I found out some academic journals charge their authors to publish articles:

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2135236
yep, you're not being malicious enough :)

the issue is not whether the destination site receives the search terms (and indeed, Gabriel suggests that they should continue to do so, either through the GWT, or some other method).

the issues is that currently, any advertising networks in use by the destination site also receive the search terms, via the same mechanism: the referrer. that's the crux of the issue.

while the destination site can't follow your traffic once you leave it, the ad networks, because of their large user base, frequently can. they can begin to build a much more thorough profile of who you are and what you are searching for than anyone single destination site could. whether that's an invasion of privacy is your call, but to many people it is. currently, they're simply unaware that it's happening.
Interestingly enough, for me 2010 was the first time in 10 years that I actually stuck with Linux on the desktop. Ubuntu really does Just Work for me, on every machine I own.

You can't beat Apple's industrial design or the quality of parts they use but I have never felt at home in their UI. I probably never will. That's too bad because I'd rather be seen with a Macbook than pretty much any PC. But that's just vanity :)
"It's maddening to see an article that you think will let you make progress in a problem you're working on, but unable to access it because of the $15 fee..."

Enough progress to justify spending $15 (less than the price of dinner downtown)? I agree, many find the revenue models / cost structures of professional organizations outmoded. However, I find this rather harsh aversion to paying a few bucks for peer-reviewed, scientific content curious.

If it's of any help to you, many public universities, schools, and local libraries provide full access to ACM content, often both on-site and off. The most common method of providing access to this is via EBSCO's "Business Source Premier" database. I frequently read ACM articles from my desk via the web; a quick title search in EBSCO will pull up the title in about 20 seconds, and I can download a PDF of about any article published since 1965 to send to coworkers.

That said, if price is an issue, please check with your local library. Odds are good that your tax dollars are already paying the cost for you to read these articles from the comfort of your home or office. This isn't just true for the ACM -- even in the age of paywalls, your library's probably been quietly working to provide digital access to all of this for the past decade.
Edit: after reading the cached article, I guess he's more like me than I'd anticipated. (Except I use a Mac to do iPhone dev, and I can't even begin to imagine giving up my Linux desktop for that. I do as much work on the Linux machine as I possibly can. But that's just me.)

Edit: reply/edit... man, I need more coffee.
Short version: Individual posts a story about how he personally doesn't use linux as a desktop anymore, then the inclusive title is copied from a personal blog to a news aggregator in a way that constitutes flamebait.
Erlang may well be more OO than C++, but I would have liked to have seen you back this up with evidence.

First take Alan Kay's definition, and then show how Erlang is more OO than C++. Would take a paragraph or two, but would add a lot of credibility, IMO.

It's not that I doubt your thesis, but your lack of evidence leaves me wanting.
A Physicist Explains Why Parallel Universes May Exist
On Mediocre Software - Where is the Love?
Was about to post the same thing. You'll never get 30% on a retail product. In effect it would make everything you "buy with Facebook" 30% more expensive since there isn't that margin there, and that would kill the concept quick.

I also question how wide spread this would be. I mean yes it has the potential to be huge but I purposely don't connect my Facebook account to anyone else (no Login with Facebook for me) because of their shoddy history with privacy. Last thing I'm going to do is attach payment info, esp since I don't play any games in the system. I'm not saying this won't be huge, but I am saying it's not going to be ubiquitous.
1. I don't doubt that google (who owns 60% of ad space online) doesn't have some kind of profiling on you already, but they don't need http referers to build that data. Hell, even the example email in the blog has nothing to do with referer tracking, unless gabriel is suggesting that wikipedia is running hidden ad trackers on their pages.
I love the link at the bottom to 'Goto Considered Harmful': http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/
Reasons to watch Tron 2

sequel to a classic: yes

3D: no

storyline: no

acting: no

VFX: yes

Daft Punk: yes

actual Unix on the big screen: yes

hot chicks attracted to nerds: yes

Disney 'family policy' WRT said hot chicks: no
Hot on the heels of Firefox' "Do not Track" announcement ... momentum is building. http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news-fire...

The first DNT proposal surfaced after a bunch of privacy advocates met a few years ago in California. It's great to see the idea get refined and adopted.