skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When is the corn industry welfare for billionaires going to end?

Ethanol in gas in already causing damage to cars made before 2000 and 2-stroke engines. Not to mention it's causing a huge increase in corn based food prices and resource shortages while reducing exports.
Matt,

Can you speak about the possibility for personal domain blacklists for Google accounts? I know giving users the option to remove sites from their own search results is talked about a lot in these HN threads. Is there any talk internally about implementing something like this?
I believe it is very hard to implement algorithms that can make a difference between stackoverflow.com and a rip-off, or a legitimate Apache mailing list archive and a rip-off.

Why not allow the community to sort this out. "Google Custom Search" already exist. Google could extend that to the direction where people could customize the Google search to exclude certain sites from the results (right now it is only possible to specify a list of sites to include in the search).

Blacklists for at least specific "fields of searching" would emerge very quickly. People could select what blacklists to use, if any.
I've been using msysgit (http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/) and it works well. I also recently installed Git Extensions (http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/) to use in Visual Studio. It doesn't work all that well but I haven't had time to play around with it much.
Yeah.. it might not be the best example, as what I was searching for is not current possible, so there are no correct results for it.
Very fun stuff! Are you planning on updating new background/character theme packs?
Negotiating a university license
I use RVM for both development and production, and I've written scripts that use it to set up both my development and production machines. It's nice to be able to reformat my workstation (for new Ubuntu releases, or new hardware) and get back to business quickly. As far as production, I'm not really sure RVM is that much of a win, assuming you're compiling the latest Ruby anyway and have only one app on the server. I use it since I've yet to learn proper packaging and therefore the only (easy) way to uninstall a Ruby is via RVM (I know about checkinstall, but IME it's buggy as hell).
In my very humble (and inexperienced) opinion, Play! is the closest you're going to get to the development speed of Rails or Django and their ilk while still using Java.I recently finished writing a small app in it for a school project, and it was nothing but enjoyable. Not in love with the templating, but everything else was a joy.
I'm trying to imagine why anyone would find this useful. Does anyone have any idea?
Thanks for posting this. It was great reading through this and seeing how meditation has helped people retain a little sanity in this crazy world. My take on meditation is heavier on faith than most of what I've read here so I thought I would submit it as an alternative.

I've been practicing zazen on a daily basis for almost twenty years now, and Tai Chi Chuan for almost as long. I am extra lucky in that my wife practices as well, and often we spend whole weekends and even vacations meditating together.

We get most of our inspiration to practice from Uchiyama Roshi, who wrote "Opening the Hand of Thought", and his student Shohaku Okumura who is now teaching in Bloomington, Indiana (and has just published "Realizing Genjokoan" which has also been profoundly helpful to us).

There have been many experiences both painful and joyous, but none of them last, no matter how much I've wanted them to. The lesson of course, is that you must let go, no matter what. According to Uchiyama, the first step to sincere practice is to clarify death. Since none of the stuff we normally value (status, wealth, relationships) stay with us when we meet that final experience, it is obvious that we must let go of them and settle on what is of true value. As a buddhist, what has true value is the true self, which is the self that is connected to all other beings. We practice zazen to let go of our petty self, and allow the true self to manifest, similar to how a Christian's or Muslim's true faith in God could allow God's love to act through them. For me, zazen has always been an act of faith towards the belief that there is this true self, that it is interconnected, and interdependent, and that it is in all of us and that it transcends each of us. This faith allows me to let go, to trust everything to zazen, and unclench however slightly from my selfish preoccupations.

I would say the greatest benefit of meditation for me is this realization that I can let go, that I am not a prisoner of my delusions no matter how persistent they may be, and also this faith in a true self that carries me through difficult circumstances and helps me correct course when my actions fall short of my ideals.
in two secs I sent it off (enhhhh, you have failed this test!) to my committed lover (sometimes can be taken as meaning the manicomio committed, but we'll leave it at that..The King of Hearts was a favourite movie after all...)
THEN i took the 2 minutes.
May he take his...
and left the sounds on my computer all day in the background.
The sea is far behind me, the c however is all before me..
In other industries, the government regulates that there must be a "Chinese Wall" (no communication or shared personel) between segments of a company that have conflicts of interest. In this case, search and advertising qualify. I expect to see proposals for this kind of regulation in the next 10 years as the FCC begins regulating the internet.
I don't like how they use static methods for almost everything.
To repair your disk using DiskWarrior etc.
Because it was only tested on highways/roads in flat areas, and not in the mountains/hills?
This site has me laughing out loud often. O what fools we mortals be! and it also takes one to know one....
eh.
Zynga Acquires Social Game Developer Area/Code
I suspect you haven't read TC in a while...
Yes we are! That's another Lego concept that inspired us. We're seeing these characters/backgrounds like play sets that you can combine to make full story arcs. Space, robots, dinosaurs are the ones that I'm wicked excited about releasing in the future.
I'm at least pleased with the way they handled the vulnerability. They seem to be making preventative changes for the future which is the main thing.

As much as I'd like everyone to be diligent about security as David suggests, I don't think it's going to happen. Developers aren't security or admin experts but they (me included) want a way to deploy apps without it being a major hassle. Handing off security to the provider is one of the big reason there are > 100K apps on Heroku, and it's a calculated cost/risk tradeoff.
2011 will see cyber scammers target Android more than any other mobile platform
At least the spelling/grammar mistakes on TC seem accidental, they dont liek right liek this 2 make u think they are kool.

Example from the most recent article currently on the PH site:

What do U think??

Urgh.
In fact, AdSense ads on sites with shitty content are even more likely to be effective, because users won't find what they're looking for in the page content.
Is google ever going to go on the record about companies like demand media and whether or not they get special treatment from google?
I agree with the commenter who said she'd shop somewhere else if this popped up at her store. Aside from being an invasion of privacy (anonymity is always a temporary condition of data), this would be annoying and a temptation to eat garbage. I can't see why anyone would want this. The vending machine of the (ideal) future is a farmer, standing behind a display of fruits and vegetables.
most of the small chinese companies at CES that were "making" tablets just buy kits and assemble them.
Supposedly to "LiveCD" onto random hardware. I have lost my ability to function productively in a Windows environment...
I wish the government would shift focus away from corn subsidies for ethanol toward funding a buildout of electric vehicle charging infrastructure. If we could increase electric vehicle adoption by 5%, we could do a lot more toward the goal of transitioning away from foreign oil than ethanol will (oh the irony of harvesting corn with diesel-powered tractors). We can't do that until every shopping mall, office building, and grocery store has at least a few dozen charging stations.
This. I don't care how much a tech blogger has studied Google from afar. Ken Auletta actually embedded himself at Google and wrote a frickin book about its history, its culture, and most importantly how it makes decisions. He is in a crazy strong position to comment on why Google does what it does.
Dan Ellsberg on Twitter, Google and Facebook vs Govt. Snooping
None of the above. My proxy does my filtering, it's easier to do that than pulling down a hosts file on every computer I use, and updating all of them each time I update the list.
So really you're asking "what's the point of art?" You could do worse than starting by reading "Art" by Clive Bell.
While searching for a pdf file, I hardly find the pdf through the top results. The top results are often kind off pdf, ebook search engines themselves and they clearly appear on top by gaming Google. I hope this gets fixed too.
If they can't measure the results, who is to say they are doing badly?
No, in fact, some of the same people are involved. The CI community thing will still be CI. This is fresh, from the ground up.
Exactly, and there are a huge number of $4 sites out there and a large number of companies providing that kind of outsourced content generation. If you've got $100k in funding to blow, it's really easy to get your first 10,000 pages of content and a stream of SEO traffic within a few months.

I agree with Ryan that these kinds of sites are worse than scrapers because they're just as useless but algorithmically much harder to detect.
Julian Assange tribute malware
Lush Cosmetics website hacked, credit cards compromised
Heroku needs to be able to spin up and spin down server processes ("dynos") very quickly. Their process right now, so far as anyone can tell, is basically to untar a "slug" and start a ruby process. Booting a VM would be a lot more cumbersome (and there might be technical issues doing it on top of EC2 instances which are already virtualized).
I agree that the appearance of revenues at this point make people dismiss facebook - but also take note of the very very high level talent they have been snatching up and the circle of advisors they have.

Give it 3-5 years. You will see Googles revenue slow/plateau a bit - but if Facebook can do what it thinks it can do with its userbase and dataset, it is going to be very interesting.

Also, I predict that Facebooks revenues will not skyrocket -- but rather their influence, reach and stranglehold on way too many aspects of on-line life will take deep root.

They will likely begin an acquisition play very soon which will be focused on payments, security, retail/ecomm and analytics.

While google has been a gateway to the internets information - I see facebook trying to be a funnel/traffic-cop to your online relationships interests and transactions.

I wouldn't be be surprised if facebook bought something like square.
Six Apart Japan and Movable Type will be acquired by Infocom
Is hand coding always better?
Same here.
Gmail has been my spam-filter for years. I have no problem putting my e-mail addresses in clear anywhere.
That ideal search engine would find itself quickly the target of people that would try to gain an advantage by figuring out how it works.

And then another SEO cycle would start. Don't forget that before google came along nobody was trying to 'game the system' with backlinks and other trickery, the fact that that google is successful is what caused people to start gaming google.
The sad thing is that "tech" journalism is amongst the least biased out there. I have come to hate watching the news (blogs included). Journalism has become a relentless quest to instill emotions rather than just inform. Blogs originally appeared as an opportunity for journalists to throw in facts up top and let opinions brew down bottom, so that every one could find what they were looking for, but how many times have you found yourself infuriated by some idiotic speculations mingled with half truths posted by a "respectable" source in the blogosphere?
Tornado is not (just) a web framework
I don't understand what point you're trying to make (also, how'd you come up with THIS particular comment, from 800 days ago?).
Let's keep it in perspective: each of those sentences does have a background story worthy of exploring further.

One may get the best of both worlds if one could, like, click on those pieces of text. That would be awesome. We could call it "hypertext"...

The bottomline is that we've been stuck with the same issue for the past 10+ years: bloggers don't have the writing/journalistic skills, and MSM refuses to take advantage of the technology. And we'll have to make do with two types of half-assed products, piecing them together ourselves (with the help of sites like HN) to get the whole picture.

No wonder no one is willing to pay for content.
That screenshot was most definitely taken with Google as the HTTP referer. (I'm too lazy to cut-and-paste the URL from the search page into the browser, I just clicked the link.)

Clicking the link again shows the additional content at the bottom of the page as you described. So there's some other algorithm at play.
I will definitely consider CodeIgniter for my next PHP project.
It seems like a very good alternative to CakePHP and I definitely like a framework that tries to stay out of my code as much as possible.
Thanks for the suggestion
What I find seriously bad is that even a huge site like stackoverflow has to optimize its search engine strategy to fight the problem. Little web sites are doomed.
Branch-Node Synchronization with SQL Azure
This will be interesting. Most of the stuff on my site are replays of articles I write for other venues. I wonder how the rankings will shift.
Proof-of-Concept Android Trojan Captures Spoken Credit-Card Numbers
I hope it's keeping track of the results on the back end for each user that's doing this. In generation 20, I hit 400+ so mileage definitely varies.
Techies don't understand what business Apple is in
You seem to be implying that share buybacks aren't a legitimate or ethical way to use a company's funds.

Imagine that there are 3 partners each owning a 1/3 interest in a firm. If the firm decides to buy out one of the partners with company money, and that the partner agrees to this, this leave the other two with a 50% interest in the company. Nothing wrong with that at all and nobody has been forced to do anything it doesn't want. It's not artificial, the stock prices are higher because each share is now a bigger piece of the comapny.
Isn't that boycott novell? IIRC that guy calls everyone who disagrees with him "Microsoft booster" so I'd take it at face value.
Back when I saw that I wrote a little js test page to generate a combo of all of them :) The result it pretty nasty.

http://icefox.github.com/js_email_link_hack/
Oops, had it in my list of useful links note in evernote. Haven't looked lately. There are others out there that work.
Sure. But that's because the one with newyorker.com in the URL has a 85 years of credibility behind it. TechCrunch and similar are concerned with speed, not quality. The New Yorker would rather be a day (or week/month!) late and have the full story than be first and have the most re-tweets.
A five-part video series on text mining with RapidMiner:

http://vancouverdata.blogspot.com/2010/11/text-analytics-wit...
Sounds like a Michaelangelo quote.
I admit to only skimming this, but it doesn't seem to be satirical. Is this actually meant to literally be a modest proposal, or is it a "modest proposal" in the Swiftian sense?
David I. on Developers and the Cloud
You can comfort yourself with the fact that after comparing the contracts, he probably paid a lot more for his.
Summary of the vuln, from the original post: Heroku was relying on unguessable filenames to keep processes associated from one app from reading files containing the config files and source code of another app. However, the random portion of those filenames was showing up in the output of 'ps' as run from (I think) 'heroku console'.

The upshot was that the filenames were easily guessable, and their contents (config files and source code of the app) easily accessible.

So, if you've had a heroku app running between December 28 and January 17, your config files are possibly compromised.

(The scary part, to me, is what a malicious party could have done with access to somebody else's database.yml, but I haven't seen any writeup specifically address that point.)
I'm guessing this is in response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128263

1: One of Google's major weaknesses is the concentration of its revenue around a few large websites. Having the most popular advertising network on the web (AdSense) is an important asset for pretty much anything else Google wants to do.

If what you said were true, the greatest threat to the Google Search page would be a strong AdSense market with high quality content which everybody finds using organic search.

2: AdSense does not compete with Content Network because it is long tail. The value for advertisers is in reach and diversity.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4b9f977918b864a4
Was anyone else, after seeing the title, expecting a satirical piece about eating babies?
Business & Technology | More money flowed to startups in 2010
You mention several good points, but, net, you miss it. The most serious place you get off the track is with your "If wanting more babies were a heritable biological drive, we wouldn't see whole societies ignoring it immediately after it became economically rational to do so."

No: There is "a heritable biological drive". But as I explained elsewhere on this thread, e.g., for the US population increase from 1800 to 1850, that "drive" long didn't play much role. Now with contraception, etc., that "drive" is crucial. Or, the lack of that drive, with contraception, etc., is now the reason for the fall in the birth rate.

It's dirt simple: Now with contraception, more career opportunities for women, etc., women without that "drive" will be pulling their genes out of the gene pool. So, come back in a few generations and find what? Sure: Find what's left, find nearly all women who DO have just that "drive".

You seem to doubt that the "drive" can exist and be from genes: Don't doubt! It's in the gene pool now: A significant fraction of women see the face of a baby and know right away, front and center, that they want BABIES. Then they go looking for a suitable husband. In particular they don't go looking for K&R on C.

Look, it's even simpler: It's really easy for girls from 2 on to really love their dolls and like to play 'mommy'. Don't doubt that most of this is just in the genes.
At web scale, this won't work very well (although it's a good start). For example, I found this one the last time I was doing encoding detection work:

http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2007/03/31/microsoft-web
It's often easy to forget that developer time == money.

I head this a lot from people who write O(n^2) algorithms instead of O(log n) :-P
Or in other words, reputation does matter.
I agree. Also interesting to see that Google defines webspam as "pages that cheat" or "violate search engine quality guidelines." By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all. Nor are the spammy sites in my field which super-optimize for keywords in ways that make it difficult for legitimate content to rise to visibility.

If Google did not operate AdSense, it seems hard to believe the company would not have penalized this sort of behavior ages ago. A love for AdSense is probably the single largest thing spam sites have in common worldwide.
Thanks for the heads up, now I know I don't even have to bother checking it out...
I would assume that Ham is in it for the domain name, not the site itself.
The role of the Internet as a platform for collective action grows
I don't see how there could be much legal standing for that position. If Maloof bought the original negatives and especially if the Meier estate has not retained any copies of the work then he's got an enormously strong case to having bought not just a copy of the work but the work itself and the rights to distribute it.
Credibility is important, but credulity is always a risk.

People would be cautious and skeptical if these exact words were posted on TechCrunch. Instead, we're hearing how awesome and correct this article must be because it's posted on newyorker.com.
Should I Become an Entrepreneur?
Oracle does not, and never has cared about their reputation with the technical community. They care about their reputation with the people who actually buy their software.

The people who buy their software understand things like duty to shareholders, and Oracle has historically determined that exercises like this are part of that duty.
Short version:

% sudo ditto -VX / /Volumes/My\ USB\ Drive
Jails aren't virtualization. I don't know why they don't use jails, but the answer on "virtualization" seems straightforward.
When would someone actually want to use octal literals in a C program? I never understood why C has this "feature". In contract, binary literals would have actually been useful.

EDIT: After RTFA'ing, I see that octal was useful for hardware with 60 bit words.
That is indeed why I linked through Reddit. I had pasted a direct link first in the submit form but changed my mind because the creator was commenting in the Reddit thread.
I'm surprised (ok, not really, it's USA Today) that the article doesn't mention the hygroscopic nature of ethanol.

Gasoline, being composed of various hydrocarbons, doesn't mix with water, nor will it absorb water under normal circumstances.

Ethanol is miscible with water, meaning you can mix any quantity of ethanol with any quantity of water and they won't separate. (A good example is alcoholic drinks: 2% beer and 190 proof liquor both are stable solutions.)

A side-effect of being miscible with water is that ethanol is hygroscopic: it will absorb water from the air.

When you mix ethanol with gasoline, the ethanol retains its hygroscopic nature, and will absorb water. This is not good. Under the right circumstances (eg marine use) the ethanol will absorb enough water to come out of solution. This is not good for engines.
Groupon has 2000 employees, most of whom are sales reps. That's what Google was bidding on.
Did you do the production in-house, or hire someone? Definitely well done, and a good tone.
Ask HN: How do you sell a domain?
I own an international domain for a top 50 website- so quite simply, how do I sell it to them?
Looks pretty slick, but it still has the search-form glitch I run into every single time:

Whenever I want to use it, I wind up pasting a URL that I copied from somewhere else into the URL input at top. My URL invariably starts 'http://, but the 'http:// that's prepopulated in the form as rendered doesn't go away. So I wind up doing a search on 'http://http://whatever..., which of course turns up nothing.

It may be some odd browser dependency, but I've seen it at least in several versions of Firefox...
It was a serious question, I didn't mean to sound snarky.

I'm asking if you think it'd be a better idea (from a security perspective) to keep customers on separate VMs. My understanding of this vulnerability is that it relies on several customers sharing a filesystem; if Heroku simply spawned a new instance (they're already running on EC2) for each customer, wouldn't this be mitigated?

Also, I was looking up info on Pivotal Tracker yesterday (after the announcement that they were going paid) and saw your comment.
Go for it! It's good fun & Friday, so lock yourself up and emerge victorious Monday morning.
We understand, it just annoys us.
Great, now I have to check and make sure it isn't going to damage my motorcycle too.