skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook marketing had nothing to do with those numbers. There were thousands of people waiting for the release of the song due to a tweet by Kanye earlier in the week. When the song was released most of those people went to their favorite music blog to hear it.
What, no Edward Tufte?? ;-D
Sorry guys, but most of the comments in this thread remind me of why we IT people have so much bad PR to overcome.

We're blaming the user for our mistake. That's like blaming the cow for leaving the pasture because one of us forgot to lock the gate.

The simple fact is that this user should have never been able to be in a position for this to happen.

Where were the IT security policies and procedures? Why was mission critical data on someone's c: drive? When (if ever) was the last audit?

We curse enterprise IT departments because they are so slow at getting things done, but they are really, really good at putting in place the things that would never allow this to happen. I have customers with strict policies regarding the protection of mission critical data, and I bet that none of it is as important as what was routinely put onto this laptop and paraded around town.

Public companies are responsible to their shareholders and the SEC. Private companies are responsible to their investors and creditors. Why weren't the same protections put in place to the trustees and taxpayers in this case?

Every nanosecond this researcher has to worry about performing routine IT overhead is a nanosecond not spent on critical research. The technological solutions to problems like this have been around for years. Why weren't they in place?

It's about time for IT to stop blaming the user and fix the problem.
Computer Modern helped me learning.
Picture of the Day: The Heaviest Black Hole Ever Recorded
You Can’t Go There. Who Censors Who On The Web (Infographic)
Fair enough; a misnomer on my part. However, it's disingenuous to tell the US consumers that the core inflation is 1.2%, when their gas price has doubled (from 2009)
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Tweet digest – week 02
DHS puts weight behind USC "mini-Internet" security testbed
already opened 2 accts.
CCB and ICBC.
Interesting idea...

I agree with revorad - turn autoplay off! If you are worried people won't start the music, have an overlay info popup that points to the play button or something.

Also, the first thing I wanted to do when I came to the site was turn the volume down. All the controls look the same, and the volume controls are not in a place that is similar to audio/video controls that I am accustomed to so it took me forever to find. Maybe make the music player controls stand out a bit more, or put them under the video where people expect them..

Also, FYI, the control layout is messed up in Chrome.
The picture of the day is not a picture today.
You're suppose to write the dot after the end of the parenthesis not before !
I like the look. Have you customised the playlist for me somehow?? A lot of those bands are my favourites.

I love free music sites, so I'll gladly use yours. But I already spend a lot of time on last.fm and thesixtyone.com. Why should I use yours?
If two spaces is right and one space is wrong, why is it that I just opened up a half dozen books and saw that they only use single spaces? If two spaces is better for readability, why can't I find books using two spaces?
The experimental noise band/art collective Throbbing Gristle used to systematically mis-spell certain words in all their writings (e.g. "the" -> "thee", "of" -> "ov") so people would have to concentrate to read them.

This reminded me of that (esp. the "salt:p_pp_r" thing).
[Defcon 18] What happens when you steal a hackers computer
If there's no profit involved, you could probably share the idea and gauge feedback that way.
> I'm in the same boat (still am). I hardly ever back up my data.

How much data are we talking about here? <10 Gigabytes? Solutions like Dropbox are just so simple for data in that range that you'd be crazy not to use them.
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couplefew things:

- Autoplay is bad

- For 'Swell Season', the album track was highlighted twice, the second for the live version. Might want to use tighter matching.

- It took forever for the left-side content to show up. I don't care if you're dependent on third-party APIs and it's their fault.

All in all pretty clean though. Might want to expose a little more magic in the recommendations. Why was Swell Season played for me?
We luv voxels: why Voxatron is an exciting indie shooter
You're right - probably shouldn't have dismissed it as just being in the idea stage.

I still stand behind the other point though - the assumption behind their lawsuit is that they would have been able to do what Zuckerberg did - which is pure speculation. I'm of the opinion that their legal troubles and outcome end up making them substantially more than their idea would have anyway. So walk away with a boat load of money, lesson learned, and get your name behind some positive press instead of negative.
In the case of the computer programmers, they were most certainly correct. Is the author really so quick to condemn while not realizing that programming is almost always done with monospaced fonts?

Anyway, I never have to worry about this these days anyway. Worrying about trivialities like this is what LaTeX is for ;)
While somewhat practical and user pleasing, it's wrong. If you can't type what you see, is it really proper typing?

Btw. I've never heard of using two spaces after a sentence. Is this an American habit?
Among other things, it makes it easier to jump around by sentence in a text editor. I think the late Erik Naggum of comp.lang.lisp fame was always a two-spacer for this reason or some related one.
I still dont get what drives people to pay more for a digital download than an actual boxed version of the game.
I also dont get why publishers dont try to reach a bigger audience with lower prices instead, which should roughly equal to the same amount of revenue.
I think this guy needs to get clear on the distinctions between typewriting, typesetting, and word processing. If you're typing on a typewriter, it sounds like it's generally considered admissible to use two (monospaced) spaces after a word.

As far as typesetting goes, TeX makes an inter-sentence space a bit wider (but less than 2x) than an inter-word space, unless you tell it otherwise. Since I trust Knuth more than this guy, I suspect that's at least considered typographically admissible.

If you're using a word processor with a monospaced font, it seems like it makes sense to follow the typewriter convention (two spaces between sentences). If you're using a word processor with a proportional font, and you want to follow the TeX typesetting convention, I think you're stuck: it's not trivial for a computer to distinguish between an inter-sentence space and an inter-word space (because of things like "etc."). So if you use a single space between sentences, it's going to be smaller than it would be in the typeset document, and if you use a double space, it's going to be larger than it would be in the typeset document. Or you could conveniently decide to follow the "french spacing" convention, in which inter-sentence spaces are the same size as inter-word spaces. Which is apparently what the author favors.
If that is your issue, then a better way is to have your own server, encrypt your emails and ask your contacts to do also. Once your mails are hosted once on a server, you can't know where you data goes and how long it stays there. One minute is more than enough to archive an email on a warehouse.
In most cases like this, the original creator will be always be the "authoritative" source, so unless you really screw that up, you'll always have an advantage over others who try to profit from your work.
3 Young Companies That Knocked It Out of the Park in 2010
Why would China do that? They already have plenty of foreign reserves ($2.85 trillion and growing - enough to buy Spain's GDP two times over), and they seem to be struggling with inflation. I guess the Chinese government is not as sure as the WSJ that the renminbi will appreciate.
Apple and 37Signals don't show products until they're ready. That works for them. Sahil of letscrate.com committed publicly to an iPhone app before even having an idea of what to make. That worked well for him.

The talking heads in this industry are popular because they commit to one side of the debate. The truth is, it depends.

Personally, my startup didn't start talking about our idea until we had prototypes made. We were so concerned that our competition would take our idea that we wanted to wait until we were a few steps ahead in the race. Guess what happened? They came out with a similar product anyway and now we risk looking like the Living Social to their Groupon. A good idea is a good idea and someone's already thought of it.

Don't go nuts and start yapping about every idea that crosses your mind because then you risk looking like a talker instead of a doer. Once you have some solid work in place, consider talking about it.

And to put my money where my mouth is, I'll tell you what my startup is up to. We make physical video game buttons that you can stick on your iPad, iPhone, etc. We plant to launch in a few weeks :)
If your new search engine gets enough traffic to be worth it, spammers will just target your search engine too

I think you're dead wrong here. I only need to catch a sliver of Google/Bing traffic for such a search engine to be worth it. Let's say I get a 1% share of traffic -- which I would characterize as wildly successful -- why would it be worth the while of SEO spammers? How many resources can you throw at something worth 1% of your income?
This is really interesting. Being only tangentially aware of the entire Facebook saga (I haven't even seen the movie yet) I had thought the Winklevosses were just guys with an idea. I don't know where I got that impression though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU
Redis is asynchronous, try doing it with a few more connections.
> A better way to go would be to use moving averages, but that's too complicated to explain to reporters.

Yes, MA is the first thing that came to mind when reading your big paragraph. It would be a real shame if journalistic incompetency truly is the reason we have not adopted it.
Top 5 Feature Requests For Google Tasks
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There is something called 'gold' my friend!
For those interested, this PDF from the Institute of Plant Genetics and Biotechnology Slovak Academy of Sciences mentioned in the article provides a short exert on the process they used:

http://pribina.savba.sk/ugbr/tl_files/download/COST%20FA603....

The section in question is titled "Comparative proteomics of seed development of soybean in Chernobyl area" and is located on page 41 of the PDF.
I know about stop and mute buttons, but in the grand scheme of things I'm 1000% more likely to hit the back button.
So, are you saying, for example, we should get subjects with good copies in these experiments to spend the same amount of time reading as those with bad copies?

Or, do you think it's some other factor?
99% classifier? So I get to have a search that's like Google/Bing for all the non-spammy searches, and it only gets 1/100th the spam for the spammy searches? I think I could sell a proposition like that!
I have a desktop with dual monitors at home, and two media center pcs connected to the two flat screen tvs (useful for , hulu, and torrents). I have a laptop with 15" screen I end up using most of the time and I take this back and forth to work, even though I have a desktop with dual monitors at work too. I also carry my iPad everywhere as well. The desktop at home is the least used, and it is what I would get rid of first, though it is useful to remote into.
Reading HN has been the kick in the butt I needed to release my own software.
Every day I read articles on this site about how code optimization tricks, or how to make money selling apps, or to how to create the perfect landing page(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2001501) and it all culminated in finally trying to put all the pieces together and actually build something.

So I finally built something and wanted to show you all. It's an application I built for the Mac app store called Space Gremlin(http://www.spacegremlinapp.com). It's a dirt simple utility for visualizing your hard drive to clean up disk space, and I'm currently waiting for Apple to approve it.

It's built for Mac 10.6 and if you want to give it a try here's a link to a review copy, it's fully unlocked but expires in 4 months. http://www.spacegremlinapp.com/external/Space%20Gremlin%20Review.zip

I'd love to know what you guys think and as a bonus maybe help me figure out a good price to charge for it in the app store. Thanks!
I felt compelled to look at the source and search for '.[space][space]'

At least they take their own advice.
Worldwide Internet Use Approaches 2 Billion
> Can I paten a technique for saving people's lives that requires no tools and anyone can learn, but no human being has ever done it before (intentionally)?

The fact that anyone would even ask this is a far more dire social commentary than an oddly unoriginal patent. If something has a $0 cost outside of basic education and consistently saves lives, but you patent it and make money off it, what kind of person are you?
Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.
For some positive examples look to FreshBooks. They were stuck with horrible, horrible spaghetti code for years, then they decided to implement a portion of it slowly with Python. They made this all work by keeping the Python portion of the project very clean and strict (massive test coverage, very modular, very consistent) and had the existing PHP talk to it. Slowly but surely they were able to rip away the horrible parts. As a side effect the PHP layer ended up getting much cleaner. It was the opposite of the broken window syndrome. Another positive aspect about having a stable multi-language system was that when they really wanted to use a library from a third language they were comfortable just wrapping it up in a thin API and proceeding like normal.

The thing with re-writes is that you only really hear the horror stories because people like to talk about failing companies that stemmed from something technical. The good re-writes never get much press, and neither do the companies that slowly fade to black. I think SAS could end up going that route if they don't completely rewrite their systems and introduce a more friendly coding system.
The only irreplaceable data I have is photos/videos of the family. It's getting to be about 10 GB - I've got two hard drives in my PC that I'm planning to mirror the data across. At the very least it'll save me from hard drive failure. Theft/acts of god are something I haven't planned for. I have thought about burning a bunch of DVDs (of just the photos) and storing them somewhere else (work/relatives/bank).

I use dropbox to sync passwords and some docs from work/home. I'd like to use dropbox (or something like carbonite) to back up the rest, but frankly I'm too cheap/lazy to go through with it.
sounds like ouhsc.edu needs to go google!
Just be be sure we're clear on the "crime", it was that he guessed Palin's yahoo mail security question "Where did you meet your spouse?" to which the answer was "Wasilla High".

source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/09/palin-e-mail-ha/

He didn't even have to guess or crack a password. This is really a major security flaw on yahoo's part, which still exists. The fix in the meantime is to avoid accounts with such questions, or to answer them with random strings of characters.

Should this even be a crime? I propose that to keep something secret you should have reasonable security measures. Easily guessable security questions like mother's maiden name as used by banks should not be considered legitimate protection any more than using a bag twisty to hold a gate closed should be considered the same as a chain and padlock.
That's really an interesting find.
"a burlap bag filled with a mixture of turds and diamonds"

nailed it
No idea why the parent got downvoted twice (i upvoted to counter one of them). If (and I sincerely doubt it to be the actual case, but the story suggests it is) the researcher is doing paid research and not backing it up at all, those involved in process design (or the researcher themself if there was adequate and clear process guidelines) should be held responsible for some kind of recklessness bordering on fraud. After all, they cannot prove that they have actually done any research right now and someone could similarly take millions and just "lose a laptop". It is comparable to not keeping proper financial records which is typically criminal.
In which the author uses none of his judgement in creating the rankings. But seriously, Edward Yourdon on the list?
مشاهدة مباراة مصر وكينيا
I can't really say what will work for you, but here's how I do it: our company only has laptops, so my work (web dev) machine is a laptop. In the office though I've a 24" monitor, along with external keyboard and mouse. Essentially the laptop is just a portable cpu when I'm sitting in the office. The nice thing is that I can take it with me in meeting rooms, go code on a sofa for a while, work in the train or wherever I feel like. It just takes 10seconds to unplug stuff and I'm good to go.

At home I have the same keyboard/mouse/monitor, backed by a aging desktop machine, but I can still plug the laptop in the whole system fairly easily. The monitor has two inputs so there is a spare cable for the laptop, and all the external stuff is plugged into the monitor which has one unique usb cable that I can plug either in the desktop (using an extender sitting on the desk) or in the laptop.

For data syncing, well the code sits in git repositories on machines that are accessible at any time. The rest is mostly provided by google apps or Dropbox-synced for the rare things that can't be cloud apps. I even have applications sitting with all their data in dropbox, so that I don't have to replicate settings changes between machines, and also for backup purposes.
It says something when Ruby's notoriously shonky documentation is the paragon in an example like this. The comparison with, say Python, is even more illuminating.
Computer's appearance on Jeopardy more than just a numbers game
He is helping in the short run and might be harming in the long run.

Read the aforementioned comment.
Texas - Budget Proposal Calls for at least 8,000 Layoffs
If you buy a car, it comes with seat belts. Safety is not optional - it's built in.

If you buy a computer, safety of your data is seen as a luxury add-on, like leather seats.

It's crazy when you think about it.
Really, this was worth downvotes? I thought it was a little amusing given the 'til death ultimatum, even if beyond the OP's control.
For some reason, I kept picturing Dexter (particularly S5) when reading this. I wish he used his intellect to somehow get back at all those other f-ing child molesters.
The BBC certainly know how to choose their pictures.
Indeed, more like a well-runned corporation with 1.3 billion workers.
Libtap: Test Anything Protocol library for C
OK, that’s the upside from the depositor’s point of view. What is the upside from the Bank of China’s point of view? Given the massive dollar reserves that the Chinese government has accumulated from its trade surplus, why should they sell off renminbi in exchange for even more dollars? If the RMB/USD exchange rate is almost certain to increase, why would the bank want to give up an appreciating asset in exchange for a depreciating one?
What -- quotes straddling punctuation?

I don't know if it's "an American thing" but, as a resident of the USA, I find it "a stupid thing". Note my period outside the quotes.

Periods go inside quotes, in my world at least, when the quoted text originally included either a comma or period at the point where the quotation ends. Otherwise, the period goes outside the quotes, because putting it inside the quotes makes it an inaccurate quote.

Damned journalistic typesetters are idiots.
How many guesses am I allowed before it's a crime?
I doubt your books display themselves in monospaced fonts. My technical literature more often than not does.
It seems that if the goal is to diversify, there are plenty of other options. That isn't to say that this one is bad, but I'm deeply skeptical of any investment once the press starts running articles about why you should buy into it.
Accel Partners' 10 Greatest Hits
I like how he so emphatically says that it is wrong, and cites style guides that say it's OK to use 2 spaces.

From the HLA source he cited (http://www.mla.org/style_faq3):
"... As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor or editor requests that you do otherwise."
"Palin went on to claim to the court that the email hack paralysed her campaign to become the USA's first female vice president."

Palin has done 100x worse than this kid, but she doesn't get caught because she paralyzes other candidates campaigns the legal way. By not getting caught when dredging dirt on other people's campaign. However Palin was still unsuccessful because now we have a muslim Kenyan extremist turban-wearing islamic terrorist fist-bumper as president.
this implies that you can detect the spammy sites in the first place

In essence, you've just admitted the feasibility of rating the "spammyness" of keyword tuples, provided you can do the classifier.

Second, of course this is possible! SEO-spammers must have some way of determining what to spam. They must have some metric for determining how they can make money and for targeting their efforts for the most profitable scraped content, determining what keyword-tuples to optimize for. An anti-SEO spam engine just has to take the same steps. Just as email spammers put on their email-filterer hats to evade filters, anti-SEO spam engines just have to think like SEO spammers to figure out what SEO spammers are likely to target.
As the article points out, Java itself isn't most popular in the niches it was supposed to fill. I don't think it's really appropriate to talk of what they were grown to solve. What they are actually used for is far more illuminating, and while Ruby is encroaching more and more on Java's "home turf," especially now that JRuby has the momentum and capability it has, you can't really say the same the other way.
So it's like the Internet? That's been done :)
I do 3 spaces now. Working myself up to 4.
You don't need any remote or sync tool when you only have one computer. I got myself a beefy gaming laptop and it's the only thing I use. I try to move it less instead of always carrying it around because it weights more, but in the end I think it's better than having mutliple setups.
Here is the original story from Carnegie Mellon University on the topic:

http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2011/January/jan13_fruitflyn...
Because spam is cheap and easy, far easier to produce than to fight, you can spam in your sleep with automated tools. Let's take your 1% example, that's millions of searches a day, well worth a spammer's time and effort. Some people will spam your search engine just because you say they can't, and that kills your unique selling point straight away.