skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thats a fun easter egg. Any idea where a scoreboard might be?
Now to find the pilot brave enough to fly the thing.
It's not just the privacy angle, DDG also returns much more relevant results for my searches. YMMV.
I really dislike spammy, bloatware like Wild Tangent too. Our app is not like that, give it a try. It doesn't download anything without you're permission and doesn't pester you.

On 1) agreed, that alone is one of the reasons I really prefer Android. But the dialog you have to check to install non-market apps is pretty scary.

As for 2) give the app a try - I think you'll see for this kind of content a rich browsing experience is much nicer than the Android Market.
Well the thing is... a company needs to have employees that create value for itself.

I was once in the position of telling an employer that he was wrong to want to hire an extra Rails dev when we had a front end guy that had little work at the time and had the drive and fast learning capability to learn it in a week or two, at least to decent productive standards. The new hire was a disaster, and three months later was replaced by the guy that I said we could train. For more money than the new hire.

A lead developer should not be expected to know everything, but he needs to know how to solve problems, regardless of the medium, and regardless of the programming language. A lead developer should not only be expected to get into mobile development when required, but he should also be involved in the effort to pursue said mobile solution.
Joystiq has some more of my commentary on this and technical details:

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/19/kongregate-ceo-jim-greer-o...
Yeah, unless someone registers for your website, your not going to be able to do much more than tag a search term with an IP so you can know that someone arrived with search term x and did y on the website, but nothing about who that person is.

It depends which side of the fence your on really, if you use this kind of data to improve your business your for it. If you operate in areas that don't rely on it at all your more likely to be against it.
A quick (and perhaps slightly offtopic) question, what's DDG's revenue model? Is it just an experiment right now, and if so how is Gabriel funding this?
This article is idiotic. Android and Google Voice won't work without a telco provider like Verizon and AT&T. The article says nothing about Google building cell towers, so I don't understand the premise.
"Lulu handed me her 'surprise', which turned out to be a card,"
writes Chua in her explosive new memoir... "More accurately, it was
a piece of paper folded crookedly in half, with a big happy face on
the front. Inside, 'Happy Birthday, Mummy! Love, Lulu' was scrawled
in crayon above another happy face. I gave the card back to Lulu. 'I
don't want this,' I said. 'I want a better one – one that you've put
some thought and effort into. I have a special box, where I keep all
my cards from you and Sophia, and this one can't go in there.' I
grabbed the card again and flipped it over. I pulled out a pen and
scrawled 'Happy Birthday Lulu Whoopee!' I added a big sour face. …
'I reject this.'"

I would certainly call that child abuse, although I suppose Chua would call it "parenting"? To coerce Lulu into piano practice, Chua prevented her from using the washroom, and withheld food and affection until she could perform to her mother's satisfaction. That would qualify as abuse according the Adverse Childhood Experience Study. A lot of child abuse is rationalized by the perpetrator as just "strictness".
Unlike Dumbo, mrjob & hadoopy, Oozie isn't a Python Streaming library, so I'm not sure what you're looking for by 'others'?
Find the section of the T&C that most likely deals with why you were terminated. Fix your app to address that concern. Grovel and pray.

Whatever you do, don't slam it up on another url and keep going - because they'll take more drastic action - perhaps banning all of your apps.

I know an app that was in a grey area, he adjusted his app and was reinstated in a few days.
It's the same thing. If the company isn't paying dividends the stock price includes whatever dividends the company will pay out in the future. The value of the stock is the total value of all expected future dividends priced in today's dollars. And in Facebook's case investors think (or want you to believe) that the future profits will be pretty big.
Another example is Linear Programming - it is provably polynomial using the ellipsoid algorithm but people tend to use algorithms (such as simplex) which are not provably in P but run much faster in practice.
Just for those who don't see the error:

2(a^2 - ab) = a^2 - ab

On this line, a^2 - ab is 0 (look at line 2). You wind up dividing both sides by 0, thus resulting in the false proof.
Check here in the coming days: http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
I really don't think badges/ or any gamifciation is necessary, KISS. Isn't winning a free coffee after buying 10 coffees enough motivation to use the product. I really don't think the problem is convincing users to adopt its going to be getting businesses to adopt. If I see 10 places I frequent often all using this app for their loyalty program.. then I think its pretty obvious I would use it to.
Facebook has revenues of $500M/year - which allows them to be cash flow positive, no word on how much profit.
To be worth $50bn, 100x as much, it needs to find 100x as many users or earn 100x as much per user.

BMW has $50Bn of earnings for selling 1M cars/year to make twice as much it simply has to sell 2M cars
No, Evernote uses a freemium business model. The client is always free; you only have to pay if you store more than some X amount of data.
division by zero ?
I didn't mean to imply that it's another Python Streaming library. I included it because it's a library for working with Hadoop jobs. Unless I am mistaken in that? I haven't yet tried Oozie myself.
Some of them, yes. The only Asian guys I find attractive, platonically or romantically, are ones who tend to be more extroverted or seem more relaxed about life.
Development Tools for Scala Language
Facebook should use the same brilliant strategy that AOL did, and buy out a clearly sustainable big name company.

Maybe BMW, how about that?
I am impressed that this company has named their core product after something that everyone is taught to avoid from a very young age.

Probably not the best marketing move there :)
Using the Wikipedia page-to-page link database
Integration with Facebook, foursquare, and twitter. A lot beyond that, but it's a little premature to talk about it right now ;)

No game mechanics, right now we're focusing on real rewards. We'd love to add some gaming layer, but it can't be some sort of tack-on feature. It needs to be a fundamental part of the product, and we haven't figured out a great way to do that yet.
From your description it sounds like you'd be considered an online gambling operator by the SAFE Port Act in the US.
Front-end Maintainability with Sass and Style Guides
The handling of a <video> is outsourced to the OS.
Why not a Russian? For example the Russian Mathematics Olympiad is considered harder than the International Math Olympiad by many of the top contestants.

Edit: why downvoting?
Where by "open", Hixie means "highly controlled by myself and my vision for the web."

I wish Hixie would retire and get some new blood in there. He's done good work, but it's time to move on.
Yeah, the good news is that it's been proven time and again that humans will bet $1 if they've got good odds of winning $100. The bad news is that you're running a casino, so be sure you talk to a lawyer.
In theory yes, in practice you need to reify the stack (even for one-shot continuations). Clinger, Hartheimer and Ost have a really good survey paper of the different ways to do that:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/47221367/Clinger-Implementation-St...
Unfortunately that's a vimeo requirement. We had YouTube, but you can't set which frame shows before it plays.
Please, retire that stupid "joke". It's 22 years too old.
I'm guessing this isn't the proof that jchonphoenix referenced, because it has a fairly obvious error and most mathematicians would see it quite quickly.
Firefox 4 beta's user input tracker
Err, what? I won the Putnam, but that's a mathematics competition, not a computational complexity competition.

Edit: If the above comment doesn't make sense, it's because the comment I was replying to was "you won the Neumann" and has since been edited.
I always think that Scala lacks a good, deep IDE, but this is a handy list. Thanks.
Who is the narrator of the video? The voice sounds very familiar but maybe I'm just imagining things.

Will be mentioning to a restaurant down the street using traditional punch cards.
I interpreted dauphin's comment as sarcasm.
http://discoproject.org/

Thats another project of similar vein. Although it has native support for Python and you dont need to install Hadoop (which may be better for some).
Ask HN Again: anyone doing anything with SMS/coupons?
I've been talking with a convenient store owner who is doing an SMS coupon program which is working pretty well. We have been kicking around some ideas on how to expand it and I was wondering if anyone here has any experience in this domain? What are the major pitfalls? Looks like I can do 2 cent texting with Twilio and it costs about $12K/year for a short code. What else should I be weary of? Thanks for any info.
Right, it's just that there's a whole slew if you decide to leave the Python Streaming world (which I figured people reading this would care about).

Cascading, cascalog, wukong, innumerable others.
This is not that exciting: a malicious XSS or CSRF and PAF! an attacker writes on the user filesystem!
Indeed, you nailed it on the head. Signing up venues is the hard part; they do the leg work to sign up customers. There's a vested interest :)
Exactly, the privacy issue around http referrers is a red herring.
He has an about me page somewhere, but he sold a business a while back for a relatively large amount and I assume he could live off that forever, so money certainly isn't a concern for him.

Edit: found the info, $10m - http://investor.untd.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=328835
Someone had mentioned this when I pitched the idea. Couldn't the fees to play be considered a service? You are not betting, but instead solving a problem.
It's interesting that they'd risk the Streisand effect in order to instill fear into people who research these jailbreaks. Granted geohotz research already has significant media coverage, so additional air into the flame wont do all that much. Then again, in the case report it says that Sony wants geohotz research materials (his computers and his site) seized; which may imply that they think they can stop it from propagating. It's hard to say whether this is a weighed decision of Sony's or if it's simply their lawyers going after blood.
Why do we pile on with a dozen threads when Apple makes one shitty move, but say that we won't pile on google unless they make "5000+" shitty moves?
> - It not only tells you whether the formula is satisfiable or not, but gives you the satisfying values.

Any yes/no NP solver can be turned into one that does this with polynomial overhead. After finding there is a solution, you ask it the similar problem "does this have solution with the first bit set to true?", then "does this have a solution with the first bit set to <answer to previous question> and the second bit set to true?", and so forth until you've identified all bits.
DVD Rewinder.com: Home of the fastest DVD Rewinder
By "standard implementation", I mean something like "OpenSSL 0.9.8o". This helps me more, since I can be fairly certain that >0 experts have reviewed that code.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Yes, >0 experts have reviewed OpenSSL code. But <1 experts have reviewed all of the OpenSSL code. Did the bits which matter to you get reviewed? Who knows...
60mo Funded by Lightbank Thanks to a Tweet
How many people have FIOS? Where I'm sitting our costs haven't changed in 5 years, and our bandwidth has held steady.

Where I was sitting last year, costs haven't changed in 8 years and bandwidth has held steady. I'd say those eight years are the norm, and FIOS is something of an exception.
"I want to see the same results (more or less) on whichever computer I'm on"

Even if only to stay aware of where your sites (and those of clients) are going to be positioned when customers search for them.
To all those people thinking that gaming the system this way is fine and they'd do it: Let's not say it's you with a cancerous liver, let's say it's your mom, child, or sibling. and they're near death. And let's not say that they'd get a liver by gaming the system, but let's say instead that the doctor just provided you with the news that your loved one will not be getting a liver in time because someone wealthy cut in line and that your mom/child/brother will not live long enough to get a transplant. NOW how do you feel about gaming the system?
I did consider that, but the NSA knows perfectly well how to attack CTR nonce collisions, and anyone looking at the diff between version 1.0.27 and version 1.0.28 can see what the change was; so I didn't disclose anything which potential attackers couldn't already figure out easily.
Restrict the platform to Mac OS X or Linux (in the sidebar on the left) and the praise curve changes dramatically.
I have a question:

Why is it that anytime google is involved, their actions have to be characterized as either "good" or "evil"?

When other companies commit even horrifically unsavory actions, no one calls them evil. We may call for their prosecution, or say that they're being monopolistic or unfair but the terminology is at least descriptive and not moralistic.
I think that all depends on the purpose of the site. If I were paying a subscription to access the site I would be within my rights to object. As it is, with HN being a free service, built to be the application spurring the development of Arc, whose reference implementation is intended for exploring language design and not performance, I wouldn't choose the word "shameful" to describe this situation.
You were certainly justified in questioning what I was talking about. I didn't know there were so many others actually. Thanks for the names of a few, though.
Never used real punchcards?? That's impressive... something like ~94% of Americans have them laying around. Whenever I pitch Punchd to a group of people they all have punchcards and they all always forget them at home.
If you choose to. We pushed north of 800 r/s in production, and just shy of 4k in our LAN, that's using stock hunchentoot with just mere customization.

This guy here broke the 10k barrier:

http://john.freml.in/teepeedee2-c10k
I made mistakes, which were my own doing like retrieving my personal input data for the contest answer before I started coding. I got pretty frustrated when it said my time limit had expired 10 minutes afterwards. I should of read the rules more carefully about the submission process, but even then the rules were not very clear.

What they need to do in future is have a better user interface that warns the user that they will only have six minutes to submit their answer after retrieving their input and then include a javascript countdown clock telling the user how much time they have remaining.
I planned on modifying tarsnap to work on local files and upload to different resources (dropbox, local, etc) but as I dug in and looked at the license I noticed this little gem in COPYING...

Exactly. That is deliberate. I don't want to end up competing with my own code.

Why even provide source if the license doesn't allow me to do anything with said source?

So that people can audit it if they wish to do so.
About that slowness on Twitter…
Comprehensive list of articles about NoSQL databases
This system is for highway traffic, there's no traffic lights. The maximum number of vehicles in a road train is 5. Obviously it has all kinds of failure recovery systems and in fact some top-end BMWs can already safely pull over to the side of the road if the driver suddenly has a heart attack or is otherwise incapacitated.
The purpose of patents is not to prevent copying ideas. It's to promote progress (c.f. US Constitution).
Google Voice now lets you port your own phone number
Unfortunately, normal people don't know how to turn them off or use the https version. Google could do a lot of things to make this easier.

The best would be to just prevent ad networks from collecting this personal information altogether. The only reason I've heard against doing so is that webmasters need search terms for SEO, but they can get them via Webmaster tools.

Failing that, they could make a setting in the http version that turns off the headers. They could also make a setting that defaults to https. And they could make https easier to get to. Currently you can't even do https://google.com/ (you have to type in www.)
I'm not an expert but I think they already have that loophole covered, hence why promotions with prizes are always "no purchase necessary".
It might be worth trying the ScalaIDE Eclipse plugin - I think it works with Helios now. That said, I had so many issues using it half a year ago I went and learnt to use emacs with scala-mode, which, combined with sbt ~test, has worked out brilliantly.

The only thing I'd really appreciate an IDE for is mass refactoring (my project is at a point now where it's all a bit badly organised).
It's definitely all JS. There are hooks to plug in specific things, but not any arbitrary behavior.

code folding is a nice feature though, and one I'd expect we'll see along the way. code folding requires some work though, because it changes how line positions are computed.
So once again, it's a problem with local government - a government that is a lot more responsive than the FCC or any federal solution. If the teclos can manipulate your local gov, imagine how effective they'll be at the national level.
Feature request: Notify me when I enter a location that uses the service.

It's just as easy to forget about punch cards on your phone as it is to forget about them in your wallet.

This looks like a great product. I can't wait for you to expand your venues.
Also worth adding to the list are Querulous and Configgy, which are (respectively) a database abstraction layer which is optimised for running raw SQL (it's not an ORM, it just abstracts away 90% of the JDBC bullshit), and a config/logging library.

Also, sbt is fantastic. sbt ~test is a cheap form of CI: every time you save a file, your project gets recompiled and your tests re-run; it makes it really easy to get IDE-like error detection out of a simple text editor, and encourages you to write tests for your code.
This is probably more worthy of a blog post.

To summarize in a few lines. Backbone.js has been wonderful for creating the MVC backend for the application. It uses Localstorage and syncs with a REST server on demand.

jQuery Mobile is still very rough on the edges. Most of the headaches I've had have been with getting jQuery mobile to work properly with the backbone controllers.

If jQuery Mobile was less buggy, performed better and was more Backbone.js friendly, then I would highly recommend taking this route.

But even though its not quite there yet, it's entirely possible to build a multi-device mobile app using backbone+jqmobile+phonegap. Just be prepared to hack both libraries.
Why would he? He has no advertising to use it for. He doesn't want the government to be able to subpoena him. (They can't ask for information he doesn't have.) And it would pretty much kill the business he's been building for 3 years if it came out that he was logging information that he's been loudly claiming that he doesn't.

He also wrote a blog post on how to change nginx's defaults to not log IP and user agent: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/how-to-not-log-p...
Yeah this is dumb, should have read the OP.
Most of the details are from this Quora post: http://www.quora.com/Andrew-Brown-2/Facebook-Hacker-Cup-Reso...

Am I the only one who thinks Quora should only host questions and answers? I hope this isn't part of a growing trend to have what are essentially blog posts on Quora.
That's the result of bad post-processing on the image.
"Pour encourager les autres" - they don't care about Goehotz, this is aimed at lots of universities who are now drawing up guidelines about the legal consequence of doing any research into computer security.

If you're Ross Anderson and Cambridge you can tell them to stuff it, if you are a new junior prof at Nowheresville U you might be persuaded to look at a new research area.

50 years ago the oil companies tried similar things to block Clair Patterson's research into lead in gasoline. If Caltech hadn't been so stubborn or there had been a law against analyzing gasoline we would still be breathing lead.
Akamai was arguably paying Comcast for carrying their transit traffic. But they never should have been paying for traffic with a final destination in Comcast's network (peering traffic).

As a Tier 1 ISP, Level3 does not require Comcast to carry any transit traffic for it. If Level3 has to pay to deliver traffic that Comcast's customers themselves have requested, Comcast is clearly charging Level3 (and by extension, Netflix) for access to the customers on their network. If Comcast broke off its peering agreement with Level3, all that traffic would instead be going through a different transit provider. Comcast would then likely have to pay to receive that traffic.

Comcast is in a position to charge for access to their customers because they have a monopoly on access to those customers. Those customers may not even have other choices for broadband internet access, because infrastructure has such high barriers to entry.

Because the consumer broadband market has high barriers to entry,[1] there is little competition.[2] That lack of competition in infrastructure is now distorting the market for internet applications, possibly the closest thing to perfectly competitive market that has ever existed,[3] by raising both the barrier to entry and transaction costs.

Yes, regulation would distort the market. In a market that is tending towards monopoly or oligopoly, this is a good thing. Net neutrality is an ill-defined idea, but I think we can agree that we want the market for internet applications to remain as free of a market as possible.

[1] This is not the case under regulatory regimes that require line-sharing, where the consumer broadband market is decoupled from the infrastructure market. Line sharing is not required in the US.

[2] Infrastructure markets are natural monopolies <http://www.linfo.org/natural_monopoly.html>; due to economies of scale.

[3] A definition of perfect competition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
In the last few weeks, I've talked to a lot of people that care. And in general people do care: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/21/web-surfers-troubled-...

I can tell you that normal people who care also don't know about HTTPS or how to use it. I'm all for Google making it easier to do so, or otherwise stop this personal information from leaking. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2122431 for some ideas.

Also, FWIW, HTTPS alone doesn't solve the issue completely, as HTTPS->HTTPS traffic still leaks.
An ad that says "Google, Bing, Yahoo all do bad thing X. Our search engine that you never heard of before this ad does not!", one response in the readers mind might be "If all the ones I heard of do X, maybe it isn't bad".

If an ad is going to mention competitors, it is best to just name one competitor in cases like this, where the reader might not have heard of you before.

If the market is more even, mentioning others might be OK. For example, if Honda put in some new safety feature in the CR-V, it would be OK for them to name the Toyota RAV4 and Subaru Forester in their ads, because all three companies are well known to most readers.