skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Paypal changes User Agreement for Indian users, again.
Just received this from paypal.

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As part of our commitment to provide a high level of customer service, we would like to give you a 30-day advance notice on changes to our user agreement for India.

With effect from 1 March 2011, you are required to comply with the requirements set out in the notification of the Reserve Bank of India governing the processing and settlement of export-related receipts facilitated by online payment gateways ("RBI Guidelines").

In order to comply with the RBI Guidelines, our user agreement in India will be amended for the following services as follows:
Any balance in and all future payments into your PayPal account may not be used to buy goods or services and must be transferred to your bank account in India within 7 days from the receipt of confirmation from the buyer in respect of the goods or services; and

Export-related payments for goods and services into your PayPal account may not exceed US$500 per transaction.
We seek your understanding as we continue to employ our best efforts to comply with the RBI Guidelines in a timely manner.

We regret any inconvenience caused to you and hope the advance notice will enable you to plan your future use of our services accordingly. For further information, click here.

If you have any questions, please contact PayPal customer support by logging into your PayPal account and clicking on ‘contact us’ at the bottom of the page. We sincerely thank you for your patience and continued support.

Sincerely,
The PayPal Team

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Sounds bleak!, What does this mean for the general freelancers in India?
I'm getting a segmentation fault on 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10. Anyone know what's going on?

Edit: Removing the ~/.Sublime Text 2 folder fixed things. The segmentation fault only started after I restarted my laptop.
That's great. There really is a big need for something like this, and I look forward to checking it out when it's live.
I think it's $20/show per season, whereas cable runs ~$60/month.
The amusing thing is that there are dedicated GSM boards available for almost less than the cost of a cell phone:

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10138

$50.
How would an algorithm detect viewer satisfaction?
Worth checking out:
First Interactive Graphic Novel for iPad is about CIA’s involvement in Iran (1979)
http://cognitocomics.com/operation-ajax/
No they didn't. And proving correctness of software isn't the same as solving the halting problem. You're confusing formal verification and static analysis (that doesn't mean that the latter doesn't work). Please, google Curry-Howard Isomorphism and Rice's Theorem, will ya?
The only valid measurement of code quality: WTFs/minute
How to access and use Android's hidden debug menu
Would I call the Crusades a style of Christianity? The Inquisition? Yes, I would, to both of those, and yes I would to both of yours.

Religions are not entities, we can only judge them in the context of what people do in the name of them.
I served in the bulgarian army with this weapon, and it was very easy to handle. That's all I can say

But every weapon was a bit off, so you had to get used to it (I guess that might be the same for all weapons).
You're right - I forgot about section 4.4. Made a note of that.
Shift Register Design in Verilog
Presumably whoever is triggering the bomb has a better vantage point to inflict the most damage. From the linked article: Islamist terrorists in Russia often use mobile phones as detonators. The bomber's handler, who is usually watching their charge, sends the bomber a text message in order to set off his or her explosive belt at the moment when it is thought they can inflict maximum casualties.
Disagree. There's actually a pretty significant collection of answers around the "Why is X popular?" tag, though most of the questions are about startups and traction, etc. "Why is Instagram popular?" is the perfect question for Quora.
Cool, but the author switched the pictures of Thompson and Ritchie.
For one thing, eFreedom.com actually answers your question. This is different from ExpertsExchange (which promises you might get an answer if you fork over $, yeah right) or eHow which only sometimes answers your question, and if it does, does the worst possible job that could possibly be done.

Community sites, at least in their early phases, need to focus on getting people to put content in more than they need to focus on making it easy for people to get it out. Delicious is the classic example: it's a roach motel which makes it very easy to put your bookmarks in, but doesn't provide a useful browsing interface for your and other people's bookmarks (other than having a list of recently hot for various tags.)

Particularly in the semantic age I think there's a lot of room for remixing CC content to improve browsing and discoverability.
To me, the biggest lesson I've learn from game programming tips and tricks was to not model the world exactly. Just model it enough to trick the eye. My first inclination was, "but of course you need the splats where the rain drop line ends! How would it make sense otherwise?" But it's not until you see the video that you get that, hey that worked well enough.

I imagine it's applicable to other realms of programming as well, like web programming. We should question if we really need something on the page, or if there's just some way to fake it or get away with doing less. Or same with scheduling notifications to be delivered. Does it really need to be real-time? Or can we just cheat a little since the tolerance is much higher?
It is acceptable to rank these websites for keywords related to torrents and downloads. But, those auto-generated pages has been ranking even for keywords not related to torrents/downloads.
There's a 14 day expiry on that domain name (at least on 8.8.8.8, google's DNS server). So you should be good for something close to that, my guess, up to 14d - 6h from when the BGP routes were dropped.

So your main issue is for .eg urls that are not cached in the DNS hierarchy you are using. Basically the root servers will direct you to one of (approx) three eg. root servers. These are probably down, or unreachable (due to BGP drops).

To my (basic) understanding of DNS, once your local server knows that ns[1-4].google.com is responsible for this domain, it doesn't need to go to the eg./eg.com. root servers to get updates.

And yes, you're probably getting directed to a "local" version of google.com.eg.
When we are closer to launch I'll send you an email.
I tried, I couldn't cope with the writing style. Is it really worth me pushing through it?
How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony
I'm sure you can get a Nokia for half the price and hassle.
Ironically, the one entry it completely fails at is this one.
Facebook forcing devs to use their credit system, takes 30% cut on each dollar
I ran across this a few months myself while searching for bicycle info. Note that this is completely different than the spam content (SO, eFreedom, etc.) issue.

I wanted to learn more about the bianchi infinito and what I found was a number of web stores selling bicycles at impossible prices. I mean oscommerce or zencart or whatever instances of legitimate looking web stores. Then when you look closer they're mostly in Indonesia and in order to complete the purchase you have to bank wire the money.

I think it's spilling over from alibaba and similar sites where 99% of the vendors are scams. Now those vendors are creating whole ecommerce web presences to make their scam sales.

The stores I saw didn't usually make the first page of results. Usually third or fourth. Sometimes second. Anyway I was a bit shocked out how many fake stores there were and how they ranked as highly as many legitimate bike shops.
I just added two more hotkeys. Here's what we have:

j or right-arrow - down
k or left-arrow - up
c - toggle top comment
d - toggle article content
enter - follow article link
shift+enter - open article link in new tab

Enjoy!
No, because Google search doesn't intentionally pollute other sites with aggregated content. I don't see Google search pages in Bing's results, outranking original content. I only see Google results if I go to google.com and specifically request them. That's the difference.
@spolsky An example of a company that was hurt by the CEO being a dick? Um, I don't know, how about every single one? This is why most CEOs don't do customer service. Especially one that has eleventy billion users and a ton of money.

People often confuse being curt like this with being effective. Often it's just some guy who had a bad day, is an insufferable asshole or some combo of the above. Customer service and 1 on 1 s with users should never be handled by people like that, though.
That's a bug. I will fix.

UPDATE: fixed
I'm sure they are. And regular old phones are apparently working (who'd have thought it!!!) so modem to modem, bbs style, is an option to bridge wifi/packet gaps.
The people who make the bombs and orchestrate the bombing are rarely the ones who end up blowing themselves up.

In fact, the people who end up getting their guts smeared everywhere aren't committing suicide in the way that westerners think of it, they have generally been brainwashed and coerced, either deliberately or just from living in that sort of environment. The people who wear the bombs are rarely the real "bombers".
seancron is right, http://geekstack.com. If you want to stay informed, you can sign up for the newsletter and/or to be a playtester. http://geekstack.com/playtester-signup/
Cheap Nokia GSM phones are probably much easier as they just have to throw in a SIM card and replace the vibrate motor with a connection to the detonator

http://bit.ly/fF3Ggu
What no Hofstadter? For shame!
terrorists disable vibrate, enable auto-answer and start using voltage going into speaker as detonators...

...now automated periodic calls are mandatory in America.
If they're lucky.
Awesome. Thanks a lot!
Good luck with that. I stopped reading TC (AOL) about 4 month ago.
...and the friendships he had created
This question comes up often, we should all have a Federated Social Web FAQ we can point to. :)

There was a Federated Social Web summit in Portland in July 2010, organized by StatusNet, and possibly another one coming up this summer. We have a mailing list, and there's fledgling W3C working group involvement.

We're all interested in how to shape a protocol that we can all use. The territory is a little wild west at this point, so some of our approaches differ, but this is a major component of the work all of us are doing.
I created a site that uses Google CSE to do just this. The link is:
http://blacklist-search.appspot.com/
Or failure is the new success metric, when you are partly owned by a cable company.
Yes, they sell copied stuff. Here in China there are huge organizations handling these things. No surprise that in some of the examples the wording sound very Chinese and even some Chinese characters appear. I am pretty certain where those guys are located.
awesome, sounds like the beginnings of a new ad platform differentiator
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33156
never mind I just went out and found a script for it...
I'm aiming for happy users. We have enough unused protocols specs floating around.

Happy users come from good web and mobile clients and a good project goal (open, privacy you control, multiple server codebases, business friendly (they can spin up a social network without hooking their wagon to FB))

Good clients need good APIs: secure, realtime, mobile friendly (quick syncing, good geolocation). APIs also need to be easy to implement for people familiar with http (the core protocol leverages XMPP's message passing architecture)

And all this needs a good architecture that builds off good federated systems.

So the end goal is to build something the right way and for the right reasons. If we can execute on that, I believe we will make users happy.

A good solution will sidestep every potential fail moment. We've sidestepped a few so far and I'm really happy with the quality of developers that are contributing client and server work. The good protocol is incidental.
I helped start http://bootstrapped.it (@bootstrappedit) where we interview bootstrapping entrepreneurs and try and get them exposure.

I agree, there needs to be more news about startups. Good to see that other people are doing this as well! There are plenty of startups to write about.
I've watch a number of "inside NK" documentaries and I agree, this is one of the better ones (despite the hipster host's somewhat condescending attitude). There was some good footage of interaction with NK common folks and the host keep trying to push the buttons of the guide. Give you a sense of how repressed they are without even knowing.
Or you could use color cycling:
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0
(choose 'Highland Ruins - Rain' and show the options to see the palette).
Crazy in these modern times, of course.
But how could you target an untargetable card? Face down cards aren't very common since morph rotated out of constructed.
Part of me doesn't want to believe it. Mainly because ebooks are too restrictive (can't resell) and overpriced for my liking.

Also, I might be nitpicking, but it seems like ebooks only beat 'paperback books'. In that article they make a distinction between 'paperback books' and 'hardcovers'. So ebook sales haven't surpassed all physical paper books yet. The title is correct, but could be misleading if you assume 'paperback' is just generic physical book.
I <3 Sparkfun!
SOAP vs. REST
It would probably cost Netflix more to add Linux support (and test it, and continually support/update/test it for the rest of forever) than they would ever make off of it, at this point.

And that's without the cost of advertising that feature.

I have always thought that if you choose to run Linux, you're smart enough to figure out a way to get things to run on Linux that don't officially support it. (What percentage of Linux users know how to program in at least 1 language, vs. what percentage of Windows users? 98% and <0.5%?)
Email sent, best of luck with the site
How do the Chinese rifles compare? Are they similarly simple & resilient?
In addition to the coldfeet scenario, they use SMS in case the bomber is captured or incapacitated, a handler watching from afar can detonate the bomb. That's why lots of suicide bombers blow up at police checkpoints, their handler sees them being detained and remote detonates the bomb.
Will this new change impact the issue where scrapers that take videos and video descriptions from youtube and turn them into 'blog posts' show up higher than the youtube page that contains the actual original content? I worked for nearly a year producing a few hundred videos only to find that spam sites (usually running adsense ads) were showing up ahead of the video on youtube.com and my own site. Our site's domain name was even plastered all over the description and it still didn't matter. The spam sites still showed up way ahead of us in the search results.
Yes, there is. You should tell customers to go away when they cost you more than they earn you. Costs come in many forms, both monetary and emotional. If dealing with specific complaining users damages team morale, then perhaps the company should consider whether those few users are worth it.

Further, I doubt very much that bad PR like this affects Tumblr. 1) The vast majority of Tumblr users will never hear about this, 2) The ones that do will probably decide whether to continue using the service based on whether or not Tumblr actually solves their downtime problems on an ongoing basis.
I've been working on something pretty similar at my school, and I think we've had some pretty good results so far.

I think the first step is to find the students who really are interested in programming/hacker culture/whatever you call it, and get close with them. If you start small, maybe just a couple of friends doing things together, it'll be a good start. Other people may then be interested in seeing what's up.

Another thing is that I'd suggest "events" vs. meetings. A couple of things we've done is start a bi-annual series of hackathons. The first one in the fall drew 40 students. The second one, which had lower prizes, ended up drawing over 100. It takes a bit of time, but I think you can snowball it into something bigger.

Another event we've found really useful is a weekly thing where we take a classroom in one of the CS buildings, and designate it for a night for people to code. We order food and stuff, usually 15-20 people show up every week.

You're not going to necessarily change the vast majority of students that don't care, but if you can join everyone else together, and maybe draw some people who are on the fringe one way or another, you can have something pretty cool.
GM Invests $17 million Electric-Car Battery Maker Envia,
Some background on the story :
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2044838-1,00.h...
The Iranian left also had no blueprint for moving forward. They were able to destabilize and oust the Shah, but they didn't know how to fill the power vacuum. The mosques did. They were not a marginalized fringe political wing, they were a cultural and religious force that quickly leveraged their position to move into the political sphere.

Thirty years later, the situation in Egypt is different. The secular centrists and left-wing have a clear model of how to fill the vacuum. Even if they didn't before, Tunisia has provided one for them. There is little opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to step in as strongmen willing to make order out of chaos.

1979 Iran and 2011 Egypt are simply materially incomparable situations. There is a possibility that the MB will cause headaches for an emergent democracy, but their ability to seize control and establish a theocratic dictatorship is minuscule, at best.
I think we are going to have many new fascinating physical objects to catch our attention in the future. Just because many objects of the past (books) have been shrunk to fit in one little object does not mean we will not create entirely new ones. We haven't done it yet because we didn't have the space. Now that the bookshelf is empty, it will be filled with many new wonderful things.

People are creative. And people like stuff.
Mirror: http://static.whalesalad.com/north_korea/
What I love about Netflix streaming is that it completely severs the old TV-viewer relationship of having to worry about "what's on now" and "when does my program start". Since we started using Netflix streaming, we spend a lot more time watching what we want to watch when we want to watch it. Instead of having to worry about having dinner done in time for your favorite program, your favorite program now starts whenever the hell you're ready for it. :-)

I also like that I can start watching a series from the beginning, no matter how long its been on. As an example, my wife and I are currently hooked on the show "Weeds". It's been on for 6 seasons already, so trying to get into it now on cable would be...difficult. But with Netflix we've been able to start watching from the first episode with no problems.
This guy already said it best: http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...
Other interesting quote is "poverty is the worst form of violence."
Good for backgrounds, but it can't be used effectively if you need rain to appear in front of another layer (in this case, the character sprite).
"For the user: she visits http://bloop.co/ and instead of viewing the regular webpages, the page content is styled appropriately for small screens."

Not in the Android standard browser.
On local news sites I see syndicated news/advertisements. Usually it's about health and getting ripped or some such nonsense. I think this has been done before. The goal of the advertiser is to trick the user that the content is part of the magazine/website/tv show.
It's so easy to overlook the benefits of staying obsessively focused.

Quickly though, almost in your back, each single bit/feature/line of code added to the mix multiplies with the others, and it's over already.
Searching from the UK, I get the exact same (really spammy) results that the SEOMoz blog post shows.

Must be a localisation thing I guess?
The short answer: not a whole lot. A government or other entity with enough resources could probably compromise the anonymity of a significant amount of the traffic going through Tor. It's generally accepted that if an attacker controls the first and last router in a circuit then they can use timing attacks to compromise that circuit's anonymity. (And if an attacker controls all three routers they definitely can.)

The long answer:
Tor does some things with circuit creation to try to make this kind of attack a lot more difficult. In general, clients will attempt to choose geographically distributed routers to go together on a circuit. (I believe the restriction is that they won't choose multiple relays on the same /16 subnet--certainly not an infallible measure, but it does make it more difficult to control multiple routers on a single circuit.)

Another countermeasure is the use of guard nodes. Guard nodes are generally fast, long-running routers that serve as the entry points onto Tor. Clients with guards enabled (and they're enabled by default) have a list of 3 guard nodes, which they will try to use if at all possible as the first router on any circuits they create. (If all of those guards go down, they'll pick more.) The reasoning is that without guards, if there's someone who's trying to attack Tor by controlling routers, eventually you're going to create enough circuits that at least one gets compromised. With guards, some people will get unlucky and potentially have a lot more of their traffic compromised, but others will be much safer. Also, because guards stay relatively static over time (and because it takes a few weeks to be considered stable enough to be a guard), any attacker just setting up a ton of routers isn't going to be able to immediately compromise a ton of traffic.

(Of course, there are other attacks too, which don't necessarily require controlling nearly as many routers. Tor is very far from perfect. Designing a good general-purpose low-latency anonymity system is very difficult.)

My experience: I've been doing research related to Tor for the past two and a half years, and my undergrad thesis (which I'm working on right now) is a practical evaluation of the attacks that do exactly this kind of end-to-end correlation.

I don't have time right now to list specific citations for all of the above, but it's pretty much all covered by papers in the Free Haven Anonymity Bibliography (http://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/) and the Tor spec documents, and I'd be happy to come fill them in later if people want.
Except for the first one, those are the spam jersey sites.
Not annoying, a good thing. Searching a group from within google groups often doesn't work correctly.
Hulu lost it's place when it basically stopped working at all in Linux. Today I tried to watch the latest episode of the Office. Even in Incognito mode (no personalizations/extensions) the video never loaded, just the gray background across the whole mid section of the page. In Firefox, it played halfway, then skipped to the end-screen, and upon trying to replay, told me that "This video is unavailable. If this message continues, restart your browser".

So I went back to plan A. TPB: "s07e12 The Office", and I was watching it in VLC 7 minutes later.
Am I crazy or was this story already on HN? I can't find it for the life of me though.
Then, what is Tokyo Cabinet?
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