skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an open question, certainly, but the broad meaning isn't vague. It's anything that would legally or technologically enable the Executive branch to disable public internet access in all or part of the United States at will.

I can't think up a way to make that a plausibly good thing to exist in any form.
The thing I wasnt able to gather from the article was how they manage the "marketing" of it. Most indians I know (in india more than outside) start asking "oh so how do we know they are not dodgy"... I have to say that was the first thought that crossed my mind (and I do feel guilty about that)... but something stirred in me (ofcourse I could be wrong)... Would be great to see a TipJar plugin on the site!
iOS is reportedly shiping on 360,000 per day:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/19/highlights-of-apples-1q-...

That would be a greater number than 300,000.

If you look at browser traffic share, either iOS has a much larger installed base, or Android users surf the Web a lot less.
I think they just mean that it's a whole site/domain action; that you can't change crawl rate for a sub-directory based site ala Wordpress MU/Multisite with directories.
There are a few Haskell web frameworks out there which take advantage of advanced Haskell features. The Snap framework is based on Iteratees, a fairly recent abstraction developed for Haskell IO. The source code is readable, though you want to make sure you understand iteratees first.

https://github.com/snapframework/snap-core/tree/master/src/S...
http://okmij.org/ftp/Streams.html
75% of AOL Subscribers Don't Need to Pay
I would spend 100% of my time Building the "Dell" model but instead of for computers, for fruits and vegetables. :-) . I have a small farm already. Nice start!
I am at a loss as to what this additional infrastructure really permits that having lots of armored men with guns does not. Armored men with guns are a flexible bunch, they can do lots of things. The marginal distinction to the person in power between pressing a button and ordering other people to go shut the net down is pretty minimal; it's not like without this switch, the President is going to actually have go out and point guns at the network admins himself, Independence Day-style.

My real worry, and the real reason this shouldn't be done, is that it shouldn't be made so easy that some clever hackers can do it, or gets accidentally triggered for some reason. But ye olde "shoot the place up" can take down the internet pretty effectively. "Stray backhoes" have done a decent job a couple of times within my experience as it is; the hard part is keeping the net running, not shutting it down.
You have to be careful about the studies on depressive realism, though; a lot of them are poorly designed. I remember reading about one study (and I'm not 100% on the details) where subjects basically interacted with a machine that flashed lights or something at random, and the depressed ones were more likely to come to the realization that their actions had no effect on the machine. The flaw is, if you design a scenario where people's actions really do have no effect on the outcome, of course you're going to discover that depressed people have a more accurate perception of reality--not because they actually do, but because you've put them in a situation that corresponds to their cognitive bias.
That's where we disagree. Sometimes an alert is just what you need, and can be better than an undo function (which can get rather complex as your ui gets more sophistiated - hence my illustrator issues).

Illustrator is clearly better with undo, but I don't think basecamp, for example, would be.
8 million in 60 days isn't bad. That's 48 million a year. Well over half the estimated yearly sales of the iPhone (70 million).

This might be the fastest selling first 60 days for a new product, but it's an upgrade to an already popular platform.
Take out a few core locations and you'd have a very hard time getting to google, or most other sites for that matter.

All it takes for the vast majority of the internet to become unusable for the larger fraction of the population is to take the .com, .net and .org TLDs down. Your packets will still route but where do you want them to go? It would take long enough for people to regroup and find work-arounds that more permanent ways of blocking access could be rolled out.
Aha! It was a z-index issue. I'm publishing the fix now.
I'm not sure what you hope to learn with this poll. The first few Google results for "internet kill switch" are all news media articles which explain the proposed law pretty clearly.
Furbies go anywhere. No one's kid is dragging their Kinect around with them.
Ask HN: best API for places?
I am looking for experiences using places API for a mobile application.
Specifically:
Yelp
Google Places
Facebook Places
Geocity
Yahoo Local

criteria:
implementation
freshness of data
coverage
TOS

any feedback appreciated. thanks!
Right now it seems to be really trendy with teenagers and kids. I'm sure many families have purchased them but I think there are significantly more teen hipsters that have jumped onboard ATM.
This is largely directionally accurate. (Especially for young ladies -- curious that the NYT missed that angle, one would have assumed they would be all over it.)

On the plus side, persistent market inefficiencies are a gift from God if you're prepared to exploit them. (Where else can you find Californian purchasing power at engineering wages which would be skimpy in small town Iowa?)
> I can see in a few years cell phones being powerful enough to broadcast network over a large enough area that they'll be ad hoc networks without a central kill switch.

Cell phones have actually lost power, not gained power over the last two decades. Likely they'll lose more power still as the push to increase battery life continues and coverage increases.
My favorite science fiction story is "The Tactics of Mistake" by Gordon R. Dickson.
Australia Loses Its Grip On The Foreign-Student Market
I wonder how many of these were sold to anxious hackers :)
KDE Releases Development Platform 4.6.0
We have used landsend in the past. Great quality. Bit pricey. Now, we have bought 20 tshirts and created a unique design with office "comments, jokes, phrases, etc" and took them to the local print. We have like 5 per developer and we are planning to get 20 new ones as we get new "content"...

Still, startups shouldn't spend on this. We did it as a trade off for the local guy print shop web site redesign!
I’m honestly not following you. I have trouble understanding in what way a warning could ever be better than the ability to undo. Why would it be?
The part about Horie was kind of interesting.

He was really seen as someone to rock the boat, and as someone who could really turn around the stodgering top-down society that is Japan. It's probably safe to say that most of the youth of the country were rooting for him, and the new economic growth that he would most likely bring to Japan.

Then he f-ed up, and got caught up in stock fraud. I know that he's still appealing the decision, but the evidence against him was pretty huge, and the backlash was rather dire.

Up until that point, all the proponents of Horie were saying "Look! This young guy is brilliant, making tons of money, and can change the way Japan operates!" When he got arrested, that changed to "Look! This young guy broke the law, was making tons of money, and pretty much guaranteed that the youth of Japan will forever be trapped beneath their senile overlords." (Ok, that last part might just be me)

sorry, it seems I'm still a little peeved about the whole thing.

Yesterday I was talking with the (rather young) CEO of a automotive-electronics startup and he was saying that Japan's industry is slowly dying because of a lack of desire to innovate. He said "In order to succeed in the Japanese market, you can't introduce something new because it'll get shot down. You need to go abroad, do your research, make demos, make it work, then bring it back to Japan and say 'Look what we're doing abroad!' ".

I hope this country does great things (because I don't have anywhere else to go), but I really worry about the future of a country that doesn't value its youth to such a degree that they lose all motivation.
The biggest problem with undo is that sometimes allowing the user to recover from a particular action is also undesirable behavior. If I accidentally typed my username and password into a file, I want it to go away, right now.

There's a somewhat worrying trend with applications such as Facebook and Google Apps where software is more concerned with making users believe it's doing what they need it to do, and less concerned with doing what users need. I'm not saying this necessarily crosses the line - if I have the space on my server I'm storing lots of incremental backups. But there's always a trade-off. And some people might rather be assured that when they hit delete that it goes away forever than that they never lose anything they meant to keep.
26th January 2011, OpenLeaks goes public
The broken window fallacy considers the case in which both the transferer and the transferee spend all of the money. A large part of encoderer's point was that he was unlikely to spend as much of the money as the transferee. Saving helps nobody right now.
Lets say it this way... Pandora is so awesome a 36 dollar annual donation is worth it just for that fact alone.
Thanks!

Any tips on the "find a consultant who charges a lot of money to go and do X at a company" stage? Do consultants have conventions or anything like that?
Hard to compare as I haven't tried SES. SendGrid works great. Love it.
Early returns are pretty overwhelming.

Just curious: of the 98%-+ who are against the kill-switch, how many of you will be willing to help if there are some activism campaigns?
Simple. I want to hear your opinions and interpretations on the idea. The raw facts are something I can find from sites that Google brings up (like you said). Opinions and facts are two different things that each have their own importance.
Good point, results do tend to speak for themselves .. a guy with pins for legs and gorilla arms obviously wouldn't be a good starting point for squat technique
Clearly someone is building a quadrocopter army.
I'm sorry but this looks similar to the iPad. I feel like Android has always been playing catch up, trying to create an iPhone look alike. Don't get me wrong, I would get a Droid over an iPhone anyday, but Google's UI team needs to come up with some original ideas. WP7 has made a valiant effort with its metro interface and really differentiated itself from all the other smartphones out there.
Ok, the fix has been published in version 1.0.1. However, after you update you'll have to go into the options and "Reset to default CSS", then save, before it will work.
I started my company around "Let's build an awesome company we want to work at, making products that people want." That was exciting enough for me to quit my big corporate job.
Samsung Galaxy Tab sales hit 2 million units
The ARM Story: Earthquake Looming?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem
You should include the #jan25 hashtag. That's where all the interaction is happening.
Its funny, hc, on every single one of my blog posts people ask the same thing: is it fiction?

But I assure you its all true:
jamesaltucher.com
I actually worked in a Lake for about 3 years. A great lake too! (Huron).
I don't even think it needs to be a switch. The actual bill that was brought up in the Senate doesn't explicitly say 'kill switch' anywhere. In reality a call from someone in the government to a few people who work at large ISPs/backbones would be enough, since they would just comply. We saw this happen recently with Wikileaks, after all....
That didn't answer the question at all, it made an orthogonal, moralizing interjection.

About 45% of the world's population is 24 or younger: http://sasweb.ssd.census.gov/idb/worldpopinfo.html
Announcing the Ginzametrics API
(This post turned into a rant. Sorry about that.)

The OS X shortcut for quitting an application is Cmd+Q. The shortcut for closing a window/tab is Cmd+W. Q and W are adjacent on a standard QWERTY keyboard, which means you sometimes hit Cmd+Q when you meant to hit Cmd+W.

Now hitting Cmd+Q accidentally doesn't matter most of the time. Most applications will ask you if you want to save your changes before you quit. Web browsers will offer to save your session. Also, most applications save their state anyway, so you can relaunch them and continue working. So not a problem, right?

There is one piece of software, though, that refuses to follow this convention. A program that has ignored every HIG and UI convention in the history of all known universes in the name of creating a "better" user experience: Google Chrome.

I didn't complain when they hacked the window system to put tabs on the top of the window. I didn't complain when their shitty multi-process model brought my aging MacBook to its arthritic knees. I didn't complain when they opened PDFs in the browser without asking me first, or when they used filetype associations from my OS instead of letting me redefine them. But this just takes the cake: Google Chrome will quit without a confirmation if you accidentally hit Cmd+Q when you meant Cmd+W. In the last month I've accidentally quit the browser twice, and lost about 50 tabs every time. Surprisingly enough, there is no extension that will fix this behavior. Yes, a couple of hacks exist, but they only work half the time.

I don't expect Google to fix this, though. There are gaping holes in Android that Google has simply ignored or outright refused to fix. I don't expect them to treat Chrome differently.
If you live in a mud hut without debt then you technically have a higher net worth than a recent college grad who may very well have a negative NW due to debt.
If you're a heavy macro user, you might find `:noremap <Space> @q` to be handy. Just stick your temporary macro in q (the easiest one to stick it in :), then press the spacebar to run it whenever you want.
Sure. There are a few local projects along these lines, with limited success. See freifunk.net, for example. The main problem is that the range of WiFi is quite short even in denser urban areas (so you wind up with lots of fragmented micro-networks), and it requires significant effort from each participant to set up. If Fon started making this an optional feature on their routers, it could get really interesting.

Or maybe just a way of connecting Android phones into a local communication network.

Does anyone know if there's some formal spec for this kind of mesh network?
Conficker Worm Still A Threat
Proposed Arizona law targets birthright citizenship
You're going to be in Thailand for 12 more hours and you're reading HN? I'd be using what time I had!
I love outsourcing stuff that is nota core to the business. At the office I want to have the best people that have a direct impact on the core offering of our product. So outsourcing is good and works for us, for stuff we don't want our great devs to work on or spend a minute on. we have a team building budget every year, to try new guys on outsourcing every year. so we even invent projects so we can get to know top developers, designers, copywriters, etc. Then when we need them we know which one is good, which one delivers, and we already have a working relationship. This has a huge impact in times where business is kicking in and we need people fast that delivers. It's a great strategy and it works for us. We can build a great team in no time because we have built this internal ecosystem of outsourced resources.

We get them from everywhere and linked in has been he best. Now that we can target by position/title the ads, it should be much better.
I can assure you everything James writes is true
Can you clarify that last sentence a bit? (I think you mean, things are enough cheaper in Japan that a skimpy salary still has great purchasing-power-parity... but I thought as a highly-urbanized country, Japan had relatively high prices for everything from real estate to food. I could easily be mistaken, and would love to hear examples of what is cheaper there, and where.)
Am I foolish for not believing the vi/vim hype?

Not at all. If VS suits your needs, then rock on!

Personally, I enjoy the occasional vi/vim story here, as in reading the comments I almost always come away with several new ways of doing things in vim.

I think there's a better question to be asked, however. Given that programming involves a seemingly endless stream of tools/techniques that seem good enough and alternatives that are promised to be much better, do you have an efficient strategy for determining which alternatives to explore? (This is a question I've been wrestling with myself recently.) How much time should be budgeting for exploring an alternative before writing it off as a time sink instead of productivity multiplier?

In your case, since you already use vi/vim daily for some editing tasks, I'd suggest a low time-investment strategy of lowering the slope of your learning curve: review how you normally use it, isolate one or two procedures that seem awkward or irritating, and then focus a small amount of time on researching/practicing the recommended alternative practices of experienced users. I've found that by focusing on the occasional experiment, learning is much more enjoyable. If I think about how much I don't know about vim, on the other hand, I'm inclined to feel overwhelmed and put off learning anything.

Admittedly, this approach isn't going to help if your resistance point is learning to dump the arrow keys and mouse. On that one, I don't know that there really is any good alternative to a couple of weeks of devoted effort.
Participate in The Mario Level Generation Competition, Round 2
Internet in Egypt offline
How I sold my start-up for $40 million
I would think that considering the audience here, it's quite obvious that the voting will be overwhelmingly for "no", making the poll pretty pointless. You're asking a group of people who largely make their living thanks to the internet in some way whether the government should have the ability to turn it off whenever they feel like it. The answer will unsurprisingly be no.
About being pedantic, "going a lot further" -- being a pedant is all a cultural construct, though, isn't it? We're in a time where the lack of distinction between vim/vi is displayed so often that it's not hard to imagine a group of people looking at my original comment and saying "to hell with you, you -are- pedantic, old-school, and vim -is- vi. But better."

I'm really happy there are enough people who apparently appreciate (if not fully agree with) my comment to upvote it, though. I don't care about the karma, but happy to see signs of kindred spirits :)
No ISP connectivity isn't blocked/censored internet, the ISP links are down completely. There isn't a possible way to get through something that isn't even connected. Ham radio is funnily enough a better solution.
"Sixty-one percent of Americans said the President should have the
ability to shut down portions of the Internet in the event of a
coordinated malicious cyber attack, according to research by Unisys." [1]

While the definition of a kill-switch is broad and may have confused some voters, it is very evident that the hacker community has different (and most likely more informed) views on the issue than the average American. Compared to the 61% of Americans, less than 1% of HN users support the bill (as of when this comment was posted).

Those who consider this poll pointless because they think the idea of a kill-switch is obviously impractical are ignoring the reality. They are being ignorant of the fact that there exists a debate on the topic, even if it seems trivial to themselves.

[1] - http://www.geekosystem.com/internet-kill-switch-poll/
Generally, gvim and vim are the same binary.
So, if you feel tempted to ever try something like that again, zodiacchange.net and zodiacchange.org are both available for $8. Two hours of work and you'll be stuck at #1 ~ 3 for essentially forever. (There are non-evil uses for this, particularly when either breaking news or a major new development opens up a new area within or adjacent to one's own market.)

By the way, if folks want to see seedy affiliate stuff in action, pretend you believe in astrology and click promiscuously for a few hours.
At the same time, chrome allows you to restore your session after you accidentally close your tabs.
I was re-reading Doug Hoyte's Let Over Lambda today, and came across this quine:

(let ((let '`(let ((let ',let))
,let)))
`(let ((let ',let))
,let))

Originally from: http://www.scribd.com/doc/47702904/Bawden-Quasi-Quotation-in...
The truth is health is in large part determined by your diet, as for fitness- you don't need to spend hours in the gym. Intensity is more important than time spent- a program like the one mentioned at simplefit.org combined with a paleo like diet (google it) will get you fit and healthy in a minimum amount of time (about 30 minutes per workout, 3 days a week).
Ools Suggest Earlier Human Exit From Africa
thanks - didn't realize the main link was on aws - just clicked the [scribd] bit.

edit: PG - this is a reason to underline links. that visual would help visitors quickly distinguish that there are, in fact, two links on a line where there is generally a single link.
Your theory that millions of teen hipsters are most responsible for the popularity of kinect lacks merit.

From what I've seen the kinect is very popular with casual gamers and non-traditional gamers, typically adults.
It's more pervasive. If you're bullied at school but loved at home, it might be tolerable. But if you're being bullied via email or Facebook 24/7, you never get a chance to "decompress".
Sure, they were more prosperous on average, but the poor were much more worse off than the poor in rural areas.

It's also impossible to say whether the prosperity was due to the free market and lack of regulations, the industrial revolution and development of steam power or the rise of the middle class and their increased free time/income.

I suspect that mostly it was technology, similar to what's happening in developing nations right now, rather than any free markets.
San Diego Startups — Hookit | Market By Numbers
This looks horribly complicated.
> Stupid question.

Don't you think that's a little harsh to say, if not even disrespectful. As quoted from the Hacker News Guidelines (that I'm sure you must have read before):

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened
to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

This remarks adds nothing to your point and rather discredits your opinion for many of us.

> I think this question doesn't really have an answer because it's too poorly defined.

This is fair to say, but I left it broad for a reason - hoping people would debate the general principle rather than specific details. If the broadness of the poll is too much for you, then ignore it.
ever tried enabling the "Confirm to Quit" setting in the about:flags page in chrome?!

A little search before ranting would have certainly helped.
I feel the US is in roughly the same boat.We have more freedoms, but our whole system puts pressure on promoting higher education, while simultaneously providing no promise that there will be a way to recoup the debt load. Our mentalities, of protecting a gentrifying population, are stifling future generations access to the same privilege that prior generations had.

My personal view on the situation, is that we need to step back and look at what this system of higher education has done. And then start focusing on vocational training, in HS, apprenticeships, and on the job skill training.
Your first step should be to get your diet and gym routine right. In the past you have probably been doing some halfhearted gym routine and not seeing any results. When you start seeing real results the motivation will come easy.

Check out these two links:
http://www.liamrosen.com/fitness.html
http://www.mensjournal.com/everything-you-know-about-fitness...