skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In re #2, I really do dislike the lack of editing in every self-published ebook I've read. It's too easy to get distracted by poor grammar, spelling, or sentence structure.

Most of my reviews of ebooks on Amazon are driven by a pedantic hatred of poorly edited written material.

I did read an ebook recently[1] where the author credited a couple online editing services in the acknowledgements. However, they missed a number of places where the author forgot to put a verb in a sentence, or forgot a preposition, or misspelled a proper name. I highlighted (thank you Kindle) passages such as"The table about ten feet away from the fence I planned on coming over,"[2] because it stopped me from "flowing" through the book while I tried to figure out what just happened. Wait, what about the table? Did it do something? Did someone do something to it? I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE TABLE!

[1] Because the author asked me to give me a bad review of his book after reading my review of another book in the same genre. http://www.amazon.com/review/R19V93VWMFZB8W/ref=cm_aya_cmt?i... -- I'm a sucker for the post-apocalyptic wish fulfillment junk. Dissatisfied with my life? Don't get personal.

[2] Some more examples: "The curved angle of the claws in this position would actually help guide the spears into chest," "He said it take much extra effort," and "People can get used anything especially if their lives depend on it."
Duke Nukem Forever: How The Tech World Has Changed Since 1998
Security can succeed by making an attack economically or logistically impractical. You have to consider when using any such system:

1. What would it cost the adversary to pull off a successful attack to reveal your identity? Would it be worth it to the attacker to do so?

2. Are there easier, more obvious targets?

I would say it's a possible useful tool of increasing that cost for a potential adversary above their threshold of resources and motivation.

If I'm wrong, tell me where I posted this from, and I'll go hide in the woods.
I think one of the points of the rant is that you have no way to know whether Tor is safe or not; if Tor is compromised then you might as well assume that it's completely compromised, including hidden services.
Hah, you just described my wife, who is a very well educated attorney and international policy expert. If it has a vampire in it, she'll read just about any book.

Before, by some strange twist of fate, she finds me talking about her online, she did not read or endorse the Twilight books. She did want to watch the movie "with the vampires fighting the werewolves" but was rather put out that the fight was so short, cramming seventeen seconds of action in a twelve-hour movie.
Microsoft's tablets were PCs. The iPad is a giant iPhone. Similar form factor, far from the same product category.

The iPad is best compared to a console gaming system: an entertainment appliance with a curated application library. Marrying that to the tablet form factor was the winning insight.

"Invention" is probably a better term than "clairvoyance" for what Apple does. They aren't so much predicting the future as creating it.
I remember reading about ten years ago that authors were unhappy about print-on-demand systems because quite often, their contracts included rights reverting to the author a number of years after the last printing date. With POD, that can just keep dragging on as people snatch up a copy here and there.
Two addendums on this topic by Jeremy Schoemaker, popular affiliate marketing mastermind, regarding what you discuss - I think he articulates the points well.

http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/10/06/dont-make-google-look-st...
http://www.shoemoney.com/2010/04/28/where-my-hatred-of-seo-c...
I believe the policy for things like hidden text is to revert as soon as the problem is fixed. (Google attempts to email the webmaster about the problem with whatever email address is available, and also puts a notification in the webmaster console.)
I don't think he's got Wittgenstein right. But it's interesting.
Given the direction in which governments seem to be moving, it's probably more relevant now than it was then.
If you first track down the location of the access point, then you know the directional antenna is pointed at you. From there, the direction finding is easy.

I think a major part of the rant is that Tor isn't provably secure against yet-to-be-discovered attacks, and several attacks against Tor have been discovered (and fixed) over its history.
Assuming you trust that hidden service? I imagine if all the nodes between you and that service had gone rogue, it would be possible to positively identify that you (or the Tor client IP at the entry point) communicated with that service, at what time, and generally how much was sent back and forth.
In addition, the blog just needs to be good enough to keep people buying her books. The best is the enemy of the good.
Lazy. Fit a line and assume the Kindle will continue down the line? This is what counts for expert analysis on HN?

The cost of producing a Kindle is much greater than $0 right now. Consider if that cost (plus the net revenue of a few books) would ever hit $0. Do you guys seriously see a sustainable revenue model here? How about a winning e-book strategy?
Naturally depends on who you're trying to hide from.

This article seems to have been written from the point of view of "the CIA are watching me", not "I don't want someone to hack my facebook profile".

And based on that logic, you have to assume that the CIA (or whatever agency) won't chose who to spy on based on who will cost them the least money.
And you can pitch the .json extension with proper content negotiation.

Accepts: application/json
Plain old PHP, MySQL, Javascript and AJAX.
Initially I balked at the thought of maintenance programming but I think this author does a good job explaining the upside.

However, the giant downside to maintenance programming is the sheer amount of frustration possible when trying to fix it, even when the programmer you want to kill is your former self.

I think if you say to yourself "this system makes money", no matter how bad it is, maybe you can see the silver lining.
Basically just a 2010 word for the 'thin client' model that's experiencing a resurgence.
The professional staff is dirt cheap and already almost 100% outsourced by the publishers. That's a barrier like not having Photoshop skills is a barrier to selling on the Internet: pay somebody money, problem solved.
Oracle searches for me usually turn on either articles by Don Burleson or the Puget Sound Oracle Users Group site.
A decade ago (sigh) I did a mix of EE and CS.

The CS program was a mix of interesting subject matter, fun and helpful TAs, and brutally long and/or theoretically complex projects. If you get in you're probably smart enough but you may not have the study habits. Most undergrads at Stanford were the big fish at their high school and have had a few years to have that beaten out of them. Sounds like you're coming from an environment where you're not working yourself too hard, and that will change. Don't expect time for electives. As a transfer you'll be proving yourself among an already-established cohort.

Most important advice I wish I'd gotten before my time there: Get to know your professors, and do what you can to be a TA for the intro courses.
I think if you say to yourself "this system makes money"

The sad truth is that if the system makes money then very likely for someone else...
I cannot find the source but I remember the same also. As well, "printing press like" techniques were used early in clay pot design and marking, again can't find source, which is the essence of the idea. Only it could not expand to the scale required of modern printing press standards.
I suspect you may come to regret posting that.
If you aren't familiar with ALS, you might have heard it under the name Lou Gehrig's disease.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis
It's called the Espresso Book Machine.
I'm not sure how refactoring, as I understand it as a programmer, applies to a UX/UI design. Are you making changes to your design that have zero effect on your design's semantics? That's what it would mean for code refactoring -- a change that has no visible effect!

CSS/HTML/Javascript can be refactored in this sense, but I'm not sure refactoring a design can mean anything quite like what it means to refactor a program.
How Google calculates search result count?
Is any body tell me how google calculates search result count?

In google search we always see "About 117,000,000 results (0.12 seconds)", but there is no straight way to go to "117,000,000"th result except next->next-> on page.

Another thing i observed is that, search results count are not real.

e.g. I have searched for search string "google videos", on first page i got "about 117, 000, 00o results"
But when i clicked for 10th page in the search i got "Page 10 of about 468,000,000 results".
How this can be possible in 2 min??
is google making fool of us as we can not navigate to last result?
One more thing i had tried same search "google videos" 5 month back at that time result count was 438,000,000 see - http://twitpic.com/30o2cv/full
I can not understand what magic google done in its search???
can any body tell me how google calculates search result count?

In google search we always see "About 117,000,000 results (0.12 seconds)", but there is no straight way to go to "117,000,000"th result except next->next-> on page.

Another thing i observed which shows search result counts are not real.

e.g. I have searched for search string "google videos", on first page i got "about 117, 000, 00o results"
But when i clicked for 10th page in the search i got "Page 10 of about 468,000,000 results".

How this can be possible in 2 min??

is google making fool of us as we can not navigate to last result?

One more thing i had tried for same search "google videos" 5 month back at that time result count was 438,000,000 see - http://twitpic.com/30o2cv/full

I can not understand what magic google done in its search???
That is a very complicated way to code this. Here is the quick and dirty technique that I have been using on lots of Project Euler problems:

def subset_summing_to_zero (activities):
subsets = {0: []}
for (activity, cost) in activities.iteritems():
old_subsets = subsets
subsets = {}
for (prev_sum, subset) in old_subsets.iteritems():
subsets[prev_sum] = subset
new_sum = prev_sum + cost
new_subset = subset + [activity]
if 0 == new_sum:
new_subset.sort()
return new_subset
else:
subsets[new_sum] = new_subset
return []

(I could easily make this more efficient.)
The iPad won't be dethroned on specs alone, even when it's feasible, which it currently isn't. It defined a product category and it can't be cloned. The usurper will need a killer feature that everyone wants and Apple can't match. I have trouble imagining what that would be.

My best guess is that some day tablets will be "essential", in the way that phones are, and there will be cheapo Android tablets for those who can't afford iPads or don't have enough taste to care. Both of those things are a long way off though, if they ever happen.
This guy says he's bought a 15 Million dollar property for $600,000 - Bull____.
I was seriously annoyed recently when my former employer's payroll software required that I have Adobe's PDF plugin installed to download my W2. It wasn't a .pdf link, no; it insisted on using the plugin before it would let me save a copy.
Clients will appreciate everything you do

I am by nature an optimist, but this does not match my experience, particularly with regards to improvements that the client cannot easily perceive. (Some days I wish apps had an XP bar so I could award a few points for e.g. "Won't die if the school gets about two dozen Chinese students who prefer English to Japanese - actual bug, by the way.)
i didn't rtfa too carefully, but from what i've heard, all newly-hired developers at Facebook go through a 6-week 'boot camp' where they fix bugs and do maintenance to get up to speed with the code base ...

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/01/business/la-fi-faceb...
You'd think reading the piece that there had never been groupthink behind funding decisions before.
I think it's much healthier to work in maintenance mode. Your mind is singly pointed almost meditatively. My personal favorite is troubleshooting. I'm always happy when someone comes to me with an urgent problem. It's such a joy to jump on it and help! Compared to that the process of new design and development is painful.
Anyone know where her sales figures are coming from? Are they self-reported?

She's obviously doing pretty well based on her Amazon rank, but I'm a little skeptical of the 100-450k per month number.
Good luck trying to get an update for it.
RIM's reply to jammur's open letter
> if you have trouble getting initial traction, you might consider giving it away and charging for support / services.

This is a very sound piece of advice. You should give it a serious thought.
I think the author intended to say "iterating" instead, for example.
The cool thing about Stanford is that they have a lot of lectures online. I find them a great source on either refreshing on material or learning new stuff altogether. Their iOS series is really good (and current)!

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

Edit: What I mean is, you can probably gauge from these lectures and assignments what you're in for.
The 20 Worst Venture Capital Investments of All Time
The editing IS a mixed bag, self-pubbed authors who take the whole thing seriously and aren't broke DO pay for editing services, but obviously not all of them do.

This is why sampling is so important, unless they got someone to edit the first part but not all of it, the grammar/etc issues should be obvious within 5 pages.
Hiring a professional editor and copy-editor is probably going to run you four-figures for a feature length book. Considering most books don't sell well, the first time writer takes a significant risk eating those costs.

Some people can write/polish well enough without those roles, and they stand to gain a lot from the new models. But it'll be a while before traditional publishing is no more. Actually, the biggest worry they should have is that bestselling authors go off on their own after one or two wins, like how Seth Godin just announced he's not doing any traditional publishing any more. That's got to be a little scary for the industry.
The CIA won't choose to spend $1billion+ to spy on a single person unless they are really important.
So they've taken a regular screen, added a touch-sensing layer like loads of things have already added, and made it harder to read what's on it. Is this supposed to be good?

If they got it to be self-lit (ie, via the edges), it might be interesting, but it doesn't look to me like that's what it is - it looks like the box behind it is providing all the light. So it is, very precisely, a large, expensive rear-projection display.

Wow. Congrats to the research team, how many DIY LCD hacks did you have to see to realize you could do this?
To those of us that know Photoshop really well, the process is more advanced than what the author suggests. For me, Photoshop is equivalent to pencil and paper -- I can see where things ought to be, how they actually might look on screen, and whether or not it is visually appealing.

I don't fault the author for having his own process, as it seems to be working for him, but having never done it the other way, I can't imagine how he can condemn it. The argument seems, at a glance, akin to a lifelong vegetarian railing against steak.

I don't work too dissimilarly, in that I will start a layout in Photoshop, start coding, then drop back into Photoshop when I need a new visual element, but when I need to plop a logo or button onto the page, I generally have it at least roughed out in Photoshop. My process works for me, generally, and I've done it both ways, but without prototyping the page in some way, I have a harder time envisioning what to code.
I've read books from major publishers that had enough grammar/spelling issues to bug the hell out of me, and just because it's NY published actually isn't as much of a guarantee as it should be, if your preferred genre gets popular, because if they decide they need x books of y genre/month, but they are only getting z (some number smaller than x) they have been known to lower their standards to fill the supposed market need.

Of course that is part of why bubbles in publishing pop so hard, people get burned out on the crap put out to "fill the need"
Justin Bieber seems desperate for funny girls: Aaj Ki Khabar
Will Youtube become a part of Academy Awards?
Neat. And pretty. And a heck of a lot more detailed. One of the best combinations science can produce - useful and crowd pleasing!

I'll be all pie-in-the-sky and ask: how much longer until we can use this to duplicate something in software, and see if it still runs? I'd like to upload my consciousness before I die, kplzthx.
Someone who doesn't give up. +1
When four people sit down to talk conspiracy, three are government agents, and the fourth is a fool.
Share timely messages across social networks & mobile devices
Six weeks to get up to speed, with what must be an enormous code base? That's not maintenance programming.
Gadaffi’s Mass text messages
Maybe I should have distinguished between maintenance programming as a member of a big IT department, or maintaining your own code, versus fixing and enhancing code the original programmer has abandoned or moved on from. I do maintenance programming freelance so whatever bad feelings or history my client has it doesn't rub off on me.
Looking for things for hackers to do in SF
Hey everyone
I'm headed down to the Bay area in the near future for the first time, and was hoping to build up a list of hacker-centric things to do ala http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1845164
Who said you can't include an entity body with a 422 status? e.g.:

HTTP/1.1 422 Unprocessable Entity

{"error": "email address must contain @", "applies_to": "email_field"}
Touching, but at the risk of being karma-annihilated: what else would be be doing?

He's probably sick of being useless, can't get paid to do anything (and wouldn't want to be, it'd be pity money), and wants to do something both productive and helpful. So he found a way, has supportive family that helped make it possible, and has a huge amount of time in which to do it. If I had that much time on my hands I'd be fixing a lot more than I am now, when I'm spending time with my wife / friends / at work.
I'm talking about people who prescribe rules for others about how to make software. In this sense, XP is thoroughly methodological. I know something about the Smalltalk history. It doesn't change the point: there is a gulf between people who live by selling prescriptions about how to make software (writing, consulting, training, and so on) and people who live by making software. This is the fundamental problem with Agile, not dilution-by-becoming-mainstream as the OP and others say.

Why does the gulf arise in the first place? I think it's because in the dysfunctional corporate software economy, programmers are low-status and there is a ceiling on how much money and status can be accrued in that role. One way to break the ceiling is by becoming a high-end consultant, writing and speaking and so on. If you pull this transition off, you can charge thousands of dollars a day and be esteemed. The trouble is that now you are no longer making software for a living. You are in the world of hype and ideology. Your customers are people inside corporations who write cheques, a constituency that has nothing to do with the culture or practice of software. This has consequences: it casts you adrift, it dulls the mind, it encourages bullshit. Then the rationalizations begin: I'm trying to make the system a little better, etc., I can have leverage by reaching more people this way, etc. This path may lead to billable hours but it puts one at risk of creative rot.

The fundamental mistake of Agile was trying to improve the broken world of corporate software by selling to it rather than competing with it.
Too paranoid to upvote and comment from my normal account...
Ask me this via email and I'll answer at length when I've got time. I have a release and client engagement tomorrow, so my only HN time today is while Capistrano is running.
From some of my earlier investigations, handicapped computing support is astonishingly bad and expensive. Largely because many things are near one-off limited-use solutions that can't be re-sold... but nothing is ever modular or adjustable or could be tweaked to be used in multiple situations anyway. The DIY crowd for such things, meanwhile, keeps hacking up things like this for almost no money.

And it only gets worse once you come to software. Hardware interfaces have a general communication format - websites do not. Applications do not. Almost nobody makes software with hinting for assistive devices, despite tools and standards existing. I suspect it's mostly because it's extra work, and doesn't (usually) significantly help to pay the bills when added.
Hold on... sorry if this is off-topic but I have two older domains that redirect into parts of my new site where the exact same functionality is offered. The redirect is a 301 redirect. I thought this was the right way to do things. Am I being penalized by Google for this? Should I just operate those pages directly on the old domains?
You can't actually believe this.

I'm not sure how you define "first product of its kind," but as far as I'm concerned Apple created the first tablet with a multi touch OS targeted at consumers. You can argue that the crap tablets MS and its partners put out beat Apple to the punch, but that's missing the entire point.

Nothing that was released prior to the iPad was anything like the tablets that people have decided are so exciting now, and to pretend they were is disingenuous at best.
If your book is likely to make less than four figures, a publisher isn't even going to give you the time of day.
It all comes down to whether one likes to create or to fix... Though I used to work with a guy who really liked to ship things and didn't care much for the process or the quality. To each his own as they say.
That's what he'd be doing. Spending time with friends/family/ or bowing to the pressure that I know I'd face at work to close all the loose ends I might leave behind.

He saw a problem that needed fixing that would benefit all of us and took some of his short time to fix it for us. It was hard for him. Really hard. Hell, he could have just watched Survivor and taken it easy. If anyone in all the world deserved to, it was him. But he didn't. And so he's my hero.
Interesting proposal, but impractical. LCDs are transparent as many others people have noted, but transmission efficiency is often as low as 10% (yes, some 90% of the light is blocked). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display_televisi...
Microsoft Bricks Windows 7 Phones
keep an eye on meetup.com - there are a ton of hackery/startupy orientated meetups managed on there.
I bet the internet makes your life at least 6 times better than what it would have been in 1930.
Do Amazon Student members count?
I am ashamed to admit that I have too much time on my hands today. The same video, with an alternate soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXZrkqKo8NQ
Benefits of a Flush Search Box
Nice article but

"Your work won’t be off-shored .. "

This is simply not true. A large fraction of the code outsourced to India consists of ancient code-wrecks in "musty languages",( to quote the author, nice turn of phrase by the way!) no one in the West wants to touch any more, while green field development with the latest cool tech stays in the US.

I've known of COBOL, RPG, PowerBuilder etc code bases maintained (well) for years in India. Infosys and co make large chunks of money this way. And anyway outsourcing (relatively) low value/cost work makes some sense. I am not saying it is a good or bad thing. Just the way it is.