skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually think the average makes sense here. The mode will give you '300', but you have 18 that have occurred at 100/200.
First leaked docs detailing Bank of America mortgage fraud and cover-up released
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Again: that 80% stat? I'm certain it's true, but it's meaningless. The stat you want is, how often are challenges to seizures denied. Because --- and I'm not saying this is what happened with your nephew --- it is very likely the reason that 80% of those seizures don't match up with a conviction is that the people whose assets are seized are in fact criminals.

Recognizing that doesn't mean I think civil asset forfeiture is problem-free or that Radley Balko doesn't have an argument with his stories on this issue. But you can't just cite that stat as if it opened and shut the case.

I agree that one sensible step to take would be to foreclose on the use of the assets as local funding mechanisms. I agree entirely with that.

Finally: I think your nephew was given bad advice.
This lacks a fundamental understanding of free markets and corporate nature. When there is no competition, innovation dies.
See my unrefactored-ruby-from-two-years-ago solution. https://github.com/listrophy/lazy_ncaa

It's pitifully simple... it just uses the historical probability of seed A beating seed B in round C. Going into the Elite 8 last year, it produced a bracket in the top 800 on ESPN.com. Of course, the other three brackets it produced (and I posted) failed miserably.
College career fairs.
I read the article referenced here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318980), and since the author seems so certain that the third containment shell would hold the meltdown safely: Can someone answer me why won't they just allow it to happen, so they can clean up the rest and get the whole nuclear plant back online? Is it just an economical reason? Or is there any other risk?
Since the author seems so certain that the third containment shell would hold the meltdown safely, and explosions keep happening: Can someone answer me why won't they just allow it to melt down, so they can clean up the rest and get the whole nuclear plant back online? Is it just an economical reason? Or is there any other risk?
I see, makes sense.

There's outliers, but not that many and not that far off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gribble

Apparently a gribble is a wood boring crustacean. Interesting.
Happy Pi day
_why was infinitely pragmatic. He serves as a constant, near daily inspiration to me, just because he programmed because he wanted to, because he loved it, not because it was his career.
Just yesterday I was unable to access twitter from my university. It blocked me by saying something like 'API calls exceeded'. A university have generally a single IP address and thousand of users. What will twitter do about this ?
> The light from the Sun that strikes this planet, (the largest fusion based nuclear reactor in the Solar System) produces more energy in one day than all the nuclear, oil, or coal based power plants on the planet.

I live in Seattle, you insensitive clod.
To be clear this is Unit 3, not the same reactor that blew up previously (Unit 1). Though dramatic, these are NOT nuclear explosions but hydrogen explosions that result from venting steam from the reactor. The primary containment and the reactor pressure vessel remain intact. Tepco (the Japanese utility) previously warned that this might occur to Unit 3.
Ask HN: Please raise the ban on my URL?
Hi HN team,
This is the 3rd time this has happened when I try to paste a link of my blog. It appears on my page (maybe because of a cookie?), but doesn't for the rest of them. Here are 2 screenshots one with the post for Interviewstreet (http://awesomescreenshot.com/02f96cy3d) and the one without it (http://awesomescreenshot.com/0b996cqf4) at the same time. I am not sure what we did wrong, but could you please look into it and let me know. Thank you.
Yeah, unfortunately the "getting the word out" could have been done better.
Man Finds His Photography Used Around the World Without His Knowing
#anon member outs himself through Facebook App ID
Actual Spy Cameras Used by the CIA
Yeah, I think a good number of people don't understand how tsunamis work, even here in Hawaii. During an emergency, radio and TV broadcasters here try to explain that tsunamis are more like solid walls of water - i.e. the entire ocean lifting up six feet, but of course, people don't listen. That makes it very dangerous when there's a tsunami warning (like last Thursday), because people think, oh, it's just like surfing! six feet is not even that much!, which means that some people don't evacuate. Plus there are always some geniuses that insist on sitting next to the shoreline, and the police have to shoo them away.
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From my outsider perspective "what went wrong" is clearly just a case of poor communication by everyone involved.
It's not the presence of a bad VCS. It's the lack of a decent one.

Without git, it's really hard to take bold steps in redesigning the project, because one would be afraid it won't work, and then you'll lose all the progress you had so far.

Git solves this problem. Just start a new branch and work in it. If it works, great, merge mack to the master branch. If it fails, no big deal, discard this branch and go back to master.

Basically git encourages experimenting in a way no other system does.
This guy actually just blew my mind with the StopHop comment - I really had no idea and feel I should've heard or read something about it.

This resonates with me but was too open-ended. It really is just a social problem stemming from different sets of socio-economic priorities and values. I was the kid who would get in trouble for taking apart the vcr, but generally my parents encouraged me to experiment with whatever held my interests. I realize, however, that that wasn't the case for other black kids from the major-metropolitan area.
CodeMirror seems to be getting a lot of uptake, does pretty well handling the basics (highlighting, indenting, etc.), and has a pretty straightforward interface for adding support for new languages. Might be worth looking at.

http://codemirror.net/
They are indeed fascinating, and Erik Demaine's MIT OCW lecture on it is amazing [1]. The analogy between the NYC subway system (express and local trains) and skip lists is brilliant.

[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
I'm the author of the OP. The comments here make me think (again) that the article wasn't clear enough: admittedly, when I first wrote it, I was just discovering git, as some of the comments said. The difference between me and perhaps many recently-baptized git fanboys is that now, three years later, I still believe exactly what I wrote. I just now also know why it came across the wrong way.

Here's what I was trying to get across at the time: git creates a whole new set of nouns and verbs for computer science that almost none of us have experienced before. Yes, it steals a lot of concepts from programs like darcs and monotone, and there are other things that do the same things that git does from a VCS point of view - but my focus is on the nouns and verbs. git exposes the plumbing of these new concepts directly to you, which is both scary and intensely powerful.

git isn't the next Unix because it will replace Unix: git is the next Unix because its concepts represent the next mind-shifting change in computer science. I mean that git is the next Unix in the same way you could say "Unix is the next Lisp" or "Dynamic Languages are the next Static Languages." Not that the new thing replaces the old thing: they have totally different uses. But that's the point: the new thing's uses are really new. Stuff that was hard is now easy.

It's hard to imagine the world before Unix pipes (and the Unix sh in general) were invented, but I used it, and IT SUCKED. The whole Unix paradigm (yikes, now I've used that word) really changed the face of computing. Even if you don't use Unix, you got changed by Unix.

git's new nouns are blobs, trees, commits, and refs. The new verbs are push, pull, merge, tag, etc. You can apply these nouns and verbs to a lot more than just source code version control.

The naysayers in this thread all sound like 1990's programmers who don't understand the value of higher-order functions or dynamic typing or macros. You can survive without those things, but some problems are just so much easier with them than without them. git is like that. If you don't get it, you're living in the past.

One final clarification: my article was written to talk about git, but it's not about git's code or API or repo format at all. bup, the backup software I started writing about two years after that article, doesn't share any source code with git, but the amazing things it does are possible because it uses the new nouns and verbs popularized by git. When new distributed filesystems and databases and social networks and wikis and massively distributed collaborative text editors arrive, they will all be using these new nouns and verbs. If you don't care about that, then yeah, git isn't the next Unix for you. But if you want to build the next generation of networks in real life, then you'll either be taking advantage of the new nouns and verbs or you'll be painstakingly building the Windows of distributed systems.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Retail availability of Apple products is almost always reduced before new launches. The iPad 1 was easily available right up to the iPad 2 launch.

Best estimates right now are around 500k units. Given the obvious level of demand, that's 'limited' in my book.
Is it because you're using bit.ly? Update: bit.ly is a banned domain: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910

(I'm not part of HN.)
> In some cases, property has been seized for acts someone other than the owner performed.

My first father in law (that sounds weird) had a SUV stolen. On the same afternoon, it was involved in two robberies - one supermarket, one bank - and one murder (one of the robbers was shot by his colleagues). It took him a while to get the car back.

Note: it happened in Brazil.
And for those that don't realize, the OP author also wrote up git subtree, which pretty much caused me to take git seriously and change from hg to it.
Is there any reason as to why this resurfaces from 2008? No pun intended.
Even if they're 99.9% confident that the containment would hold against a molten reactor NO ONE would want to be the official to actually just "let it happen."
How long does this post-shutdown cooling process take?

I thought I'd read something like 48 hours in the immediate aftermath of the quake, but that's obviously not correct.
There's a big disconnect here; if you think there's some compelling use case for having shared state in a central location, then anything that gives your central service access to that shared state will meet that need. That does not mean this shared location is necessarily "the cloud", nor does it mean you "must" actually literally serve the IDE out of the cloud so it can live in the browser. That's just today's mantra, tomorrow's will be something else. You simply must have the state moved somewhere where it can be analyzed, or even simply shared P2P with no central node.

This is taking on an immense amount of pain for what sounds like gain that can be had for far cheaper in every conceivable way with a much simpler and less boil-the-ocean approach. Whatever benefit you think this is going to bring when it's done, why not prototype that now?
I think you may be underestimating the potential reach of Google's ambitions in the search space. Think of improvements in search in specific areas of knowledge. How about searching for flights? Well, they bought ITA software for that, probably because they wanted to get into that space. How about organizing books? Right, Google Books? Scientific papers, law information. The extent that searches and organizing information in various disciplines is virtually limitless. Then there are things like the semantic web. I would go as far as saying that almost any kind of problem solving humans do involves a form of 'search', and as these processes take advantage of the ever increasing information on the web, they will benefit from improved search techniques.
To conclude and restate again, Google's objectives, IMHO, are extremely far-reaching.
Fairy Tales
Only diet advice you'll ever need- cut out grains from your diet. Will never have to worry about weight again. Eat meat, fish, fruits and veggies. Have one cheat day during which you eat anything you want. Easy. Simple. No diets, no counting calories. Done.
Data Overload Has Economic Costs
I would say I'm offline often. I was interviewed by a company who's tech lead required everyone to program using VIM only on the server (production server). They didn't want any of the developers to have code on their machines for fear of them running off with it or something.

I won't even begin to enumerate the problems with that philosophy (developers editing code that was live and used the production DB - this was the biggest uh-oh) and other glaring issues of not trusting your programmers.

I promptly explained their silliness and walked out the door.

The most important feature of working-on-your-desktop, however, is to have mobility and isolation. I never let anyone edit code through SSH on the live server. If something is brokedd, even if it is something big, it can wait an hour to be fixed, peer tested, unit tested and pushed to the server. Plus WHY IN THE WORLD would you have your VCS history on the production machine!?!?! I don't get that about some of these cloud services that have you clone your source repository!

Laptop + Emacs + local db + Mercurial + rsync + Fabric is flexible and expressive in a way that anyone arguing for on-server only editing can't argue against.

I make a edit, hit refresh on the browser and verify it works as I expect it to then I simply type in "fabric deploy" and it asks me if I'm pushing to the staging server or to the production server. If I tell it I'm pushing to the production server it runs all of the unit tests for the project to make sure my edits didn't go f'up something else in the application I wasn't thinking about at the time. If the tests ALL pass it then rsyncs the files up with the server (using checksum not timestamp comparisons). If the tests fail, nothing happens.

[EDIT] Obviously I make batch edits - running unit tests for the whole project more than once a day would be ridiculous. But you get the idea.

It's the best process I've come up with so far and I've tried a lot of stuff. I've seen many horrors related to on-server editing.

Code on YOUR machine. Period.
Huh? My friends at Google tend to love reader and think of the Reader team as one of the better ones at Google.

I don't personally use it, but my impression is that it's generally a much beloved product internally.
Pretty snarky comment to end on... Since HBGary I'm not sure if it's fair to call them _all_ bored teenagers. I hope Elo Pro is far from a real identity.
This sounds more like friendly advice to developers

I would agree with you if they had not changed their terms of service, to make it illegal for you to do <unclear> things.

A simple warning saying: "we intend to compete in the client space" would have been fair.
I'd read that the problem was residual heat, as the control rods should have dropped as soon as coolant flow halted. This means that no new heat is being added to the system, but that the reactor will experience a gradual decline from its 3000 MW operating capacity. All of that energy is stored as irradiated steam, which can be forced into pools of seawater beneath the plant to cool it, but only so much.
Sadly, this can't handle C extensions in either language, making it unable to port a lot of major libraries. Fun to play around with, though.
A number of these startup billionaires are paper-billionaires due to Facebook's grossly inflated private market valuation.

I expect to see a lot of these names dropping off the billionaire list as quickly as they got onto it.
Users complain iPhone clock bungles time change
In his comments, he says Ruby and Python programmers "battle" a lot. I love and use Python a lot and have a small dislike for Ruby's very irregular syntax, but nothing worth fighting for.

But don't get me started on Java... ;-)
I don't think it matters much whether many challenges are successful. When it takes years and costs more in unrecoverable legal fees (it's a civil court case, not merely a request) than most seized property is actually worth, very few victims are going to bother.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2009/1209/p02s06-usju.h...
Couldn't you stick a piece of platinum at the mouth of a vent and just vent it steadily?
- It's rare that stock completely bottoms out. There's a lot of tea-reading that happens with reseller stock levels near new product launch. It happened with the iPad too: http://www.gforgames.com/gadgets/news-gadgets/ipad-stock-sho...

Either way, I disagree with you. 1) if you expect that you wouldn't be able to get an iPad at all. 2) if you think the pre-low-stock talk was any different for iPad than any other refreshed Apple product.

- Estimates for 500,000 units are from Analysts who are notoriously inaccurate. The original iPad sold 300,000 units opening weekend. So if you were Tim Cook, what's your reasonable "not limited" number to shoot for iPad 2 launch based on the original sales? 2x? 3x? 10x? We'll likely find out how close you and Apple's numbers agree as the launch numbers will probably be announced.
Ask HN: experienced titanium developer
I am trying to find a developer that could work (part or full time) on my mobile app. So far I have tried Vagent and Odesk, but it looks like a nobody there has enough experience to write quality code.

Please reply with contact details if interested.
News: Twitter Fortifies Nest - Inside Higher Ed
Another update: Tepco has confirmed that 11 engineers were injured in the blast. No word on their condition.
They are currently not available in the US probably because of that reason but have seemingly have approval in the UK
Heh, and I use Ruby a lot and find Python's syntax troublesome :) I do like the idea that we can all unite behind hatred of Java however. Although Groovy at least is a step up and would be my choice if I ever had to program Java under threat of death or dismemberment.

Also I'd highly recommend the movie Python from 2000, starring none other than Wil Wheaton trying to defend the small town of Ruby from an attack by a giant Python.
Poker Bots Invade Online Gambling
Microsoft Delays Windows Phone 7 Copy and Paste
I wrote a parser once that translated Ruby code using Python syntax convention into Ruby. It felt like it was basically Python, without explicit self method parameters. But I'm sure everything was horribly un-Pythonic.
You had me until dynamic typing. ;) And I really hope you mean Lisp-y macros, and not CPP macros.
Meh. Good for them, but fawning over these guys is like aspiring to be the next Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. The startup media focuses too much on the outright winners instead of... I don't know... not failing?
StumbleUpon Unveils Paid Discovery, Its New “No Click” Ad Platform
Cool.

When I last looked at tarsnap, I got the impression that it's a smart compressed rsync - apparently I was wrong.

bup has a FUSE frontend, that exposes every backup set as a complete file system (also through http and ftp, but the file system angle is the most useful in my opinion). Does tarsnap have something comparable? I'm going to look at it again.
I probably should have qualified that a bit. Clearly there are some capable members of #anon, but by design, its membership is fluid, and for the most part, far from capable of doing anything but following the instructions of others.
Thanks for the response. I'm not even in my 30s yet, but I feel old when I hear about John the Tripper and l0phtcrack. :)

> Failure to comply means you sit in a jail cell until you cough up the password.

I don't think this has precedent in a US court. The closest I can find is the following. He messed up by being initially cooperative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Boucher

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_State...

This is also relevant for those interested in disk encryption:

http://news.techworld.com/security/3228701/fbi-hackers-fail-...
Japan Earthquake: readings, photos, videos, links
Spent the last three days reading about the Japan earthquake and tsunami and decided to compile this page with the best resources I've come across on the web...
Can anyone explain why Twitter even matters beyond app discovery?

If I create an app that posts to Twitter so that someone else can consume that data, why not just cut out the middleman after the initial announcement?
I don't find skip lists to be simpler than AVL trees, but it's my understanding I'm in the minority on this issue.

What I do find very interesting about skip lists is that they support fingers - pointers to locations in the structure that allow fast modification nearby. As a very simple example, prepending an item to a skip list (this cons) is O(1) expected.

Getting this property for AVL or red-black trees is possible, but much more difficult, and requires fundamental changes to the structural invariants and representations.

For more on the uses of finger search, see:

http://www.cs.au.dk/~gerth/pub/finger05.html
I've been hacking at gollum (github's FOSS git-based wiki) for some time, and I might have some interesting uses for it in the education space that go well past a basic wiki.
Java has a very regular syntax, albeit a verbose one... but I guess the last part about Java was for different reasons.
The long, rambling landing page: The video version
Today I encountered a marketing landing page different from anything I had seen before, and I thought I'd share it here. It mimics the long, rambling landing pages we've seen (for example, the parrot book) but it is in video format:

http://www.stansberryresearch.com/pro/1011PSISBBVD/PPSIM312/PR

(My intent is not to start a political debate over this person's claims; I just want to dissect the promotion strategy.)

For those who don't want to look, the page features a video where a narrator describes an impending economic catastrophe while hinting that he can share the know-how to survive it. The video shows the text from the narration, along with illustrations.

The page is almost completely bare besides the video. A header warns of "controversial" and "offensive" content in the video.

The video is in a Flash player that exposes no controls. The visitor has no way to skip ahead, pause, or rewind the video. If you want to see the video's conclusion, you have to sit through the whole thing. (I got bored after five or ten minutes.)

Anyone notice any key other details? Any thoughts on lessons we can learn here, or how they can be applied?

Does anyone have any information on how successfully this campaign is shaking out?
Most of the time when I shower I usually let the water run over me for some time. I use that time to brush.

Yes, it probably is using more water but I waste that water anyway.
Yahoo's Open Hack Europe 2011 - Calling all hackers; Chemam toti hakerii
"... any reason as to why this resurfaces from 2008? ..."

A practical reason: Ruby doesn't have the depth of Python libraries, get more done in less time.[0] A theoretical reason: reading through the docs you find that 'decompyle' is based on 'spark' (John Aycock's generic small languages compiler), learning new things about languages & compilers is good. A philosophical reason: studying _whys' code is like finding some lost Greek classic from the library of Alexandria. Worthy of reading, just to see how a hacker works this problem, thus making it timeless.

[0] At the time the code was written.