skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago I went to Belarus. I made probably 1 20-30 minute call. I got a bill from ATT for ~$1000. The call cost $5 an minute!!
Anyway, we called ATT and cut that payment, however I did still have to pay around $500. Call them and fight it for a while, tell them that you are going to sue them on some grounds (such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unjust_enrichment).
Thanks, this is a great tip.
You are right.

Actually I was almost going to add (car '(lambda (x) x)) to my post in the first place; in line with `The syntax for functions is lists.'
I recently went on a crusade to find this and show it to my children. I view it as a turning point in my development and one that influenced my life's path a great deal.
Walk away from a tough problem

This one has served me well a number of times. I'll get stuck with a problem that I'm just banging my head against the wall trying to solve. Then as soon as I walk away (to go home for the night or to drive somewhere or something) I'll come up with a solution.

Since recognizing this pattern I'm pretty good at walking away from problems and letting my subconscious go to work. Can't tell you how many times it's worked.
The only thing missing was converting the dictionary data into a trie. ;-)

That's what I was thinking. I wonder what the memory and download footprint for that would be in practice. Considering characters are represented by string objects in JavaScript, it could get expensive, unless the runtime interns short strings. If not, you could represent single letters with integers, which are almost certainly interned or even use a non-pointer representation. All those objects at each tree level might be a bit much though.
While it was in vogue, the nobles would all try their hand, no matter how bad they were at it, and no matter how little they actually knew of the language.

Think Janglish, but the Chinese version of it :P
Man becomes hermit, film at 11.
In that case, I did not just describe tarsnap, or at least - did not intend to.

bup _is_ designed for backup rather than random access. But it is easy enough to make those backups look like read-only file systems (bup includes an FTP server, HTTP server and FUSE module that expose a backup set through the respective protocol or as a filesystem).

But since bup builds on git, and a bup backup set is actually a git repository, you get all the git related stuff for free - e.g. bup supports cryptographic signatures in the repository by way of git's signing support -- although, for now, the "bup" command does not implement them (so, if you want to sign or verify the signature, you'll have to use git on the repository rather than bup)

Bup's deduplication is comparable to rsync's (and it reuses rsync's main tool for that). If you change a byte in the middle of a 100MB file, you'll likely need to transfer ~16k to or from backup (compared to the other version of the same file). That's also true if a byte was inserted in the middle of the file. And if you backup 100 copies of a 100MB file, was just a few bytes changed in each file compared to each other file - you'll need less than 150MB of space/storage, rather than the 10GB or so without deduplication.
Top 10 Ways to Royally SUCK at Networking
Probably not, but it would be interesting if we carved out a something in tort law that allowed for civil penalties when gross negligence was provable with a preponderance of the evidence.
No it should move forward and privitize the roads.

Particularly it should sell them to different car companies and arrange for them to have a monopoly. So the interstate is usable by anyone who pays but the local roads are GM only and the off ramp where you work is owned by Toyota.
Downvoted, really? Please explain.
New "Switch to Gmail" page
Less than a naive dictionary; it's a very compact and natural representation of ordered lists of unique words.
Mobile Ticketing for Sporting Events
Is this the future (like we're starting to see QR codes for airplane tickets sent via text/email) or will paper tickets be around for a while longer?
I realise that, I'm interested in the per-object overhead. This approaches zero for the single giant string.
I don't know if this is true, but this was making rounds today:

If you need water, Suntory vending machines have emergency
levers beneath a sticker on the upper-right corners. Pull
the sticker off, pull the lever firmly and you’ll get free
drinks.
Why not link to the original site?

http://www.thisiserichoffman.com/css3-generator/
Exactly! This Why are the Japanese so different! is just romanticising them for not being us. It may not quite rise to racism, but it certainly is silly.
This is not a perfect truth. Friend reports that her family have seen (directly or indirectly, I don't know) both theft and rape. Nonetheless, the extent is probably much less than any other place of crisis.
Lots (if not all) points in the blog post are covered in the book "Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else" http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-Separates-World-Class...
I've heard good things about Ardour http://ardour.org/ especially and also Renoise http://www.renoise.com/ but I haven't tried them personally.
This article is confusingly written to obscure the fact that there's no story.

Some field tests showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected, but the TSA has determined it's because some field testers, who were conducting 10 tests at a time, reported the sum of the individual radiation levels instead of the average.

Apparently this is due to a confusing field test form. So the TSA has fixed the form.

I mean, I hate the TSA too, but come on...
I deleted that line, so we don't have to have the world's most boring discussion on HN.
The Anglo-Saxons came about 1500 years ago and nearly completely replaced the Britons, genetically and culturally

Replaced in that region, but the Celtic peoples were driven West and North (Wales, Cornwall, and Northumbria).
No, this was NOT "The Register's discovery". This was originally discussed here on HN last Friday, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317804 by marcusramberg, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marcusramberg.

After replicating some of the tests, as I documented here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317975 in the comments, then here on my site in full, http://trending.us/2011/03/12/performance-numbers-for-nitro-....

That was Friday. Then yesterday the author of the Register story, Cade Metz, contacted me out of the blue about my blog post. I more or less told him (what I imagine every developer he contacted about this story) was that Yes, it runs slower in UIWebViews and that No, its not an Apple conspiracy, and that this appears to be a bug that Apple is now aware of going by posts in the Developer forums. I told Mr. Metz that if he can get into the dev forums, he can see for himself, but that I could not directly provide links or anything because the forums are confidential. I don't intend to lose my developer license, thank you.

Then yesterday afternoon, the story was published. I was not referred to directly (for which I am thankful), though perhaps one of his anonymous sources was a paraphrasing of some of the things I said.

Now here we go again in the echo chamber that is the Valley, where ReadWriteWeb is regurgitating a non-story published by The Register, that was verified by me and others on our personal sites, that I (we?) heard about from Hacker News, that was originally reported by someone else who first found the problem.

Assuming marcusramberg was the original discoverer of the this, has he gotten any credit? No.

Fucking mountains out of molehills.
In Semi-Defense of Twitter
So here is a question for my fellow programmers -- how do you practice writing better code deliberately?
Ruby or Python. Why: because they're popular, well suited to web work, and will expand your skillset in a useful way (with new concepts etc.)
"we'll make the URLs pretty, but we'll ignore the stuff about statelessness."
I can't find the link right now but I'm prety sure I saw a news report yesterday about some looting happening. In any case, I see absolutely nothing wrong with looting in an emergency situation where there is no access to food and water.
Like others have posted, I have also had a surprising number of page views without knowing it. The secret for me was Google Images. Got an iPhone image from Apple's PR site and uploaded it to my homepage. Now my page shows up in image search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Once I realized what was happening, I added some code to my webpage so that removes itself from the frame it's embedded in. It's essential the same as finding it on a web search, but it's page rank is a lot higher on the image search due to the iPhone image.
Yes, you need to have this person sign something stating that he doesn't own anything.

And go watch The Social Network.
Sure, no problem. I guess Emacs Lisp falls under the old-and-broken category. And Picolisp eschews functions as a data-type by choice. Do you know whether Picolisp offers lexical scoping?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/asia/22poverty.html
The poverty rate in Japan isn't that much lower than the US (15.7% vs. 17.1% according to the article). However, people below that line in Japan are somewhat unwilling to admit being in poverty.
I wondered the same thing. I actually built the original Caledonian-Record site back in high school when the Caledonian was partnered with Helicon (anyone remember hcr.net? Oh the nineties). I was very relieved to see that the link wasn't some old embarrassment of mine from 1996.
That doesn't even make sense. If they forgot to divide by 10, the results are actually 10 times too large, meaning the actual radiation is 1/10 of the previously reported result.
That's http://packages.python.org/milk/benchmarks.html if anyone was wondering
Take a look at Saurabh Odhyan's JavaScript prefix trie implementation; https://github.com/odhyan/trie
I really like that, but Roy Disney died after Disney World opened. You may be referring to his brother Walter Disney (the 'Walt' in Disney), who died prior to the parks completion.
It's bots. Google Analytics starts out by only counting clients that run javascript, so that eliminates most automated queries right there. AwStats looks at actual requests from server logs, which is going to count a lot of requests from poorly written comment spam botnets, email scrapers, and other non-vistors.
If you're looking for a webserver to use for jruby check out kirk:

https://github.com/strobecorp/kirk

It's a really nice jetty binding for jruby.
Is the "New Approach to Amazon EC2 Networking" really so new? 
Comments on latest blog from AWS, wondering why some simple features are considered new, when they shoukd have had been there in the first place
http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default-rea...

when you feel like you’re on your own, when you feel abandoned and the only one who you can depend on is you, then yes, you’re going to do what you have to do to survive. This has been seen around the world in many countries and cultures. The big difference in postwar modern Japan is that people are confident that help is on the way.

...

Here’s where you see a glaring cultural difference: virtually nobody in contemporary Japan has this kind of contempt for their fellow countrymen. Yet prewar Japan was deeply divided along class lines, and when disaster happened and the poor starved and burned, neither the government nor the upper classes could be bothered to give a shit. Currently in Japan there are calls for the government to scrap proposed tax cuts and use the money for relief efforts. Can you imagine the same happening in the US?
Now Facebook does the same thing, but in Facebook's case this is enormously bad, evil and wrong

Selfishly, I disagree. I hate sites that constantly forget who I am. I would be totally happy for every site, including my bank, to set a perpetual cookie. If I want them to forget me I can explicitly log out.

Maybe for people who don't know better you have a point, I don't know. But for me, Facebook remembering me isn't bad, evil, and wrong, it's good, righteous, and correct.
Historical analysis doesn't have enough comparable data points and there are significant failures on record. How many times has a reactor been hit with an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami? There's only 1 data point.

Historical and simulation models both have large negative expected value (unless you can rule out a black swan event with a miniscule probability at around 10^-8 - unattainable certainty with current analysis).
Many other people on this thread have compiled lists of "western" tragedies that did not come to looting, so I think calling it a cultural thing is out.

I think the difference is that when people believe the world is watching and that help is coming (ie September 11th, this earthquake) they maintain their composure. People destroy and loot when they feel that the world has forgotten them and that help is not coming. During Hurricane Katrina the government was quite slow to respond. In Haiti it took nearly two days to reach twitter/the public and trigger international relief. Almost nobody was there to hold them over until then, and chaos happened. I think this is quite rational: if you felt the world had ended and that it was not going to be made better, you'd probably act like an animal and only think of yourself too.
Also http://git-annex.branchable.com/
Show HN: HTML-DOM λ-calculator
An untyped lambda calculator in JavaScript which operates on DOM nodes, which I created some time ago.

This is a very impractical way to enter lambda expressions; so it has little use other than as an example.
The radiation pattern of the antenna is probably different enough with the phone in the glass to cause the network to switch it to a different cell tower altogether.

Also, "radio is fast" but signal-strength indicators are not updated at millisecond frame rates. :-P
It offers something similar-but-not-quite called transient symbols:
http://www.software-lab.de/doc/faq.html#problems

Alternative phrases for similar-but-not-quite: insidious, error-prone.
This is an awesome list! Still haven't read some of them yet, but the few left are in my queue. I would add one more:

The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doige. This book will give you a whole new perspective on how your mind and the human brain works! It will talk about neuroplasticity and real world examples of people that had their brain tweaked through this new area of research in neuroscience.
It's silly how this is actually becoming the truth. People use the same password and different usernames for different sites. In the end, remembering your username becomes the problem :)
Ugh, just for the historical record: no, it is not "conspiracy theory talk". It's the simple observation that without reasonably accurate data, valid analysis cannot be done. We don't have most of the data pertaining to Chernobyl, and we never will. That is mainly because the USSR was a totalitarian state with rigorous information control systems, and it didn't like to be embarrassed by its nuclear oopsie-daisy.

Good scientists--those of the WHO included--do their best with what data they have, and don't make claims that can't be backed up by data. Because there isn't enough data to support it, there will never be a comprehensive scientific analysis of the real impact of the Chernobyl event... at least until we get some kind of time machine tech.

Until then, you can't KNOW the impact of Chernobyl. Sorry, but you just have to GUESS. I realize that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but that's how life works a lot of the time.

So my point wasn't "I know the real Chernobyl outcome in its entirety! It was baaaaad, man!" It was, "nobody knows the real Chernobyl outcome; we only know some partial results that we've been able to piece together, mostly many years after the fact from inconsistent data." (And that my personal hunch is that there was probably a lot of negative impact to humans which could not be captured in reports such as the ones you cite.)
Ask HN: How does this happen?  Pandora Radio founder owns less than 3%
http://blogs.forbes.com/nicoleperlroth/2011/02/11/pandora-files-for-ipo/

"The biggest winners in a public offering would be Pandora’s investors: Crosslink Capital (owns 23%), Walden Venture Capital (19%), and Greylock Partners (14%). The offering would be the second big win for Greylock this year–the firm also owns 16% of LinkedIn, which filed two weeks ago. But according to the S-1, founder Tim Westergren owns less than 3% of the company."

I imagine this situation being far from ideal for Westergren. How does this sort of thing happen?
The real issue is that these scanners violate the 4th Amendment and impose health risk for no gain in security.
This is my hometown newspaper - I saw this the other day when looking for an article... is there any good reason for this? I cannot fathom what's going on.

For what it's worth, the opinion of the paper myself and those I know have had is that it's rather poor quality, but there's not enough market for competition.
St. Johnsbury natives on Hacker News? Say it isn't so! Another one here.

The Caledonian Record does many things that don't really make sense - I'm not completely surprised.
Japan also gets more earthquakes than most places that you're probably used to. Even though this one was larger, it seems that to the Japanese, dealing with earthquakes is rote.
Correct. These new tests produced abnormally large results. If these results were true, then this would be front-page news. But the results are faulty. So the actual radiation is ... the same as what we thought before these new tests were conducted.

It's confusing because, once you understand it, you ask why they wrote a story about it.
Jazz sounds awful. There's a reason pop music sticks to the four chords of victory - they sound great!
Thanks, my earlier comment reads as being more inflammatory than intended.

The very existence of Mrs Espinel's position speaks volumes -
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9570293...
Will this compile on Cygwin like Tarsnap does?
so is "those gosh darned greedy bankers caused everything" the accepted meme at this point?
3% of a (soon-to-be?) public company is pretty good.
Tell HN: Ask.com is a crappy search engine
I saw a referral on one my websites today from a search on Ask.com. To my surprise, my website had shown up extremely high up in the results for this search: http://www.ask.com/web?q=whats+the+funnest+game+on+the+app+store%3F&search=&qsrc=0&o=102280&l=dir

Believe me, there are thousands of apps out there (and their respective websites) that should have appeared above mine for what must be a fairly common search. Google and Yahoo searches are proof that my site shouldn't have shown up where it did. I realize that Ask.com is trying to let users form questions rather than queries, but isn't it just a really crappy engine? How does it's page rank work? I just gave one example, but I have seen this countless of times before. Does anyone even use Ask.com here on HN?
I'm a sysadmin at a Big 4 auditing firm. Adobe products are the bane of our existence.

Acrobat 9.4.1 takes over to install. Oh that's right, there's a vulnerability in that version, so now we're gonna have to push 9.4.2

When a user's Flash installation is corrupted, many times the uninstaller fails, so we have to use Windows Installer Cleanup to remove it. Every week, there's a new issue. Can't these fellows get it right?
I am surprised nobody mentioned this yet: Japan has a much MUCH lower level of income (and wealth) inequality than the US, Haiti, etc. [1]

There are just a lot fewer poor people in Japan. So if your house got leveled by the tsunami, you can go to your friends, relatives, family, etc for a little help because they aren't half impoverished already.

I don't mean to demean the theory regarding social differences. I'm sure it's very true that society's standards and everyone's individual respect for shared property play crucial roles in the lack of looting. But I'm willing to bet that economic factors made a difference too.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Yes, that is true, and I should have mentioned Northumbria especially because that was a wonderful culture, but their numbers were still greatly reduced. Cornish culture is now completely wiped out.

Edit: Cornishness wiped out as far as continuity. I respect the "revival movement" but the re-rooting process will take awhile even if most of the people there support it.
The short story, the company struggled for a long time early on, hence the need to dilute to not close the doors
Ask HN: Working from home & depression
I have been working from home for 2.5 months with no option to go into an office for social interaction. I noticed in the first month I was starting to get cagey so I joined a gym to go to evening classed and moved my evening piano lessons to lunch time to get outside for a break once a week. I also try walking to the local gas station for any trivial treat or newspaper...But I feel that over the last few weeks my moods have been really affected by working and living in the same 1200 sqft. How else can I change my schedule to avoid the loneliness of working from home and the familarity of living in your work area at night/weekends.
"What Is The Name Of This Book?" by Raymond Smullyan is a great book if you like puzzles or want a playful way to improve your logic/reasoning skills. It does a really good job of incrementally building up to more complicated problems. It starts out with puzzles using basic if p then q style logic and moves all the way up to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in a way that is both accessible by and entertaining to someone as young as 10.

It took me about two weeks to a month to read and give each question due thought at a pretty leisurely pace, though I am sure most would take many much less time. (I had to stop to keep up on homework/study for tests for about a week of time.)

I don't know if I became a better programmer from it, but it is very much inline with the hacker spirit. You can get it probably from the library/inter-library loan (as I did initially), but you will probably fall in love with it and shell out the $10 to get the used copy.

Hope you enjoy, pwp
The curious can prove this by pressing Ctrl-A to select the letters (and all other text on the page).
Odd... why is my username now $2a$11$xhZJBhGhnD9yy8nwTWxif.Wrg1sbfs5pFyhLuscGvpVKMCPgq8WLG ?
Big Scale: Build an organization that is capable of doing crazy shit (e.g. software company that opens a school) with the time flexibility built in to imagine/execute on crazy shit.

The fundamental requirement for doing this is that you make enough revenue off of certain products/services to allow you to feel comfortable doing crazy shit, and have enough staff that are well paid that no one is scared of losing their job by doing crazy shit.

You also probably have to avoid investors, as they may not like you doing crazy shit. It's possible that they'll be ok with it, but not likely. Of course this makes it harder to build the company up to a point where it's making enough revenue to do crazy shit.

Anyways, I've gotten started on it: http://www.irrationaldesign.com - but it's slow going...