skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My interpretation of the article is that Allen felt betrayed because Gates and Ballmer were having these discussions behind his back.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/american-people-hire-highpo...
The server logs he mentions at the end of the article are rather convincing (if circumstantial) evidence.
Perhaps providing more context (even if you follow it by declaring that you believe it's for pretty much any kind of business - the reality is there are many business types for which jumping in with no thought is a very bad idea[1]), and not being so aggressive (the very name is an attack, because of the swear word). If you then also included a mention of StartupBritain in a positive way (rather than the veiled "popular belief" reference), it would probably come across as complementary, rather than opposed.

Ultimately, you do disagree with StartupBritain's message, which is perfectly fine - I don't see why you feel bad about it. It's ok to disagree and have strong opinions! Just... stand up for them and accept the fact that others will disagree with you too :-)

[1] To take an extreme example, an airline. To take a less extreme example, heh, a B2B SaaS startup.
Cool, I was wondering if it could be implemented in ruby; it's a shame that callcc isn't present anymore in ruby 1.9
...

It is simply not possible to dismantle a nuclear reactor that close after shutdown -- the power produced by radioactive decay heat right after shutdown is in the order of 10MW, and the core is incredibly hot for weeks. If they had done everything as well as they possibly could, they would not be any closer to dismantling the plants than they are today. The best course would have been to maintain cooling so that nothing would have been damaged -- they tried this and failed. The failures in their actions are not asking for more help earlier, not in the basic course of action they took. The idea that the reactors should have been buried with 24 hours of the emergency generators going down betrays basic lack of knowledge of the facts of the situation. Should you have tried to bury a core that has been active less than a day before without considerable active cooling, it would have simply melted it's way to the water table.

The total amount of plutonium that has been released into the environment so far is minuscule. It is significant because it serves as an unmistakable indicator that the cladding for the rods has melted, meaning that should any containment fail now, the results would be catastrophic. But we knew that -- TEPCO said that the cladding was melting on 14th of March. Still, unless something unexpected and catastrophic happens now, the nuclear side of this disaster will still kill more people in Germany than Japan.
Nope, this is all node.js. The scraper hits the homepage every 10 seconds or so with a generous fallback timing if a non 200 response is received. Have to be nice to the server. The response is then parsed into an object using node-jquery.

Client rendering is handled via Express. The object is passed through the jqtpl rendering engine. Results are then cached for initial page loads, and separately for socket.io updates.
Google settles with FTC on Buzz:
http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/google-buzz-ftc-settlement/
Google Settles With FTC Over Buzz Privacy Issues
Even more impressive when the sauce was smeared everywhere.

Apparently this will be used for handling dough in industrial bakeries.
It is exactly the kind of response I would expect from someone in his position. He has nothing to gain by reacting overly negatively, and his legacy is not exactly at stake.
Go for it. http://blog.getgush.com
Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City, Kansas
Just note that robots don't work either, because particle radiation has a nasty way of flipping bits stored in memory. In the presence of a strong beta ray source, you can treat sram and dram as good sources of truly random data. :)
Considering Apple has removed apps after the fact for learning they had functionality they did not desire to be available (Camera+ using volume control for other things, or Yelp's special feature that was turned on via gestures or shaking or somesuch), there is 0 reason to believe they will catch outright malicious software.
For no particular reason other than the sheer illogic of it all, the anti-drug "war" was an interest of mine for a while. I read a book, maybe 18 years ago, about a DEA agent that managed to get so deeply embedded with one of the key cartels that he got to the point he was buying directly from the manufacturer (cocaine in this case). At that level, the price was also substantially lower than street price, or even higher-level middle man prices. His comment was that the US could buy ALL the cocaine they could possibly produce for something like 1/4 what they were spending on "enforcement". Of course, there was no interest in that.

My personal opinion is that the whole "war on drugs" thing is nothing but a boondoggle perpetuated to give some people jobs and a distracting thing to fight against.
The spikes you are mentioning might be due to the OS lowering your process priority. If you are on a FreeBSD machine, try running rtprio(1) to avoid the OS changing the process priority upon extensive CPU usage.
A huge challenge for the big tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.) will be how to offer unprecedented convenience without stirring up privacy concerns.

The company that can best walk this tightrope will win.

Some of the areas we'll see this in are:

- social search

- location-based services

- personalized recommendations

- purchasing history (think Blippy + Amazon)

- social network ranking and filtering (along the lines of what Buzz was doing)
Some interesting insights into the culture of Japan (and corporations both Japanese and American). Is there a way we could help that would be more amenable to the Japanese culture and way of handling things?

Saving face is an important aspect of Asian cultures and if we are truly trying to help them on humanitarian grounds, we should try to become more effective rather than bemoan the fact that they have pride in their culture.

It is an interesting test these days to think how would America respond to foreign help/intervention - I didn't follow what happened post-Katrina but it seems like we also downplayed foreign aid and focused on American rescue efforts.
Tell HN: A proposed change to assigning karma to submissions
There's a very long thread about karma, submissions, comments, bots, and improving HN over here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443

One of the proposals in particular strikes me as having real potential:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387216

Problem is, it's deep in a long thread, and not many people will see it. Hence I post this to help it get some attention. It's not mine - tt's better than anything I've thought of.

(edited to fix the link (even though it's (not clickable)))
Tweets imply immediacy, crowd witness, etc. While blogs imply longer writing, research & fact-checking. Quoting a tweet is like quoting a dude in a crowd, but a bloger is someone doing the same thing as you. No one ever got caught in a public riot and wrote an essay about it on the spot, but they tweet about it.
Irrelevant and not surprising considering the author but thats a very clean and sexy looking blog.
Clickables:

Proposal: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387216

Parent: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443

(edited to fix the link)
Samsung's response is here: http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/sec/2011/040411sec1....
The only problem is that now you have to find a way to download the iso's from microsofts' servers to do it now because most laptop manufacturers only give recovery media that gives you all the crapware when you reinstall.

It wasn't that long ago that you got actual windows install media when you bought a computer.
Yeah, except Samsung admitted that they installed it in the followup article.
This is why I hustle.
If you read the follow up article (linked to from the original) Samsung actually confirmed that they install the software.
APU's should fix some of that.
This is a great point. As engineers, it's a great lesson that we need to stop apologizing for our tools and instead contribute to an effort to make them better. The natural language basis of SQL is very handy, but it does not lend itself well to detainting of input. There should be strict segregation until a late phase between what the developer wrote and what the site user wrote.

There is no excuse why programming languages should require the programmer to work around the inherent deficiencies of SQL. Just like the x86-64 architecture introduced the no-execute bit to the mainstream computing world and made the rampant buffer overflow remote code execution exploits of the 1990s into an endangered species, we should look to a technological solution to solve SQL's deficiencies.

Why should we need to trust that thousands of CMS module developers all use, know, and understand detainting of input in their native language? If we want to allow reuse of code, we put our absolute trust into thousands of developers other than ourselves.
BigOmaha - May 11-13 - Thats right, you should attend.
You can't just 'dismantle' a plant that still has residual heat being generated.

Additionally, if you're suggesting burying it in reference to the solution at Chernoby, that also doesn't work so well. At Chernobyl the plant was effectively destroyed, so there was no harm in simply filling it with concrete and placing the sarcophagus over it. At Fukushima the plant is still largely intact. Unless you can submerge the plant in concrete in one fell swoop (not possible), the damage done by the piecemeal burying of the plant would undoubtedly create even more damage and result in more radiation leakage than we currently see.
Of course, the infrastructure in the entire region had been destroyed by the earthquake + tsunami, making the simple task of transporting hundreds of tons of sand and concrete a herculean task...
I appreciate the POV. At the risk of litigating a separate issue, i think you're wrong. Aside from people who care about big data, information gathering and management by the government is a big deal for journalists, people who interact with the government, and ultimately tax payers.

You're going to fall into at least one of those categories, and i think that hackers in particular are going to fall into multiple of those categories (that i happen to know from personal experience).

But if you didn't think it was relevant, then i certainly don't think you're obligated to upvote. :)
The protocol does; the application does not.
Yes. The majority of regular people would never do that, or even know where to start.
Yeah, I completely agree. I'm sure he doesn't need my or anybody else's money or respect. But I wonder if the message he's trying to get across is the one that's actually getting across. Looking at it from a gaming standpoint, can his play here can ever have a positive expectation?
Currently on an R720 and I've no SL folder, either.

I've poked around various locations on the machine and run some scans with a number of different tools, but I've discovered nothing untoward, as yet.

My attestation is somewhat of an irrelevance, however, as I've no way of accurately replicating the environment in which Mr Hassan carried out his research. It looks as though I shall simply have to wait and see how this all plays out over the coming days.
Your energy could be best spent doing something other than telling others how to spend their energy.
The spikes are from hard problem instances - he's not running on the same data set each time.

From Norvig's post:

But the main message is that the mean and median stay
about the same even as we sample more, but the maximum
keeps going up--dramatically. The standard deviation
edges up too, but mostly because of the very few very
long times that are way out beyond the 99th percentile.
This is a heavy-tailed distribution, not a normal one.
Exactly, everything should be done above board -- when an unexpected event happens and the outcome is unknown it doesn't hurt to have a contingency plan if stuff doesn't work out.
Tablets might be fad, says Microsoft's global strategy chief
A mix of FPAAs and FPGAs, rather than all FPGAs or all FPAA. The DSP elements in newish FPGAs is a nod in this direction.

High resolution analog seems to be just hard to do in practice.

That is exactly the challenging bit. And something I was trying to figure out if Lyric had actually made an improvement on. If you could do computation in an analog matrix and still pull 32 bits reliably out of it, that would be something new.
Today’s Facebook forecast: Cloudy with a chance of girlfriends
Link to the proposal goes to a blank page (just the header, no content)
100 innovations that shaped IBMs first 100 years
The link to the part where someone from Samsung confirms they installed the keylogger so they could lern how people use the machines.
There are also user accounts that have been created just to spam HN, eg:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=subhbwn
Yes, but I can't actually prove those.
Sounds like even without legal action, the case was /sewn/ shut!
There are of course ways to shield from that (as illustrated by spacecraft and common military electronics), but nuclear station damage control robotics is perhaps too niche application to be implemented.
Great simplistic design! Just a question, I havent done some more twsting but; is it normal that the game doesn't work on iPad Safari? Do you need to drag the pieces ?
Invisible hand of the free market my friend.

If a bank lets a thief get away with an unencrypted harddrive full of bitcoins who is going to ever use them again?.

Bitcoin is a strange concept, I am not convinced it will take off but the potential is amazing.
Calacanis is right, the launch was a huge success. If you can't cause mass enthusiasm, the next best thing is mass controversy. Now everyone is falling over themselves trying to figure out what Color is all about. Whatever they do, they'll have no trouble getting noticed.
Of course the price is lower. If Time Warner had the power to levy property taxes in addition to charging for internet services, they could probably get away with charging less for internet access.
Okay, at the risk of sounding a bit sleezy, here some tips I found useful myself:

1. Never, ever, give out information about previous compensation. Always attempt to deflect that with "I don't feel comfortable talking about that yet" (and get the conversation back to what you can do for them.) If they insist (and you are not prepared to walk) give them a really high estimate ("I was thinking roughly <highest you could think of> to <that + 25%>")

2. Always let them make an offer first

3. Remember that their budget isn't a problem, if they decided they really want you, on the scale of Google your salary is merely a rounding error on the budget.

4. PRACTICE! I mean, get a friend you trust to do a role-play of the various tactics the recruiters use to low-ball you and practice the conversation _at least_ 5 times.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring (March 2011 Edition)
I haven't seen one of these lately and I know there are a lot of companies looking for people, ours included (Surveymonkey.com).

Please include the location and whether working remote is a possibility.
The proposal is taking me to a blank page.

Edit: It's fixed now. Disregard.
Does Beauty Equal Happiness?
Sausage.js a jQuery UI widget for contextual pagination.
They are more likely due to properties of the puzzles themselves than operating system behaviour, especially on a modern operating system on a multi-core machine. Plus, in the original Norvig article (http://norvig.com/sudoku.html) he talks about several puzzles which take 10s and 100s of seconds to complete, which is extremely unlikely to be due to scheduler behaviour.

With languages like Python and Clojure several background processes (like GC pauses) could also contribute to some drops in throughput.

Of course, it would be easy to tell these cases apart by counting operations (backtracks, etc) rather than time.
Is cassandra a good fit for random bigdata access?
I am in the need of scaling a TB-scale hashtable in a distributed environment; the typical use case is looking things up hash-wise, the hash is not crypto-strong and there's a fair amount of data redundancy, so collisions will be the norm. Data will be write-once read-many, and queries will be random.

Currently I'm using a RDBMS on a single machine, on RAID, and the I/O is clearly the bottleneck.

I keep reading that Cassandra is write-optimized more than reads, and in http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/CassandraHardware it says "Obviously there is no benefit to having more RAM than your hot data set", suggesting the obvious benefit of caching.

My question is, what would be the right "bigdata" choice for applications where caching is not really possible?

Is cassandra read perf limited by reads rate or by the amount of RAM (ie. the ability of keeping the keys in memory)?
Show HN: Easily migrate inlined CSS to a separate CSS file (8 hour project)
I stand corrected, and should have read the followup article.

I don't think the Samsung "confirmation" brings me to 50% confidence that Samsung actually was logging and capturing people's keystrokes, though.

I would still like to see what the keylogger is actually doing - storing, transmitting, what?
I think you misunderstand me. What the Government does with your data, and what it doesn't do, is big news, of great interest, to everyone.

And that's my point.

It should be of interest to everyone, and it's got nothing specifically related to being a hacker, being a founder, running a project, or other technical issues that are the point, purpose and focus of this community.

Or once were.

And before someone trots out the "satisfies intellectual curiosity" line from the guidelines let me just say no, it doesn't, and if you think it does then you have a very different concept of "intellectual" from mine.

So I'm not saying it's uninteresting in general, I'm saying it's uninteresting to this community as I understand it ought to be.

And in consequence it's clear that you have a different understanding about with this community ought to be. Maybe I'm now out-of-date, and it's changed into something with which I don't share significant overlap.
Stupid things I have done in Ruby and Rails
http://www.wordchute.com
http://www.rdtn.org/
Where AMD is headed with the catalyst driver
I would consider that a bad response if you kept it after probing simply because the sales dept likes to sell clients on the lates/greatest tech. And if you were a serious web dev, you'd have to keep up with it in some way.

Assuming you are a web dev, Im sure you know which browsers support which html5 features, which ones play which video types natively, and the newest css3 tricks that everyone except probably IE supports.

There is changing course with every shift in the wind and there is understanding which way the wind is blowing and charting your course based on the fuller picture. (and of course there is "the wind is blowing?")
That's my point. But the Bitcoin proponents don't address the tradeoff, just one side of it.
The cost of market data and a system equipped to process it are not inconsiderable.

Historical tick data (quotes and trades) for US equities will run you $20k/year, minimum. US equities runs about 30-40GB/day so you are looking at almost 10TB/year. You need to be able to access the data quickly so you probably don't want to compress it and probably do want to duplicate the data, slicing and dicing it in different ways. Call it 20TB, minimum, per year of data.

Futures and options data will run another $20k/year, each, and futures has about as much data as equities and options has an order of magnitude more. That is another 100TB/year, minimum, per year, probably closer to 200TB.

How are going to to study these data? Even if you were able to operate at disk speed (which seems unlikely unless you have lots of disks and have duplicated and distributed your data amongst them) it would take you five minutes to run against one day's worth of data, or close to a day to run a year's simulation. If you consider more than a few cores in parallel, reading from disk is going to be seriously hampered.

None of this even considers the cost of the software necessary to support this effort: contending with corporate actions, tracking halts, etc.

This all adds up to a significant financial hurdle.
Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhhh !!!

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry - dogfood, dogfood - check your work, use what you produce, follow the links properly.

Mea culpa - apologies - link now fixed.
The wikipedia article on the softcard doesn't even mention Allen : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard

Is that a mistake?
It does seem a bit odd that a tool that is ripe for collaboration is not available to the organizations that use Google Apps. I don't need to collaborate with my friends on anything, but I need to collaborate with my colleagues daily.
Thanks, Evan Williams, For All You’ve Done So Far
It's mostly explained in the "about", but I have a habit of making most of my CSS changes inline in my HTML, so I use a lot of style attributes. This is usually "bad form", and I always tell myself I'll just move it all over to an external document later, but it's really annoying to do that manually.

So I made this tool last night that takes an HTML document and extracts all the inlined CSS style attributes and puts them into their own classes and then removes the style attributes from the HTML and replaces them with neat little classes.

Definitely a ton more this tool could do to streamline the process (also I could just learn to do all my CSS in an external file to begin with), but, whatever, I'm definitely going to use this. It's a start at least!
Who destroyed Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland and Netscape? Who swore under oath that the browser is part of the operating system, and couldn't be removed? Why are 9 out of 10 desktop computers running Windows? I think only one man gets the credit. :-)

Hopefully, he can ruthlessly solve a few of the long-running problems in the world.
In all seriousness, I would rather see a market designed explicitly around the barring of high frequency trades. All trades taking a fixed and relatively long period (say, 30 minutes) to complete.

This sort of investment strategy doesn't seem to be creating long-term market value, it's exploiting short-term edge effects in a zero-sum strategy. The arms race to pursue ever more inhumanly fast automatic trades seems to have no net value at all yet is consuming resources to impoverish the algorithmically and connectively poorer at the expense of the richer.

Markets seem to be favoured because they allow prices to find their natural level from supply and demand. How is this facility helped by permitting trades to be completed and then reversed faster than any human can ever perceive? This is algorithmic gambling on edge effects far more than a true market.
The protocol is proprietary - and in that case it is in Skype's best interest to maintain a similar look and feel throughout all platforms they support.

This of course doesn't mean that they shouldn't be doing so much more on both systems - I just think in this case the requirement of having a similar application on both systems is necessary.
On March 1, 2011, I called and logged incident 2101163379 with Samsung Support.

...

The supervisor confirmed that Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."
Dialysis Facility Tracker
Spotlight Interview - Limor Fried, Adafruit Industries
I wonder if it only works on that particular surface (whatever it is made of).

I say this mainly because it looks similar to the material that the 'dustpan' tray/conveyor is made from.
Yes, our current release implements Python 2.5 completely, and our trunk implements 2.7. As for speed, I'll let: http://speed.pypy.org/ speak for itself.