skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of curiosity: http://www.quora.com/Jinghao-Yan -- what is your HN handle? I would have expected the response to give some indication that he (im guessing gender based on picture) actually used the site ...
It makes more sense when you see that Charlie Cheever (co-founder of Quora) asked it.
Here's a nice, and recent article, by Amartya Sen, comparing development in India and China:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/quality...

Sen wrote the book "Development as Freedom" after winning the 1998 Economics Nobel prize. He's known for the general observation that famines occur seldom in democratic societies because politicians are at a gross level accountable for outrageous mismanagement of resource allocation.
That's me.

I'm surprised (sort of elated) that someone dug up an old answer of mine to link here. I would've linked it, but it would've seemed a little self-promotional, and strangely ironic given my answer.
It's been like that ever since they rolled out Google Instant last year. While you in particular might not like it, it's been a pretty big hit in the web development community and average user experience.
You may have #3 backwards (and also have the reason people want dollars backwards; it has very little to do with nominal oil pricing). I suggest reading http://mpettis.com/2011/05/is-it-time-for-the-us-to-disengag... for the former and any competent explanation of international trade mechanisms for the latter.
I have read the book. I just think that the people who style themselves as "influencers" no longer fit the model's early adopters. Mostly because they've been professionalized. PR people aren't early adopters, they're PR people.
WP7 App 6 months worth of Sales and Downloads stats
It's difficult to describe. Go sign up for a new Google account [1] and click the wheelchair symbol to activate the audio captcha.

[1]: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
Do you guys think this is disingenuous?
Yes, and such failures are interpreted as a direct readout on our national technological capability and international prestige. It's nonsense to read so much into it, but that's how it works.
I'm guessing this won't work now. Since mid 2010 you've needed to OAuth to update your status.
World population projections: Growing pains
I think for a lot of people their email password would essentially act as a single point of failure anyway. An attacker could go through the email and use recover password on any services they find.
I had never heard of PwdHash (linked from the article, https://www.pwdhash.com/) before. SuperGenPass (http://supergenpass.com/) is an alternative that uses a bookmarklet rather than a browser extension. (PwdHash links to a bookmarklet deep on its site, but nothing happened when I tried to use it.) SuperGenPass also allows for variable password length given the same master password, and its site is designed better. If you’re concerned about sites interfering with the bookmarklet using malicious JavaScript, there are unofficial browser extensions for SuperGenPass too. I don’t use any password manager right now, but I would recommend SuperGenPass over PwdHash.

The only factor I’m unsure about is the hashing algorithm: I’m not sure whether either SuperGenPass’s or PwdHash’s is safe. I couldn’t find what PwdHash’s algorithm was after a quick look on its site. SuperGenPass uses multiple iterations of MD5 – bcrypt would be a better algorithm, but I don’t know whether repeated-MD5 is unsafe or acceptable. (The aspect of the hashing algorithms I’m worried about is the speed at which an attacker can brute-force the password.)
The Tech Press: Screw Them All
Indeed, regardless of how you choose your passwords email is a huge target. It's good to see Google and Facebook trying to thwart this by adding account activity information, etc.
Spolsky on Building Communities and More
"What is to stop them from buying rickety old smog-producing cars and clogging up the city streets?"

What's to stop cartel taxis from cutting costs in the same way? I don't see the connection.

And the glut of cabs will cause a downward spiral in quality of service. Why maintain a clean cab when it cuts into the profits, and your competitor is not doing so?"

Brand value? Also, so what? So what if people who care about their wallets prefer a cab that costs half as much, even if its not as clean and shiny as your price-inflated central planning solution? (And it's not just taxis -- private mass transit, like vans, directly competes with taxi cartels and are likewise assaulted by monopoly enforcers. Price matters.)

"But your cousin can come and make the same argument you are making about inspecting/training/certifying drivers: that it is to maintain a 'cartel' and deny access to other drivers."

Because the intent of inspection, education, and certification is emphatically not to maintain a cartel, and unless the regulators are more-than-usually incompetent it will not cost anywhere close to e.g. $930,000 per person [1]. Nor would that entail explicit quotas/supply caps.

The intent of the medallion system is explicitly and openly to act as a supply cap, to artificially inflate wages in the taxi industry. It has nothing to do with safety regulation, and it is silly to pretend you do not see the difference.

[1] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110505006101/en/Meda...

"The same government that you are scoffing at?"

I'm not scoffing at government; I'm scoffing at a particular government policy which is corrupt, unjust, and an insult to freedom.
Amen. Could be the greatest case of corporate succession planning there ever was - wonder if it will work...
Every single blog post? Probably not.

A blog post you really spent some time on, that's on topic and you'd like to show off? Feel free.

I think Hacker News is generally pretty accepting of folks who submit things to HN to discuss, rather than to self-promote. If you're submitting one of your blog posts every day or multiple times a day though, you're probably doing it wrong. At least, that's how I feel. I originally came here from reddit (and started Report the Spammers there) so I'm likely less tolerant of self-promotion than some people are.
Is this amount of an article being reproduced/summarized really within the bounds of fair use? I'm not complaining, but I felt no need to pay to read the actual article after reading this summary, and I can't imagine Fortune would be happy about that.
Job: OCR Library
You need to write a Library Function. You will get a JPG or image file as input.

You will output text in key-value paris. Where the value is any number on the page and the key is whatever text preceded the value.

The file may have the following characteristics:
- Be black and white or color
- Will be fixed type of font
- The image quality can be matched to whatever you want

You must:
- Use Java to expose to the library's functions
- Run in reasonable amount of time
- Provide full source code
- Provide list of dependencies
- Provide reasonable amount of documentation
- Provide javadocs
- Tell us which formats of bill can be processed

You are free to:
- Use whichever library you want to do the ocr
- Use a C based ocr, and call it from Java using JNI
- Use whatever platform you want

Use images similar to: http://www.growingmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/coned-bill-june-2008.jpg

jhighsmith at gmail dot com
Poisoned Google image searches becoming a problem
Every few weeks I go to gmail and search the term "password" as well as some of my more commonly used passwords and permanently delete those messages. I'm forever annoyed when a service sends me my password via email.
great on my 10.1 Galaxy tablet, which also makes phone calls ;-)
Those are good points.
JSOC and the associated SPECOPS parts of the military are more and more valuable every day. Thanks for posting this +1
the rewards sony is offering to helpful hackers include: jail time, equipment seizure, bad publicity, and evil looks.
La Reina del Sur
Synopsis telenovela La Reina del Sur : Teresa Mendoza who was born and raised in a small town Cullican has a lover Raimundo "El Güero" Dávila Parra, an airplane pilot who in the story telenovela La Reina del Sur is narrated in an accident, and died.
"Military service holds a vaulted position in Israeli’s entrepreneurial culture. Many start up founders attribute their success to those post-adolescent years spent following orders and memorizing technical manuals in specialized army units."

Unfortunately this only seems to work in Israel. From a Scandinavian perspective, and personal experience in the Finnish Defence Forces, our conscription and entrepreneurship seem to have nothing to do with each other. Our service does provide connections, but they don't readily turn into businesses. Perhaps because there is nothing like the current threats around Israel. Thus there is less procurement etc.

Finland's and Israel's aerospace/weapons industries have surprisingly much common history. We had the leg up after WW2 until about 80's. Tampella (mostly known for grenade launchers) and other Finnish manufacturers provided quite many designs (for example Israel's Galil rifle was based on a design licensed from Finland) and consulted in the development of Israel's armament industry. Nowadays the tables have turned - Finland buys a lot of defense materiel from Israel.

Scandinavian countries already have quite selective conscription. International op requirements and cutbacks seem to be leading to rapid professionalization (very apparent in Sweden). Soon Finland could be the only N. European country with mandatory conscription, since it's the only non-Nato country which borders Russia.

Military & entrepreneurship: Very interesting pair. Remember Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ
...except when there isn't. ;-)

PHP's htmlspecialchars function, which is called out specifically in this post, is actually fine for most use-cases. If you write code like this:

<input type="text" name="foo" value="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($_GET['bar']) ?>" />

Then an attacker can't break out of the attribute (and consequently can't do anything bad). htmlspecialchars also accepts a flag, ENT_QUOTES, which allows it to sanitize values for single-quoted attributes properly. If you don't surround an attribute's value at all, then you're still vulnerable: you also have invalid HTML.

The real takeaway here can be found in the middle of the post: "you must be aware of the context in which you’re working with user input."
It is likely to be illegal; banking without a licence, not revealing the ownership, etc.

Look at E-Gold's fall:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/e-gold/
Why would you want a DK check with someone else's name on it?
Select highlights version:

The era of software was a narrow period of time. Before 1980, customers purchased hardware and software was bundled for free with the hardware. Microsoft was brilliant because they realized they could sell software and make a hefty profit from it. Today, we’re in a post-software phase. The software isn’t the valuable asset, it’s the ability to tap into a community that is truly valuable.

...software is not difficult to build and hosting element has become a commodity; the hard part is building a community. That’s the unique element, the people who you can convince to come to your site each and every day.

Lesson: Whatever you choose to do in your career, think about how you’re going to capture a community. Stop blogging to your friends. Start blogging to your customers and your intended audience.

StackOverflow wouldn’t have worked unless I had spent 10 years building a community of programmers.

...skeptical about building on the iOS platform long term, feels that it’s not a great platform for vendors because they have no control over whether Apple allows your application in their marketplace.

Pageviews are so cheap to deliver that if you can monetize a small fraction of them you can run a very nice business.
I would argue that Github has many if not all of those features.

Wiki - check

Ticketing & Bug Tracking - Github has 'issues'

Embedded documentation - include a README file in your repo, and Github immediately shows that under your project

News/Blog features - Github has pages, and automatically generates RSS feeds for your commits.

I'd argue that Github does all these things better than Fossil (or I) can ever do - they have a whole design team constantly worrying about ease-of-use.
App stores are irrelevant if your phone allows you to install non-market apps. As far as I'm concerned, Google can censor the hell out of their Market, because I can just sideload whatever I want.

Frankly, I think that's actually the best way to do things. Have a curated/censored app store for the normal folks/applications, and a method to install arbitrary apps that Google may not want to advertise in the Market. Now if AT&T would allow sideloading, it would be perfect, but every other Android phone I've seen has had this level of freedom.
This is actually solved in fossil via "shun". The case of publishing a password or credit card numbers or $seriousMistake will be attributed to an artifact. Applying "shun" to that artifact will prevent it from being pushed to remote repos, and, on repo rebuild (a local operation), that artifact will be completely removed from the repository (locally). The list of shunned artifacts is maintained forever however, so if the artifact is re-introduced via a pull from some other repo, the shun that was previously applied will still be in effect, and keep the artifact from being further propagated by this repo.
Steve Jobs on the difference between a VP and a janitor
Google Talk and AIM to Become Interoperable
Personally I’d just consider quoting attribute values to be best practice. And BTW, escaping < and > is not even necessary if you are using quotes with HTML attributes, unless you need compatibility with browsers prior to Netscape 2.
Google Tests a New Search Interface
Apple could adopt ARM for laptops, but why would it?
hey sorry. the link referring to it is a shortened one via the rockmelt browser.
So will a good corporation. The point is expecting vs. encouraging initiative.
Exactly. It's not a zero-sum game. China getting better economically is good for the U.S. and vice versa. Anyone who thinks differently needs to take ECON101.
First a little bit of anecdotal evidence:

I'm from Australia and I just finished a 10,000 mile road trip around your nation with some mates. I can assure you your road network is falling apart. A lot of the time I felt like I was driving in a 3rd world country. While it is evident that the US has invested a lot in infrastructure in the past they are certainly not well maintained. From my limited experience Illinois had the worse road conditions and New Mexico and Texas has the best.

Here's what the economist has to say:

"Total public spending on transport and water infrastructure has fallen steadily since the 1960s and now stands at 2.4% of GDP. Europe, by contrast, invests 5% of GDP in its infrastructure, while China is racing into the future at 9%."

and

"In 2008 the commission (National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission) reckoned that America needed at least $255 billion per year in transport spending over the next half-century to keep the system in good repair and make the needed upgrades. Current spending falls 60% short of that amount."

You can read more here:
http://www.economist.com/node/18620944?story_id=18620944
Do you think Google and Jobs would have been a successful combination?
John Norton (the author) is an amazing historian and philosopher of science. People might be interested in some of the other "goodies" on his website -- http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/ -- and perhaps some of his papers as well.
Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru
I'm sure many other arguments could be found.

Like, "Bitcoin is anti-American" or "Bitcoin will be used by heroin dealers who will sell your daughters into prostitution"

If bitcoin is a means to circumvent the tax system, then we'd have to apply whatever tax regulation that results to all other forms of currency. Social Security is an illegal pyramid scheme because it wasn't sold to the American public that way.

Let's start applying the law equitably before we stomp on innovation.
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, ...

[Road "First", aka "Scary Road"]
And looked down one ... To where it bent in the undergrowth; ...

[Road "Other", aka "Happy Road"]
Then took the Other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim, ...

Oh, I kept the First for another day!

In other words, "I didn't take the First road; I took the Other road."

Substituting, this brings us to, "I didn't take the Scary Road; I took the Happy Road."

Then, the key is...

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, ...

This means "both roads were equally traveled". So therefore we must extrapolate into the future. Take a thousand average people. Not entrepreneurs; think more along the lines of Grandma. Now show them a Scary road and a Happy road, then ask them to choose. Which one are they more likely to select?

I'd say the Scary road is the one "less traveled".

I shall be telling this with a sigh, ...

Why would he sigh if he were not lying?

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by

This means he claimed to have taken the "less traveled" road, which is the Scary road. But he took the Happy road.

Therefore, the poem is about a lie.
Good advice for people who aren't particularly technical when it comes to websites, but I don't think there's much there that isn't already widely known, and frankly could even be learned simply from using YSlow to tell you what to change.
re: digression

I don't use rebase and I can't say that I like it, but that doesn't make me hate git. I commit all my crappy and stupid intermediate code (for my personal projects).
From the age of the Masses to the age of the Self
Beautiful CoffeeScript code for metaheuristic optimization. The visualizations are done in Protovis. A common misconception is that Protovis has its own language, since Protovis code is usually in

<script type="text/javascript+protovis">

tags, which lets you write code like

function(x) x*x

This is actually JavaScript 1.8 (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en/New_in_JavaScript_1.8); Firefox can handle it directly, but Protovis down-compiles it to standard JavaScript for the benefit of other browsers.

That design decision made a lot of sense before CoffeeScript existed, since standard JavaScript becomes extremely unwieldy in a Protovis context. I expect to see a lot more Protovis code done in CoffeeScript in the future.
Taskwarrior Web: A web frontend for the taskwarrior command line task manager
I'm conflicted.

On one hand, I agree with his rant on other tech journalists / editors, but on the other hand, what he's essentially saying is, bias on his part is okay, or even expected, if the company he's writing about is one that he's investing in?

Given how influential techcrunch is, are you supposed to cross check all the companies in his portfolio, figure out if the company you're reading about is a competitor and then adjust for bias as you read? Isn't there a huge difference between being loosely linked to Google / FB and investing in a company?
Do you ever use the change history for anything?

When you keep the change history clean, it's a lot easier to answer questions like "why did I do that?", and it's a lot easier to explore topic branches and back out bad design ideas.

If the history is messy, removing bad changes is about as difficult as opening up every file and removing the changes you don't want. In other words -- error prone.
After Tsunami Honda Reduce Production in India 
The Biggest Japanese automaker Honda today said its decision to reduce car production in India by 50 percent. honda after tsunami, honda reduce production
I'm gonna go ahead and agree with the the title and use it as my justification for not reading the post.
TL;DR - "Tu quoque."

Additionally, when I read Kara Swisher's article in AllThingsSD, the next thing I read was her own disclosure (http://allthingsd.com/about/kara-swisher/). It left me with the impression that she takes journalistic integrity very, very seriously (maybe even too seriously, honestly). Arrington's self-righteous, dismissive diatribe here leaves me with exactly the opposite impression about him.
Right, htmlspecialchars() works perfectly as long as you use it for an attribute value surrounded by quotes, or if you escape a whole string. The only way you can get into trouble is if you use it on an attribute value that doesn't have quotes.

If you are using PHP and want to accept any user input that should be interpreted as HTML, you basically need to be using http://htmlpurifier.org/. If you are going to be accepting text input, clean the input value to ensure proper character encoding is being used (important for multi-byte encoding such as UTF-8) and then use htmlspecialchars(), and make sure to specify your encoding as the third parameter.

// Specify your encoding to the browser
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf8');

function get_escape($field) {
$value = iconv(
'UTF-8',
'UTF-8//IGNORE',
isset($_GET[$field]) ? $_GET[$field] : ''
);
return htmlspecialchars($value, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');
}

// Safely output text user input
echo '<html><body><p title="' . get_escape('title') . '">' . get_escape('content') . '</p></body></html>';
Slightly off-topic:

Sometimes I think TechCrunch and Michael Arrington could be a little more cordial.

On the other hand, I respect it, and him, for being open and straight forward about things.
The problem with web browsing on the Kindle is that its processor is amazingly slow and rendering web pages takes a lot of CPU time. The screen update speed is orthogonal -- it's not amazingly fast, but considering how much latency 3G connections have, you're going to notice network latency long before you care about the screen.

In the end, I'll take an Internet-enabled phone with a black-and-white screen and a 1 month battery life over a retina-display phone with 2 hours of battery life.
What about the many Joe average readers that criticized the situation? Should we assume Mr. Arrington thinks they should get fucked too?

Most of this comes down to the fact that there are good, established reasons why it's a bad idea to have journalists covering industry buying and selling positions in those companies based in large part on abuses that have happened.

Puffing out your chest and screaming about your competition doesn't actually change anything about the fundamentals of the issue.
Get 10,000 hours, right?
Cant believe nowhere in the article is the tick/grave mentioned ( ` )

That bugger can really do some damage.
It is JRuby-based, and they only give you a compiled binary, and it's weeks to months behind the public GitHub site. Aside from those issues, it's really quite nice.
Get Rails 3.1beta1 on Heroku
I think you can keep and show a copy of contracts you agree to. If not, that's an awfully one-sided situation.
Isn't the "bank" on your hard drive?

E-Gold was a commercial enterprise with only 20 employees and no legal team. Very easy to take down. It will be hard for the feds to take down a P2P network, although very easy for them to police e-commerce sites that accept it.
"OK, so you should give my peers a raise..."
Utterly agree. Swisher's measures are draconian. And Arrington comes off like an impudent 17-year-old here.
If anything the lastpass breach gave me MORE confidence in lastpass. For all we know there was no breach. HOWEVER lastpass immedicately communicated to everyone and discovered an issue in a very paranoid way. I think this is security I wish every site had. However I kid myself thinking that is possible, I rather that a single-point-of-failure is lastpass vs a crappy website that exposes a password which compromises tons of accounts and having to change all of them even if I was notified.

Furthermore lastpass supports youbi key so it supports two-factor auth.