skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was helpful. Thank you. I may actually use their service now that I understand it's usefulness.

Anyone care to comment on the experience of using it while not being a conference frequenter?
From SFGate article about the acquisition: "Skype's huge user base- more than 660 million users, including more than 120 million active of 'connected' users." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/05/12/...

The 500million user figure was from a big TechCrunch article from 2009. http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/skype-hits-521-million-user...

Again, I'm not trying to necessarily argue that this acquisition was worth it. But, there is more than technological value here. There is a huge user base here.
Have you seen these boards http://www.gumstix.com/store/catalog/index.php?cPath=27 ? There are more expensive, but are pretty neat. They even come with Wifi support on board.
Source for "slave prison labor" in China please.
A person whose itch you are scratching that doesn't mind all the rough edges and missing features.
I'm fairly certain that if someone wrote something you didn't agree with, you would try to swing it into a bizarre straw man that you could blow away with a light breeze.
Is Google doing anything to solve the content duplication problem?

It seems like a solvable problem. Why don't they let webmasters implement some kind of time-based cryptographic signature?

It seems so lame that his problem has gone on so long, especially when there must be some kind of technical solution.

For real businesses spending a few days implementing some authentication protocol would not be particularly burdensome.
Nobody is ready for IPv6 yet, and it's depressing.

I tried an experiment the other day, turning off IPv4 and using only IPv6 on a desktop at home. HN, Ars Technica, Twitter, Facebook... none of them even have an AAAA record. Google does for the main google.com site and for gmail, but not for Google Talk. Hell, even test-ipv6.com doesn't have an AAAA record.
Java Interview Questions - JavaGalaxy.com
Chromebook rentals priced at $20 per month for Education Institutions
The Maple board looks great. Are you guys based at MIT? I'm working in building 8 these days.
Because there's lots of spam, and aggressive measures in place to thwart it.
Ask HN: How important is "unobtrusive javascript"?
I have read in many books that all javascript should be "unobtrusive". Its said to be best practices to avoid the problems of traditional JavaScript programming (such as browser inconsistencies and lack of scalability).

But here I see world's biggest search engine which handles zillion, jillion, and gazillion of web traffic are not following this "best practices" and it works just fine

See image: http://i.imgur.com/q9N4n.png

Further, unobtrusive javascripts requires bit of extra effort(adding event listeners etc). for user's perspective it works the same way.

I guess, the number of people do not follow these "Best practices" are more than who do the extra effort and follow these Best practices. In both cases, apps work just fine.

so question is:

How important are these "Best practices"? And why should we follow them knowing smart people at google don't? they must be doing this for a reason, right?
Could BitTorrent create the first popular distributed social network?
Would a public proxy that has IPv4 and 6 at the same time help?
Consumer focused companies are barely ever valued correctly, and it is the reason to invest in mature stocks with predictable incomes. Consumers are simply too finicky, and revenue is just too erratic. Today, I bought tech cominco(TCK), and later hypercom(HYC). I already have sell orders in, and we'll see how it goes (as an example).
>It's not nearly so simple. If we drew the line according to what portion of our population we imprison

Yes, it's not simple. A single metric will not draw a meaningful line.

Compared to the average person in North Korea (imprisoned or not) American prisoners are very well treated. They have balanced diets, and can read anything they please. Even if everyone in America was imprisoned, I think America would still come out as a more humane dictatorship than North Korea if half of what I've read about that country is true.
> Better still might be to sort by position along a Hilbert-curve traversal of the RGB cube or HSL space or something

Like this? http://corte.si/posts/code/hilbert/portrait/index.html
Ask HN: Would you use a service like this?
Imagine a service that:

1. Provides you 3 NFC cards for development at no cost

2. Provides an API to those NFC cards via the web at (.02 per request)

3. Provides you with Push notifications to your server via the web (.03 per push)

4. Provides you with a square like device for reading NFC cards using your smartphone (at little, think $15-25 or NO cost) for development & $30 thereafter

5. Gives you $25 in credits for development

For those unfamiliar with NFC, it's cards/tags/stickers (3/4in x 3/4in smallest form factor) that are readable by a rfid reader in ranges less than 8inches.

--

Specifically, I'd like to know:

1. What sort of applications you'd build on top of this platform?

2. How do you feel about pricing?

3. Would you use the service based on these points?

4. What other questions would you have?

This is basically a follow up of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2541266
Umm, wasn't Google supposed to "Don't be evil" and care about their search result quality about all else? I find your defense of and apathy to hypocrisy disturbing.

And oh, your post pushed a hot button of mine: comments by people who think they're being incredibly insightful by saying "the world is not fair" in different ways. On HN, I think we can assume that people are adults and understand such things. Sorry about the flame.
This is pretty cool. One thing tho:

The @routename construct is still not explained in the documentation, but used in that documentation.

I hate to be this guy, but I pointed that out to the mailing list before the last release, along with a request for advice on how to proceed with fixing the docs, and got no reply. I figured since Zed bragged about fixing the routing docs, they would have included some sort of mention of the mysterious symbol, but alas, no.
So if I sit idle instead of consuming this means I'm stealing? On the other hand, you admitted yourself that this reasoning doesn't make much sense.
Readable but not editable. The person editing or debugging your code needs to know how it does it.
ROME HTML5 demo
Techniques for Generating Image Noise
I (hope I) know that's not what you meant. But it still is another hurdle. The skills to do a decent video are mostly irrelevant to the job you want the guy to do (assuming you want a freelance coder. I obviously understand that you're not going to choose a co-founder based on some textfields and a short bio).

Creating a video is the worst way to get an impression though, in my world. If you meet me on the street we can have a great talk and I am quite confident that my english is more than good (though with an accent that I hate) enough to discuss every practical matter. Doing a video call would be more awkward, but perfectly doable. Sitting alone in front of a camera, selling myself to the world with a broad smile? Nope, sir...

I don't think that I'm alone with that attitude and I doubt that this influences my communication skills in a project let alone my coding abilities.
yes, but then it might be easier if you just find a nat64 server and use that. I've run that for time and used an IPv6-only network like that for a few weeks, and it works "ok". Most HTTP stuff works, but things like Skype, FTP, and local DLNA (PS3 streaming) don't work at all.
Bad Design Practices to Avoid on your Homepage
Paying a dividend is what a company does if it thinks it cannot invest the money better than its shareholders could.

Apple thinks it can make good use of billions of dollars and Microsoft thinks you can do better with the dividend.
Pypy starts a light weight interpreter first (that is probebly just about the same speed as CPython maybe a bit faster) and then only compiles if it sees a recuring pattern.
This may be a private tech bubble though. To me it don't seems like tech stocks are too inflated compared to the revenues we can see. Facebook may be overvalued, the Skype buy was very expensive, VCs invest like crazy, but all of that is private investment. Does anyone here see a risk for the stocks also?
Once upon a time we were, nowadays we are are working out of Inman Square. Building 8 ehh, lots of cool toys around there (esp. along the infinite).
Note that at least in France, this made the front page on the website of all major newspaper (Le Monde, Liberation, etc.). It's probably the same in many european country where Facebook is sometimes struggling to keep a clean image.
That was just the Plus. By the time the SE and Classic rolled around, all you needed was the long handled torx, but it helped if you had a case splitter.

I can't believe I soldered a resistor on one of those with a 50w monster soldering iron.
Its legit :)
I'm guessing a lot of it has to do with determining where the content originated. Google will crawl sites at different times of the day. If site B stole content from site A but Google came to site B first, how are they supposed to know that the content originated on site A? I'm sure there's certain things they look at like PR, trust signals, etc. to determine if the content on site B could have been copied, but it can't possibly be perfect. The time based signature sounds good in theory but implementing it across billions of pages would be very difficult. Not only that, but what if site A didn't create a signature but site B did when taking site A's content? I don't think there's an easy solution to this problem.
There's a good reason test-ipv6.com doesn't have an IPv6 address. If your IPv6 is broken then you can't go to that site to test it :).
This is definitely a PR hit for Microsoft, and nothing else.

The graph of market share seems like pure imagination, with a "hocky stick" for Windows Phone in 2012. The citations of "market research" seem mostly like wishful thinking to me, and constitue little more than saying "but, but, Microsoft and Nokia!".
The fact that "are we in a bubble?" is the question on everyone's mind is highly telling.
How is that a good thing? They've basically made a prison city, I thought we don't do things like that anymore (i.e. Australia).
It would help with dup detection if Google had a "push" mechanism for websites to upload their content to Google.
While I like the split between attr() and prop() conceptually, the difficulty of updating was much higher. This is probably the right way to go about this for now.
For "Switch statements don’t allow you to fall-through to the next case", you can combine multiple cases:

when "a", "b" then doStuff()
"Umm, wasn't Google supposed to "Don't be evil" and care about their search result quality about all else?"

Mmmm... no, unfortunately Google is supposed to make money, and they make money mainly from adsense. I'm not prepared to accept that random algo modifications having big impact on their revenue are done without concerns.

And when you are at the same time the same company driving people to web sites (search) and getting profits from ads showed in web pages (adsense) something bad can happen as it is not a free market setup.
I remember the last time someone posted about ThemeForest, there were questions of whether you needed the extended license for a SaaS app that charged money or if the regular license was fine.

The license prices (~$100 vs ~$1000) could make a big difference; was there ever an "official" answer on this? The terms on the ThemeForest site aren't super clear.
>The biggest problem in American prisons is the advocacy by law enforcement of inmate-on-inmate rape as a sanctioned form of punishment

Do you know if this is correlated with overcrowding of prisons (actual capacity vs. intended capacity)? You mentioned California prisons are some of the worst, to my knowledge they are also the most overcrowded?

What strikes me in a comparative analysis of the US penal system is not quality of treatment, but the perverse economic incentives promoting hoarding such a large percentage of the population in them. I would argue the biggest problem in the American penal system is public policy structuring unrehabilitated prisoners as assets:

1a. The standard contract for private prisons seems to be money per prisoner housed rather than money per prisoner rehabilitated.

1b. Each prisoner generates further revenue for the private prison as a labor source.

1c. Thus on a balance sheet, each additional unrehabilitated prisoner becomes an asset to be kept rather than a liability to be reduced.

2. Allowing drugs inside prisons becomes an efficiency gain, as prisoners failing drug tests results in assets being held longer.

3a. When prisoners are housed in prisons in rural districts, they count towards that districts population for purposes of calculating representation in state legislature. Even though prisoners cannot vote and are primarily from urban districts.

3b. Prisoners then also become an asset rather than liabilities for politicians in rural districts by giving them undue representative power. Politicians then are incentivized to increase this asset by supporting minimum sentencing laws.

Now there may be no direct agency or conscious intent to the above, but historically changing the underlying structure of economic incentives can have profound positive effects on individual behavior: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/09/09/129757852/pop-quiz... . I'd be interested to know if this perspective fits with your knowledge of the subject.
Just like the anti-content farm blog posts previously, I'm half hoping that the internet community turns its attention to the problem of content scrapers (in the hope that Google take more action against the problem). I am a fan of Google - and the biggest source of traffic to my websites is Google search traffic - although the issue of scrapers does seem to be growing (even despite the attempted anti-scraper Google algorithm update earlier in the year).

A couple of days ago I did some searching online and found that a fair number of websites had copied some of my articles in their entirety. And sadly, a lot of these 'websites' were actually Google Blogger (Blogspot) blogs. And whilst some of these copied articles weren't appearing in Google search (I guess since the entire site contained copied/scraped content, thus giving them a Google SERP penalty?), some of the copied articles were appearing in the SERPs. And a couple of these websites even had Google AdSense on them.

So there was the crazy situation whereby my content had been stolen/scraped illegally, and put on a Google Blogger blog with Google Ads on it, and (in some cases) that blog then received traffic from Google Search. Hrmph.

In the interest of balance, I will point out that I filed Google DMCA requests after finding these scraped articles, and Google did promptly reply (a non-automated reply around 30 hours later, which is quick considering how many DMCAs Google must get).

They only removed the individual blog post (and not the blogs overall, even though they were clearly spam blogs), but nonetheless I am happy with Google's quick response.

I just wish that content scraping isn't (in some cases) a profitable endeavor..
There's room here for a dedicated site to focus on all the little design widgets that a developer needs too: Login boxes, modal dialogs, growl style notifications, mouseover effects etc. There's a lot of individual jQuery plugins available (and jQueryUI is too spartan), but for someone who is primarily a backend developer, it can be hard to put together something with a consistent look.
Actually the biggest problem is that the North Korea military is pretty well equipped. Any military solution would require evacuating large sections of South Korea.
before tax.
was there ever an "official" answer on this?

Before I wrote the blog post, I contacted the author of the theme I use on TweetingMachine (for the tool itself), and he congratulated me on its use. Given the price difference of what he could be missing out on, that's good enough for me.
Ask HN: What kind of give aways work best for pre-launch buzz?
On a launch-rock type pre-launch page what types of giveaways work best for encouraging people to share with their friends? I'm building a social site and was offering free dinner anywhere and it didn't move conversions at all.
A human can figure it out. That's the real problem. You have a guy send in a support ticket / request, and then you pawn them off on someone who really cannot do anything about it. It really seems like support is just there to deflect rather than solve. Heck, look at the actual forum thread the article links to http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords/thread?tid=0bb...

It just seems like a purely algorithmic solution doesn't really scale and some human intervention is really necessary.
That site seems to focus on client connectivity tests .. http://ready.chair6.net will do some basic server-focused tests (enter a domain/URL to test for IPv6 connectivity).
I've recently dropped it; I simply say to clients that if they want their site to support a ten+ year old browser with little standards support then costs will increase. Haven't had a taker so far.
There's actually a really good book on this: Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers, http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0743222091/

The book places adopters into 5 categories, innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

The innovators are the few that have the means and risk-tolerance to constantly try out new ideas. The book estimates that about 2.5% of the adopters fall into this category.

The early adopters are the next to adopt. They kind of serve as liaisons between the innovators and the rest of the world. The book estimates them at 13.5% of adopters.

The early majority are the people that pay attention to what the early adopters are doing. They make up about 34%.

The other two categories are uninteresting.

To illustrate, HN would be the innovators, Lifehacker the early adopters, and Lifehacker's audience would be the early majority.

There are various characteristics of early vs. late adopters. Most of them are as you would expect. Early adopters have more education, higher social status, more empathy, less dogmatism, more optimism, more social connections, etc.

I highly recommend the book. It's aimed towards sociologists, but I didn't have too much trouble, and I'm certainly not sociologically inclined.
Exit Interview: Newsvine's Mike Davidson
As others have pointed out, Apple had a giant stash of cash. $150 million was small change to Apple at the time.

It is widely speculated that this deal was really a settlement over the alleged infringements in Windows of Apple's IP. Microsoft pays Apple $150 million, disguised as a face saving investment, and agrees to keep Office on the platform for a few years, and Apple doesn't sue the crap out of Windows.
I don't know if it's an easy fixer but it's certainly not difficult to eliminate 90% of scrapers. My sites get scraped all the time and if you look at these scrapper sites, they usually are not scrapping just one site. To simplify the issue, let's look a small data set:

Site 1:
* Content ABC
* Content DEF
* Content GHI

Site 2:
* Content JKL
* Content MNO
* Content PQR

Site 3:
* Content STU
* Content VWX
* Content YZ0

Site 4:
* Content ABC
* Content DEF
* Content MNO
* Content PQR
* Content STU

Which of these is a scrapper?
Jupiter's moon Io may have a molten core, mantle
Shouldn't we be hoping that more and more bots enter the markets? Sure, there will be a period when hackers will be able to exploit their weaknesses, but in the due time they will evolve and market will equilibrate, making today's speculative traders' job much harder.
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co...

"Using their vast pools of free labour, China's prisons produce everything from green tea to coal, paperclips to footballs, medical gloves to high-grade optical equipment."

http://www.goiam.org/index.php/news/iam-news/2007-iam-news-a...

"Prison Labor is also being exploited in China, according to executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation Harry Wu, who said prison laborers make garments, electronic components, coffee mugs and toys that end up in U.S. stores. “The Chinese government continues to use forced labor to make goods, condones sweatshop conditions in its factories, and refuses to allow workers to create independent unions-- is it really any wonder that low-quality, harmful toys are being exported to the US and into the hands of our children?” said Wu, who spent 19 years in a Chinese prison.

Wal-Mart was singled out for their role in allowing the exploitation of cheap Chinese labor. “Wal-Mart bears a lion’s share of responsibility for pushing the toy industry into a region where product safety and worker safety inspection is virtually nonexistent,” said Bama Athreya, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum."

http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa45502.000/hf...

1998 FORCED LABOR IN CHINA - HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITEE ON INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
I thought it seemed a bit optimistic as well. It'll be interesting to see how many handset manufacturers adopt the open accessory kit or opt to omit it or otherwise lock it down--similar to those that chose to provide their own app stores (I'm under the impression that you can do this, but you lose the ability to certify your device with Google and therefore lose access to the Android marketplace, Gmail client, maps, etc., correct?). I believe manufacturers are still generally motivated to profit from their accessories' ecosystems (not that the toolkit precludes this, but it relinquishes some control they've become used to).

That said, I'd love Apple to open up their accessory platform. I maintain an Apple accessory software stack that I'd love to throw on Github (frankly, I'm tired of maintaining it), but I am unable to do so due to our development agreement & the closed nature of their accessory program.
Ooh.. I can play this game too. I guess Apple/Google could have bought Facebook for a few million dollars in 2004.
Substance.io 0.2.1 released — it's web-based document authoring
Netflix for Android has arrived
I was just pointing out a mildly embarrassing factual error in your argument (but one that is made frequently); your points remain valid of course :)
The headline is factually inaccurate. It looks like a mistake that he was denied access to Adwords due to original content, but that has no connection to his ranking in search. It looks like the adwords representative may not have access to fine-grained enough tools to assess the site accurately, which is an organizational failing, but there's no bad intent there. In some sense it reflects how disconnected search and ads are from each other that they're using crude tools to assess original content.

Google cares a great deal about putting the original source of a piece of content first. If we're doing that incorrectly, it's because we screwed up, not because that's how things are designed. It's a hard problem and an area we are still working on intensely. It would be great if someone involved could post the queries on which we are screwing up so we can debug what's causing it.
I don't know about the majority of manufacturing in mainland China.

I do know that the several thousand people my employer has in manufacturing there are not slave labor.
Ruby on Rails on top of Heroku on top of Facebook. So it's basically an app framework inside a social framework hosted on a hosting "framework" :-)
Unfortunately, I can't find it on the Android Market using my HTC Incredible.

Edit: Direct link to android market. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.netflix.mediaclien...