skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a secure wipe option. You can crank it up to some absurdly paranoid set of passes, although it takes a day or two to complete at that level given a reasonably large drive.
BOJ Shirakawa Warns Japan Economic Outlook ‘Very Severe’
This was a not yet employed recent engineering college grad who was contracting with me for $12/hr. And to be precise, she could spin up an EC2 instance, but couldn't keep my schedule.
Isn't the war on terror over? I thought we should get back to $.99/gallon gas again.
Analyzing Groupon's Design: Why So Many Buy In
Couple says rented computer spied on them
Agreed, some jail time is appropriate. Destroying her financially to "compensate" the victim for a hugely inflated loss isn't.
the promo-code is: HNFREE

If you enter this code you do not have to enter your CC info.
Even Greenpeace seems to claim at most roughly a quarter million deaths. Thirty one people were killed directly, everything else is the result of trying to measure the increase in cancer and such. Clearly, the real cost was far higher than those 31, but how high is a good question.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chernobyl_dis...

Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously: Thirty one deaths are directly attributed to the accident, all among the reactor staff and emergency workers.[10] A UNSCEAR report places the total confirmed deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000.[11] A 2006 report predicted 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths as a result of Chernobyl fallout.[12] A Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more.[13] A Russian publication, Chernobyl, concludes that 985,000 excess deaths occurred between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination.[14]
For sure we should transition.
You're definitely not mistaken. Use either link -- applications welcome.
Tips from a Production MongoDB Deployment
Last I checked Sprint 3G had a 5GB/m limit while 4G is actually unlimited.
Ask HN: If ideas are so cheap, why can't we think of better ones?
i live much farther than you can imagine, and they (some of them) replied me.

(and +1 to angellist, magic thing)
Spoilers...
You really want to begin any startup during an equinox. That's when you can stand an egg on it's end without falling over. It's a magical time! But seriously, what a silly thing to worry about. It's like asking, should I serve Coke or Pepsi at my startup? Which will make me more successful?
Taking too long to deal with emails? Separate writing and sending.
We are in agreement for sure.

UX at rackspace now is ick at best, but since the Polvi virus is currently spreading in the place, I'd bet on significant improvement.

I just see that there are two independent issues. One is that Rackspace UX needs help, the other is that there are dual/competing brands, one of which is feature stranded. Clearly they are related when you consider collapsing the brand into one, but I still think it's worth thinking about them in terms of two distinct issues.
Why The Mobile Web Versus App Debate Is Irrelevant
It's a bastardized summary of a technical paper; this is not a surprise if you've ever read _USA Today_ trying to explain what XML is.

That said, they link the paper so you can read it for yourself. So far it makes a lot of sense to me; turns out you can eliminate a great many buildings and locations by selecting a few characteristics.

For example, bin Laden's height, need for dialysis, entourage, and defensible walls rules out all but 16 structures in the Kurram region (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurram_Agency) if you look for only 5 out of the 6 criteria. (Page 4 of PDF.)

As for your specific criticism; you're quite right. The OP has misstated his link, which says:

> According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 88.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in a city less than 300 km from his last known location in Tora Bora: a region that included Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night.

That's much more sensible, and does follow directly from their geographical theory - if you think of animals as random particles moving in Brownian motion, there is an exponential dropoff. Random walks don't go very far.

On a side-note, they were largely right about the room characteristics. The compound bin Laden was in was in fact, a tall building with multiple structures with more than 3 rooms and walls over 3 meters tall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Osama_bin_Laden_hideout.jp...).

In fact, the only characteristic I see missing is 'trees for cover when outside' (few trees in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Osama_bin_Laden_hideout.jp... ) and arguably, the need for aerial cover was met by being so near the military academy. (I've seen reports and speculation that the helicopters had to spoof Pakistani transponders to avoid triggering air defenses.)
I am an open source developer and I love the Mono project.

I really don't know what you are basing you assumption on that most open-source developers dislike Mono, I know plenty that think its great as I do. A lot of pretty cool stuff is happening in the .Net world these days and Mono makes them available to us Linux and OS X developers. The only arguments I have heard against the project has been based on FUD.
I know a little python, very very little c, but I'd like to help.
I agree. This is robbery! Completely anti-consumer! No sensible consumer or business could have pay this kind of service charge. Telstra could have easily block access to any individual with excessive network activity. The judge should reject this bill and ask arbitrator to come up with reasonable payment plan. Automatically upgrade her to unlimited plan and then add a small penalty should be a reasonable resolution.

Law maker should ban telco from excessive charge, say more than $1000 a month, unless authorized by the customer.
Correct, most people don't do this but there's a class of 'assistant' where technical skills are worth more than secretarial skills.

For example, research assistants are expected to help with the tedium of econmetric studies (e.g. performing regressions, collecting data, etc.) and this requires at least a masters level education.
Ah, how sweet the naivete!
"The ability for civilians to secretly spy on officers responding to calls could have serious consequences for their safety."

These are public employees performing a public duty. Unless there are extenuating circumstances, maybe a SWAT raid or something, the public should have access to this data to ensure that public employees are serving the public good. At the bare minimum it should be available within hours of it's creation.

Routine traffic stops? Police abusing their powers? This should definitely be made available to the public if it is recorded. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.

We have the technology to go big brother on government, why are we letting them go big brother on us?
I think the original article from ScienceInsider realized they had it wrong and have corrected it...

"According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 88.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in a city less than 300 km from his last known location in Tora Bora: a region that included Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night. "
Not likely, as the gap is about 4000x

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
Read Every Bleeping Tweet Without The Naughty Language
Why did you choose vWorker compared to the other outsourcing websites?
Working with XML in Java.
I saw this reply shortly after it was posted:

"never give out your pitch deck"

http://twitter.com/#!/rafer/status/65477539711295489
> It's about as relevant as any random person on the internet.

He's also investing in them, as you can see from the article, which makes him more newsworthy than some random person.

> My solution is the people for nuclear power and those that build the plant, must live next to it.

I already live near one. Also, if you look at all the accidents, the workers suffer the most. If they were that against nuclear power, they wouldn't work there.
Honestly this sounds kind of strange to me. It's almost like, "I need someone who can code Ruby and also take out the trash."

Adjusting a Wordpress site or spinning up an EC2 instance isn't the same as coding Ruby. (For values of "coding" that are really substantive.)

Making appointments isn't quite the same, but it's certainly not using the skills of a technical person and seems insulting.

She knew what she was getting into ahead of time. I doubt she was ever insulted by what I asked her to do.

At the very least, administration is a different skill set. It's like "I need a salesperson / chef" or "I need an accountant / news reporter." What you need is 2 people.

Actually, there is call for someone who has some culinary skill and some sales ability, and they can be useful for making money. (The guy who did the Miracle Blade infomercials, for example. There are others in boutiques I see around town operating on smaller scales.) Accountant / news reporter -- I could see a valuable business reporting niche!

What is a founder, but a W/X/Y/Z person?
Twitter sentiment surrounding the Osama Bin Laden events
Linode launches native IPv6 support
Ask HN: HN for medicine students or doctors
Hi Fellow HNers,
I'm looking for a discussion forum like HN (quality and also quantity) about medicine. I have been looking for a while but failed to find out.

Please post what you know is worthwhile. Thanks.
Basically what you're saying is that Telstra should come up with a product to support people who steal the SIM cards out of utility smart meters.
I thought Osama was confirmed dead by Prime Minister Bhutto three years ago?
I'm also curious, since I agree that tabs as they are currently generally implemented definitely have some issues.

I like what FF4 is doing with tab candy (panorama now?) and tab search. I'd really like a way to be able to see two tabs at once, though, similar to Windows 7's half-maximize.
Sorry for not addressing that first time-round. We are funded by the Google and Gates Foundation grants plus private donations. As far as "most", I am not totally sure. I have very gladly stopped worrying about the particulars there as we've got some great folks (Sal, Shantanu, and Jessica) focused on making sure we're funded well enough to keep making progress at the rate we want. That frees up me and the rest of the developers to focus on building the product. Charmed life, eh?
Google Chrome 11 crashing on OSX
What If Prince William And Kate Middleton Were Linux Fans
Replace ORM in your argument with C and SQL with assembler. Just like high level languages it's an abstraction layer and it can really help you put stuff like caching, escaping (think SQL injections) into once place. Also it's much easier to change a function name in your abstraction layer, then to change your database schema.
I call my current assistant a "Producer." This is because he also has skills in professional theater, and could well do some work as a spokesperson.
A day or two is fine. I had a friend who would go through old donated computers to get data off of them. I think the odds are pretty high that people will try on a given machine you give away.
>How? How would it have cost them less?

They could have arranged with Telstra to cut off service to any meter that billed over $X in a month.

In fact, that should have been an obvious step to make, because a meter that was sending too much data was probably buggy, which could mean the data it was sending was probably worthless. The engineers who failed to include the cutoff were insufficiently paranoid.
DNA Fingerprinting Osama Bin Laden
It looks like a nice little research project that didn't take itself too seriously, but the article reads to me like "he's probably a few tens of km inside Pakistan because it's not too far from where he was last seen 10 years ago, go look in these three buildings".

Of course, the prevailing view was that he was somewhere in the border region and he turned out not to be in any of those buildings.
Here's Terry Tao's Buzz post about this: https://profiles.google.com/114134834346472219368/posts/2Lwv...

Largely along the lines of a couple of comments that were already mentioned here.
'Injured' is not well defined. I know a 4 y/o who, when he falls and hurts something (and that happens often enough), simply gets up, cleans it (if necessary) and goes on. He may cry/shout for a moment, like you would go 'Ouch, !!$%#&$&^', but that's the end of it. That makes another that cries and stays down until mommy comes to get him look as if he was raised pretty badly. Those are the extremes and you seem to be placing each other on opposite ends of it.
Chrome deserves APNG support - 2 years was enough time
Title seems a bit disingenuous; a professional pen tester getting a live feed from a camera on a police car does not constitute a "hacker pwning a police cruiser", and whether he would live to tell the tale doesn't appear to have been in doubt.

If I write a blog post about going to the grocer's, should I post it to HN with the title "hacker infiltrates local business, lives to tell the tale"?
So my last 2 laptop upgrades I never even booted the new laptop as it was (though I did turn it on to make sure it worked). I took it and my old laptop apart and swapped the disks. Took about 5 minutes each time and I'm rewarded with a computer in exactly the same state as it was before the hardware upgrade. It also leaves the old laptop in a state that's perfect for selling.
I really wish I'd never bought MonoTouch, I think a refund should be available to us that bought it less than a year ago.
Stack Glue Using Node.js & Redis
Osama bin Laden was unarmed when killed, White House says
You jest, but I wonder if these type of technology would be useful for the clean up of the Deepwater Horizon spill?
That's actually a funny story.

The fact that someone wouldn't bother to open an envelope, and just write "WTF!?" on it -- is itself a WTF!?
Looks like this is somewhat dependent on their data center providers:

This will be a phased roll-out across the facilities, starting with immediate availability in Fremont, Newark in a week or so, followed by Dallas.

From the FAQ[1] page:

Fremont, CA: Yes
Dallas, TX: Soon
Atlanta, GA: No ETA
Newark, NJ: About a week
London, UK: Q4 2011

[1]: http://www.linode.com/IPv6/
Discrete mathematics is definitely what I've been waiting for.
The first step to getting started would be to run through the development guide: http://docs.python.org/devguide/

After you are setup there, http://bugs.python.org/ is the bug tracker. Bugs are sorted newest first, and there are a bunch of queries on the left side of the page, plus a query builder. The search feature works fairly well, and I sometimes suggest that people search modules they are comfortable with. If you use zipfile a lot, search it, and you'll find 46 issues.

In addition to that stuff, as Jesse mentioned in one of the responses, http://pythonmentors.com/ is the mentor site. There's a mailing list you're more than welcome to join should you have any questions, comments, or anything about the process. We can help you get setup, help you figure out what to work on, and help you successfully contribute your work.
Electric cars (and solar) will work a lot better when we figure out a better way to store the energy. So far, our battery technology barely fits the bill, and is expensive.
I think part of it is a bias against solo founders. We simply don't hear of many solo successes, but I'd venture that's where a lot of idea-mill work happens.
I think the key is selling it in a year. A year old macbook retains most of its value. It's actually the same thing with BMWs ;-).
This sort of thing also happens to people who do not steal SIM cards. It is all too common, sadly:

http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=news/bizarre&i...

$22,000 bill because son's data use wasn't covered in family cell phone plan.

http://www.switched.com/2007/12/14/man-gets-slapped-with-85-...

$85,000 phone bill. "It turns out that he was being charged on a per-kilobyte basis because his unlimited browsing plan didn't cover using the phone as a modem. As a "goodwill" gesture, Bell Mobility has dropped the bill to measly $3,243."

Finally, here's one from Telstra:

http://www.blackberryforums.com.au/forums/general-bis-discus...

"I have recently signed my BB 8800 up on a Telstra $39.95/mth plan which I understood was for unlimited email and internet browsing. I got the shock of my life when I checked my data usage online and saw a bill for $250+ after only a couple of days. On examining further I note that I have not been charged for blackberry.net connections but heavily charged for wap.telstra."
I still don't understand why dependencies don't belong to the repo. My naive reasoning: I just have to clone the repo and bam, I already have all the dependecies needed to build the artifact. When I need to upgrade to a new version of a library, I only have to commit a new version and delete the old one (possibly integrating the new library in a separate branch if the process is not trivial).

Can you elaborate a bit more on this?
O boy, it's getting frothy when designers are looking for big $ in options... (IMO).
I think the most significant part of this story is that it appeared in the New York Times. This means that even people who aren't tech enthusiasts are becoming aware of how copyright laws are affecting bloggers and other small-time users of content.

I hope that this increased awareness will lead to better laws, but realistically those will be ten years away, at least.
> IPv6 is a big deal though. Everyone's going to have to touch their long-running servers sometime before the end of this year. With IPv6 Day closing in this June and the eventual migration of residential broadband to IPv6, this is one of those inevitable things that isn't going to magically go away.

I think you're confused about the implications of the IPv6 transition -- IPv4 is a subset of that address space, so existing servers will "just work" via Carrier-Grade NAT that ISPs are providing.

Some tiny percentage of the Internet is IPv6 reachable today, and it ain't all gonna change this year. The IPv4 space can't turn into a parallel ghetto Internet after all...
What about meter diagnostics? "Cut off" means "cut off"; what if the utility needs the capability of remote snapshotting the memory or current firmware rev of a meter? (Having done multiple smart meter security review projects: this is not a crazy notion).

Yes, fellow geek, there will be some number that represents the maximum amount of bandwidth that might ever be used to diagnose a faulty meter. How much would it cost to figure that out? Again: weigh that against the business benefit of doing so.

The person who abused the meter SIM did not accidentally do so.
Nope, Verizon has a 5 GB limit, but I've had Sprint tethering for 6 months and they've never charged me an overage. But I'm not in a 4G market, maybe the rules are different there?
The movie is obviously a spoof and fits into Banky's prankster narrative. For those who have seen the movie, remember the scenes when: Shepard Fairey talks about perceived power creating real power, the fake Princess Diana currency, the hipster/followers in line who get interviewed and talk about 'art'. There are others, but those scenes make it the most obvious.
I don't think they'd have the power to drag the users to a new service without them wanting to join - but they could highlight a new one quite prominently within TweetDeck.

A new service that has 20-30 percent of tweets from the start and many power users is off to a pretty good start as a twitter competitor.

In a way, for those reasons, it's a shame twitter have gobbled it up - but obvious why they'd want it.
Why a Startup is Like a Science Experiment
Every product a startup creates is really an experiment that test a particular hypothesis about the market - just like a science experiment.
Historically, I've updated my Mac every time a new release comes out (mostly of Macbook Pros). I've been doing this for about the past eight years.

About a month ago I broke from that pattern and bought an 11" Air (right after the new Macbook Pros came out, and pretty far into the current cycle for the Air's). It was the first time that the new machine was way less powerful than the old one (also, so far, the best machine I've ever had).

Usually I'd sell my old laptop for about 66% of the price of the new one. Originally, I sold them on Ebay, but it got to be a pain in the ass dealing with people there (I had one guy complain after buying a Macbook Pro from me that the screen had smudges on it. Not marks mind you, but "easilly wiped off with a rag smudges".)

After that I started selling them either to friends or on craigslist.
I don't think I expressed myself very well. I'm saying that despite the nice features of C# that Mono brings to the table, it doesn't appear to have seen wide adoption. That's all. I didn't realize Tomboy was written in C#; that's great. I understand what Mono is, and that's why I'm confused that there don't seem to more (or at least, more visible) projects using it.
I do not accept the notion that these are remotely comparable situations.

I agree with you that b2c MNO fee structures are predatory.

I do not agree that the fee structure arranged between two giant corporations can be described as "predatory" when it happens to bite the ass of someone who breaks into their network and uses it to steal connectivity.
Who says we haven't? We're blissfully unaware of most of human thought because it isn't acted on in such as way that we become aware of its existence. YC is a great example of this, to a certain extent PG started it because there was no possible way for him to carry out every idea he came up with, so he created an environment where he can involve himself with other people who have ideas that he's had or likes. I'm not entirely behind the "ideas are worthless" camp. They're worth something (after all, you do have to execute on SOMETHING that had to be thought of prior to), but most of a company's value is still derived from the fruition of its core idea.
For what its worth, I stopped using Rackspace (specifically Rackspacecloud) for 2 reasons:

1. The control panel experience was incredibly bad. Incredibly. Large chunk of features simply didn't work and consistently gave errors (I opened numerous tickets, some were claimed to be fixed but later the errors came back). It's unacceptably slow, to the order of 2-5 seconds of loading anything. And the overall flow and experience is just bad (it took far too many clicks to do something like change a DNS entry).

For a while my startup persisted with using Rackspace just because we already had some infrastructure on it. Once an opportunity to move off came along, I jumped on it (it's now hosted on DotCloud).

2. I had some bizarre experience with getting questioned on the phone while signing up for a new account (setting up a personal account to toy around with vs my other business account). I was questioned about all sorts of things like what I will be using it for, what I'm working on, various private details that I was unwilling to give out. As long as I'm not doing anything illegal or against your ToS, it's none of Rackspace's business what I'm going to run on my VPS.

Now I use Linode for all my personal VPS needs and I love it. The control panel is super snappy, the user experience is simple and efficient, and they don't ask me questions they shouldn't be asking. Also when I report a problem, they actually fix it and are very open and transparent about everything.

Since then, I've recommended Linode to at least a dozen people specifically against Rackspace. Yes, I may be a squeaky wheel, but I believe fixing the control panel (and customer privacy policies) should be Rackspace's #1 priority, especially given all the other feedback you're getting inline with this. Each person who posted here could represent a dozen customers down the line.
Imprecise programming: How to stop worrying and love the bug