skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of this nor the OP applies to me. Not just the smart part, but when I see the work awkward, I think of a different set of problems. I get along with people just fine and I'm not confrontational, but I can never really relax when I'm around people without an agenda because I don't know what I'm supposed to be talking about. That's what I'd hoped to read about.
> After about two weeks, I received no response to either email. I decided to start operating the site, thinking they wanted to see something working before spending time on a response.

I don't follow the logic here... no response != assume whatever the hell you feel like.
It's hard to explain, so please allow a bit of room for error in my post.

Before I start, you can get it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gzigzag/files/gzigzag/0.6.3/...

You have to use it (in Gzz) to understand it.

It's like Excel in that there are connected 'cells' (called that in Excel and Zigzag), but instead of being in a grid, they can be connected via a link to another cell. A link is either - or +, and the link has a dimension (eg, d.1 or d.name, or d.date). A cell has a string of text as its value.

So say we have 2 cells (which are numbered uniquely), cell 1 and 2. "1+d.1" points to 2, while "2-d.1" points to 1. Cell 1's text is "Here" and cell 2's text is "There".

The final element is that there is a cursor, which sits on a cell, and the program follows all the links from the cursor and draws them onto a canvas, and then shows it.

The user interface lets you make links, break links, edit the text in the cell, delete a cell, and show cells adjacent to the cursor cell. Another aspect is that the screen draws 3 dimensions, and you can toggle the ones shown. This is because showing every dimension is impossible, so we view a subset. It's not a static environment: rather, you make new cells, link them all together, etc.

http://xanadu.com/zigzag/ZZdnld/zzRefDef/pic24-bettersharedl...

My work was making a C version. Existing versions were a Perl version (the original prototype) and Gzz (an excellent Java version).

I should have improved Gzz instead of making my own version, but porting it from Perl to C was a good learning experience.

I then made a Lisp version which works great.

Finally, one challenge was getting Ted to accept my innovations and new features, but that isn't easy, so I had to stop working on my version of Zigzag, and maybe even stop using it.
I once heard someone say something along the lines of "not accepting praise for being skilled isn't humility it's arrogance".

Know when you're good and accept a compliment don't feign being stupid.
Wikileaks: Police Arrested Movie Pirate As “A Personal Favor” To Movie Official
I think the tornado danger is exaggerated. In the Nebraska and Iowa areas, at least, there are good warnings systems and if you have a basement you'll fine even if a big one wrecks your house. Whenever you hear this sound [1] just grab your family and a beer and chill out in the basement for a bit!

The danger is if you live in a trailer park without shelter, on land that has a history of tornadoes... The actual danger seems to be a problem of poverty. :(

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdn5Qo4kEWQ
A lot of people posting about how this is a 'blog' or 'complaint' or whatever seem to be completely missing the fact that this is an artist's portfolio and an actual art piece that has been previously exhibited.

It's clearly meant to generate discussion regarding racial and human rights issues, as well as the clash of public/private space. I do not see a single hint that the artist is in any way unhappy or resentful, but IMO is rather opening up an issue for discussion. (See his CV: http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/resume)

I'm shocked at all the angry responses.
He writes, that his chargeback rate was 1.5%
Here's your problem, put bluntly:

Your cards don't look better than a normal person could design in an afternoon or two, and they cost ~10x what a deck of cards does. You've got a mediocre product you want to sell at a high price.

Here's what to do:

1. Lower your price until you get customers

http://www.printerstudio.com/unique-ideas/custom-playing-car... will sell you 151 decks of cards for $604 ($4 ea). Buy from there and set your initial price at $5.

2. Sell cards that actually add value to a trip

Some ideas:

- fizx's combinatorial directions idea

- base it by city, with city specific adventure ideas

- lose the "play it safe" card copy. If you have any non-family/friend sales yet, figure out who your customer is and use the same kind of language/slang they use with their friends.

- Use adventure ideas that actually put people in the mood to adventure ("Go to a local bookstore and ask an employee about his favorite book" honestly sounds incredibly boring. "Find an attractive girl at the local bookstore and convince her that your favorite book is better than her favorite book" sounds more fun. With thought, you can do better.)
My (non-expert) understanding of the issue is that a having majority of the mining computation gives you the power to roll back transactions, but not to forge transactions that transfer money to you; and that the risk of having a transaction be rolled back on you can be reduced just by waiting for the block chain to get longer.
What "the hell" should he have done?

There's only 2 possibilities here - 1. They didn't see the emails or 2. They saw them, but chose to ignore them. Either way, his choice boils down to killing his idea or launching it and seeing what happens.

It would be utterly moronic of him to kill his idea simply because they didn't respond. Might as well leave that decision to them by launching it and seeing how they respond. If they don't shut him down, then his service isn't breaking their rules. If they do, he's no worse off than not launching in the first place.

He did the right thing.

EDIT: HN is not letting me respond to wmf below, so I'm responding here - Where does he say he knew paypal would freeze the account sooner or later? In fact, the whole point of his emails to them was to specifically ask if his service was compliant with their TOS.

Let's stick to facts and not get into subjective arguments. Your idea of 'ordinary' can be completely different from his or anyone else's idea of 'ordinary'. This is why TOSs, FAQs etc exist in the first place. But since he couldn't find an exact answer anywhere, he emailed them.
I can certainly understand not wanting to abandon a project simply because somebody was lax on responding, but with something like this (large amounts of customer money involved (60,858 BTC), legal issues), he really put a lot at risk here.
Anonymous Targets Iran
I'm really interested to see if bitcoin will survive the law. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that creating an alternate currency is strictly illegal. Maybe this is the first indication of the end of bitcoin?

(Edit: This is incorrect. See comments.)
Lean Designs is now $9/month
Never used PayPal to begin with, knowing that they'd freeze the account sooner or later.
Key signing party
I've heard that sound two times in my life (in Georgia). Only one was a tornado anywhere near structures and people. We get thunderstorm and tornado watches every time a storm moves in.

The odds of a tornado occurring are slim already, and the odds of being impacted by it even slimmer. I think it helps being right at the edge of the tornado risk map where storms are already weak.
This line of reasoning is futile.

Whether it is a valid argument or not is immaterial. The purpose of patent law is to protect applied innovations. If patent law is proven to not cover the innovations that the lawmakers intend it too then that doesn't mean that those innovations will no longer be protected it means that there has been a drafting error. The law will be re-drafted, or more realistically reinterpreted, to have a meaning allowing software patents but somehow defining a complexity limit or some such to prevent mere mathematical discoveries from being patented. I know that recourse to consider the intention of the draftees is made in UK [patent] law and assume this is true in the USA(?).

See for comparison UK/European patent law with respect to computer implemented inventions. Software patents are a mentioned exclusion but a little "as such"/"per se" keeps the door open for them.

Field matters too. Compression algorithms and codecs always seemed too close to mathematics to be patentable to me but a compression algorithm as applied performs a useful real-world action ("provides a technical contribution to the art") and so is considered to be in the class of innovations that it is desirous to protect.
Yes, I'm looking for a developer/designer who are interested in working at a start-up. I want know their programming/designing backgrounds before I introduce my start-up.
This list is missing the excellent ep.io.
What are the options of stopping bitcoin? It could be banned from paypal and card transactions. But you can't really ban it otherwise. If I want to give you something for bitcoins, we can do the exchange. There's no real trail, so it simply can't be stopped for personal use.
Can numpy be used with pypy? Or are there plans for that?
Show HN: I built something for you
I was interested in learning Clojure, learning how to scrape websites, and making something that might be useful so I built a site that is rather like a StackOverFlow for Hacker News. It scrapes Hacker News discussions into a very naively implemented wiki. One thing I like about the site is it has tagged search. One thing I don't like is its lack of polish. Right now submitting articles is disabled until pg is done experimenting.

Link: http://173.255.212.42/

PS: I'm looking for a summer internship.
On a side note, coming to read this now with over 350 comments, without the rating system I can't make heads or tails of which ones are or are not worth reading.
call in the /b/?
You can often use the menu View -> Page Style -> No Style to fix these sorts of problem. On Windows it's a quick Alt-V-Y-N and then an Alt-V-Y-B to turn styling back on.
As low as 15%?

Citation needed please.
That's funny - I saw the link in HN and before clicking on it I thought to myself "simple, Corvallis Oregon, where I live." And sure enough, I was right.

When we moved here from California I was struck about how much people in the Willamette Valley love to talk about how the "Big One" will come and how there's going to be a big Tsunami. Well, maybe, but in the meantime it's been the most temperate climate you can imagine. The worst thing we get is the occasional ice storm but nothing like our neighbors in Portland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_rate would be a good starting point.
Analyzing data from a nationwide study involving more than 3,400 men, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found that men with the highest blood percentages of docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, an inflammation-lowering omega-3 fatty acid commonly found in fatty fish, have two-and-a-half-times the risk of developing aggressive, high-grade prostate cancer compared to men with the lowest DHA levels.

Correlation isn't causation. There are literally a billion possible factors that could be responsible besides a direct relationship. Of course, the same applies to any research demonstrating the efficacy of Omega-3s, too.

This is the problem with a lot of nutrition studies: a huge number of completely false associations were and still are being invented because of an inability to control for important factors. For example, the "fiber theory" of health has turned out to be almost completely false: it appeared to be "healthy" because eating fiber meant eating fewer (digested) carbohydrates. The fiber itself did almost nothing for health.

It gets worse when massive chains of correlations are assumed to be causes. A is correlated with B, B is correlated with C, C is correlated with D, therefore A causes D. The whole mess of saturated fats, cholesterol levels, heart attacks, and heart disease is a case of this.
Can't believe I forgot about ep.io! I added it to the list, thanks :]
There are plans, but nothing yet, this reddit thread has some decent information: http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/h0uuv/pypy_15_releas...
Wasn't this the whole purpose of the distributed system? It was created with such situations in mind where a governments and others try to stop the flow of money through certain areas or to individuals.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that creating an alternate currency is strictly illegal.

IANAL either, but I would be interested in a citation on that. My understanding is that say in the US (a) you can't print US dollars (because the Fed has a monopoly on that) and (b) you can't refuse to take US dollars (because they are legal tender). That said, I don't know of a law that says you can't also use an alternative currency. For example if a school had "school money" where "credits" are earned for good grades and are exchanged for lunch or snacks, that is a form of alternate currency that surely is not illegal.
Trying to Stir Up a Popular Protest in China, From a Bedroom in Manhattan
Yeah, I didn't even know about it until today. I saw fliers for the Cambridge science festival, but it was basically just a calendar of events and I didn't notice anything on the scale of the open house.
Sounds like I should paint one wall of my office blue, for when I'm doing creative tasks, and one wall of my office red, for when I'm doing detail oriented work. I wonder what would happen if I painted a third wall blue with orange and lavender spots?
Uh.. Aren't mathematical formula patentable?

(Edit: the answer is "sometimes." http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/2100_210... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Street_Bank_v._Signature_...)
rolling back a transaction and claiming it yourself is a kind of stealing

more advanced ways of stealing bitcoins have been developed and successfully simulated, for instance the dominant cartel can actually go several blocks ahead of everyone else but not advertise them, and then only roll back other people's finds when those people advertise them.

For instance the cartel using superior cpu power actually solves 2 blocks ahead of everyone else but does not tell the other nodes that it has solved it. It waits until someone else advertises that they have solved the block and then releases their own and rolls back the other person's.

There are many optimizations that can be made to improve this exploit. The exploit completely ruins any hope for bitcoins being an unmanipulated currency.

Even in the base case scenario where multiple cartels compete to dominate the bitcoins, the average person will be squeezed out and all the advantage will go to the cartels. It will end up WORSE than other currencies based on the credibility of the various governments.

The bitcoin concept is inherently flawed because cpu power is not democratic. Especially when it comes to the implementation details of bitcoins, which are actually very inefficiently computed on a regular person's computer. Purpose-built bitcoin computers are orders of magnitude more effective than normal computers, compounding the other issues with bitcoins.

The fact that most people's CPU cycles are migrating toward mobile battery powered devices does not help either. How many people do you know who still have bulky desktop computers plugged into the network 24/7 rather than mobile battery powered devices that spend more time offline than online?
Disclaimer: I work at Endeca, which just launched Latitdue, a mostly in-memory OLAP product. I work in the performance and scale group, and I've been experimenting with the speed of these things lately.

As an experiment, I wrote a simple, stand alone program that takes a compressed database column and a list of which rows you care about, and does a group by with count. (We're a column store, so every column is stored separately.) For 1 billion records, it took about 250 ms.

This is on a 4-socket Nehalem, so I had 32 cores and used 32 threads. If they're using Nehalems as well, and have 1 socket per box, they're using 320 cores. So they're about a factor of 40 slower than my simple experiment.

To be sure, theirs was a general system that presumably runs on their actual data, whereas mine was just an experiment. Still, it seems quite possible to get the same result with significantly less hardware.
Hacker News has a timeout for responding to nested comment threads. The idea is to prevent long and drawn-out reply bickering between two people. If you can't reply to one of your comment's children, calm down, take a breath, and wait 5-20 minutes.
If your app uses a database, you've got bigger problems than optimizing Nginx for high traffic loads.

That said, I absolutely love Nginx because it's so damn lightweight, and easy to setup and maintain.
The video in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
I'm not worrying if people believe me ;-) My lengthy post was because you said you were interested in hearing more details. If you believe me then great, but if not, whatever.

The pressure aspect is very interesting. As far as I remember, I've always had it, but it varied each time. I've never experienced the splitting in two; that would certainly be strange. I remember one trip where it felt like I was slowly rotating, so that roughly 50% through the trip I was upsidedown. When I rotated the full way and was upright again, I instantly snapped out of it. I often had those kind of "when X happened, I instantly snapped out" experiences actually (another time I was walking around and it felt like I was falling (the pressure) away from where I took salvia (in a car), bouncing off people to get back "up" to where I was and when I got back, I sat into the car and the door shut, I snapped out of the trip).

Hmm, good point. Honestly, it was too long ago and I don't remember. I do remember that after a little while I gave up and dropped the pen. As for knowing if there are people or not, I've had different experiences each time - sometimes I forgot about people completely and was lost in my own world, other times the people were there with me (eg, the car trip I mentioned above, I was interacting with people and it felt like I was bouncing off them to get back to the car, kind of like being the ball in a pinball machine).

I've only ever smoked extract, usually in a pipe (the other times in a bong). I have smoked different strength extracts, the weakest being either 5 or 10x, the strongest being perhaps 50x and most often 30 or 35x. I have never tried it any other way (due to availability). I don't remember what strength it was that night or if we used a pipe or bong.

I didn't try it again. Thinking about it now, I really don't know why, it seems obvious that I should have, yet somehow it never ocurred to me to do it again. We thought it was a bit of a laugh really, which is probably why we didn't put any effort in recording the solution. Kicking myself now, of course. I remember that day we were doing projects for class or soemthing, so perhaps thats why we decided to program on it, while other days we wouldn't have been, but we did a lot of random programming, so I don't think thats why. I don't have a good answer for it really. Then over time I ended up taking salvia less and less until I stopped altogether, for no other reason than that I just didn't feel like it. Then they banned most formerly-legal drugs here, so now I don't think I can even get any anymore (afaik anyway, I never actually checked after most headshops were closed down here). I kinda want to repeat the experiment now!
While LGPL and MPL are similar, there are differences and they should not be lumped together.

The biggest difference is that MPL allows static linking while LGPL does not. While in the past this wasn't a big deal, it is important for iOS development since you cannot dynamically link to libraries in iOS apps.
It is the end. Because they had no funding, they could not get legal representation, and had to accept the default judgment against them. So the company went bankrupt and had to be shut down. They are now doing different things.

The interesting aspect of this story to me is that you can utterly destroy an early-stage startup with a well-timed patent lawsuit, even if your claim has no merit. I wonder why this hasn't happened more often.
Now that you know he exists, you can track his HN posts with http://hackerfollow.com/ (I'm not affiliated in any way, I just think it's a nice tool.)
What about websites that offer credits? If Bitcoin is illegal, then so are stuff like Facebook Credits and Flattr for being alternate currencies.
I'm not sure if this is really necessary...

- With Automator (Applications folder), even a shell script that pipes input into itself can be wrapped as a standalone application and saved.

- Naming any script with a ".command" extension (or ".tool") makes it double-clickable from the Finder. Though in that case, it runs in a terminal window and isn't quite as nice as a standalone application.
Cloud Printing with Box.net
Thanks for the explanation, had no idea. You really shouldn't get so angry tho.
Sounds kinda cool, but unless I'm totally missing it there isn't a demo available of what this actually looks like on a site.

I appreciate it is free, but attempting to create one asked for my email address at which point I'm not even sure what I'm giving it out for.
I thinks this is amateur hour for NY Times.
“We don’t know much about the terms of this gift, but it seems like it clearly falls into a gray area that has been of concern to Congress,”
“If the shares truly can’t be sold so that there is some restriction on the university’s ability to transfer stock, then it would suggest it is a contribution of partial interest only, which would not be deductible as a charitable contribution,”
They don't know the actual terms of the deal. It's only speculation and they're trying to paint Dr. Bose as a law-breaker without hard proof.
Everyone knows or should know that PayPal freezes all accounts that are doing anything out of the ordinary.
It may still be possible to exchange bitcoins through mtgox and then through liberty reserve and bank money orders. Each stage along this route eats up 1-5%. Otherwise, informal transfers through the OTC ( http://bitcoin-otc.com/ ) do work.

Tying too much cash in paypal is a mistake. There is no guarantee that you won't snag on some tripwire in their rules engine. That and all BTC-cash exchanges have so far been shut down by PayPal.

But more fundamentally, Bitcoin is incompatible with the credit card system. CC security is very lax, so CC transactions have to be reversible (the onus is on the merchant rather than the buyer). Banks (and Paypal is a bank) are ill equipped to parse the math and the crypto that go with a proof that a transaction has occured. Not technically, but institutionally they are a different thing.
Interestingly, if you say this in a "oh noes, my spam ads got pulled from Google and they won't talk to me on the phone!" thread, you get downmodded to oblivion.
What value are bitcoins if nobody can legally accept or use them? The IRS is not known for being understanding toward things that look like tax evasion.
This isn't about social skills, it's about not being a dick.

And yet it is so easy to be a dick. I remember working at one company where my boss was awesome at telling me when I had inadvertently made myself less popular. The classic example was when someone in a meeting said "Wow, [some technology] sounds amazing - how does it work?" and I started my reply with "Well... it's quite complicated, but..."

Now, when someone tells you that the above is irritating and condescending, it's obvious - but before then I had never considered it. So socially awkward isn't necessarily about lacking confidence :)
Somehow, I doubt the collection of fewer taxes will stop things like war. Instead, it's really you, me, and other taxpayers who aren't getting our cut.
Save Time Later by Making Decisions Now
Factor e Farm Convergence
There is a nice Firefox plugin called Scrapbook that does this.