skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my own experience with gold farmers, they have gotten much smarter and efficient which at the same time means it is much harder to automate than the regular WoW "farm bots" that will run around and kill pigs. Also, blizzard actively monitors your PC with the infamous "Warden" cheat prevention.

Back in the "Burning Crusade" days I got an in game whisper (message) with an obvious spam for Chinese gold. I whipped out google and found a few phrases in Chinese and began chatting back, asking where they are from, how are they doing etc.

Sure enough after a couple of tries, they would reply and tell me they were from Wuhan, I believe. Next they invited me into their group, told me to come with them.

They were two Frost Mages and went into the "Underbog" dungeon and proceded to clear the first room with nothing but "Frost Nova", "Blizzard" and "Arcane Explosion" spells - so they kept an absolutely deadly group of 6 hostiles completely immobilized and killed them more or less slowly with "area of effect" spells. But ultimately it yielded them a better result than killing regular monsters would have.

It was absolutely hilarious to watch and help them and it is a very fond memory of an otherwise actually quite boring and repetitive, non-extraordinary game.

And my point being: with blizzard constantly working on making it harder for the gold farmers, they have to constantly come up with new tricks; with the introduction of the "diminishing returns" on root effects, this would not have worked anymore, for example.
nah. Here's a detail of Lunokhod 3 wheels: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Lunokhod_...
This is changing. The only paper bank statements I get now (I'm in the UK) are credit card ones which they're obliged by law to send out. Similarly all my household bills are now electronic. Taxes are done on-line and the government website dumps out a completed PDF for my records.

It's taken a while but things are getting there.
> it prevents a user from doing what they want

Have you ever seen a false positive report from an anti-malware application? I have.
Yeah, I was disappointed that we hadn't discovered a way to extract energy from water...
How many other large (or even mid-size) brick-and-mortar retailers do digital receipts? A quick Google session turned up a test case at K-Mart and a hockey chain in Canada.
OK, everyone here who codes in ADA, raise your hand. Atlas?
Utter bullshit. Microsoft chooses to price Windows high in China, knowing that most people will therefore make a private copy, because Microsoft is afraid that if they price it low, it will undercut sales in western nations (people will import legitimate Chinese copies of Windows to the U.S.).

That's their business decision and a perfectly acceptable tradeoff. But you don't get to make that decision, profit from it, and also whine about it.
One must remember that there can be a difference between an argument that is logical and one that is simply persuasive, although they can be one and the same.

I agree that we can use some persuasive-only arguments - that is: some type of informal fallacy - to justify a line of thought.
It was a joke, no need to downvote.
We had a programming intern a couple years ago, he was doing some Python stuff for us. One day he comes to me all excited about this awesome editor he found that was x-platform and had syntax highlighting for everything and was scriptable. I like editors so I asked him what it was..."It's called Vim!".

The editor I had been using for years. :)
Turntable: Play music together.
>Music from the last 5-10 years is largely damaged by the loudness war

It really depends on who you're listening to. For example, this LP and ones like it will reduce you to tears of joy on expensive headphones, and as you can see from the waveform nobody is telling amon tobin how to compress his tunes:

http://soundcloud.com/amon-tobin/amon-tobin-isam/

Especially check out the second track, which starts at around 6:40. Although that is obviously a 128 kbit/s preview stream. Get the CD.
I have a hard time believing this one guy was the entire lynch pin on wallet and was the difference between Google doing it or not

Perhaps not, but as the filing alleges, he was the person in charge of negotiating a deal with Google for Paypal to provide these Wallet-like services at the same exact time he was interviewing at Google for a job. That sounds like the definition of conflict of interest to me.

As an aside, I wonder what the interview process is like for someone Google is hoping to poach like this? Wonder if he had to interview with Andy Rubin a few days after/before appearing on the other side of the negotiating table from him?
With all due respect, there's an awful lot more to it than that. There are also the many, many relationships that need to be set up to get a mobile wallet going. This is certainly part of what irritates PayPal.
Odd story, makes software development in Ada kind of a catch-22. The DoD has used Ada for so long because of the security and correctness constraints built right into the language and compiler. When you're talking about software that's flying a plane (passenger, war time, whatever) it HAS to be right, because if it's wrong, people die. When something HAS to be right, that by itself ensures longer development time and testing.

Now I'm not in this industry, but I know that planes these days are extremely complicated beasts and require a ton of code to run everything properly. I worry that if development is artificially sped up, that code problems that would have been caught in the testing get caught in production.

Of course the above kind of assumes a decent dev team and a good code base. What I said could be moot if what's really happening is the technical debt of some of this code is so massive that simple changes take months to make and ensure correct, which would be a problem for sure.

Either way, blaming the language probably isn't the right way to go about this.
Designing in the Open
That would be a non-profit.
We have a paperless account and they're forever sending us letters about it ...
A number of my professional friends participate in mentoring programs for young underprivileged kids. From what this article talks about, such programs should have a good potential at making a difference, at least for those that go through it.
Interesting idea but I'm not 100% sure how it would apply to all situations. Coming from 37signals I'm guessing this mindset is feature-centric. Might have to give this a try.
>"Nobody believed me when I explained that lots of people in the US had paper shredders in their homes."

As a current UK resident I find that surprising as a high proportion of the people I know have shredders at home, they're very common.
This guy is not leaving a legacy with his startup. Google acquired it and him and will/has buried his project.
Also, 20 years for now people will still engage in arguments about which is better - it's the ultimate flame war :)
> And why exactly are myths, religions or philosophy better at answering questions than science? What’s the justification for that claim?

Science assumes that there is a "justification" (for language, the universe, you name it). A true philosopher always begins by asking himself if there is such a thing as "justification". Just think about it, science has helped us put a man on the Moon and create the Tsar bomb, but it isn't able to answer Epimenides's "All Cretans are liars" paradox, a 2,500 years-old problem.
One thing to consider: "Follow the money", and consider whether the work is contributing to rehabilitation, restitution, and expenses. Or whether it is lining other pockets.

Whom is the work benefiting.

Given the continuing privatization of prisons as well as the apparently rampant level of corruption, I have my suspicions.

And how much does it compete with the normal labor market? Is it reducing employment or depressing wages? As more and more people in the U.S. are imprisoned, this question would seem to become more pertinent.

Now, if formerly "unemployable" people left prison with job skills, and someone was actually willing to hire them, perhaps we might even consider prison labor a form of "internship".

But, to my very limited knowledge, the statistics do not bear this out.

Pennies an hour are unlikely to add up to any substantial restitution.

And states seem to be going broke paying for their prisons -- directly or via contract.

Maybe someone else can cite some informative journalism or substantiated data with regard to these questions.

P.S. I'm somewhat uncomfortable commenting at all, from my position of limited knowledge and experience. But, damn it, imprisonment is a State activity, and therefore, like it or not, the responsibility of all the State's citizens (at least, in a representative government). So, it's our duty to try and make some sense of this. It's not simply "someone else's problem".

Is it merely a matter of "idle hands", and allowing select individuals to benefit from the side effects? (Or vise versa.)
The problem is we don't understand the problem
Tell that to the IRS, when you show a loss for three years, yet keep going.

Is it a business or a hobby?
New & Improved! USA PATRIOT Act, now with 30% more Bill of Rights violations!

This damn thing just needs to die (expire), already.
That anything at all exists has to be accepted as a given.

"God" (in its various versions and revisions around the globe) is just an anthropomorphized version of the previous proposition.
I hope this will be retroactive to older htc devices like the EVO. Would be really nice to just not have to hack anything and just get CM7 working on the phones.

I am an unlucky one with HTC EVO hardware rev 3 which has problems when flashing a kernel, murders battery life until a full restore is done.
> A lot of modern IDEs provide features that are pretty close to magic, compared to what emacs sports.

Which modern IDEs and what features? I have used eclipse for months before deciding I was better off with emacs with eclim-mode anyway to provide the only two features of eclipse I liked: the compiler and the ability to see the members of an object (occasionally).
And what's the on-going maintenance?
Chomsky's April 8th lecture at Carelton University on language had several thoughts on machine translation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbjVMq0k3uc

(I think it even had the same bee-dance example)
Why can't someone = you?
Not sure if that was a serious suggestion or not? The logistics of that get more difficult when you take into account door frames and window ledges, the over all product would not be very appealing. Over all be easier to gut the room. If that's the case, I'll wait until we can get a new home we want to live in for years. The current one is on the wrong coast, my wife from Vancouver wants off the east coast :)
And you're suggesting that these other countries don't have tax offices who carry out audits?

Where are these countries and can I move there?
Buster Keaton noticed the opposite in his time. He mentioned in his autobiography that there was a silent comedian whose movies got bigger laughs than himself, Chaplin, or Lloyd. Lots of absurd cartoony stuff, like jumping into an empty swimming pool, then coming out of the hole with a Chinese family, or being shot out into space. Keaton noticed that guy's movies got bigger laughs, but audiences didn't remember scenes from his movies like they did for Chaplin and himself.

If people remember lines from Airplane! it's not necessarily due to the absurdity. They could just be good lines. Try remembering a line from any of the Scary Movies.
ICC is pretty spectacular (and sometimes awesome!) at optimization.
No need for proof, just intuition.

Think about it: they can create any new website and instantly give it good Pagerank/TrustRank/whatever by internally linking to it from the Google.com domain. They dun even need to manually boost it.
Ways to Not Build Stuff
What's more, it is why the concept of business exists. It's a system by which society can advance by efficiently using our individual talents.
T-Mobile does, with their "Even More Plus" plans. Of course that's unlikely to survive the AT&T merger.
Self-hosted HTML5 Notepad App with Sync 
Spent the past week coding this as a proof of concept. Has anyone worked with syncing browser's localStorage with an external data source? (I've found persistenceJS which is JS only)
Montana Free Online Newspapers - CellPhoneHacks
I don't find the salaries that high in practice (depends heavily on where you live), teenagers on the street are anything but polite and I don't know what you mean about counting and spelling. I do know that every time I've been in a store that lost power I wasn't able to check out because no one in the store knew how to assess the taxes.
Getting Started With Defensive Web Design
Good article. Funny, earlier this evening I stumbled over an interview with Tony Schwartz (the author of the parent article) and David Allen, from 'Getting Things Done', in the print version of HBR.

I follow many of the advices, they make, already and they work great but many others I keep struggling to make a ritual.

1) Morning Workout: Takes time, especially on days where I have to commute a lot. Sure, I can make a good 5 minute workout but if I have to leave a lot earlier than my usual sleep cycle I don't even want to take that time. I might even decide to only shower the night before and hence can't afford a real work out before jumping in my clothes. Also, I found that I'm often significantly more tired over the whole day when I do a hard morning workout. I have plenty of experience of this from my time in the military. Sure, I should probably do a lighter workout. But I rather have a real workout later than wasting time on some wishi-washi with Homeopathic weights. And real, strenght workout requires full concentration and an awake mind.

2) Sleep Cycle:
In winter, I usually succeed on this and I love the benefits. But now that the days are long its hard to enjoy a social life and still get up early. So I do get up early only when I have to and stay up late when its worth it. Not very healthy but a lot more fun.

3) Planing the day ahead: I would love to make it a ritual to decide the night before what is going to be the most important task tomorrow. Sometimes, I do, but tonight for instance I fail. I worked in "the zone" for hours, stopped at midnight. Now, instead of making that decision, write it down and then go to sleep, I'm procrastinating here for more than an hour. I guess, I'm afraid to take the step back to look at the whole task - which is huge for me - and get mentally destroyed by the weight of that challenge. Whereas, if just keep writing tomorrow where I stopped, I might not work on the most important thing, but at least I get something done.

Any thoughts or suggestions?
crashplan looks like a good alternative to back blaze, with a nice linux client. Also, they have a free option to backup over the net to a friends computer (encrypting everything before it is sent).
I guess this is an indication that it doesn't work unless everything changes at once.

I actually do have a few "paperless" services here (DSL, for one), and it's actually biting me now because there are still organizations that absolutely require paper documents to function.

Banks are just as guilty of this as the government. Try opening a bank account anywhere without a paper copy of a utility bill to prove your address.

The more paperless we get, the tougher life gets when trying to deal with the few holdouts who need to see your papers.
Dude, this is crap for many other reasons. Honestly, Balmer's whining is just like a 5 year old saying "its not fair". Get over it. Solve the problem. Nobody wants to buy your software. Your software costs too much. And exactly as next said, if china could not hack windows, you would have people running linux and that is much worse for MS because then linux desktop innovation would come from somewhere and in higher volumes.
Your comment incorrectly states that Luna 1 to Luna 15 crashed into the Moon. Luna 16 was not the first to successfully soft land and not all crashes were accidents. Only 6 of the 14 Luna missions intended to soft-land on the moon actually crashed. (There were a lot more Luna missions in total, some were not supposed to try soft-landing, and some failed to even reach Moon orbit.)

For those who are interested in Space trivia:

According to Wikipedia[0], Luna 2 intentionally crasheded into the Moon, making it the first human-made object to land on it. Luna 5, 7, 8 failed to soft-land, making Luna 9 the first object to soft-land on the Moon. Luna 10, 11, 12 and 14 were designed to orbit the Moon and crash into it after they failed. Luna 13 successfully landed on the Moon.

Luna 15 was supposed to bring back soil samples, but it crashed into the Moon as well. (More space race trivia: It was supposed to bring back lunar soil samples before Apollo 11 returned to Earth. Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface of the Moon when Luna 15 impacted.)

Luna 16 was the first unmanned probe to successfully land on the Moon and return a soil sample (which is an event even rarer than manned moon landings).

Luna 17, which carried the Lunokhod 1 roboter mentioned in the artcile landed successfully as well.

Luna 18 (another planned soil return) crashed, Luna 19 successfully orbited the Moon for a year and later crashed into the Moon.

Luna 21 also soft-landed carrying Lunokhod 2, the second roboter mentioned in the article.

Luna 22 and Luna 23 were also soil return probes, but Luna 22 crashed and Luna 23 damaged the return probe on landing (the landing was a soft-landing though).

Luna 20 and 24 both successfully landed on the Moon and returned to Earth with soil samples, making Luna 24 the last man-made object to return from the Moon to Earh.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_man-made_objects_on_the...
Introducing STFU: Command line C# projects
Org Mode's agenda has something like that: http://orgmode.org/manual/Timeline.html
What’s there to answer? It’s a paradox.
Thanks for the tip! Will do.
Freeman Dyson earlier this year on this type of ambiguity as expressed in the drum language of the Democratic Republic of Congo:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-...
The ciphertext is "essentially random"; the amount of ciphertext (per second) isn't.

Encryption will keep your wife from reading your letters, but if you send a hundred letters a month to the new girl at work she might still get suspicious. Encryption does not promise to prevent that.
Holy pressure vessel batman! I did not know that and find it weird and fascinating.
Astronomers Unveil Most Complete 3-D Map of Local Universe
It isn't that you shouldn't have those books. My point is mainly that once you read them and learn the tools, they just gather dust. I just went back and amended my post with an additional sentence. Basically, most of the books that teach tools are read once, Google later. Once I know about a tool, it is usually a lot faster to quickly search for a bit of refresher knowledge than to thumb through the book looking for some specific page.
I think the whole point of that part of the article is that the only answer that could satisfice O'Reilly and viewers is that of religion, and Norvig says Chomsky has a philosophy "(some would say religious belief)" i.e. some unscientific belief that "language should be simple and understandable", which is balderdash to claim that is a religious viewpoint, in my opinion.

There are several ways one could model language, from a top down purely statistical approach that Norvig likes, something in the middle which Chomsky proposes, to a bottom up neural model of chemical interactions. There are advantages and disadvantages to each method for many different reasons.
> They are guilty though. If I buy a TV from someone's home-care nurse, knowing the nurse doesn't have their patient's consent to sell it, I'd be a thief. Legally and more importantly, ethically.

While true, that's not the case here.

>> We're assuming that govt officials have the relevant authority. If they exercise it poorly ....

>What a dumb idea that is. What precedent have you ever seen for that?

It's almost always the case, so assuming otherwise is silly.

You're confusing "it would be bad for govt do to {something}" with "govt has no authority to do {something}".

If you don't want govt to do {bad thing}, you shouldn't give it the power to do {bad thing}, even if that authority is necessary to do {good thing}.

> Seriously, a vote isn't a sign-off on anything a government does, it's a last-ditch effort to keep things from going really badly.

Between that and not changing govt, you have consented. You may not like what you've consented to, but until you effect change, it's yours.
Thanks for posting this Sharon - Happy to chat more on the topic if you'd like :)
What our economy needs:  more developers
Extract the deuterium from your water and we've been able to extract lots of energy from it for a long time (50+ years).

Doing it in a nice controlled and easy to start fashion is the catch...
Differences between German and British manners
"Germans really don't do small talk, those little phrases so familiar to the British about the weather or a person's general well-being, but which she describes as "empty verbiage"."
> Your comment incorrectly states that Luna 1-15 crashed into the moon.

Not exactly. It incorrectly states that all luna landers (therefore landing attempts) resulted in crashes, not that all luna missions preceding 16 were or contained landers.

Thank you for the correction on 9 and 13, though, I had forgotten about them.
>A lot of modern IDEs provide features that are pretty close to magic, compared to what emacs sports.

This is true, so why did I go with vim?

Well first, I'm primarily using Ruby not Java, so the magic available in IDEs is somewhat diminished. But more to the point, vim is really well optimized for the widest array of types of editing. It also has the advantage of critical mass open source immortality.

So when I hone my vim/emacs skills, it's an investment for the next 50 years, during which time I'll have no problem using my preferred editor on my preferred platform with whatever languages happen to be striking my fancy.
> The important bit is "but is essential for part of the site to operate." To me, that clearly falls under the "strictly necessary" banner

They say that, but it is easily demonstrable that running a web site providing static content such as they do does not require the use of any cookies or similar technology at all to provide the service the user is requesting: millions of web sites manage it every day. As you say, if only part of their site requires the cookie for some genuine reason, perhaps they should only set it there. In any case, there is really no excuse for not explaining properly what the cookie is for or for cluttering up the screens of visitors who don't check your "do whatever you want" button just to make the extra panel go away.

Bottom line: the exemption is not for cookies that are required because you hired poorly trained web developers or picked an inconvenient tool somewhere on your hosting platform. It's for cookies that are essential to providing the service that visitors are expecting. The ICO themselves have been very clear on this in the guidance they published in the run up to the handover, and their own site is flagrantly violating at least the spirit of the rule if not the letter of the law -- which AIUI they have responsibility for interpreting in the UK, so if they can't get it right, what hope is there for anyone else?
doesn't work in chrome, letter is blank.
Yes, I totally agree. Learning is learning. But the pitfall is when the learner just learns the tool but misses the concept that generated the tool. I see this all the time. Knowledge and wisdom need to go hand in hand.
Watch 'X-Men: First Class' online
watch 'X-Men: First Class' online
When they were young men who have learned that super powers before they became enemies