skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@JT: People are getting off topic again but it sounds like your main concern is getting the documentary released to a large audience. It would be much easier to gain support from outside the bubble if the documentary was finished. Giving the cause more credibility. It's a step by step process. The main focus of the kickstarter page is to get the documentary finished. Just finishing the documenary will bring us closer to ensuring a free and open internet. Once the documentary is finished the main focus would then turn to distribution to as many people as possible.
United Airlines having computer issues
Thanks for commenting, patio11. Appreciate it!

Without trying to sound like an arrogant blow-hard, I would say I'm one of the most vital employees in the company bar none. As the months pass by, I continue to take on more & more responsibilities & today my boss pretty much confided in me that other than him, I am THE creative force in the company.

When I go into the meeting, I don't want to come off cocky. I want to come off confident, which is why I'm trying to gather as much info as I can about this stuff.

I really think the benefits thing should be factored into the equation. It makes sense, right? I know benefits are necessary. But, how do you quantify that? Just do some research into what it'd cost to buy those benefits myself and factor it in?
the gist is that in a 3rd party compiled app, they wouldn't be able to tell if it was nitro turning data into code, or some part of your app recompiling itself. they don't like your app recompiling itself, they want updates to come through the app store ecosystem.
"Adding new capabilities can expose parts of the application stack to potentially-hostile content for the first time. Graphics drivers are an example of that, as are font engines, video codecs, OS text-display facilities (!) and image libraries."

These are all technologies that have, in fact, been a continuing source of terrible security vulnerabilities. I'm not sure of the point he's making; surely, he has to know that font and image libraries --- and even just new ways of gluing those things together, like the new CSS font goo --- actually are security threats.

I don't have much of an opinion here. Microsoft is right that WebGL is scary from a security perspective. Maybe Mozilla is right that it's worth the risk. But this is a bit of a weird post.
I don't really know chinese, but i've worked on multilingual sites before.

Here's my portfolio: http://sidmitra.com/portfolio.html
I'm definitely not in the anti-college crowd, but I'd have to say that academia isn't the final judge over tech ideas. Plenty of great ideas start outside of that realm. Not to say that Bitcoin is or isn't a good idea.
No, really: stop me if you’ve heard this one before (2009)
Computer Failure Delays United Flights Nationwide
Long before Chrome Frame even existed.
And I've zapped myself several times deliberately, even holding the weak little class IIIa laser pointer right up to my eye to show people that the "dangers" are too often overstated. Granted, that's only for low-wattage laser pointers. There are high power lasers where the "do not look into laser with remaining eye" warning is absolutely correct, after all, as well as a lot of different things in between. Lasers aren't inherently dangerous after all simply because they're lasers, it's a matter of how much energy they're zapping your eyes with and for how long.

So I'd have to say, no. If reasonably engineered, this would be less likely to be harmful than someone's headlights shining in your eyes. They're so focused that they wouldn't hit you in the eye for very long given that you're a moving target likely to be several meters away from the bike.
Fabulous. I would have bailed due to sound quality (I don't hear speech real well in general), but the content was worth squinting my ears for an hour.
It's a practice that I assume started on 4chan where you get roped in to a serious sounding story only to have fresh prince lyrics busted out at the end. The story is always made up in these cases. It's kind of the rick rolling of wall of texts as in that if you'd never heard of it and saw a link like that you might assume it was a mistake or just random but of course it isn't.
I found the discussion about domain experts interesting, as if there is no domains within CS. Wouldn't domain expertise in networks, machine learning, DSP, data bases, operating systems etc. be of any value.
Pat, any audio only option?
Eben Moglen: The alternate net we need [video]
It is. Gold's actually a particularly good example since its speculative value is much higher than its actual value.
It depends on the existing available methods of communication. If "the poor" have internet access, email, Twitter etc then adding phones doesn't help much. On the other hand if the poor don't have any internet access then just having a cell phone that lets you communicate with business partners across town could make a substantial difference. Imagine a simple business where one guy sells vegetables in a marketplace in an urban area and his business partner buys vegetables from farmers 10 miles away in a rural area. If the two can communicates via phone then they can coordinate buying, selling and transporting the vegetables (or any physical good) easily. They could even optimize purchases on a given day based on the "real-time" demand the one guy sees in the marketplace. In general the local economy could be optimized in ways that are a net win for everyone. Lack of phones and communication could hinder this.
Anonymous, linear dialogue. Free and open source.
The iCloud: Another Storm for the Music Industry?
Will the iCloud promote P2P music sharing and offer yet another detour around legal purchasing of music online?
One Person Can Drive Policy Change
Read this blog article from McKesson CuroSphere to find out how one person can drive home care policy change.
One of new 3.1 features actually makes it easier for you to use external assets like gems and plugins.

Instead of downloading downloading code and then moving files to their proper locations, the new asset pipeline lets developers package such assets so bundler can accomplish that for you. You'll just specify what the asset is and what version you want in Gemfile.

That's a change that you can't just rely upon some gem to make. It's really the responsibility of the framework. And it creates order, making Rails easier to work with, especially when the app gets complicated.

Similar changes have similar rationales and these can be understood by watching videos like this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGdCI2HhfAU&list=PL379EA9290474C86C
How To Vet New Product Ideas and Save Time, Money, and Effort
I can probably tell you it's not due to people becoming more evil.
Agreed, I think our dislike of long-term thinking leads to many of our most fundamental human problems.
Since I posted this link last year: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584998 .... I've put a few DBs on SSD (Postgresql and Filemaker Pro). The real-world performance on extreme concurrent usage was been insane, ie something like a order of magnitude faster. For instance, a query on FileMaker Pro that would take up to 10 minutes on a heavily used instance (100 people accessing at one time) now takes seconds.
Manual Override - info is the plague of Linux
Sometimes I think the lawmakers should be in jail.
This is beautiful, wonderful, hopeful, and sad all at once. Stuff like this, the voyager probes... I dont know, really get to me.

I was also reminded of reading Asimov's Foundation novels in middle school.

And how about that solar synchronization mechanism. I mean Jesus, how amazing.
Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2667357 for his website documenting this.
Yep... In the long run, I think you would get at least equal educational value by prototyping some parts of the computer in TTL logic, and then writing it in VHDL for an FPGA. Then, you could go into far more advanced things like pipelining, instruction caching and even multi-core design...

And it would be a lot faster (both in terms of building the thing, and in terms of how fast the processor would clock) and cheaper.
I'm going to say "no", assuming that when you say "computer", you mean transistor-based.

I am not an expert on the subject, but I suspect making a facility that can manufacture thousands or millions of transistors, and then operating that facility would take obscenely more man-hours than one man has. Even if his goal was only a 4004, or even just a bunch of breadboards full of TO-92's.

Vacuum tube based might be possible for a very simple computer, if automating the glass-blowing and delicate assembly isn't too hard. After all, at least it's macro- rather than micro-!
Sure it is, but you have to define it better. He could build a difference engine much easier than he could build a system-on-chip. The difference engine would require metalworking and precision tools; the SoC would require a working digital computer to design, which requires lasers and other production technologies that in turn require advanced production technologies to make. Even if you just wanted to make a basic 4-bit machine with vacuum tubes, you'd still have to invent all of the preceding requisite technologies just to make the constituent components.

A mechanical device would be much easier, and would be well within the capability of a single person with all of the prerequisite knowledge to make. Just look at the Antikythera Mechanism.
Unfortunately, a large number of those people will still see "your browser does not support webgl" after changing browsers, thanks to old/broken/blacklisted gpus and no browser shipping a software renderer for webgl.
Barack Obama to Start Tweeting From BarackObama Account
I'm guessing that he built this computer based on some DIY project, which means he followed directions. In college, the most important things you learn involve not following directions. Instead its about teaching you how to "think" and following directions doesn't involve "thinking" at the level that it is taught at college.
Or you can see how ants calculate it in "The accuracy of Buffon’s needle: a rule of
thumb used by ants to estimate area" at http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/12/6/655.full.pdf
PHP, python, perl, ruby - which to use?
Hi All,

I know this is probably an age-old debate, but I need help deciding. Has a winner emerged as the clear definitive choice for quick ramp up time and scalability? I'm seeing a lot of buzz around Ruby on Rails. I need something can eventually handle huge volumes of traffic and DB intensive tasks.

disclaimer: I'm not a backend developer....I'll be outsourcing.
Well, I'd still have to close the sale, get the ad creative, have a web site that gets enough traffic to deserve an ad spend of that kind, run the ad, answer questions from the advertiser as the ad runs, take down how the ad performs, answer questions from the advertiser about their numbers....

So yeah, the thingie that makes it easier for me to do step zero in this process is worth about $40/month in that value chain.
Let users rate the quality of reviews, like amazon does.

Also, get backlinks into your site for keywords like hotel reviews. To do this you can tell your reviewers to post on their blog twitter or Facebook that they just wrote a smashing review, and then place a link to their review.
Steve Case is my dad.
Will you be bringing on a technical cofounder later after building the prototype? If so, it probably wouldn't matter much. There's a chance it'll get scrapped and be redone. And at that point, your technical cofounder will probably have a preference.

Also if you are planning on bringing on someone else, there are more php developers available to choose from and possibly you might get better pricing due to the number of developers out there (I could be wrong on this).

Aside from that, I have a strong personal preference for Python.
> This is assuming that the web needs to be a competitive app platform

This is one of the goals of HTML5.

> That is a huge assumption. Here, you're talking about Microsoft's own 3D API bound to their own VM, running on their own OS.

Whenever you have code that has access to low level API and hardware, you'll encounter the same issues. Look at the history of windows with running native code and all the security issues it has enabled, there is no question they will meet the same issues with 3D on silverlight.

> this is not about Microsoft.

It is about Microsoft. They also had tons of reasons not implement SVG because SilverLight was better and SVG had flaws according to Microsoft... until they added it to IE9 because it was turning popular. They'll try the same with WebGL, this is typical Microsoft behavior.

> So far, I haven't seen any response to the WebGL security issues stronger than "don't worry, we'll try really hard" and that is not very reassuring.

They said they will improve the specs to fix the issue. What else do you want?

> With regards to web security in general, everything that could conceivably go wrong up until now has.

The same could be said about native apps security. The real story here is that Microsoft doesn't want to implement WebGL for two very known reason:

1) It competes with Silvernight 3D

2) WebGL is based on OpenGL while Microsoft is pushing hard for Direct 3D. If webgl gets popular they'll have to implement WebGL on windows and developers might want to develop against it instead of D3D, although they could limit it to IE. Either way, it's not appealing to them, like SVG was when they still believed Silvernight would take off.
I'm reading the definition of Sybil attack... but I do not understand how multiple accounts per user could damage the platform. Do you mind to extend a little your point?

Def: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
Microsoft Releases Kinect SDK Beta For Windows
Gmail integration would be great because I use Gmail and wouldn't have to use some other app.

So if this were a rails app, there'd be two models. You'd have Message Templates and Senders.

Message Templates would be subject line, body, signature, and any file attachments.

A sender would consist of an e-mail address, a selected message template, and then some sending settings (how long to wait before writing back, for example). There'd be a button for a sender to be "active" or inactive. If a sender is "active" and has a message template associated with it, then when an e-mail comes in, the sender sends back the template tied to it.

Then maybe each sender would have some stats about how its performing, how many times it executed, what the open rate on those e-mails was, if there was a response etc etc.
> But this is a bit of a weird post.

It's not weird. What he's saying is that "if we applied Microsoft logic about WebGL to everything, then we'd have to get rid of fonts, video codecs, text-display facilities and image libraries which would make the browser suck".
If you buy storage media, you must plan for failure. Having worked in data centres, I've seen spinning disk drives DOA, die after a week, die in clusters (sequential serials, different machines), etc.

SSDs aren't 100% reliable, but neither are HDs. You lost your SSD at an inopportune time, and that sucks, but it could just as easily have been a spinning disk that died, or it could have died after you finished a nightly system backup so you had no data loss at all. It's pure coincidence.
I'm more curious about the tptacek consulting tips now, than BCC. :)
John Lasseter on Pixar's early days
Something like this, I assume: http://www.bitcoinminer.com/post/5328668205/deepbit-50-perce...
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SEO: If you are clicked in the search results, does that boost your SERP?
The recent thread about SEO inspired this.
Ive been reading SEO blogs and books extensively for the last half a year and having come across this topic.<p>If your site is the most often clicked search result, will you rise in serp?
This is pretty cool - are there any in-development frameworks for Pregel, sort of like how Hadoop was with MapReduce?
here's something I'm curious to know - how often do you reboot your computer? I've got two I use daily, one has an uptime of 47 days, the other (a little macbook that spends all day on the road with me) about 32 days. They're just never off. Do people still turn their machines off?
Visitors 53x More Likely to Share Via Twitter & Facebook than Google +1
I'm thinking of this more as a value add for corporate email, actually. I suppose there are already CRM systems out there that do similar features, but it would be interesting to do it in a more open manner. Via POP3 or something, rather than a proprietary vertical stack (which is what I mostly see at my target companies).
David Chaum has published many papers on digital cash:

http://www.chaum.com/articles/list_of_articles.htm

As well as several patents:

http://www.chaum.com/patents.htm
Canned Responses will let you write arbitrarily long responses. It won't let you do attachments. (But are those really necessary for a spam response? Just send a link.)
It will definitely be a Stone Henge of our time.
Are you sure? Is there an absolute measure of evil or just what a particular society considers evil?

As an example, when your graph started, people went to jail for sodomy. Now they don't. So if it's possible for society to reconsider something that was evil and decide it's not evil, surely the opposite must also be possible?
As the Hole-In-The-Wall experiment showed even slum children with no education figured out how to use the internet and learn from it.

http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

So I think the kids will figure out how to use it well and learn from it as long as we can get into their hands.

The language issue is not a huge problem in my view. Because at the very least the kids will learn english using this thing.

Also you could preload links to youtube videos showing lectures in the kids's mother tongue.

I wish this thing had a 3g connectivity as that is available in a lot of rural places in India. Wifi is going to be tough in a village.

My dad's village has water for 3 hours a day and electricity for about 20 hours a day but I've never seen the internet connectivity ever fail me.
I don't see how you can compare interviews at companies that do different things against each other in terms of difficulty. In fact I don't even know what this means for interviews within the company. For instance, Amazon: is it a difficult interview for a programmer, any technical person, or even for a marketer? If it's for a software engineer, is it as difficult for new grad entry positions as it is for higher positions? Which is being evaluated?

This comes to mind mostly because I'm surprised at who ended up on the list in terms of tech. Palantir, for instance, is indeed one of the hardest interviews out there, if only because the variety of programming questions they ask you is so large.

Salesforce on the other hand, while not a cakewalk, is definitely not on the level of difficulty of a Google or Facebook technical interview, at least for their university hires.

Lastly, I'm glad to see Teach for America up there. It's become a pretty competitive program to get into and this just further proves it, and I hope it gets expanded so more people can be out there doing good.
United flights unable to take off after computer system crashes
This french HAM just about has it covered. He makes his tubes from nearly scratch.

http://boingboing.net/2008/09/18/video-of-a-guy-who-m.html
Bigg Boss Season 5 Coming Soon: Salman Khan To Host Bigg Boss 5
Bigg Boss is a popular reality TV programme broadcast in India. It was first started in India in 2006 and was hosted by Arshad Warsi. After the Seasons of Bigg Boss 1 2 3 and 4 Bigg Boss is ready to back with its Bigg Boss Season 5. From then there has been different different host of Bigg Boss. Shilpa Shetty hosted Bigg boss season 2, Amitabh Bachan season 3 and Salman Khan hosted Bigg boss season 4 in which Shweta Tiwari was the winner and khali was the runner Up. SO now the question is that who will host Bigg boss season 5 ?. Renowned astrologer Bejan Daruwalla has predicted that Bollywood star Salman Khan has a fair chance of hosting the next season of Bigg Boss. Bigg Boss Season 5 Starting Date:
If you want to bookmark an article on HN, you don't have to leave a comment for the purpose of tagging it. Just upvote the story. Then goto your profile and click on "Saved Stories." Every article that you've upvoted on HN will be there.

Or you can bookmark the page using your browser/bookmarking service of your choice.

Either way it's better than leaving a "tag" comment.
My favorite interview questions are the ones where they have you figure out an algorithm for something and then say, "Ok, but you can do it better (faster or with less memory)."

It's slipped into how I do my work. I write something that I want to be optimized and say "Ok, but I can do it better", regardless of whether I know it can actually be done better or not. Very fun.
Be realist to begin with. You're not getting millions in traffic in your first month, so don't worry about performance for now.

That said, Ruby seems to have the quickest turn around times. But it depends 100% on what you are gonna be building, you can't choose the tool if you don't know whether you'll build a house or a boat.
Thanks for the insight. I appreciate the reply.
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Ask HN: Symbolism like "Join, or Die"?
I came think recently about how similar modern web marketing is to Benjamin Frankin's famous "Join, or Die" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join,_or_Die) political cartoon, which was used as political marketing. He made it simple so that the people, who were largely illiterate, could get it at a glance. Nowadays, the average person still doesn't want to read more than a few words, especially in the fashion vertical.

I was wondering if anyone knew a good resource on this kind of thing - how symbols and images can be used to send a message. It's a topic that's a bit hard to search for on Google.
Watch the BBC comedy series "Yes, Minister" for an insightful and hilarious exegesis of this idea.
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Automate web application deployment on multiple tomcat servers
Maybe getting the song wrong was a metatroll?
How about the original: http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf?

Would you care to explain how a Sybil attack applies? There are no identities nor any kind of reputation system in bitcoin.
the price of bitcoins will converge to the average cost of computing bitcoins

Actually, it's the other way around. Since rate of supply is fixed by the protocol, the cost of producing that supply has no influence on the price.

But the price does have an influence on how much the suppliers are willing to pay. Hence total bitcoin computation power follows price (with a delay due to time to acquire new hardware or repurpose existing hardware).
It's called a Jalaba, I got one when I visited Morocco.