skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've suggested a similar feature through their Feedback link, although the other way around: G+ should detect your contacts' default languages (via GMail, for example), and then automatically create circles for different languages (you could amend them manually where you have bilingual people). When you post, G+ should then detect the language (Translate can do that!) and suggest the right circle. To work properly though, you'd also need an "intersect" feature, so that you could share something with "people in English-speaking circle AND people in Friends circle".

Edit: in any case, considering their experience with Orkut (which was overrun by Brazilians and Indians using their own idioms), I bet Google is already working on language filters of some sort.
Whenever I read HN on my laptop and was about to switch to my desktop computer at home, I found there was no easy way to send the tabs I had open over to my desktop machine easily. So I made this extension to solve that problem.

Here's a 14s screencast of it in action (between my desktop and a VM): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CUOcsqKWeM.
Hope someone finds it useful here.
A household is an open system. It is possible for a household to increase its net revenue without incurring costs. For example, if I get a new job with higher pay, the amount of money in my household has increased.

Countries (even countries in economically integrated Europe) are closed systems. Increasing the revenue to one sector results in losses to another. In this case, the Greek government can increase its revenue by increasing enforcement and raising the tax rate. However, that results in a cost to the private sector. People paying more in taxes have less to spend on other things, which lower economic activity and lengthens the recession.

As an aside, this is why I get very irritated when politicians use household/business analogies to model national economies. The two are different in kind, not just in size, and trying to compare an open system to a closed system leads to serious errors of judgement.
The author mentions his experience with capacitive buttons that are too sensitive. I have the opposite problem on my phone—the buttons aren't sensitive enough.

I think that capacitive buttons are just too difficult to tune because the conditions they are used in vary so much. My phone doesn't even register touches at all if my hands are slightly sweaty.
Well, when you live inside of a walled garden the proprietor can kick you, or your son, off the grass for any ephemeral or arbitrary reason they happen to have just thought of.
They don't. I've been watching intently as a .net dev for the last few years and MS doesn't play a leadership game of any sort. They aim for the lowest common demoninator and their framework development is "me too" development.

They wait and see what is popular and after it has shown it's worth, they spend the next few years catching up to the community. Except they always add their own MS flavor to pollute it. Case in point: the enum designer for Entity Framework. And the worst part? People eat that stuff up.

There is and has been .Net communities outside of Microsoft but it is terribly difficult and frustrating to try and turn the tide. Most of the communities wither up and die as they discover the power of other communities they are trying to emulate. It ends up being easier to switch (or do both) than to turn the tide.

Frankly, I don't blame them. I've given up trying for change. My influence isn't large enough. I'll likely move on at my first opportunity. I still like c# an will keep it in my toolbox. I just feel like it's starting to be a burden more than a boon for learning. Not that there isn't opportunity, there's just more elsewhere. And I have more fun when learning.

I wish it wasn't the way it was but I have a feeling it's not going to improve. For another 3 or 4 years.... At which point they'll have caught up to where everyone else is now.
Every time I bring this up I get down-voted, but...

Every time someone begins a comment or blog post with text that says absolutely nothing about what they are trying to say, they weaken their point. If you cannot resist including meta-commentary, I suggest putting it after your rhetoric, like this:

p.s. I apologize for meta-commentary, obviously this has nothing to do with the Greek Economy.
The factory bankrupted itself. If it was worth something its wares will get bought.
tldr: Did they never play a game in landscape mode, and accidentally back out of the whole game by merely holding the device wrong?

I really don't get the anti-(physical-)button trend.
So one of the first languages with closures to get huge mainstream popularity hasn't helped? right...
isn't the entire screen of a smart phone a capacitive button? It's pretty hard to accidentally dial my ex or launch the "fart noise" app in a meeting on it so why not link the "capacitive" buttons to the same software unlock as the device already has. (referring to my Android / HTC desire)
which means a big hunk'o'plastic sticking out of the underside.

I have an old Acer Aspire One with a similar battery configuration. Turns out it's actually very useful at positioning the keyboard at a much more comfortable typing angle. I end up propping up the back end of my MBP with my phone half the time so I can type comfortably.
Twitter can afford the to have multiple languages in their stack but most start-ups simple don't have that luxury. If you have a early stage start up with about 10 developers and you need to quickly build a set of server side component or services for your product, would you want to use multiple languages to develop that or use one programming language ? Having developers choose best languages for the job would be disastrous if you end up with your stack written in 5 different languages. I would not discount the importance keeping codebase easy to manage.
That's not true. There is a terms of service page upon the first login to gmail for any google apps for your domain account. Each user must accept.
The story of Ymads, the latest advertising network.
> The campaign aims to make all manufacturers wary about bringing their DRM-enabled products to market. DRM products have features built-in that restrict what jobs they can do. These products have been intentionally crippled from the users' perspective, and are therefore "defective by design"

oh come on, that's just silly. That isn't at all what DRM does, it can be a side effect of bad DRM but good DRM doesn't "intentionally cripple" products. Why would anyone support a campaign that starts off by spreading such silly claims.
He references the post "Parallelism /= Concurrency," which we previously discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457307

That was largely a semantic issue, which I responded with:

Parallelism: simultaneous calculations executing in the service of a single problem, usually with the goal of improved performance.

Concurrency: executions in the same time granularity, but not necessarily simultaneous. Also not necessarily in the service of the same problem, but some form of synchronization is required.

What I will add this time is that there are different kinds of parallelism, and I think he's considering "data parallelism" the real parallelism. I think this is a false distinction. What he calls "concurrency," I and others call either task parallelism (for distinct tasks that don't need to communicate much) or pipeline parallelism (for tasks that work on data in stages).
This is a commonly heard statement, but it doesn't actually make sense. Like any company which sells advertising, there are two levels of product: the products they charge money for (e.g. ads and customer info), and the products which attract people who enable the former - gmail, search, etc.

If they do a bad job at creating and servicing products which draw people to the site, people will not go there and Google will not make money. So, is gmail 'not a product'? No, that's absurd.
Failure Isolation and Recovery: Learning from High and Extreme Scale Computing
Look at companies like CollegiateLink (www.collegiatelink.net) or Orgsync (www.orgsync.com) ... They collect this type of non-academic/participation based data and use it to, among other things, generate 'extra-curricular transcripts' for students to document the activities and organizations they participated in while in college. Might be an interesting model for your approach.

As a former student user, I vaguely remember students self declaring their affiliations/memberships, but them having to be validated by an organization contact on campus -- like an advisor or group president.
I was more thinking coffee script development for nodejs. The browsers on a whole have only just got javascript sorted. I think it's too much to ask for native coffee script support in the browser.
Scalable Virtual Environments
I was just about to type something along those lines, but then I thought for a second and realized that a lot of these insane JavaScript projects coming out may never become the next <whatever is cool with the kids>, but the technical achievements made in each of these projects inspires the NEXT group of hackers that might be working on <next awesome thing>.

So I think there is a lot of value to these hack projects even if Facebook isn't going to roll it out in it's next update.

Engineering is like art... we all look at what each other is doing, get inspired and move the entire discipline forward.

What I love about that is you never know when you are going to inspire something, not with a project, but maybe just with a particularly nice snippet of code or data model that is SO intuitive, they feel compelled to work it into something.

Equally cool, you never know when YOU will get inspired. I know I've honestly read class definitions or parser implementations that were so intuitive and elegant that I have developed a compulsion to go code something that uses the same technique because it is so pretty.

I don't know why, but I think that is what makes this line of work so great. It's technical AND artistic... and it doesn't always make practical sense ;)
I didn't even have a Google profile until three days ago. I hadn't entered my full name, had not used the gmail to sign up for anything, have only exchanged 2 emails.
I remember when I bought an LG Chocolate when it first came on the scene about 5 years ago. It had capacitive touch buttons that were in such a bad place that if I was talking, and the button brushed against my ear it would hangup the call. It was awful and I vowed never again. Its the very reason I never got an iphone, opting for blackberry instead.
Wait, I don't understand this argument. iPhones are one of the few phones that don't have this issue.
Big(D)esign 2011 - Get Your Tickets Now for 3 Days of All Things Design
In Honeycomb (and presumably 4.0), the capacitive buttons have been replaced with on screen elements, so sort-of yes.

The difference, in my opinion, is that there is on-screen feedback when you press a screen button, vs a capacitive button which is just a backlit touch element. I agree with your solution to link their active state to the software unlock, but in practice it seems to not be how devices have been implemented.
Agreed, really would like to see more technical information about this. A deeper dive is preferred...
Tunneling Out: IP over DNS - How to escape in a locked down environment
If I can activate a touch button with my finger than why not my ear?

EDIT: I didn't know about the proximity sensors and other mechanisms until the replies below informed me. I still prefer tactile though :)
Wouldn't it be awesome if one of these days these kinds of hackers actually did something that improved the world?
Review Board [1] is a pretty good code review tool, but my experience is only with Subversion integration.

I'm not quite sure what kind of integration with Mercurial you are looking for, but the Mercurial wiki contains one such extension [2].

[1] http://www.reviewboard.org/
[2] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ReviewboardExtension
Ask HN: What language for a web frontend?
At some point we would like to write a frontend for our Open Source Broadcast Encoder.
The encoder itself is written in C. I have no idea what today's "in" framework/language is,
but PHP is not an option for various reasons.

What would be other good options (Python, Perl?) and what frameworks, if any?
And that doesn't even get into the problem of the DST dates changing at the whim of legislation like it did recently in the US about 5 years ago. If you are attempting to track timezone instead of UTC you've now have to check date ranges when different DST was in effect. Very messy stuff. Better to just keep it in UTC or Unix if you need the offset it was recorded in as you mentioned.
I didn't know what it was. I clicked the "more information" button. I still don't know what it is.
ed, I know what you mean -- it seems like an empty argument until you get one of these phones (specifically Android) with the fundamental buttons all touch sensitive.

Normal touch-screen phones all have context sensitive operations, for example you are playing a game and no where on the screen can you accidentally press the "Fart noise" app button or the "Hangup" button -- because they just aren't there.

With Android there are those 4 or so required buttons (Home, Back, Menu, Call/Search) and moving them from mechanical buttons to capacitive you CAN find yourself in the middle of a YouTube movie or game where your thumb just barely touches the back button, closing the app and taking you home.

Or as another user mentioned, you are on the phone talking and part of your chin or face (if you try and neck-cradle the phone while doing something) may hit the hangup button, menu button or Home button to suddenly start activating other things on the phone, ending or interrupting your call.

It is absolutely MADDENING.

The iPhone never suffered from this because it always had the one single mechanical button and the proximity sensor was good enough that when it got close enough to your face, all input on the pad was deactivated. Most of the Android phones that have mechanical core buttons don't suffer from this either for the same reasons.

It's once you get those damn touch-sensitive buttons on there... oh boy, there are a few times a week where you just want to throw your phone right into the ground and wish it a happy birthday.
I don't agree with his comment about the stove - Sure it's more fiddly than a real button or dial, but the ease of cleaning more than makes up for it IMHO.
The iPhone's proximity sensor disables the touch screen when it is near your head. Sounds dicey, but in practice has worked nigh flawlessly since launch.

The issue here is buttons that you physically press down (like the iPhone home button) vs buttons that are an extended part of the touch screen element (the back button on most Androids).
It's a pretty common cause for law suits actually and is known as reverse-engineering. It touches on exactly what we are talking about here. You seem to believe that the inherent value of something is exclusively associated with the cost of the material, but of course it's not. Let me give you some examples. Dirt doesn't have any value to most people, but if someone creates pottery from it that people deem valuble, then it becomes a commodity that can be sold. The difference between the dirt and the pottery is the labor and the skill of the creator, that is what creates value. Similarly with a book, what creates it's value is not the paper or the ink but the narrative, it's what makes you pick one book over another or even an empty notebook.
So you think America has a wonderful democracy too? We're wealthy, we have a constitution, we have a sophisticated (well...) intellectual class, and yet my taxes are still used to murder impoverished people around the world, support autocrats, make Goldman Sachs executives rich. But I suppose that's what we voted for after all, right?!

Greece may have a more democratic government than Saudi Arabia. That doesn't mean its people's interests are represented. They may be one of the more open and prosperous societies in the world, but even the most open and prosperous are run primarily for the benefit of special interests. I didn't think that was controversial.

"What you wrote in another message - "why pay taxes to a government that you feel doesn't represent you" - is the biggest thing that's wrong. You have to pay taxes because it's the law, and the government is the government, until you vote the next one in. If everyone evades taxes until the government does exactly as he wants, nobody will ever pay taxes."

You seem to believe that a government is legitimate simply because it is in power. To me this is both a spineless and a dangerous position. Every third world dictator hosts sham elections and of course they use your exact argument when their people complain. "But we have elections! We have parliament! If you don't like the course we are on, you are free to change it at the polls." The first world is more sophisticated in its deceptions, but the outcome is similar: the government is run for the benefit of powerful interests at the expense of the people, and election law is carefully manipulated to maintain this state of affairs. Intelligent, ethical people will reject this ruse. Legitimacy must be earned.

"You'd think they were being forced to toil in salt mines and fed gruel."

I suppose it's very easy for you to spout your trite little sarcasms from a position of comfort and privilege. Let them eat cake!
Google+ gets first Worm
Because there is an IR proximity sensor which turns off the screen when your head is against the phone
Best-Rated U.K. Stocks (Jul 5, 2011)
Because the iphone uses accelerometers and other sensors to work out when the phone is even near your ear when on a call and disbles the screen, both saving battery and disabling input.
Why wouldn't I? Plus, Raphael suggested that Google's action would lead to people lying about their ages - which hinted that their was a way for people to change their ages on their Google accounts after the fact. I was simply responding to that question.
Why did you only want to go into medicine if you got into a top-tier school?
The iPhone has a proximity sensor to prevent this from happening.
Daily Stamp
Hi, sorry, the description didn't come though:

I've been a long time lurker on the board, but this is my first official post. My name is Brian Spector, I'm a long time crypto geek, working in infosec for about 20 years.

Last week we launched a new service called PrivateSky, which is a end to end, browser to browser encryption service, for free. Our first product is the PrivateSky for Internet Explorer add-in. Yes, we will come out with Firefox and Chrome soon.

I'd love to see what the board thinks about what we are doing, and if so, what we could improve.

I hope this is the appropriate place to post this, if I'm violating policy (checked, couldn't find anything), then please do let me know and I will delete this.

You can get the free PrivateSky Internet Explorer add-in at:

https://privatesky.me

What does it do?

CertiVox's PrivateSky SaaS is a major innovation in secure inforamtion exchange. The PrivateSky for Internet Explorer Connector add-in is a whole new approach to securing confidential information posted to the web, and anyone can use it. The PrivateSky for IE add-in doesn't require multiple passwords, certificates, or complicated processes to learn. It's simple browser to browser encryption that just works. Use it to encrypt your webmail, Facebook posts and messages, LinkedIn messages and even blog posts. PrivateSky uses the AES encryption algorithm, that means it is super safe!

Enough with the marketing schpeel, here's what we really do:

We operate an encryption key management server in the cloud. Our software connects to our key server to get everyone who enrols what we call a SkyKey. You can think of this like a private key. However, we are using a new form of key agreement called non-interactive authenticated key agreement, based upon bilinear pairing mathematics. No, this is not identity based encryption, this is non-interactive key agreement. It's heady stuff, but it has suffered through 20 years of cryptanalysis and is secured by the DLP.

Now, the thing is, there is no public key. There is only one key, your SkyKey. But, this enables you to create "connection keys", which are regular AES 192 bit keys. The analogy I always use is this: Suppose every time you made a friend on Facebook, a worldly unique AES key was created between you and your friend, and could only be created between you and your friend.

That's what we've managed to do, but in your browser. Oh, and there is a boatload of key protection, rotation, etc., going on in the background.

Again, love to get some feedback. I'm the chief bottle washer at the moment so I can't promise to respond to feedback immediately, but will try my best.

Thank you for giving it a shot and please let 'er rip, the good, bad and ugly.
At the very least its not clear. Let me give my evidence as to why the TOS applies to search:

1) While, as you note, the TOS URL contains "accounts", it is accessible in two clicks from Google.com. Simply click the "About" link and the TOS is on the About Google page. It's on a page that has nothing to do with accounts per se, but is the high-level page about the Google company and services.

2) Here's is the first paragraph in the TOS:
Your use of Google’s products, software, services and web sites (referred to collectively as the “Services” in this document and excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google. “Google” means Google Inc., whose principal place of business is at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States. This document explains how the agreement is made up, and sets out some of the terms of that agreement.

They don't call out anything about accounts at all here. They seem to be referring to all services.

3) They actually have a section which is about accounts. If the whole document was about accounts they wouldn't have a specific section about it. Here is the opening paragraph of that section:

In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you give to Google will always be accurate, correct and up to date.

Notice the use of the term "certain Services". That is, certain services require an account, but not all. This document as a whole is referring to all services.

If you think this TOS only applies to accounts, I think you'll need stronger information than simply the URL where the document is located. I certainly don't think the URL is part of the legal agreement. And if you read the TOS by itself, it seems pretty clear that it includes Google search.
LinuxTag 2011 - LinuxTag-TV - LinuxTag 2011 - Die Vorträge
Well, this isn't exactly the same thing. Moving out of China was simply a case of turning off the servers there. Should Google try and set itself up in the Cayman Islands?

Considering the very large stick Google got beat with in regards to Buzz, I do not think that they are particularly interested in lobbying Capitol Hill for a change. In fact, both they and Apple sat out a congressional hearing on COPPA [1], although I couldn't find the cause. I would expect apathy to the process, as I would think Google would love to be able to sign up more users.

[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/95067-la...
I'd like to see how it works. Screencast? At least screenshots? I tried to click on the screenshot-ish image on the main page but alas, no images of the product.