skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never heard of other games spawning threads like these:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77736.0

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=82309.0

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76007.0

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=80022.0

I've never seen other games where people use that as a reason to study geology, farming, beekeeping or whatnot. One person, not satisfied with the material properties of Saguaro wood and unable to find good data online went so far as to track down a sample and measure them.

One person even mentioned that they neglected to study for their geology test and played Dwarf Fortress instead. They got an extremely high score because so many of the questions were relevant to DF, such as asking for the names of common iron ores. Any good DF player can list at least magnetite, limonite and hematite without any trouble.
don't know if anyone else is having the same problem, but the decoded message is not displayed for me (it's truncated because it's longer than a line; chrome on linux). the entire message (from page source) is KILL/SLF/DR/HELP/ME/KILL/MYSELF/GAS/CHAMBER/AEIOUR/DAYS/
QUESTIONSABLE/EVERYY/WAKING/MOMENT/IM/ALIVE/MY/PRIDE/LOST/
I/CANT/GO/ON/LIVING/IN/THIS/WAY/KILLING/PEOPLE/I/HAV/
KILLD/SO/MANY/PEOPLE/CANT/HELP/MYSELF/IM/SO/ANGRY/I/COULD/
DO/MY/THING/IM/ALONE/IN/THIS/WORLD/MY/WHOLE/LIFE/FUL/O/
LIES/IM/UNABLE/TO/STOP/BY/THE/TIME/YOU/SOLVE/THIS/I/WILL/
HAV/KILLD/ELEVEN/PEOPLE/PLEASE/HELP/ME/STOP/KILLING/
PEOPLE/PLEASE/MY/NAME/IS/LEIGH/ALLEN/ (i've added some line breaks)

which also explains why the article after that point is discussing leigh allen...
Mozilla and Lean Startups
That is actually one part I liked, especially the HTML.

For bigger projects I would do the development of different parts of the app in different JS files and have a server side script combine them when requested from a web browser.
Interestingly, high pressure, high temperature synthetic diamonds are produced using graphite dissolved in molten metal. (Or at least the first commercial scale production was thus, according to Wikipedia.
Back door, anyone?
Choosing the Right Image File Format
If it was that easy, wave or buzz would have taken off.
It only took spamming the entire internet on twitter to get someone to notice. If you look at @thomasmonopoly, you'll see what I mean.
I hate the assumption that an entire industry of people follow a narrow derogatory stereotype.
Just a suggestion, based on a different meet I'm attending: have you tried meetup.com?
Well, up to now they only used SQL injections.

But please enlighten me.
Sounds like a great service. Then I went to use it... it doesn't backup email?! I got my contacts and some random stuff that I didn't know I had (and don't care about). But where's my couple of gigs of email? Is there a different service for that?
Apps vs the Web
About #1... can you work 9-5 at a tech company? Is this guy a developer?

There are non-competes too so you can't build something Google is thinking on building or have you working on, also, and more importantly, most of the "successful" startup guys wont just "get a job at Google", I know many people here would, but it's hard for a lot of people that start businesses to:

1. Just get a 9-5 job
2. Be so deep into computer science that Google requires

For many of these guys to get to Google it would be easier to build something and then sell it to them.
I respect your inquiring tone.

What I'm trying to say is that you're focusing on a couple of high-profile examples, and the politics don't have the all-encompassing effect that you think they do.

(I love politics, and I'm very interested in the interplay between missions and politics, but your estimate of the interaction is way, way overblown.)

There are some "poster children" for the influence of politics in NASA. JWST is one, Hubble was another, so is/was the manned program (Constellation and its predecessors), and also some elements of the Mars program.

It's appropriate that politics influence some of this. It's citizens who fund this work, and their representatives, for better and worse, vote on funding. The portions of NASA that are most visible externally (same as the list in the previous paragraph) are the most subject to politics.

[[ Note on JWST: it was not cancelled, as you seem to think. The House voted against it. But all its support is in the Senate (Sen. Barbara M.'s district includes GSFC and STScI, which run JWST) and there's no way it will be cancelled. NASA watchers know this. But JWST is being sent a message, because it is way over-budget. And that is the politician's business. ]]

The political process described above is very distasteful to nerds.

But that's not all there is, and my references to the Earth program above were intended to illustrate that. That roadmap I linked to has about 12-20 missions planned out to 2020 that will have a huge impact, and there's very little political influence there. It's nerd's wet dream, a bunch of scientists at the National Academies contemplating what measurements will best advance the efficacy of various earth system models.

Modeling accuracy does not interest the citizenry, except when they want to know a hurricane's path or the amount of seismic deformation of an earthquake or what the water levels in reservoirs will be next year or what forests are healthy or ...

So the question comes down to proportion. I don't know the most recent figures, but various "science" stuff is certainly more than 1/3, probably almost 1/2, of the NASA budget. One can argue about the boundary cases.
Make it easier by putting up a sign up form. Don't expect people to open their email program, copy your encoded email address, write a message, wait for a reply and then test your startup.

Actually, just link to the demo right here and get cracking.
Yes, Google Chrome Built For OS X Lion Is Coming — But It Will Take Time
To put it another way, the makers of Angry Birds are crack dealers while Tarn prefers to expand minds by selling LSD.
This was the first thing that came to my mind. Sure would make "wiretapping" those linux boxes a bit easier.
Actually, a lot of people have created "cobblestone generators" in Minecraft. They are pretty easy to make, and are infinite and fully automatic (a cobblestone appears, you destroy it, loot it, and another one appears instantly).
Feature Selection using Support Vector Machines is going to be patented?
Google cancels future plans for Google Toolbar for Firefox
Snow Leopard comes with Java vs. Lion not coming with Java.

Seems like Lion removed Java to me!

You are a perl guy, what are you doing reading articles about Java anyway? ;-)
British Cell phone scandal...The True Reporting
It's kind of hilarious and sad that, judging by their home page, it's possible to build a business on selling "In Case Google Stabs You In The Face" insurance.
Google made a decision not to provide human support because it isn't scalable. Google is doing quite well with the support system they have in place now, in terms of financial success and still with general consumer sentiment.
The wording of this blog post is very silly, but I think there's a valid point in here, and that is: the right full-time job can still enable you to work on your startup.

That job probably isn't at Google though. There are lots of software engineering positions where hours are 9-5, the problems you solve aren't very hard and thus leave you with lots of mental energy, and there isn't much in terms of "extracurriculars" (conferences, etc) to occupy your time. These are terrible jobs if they're your only path for professional development, but they can be good for a 3-12 month stint while you try and get your startup off the ground. Low commitment, low stress, just enough to pay the bills and get you some health insurance.

I can't imagine a software position at Google ever matching that description though.
Now, I just disagree with this view.

The vast majority of companies don't take VC money. Many great companies had ideas that were quickly dismissed by these "VERY smart VCs and entrepreneurs".

Of course, there's also the argument that the 4-5 YC partners just can't take on every potentially successful startup. Harvard can't accept every qualified candidate; there's not enough seats. But to then tell one of those rejected (or in this case, waitlisted!) to simply forget continuing on with their education elsewhere is just preposterous.
They provide IMAP and POP to let you download your email.
Yeah, just get a mail client and have it fetch your mail using POP. Make sure it runs every once in a while and you will have a backup of your gmail.
Ask HN: AT&T Subpoena for Customer Information by IP?
Today I received a subpoena from AT&T saying that they had been subpoena'd for my identity due to allegations that there had been mass bittorrent activity from IP. Anyone know what this is in relation to or have a similar experience? The subpoena is about as vague as it gets.
There are scripts to do it via IMAP, but it takes a very long time and it's a bit of a pain to set up.
want now...
I have to admit, this whole story gives me pause. I live and breath by my gmail account, and it they decide to deactivate it for no good reason (or refuse to help me after the fact), how can I be expected to use their services with any confidence? Perhaps my planned migration to google+ is on hold...
The world would be a better place if if companies focused on "people", and not on "money".

Of course that's unrealistic. But I don't care. I grew up believing in Star-Trek-style society. You know... "Social problems are gone; people are free to devote themselves to improving themselves; etc". I honestly believed that humanity would someday achieve this.

I used to believe most people were inherently good, and that they are naturally adverse to doing unethical things, and that if they did something unethical by accident, then they would go out of their way to fix it, even if they weren't obligated to. Because it's the right thing to do.

Needless to say, Real Life came as a nasty surprise.

You're a bad person for not caring about That One Guy Who You Deleted 7 Years Of His Life. But hey, our capitalistic society encourages not caring, so it must be okay, right?
Hmmm, I also came away from the article with more questions than answers.

Would this mean that the lyrics are not under copyright, but just the performance combined with the music? And that the music is not under copyright unless combined with those lyrics?

Assuming that the copyright to the combined is valid, is there any other way I could recombine them that would constitute a copyrightable derived work -- simply shifting the key the music is performed in perhaps?

My conclusion; copyright laws suck.
Massive water reservoir found at edge of universe
FWIW, Brett Slatkin at Google reached out via Google+ to try and help this guy. Looks like they made the connect:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/116969159384245484847/posts/Z1UH...
Byword: A Simple Text Editor for Mac
The Value of Team Built Prototypes
That was years ago. Practically no one has ever written pleasant Java-based consumer-facing applications running on OS X. Then iOS and OS X attracted a lot of native app developers using Xcode/Obj-C, and it paved the end of pre-installed Java on OS X.
"But, see, the trouble here is that these users aren't customers. They're product sold to advertisers."

The whole product/customer thing is a boring bit of sophistry usually used to slander Google.

Google's profitability secret is a very high revenue to employee ratio. When I bought a $600 Nexus One from Google and discovered a problem with fulfilment, the grand total of support Google supplied to me was an automated email response (that itself was a dead end -- no recourse or escalation), and a link to an FAQ.

That's just how Google operates. If they can make a cron job that eliminates the need to supply support for most customers, that's what they do. It is this way whether they benefit from you via your eyeballs, or from your wallet.
What No One Told Me About High-Fidelity Wireframes
It doesn't display right for me in Chrome/Mac but clicking on the images shows a picture of a solution sheet with that same text.
I didn't know that. I was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullum_crimen,_nulla_poena_sine... . Obviously, history shows that governments can do whatever they want if opportunity arises.
I just signed up. Thanks for reminding me they exist.
Is Pre-Cognition Possible & Can It Beat Twitter on Breaking News?
How 38 Monks Took on the Funeral Cartel and Won
that is a pretty strong recommendation. Must find time to try it out.
40 useful APIs for web designers and developers
An application programming interface (API) is a set of rules and specifications that software programs can follow to communicate or ‘interface’ with each other.As developers are well aware, there are hundreds of APIs out there for doing almost anything you could imagine online. Some are better than others, and some are definitely more useful than others.
Even if that were true, the price of Apple's early adoption is that they have to support it for four years. (Just like they supported 32-bit x86 for years even though they only used it for a short time.)
I don't think we'll see a change in Google's approach to ignoring customer service, until they get hit with a class action lawsuit

The problem is with bots...Google automates everything, so they hit a lot of people with false positives.
I did, along with the updates:

Update 2: Adobe sent us a message saying Flash hardware acceleration was, in fact, not disabled in Lion. The company declined to talk about all of the other problems mentioned in this story. Here is the company’s official statement:

The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers.
Can't you just order one from BMW/VW/Mercedes/etc? I know at least one owner of a recent 3-series diesel BMW in California.

In fact the same should be possible with this phone. You can just buy it yourself and plug in a SIM, that's just not common in the US. The 3G frequencies are sometimes not the same though.
This is why I've imported all my phones for the past 7+ years...

Nokia 6820

Sony Ericsson M600i (white)

Nokia N95 8gb

Nokia N900

Galaxy S2

It's a tad more expensive than a locked-in contract plan but you get your phone many months before the US Market (if they get it at all) and none of the Marketing / Carrier BS.

Having a smartphone years ago was almost like owning a really nice car, everyone used to ask me about the 6820/M600i especially. Now the only advantage is getting something a few months earlier, so the markets are at least improving in that most great phones are making it to the US markets. The US mobile market was complete garbage years ago compared to what it is now...
‪The Undercover Snatch and Grab Squad London (Raw Video) 2011‬‏ - YouTube
Will videos of the talks be published?
Collider sees tantalizing hint of Higgs
The ped is travelling perpendicular to the original direction of the car (crossing from right to left from the cars point of view) and is most likely just stepping off the sidewalk.
Y Combinator Taps Into Its Alumni Network, Announces Ad Innovation Conference
IIRC The 3.7 Lion install is down from the 4.7 Snow Leopard install, which was the result of a crash diet that Leopard was put on, I believe, bringing it down from around 7GB originally.

Apple's been squeezing out the bloat for several years, I believe, with the intention of doing digital downloads of OS in the future.

This implies the Mac App Store has been in the planning stages since around 2007-2008 or so (when Snow Leopard development likely started.)
It was only a single explosion. There were rumours of multiple explosions, but they were not true. People mistook glass falling from buildings and fake CG YouTube videos (Sky News retweeted it), but the rumors were quickly denied in the Norwegian media.
After poor sales, RIM pushing for Android apps on the PlayBook
This is so biased that that its fairly offensive. Their 'source' articles are grossly misrepresented.

I would like to see a link to an article that is more balanced (too bad groklaw isn't around anymore). Does anyone have a more suitable source document for discussion?
Not at all, it's utterly trivial with something like OfflineIMAP. Of course, depending on the size of your mailbox it'll take a little while for the first synchronisation but after that it's incremental.
Engagement on the Three Social Networks
Their more important enemies undoubtedly have more security theatre, but I highly doubt they would actually be harder to attack.
ZFS on FreeBSD works a charm - I was happy to switch to FreeBSD after having done OpenSolaris & Nexenta specifically for ZFS.

I actually use ZFS on Mac OS, as well, and have been happy with it there (thanks Dustin Sallings!).
Here's some footage from the attack location just seconds after the explosion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciQvqBgK-nY
Thanks, but BBEdit 6 worked just fine.
The single select also cannot be reached by pressing the tab key (for me, Safari 5.0.5). When I fill out a form, my hands are on the keyboard. I tab to the country field, start typing my country to select it, and move on. So I'd say the single select is worse than native on both Safari and Mobile Safari.

The multi-select is great, though. Why not make the single select work like the multiple?
You may not use them, but not everyone speaks english. Plus, I suspect that those were one of the things that got removed and that get pulled down at install time if needed.
Somewhat related:

http://www.visionsofjoy.org/pdfs/BatesPerfectSightWG.pdf
http://www.i-see.org/perfect_sight/

William Horatio Bates (1860-1931) first published his treatise, The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses (title page), also known as Perfect Sight Without Glasses (cover), in 1920.

This guy has some kind of crazy ideas; but the general thing I learned from him is that the shape of the lens of the eye is a function of three sets of muscles that can be trained/relaxed to help vision come back to 'normal'.

A great read. The HN worthy title would be "hacking your crappy vision"
I used to play a lot of Dwarf Fortress but like you I realized that it takes a lot time. I ended up quitting the addiction because I needed to get some real work done. One thing about DF: there is never a lack of things to do with your world. In my last game I built an engraved obsidian cast tower. In Dwarf Fortress terms this means I built a powered pump system to extract magma from the earth and water from a nearby river and used the water and magma to cast obsidian for a stone tower which I then hollowed out with rooms and storage areas as a dwelling place for my dwarves. Around the tower I built a magma moat for defense from the marauding goblins and zombies. The fortress has survived more than 15 years of attacks so far. I just don't open it up for fear of getting hooked on DF again. ;)
Ha, good point. I neglected to include that the mirror must be flat....

I'm glad you tried it, though! My friend told me this and I just didn't believe it until I tried it for myself.
I was on the checkout page to book a flight for the last launch, then ultimately decided not to. I'd been wanting to see a Shuttle launch since I was a kid, but I realized we're going to have a lot more launches. Sure they won't be shuttles, but I'll be able to look at that launch and say "That's the rocket that is taking people to Mars." Not "That's the rocket that is going to take a shipment of astronaut ice cream up to the IIS and bring back bags of space poop for disposal."

And when you look at the Ares V rocket. OMG, watching that take off is going to be sick!

Size comparison: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_A7wB2gcr8lA/TAU3evWPPSI/AAAAAAAAIE...

So don't be too bummed, you'll be able to see lots of great launches in your lifetime.
Startup idea: Sync all Google services with local hard drive
Android Jobs to Surpass iPhone Jobs by Year-End
Do you still get 3G? AT&T and T-Mobile both use different 3G frequencies than the rest of the world. You can easily just plug in a SIM to a foreign phone but you may not get 3G.
I believe the fact that Oracle owns Java is almost reason enough to hate the language.
It sounds like this system is meant to be something along the general lines of something like Tinfoil Hat Linux.

If you're expecting Citrix... you're probably not in the target audience.
It's copyright infringement by you, the person who made and sent a copy, not by me who just received it. If you look at the lawsuits, they're all convicted because they uploaded, not because they downloaded.
Just a note, you can't seem to choose "0" as the number of guests that you'll bring along.
First Twitter Engineer Does it Again, Secures 2 Million, Amen.
FCC wants to auction off more public broadband spectrum
Also Vic Gundotra: http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090
I recalled there was an internal Apple support stat showing that the two major sources of security holes on Mac OS X are Flash and Java. Apple has to maintain its own JVM stack, which is basically nightmare for a company with so few head counts compared to its product volume. The majority of OS X users won't ever use Java in their life time. Seems a really good idea not to bundle it.
That looked like a cool project, so here:

https://github.com/gk777/Easy-List-Select

Unfortunately, I don't think it's as good as I thought it would turn out to be, but it's definitely neat.

EDIT: it's a chrome extension BTW
"[P]eople love to look at faces, but we often use them as clues as to where else to look. Following a person’s gaze is almost a reflex. James Breeze demonstrated this really well in a blog post called “You look where they look.” His experiment was simple: about 100 people were shown a picture of an advertisement with a baby and some text. Half the time, the baby was facing the reader, while the other time, the baby was looking at the text. Breeze found that not only did the people shown the baby looking at the text pay more attention to the text, but they actually stopped looking at the baby faster in order to follow its gaze."
I have to wonder how many complaints of Google shutting down accounts is due to the person getting hacked and the hacker commiting the violation.

Not sure how Dylan can say the below quote with absolute certainty...

On July 15 2011 you turned off my entire Google account. You had absolutely no reason to do this, despite
your automated message telling me your system "perceived a violation."
The interface for DF is actually not bad at all. Once you learn the keystrokes the interface disappears, and you don't even need to have the side menu open at all except on context menus where you need to scroll up or down. I find it to be vert fast and efficient and would hate the game it I had to use point and click or some other slower method of manipulating the world.
The process can be automated using pistons and a redstone repeater, as shown here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wLuEO6xOM4&feature=playe...

This can produce cobblestone as fast as you can mine it, at a cost of three lava, three iron (for pistons), and a bit of redstone dust (plus items derived from wood, water, and cobblestone, which are all renewable resources)

There are other designs which use even less non-renewable resources as well.
So maybe get these companies to spend nine figures founding a non-profit to systematically challenge the patent trolls' portfolio.
Seems like an excellent business opportunity.

£0.31 * 30,000,000 = £9,300,000 pa
"Running it from a CD means there is absolutely no way the OS can be compromised..."

... except if the underlying hardware is compromised.
Lawsuit Jackpots.com launches(check it out)