skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am developer at a small start up, in terms of company size at least. There are only 4 people in the company and I the only full time developer. The CEO is technical and writes code half of the time himself as well. Though, while small in size, we have roughly 1.5M uniques per month. Only a small part our service is read only / consumption based (the forums and other social networking features). Based on the nature of what our service does we end up collecting a lot of information on all of our users. Non financial information, but most of the information we have about users they would never want other people to know or find out about. Each day the average active user gives about 10-15 new bits of information (willing-fully, thats why they use our service, we are not just tracking users to get the information).

That being said, a lot of users when they close their account contact us and demand us to verify we have deleted all of our their information. We do our best to anonymize by blanking out their name, location, email address, etc... in our database. Then we mark the account no longer active.

However, we can never confirm their data is fully gone. We can not retroactively go back and remove them from our countless number of backups. We snapshot ever night and keep the backups for differing amount of time. Since we can never get rid of them via the backups, which basically are just as good (if stolen, leaked, etc..) as the data in our live database we can never confirm their data has been deleted.

Would this mean we would be breaking this code of conduct? If so, that would make this code of conduct way to burdensome for any start up or company to follow.

(Not to mention other things in there besides the data retention policy that make this way to much for any start up to promise to follow)
Oh, I got only 16900. I think I will do the test again each year to see if I'm improving.
One of the recent "hot" topics in computer vision is solving this problem automatically. It was started, I think, by the IM2GPS [1] paper, and has since been taken up by many different groups.

As you might imagine, it's a very challenging problem, and at very best people seem to be getting around 30% accuracy, on easier-than-normal datasets.

[1] http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/im2gps/
you might want to put a different picture of you on there - it looks like you are totally stoned. Maybe you are, but that's not the point xD
Produce Dysons, not fart machines (product development lessons from handdryers)
It's a great idea. Having the OS run on a ROM directly would make things easier...

For me, the worst part of writing an OS to x86 is that you have to start with a bootloader, a primitive filesystem, change CPU modes... all that before you get to the fun part (memory management, threads, running programs, improving your filesystem). Then I discovered LILO and GRUB, but it was too late!
Sure, so long as nothing came up over that 30 years.
Yes, please get rid of the "next" button or at least allow me to advance with my keyboard - preferably the space key.
I bought my first server.
i know this may be a stupid question, but i just bought my very first server and i'd like to set up a webserver.

i've searched extensively for guides and everything (trying to have each user have php run as themselves and a cgi-bin), but they all seem to have caveats/issues.

currently on apache, if i mod_rewrite a file like "/index -> index.php", /index.jsp and /index.asp work (which is bad)

on nginx, i tried uploading a gif and was able to do file.gif/file.php and it would execute..

does anyone have a definitive guide on a (reasonably [security is a journey, not a destination]) secure server setup?
The mom and her family should have been investing in side income streams along the way.

My grandfather came over to America, worked in a box factory. At nights he took courses in accounting. When his kids were old enough he had them working part time jobs and they all pooled their money together. Eventually, they started investing in businesses where they could earn alternative forms of cash flow.

First it was bars/mechanic shops/restaurants, then it went into rental properties whenever real estate markets got very cheap (e.g.: he bought 10+ houses in Texas post-S&L crisis). This worked out pretty well.

Most of the successful immigrants I know did this. They came over, most were poor. They would sleep 4 to a 1 bedroom apartment. But eventually they found steady jobs, lived cheaply, and then invested the savings into a bunch of different things whenever the right opportunities came up. (The Patels in the motel biz are a good example of this).

The idea that your job/your one career should provide enough for you the rest of your life is just foolishly optimistic. You have to diversify to build in a margin of safety for when life throws a curve ball your way.
Backups are hairy, from what I understand the EU directives on user privacy require that you delete the data from you normal business processes and you warrant that this data will never again be used actively or passively after the user requires deletion. The way I deal with this particular requirement on my site is that if a user requests removal that the deletion request is archived separately after the deletion. If I should have to roll-back a database from a back-up then I will run all the deletions against it that were made since the time that the backup was made.

I'm not 100% sure if that is in compliance with the law but it is a pretty gray area. As far as I'm concerned I would say that you are doing just fine and that you operate to the spirit of the document even if you can't guarantee that in the most extreme cases you'd be following it to the letter.

And that 'spirit' is exactly what this is all about.
I understand your issue with sharing such a link with your grandmother, and that would have been an issue for me as well (if I had a living grandmother). I respect my grandmother and I would always honor her values because of her accomplishments (esp. b/c I directly benefited from them), but I don't agree with many of the beliefs she held that caused her to take issue with 'curse' words.
I was considering using it for an internal webpage in my company. In my particular use case, I would have needed a separate backend thread that watches some files and gives some data to the server thread(s) with proper synchronization. However, because of the GIL, I decided that using threads like this only adds complexity to my code without improving performance. In the end, I chose Twisted, which supports async. Using Twisted also allows me to use hanging GETs without worrying about needing too many server threads.

I would have been happy to use Bottle if i) it had a feature that lets me specify FDs to watch and associated callbacks, like what I could do if I directly controlled the server select loop and ii) Python had built-in support for reader-writer locks.

Twisted had async support but it's documentation could be more comprehensive. I understood the programming model, classes and methods well enough to use it for my project only after tinkering with code, not from just reading documentation or looking at examples.
What I don't see there is collisions. Without a fast collision tool, it's hard to do whole classes of games anything like efficiently. It's a little disappointing that, having written a renderer adapter with native code, there isn't collisions as well.
I believe someone is working on an emacs in guile. That's the right approach. I don't believe it's necessary or sensible myself. I like Scheme a lot. But Emacs resembles CommonLISP more than Scheme so for Emacs future CommonLISP seems the most sensible option.

Anyway, we're ages away from any of that. Although I do believe we'll see a more capable LISP inside Emacs within a few years now.
It seems a shame than Android is so different from standard Linux distributions and doesn't really use any of the normal Linux stack. It would be really cool if Android was more "Linux" than just the kernel (like Web OS & MeeGo are).
check out http://www.howtoforge.com/
No offense, early adopters, but if you desire a SLA like this one from me, you'd better get moving because only one person will ever get one and my girlfriend looks like she is the odds-on favorite.

This strikes me as optimizing for the somewhat quirky preference set of a group of people who do not pay money for software. (People who do pay money for software have an easy mechanism for determining what they are owed: check the contract, if it says you're owed it, you're owed it, if not, you're not.) Their opinion may, possibly, be relevant, but I wouldn't really go out of my way for it without a darn good reason for why.

There are few startups on HN for whom API stability 18 months from now is a life-or-death issue for their startup. There are, almost certainly, juicier fruits which hang lower for your marketing than guaranteeing your API stability in the event of an acquisition or death of your startup.

If you doubt this, please, post a statement of User Rights or what have you on your website. Count the clicks to it. People's revealed preference is that they do not care. They might think they care, they might even say they care ("How dare this Mobisocifotogame that I read about on HN close without letting me download the 5 minutes of attention I put into it in a convenient-to-use XML file?!"), but they do not make decisions based on this. Spend your time on things that actually influence decisions they make, like e.g. button colors. Seriously. Tweaking button color on your signup form will, provably, do more for your business than optimizing for the opinions of folks who flit between new web services like mayflies with less spending power.
I really like the app so far. Especially the waterfall game is cool.

I'll use it to brush up my spanish. :)
Firebug lead developer now working on Web dev tools at Google
Yes, the heavy work is done in C. So it should be fast enough for many games.
There's a method to check for collisions between rectangles (which can be called on sprites too).
That is just amazing. Location is everything.
Haha, I'm not at all, but yea, I will look for another pic.
Application - Android - Mobile - Page 1 - Downloadplex.com
Seriously, why are you all voting this guy down? He's expressing an honest opinion, not trolling.

Just because you disagree is no reason to downvote, especially since HN fades the text until it's near impossible to read, making discussion harder.
[url=http://www.windows7download.com/win7-windows-7-service-pack-... 7 Service Pack 1[/url][url=http://www.windows7download.com/win7-windows-7-service-pack-... 7 Service Pack 1[/url][url=http://www.windows7download.com/win7-windows-7-service-pack-... 7 Service Pack 1[/url]
" I'm just observing that Google is a company with few patents and are in competition in multiple areas with companies with more patents that they very possibly infringe on. It is therefore no surprise that their view on patent law is incredibly in line with this position."

It's a given that you can't enter a field without infringing on patents. Therefore the choice is to either not to grow or to infringe on others patents. Every company has to make that choice not just Google. In the current system the best thing Google could do to defend itself would be aggressively patent everything to use as a weapon. For some reason they have chosen not to do that and that hamstrings them.

That gets dangerously close to "patents are pure evil". When a company that chooses not to abuse a government provided weapon is at a major disadvantage and other companies can use the government to damage it.
So I initially included this step so that you can review a word that you miss. But yea, I think it is a great suggestion to remove this if you get a word right. Also, including a keyboard trigger is an awesome idea! Thanks.
Automatization was the first thing I thought about when I saw this site.

Good to have some reference about some research about exactly this topic.

I also thought about http://images.google.com/ (where you can also search by image now). Some people told in some of the comments that they had success by just using that.
Armin wrote a post back in January regarding mergers in the Python world of frameworks.

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/1/22/python-the-web-and-little-...
The page doesn't seem to render properly here (Firefox 5 and Chromium 12 tested).

In case it helps: http://i.imgur.com/xvEZE.png
Interesting expansion of the "view from your window" series that Andrew Sullivan does. I think it would be cool to see where previous users have guessed on a google map.
If you'd like each user to run PHP as himself/herself, you'd need at least a separate process per user. Depending on your use case, this may be expensive.
I still use it, and most of my friends still use it, though I suspect that using it solely for the statistics probably makes me (well, my friends too) an odd man out.

The only time I've ever considered switching was when I was debating writing a program to take the statistics myself, but then again... why bother?

Regardless, I know way more people using last.fm than I do who use Grooveshark, and I don't really know anybody who uses Spotify. I'm not worried about last, but you never know, maybe I should be.
Back when I was preparing for the GRE (in the early 90's), I found two things to be very useful for increasing vocabulary.

1) Anu Garg's "A Word A Day" (wordsmith.org), back then it was just a daily email subscription that emailed out an advanced vocabulary word. One per day, simple and effective back in th'day when people received a volume of email that was actually consumable in one day.

2) A buddy passed on to me a huge stack of index cards each one containing a turgid vocabulary word that you would never use in real life but that would be common on the GRE or in a George Will essay.

I recall that when I took the GRE, there were a couple of words that I would not have known if I had not prepared with the cards and at least one that was on a word a day. A few words is enough to seriously boost your GRE score and totally worth the small investment in time (a few minutes everyday for ~6 months).
The income bit is the only interesting part.
Hey you! don't you dare call me a Hacker!!!
It's voluntary :)

People's revealed preference is that they do not care until they get bitten. And then they care very much.

So we can and should do better than the bare minimum, and better than 'what users ask for' before they get bitten.

That you do not care is a different story altogether, but consider that if you align your users' interests with your own that you probably stand a much better chance of success than if you do not.

Sure, 'greed is good' and all that but in the end, company data being sold in bankruptcy proceedings is simply bad, companies giving several days warning before shutting down (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2770257) are not helping anybody (not even themselves), and Yahoo!'s shutting down Geocities still reverberates around the web (especially the way they went about it, for a pittance they could have continued to at least store the data).

My inbox fills up daily with people that thought they had an agreement with one of the largest companies on the web and it turned out they got hurt badly.

Big or small, it does not matter.

We are all operating by the grace of our users and those people that put their own interests ahead of those of the users are hurting all of us.

Maintaining this sort of integrity is not a cost, it is a long term benefit, for everyone.
Oldie but goodie. It's a great and fun talk in which Eric talks about how SoundCloud got some of the early traction and credibility by organizing cool parties in Berlin.
It's adequate to work remotely, at least if you don't need to upload large amounts of data often.

As to cost of living in general, that's the kind of question that sounds very simple but turns out to have a rather complex answer. Get in touch (see the contact info in my profile) you're interested.
I think you are being unrealistic about acquisition. I hear way too many discussions on HN about monetizing your products, and people looking for their big exit/payday. People are not going to give up their exit plan because of an idealistic "code of ethics" for their users.
Woh, yea, I haven't tested in Firefox 5 and Chromium 12 at all. Thanks.
http://tcfast.com/2011/07/17/hadoop-startups-where-open-sour... (readable version)
That's why I really like reading with the Kindle app. The dictionary is only a tap away. I'm now in the habit of looking up every word I don't know.
Very cool, but i really do like my back button and would appriciate it if i could use it.
That was the top of every google result, and where I found a lot of issues (nginx, apache rewrites w/fcgi+suexec
Rebekah Brooks arrested
Can we clone extinct animals?
I think we all speak for ourselves here. Maybe it is true that not many companies would require an acquirer to continue to run the service as it was at the moment of acquisition (or better!), but I think those that do want to make such a commitment to their end users should get a leg up.

If someone offered to buy out the sites that I run in order to shut them down I would refuse.
I don't know what sort of maths you're arguing for here, but your argument doesn't make any sense to me at all.

If we assume there are about 100,000 flights per day worldwide (a quick Google suggests this is a reasonable round-figure estimate) then there are 36.5 million flights per year. If there is 1 actual attack attempt per year, then your chance that a flight you are on is a target is only 1 in 36,500,000 or so. Then, of course, many such attacks apparently do not succeed if your one-per-year rate is accurate, and even a successful attack may not kill you, so your real odds of dying due to a terrorist attack on an aircraft are going to be lower.

Even someone who flies a few times per year probably has lifetime odds of dying due to such an attack of 1 in 1,000,000. In other words, you're more likely to be hit by an asteroid, drowned in a tsunami, blown up by a firework, or fatally attacked by a dog. Of course, you are also 50x more likely to die in a non-terrorism-related air accident, and 200x more likely still to die in a motor accident. (See, for example, http://www.livescience.com/3780-odds-dying.html)

The one I find most amusing is when the advocates of the virtual strip search machines trot out the line about how statistically only a handful of people per year are likely to get cancer as a result of those machines who wouldn't otherwise have done so, while conveniently overlooking the fact that the odds of being killed in the hypothetical air-related terrorist attack they are "protecting" us from are even lower.

Basically, the reality is that terrorism is real but the threat it poses is insignificant compared to numerous much greater risks that we don't rewrite our lives for. The extra danger created directly by the "improved security" is probably at least as bad. The extra danger created indirectly, for example because more people choose to drive than to fly, is very much greater than the original threat.
For the most part, I remember sites like Facebook asking you for your e-mail username and password, then logging in as you, and scraping the data out: I don't remember it being because "email providers like Gmail [] allowed users to easily export their contact lists".
1 error prohibited this user from being saved
There were problems with the following fields:
Password must contain only letters, numbers, and underscores
Thanks for the explanation. I don't own a smartphone or have experience with media queries, so this was one of my first times seeing media queries in action and I'm easily impressed.

By "love the scaling", I guess I meant "I love media queries."
This article is timely, in light of (yet another) terrorist attack on Mumbai by allegedly Islamic militants. I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that this attack is only the latest in a long bloody series of consequences of Partition.

The history of armed communal militancy, both Hindu and Muslim, began with the Kashmir movement in the late 80's; this itself was a side-effect of Partition. This was the first time communal tension took on a decidedly dark tone with armed militants entering the picture. Since then, things have only become worse, with the Pakistan establishment actively supporting and arming anti-India militants and Hindu nationalists in India attempting to derail any possibility of reconciliation by repeated acts of religious intolerance. The current situation vis-a-vis Mumbai is quite pathetic, with politicians falling over each other to get a quote out; and the people of Mumbai developing a horrible sense of resigned apathy, touted regularly as 'resilience'.

What is the solution? I don't know. (War, of course, is guaranteed to always be the wrong answer). A reasonable answer, as always, is economics. If the economies of both countries improve, the resulting improved education and decrease in poverty might provide a solution. India seems to be on the right track here; Pakistan, not so much.
Actually it seems to work for me as a way to learn words because I get the meaning of the word after failing. I don't mind clicking next because I often don't know the words (I only got 8500 at the vocabulary test earlier, so I fail quite often ).

May be the next word button should only display if you don't make a 100% score ?

The app is really useful for me actually.
yeah, well, 9/11 still happened with people that didn't appear "normal".

"The way to fight it is to alter the conditions. To do this we must understand why people hate America."

We should bend over backwards to make the terrorists happy so they don't attack us? What if they hate us because we aren't part of their religion..is the answer to make the US a Muslim country? Negotiating with terrorists that clearly aren't interested in negotiating is not what we should be doing here.
My comment does say something about me, but part of the problem is not just what I think, but what I predict my friends would think. I would not share something on Facebook if I expected it to offend 20-30% of my friends.

There are plenty of uses of the f-word that I find funny, witty, or appropriate, but this is simply not one of them.
(NSFW humor: http://justin.justnet.com.au/rudestuff/uses-of-the-word-fuck...)
This question was posted on Zombal, but I would like to see some of the HN community's answers.
Military action is part of the "let's pretend we're doing something useful"-strategy. Dropping bombs and sending soldiers is MUCH easier than trying to tackle the very complex social problems that drive people to blow themselves up. I'm not claiming I know the root cause of the problem, but terrorism does seem to be connected with poverty and oppressive governments. Blowing yourself up is obviously a last and desperate & futile resort.

At the end of the day, we're all human, and we're all more or less equal in what we're capable of and in what we want. We all want a bit of happiness for ourselves and our loved ones. And I dare say that happy people don't blow themselves up.
Good to hear! Thanks.
Why does that matter? And fuck you for thinking that if a muslim prays it means they're involved in terrorism.
Or just use Mutify [ https://code.google.com/p/mutify/ ] for Mac. Works very well. There's Blockify [ http://tribe.nu/Blockify.html ] for Windows, but I haven't tried it.

Free version is quite unlistenable these days though. I'm a spoiled Swede though. I started using the service years ago when it was still based on the Spotify employees pirated music collection (with occasional release group names in the metadata).
In theory if you can prove you do not live in USA. It's a stress.
A word of the day would be a very good way to get people enter their email and tip them to come back to the site. I'd leave my email without a thought.
Better to compare this to Gosu (http://www.libgosu.org/) which Ray seems to have taken a lot of ideas from.

Good to see more people working to combine Ruby and game development.