skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For you to bring child prostitution into this I believe you did not read the article.

>There are prostitutes because there's a market for sex

There is a market for sex because women have been legal chattel for centuries, wherein women are traded as objects primarily for the purposes of empowering a certain view of the world.

For the record: many organisations specializing in trafficking relief admit that women are equally, if in some cases more at fault, in forcing other women into the prostitution market. I am in no way attempting to blame men for a difficult, millennia-long problem, I just refuse to accept the status-quo while it causes genuine and significant damage.
In the US, they could be charged with "Conspiracy to commit <crime>".

>One important feature of a conspiracy charge is that it relieves prosecutors of the need to prove the particular roles of conspirators. If two persons plot to kill another (and this can be proven), and the victim is indeed killed as a result of the actions of either conspirator, it is not necessary to prove with specificity which of the conspirators actually pulled the trigger.[1]

I'd assume English law has something equivalent -- it's a really old problem, and involving computers won't change the principles involved.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29#Conspira...
Why don't ecommerce sites just create an account for users on the fly? Why do they require the extra step?
That doesn't follow at all.

First, I'd like to be clear that I'm not advocating for or against AirBnB (and my sole experience as a buyer of accommodation via AirBnB was positive).

It should be transparent that different actions have different levels of risk and reward. Often by accepting higher risk (e.g. accepting the risk of letting strangers into your apartment) you can get higher reward (e.g. some money, a sense of community and connection, etc). But risk is risk, and so you can also get anti-rewards, sometimes huge ones (home ransacked and burglarized and vandalized, identity stolen, sense of life violated, etc).

If you want to draw conclusions from events like this, they should be about modulating your risk tolerance, not about setting your risk tolerance to zero (which is incoherent anyway). You might decide that although things like this happen, it's a risk you're willing to take. Or maybe not. You might decide that if you're going to rent your apartment out to sight-unseen strangers, you're going to put all your identity documents in a safety deposit box first, to slightly limit the maximum damage. Or you might decide that that would offset the benefit too much, and thereby just go back to the no-renting-to-strangers option. Or you might decided to take martial arts lessons, and not let strangers in. Or you might decided to install security cameras, with real-time transmission to offsite backup, so that if something bad happens you'll always be able to strike back and regain a sense of control. Whatever. All of those options are coherent alternatives, and all are a far cry from 'never leave your own home, never let anyone in'.

It's certainly true that simply walking down the street requires trust, and it's certainly true that transforming strangers into friends is a process that requires risking trust, but both of those _can_ be done with very small trusts. Or they can be done with large trust, which has greater risk, greater possible reward, and greater possible injury.
My main machine for the last two years has also been optical-drive-free. Installing Ubuntu on it was kind of a pain (see http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-journal/2009-Jan... and http://canonical.org/~kragen/unetbootin.html for details) but otherwise it's been pretty much fine.
In related news, Dropbox employees were surprised to find that the new building's locks could be opened with any key and that despite the landlord's Terms of Service, janitors and other building staff can in fact open and view private containers and documents belonging to employees.
I actually stated the opposite : People might use this as an example of how amoral hedgefunds are, but it turns out that they are just more clearsighted. Ditto shorting, HFT, etc.
Horrible headline.

I'm now more inclined to buy from 23andMe than I was before because I know they are doing legitimate science and reporting the results without prejudice.

Questions:

[1] Wouldn't it be worth funding this company just to find this out about Parkinson's disease?

[2] Is this a reason for them to pivot or adjust their marketing to talk about what their service does do well?
High number of infosec textbooks almost 100% copied, according to attrition.org
Awaiting the day when 'Patent Law 101' becomes a pre-req for Computer Science degree..
He does suggest a few things which are useful but not practiced in all academic disciplines (note "academic" instead of "scientific"): systematic ways of finding truth (specifically, Bayesian analysis), carefully specifying the exact experiment done, being open about your confidence (or lack thereof) in the results.

To pick a random example, I've been told economists don't often look back to check the accuracy of the macro-scale predictions they made. (Un)succesful predictions are an excellent way to check for (un)truth.
The scientist's open letter on cryonics, signed by people such as Gregory Stock, Stanley Shostak, Ralph Merkle, Eric Drexler, Aubrey de Grey, Gregory Benford, and a range of researchers in the life sciences you're probably less familiar with, but who are household names in their fields.

http://evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open-letter-on-c...

A layman's introduction to cryonics:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2001/11/cryonics.php

Lots of deeper technical details can be found at Alcor (which maintains a better web presence than the Cryonics Institute):

http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm

The basic process is pretty similar between all modern cryonics organizations. Important to note is that freezing is out, vitrification is in. That makes a large difference to cellular structural integrity. See:

http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/vitrify.html
Awesome! There are some really things you could use this for. I have done something similar here: https://github.com/bgrins/DrawWindow

I'm interested to look through the source and see how this was implemented. There are many things that are really tricky to handle using the computedStyle way of rendering HTML. Just to name a few:

* Form elements

* Dotted, dashed, rounded borders

* Gradients

* Text with word-wrap: break-word applied (for some reason measuring each character does not work properly here).

* CSS Outlines can be tricky, though I have gotten that to work pretty well in my implementation using getClientRects().

* Overflows / scrolls with fixed width or height divs (and nested ones)

* Iframes

For basic text and images (such as http://bgrins.github.com/DrawWindow/tests/basic.html) it holds up pretty well.
Excellent. This means the problem is solved and we don't have to secure any of our systems, because he was a one-in-a-billion case that nobody could replicate. (Surely nobody is currently doing the same things with less fanfare.)
The appropriate multiplier is zero, because in this case it is time to leave and move on - there is no repairing the rift in the relationship; both sides see the other's position as outrageous and assess your role completely differently (hired help on the one hand and cofounder on the other). Finally, there is a significant difference between a small business and a startup when it comes to how closely the owners expect to hold the company (as you have discovered.)

Hindsight is the right word, because it's time to put this in the past.

Good luck.
Show HN: Buy the Humble Indie Bundle #3 with Bitcoins
Only if buying the insurance was cheaper than the carry from owning the bonds. There's no reason that this should be a 'free lunch'. Indeed, CDS, the bonds, and the market for short-selling the bonds, form a no-arbitrage kind of thing : So that no one makes money without risk.
Evening project: hsline, a grep/sed-like text processor with haskell goodness
I started at Microsoft straight out of college in June of 2000. Here is my last 11 years:

- 18 months @ MS. Didn't enjoy what I was working on. Didn't do particularly awesome work. Quit after ~18 months.

- Took 6 months off. Made actual friends (I moved to Seattle not knowing anyone) Went to burningman for the first time.

- Found a job at a small startup called PureNetworks on craigslist. Stayed there about 2 years. Did pretty good work, but the company didn't do so well. Management got changed over and I got fired (which kinda scared the hell out of me) after showing up to work super late one day (like 3pm) after going to Vancouver to party the night before.

- Interviewed with some random companies in Seattle including Amazon. Got referred to Google through a friend and interviewed with them as well. Ended up taking the Google job & moving to NYC.

- My GOOG options did pretty well (I started a cpl months before the IPO) but def nowhere near "fuck you money." Spent 5 years @ Google working on couple different things. Did pretty good work. Met @dens and worked on Dodgeball for a while before it got canned. Spent my last 18 months at Google semi bored kinda looking around for something new/smaller.

- After @dens & @naveen got foursquare up and running they brought me on as the first hire. Now I'm running the server engineering team (about 35 folks...and PS we're hiring! http://foursquare.jobs).

So, how did I get here? Worked hard. Picked up both small company and big company skills (learned much super valuable knowledge working on large scale infrastructure at Google) but also caught some good breaks.

Advice: work hard, learn a lot about a lot of different things. Network like hell. Networking will get you good breaks. It'll also help you recruit once you're running a team. This is vital. Keep a file of every smart person you ever meet in your whole life. You won't regret it.

-harryh
Especially considering the payroll costs would be much lower in Alabama. Never understood the reasoning behind everybody wanting to be located in the most expensive places in the country. Internet connections are available in the South you know.
Perhaps that was a bit blunt.

I don't know who he is or read many of his comments here, but on the basis of the article alone (long, incoherent, illogical) I didn't get a favorable impression.

Perhaps he should have thought a bit more about what he wanted to say, and he would have a written a better piece (which reminds me about a quote from Twain: "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one").
While we debate the merits of Mr. Yegge's principled talk at OSCON Data 2011 and the potential ramifications that a sudden shift in priorities would cause in the developer universe, #imisswhen is trending from my local cat-picture dissemination outfit.

Personally, I believe we've done enough for humanity already.
That may be so, but I suspect it's in more direct reference
to the LulzSec/Anon open letter to the FBI posted at http://pastebin.com/RA15ix7S
Let's hope they all get to deal with that awkwardness at some point in the future, because it beats the alternative.
I felt like learning Haskell last night, so I decided to rip this idea off PyLine < http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2808400 >
Would I read this to mean specifically in this case, why would this woman pose showing off surgically-enhanced breasts, knowing that she is being objectified? If that's what you mean it's not something I can answer (and wouldn't presume) just because I'm also a woman. We all do things against our self-interest for complicated reasons but at the end of the day don't we all just want to find some love and acceptance?
Yes indeed. Maybe too deadpan for some.
This doesn't account for users who have never submitted or commented, because there would be no way for their profile URLs to end up in Google's index. Or am I missing something? I know that there's the possibility for things to get into the index through the Google Toolbar, but I suspect that the fraction of HN users who use the Google Toolbar is quite low.
Rand Paul's balanced budget in 5 years proposal:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2011/03/sen-paul-unveils-5-...

Your assessment of the republican leadership is correct, your assessment of the tea party caucus is off. It will probably play out the same as the 94 republican revolution, where the leadership takes over the movement and resumes deficit spending.

The goal is not spending or balanced budget per se, the goal is to maximize freedom and minimize the impact of the federal government on the individual citizen. So single payer health care is not optimal if you value freedom of choice. If your only criteria is cost, then we should just make all doctors and nurses slaves, because that is cheap.
Hi there! I'm a YC alum (reMail W09) and helped Jeff and Sanjay with LevelDB. Let me know if you have any questions about LevelDB and I'll see if I can help.
Try to explain the meaning of your sentence to a manipulative sociopath.
Generally it does seem to be a common attribute. Some activists are also idealists, which is to say they have a view of the world that is idealized based on their principles which is a distortion of reality to a lesser or greater extent.

Living as I do in the San Francisco bay area, I encounter all forms of activists from people living in trees on college campuses (illegally) to folks who provide services to undocumented workers, to folks who expose security flaws on web sites. Of the ones with whom I've been able to talk briefly about their goals, all of them did not grasp that the results of activism are later perceived through the dialog of what the people that 'win' write. (sort of a variation on the winners write the history)
Mobile Gaming: Highest Revenue Comes from the Least Number of Players
Hiding your identity from casual observers: trivial.
Hiding your identity from scrutiny by local law enforcement: straightforward.
Hiding your identity from scrutiny by federal agents: Tricky.
Hiding your identity from scrutiny by an international investigation after having pissed off several high octane intelligence agencies: impossible.
Cellular Roaming, How, Where & Why?
Pretty icons. I like the favicon-like colors and aesthetic better than the geometric identicon/gravatar badges.

Do you mind elaborating on this comment from your hash icon site?

- Using the hash to seed a PRNG decouples pattern generation from precise details about the amount of available state.

Are you trying to avoid embedding the hash (steganographically) within the hash icon's pixels?
You'd be hard pushed to find a smartphone contract (for the likes of the iPhone and SII, anyway) on the high street that isn't 18 or even 24 months, in the UK at least. If Samsung think they can have a 12 month turn-around on their high-end models, they're lying to themselves, and if their business model depends on a 12-month turnaround, they're in trouble.
Japanese researchers develop EV motor not reliant on rare earth metals
People always bring up the floppy drive example, but I didn't remember the huge outcry over the lack of a floppy drive that everyone mentions. By the time Apple dropped support for it, I hadn't used a floppy disk in years. Sure, PC tech pundits and journalists were up in arms, but that's their job.

As for optical drives, I have probably used it maybe half a dozen times over the past few years if you don't count an XBox. What's so crazy about dropping support for it in PCs? If anything, I'm glad. It'll lead to lighter and thinner laptops.
I can make the distinction. Although they are obviously different, there is an obvious similarity, the exchange of two valuable thing. Money for a car. Exposure to advertisements and loss of (some) privacy for a service.

Black and white is rare.
Well, there are people who still buy and rip CDs as a means of obtaining lossless music :).

I will not claim to hear a difference, but like lossless music for archival purposes (to avoid future lossy to lossy conversion). Besides that, some music is still not available legally online.

Still, I would like to see optical drives axed across all Mac models. I can use an external drive for this purpose, and I do not want to carry around the extra weight if not necessary.
Yes, we put up the Google Code site incognito mode back then, but have since added a number of bugfixes and optimizations, so we're actually comfortable announcing the project now.
Remove the word "But" and it makes logical sense.
I would buy a machine with ECC memory, see djb's rant http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html
I would also add another 2tb drive and mirror them.
Your favorite SEO sites
Kind of self-explanatory title. My favorite site is seomoz.org, they have a good official blog and YOUmoz guest post blog. Good links to tools and insight multiple times a week.
Most people are able to think 'this would make me feel awful, I don't want to make someone else feel this way' - those that aren't are usually canny enough to pretend.

People might not be essentially 'good' - but most people are rational and lucid enough to stay within the bounds of what's socially acceptable .. even if they're unable to empathise.

This was a random nutter / group of nutters .. stuff like this, unfortunately, happens all the time - although, thankfully, on a minimal scale.

The issue for me, is related to some fundamental flaws in AirBnB's business model .. flaws which are seem largely absent from the alternative of CouchSurfing.
Have they acknowledged the bug and refused to fix it?
I believe the basic answer to that is in the first paragraph.

He should almost copy & paste that first paragraph and append it to the end.
Hiring based on plan compared to need. Does all of this crazy funding raise anyone else's hackles? Maybe it's just that I'm not in Silicon Valley or SF.

Update: Perhaps it is just the signaling of going from 65 to 400 that bothers me. I like Dropbox's service and agree they are doing well. Is the mention of 400 employees meant to be a signal for future investors, those interested in working there or perhaps other competitors? A change from 65 to 400 employees is not a single hop but requires quite a bit to fall into place according to plan.
It's exactly as kragen says. I think he should call himself hacker, and explain why. Altough, of course, it can be a pain having to explain it every time, so it's understandable.
These methods should be incorporated.

Incorporating these methods will not significantly impact the public perception of science.

My reasoning is that there is a game of telephone between scientists and the public.

Currently it looks like this:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif

However, even if we were to refine the news process, or try to cut them out entirely through blogging, games of telephone will still happen, as people will still try to communicate a simplified version of what was said. This will not be intentional, but every time some fact gets left out, the certainties change, making the statement less and less true.
Misleading image is misleading. This is what the first Android phone looked like: http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2008/10/androi...

Plenty of handsets had full touch-screens before the iPhone came out. The only difference being that the iPhone decided to ditch any hardware keyboard option. Oh wait, what's that on the knockoff? A hardware keyboard option, and almost every other button from the pre-release prototype as well.

Please. The arguments are childish now. Every manufacturer takes inspiration from devices on the current market. Apple included. Only they decided to go and start suing everyone left and right.
Come on, that's just mean.
Ex-NASA CTO Launches OpenStack Appliance Company Nebula
Isn't the second half of that 'but you can torture a metaphor' ?

I get the impression reading some of the blogs that some of the arrests recently have in fact picked up people who were 'known' to other people who might very well become somewhat more cautious.
<meta>Too bad I have to post this instead of just showing my approval of these comments by upvoting them</meta>

Exactly. No insurance will cover this type of transaction if the informally renting out your place is illegal in your locale. On top of that, you have to worry about your own safety. 99.999% of the time you'll be fine, but taking that risk is a very personal choice.
And speaking of "a simple zip code field"...

If you're going to require a zip code to ship, because you only ship to the US, wouldn't it be nice if you said so up-front, so I could avoid wasting half an hour comparing your totally effing useless-to-me products to retailers that actually want to sell to me?
Can anybody see the books on his dining room table (at 13:49)? I think I spotted Concrete Mathematics at the bottom, Duda and Hart, and Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman. Good places to start.

What would your list be for Steve?
No, it doesn't cover illegal transactions. In many places the Airbnb rentals are violations of local or state hotel laws. Even in places not covered by those kinds of laws, it's unlikely that insurance for owners and renters of a private home covers commercial services in the home. Of course everyone should check their own policy to be sure.
As a person who worked at a company that has expanded to a couple other cities, the problem is bringing the culture of the company to the satellite office and ensuring that such an office has enough of talent pool to make that investment. Having top leaders willing to move from a place like the Bay Area to smaller towns to help the transition is not always that easy.
Automagically has been trademarked. WTF?
I've just seen an ad for TuneUp and noticed they have trademarked "Automagically".

I've been using this word for ages, as I'm sure others on HN have too. WTF!?

http://www.tuneupmedia.com/
And the last three or four years have been a bounteous cornucopia of false macro-scale economic predictions... with no apparent adjustment of the theories being considered necessary or desirable, at least from my outsider perspective.
Thanks so much for creating this!
To me the whole argument about the ineffectiveness of current methods implies you do no writing in the downtime. So yes, if your argument is that "students who do no writing in their spare time, and instead stick to the bare minimum necessary to meet the courses requirements, don't magically become good writers" then I both agree and don't give a jot. I love my field, and the idea of not writing code in my spare time as well as doing my academic work never even occurred to me.

Edit: I just mean that particular bit of it, by the way. Overall I totally agree, better feedback and faster turnaround are crucial for effective learning, and there was a complete lack of both at my university. I got the marks for my coursework in one unit a few days before the exam for it - over three months since the lecturer, already late, posted to the forums that they would be releasing the marks "next week". Yet if I had turned the coursework itself in one second late, I would have gotten zero.

Aside: It would be incorrect to say that my university's methods did not cause rapid and effective learning to occur - but I don't think I learnt the lesson they intended.
Oracle Deletes Evidence Pointing To Sun’s Approval Of Java Use In Android
I don't know if this is all that crazy. Ambitious, yes, but it's tempered compared to the '90s. Dropbox is doing very well and wants to try and do very, very well.
Facebook open sources the Open Compute Project
because they find the vulnerability first with a scanner and then work backwards to find the cause they are fighting for
That doesn't help the customers who come back later for a second purchase and then have to fumble to find their account info.
If you are a designer or developer and moved to the Bay Area or New York City, chances are, you are a very driven person.
This is, as he put it, a "high class problem" :)