skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Update: Airbnb's new post http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/on-safety-a-word-from-airbn... says "undermined what had been – for 2 million nights – a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good." If I take that to mean that 2 million nights had been booked via Airbnb to date, then I underestimated the (frequentist) risk by a factor of around 350: 2 million nights are only a quarter of a million weeks, so this is a one-in-a-quarter-million chance, 0.00035% rather than 0.000001%. Also, my original figure, "It's more like 0.000001%," was wrong; that would have been one in a hundred million, not one in ten million. And the original "0.01%" was an overestimate by only about a factor of 300, not ten thousand.

So the risk of this happening to you is not like the risk of dying by traveling 20 kilometers by car, but more like the risk of dying by traveling 700 kilometers by car.

(Of course that's assuming that past performance is some kind of a guide to future results. It could be that all kinds of tweakers are going to get on Airbnb now and trash things that one of their friends has had a taste, or it could be that future people thinking of doing this kind of thing will be deterred by the rapid arrest of the apparent culprit in this case.)
Or, indeed, to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.
What does this even mean?
Which is better, having 80% of the market and 10% of profits, or having 20% of the market and 50% of the profits?
This is a good write-up on how to build this, but it should be stated if you've grown beyond what subversion can do you should switch your repository over to Git or something with more advanced functionality built in.
What you think is not important in the court.

I too think these kind of lawsuits are boring as hell, luckily there is a system to sort it out, it may not be perfect, but that's what we've got and a whole lot better than a flamewar.
Cloudflare does a LOT more than this. In fact, the area where they cross-over is the area that interests me the least - I am quite capable of making a website balls-to-the-wall fast without either of their products, but Cloudflare leverage their size to accomplish things I literally could not accomplish without them. I initially wrote Cloudflare off because of this, they don't do a great job of telling you about the coolest things they do.
copy of the proxy source available at https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas-proxy now
Having done a bit of work for a state agency here, I have to say the "fixed price" aspect is the most frustrating. Having to estimate the needs/demands of a system 1-2 years ago, and budget for it today, then earmark all that money ahead of time... argh. It's a recipe for wasteful spending. Compared to "just in time" philosophies of only paying for what you need when you need it, current procurement and budgeting strategies almost demand wastefulness be an integral part of the process.

Combine this with a culture of "if you don't spend as much this year as you did last year, you won't get all of the money you request" and we're in a never-ending cycle of bad decisions.
I buy a lot of (physical medium) music, so I don't need to pay for a music service and I have a collection of music on my hard drive that I want to listen to. Because of this, I use Google Music a lot, especially considering they have a good mobile app for my phone.

Grooveshark has become a distant second since I got my Google Music invite, and I used Last.fm before I found out about Grooveshark.
The author of the article has absolutely no grasp of futures or how they work. This trade is no big deal, trades this size are done all the time by all sorts of financial institutions for any number of reasons.
This sounds basically like pumped up MIMO, nothing that is not already known, just not implemented due to limitations of devices. As an example from the whitepaper:

"AP 1 and AP 2 both transmit their respective radio signal waveforms simultaneously."

The most difficult part here is the syncing of the transmission. It really has to be precise almost to the sample level (10-0.1ns time window for the transmission to start on both devices depending on the bandwidth used). And syncing clocks on remote devices to this precision, not to mention maintaining the sync is very, very hard. And this is just one obstacle this guy has to solve.

In addition if the users move the waveform has to be recalculated, on worst case even if the users do not move the radio environment has already changed (due to other things moving) before the old optimized signal has been sent. This makes it necessary for the signal calculations to be local to the device as latencies to remote devices are way too high in order to update the waveform fast enough. However on stationary receivers this problem is not as bad as on mobile ones.

These were just few of the problems with this guys approach which sprung up to my mind when reading the whitepaper.
This.

After 9/11 there were enormous structural issues with the world order that made it easier for terrorist groups to proliferate. That's why the Treasury Secretary was in all the initial planning meetings- there were two prongs to our response, one financial, one military.

The military one was an unmitigated clusterfuck.

The financial one was a rousing success. We forced the world to tighten financial controls, largely ended anonymous banking, seized huge quantities of terrorist funds, and made it really, really hard for the people trying to kill us to get money and to move money around.

There was a financial War on Terror, and we won it. Just because the military side went so badly doesn't meant there wasn't a real threat.
What it really represents is to what degree others think a country can pay back it's debts. The US has a higher rating that Spain or Italy because those countries will have a much harder time paying back their debts.

I think alot of people really underestimate the size of the US economy.
You can use tools in your browser such as FireBug http://getfirebug.com/ or YSlow http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ , which will show the time it takes to download each component using your connection.

There's also tools such as this http://tools.pingdom.com/ from Pingdom that'll show the same figures from an independent network link.

From there, look at how long it takes to receive the HTML (not including any of the images, CSS or JS), if that's slow then it's likely that the web server is taking a long time to render the templates server side (it could also be due to a really slow connection...)

If most of the time is spend downloading a lot of images, CSS or JS then YSlow will highlight this and the areas that should be improved. YSlow will also highlight any issues you might have with not setting cache headers correctly.

If the site doesn't contain excessive images, CSS or JS, then the connection might be slow, the 500kb background image will give you a decent indication of the connection speed, though something bigger would be better.

Also, if you have access to the logs then most web frameworks will log out the time taken to render each page on the server.
Why you suck at programming
+1 Turntable.fm
wasn't there a wall street journal article talking about how poor small business security was recently? How does this tie in?
Environment, technology, infrared, thermal-imaging
If anyone on HN thinks their site might be sub-optimal on the front-end, contact me on whyslow@zofrex.com and I'll take a look, and let you know what you can do to speed things up :)
Ben 10 Gökyüzü Savaşı
Yep, and in other (non-travel) areas as well - grass is greener and all that.
WordPress Display total published words in “Right Now” admin dashboard
Poll: Do you use Opera (the browser)?
Yes, it's my main browser (desktop)
Yes, it's my main browser (mobile)
Yes, but only for testing (desktop)
Yes, but only for testing (mobile)
Never or rarely
Which is apparently what Assembla has done for internal product development:

http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/7437/W...
This might be more useful as a poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816500
http://gtmetrix.com

Google's page speed service: https://code.google.com/speed/pss/docs/tryit.html

http://code.google.com/speed/pss/index.html
I know which is worse: the companies. Because barring evidence to the contrary, I don't believe that these 'idiots in the upper levels of the civil service who don't really care because "it's just taxpayers money"' exist. I'm sure some of them are incompetent as regards IT, and that's a problem that needs addressing, but this sort of baseless castigation of public servants irritates the hell out of me.
Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in search of techno-Utopia (CC-BY-SA)
MBT Kaya Womens Chocolate
first of all, thank you very much for this generous offer, it is very kind of you.

----

i am currently working in networking support (cisco stuff), but i know some python and common lisp. i am very interested in programming, compiler technology, languages (i speak 3 and currently learning 4th) and teaching (i worked as a trainer for cisco networking academy for 7 years).

i am mostly self-taught, learned english mostly from reading books/docs and listening to music/tv. i know little about many things and much about few, if any.

currently i am trying to change my job to programming because i want to gain experience in the field and ultimately get a chance to implement some of many ideas and help develop some which i would love to see advance (e.g. what sal khan is doing).

i see mathematics as a very important skill that i need to master since it is in big part connected to all of the domains i am passionate about. my current skills are pretty slacking but i do have good imagination and learn fast.

the most recent physics/math problem i have is directly connected to one particular job opportunity. i am developing a python application which does certain sound singnal analysis and will also include various software testing practices including some code analysis. this project will serve as a demonstration to my potential employer that i have mastered the skill enough to be hired.
i am using khanacademy heavily for basic stuff, but most of the things are not covered there and many a time i have to rely on wikipedia solely.

if you are interested in any of the following areas i can teach you in exchange: learning a rare and unique foreign language, programming basics, networking, linux stuff.
i am in a bit of a trouble with time-frame though since i am in CET zone and i don't really have flexible work hours.
In the UK, that would be PFI or PPP (Private Finance Initiative and Public-Private Partnership)? These are indeed a dog's dinner... for which we can blame only the people some of us elected.
Yes, completely agree - moreover - if the trader is going long the futures, he's betting that interest rates will drop, therefore, isn't he betting that the US WON'T lose it's Triple AAA rating (which should cause interest rates to rise)?

(Bearing in mind the other purposes which could exist for the trade - ala hedging, etc.)
I used it a few times here in São Paulo / Brazil to catch a bus and it worked like a charm, but I would love some offline caching of routes since the 3G sinal here is terrible and expensive.
As a almost exclusive Apple product user I am happy with Apple having about 20%-30% market share in major category it is competing as well. (Mac may never reach the goal, but then again as long as it is doing well.)

I'm uncomfortable with iPad's share to be honest, it's not healthy.
They (Norway) probably learned from their (the U.S.) mistakes.
Yeah i agree there seems to be some overlap with CloudFlare. I wanted to sign up a client of mine who is running a Wordpress site to CloudFlare, but wasnt able to do so because it required moving their complete zone file over to CloudFlare which they werent able to do for multiple reasons. CloudFlare dont seem to provide a solution where you can just point an A record to their servers (currently).

I wonder if this Google PageSpeed service can provide a similar service to CF, without needing to move the Zone file across completely. Mind you CloudFlare's basic service is free.
I like where this is going, but it was a bit unstable for my taste last I tried it. I think it still relies on the file being syntactically correct, which may break your parsing sometimes and is still quite slow with template-heavy code (Boost mostly). Is it still the case?

I'd also like some more build system integration hooks (e.g. provide project-specific include dirs and CXXFLAGS on a per-file basis).
Yes, but you'll be taxed in your country of residence unless you can prove that you don't have a Permanent Establishment, which will be near impossible. If you wholly manage your business from a given country, your business is prima facie established in that country and wholly taxable there, regardless of where it is incorporated.

There may be some advantages to incorporating abroad in order to take advantages of streamlined legislation - many Germans incorporate in the UK to avoid the complex and expensive GmbH - but trying to outsmart tax authorities just isn't worth the effort for a small startup.
Good point. I meant recent Apple devices :-)
That's the picture today with smartphones accounting for 28% of the total phone market. If Apple's market share doesn't keep up with smartphone adoption their profit % will go down. That's simple math. The notion that Apple doesn't care about market share is absurd.
To be fair, they look like any other smartphone which is black and has a touchscreen. Apple cannot be granted a patent on being black. Not even black with rounded corners. That's not how the world works.

And if we dig deeper, behind the PR-piece which Apple seemingly is winning (here on HN at least), lets compare the iPhone to Samsung F700, introduced in 2007, before the iPhone.

http://phandroid.com/2011/04/20/did-apple-really-steal-their...

I mean... It may not be all black and white, but lets not grant Apple a blanket-right to make rounded, glossy things and assume everyone else is stealing from them.
Every language fixes something - a DiGraph - just for fun
I really hate why Django calls them 'apps'. Kinda difficult to distinguish between a working application or a Django 'app'.
I'm woking with Symfony 2 now for a half-year. And I can say that it is brilliant. Dependency Injection that they have implemented is a really nice feature.
It is also great that it consists of de-coupled components. You can use any of the components including Dependency Injection in ur PHP projects.
Wherever you live. If your country of residence is highly bureaucratic or corrupt, you may wish to incorporate as a Delaware C-Corp or a British Limited Company.
Borrow other people's traffic. Specifically, guest blog everywhere you can, and set up an affiliate program. If you don't want a public affiliate program, that's fine - only open it to certain referrers. For instance, give bloggers with large audiences who you'd like to target a discount code they can share with their readers.

Email/tweet at Smashing Magazine - they're nice folks and I bet they'd mention this, even if just in a tweet.

Edit: I see now that you have been guest blogging. Do it more! It's not just about the traffic you see in the next day - it's also a long term link-building strategy.

Also, don't get down about "only" 5.5k uniques. That means FIVE AND A HALF THOUSAND HUMANS were interested enough to visit your site! Go watch Gary Vaynerchuk's talk at RailsConf 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWHkcCP3tA

He talks a lot about caring about your customers/audience/whoever (or, as he puts it, "giving a fuck"). Maybe you could put in some sort of "Not totally convinced? Enter your email here to learn more from the founder" mechanism, and then personally email those people, get to know them, and convince them to buy (if it's a good fit). Sure, that's not scaleable, but why not do it right now while your traffic is "low"?
I'm totally on Amazon's side on this. There is this little thing in the constitution called the commerce clause, and any state that is going to try to force you to collect their sales tax even though you don't have any physical presence in the state is violating Congress's sole authority to tax interstate commerce.

To say that an affiliate counts as a physical presence is preposterous, Amazon and the affiliate have a business arrangement, Amazon doesn't own the affiliate. If anything it is a Customer-Vendor relationship (Amazon to the Affiliate). It is as ridiculous as Georgia insisting that Amazon collect sales tax because the books they sell came from trees grown in Georgia.
The developer didn't steal anything. At most, Apple did. But there's probably wording in the agreement about services for payment and Apple taking the payment. Their reasoning likely being he took the service, so they took the money.

Legal? Probably not, but he has no recourse. But it reminds me of when people call the cops and say "arrest that person; they stole my drugs!"
I'm very interested in more info on the financial War on Terror - is there are good articles or books you can recommend?
Not strictly a service, but perhaps "torrents" should be an option? I know of a few people who either buy or torrent everything.
Unfortunately they really do exist - I've met some. I suspect this attitude is actually more prevalent amongst very senior civil servants (who are extrelemy elitist) rather than the rank and file.
InMobi: How to use mobile advertising to test, launch and sell product
What does a blogger do? Awesome list of 38
Surprised no one mentioned iTunes. I probably spend way too much money on iTunes on albums every month.
Nearly every Internet user in South Korea is hacked
Can someone comment on Symfony vs. CodeIgniter? I've done a few projects in CI - any big compelling reason to switch to Symfony for the next one?
Because you can now buy an Android phone for less than £100. If Apple want to compete with that they'll have to compromise on both quality and profit margin.
Hi,
I have been trying to Learn to work hands-on on Machine learning/AI algorithms(for about 4-5 years). But somehow, have stopped with reading and understanding the algorithms in the text books/blogs and stop there. Recently came across Fractals and love them. Got a Fractal Geometry(Kenneth Falconer, thanks to library.nu) book but i seem to have lost the ability to learn from books(too much interaction addictivity). Anyway, i would be glad if you can teach Fractal Geometry.(sorry, if that is outside your offer). Thanks and Regards,
anand jeyahar
Martin Luther King also put didn't hide from the authorities and voluntarily went to jail out of belief for his ideas.

Lulz puts as much effort in to remaining anonymous as anything and, it would seem the consensus opinion here, folds like paper houses when they get caught. I didn't see MLK Jr trying to negotiate a sentence down by selling out the rest of his leadership. Instead, he actually accepted prison time rather than pay a fine because he truly believed in what he doing.

Not quite an equal comparison.
I don't use Opera and I never test it because the user base is not big enough to matter. My experience with Opera has always resulted in broken websites because of their poor rendering engine (in my opinion). I still can't believe the Opera browser has existed from the beginning of browsers and still exists today and their market share hasn't really gone up significantly.
Yes. Because Apple chase the top end of the market, not the middle.
Hope you're right.. but only time will tell
I agree with your advice, but I'd probably suggest doing so in the opposite order.. that is, to put the car in a neutral gear first, then to use the hand/parking brake to slow the car. Part of me wonders if the excessive revving will blow the engine, but in that kind of situation I'd take that over a fatality any day of the week.

I'm not aware of how the hand brake electronics work here in the States, so I can't comment on that part.
SQL-like group by and aggregation using DataFrame in Python
The article is well written but fails to point to any one particular phone that carries all of these iPhone similarities. A customer only buys one phone at a time.
I thought the largest issue was searching for an App by it's name and not getting it at the top of the search results for that term. It makes it very hard to just find and download an App if you already know what you want.
Liveblogging from Refresh Colombo July: Sri Lanka's tech meetup
I never intended my opinion to be law, just my own view. No flamewar on my side...
"Liter of Light" Brings Sun into Dim Shanties Using Only Plastic Bottles
Hey there everyone. The article says most of it but as for why I decided to share this news with you is because I want to get maximum exposure for an effort like this. It's organised by three guys mainly who get little recognition so I thought why not get HN involved with it too. So here's my invitation to you guys to join the discussion.
Care to elaborate? I've been wondering what the advantages are but haven't had the time to look into it in more depth. What's been your experience?
Added options: Youtube, Turntable.fm and Itunes
My self hosted instance of Subsonic.
BBC iPlayer Goes International, US Support Coming Soon
Yeah. I'm giving the author the (probably undeserved) benefit of the doubt and assuming the trade was a short. Although I don't think it's expressly stated. (Edit: actually it is, towards the end of the article)
Grooveshark, since it's completely free and it works in India.

CTRL+C > CTRL+V :-)
That's true, but it should be added that Norway was already a much more open society than the US. There are obviously reasons for this that could be discussed ad nauseum.

Remember, the Norwegian police are not carrying weapons (unless they get permission), the Oslo police did not have a helicopter they could use, politicians were only recently somewhat given security considerations.

So all in all, given that this system will not change much in response to this is actually quite remarkable.

It should also be noted that this is not being treated as the work of a lone madman. The focus is now directed at right-wing extremist groups internationally.
OS X Lion: Reclaiming the System Profiler Application | The Mac Observer
When Your Data Sings (Or, how to milk a social media data cow)
Interesting bit that I worked out the other day that might be non-obvious for those not familiar with the demographics of Norway:

The 76 people that were killed in the attacks is a larger percentage of the country than the 4000 killed in the US on September 11th. So, despite the absolute numbers being far smaller, presumably the psychological impact is of a similar magnitude.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2876+%2F+%28population...
In places like Russia or the CSI countries, Opera is the leading browser, with between 24% to 40% market share. It's not a browser you want to ignore if you want to appeal to those markets.
Is a web app earning $100/month a failure?
That too! Accountability for decisions is anathema to the unions however. They will need to be broken first.
Yes you are right. But It does not have to be all about yaml format itself. Instead, Symfony utilizes this format to get things done in a fast and neat way, in comparison to others.
A good developer cannot be the cause of their bosses redundancy.
While renting an apartment the dishwasher broke and I offered to install the new one. The landlord turned me down and scheduled it for a time I had to be at work and took the opportunity to snoop around and accuse me of harboring a child that I had not told him about (in reality, my niece would visit a lot so we had a bunch of toys for her). He withheld the entire security deposit on those grounds. So it cuts both ways with the unreasonable humans. :)

Happy ending though, because Chicago has fantastic renter's rights so we got all the money back and then some.