skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Big Trouble at Little China Banks
An Inside Look at the (Python) GIL Removal Patch of Lore
San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest
This seems like an unjust, overly harsh punishment. I mean, who among us has not urinated in-flight?
I wonder, in idle speculation, if a three strikes law would remove their internet connection for three instances of trying to sell a copyrighted work where they don't have a license to distribute it.

Surely you know better than to think that corporations are held to the same standards as individuals ;).
I just signed up: my girlfriend moved to NYC, and when I was there visiting her I kept meaning to go to one of the drug stores and make prints. But I never did.

EDIT: I realize that this thread is likely to devolve into, "I'd love to see obscure feature X," so let me contribute: I'd love to see larger sizes, especially 8.5 x 11".
It was a post titled "YC S11 Company Seeks Rails Architect". It began "We're an exciting young explosive company. Our users are true evangelists—wearing our gear, drinking from our shot glasses, and shouting cheers to our name..." The rest was equally as vague and platitude-filled.
Actually, the legality covering this issue is WIRE FRAUD.
I didn't get the price. Care to explain? 100 tasks free, and then?
We're also always looking for suggestions on how we can make the experience safer and better for our users. Let us know what else we should do!
"The only way that social networks can be pro-user is if they are a standards-based commodity like email, where anyone is free to implement the standard and offer the service."

This already exists for social data, it's called The Locker Project. http://lockerproject.org/#vision
If I say anything, I usually go with the mangled pseudo-German "gesundenblasten".
No apologies needed :) . I was just trying to point out a disturbing trend.
PyPy Status Blog: Visualization of JITted code
He has disabled commenting on the post. And, as such, now no one can even view the comments. He puts himself up on a pedestal only to be a fascist when criticized.
Nice read. I am very curious about iPad apps and their revenue, some time ago I asked around here about the profit ratio between the iPhone and the iPad for those apps focused on both platforms but I got no response and I did get some upvotes so I guess it's something people would like to know a little better. Anyone?

Original submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845158
There was no agreement. Jonathan placed information in the public commons.
This is neat, but it only works if your setup is simple enough to be usable by a random thief so that they can get an Internet connection ready so that the machine can phone home. Were someone to steal my laptop and boot it, they would reach a tty login prompt in a dvorak layout, and playing around in grub would also lead to an LFS install with a patched agetty greeting them in lolcat. (My LFS was just for fun, so I did silly stuff with it.)

In other words, they would probably just wipe the computer and install Windows, and I wouldn't hear about the machine. I guess I could have a Windows install ready with a guest account and sneaky tracking software just for the benefit of an hypothetical thief, but it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Indeed, although I'd be sighing as in this case, not be shocked.

I wonder if it's just an illusion or if there really also is an influx in me-too submissions. Not that I'm judging any submission in particular, but there is clearly a difference in usefulness and novelty when you compare them.
I'm certain that "Burning Man" is copyrighted. You might have to tangle with that.

http://www.burningman.com/press/pressRandR.html#bmanRR
Passwords in general are horribly broken. They're the worst conceivable way to authenticate, except for all the others. Solve this problem and you'll be the next Verisign, if not the next Microsoft.
Best Web App UI/UX's of 2011?
Anyone know any good ones? Please don't be biased.
I'm meddling with forces I do not understand!
Can you share some good ridesharing services?
Of course that is expected behaviour: tux loads multiple independant shell environments. A change in one will not affect the other. The same holds true for modifying the PATH environment variable, which is how rbenv works. So I'm not sure how you're expecting rbenv to avoid that behaviour.
Even though I don't agree with what this guy is saying I don't think this comment should have been downvoted, if you don't agree say so, downvoting is not for that!
Could you please cite the childish insult?
Mark Shuttleworth on patents, tablets and the future of Ubuntu
I don't know of many, sorry. I think the time is ripe for a startup to own this market though.
A while back I saw an article on HN that was on the blog of a porn site (something like blog.pornsite.com). It was a blog worth following, it was about building a modern video site on Python and Django and GWT, and all these interesting technical challenges. It just happened to all be for a porn site.
We hear you for sure on these points. Audio is the top of the priority list for polish we need to add to all of Cityposh. Thanks for checking it out, and helping us with this.
There are many 3rd party apps in the Flickr App Garden that can make up for any shortfalls of the website.

For example, if you're uploading photos, an app like photoSync (http://webecoz.com) knows enough not to duplicate your photos. It will detect that it's a duplicate and use the copy that is already on Flickr.

I believe it may also recognizes duplicates when it's downloading photos.
We don't implement such paranoid measures either in other web-services

Yes "we" do. Steam doesn't let you authenticate, let alone buy stuff, from a new computer without entering a code that they'll email to you. Takes all of ten seconds--start up Steam, go to my email client, paste the code in, done.

And it works great. So what's the complaint?
For me, even the most minimal description is sufficient:

"We're in niche X."

Example: We're in cloud storage. That gives away nothing about your "secret sauce" while still providing the minimal amount of info needed for a hacker to know if they are interested in what you are building.
Actually, there's a great reason why large, resource-constrained countries like China have declared that they will begin developing thorium-based nuclear energy - the technology has the potential to be clean and safe.

Thorium is great because to generate a reaction, you also need that energy input (a laser). There's no chance for a meltdown because if the power turns off, you lose the laser and the reaction stops dead in it's tracks.

Thorium was abandoned mostly in the 60s because governments wanted uranium-based technology with it's nasty by-products (namely, plutonium for bomb production!). So, arguably the better, cleaner thorium technology was abandoned. Such goes geo-politics during the Cold War!

Don't discount the small-scale applications in a car or other vehicle either. It's 50 years away, but a thorium-based small-scale reactor is possible.
Thanks for pointing that out! We've been in touch with folks at Burning Man HQ and they're fine with our using their name since our site is entirely free to use and without ads.
Wouldn't this effectively be violating freedom of assembly?
You would still miss the huge returns though (unless you remove those not being used since x weeks ago).
2x as fast, not 2x faster, although the actual page doesn't make that mistake.
That always bothers me, because even technical people get it wrong, making it hard to interpret "X times faster" correctly.

</pedantry> :-P
Sure thing.

While the service is in beta, anyone can try a maximum of 100 tasks for free for any of the products built on MobileWorks: form digitization, web scraping, or tasks that new app developers build on the API. The idea is to get developers started working with crowd as easily as possible.

We'll announce the formal pricing for form digitization and scraping products soon.

For community-built applications, prices are set depending on the complexity of the task and how long it takes workers to do them. We time the first few workers to do a task to see how long it takes, then return a price based on that.
BART's initial statement includes the following:

Paid areas of BART stations are reserved for ticketed passengers who are boarding, exiting or waiting for BART cars and trains, or for authorized BART personnel. No person shall conduct or participate in assemblies or demonstrations or engage in other expressive activities in the paid areas of BART stations, including BART cars and trains and BART station platforms.

Source: http://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2011/news20110812.aspx
1) the predictability of the distribution of characters in the English language has nothing to do with this type of password - the symbols aren't characters, but words.
2) that figure of entropy per character of 1.3 bits per character only applies to English text, and the figure is low because there are a bunch of small words, like "and" and "the" that are regularly repeated. The entropy per character for words containing 6 letters or more, not arranged in sentences is a lot higher, like about double if I recall correctly. So sure, just as I can expect to get brut-forced if I choose a pin of 0000, I can get brute forced if I choose a passphrase of 'and the in'. Good luck forcing "queens examine faulty charges" though.
Ask HN: Other startups are cloning my startup - what should I do?
As my startup becomes more successful I'm noticing that more of our competitors are wholesale copying our website. Page layouts, search features, registration flows, and business logic, to name a few. One site stole our tagline. Another posted on ODesk asking for developers to blatantly create a clone of our site.

Imitation is flattery, but I'd much rather this didn't happen.

Is there anything I can do?
How is this worse than someone who buys coffee with the card, and never contributes any money?
Congratulations, Anand! Didn't know you were in this yc batch.
It's a behavior that we as a society have decided is polite. It hurts no one, aside from maybe a few neckbeards who have entirely too much invested in Being An Atheist (or the
equivalent for your hair-splitting worldview of choice).

That you choose to get "annoyed" about such things is your problem, nobody else's.
Did you just use the words 'Facebook' and 'coolness' in the same sentence?
(if you pay for it?)
As I recall, it was a specific, first-hand account. And the author was initially as puzzled as you are. What happened? Why?

It's one of several stories/anecdotes I've run across. Unfortunately, I haven't kept a list of links to those.

En masse, they've caused me enough concern to not "push the button". In good part, if something does go amiss, you're pretty well stuck, unless you have a big enough megaphone to garner sufficient publicity and/or enough of the "right" connections to garner some love from fellow geeks.

Maybe I and others are being gamed by opposing forces. I'm not at a point where I care to find out the hard way whether that's the case.
if( test ){
I'm glad it worked well for you.
Potentially very useful. I often attend dance exchanges; most of those going know each other but logistics are a hassle.

One event organizer is currently using a google-doc hosted spreadsheet. Something that was announced and promoted with the event could make attendance easier (which organizers love).

A web UI could help show people on the way - maybe graphically with a map, so you don't need to do any algo work.

Please let me know if you do this; chebuctonian at gmail. Thanks!
Execute better than them and keep innovating to stay a step ahead...
Google Adds Public Google+ Posts to Social Search Results
I was about to jump the gun and comment that YC backed a direct competitor to an older YC backed startup. This is the second startup to provide this service, how will it be different than the first? Maybe the approach to tackling this market is a bit off base...
Your argument with the dollars fails on two accounts. First, the "take a penny/leave a penny" concept has one MAJOR security guard that this experiment doesn't have ... a monitor. That monitor being a sales clerk. The second a MAJOR security breach, the anonymity factor.

All arguments to make this experiment analogous to any "Take/Leave" scheme is flawed on these accounts. (Not that I don't appreciate the analogies, I do.) Would Sam (or anyone) have acted the same had they been in the same position with any of the "Take/Leave" assumptions. My guess, no. Sam like the anonymity of being able to take without consequence. Now that he has revealed his duplicity he's not liking the consequences.
Technically, browsers are supposed to drop the prefixes when the spec reaches Candidate Recommendation.
I have no idea whether or not pg is a prude. What I meant was that it's a hyper-competitive, highly saturated market and most porn companies these days are "innovating" with traffic generation and content, and not with technology or novel business models.

Believe me, I've worked in and with the industry for years and it is ripe for a breakthrough. I actually was working on a project at a porn company that had the potential to disrupt the porn industry but was abandoned due to internal political reasons. If pg wanted me to build it again, I'd be all over it.
Keep Your Friends Close and Your Competitors Closer
So... a company's line of tablets that's been on the market for 16 months has sold more total units than a company's line of tablets that's been on the market for 6?

This is both new and exciting.
Thanks! Looking forward to having the research community start using our crowd and giving us their thoughts.

Bonuses: no task starvation, no spammers, a usable API, and highly motivated workers.
Never Fear, Traits are Here - Factory Girl 2.0.4
I've loved what little EWD reading I have done. The two points highlighted here I read as:

1. The program structure should reflect the problem structure as closely as possible

2. Thinking of every possible case ("enumeratively") is much less powerful than abstract reasoning

To me the second point is where the power of functional programming lies. You express ideas in relatively small units with no side effects that are easy to fully reason about. When you express things clearly it just feels right. Special casing is possible in most functional languages, but it usually feels like a kludge.

Another excellent essay is EWD831, "Why numbering should start at zero", which was something I felt was intuitive once I got used to it, but couldn't articulate clearly. Reading his essay was soothing in the same way as scratching an itch.

The essay is here:

Why numbering should start at zero - Edsger W. Dijkstra
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
Not sure I understand how sync works when the same file is being edited from multiple places simultaneously. Who wins? Any pointer appreciated.

Totally unrelated: how do you pronounce aerofs? If I try to say it in French it either comes out as "erofesse" (erotic buttock) or "aerofesse" (flying buttock). That will definitely win points with French-speakers :-)
It is unfortunate that you posted this to such a transient medium as News.YC. This is art, of a bitter and brilliant variety that should be printed on crisp white paper with dark bold letters and hung in the MOMA. People would gather around it and claim to "get it".

But they wouldn't get it, of course, unless they'd lived through the same history as the artist.
The justification being that the area isn't "public" so the right to public assembly doesn't apply? I find it really interesting that they have that sort of macro-control on the cell broadcast antennas in the BART stations in order to turn service on and off...that implies a system to control or coordinate wireless broadcast access throughout the system...
An alarmingly high number of comments are saying pretty much the same thing, would be great if people writing had something new to say, if not just upvote a well written comment that states your view!
Setting up your accounting system
Most of the “freedoms” people speak of are really freedoms from government interference. For example, “freedom of speech” doesn’t apply to a symphony hall that requires its patrons to be silent during performances, but it may restrict a government’s ability to enact anti-hate crime legislation.

In this case the more interesting issue is that a private entity disrupted telecommunications on its property without notice or warning. In addition to making it difficult for protesters to coördinate their actions, it also made it difficult for people to make unrelated calls, to report crimes, call 911, and so forth.

It might be legal, but I admit I find the idea very unsettling.
It will be helpful if you specify what the candies are made of. I can imagine people with specific tastes, vegetarians, people with allergies, etc will be interested in knowing such details.
They don't, I don't think. They contacted the providers directly and asked them to do it. They don't just have a magical pull-switch - they just have phones, and apparently a lot of pull.
Interview with Sal Kahn of Khan Academy in Bidoun, a Middle-East Culture Mag
You could do our contradance theme camp a great favor by implementing this ASAP. We had a key musician drop out and the person who is by far the best replacement has a conflict that can only be solved by a flight at just the right time (ie this might provide the miracle we need).
Can you run the latest OS on an iPhone 1? Can you run the original OS on an iPhone 4?

I can see how they're not as different as PS 1/2/3 but they're definitely not the same device. Steve Jobs would slap anyone who dared say that iPhone1 and iPhone4 were "hardware upgrades with same software and software ecosystem"
I had a feeling BART was up to some BS when my phone just did not work at Civic Center yesterday. It was also nice to share the platform with police fully decked out in riot gear.

The only positive thing was that the trains were empty because of all the hullabaloo
Non logarithmic graphs of money, how I hate them!

This entire premise would go out the window if he only knew how to graph money correctly.
Yup and at the same time the trains did not roll for 3 hours earlier in the week because of a 'routing problem' with their system that is from the 1970s.

Good job BART. BART and you're there....if the trains can make it!

And pavel, if you read the article you'll see that BART pulled the plug, not ATT or anyone else.
I've only lived in SF for 2 weeks, so I wasn't sure if the BART/Muni stuff was public or privately owned.

Good point though about unrelated calls, 911, crimes, etc. Had something bad happened during that time I imagine they'd be in some (more) hot water right now.
Naval Ravikant On Getting AngelList Funding
Thank you for the Outkast reference: "cooler than a polar bear's toe nails."
Perhaps you are also meticulous enough to not allow your laptop out of your sight in the first place.
I just don't understand why all these announcements say stuff like 'we have 150k users' -- but they won't even mention their name? I understand if you are IN 'stealth mode' but if you have so hundreds of thousands of users -- that's not exactly stealth anymore is it
I find it hard to believe that you wrote such a long, pedantic rant about an "extras" chapter in an introductory algorithms book. Are you aware that most introductory algorithms courses (i.e., the ones this book is targeted at) don't end up touching linear programming? Why? Because there are tens of other algorithms that are more useful for a typical CS person at that level. For those skimming the book, or perhaps more commonly, keeping it as a reference, it's a great compendium of algorithms references, much like a slightly more rigorous, paper version of Wikipedia.
I agree but to be honest, it's not like Facebook is printing money either so far.
<I don't think that the people who put money on the card have any claim to determine how the money is used.>

Yes, they do. When any funds were contributed the presumptive use was that the funds were to help someone down the line get a cup of coffee if they really couldn't afford one. To say they don't have can't claim determination is like say anyone who contributes to aid projects sent to Africa can't be upset when it is siphoned off by corrupt politicians.
Build a Neat HTML5 Powered Contact Form
Do you have a source that supports you claim that CS has some of the best funding in academics and the most students? That doesn't seem likely to me.

As for the academic relationship between math and computer science, I don't see it as any different than the relationship between math and physics. Physics and computer science students both have to take lots of math courses, but I wouldn't consider either to be a subset or focus within mathematics.

All formal mathematics is founded on logic and discrete mathematics, and you could easily argue that logic and discrete mathematics are the realm of computer science. You could just as easily argue that mathematics is founded on computer science as you could argue the inverse.
CouchDB + Redis might be a match made in Heaven
I'd definitely be curious to see a comparison from someone who wrote an iPhone and iPad optimized version of an application and released in the same time frame.

The other thing I'd be interested in seeing is if someone did a study on the buying habits of iPad vs. iPhone (heck, lets generalize and say tablet vs. smartphone) application buyers. I have a feeling we'd see more apps being purchased in the smartphone arena as people buy-try-dump apps on the go, whereas there'd be a more stable market in the tablet space where people research which apps to buy because they use the tablet for longer durations.
Is BART a private entity, or are they state funded/run?

I've never been clear on this in most places I've been; I don't know if New York's MTA is part of the city, or if it's a private corporation entrusted with a public utility - and if it is, what are the ramifications?
I can't imagine anyone at a small startup refusing to do something unless it would be seriously detrimental due to their lack of experience on the task at hand. I know the article is geared towards CEOs, but being able to touch so many different areas is one of the best things for anyone to be a part of at a startup, including the customer support aspect. There's so much you can learn.
But... Who are you, and what do you do?
I would not be surprised if carriers rented space from BART to deploy equipment and antennas. Which would make BART the landlord, and provider of electrical power.
Tech start-up industry in China and Taiwan, English version
Another well-sourced story quotes BART Deputy Chief Benson H. Fairow as saying that the "flip was switched" so to speak under his authority, based on the contract that BART has with its wireless providers:

According to Fairow, the statement from BART saying that cell carriers participated in the shutoff isn't precisely it. Fairow says that language in BART's contract with carriers allows BART to "flip a switch" to cut off service for issues of safety. A spokesperson from one of SF's major wireless carriers confirms this, and says that the carriers themselves weren't involved in the shutdown.

"Ultimately, I'm the one that implemented it," said Fairow. "It was certainly run through through channels. A lot of thought went into this."

Source: http://sfappeal.com/news/2011/08/bart-cell-fcc.php

All of the reports that I have seen (including the CNet story linked above) have retracted any statement that the wireless carriers turned off the signal at BART's request.
"Macro-control" being the power switch?

Yeah, BART probably knows where the power switches are.
It is not OK for the government to cut off citizen communications in times of civil unrest or any other time. BART, which has its own police force, must be held to constitutional standards. While they can prohibit assembly within their stations, disabling communications infrastructure violates people's basic rights.