skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think accusing someone of "bordering on tinfoil hat territory" is essentially a personal attack.

I was talking about the claim, not the person. I'm sorry for expressing it in a way that could easily be construed as a personal attack, that was in no way my intent. I still think that it's a totally ridiculous idea.

Google doesn't have any obvious motivation for wanting to suppress dissent. Google does have a motivation for making a popular social network that can supplement their other products, and hopefully be a profitable business sometime in the future. You suggest that the motivation might be a secret US government order, and it is pretty sad when that is the most plausible theory.

It's one thing for the government to force the handover of some data. It's totally another for them to be secretly controlling the minutiae of R&D at a company all the way from the secret inception of the project...

Additionally a "real name" policy will in practice be a "real-looking name" policy, and thus not all that useful for censorship. If you use the pseudonym Mike Johnson or Steve Smith, how likely do you think it's that Google would be checking your identity? Is there any evidence at all that people with some political views are being singled out for id checks.

> You claim there are plenty of practical reasons, but you didn't list any. I can think of some, but none that are appropriate for a social network.

Well, the biggie for a social network would be that there's empirical evidence that social networks using real names seem to be more successful, and more useful. Nobody ever got fired for copying Facebook.

Using real names means that people who know you by your real name can easily find you. The network is less likely to be run over by novelty / joke / abusive accounts. People will in general behave better than when being pseudo- or anonymous. All of this will translate to better user experience and engagement for a large group of people.

So if you want to create a product with mainstream appeal it seems totally reasonable from a business perspective to go somewhere near closer to the real identity end of the spectrum. No sinister conspiracy needed.

Maybe some of these reasons are fallacious, either for everyone or small niches of people. It doesn't matter; all that's needed is for the people in charge to believe that they're valid for 95% of the people, and it'd still lead to the same decision being made.

> Thus the comment you're replying to is not out of line-- it is a primary reason to use a pseudonym. And it is a real threat in countries like North Korea, Iran, etc.

It might be a reason to use the pseudonym, but that in no way implies that wanting to prevent that is the main reason to forbid pseudonyms.
I'm almost certain that (in the States at least) that information would be public record. After all, the person has to be arraigned and go to trial. Police reports are almost always public information, even reports that don't involve you personally. You just have to go to the station sometimes.
Umm... did you click the article?
Karma is a bitch when u r a bitch ... Just dont stol laptos nd ur image will not be on the internetz
The explanation I heard once was that childhood illnesses have a large impact on symmetry. In general, symmetry implies health/fertility, so it makes sense that we're attracted to it.
In the US it seems normal to even expose people's full names on any police stuff and/or after prosecution (I never paid too much attention what was what). Privacy and personal rights are very different in some countries. In germany we highly value personal rights and privacy.
edaboard
Virtual Teams Series: How to Effectively Work with a Virtual Team
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GIL is a problem - that has been acknowledged every time it has been brought up. There has been past attempts to remove the GIL - that slowed down the interpreter and the patch wasn't merged.

Removing GIL is massive work and will make the interpreter complex. Meanwhile, you have gevent, multiprocessing, c extensions... to work out the limitations.
Thank you for all the links, I will certainly check them out.

It is hard for me to stop second guessing myself, as I always like to be certain of my decisions before I act. Maybe I just need to jump sometimes.
That's awesome to hear. Thanks for mentioning your progress! Most importantly, I'm happy to know you're collecting metrics that affirm for you that your changes are getting a positive outcome. (Better than intuition any day!)
What Google Plus Needs to Do to Win Developers' Hearts
Java SEX er API
Best for java beginners. OOP in a distinct way. Easy to understand. Simple concept but 18+
2) displayport/thunderbolt and daisy-chaining should help out with this in the future.
Think about it. Why do we put far more money into law enforcement than the cost of the crime? Because it's not just about that one laptop. If we don't get the point across to the criminal, he'll do far more damage to all of us. Most burglary is the result of a small number of people. Because few police departments treat that crime seriously, a single burglar gets away with hundreds of crimes before getting caught.

As for his privacy, he surrendered that voluntarily when he stole the laptop; the government didn't impose that sentence on him.
Ask HN Do we need a forum?
I'm seeing more and more Ask HN, Tell HN, etc. posted here lately. I'm wondering if we need to have a forum.ycombinator.com or something similar to distinguish news from talk.

We have "ask" and "jobs" navigation at the top, but the main stream still includes everything.
I don't think there's anything to prevent more than one thread from being scheduled at any time. They just block when trying to run concurrently because of the GIL.

>I'm not sure if you misunderstood the mail. The constant locking would only be used if they were running in parallel.

No, I'm saying that the GIL is constant locking. You still have two threads being run concurrently on (possibly) two separate cores accessing the same cache lines. They just cannot actually run in parallel. I have no idea how the GIL time slices between the two threads, so what i'm saying is completely possible.

However, below my original post meastham correctly pointed out the GIL does prevent cache thrashing where updates to shared memory might go back and fourth multiple times unnecessarily. So it's not as bad as I was imagining.
Yeah that's a good point. Although unlikely, the guy could have bought the laptop off of Craigslist or something.
Tried it, and got "./error"
It wasn't that long ago when you could have shown a similar chart with Android phones.
We are trying to scale the service up at the moment, and also optimising the extension to reduce the number of redundant requests.
It's sad that many of the people who say the word "hacker" means all these positive and inclusive things are often the same people who lambast someone for actually using the word that way to refer to themselves.

Make up your minds. Is it the inclusive, "explorers of technology" meaning where it's more about curiosity and open-mindedness than skill level, or is it your little l337 boys club badge of honor?
They either guessed or brute forced it. Both of which are essentially illegal computer hacking.

I don't know about you, but I'm not going to do business with someone (here the Founder of Freshplum) if they enjoy hacking credit accounts in their free time.

His reason for doing so is so poor that I worry about his ethics in other affairs.
> Have you ever heard Guido speak about the issue?

Yes.

> He and a number of others don't think it's one worth solving. Really.

Check your claims.

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214235
http://docs.python.org/faq/library#can-t-we-get-rid-of-the-g...
I care more about the safety of my data than the safety of my computer, so I have FileVault full-drive encryption turned on. I don't think a thief could log into my computer without wiping the drive, which would wipe Prey if I had it installed. So I'm not going to bother installing it.
A Future Shop representative told me only 5 HP WebOS tablets were sold in all Future Shop stores in Ontario.
Agreed, I had to zoom in to read it.
An interesting aspect is that some of Prolog's ideas, such as the signature one of backwards-chaining, unification-based queries, are starting to resurface in other languages, so it might be worth learning even if you don't plan to use Prolog itself.

I wrote an opinion piece a while ago about why Prolog had fallen out of favor (http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html), and one of the reasons was that other declarative programming approaches, like forward-chaining, SQL w/ recursive queries, and LINQ-style dataflow variables, have bitten off a simpler but useful subset of what it bought you. In response, Mark Proctor from Drools argued that they're well on their way to importing nearly everything important from Prolog, rather than only a useful subset, including backwards chaining with unification: http://blog.athico.com/2011/04/backward-chaining-emerges-in-...

This includes a very interesting mashup of the two ideas, "reactive derivation", which does Prolog-style queries, but where the results, like with truth-maintenance systems or SQL "views", update in real time when the underlying data changes: http://blog.athico.com/2011/06/truth-maintenance-over-direct...

Imo, the simultaneous use of Prolog-style derivation and real-time forward-chaining style truth maintenance is both really interesting and a bit mind-bending, so learning Prolog first might be a good foundation.
The Nintendo Virtual Boy "was released on July 21, 1995 [... and Nintendo] discontinued it the following year"
... so no - it really was a flop that sold more units than the playbook (to date).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy
"A family of four will certainly have more than 20GB to 60GB of photos and home videos"

a family of four will also probably have more than one computer. you can pick up a 2TB NAS for about $150, that should be plenty of room for all their home movies and photos and it is accessible from all their computers.
> A similar question on a much simpler key mapping task is what do you do about cut/copy/paste?

I take the same approach as above: nothing.
This data would be more interesting if put into context with the category leaders at the time. The ratio of lead sales console vs "obscure" console would be nice. Even better if you can normalize time (avg monthly ratio) or plot the ratio vs launch month. That would give some idea of the non-lead tablets are on a similar sales trajectory as non-lead consoles.
It's 2011. Who picks up a phone? Phones are for texting, web surfing, and posting on HN.
Would you share that script?
Thanks! Finally a reason to upgrade to Lion.
Really appreciate the combination of honest and helpful feedback. I will certainly keep doing exactly that :-)
Are you sure this is the reason? Our company uses Microsoft OS and office tools across the board. But when it comes to development most of our work is done in linux. A version of Visual Studio for Mac would make no difference.
A story entitled: "Why you don't steel from a Texan" would generally entail the thief getting shot. Shooting a thief doesn't make one a Texan, but it is the kind of thing a Texan would do. (Gross generalization for illustrative purposes only.) In the same way, having a software program installed on one's computer in case of theft does not make one a hacker, but it is in the spectrum of things a hacker might do. So I think that the title is plenty accurate.

That said, the title does prime one for an epic tail of recovery and revenge involving spoofed IP addresses and total identity theft. This story is a little bit of a letdown, but I doubt he meant for it to get the attention it got.
Facebook Lets You Export Friends’ Email Addresses, But Makes It Opt-In
That's why I never stopped having my own site, and posting EVERYTHING (even photos, bookmarks, likes, check-ins) there, and using scripts I made to propagate the info on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

It's the only way to be safe against any company shutting you down.
Sprint cancels plans to launch 4G BlackBerry PlayBook citing lack of demand
The agreement was that you're allowed to use the gift card at starbucks.

The agreement wasn't that you can hack the pin of the giftcard, then transfer over all of the money to your own account.

That's essentially stealing from the 'coffee and sandwiches' charity for your own personal reasons.

Its a violation of the trust given to him by the community, and rightly puts a sour taste into many peoples mouths.
3 Free iPhone/iPad Apps for Movie Makers | Free on iTunes | The Mac Observer
What makes the experiment so interesting is the anonymity factor. Since there are a functionally-unlimited number of Starbucks locations, you have absolutely no way of knowing who else is using the card and on what.

If it was for a small locally-owned coffee shop, it's a given that the folks charging/refilling the card are the same people frequenting the shop with you every day. I can't imagine this wouldn't drastically affect the way the experiment turned out; the social obligation is much stronger when you can connect anonymous people to faces or names, even if you don't know exactly who is participating.
This is a great read for any programmer, not only those interested in functional programming.

Also related (HN discussion): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138979

And Cris Okasaki's blog: http://okasaki.blogspot.com/
I don't think he surrendered his privacy voluntarily. exposing his picture and info has nothing to do with law enforcement - that's just self-administered justice. a well functioning state of law / rule of law (I dunno how you call it in english) works by sentencing criminals to prison according to the scale of their crime. not by punishing them overtly and excessively as a warning to other criminals (that's just barbaric).
Thanks for your software, i think u guys are latin-americans? ...
Also, I wrote a follow-up blog post here. Comments welcome http://betab.ly/oiuOrA
Common password crackers will take a dictionary and then extend that basic dictionary by using common transformations.

Moving a letter around on a keyboard or replacing vowels with numbers, all of these increase the dictionary size, but since they are reducible to simple rules, the crackers can keep up. These methods aren't adding significant complexity.

When you add additional words, then you get some exponential complexity. Say we have five words in our dictionary:
apple
beggar
catapult
dice
entropy

If we include reversals, we double the size of the dictionary. This is true for any sized dictionary.
If we include versions which substitute all vowels with numbers, we double the size of the dictionary. This is true for any sized dictionary.
If we include shifting the characters up, down, left, or right, we multiply the size of the dictionary by 5. Better, but true for any sized dictionary.

If we instead use passwords that combine two words, the dictionary grows by 24 times. This increase becomes more dramatic as the dictionary grows, and it outpaces all other simple substitutions. If our dictionary contains 100 words, the number of passwords to check is well over 100 digits long. None of the other simple transformations is as powerful as the addition of another word.
To finish the exercise include iPhone / iPod Touch sales vs. the biggest consoles ever released and the point is made.

eg: ~100m iPhones (most recent data I could find was through Q4 2010 for aggregate):

Then compare to the top gaming platforms ever shipped:

PlayStation 154.59 million

Nintendo DS 147.86 million

Game Boy/Game Boy Color	118.69 million

Sony PlayStation 102.49 million

By that measuring stick iOS wins big vs. obscure consoles, but it also wins vs. the biggest and best.

ref -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter.s...

ref - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_conso...
Do you have an Amazon Web Services account already? If not they have a fee usage tier which gives you a micro instance for a year. I use mine for testing/code repositorty/ssh hop and it works great. It's worth checking out.
Isn't "the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website" a bogus measure of success? I find myself having to follow more Bing links because the captions are irrelevant sections of the website.
That's a value judgement. As a hacker you can't do everything.

Prey is a polished product that you can trust to work. If you are into this sort of thing, certainly you can achieve more functionality and better security by rolling your own, but I don't consider it a prerequisite to hackerdom anymore than soldering your own motherboards. How often do you expect your laptop to be stolen anyway?
I could believe that a fraudster might spend a few months trying to appear legitimate, but six years?

Your point about PayPal's risk vs. their profit on this account is valid, but look at it from the other side. Let's take a more plausible scenario than one in which the account was opened for fraudulent purposes from the beginning. Let's imagine our business owner has had every intention of running a legitimate business and has been doing so, but as a result of personal misfortune is now in a state of desperation. Would it really make sense to torpedo a running business in order to get a final payout of maybe £50,000, and put oneself very much on the wrong side of the law in the process? For £500,000, I could see this, but I don't think many people, even those desperate or venal enough to ignore the ethical difficulties, would do it for an amount comparable to a year's revenue from a business they've worked for years to build.

Or conversely, if there really are fraudsters with the patience to run a legitimate business for six years in order to run a large scam, surely they would also be shooting for a payout well into six figures if not seven.

I think PayPal has made the considered decision that it's not worth their time to think about individual cases. That's their right, though they certainly are inviting competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toys_%22R%22_Us
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korn

Thankfully, Cyrillic as a poor approximation of the artwork doesn't always win out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Superunknown#Track_name_.2...

And hey! It looks like discussion that I wasn't even aware of spawned on the Toys R Us talk page about it.
This just seems really odd to me because you are skipping a number of "social requisites" for inviting someone into your home and furthermore for cooking/eating for strangers.

I just see this turning in to another craigslist. Starts off with good intentions, then it becomes exploited and ruined by people with spurious motives.

You may also want to watch the IT Crowd episode "Moss and the German" as to what else could happen :)
VS 2010 is extremely fast for me, running on essentially the same hardware. Sounds like you've got something else going on there.
Previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1604148 <- Many comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639049

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671845

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2524122
This article seems to imply this "hacker" used some actual skill set to retrieve their stolen goods. Installing tracking software on a mac and then bragging about it when stolen and then found doesn't fit with what I'd call being a hacker.

Nice story though. And I'm happy another rioting / looting is going to court to answer for there actions.
I hear you. From a personal view lot is BC/AC - before and after child. From a corporate view, it is a question of sprinting (to an exit or market opportunity) versus building for a longer time horizon. As we age, our priorities change, as do the types of places we choose to work.
Xmarks on the other hand supports tagging which Google still not managed to implement.
I'm using Xmarks (for cross-browser syncing) as well as Chrome's native sync but after setting up a new OS install I've got every bookmark twice.
That'd be way disproportional. And there could be a totally unrelated people who might suffer from the result of that experiment. Just get the money back on the card.

As a side effect he can claim the karma points for the entire good deed he described, on his own account. Then his experiment would get a much nicer feel.
It was never meant to be an experiment about charity. It was meant to be an experiment about yuppies buying other yuppies coffee. That is it.
All that happened is that the World knows that he is a criminal. His right to privacy doesn't mean the right to conceal his misdeeds from the rest of us, nor the right for us to keep silent about it.
It is? OH.

Don't I feel stupid. :)
I think the point of the comparison is basically: here's a bunch of console you probably never heard about. They flopped.

That's exactly my point. "Here's a bunch of [insert failed consumer electronic] you've never heard of without regard for disparate product life cycles or market environments". The data points are interchangeable so long as they follow the guideline of "consumer electronic that existed at some point in time and didn't sell well"
If a person breaks into/trashes/takes things from my personal space they are certainly giving up their right to anonymity in my eyes.

Why should I respect his privacy when he has absolutely abused mine?
The whole "Buying yuppies coffee will improve the world!" was obviously tongue in cheek. It's hard to believe some people don't see that.
Entrepreneur Mark Cuban on investing and patents
"With PyPy the performance will get better, and they also have a GC, so that hinder is removed. I don't really know if PyPy has a GIL, I would guess that they don't."

PyPy still has GIL:

http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/faq.html#does-pypy-h...

For more information about it, check these sources:

Official PyPy Status Blog - http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/05/threads-and-gcs.html

Thinking about the GIL (read the whole thread, interesting stuff) - http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pypy-dev/2011-March/006991....
I wonder if marco reads HN? I'd be down for some action on longbets.com:

http://martin.drashkov.com/2011/03/why-android-tablets-will-...
Supporting evidence: the lack of Markdown support in the Mail app
Seems pretty silly. A child, when rescued from a university pond, returns to a safe stable situation.
10 ways to make money on the internet
Article outlining 10 ways to make money online. If you have any other ideas please add them to the comments.
I see that as market potential, no?

Wait 'till 10 inch clone tablets hit $100 for xmas.

(ironically hitting the OLPC pricepoint goal)
I see... thanks for the correction. Why the hell does that merchant page exist, then?

"2.4 stars over the past 12 months (16 ratings)"

"Amazon Digital Services, Inc. US has not provided return and refund policies for display on Amazon. Please contact Amazon Digital Services, Inc. US to request a refund or get information about policies that may apply"

Highly confusing.
Hi Sam. I know a lot of people are going to talk shit to you about this, but I think what you did was right. You shouldn't have published though. Next time just take the money and run.
The thing is: rolling my own takes less time than installing Prey. Of course, it won't have bells and whistles, but it'll be much less limited.
Well, we have the "ask" tab at the top. I don't see a need for a separate domain or anything like that.
While Apple's hardware is built in China, iTunes and the App Store are not.
You're right. He said he was switching from PayPal as the payment processor to Eventbrite.

We used PayPal for our first event, but their extra cut on top of Eventbrite's made little sense, so we too switched to using Eventbrite's processor and haven't looked back.
Makes it hard to combat spam, because you don't know where the link goes.