skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook gets a pass in part because they've been a lot less aggressive in enforcing the policy. They'll shut down a pseudonymous account when someone brings it to their attention (most notoriously, the Chinese writer who was going on Facebook by his longtime pen name, Michael Anti), but they don't go searching them out.

The upshot is that pseudonyms used mainly within circles of friends can exist without getting hassled --- to the point that this commenter on an earlier jwz post, with numerous pseudonymous friends, refused to believe that Facebook even had a "real names" policy at all:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/08/nym-wars/#comment-93494

(The largest such circle I'm aware of involves dozens of kids with pseudonymous Facebook accounts at a local middle school; I heard about this from a parent, who in turn is aware of it because their kid sometimes forgets to log out. So much for Zuckerberg's line about pseudonymity being a marginal concern of old fogies.)

They certainly could be more aggressive in tying Facebook accounts to real people, for instance, by requiring everyone to "verify" with a credit card or mobile number after a certain period of time. But they don't.
Nice work. How does it update realtime? Javascript? I thought Javascript is not run inside the email message pane?
Street View hits the stunning Swiss Alps railways
salman khan? along with those names?
електрошокове 
Електрошокове - всички модели на елктрошокове и шпионски джаджи
Those of you who have heard Bill Gates speak about global health will know that he is NOT just "giving away lots of money". Doing that would be easy, for somebody who has so much money (though Steve Jobs never bothered!).

I've heard Bill speak about global health issues in large plenary sessions and in small poster sessions. Speaking as somebody who has spent two decades working in this area...Bill's command of the issues is stunning and far ahead of most of the scientists I work with on a daily basis. He has the kind of knowledge that comes only with a huge investment of /personal time and energy/ spent flying all over the world, speaking with scientists, politicians, educators, and people affected by these various conditions. Frankly, I have the impression that global health is now an 80-hour-a-week job for Bill Gates. He has that kind of knowledge and passion about the issues when he speaks.

Bill's investment of personal time and energy is what really impresses me. If I had $50B or so, I'd probably give most of it away, but I'd probably do that while lying on a beach somewhere. Not Bill. He's working hard to give his money away in the right way, while taking time away from his family to do it.

And that's charity.
It really doesn't matter if the law is right, what matters is the fairness in enforcement. In this case, he could followed the law, waited his turn and come to the US. Instead, he came to the US on an exchange visa, then stayed illegally when it expired. He claimed asylum, but after investigation, the INS/ICE found that he wasn't being persecuted. The US has even told him what he needed to do to become legal, he chose not too.

He's tried for twenty years find loopholes in US law because he didn't want to wait his turn with other would be immigrants.

So while US immigration law may be messed up, he's messing up far more by trying to cheat his way in.
Would be nice to show the port you've accessed in the body (useful for scripting etc).
Time is Money and Cloud Computing is Saving you Both
My Kindle case has a lamp that is very effective and yet not too bright. It's perfect for reading in bed.

(And you can't use a smartphone to read on the beach or any place under direct sunlight...)
Jimmy Wales wades into London's startup scene
8 bucks for a 300 page book? What's that, $1.60 per hour of reading time? If anything it's generously priced.
I'm sure Salman Khan would agree with you.

Now let's give it 50 years and we'll see how 'Global Free Education on any subject that matters' sounds.
You can say this about all of the Americas, in general. National borders, especially that of the US, are becoming harder and harder to deal with if you're a human being. It seems to be a lot easier if you're a trade good.
For one, it exposes a heavy-hand predisposition makes me worry that a bug in my program might result in a visit from police.
Why bother with that? They could just make the images the correct way to begin with.
Steve Yegge explains his verbosity (2008)
Android 4.0 developers will get source code 'soon'
Nice list, Jacques. My list of heroes is shorter and even more obscure:

Samuel Weissman & Louis Marcus

My grandfathers

There were two of the smartest people I ever met, but neither ever went to school a single day of his life. Both worked very hard and succeeded at everything they tried. I imagine that if they had been born 80 years later, we may admiring their Silicon Valley achievements right now.

Both came to the U.S. very young and alone, surely knowing that they would never see their birthplace or most of their friends and relatives ever again. They did it to build a better life for themselves and their families.

And they did it all for me, long before I even existed.

That's why I have to succeed; I could never let them down.
The Beginnings of the Internet Unfold (historical Usenet archive)
I believe we're approaching this point. The least noticed big news of the year was Foxconn's announcement that it plans to replace its workers with robots in the next two years. The fact that robots have reached even the Chinese labor price means robots will always be preferred when manufacturing returns to the US. So how will we distribute the wealth? I suspect the masses will vote in a form of distribution and would rather see it some kind of force employment than a government handout.
Upper body workout to lose arm fat for women
They got lambasted for not releasing Honeycomb because "open" is one of their largest marketing platforms and the reason many people use Android. I'm glad they're going to release ICS source at some point, but can anyone be sure they'll continue to publish code for future versions? That kind of uncertainty diminishes their claims of "open" greatly in my mind.

Also, a tiny nit about the headline - it's not open source until they actually release it. Who knows when that will be.
What are the best 2011 Android "phones" for power users?
Ok, got it. In that case, and with a possible exception of EU zone, there are no countries that allow doing what you described. For example, being a citizen of Canada I can travel almost everywhere w/o visas, but I cannot just fly to Italy or Mongolia or Japan and get settled to live and work. Nor would I be able to get a work-enabling visa easily. In other words the USA is not an exception, there is nothing unique about their free settlement restrictions.
Copyright is not about ownership of ideas or works; it is about guaranteeing remuneration of artists to permit them to create art without being supported by a patron.
"Sure he's the CTO of a very important company" ....

... and Yegge's criticism was squarely about Brin's area of responsibility. So it's natural that Brin would be a little pissed about it, because Yegge was effectively saying that Brin's doing a half-assed job in some critical areas.
> "Yo-Yo code" that converts a value into a different representation, then converts it back to where it started (eg: converting a decimal into a string and then back into a decimal, or padding a string and then trimming it)

The other day I was at a hack night and some guys were working on something written in Node. They were having all kinds of problems with an object, so they serialized it to JSON and loaded it back, and somehow it magically started working.
Isn't this something that the http server handles? I am not in web development except for basic php and cgi scripts. Are people actually writing web app code to dictate what http code comes back on each request?
Whatever this alternative business model looks like it needs to be legally possible for me to watch any movie, listen to any song or read any book I like for free. Alternatively, people will find illegal ways to do this. They'll share files over this internet or bring their harddrives round to each others houses. Inevitably, the only way to effectively stop people doing this will be to ban private communication and have DRM required on all our hardware. Otherwise piracy will still be possible.

I'm all for rewarding artists to encourage them to create more work, but I'd rather it be impossible to finance big-budget cinema then have the kind of dystopia that would be required to enforce copyright law.
Some real gems there, like the old video material he used to draw the animations. http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1985/10/october-20-198...
Early in my programming career, my team leader took me aside and explained how to write an effective and persuasive memo that would get through to management. It was valuable advice as the rant I had written got nowhere. And management is not the only target audience with short attention spans; same-level colleagues have been equally challenged by having to read an E-mail longer than 1 paragraph, even when it concerns technical details of the project they're working on. Consequently, I dumb down E-mails in an effort to get the attention of as many of the recipients as I can. Condescending? No. Realistic? Yes. (Given my druthers, I'm normally prone to writing Yegge-length E-mails and memos; I've just learned that less is better when trying to through to the most people.)
True, Aussies now have the E3 visa which is a work sponsored visa just for Aussies. But I came here years before that happened. I had to convince someone to give me one of the very rare H1B visas just to come over to be with my then girlfriend. We eventually got married and I applied for the greencard.

I'm not sure about auto qualification if you want to start a business. I think you need something like $1M in the bank to prove that you have the resources to start...
New York Times Paywall Helps it Turn a Profit
Summary: If your writing is too short, then it doesn't spill over into people's long-term memory and they will forget it all too soon.

Having said that, you should go read the blog post so you can remember it.
I believe it's usually done (I've not had to do it) so that you can force some small set of data to always be in ram. This way even in the case of someone managing to cause something to leak memory the code will always be in ram. Whether this is really needed or not I can't say.
Calling out someone for not doing their homework seems somewhere in the DH1-2 range:

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

There are some good points in Kurzweil's response, but the ones about Paul Allen are definitely not them.

I think his best point was about extrapolating function from individual cells or structures, without needing to understand every single cell or structure individually.
Aortic Valve Anatomy, Function and Diseases.
Thanks for that, J. The cargo cult and cult of personality junk sometimes gets under my skin. You're going to catch some heat for fighting it, but it's always the good fight. Rock on!
Similar to the coffeeshop fallacy is something I described to a friend over dinner the other night as the "ambulance fallacy" ...

He was telling me about his startup ambitions and about one particular business that he said sounded like a ton of fun (it was an alcoholic beverage business) - he loved the lifestyle potential of being "that guy".

I told him a story about how I wanted to be an EMS worker when I was 12 years old. Why? For a single, simple reason -- I thought it was _extremely_ cool to be able to drive around with lights and sirens blaring, blasting through traffic. That was it.

Then a family friend who actually was an EMS worker told me one day what the job was actually like - sure, for about 10 minutes you were driving like a madman through traffic, but the rest of the time you had to, you know, actually BE an EMS worker :)

And the same goes for startup life -- you have to actually BE a startup founder for 99% of the time. Don't get caught up by the lights and sirens.
>I really don't get it what so many people see in the US.

1) US and EU economies nearly equal each other in size. [1]

2) You only need one language in the US to reach the entire market.

3) I don't believe for a second there isn't prejudice against outsiders in each individual European country. Wikipedia hosts an article written just about tensions regarding Polish people entering the UK! [2]

1 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Polish_sentiment_in_the_Un...
You may be right - although I find myself inadequate to predict 6 months hence not to talk of 50 years. It just seemed the easiest 'odd man out' scenario so I commented.
A poster above makes the opposite claim, that the contest graduated from Waterloo to Google.
I have been considering this recently as well, and exploring the alternatives...

* Search - DDG is good enough most of the time

* Google+ - I can live without this, no biggie

* Reader - I love it, but it's not critical. Any suggestions for alternatives?

* Gmail - This is a big one. I don't want to use Hotmail/Yahoo either because that is just jumping from one frying pan to another. So anyone.....are you willing to build a DDG for Gmail? I am willing to pay for it as well. But I need a large inbox (5GB+), speed, reliability, great spam protection, priority inbox, don't sell my data, no personalized ads....and my money is yours :) I might even be willing to work with you on this, just don't have the time/inclination to do this alone.

* Google apps for business - at the moment, I just use the email feature of this extensively, so once again, the Gmail alternative can work here.

* Google analytics - there are pretty good competitors out there, though not necessarily free (but that's okay)

So in my opinion, apart from email, I think it's possible to move off Google's services without disrupting your life.
Ask HN: What do you look for in an intern?
I'm currently a sophomore computer science student and am in the process of looking for internships for summer '12. I'm wondering what it is that big companies/startups look for in an intern. I'm extremely passionate about comp sci and would really love to spend next summer doing what I love.
I have some of the necessities for standing out (extra curricular activities and projects, leadership, etc.). Just looking for some insight.

Thanks!

Tyler
Actually I'd prefer a job drinking coffee in a coffee shop.
Power Bracelet from Google. Weirdest corporate gift ever
how long/which app did you use to find a pay phone?
The problem with this statement is what is meant by "just come" to the country. I personally don't think that any immigration process should cater to the serendipitous. It's a legal process and most modern countries have processes in place where if you say "I want to move to X" and start the legal process to move to X in your own country, then yes, you can go there and live there if you meet the given requirements. Are there any countries without any requirements for new immigrants (money in the bank, job offer, etc) so that anyone regardless of status can just come? That I don't know. In my experience the barriers are always money, time, patience, and background. Usually in that order.
I was once at GMX. They insert Advertisements into your emails and offer to less space for the buck.
Also, since you think of rebranding... have you narrowed down to a smaller niche?

Yes car fanatics like all kind of cars, but you might create better, tighter communities if you selected one (and eventually replicate) niches: modders/racers could have some car porn to look at, antiques/american classics too but are very different than the fast&furious crowd...

It would help you get a better identity (just my 2 cents)
Spoke to someone at Apple the day after Jobs' death and he said he was surprised as his team was getting product feedback from him on the Monday - 2 days prior.
For those who have read the Commonwealth Saga: is Ozzie=Sergey and Nigel=Larry or the other way around?
When they showed the scene where that one guy admitted to embezzlement I thought "wow, that's intense." Now I know that the participants were told that none of the audio from their private mentor meetings would be used. They thought they were having a private discussion about a team members hardships. Talk about lost trust, sheesh.
It might not work with an int, but I'm virtually certain it works with a long int. I say that because I had to research whether I could use a long value as both a reference count when a struct was in use, and a free list pointer when a struct was not in use. I didn't want to declare the field as a clunky union, but as simply "long".

I researched the issue in the C Language Reference Manual, document 007-0701-150, available on the web as a PDF. Here are my notes:

"In the value structure, the reference count N is a long int, which guarantees
that it can also be used as a pointer to link unused values on the free list,
without my having to use a cumbersome union type.

The standard says:

long ints are large enough to hold pointers in -n32 and -o32 mode. Both are
32 bits wide.

long ints are large enough to hold pointers in -64 mode. Both are 64 bits
wide.

(C Language Reference Manual, document 007-0701-150, Appendix A, Section F.3.7
"Arrays and Pointers")

Assuming there are no other modes, I conclude that long ints are large enough
to hold pointers, period.

As further evidence, the section titled "Integer and Floating Point Types" has
a table of Storage Class Sizes which lists the size in bits for the various
types in all three modes -o32, -n32, and -64. In all modes the size of a long
equals the size of a pointer."
How to Network Successfully
How the iPhone Got Tail Fins – Part 2 of 2
Is this compatible with Free Software, or is it a big chunk of proprietary software with a good amount of proprietary hardware thrown in for good measure? The site does not make this particularly clear.
McDonalds quality control is second to none. Their standard menu tastes practically the same everywhere in the world. It's the same with Starbucks. I know that no matter what part of the planet I am at, I can get exactly what I expect to get. I'm never disappointed. I can't stress how important that part is. Bad quality control can really injure restaurants.
My absolute hero is Richard Feynman. Required reading:

- "Surely You're Joking"

- "What Do You Care What Other People Think"

- http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm "Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle" (Challenger disaster report)

- Also, consider torrenting videos of his "Messenger Lectures". The youtube snippets do not nearly do them justice. They're some of the most intellectually interesting things you'll ever watch:

Richard_Feynman_Messenger_Lectures_at_Cornell_-_The.Character.of.Physical.Law_-_Part_1_The_Law_of_Gravitation

Part_2_The_Relation_of_Mathematics_to_Physics

Part_3_The_Great_Conservation_Principles

Part_4_Symmetry_in_Physical_Law

Part_5_The_Distinction_of_Past_and_Future

Part_6_Probability_and_Uncertainty

Part_7_Seeking_New_Laws
85% of Fortune's 40 Under 40 is Male
The interesting bit is that in 50 years or so people will likely go "Salman Who?".
Gmail's New Look
I wouldn't call this a surrender. Google seems to have bought some time to enable it to come up with a workaround while being seen to be compliant.
Zend Studio + GitHub - GitHub
For me there are 3 things that I used to download. Music, Movies and TV shows.

I was most prolific with music. I didn't share the music, I didn't burn the music to disks. I just acquired it to listen at home. The reason was I simply didn't have the money to buy every album of every artist I liked. Instead I downloaded the music and paid to see them live.

This really all changed with Spotify. A flat monthly fee to listen to as much music as I want. This was all I wanted all along. I don't care for owning music. Now I buy the albums of a handful of artists for my iPod. Then use Spotify around the house. This is the music industry adapting to the needs of the listener. Its good stuff.

With movies. I love the cinema and watch most movies there. I hate the cost of dvd's. If I buy a DVD I watch it maybe once a year... if that. I will watch the extra's once. The cost of a new DVD is like £12, BluRay is higher... I just don't see the value in it. There is rental but again, its bad value. It costs like £4 for one night. Often the disk doesn't include the special features. The ad's at the start of the disk cannot be skipped.. It requires a lot of planning to ensure your night is actually free to watch the film.

If I was in the states I would get NetFlix but where I am there still isn't much alternative to downloading a film for the single viewing or waiting 6 months till it eventually comes into the sale.

My main gripe is with TV shows. I enjoy US TV shows. I don't want the worlds most expensive TV package to catch them all scattered across ten's of channels. Even if I had all the channels. Watching it week by week with ad's. Boring. Even when the US season end's. The DVD or paid download version doesn't come out in my country for 6-12 months later because local TV is still waiting to show it...

This model to me seems broken. It is too slow and separate's fans of the show from the show itself. I download most shows I watch. I then buy the boxed set when it comes out here so I can get the extra's and support the show.

In my opinion piracy in terms of downloading for individual consumption is - in many cases - understandable. It is the failure of industries to understand why people are doing it and not catering for them which is the larger problem.
I'm actually astonished by the hero-worship surrounding the inventor of C. Its got so many embarassing flaws, or had at any rate; its been patched and bandaged for decades.

Sure, say that hindsite is 20-20, but I knew C was busted long before I learned anything about objects or monads etc. Syntax is goofy, backward as you say (I thought that the 1st time I ever saw a C program decades ago); its promise as an expression-based syntax was botched and mortgaged, resulting in generations of hacks; its fundamental expression evaluation syntax was broken to begin with, and as patched its cumbersome and baffling at times.
</rant>
Yes, sometimes the correct response is not an HTML page, but an error code (e.g. 301 Moved Permanently, 302 Found are used to implement redirects).
There was a beta testing period to develop the game engine and ensure that the game was viable (i.e. there isn't a trivial solution, it's interesting to work on, etc.). There have been some fairly significant changes in the objectives from most of the beta, so that should help level the playing field somewhat.

It's regrettable that the beta did last so long; this has to do mostly with the up-and-down nature of the time volunteers had to work on the project (they have school and work).