skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So we have this one extra-legal, transnational group dedicated to running drugs.

They pick up a guy who is a member of another extra-legal, transnational group in order to hold him hostage.

In retaliation, the second group breaks into the drug-runners' computers, find all the people they have blackmailed and paid-off. They threaten to publish this list unless their guy is released. Most observers say this would result in dozens of deaths.

Is it just me, or does this have a distinctly "Mad Max" feel to it? Will this trend continue -- groups self-identifying and taking public actions on the net that result in dozens of deaths because all the people in that group feel that it is the right thing to do? If so, this might be a good time for us all to start looking for our own groups. (That sounds hyperbolic, I know, but the nature of the story lends itself to this kind of observation.)
I use GrooveIP ($5 on Android Market) to use Google Voice over the data connection on both my actual Android phone and my ASUS Transformer tablet/netbook (which has no cellphone chip at all inside of it, just wifi).

Granted, it would be nice if this were more of an integrated part of the OS and the Voice app, without needing to set up or use a third party SIP provider and it all Just Worked including seemlessly handling incoming calls, but there are some options out there now to get this sort of setup working.
Lucky or good
Try opening Finder or any other sufficiently "native" application, opening one of the menus in the menu bar, then tapping alt (option).
I was referring to your single-source posting history.
"Famous In 60 Days" Review: How To Market On Facebook
Yeah, so far the most any of us can do is be aware.
Popped collars, sunnies and fratboy antics; enthusiasm for 'Agile' entirely optional.

A primer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi_AAqi0RZM

(Yes, it's dumb.)
Isn't this just an impossible situation in general? What else is there to do? If people are getting kidnapped now, staying quiet is not going to stop it. If not staying quiet and trying to expose the responsible (or indirectly responsible) is going to result in some deaths, then not only this is not a better solution, but also shows that there is no higher force that can stop this from happening at any time in the (edit: near) future anyway.

So affected people are screwed one way or another and people who should help them cannot or don't want to. What exactly is there to do? If anyone has a real, longterm solution they can prove, I'm sure they can find some people who would help them execute it. Saying this action is either right or wrong is... well, a bit pointless.
This reminds me of one of my favorite philosophies on learning, the four stages of competence:

Unconscious incompetence -> Conscious incompetence -> Conscious competence -> Unconscious competence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
I apparently scored a whopping 16 points.
I think people are blowing his words out of proportion. I found his comments were delivered casually, with a pretty straightforward message: he wasn't discounting what SV has to offer, he was simply stating it has more to offer to those who know don't know what they're doing.

He didn't know what he was doing when he founded FB (by his own admission), and so moving to SV was immensely helpful for him. He knows how to run a company now, and was simply stating that for those who live outside SV and know what they're doing, there's nothing intrinsically holding you back from success by locale.
It's pretty well known that Java hovers around 1.1x the speed of C where as JS hovers around 2-3x the speed of C.

So yes Java is faster.
me having 26 seems a rather good score after reading yours.
I have no empathy for your sad feelings about your score.
About Sisel International - SlenderPops
Klout Is Odious
sry, wrote 19 instead of 26. still not sure if I care about you caring. but I do care more than you I guess.
FWIW, a booksprint (http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.reps.general/browse_t...) has been organized several weeks ago by people from Framalang (http://www.framalang.org/) and Frenchmozilla (http://frenchmozilla.fr/) to translate this book to french. The result can be consulted here : http://books.lifeleaks.com/eloquentjavascript/.
I agree with the sentiments on OT. It really ought to be baked into everything. It has features you want, such as undo/redo, collaborative editing and optimistic locking.

I've been working on an OT implementation for the past few weeks. It really is some brain wrinkling stuff. The adoption of data-bining we're seeing in the newer JavaScript client frameworks/libraries could be paving the way for something like OT to go mainstream. OT is a bit like pulling your brain through a wormhole#. I think it's going to take a really easy to plug-in library to have something like OT get any traction.

# That is, OT is fairly straightforward if you're editing a document. It gets weird when you have to map a graph of objects onto/from a stream of operations.
Better yet, you can just grab a pirated PDF copy.
San Jose Smog Check
The reason I added "one-day" is that I get tons of emails that recommend I focus on one thing.

The thing is, I am 100% focused on one thing. So a title like this when I hack together an idea I had in my downtime prevents the majority of those emails.

Thanks for your feedback though, I appreciate it.
it is definitely not magical to the engineers and programmers who made it.

I'm not sure if you're saying engineers in general, or specifically the ones who programmed it.

I'll say this: I tried Siri for the first time the other day. It is magical. Not because any single part of what it does is such a huge leap, but the way in which it combines existing elements to create a whole new direction which is so much greater than its parts.

While Google was busy making voice-driven Google searches, Apple was making voice-driven user interface.

Overall, I was amazed at how much more integrated and useful the iPhone was than my Android device. Siri just brings that to a whole new UI level that others had the technical ability to bring, but not the willingness.

Is that a product of genius? I don't know, but I get the impression that both Google and Microsoft are driven by committee, and have very smart people who can't seem to really finish anything properly. They seem to lack creative genius, leadership, and/or drive.
Anonymous takes on Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas
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Hmm, upon looking at the quote again it really isn't that great. When I say "played" I mean just getting the notes right at the right time - no other of the many dimensions that can change based on the player's skill level. When a skilled musician is reading sheet music, I think they're doing more than just straight playing through it (again using my definition of play, maybe a bad word choice?)
Does anyone have invite codes available?
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I was making a joke. Or apparently confirming my score of 16.
Just use pry, it's not really a debugger replacement, but it's useful in most cases that ruby-debug19 would be used.

http://rubygems.org/gems/pry
Umm someone isn't able to count decimal places, 0.02 - 0.04 kilotons is 20 - 40 tons of TNT; in the article one or the other is wrong. Wikipedia seems to imply that the yield was supposed to be equate to 72 tons of TNT.
OT is fairly straightforward if you're editing a document

Even with a “plain text” document, there is much nerd sniping to be done when you consider that OT works best at a semantic level, not a character level. A trivial example is that conflicting edits to words and numbers should often be treated differently. This may not generalize very well, a domain-specific editor for one application may want to use slightly different transformation semantics than another.
The issue I see here is that Ubuntu doesn't have a coherent development platform like Android or iOS. That said it would allow even more flexibility than Android, but would that mean it would fail for having too much choice? Ubuntu phone anyone?
Crappy documentation.
Has this book always been so expensive? I don't remember paying that much for my copy. That was ten years ago though so maybe I'm just getting old :)
Definitely.

(among other points!)
One thing I take from this article is that the things that give us that "Dreamy" feeling are (especially in tech) things that turn ordinarily mundane or complicated things into simple and easy things.

For example, the GUI basically turned accessing files (along with other commands) from mundane tasks into easy and attractive tasks, effectively making it far more useful by lowering the learning curve and lessening the complexity.

Movies are another example of turning something (plays) into a more exciting, entertaining, and accessible form.

It seems that what we consider "Dreamy" is simplicity. Perhaps that's why consumers gawk over Apple device's and describe them as dreamy. It makes one wonder, why is it that we consider simplicity so attractive?

One reason could be that it is purely natural human instinct. We do not like not understanding things and we constantly try to understand that which we don't. When people create things that increase other's ability to understand whatever product or service they are offering, they are creating desires, also known as dreams.

In a sense, that's the only reason that businesses exist, or at least it's the only reason businesses should exist.
I did get your joke, and made one on top of it. I would guess we both have improvement to be made.
The ZooGue Dual iPad2 Case - You Know, For iPad Multitasking...
Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
HiTecLiving.com
Press an enter key, end random people's lives in a country you may or may not have visited. It should sound insane, but it's real =\

I wonder how many people would be brave/stupid enough to press the enter key, trusting in the methods they have used to hide their own identity, because if you haven't done it properly, the cartels have a long reach
The $10,000 College Degree
Wow. I am retarded.

I'm going to go look for friends at an Aspberger's Meetup group now.
They might have some local GPS jammers to make it harder for unmanned drones or bombs to navigate near the building.
The downvotes are horribly biased and uninformative. I think an interesting experiment to try is to force downvoters to also give a comment, so the parent knows why he/she is being downvoted, so as to discourage that behavior in the future. This is a great way for newcomers to stop making rookie mistakes, and to reduce the number of "Why was my post downvoted?" updates/comments that add little value, but is a question that understandably vexes the parent.

I sometimes make a comment that I don't feel is controversial/wrong at all, only to see it downvoted. Not only is it discouraging (and a great way to ruin my day), but it's also low in signal--I don't know whether someone just had a bad day and wanted to spread their hate, or whether I misperceived the controversy of my comments. I always want to ask the downvoters to let me know what I said wrong--I just hate the anonymous drive-by shooting, if that analogy makes sense.
East Harlem Landlords Keep Apartments Sealed Up
IME it is never really faster to check yourself out, even if you're good at it... at best and assuming you only have a couple of items you'll be just about as fast as non-self-service. And most people are not very good at it (I've sat in line behind 4 people all using the available self-service checkout machines, all 4 seemingly completely stumped by the whole process), so those people will be significantly slower than just using the cashier aisle and they'll slow everyone else down too just by the bottleneck nature of queue/lines.

When self service machines first arrived on the scene it was faster to use them because nobody else did and thus there were no lines for them even when lines for the cashier-aisles were crowded. Now more people are using them (often VERY slowly compared to a real cashier) and now the lines move significantly slower than cashier-manned lines. I no longer use the self-service aisle unless it is empty and all the non-self-service lines are occupied.

YMMV depending upon where you are and how recently self-service has showed up, but here in Southern California where they've been around for years it was a great option that turned into a very bad option once a critical mass of consumers felt comfortable enough to use them.

Also of note, particularly here, is that the usefulness of the self service devices depends a lot on their UI/UX. Around here the Ralph's stores have a system that is very streamlined, and the Vons stores have a system that sucks (you have to switch back and forth between using two different screens like 4 times if paying by debit/credit), so that factors into it as well.
//Sub/Corpus Blog: This must be some really good milk
GORILLA.BAS
I try not spend too much time on semantics at the transformation level. There are already hundreds of cases that must be understood transformed just to handle concurrent operations on an XML document. If you want the transformer to handle semantics I fear you're going to balloon in complexity to the point of deep sadness. ( What do we do if I'm typing a number inside your word? Word inside a number? Delete a number inside a word? What if you word is the name of city? etc. forever )

I think there is a better ROI on making the intent of your collaborators clear, such as with cursor/mouse indicators. If I can see you're editing a number, I can know to steer clear, or at least be ready for the consequences.
Looks good, I'm going to try it out. Can you keep the left sidebar static as the page scrolls down?

http://searchyt.twittrank.info
Music and metrics
A collection of memorable quotes from yesterday's Startup School
Greek Ferries
For me I interpreted it as him being somewhat conscious as the feeling of your body dying comes over you and you pass. I have no idea what that would actually feel like, or if that's what happened/is possible, but the thought of being awake and experiencing that feeling gives me chills.
In my experience there are vastly more ATMs than bank desks. There are ATMs in shops and bars and on many street corners.ATMs are also available 24/7 not 10-4.
Doesn't it also mean that every person who has been extorted rather than is a part of the group will fear for their life? Doesn't that make them more likely to talk to law enforcement and tell everything they know in exchange for protection, knowing they can get killed if they're outed and are free?
Application deadline for Imagine K12 today
Raspberry Pi: An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte
This post reminded me of some discussions I've had with a friend about open source. He always says that open source software is written by geeks for geeks.

His point was that the software might be free but there was too high a cost struggling with difficult installs and ugly user interfaces. You can stand out if you bridge that gap.

Did you catch what Matt Mullenweeg said yesterday at Startup School why WordPress succeeded in the early days? He said it was because WP had the quickest and easiest install of any blog software.

Bringing tech we use every day to a wider audience is a viable business model.
roelof botha, elon musk....not nil.
Pretty cool.

Would would be even better would be if:

a) Git diff/merge gets ability to look into zip/archive files, treating them as sub-trees of files. diff should be not too tricky. Merge is more awkward, because you have to create a new zip/archive which is compatible with the format of the parents.

b) Git diff/merge gets ability to work well on XML files, and be XML-element-based, not line-based.

With those, full version control with branching and merging of ODF files, plus many other interesting file types, falls out almost "naturally".
The success of a startup is commonly viewed to be a combination of the concept and the execution. Of course, the "concept" is rarely a singular thing---a company often needs an initial niche product to score desperate early adopters, and then it may need a more general vision to break into larger markets. Was/is Facebook a social network for college students? A social graph? A platform for social games?

Silicon Valley seems like a good multiplier on execution, as well as a place where it is easier (and more expected) to increase the original product vision. VCs insist on the team trying to take over a $100B+ market, many top infrastructure engineers, mobile developers, UX people, and so on won't stay if they don't think the equity will be worth anything, and there is a huge amount of highly mobile web talent. More talent breeds more ideas, expanding the concept and improving the execution.

Could Facebook have scaled their engineering team to handle 2x-5x the number of users every year (with maybe 1m users on day one of the company), with a huge portion of those users viewing the website every day, without being in a place with (a) tons of web talent and (b) a culture where leaving an established job to work at a web startup was reasonable?

In terms of upper level management, half of Facebook's C-level executives appear to be ex-Google. Could Facebook have gotten that level of operational and advertising expertise in Boston?

To answer your question directly, I suspect there are huge recruiting, operational, and business development challenges to running a large scale consumer web startup outside of Silicon Valley. That said, it is hard to know how that would impact any particular company, or any particular space (e.g., location-based services).
You are not the customer. You are not a shareholder. You're not even a user. So why should they care what you think of them? They're using your (very) public data to provide value to their actual users. I don't think that's such an odious idea.
Richard Muller, Global Warming Skeptic, Now Agrees Climate Change Is Real
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Don't blame the Panda for your site's poor keyword rankings
Perth app developer Filter Squad downloads $1.1 million investment
Apple hits out at German café over logo
I think it's highly detrimental to peace to equate "bringing sensitive government documents and other material to light" with making the world a better place.

I agree that it very often is, but if we make this equation, then yet another term, "peace" will have zero meaning, co-opted by those who will push their own agenda by making it sound like that of others.
I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds

Apropos Bill Gates and puzzle solving, http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm
It's odious because they refuse to remove info about you if you ask them to. There is no legal obligation to, but most people believe that they should respond to user requests
What is the actual breakdown of costs for a university? In my experience at mostly public schools, it seems like a majority of the costs are in administration and buildings. Actual undergraduate education is an afterthought. So there likely is a lot of fat to cut at most schools.

Not that schools would cut cost even with competition from a $10,000 total cost university. The cost of college has risen so much because you need a degree to get a decent job today. It is supply and demand. And students will always choose to take on debt for the big name school rather than save money with the cheaper school.

What is interesting is that most big name schools don't seem to be putting all of that extra money into bettering undergraduate education.
my answer: yes yes yes, a million times yes. I found this article to be spot on and completely agree with everything the author says: http://andyrutledge.com/web-design-is-product-design.php
That picture was not the least bit awe inspiring to you? That someone along time ago moved huge masses of stone and created something like that?

Its not just me though, apparently a lot of other people liked it too, and it made it to #2 on hn:classic. Why continue this argument? Even in their hayday the big tech aggregators (/. , kuro5hin, etc) had posts that were not OMG, ROFLScale! I wrote a webserver in Clojure+Assembly that runs on my thermostat!
I'm not sure how this would work..
They would really need full compatibility with android for this to make any sense or they will be fighting an uphill battle for adoption.

Most of the desktop apps shipped with current ubuntu would work very badly on a tablet. I really can't imagine Unity working on a smartphone at all without some major changes.

Do canonical really have the rescources to work on this many fronts?
Come say 'Hi!' at the next Selenium meetup! :-)
1. It is not a user request, because you are not a user. The real users want your data. So they have it.

2. It's not personal information. It's your twitter handle and some info about your "network" that anyone can get from the Twitter API.
Costs about this in New Zealand for everyone. State subsidised. Perhaps a touch more. And longer degrees are obviously more. Living costs excluded, although there is a small student allowance to help out.
As pg pointed out, everybody should be concerned with creating more wealth instead of creating more jobs.

There are economies where are a lot of jobs (low unemployment) but very few wealth and it doesn't seem to stick regardless of what they do. You probably don't want that.

As long as you do your job of creating wealth you can hope somebody else to work at improving wealth distribution process.

Most of programming either creates wealth or conserves wealth, which is a good thing.
Why So Few? Hmmm?
"You slowly replace your friends with "better" ones"..."will make you more of who you want to be"

I believe the talented Mr Ripley used this strategy to good effect. There's a saying about never trust anyone who doesn't have at least one friend left from childhood.
Indiana Student Medical Insurance
Happy Halloween - Do you get this costume?
Note one of the comments to the article at the bottom quotes Kurt Vonnegut:

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/3786
I think the reason why we are drawn to simple things is down to, among other reasons, something that I've observed with how the human mind fills in blanks.

Ever noticed how someone looks attractive from behind but then they turn round and are not so much? It seems to me that when our brain fills in the gaps it assumes that the subject is aesthetically pleasing. (Well, either our brain defaults to expecting something to look nice, or it fills in the blanks with an average and we find the average to be attractive.)

So coming back to simplistic design and why it evokes a positive emotional response from us: Perhaps it's because with a simple design our brain has more 'blanks' to fill in.

If anyone knows of a name for this phenomenon and further information exploring it I would love to learn about it. Same goes for if what I'm saying is nonsense and there is an alternate theory disproving mine!