skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even in large cities, availability of wifi can be very hit or miss.

Based on my completely anecdotal data from a few different cities, the wifi situation was actually quite a bit better a couple of years ago than it is today. Granted, the number of wifi points you can see keeps growing, but the percentage of them that are locked down has also increased, so there's actually less points available.

Part of this is people getting wise to security, which is overall a good thing (if inconvenient for a harmless wifi poacher that just wants to check his own email). But increasingly this is also due to retail places putting limits on or eliminating their wifi due to realizing it tends to result in people who are more loiterers than customers.
I too get snippy when basic functionality doesn't work and the all of the latest commits in the stream do things like add colors or use VT100 line drawing characters to put boxes around something on a serial terminal.

That being said I understand how difficult it can be to contribute positively to some OSS projects. Tired and perhaps jaded core team members responding "Hey if you don't like it just create your own <xyz tool>." don't help.

The Selenium guys are a great example of an OSS project that is both open to outside input (even from relative noobs) and focussed on the right priorities (correctness over speed for example).
Crowdfunding could spark a culture shift. Right now much of society is uninspired and doesn't think about building things or making things better because they know they have little chance of getting the funding needed to make their ideas happen.

Making crowdfunding available to the masses could inspire a culture of possibilities that leads to more ideas and hard work from people whom would normally be watching TV or playing video games.

And this cultural shift could reach beyond entrepreneurship. Joseph de Maistre said, "In a Democracy, people get the government they deserve".

Right now many of us are frustrated with the political spectacle. But the media is simply giving the public what it wants -- entertaining candidates, not the best and the brightest (http://www.quora.com/Why-are-Americans-so-fond-of-presidenti...).

In a 1996 Wired Magazine interview, Steve Jobs said:

"When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

Inspiring a widespread culture of ideas could lead to a mindset where people care more about truth and the purity of ideas than entertainment. Crowdfunding could change our culture, change our values, and change the world.
There are a lot of things required to make a modern spy satellite that I know nothing about. Saying there is a special clearance related to that information is limiting but so is lacking the engineering knowledge to understand it even if someone where to tell it to me. Ditto, sonar, atomic bombs, jet engines, tank armor etc. But, I also lack the historic understanding of the middle east politics to understand a transcript of high level diplomatic talks. Toss in the classic military issue of troop movements etc which are just as meaningless to me but still dangerous. And you are left with a huge pile of information would be valuable to a wide range of institutions AND totally useless to most people out there.

So, while there are implications of need to know they are IMO less significant than capable of understanding.
The reason to divide it up into many categories is to compartmentalize the information. The best example I've heard is take an NSA Cryptography expert. Their clearance level needs to be extremely high. Another extremely high level clearance would be for the engineer responsible for turning the key in a nuclear silo. While both of these people have a need to know extremely secretive things, there is no reason for them to know anything about the other's work. Thus the compartmentalization into 15-20 categories.
>Different culture but I haven't seen China nor South Korea fail so far :).

It's also the reason they haven't made any major inventions or advances. The yes-man culture is positively noxious to innovative thought, and if you look at Korea right now, they're trying to loosen up that culture so that they can innovate and don't get stuck in a role of constantly receiving secondhand innovation from the US/Europe.
Couldn't agree more. The design motif gives me the impression of a manifesto, with a call to arms. In spite of the actual content.
Simple Marketing Tips for Retailers
I guess my feeling is, why automate something that doesn't need to happen at all? If you need to see your whitespace, it should be trivial* to make it visible. Thus, I agree with the comment about brackets being no easier to count than spaces.

*Assuming you're using a reasonable editor.
You need to trick an account into accepting three fake friends, since those users will receive the code to change the password. Hardly seems like obvious security flaw, more like a long, complicated piece of social engineering. Which is what all hackers do....

http://www.hackersonlineclub.com/hack-facebook-account
Death to Pennies [video]
Ridiculous Facebook Fail
Two out of three ain't bad.
Of course they want to make money though. They are a business. However, they've forgone more profitable business models in the past in favor of tighter control and they'll likely continue to do that.
Kind of a stretch, an elaborate ploy all to merely "friend" someone.

Like, "Car thieves who want to steal your car can construct an exact replica of your street, house, and garage, so that you're actually parking right in the thief's carpark, security researchers reported today."
What happened with the Facebook Timelines?
Not sure if your question is serious?

Here's the obscure blowups that were filed in November alone;

https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1793
https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1790
https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1809
https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1785
https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1801
https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1770
https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1727
https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/1654
It's funny that you recommend a twin 650 or mono 600 as a starter bike. Not so long ago, these would be considered big boy bikes, suicidal for a beginner. I wonder what changed, the simple availability of bigger bikes or the improvement of bike safety ?

As for me, I'd recommend a tiny 250cc or even 125cc for a starter. A year or two later, you can always get a bigger one safely.
I haven't read the contract, but I'll go out on a limb and speculate a bit. The article mentions "copyright assignment." This suggests to me that perhaps the contract assigns copyright on all future reviews to the dentist. E.g. something along these lines:

"If you write a review of our services, the copyright on said review will be immediately assigned to us."

As the patient's lawyer notes, there's a good chance that fair use and unconscionability (two different doctrines) would render such a term unenforceable.

Again, this is just speculation based on a hint in the article.
The #1 University in the U.S. for spinning off startups may surprise you
I agree their needs to be a way for a mass of small investors to "negotiate" a valuation and terms but setting up "qualified venture capital" firms as a proxy is not the way to go. Who qualifies the venture capital companies?

How about the terms are posted and a dutch auction takes place to fill the round. In a dutch auction every potential investor who bids over the price required to fill the round gets in at the lowest price.
I wanna try these recipes of chicken soup
"inherently public"

Exactly.

The ideas of a "Facebook" _as Zuckerberg has constructed it_, i.e. a website on the open internet, and "privacy" are incompatible.
To limit the ability of scam artists setting up sham companies and fleecing inexperienced investors. Presumably, if your net worth is pretty high, than you probably have enough financial savvy to spot these scams (although plenty of wealthy individuals manage to get fleeced).
Herbal Tea and the Many Benefits of Green Tea
You need to trick an account into adding three fake friends as "trusted friends", a feature that most people do not know about or use. This is much harder getting someone to friend three fake accounts.
Heroku launches Postgres as a standalone service
I believe they have something in the contract a patient signs before services are provided which turn over copyright to any reviews.
That makes me shudder. Security footage "compressed" this way wouldn't stand up in court (I hope); did the guy on the tape really do that, or did the algorithm just fill it in?
Pygmalion effect
If anyone has seen the comedy series "Yes, Prime Minister", they'll often understand how a leader can be manipulated by his mandarins through selective disclosure of uncorroborated information, present consequences couched in politically unacceptable terms, force the hand by setting the agenda.

This is especially true if dissenting opinion is filtered before it gets handed to the President etc.

I apologize if the following sounds a little leftist. I only intend to make a point about how mistakes come to be made, and what governments may need to do to arrive at better decisions:

Over in Australia, an ASIO analyst chose to resign rather than see Australia join the Iraq war on the basis of WMD pretexts. (Andrew Wilke is now a Member of Parliament).

The trillion dollar mistake US made was due to influencers being able to feed super-classified information to the willingly gullible people.

It is not easy for a President to call bullshit. I believe the reason is because there isn't sufficient accountability that is built into the system. In days past, members of the royalty are expected to fight in wars. Even during Roman days, only landowners could join the army. The appearance of the professional soldiers lowered the personal risk of the people in power who rush into war.

The Chinese emperors surrounded themselves with eunuchs thinking that the absence of offspring give some assurance that these people will be less biased, but it didn't work out that well. Influence is still peddled, particularly because power itself is very addictive on its own.

Some cultures resort to shamans to try to get an outcome that is independent of any one person's viewpoint. The most interesting one that I came across is the use of ibogaine, where people have a "spiritual" moment, where they see the big picture instead of worrying about themselves.

For a complex society to survive and transcend humanity's limitations, we may need to create a supermind. Some elements of this already exist. One is the idea of "opensource intelligence" that can be used to corroborate otherwise secret accounts.
Why doesn't he simply offer money? If I needed to survive, I'd offer something like all my savings, plus 50% of my net salary for 10 years.
Alembic: Python / SQL Alchemy db migrations
Yes, I read your article. I think I understand where you're coming from, but it's completely circular. All you need to do is create another mostly impermeable strata. People do this all the time, and it has been wildly successful so far.

In that sense, original foundations don't matter. But, of course, they do, 'cause you had to build a new strata, right? Round and round...

And, in the passing of time, you can simply replace the underlying foundations with something more unified. This, again, happens all the time. CPUs gain SIMD instructions and new addressing modes, VM support, etc. I fully expect, while nothing like DESCRIPTOR, more hardware support for higher level GC to come if its worth is proven.

The input device remark was probably a poor analogy, but it is somewhat similar. "Input devices matter". Well, duh, yeah. But it certainly is not a good summary of an argument to replace the mouse and keyboard with an generalized gesture recognition device. :-) The mouse was an addition to the keyboard, not a reconstruction of it. If we find that, say, speech is better at some things, we don't propose to take away everything else. We build on top, because, while it may offend the sensibilities of some -- you can fix the warts later.

You're right to say that we're all working on huge 8bit micros to an extent -- but beyond the historical implications, it's circular to think that really matters. It's why Alan Kay now sounds like a grumpy old man, as Raskin does, as most people who moan about lisp machines and the DESCRIPTOR architecture. Today, I can run emulations of these things far, far faster than the originals and the software on my box is far more capable than the software people were using then. The real world favors cutting away/polishing a turd into a smooth stone, not piling up someone's perfect diamonds -- because restarting from scratch every time you discover something new is wasted work.
I believe you already addressed your second concern. For your first concern, an individual can make an assessment of the VCs and investors already tied to the project instead of the entrepreneur.
I've seen this subject come up before, and someone said that Medical Justice sells themselves pretty hard to medical professionals -- sometime places will sign on without really understanding all the details.
Is Siri pro-life?
Sunglasses and the Nose Factor
Fundamental constants are not constant or maybe they are, we don't really know
Yet unlike building said exact replica, this could conceivably be automated and executed against an untold number of users at once.
I thought Cosmic Panda was supposed to be the future of the YouTube-interface? If not, what is it?
This would most likely reduce the number of people who would screen themselves. I wouldn't undergo a possibly horrible medical procedure for $100,000, but I might do it to save someone's life and feel like a good person.

For further reading, look into social norms vs. market norms, especially the example of the Israeli day care: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=180117 (paywall)
Ars has not been a good website for some time now, at least a couple of years. They have squandered their future, but I dunno, I haven't checked but were they acquired by Gawker at some point? It would explain a lot.
> 30% is always far less than the losses of a traditional website sales funnel, potentially by 2 orders of magnitude. The App Store simply sells more software.

I don't understand how your maths works. You are asserting that a traditional website sale costs 3000%, thus losing the seller 29 x the price of the item? Obviously I am misunderstanding you but I don't know how to make sense of what you are saying.

I'm always curious about the people who say 30% is a good deal. I sell software directly over the web. PayPal charges me something like 0.50 + 2.5%. I do host my web site but I would have a web site anyway. Bandwidth associated with sales is negligible, support is a cost but again, Apple wouldn't do that for me. 30% is bigger than the cut I give to generic resellers who actually come to me to ask to list my software in their stores. I can see that Apple's store can increase volume (but then, we have nothing to compare it to - we will never know how well iOS software might have sold without the app store) - but I don't see how it's anything other than extremely expensive in terms of a way to sell software.
A good friend of mine, Eric Drew, survived two failed fully oblative bone marrow transplants (partial match) and was out of options, so he "qualified" for an experimental "Cord Blood Transplant" which cured his Acute Lyphoblastic Leukimia. I believe it was done through the University of Wisconsin, but I'm uncertain if the procedure has gotten out of research trials. If Amit runs out of options, he should look into it.

EDIT: I do know the fancy medical terms, but I don't pretend to really understand what they mean. You need a real serious medical education to understand this stuff.
I believe $30,000 has been offered by various people, starting with Seth Godin offering $10,000 and a spotlight on his blog to anyone who's a match and goes through with the procedure.
Whenever people suggest that Facebook users are morons for actively using the service, they're empowering Zuckerberg to continue his mission. The problem isn't stupidity or even ignorance, but rather Facebook's data mining crusade that's fueled by a veritable carte blanche: contracts of adhesion.

Contracts of adhesion prevent us from negotiating which services we receive at what price. We can either accept Facebook's terms or not use the service. Period. Usually, this isn't a problem, but Facebook started off small. It grew into a service with network effects strong enough to actually raise a viable argument that we agree to the terms of service under duress and therefore never manifest assent.

It's a unique legal situation: generally, people offended by a company's practices can boycott. However, Facebook has turned us into the product, and while we can leave, our friends might not. The underlying purpose served by Facebook requires its community, a community that grew before establishing the invidious privacy practices.

The technological difficulty of building a Facebook replacement is compounded by challenge of convincing not just one user to switch, but enough of them to guarantee a tipping point. Not discounting the technological difficulty, I think more of the focus should be on an "exit" plan from Facebook. Google+ nailed the technology, but completely blew their Facebook evacuation plan.
Because that is illegal. In the US, there is the National Organ Transplant Act which forbids paying for organs. In this law, bone marrow is considered an organ.

> It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce.

> [...]

> The term ''human organ'' means the human (including fetal) kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, bone marrow, cornea, eye, bone, and skin or any subpart thereof and any other human organ (or any subpart thereof, including that derived from a fetus) specified by the Secretary of Health and Human Services by regulation.

-- http://www.livingdonorassistance.org/documents/NOTA.pdf
guys do the same thing.

Replace "$1200 a month in fancy dinners" with sex.
Microsoft has in fact done the same sort of thing in Windows Update, though it denied it. Certainly nothing as brazen as a keylogger, but in 2003 it was caught phoning home a list of all installed software, and hardware identifiers, in an SSL connection.
Can one stumble over a bot?
Facebook friendships have always been symmetrical.
Cubicles and gated communities or open campuses and walkable cities?
It sounds like you're equating basic social engineering to an elaborate, large-scale, nearly impossible architectural trick. Are you trying to discount the effectiveness or feasibility of social engineering? Social engineering requires far less effort that your proposed analogy. I doubt if it took this guy more than half an hour to do the "hard work," which is just duplicating a profile and cross-referencing friends from two social networks.

I agree that accidentally friending a fake account probably won't lead to much further online problems: the trusted friends example used in the article is far-fetched (and other HN comments indicate it's complete bogus), and they're not going to get your credit card info or account passwords. However, it's still a privacy concern. Anyone from an estranged ex-lover to a private investigator could get information like home address, vacation times, etc.
Mr. Data Converter: javascript data converter
Sorry if the truth hurts.
Roger’s New Racket for 2012 – Wilson ProStaff SixOne 90 BLX
Not sure why you were downvoted. They are awful, that is why they are losing money.
Networking Introduction Strategies -- Should You Focus on Pain Or Gain?
I don't know why so many people are cavalier about this. Proper capitalization is part of proper spelling, which is important for clear communication. Whether it's 37Signals, Github, or Javascript, it irks me every time.

This cavalier attitude is so entrenched that attempts to correct it are sometimes even met with hostility, which on HN manifests itself as downvotes. Apparently there are those who feel that comments on this subject (e.g., this one or its parent) don't add to the discussion. And yet, I sometimes stop reading otherwise interesting articles simply because they exceed my misspelling or typo threshold—reading badly edited copy is unpleasant, and the lack of attention to detail undermines its credibility. I'd much prefer to avoid the problem altogether. In that spirit, I'd like to offer some surefire advice on how to prevent this kind of nitpicking: Get it right in the first place. Anyone who can develop awesome web apps or write an optimizing compiler can surely spell 37signals, GitHub, and JavaScript correctly as well.
Would it be possible for someone interested in the money to get tested and ask for money in case of a match? Although I suppose the moral pressure would be quite high if you are already tested.
Make it an opt-in feature for the moment and maybe make it the default for CS 2.0 or some other milestone.
He has a point. Whitespace is definitely significant to C's lexer, if not it's parser. When people say "significant whitespace" they're implicitly talking about "implicitly significant to the parser as well as the lexer."
Yes, but apparently people need constant reminders Facebook users are essentially getting a service for free, so they're not consumers in the same sense as someone who pays for a service and is dissatisfied by the treatment hey receive at the hands of the vendor.
"Fast enough" pegs my CPU usage at 100%.
I'll be interested to see if this works...
Amen brotha! Here's to a world where engineers are lead by engineers who lead by example, and not by VCs with law or business degrees.
And how much did you pay Facebook for the privilege of using their service?
I am a south asian male living in the US.I tried to sign up as a donor.Here is my experience.

>Your password needs to be between 8 and 15 characters long, must contain at least 1 number and 1 letter and cannot contain spaces.

Seriously WTF....I am sure half of the people who wanted to sign up did not just for this bs!

Okay chill...password abcd......

> In the past 5 years have you taken money or drugs in exchange for sex?.. (Men only) In the past 5 years have you had sex, even once with another male?

Half of the people who passed stage 1 probably said "fuck it" at this stage.I am close but am willing to go through this for amit.

> SSN? Driver License Number ? HomePhone ? Current Mailing Address? Permanent Address ? Employer Information ?

Should I also give you my bank account username/passwords?At this point I am really mad!..Luckily the SSN and DL fields are not mandatory

> First Contact Information ? Spouse Information ? Second Contact Information

Grrr....what the fuck!

> Race Information? Not Hispanic or Latino ? Black ? Asian ?

Wtf...take my DNA and figure it out!

After a cpl other irritating forms I am finally able to get a kit sent to my address.

-My advice to Amit's friends would be to please do something to improve the signup workflow.

-Also I have my genome phenotyped with 23andMe.I am totally willing to share it with Amit's Friends or Amit.I am sure a lot of other south asians on 23andMe would be willing too but there is no way to do this!
GE to Hire 400 Software Engineers