skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a registrar I would like to point out that this is a good reason to not have privacy protection on your domain.

It raises the chance of losing your domain greatly. (Even though you can argue that having your email displayed exposes an attack vector).

Public info makes it much easier to recover a domain. And proper security on the email is required as always obviously.

I've helped several people recover domains by going to contacts I have at ICANN. Not having public info doesn't give me what I need to make a case. It's a non-starter many times. And it just confuses the issue for you as well when you are trying to correct things.

Registrars (we don't offer privacy by the way) want privacy because it is a) something they can offer and charge for and b) allows them to lock the customer in and create a barrier to exit. c) Many of them do this by changing ownership to them for the domain and giving you a contract that you are the beneficial owner. Not good for you. You want and need to be owner according to whois. (Read this again.)

If you want a private domain use a po box or a work address etc or your uncles's address. If you are a business you absolutely have no reason to have privacy (and many many businesses do because they have been sold some bullshit on this with respect to spam).
Way to assume every founder is a straight guy.
I think the point is there is a romantic ideal of building product first, just make it cool, no ads, don't focus on revenue. If you need cash, raise a venture round.

But that actually puts a lot of strange stresses on a company, because the need to find a exit for a multiply of the money they raised.

In this case, the company figured out how to monetize and attract users, but not retain them (a lot of churn). Now they are trying to build a stickier, more engaging product.
Ironic, considering they're a Canadian company.
If you're all presuming that EC2 is some magical pixie dust for reducing the costs of running a large site, that's not the case. We had ~10 EC2 boxes and 15 managed servers at Contegix, CDN, Dynect, email service provider and a few more services thrown in.

It's not any less expensive today because those numbers I gave are current numbers.
Something is wrong with this... Color Fail  CNet Technology News
YouTube Redesigned with a Focus on Channels and Social
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Napster Is Finally Shutting Down
Do you spend all day scheming ways to exploit people? Fuck no, get over it already.

This is true, but a bit misleading. As an engineer at Zynga, you spend your time developing to spec, not scheming. The game designers are the ones that actually spend all day scheming ways to exploit people.

I think the stigma mostly comes from the fact that so many of Zynga's users hate their products. It's not really because of the engineering talent there, it's just how the organization works, but still, it's a stigma that makes sense.
Wow, this was really fast. Congrats to the team.
Google's Navigation History From 1998 - 2011
Introduction to UIAutomation
Donors of bone marrow can now be paid
It occurs to me that if GoogleBot is executing client javascript you could take advantage of Google's resources for computational tasks.

For instance, let me introduce you to SETI@GoogleBot. SETI@GoogleBot is much like SETI@home except it takes advantage of GoogleBot's recently discovered capabilities. Including the SETI@GoogleBot script into your web pages will cause (after the page load event) the page to fetch a chunk of data from the SETI servers via ajax request and proceed to process that data in JavaScript. Eventually, once the data has been processed it will be posted back to the SETI servers (via another ajax request) and then repeat the cycle. Thus enabling you, for the small cost of a page load, have GoogleBot process your SETI data and enhance your SETI@home score.

Obviously, this isn't a new idea (using page loads to process data via JavaScript) but it is an interesting application to exploit GoogleBot's likely vast resources.
Seems like a one-man effort as opposed to the team (or maybe I'm wrong).
DIDO -- Future of WiFi
We've recently had to do something similar, and I appreciate the transparency around this. Thanks for sharing your experiences and intentions with your customers, it's a good template for how others can gracefully make decisions like this.
Some of the best:

- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
- Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
- Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity
Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial
This is interesting timing because of the Amit Gupta social media attempt to get a donor. Now, Amit is allowed to offer money for the bone marrow.
Why pick on Heroku for this? Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and basically every other tech company do the same thing.
FYI: I'm still having that issue...
Doesn't do anything? They sell things. Directly. What more do you need to do to be a business?
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson: a review
One more great reason to set up two-step verification for your Gmail and Google Apps accounts.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-secu...
The 93% mentioned is far beyond the expectations of most. Prior to the 20th century (at least in the upper class) a child was taught every thing from Greek and Latin to water color painting without regard to 'talent'. Examine the life of Ada Augusta. While there is no doubt that she was talented, her studies were not predicated on that talent. Today most people foreclose on what they might become accomplished at because they say things like 'I can't draw a straight line' or 'whistle a note' or similar such. Again they have no understanding of just how good that 93% level is. I can't teach you to engrave as well as Rembrandt, but I can teach you to engrave as well as the majority of professionals.
Data caps a "crude and unfair tool" for easing online congestion
$ python3
Python 3.2.2 (default, Nov 21 2011, 05:01:42)
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
>>> print('hello world') # <-- Unicode!
I agree on this one... just because Google CAN do it doesn't mean they will.

On that note, I am personally of the belief that the fragments are part of Google's learning/training process for their spiders.

If they sniff the XHR traffic on every domain they encounter a HashBang they can learn lots about the use of AJAX and the types of content being exposed via AJAX.
Node.js modules you should know about: optimist
Hundreds. Please stop diluting the startup term with your hobby projects.
If you don't practice, it doesn't matter how much talent you have. Not only won't you be the best, you won't even be good.

At least in the context of this study, amount of practice is the dominant term.
Wow can't believe this is still going. I had a chance to work with the original creator, Ken Stanley, during a summer internship at a University of Texas media lab. We had a ton of fun training up teams of robots -- my favorite was making a team of cowards that would cower behind walls when they would see a turret.

This project and the original used a variant of his rtNeat neural network software:

http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?rtNEAT

Since then he's moved onto the University of Florida and created some new variants. One that is particularly interesting to me is cgNeat, for creating evolving, procedural content for games. It was used to evolve new weapons and particle systems for a diablo-like loot system for this game:

http://gar.eecs.ucf.edu/
A very good point. Personally, I use Gandi.net as my registrar, and I use their privacy protection; however, they very specifically keep my name listed as the owner, and just provide a forwarding email address and a dummy postal address and phone. Gandi mentions this ownership issue as the reason, and points out the implications of other registrars which list their own name instead.
The article and the conclusions of the underlying study bring up more questions than answers for me. Such as:

1) Does the importance of talent vary by domain?

2) They show working memory matters. Does working memory matter by different amounts in different domains?

3) What other "talent" factors work across different domains?

4) To what extent does having natural talent in an area lead to the development of poor work habits (because things come so easily) and thus long-term underperformance?

I don't have answers, but I believe that drawing firm conclusions about the talent/practice question is premature.
Vitiligo Cure...?
Is there any example of a site having their dynamically generated* disqus comments indexed by google? Disqus is probably one of the most common form of ajax-generated content on the web, so if this were the case that googlebot was actively indexing dynamic content like this, I would expect to see disqus supported.

* disqus has an API to allow you to display disqus comments serverside, so some disqus implementations - think mashable is one - will have comments indexed without the aid of Javascript.
I'm one of the students from UofT that helped with this project. Basically, my group for one of our Software Engineering courses had the assignment of helping with this enormous task. We didn't finish (this was two years ago), but we did make a lot of progress (fixing bugs to get the tests to pass in both versions). It was one hell of a goal so it's great to see this finally done!
The iPad IS the new IE6
http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2011/01/ipad-is-the-new-ie6/
Facebook To Open Engineering Office In NYC
I just need to add my voice to the chorus: OAuth really, really sucks.

I don't understand what problem it solves. A malicious app (native or web) can find a way to get your password, period. A well-behaved app can have your password and do no harm. And, practically speaking, I don't know any real person who's had a problem that has been solved by the existence of OAuth.

OAuth is just a massive pain in the rear end.
Their brand of "psuedo-entertainment" is in the same category as telemarketing, spam email, infomercials. I can't imagine anybody who works there goes home at the end of the day being proud of finding a new way to rope people into clicking a button 700 times in a row.
Guess which division has the CEO's ear!

It's like having an online Office suite that will only work from computers running your company's desktop OS.
Smartphones Arms Race (Stephen Fry)
This is really backwards thinking. The regulation of 'Engineer' has not grown to support the concept of the modern world. The laws in Canada were enacted as a result non-qualified people designing bridges and buildings that fell over. At the time almost all 'Engineering' actively had a life safety component, the same is far from true today.

Those fields that still life safety components are of course regulated, primarily through PE licensing but there certain is no reason not to properly use the term 'Engineer' when its due.

For what its worth my degree is in electrical engineering and have never even considered getting a PE license, its not applicable in the fields I work in.
Facebook to Open Engineering Office in New York City in 2012
Ask HN: Soliciting UC Berkeley Grad students for Steve Blank's course at Haas
Posted using a throwaway account. Email: throwaway4hn@gmail.com

What: Steve Blank is offering his Lean Launchpad Entrepreneurship course at Haas in the Spring '12 Semester, for which teams of some MBA students and some Grad Engineering students at UC Berkeley need to apply and if selected will work on the idea, including launching it. Each team needs to have both EWMBA and Grad Engineering students.

About us: We're a team of two Haas EWMBA 2nd year students (Evening-Weekend MBA). Both of us are Engineers and actively code in our day jobs.
We have an idea of our own and have been doing preliminary investigation on it, but are open to other ideas also.

Requirement: Total team size is 4, so ideally we would like to team up with 2 Grad Engineering students. Coding experience is required since we will need to develop a product, though you don't necessarily have to be EECS. One Engineer and one Design student would also be great.

Process:
If interested please contact me at: throwaway4hn@gmail.com and we can talk more, both on or off campus, to see if there is any interest/synergy.
We're totally fine if you have any ideas, and can evaluate all of them and pick the best. If you don't have an idea, that is fine too.
That's all this is really. The left Y axis applies to the sets that involve an average score, the right Y axis applies to pickup ratio only.

That said, what is a pickup ratio? Some sort of measure of extra votes over time?
"Sweden wants everyone to think they hate men."

What does this mean?
And a piece in the Atlantic[1] says that actually, Obama's threat to Veto this bill is only, "... not because he is alarmed by its civil-liberties implications, but because the extraordinary powers it would hand him are in some cases less sweeping and more constraining than what he has asserted for himself via frustratingly secret Office of Legal Counsel memos. (For example, it would force him to keep some War on Terror detainees in military custody.)"

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/congress...
I suspect that most advocates of radical copyright reform would draw a distinction between commercial and non-commercial infringement. I would also treat different media differently, so e.g. software may have either stricter or more relaxed guidelines than music and movies.
Anyone on HN a quadcopter aficionado? I would like to get into this hobby, and am eager to learn more.
Other follow-up articles, previously submitted to HN:

"Sorry, Talented, Striving Matters," by Jonathan Wai, a researcher affiliated with the Study of Exceptional Talent,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3283300

"Talent, Practice, Scientists, and Journalists: Can't We All Just Get Along?" by Scott Barry Kaufman, co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3279085

and

"Is High Ability Necessary for Greatness?" also by Scott Barry Kaufman.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576
Who does the GOP want?  Anyone but Romney...
Not familiar with OAuth, but the concern about NSURLConnection seems a bit silly. Create an NSObject subclass, give it a NSURLConnection and a block ivar. Set it as the delegate of its own NSURLConnection. Setting up a "store" object that handles the preparation of NSURLConnection instances is also useful. Have the store keep track of all working NSURLConnections (which gives you the ability to cancel easily, too).

If you are using NSURLConnection out of the box and writing the delegate methods over and over again in every view controller or store object, you are doing something wrong.
Consejos de viajes
I don't think a comparison to EA and Blizzard is appropriate. You'd likely find a better indicator of value by comparing to something like Dave & Buster's, which sold for ~$600M last year. D&B is aimed at wholesome entertainment for adults. Zynga is targeting much of the same market with a focus on women. EA and Blizzard mostly produce games for males 16-35.

The main difference between D&B and Zynga is that Zynga is available to any one with a computer or smartphone, while D&B franchises are only built in cities of 500k+ people. That difference might create a multiplier on the order of 10. $600M * 10 = $6B. So $7B in valuation doesn't seem that ridiculous to me.
+1 for namecheap
Ask HN: Android developers, would you use a website to beta test your apps?
Hey all, I've been working on a website that will allow app developers to upload beta versions of their applications and either allow the public to test them or a set group of users. I'm also developing a framework that developers can easily add to their betas to license it (only allow users who are allowed to test it within the beta period), gather usage information and report crashes during the beta period.

My question to you guys is would you find a use for this sort of thing and if so, what would you like it to be able to do?
I find that simple SVG animations frequently push up the CPU, but Canvas can do much better. I wouldn't be surprised if this same demo used only 2-3% of your CPU in Canvas.

WebGL should deliver another order-of-magnitude speed increase, but I'm holding off for another 6 months or so for things to stabilize before diving into the 3d context.
I'm very glad to see that the mod API is now top priority. They've made similar claims in the past, but this sounds more serious.

The future of this game is definitely all about mods, custom maps, and new game formats. There is tremendous potential, some of which has already been realized, but only through elaborate unofficial hacks.
I'd argue that best practice in web development is not requiring JavaScript to load a page, but I'm sure that issue has been done to death in the past.
"The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing."

Hate to burst the bubble, but this is a pretty stupid conclusion if you're trying to advocate for piracy. People who download more tend to buy more. Why is this surprising? Obviously, the people who download more are the same people who care more about entertainment, so of course these are also the people who'll pay more.

That is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion of whether piracy is a net benefit. It's mixing up causation with correlation. Download more pirate content is not causing people to go to more concerts - the people who would "naturally" go to more concerts are the same people who would "naturally" buy more music, but are now simply downloading more music.

Note: Or at least, that's another theory, which is also the correct one in my opinion. My point is that this fact doesn't prove in any way that piracy is good.
How is CarrierIQ worse? Has it been proven that anything malicious or questionable was done with any data that might have been collected?
A primary question, of course, is how malleable working memory is to practice effects. The experimental research shows that improvement in domain-specific working memory is very malleable under deliberate practice.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html

http://www.psy.cmu.edu/chasepapers/Acquisition%20of%20a%20Me...
It's freemium, there's a Pro version you can upgrade to
Just In Case Anyone Needs Some Motivation
Impressive! Is python 2.5 still supported? In my experience (with Tornado) it's difficult to get a single codebase to work on 2.x and 3.x without using some of the features introduced in 2.6.
We put boxes on the walls of subway tunnels that, when the train passes, look like movie screens to riders. We sell ads on the displays on a monthly basis and share revenue with transit authority.

Some videos here: http://www.submediaworld.com/submediaworld/Submedia_Tunnel_A...

I also make art with the medium, but that's another story.
Will Jobs biography trigger a 'jerk explosion'?
This would be great. Shipping is incredibly painful (in terms of cost and time) when ordering from anyone but Amazon...
> My personal favorite example of this is Google Translate, which is one of the most accurate machine translating tools on the planet. Google almost sacked it because it was not profitable, and had it not been for public outcry we may have lost access to this technology altogether.

I kind of missed this "public outcry", when did it happen? And if Google listens to public outcry, why did we lose Google Code Search?
Profitable, yes. Vulnerability to competitive threats looking to undercut its position in the market, also yes. Zynga is a media company, and as such it's competitive advantage lies in its ability to use the FB graph and continue to pump out games. Will people get tired the constant barrage of new titles in the same way Facebook's users are starting to tire its core product? I would speculate yes, but that remains to be seen.
Moving browsers and the web forward
Django is not the only killer app for Python. In fact I would argue that scientific computing (numpy, scipy, pandas and friends) is no less, and in fact, may be more of a factor in transitioning to Python 3.
I didn't read the article because it's crap. Did they mention that it auto-updates? That alone makes the whole argument invalid because as long as there is auto-update there is no lingering in the past.
That's certainly better. And you have a somewhat unique name.

But imagine your name was "John Brown". Having address data (any address data) is additional protection. And it creates an additional public paper trail.

And even your name is coming up with approx. 42 potential matches (according to http://www.usa-people-search.com)

Why not just use the address data you use for apters.com ?
Still not working in US, 2:30 eastern time.
Why You Need A Professional Social Networking Avatar
>you're doing is not startuppy enough to count

I have always had a problem with that. A start-up is a start-up if you decide it's a start-up and want to transform it into a viable business. There is no magic line that you have to cross to transform your project into a start-up. I always advice people to call their projects a start-up from the beginning.
Periodic Table Ready To Welcome Two New Elements
I would say they are mainly from removing the need for decorators due to there being a nice lambda function/block syntax. So we can define methods like "get" and "delete" which does the job of the decorators, creating something kind of like a mini-DSL.

Some savings through the removal of types, sure, but that is not what I personally see as most import here.
VP trees are well known but not necessarily the best approach for large datasets or high dimensional objects. I am creating a startup that offers the fastest similarity search engine built so far (10X faster than LSH from MIT). See more here: http://simmachines.com
Yes, in the latest development branch they dropped support for python 2.4 though.
Many of those have moved already.
Top signs you're about to get a bad cup of coffee
Similar to this: http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/n-l/item/408828/ (infinity candle holder)
Success With MLM - How To Convert Leads Into Buyers & New Reps
Yes, many companies are guilty of it. It comes down to ego inflation. "Engineer" lends an air of prestige and esteem, but it's a title that's undeserved by most who use it in modern times.

Of course, this gets severely down-voted because many people on HN and similar sites think of themselves in this fashion, and their ego takes a hit when they run across a comment such as mine.
Finally Some Good News For Windows Phone
Given RIM's atrocious performance and the fact they've been hemmorhaging customers for a long while, where's the shareholder revolt? The board might not see the obvious, but surely the investors in RIM can see that when a company loses some 80% of it's value, something needs to change.
Could the Cloud Be Big Data's Missing Link?
Facebook to open NYC Engineering Office
The problem I have with optimist it that it provides no default usage statement (last time I checked). One of the big selling points of argument processors is that you can define the args and some descriptions so it will generate the usage statement. This cuts down of re-typing and errors. It also has the benefit of autocomplete tools being able to handle standard formats.
I've yet to do this. Reason being I wonder what will happen if I lose my phone...

Is there a way to set up two-step without a phone?
Best workouts for abs.
There is a delay, during which replies to comments replying to yourself aren't enabled. I believe it's designed to prevent a flame war comment thread.
Heh, I misread that as "Living a life of douchebaggery" and heartily agreed :)