skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not surprising that Ron Paul would be against SOPA.

That said, libertarians like Paul would have been against funding the projects that led to the Internet, and are today against funding similar government projects that might lead to future innovations.

In many cases, innovations are bootstrapped by government funding or research, and then handed off to an appropriate role by the free market. Libertarians are usually against regulating the private market once the handoff has occurred (for good in many cases, and definitely in this case), but they are usually against the initial government bootstrapping.

It's easy to imagine attacking the initial ARPA work on privacy, anti-military, or anti-elitism grounds, and I could easily imagine it losing its funding today, decried as a boondoggle that was useless for regular Americans, who of course would never have access to a computer, with taxpayers footing the bill.
You're inappropriately comparing the actions of candidates with people who have actual power. Neither George W. Bush nor John Yoo is running for office. Ron Paul is, and as a non-leadership representative, he's not in a position to affect policy in any significant way. He hasn't had the opportunity do things that Bush did. In order to assess him as a candidate, we have to understand how he acted given his opportunities.

Considering how small those opportunities were, a profitable newsletter publishing articles exhibiting this level of inaccuracy and racial animus is meaningful.
Learning about customer relationships by grouping iPhone apps
I generally think of it this way: a manager tells you what you have to do. A tech lead tells you what you'd be stupid not to do. You won't have much formal authority. At the same time, you hopefully won't be under much formal authority if you chose the right startup.

At the same time, you earn a significant amount of "political capital". People will probably give you a certain amount of deference. And you earn the unique benefit of having a unique perspective on something.

Don't think this can't all be taken away from you, because it can, either due to political or technical considerations. You can get marginalized by someone with an agenda, or you can lose the respect of your peers with a few wrong decisions.

The good news is that you really don't need great leadership or people skills. You just need to convince people that the benefit of having worked with you is greater than the cost of having to put up with you. People are willing to forgive the occasional foot-in-mouth incident or the occasional screw up. You just have to make sure people know what benefits you're providing them in return. And having been objectively right or gotten great results will more than make up for having accidentally hurt a couple of feelings in the process.
There is a huge amount of ignorance about what Ron Paul really stands for - when he becomes a serious candidate (not very likely) and is given the scrutiny and attention that other candidates are given, then he will implode like Perry and Herman before him.
Cognitive Screening Test Killed Over Infringement Law
The developers at ObjectFusion (http://www.objectfusion.fr/) appear to do much of their development in GNU Smalltalk. That's: Iliad web framework, Odyssey CMS, and possibly the upcoming Smalltalk Hub (the equivalent of GitHub, and an anticipated replacement for SqueakSource).
What a cop out.

Ron Paul wants to define life as "starting at conception", he wants to do this at the federal level, and he wants states to ban abortion (which they'd frankly have to do if life was defined as starting at conception).
Ask HN: Your Startup Progress (December 2011)
Just like last month:

What progress have you made on your startup for the month of December?? (full-time or on the side)
Launch something? Almost launching? Got featured on a great blog?

Guess I'll start off: Parted ways after getting ripped off by a terrible Ruby on Rails programmer and decided to learn myself Rails and have hacked away at Freelanceful.com. Hopefully will launch in a couple weeks.
Cool to see but stupid idea, who in their right mind would use this for production?! By using such a "technology", you lose SEO strength due to urls-not-being-like-this.html and even worse, what can stop me from publishing a fake press release on there site/spamming porn and getting that URL indexed? And what are the benefits? To also bring SOPA into this, couldn't I share copyrighted material on someone's site like this? How could they control that?! Besides blocking each URL manually. Just seems dumb. As a concept, cool, but for production.... Yikes?!
He also wants to make it legal for states to legalize marijuana, despite that fact that he (I assume) would personally oppose the use of marijuana.

His personal opinion on the particular issue isn't what's motivating him, it's his opinion that it should be up to the states to decide, not the federal government.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/05/...
Great example of crisis management in action (AvengerController)
Not any first-hand, and I hope never to have to find out. Still, I suspect "I am an RA working with a security researcher and we're studying password strength" would go over better than "I'm curious", although they amount to the same thing. The respect and deference we afford institutions can be a bit strange, at times.
Backyard Brains funding Open Access publication via Kickstarter
His personal opinion certainly does drive the policy he advocates.
There is definitely such a thing as a book that was released too early.
Your New Year's Resolution--Pick Better Passwords
Time Tested Ways of Picking Color Combinations
For Brother Printers this one worked quite well for me.

http://www.nrdy.ch/2011/05/07/printer-hacking-101-reset-your...

I reset the original cartridge the second time now and it's printing like the first page.
That's a poster child of convention over configuration. One huge benefit of which is maintainability.
Three years ago, I was the sole employee/founder of my startup. Today, I'm CTO of a 21-person company with a 6-person dev team.

As an individual developer, my default loop is "Find something to do. Do it. Repeat."

As a CTO, my default loop is "First, cycle through all my employees and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."
Format Strings in TextMate 2
http://rightwingnews.com/election-2012/statement-from-fmr-ro... has good details on one close staffer's view of his distrust of Black and Latin@ culture.

He's not racist, as long as people of all colors assimilate into his culture. I can see the confusion: people who aren't part of this culture see that as a set of racist, irrational beliefs that lead to stop-and-frisk harassment and profiling in airports, whereas Ron Paul obviously has a cultural fear of people different from himself and doesn't equate that with skin color except by correlation. He doesn't consider this "racism", and thus is offended by the implications.

We disagree on the terms and on whether or not it is a disqualifying feature for the highest office in the land, but we should at least be able to agree that the only evidence we have for what he believes have been the things he's done or said. That he began claiming he never did them when they became politically inconvenient doesn't mean he's changed his mind.

I wouldn't care what he said 20 years ago if he stood up and said, "yes, I said those things. Since then, however, I have spent more time with people from cultures I had previously been isolated from and feared, as many of us do when faced with the unfamiliar. I now appreciate that theses communities have come together in the face of adversity and are an assets to this nation." Instead he claimed that Not Me did it, and looks about as mature as that kid from Family Circus while doing so.
Surely you can read that though. Look again.
Useful Development Tools for OS X in 2011
http://alienvps.com/vps-hosting/

2 GB RAM
4 cores
100 GB disk

$19
How SOPA Could Ruin My Life
Interestingly enough Van Jacobson has continued in this line of research, but the future of Internet networking looks radically different than what was proposed in these early days.

A pivotal recognition is that the Internet nowadays is dominated by content, not by endpoints. The modern CDN is really a very complex kludge in order to deal with what we now believe the Internet's primary purpose to be: content delivery. The Internet was originally designed in a TCP/IP point-to-point structure, with the most important aspects being the communication of two parties. Now the most important part is that a given party (or really many parties) receive a specific piece of content, regardless of where that content comes from. In this light, it is wise to redesign the Internet's infrastructure against standard TCP/IP and instead build knowledge of content and caching layers directly into the transport protocols.

The preliminary paper which deals with many of these issues is Jacobson's Networking Named Content[1]. The general idea is that one requests content instead of communication with a specific party. ISPs and other intermediate layers cache content blocks (because its in their own financial best interests by saving money in peering costs and pure networking hardware costs) and your request for content is delivered via the nearest available hot cache. Many other papers have been written with their own tweaks, but this is the general idea for what the next generation of the Internet should look like (from the distributed systems researcher perspective). In my Distributed Systems in Challenging Environments class one of the things my partners and I were working on was building a prototype of CCN (the protocol described in Jacobson's paper) on top of the current TCP/IP layer to examine its real-world characteristics and swarm behavior. We never completely finished the prototype for Contemplating Content Centric Protocols, but it was an interesting project nonetheless.

[1] http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2009/papers/Jacobson....
I could have sworn that 37 Signals did this 'first' in that they popularized the idea of 'lean' or iterative product design around a SaaS model in 2004ish. It is the whole philosophy around the birth of Rails as I remember it. If you go way back into their blog archives it is likely there:

http://37signals.com/svn

I will give them 'first' because they built a framework around the idea of building fast and cheap.

Because startups are hot (again) and trendy (again) people are just looking for 'the right way' to do it. The real secret is that it is really hard work and knowing that you don't know everything while holding true to your vision.
Link shortening service?! Twitter automatically shortens it for you :)
Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
It's the same OpenGL ES 2.0 that is now on mobiles. I doubt you could do something even more complex in browser with Javascript, at least not until Javascript approaches native code speed. Until then there's Native Client.
Are some of these cross-platform?
The only McMenamin's theater I've been to is Kennedy school, might have to try out the Mission Theater, will have to look into the Living Room. Also, the Hollywood Theater on Sandy now serves beer, but they only show indie films, so I haven't gotten my wife to go there yet.
Hedge funds underperform in the long term
Crashed my 2008 Mac Pro (Chrome 16 stable). Had to do a hard reboot. Great.
He doesn't "favor the death penalty" he calls for the execution of people based on their sexual preference in accordance with Biblical law. This man's endorsement was touted by Paul's Iowa campaign. So yes, I find that offensive and reprehensible; Paul should immediately repudiate the endorsement.
Page seems to be down. Here's the google cache link

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...
Ask HN: Do you use Feedback Tabs?
I'm in the process of developing my MVP, and I'm on the fence about implementing a feedback tab. You know, the ones that appear of the side of your browser. What are your thoughts on these? Do they actually increase feedback from users?

I feel like I used to see the tabs everywhere, but not so much anymore. Maybe they were simply a fad that didn't prove valuable.
From his campaign page: http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/abortion/

And as President, Ron Paul will continue to fight for the same
pro-life solutions he has upheld in Congress, including:

Immediately saving lives by effectively repealing Roe v. Wade and
preventing activist judges from interfering with state decisions
on life by removing abortion from federal court jurisdiction through
legislation modeled after his “We the People Act.”

Defining life as beginning at conception by passing a “Sanctity of Life Act.”

It's very difficult to interpret that as anything but being anti-abortion at the federal level. Passing a law outright banning it is unnecessary if life is defined at the federal level as beginning at conception.
Like Rubinius, I also use RubyRegexpMachine (Mac Only, http://rubyregexp.sourceforge.net/) for regular expressions. Its pretty cool, you can describe expressions in english.
Anecdotal at best, really. No science in there. A friend of mine dropped his brand new Samsung Galaxy S II out of his pocket, less than 1 meter into the soft linoleum floor of his kitchen, and the screen burst completely. No concrete needed there.
Computer controlled plan economy, in the 70s
Fallacies abound in politics. If anything, I think the majority of political discourse is based solely on fallacies. Such as "individual X is Y and is associated with group Z, hence all individuals associated with Z must be Y".

It's a game of influence, not rationality. If calling people names "wins" an argument with less effort and time than applying logically sound arguments, why bother with logical arguments?

The sad part is that Paul has been the only politician in a long time to resist the trend and talk about the issues in a serious and straightforward manner, only to be attacked and ridiculed.
We've experienced location-wide outages due to natural disasters in host centers - putting all our servers in one place is no longer an option, so we're looking at a combo of colo and cloud. We're scaling up to 5 locations in the next months, thanks to all the great replication tools we have at our disposal now it's a fairly simple task, more than it would have been 5 years ago.
Didn't Lisp machines provide an analogous environment? The Smalltalk VM provides access to the entire 'OS'; only the hardware is abstracted away. Surely a similar Lisp VM is possible now?
Here's my manifesto for learning:

1)Be inspired to build something.
2)Pick a tool you think might work.
3)Build it.
4a) Success? Go to 1.
4b) Failure? Go to 1.
Obviously you could also have a database with all content URL strings that you publish - but that makes this technology worth nothing at all.
Can you please cite some of his false assumptions and the illogical conclusions. I believe his argument against SOPA and regulation/censorship of internet is quite sound. His arguments for a sound fiscal policy is based on evidence that governments (or individuals or corporations) spending beyond their means usually lead to their downfall. Results of Vietnam war, Iraq war provide alot evidence that much more diplomacy is needed before going to war, and once you go to war, fight it win it and get out, don't go into nation building.
My understanding is that Ron Paul's idea of freedom is to limit the role of the Federal Government by moving the legislative burden to each State. I can relate to the frustration that most Americans seem to have towards “Washington”, but would this really be in the best interest of the country?

It's 2011, not 1787. The US is a vastly different country than it was when the idea of States Rights was created. Would the level of innovation that you describe be possible in a country that does not have a strong central government? Could an individual State put someone on the moon? Would sectors of the economy that are closely associated with a specific area (Technology – CA etc) still be as prosperous without a central government? I am skeptical.

Abandoning the Federal Government because it is dysfunctional seems short sighted. Personally I do not see how the US can prosper in the modern world without a central government. We need more political compromise and a more consistent government agenda, not a shift towards one political agenda. Government should represent everyone, not just the 51% of constituents that elected them this term.

Also, suggesting that human rights should be legislated at a State level is absurd. It astounds me that a Libertarian such as Paul can so proudly proclaim that government intrusion is wrong, but then defer to the State on issues such as gay marriage and abortion. Legislating religious views at a State level is no different than doing it at the Federal level. Rob Paul style libertarianism only brings “freedom” for some.
First suggestion: get an ip address people can remember. Not very practical I know, but I guess that is the only way to get by without DNS at the moment.

Also: you've emailed your customers the new address yes? Even if it is only temporary? Maybe buy a new domain and point them towards that:"Please use [FINGSOPA].com while we get everything back to normal."
In Afghanistan Your Phone Plays Taliban Ringtones or You Die
From a user's perspective, what can EC2 do that a PC in a closet hanging off a T1 can't do?
Time to start taking Amtrak
Let's start paying college athletes
>> But none of that really matters.

I would bet that you are neither a woman, black, jewish, poor, or gay.

So the fact, for example, that ron paul is a huge racist is something that you can discount at no cost to you.

edit: wow, i see the ron paul brigade is out in force, as usual. thank you all! never been so proud of being downvoted.
Actually, I usually hear him promote local (and often church-based) fundraisers and volunteer efforts to assist in these situations. Admittedly, that may not be enough for a Katrina-size disaster -- that might genuinely warrant federal intervention via the Reserves/Nat'l Guard.
he's not in a position to affect policy in any significant way

I think you misunderstand the separation of powers in the US government. As a member of the House of Representatives, part of the Congress, it's been explicitly Paul's job to set policy.

As president, on the other hand, the job is to find ways to implement the policies that the Congress has defined.

We get all excited about Presidential election, but at least in theory, the Executive is less important than the other branches.

On the other hand, Congress has ceded so much power to the Executive branch (e.g., giving the EPA, IRS, FDA, etc., so much latitude in defining regulations) that power tilts significantly in that direction -- although not to that office itself, but to that branch.

And I suppose that it's natural to focus on the single individual figurehead, when the power of the Legislature, even if it really is more important as I claim, is more diffuse across all the members of that body.
Agreed. I also see this "some company no one's heard of only hiring geniuses/rock stars/talented people"

It's almost implying that all other job postings want to hire idiots.

A title of "startup looking for developer that wants to help us build our company" would be both refreshing and compelling
Wow those guys are cheap. My AWS free tier just ended for my play server and I think I know where I'm headed next.
How is Facebook different from telephone service, or USPS, or an ISP, under your analysis?

(Sidenote: USPS actually is ad-supported by bulk mail, and "heavy users subsidized" by parcel post. First class letter postage is really a nominal fee to eliminate DOS and DDOS attacks. )
It's often assumed that without the ARPA the internet never would have existed. ARPA, however, is just one of many "internets" that sprung up over the years. There was also FIDOnet, Prodigy, BIX, Compuserve, MCInet, etc. Everyone with more than one computer thought to hook them together. Heck, even some friends of mine invented their own internet back in the 70's.

If it wasn't ARPA, it would have been something else.
This was primarily the reason I started taking notes - I really had no plans to use them as references.

However, three factors have changed my outlook on this: 1) full-text indexed search, 2) cloud storage, and 3) low barrier to entry (I have found an organizational style that makes it easy for me to start writing at a moment's notice, without worrying about how to store/organize until later).

Full-text indexing is a huge deal, because I will often remember a certain combination of words or a particular term used in reference to some concept. Cloud storage ensures that I am almost never without my notes.

Add in the fact that if you make it easy enough for yourself to start writing, you will naturally end up with a lot of content about concepts you find difficult, and you'll skip the stuff you know well. The end result is a fully-searchable set of textbooks written specifically for your brain that you can always refer back to.

Sometimes, even if I'm not looking for a particular note, I'll crawl through a few old notes on any random subject in my notebooks and it will give me a new perspective on a problem I'm trying to solve, or remind me of something I wanted to try/research but didn't get around to.
You forgot all the self righteous "you're doing it wrong" posts. Usually written by a coder who works for a company that's still in startup mode.

It's also funny to read the "how to ___" from companies that are not yet profitable. I try not to take advice from a VP/CTO who has not yet lead an actual profitable company. And my profitable I mean make more money than it spends - not get bought out and cash out stock.
The challenge from China on space needs to be kept in perspective the chinese still spend much less than the US on space technologies. The real failure has been the constant insistence by political leaders that NASA utilize shuttle derived components. After having to cancel the constellation project due to questions about whether the ares rockets would ever fly it is disconcerting that a similar approach is now being tried again. The new approach is probably workable in the sense that it will fly but it will continue to use shuttle derived components that will promise a high cost and limited flexibility for very little benefit over commercial approaches.
I'd say that this could really take off if they implemented federated storage, such that there was sync'ing across multiple storage instances (a semi-cloud, if you will). Furthermore, I see where encryption could be used to facilitate ad-hoc federation among people who might not normally trust each other, like a Tor of storage.
At the end of the day, it is up to the customers to wisely choose.

I honestly don't think that's a scalable answer. The creator of a product spends years thinking about the product. Customers often spend mere seconds before purchase. Given the number of purchasing decisions people have to make, I don't think it's realistic to depend on customer wisdom. Just look at how many consumer decisions about technology were terrible from the perspective of we nerdy experts.

I think the first responsibility is on creators to create wisely. Then I think the community of entrepreneurs and makers has a responsibility to call out bad products and bad producers. With that accomplished, customer wisdom might have a chance.
Excuse me, what? He supported both the Defense of Marriage Act as well co-sponsoring the Marriage Protection Act, "which would have barred federal judges from hearing cases pertaining to the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act." That sentence alone is so offensive to my sensibilities as a citizen as to permanently disqualify him from my vote.