skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been done before, but I think the result the same. I met with a guy who was a co-owner of a luxury car rental service in South Florida. He wanted help with implementing a tracking system, but I passed up the job. He started the company back in late 2008, and it had gone under some time early in 2011.

I saw him again recently and asked why the business went bust. To paraphrase him: "High overhead and picky customers." Turns out people who rent exotic cars want the newest and latest cars, not older models (unless it's vintage/classics they're looking for, but that's another beast). So you have to keep your stable fresh. Trying to offload exotics is a pain, because there's a specific type of person who will buy a used exotic: a nouveau rich man with more pride than financial management skills.

The kicker was when he told me that if he ever decides to launder money, he'll start another luxury rental place, because it would be perfect for that.
I don't really see how GPL enters into it, as the problems are with laws, policies and regulatory bodies.

The problems with the DNS system that I assume you're alluding to aren't due to the software or the software's license. It's the data the system runs on, and the people with the power to influence that data.
Show HN: How I built a self-driving (RC) car.
I have been taking Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course. The lecture module on Neural Networks ends with an intriguing video of the ALVINN autonomous car driving itself along normal roads at CMU in the mid 90s.

I was inspired by that video to see what I could build myself. A link to my incomplete write up was posted a couple of weeks ago (ouch!) but I finally finished it and open sourced the code tonight (so you can build your own self driving car).

What do you think?
http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar
https://github.com/dps/nnrccar
"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence. "

This is absolute complete nonsense... America does worse than Finland because America is racially diverse... and Finalnd is the most "bigoted" of all the Scandinavian countries. America's education system is just fine... actually it is excellant.

Just look at the 2009 PISA scores. American Whites do better than all other "white countries" except for Finland. America Asians do better than all other Asian countries except for the elite part of China(Shanghai). American blacks do better than all other black countries. American Hispanics do better than all other Hispanic countries.

http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize...
Rarely have I come across an article that promised such a ringing endorsement in its title only to find it peppered with bits of snarky back handed compliments.

So it doesn't come as much of a surprise that there wasn't much there even for the mostly uninitiated, still good(?) press is good press.

Surely, I thought, now that we've declared the imminent death of the Liberty and the Internet and its subsequent rescue by Saint Rick we must have hit bottom.

In the fine tradition of the showman the best had been saved for last. Never fear, he says, because Stallman's had our backs all along - it may have taken a long time but thankss to Richard we have Free and Open platforms like Android* that will protect us in the dark days ahead.

* resist temptation, remember: boot locks, carrier installs, 3rd party spyware, location tracking, cloud storage, baseband, drm everything, few security patches, etc.
Ask HN: How to write with an online pseudonym and, if possible, accept payment?
For the last year I have written social science analyses but kept them to myself. Since I believe others would benefit from reading these, I feel compelled to start releasing them publicly. At the same time I don't feel comfortable using my real name. I worry that I will alienate people around me, sabotage future research and jeopardize my career opportunities outside this field.

My question then is how do you release material online anonymously? I'd like an anonymous website, and, ideally, some way of using Google Adwords to advertise and Paypal (or an equivalent) to receive money (so that I can productize and fund the research). I don't mind Google or Paypal knowing my real identity - I just want to protect myself from the public eye.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? Any advice?
The real benefits on using Facebook/Path liked sidebar navigation in iOS apps
A Valuable Medical Tell-All Can Be Found in Urine
Don't VISA et al require some kind of PCI compliance for storing credit card details?
Sure:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353557

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3340794

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3340315

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3321549

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3321511

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315126
The links:

http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar

https://github.com/dps/nnrccar
> I guess the logic behind that decision is that unsuspending an app and allowing it to run arbitrary code while the system is in a low memory condition will take memory.

Even more so as a suspended application already got a message indicating that it was suspended, so it already had the opportunity to perform operations it needs to perform (mostly persisting state).

> Because of that, the likely effect of informing swapped-out processes

iOS does not swap, the VM only ever uses real memory, suspended processes live fully in real memory.
Term Sheet board on Quora
ext4 if I'm not mistaken
Okay, he wrote a scary story.

What has he done to promote laws to prevent what he fears, and to fight laws that lead to what he fears?
Disclaimer: I'm no RMS fanboy by a long stretch of the imagination.

What you're saying is that they should throw their arms up in the air and say "welp, that's how the real world works in reality, so might as well give up and accept it".

But I think you're being unfair. The normal open advocates don't fear and demonize closed source. They may secretly pity it, they may secretly hate it, I don't know.

The RMS vision of open source, when you get right down to it, is that of two sandpits. In one sandpit, everyone shares their toys. In the other sandpit... who cares what they do?

If someone comes from the closed source world and wants to play in the open source sandpit, they have to play by the rules (sharing and openness).

I think RMS gets frustrated sometimes, because he doesn't want the other people playing in the open playpit giving their stuff away to the people in the selfish (no sharing) playpit. I think his thinking is that it would mean that there is less incentive for them "over there" to examine and repent of their selfish ways.

Sometimes the people in the no-sharing playpit have rich relatives that buy them nice toys for Christmas. But RMS views that as okay, if the open playpit turns out to have a need for one of those, he is confident that the open source people have the ability to make something even better, if they can be bothered to do so.
> You have to understand that the system isn't that simple.

No, see, you are the one failing to understand. We understand what you are saying. We still disagree with it. At some point, someone has to stand up and say "No, this is wrong."

Someone has to call out Congress and the President for using the military's pay check to erode our rights. The President could have done this. He didn't. He elected to accept the measure, despite disagreeing with it.
> Again, I don't know the exact cost, but I think killing suspended processes is pretty cheap and it is really the memory warnings that cause a stutter.

Might be, my point is mostly that iOS's application management is not as painless and transparent as TFA makes it sound, there are (edge) cases where "not managing background tasks" impacts the experience even when all applications are correctly coded and well-behaved.
TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps
Cool! I did not know that one. I also found out holding down "Shift" does the same for "move" and holding down "Alt" allows you to create a shortcut.
Good point! I see good development practices like good dental care or good conversational skills, something you constantly work at. I know I need to consciously improve my technique and follow best practices. New developers need to learn the same lessons most experienced developers know, that balancing speed with quality is tricky.
Here's an easy way: promote the use of a security cryptographic communications protocol. Fund development of a plugin for Windows. Advocate or even pass a law that banks, the IRS, and other organizations support it. Ignore requests that the code be published and/or available for other OSes. Ta-da! You've effectively discouraged use of free OSes.

Okay, it's still possible to have a system without proprietary software. Just much harder, and not worth the frustration to most people.

See the links from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEED as an example of that scenario in action in South Korea.
> Instead of trying to create an interpreter from scratch, SpiderMonkey is compiled into LLVM and then emscripten translates the output into JavaScript.

Heh, this is pretty much the epitome of hacking: needlessly complicated, ultimately pointless, but still awesome, clever and inspiring.
From what I understand, RMS has spent a large fraction of his working life in the last 20 years traveling the world to speak to people about free software. He could be dismissed as too extreme, but dismissing him as someone who hasn't fought for his beliefs is way off.

His speaking schedule is often published in the FSF newsletter; he appears to speak to a group about free software around once per week.
so eval() written in js?
Obama deserves credit for giving the army the resources needed to catch bin Laden. Under Bush, most of those resources were diverted to Iraq.

At the moment, this is the only relevant article that Google is pulling up for me:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/05/03/163155/bush-did...
(I know how sketchy a news source called "thinkprogress.org" looks--if you care enough to want a more reputable citation, you'll need to dig a little more on your own.)
what's the password of the rar inside the rar? the page referenced in the "readme" file is unavailable
The problem has nothing to do with theory vs reality, but rather emphasizing the wrong aspects of reality.

1) All the discussion of memory usage isn't terribly relevant. There's some stuttering while iOS kills background apps when the running app requires it, but this is not a huge problem in practice.

2) Battery life is a huge issue (which iOS still handles better than anyone else) for the average user. The article lists five classes of apps in theory and in practice can contribute to significant battery drain, yet seems to believe that's proof that this isn't a problem.

I still agree that it's bad advice from the Apple Store techs. From a technical aesthetic perspective, it would probably be better to just tell people with battery life problems to reboot the phone.

And then fix the problem. This seems to be a regression from iOS4 to iOS5. Perhaps there's a bug that's been introduced in the scheduler, or perhaps there's better logic that can be applied. There's no reason that iOS couldn't detect background processes that are exceeding a threshold of CPU usage.

The principle that users shouldn't have to manage background tasks is correct. However the fact that the technique is, in fact, effective, means that it isn't going away as a tool in the Apple tech toolbox.
So what you got out of my interview is that just a tweet from 2 famous people results in 100k subscribers?
Any thoughts as to applications for this? At ~65MB, I don't see this getting used client side.
I'm not sure which issue you mean by "this issue," because the freedoms involved in free software touch many issues.

I also can't recommend for others not knowing their needs and interests, but I can tell you some things I do. Maybe some things will translate to what you do.

I use free software as much as possible, running gnu/linux on my computers since 1996. I stopped dual booting about ten years after that.

I give some time to support freedombox -- http://joshuaspodek.com/tag/freedombox -- when I can.

I keep apprised of activities of Stallman, Eben Moglen, and a few others.

I attend conferences when I can, like Debconf.

I hardly code, but I've released a bit GPL'ed.

I support and contribute to Wikipedia.

I talk about free software to people who want to know more.

My art pieces -- http://joshuaspodek.com/tag/unionsquareinmotion and http://joshuaspodek.com/new_bryant_park_in_motion_videos -- run free software.

There's a short list. I'm not trying to save the world all by myself, just to avoid infringing on other people's freedom. All of the above together adds up to a modest amount of time and other resources. I have other priorities for most of my time, but, as I mentioned, I think by making myself aware of the issues, I've reduced how much I'd infringe on others' freedoms.

If you're looking for suggestions, I think asking the questions you asked in an open-minded way will start you off. I expect the more you do, the more you'll learn you can do.
Not to mention demographics. Most of these studies pretty much overlook that dimension entirely, and it's usually the most critical.

In the case of Finland, we're looking at a country with a total population of 5.4 million people, 92% of which share the same native language and ethnic background. By comparison, the USA has 313 million people and a heck of a lot more diversity of income, class, race, ethnicity, linguistic background, country of origin, etc. It's also got a much higher variance in population density per city, state, region, etc.

If ever there were a case of comparing apples to oranges, this would be it. There are vanishingly few analogs between the two countries on almost any dimension, and most of the education statistics I've seen over the years have not been weighted accordingly.

I'd be much more interested in apples-to-apples comparisons. How does Finland perform against countries like Finland? How does the US perform against similar countries (of which there probably aren't many)? Even comparing the US to a country like China is problematic, given that only the top some-single-digit percent of Chinese children take these tests in the first place.
Broke the law, or broke the PCI standards?
This appears to be the same goal as https://github.com/mozilla/narcissus/ but substantially less clever.
The best part is that the blob is too big to explore on github.
If there's so little margin for error on the length of the runway that it makes the pilot nervous, why shouldn't it make the passengers nervous as well? Doesn't it make you even slightly nervous that the pilot would say this:

Look at the runway length of the “long” runway: that’s right, 6,800 feet–200′ shorter than LaGuardia’s aircraft carrier deck, and often on final approach, the tower will ask you to sidestep to the 5,200 foot runway instead. ... Then figure in the winds and the runway condition (wet? look at the numbers: fuggeddabout it) So the answer is usually “unable”–but at least half of the time I hear even full-sized (not just commuter sized) jets accepting the clearance.
I would call it black hat hacking, hacktivism or sabotage. I wouldn't call it a terror attack unless you feel terror when you realize you have to call your credit card provider.

Lets save the word terror for things that terrify people like say bodily harm or death.
even maemo and meego were a large step in the right direction.
I have a very hard time resolving how this type of attack could fall under the umbrella of Anonymous. Saudis specifically attacking Israel implies a nationalistic attitude, given their history. They also affiliate their hacker group with Wahabbism, which is a strict branch of Islam that most would brand as fundamentalist (and sometimes extreme).

I can't really see the ideals of Anonymous coexisting with nationalism and religious fundamentalism.
Anonymous just declared that they are not responsible for this:

https://twitter.com/anonyops/status/153969476277248000

"We have no love for Israeli gov't but targeting 1000s for being Israeli? Sorry, you are not #Anonymous pastebay.com/148920"
I wish other Open Source companies adopted some of Red Hat's awesomeness, specifically open development of upcoming releases, a public bug tracker, and their patent promise.

Some of us are working on doing just that[1]. We have an open issue tracker, code on Github and a commitment to real Open Source development. We haven't done a "patent promise" yet, but we don't have
any patents, and it's just something that we haven't gotten around to yet.

Of course, I'm an ex Red Hat guy myself, and have been a fan of theirs for a long time, so it comes pretty naturally for us. We're also in their backyard geographically so I guess it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

[1]: http://www.fogbeam.org/
You're not curious about how he got those two people to invest in his company? Or how he turned their support into subscribers? Or how Zaarly got those subscribers to get their friends to try its service?

Even if you don't like me, I hope you don't lose sight of what Zaarly did or what you can learn from it just because it has a few well-known backers.
The article specifically describes a comparison of Finland with Norway, similiar in size and ethnic composition. Apples-to-apples, as you say. Norway's education policy is much more similar to the US, and Norway's PISA results are mediocre, also similar to the US.
"Mark Zuckerberg's design team is his imperial guard. They work closer to him than any other discipline in the company"

Interesting... as I don't rate fb's design at all...
From another Linux noob--what went wrong? What is the correct way out of that situation?
I don't even think the worst part is the download (which can be cached). The worst part is the fact that you're running your script, interpreted by a weirdly generated unoptimized script, interpreted by a scripting engine which only then runs on metal. I'm shooting in the dark, but I'd bet the performance and memory usage would be a disaster for anything but Hello, world.
It's really difficult to fire a teacher in Finland too. Practically impossible if the teacher in question doesn't do violence to kids or come to work drunk.
So if you are looking to make copies, and you see a shop with just the name "Kinko's" above it you would know to go in there?

Or starbucks? Those names don't in any way tell you what the business does. Without advertising above the shop you wouldn't have any idea what they sell.

Look at those photos again - the only thing they have is the name, with no indication about what those shops sell or do.

Should all small business have to advertise on TV until they have a household name?
"Yes, the President could veto the bill but then the next few months becomes about him veto-ing a military appropriations bill. He would then need to explain to the American public why the freedoms it eroded were unacceptable and that their loved ones serving this country couldn't buy milk for a month. It would consume a significant amount of time and resources."

Sure, but running against Congress is often a very good thing. Especially when their approval ratings are so low. And much of Obama's putative 'base' would have preferred he veto it.

Obama could probably make the case by going on Fox and asking if he should have the power to send Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity to prison without a trial for an indefinite amount of time. "Stop me before I send Glenn Beck to Gitmo".
Hacker satellite grid to counter Internet censorship
"If one reads this as B, then once a citizen accused of being a terrorist steps foot outside of the country, they are screwed."

Seems like they already are.
In Germany a teacher, like most people working in the public sector, cannot be fired. You are either stuck with them or you promote them so that someone else has to deal with them.
Wii DVD
Raspberry Pi is the bees knees because it's near-hypeless. They get it, they know that they can make it. There are no silly 3D illustrations of it doing magical things, and they refused pre-orders because they had enough financing to make them. And, heck, they have lots of people with real uses for the thing who will order it.
I believe this is how Cobb and Saito slipped into Limbo.
Urbanized, a Documentary
What does "8-bit clean" mean? I've seen that phrase before in regards to Nvi as well.
I run and manage a very large freemium service, and I will tell you that the percentage of users that convert is a highly watched metric that is very important to my business.

I agree with the fact that there will always be consumers out there that will never ever convert, and that is accepted. But I'm always doing A/B tests and feature adds that makes sure that the fraction that does convert tries to increase.

With that in mind, I'll share with you some other lessons learned running a freemium model for many years:

1) free users generate enormous traction for your business
through social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

2) free users today really view the Web with suspicion and will often, instantly accuse you of a bait-and-switch or scam without ever taking the time to read what has been presented to them.

3) the instant you even gently nudge an "upgrade" path, many customers instantly believe that they cannot use the service AT ALL unless they pay for something. In our case, the vast majority of our services are completely free, yet folks will instantly cancel their accounts when they even learn that we have a "premium subscription."

4) customers will times see a premium upgrade landing page and click through and purchase the most expensive subscription, as fast as they can, and then come back and argue it wasn't what they wanted.

I have a zillion other stories to tell.
We do know. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/stati... and select a custom range starting 2010-12-01 and ending now.

You can see that the dip then is almost identical to the one now. In fact, it was a bit bigger then!

The author of the post knows zilch about trend analysis - it's only link bait.
i think in IL standing in the PCI standards is a must for clearance comapnies.
Please don't confuse discipline with not enjoying school. The point I was replying to said:

the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe

This is not a fact. Instead, the opposite is the fact: I looked up an OECD study and Japan and Finland are on the opposite ends of the scale with Japan having the most school discipline.
well, with gnu tar I prefer to use:

-a, --auto-compress
use archive suffix to determine the compression program

So tar cvfa archive.tar.xz files* would create a tar.xz file
Gentoo Linux releases 12.0 LiveDVD
Heh. I like how Anonymous keep on repeating how are they "decentralized" and the only thing really needed to join is to call yourself Anonymous - and at the same time keep on telling trough semi-official twitter accounts, how this Wahhabi attack or that Stratfor attack was not official Anonymous and blah blah blah.

Hypocrisy on hypocrisy.
Your explanation will be edited down to two-second soundbites by the media that manage to miss your point entirely. The opposition will completely ignore your argument completely and repeatedly tell the party faithful that you vetoed the bill that would have given the hard-working American servicemen and women their deserved salaries.

(If you're really lucky, you'll be accused of "flip-flopping"--because Real Men stake out a position of being Pro-X or Anti-Y and never, ever budge.)

There is no such thing as a nuanced opinion in Washington politics today.
Double-Blind Violin Test: Can You Pick The Strad?
Teachers are government employees, unionized no less. That is to a great many Americans a double whammy. The relationship between Americans and their government has always been -- and will always be -- adversarial.
OLPC has a display, a battery, and (AFAIR) a radio to communicate with other OLPCs in the area.