skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Best TLD that can't be taken down by US/etc?
This is purely hypothetical (I'm way too vanilla to actually have a use for this), but me and a friend were wondering... considering the US now lays claim to any .com domain as their own jurisdiction, and also considering how many domains are getting taken down lately for "arguable" offences, which TLD would you use to have a site that is "safe"?

Just say you wanted a blog where you could post anything you wanted, and host anything you wanted.

Assuming you don't care about the branding benefits of a major TLD.
Yeah, the CEO of the 7-11 down the street is a friend of mine.
I'm not really surprised in the slightest. Adderal and the like are rampant in pretty much any competitive university and I would expect ambitious people working at start-ups would be seeking the same sort of edge competitive students do.
This is an incredibly fallacious line of reasoning. Just because something is prescribed to elementary schoolers does not mean that being pressured to take it in a different context does not qualify as "abuse".

Also, the comment references Provigil (also known as Modafinil) which I believe is usually only used by soldiers to stay awake for days at a time.
Definitely agree, would be cool to know about this and similar events. For those of us in NYC, there are some solid Penn tech and VC groups on Meetup worth checking out.
1. Who knows? It all depends on how they intend to implement this DNS blocking. I'd expect non-US ISPs would stop using any US-based root nameserver, circumventing the block. Considering most of entities taking care of the root zone are either American institutions or US-base multinationals, this would really pout a strain on the existing non-US infrastructure, but could actually result in a better designed network (i.e. less reliant on US bodies).

2. Yes, blocking access to foreign websites is the whole point of the legislation. Note that this would only mean that US-based users wouldn't be able to resolve your .dk, but everybody else (i.e. in Europe or Asia etc) would still be able to do it.

3. Good question. Again, this will depend on the technical implementation; I believe at the moment they're only talking about blocking DNS resolution. The minute they block IP-based connections, you basically have the Great Firewall of America in place.
If you're serious about programming in C you'll read multiple books anyway. LCTHW seems like a good starting point to me. It's probably not for everyone. No book I've ever read about anything is. But it gets you to from passive reading to actively playing around fast. And it doesn't throw just code in front of you. It also explains the most basic functions of some of the non OS specific tools you will actually use when you'll be doing serious stuff much later. You can build on that pretty well, because you now know more about what you don't know, which gives you a tremendous advantage in terms of further research.
>The most important thing is: don't get emotional. Don't get indignant. Use a tone of voice that you would use with a child who has told you a fib (or made a mistake).

This, absolutely. For some inspiration on this point, one of the best real-life examples of someone keeping cool on a heated debate show, and neutralizing his opponent in so doing, was John Kerry vs. John O'neil on the Dick Cavett show in 1971.

O'neil opens with a three minute tirade, calling Kerry a 'little man' and 'coward' among other things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j4AP2GW7Ac&t=4m4s

Kerry responds in a completely unreactive, nonplussed, measured manner, and supports his case with data:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j4AP2GW7Ac&t=7m16s

Regardless of your opinions on his politics, that's the way to handle such a situation - unreactive, unresponsive, data-driven.

Regarding SOPA, there are a couple points to keep hammering home:

1. The people pirating movies would not otherwise be paying for them if they couldn't get them for free. They just wouldn't buy them. Many of them lack the disposable income, or they are foreigners circumventing DVD region restrictions, or they're just doing it because it's available, etc. (Can you make a supporting case for that with the data? I'm not familiar enough with the issue and available data here.)

2. Businesses that provide innovative delivery options are booming - iTunes Music/TV/Movies, Amazon MP3, Netflix. Torrenting media, even MP3s, is enough of a pain that people will pay for a good user experience (a/v quality, reliability, on-demand, etc., everything torrents lack). Sometimes people will even buy high quality versions of stuff they've torrented and really liked. Companies that take advantage of that opportunity are rolling in it.

3. The content industry has fought every delivery innovation ever - radio, TV, VCR, and now even the Internet. Are we really going to let them compromise the greatest platform for social, political, educational, technological, and business innovation ever created, over a shortsighted attempt to squash the genie back into the bottle so they don't have to adapt and adjust?

As long as no one challenges the assertion that piracy is this terrible thing and the only way to deal with it is to censor the Internet, they'll keep coming back and back until they finally get what they want. On the off chance you haven't read Tim O'reilly's argument on this point, it's well worth it:

http://gigaom.com/2012/01/13/tim-oreilly-why-im-fighting-sop...

and followup:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107033731246200681024/posts/5Xd3...
Very genius work!
Many people in the top .1% probably don't consider themselves to be all that wealthy either. We tend to compare ourselves to those that surround us, not the majority of the population. Afterall, living in manhattan and vacation homes are expensive.
Your article is a bit deceptive - "some association with the financial industry" can mean an entrepreneur who made their money by building equity in a startup rather than earning a salary:

One of our clients, net worth in the $60M range, built a small company and was acquired with stock from a multi-national. Stock is often called a "paper" asset. Another client, CEO of a medium-cap tech company, retired with a net worth in the $70M range. The bulk of any CEO's wealth comes from stock, not income, and incomes are also very high... Another client with a net worth in the $10M range is the ex-wife of a managing director of a major investment bank, while another was able to amass $12M after taxes by her early thirties from stock options as a high level programmer in a successful IT company.

So by their criteria, Larry and Sergei, Steve Jobs, etc, all made their money "as a result of some association with the financial industry".
This is one startup in one city in one geographical area. Extrapolating this to a general anecdote about all startups in the Silicon Valley is a bit of a stretch.

However, in any competitive and high pressure enviornment people will always feel compelled to use performance enhancing drugs to get an edge or just to keep up with the rest of the pack. In my mind it isn't really all that different than professional sports.

As a counterpoint, the company I work for is predominantly immigrants from India and nobody at my work uses drugs to my knowledge (except for the sales team, can't really speak for them ;).
My anecdotal rebuttal of his anecdotal accusation is that there are plenty of startups where drug culture is non existent, and doing drugs (ignoring 'reasonable' alcohol/nicotine consumption) would be looked down upon.

That said, I look forward to substantial evidence being brought into the conversation.
Nicely done... I just updated my Drupal blackout module to use it.

https://github.com/mcantelon/drupal-sopa-blackout
Wow, the effect is AMAZING, especially the dynamic shadow on "STOP SOPA". Nice work!
Drug culture in American schools is a huge problem.
I haven't actually started looking as such yet, but this can't hurt:

Sometime after August I'd like a job in Silicon Valley. H1B, since I'm from the UK. I have varying amounts of experience with C/C++, Perl, Python, Actionscript and a smattering of other languages. I'm a quick learner, and mathematically inclined.
Improving offence helps you improve defence. If you make the most dangerous weapons in the world, then you solely have the ability to figure out the best ways to defend against them.

The US will have a significant advantage in developing jamming systems against these types of rounds.

The US isn't afraid of some Afghan insurgent living in a cave from developing a countermeasure against these new munitions. They're afraid Russia or China will be capable of developing a countermeasure. The rounds are worthless, or potentially dangerous, if you can cause premature detonation.
Who said anything about pressure? No one mentions pressure anywhere in that reddit posting. It is EXTREMELY easy to get ADHD prescriptions.
I’ve been through the experience of taking modafinil to get myself through 'rough patches', but then accidentally allowing it to become a daily necessity. Nevertheless, I hesitate to call it an addiction because the moment the pressure went away, the drugs did too.

I analysed the situation and concluded that my increased work capacity (due to modafinil) was the cause of my increased workload; I found myself volunteering for more work and more responsibilities because I knew I could fall back on the drug if it became too much. I wasn't addicted to modafinil—I was addicted to work, and the drug was my enabler.
So now we vote totally unsubstantiated reddit comments to the top of Hacker News? I have never heard of this and highly doubt it is true.
I agree. I believe ADHD is a legitimate "thing" but I also believe it is over-diagnosed.
Ion Proton: An Even Bigger Leap for Human Genome Sequencing
Holy crap. Does that mean that 6% of the USA is on Adderal? Or might one individual have multiple prescriptions?

On a side note, there are ~75mil children in the USA, which combined with your numbers means roughly 7mil children have been diagnosed w/ ADHD.
I've experienced the same type of anxiety when faced with a daunting task. I try to be objective, and I try to focus on the problem itself, rather than the problem in relation to other things, like what someone else might expect as a solution. I focus on the exhilaration of finding a solution to the task I had no idea how to do when I started.
A software engineer that moves into management / entrepreneurship because he feels that youngsters make him obsolete, was probably not a very good engineer, and will probably not be a very good manager or entrepeneur.

But good luck.
Unfortunately, like (every single debate ever?), there isn't enough time.

A few people never got a chance to speak, Alexis is rightly looking a bit frustrated at not being able to respond at times.

Why can't a debate last for 5 hours instead of 20 minutes?

Then we could see the details explored further (such as the act supposedly not affecting US sites) instead of frustratingly brushed over due to time constraints.
Needs bold, italics and underlined options. I don't really rely on colors but rather a bold/italics/underlined mix based on only 3-4 colors. Cool service though.
This is written in PHP but no PHP preview?
True, it is grenade launcher. One thing that makes it more rifle like is the trajectory, it's much flatter than a 40mm grenade launcher. M203 and M320 grenade launchers launch long range grenades in a high arch, like a long football pass.
I wish you weren't so easily baited.
The user to linked said "expect pressure to do adderall" in the second sentence.
Caveat: only scanned the structure and read the final chapter.

Regarding the final chapter: K&R, like most programming books (especially those for new language) shows pedagogical code, not for productive use. I highly doubt it was ever intended as the equivalent of the modern-day "Code Complete"!

The value of LCTHW, apart from the intro and availability, is its unusual dissecting/analytical approach, which I welcome and am grateful, and for this reason will read it in its entirety.
I understand that changed when the UN was formed. Its member states aren't permitted to start wars, period.
So you want more space on your SSD.
Whoops, you're right. I missed that. However I will definitely say there is pressure on parents to get their children "seen" for ADHD from schools. At least around here. I'm speaking from first-hand experience.
How far into the Palo Alto startup scene are you?
You still have it wrong. An accelerometer measures acceleration.

Users usually calibrate the device at rest to get a good estimate of G so that it can be subtracted from accelerations measured later. Is that what you mean?
"The fascinating thing about Adderall is that it was a weight reduction drug for adults called Obetrol. It was so extremely addictive that Obetrol was taken off the market for that reason. Now we have the FDA bringing this extraordinarily addictive drug to market for little children."

Wow, if that is true, then that's very sad.
This is actually an interesting question: What fraction of the households in the top 1% are there because they have two salaries in the $150k-$200k range and what fraction are there because they have a single high earner? You're assuming that it's mostly the former, but it's not obvious to me why this should be the case, necessarily. It'd depend on salary distribution within various fields and across fields....

I haven't been able to find good data on individual income, sadly. At least in part because if one uses AGI then all you have to go with are tax returns and if a married couple files jointly the AGI will just be the joint number and that's that. But people also keep claiming this is "household" income, which doesn't quite match AGI in many cases (e.g. married-filing-separately situations, households which consist of taxpayers who are not married to each other, households with more than 2 taxpayers, etc).

I really wish the data-gathering methodology were actually spelled out somewhere. :(
Pagerank checker (strani.eu) of keyword: (gostovanje spletnih strani) results.
The bill does apparently say that it does not force US based sites, ISPs, Name servers to change their current operations.

NO TECHNOLOGY MANDATES.—Nothing in
title I shall be construed to impose a duty on an en-
tity described in section 102(c) or 103(c) to design
its network, technology, or service to forestall or pre-
vent acts that would actually or potentially create a
cause of action under such title, or to utilize any
particular type of technology to comply with the re-
quirements of such title.

Perhaps someone else can shine some light in how Google could still be victim to increased administrative burden.
Yeah...parsing addresses is non-trivial. It quickly turns into a probabilistic/NLP problem, if you want to deal with any sort of real-life input. I can believe that Wolfram Alpha hasn't put a lot of effort into it.

The DB lookup part of the problem (the part that Geocoder::US solves) is the straightforward, mechanical part -- but geocoder precision/recall is almost entirely determined by the quality of the parsing. That's a lot harder to do well.
Mobile Game Design: How Evil Monkeys Chased Temple Run To App Store #1
Neat. It might be useful to be able to import existing color schemes and make changes.
The primary appeal of a REST interface is simplicity. You don't need a proprietary library to make sense of it. All you need are a list of resources and in the case of PUT/POST operations, parameters, and the rest is handled by the nature of HTTP. No fancy libraries, no confounded WSDL files, easily-inspected responses. You can consume it using very common libraries and even roll your own with ease.

If you're always providing API access through a proprietary library, it doesn't matter if it's REST, SOAP, custom binary protocols, or whatnot.
> How do you know if you are "really" passionate about doing something?
Does it keep you up late at night? If it does not keep you up at night, is it all you can think about during the day? If I'm writing notes all over the place unable to focus on other tasks for very long, and I'm able to work through till 4am with no concern about more programming at my day job in the morning, then I know I feel passionately about something. Everything else I want to think I'm passionate about I can't be sure until it consumes me. In that regard, I suspect it's probably possible to grow a passion for something. For example, having not taught myself how to work with certain aspects of a scripting language, I would have never stumbled upon an idea that kept me up working all weekend. I'm sure there's mixed opinions on whether or not passion is overrated, but my vote is no, it's not overrated, and I make sure to look for it at every corner I turn.
AirDrop is great at college: most people have macs where I go to school and don't know what fileshares are. "go to this icon in your sidebar and press accept" is much easier than putting it on a fileshare.
Also, the comment references Provigil (also known as Modafinil) which I believe is usually only used by soldiers to stay awake for days at a time.

Two points: 1. Provigil is prescribed to civilians as well. 2. If it's good enough for soldiers, why not let everyone else take it too?
'Assertions made without evidence may be discarded without evidence.'
It's Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt, but...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obetrol

There is a misconception among some that the ingredients in the drug Obetrol have always been the same as those in the present day drug Adderall. In fact, the drug Obetrol was reformulated at least once.
Startup will wash your car wherever it is located
All the positive acceleration happens in a very short time. It might be hard to measure it frequently and accurately enough to use the integrated results as a velocity estimate.

Perhaps measuring the negative acceleration caused by air friction could give you a velocity estimate (the velocity-to-friction function is probably non-linear). But this may vary a bit with air density, temperature, etc.

I'd be interested to see how it's done. My bet is that it's not directly measuring a near-impulse acceleration.
Well, if there were actually shortages, then wages would increase until the "shortages" disappear.

This notion of "shortage" bugs me. There's two sides to a "shortage": supply and demand; but they meet at a point determined by price, where both are equal. There is always a "shortage": demand for engineers that isn't fulfilled by supply, because they can't afford to pay the engineers enough. But there is also always a "surplus": too many engineers to warrant high income levels in the 1%, etc.

A shortage would actually exist in a rigid market with inefficiencies, e.g. price fixing. To the degree that's not true, we don't have a shortage.
I don't know who he has, but Time Warner does this in NYC. You have zero control over the configuration of the modem/router.
That is a great reason to wear them. My wife and I both wear Vibram's (we even did a Tough Mudder event in them), and they're great for starting conversations on the trail. Of course, if you don't like small-talk with strangers, they will be a nightmare :)
Keyboard ghosting: https://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/AntiGhostingExplai...

Gaming on a keyboard with severe ghosting problems is infuriating, and I'd imagine that steno would be just as painful.
No, I'm probably thinking of the same case. I think the crux of it is the FCC has some rule against broadcasting lies and the court appeal case decided that this was more of a guideline than a hard-and-fast regulation.

http://www.ceasespin.org/ceasespin_blog/ceasespin_blogger_fi...
Lack of nested comments is a shame, I believe it's vital for anything more than Engadget/Youtube style comments.
I have been in the valley for years, and I have seen hundreds of developers doing some kind of adderal/modafinil or some other performance drug.
If/when apple exposes an "iCloud folder", then it'll be competing directly with Dropbox. It's currently not a competitor, just a potential one. Although it'll be a Mac-iOS only solution anyway, not catering to a huge portion of the "real world" - linux & win users.
"wealthy suburban school district" is important.

For example, http://acta.us/growls/2010/01/keeping_up_with_the_jones_in_m... lists numbers slightly over $100k for maximum salaries for teachers in two Maryland counties.

http://va.aft.org/fcft/index.cfm?action=downloadasset&as... is Fairfax County in Virginia; salaries are near $90k during peak earning years.

But even the pay scale you linked to has salaries near $90k at the top of the range....
"I don't see our government - or any current government being able to do that."

The Israeli's have a completely different approach to security - orientated around threat-intelligence and behavioral analysis.

True. Israel might be the exception to the rule.

Of course, Israel has a much smaller area to control and a unique motivation.
Computers just don't show up, despite, as far as I can tell, being properly configured for it. It's probably a network settings thing (as I believe it is with BTMM). I've only used it on my local LAN though.
matwood, do they really compare to the feel of the vibram's? i think my favorite thing about the vibram's is how they let your toes spread out to help with balance and changing direction. do you get that same feel with the merrell's? i've been looking for something similar to vibra's that would also protect my feet on trails.
I took modafinil for few weeks, I was really sleepy and it was affecting my work at ambitious startup. It helped me go through the period. Also after that, even though I didn't take it any more, effects persisted. I would say it helped me.
See, for example: http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/10/enter-prise/
I wonder what the purpose of requiring Google to remove the links is - when, I would assume, there would be DNS-level blocking of TPB. Wouldn't the links just not work? It would seem like Google could then not worry about policing search results (aside from the desire to remove broken links).
That's odd. When I've tried modafinil, it marginally increases my productivity primarily through enabling me to be alert for more hours of the day and stay up longer (my thinking isn't any clearer, nor is my focus better), but I have a "hangover" for a couple of days afterwards. On net, modafinil is a productivity loser for me; it is only good for deadlines.
Are these mostly founder-types who have a stake in the projects they are working on or also just regular programmers for whom its "just their job".
The Turin Horse (2011)
Let the votes speak for themselves. If everyone thought this was absurd and contrary to their personal experiences, it wouldn't be at the top of the homepage.
Although unsubstantiated, I find this claim completely plausible. In an environment where twenty-something hackers are told that their only path to "fuck you" money is compressing forty years of work into four, and we glorify startup success stories where people spent weeks sleeping under their desks (http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...), is it any wonder that this would be taking place?

Just search the archives of HN for these drugs and you'll find a surprising number who have tried them recreationally.

Still, I'd like more data.
Does that mean that 6% of the USA is on Adderal?

Nope. The 18 million is the number of prescriptions in a year, and most prescriptions are for far less than a year's supply.
i just switched to VIm and things like this just make me love vim more and more. Thanks for the post!
Yeah, that's true. For me, without cross-platform support (and a website) I still wouldn't be able to use it: my Dropbox syncs with 2 Ubuntu machines, 2 Macs and a Windows laptop, and I simultaneously use it to access files on my university's lab (Windows) computers via the website.