skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My issue with this (other than the stupidity of not backing up an important file) is that I bet that the MegaUpload ToS (sadly not available right now) stipulate that they're not liable for any file loss.

If that's the case I don't think it would be unreasonable for the FBI to say that anyone having lost files has only themselves to blame as this wasn't any sort of guaranteed storage medium.
> ... I am proposing that you increase the ability for both humans and computers to reason about it

Ah :)

On my TODO list is to create an intermediate representation to more easily reason about Roy's semantics:

https://github.com/pufuwozu/roy/issues/41

I think this would satisfy your objections: hopefully the core semantics are so small that writing a JavaScript version from them wouldn't be so scary.

I should try that as soon as possible. Simon Peyton-Jones has said multiple times that defining a core intermediate-language for Haskell was very important as it meant they wouldn't add things that didn't make complete sense. Working on Roy doesn't give such a strong sense.

My worry about separating the semantics out into an IR is that we might lose information that makes outputting readable JavaScript possible. But we'll never know until I try.

> Will you commit to implementing Roy in Roy?

Would really like to - or at least some modules:

https://github.com/pufuwozu/roy/issues/1

> Will Roy offer a subset or a superset of the type system of the metalanguage (JavaScript)?

Mostly a superset of JavaScript.

> Exhaustive case analysis and polymorphic variants?

Not yet.

> Will you be able to implement the type-checker correctly and safely in JavaScript?

With enough tests I'll have some confidence in it. I don't have enough tests. ;)

> Will your users ever be able to compile their pure Roy code into another functional language?

Probably not - at least not written by me since that's not what I designed it for. But no objections if someone does it. :)

Hopefully some core semantics will make it possible for someone to do that.
Siphoning is to extract something with out giving back. An ideal economy is exchanging wealth for wealth. Selling oil/gas to someone is not siphoning, because they receive value (the ability to transport themselves, make goods) in exchange for their money. My earlier post explains some of these concepts
Jay-Z & Beyoncé name Oprah Winfrey as Godmother of Blue Ivy
If you reduce government sufficiently, there wouldn't be any corporations, as corporations are an artificial construct created by the State. Whether that would be a Good Thing or not is an open question, but don't make the mistake of believing that libertarian views automatically equate to (accepting|endorsing|liking) big, evil, greedy, abusive corporations.

Also never mind that corporations, as we know them today, would likely never become as large and powerful as they do, without the corrupt collusion between corporations and government.

As for oversight of government... please. That sounds good in theory, but in practice it's all but nil. It took an unprecedented Internet-powered mass movement just to derail SOPA/PIPA... and they'll almost certainly come back later, sneak in the back door (attached to a defense spending bill or something) and become law. And this is the same government that assumes the power to simply label someone a terrorist and disappear them with no due process.

I'd prefer to reduce the influence of both government and $BIG_MEGACORPs in my life, but since governments reserve for themselves a monopoly on the use of force (well, until they contract it out to Blackwater or whoever), I'd rather start there.
Sadly, not even Google's apps do this correctly all of the time.

Google Voice is a particularly dreadful offender. If you click on a Google Voice notification, "back" doesn't take you "back" and it doesn't take you "up". AFAICT, it takes you "back within the app", which is often crazy.

Here's the scenario I just tried:

1. I was in Google Voice talking to person A.

2. I left Google Voice and was in another app X.

3. A text arrives from person B and I get a notification
from Google Voice.

4. I click on the notification and go to my conversation with person B in Google Voice.

5. I hit "back". It didn't go back to app X (the Right Thing). It didn't go to my conversation list in Google Voice (the more common wrong thing). Instead, Google Voice, of course, goes to my conversation with person A!

I can only hope that one of the reasons the Android team published their design guidelines was to publicly shame the developers of substandard Google apps for Android.
"external drive" is not what a smart card is. You can not read the key from the smart card. The actual crypto operations involved in performing the authentication are handled on the card it's self.

If your key is on a smart card it can not be stolen, even if the machine you're ssh'ing from has been compromised. This has real value and is not "insane"

In your setup, if their machine is compromised, it doesn't matter if they password protect the key, the attacker can key log the key password or replace the ssh executable with one which leaks the key, then ssh into your servers at will.
Had his ethics really changed he would acknowledge what he did before, at the helm of Microsoft, was wrong and pressure his successors not to repeat his past misdeeds.

I think the only thing he apologized for was the plan to seize Allen's part of MS while he was dying (luckily, he recovered). And he did so after Allen found out about it.

Have you ever heard something like an apology for all the rest? Me neither.
Митко Цонев все още изхранва дъщеря си
Деси Цонева, която за кратко се сроди с милионерския наследник Янчо Таков – младши, призна, че родителите й помагат финансово, пишат от „Блиц“
It's funny, we routinely travel thousands of miles across the earth on jets, yet going ten miles up is like going off the edge of the world.
Respect: Poland on ACTA [video]
The reason why this article is hardly comprehensible is that author is reaching out to a libertarian crowd while noting a problem generally noticed by the left - labor rights.
Inner Secrets Of Martial Arts Success Multimedia Package.
Megaupload Users Revolt, Threaten to Sue U.S. Authorities
20 Cool iGadgets of January 2012
The year 2012 is undoubtedly a friendly year for tech-geeks and especially for iDevice lovers out there.
I don't think MU disclaiming responsibility for file loss automatically means the FBI should be able to come in and pinch them all without consequence. Every shopping centre has a sign in their carpark saying that they don't take liability for any damage to cars parked there, but if someone drives into your car in one they're still liable for damages, despite there not being any guarantee of security originally.
My First Year Fighting Spam - spam-fighting as seen by a Facebook engineer
Just wait until you see my Lean startup's REST based MVP that we produced with Agile.

(Downvotes, ho!)
Sorting Out the Sharing License Shambles
> Or willfully having inadequate safeguards for profit.

In the early 2000s Steve Ballmer himself visited my (rather unimportant) East-European country and had a one-on-one with the then PM about the software-procurement decisions the Government was about to take. Soon enough it was decided that all Government-run institutions in the country should be fitted with Windows-run computers, using only Microsoft software.

A lot of my compatriots' tax money (and my own money) went directly into MS' coffers (when it could have find a better use in other, more important places), but I can see that 10 years from that moment some of it is invested in trying to cure malaria. Well, at least we weren't robbed for nothing.
How to Choose the Perfect Colors for Your Custom Wedding Logo Design
Colors can not only symbolize your personality traits but also set the overall mood for your custom wedding logo design. Find out what each color signifies before using it as the event brand mark.
Yes, life is all about tradeoffs. And I'm not saying we won't ultimately apply... all I'm saying is that it's not necessarily the easy decision some people seem to think it is. Especially for the people who aren't part of the "just out of college, single, no family, few commitments" scene.

I'd like to do YC myself, and being single (although not "just out of college") it would be pretty easy for me to do. But my cofounder has a say in this as well, and I have to respect her position.

Anyway, I was just giving one example of a situation where the decision is a bit complicated.
1) Ask the coder to develop a system to insert ad code by yourself.
2) View source-code and verify it.

My Question to you...
If you do not trust your coder, why do you even allow to code your business logic or what-ever you have?
I would love to see this. But there's two problems with it:

1. Bytecode formats are never completely language independent - there's always a feature or change that would make language X better

2. Browser vendors will never be able to agree on a bytecode format

So, to solve those problems, I've been thinking the following approach might work:

1. Write a JavaScript interpeter for a fairly language-independent bytecode

2. Write some small languages, targeting that bytecode (something for everyone: Haskell-like, C-like, Lisp-like, Forth-like, etc)

3. Hope people start writing more languages to target the bytecode

4. Hope that it's hard for browser vendors to ignore implementing the bytecode natively - for performance reasons

This way we avoid committees and just get it done. Let me know if you think this is a good or bad idea. I'm very willing to work on it.
+ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQdMtSmkVBs
In the case of technological products, make no mistake: the consumer does not want products to last 10 years.

You can surely run a 10 year old computer, but what are you going to do with it? Does anyone want a 5 year old cell phone?

So long as we continue to make advancements at the pace we're moving, there is no demand for consumer electronics that last that long. So long as each generation gets cheaper or better (which for the most part is true) and we figure out a decent recycling process (and I think we have) let's just keep moving.

I think it's a very fair point in other, slower-innovating industries.
Not to make a joke, but after asking me for a souvenir idea my roommate's German boyfriend said "...a gun?"
1)Germany is large too with different dialects. The point was that the US once produced these things (guitars, bicycles, etc) now we don't. And the younger people who can produce them are wising up and taking jobs in finance. The BBC made a documentary about this just this year.

Fender Guitars was sold to CBS Corporation and quickly mass produced with cheaper woods.

European: Tag-Heuer, Zeno Basel Watches, smaller watch makers, furniture, there are still towns with thriving silverware companies in Southwest Germany
2)Every country is an amalgam of cultures, Yes Winchester rifles of Jonathan Browning are definitely American

3)They use different, more expensive grains (rye, whole wheat) and sourdoughs which do exist in the US but only in a few locations. Baklava is hard to find outside college towns and metro areas in the US, this makes it unique
Simple Linux Auditing
Yes, this is it. In Europe, this is something very important. For example, you can only name Camembert a Camembert cheese coming from the area around the Camembert village. As customers, it allows a quick check: this is the cheap "like" version, this is the real one as they have a European label on the packaging too.
HP Touchpad now runs Android Ice Cream Sandwhich
> Making quality products for consumers [..] is dying.

This is a tired old line. The art and craft movement rose a century ago on the same ideas.

But the examples he gives are bizarre - Fender?? Fender is a text-book example of the strength of engineering things to be mass-produced.

Fender guitars were conceived to be mass-produced. Where Gibson makes a big deal about the supposed tone benefit of a guitar with a continuous neck to the base of the noise-box, the Stratocaster has always had a bolt-on-neck. The paint is Dupont car paint. Yet Clapton prefers it to the hand-built stuff. Better yet, if you break one you can just go and buy another off-the-shelf that matches it.

Some people pay a lot of money for old fenders, but people make strange purchase decisions when it comes to music and art.

I think people want to believe that hand-made things are better (particularly when they are committed to hobbies to build things that have no market), but I rarely see an example of it.
Every day hundreds of weather balloons around the world get launched for weather forecasts. There have been reports of sightings by planes, but never any collisions.

Air traffic control are aware of the locations where balloons are launched. In the UK at least, you must notify them before a launch.
Sites That Should Be Shut Down By SOPA according to Kamaila Sanders
For some reason, the URL tab won't accept this site so I pasted it here instead. Please visit this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-sites-deserve-to-be-shut-down-by-sopa-or-a-bill-like-it-2012-1#

I don't agree with most of the items on her list. Tell me what you think.
While the author's examples are horrible (German bread? Iranian baklava?), he has an important point.

When you have an expanding economy, such as the US has had for the last 60 years, marketing trumps manufacturing. People don't want any shoe, they want a Nike. But we've changed to a contracting economy now, where manufacturing trumps marketing. People care less about the label and more about having a decent shoe. (Note, I'm not talking year-by-year ups and downs, but 'bigger picture' movement.)

During the expanding economy, America outsourced manufacturing to focus on marketing, since it was what was important. And now that things have reversed, it's in a bad spot.
The name is "wordpoke".
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wordpoke/id471756627

I use the app every day as I built it for me first, the internet second.

A blog post is in draft, waiting the "first update" as its all part of the learning curve I wanted to cover in my journey into iOS development.

A new update to the app will be arriving within 10 days, Apple willing.
( It was interesting to learn how to tackle upgrades to the database. )

Issues can be reported and progress can be viewed:
https://github.com/freshteapot/wordpoke/issues

New features are not on that list.

The webpage for "wordpoke" is http://wordpoke.me

On the way to work, I realised I should and now will add it to my profile.
Twitter To Censor Tweets In Some Countries
If you "reduce government sufficiently" without reigning in corporations at the same time, there is nothing to prevent the organization of de facto corporations.

Corporations are an artificial construct of a state, true, but the only reasons it was "necessary" to invent them was that the states of the time did have enough power to otherwise enforce laws directly on the members of makeshift, de facto attempts at structuring something like a corporation. Reducing government power might remove de jure corporations, but it does not take away the ability to structure de facto corporations. The lack of legal recognition don't stop crime syndicates from organizing, for example (not that I mean to imply all corporations are as bad as crime syndicates).

> Also never mind that corporations, as we know them today, would likely never become as large and powerful as they do, without the corrupt collusion between corporations and government.

That presupposes that a new mechanism is put in place for keeping them in check, or you're taking away the one thing that presents them from setting themselves up as de facto governments.

Note that we agree on minimizing government. But I find the idea of doing so without popular control of corporations abhorrent - at least the governments I've lived under adhere to a basic system of justice, but large corporations unchecked by threats of force from the public - whether directly or through a government - would have no need to.

> That sounds good in theory, but in practice it's all but nil.

I have far more insight into what my government does than what I can legally get into most corporations. So while popular oversight of governments by no means is great, popular oversight over corporations is far worse, and what little there is is only there because of government intervention.

> but since governments reserve for themselves a monopoly on the use of force (well, until they contract it out to Blackwater or whoever), I'd rather start there.

By doing so you're just transferring that power to the richest corporations, unless you at the same time dismantle them.
Semi-Autonomous Road Train Trial Is a Success
Tweeting about where to find pirated sheet music will lead to DMCA-takedown
you should read about Tragedy of the Commons and externalities.
If you're interested in high altitude exploration, take a look at UKHAS:

http://ukhas.org.uk/

There's a beginner guide and information on current projects. Cambridge University Spaceflight is of particular interest - they're working on amateur rocketry in space, not just near-space.
The tweet in question; "Pasek and Paul's sheet music is $105 on their site...but it's free on http://piratebay.com > haha."
List of Major Companies Supporting SOPA
Show HN: Wisherbot - Automatically wish friends for their birthdays on Facebook
I'm glad you like wal-e. I tried rather hard to make it as easy as I could to set up.

Please send feedback or patches, I'm happy to work with someone if they had an itch in mind.

If one has a lot of data, EBS becomes much more attractive because swapping the disks in the case of a common failure (instance goes away) is so much faster than having to actually duplicate the data at the time, presuming no standby. Although a double-failure of ephemerals seems unlikely and the damage is hopefully mitigated by continuous archiving, the time to replay logs in a large and busy database can be punishing. I think there is a lot of room for optimization in wal-e's wal-fetching procedure (pipelining and parallelism come to mind).

Secondly, EBS seek times are pretty good: one can, in aggregate, control a lot more disk heads via EBS. The latency is a bit noisy, but last I checked (not recently) considerably better than what RAID-0 on ephemerals for some instances would allow one to do.

Thirdly, EBS volumes are sharing with one's slice of the network interface on the physical machine. That means larger instance sizes can have less noisy-neighboring effects and more bandwidth overall, and RAID 1/1+0 are going to be punishing. I'm reasonably sure (but not 100% sure) that mdadm is not smart enough to let a disk with decayed performance "fall behind", demoting it from an array, using a mirrored partner in preference. Overall, use RAID-0 and archiving instead.

When an EBS volume suffers a crash/remirroring event they will get slow, though, and if you are particularly performance sensitive that would be a good time to switch to a standby that possesses an independent copy of the data.

[0]: http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs...
Apple has tremendous proven ability to create/ride new markets, but no demonstrated ability to rescue doomed businesses with (soon-to-be-)failed business models. Why should they start now? Sure, that's only a backwards-looking argument against Apple buying Hollywood, but the burden is on those arguing in favor to explain why this makes sense for Apple. Seems like it'd be better for Apple to just milk the distributors while they can and at the same time make it easy for the next generation of content to be distributed via Apple... which is exactly what they're doing with iTunes.

Hm, what are some new business models (or more generally, pivots) that would make the dying distributors continue to be relevant?
Rising inflation could be the end of Pound Shops
Firefox 12 now comes with new tab page
I think you are confusing product creation with engineering.

Engineering is solving a problem or need.

Product creation is trying to artificially create a need.

Marketing and sales get involved in the latter. Engineering is a byproduct of need and requires no marketing.
MegaUpload Alternatives See Surge in Traffic After Shutdown
>Apple has ... no demonstrated ability to rescue doomed businesses

Uh... Really?
It bears repeating: ACTA as a treaty has been ratified, but the legislative part of ACTA has not been ratified.

You can:

1. Donate to the EFF - https://supporters.eff.org/donate

2. Write to your MP and MEP - the Wired story has a lot of good points that can be used in a message. Remember paper beats email, but email still counts. Google "find your mep" for many services

3. Link to the Wired story.
Pcod.es - share, track and promote iOS promo codes
To rank the complexity of a game, as it relates to the user, couldn't you:

Record 1 hour of input in a string. Run a block level compression algo on it, and order the compressed strings on size?

Wouldn't that give a measure of the amount of input required by the game, coupled with how much of that input repeats/has simple patterns?
The writer is just a plain sypporter of SOPA.
PG: do you feel you burned your hands with those kind of startups not transferred from RFS2008 to RFS2009?
( For others: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html , http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html )

If I may go specific, does the idea of a web OS make you go "OMG, forget it"?
1. Take 1 as a divisor

2. Choosing a suitable dividend

3. Calculate quotient

4. Instant interesting observation!
Countably uncountable
and then there are some who are dying to have some of these sites shut down.

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-sites-deserve-to-be-shu...
I stated in my "Sources of the Economy" that marketing is essential to the economy. I partially agree, marketing can generate wealth indirectly by creating demand, but marketing only creates wealth when the end product is used for something functional.

If I market a music band, I create no wealth, I facilitate the exchange of wealth. I am not saying that this is bad, but I am saying that the creator is the basis on which everyone else operates.

I agree value can technically be created at the base level by controlling production of crops and things. You are right, but still this is dependent on the producer.

@bwarp you are right, engineers usually have clients and contracts for which they build.
Really good invention cannot be killed.) Invention like Lisp.
The low bar for tweets to be taken down can be seen on their database already:

simply mentioning that TPB can be used to download movies: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/notice.cgi?NoticeID=...

claiming someone used your copyrighted photo as an avatar: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/notice.cgi?NoticeID=...
A tramway can be 50 meters long. A bus is usually 12-18 meters.

A tram system can be fully automated.

An electric engine is more efficient (constant torque) in an urban area with lots of stops.

In countries like those in Eastern Europe, car drivers don't give a fk about buses and bus lanes. But they are scared enough to make way for the trams (if they collide, the tram will barely be scratched while their car ends up totally smashed).

The tram vehicle lasts more time. My town uses 50 year old trams without any issues, while the buses must be replaced after 10-15 years.
You can also do it lower level with AVR microcontrollers and a bunch of sensors. Arduino itself is a simpler, higher abstraction enabling architecture that doesn't compete with industrial level electronics in terms of cost/performance.

This is simple a higher abstraction framework. Something I can probably entertain my SO with.

I'm CS/EE and I'd still use something like this and enjoy it. If I had any time left for distractions right now.

Might take the plunge.
Polish MPs wear Guy Fawkes masks to protest ACTA