skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading this article, I sat for some time and pondered whether I should come to the same conclusion. It's not as if he didn't leave that as a possible reaction and one he was aware many would adopt.

I concluded that he is a hacker who is eternally curious and likes to figure out the dynamics of unknown systems by jumping in to them and doing experiments on the systems in real time. This is an effective and efficient method of developing understanding through the use of the scientific method.

If he used this attribute of curiosity, analysis, and control over fear to make a career of defrauding people then I would conclude he was a criminal, such as the folks who are using the trust people place in software developers to steal people's address books. But he is not at that point, this is not a career, but rather an experiment. At this point.

On the other hand, I am certain though that if these practices become widespread at all there will be a crackdown that will make events less pleasant for all. Therefore, although I enjoyed this article I believe his most significant sin here is publicizing these methods as something for others to emulate. There can be no outcome to this except to increase the amount of surveillance and suspicion in the world. Better to keep such youthful escapades as a story told to friends and family.
Clearly untrue. DDG has been getting steadily increasing mentions from sources which are clearly not PR shills. Some good PR may well have given them the seed, but a lot of people are trying DDG, and liking it.

In fact, I recently changed my default search engine to DDG, and I'm enjoying it. And I'm not a PR firm, working for a PR firm, or paid by a PR firm, so I guess that disproves your snide assertion that "no one uses DDG".

Yes, I decided to try switching because of the drumbeat of positive mentions on HN and elsewhere, and yes, some of that may be the result of good PR efforts. But at the end of the day, they provide a good service. Maybe you should give them a try?
Show HN: LazyScout - Zipcar for location scouting
How to List Items In A Dictionary in A Django Template
The difference is that I know not to install random crap on my PC. I don't do it for exactly this reason.

The App Store has a "vetting" process, which leads you to believe that apps aren't doing malicious things to you and your data.

Also, most people have THE authoritative set of their contacts in their phone. I don't know anyone who keeps contacts on local files on their computer.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said except for the part about drunk driving laws. Could you please elaborate on this part?

It's also worth noting that there are two types of career suicide here: 1. Acting against the population's wishes, and 2. Acing against what is deemed acceptable by the ruling establishment. I think the "war on drugs" is an example where the general population might be very receptive to an unorthodox (i.e. decriminalization) candidate, but such candidates are filtered out of the process.
Tearing Down Barriers: How to Bring MMO Players Together
I was born in Waltham and grew up in the area; I'm in New York right now.

It's unclear what stage you're at right now from your question, but being in a tech hub isn't always as important as you think. If you grow beyond a certain size (hard to quantify; there's no hard-and-fast rule here), you'd be foolish not to have at least an office in/near one of the large hubs, but that's not necessarily the biggest consideration at the beginning.

By the way, this is one area in which tech isn't really any different than any other industry - you'd be surprised how many companies in the financial sector have headquarters elsewhere and simply have a (rather large) office in New York (though not usually on Wall St. - that's more of a metonymy than the actual center of business these days).
Interesting...why wouldn't it work? The reason people are shy to connect with professionals on Facebook is privacy, but if you're able to leverage those relationships without giving up any of your privacy, that's a win, right?
The bottom line is simple: they can't do it, they won't be able to do it, and it makes the issue moot. Someone is desperate for attention.

You would need to have complete control over the infrastructure of something equivalent to an Amazon, Microsoft, or Google to take down the whole DNS system - and it would require a permanently sustained and constantly evolving attack.

I'm always amazed at the vast under-estimation of what would be faced in a real attempt of that sort. First, let's assume they made some progress and actually started harming the stability of the global Internet. 1) the number of interested parties (from hackers to corporations) that would immediately respond to the counter, in numerous ways, would resolve the issue in an extraordinarily short amount of time and 2) watch you don't have the US special forces black bagging you within 24 hours if you're involved, no matter where you're at on earth. The corporate money interest in the Internet being up is at least a hundred billion dollars per day. They will kill you over that, or at the least put you in an off grid terrorist prison.
This article is already a little bit out of date: It strikes me as unusual to describe 6,094 as "over 5,500" :)
I would suggest reading these two articles:
http://rob.yurkowski.net/post/17610425880/rails-is-definitel...

Best way to Learn Ruby & Rails
http://astonj.com/tech/best-way-to-learn-ruby-rails/
I agree with shashashasha that the visual nature of the content actually works well with this type of content. There is a bit of information overload that you refer to, but for me it makes the feed of videos (at chill) more engaging than a feed on youtube (straight list).

I'm not sure why, but i'm thinking it is because many people's brains are getting bored with the repetitiveness on internet and the information overload (combining thumbnails, comments, ratings) keeps it interesting.
agreed..it's like people never dealt with anyone from a big corporation before...it always takes a while to get a response...and something like would require decision making from multiple executives...they probably just waited till the next meeting to bring it up
A Core-i7 2600 has a die size of 216mm^2.[1] Assuming it's close to a square, that's about 14mm on each side. Electrical signals in a CPU travel almost at c, so at 3.4Ghz, signals can go across the die 6 times.

It's probably much less than that because paths in the CPU aren't straight lines. Also the i7 is a 4-core die, so it's unlikely that any signals need to go across the entire die in one clock. (Besides the clock signal, of course).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microproc...
good point - that part of the post was written yesterday, and since then the boycott numbers have gone over 6,000!
Physical limitations of dead-tree encyclopedias (as opposed to Wikipedia) is distribution and availability - these, in turn, produce the spam/defacement issues that Wikipedia has evolved process to control.
How Much Have Foreign Hackers Stolen?
Thanks for letting me know that the movie is on Netflix. Going to watch it now :-)
I have The Little Schemer, but have had trouble figuring out the best way to use the book. Do you just read it from cover to cover? Or do you cover up the right hand of the page and try to come up with an answer (maybe even typing it into the repl) before looking?
I want very badly to love Clojure and have done my best to try and use it in a number of medium-sized projects composed of several services... unfortunately it seems that deploying JVMs on EC2 (under Ubuntu, anyway) is just not reliable and we would always get into situations where the VM was locked up and pegging the machine at 100% CPU. Not sure if this was a Clojure problem or a JVM problem but it definitely was a huge headache.

That, and the fact that many of the libraries are immature (so you end up spending the time to fork them and add whatever they're lacking), and many of the error messages and exceptions it throws are pretty cryptic and useless... I'd be wary of Clojure in a production environment at this stage, unfortunately.

Which is really too bad because it is such a great language!
but it's also true that it's very common to see reviews where users complain about excessive, unnecessary permissions

That may be true, but it's not showing a big effect. Pick two apps randomly from the store and you'll probably be asked to grant all sorts of unrelated permissions both times...

developers explain in app descriptions why they're requesting certain permissions

Yes, that's another aspect worth fixing. The developer should be able to annotate each critical call with an explanation. Although I like the idea in the sibling comment even better; just raise a popup when the permission is actually used (for the first time). There will be some corner-cases but in 9/10 cases that should make it pretty obvious for the user.
There Are Now Over 100M iCloud Users
Btw, you can drop this into Google: lightsecond / 3e9 in inches: 1 lightsecond / 3e9 = 3.93428423 inches
The News Is No News At Cloud Connect 2012
FCC grounds LightSquared’s plans
Apple’s stock price: It’s still a bargain.
You can be arrested for drunk driving if your caught sleeping in the back seat of your car.

You can be arrested for drunk driving a segway or a horse.

The drunk driving threshold in most states is so low they can't do physical tests to determine that level of impairment. They can only test your 'impairment' by testing directly for alcohol as many people preform better on reflex tests etc with that much alcohol in their system.

There is some impairment at that level but it's well below other accepted thresholds like being sleepy or talking on a cellphone. Still even sober people cause accidents so there are plenty of accidents caused by people with that level of impairment, which helps keep threshold set that low.

PS: Much of the world is much worse though with .02 being the limit in China, Estonia, Poland, Sweden.
The worst ebook feature is that the Kindle only stores max(last_read_page, current_page). This means that if you follow a footnote to the end of the book, your reading position is lost forever. This makes flipping through the book a mentally-expensive proposition. (The screen refresh also makes this impossible.)

I'm a big ebook fan, but only for novels or books that read like them. (Which is 90% of the reading I do, so still a big win.)
Check out meetup.com groups in Boston.

I know that the Boston Python group has solid meetups, and I think the Ruby meetups are also popular.
More precisely, a few bits of sandwich
Very much agree. The analogy I'm used to (and use) is:

CPU = person (researcher at library)
RAM = bounded physical space on desk
Swap = cart for stacks
Disk = the stacks (requiring scheduling of the elevator)

In my mind, the discussion of second/nanosecond is unimportant and makes this seem more technical than it needs to be to illustrate the point that "fetches from (non-SSD) disk are very slow and waste a lot of time." But this doesn't seem to be quite as focused as "A complete idiot's guide to the main components in a computer and what they do." (though I'm not sure that it's either time scales or components or SSD)
I know I'm probably asking a stupid question, but why can't my browser adopt some variation of OAuth and automatically authenticate me everywhere, forever? Imagine if we never had to discuss sign-up forms anymore. Everyone has an identity built into the browser, no questions asked. That's way better thank cookies, and just as transparent.

What am I missing? It would just take one browser (such as Chrome or Firefox) to support it and I think it would take off.
Chrome Team's Field Guide to Web Apps
How one dev used 90% of his Windows Phone code to port a game to Windows 8
I play Eve Online. The reason I play it is exactly the community of 300000 users sharing a single universe.

It allows social dynamics to emerge, thus translating a gaming experience into a learning experience.
Meta answer: I've been a long time reader and love how good the feedback is on most posts.

I'm not very concerned about the chat feature much at all. My problem is sending out "mass texts" and making many phone calls to find someone who is also free. I find myself waiting around a lot for people to respond to me and finding out most people are at work or busy elsewhere. If I could just load up an app on my phone and see that Mike is free for a few hours then I could get in contact with him and make plans.
This article is a bit dramatic. It's really easy to crash a party. You just walk in. Unless you are causing a problem, or you really don't look like you belong there, nobody will notice. As party crashing is sort of a pointless activity, not many people actually do it. Thus, parties aren't really prepared for it, and it's pretty easy.
Why do you care about the gender of the rent-a-cop that tells you to stand inside an x-ray machine? He doesn't see the images, and even then, what difference does the gender make? There are plenty of people that are sexually attracted to people of the same gender.

I don't like the body scanners, but I could care less if someone sees me naked. The reason we should fight body scanners is because the cost/benefit ratio sucks. It takes too long to move a line of people through these things, so they aren't used on everyone. So all you've done is thwart terrorist groups that only have one member.

There could be no airport security at all and it's unlikely that many more people would die. If we lost one 747 a year, it would be a rounding error compared to the number of people dying in car accidents or from excessive consumption of unhealthy food. So why do we spend any time solving this non-problem? It just doesn't make sense.
After a significant amount of window-resizing this ended up throwing webkit into an infinite loop. Impressive.
Teller closes with a great point about where to draw inspiration from. Look beyond your own field. If you can distill something about the greatness you admire in a different art and adapt it to yours, then you will have accomplished something original. Study the masters, but especially the masters of other arts.

I wonder if the same could be said for software engineering. Maybe it's pretentious but I like to think of it as a practical art. Certainly much of what Teller teaches about "how to surprise" could apply to Steve Jobs' keynotes. Withhold information. Tease. Throw in a false ending. LAND the real ending.

Sounds like Jobs had a lot in common with magicians.
Apple takes a 30% rake on all app sales. The customer buys from Apple's store and only Apple's store. It is very reasonable that many would expect Apple is providing value above and beyond the 2 to 5% rake a credit card company provides for such a transaction. I have been programming for 30 years, know very well what a privileged program can do to your information...And yet, this business with Path and apparently many others stealing your address book...totally caught me by surprise.
While the public does have an interest in research becoming public after a reasonable period of time, I think the government is going to have a hard time declaring that it wants to unilaterally sidestep a multibillion dollar industry that is crucial to science as it is practiced today, and an even harder time getting scientists to accept whatever solution it comes up with, since publishing in high quality, peer-reviewed journals is key to job advancement in most of academia.
You're definitely not wrong here but I'm more looking for a quick way to see who is free and would be willing to meet up and get coffee or come over for a game of pool. The chat would mostly be just to make plans for hanging out in the real world.
I may have a problem with OCD, but I would hate the idea that some content is hidden to me just because I'm browsing with the wrong screen/window size.

Hiding redundant elements, navigational bars, maybe images, etc... is fine, but I'm definitely not comfortable with the idea of hiding content based on context.
I just use my debit card everywhere. And just get pissed off when I need coins for parkmeter and laundromat. Everywhere else -> slide!
Interactive API Documentation Now Available with 3Scale
'In living memory' was stretching it a bit, I suppose - I ought to have said 'in my lifetime (1970->).

On the other hand, I can't really agree with your criteria for inclusion; in both WW 1 and 2 the US only entered the war after direct provocations (the sinking of the Lusitania and the attack on Pearl Harbor, respectively) and while entry into the Korean war was optional, there were strong strategical imperatives as Communism presented a much greater existential threat to the US in 1950; the USSR had exploded it's first atomic bomb in 1949, and China had fallen to Mao's Communists late that same year. I don't regard it as hawkish to respond militarily to significant emergent threats or actual attacks. You are quite right aout LBJ and Vietnam, though.

My underlying point stands, I think: Obama has shown himself to be far more comfortable deploying military force than many expected, and has had several apparent successes; but Republicans still attack him frequently on national security issues, and will continue to do so given that it's an election year. He needs a fresh electoral mandate before he can propose dialing back the TSA or DHS in general.
Looking Beyond the Vanilla Data Center
Humorous story: I once got yelled at by Teller. I was in Vegas for the World Series of Poker which was held at the Rio, the same casino where their show runs. The previous night I had had dinner at Okada with Penn's wife, Emily, who was a friend of the friend who put the dinner together. I also had tickets the next day to see their show for the first time.

On a break from my tournament I stopped by Starbucks to properly caffienate and saw Penn and Teller sitting in a corner. I went over to introduce myself, as I would to the spouse of anyone I had just met if I somehow recognized them. Right when I got there Teller gave me the evil eye and said something like "Can't you see we're working here?".

Of course they were just sitting at a Starbucks talking. They didn't have any props or anything. And probably they were hashing out details for the show or something, but I still found it quite rude, especially since I know they greet people outside of the show every night afterward.

But mostly I just thought it was funny to get yelled at by a guy most people think is mute.
A Chemist Uses Google's Algorithm to Determine the Structure of Molecules
Generally agreed, but for this case I remember the speed of light as a foot per nanosecond, and the arithmetic is just dividing 12 by 3.
MyDanceHits.com Interview
Perhaps more accurate to say "if the site had fallen over, he would have looked like a total asshole, lost a ton of money, and no mainstream entertainer would even dream of trying something similar for a decade."
Yet another reason to love P and T. Although unmentioned he captured the valley spirit of execs mentoring youngsters who might nonetheless become competitors.
Actually 30 years or so for one human-second. (Rule of thumb for that: pi seconds is a nanocentury.)
Rails has CSRF protections baked in; unless you explicitly turn it off, non-GET requests require a CSRF token associated with the user session to complete successfully.
that has nothing to do with using a password or not to authenticate. anti-forgery tokens are the answer to csrf.
Mozilla's plan to devour Android
UK Police: download a file, go to jail for 10 years and pay an "unlimited" fine
> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up.

While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing Group, the University of California system organized a (moderately effective) boycott, where scientists would not submit papers to any NPG journal [1].

[1] http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/6582...
I'm surprised by the amount of negative reaction here. Aside from the dollar amount, morally, is sneaking into, say, a tech conference at a hotel much worse than torrenting a new release movie?
Bloomberg on Women-Owned Businesses
Tim Cook Makes His First Mark on Apple
As for drunk driving laws, this article summarizes many of the issues fairly well: http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/11/abolish-drunk-driving-...

And there's definitely something to be said about established party powers holding sway over policy. But as we've seen recently with the Tea Party: the established power in a political party can find itself very quickly out of power, should it ignore the policy preferences of a motivated voting bloc.
Maybe the Americans were busy incorporating the delay due to the finite speed of sound.
Shorten URLs With TextExpander and j.mp
If you give your contact information to another person but what to technologically restrict how that information can be disseminated after that you are asking for DRM.
How do you expect Congress to get more knowledgeable? On the face of it, asking questions of knowledgeable people sounds like a reasonable response, as does asking involved parties for their version of the events. I'm not saying Congress is particularly effective in general, but I think it's reasonable that they should investigate whether to get involved, rather than just leaving everything in the hands of the same parties who created the situation in the first place. If we want a better-informed Congress, then we need to meet them half-way and help guide them from ignorance to knowledge when they ask for it.
Lots of people like it. To the extent that it inconveniences them, they wish it were directed solely at Muslim-looking foreigners, but are willing to accept the security theater because they have a siege mentality. Similarly, there's a good number of people that call for ever more draconian enforcement of immigration laws, despite both economic costs and significant inconvenience to US citizens, Latinos in particular.

The US frankly has a bit of a security fetish; you might find this paper interesting: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf
Fantastic overview of Transactional Memory in general and in Haswell
If you are looking for serious computer science expertise, Boston is a great place to be. It's not the place to find cheap web developers, but if your start up needs CS Ph.D.s who can write code you'll be set. Most of the famous Boston start ups were fundamentally algorithm shops.

For what its worth, most of the MIT grads I know have either stayed around Boston or gone into academia. Cambridge, and then later Arlington, are great little towns and vastly different than California.
Some neat Unix Utilities
You're right, there are cases of boycotts like this.

Another interesting case was when the whole editorial body of the journal "Topology" resigned in 2006 because they thought that its owner, Elsevier, was charging too high a price for subscriptions. Those editors then set up a rival journal, called Journal of Topology.

There is an interesting letter here from the editors of the journal explaining their reasoning behind their mass resignation http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf
Heartland Institute exposed (A Lobbyism HOWTO)
Mostly the same, Volume/Silent switch are a little bit higher. And the steel rim now has more breaks in it (which was apparently a cause of the reception problems, when your finger went over the only break)
The Design Evolution of Piezo
Resident Evil 6 Trailer, Release Date
I too like reading on iPad more then kindles, but iPad is unfortunately not very fast either. Opening an interactive ebook (the ones they introduced last month) on my iPad 2 takes about 2 seconds...