skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say it's designed to filter out honest people, it's designed to filter out people whose past drug use could be a liability. Is it really so ridiculous to assume that anybody can honestly answer no to those questions? While marijuana use is certainly common where I've lived most of my life, I'm well aware it's not as common in other places, and I know plenty of people who have never used it.

In any case, the article says nothing to imply that the author's past marijuana use was the problem. The issue was with hallucinogens and I would assume that most people can honestly say they've never taken any.
HPPD isn't the same as flashbacks, it just consists of seeing things like floaters, slightly breathing walls, and fringing where there are straight lines. It probably wouldn't be safe for someone with HPPD to fly a military plane though. When treated correctly the condition normally presents few or no problems in everyday life at least after the first few months, but things like stress, sleep deprivation, and all psychoactive drugs (including caffeine) can make the symptoms much worse.
Any examples of web interface not being good enough? I know it's far from perfect, but couldn't really blame it for anything more specific than "general polish" at the moment...
Me too, but I noticed the other day that you can only save your progress at Khan Academy if you sign it with either Google or Facebook. That stung. I don't want to sign up for a social network, just to save my progress on a math course.
Article about decline of brick and mortar cites yellow pages. This is a joke right?
Yeah, just looking at mail to model spam is one thing. Looking at it to model the user's life and interests is quite another.
I was about to suggest iCloud, but it does not support some features that may be of interest to HN type users: in particular, "email personalities" - the ability to send outgoing email through the iCloud SMTP server using any of your various non-me.com email addresses.
With certain audiences, forums are still popular and profitable. For example http://candlepowerforums.com is still the place to go for advice on flashlights, and has a thriving marketplace and following.
Android Vs. the Proxy
I would like to involve all Android developers in my project. I bet that a small percentage of developers are aware that our favourite OS is afflicted by a defective support of proxy settings under Wi-Fi networks.
My understanding is it is different: https://commons.lbl.gov/display/google/Google+Apps+-+Privacy...
I cannot recommend more the BBC Radio4 In Our Time talks:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/

They cover different topics, from philosophy to history, and they always have the most interesting guests.
I LOVE the automated checkout line. The queue is shorter, my yoghurt isn't packed next to the hot roast chicken, and a cashier isn't there to sneeze on my lettuce or silently critique my snacking habits. Not to mention the irrational fear of embarrassment when you're walking out with feminine hygiene products or lube or something -- it doesn't matter when you're packing it yourself.
That's Not Agile
This really doesn't need a new thread.
I wouldn't do this if that person were a federal agent. Lying to a federal agent is a serious felony. (Of course, you shouldn't ever say anything of substance to a federal agent without a lawyer.)
Http://www.locksmithofnewyork.com
If you follow all 3 of those things, it would make it almost impossible for someone you just met to find you on FB. Unless you explain in person what your FB strategy is. Basically if you did all those things, at that point you might as well not use it at all. (I no longer have an account)
I have a specific ritual for getting into the zone and one for getting out of the zone. My ritual for getting into a focused state is something like:

Move back from the computer, touch my index fingers to my thumbs, close my eyes, count down from 10, and say out loud (or write) "I am now working on (project)". It takes ~30 seconds and it works pretty well for me.
Scale and business model. My ISP is not trying to help people sell me stuff by modeling my life and interests.
Great article. BTW does somebody here know great timer app for Mac or Linux? I'm trying this "60 work / 30 rest" pattern, but sometimes problem is so interesting and I just can't keep track of the time:)
Massive differences in terms of capability, and reliability. Mainframe computing is not the same in comparison of clock cycles.
Arguably corrupt though can they account for all the VC's money?

I remember working for a Company that took VC funding and they competed that they liked us as the senior management didn't go out and buy BMS the instant the money cleared.
Much better app than basecamp
"The objectives of STXXL project (distinguishing it from other libraries):

• Make the library able to handle problems of real world size (up to dozens of
terabytes).

• Offer transparent support of parallel disks. This feature although announced
has not been implemented in any library.

• Implement parallel disk algorithms. LEDA-SM and TPIE libraries offer only
implementations of single disk EM algorithms.

• Use computer resources more efficiently. STXXL allows transparent overlapping
of I/O and computation in many algorithms and data structures.

• Care about constant factors in I/O volume. A unique library feature “pipelining”
can half the number of I/Os performed by an algorithm.

• Care about the internal work, improve the in-memory algorithms. Having many
disks can hide the latency and increase the I/O bandwidth, s.t. internal work
becomes a bottleneck.

• Care about operating system overheads. Use unbuffered disk access to avoid
superfluous copying of data.

• Shorten development times providing well known interface for EM algorithms
and data structures. We provide STL-compatible2 interfaces for our implementations."
For some tasks, JRuby is faster than python and for others, it is slower, but the difference is not big. PyPy is significantly faster in most cases than both.
Amazon is expensive when you do an apples to apples comparison to other hosting options at a small scale.

It's value starts to appear when you are operating at a scale high enough that you start hiring people to futz with servers.

Enterprises love Amazon for a few reasons:
- Cost containment -- all costs for a projet can be borne by the project, and go away at the end.
- Cost savings -- Amazon costs are easily a third of what large enterprises charge back for similar services.
- Avoiding internal IT challenges -- Amazon gives people who own applications or businesses to avoid many of the bureaucratic hoops that they must deal with internally. (Remember the story about the NY Times guy who digitized all of the back issues of the Times? Getting the resources for that project would take months the normal way.)
- Speed -- Physical server provisioning times as long as 8 weeks aren't uncommon. VMs can take days. Amazon obviously doesn't have that issue.
- Performance isn't an issue -- EBS sucks, but so do the overcommitted VMWare clusters and shared SAN at a large company. At least it doesn't cost $1.50/GB/mo (benchmark cost for enterprise SAN a couple of years ago.)

For a startup that can run the business on a half dozen boxes, it is definitely more expensive. But... if you are expecting lots of growth, you do need to make sure that you choose a colo/hosting place that has the ability to scale up as well.
I did a switch in a reverse direction. From Ruby to Python.
People actually shouldn't compare both languages in terms of language constructs and what or what not they got right. They are similar enough that it doesn't matter. What matters is library support and the community.

I got into Ruby by pure accident (No Rails-bait). I needed a scripting language to automate some tasks and one of my friends was playing with it back then and suggested it.

Ruby's weakness (and it's strength at the same time) is that it got popularized by Rails. As a result a huge community has grown around it - but it brought a tunnel vision effect along with it. People don't recognize that there are things besides Rails and it's reflected in weak (non web-dev) library support.

I didn't like the fact that there's a big push in Ruby-land for metaprogramming / DSLs and monkey patching. Ruby's not inherently that great at it. It just happens that you can do it, but it doesn't mean you should. Which has always been in my eyes mostly a big abuse of *_eval, method_missing etc. that leads to performance issues, maintainability issues, and so on. All that just to save a few keystrokes. Couple that with the very implicit nature of Ruby then you get a disaster. How often did I want to use libraries that turned out to be monkey-patching the same built-in classes and clashing with each other, How often did I want to delve to some code base to customize something, make a fix, etc. just to find such coding practices and being unable to reason about it in a regular object oriented fashion which Ruby's foundations are built on.

The more I wanted to build serious things in Ruby the more often I would hit such problems.

This all brings a question: What would happen if Rails had disappeared the next day. What would all these people do? What could they use instead?

It was an obvious choice not to stick with Ruby because it has nothing to offer in the long term over Python. Learning python is a very good investment - I can do web programming, gui programming, scientific computing. I can use it to script blender, gimp, you name it. And unlike Ruby - I have excellent alternatives for each task.
Erlang vs JVM: Comparing Chalk with Cheese
Why Devs Owe You Nothing
I think turnkey website scripts (mostly in php) are doing well. People that want url shortners or image hosts or some such things can buy a turnkey website for $50 or something. I know a few people who make money from scripts like this.
There is unfortunately also the problem of too many "best practices", that gets popularized, dogmatized and horribly misused.
There is a $100M discrepancy in Facebook’s payments revenues
Never talk to the police:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
Ask HN: What would you work on, if money was of no concern?
I'm sure plenty of you work on projects with no motivation for financial returns, but suppose you could quit your job right now, and work on any project full time. What would it be? Why?
If the article's premise is true, that there's a decline in the belief in magic due to having more information at your fingertips, that's good news to me. Sure, it'll mean a decline in the magic industry specifically (although it'll never die out entirely simply because watching someone perform a magic trick well is amazing even though you know it's a trick). But it also means that people aren't taking what's fed to them on faith, and are looking behind the curtain. At a societal level, this is something we should definitely encourage.
That's what I'm looking for yes?

It's just that the arguments generally presented seem to be able to be applied to skype, forums, blogs, email... pretty much having an IP address, or even a mobile phone. I'm just generally interested in what makes facebook specifically so bad to me personally - beyond it's obvious size and centralisation.

The riots one is an interesting example. Do you have any links to examples of people arrested as a result of just having a facebook account? Not just as a result of posting pictures of themselves doing something illegal or organising illegal activity publicly; in which case the medium is unimportant.
Ask HN: How Come There Is No Captcha To Create A User Name On This Site?
I really like the simplicity of the sign up process on HN. But it got me thinking why do I always have to enter a captcha every where else and there is not one for the user name sign up on this site.
Valve admits hackers accessed Steam transaction log
Dare I suggest it - part of the problem here is the minimum wage. I'm pretty ambivalent about even writing that, but before you downvote me, think about it. The only way it makes sense to hire a human is if you expect to make more money from having them than you pay them in wages. Which means (in the US) that human labor has to be worth more than about $10 (including taxes and benefits) per hour to even consider. It's just not worth hiring a human dishwasher at that rate. Would it be at $3/hour? Perhaps.

The trouble, of course, is that we've already been on the automation train long enough that it's not quite so simple as just removing the law now. Is not like flood of low-paying (but greater than zero-paying) jobs will materialize out of thin air.
Obat Tradisional Darah Tinggi Terbaik
bat Tradisional Darah Tinggi

Apakah anda mempunyai penyakit datah tinggi ? nah taukah anda apa peyebab penyakit darah tinggi tersebut ? dan bagaimana cara menyembuhkannya ? dengan obat tradisional darah tinggi XAMthone plus.

Tekanan darah tinggi atau hipertensi adalah kondisi medis di mana terjadi peningkatan tekanan darah secara kronis (dalam jangka waktu lama). Penderita yang mempunyai sekurang-kurangnya tiga bacaan tekanan darah yang melebihi 140/90 mmHg saat istirahat diperkirakan mempunyai keadaan darah tinggi. Tekanan darah yang selalu tinggi adalah salah satu faktor risiko untuk stroke, serangan jantung, gagal jantung dan aneurisma arterial, dan merupakan penyebab utama gagal jantung kronis.
Keeping your friend list private even from your friends is indeed the first necessary step to reduce the risks Facebook poses. On any other setting, whatever other data you keep "private" on Facebook is pretty much public.

Note, however, that this information may leak if you let other services access this information to build their own friend lists.
Zimbra is pretty nice
Honesty is seen as a liability in modern life. We never see it from politicians, bankers or public figures and people lie constantly about their CVs, jobs, income and so forth.

Why even bother asking if someone's ever done drugs? The chances are they will not be telling the truth anyhow, so you may as well rely on gut instinct and make the assumption everyone is lying all the time.

Sadly, today in every walk of life, its just a matter of making the "right" noises at the appropriate time to the right people. And that's not good. For anyone.

Tell the truth, shame the devil, take the consequences, one time. It often works out better than you might think.
Epic's Sweeney on graphics tech: "the limit really is in sight"
Payment Processing.
Not good ideas but lucrative: porn, pills, casinos, rebelling fraud, diet scams, Make Money Online, etc etc.

Oldies which add value and continue to make money: affiliates (travel, mortgage, credit cards, insurance, etc continue to print money, though barriers to entry are much higher than they once were). Lead gen remains a multibillion dollar industry.

There are many companies with six/seven/eight figure sales of unsexy software, not all of which is SaaS on a monthly basis yet. (Though it probably should be :) ). Time tracking, invoicing, collaboration, and all the other usual suspects for freelancers each support more than a dozen companies. Business productivity/communication/collaboration tools. There are thousand niche things you'd never think of if you didn't love a vertical to death. (e.g. Solving the problems of multi property landlords... with software. There's one guy whose supports four families with a very specialized spreadsheet wrapped in a Swing app.)

Traditional web page hosting continues to make money. (Not everyone loves VPSes or AWS. Your local bakery has to get on the net somehow...) There are ecosystems around e.g. wordpress themes and shopping carts for getting the Fortune Five million on the Internet. These support marketplace sites, affiliates, etc etc.

Niche publishing plus ads remains lucrative in many sectors. If you dominate the Internet for Christmas cookie recipes, that is about equivalent to a full-time job as a cookbook author. Every similarly sized field of human endeavor makes someone the 68% that Google isn't taking.

E-commerce still exists. Pick something you can buy: fishing rods, for example. Someone makes a living selling fishing rods online, I'll guarantee you.
I don't understand why the methodology is flawed: the objective isn't to price N servers. The objective is to serve all the load at the best price. If you need 131 during peak and 20 during off-peak and can not pay for the delta- yay!

My company works in the media space and I love EC2- during the week our loads are low but when it's Superbowl Sunday or the GRAMMYs, the ability to spin up capacity is huge. But the fact that I'm _not_ paying for that capacity 24/7 is even bigger.
One of Facebook's redesigns a while back made everyone's friend lists public with no option to hide it. Have they since reverted that?
Not sure if an task / ToDo manager can be "advanced" without a desktop companion, or tight integration with one. Mobiles are handy, but not where work actually gets done.

So far, I have not warmed up to web based task managers, which lack the convenience that a local app can provide: hot key integration, interop with local calendars, mail, etc.
Microsoft's "Shrimp and Weenies" Memo
Tim Schafer's effect on Indie Game Kickstarter Campaigns
Not sure if it's still profitable but I used to know a few people who would rent dedicated servers and sell shared PHP hosting to small businesses. See http://www.webhostingtalk.com, http://forums.cpanel.net/forum.php and http://www.directadmin.com/forum/.
Letting someone read my mail and track me across the internet is a loss of privacy. There is no need for a breach or erosion of privacy, because by using gmail I'm giving up my privacy in exchange for a free email service. That's simply the deal.

The question is, does this undeniable loss of privacy matter and can we know how great that loss will eventually be? I think it does matter, partly because we cannot know or control the extent of the loss and we cannot easily take it back (if at all).

There's also a great security risk if so much sensitive information is stored in one place. Google is certainly more competent than I am in securing their database. But the incentive for someone to steal it from them is orders of magnitude greater as well.
Not to intend to hijack this thread with a sideline, but I find it interesting that the author's problems were caused by the mushrooms he consumed in Amsterdam, at a time when doing so was presumably still legal in The Netherlands. In other words, he did nothing illegal at all.

I spent some time in the US as an intern at a large corporation and part of the admission procedure (on the day of arrival) was a drug test. My contract clearly stated that my employment was contingent on a negative outcome of that drug test.

I happen to be from The Netherlands, a country where as an adult I am allowed to smoke weed should I choose to (even though I don't). Apart from the legality of this, would they really have sent me back for doing something that is legal in my country?

The test would actually have detected any weed consumed up to 6 weeks in advance if I remember correctly. I got the notice perhaps 4 weeks before the test, so if I would have been a regular smoker, it would have been a quite likely outcome.

Can you really be held accountable for doing nothing wrong?
Why Oracle May Really Be Doomed This Time
Difference between a cross join and a full outer join
The high-performance computing systems at NASA Goddard are described here:

http://www.nccs.nasa.gov/systems.html

And the resources at NASA Ames are described here:

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/environment.html
Codebits: Meo Kanal
Well, they could just build supercomputers from off-the-shelf parts and Linux. Like everyone else seems to be doing these days.

Mainframes have magnificent reliability, uptime and throughput, though, and I'm not sure how a commodity stack compares to that. Modern, cheap hardware is pretty reliable, though. The LHC uses a lot of it in huge Linux farms with MySQL (amongst other things) for data storage.
If You Can't Say Something Nice... Well, Shout It
Wikipedia in the Classroom
Comic artists uses Git to produce automated "making of" videos of his workflow
Given that one doctor diagnoses most of the cases in the world and that it happens in a country that has a draft for a self-destructive war, I've got a suspcision that HPPD is a form of malingering.
In their new privacy policy they say this:

"We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users".

Develop new services sounds pretty open ended to me.
If you don't want to be found, no. If you do, adding a nickname to your profile on Google+ will (either now or eventually) allow them to make that connection.
Selling pet food.
i found the Pomodoro technique helpful
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

and if you're honest with yourself, it gives a useful measure at the end of the day of how much time was spent on uninterrupted work.
If looking at someone's website was like looking at someone's house, this would be like trying people's front doors and coming in if they were unlocked.
The definition of ownership is the right to exclude others' access to the thing that is owned. By circumventing that right, you are depriving someone of ownership - in other words, you're stealing.

To invalidate that argument you have to redefine ownership, and that is a tricky thing.
"Mainframe computing is not the same in comparison of clock cycles."

That's the thing everyone has forgotten.
The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician
You've hinted about the difficulties with affiliates before[1], can you elaborate on this? I'm starting an affiliate-supported business as a spare-time project and would love your thoughts.

[1] "Don’t look like an affiliate. Google is very ambivalent about affiliates" - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/06/landing-page-design-tips...
Google has intriguing plans at the Googleplex
Cash175.com Get $100-$1500 Cash Loans Overnight
Cash175.com that allow you to cover in a way that you have paid for your payroll to come up. You can apply online in 4 minutes.
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While I'm sure some or even many in Israel are faking it to get out of service, there's no doubt that it's a real condition and there are hundreds of threads on the Internet about it. It's fairly uncommon if you only do psychedelics once or twice a year, sleep properly before and after, don't mix them with other drugs, are eating healthfully, and don't expose yourself to any other major stressors. But once you start doing them 5 or 6 times a year your chances of getting it seem to be 20-30%, and only go up from there. Here are some Google links for you:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=...

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=...

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=...

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=...

For what it's worth it's also in the DSM.
"Google's ad revenue is best protected by them respecting their users privacy."

Their economic incentives are aligned in exactly the opposite direction. The more they know about you the more money they make, ergo the recent privacy policy changes which now tie your data across all of their services. In my opinion this is already a privacy violation, even if they don't sell my data to unscrupulous marketers. It should be opt-in. I believe the relevant quote is from Eric Schmidt, ""Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

If you read their privacy policy, there is an entire section called "Information we share" that is worth reading. It's short, so that's good.

But still, I don't completely buy the notion that as long as Google doesn't resell my data to some "unscrupulous" marketer they are respecting my privacy. If at some point in the future they buy-in to Zuckerbergs "everyone should be open about everything" philosophy and create another privacy policy that isn't opt-in... I guess we're all screwed.