skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because half the Flash "enabled" pages I load on my Android phone end up crashed, lagging, or completely borking the touch controls. About the only thing Flash ever works for on my phone are simple ads or video players (with unresponsive playback controls).

That said, not wanting to use something is certainly a fine reason to not want it installed. For example, I don't want to use closed media formats. I also don't want others to use closed media formats because I believe it to be detrimental to long term archival and sharing.
Amen. I got into HN and programming in general with big ideas of what I wanted to build once I knew how. At this point, I'm pretty happy working as a contractor, building my skills up, and getting to cook dinner and read stories to my kids at bedtime every night.

Contract programming can facilitate a cushier lifestyle than I really ever thought possible when I was a professional musician. My ideas and my abilities will some day meet, but in the meantime I'm pretty satisfied. This whole post/thread gives that a bit more perspective.
For people interested in the more "anonymous" parts of filesharing, I wrote my Bachelor's thesis on the subject: http://blog.marc-seeger.de/2008/07/23/the-current-state-of-a...

It's a bit dated at this point, but still give an ok overview of networks like Gnutella, EDonkey and Bittorrent and also goes into the more exotic ones.

As far as I see it, the currently 'usable' clients that use darknets and turtle-hopping are Oneswarm (http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu) and AllianceP2P (http://code.google.com/p/alliancep2pbeta/)

p.s. Sorry about the language, it was my first bigger paper written in English, so I'm a bit heavy on the passive forms and runaway sentences.
Why the Dow isn't a good proxy for the US Economy
What Is My Game’s Sales Potential?
Sorry for that, our central servers are flooded.
We're bringing a few more online now for dedicated .EXE downloading. Should be running fairly quickly.
> You might argue the ability of using Flash as an option. I see the fact that both Apple (and now Google have) actively taken a stance against Flash as something good for the society as a whole. It's a step towards better, and more open standards.

If only Apple took the same stance regarding video codecs, too, and embrace WebM. But the truth is they support what is convenient for them at the time. If it also happens to help the society in the long term - great. But it's not their main priority.
The Fifteen Minute Maker's Schedule
Residential Roof Options: Pros & Cons of Shingle Roofing
Because I want to have enough money to say hey, people should go to Mars and so I'll start a company that does that. I want to pursue social, medical research, and technological policy on my own terms which needs my own capital.

Because I want that apartment on One Central Park that costs $17 million and I want a chauffeur at 50k a year and a PA at 100k a year and someone to take care of my kids for 100k a year (no sketchies). I also want to be able to hire a plane when I want to do I can zoom out to Tripoli or Nigeria when interesting things happen and no private charter will go.

Maybe I'm being the stereotypical New Yorker, but I can see 30, 50, even 100 million dollars whisking away rather fast. You know what traders call $100 million of personal income? A unit. It's the starting point.

Note: CEO pay is not, when done sensibly, where the Board goes "Mark, you look damn handsome today - here is a hundred million. Go wild." It is a structured pay where you try and align incentives, that is, give the CEO upside when he does well and some downside when he doesn't. You want to encourage sensible risk-taking, remove principal-agent issues, and deal with moral hazard. Most pay for CEOs comes in stock grants or via other non-cash instruments. It is also usually not guaranteed up front.
Tower 1.4: Git submodule support
The Away Month
EAI & ETL: When you should choose one over the other
How to choose between EAI (Enterprise Application Integration)and ETL (Extraction, Transformation & Loading).
Crypto crack makes satellite phones vulnerable to eavesdropping
I like the idea, but you MUST get people to sign up before they can post!
I spent 6 years as a structural engineer on space shuttle flights. A few thoughts:

While I don't know the people involved with Challenger - I was in 6th grade at the time - it goes well against my own experience that NASA management had anything but the interests of the crew in mind. To a fault. In fact, your average NASA employee doted on astronauts like a star struck little girl. What the crew wanted, the crew got. You could always tell who the astronaut was when you saw a group walking about the centers - he/she was the one whose every semi-whimsical comment extracted voluminous and polite laughter from the others in the group.

I was, however, working when Columbia blew up. In fact, my mission was supposed to fly on it when it got back. Although sad, I feel comfortable saying that most of the people working on these things sort of know it's going to happen from time to time. It wasn't exactly surprising to us or the crew.

Blaming managers and celebrating engineers is overly simplistic. The line is not as well defined as you might think. I had few - if any (I can't think of a single one, actually) - managers (either contractors or NASA employees) who were not experienced engineers.

The safety rules for a shuttle payload, let alone the actual orbiter, are voluminous and arcane. It is the primary reason that very little new technology comes out of the manned space flight program. Everything new is considered too dangerous because it hasn't been flown before.

This stuff is insanely dangerous. It is pretty damn easy to come up with a way some piece of hardware you're working on could kill someone. The complexity is enormous. The number of people involved is in the thousands, and they're spread all over the country. Different centers have different rules.

As a result, you make life-and-death decisions literally every day. It's not such a big deal, because there is a lot of formal process in place to make sure it gets done right. The the "standards" are what keep space flight as we know it as safe as it is. Are they or the processes by which they are enforced perfect? Hell no.

The system failed. People failed. But we knew this would happen, and we did it anyway because it's the price of exploring the frontiers. We learned from Challenger. We learned from Columbia. We will learn from the next catastrophic failure. NASA isn't perfect. In fact, you might say the bloated organization and government involvement makes this sort of thing inevitable. But I bet the small privateers exploring manned space flight will run into their own challenges.

Basically, what I'm saying is that we need to keep this in a larger perspective. Obsessing over one failure in what is a centuries-long quest is not helpful. Dissect it, learn from it, and move on.
That actually isn't the case anymore. It has been removed for various reasons, a major one is stability. While the promise of isolates was nice, I think the choice to remove them was a good one considering the tradeoffs.

More info: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/nodejs/zL...
You're right, it is ridiculous, but if you were a merchant why would you want to pay out Pinterest? If you didn't pay Pinterest for their leads, wouldn't you still get the same number of sales?

Currently, Pinterest doesn't have a foot to stand on if the affiliate programs simply kick them out. They can do things to bias certain merchants, but that's a riskier play.
I think the point is the board should structure pay so that when the company does well the CEO automatically earns more and when it doesn't he doesn't.
I think the book is 90% full of just filler text, i wish it was shorter. The advice i think is valuable which i took from the book was to concentrate on cashflow.

Analyse all the things you pay each month and try to get each of those payments to be less, this is especially easy for things like mobile phone contracts, gym memberships, TV subscriptions, etc. Then you have more money each month. If your cashflow is greater each month, you'll be better off.

I think this advice is applicable to most people and more importantly, its actionable.
Because they only ostensibly have to be paying attention. The reality is that they'll probably be eating, texting, fumbling with CDs, rubber-necking, etc. This is where partially-autonomous cars really pay off.
No Framework Needed
"Is there other news besides campaign news?" TPM's Evan M-S, newshound
Having integrity would be easy if you never had to fight and the results always benefitted you. Life is not a fair thing.

Engineers place a lot of emphasis on having the right answer and almost no emphasis on ensuring their influence. It doesn't matter how right you are if nobody will follow your direction.
El gobierno de la web, ¿Quién tiene la potestad para regularla?
Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Can you say what you work on, or at least give us an idea? Systems more complicated than the space shuttle - that sounds really interesting and I'm not sure which ones those are.
Long-winded reply, but 3 years in the valley during the dotcom boom working at a variety of ultimately failed startups taught me:

1) The expected return of a startup does not compensate for the loss in compensation because 0.1% ownership assuming even a generous 10% chance of success times $1M (assuming a magical $1B buyout/IPO) is only $100,000 divided by the number of years worked. You wanna take a 30% haircut for those odds?

2) This equation shifts dramatically if you get one of those fancy three-letter titles and the equity that comes with it. Which is to say do not go to a startup without one. Failing that, the more of a George Carlin outlook you develop towards the three-letter title sorts blowing smoke up your keester, the better off you'll be.

3) Override number 2 for a sufficiently high consultant rate. Crossing my palms with silver cures all ills and shows that either you're an utter fool with too much money (most of the time) or you have a relatively good grasp of the costs of getting things done right.

4) Why bother with a startup in this day and age when, as the author said, you can just build something yourself without leaving your current gig? 100% equity times a 1% chance of success times ~$10M equals the same expected return without any sort of haircut whatsoever.
The lynch mob is in full effect at Mozilla. Tie em up, hang em high, put em out of business!

So a company publicly announces they are revoking a subordinate certificate, the only one they ever issued, as a proactive step to prevent abuse. And the reaction is to destroy them. Seems unfair. Why encourage companies to keep this a secret?
"Rich Dad" does seriously advocate real estate, not to the exclusion of those other options but certainly above them. Real estate stands out mostly because of the leverage that a mortgage can provide: you can control the income and appreciation of a $250,000 asset with only $50k of actual capital. You can't get 5-to-1 leverage on stocks or other such passive investments.

That said, real estate is certainly no magic bullet. You certainly take on risk, of depreciation and vacancy time and deadbeat tenants. And it's hard work to keep a property maintained or expensive to hire someone to do it. It's not for everyone. These are the points that "Rich Dad" doesn't make and must be included for a balanced perspective.
Oklahoma City general contractor
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Ways In Which Lowe's 'License Agreement' For Linking To Its Site Is Insane?
The UK is in Europe, and we certainly have credit rating agencies and personal bankruptcy.

Laws differ between countries in Europe. Please don't try and generalize unless you're certain there are no exceptions, otherwise it may give people incorrect information. Instead, mention your country specifically.
I disagree with the review. The book doesn't contain a complete and perfect path to personal wealth for anyone. But what book could ever accomplish that?

Disclaimer: I read it several years ago. But the takeaways of the book that stayed with me to this date are:

* Don't get emotionally attached to the concepts of money and debt. Money is not worth anything by itself and debt is not bad by itself. They are simply tools that you use and you can use them wisely or foolishly.

* Try to invest your money and time in a way that creates recurring income. I.e. a house is a very bad investment because it creates recurring costs rather than income. Of course you need somewhere to live but don't get emotionally attached to the idea that happiness equals living in a fancy house or driving a fancy car.

* Debt is nothing more and nothing less than a tool for creating recurring income as long as the costs of the debt are lower than the income it creates. Discounting for risk etc.

* The way we teach our kids "the value of money" is creating exactly the emotional ties above that will lead them to making bad decisions about their personal finances, and ties their happiness to how much money they have in the bank.

I don't know if these points are what the book says, simply because I don't know how much of it is my own interpretations. But reading this book allowed me to come to a number of conclusions that have been very helpful ever since. I can think more clearly about what money, income, debt and costs really are.
True, you can't have too much, but you can have enough that it puts you well past the point of diminishing returns.

If I, for example, were making 1m a year as a software engineer but still had to answer to someone else and deal with bullshit (read anything I didn't want to deal with - politics, TPS reports, writing boring software, limits on vacation), I'd still be as unhappy as I would be at twice the pay. More money wouldn't make the situation any more palatable. Getting a position that lessened the bullshit would. That position could take several forms, and there's many different levers (e.g. paid vacation, a position of substantial autonomy) I can pull besides money to increase my satisfaction.

I can't imagine, though, that most CEO's can move those levers drastically. It's not like you can negotiate for a more reasonable board come hiring time. CEO's don't take vacation in the same way you and I do, and even if they did, I'm not sure a CEO who fought to take time away from his company would be thought of favorably.
Telecommuting with Exvo OS Cloud and Apps
a useful one is 'markers'. I use it a lot when jumping from place to place.

Example:
:ma <-- sets a marker at the current cursor location named 'a'

later on, you can go back to this exact place by typing "a (that is quote followed by letter 'a' - the marker you named.

Note that you can have as many markers as you want.
If anyone feels like paying my salary for a year, I'd love to work on this project ;) Not surprisingly, at the moment most (all?) of the PyPy developers are Python people, so none of us have invested time into a Ruby VM in our spare time, but it's definitely a cool project.
On dams and water towers (Budgeting on an irregular income)
Curious why you would move to Usenet unless you are using a free service? The remaining DDL services (such as DepositFiles and RapidShare) are cheaper and tend to have faster DL times. Something I'm missing?
> Thankfully, very few of us will be faced with these honestly life-or-death technical decisions.

You'd be surprised. Check out the computer risks digest - always a sign of how pear shaped stuff can go:

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks
Have a look at this[1] e-mail. Would you say that it's not a scam because it clearly says "this notice is not (...) associated with a continuation of services for domain registration"?

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/1fJAh.png (via reddit http://www.reddit.com/pbvtg)
Sounds like 4chan but with a better interface.
Privacy, hashing, and your customers
SOCIAL ENGINEERING
Answering both ThomPete and talmand here:

In Flash, browser shortcuts like ^L are always broken and you have no choice about that, because that's the way Flash is designed. If a similar thing happens in a non-Flash environment, it's because the developer designed it so.

If many users complain to the developer about stuff being broken, it has to count for something.
CEO pay is frequently structured like this already. CEOs will often get half or more of their pay in restricted stock and options, and it's not unheard of for their salary to be a token value like $100 or $1. They also have the incentive of not being fired, and being re-signed if they're on contract.

The alleged problem is that the vesting/restriction periods for these stock and options is too short, like a few years. I have a pet idea that CEO pay should be mostly in stock that vests quickly but is restricted for a very long mean time, like 20 years. But that's just a pet idea and I bet it would be a very hard sell to potential CEOs.

I also think pay for performance is overrated. It won't help if you have the wrong guy in the first place.
Infographic of the Day: what type of geek are you?
Different teams working on modules is a very different animal than one engineer saying "this item is going to blow up" for years and obviously everyone ignoring him... I find it particularly shocking how your answer suggests a strong "well, shit happens" attitude when clearly the potential AND a strong reason to make things better was right there.

What would really be interesting is why he "failed to make his case" according to executives.
Paying CEOs for 'performance' may not be a significant improvement unfortunately.

Daniel Kahneman, and Nassim Taleb have spoken about this - essentially that there's no good reason to think CEOs of large companys have any significant control over their company's outcomes. Our judgement is clouded by a combination of hindsight and narrative biases along with a significant underestimation of 'luck'. Kahneman quotes something like a .6 correlation IIRC. So, it CEO performance exists, it's just overestimated.

Kahneman's new book - Thinking Fast and Slow - is an excellent read.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/in-dumb-luck-we-can-trust-2012...
Sort of like the rabbit thanking the eagle for the evolutionary pressure to make them faster and faster?
You raise two main themes here: NASA/space travel has grown into a Byzantine set of rules, and also that it is an accepted cost of doing business that you'll lose lives.

Do you believe that we'd be better served by simpler (but potentially much more dangerous) craft flown by private industry? If not, why is the NASA approach better, seeing as how it is mired in both politic from without and bureaucracy/process from within?
Well, looks like a plain old forum with auto-refresh to me. Except that I can see only one thread at a time. And that the UI is pretty horrible...
Honest feedback: The UI is extremely confusing, the whole site needs to be proofread for spelling/grammar, and the name doesn't really describe or even hint at what the product does.

It's a really good idea in concept, but the execution could have been much better.
Ask HN: Why do so many companies hire only local?
I've noticed that most tech companies, when they do post for new hires, are looking for someone in X area.

I've been a contractor for several companies, and I can say that my performance has always been praised. In all cases, I have not worked on site, or even locally for some. This does not impact my ability to perform, and in fact may sometimes enhance it, since I don't have people wandering by to disturb me.

For those of you who deal with hiring, what influences you to only look locally, and not for remote workers?
Sounds more like inspiration and self-help than personal finance. You could point to any number of career paths and say, "This is a well-established route to wealth, and if you work very very hard and manage your money well, you can become wealthy this way." For example, there are high-paying specialties in law and medicine where the rat race really does lead to wealth. You have to outcompete 95% of the people in your field to become wealthy, but the same thing is true of entrepreneurship.
HTML 5 image recoloring
I'm always fascinated as to why people on this board fervently defend scammy self-help books. Tim Ferris' completely phony 4-hour series provoked a similar reaction.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html considers ISO-8859-n character encodings:

"Commonly used character encodings on the Web include ISO-8859-1 (also referred to as "Latin-1"; usable for most Western European languages), ISO-8859-5 ..."
"the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success"

No, it may be one of the best paths to wealth and independence --unless you're born into wealth already -- but it's not necessarily a path to success.

My parents worked themselves to the bone in business, were repeatedly screwed by business partners and banks. It didn't give them one bit of gratification.

My mother went back to university and got into not-for-profit microcredit and was reborn as a happy person.

My dad spent time with his kids and neighbours, when he passed away he had three times as many people come to the funeral as we had space for.

Entrepreneurship has a lot going for it, but it is very hard and given the barriers that can be thrown in your face, it can be just another rat-race for lots of people.
Does Harvard Business School have a kindergarten class now?
I honestly don't think Apple set out to kill flash. They just chose to not support Flash, like they also don't support a bunch of other browser plugins. All of them, in fact.

Had others not made such a big fuss about it, Apple's mobile devices would simply silently not support Flash. But everybody made such a big stink about it so they had to vocally explain their motivations for not supporting Flash specifically, making Apple some kind of Flash opponent.