skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll all for punishing politicians that do stupid things. I believe the best punishment is booting them out during their primaries, but let's not split hairs.

And I'm hell on wheels about personal freedoms and liberty. We live in a terrible security state. We need to stand up and take action.

But at times I start feeling like I'm having my chain yanked -- that in my obedience to and love of freedom, other people use my passion as a way to manipulate me. BoingBoing is stepping over the line between simply trying to inform me and actively trying to manipulate me. Perhaps they're doing that for good reasons instead of ratings. I don't mean to smear them in any way. I just think you can tell me Congressman X is working on Bill Y without making it sound like Nazis building death camps in downtown Washington, DC. Sounds like a modern witch hunt. Jiminy Cricket, folks, politicians come up with ideas for bills all of the time. It's a healthy thing to have a Congress with all kinds of diverse personalities and opinions proposing all kinds of things. We don't need to start chasing them down the street with torches and pitchforks.

If he starts getting co-signers? If the bill looks likely to move out of committee? Much different story.

It's starting to feel more like "Lamar Smith is the devil! Let's all attack!" and less like "A bill was introduced that could dramatically change internet freedoms...."

I don't like that. People do things I disagree with all of the time. That does not make them my enemy. We are not all 15-year-olds and having to determine which person is part of the cool group or not. We do not have to make people into our enemies who just have a different opinion than we do, even if that opinion is heinous.

Not only is most of this material lifted, it doesn't cross my personal threshold as being important. Certainly not as important as the cell phone carriers saying they're getting over a million requests from law enforcement for tracking/surveillance data (A follow-up on that story would have been great). There's a great deal of hand-waving and vitriol here and very little reporting or providing unique value. Simply, it's lazy and manipulative.

This is the second time this week a BoingBoing story has hit the front of HN and it's been, well, sub-optimal. Here's hoping their luck changes.

ADD: And, if other commenters here are to believed, the freaking story isn't even accurate. Geesh.
Thank you. Outlook 2007 and 2010 have a) flags, b) user-taggable-color-coded categories, c) an extremely usable ToDo bar, and d) Xobni and a million other plugins that attempt to prioritize your incoming mail automatically.

I'm not saying Outlook works for me (it doesn't), but it's annoying that the author pretended Outlook doesn't exist, and essentially proposed his version of Outlook as a solution to the "problem".
Claque SEO is out
I just want to point out that those were done by two different groups - the commercial was from TestPAC, a PAC started and run on Reddit. They also put up a billboard. Fight for the Future is separate. The thread you linked to on reddit was a post by Andy Posterick, Treasure of TestPAC

(Disclaimer: I helped do the TestPAC billboard and commercial as an officer in the PAC)
Proof that NES games are NP-hard [pdf]
Try making the comments fully collapsable, pulling into the DOM dynamically without firing up a whole new page, like reddit does.

Also, my gut feeling is that the default should be no inline comments at all, i.e. you have to select something to pull in any new comments, via the above scheme.

This would preserve what is after all one of the best features of the HN interface -- the ability to compare a great many of incoming topics side-by-side -- while still allow for a slicker way to drill down into the comments section, without having to do a full page reset.
It depends on the organization, but using a new language to solve a specific problem is a good way to get the foot in the door.
Sounds like Project Darkstar,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Darkstar
tl;dr authorial intent > viewer preference
How would syntactic awareness change search results? Would we have to change the UI as well, move away from 'type in a string'?
Apple's "textedit" can't open files with these characters in them. It reports "The document “test.txt” could not be opened. Text encoding Unicode (UTF-8) isn’t applicable."
Tell that to the buyers of first or second generation macbook pros. My family owned 3 of those things, all of which failed within 3-4 years.
Plop: Low-overhead profiling for Python
Doesn't amazon payments have the same problem?
Yeah, well, Unicode is hard. If it looks simple, it's only because you haven't looked carefully enough:

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/

The latest published version of the standard (5.0) runs to almost 1500 pages:

http://www.unicode.org/book/aboutbook.html

(Best quote from that page: “Hard copy versions of the Unicode Standard have been among the most crucial and most heavily used reference books in my personal library for years.” -- Donald Knuth)

People think that Unicode support is just a matter of implementing multi-byte characters, but it's so much more: you've got collation rules, ligatures, rendering, line-breaking, punctuation, reading direction, and so on. Any technical standard that aims to cover all known human languages is going to be a little bit complex.
I think I'll skip both and install postgres
Cheating voids 70 students’ tests at top NYC school
Pointers to a comparison across languages would be welcomed. TIA.
Agreed. I can basically get everything he wants in gmail with a few extensions/labs enabled.
When MySQL first implemented UTF-8 they probably did support every Unicode character... because there were less than 64K Unicode characters. Then Unicode/UTF-8 was redefined out from under them.
ClinicalTrials.gov link [1]

Johns Hopkins link [2]

[1] http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01056029
[2]
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/kimmel_cancer_center/research...
LolwutCon is an infosec con for talks that have been rejected from other cons.
Is Your Company A “Silent Killer”?
I really really wish the flattr model would take off for stuff like this. Each and every site having a huge fundraiser once a year like this seems unsustainable.
I see it as being a bit like moving to a service-oriented architecture. When you're just getting started it adds overhead, but by the time you get to your 5th developer or platform-dependent bug (hello HFS case-insensitivity bugs!), maintaining a VM image starts to make a ton of sense.

Similarly, when you start a new web app, of course a monolithic framework like Rails is great and is flexible enough to roll in all your business logic. Somewhere around 50k lines though, you start getting that ball of mud feeling and managing changes across the entire code base starts to become onerous. At that point you realize the sysadmin overhead, and cost of defining and maintaining slow-moving services interfaces allows you to turn your ten-person team into ten ten-person teams and get a reasonable productivity multiple out of the deal.
How do they handle security? If the software they're using to virtualize these instances is exploitable, then you could break into the host machine and do whatever you like with it.
London datacentre outage takes more than 50 businesses offline
You could weigh search results. Instead of a random comment in a random device driver as to why we use mmap here, you could directly show me the core mmap implementation when I search for it. You can directly link me to functions, you can show me the definition for a struct object inline, you can show me dependency graphs.
>Mr. Diamond’s fall was spectacular and complete.

I doubt this his downfall will ever be spectacular. But it will be substantially more complete when we see him doing jail time commensurate with the gravity of the offense.

(After a fair and speedy trial, of course).
So, how would one contribute to this?
The role money plays in congress is only a larger symptom of the overreaching power of the Federal Government, which in turn is a larger symptom of an apathetic, uninformed, and not-too-bright population of voters.
Not trying to denigrate the new device, just pointing out that comparisons are being made of a new device with a device which is near the end of its rather long refresh cycle. Of course that tends to favor the new device. I expect the xbox to jump ahead in performance by a significant amount after the refresh.
The BMC is horrible. It needs a cold reset frequently, and it often doesn't work at all when access from a non Windows machine. Otherwise they work really well. I like that the sleds are able to be removed from the front too.
Did They Copy Your Idea? Deal With It.
Peak Employment
> The government asked Barclays to falsely report their libor rate at a lower amount.

Allegedly
The article doesn't specifically mention this, but Last.fm is one of the services that was offline.
From [1] - "Our users volunteer their idle compute resources because they want to be part of something valuable to the world. We believe that this is a motivator far more powerful than paying people a small amount of money every month.".

Yeah, I don't think that is going to work, especially because you are for-profit organization not SETI

[1] - https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe
Agreed that the subset of the community with no respect for the Debian process showed the worst sort of young hipster developer arrogance.
You're missing that all of these things have valid uses. Take CDS for example. They're a very efficient way for organizations to mutually insure each other's risks, cutting out the middleman. The trick is to cross them with two uncorrelated things (pork bellies and frozen OJ, for example) rather than using defaulted mortgages to insure umm defaulted mortgages. Or CDOs, done right they're how a bank protects itself against a run and is still able to do maturity transformations (e.g. turning monthly salaries into 25-year mortgages).
So the same bug can knock out the primary and secondary for the same reason? Sure. Again, this boils down to what's an acceptable risk.
Ditto.

Sidenote: SkyDrive's "fetch" feature is awesome. Can grab any file on my computer even if it isn't in my skydrive folder.
It's very big news in the UK.
Unicode is just plain hard to do right...

I worked on a product for a couple of months geared at minority languages in developing countries - doing linguistics work etc. It was a pain to support Unicode, because there's lots of code points, lots of weird cases (what's capital?), ICU is a good lib but it's not up to date to the latest Unicode version and it's C/C++ (and thus a pain in C#). Oh, and there's the Private Use Area where characters go while Unicode decides to include them or not...
Not sure, they have enough flexibility. But I ll try anyway
I beg to disagree. It's a variation of the builder pattern and I find it quite useful, thank you.
I tried to sign up. First it wouldn't accept a + in my email address, then it wouldn't let me select my birth date, and then when I finally managed to get a birth date in and submitted it, it just redirected me to the login page without any message saying my registration was successful. I entered the email and password I registered with and it didn't work, and there were no emails in my inbox.

Why is it so hard for big media to get the simple things right?
If you want something like this, but more generic than Wikipedia-only, have a look at PersonalBrain (http://www.thebrain.com/, no iPad version?). To be honest, I could never make it work for my main intended use (academic papers & citations), but I really think it is a cool app with lots of potential.
Time for a 220V economic stimulus
You get back to some very deep concepts in economics and finance.

Value is defined based on trust and faith. I accept dollars for goods I produce because I believe that I can then turn around and give the dollars to get other goods. It's a trust issue throughout the economy.

Many of the problems associated with the economy hinge on the very usage of the dollar or renminbi or whatever currency you use. You need to replace that currency. As we saw with BTC, it's not a simple task to replace a currency and maintain a trust structure throughout critical infrastructure. We are willing to lend trust to the sovereign but your task would be to establish faith in this other entity.

Unfortunately, you will need to establish a new currency to accomplish your goals. This is far beyond the scale of a YC startup.
No, it says it right on the page. It's for non-privacy-sensitive applications.
Yes they will, most likely. Or rather they will collide in various areas struggling for consumer mindshare (with MS in a very disadvantaged position right now).

I still argue that Apple is far less "innovative" than it takes obsessive interest in the packaging of already done things and has the greatest marketing arm of any corporation out there.

"but you can't deny that the man [Ballmer] has passion" Maybe, but I don't think its for interesting product as much as a belligerently competitive business streak. That isn't a value judgement as much as an observation of character. Jobs was a bastard but one driven on what was produced. Ballmer is also a bastard but about as in the box a thinker as one gets for the industry.

If MS can even put up a viabe fight it will be some time in, and will be more to grab the
Lamar Smith is pretty horrible on all fronts (and my new congressman thanks to some gerrymandering that looks like it was done on a Spirograph). But SOPA is probably not one of his greatest sins.
Ah. Thanks, that makes more sense.
Are you looking for a full time developer or part time?
The trouble with articles like this is that they focus entirely on the problems created by 'relaxation' of regulation, but the benefits are not discussed. What we need to know is the net outcome (if it's knowable... But it's definitely worth discussing).
Currently I am working on a custom language compiler and direct executor in JavaScript, just to test my skills.

it takas commands like:

"OUT hello;VAR nin = 1;VAR nino = 31;VAR nana = brrrr;SAN nin;OUT var nin;COU nin;MAT nana = nin - nino;IDE nin 1 int;LOO nin <= 100 DO MAT nin = nin + nin;OUT var nin;"

and tokens and parses them.

It's not particularly interesting or useful yet, but i figure if I add sufficient abstraction to the operations as I go along it could be a fast way to process long numbers of JavaScript functions, but I'm really only doing it to push the limits of my current JavaScript abilities and see what is possible.

If anyone is interested (though I doubt you will be) my current progress can be found at: http://shanearmstrong.co.uk/other/jqueryassembly.html, the current page contents are just output generated, but a view source will reveal the code in all it's glory :) It is well commented enough to understand, though not standardized by any means, as sometimes I code after a 9 hour work shift and it's harder to concentrate.

I digress, that's what I do for fun in my spare time :)
Tucker has fallen back on the "no recollection" defence, which is only one step up from "only following orders". Looks like him and Diamond are sacrificing themselves to protect the real power brokers.
SQLite Database Speed Comparison
Nodejitsu (Node.js PaaS) Public Beta
Hmm, I'm no expert. But AFAIK open memory mapped files are counted towards a process's virtual memory (as displayed by utils like 'top' and 'ps). Dunno if FF uses memory mapped files extensively.

There's a utility called 'pmap' that you can use to display the memory mapped files and subtract it from the total etc.

Finding out how much memory a program is using is surprisingly tricky to compute. Good luck.
At first I was going to commend the author on being a UI/UX reincarnation of Dieter Rams (I know he isn't dead yet, so that's not quite logical). Then I realize the entire page was all images. Why???
This is a wonderful piece of waffle, but I'm trying very hard to find any abstract or even remotely concrete idea that it would describe that doesn't in some way model our existing markets, which already exist in almost every conceivable formulation, with and without regulation, with and without every kind of fee/commission/rebate/order structure imaginable.
I love the design of that blog. Simple but subtly original.
Where China is harmed by their overregulation they are helped by their practice of creating laws and then selectively enforcing them.

In Zhuhai (near Guangzhou) there are far less taxis on the street than demand would dictate, however plenty of citizens drive around offering people rides at similar rates and everybody uses them, locals and foreigners alike. It is obviously illegal but it is so widespread and common (happens right in front of you and the police on every major street all day) that it is clear the police aren't doing anything about it.

That system is very Chinese. They make laws that would seem to restrict business and then local officials tell the police to ignore them when they deem their area is better off without them. Unfortunately this also extends to things like drugs and even kidnapping in some areas. No system is ever perfect.
I guess you started feeling manipulated with this line:

>Lamar Smith, the powerful committee chairman and corporatist archvillain who tried to ram through SOPA last year is now bent on reviving his slain monster and unleash it upon the earth.

Keep in mind that Cory is a novelist after all.
I don't understand.

Literally.

Is 'now' the niche filled by your app? Is 'then' the pre-smartphone era? What is this presentation trying to convey?
On Resilience in Automated Systems, Failures and the Human Factor
> there were less than 64K Unicode characters. Then Unicode/UTF-8 was redefined out from under them.

Unicode 2.0 introduced multiple planes, i.e. more than 65536 characters. That was in 1996. If that was the case, then MySQL has had more than one-and-a-half decades to introduce multiple planes and seems to have done so less than a year ago. I disagree with being 'redefined out from under them', when it was defined a year after MySQL started, at a time when it probably didn't even have Unicode support yet anyway.
I agree with just start it going.

But i'm using generalizations just because the OP does that too; freelancer services suck. Yes they do, for certain jobs. The fact that there ARE countless variables gives me pause about the viability of this project. You either try to provide a service which github/37signals would hire which they will never do (they would try to steal all the people away but they wouldn't outsource) or you are trying to give less high brow companies 'worth for their money'.

I think in GENERAL the market is big enough for this, it's just an uphill battle as most companies won't listen. They are price focused EVEN though they had very bad experiences. We have people calling: 'I have had very bad experiences on freelancer.com, so now I want a local person, I found you. I paid $2000 on freelancer.com and that was shit, so i'm thinking $5k max here.'. This is just very normal behavior. Without seeing the project I'm 100% sure, after reading that, that this project will be FAR over $20k to build, not $5k. This is, however, not what the buyer thinks. Issues like that are by far the biggest part of the market. And enterprises probably won't use the services as they want to be pampered locally (so it can be a frontoffice service in front of this, but not just this).

Also; 'technical skills are easy to pick up'. Right. I agree with the people skill part, but technical skills are easy to pick up is complete rubbish. It's just simply not true. 'Cheap developers' do not only lack people skills as you are implying; they are mostly just really bad and not capable of 'picking up technical skills easily'. I can copy interviews with CS Master graduates with 3+ years experiences showing that after roughly 10 years of study + experience 'nothing' was mastered. And that's not an exception. I understand that your experiences are different; I would like to see what you mean in that case. We have managed to turn every promising/talented devs into very valuable developers with people skills; there are a few (really a few, like 1 or 2 on over 500) who where so Rainman that it didn't work, but the rest did. So what kind of 'cheap developers' do you mean, because I think we mean the same thing but you just call that people skills?

But yes, right here is; people skills and especially quite advanced people skills and project management skills are needed to do large projects where this pesky money thing hardly ever appears; these people are very hard to get on this site. If you have those skills you are worth A LOT of money and if you have those skills you know you are because you learned those skills somewhere.

If OP gets this going i'm willing to help (for free) giving advice if wanted (I have lead and done 1000s of projects, direct or indirect, for big and small companies) and just talk about the problems in this market. I'm not looking for money or a % or a job; i'm just very interested in the subject. That's why I recognize the problems and I would like to brainstorm about the possibilities as I find the challenges here very interesting. So if you want to mail me, please do.
This is brilliant...I am glad someone finally ran with it. I wrote a blog post about this almost 2 years ago - http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dolla...

There are many applications for this - including fighting DDOS attacks. There are still huge technical challenges with that particular application, but as I understand it...the only way to fight a DDOS is to a) get bigger guns, or b) lie down and take your raping.

Having something like this, can (in theory) give you bigger guns.

Do you guys pay the people who have idle resources?
23andMe Acquires CureTogether to Boost Crowdsourced Genetic Health Research
You mean the Michelle Rhee who was disgraced by a cheating scandal for gaming the standardized tests?

Unions have a lot of problems but I wouldn't call them the only bad guy in that situation. DC public schools aren't going to be fixed by a single term from a young turk mayor and a chancellor encouraging everyone to juke the stats like it's the Wire.
So this is where the bot nets computing power go?!
While I don't really want this for coding, something like this for a music editor (DAW) would really be fantastic.
Did you not read the headline at the top?

Note: This document is very very old. It describes a speed comparison between archaic versions of SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

The numbers here are old enough to be nearly meaningless. Until it is updated, use this document only as proof that SQLite is not a sluggard.
Can we refrain from punishing people for sharing their insights, especially when they explicitly opt to not share those details?
We did that with Krugle awhile ago. It's still alive as an enterprise product... http://krugle.com/
Definitely a good thing! :)
I'll concede that my comment was a bit curt, but disagreement is not trolling.
Try curse words such as 'fuck' 'shit ', 'bitch' or 'bastard' :)
I inferred that the parent comment meant he/she worked for a startup, that became successful and is now a publicly traded company.
And yet, it leaves so much to be desired.
There's a surprising behavioral economics result that says people will do things for free that they won't do for small amounts of money. A check in the mail for a dollar or two every month isn't as compelling as being part of a group effort.

And empirically, it seems to be working. The number of contributing machines is currently in the six figures. The main risk right now is on the demand side, i.e. whether or not people want this type of compute.