skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure 2.5 billion dollars is a large sum of money. Imagine how you'd break this news to the public. You've practically crushed people's hopes and dreams. "Umm, guys, we just accidentally bricked the rover because of a firmware upgrade gone rogue". I'd end up in tears if I had done this.

Speaking of firmwares, I'm unable to find out information if they have a dual bios kind of system where if the boot fails it can recover from the backup firmware.
Apocalypse Not: The 2012 Myth Scientifically Debunked
I really hope more aid organizations will heed this and similar advice, and understand that family planning via sexual education and the availability of contraceptives is going to be one of our best chances for a better world.
"Uncaught The Javascript Facebook SDK must be loaded before calling init.". I have Facebook Disconnect installed and all i see is a big blank page. http://i.imgur.com/KlK8n.png
It would be useful when making this sort of comment if you mentioned where you live.
For context, more Olympic logos.

My favorites are Grenoble, 1968 and Nagano, 1998 and Cortina d’Ampezzo, 1956.

http://www.digitalhorticulture.com/a-history-of-olympic-logo...
So if you sign up with another method, then you can manage which bands you like on the service itself? Will we also manage relationships with other users on the service? From the way the TechCrunch piece was worded, it almost seemed like FB integration was central to the value offered to users and artists.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The second idea struck a cord because this is essentially the basis for knowledge management, which I've been studying lately and find incredible useful as a source of inspiration on how to run a business.
This gets dangerously close to Minority Report [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film) ] type scenario where political dissidents or a minority group, can be denied all services by a corrupt official.

Fingerprint scanners can be defeated by a determined person. Retinal scanners will probably be defeated in the next 5-10 years. The government will claim "The retinal scanner authentication database is never wrong" until they are proven wrong.
TRIM & dm-crypt ... problems? (2011)
From the linked article on wikipedia:

“Not to be confused with Murphy's law.”

Muphry's Law is something different (yet related).
UAC for online accounts
> Moreover, I think a introduction using terms and ideas from category theory would be more useful, more thorough and more enlightening than an introduction to "compositional programming" without any math.

Yeah, this article left me wanting to know more about category theory. But that in itself is valuable. I googled and found a couple introductory papers [1,2], some slides introducing category theory for software engineers [3] (with a NSFW diagram on page 8), and an introduction to category theory as it applies to Haskell [4].

[1]: http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~fokkinga/mmf92b.html

[2]: (PDF) http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~ooste110/syllabi/catsmoeder....

[3]: (PDF) http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/presentations/cat101.pdf

[4]: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Category_theory
Having known Apoorva since our days in UW, everyone should know this is par for the course for him. Many of us in our class were exceptional people, and have gone on to do exceptional things.

Apoorva's different. He takes the tools and abilities he has, and just applies them differently than anyone else. It's tough to put my finger on it. When he first told me this story, I just laughed. I just thought, classic Apoorva.

Think what you may about Instacart, but this man is going places.
As much as a I could keep up with his fast talking: "Backly is a way for businesses to reward the supporters of their brand and business. It's more of a close connection between a business and a consumer rather than just have them follow them on twitter[...]"
https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action?name=Xcod...
I wonder why github's US traffic numbers go down?

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/github.com/
Don’t take no for an answer! YES is around the corner!.There are always back doors to opportunities if you want them badly enough.The key is transforming the 'no' from a flat refusal into an obstacle to be surmounted. If you can deal with the obstacle,your request is more likely to be granted.Whenever someone tells you 'no,' there's almost always a way to turn it into a 'yes.'Period!
It's a way for business to reward supporters of their brands apparently. I like the idea. And this is a great way of gaining a bit of publicity.
I love the idea, congrats to Mazy and team!
Yes you'll be able to manage it yourself. We are working on a tool to let you search for artists to follow and to suggest you similar artists to follow.
Related, and very good, post from swombat's:

Making all the decisions yourself[1]

[1] http://swombat.com/2011/7/13/taylor-drucker
I have huge amounts of respect for the Mazy + the Tracks.by team and believe they can do big things, but...

This is disappointing. I would normally not have signed up for this service given that it requires facebook login, but I was just about to pop open pandora and figured I could use some new music. So I gave Hipset a shot. A few seconds later I see this:

http://imgur.com/UvB9s

Music discovery? What? They just pulled in a bunch of status updates (ie noise) from musicians/bands I already follow on facebook and laid them out pinterest style. Really? This is music discovery? Well, it turns out their site doesn't even mention music discovery... Techcrunch added that bit of editorial magic.

Hmmm... so no discovery... but at least music.. right? Nope. There's no music on that screen. There are some tabs, though: recent posts, photos, videos, statuses. Nothing mentioning music. I don't really care about any of that. I came for music. And I'm gone as quickly as I came.
You do realize that some use this exact argument to justify date rape, right?
Having worked outside in the "real-world" with large corporations, and having tried to sell my software as a 1-man crew, you're really going to have to get used to this.

Most of us here know how difficult it is to build a technology-based startup and have it shine. YC has been through enough batches to start making judgements about what works and what doesn't.

That means they can cut through the bullshit. You may be able to wow some guy at a Fortune 500 with your whiz-bang product, but being assessed by people in the know (i.e. your peers) is a whole other ballgame. Moreover, if you can't make it past YC's criticisms and processes, how are you going to do the same with people outside the startup community?

Remember, we may be a tech-savvy community, but you need to convince the rest of the world why you're worthwhile. They need to see why they should buy/invest in your product. If showing off your product in the best light possible means delivering beer to a YC partner, then do it.
That's a rather depressing interpretation of his article. I thought what he did was quite clever; by demonstrating his product he really made them understand quickly how it worked.
because those analytics are (most likely) not accurate, github doesn't have the compete tracking installed.
I really like the site - good job! I think the cover page example should be related to a Nigerian bank scam though - everyone recognizes those "A prince passed away, you are 20th in line...collect your millions!" and I think it'd be a lot funnier/relatable than Charter :)
Actually lack of good development may be the problem. Mike Cardwell's opinion of status.net certainly isn't very high:

https://twitter.com/mickeyc/status/236796994532827136

and a lot of disaspora's momentum was destroyed by their early security issues (someone correct me if I'm wrong on this, I wasn't following diaspora that closely at the time).

Remember that as soon as even a few distributed or open systems get going they can be linked together. At that point any new competitors to FB/twitter have a strong incentive to be open as well because it gives them that precious starting network. Then, like good guerillas, you engage the centralized service in a drawn out struggle. They have to win every time, because as soon as their userbase slips it's never coming back. You only have to win once. (You can lose unlimited companies/protocols as long as more and better ones are taking their place)

EDIT: P.S. I totally stole this strategy from a Pournelle book (Prince of Sparta). "We Helots be coming back for more. Again . . . and again . . . and again." Just because they're the bad guys doesn't mean we can't use their tactics!
Why US educational system is so broken? Look at Canada - does not seem to have charters, yet outcome is better. Why? From what I heard, better more tight regulation on provincial level - single curriculum, so on.

Besides, there are many excellent public schools, with unionized teachers, in not so good areas etc.

Besides, charter schools are not the solution: among them, for some mysterious reasons there is a plenty of really bad ones. Check greatschools or similar web site - many, many bad charters.

I would recommend to leave schools government run, but absolutely remove school districts law. If a child from Bronx wants to study somewhere in New Jersey - allow him, if there are places in the school left. Let the word spread which schools are good and which are not. If a school is bad - make investigation why, if not fixable - close down.
Human Centered Design Considered Harmful
In the demo, there seems to be a change in responsiveness as you approach a wall.
Reciprocity isn't something to take that lightly, by all accounts. It's not that a six pack of beer buys your way in; that's absurd, it's that when someone has handed you something, you feel inclined to give something back.

Chapter 2 of this book covers it in some detail:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002BD2UUC/?tag=dedasys-20

(no offense, anti-referral link guys). I thought "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" did as well, but a cursory search didn't turn anything up.

Of course, something that's sort of missing from the story is how this showed Instacart in action: it sort of sounds like some guy driving up and handing them some beer, which in and of itself doesn't demonstrate a lot.
This article is about some webspace on presumably some kind of shared hosting account being compromised. Not a box being rooted. No doubt scripts in his account run with very limited privileges.

If hosting companies wiped a server every time one of their customers sites got owned the servers would hardly be online at all.
Ensalada de papa
This is just the beginning and it will get better. There is SO much still to do.

For now, to discover new music you can go to a couple sections of Hipset:

1) New Videos from artists all around the world http://hipset.com/all/videos/

2) New Videos from artists you follow http://hipset.com/following/videos/

3) New Videos from artists in different genres
Hip Hop: http://hipset.com/genre:hiphop/videos/
Rock: http://hipset.com/genre:rock/videos/
Indie: http://hipset.com/genre:indie/videos/
Electronic: http://hipset.com/genre:electronic/videos/
Country: http://hipset.com/genre:country/videos/
Pop: http://hipset.com/genre:pop/videos/
Yeah, that really moved the goalposts further afield.
And the second rule is to fix typos before posting. :) Sorry all.
Lately I've been reevaluating my predictable sci/techy pro-nuclear stance. I still roll my eyes at folks who don't really know what radiation is but think it's inherently bad, and I still think nuclear power is probably a lesser evil than fossil fuels. But two things I learned this week gave me pause:

First, that Fukushima was not as benign as I believed if butterflys are mutating
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120809/srep00570/full/srep00...

Second, and maybe everyone else knew this, but I never knew that we haven't been able to produce low-background steel since 1945
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

And maybe those are both insignificant. But I think they both serve as non-partisan evidence that we can and have semi-permanently altered the planet with each nuclear mistake we've made.
At what point can I say I’ve “learned” a language?
Very true. It would be the job of the implementors to provide new properties that handle common use cases. For this example in particular, we now have:

animation-fill-mode
OK, that changes my impression of the service quite a bit. Do you guys have a blog? You might want to make more such information available there and put a link to your blog or about page on the landing page. Relying on third parties like TechCrunch for communication might be problematic. Rock on!
Exact traffic numbers might be not accurate, but traffic trend in the course of full year at that traffic volume is generally pretty accurate.
Show HN: Making Tumblr Work vs. Medium & Svbtle
Cool, thanks for pointing this out. Wish it was more obvious :)

Keep up the hustle.
HTTPIE on Windows - Great for ASP.NET Web API and RESTful JSON services
"All that is lost is the MySQL name and brand."

I respectfully disagree.

Building a community of database developers is no small task. PostgreSQL has spent a long time fostering a diverse group of developers, maintaining a clean codebase and infrastructure, and having explicit policies and procedures in place that make it easier for new developers to get started.

That has never been true for MySQL. Development happens largely because of the money that MySQL AB, then Sun, and now Oracle is paying.

Monty is trying to change that with MariaDB (I don't know as much about the others) and I respect that and I hope he succeeds. But it takes a while to go from corporate development to community development successfully -- it doesn't happen overnight, especially in a field like databases where it can be hard to find developers regardless of money.
Recargas Moviles Celulares y Tarjetas Prepagadas
> I can't see what test Fukushima passed

They had a disaster much bigger than was planned for, multiple failures, both human and machine and even so nobody died from it. At worst, some might eventually succumb to cancer someday.

But it's radiation, so people are still more scared of it than the tsunami that killed everyone. I mean, nobody is talking about how to make sure that we're better prepared for the tsuanmis that kill thousands of people and utterly devastate so much land.
guynamedloren, you might want to have a look at this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747
Fair question. That sentence is geared towards non-programmers (which is of course an audience outside of Hacker News) Think of it this way:

Sincerely is an extension of me because I have to pay them 99 cents per postcard so it is costing me 'time' (but in this case I am paying for that 'time' with money). Then on top of that I need to pay Stripe 36 cents to collect. Same principle.

But maybe I need to come up with a better/more-convincing sentence there to justify the $2. Additionally, if the idea actually catches on (it was just a friday night project) then I'll put the effort into closing the margin and finding a more affordable print/ship api.
Have a membership system. Membership is free, but must be applied for and can be revoked. That combined with before/after pictures should prevent most abuse.
Where are they giving up liberty. You have to look at the problems from an India perspective not a first world one. Personal identification is a solved problem here but in India lack of trust and lack of access prevents many people from gaining liberty. This system will allow a greater number of people to access government programs, education, and financial tools like bank accounts. That being said there needs to be some safe guards in place to prevent the police state scenarios that many here seem to be worried about.
Choropleth of GeoTweets from India, neighbours
I hear you! We've heard this from others as well. We will definitely be adding more ways to login than just Facebook.
It is shocking how many pages break because of this (usually, you check the console and it has thrown an exception because FB is not defined)
I love the idea of a 'do not junk mail' list as part of the payment fee. Anyone know of an api or form to submit someone's address to (with their consent of course) in order to be added to a 'do not junk mail' list?
Standard Rule of Thumb: As soon as you can complete the "hello world" tutorial, you should add the language to your resume.
i thought it was pretty obvious from the very name of the site.
You're missing the point amidst your rage. The author means protocol as an abstract mechanism, not a specific implementation. Email is not a specific protocol either - I can receive email using JSON over HTTP - but a abstract mechanism that is implemented by a collection of those.

And that's not Twitter irresponsibility; its responsibility is to do whatever its owners want it to, following the law. Especially since it's a private company, not a public one.

The world isn't entitled to anything Twitter builds.

Nobody says it is. The article is saying that Twitter is not entitled to be the sole mechanism for distributing Twit-like messages, and that we should build and use a different one.
haha, that would be funny but those are 'spam' based, right? I am targeting real world 'junk' mail with this.
My sincere belief is that the change of reproductive patterns of women (and all associated social, human rights, and political change) is just a consequence of economic growth and demands which it brings up. Change in mortality, on the other hand, obviously results from vaccinations.

Western countries who invented both things (economic growth through division of labor and later, machines, and vaccines) have been lucky to keep both processes approximately in line with each other, thus avoiding population explosion (while even them didn't completely evade trouble).

Then they brought vaccines (that are cheap) to developing countries out of their 'humanistic' values, but could not bring modern economy along with it.

We see the result. Genie is out of the bottle - and there is nothing we could do. We cannot bring modern economy to these countries quickly. We cannot deprive them of vaccines, because they are cheap and they can even afford buying them without any foreign assistance.

Trying to fix this with some sort of 'education for girls' before the economic stimulus (market demand for women to join the organized labor force) arrives resembles attempts by Russians to build communism by killing all capitalists and forcing everyone to work. They will call these attempts 'sinful' and 'brought by our enemies who don't respect our traditional way of life', and rightly so.

All we can do it just sit and wait, that's my guess. Social change does not come by itself, or as a result of some external manipulation, it is always a product of change in productive forces.
That + Helping artist's content go viral as well (most artists don't understand viral Facebook integrations - so with Hipset we're automatically doing it for all of them)
I question that conclusion. The power shortages have been quite troubling.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/03/12030...

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201207...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18468685
This case was exceptional because of how late he was to apply. 90% of yc startups come in via the regular process, and nearly all of the companies that send gifts are not accepted into yc.

But of course everyone is free to re-interpret the facts to fit their own self-defeating narratives...
What a comical overreaction. The history of cinema and literature is replete with love story cliches just like that -- a boy being rejected by a girl and eventually winning her over with perseverance and charm. Of course, the over-correcting HN crowd instantly interprets such a comment as the words of a misogynistic psychopath.
that Aussie rent-a-cops working in a US Consulate can be real dicks

This line gives a great idea for a startup. Rent-A-Person for specific occasions or tasks. I mean rent a cook, cleaner, professional trainer, swimming instructor, basically anyone who's willing to show up in exchange for money.
It kind of depends on the question, don't you think?
This is just startup porn. Do something yourself.
I don't have Facebook Disconnect and all I see is a blank page too. I'm using a recent browser (Firefox 10.0.6), and JavaScript is enabled.

Anyway I wouldn't have tried the service since it requires connecting with Facebook.
Those analytics bear very little resemblance to our actual traffic both in terms of volume and overall trend.
How about just registering at dmachoice.org or similar? Would save some energy and recycled paper cycles...
That first point is referenced in this story, actually. It's about half-way down.
Help open source an Instagram-like camera for iOS
Every energy source kills people, even solar and wind kill people. This guy did a collection of statistics (I think they are each by a different body so they're not directly comparable but should still suffice for orders-of-magnitude.) http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
> WHY someone felt compelled to create the spoof is still a mystery to some of us.

someone was simultaneously bored and disdainful of app.net.
Compete is often wildly off. Compare the different services that offer similar analytics and you'll see how often they disagree.
Am I missing something here? This post makes it look like the conversation is surrounding the increase in negative comments vs the decrease of positive reinforcement. I don't think that's the crux of the issue at all. I come here for an interesting conversation. Lately, I haven't been getting it. Replacing overwhelmingly negative but unconstructive comments with overwhelmingly positive but unconstructive comments isn't the way forward. That's just trading one kind of troll for another. And to clear up any misconception - I don't think anybody's explicitly saying "say nicer things, no matter what!" But I think a focus on the positivity vs the constructiveness of a comment will take people down that road anyway.
> No, it's not. Accountability is very precisely "your fault", that's all it is. That's pretty much the definition of it.

That. Accountability (worse: "personal accountability" and variants thereof) are a tool provided by the law to determine who to recover damages from after a failure has occurred. It is entirely unsuitable for failure prevention because it is entirely orthogonal to rigorous testing and a culture of workplace safety.

Anyone who insists on accountability on their project does not know what they need. What they get is an extraordinary amount of ass-covering, finger-pointing and blame deflection, though.
It's not what you say, it's how you say it. This is a well-researched aspect of human communication.

The internet desensitizes people in that respect because nothing is ever said, it's just written.
That still confuses radiation with radio-isotopes which are sources of radiation. If you consumed a highly radioactive isotope you would likely get more radiation not different radiation.

If a single bioloogically consumed radio-isotope molecule put out the same amount of radiation as the annular insolation in Denver, then you would likely get more localized damage from the ionizing radiation at its point of binding. If it were multiple molecules (measured in parts per billion) and they in aggregate summed to the annual insolation in Denver, then its no more dangerous than the annual insolation in Denver.

Alpha particles and energetically ejected electrons and positrons are ionizing radiation just like gamma rays, and its the amount and concentration, not the source, that matters.
There are less things you can do with GPLed software than BSD software. Therefore, when comparing GPL and BSD, GPL is more restrictive. There is no need for the doublespeak of calling it anything else in a comparison.

Tell me, how does "robust" translate to "there are more restrictions on what you can do with this"?