skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just voted it down myself but I'm sure it will be voted up again.

The unexamined fallacy that I saw in the post was the idea that TV stations engage in hard hitting news at the level of the local newspaper reporting. Internet outlets can publicize local stories if the original stories exist. The original article's point remains: without newspaper digging there would be no local story, especially no credible local story.

The problem would be worst in smaller cities like Baltimore.
> So glad I'm on cluster 4.

So glad I lease real servers.
No.

http://www.sirimo.co.uk/ukpr.php
What about the rest of the book seems ridiculous to you? The first time I read it, I thought that everything in Atlas Shrugged was perfect. Even with repeated readings, I never once thought anything was ridiculous. Be specific in your answer.
There is a much better article here (you can actually understand what he has done): http://www.oneitsecurity.it/22/01/2009/mac-os-x-vulnerabilit...

I haven't read the slides, so I can't say specifically what he's done, however this is nothing new [1]. Essentially, he has ported a known technique, for executing programs within a host address space, to the OS X platform. It is neither "new" nor an "attack", so the article is extremely misleading.

From the article it appears that he's implemented a framework for injecting code into another process on OSX. It sounds like he uses the original binary to either a) hook execution, or b) access dynamic libraries[2]. [The part about using addresses from the existing Mach-O binary isn't clear as to the purposed purpose].

This "attack" is actually more like a technique for running a binary without creating an on-disk image. For examples of why you'd want to do this see phrack [3].

[1] Userland Exec, 2004. http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2004/Jan/0001.html

[2] Cheating the ELF: Subversive dynamic linking on UNIX platforms, 2001. http://mirror.sweon.net/madchat/coding/Cheating_elf.pdf

[3] Remote Exec, 2005(?). http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=62&id=8
"doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude harder than doing it on dedicated hardware; the assumption on EC2 has to be that things will fail and you have to build accordingly"

I don't follow, how is that different from dedicated hardware where you also have to assume failure will happen?

If anything I'd argue it's the opposite (but ultimately note that I think both take some work). But I say that it's perhaps the opposite because on EC2, you have EBS:

"volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%"

And neither failure rate involves RAID which you can of course do with both EBS (mdadm) and disks to go for lower AFR projections.
My startup, The Windy Citizen is a social news site for Chicago. When Citizen journalists post something to their blogs, they submit it to the Windy Citizen and Chicagoans can vote it up and check it out. We're sending 50-100 readers to the sites that crack the front page right now...and those stories are then showing up in the local papers since reporters and editors are reading us.

3 years from now there will be hundreds of local blogs in every U.S. city. We need "interesting-ness" filters for this stuff just like we need filters for tech blogs and political blogs right now.

If there's anyone out there interested in chipping in some tech expertise to help out (I'm a journalist and am bootstrapping this) I'm all ears.
Spamdog Millionaire - The geography of social media spam
Some local blogs I enjoy:

http://sfist.com

http://sf.metblogs.com

http://sf.curbed.com

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/

http://njudahchronicles.com

http://violetbluesf.com

http://missionmission.wordpress.com

The local blogs tend to link to each other quite a bit so if you find one you like its pretty easy to become exposed to more that might interest you.
3D duck, done in Javascript, 4k.
Online news can be localized. Forums like these can be easily retrofitted for the hyper local and give people lots of things relevant to their area, rather than having to sift through the trash of news to find the morsels you want.
People pay only $20 per month and then complain like they're paying for hosting at rackspace. The service is a great value for what it provides. If what you're doing is that vital, you shouldnt be hosting it on a grid server at media temple
Ayn Rand often overstates her case for the sake of art (her evil characters, for example, are mostly shallow caricatures). I find that people who don't share her views often mock her works and call her "ridiculous" because she treats some ideas that they hold completely without nuance or sympathy.

I can see why they do this, but I think Ayn's detractors overstate their case. She is valuable because she is the only major author that writes from her point of view. I read many books in high school with a feminist or socialist moral, I read many literary triumphs that exposed the "failure" of capitalism, only Ayn dared to be different. I think every teenager should have a run-in with Rand, if only to begin the process of developing critical thinking.

However, I do think her complete philosophical system has many more flaws then she would care to admit (the one laid out in the "BFS", "Big Frackin' Speech", at the end of Atlas Shrugged). She tries to lay out a case for the absolute, unassailable truth of her ethics, but absolute truth shall ever elude humans in this complex world.
It would only be an illegal monopoly, like MSFT, if they charged customers for all ads even those placed elsewhere and charged customers less if they promised never to advertise anywhere else.
Although I'm not a pb user, reading around its been said that this flag doesn't work for Python bindings to PB.
Microsoft enjoys something like 90% market share on the desktop, and they're worried about Google's 70(ish)%.
Me too, +1 slicehost
Please review my recent launched site Crosstips.org
Is it obvious what it does?
Does it work?
Does it help?
The American antitrust law (as I understand it, I'm not a lawyer) allows you to create and have a monopoly. What's illegal is using your monopoly in one market to muscle your way into another. The classical case is Microsoft having a monopoly on operating systems, and abusing that to dominate the browser market.

As I see the argument made by the author he is saying that Google has a monopoly on search, and that they are using that monopoly to dominate the advertising market.
Alternatively just pay $20 to Slicehost or Linode and get better service, oh, and skip the 18 hours downtime; but sure you're right, when you pay $20 you shouldn't complain when you receive a crap service--whatever.
I think public transportation in the NYC area makes the "sprawl" into Jersey, Connecticut or even parts of PA not so bad. Hailing from that region, but living now in the western outskirts of Chicagoland, I can attest to the very strange difference of the sprawl here versus what I'd term as "cohesive" outgrowth in NYC.
Typical comfortable room temperature is usually between 65 and 72 degrees. If it was 76F in here I'd be sweating and very uncomfortable. Anything over 74F-ish makes me physically uncomfortable and anything over 78F makes me feel drained of energy. Pretty much EVERYONE in Boston has A/C. In the summer it often gets over 90F and has very high humidity.
Noisy != useful

Moralistic != useful

But your mileage may vary.
I have not heard of a case where the press was involved in corruption - honestly. And even if they were corrupt, they were corrupt with private money.

Even in cases where the press "got it wrong" the harm of public interest was not that great. Maybe in the USA there are not a lot of corruption - but in my country it is rife.

Politicians wants to push everything under the carpet and the police system is wilfully incompetent (since it falls under the minister of safety and security, another politician).

The reality is that there are a few publications that do excellent work. Here are a few things in which the press paid a significant part in bringing to light: corruption in a massive arms deal (and by the next president), dealings of a mining magnate (who eventually was murdered), showing corruption by the national police commissioner, shedding light on numerous large fraudulent financial schemes, etc...

The list can go on. I doubt a blogger will be able to take on complex and multi-faceted corruption cases while he is being sued from all sides.
Perhaps my comment contained too many prejudices, I apologize. I should have said that in my experience, I have not found any cities with large concentrations of gay people that match the close-minded deep south stereotype. There is a good reason for this - people generally don't enjoy living in areas where they aren't welcomed, and they move. Atlanta is a very metropolitan city, full of people of all different sorts of cultural groups. It is not the kind of place where people are persecuted for being different, or where the residents have a narrow-minded view of the human experience. You will find yoga parlors, sports teams, nerds, professionals, underground (literally!) indie dance clubs, clubs that only let you in if you know P Diddy, trendy restaurants in renovated warehouses, the best cuisine south of New York, weird religions, traditional religions, and, yes, two of the largest county-level gay populations in America (Dekalb and Fulton). On top of that, I paid $350/month in rent when I lived there. It's a good place to live.

I apologize for the previous flippant, un-nuanced comment that I snuck in while coding. It's a bad habit.
Anybody has a link to the original paper?
Why, Reddit will! (for visiting Redditors: </sarcasm> :)
Great article. Thanks for posting this.
A guide to creating a minimalist home. (same applies for software UI)
If you're out by Plainfield or (god help you) Dekalb, you're dealing with the impact of the mortgage bubble over the last 10 years, which has totally over-developed the former farmland that surrounded Chicago. Much of the Chicago suburbs have public transportion access that rivals the NYC suburbs.
If you're running a small site (say, 1,000,000 pageviews per month), you aren't going to have trouble scaling a MySQL/PostgreSQL database and application. You'll normally be showing one pageview per second at that rate. So, it's just as easy to go with Slicehost or Amazon.

It is significantly easier to go with App Engine, though. There's a sizable group of people who don't want to deal with all the messy details of SliceHost or EC2. When you consider that all they really want to do is host a web application and have it scale, requiring them to start with a bare metal VM is total overkill.
I think this qualifies:

http://www.injusticebusters.com/04/Diotte_Kerry.shtml

It's only one story, but it includes lots of bad cops. One newspaper reporter. And no video.

Yes, there was an overheard conversation on the police radio. But that was 'hearsay' evidence. Not something that was copied (at least to my knowledge).

Edit: NO, it doesn't qualify. The conversation was recorded. Thanks for making the point.
See my question here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482551.
HIV Mutates to Death With New Drug
Limitations of the WAI-ARIA
I'm afraid the new standard for me is Quake 3. Real-time multi-player good-enough 3D graphics. This is definitely cool though.
> I design my application around YUI widgets and then have to think about how it will degrade.

That is what you should start trying to avoid. Do it the other way around:

- Start with a url that outputs the correct table according to params.

- Return the correct data type, eg. json/html from the same url using your method of choice (url extension/Accept header)

- When you want a javascript enhancement to, eg. convert the table to a live spreadsheet that flushes changes after you change a cell via ajax just do it. Make the fields editable (or replace them with input boxes, whatever you fancy) and hook their 'onchange' event.

This is why I don't like things like YUI datatable, or very full stack frameworks in general, I prefer to have a small useful library that gives me the tools so I can do exactly what I want with albeit a little effort, but mostly very simple.

Far more flexible than creating a datagrid with 4 lines of framework code but hitting a roadblock the moment something different needs to be done.
This is why I won't buy a Kindle.

What I'd really like, is an E-Ink device about the size of a sheet of letter-writing paper (A5), based on an open platform (BSD, Linux, etc.), with a touchscreen. It would make not only an excellent platform for textbooks and reference, but also for taking notes and drawing.

I'm half-tempted to build one of these for my own use; anybody know where I can get an A5-size E-Ink display?
That's not how Cappuccino works.
The reason insurance is generally exempt from gambling laws is that you are supposed to use insurance to protect you financially from what would otherwise be a negative event. Which I think fits here...
J-Startup News: Helping news people find news about journalism startups new biz models
I got about 20 minutes into that "Money as Debt" video -- that's when he starts departing from, let's say, generally accepted theories of money. I don't have time to watch the whole thing, but I gather from other descriptions of the video that he advocates a policy of fiat money and repayment of debt via deliberate inflation, which is exactly the theory of the old Social Credit movement in Western Canada. That self-destructed.

He's correct that banks create money through loans. He's totally wrong when he says that money represents servitude.

He's ignoring that the purpose of debt is to create value, specifically to be able to do things today that make us all wealthier in the future. Yes, banks create money from nothing. That's because things of value - real wealth - are being created all the time, "from nothing", or at least, from nothing that is represented in the economy. They're mined out of the ground or grown from the sun, soil, and rain, or some complex permutation of all the above. Which is why we allow banks to grow the amount of money to represent it. When we take out a loan, we are saying something like "I'm pretty sure I can mine some copper out of that hill. So give me some capital now because I need to get a shovel." Rather than say money is debt you might as well say that money is certitude of present or future wealth.

By the way, this is the hidden truism of Paul Graham's mantra, "make something people want". Because "something people want" is another name for "wealth", and "wealth" is, under normal circumstances, easy to turn into money. So someone who says "make something people want and you'll make money" is expressing a near-tautology. (One that escapes most people, so it is good that he says it.)

I'm not totally in favor of our current systems, but that's another topic. And you have to know how the system works now to change it.
And now, Twitter philanthropy
I don't think that the graphics of Quake 3 are done in Javascript. I believe only the setup of games (team building, joining levels) is done with AJAXy things.
C'mon, give the guy a break. He's presenting to a non-trivial fraction of the movers & shakers of the world, and probably doesn't have a lot of presentation experience.

I think he did great.
One thing GAE does do, in my opinion, is put the final nail in the coffin for shared hosting. Who would pay even a few dollars a month for low quality, limited shared hosting when they can get their app on Google's infrastructure for free? The only group I can think of is those who only serve static content.
The gist:

There needs to be a Hacker News for entrepreneurial journalists. I've pitched this idea to some of the foundations funding journalism startups without much response. So I set up a slinkset and a twitter account http://twitter.com/jstartupnews

I'll be posting news of new newspaper/government APIs, niche publications, and business models.

If it takes off, great. If not, I'll have a great archive of useful links.
The 'grid' has TERRIBLE database performance and always has.
Both of you, kindly include atleast one or 2 examples to make your respective cases. I can think of Enron, Nixon which were uncovered by the press. But where did press uncover something that wasn't? How does that work ..
I thought this looked like a future as envisioned in the 90s. There sure is a lot of "copy files around", moving them between devices, taking snap shots of them, for a future of always-on, always-accessible remote storage.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0902.0878v1
(mt)'s gs offering has been absolutely terrible for us. Since the summer uptime and support have both been equally awful. The only redeeming quality of the gs service is the insanely large storage (100gb).
The Economist has an article regarding the recent resurgence of "Atlas Shrugged" sales:
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
Correlation/Causation problem: The police are getting away with these policies not because journalists aren't there to watch them, but because ordinary citizens no longer give a damn.

The newspapers are desperate for a reason to exist.
3D in a canvas is no longer amazing.

3D without is amazing but it does make you wonder why.
They better think of an interim solution, because databases with schemas are not going away for quite a while, even if they are eventually going to be replaced by giant single key hash tables like everyone is clamoring about these days.
Try that line with an actual journalist. There is corruption everywhere, even in the newsrooms. And politicians don't always want to hide things.

A few years ago it came out that Deep Throat was Mark Felt -- he had been #3 at the FBI. Felt was disgruntled that Nixon had passed him over for promotion after JE Hoover died, and so carried out a leak campaign through the Washington Post that ultimately brought Nixon down.

The Post editors and Woodward & Berstein knew who Felt was. They chose to keep quiet and accept decades of hero-worship. The truth was that they were willing participants in a rather slimy and petty act of political revenge.
Cocoa with Love: An Asteroids-style game in CoreAnimation, Part Three.
I personally prefer the simplicity of App Engine, for the types of apps that fits in that space. As I heard they have plans to support other languages later on. They are constantly improving the service.
There is some cleverness in there, and, I believe, some truth. Here is a quote that I liked:

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it."

Besides, wealth is often demonized by egalitarians. They see its distribution as a random function of the universe, and not as a function of the productive efforts of the earners. For one person to have more money than another is considered unjust. We hear so much about how the wealthy are evil, it is nice for a different point of view to be aired every now and then.

>"The saddest thing I've ever heard was from a friend who told me that his main goal in life was making money"

It would not be so sad if he said that his goal was producing something of value, which often results in making money. As Ayn says, "Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values".

> "Are people impressed by that article because of the sonorous prose?"

Yes, I do think the prose is quite nice. When Ayn hits a good stride, she reaches a style that is all her own. I think her talents are often under-appreciated because the literary establishment is very much opposed to her political views.
"There is corruption everywhere, even in the newsrooms."

So? What is to prevent a rival paper from reporting on the newsroom? (I actually have memory of this happening - an editor of a major newspaper was a philander and another paper ran an article on him. Another big story happened 20 odd years ago - one paper was funded by the government and another newspaper brought that to light - the result was that one of the people who organised funding did not become president).

"And politicians don't always want to hide things."

So, if they are not hiding something they would not mind people looking? I am one of those people who think it is a good idea of a healthy dose of cynicism for public officials.

"They chose to keep quiet and accept decades of hero-worship. The truth was that they were willing participants in a rather slimy and petty act of political revenge."

The question is not if Woodward&Bernstein were upstanding citizens with good values. The question is this: Was the Watergate affair good for the country? Would it be better if it had not been brought to light?
I disagree. Many people are using shared hosting to run apps such as WordPress or Drupal that don't run on GAE. It's more likely that $10/month VPSes will be the death of shared hosting.
I like the idea, but I would make it a bit more clear what the site actually does.

I'd also recommend making the boxes quite a bit larger since there's so much white space. Done right, overly-large boxes work - like at tumblr ( http://www.tumblr.com/register )
There is good work being done by internet writers. For example, Radley Balko's stories have gotten more than one corrupt prosecutor fired. His efforts at exposing phony forensic experts in Mississippi could lead to many freed innocent men:

http://reason.com/blog/show/131954.html

I've rarely seen newspapers conduct that kind of journalism, especially on the national level. Another example: Balko has been almost single-handedly raising awareness about the death and violence that occurs from the military-style raids that many police departments use to arrest suspects of non-violent crimes. I haven't heard any newspapers tracking that story:

http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

This website has exposed more corrupt police practices than any newspaper I know about:

http://www.theagitator.com/

But regardless, the death of the newspaper is going to cause a lot of change in our society. Not all the costs will be easily dealt with.
for a second I thought he was also ripping of cardboard knives.
We are on Hacker News, aren't we? Most people here value the material world more then the spiritual world. This doesn't mean they completely ignore the latter, of course. But between discussing spirituality and creating something, I'd say most would choose creating.

As for making money, this is how our success is measured. Yes, you can do things for your soul, of for your friends, or for your family or for the society at large, but to be an entrepreneur means to accept to be judged, indeed, to judge yourself by your material success: money. It is not an easy thing to do. Money does not lie to you, does not tell you you're ok as you are now, that things will be better or that it will love you no matter what. Failure is clear to see, and so is success.

I probably needn't say it, but all this is worthless if you do not apply complete honesty to your work. Money is not an end in itself, it is the measure of your skill. To steal or cheat in any way makes it useless for this purpose.
It's more that you can't use it to prevent competition in your market or cause harm to consumers.