skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> More important, that's irrelevant because corruption investigations rarely involve lawsuits.

> Corruption cases are full of lawsuits!

We're both assuming that our home turf is universal.

Libel suits in the US are extremely rare. Libel lawsuits involving public figures are a small minority because they're almost impossible to win. If the accused libeler can argue "I'm part of the press", it's even worse.

As a result, libel lawsuits aren't a factor in corruption investigations in the US.
Good advice. I think I will wait until I finish learning Java and C++ before looking for internships. Your a sophomore in college and interviewing people for your startup? I think im behind :(
I couldn't agree more.

This is a huge, huge branding win the Skittles guy. Thousands upon thousands of people who would never visit their site (I mean, who the hell visits a website for a candy?) are not only visiting but immediately talking about it to all their friends. Skittles on Facebook has nearly 600,000 fans, more than John McCain, who I assure you spent a LOT more money trying to get people to like him.

Sure, people will say stupid stuff and try to mess with it. But the majority of people are saying funny or at least neutral stuff, and are drowning them out -- just like in the real world. The confidence in the resilience of their brand and in the technology behind this is impressive. These people Get It, get it even more than some readers of Hacker News.
I'm pretty sure that it's been well-established that most people just aren't that interested in video calling, at least not through telephone devices. The technology for that has been around for years and years and no one really cares -- perhaps presenting the option in a better/more concise/usable way will change things, but it just doesn't seem like it's in very high demand.
It's amazing. Not only do they have a ground breaking site and a ton of viral traffic, they're not even paying for the hosting. They're getting Facebook, and Google, and Yahoo, and (cough) millions of altruistic donors to Wikipedia to foot the bill.

I'm sold. This isn't gimmicky, this is _brilliant_.
> Could we please have some examples? I can recall many cases where the press has made mistakes, but none where they were actively corrupt.

What definition of "actively corrupt" are we using? Is it enough for them to get paid off in return for looking the other way/not reporting, or do they have to actually steal something? Does it matter who pays them and what the connection is between the source of the money and the evil-doer.

Note that "the press" is often a cheap date. They'll go out of their way to avoid writing bad things about folks/programs/issues that they like. They'll trade access for non-coverage.

For example, CNN admits that they didn't report things that Saddam Hussein didn't want known in return for being able to report from pre-war Iraq. That let them make money, money that didn't come from SH. Do you count it as corruption? (I don't, but many folks who get excited about corruption do.)
I for one welcome our new skwittle overlords. Skittles: the official candy of the twitterati?
There was a flash somewhere in the video of the house's computer display showing how much power was being used and indicating it was switching to solar panels when the sun was out.

I think the home is kind of the last frontier of digitalization of everyday life. I want my exact power bill/consumption information to be visible on my computer somewhere in a similar way to Amazon's AWS dashboard, and I want to be able to turn on and off lights and stuff remotely.

All the technology for this exists, and it's very simple. But new homes just aren't built with it because there's no great company building the connection between the physical infrastructure of the home and the internet with great hardware + software.

Most new built-in central heaters and air conditioners have a standard digital communication interface that can easily be plugged into and controlled by this home computer. All power outlets and light sockets are connected to the powerline, and it's trivial to send data along powerlines.

The sensors to detect how much and at what temperature water is flowing through your pipes are cheap. You could probably build a totally connected home for a few hundred dollars (just for the hardware). That includes the power consumption information for every light socket, light switch, and outlet; every water socket, sink, shower, etc; and your heating and air conditioning system.

Can you imagine how much money you could save if you could see a dashboard of what is sucking up power in your house? Or if your house detected when all of your cars left the garage and lowered the heater target temperature? Or optimized light automatically by turning the dimmer up and down based on the natural light? Or sent you a text message when you left the doors unlocked in the morning? Or the heater is sucking up more power than normal for a longer time, so it gets shut off?

It could be monit + munin for your house.

Someone please build this. Or I will.
> 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?

"Don't say anything" isn't the only alternative to "tell only part of the story".

Woodward and Bernstein deliberately withheld relevant information to make themselves and their source look good. If anyone else does that, the press screams "coverup", "corruption", etc.
Not sure what everyone is talking about. I use netflix on osx and it's by far the best online streaming experience I've had.... equivalent to iTunes in quality, but with better error handling for flaky connections.

The DRM also works seamlessly.... so the end user wouldn't even know the content was protected.

I just wish it worked on linux... I don't know if moonlight plans to support DRM...
I wonder how hard a sell this was at the pitch meeting. On one hand, it's pretty unorthodox, especially for a snack food or junk food, which generally have product sites which are the web equivalent of the back of a cereal box, at best.

On the other hand, how many times has a marketing VP said "get us on Facebook, get us on Wikipedia, get us on Twitter, get us on flickr, get us on YouTube!" and had the advertising team reply with a site containing nothing but a set of six buttons which do nothing but that? Pretty hilarious.
no. read the page.
This is exactly why easy-to-use programs that can ecrypt or anonymize your data are good. People are willing to use something like Skype because it's easy to set up and run. Want to call someone? Type in a phone number and hit 'call'. The average user doesn't know or care that their conversation is being encrypted, but they benefit nonetheless.

I'm really glad to see programs like Adium, used by the majority of my OSX friends, can encrypt conversations by default, and interfaces perfectly with options like OTR ( http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ ). I've managed to convince exactly one friend to use OTR - it's not an effective way to fix things because most people don't care. Getting programs to have useful defaults that protect you while still being easy to use is the key.

Now all we need is an open-source version of Skype ( http://www.qutecom.org/ ? ) that joe-anybody can use on their phone :P
That's also... not an answer to the question.

Still, given a CS major and no experience applying math to practical matters, how valuable is that to someone looking for new hires?
12 Free Windows Antivirus of 2009
12 Free Windows Antivirus of 2009
Yes. Mozilla products are licensed very generously. It is a roughly BSD-like license, though it has stronger trademark and liability terms.

The license is online, and the Mozilla foundation has never been secretive or quiet about permitting commercial uses. Several companies have built commercial products using XUL for the UI, for example.

This is definitely not a GPL-licensed codebase, and the license is in no way "viral".
For a second there, I thought that was a twitter search page, and that skittles had put ads on it since the search term was skittles, and that twitter finally started making money of their service!!
Thanks for your insight. I think my question is still unanswered, however. If more kids go to SUNY, less kids are going somewhere else (unless there were just a lot more kids born 18 years ago than 19). So where are less kids going?

Alternatively, if there are less jobs out there, perhaps people are going to college rather than work right out of high school. Anyone know? I'm genuinely curious.
I feel uncomfortable with a mission statement targeting to "kill" something when it's not an unquestionable problem like cancer or HIV.

What is the added value of the project ? What problem would be solved ? That is important.

The murdering rationale is for VC who get excited with the idea to rob market shares from the corpse. And some really want to believe.
Fred Wilson shows off integrated Twitter Search, featured users
I (actually mostly a contractor, though I ended up maintaining it) built a toolbar back in the neolithic era (Firefox pre-1.0) for managing a URL black/white list for a product I was developing at the time. We gave users a username and password (the same one they used on the website version of the tool), and they simply logged in. Anybody could download it, but it didn't do anything useful if they weren't logged in.
This might be worth a look for a decent diff algorithm:

http://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/
Our install wizard asks the user whether they want the history component or not since we figured it's best not to make any assumptions. History is only one part of the product now - that's what I meant by 'de-emphasized'.
Skittles on Facebook has nearly 600,000 fans, more than John McCain, who I assure you spent a LOT more money trying to get people to like him.

Well, that's not entirely fair. Most of the people using Facebook are what, 14-22? Definitely in the Skittles demographic. In the McCain demographic? Not so much.
Have been working with Linux for over a decade. Had 9 interviews for a site reliability engineer role at Facebook here (which I gather is considered a startup until it becomes profitable or gets bought), before I got a 'no'. Interview that lost it for me was a guy (who'd just graduated college) presenting a page of math and telling me to write some Python to implement it. This wouldn't have been my job function, but I couldn't read the math = 'definite no hire' in Facebook speak.

Worked out better in the long run.
I would really like https encrypted login, so people can't see my password when I log in to the site. Is this feasible?
Seconded, thanks for writing this. I especially like point 5, because I hear people and corporations use the "if you've done nothing wrong" argument all the time.
One of the interesting things that graph shows is the IE market share on weekends vs weekdays. It is noticeably lower on weekends, but only by ~5 percentage points.

People often argue that corporations that require employees to use IE are boosting the browser's market share, but from these numbers, that effect seems small. The weekend market share should be a reasonably decent estimate of browser share without the "corporate effect".
Its definitely a good idea to know something before applying for an internship. You don't want to go in there and sit around doing nothing for the duration. It looks bad on you.
Can we arrange for you to come back in a week and give us an update on the state of the Skittle era?

I think it will be instructive, in much the same fashion as I think anybody trying to make money on the Internet should be willing to give the Pets.com marketing plan a few minutes of their time. I'm sure when some marketers saw the $1.2 million sock puppet Superbowl ad they were convinced a new era had dawned, a cult hero had been born, and they were about to sell a lot of dog food.

Two out of three ain't bad.
Isn't part of it on the technology side? More specifically, the cost for bandwidth. Streaming videos back and forth takes up a lot of bandwidth compared to calls and texts. From what I understand the carriers have experimented with it, but the cost doesn't justify it.

Then again, even if it was included in my cell plan, a video call would take too much effort on my end. I'd have to devote my time to the call and interacting with the person I'm calling. How can I do that AND drive at the same time? /sarcasm. Actually, I'm sure some people would find a way...
http://code.google.com/soc/ maybe?
twitter == public feedback page
Ask HN: anyone using Haskell to build web sites?
Is anyone using Haskell to build web sites? Are you experiencing problems with the so called memory leaks from laziness? Does Haskell's multithreading scale as advertised?
If startups hire CS majors, they code. CS at your college probably isn't pure theory, but rather closer to Software Engineering. And you can't expect college to teach you everything that you'll need to know on your own.

Take this summer and spend it hacking on a project you find interesting. Learn a particular language (preferably one that your college wont go over. Be it Haskell, Ruby, a Lisp variant, whatever) and learn it as well as you can in a few months.

Then when the next summer rolls around, you'll have two years of class + that summer building something on your resume. And that summer will help out a lot in terms of practical experience working on a project (as opposed to a 1-2 week assignment that you drop as soon as it's handed in for a grade).
i like this and needed it about a week ago. i eventually had to write my own script.

i also found dwdiff, which you may like because it is very similar and very unixy
http://www.linux.com/feature/114176
Fast caching with Django and Nginx
6 Tips For Doing More Security With Less
Cybercrime is on the rise as organizations face the tough realities of a poor economy putting the squeeze on their security spending. But don t panic -- some creative ways to defend your data on a tight budget do exist.
This seems a bit crazy. To my surprise, Silverlight has worked awesome on my mac. This link is just a trial for a new beta player. Is the "up in arms" part that they still don't support PowerPC?

PowerPC is sorta on its last legs anyways. Even a profitable startup like Netflix has to invest wisely, and pouring development resources into building an entirely new player on the mac (since Microsoft wont support silverlight on PPC) would be a pretty poor business decision.

Sorry guys, you're going to have to upgrade at some point. You just aren't really an install base that has any weight any longer.
Richard East Lead Gen
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Nah, the "Opt In" is just for the new version of the Silverlight player.

Netflix on demand has always been silverlight based.
Yeah like Zev said know something before you get there, but expect to rapidly learn new technology at your internship...that is the best way to impress and push forward in a job. I was hired a couple years ago to work on a company's employee portal, which started as sort of a joke because it was so rudimentary, but I learned the insides and outs of the existing software and quickly learned how to hack it (without using any real programming language). Within weeks my boss had me doing complex work flows/applications on the portal and paid me a pretty penny for it! Every internship will be different, but just try to be flexible with what you're given. My guess is this is what will impress potential employers the most, especially web startups looking for individuals who can think outside the box.

The interviews were actually slightly intimidating because most of the applicants knew more programming than I did! Cool experience though :)
Paul Blart is not a good movie. It's the worst type of movie I can imagine, it's 1) Not Funny, 2) Predictable, 3) Derivative, 4) Just plain boring.

Really only #1 matters, but that is a horrible movie.
Hurray for change in Washington!
PHP Components & Tutorials for Everyday Projects
Topless coffee shop = recession-proof?
"Spypig" - Cool Free Tool To Find Out If People Are Reading Your Email
Did you send out an email to a prospect and ever wonder if he opened it up? Here is a cool free new tool that will help you track your emails to see if they have been opened up!
Yep. Sun owns the JavaScript trademark though, and licensed it to Netscape. Mozilla is still allowed to use it, but everybody else have to say ECMAScript. (So perhaps Sterling meant to to say "the guys who built "JavaScript""?)
How is throwing search.twitter.com in an iframe spending money? They're probably saving money.

Twitter has to spend a little more on bandwidth, but they're getting some more mainstream exposure, and likely a lot of new curious users.
because it's like 10th post on computer science lectures. see the right sidebar.
I think this shows the advantage that a default browser has on the two vendors' operating systems. Amazingly, over 20% of people bothered to download and install Firefox.

Mayhaps Ubuntu, The Google OS, and A Squeak-like OS based on Arc need to come pre-installed on new hardware each with their respective default browser.
I think the "corporate effect" is mostly on IE6. I've seen that people who have a choice to switch from IE6 usually do, but they switch to IE7, not Firefox.

For example, my company gets a ton of hits from IE; about 50% IE7, 25% IE6, and 10% Firefox (our software is for Windows, so we see almost no mac users). The only one of those that drops considerably over the weekend is IE6 (by about 10%) and IE7 spikes nearly as much (8%).
RuneScape Hacks
Discover what we learnt about RuneScape Hacks
Having interviewed people fresh out of college for both web-startups and established companies, from my view the most important thing you'd need to know if you want to work in a web start-up are:

1. how to get around a UNIX system (be comfortable with emacs and/or vi, know your shell, be able to install Apache/your favourite web frame yourself on a machine

2. know basics of TCP/IP networking (know how HTTP works, be able to debug it using telnet/netcat and tcpdump/pass through proxies)

3. know databases (not just "SELECT Ajax FROM Php", but know about indices, joins and normalization/de-normalizations)

4. or more dynamic languages (Python, Perl, Ruby, Php etc...) as well statically typed as object oriented languages (Java is common for enterprise web development)

These are really just the basics (give or take). Most of these (except for databases and dynamic languages) are a standard part of any CS curriculum. Databases course should be readily available as an in-major elective. Dynamic languages -- if not available as an elective -- should be easy to pick up as you go along.

These are also very nice to have and would make you not look like a "PHP script kiddie":

* Understand how your OS works, at the least be comfortable using strace and gdb and digging around /proc and tuning sysctl/proc/kernel parameters

* Understand more about networks: more about DNS, know how a load balancer works (NAT)

* Know C/C++: that's what the extensions for your dynamic programming language are written in, that's what your web server/web proxy and database are (usually) written in.

* Know algorithms, data structures. Be able to do bitwise manipulation (e.g. how would you track on which day of a month a user visited a site?). Understand the advantage a message queue would provide, understand non-blocking I/O and threading/forking models.

* Know more about OO, meta-programming/reflection, functional languages -- be able to hack up your own ORM layer/ad-hoc MVC.

There are jobs in web development that don't even heavily touch HTML/CSS/Javascript and tend to be heavier towards algorithms, databases and UNIX hacking. These are called "back-end jobs". The other end is "front-end", which requires more familiarity with UX principles/Javascript/ActionScript/Flex and basic graphics design/layout in addition to HTML/CSS. The specific hot things (current frameworks, etc...) change but the general of computing is an invariant. The latter is what you learn in computer science classes.

Lastly, you should absolutely do programming/web-development for fun -- first, it's the way to learn things you won't learn in class (or at your first job). Secondly, many start-ups operate under the maxim of "don't hire anyone who doesn't code for fun", thirdly -- chances are, working for a web start-up won't make you a millionaire: if you don't find programming to be fun and worth your time (making long hours non-monetarily rewarding), enter a field that you would (you're lucky to be amongst the few who has the chance to choose).
I think Twitter handled the issue of being bought with 80% Facebook stock very well. After all, how does Facebook even determine their own value? They have revenues, but not enough to justify a valuation as high as $9 billion. Facebook probably bases that valuation on the marketability of their user base. But how do you place a dollar amount on a number of users?
Ironically, I'm in the middle of writing an ethics paper on Aristotle. We will be considering Ayn Rand's position starting next class.

On point, there is a flaw in her speech. Many people produce money for themselves at the expense of other things of value. The problem is that money is not valued as a medium of exchange, but as an end in itself.

For people that not only say, but act, in the proper way, Ayn Rand is right. In the real world, it falls apart. Not everyone is a philosopher, and they will be tricked by hollow artifacts of social acceptance and material wealth.

I like pg's position where people produce because they like to build and solve problems using their reason ( A position much like Aristotle's I'm finding. ) Material things lose their fun after enough time and you have interacted with the static object enough. People are interesting because they can be dynamic because of their reason.
It's funny how Apple convinced many people that iPhone is a 200 dollar phone. iPhone is not a fancy 200 dollar phone; it's at least a 500 dollar phone.
But what does it DO?
Which IRC channel?
A good way to get a leg up:

1. Do some jQuery tutorials and really bone up on flashy javascript.

2. Learn to use any popular web 'stack' - LAMP is easiest on *Nix servers, RoR and Django are not rocket science. Nor is ASP for that matter.

3. Go out and find a web designer, or yourself bone up on design and CSS

4. Find easy contract work such needs basic web programming. Eg "install a picture gallery in my website" = $200/300/400.

5. Move on up with the contract work or launch your own site.

6. ???

7. Profit!

If you do this through college (and I didn't start until my senior year, a deep regret), you will level up to the forefront of web programming by the time you graduate.

Also, now that web is mature - there are multiple paths to success. I think getting the Server Side Language/ Javascript/ CSS/ HTML loop right in your head is the most important. You can follow that up with MVC frameworks, Adobe Air, Silverlight there are at least 4 or 5 solidly "employable" paths you can take