skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about countries where English is not the native tongue? Surely learning it can have huge advantages.
I disagree that we don't need a Facebook for dogs.
You faked thousands of dropbox accounts, created thousands of fake mailing lists and it seems you bogged down parts of the network. This may not be terribly destructive, but it is reckless and borderline malicious. Someone at MIT and Dropbox will now have to spend their time checking their systems for your manipulations. It may have been fun, but I don't think it was worth it.
We've got hundreds of thousands--if not millions--here in the United States that need the same sort of help, and that they ought be prioritized before we reach out to help others.

On a related note, are you familiar with Lifeboat Ethics ( http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_et... )? It's an interesting issue I'd run across in a ethics course a few years ago--seems relevant here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
I can see 3D printing really taking foot in areas where making your own assorted odds and ends is already commonplace. Plenty of universities have glassworking shops that chemistry departments make extensive use of (for example: http://www.chem.vt.edu/facilities/glass-shop-index.html ). 3D printing shops could find similar usefulness.
Firefox issues are fixed for page up/down and home/end keys.
I read the book much better than Rodrigo's Python code. The book writes about "max-heaps." Rodrigo tries to rewrite is to apply it on an array, uses confusing names where simple one letter names suffice, rewrites tail recursion which is anyway obvious that it can be substituted with a while loop, producing, at least for me, much less readable code. By the way, even in the production code I do use one letter names for local variables in the functions that span a few lines and where their use is obvious.
Which of the real-world objects in your life have neon-green consoles with monospaced character cells? Presumably naught but all the the neon-green consoles you have stashed somewhere.

This just in: OS X's window chrome is a skeuomorphic replica of OS X's window chrome.

This does not replicate the form or function of some random non-digital thing in the name of usability or user comfort.
With Oracle slowly transforming MySQL into a 'free-open-core, closed-outer-shell' RDBMS[1], PostgreSQL is quickly becoming the main go-to alternative for anyone who wants to avoid database vendor lock-in.

Hopefully SalesForce will contribute its improvements back to the PostgreSQL community.

--

[1] For example, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4400797
Counter point:

http://xkcd.com/1122/

It's an interesting hypothesis, but it would have to be tested over a large number of elections before you could claim any statistical link.
We are implementing bidirectional communication for the game using Socket.io on the client side and Vert.x on server side.

Our main concern is to distribute correctly the communication with the users with a AWS load balancer, having more than one server instances for the game.

Any suggestions on how to do that in a scalable way?
I understand where you're coming from (in your frustration at least), but where most academic papers are concerned this isn't an issue of attempting to sound "smart", it's an issue of audience.

The audience of most academic writing is other experts in the same field, and the goal is to convey the contribution. Without the necessary abstractions, and therefore the requirement of understanding them, the task of composing works on meaningful contributions would be absurdly difficult.
As I understand it, it attempts to decrypt a TC volume (and any hidden volume contained within) by brute-forcing the password and using a dictionary of some kind.

Essentially it just tries to open the volume with many passwords in quick succession. So there isn't a vulnerability in Truecrypt itself, and complex / long passwords are unlikely to be found with this tool.
It surprises me that the author holds Myrvhold to such high esteem when his company, Intellectual Ventures, is working pretty hard to stifle innovation.
I'm in agreement with his thesis (that there should be an increase in the funding of riskier projects by non-profits) but I dislike his examples of "useless" tech. Technology often starts off in toys and novelties until it can be made with greater reliability at a lower cost. Tech may be "useless" simply because we haven't explored it enough to find all of its applications.
Microsoft: Google's biggest search competitor.
Nokia: Microsoft's lapdog.
Oracle: Just lost a major patent case against Google.

Hmm, yes, quite an unbiased group of jobcreators!
Seriously?

An article about "make meaning, not money".

Which lionizes Nathan Myhrvold, the world's largest patent troll.

Seriously?
I had thought this was the case, but all the restricted zones I saw were open, so I thought it might be for a reason. But after going up 4 floors I decided to ponder instead the effects of herd mentality. As it turns out, you exit through the top anyway :)
How TechCrunch must change to stay relevant to the startup community
This book was worked on as "DIY Accelerator: How Startups Can Accelerate Themselves for 0% Equity". I changed the name to appeal to a broader audience, but the working title might tell Hacker News audience a bit more about what the goal of the book is.
Have you disabled the ability to select text on purpose? Because that is really annoying.
^ This. If you're good, your sex/race doesn't matter. Stop trying to force your shitty "equality" politics on a field that does very well without.
Facebook asked to close undercover cop page
3rd Ward in Brooklyn has a wood shop and metal shop among other things (so not quite the FabLab of your dreams) but there are literally tons of places like this, it's just a matter of looking for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_immunity -- "Diplomatic immunity as an institution developed to allow for the maintenance of government relations, including during periods of difficulties and even armed conflict. When receiving diplomats—who formally represent the sovereign—the receiving head of state grants certain privileges and immunities to ensure they may effectively carry out their duties, on the understanding that these are provided on a reciprocal basis. Originally, these privileges and immunities were granted on a bilateral, ad hoc basis, which led to misunderstandings and conflict, pressure on weaker states, and an inability for other states to judge which party was at fault."
Cofounders need:

1) Complementary skills. This means a broad enough combined skill set to understand the market, build something and gain initial traction.

2) The focus/discipline to actually get things done. Most teams flunk this test completely, or one founder ends up trying to do everything. Either way, doesn't last.

3) High-level agreement on vision. Fighting about how to get from Point A to Point C can be useful; fighting about what Point C is? Not so much.
No, my point was to make meaning -- not trivial stuff.

There's lots of non-humanitarian efforts that create lots of meaning:

* Facebook, helps me stay connected to my friends

* Etsy & Kickstarter, empowers artists around the world

* Reddit & HackerNews, lets me find stuff about topics I like

There's also lots of humanitarian stuff that's just pretty pointless.

But folks can build some pretty amazing things and I wanted to poke the emperor on that.
This is truly the problem with evidence based medicine. You can say how a given treatment will impact a population (i.e. 1 out of 100 patients with stage 4 colon cancer will survive past 6 months) and say it's not worth it, but when you're talking to a single patient, you don't know what the outcome will be. Maybe the treatment will be in vain or maybe he or she will be the one patient that goes into complete remission.

What do you do then?
What are Glucuronolactone Benefits, Side Effects
He only successfully sold it once, according to the article.
I'm not doing some post-modernism or whatever sneaky jab you're throwing in.

You're implying that you have some definition of algebra that is truer than mine. But that is all meaningless arguments over words anyway.

The real issue is that I'm arguing that the vast, vast majority of people only need to know that concepts can be "quantified" - "variabilized" or "symbolized". This is mostly so that they can interact with computers for the purposes of computer programming, or for creating tables of data to be fed into machine learning black boxes.

You've also think you know a truer definition of science than me. I think science today is about collecting data and having computers make predictions, increasingly use black box machine learning. I'm inferring that you think it's about theorizing from data and writing out simple equations. I have disagree with you on that (though you'll probably turn around with your post-modernist jabs).
Komenti i vitit ne Facebook - FOTO
hello people
The article about Doggyspace is from 2008 and their twitter account has been inactive for almost two years. So apparently they did stop building dumb stuff. It was probably the invisible hand that made them stop, not a blog post.
Sorry, I should be more precise.

First, I don't believe that IQ exist as a measurable quantity - IQ is too many things thrown together in a single bad. Tests group together various things which may be handled by different subsystems in the brain. If there is something called IQ, it's an aggregate.

Anyway, if there was such a unique quantity, actual data shows a progression of IQ scores in time - therefore if the tests are considered accurate and unbiased, it must be a "quantity" that can evolve based on the society a person lives it. It should then be considered not as a value, but as a function depending on a variable called society.

I do not know if studies have tried to measure the accuracy of repetitive measurement in low education adults enrolled in a learning program. If there are such studies and if they show inconsistent result (ie any change of IQ), then IQ should be considered as a function of 2 variables : f(society, personal experience).

Now, even if we consider that at a time t it could be accurately measured and that societal bias could be removed, considering how other qualities (such as determination, work ethic, consistency, creativity, competitiveness...) influence the outcome of any human activity, it seems foolish to rank people based on just one quality - especially if we don't know the other values, and their individual ponderation in the end result.

This ponderation could also be different depending on the activity, and IQ provide an absolute advantage in some activities (rhetoric?), but say determination would give an absolute advantage in other activities (startups?).

I prefer to say I "don't believe in IQ" because it's easier to say that way than giving this long version.
There is not enough memory to keep all the numbers and therefore radix sort is no viable solution. But I think you actually meant counting sort, but this will not work either. It requires 100,000,000 slots each 20 bits wide for a total of almost 238.5 MiB.
Yeah, I totally agree, in non-english speaking countries it's completely justifiable (until human-level language translation comes around).
My father spent much of his last year of life in hospitals. It was a frustrating experience as well.

As far as the expenses went, he had Medicare in addition to supplemental insurance as a retired Marine. So he paid nothing out of pocket. I can definitely understand how this would add to the frustration of the experience.

A huge problem is that no one is actually in charge of a patient's treatment. The individual doctors were quite good, with maybe one or two exceptions, but there was never enough evidence of actual coordination between them for me to feel very confident. I saw him on a daily basis, but much of my time was spent staying on top of what half a dozen doctors and nurses were doing or planning to do at any given time and keeping everything coordinated. I worry about people who end up in the hospital without anyone else around to watch over them.

Hospitalization can be a very frustrating and disorienting experience, especially for older patients. The thing about hospitalization is that it's essentially a form of captivity. You could write a good psychological horror story that took place in a hospital, and it wouldn't be too far from reality.
I personally use Path and love the "neighborhood" alerts which periodically post to Path "Nathan is in Downtown Austin", "Nathan is in Barton Hills, Austin", etc. This system is very elegant and seamless because it posts directly to the social feed without any effort.

From the landing page for the app I'm unsure of how this app works, or what purpose the shortlink serves. Why not make the app link to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks and just post neighborhood information automatically like Path does? (Or maybe if they have privacy concerns with the press of one button.) This would be much simpler, easy to explain, and would doubtlessly be well received by those whose social networking apps don't have this useful feature of Path built in.
They made the owner of wi-fi networks liable for all actions. In Spain I think. Mostly for the benefit of the carriers. Because almost everywhere there were open wifi-s before the law. But you can get 1GB 3G traffic for the modest 20 euro .. .
Great, another page chastising me for using a browser that isnt from"the 21st century". Oh, wait, I'm on a brand new Android device, maybe it's the developer who isn't in the 21st century.

/mobilerant
Talk about sore losers.
Windows 8 bug you will "enjoy" this week
Good work Mikko.
The POC code offered by Renat Gilmanov is OO.
If the dictionnary attack is very fast, it is a vulnerability in TrueCrypt.

A good encryption scheme uses a slow hashing scheme and salt to defeat such attacks.
Why in the article they are comparing megaupload with TPB? Megaupload needed those servers because they were hosting the files. TPB only has torrents to download and they were using P2P to distribute the files.
The London Hackspace is amazing - here's their list of tools: http://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Equipment
If my college days are anything to go by, the presence of drunk college kids has never deterred women before.
Because the guys building Facebook for dogs, or working on faster games have the transferable skills required to work on a Malaria vaccine.
Well, you chopped off half of what I said and miss-quoted me in the process. I said there was no real advantage to starting an operations/infrastructure-focused company in SF Bay Area. I pointed out that for social, in particular, SF/SV is totally high value.

But, back to operations-orientated (eg infrastructure, etc) startups:

So, orders of magnitude more top notch engineers is not an advantage?

Nope, because such companies have a greater reliance on sysadmins, devops and tech support folks. And there is more talent on that front in Austin (for reasons explained in the OP) than in SF/SV. Also there's no point having an order of magnitude of engineers in SF/SV if you can't afford to hire them. I'm not going to reveal our wage levels but like-for-like they're probably 50-66% that of Bay Area and still highly skilled.

An order of magnitude more VC firms is not an advantage?

Nope, cos Sand Hill Road will still invest in Austin based companies.

The existence of YC is not an advantage?

Nope, YC is nothing to me. I'll never participate as I'm a 31 year old with going on 14 years experience of the industry and been involved in several exits. I'm not a candidate YC entrepreneur.

Order of magnitude more tech oriented events and meetups is not an advantage?

Well, I live in SF so I go all the awesome events and still benefit from being in Austin. What they don't tell you is once your company takes off and you have $MM revenue and a huge team of employees you end up going to less events and start focusing internally.

Maybe you meant "for me, personally, for my very specific business, there's no advantage" but maybe you shouldn't make sweeping statements based on what seems like a strongly held opinion and not a reasoned position.

No, I'm saying for most non-social, non-software-pure-plays, it's a big advantage to get out of Bay Area. I'm sure Austinites would argue further than that. It's not just for me.

which Austin tech company is on the list of 500 biggest US companies, next to Google, Apple, Oracle, Yahoo?

Not sure about Yahoo! (and couldn't care less about Yahoo either) but all of them and Facebook have significant presences in Austin. To answer you question, though, Dell is. I'm not saying that's particularly sexy but you asked the question. I'm not also not sure what your point is here or how it related to startups?
Curious. Doesn't bode well for the Kim Dotcom's MEGA project.
Q&A with Elon Musk on SpaceX, from Wired
Unfortunately I can't see the pseudo code you are criticizing. But I have a degree in CS and I'm familiar with the notion of pseudo code and the way it's usually written in academic papers.

I agree with you that the way code is written matters a lot in practice. But in academic papers, usually the idea, the runtime and the correctness of algorithms have a higher priority than implementation details. Sure, you can write more readable pseudo code, but I haven't come across an algorithm in a paper that I wasn't able to understand. In fact, I do often like the way it is written.

Who says that computer scientists are necessarily great programmers? That's not the case. Universities (at least in Germany) doesn't teach you how to be an "elite grade developer", as you said. They teach fundamental concepts in computer science.

Why recursion? If you approach a problem with mathematics then thinking in terms of functions and recursion is very natural. Recursion is a fundamental mathematical concept and it's often easier to reason about recursive functions (inductive proofs).
A good system uses a key stretching function, not a hash. (For the same reason we don't call a MAC a hash, we don't call a key stretching function a hash.)
What's interesting is that apparently the project was written in Go--despite whatever technical merits it may have, you need to be able to staff your project to make things happen.
"Meaning" is arbitrary and can be extrapolated out of pretty much anything.

A multiplayer video game where you shoot aliens (to quote the posted article) can be a way for some people to find a sense of community they wouldn't find in real life for whatever reason, or a way for some kids to protect themselves from the world around them (parents divorcing, illnesses, etc.).

You cite Facebook as a product that's not humanitarian but has "meaning". Facebook was essentially started as a way for privileged ivy-league kids to talk about their college life and hookup. It may have become something bigger, but by your metrics it probably didn't start as something with "meaning".

"Make meaning— not trivial stuff" is a superficial, empty sentence which only achieves the goal of sounding good and making its writer feel good about himself.
How can this guy get all the way through this article without mentioning that not only is Nathan Myhrvold "former CTO of Microsoft", but that as owner of Intellectual Ventures, the most powerful non- practising patent troll in existence, he is perhaps the world's biggest example of what is wrong with the patent system and why ideas, innovative or not, are almost impossible to turn into reality without the threat of litigation.

The fact that he would avoid mentioning this shows that anything else said in this piece can be assumed to be utter bullshit and spin.
Let me point out the logical flaws in your post:

1. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "he tried a controversial holistic treatment, therefore he was cured" - My father was cured of prostate cancer just after he quit smoking. Therefore I advocate quitting smoking as a cure for prostate cancer.

2. Fallacy of the single cause - "he believes he was largely cured by" - it's unlikely that any single cause is responsible for something as large as being successfully treated for cancer. Many prostate cancers are simply left untreated with no harm.

3. Hasty generalization - "his family, his employees, and everyone he knows" - We can know nothing about the effect on the general population from anecdotal evidence.

4. Red herring, subtype appeal to authority - "However, he is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery" - entirely irrelevant to prostate cancer treatment.

5. Ad populum, in reverse - "None of this information [...] is widely known" - whether it is widely known or not, it should stand up to scrutiny on it's own.

And of course, my post itself suffers from 'argument from fallacy' - something need not be false just because it is argued for in a fallacious manner.

That said, you can roll your quackery up and take it with you.
sorry, we have the same error page for IE and mobile browsers (we don't support mobile yet).

just changed the message for less sarcastic one U_U
You are absolutely right. This is just our first version and we these are great tips. Thank you for your suggestions and we will improve in the next version.

We wanted to get this out early so we can learn from all of you.
I think it's fine to create things that seem trivial, as long as they are original, experimental, or new in some way.

Often times, ideas don't seem important until after they have been implemented.
Some landing page optimization to explain the product would be really helpful: since this is a mobile app, you want to give people a good idea of what they're getting into before they go to their phones, find it, and download it.
I know I am but one data point, but I feel that was a poor investment choice for the windows team. They should have doubled down on XAML/C#, along with unmanaged code to bring in toolkits like unity and other developers that prefer working in C++.
Agreed - but how frequent is that ?

And how will people understand that some cancers should be convered while others shouldn't? (especially if they have the "other" cancers)

Add to the mix a difference of incidence based on ethnicity and people will want universal converage of all cancers regardless how useful or useless treatment may be.

It's a pandora box.
There's something that rubs me the wrong way about this article, and I think it's the false dichotomy. On the one hand we have safe conveniences like "another link shortener" and "Facebook for X" which do not involve any innovation. On the other, we have risky humanitarian projects which require huge innovation.

So there are three differences here: safe vs. risky, easy vs. innovative, and luxury vs. necessity. I feel like the author is trying to bolster our valuations of each difference by associating them with our valuations of the others.

So we start out with this true but completely obvious idea that it's not the best use of our time to build safe and easy luxuries, yet the alternatives we're pushed to are risky and difficult necessities. And I suppose if you want to point to that as an ideal, then that's one thing.

But then we get to the quote about "faster aliens", and I start to wonder what universe we're talking about. Much of the research that went into making those aliens faster? Directly applicable to a ton of other fields! Is the author suggesting that we should take the engineers off of the teams that are working to build more powerful GPUs and CPUs, and instead get them working on a malaria vaccine? Should we send them back to school first, or just plop them in a bio lab and tell them to get crackin'? Or instead, we could let them just keep doing what they're good at, since faster computers will also help us find a vaccine for malaria.

If you want to attack something out of the safe/easy/luxury group, attack "easy". Safe luxuries have proven to be absolutely amazing for driving innovation, and then we get to use that innovation for the really important stuff.
Missing the Point of Promises