skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure which clients would indicate they were browsing from Antarctica.

All the British stations use a satellite link to the British Antarctic Survey headquarters in Cambridge, UK. The link to the Antarctic is transparent to the outside world so all browsing down on the stations (and ships) appears to come from a Cambridge IP address. I'm sure many of the other Antarctic stations work the same way.

The VoIP phone system works the same way so you can ring the station using a "local" Cambridge number. This often lead to strange conversations when people dialled the wrong number and found out they had accidentally phoned the Antarctic.
(but I can see why you spent so much money on IP now; patents are expensive).
Why the FUCK does that graph go to 110%?
not really sure. I found it through an arbitrary google search.
I'm in a different boat, my last 3 machines have been notebooks and I'm actually going back to a desktop.

Then again, my needs (3D modelling + animation) are a little different than most and the subsurfacing can be intensive on a notebook (especially when you want framerates to be as close to realtime so that you can judge timing effectively)

There's also other reasons why it's useful, More RAM, more raw CPU power - but obviously I'm on the other end of the scale... the people who need that extra oomph
This essay and the associated talk happen to form a great object lesson in writing: record some people talking and transcribe it yourself. You learn complexities of human speech, proper use of punctuation, when to break the rules, how unbelievably much people talk, all sorts of good things.
If you think about how you'd build a script to spam Hacker News, it's easy to see what's going on here.

- Step one is getting your bot to reliably create accounts.
- Step two is getting it to create accounts and post links.
- Step three is feeding it a list of 5000 of your sites.

This bot appears to be at step two.
Right, and this is the one to read if you are coming from C++. No acres of verbiage explaining things you already know, just some quick 1:1 mappings and then explanations of things that are not 1:1.

e.g. 1:1: bool(C++) -> BOOL(Objective C) { domain is YES and NO }.

not 1:1: Every object is of type id. This is a tool for weak-typing – that gives you the aerial view of difference in type systems in one sentence right up front.

(I have to confess that despite writing quite a lot of Objective C, the part about "nil", "Nil", and "NULL" had escaped me, so I learned something in the first page of meat. I don't think I've ever used "Nil".)
Well, if they wanted twitter they'd probably already attempted to buy it. My guess is that twitter is not for sale.
While stock option repricings please employees, they aren't popular among shareholders, who don't get the same opportunity to erase their losses.

How is stock option repricing erasing losses? Those with options have not exercised them yet (otherwise they'd be stock holders, not option holders), so they have not taken any risk against which gains or loses could be considered. If the employee considered the options as a significant part of their compensation, then I guess there is a loss in terms of time or opportunity (as in they could have worked somewhere else for different option terms), but it is also in the current share holders' best interest to keep employees happy and not bailing because they had a reduction in a certain kind of potential.

Google workers had an incentive this week to root for the company's shares to decline, lowering their exercise price and boosting the potential payout they could reap later.

Only if the stock price reverses its trend and starts going up -- it's been on a downward trend for over a year, and I doubt it's going to back to its $700 high any time soon.

If they don't reprice the options and an employee does exercise them (they'd be stupid to do so) and then sells, the employee LOSES money on the transaction. Even if you aren't that stupid, it doesn't send a good message to the employees that the company, and their contribution, is worth something. This is a much greater threat to the company than workers rooting for a stock price decline for a week, especially considering that the employees will be rooting for it to go up after the new strike price is set.
Chicago investors kept telling me they would only invest in a company with "protectable IP." Coming from a healthcare VC background, I didn't question it. That was a mistake.

It is what it is at this point - so much money sunk into it that I want to finish it off.
Managing Online Business
What the Heck Is Twitter?  It's not a Google killer, and it's not a Facebook killer.
I agree with the author that many people go into graduate school for the wrong reasons. However, it doesn't follow that all graduate school is bad.

The key here is the distinction between practical and impractical knowledge. The author seems to operate under the assumption that only practical knowledge is good. In her experience, she has been able to gain practical knowledge at least as efficiently outside of the graduate educational system. I agree with her point here, but I don't think you can discount the value of impractical knowledge - which I would define as knowledge that does not have any immediate real world application.

The value in impractical knowledge is twofold: 1) it can (and often is) able to called on later and 2) it can serve as an introduction to other practical knowledge. For instance, even the lawyer that the author has argued has wasted his/her education by transferring to a different career field may immeasurably benefit from some theoretical aspect of his graduate experience. More likely, an experience in graduate school may introduce a person to a subject area or conceptual idea that has a practical application they would never have been exposed to outside of that environment.

Some may argue that both of the above benefits can also be obtained through real world work experience, which leads to the question of knowledge for its own sake. I personally am a believer in learning for learnings sake, although I'm not sure I can articulate that argument in a comment length...
Steal These Federal Records — Okay, Not Literally
دقيقه بدقيقه - بحث Google‏
Went away with:

@Eric wants people to capture evil police people on their phones.

@Those crazy 20-percenters will solve how to make money off YouTube SOMEHOW.

@Micropayments of 1 cent, 3 cents, per video, so Ted Nelson now vindicated.

@Eric has a healthy sense of humour.

@"We've seen an explosion" [of usage...] - funny phrasing, given he was talking about evil terrorists using Google Earth.

@Map reduce isn't just CPUs - Google's developers tackle problems in parallel.

Great interview!
You mean section 1.iii is misspelled as 1.iiii
And I guess moderators are reassured by the nice (though valueless) words... and permit the comment.

If your theory is right it would suggest that moderators set a higher standard (e.g., actual content to the comment) for what they permit?
in my opinion, the worst thing about learning objective-c is memory management. autorelease pools and retain/release/autorelease is a compromise, somewhere between C-style manual memory allocation and garbage collection. i think it's far and away the worst scheme out of the three. it's even worse with the new property syntax, which disguises a lot of retains and releases.

objective c 2.0 provides garbage collection, which is probably better. but it's not available on the iphone, so it might as well not exist for me.
DTV coupon program back on track
But 5 out of 4 people don't understand fractions anyway.
I wrote a charting program a year/two years ago. http://chartwidget.com

I never did much with it.
Is there a karma level at which I can vote junk like this down? Or do we just have to wait for it to be deaded?
They detect when you paste something and use a fixed-width font on it. Also, they truncate it and link to a full version.
Your suggestions seem reasonable... if it gets to the point of an all-out War On Spam-bots. Unless things get that bad, it may be sufficient simply to make it a little more difficult for the spammers (so that they go hit on other sites). Meanwhile, I doubt that many spammers are going to go to trouble to create the mutually-supportive accounts (and certainly not actually spending money by hiring live users).
What about proxy servers?
at a certain karma level, you can 'flag' articles, which is the next best thing to voting them down.
Lets Go Deep - Spring Training Long Ball Update
Why Global is the New 'Local'
Probably a dealbreaker.
Reilly’s Right - Tickets Are Cheap
That is fascinating. Admittedly probably more to me than anyone else. What do the red titles mean? Could you make a version that plays at half the speed? It would be interesting if the background changed color to show day and night PST.
About hiring live users... it will be a slave hiring, without paying money.

Here is how it works, just one of these 2 options:

1- Spammers automatically create a blog, crawl the submitted articles here to their blog, and wait for a real user to comment on it, and then submit that comment here.

Or: 2- Spammers would create a bot that crawls the submitted article, submit that article to any public social news website, and wait for real users' comments, and then automatically submit the real users' comments here, and you will think it is NOT a bot/spam, but it is.

EDIT: This is something that can be implemented these days, not after a decade!

If this happens, will you think that this is a bot or not?
Unfortunately no. The good news is that pg is already aware of this issue. The bad news is that the best we can do now is just flag, which seems to be working alright for now.
I agree that Mechanical Turk is a huge red flag as far as quality goes, but 1000 subjects looking at 6,821 loan applications could get fairly expensive. That is 6,821,000 *(number of questions per loan app and it looks like seven factors just from the article) HITS. This could be fairly costly depending on the price that the researchers set per question.
The alternative approach to this is trade secrets law --- we've advised trading firms (for instance) that go through some formality to demonstrate controls on trade secret information for exactly this reason. But you'd probably have been screwed on lawyers either way.

Best of luck with the project.
It's a new protocol for nondeterministic messaging.
The protocol token used in the Upgrade header is: PTTH/1.0

This is a little too cutesy.

In this case, application layer interfaces can no longer be symmetric: If a host needs to invoke a function on a host that cannot function as an HTTP server, than that function cannot be easily layered on top of HTTP.

It's things like this that made me wish RFCs included a few real-life use-cases. Because I just can't see a need for two reasons: 1) the RPC functionality of the inaccessible host ("the client") is unknown, you actually need to have known code running on the end that is opening the connection, and 2) it doesn't matter how bad you want to make a remote call to a machine you can't get to if you need to wait for it to initiate the connection. If you can put known code on a remote node, you can just have it open up a non-HTTP connection to accept RPC calls over.

Not only does this break stock proxying, but clients would have to use the CONNECT method to enable bi-directional requests on port 80. This is normally reserved for things like SSL, where you need end-to-end connectivity assurance. This sounds like a way to by-pass firewalls ("if we make it work over HTTP, it'll be able to punch through anything!"), which may be a legit goal, but as a system, network, and security administrator, it doesn't enamor it to me.
Borderline stuff can last a few hours. I've occasionally seen linkjacked stuff that is several hours old. The story being jacked is interesting, and so it may even have upvotes. Obviously, once a moderator spots it, the link gets changed to the original story...but it'd be hard to spot in a quick peruse of the New page, so I can understand how such links could live so long.

Anyway, it depends on your definition of "survived" and whether there is value for the spammer in their story living on the new page for minutes or hours. Our company forums get an onslaught of spam about once per week, and though the spam never lasts more than a few hours (far less these days, as I've added a couple of moderators), it seems to be the same spammer doing it over and over again, so they must consider it worth a shot. When your employees time is almost free (or the work is done by a bot), pretty much any result is a worthwhile result.
Argh, you are right, off by a magnitude.

Well, I'll try to make up for it by pointing the original asker to http://simplecdn.com

From their frontpage:

A software developer with 100MB worth of downloads would pay $24.90 for
lifetime storage, and would then receive a transfer rate of 3.9 cents per GB.

So, pay $24.90 once and serve your 1000 downloads for $5.80 then.
You know, "meh". This is basically like saying, "when he was at Microsoft, Spolsky traded off the vision of a grand unified scripting architecture for all Microsoft products in favor of something that the Excel team could actually execute on and launch. Later on, when he founded Fog Creek, he allowed a developer to write a custom scripting language to implement common-codebase cross-platform, rather than waiting for the industry to come up with a totally acceptable cross-platform development environment". He sounds consistently pragmatic, if perhaps a bit inelegant.
Spolsky seems to get around this problem by not giving a shit when people on Proggit decide that he's a douche.
Existing projects rarely switch VCses, because it's such a pain to move everything over.

git trounces the competition on this single point, actually, and it could even be one part of the explanation for why git has won so soundly. The tools for converting from another VCS to git are dramatically better than any other DVCS that I'm aware of.
thanks, i see that now, somehow i'd missed that, thanks again
Evan Williams doesn't sound like that interesting of a person

You can't conclude this just because you don't like the style in which the New York Times writes its "The Boss" column.
Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times
It's a clean (but probably untenable) replacement for long-polling. You open up a web application somewhere. You make lots of little connections to grab images, post data, etc. You also make another connection to allow the server to post back to you.

Presumably, the idea here is that you'd be able to drive the "client's server" side of this from Javascript event handlers.

In the real world, CONNECT proxies aren't going to allow these connections anyways (try running Meebo through a BlueCoat). Although in fairness, the whole industry has already adopted "run-whack-ass-protocol-over-HTTP-POST" as the accepted tunneling solution --- that ship has sailed.
Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem
Ask HN: Worthwhile hacker events in the Bay Area for March/April 2009?
My business partner and I are in SF from Australia until mid April. We are working on a SaaS style collaborative modelling tool. We've been reading up on events listed on meetup.com, garysguide.org, sdforum.com and googling what we can find. Can anyone recommend any other websites, or particular must see events?

Doug
Ask HN: We just launched PleaseRT.me, a Twitter-app, please send feedback
Interestingly, there's the same weekend bump for Vista over XP.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-daily-20090101-20090306
Ask HN: Review my latest web app - BoostCam
Bill Wyman has been reporting this story at http://hitsville.org (mostly in the context of the LN/TM merger); for instance, liveblogged from the senate hearing:

%< ----------------

(R-ME) Sherman: If there’s ten thousand seats in the area, are you selling 10,000 tickets?

(TM CEO) Azoff: Never. On average we might see 80 or 85 percent of the seats.

Sherman: Are those the good ones or the bad ones you’re not getting?

Azoff: The vast majority of the best seats in the house.

%< ----------------

From a later article:

[..]

Hmm .. it sems like an almost insoluble economic problem. They have inventory … it’s sitting on a shelf … and it’s highly perishable—worthless at a minute after showtime.

Whatever can be done?

The article crystalized a feeling that I had several times while watching the hearings on the merger: Why does Live Nation need to merge with Ticketmaster to deal with the alleged broken concert industry?

In this case, why couldn’t it just, you know, sell the farther-back seats for less money?

[...]

Indeed, I recently got an email from someone who added an additional wrinkle: Paraphrased, the point was simply that LN controls too many goddamn venues.

Why are the company’s bookers not putting acts in smaller rooms? Because LN has to keep its own buildings in action, even if they’re too big for the artist in question. [em. orig.]

Are these guys squirrelly or what?
Neither does suing companies engaged in productive activity, such as Google

While I agree with you on this with regard to the relative righteousness of a domain squatter suing Google, it's worth noting that Google offers a domain squatting service. They are participating in the very activity you and I consider abhorrent (while also doing productive things, too). In fact, Google very likely makes more money from domain squatting than anyone, since they have a very strong unfair search engine advantage over spam domains from any other provider.
ZoomInfo Scores Deal With Microsoft To Integrate Search Into CRM
What problem are you trying to solve exactly?
Retweeting is something the twitter community has invented; there is still no built in functionality for it. As more and more people sign up for twitter, they have to continuously be educated on what retweeting is and how to do it. We are trying to make retweeting easier.
not sure if I like that logo, doesn't really work with the niche you are in. You need to spice it up...I dunno, maybe replace one of the Os with a camera.

can't say anything about the actual process, since the camera screen doesn't load for me
Actual links for the curious:
http://www.meetup.com/
http://www.sdforum.com/
http://sf.garysguide.org/

Also been sifting through:
http://www.churchillclub.org/index.jsp
http://www.eventbrite.com/
I think you got it backward, read it again. He used the Mechanical Turk to put a number on each face rather than just yes/no. He then compared the results with actual loan applications, and found that it correlated pretty well.
So, what happens when the heart surgeons, dentists, litigators...

Umm... duck, duck, goose?
Microsoft Confirms IE8 Can be Removed from Windows 7
It's crazy. Both companies are so intertwined that no one in the TM/LN camps knows what to do. Acting one way hurts them the other way. LN is in especially big trouble because of all the lucrative "360" deals they agreed too:

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20081218/u2s-live-nation-dea...

There are many parallels with the the outrageous deals that Sirius Radio signed:

http://www.bestsyndication.com/?q=20090212_sirius_radio_bank...
I can't really do much about the design right now. I'm not a very talented graphic designer. If this starts to catch on, I'll find someone to help me out there.

Check out the help page if you're having problems getting your camera to work. If you're still having problems, let me know.
Fair enough, why don't you create some variation of twitterpedia.com and put a lot more definitions on there?
The way we did it makes it more useful for the whole community, and helps ideas spread through twitter. It lowers the friction to retweet. Also, most users are not likely to go to a twitterpedia site, pleaseRT.me is viral by definition, and gets the idea right in their face.
http://superhappydevhouse.org/ is fun
Good essay - and I also liked the video (posted earlier) that it was based on. Tiny pedantic point; there's one too many 'should's here:
"Similarly, founders should also should not get hung up on deal terms"
Either 'Similarly, founders should also not...' or 'Similarly, founders also should not...'
Didn't want to detract from the message of the piece, but thought it worth pointing out in case it helps.
It says in his explanation -- green stories made the front page; red did not.
Facebook consequences: Copyright infringement? Nada. Spamming? Deletion.
I think an Bram errs when he thinks that his experience in studying and experimenting with merge algorithms gives him deeper insight than the apparent newcomer to the field, Linus.

Whatever the value of years of experience, it's foolish to disregard the cost of bias those years build, also.
I don't know if you can get them to upload to a WebDAV server, but if you can then I'd recommend http://bingodisk.com

I pay $29/yr for 15GB space and unmetered bandwidth.
Agreed 100%. TAing a class with 240 students is no joke (no, I'm not the only TA). I am looking forward to my summer internship because I think it's going to be a lot more relaxing than school. I'll have time to buy my own groceries (vs. Safeway delivery), I'll only work five days a week, I will be able to sleep 6-7 hours ever night, etc. Being a grad student is very unlike being an undergrad.

Plus, grad school finally got me to stop playing WoW - I suspect that if I'd gotten a job right out of undergrad I would still be playing.
Not the same bump -- Vista is bundled with IE7. Presumably we are looking at bumps for different segments of the population, using Vista and XP/IE6 respectively.
>It's worth noting that you can and should apply #7 - Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job - to grad school as well and treat it as a job with a long term contract, one that you need to mine for all kinds of interesting things that you didn't think you'd learn. For example, I bet a lot of people (understandably) go into a top neuroscience or cell biology program thinking they'll learn a lot about biology and research, and they do, but the ones that did really well learned things like how to manage your time well, motivate yourself on an independent schedule, network in a loose non-corporate environment and blow off steam with non-contact sports.

Very good point. I'm learning a lot about CS, but I'm also learning my limits in terms of how much work I can do in general, and how to handle being overwhelmed. I'm making excellent contacts. I'm learning to organize myself better (and actually use a calendar). Even without the CS, I will leave grad school better prepared for the workplace than I came in.
Meh. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that a humanities PhD might not have practical value, but it has value to some people because they like it and come out of it more worldly. I mean, sure, okay, but there is a qualitatively different type of advantage that comes with a technical PhD.
Yep. Germany is the second largest country for Firefox usage.
US 27%
Germany 11%
France 5%
The History of Python: How Exceptions Came to be Classes
(Putting my normal user hat on here. I'm purposely preventing myself from trying to think hard on the purpose of your site.)

"I" don't follow what your site does, even after I see the example. Something to do with retweets, which I thought was just sending someone else's tweet to my friends. But I enter some text and submit, nothing seems to happen. I alt-tab away and come back and a username/password field has appeared, with an empty text box and "60" number. I don't get it.

I give up, feeling dumb, and leave the site, to do whatever it was I was doing before.
You guys seem to think that I was making an argument against using the Amazon service and in favor of buying servers. That was not what I'm saying in that post. I was making an argument that moving expenses from upfront costs to ongoing expenses is not necessarily a good thing. It may or may not be. You're also assuming start-ups or small companies as customers. I'm also thinking of larger enterprises.

Many of the issues raised in your comments are addressed in the blog post itself and in the comment thread.