skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re: Money laundering

I once heard that some, if not many, of the Chinese all-you-can-eat-buffet restaurants are/were fronts for the Chinese mafia. Makes you wonder - as a lot of them go out of business in 6 months - 1 year.
Vitamins and Minerals: Clanking Replicator Blog
But Who's Counting? Monetizing Web Media
Didn't work in FF3 w/ FlashBlock and NoScript even after I whitelisted them.
Ferriss basically says "This stuff is too extreme for me to actually do, but it's freaking awesome to read about."
I've always thought that the H-1B system should be entirely scrapped in favor of an actual skill-based immigration policy. My parents were able to come to Canada years ago based on their education and skills in the tech sector. We had a defined path between landing and citizenship (only takes 3 years) which only made it more attractive. My father is now gainfully employed at over twice the Canadian income average, and my mother has started her own business that has contributed significantly back into the economy. It's a win win for everyone.

If the US is serious about recruiting top talent from the around the world they'd be wise to get on a similar bandwagon. Part of the H-1B problem is the abuse that's so prevalent, since an employee is essentially at a mercy of an employer until he/she gets the green card, which takes, in cases, up to a decade. I'm just about to graduate from college, and I know plenty of extremely smart people who simply aren't willing to throw 10 years of their life into a pit just for the privilege of being American.
> His point is that if your objective is to catch criminals, and in pursuit of that goal you're willing to set up checkpoints to collect fingerprints, and you're the US authorities primarily concerned with US criminals - wouldn't it be far better to set up those checkpoints inside the country?

The US has no laws against criminals travelling (assuming that they're not being pursued). It has laws against people with certain characteristics entering the country.

In short, the "catch criminals" premise was wrong.
Nobody went into debt for college. You either saved money in advance or worked your way through.

The Federal government has been loaning money directly to college students since 1958 and has been guaranteeing bank-originated student loans since 1965.

Phones had disks with holes, not number pads.

I can't find statistics on how quickly Touch-Tone dialing was adopted, but AT&T started promoting it at the 1964 Worlds' Fair.

Tapping a phone was difficult, both technically and legally, and you could safely assume your phone calls and letters were private.

The Church Committee reported in 1975 and 1976 that the CIA and FBI had been wiretapping and intercepting mail without warrants. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was not passed until 1978.
For Free Throws, 50 Years of Practice Is No Help
VCfeeds : Alltop meets Venture Capital.
Can we build a world with open source?
I don't think it is only their own problem. Many people in school simply cannot recognize when doing the homework is necessary to learn the material versus when they already sufficiently understand it. Good teachers actually teach students how to learn effectively, and can help recognize how a student learns best.

It seems that the prevalence of homework => test in schools today is a result mainly of larger class sizes requiring the teacher to make compromises for students with varying levels of ability, motivation, and parental involvement.
Ahh, thanks for the clarification. Is there a way to display a warning to just noscript users?
For those who are curious, ran some comparisons versus jpeg here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/corylinden/3330168391/).
Short version is that, as expected, jpeg block artifacts completely overwhelm image at very low quality levels. Minimal jpeg file size ends up ~3k.
7 Brilliant Ideas Scribbled On Cocktail Napkins and Toilet Papers
YouTube and Universal Music Discuss Deal
How to block Facebook ads in IE with a CSS stylesheet
The central fallacy here is "The stimulus money that flows to taxpayers, government agencies, and businesses has to come from somewhere (the unseen)."

The short explanation for why this is false is that the velocity of monetary circulation is a variable rather than a constant. A slightly longer explanation is here:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/01/time-to-bang-my-head-a...
Proposal: Changing a presentation course on the go
Why does the 89.4 to 89.5% matters anyway? It will all average out over the 40 or so classes one takes in a typical B.Sc.
"(I suppose this advice would have also been good for Wall Street quants.)"
I did idly wonder if it would come to that, when Icesave announced it wouldn't honour guarantees given to British savers. Iceland's defence strategy during the Cold War was to umm, do nothing, and rely on NATO, knowing that it would never permit the Soviet Empire to gain such a strategic foothold. Even tho' the Royal Navy is but a shadow of its former self, invading Iceland would have taken all of one afternoon, if that.
I find it strange that presentation tools haven't been created for educational environments. Most professors use powerpoint to deliver presentations, but it's clear Microsoft never designed it for use in a teaching environment.

What if there was a presentation tool designed for classroom use that incorporated student polling, slide forks, and even student feedback?
I'd much rather learn how it works so I can identify, avoid, or fight. Which are all preferable to me then ignoring it. Criminals are hackers in their own right (never mind criminal hackers, but society hackers, they make society do things it was never intended to.) and I have to say reading about a good scam is almost as entertaining as reading about a good startup. One just has more practical value.
You also got something you did want - a recommendation of the correctly spelled name. Courtesy of a search engine. Seems fair the search engine gets to brand its helpfulness.
Wait, so this isn't a joke?
Going by the javascript version he was inspired by, it takes a long time to converge if you are lucky (I kept it running for several days on and off). If you're unlucky, it doesn't converge before you get bored.
I would totally be interested. My twitter: quellhorst
Another problem with H1-B is that any coworker you meet who is here on H1-B cannot actually get involved in your startup, if you decide to leave that company or work on it on the side. This actually stifles innovation. I worked with a couple of very bright H1-B coworkers who I become pretty good friends with, and even though they had the time and the inclination to work with me on a startup, they couldn't b/c doing so would endanger their visa status. We consulted a lawyer who told us that even coming over to make coffee on a regular basis could be construed as contributing.

If I had worked closely with people who could actually branch out and work elsewhere that would have definitely accelerated my project, but instead, though I value the friendships I've made, the acceleration to the economy via H1-B only occurs in terms of the work large companies can do.

Startups can't afford to sponsor H1-B and H1-B's cannot start their own companies.
Musicians high frequency hearing test
Yes. The RIAA Curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization) has been around since 1954. Before that there was an assortment of different compression strategies used by different record-player manufacturers. In the 1930s records made by one company often wouldn't sound correct on record players made by another company. The RIAA standardized this. Perhaps a more surprising note for the 1975 list would be "And the RIAA made contributions to the industry which benefitted consumers."
3 Reasons the Stimulus Bill Is a Red Herring for Clean Tech Entrepreneurs
Happiness is contagious, research finds
Interesting stuff. Here's the full study: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec04_2/a2338?maxtos...
Kundra is the nation's First CIO
Agreed. As a Canadian I sometimes bemoan the fact that startup culture is almost non-existent in this country, and that legally I have no realistic way of participating in an American startup, ever. But them's the cards I've been dealt I suppose.

There is always the TN visa, which is quota-less and hinges only on an existing offer from a company, so I suppose I could work for a startup. The TN, though, is not on a track to a green card.
Are you sure start-ups cannot afford H1-B? It might be a few thousand in lawyer fees, but that might be well worth it, especially if a few key founders need H1-B. Since more than 50% start-ups had some immigrant founders, I'm assuming that a large part of them had H1-B rather than some other visa or green card.
Are you saying that you can produce 6 seasons of Frasier with the cost of 1 minute of Pixar animation? Sounds doubtful.

Not cost - number of artifacts within a that timeframe over several shots.

Then again, Let's run some numbers to talk about cost.

WALL-E cost $120 million for 98 minutes, Ratatouille cost $150 million for 111 minutes, so you could infer that Pixar animation costs about $1.3 million per minute (roughly) and each production takes around 3-4 years to make.

The Blender "peach" team produced 10 minutes of animation (Big Buck Bunny) in 3 months with 9 people from concept to delivery using all open source software. (There were only 6 people primarily involved in the production of the animation itself, 2 were actively developing Blender as software and 1 did the music)

Big Buck Bunny - http://www.vimeo.com/1084537

Once all the meshes, sets etc are initially created, it all boils down to production of scripts, storyboarding and then animating more content based off artifacts you've already produced.

Remember, I'm talking a sitcom format, that is you artificially limit yourself with numbers of characters and locations (which includes lighting etc) which allows you to spend more time on animation instead of producing more sets/figures.

In fact, once everything is set up, animation is one of the shortest segments of any film animation project (dont believe me? check Dreamworks Animation's general timeline breakdown from their most recent annual report, page 21, link follows)

http://ir.dreamworksanimation.com/dwa/export/system/modules/...

So while no, you might not get a full 6 seasons, you could probably do several seasons for the cost of 1 minute of Pixar production.

You seem to be talking about growing an animation studio from the ground up.

Thats exactly what I'm talking about.

The model I've been more or less discussing throughout this thread is for a startup I'll be working on soon, maybe even applying to YC with in the next round of funding.

PG says, make something people want - this year is turning out to be the biggest year on record for Hollywood in terms of ticket sales, people spend more time in front of their TV's now than 5 years ago and now they also spend more time online (and TV/film piracy is on the rise)

Fact is - people want to be entertained...
Vlad is another good Capistrano alternative written on top of Rake.
http://rubyhitsquad.com/Vlad_the_Deployer.html
This list shows how much things don't change more than how they do. A lot of new ideas are really just old ideas recycled and updated. Look at movie plots and popular music - even movies that aren't explicitly remakes are often very similar to old movies that most people have never seen. The same thing for business ideas - just as development of railroads and parcel post allowed Sears to develop as a catalog company, Amazon was made possible by the internet and electronic payments - and they've gone about capitalizing on it in much the way Sears did - by getting very big very fast, etc. Studying the past teaches us about the future.
If you met someone face to face who happened to be a PHP programmer, would you let them know that ostensibly based solely on the language that they happen to be using at the time, you don't consider them a real programmer?

Sure, why not.
Universal, YouTube near deal on music video site
I have no idea, but the <noscript> tag will show to anyone with JS disabled.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_noscript.asp
I've been trying to get the word out about my game. The biggest problem is no hype leads to no reviews leads to no sales. Getting noticed is a total crapshoot. After a couple of days on Twitter, it appears most sites just want a free copy of the popular apps. They'll bend over backwards for codes from @EAMobile but flatout ignore you unless your name ends with Inc. or LLC.
Interesting, for sure. But, as an aside, look at the point size and location of those link ads! Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.
Doesn't seem like there is much going on from their sparse home page -- is this yet another search engine? Do we really need more?
Tatango: Changing Group Interaction, And Profiting Along The Way
Tatango is a startup that appears to have a strong revenue stream, and a incoming new wave of financing. Good look at a startup that is surviving the recession by generating actual profits.
"Actually forcing TV on your kids"

What??? I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. I don't realy understand what you're trying to argue.

Preventing kids from growing up with experience of popular culture, is what I considered cruel.
Joost Continues Fight For Relevancy, Teams Up With Social Network Netlog
Yeah, those are definitely not the best ideas right now, but I would think that he uses AIG the same way we use kleenex to mean tissue. It's the concept there.

Same with Iceland, that may not be the country of choice anymore, but the concept remains the same.

Obviously not ideal, but not a reason to ditch the book. Strauss' writing is entertaining, so I'll probably pick it up for the enjoyment factor :)
Zoho Writer Gets A Makeover And Some New Features
Global Warming May Get Its Very Own Top Level Domain
This is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it seems the people behind it were more concerned with technically getting it to work, than making it work in a useful way. While I think it's a great technical achievement to aggregate comments across all of those social networks, displaying them all as a 500+ item list, in no particular order, unthreaded, and with no options to filter, sort, or group, renders this feature almost completely useless.

It seems I'm being provided this information just for the sake of more information. What is the point of seeing that so-and-so tweeted the exact same thing that such-and-such did? Is it just to show me some active twitter usernames (with no avatars)? Apparently not, because I cannot even click through to twitter profiles using this.

I'm still amazed that there is no service where I say "here is a URL" and they say: "It's been Dugg x times, here are the comments on Digg, Redditted y times, here are the comments. FF'd z times, here are the comments..." and that the "best" commenting system, to date, is Disqus.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History , The History of Rome, Econ Talk, and TED talks. As I have a very long conmute im always on the looking.
Postcard Mystery | Bea and Mildred Mystery Series
Fun and exciting Morse code contest with great prizes for media and publishing industry from Canadian mystery author Barbara Murray
Looks like a good start, though there are a bunch of potential feeds to add.
Mercurial 1.2 released
The Programmer's Future
It's interesting because it's a novel approach to solving a problem. Instead of "How do we kill something that's constantly mutating?" this approach is "How can we make it not a problem in the first place?"

Also, it uses "devices" (odd name for a gel...ain't medicine fun?) that are already approved, so the time to market can be greatly reduced.
I guess it depends on how early stage the start up is. Once you get some funding, sure, I guess you could spend it on lawyer fees, though there are likely many other places you'd be taking it away from.

Pre-funding though, or at the founder level, H1-B co-founders need a legal structure to transfer their visa to, or they can apply for a 2nd H1-B visa, but both of those options require a ton of redtape and hold an element of risk to their visa status.
Google Launches New Service - TipJar: a collection of money saving tips
There has to be some editorial control over which feeds get added to which category.

Would a "Suggest a Feed" page be enough do you think?
No need to, anyone who believes this crap isn't looking to be converted. Humans don't tend make decisions logically, they make them emotionally and then use logic to justify those decisions.

I've yet to meet a Rand follower who wasn't really just a selfish emotionally stunted ego maniac who thought they were totally self sufficient and society was mooching off them, especially those lazy poor people. Generally a complete lack of awareness of the interdependence of all men on our societies and forms of government.

You can't get past the first paragraph without noticing that Rand doesn't even know what the phrase "money is the root of all evil" means. It certainly doesn't mean money is evil which is how she interprets it and spends the whole rest of the article knocking down this absurd strawman.

Anyone with half a brain knows "money is the root of all evil" means the love of material possessions has caused much evil in the world.
My impression was that "The Game" was credulous and a bit sleazy. Am I wrong? Is Strauss actually a good writer/reporter?
You wonder what they do when a security fix slows Webkit down.
Really? This concept is that strange to you?
Afghan tech boom: Mullah embraces iPhone
How do you expect them to make money for the service they provide? Are you arguing for no cut or a lower one?
I rarely watch TV. Chronic stress is a concern for me.
Google Misses an Opportunity With Its Life Magazine Archive
Oh no the entire concept is sleazy and skeezy, but it's still a story about normal guys who have zero confidence and see the world as a system with rules. But it's wrapped in these stories of a rockstar life, living in Hollywood, pursuing starlets, and learning the ability to "make" women lust for you.

The story though is entertaining.

I'm not supporting the concept, but it's got an allure. To learn to be a Casanova, could - according to these people he talks about, and in a sense, him - be within the grasp of any guy. It's learning how to be more attractive without having to get in shape (though getting in shape is a major boost.)

It's probably not a book for everyone, but if you read it for entertainment and not knowledge, you'll enjoy it I think.
Why Microsoft will rule the cloud…someday
Does Daylight Saving Time Conserve Energy?
I think "Suggest a Feed" would be fine. I took a quick look on the Twitter page, for example, and I know there are a lot more VC's using it than what are shown.

But agree that you do need editorial control. :)
"Were"? Are things different now?
Wow PETA is going to be all over this one. But I'm pretty sure monkeys can't get HIV? It's unique to humans right?
User info stolen from music streaming application Spotify
One of the things that makes Strauss's writing so fun is that he's willing to immerse himself into a culture so thoroughly. He has the ability to so thoroughly pass the guards of reason (like, I'm too poor to worry about this stuff!) for the sake of the story.
Why Are iPhone Users Willing to Pay for Content?
Have you read the last 3 paragraphs in the article?

What they say essentially is "This is just another yellowish PR puke. You will never hear from us again. Thank you."
But you don't need to read it in full to know what it's about, a quick skimming should do. I don't count that as reading the article.
Facebook copied Friendfeed’s UI? Suprised?
Yeah, that category is kind of experimental with potential to generate a lot of noise if we added most VCs.
The only issues I see here is that most tips are pretty decent. So a simple yes/no doesn't suffice. I'd like to see some sort of rating system (1-5). Unless they are relying on new content bubbling up and then being replaced by even newer tips ala HN.
That's mostly true for research software.

But there's a ton of cash floating around for process improvements in the for profit biotech/healthtech sector.

That may not be much more exciting then business apps, but it pays the bills and it's still interesting work.
If you're asking about the quality of his writing, it's up to snuff. That said, having read his last book and excerpts from this one, it's probably not fair to try and compare him to a journalist.

Neil chases stories and ideas that are both a little crazy and secretly appealing to most men. Let's face it, all of us guys have wished at some point or other that they could seduce any women they wanted. In the same way, a lot of us have probably wondered what it would be like to live a spy lifestyle, or to have bank accounts in exclusive foreign countries. This is basically just the equivalent of a harlequin novel, but for guys.
I'd read it as a fictional novel, and for 10$, I feel like it is.
the question I'd have to ask, is why are they doing this now and not when the iPhone was released? The App Store bandwagon has been in full swing for a while now, chances are that most of the apps they want to develop have already be developed. Why did they decide to wait so long to get on board?
Michael Lewis is kind of famous for saying that those trained financial professionals don't actually know what they are doing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker

But yeah, your point is good. Iceland could yet end up a net winner from its financial dealings, depending on what their creditors decide to forgive. Certainly those creditors will end up net losers no matter what.
Declare that the previous code obviously wasn't functional and therefore the performance is invalid?

Following this literally is a recipe for getting stuck in a local optimum. I don't think they follow it literally, which then raises the question of, why phrase it that way? Probably because A: It gets attention and B: It establishes the expectation that deviations will be "nonexistent" (read as: rare), which keeps everyone on the same page in the debate, instead of having to refight the performance fight on every patch.

Read literally, it really doesn't work, because performance is not a scalar value and there's no universally correct way to say that the performance of program X is better than program Y. Testing to benchmarks only mitigates that, it doesn't really eliminate it, because yesterday the benchmark suite was one thing, today it is another, and tomorrow it'll be yet another thing, as it gets changed.
Order Fap Turbo Today & Receive $2000 in Bonuses
iPhone owners tend to be better off, at least in my experience, than the average web surfer. Not a big surprise here that they would spend more money. Still, Apple had to create this success, it wasn't thrown at them.
I don't understand how you can improve performance continuously while adding features, unless you optimize parts of the program unrelated to the new features...
Energy Star Ratings for Servers Coming May 1
I hate if I have to enter a username when I just want to quickly try what something is about.

I always try to build my apps so that you can use most of the functionality without an account. I think that should be the standard way to do it and not other way round.
Very true, but I just took a look at the blogs section and think there's some room to add a number of VC's there, too. Most of them have very interesting posts, so there's some good potential value, there.
You should use mod_rewrite and similar to get rid of your .php / .asp extensions because you care about the design of your URLs and don't want your URLs to all break in the future should you move to a different technology - not because you want to hide from crawlers out looking for SQL injection targets.