skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a rather archaic example but, in Ruby if you had this code to define a user inputted method name:

print "Method name: ";
m = gets.chomp;
eval("def #{m}; puts 'Hi!'; end");
eval(m)

and the user types this in:

abc; end; system("rm -rf /*"); #

you'd be in big trouble :-)
Ever try a handshake at a bazaar?

I've tried them with people working on my car transmission,
my real estate agent, and various/sundry people in my path I thought I could trust. I would trust a stranger at a bazaar more than any of those parasites.
Fring: Cross Platform Mobile IM
I don't think it's a coincidence that the financial system peaked out at roughly the same time global oil production peaked. We ARE in a real energy crisis. A big fraction of humanity in the poorer parts can no longer afford gasoline or heating oil. Oil has quintupled in recent years.

The 1929 crisis was of purely financial origins. It was rather basically a cheap credit bubble. The bubble we're in now is both financial and a raw materials/energy crisis. These dynamically related forces may together put us in a very bad position. Oil, natural gas, fresh water, grains, fish, metals -- production of all these things are hitting physical limits and shooting up in price, progressively constraining economic opportunity.
Eee PC - derived from "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play"
I uploaded it to scribd for the lazy among us:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/941859/Brain-drugs-boost-try-for-m...
> it's important to work on things you care about; even in downturns

This does not mean it makes sense to naively proceed with plans based on the status quo, which is a common sentiment on this board. Advertising and media get slammed in real recessions (2001 wasn't one), which is rather disastrous for Web2.0 as I understand it. Opportunity, or at least security, is largely limited to the non-discretionary side of the economy.

I read PG saying you should ignore recessions because nobody can time them. Well, that's just not true. People with solid macro-economic grounding have always understood roughly where we are in the business cycle. If you rely on the newspapers and NBER pronouncements for your understanding of the economy you will have the impression that it's all guesswork, but that only reflects on MSM incompetence and conflict of interest with advertisers.
> some form of amphetamine ... since coffe was discovered

Caffeine is not really a stimulant. It primarily works as a drowsiness suppressant; it doesn't even measurably do much if you're well rested. Caffeine is not in remotely the same league as amphetamines and other stimulants.
To be completely honest, your logo and name are so loaded that I was turned off from browsing your site from the beginning.

Also, if you're planning on playing on the whole Ron Paul bit, it won't work. A huge part of why it's worked on Digg/Reddit is because users are motivated to pollute existing news stories with Ron Paul talk. Having a section dedicated to Ron Paul takes away that motivation.

Your site seems extremely biased, and would be one I would not visit if I were looking for level headed, balanced news. And if I wanted otherwise, I'd stick to Digg/Reddit.

Congrats on launching.
I'm not about to defend the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition! However there are certain differences between say, Europe in the year 1200 and any random warrior nomadic tribe of the same time. I keep getting back to private property rights, which I believe is the foundation of all western civilization. Also the religious insistence on personal responsibility (as opposed to blind submission) was nascent even at that point. And the Magna Carta showed that the idea of governance being a two way street. These themes bloomed into the Reformation, which kicked off the 100 years war, which got us modern secularism, which enhanced the renaissance and set the stage for all those miracles that happened in the last 400 years or so. I would tell you to wait for the movie, but it would be something like a 200-hour serial or something just for the highlights.

You hit on an interesting startup topic, though. Is it possible to algorithmically determine cultures and sub-cultures by biometrics, writing analysis, web sites visited, or some other factor? Aside from the big brother implications, there's actually a real market need -- people who belong to the same "clans" usually like spending time together on the web. Any way to make that easier should have value. In the information age, it's very possible that people belong to some sub-culture that they are not even aware of.
Elementary Math Grows Exponentially Tougher
I more or less liked it, but I was sort of confused by the sell... I do a lot of gigs where I play an agile-shmagile "coach", and much of what you wrote sounds to me like you're in violent agreement with the rational portion of the "agile" community.
You would trust a random person in an open-air market more than you would trust a trained, certified, bonded, licensed real-estate agent?

Care to think that over a bit more? Perhaps phone a friend?
Ah. Gotcha. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Ooh! I thought I was just making money, but I was also fighting evil. My awesomeness cannot be contained.

I spotted an immediate opportunity as soon as they opened up the box of trouble that is a baseless lawsuit against IBM. I shorted SCO during their long decline. It took longer than I expected, and I bought to cover before the end (which still hasn't quite come), because I wanted to avoid more tax hassle (I was short on SCO something like three years ago, and the end really hasn't come yet). I personally followed SCO from before all of the trouble, because of some intellectual property issues I had with them, so I already knew they play fast and loose with copyright and IP (I won't go into detail, because I'm pretty sure the non-disclosure from the settlement is still in effect).
If you buy/sell your stocks and options online, you can! (I guess you still could, even buying down at the local Schwab office...but I'm not sure what kind of service you'd get.)
What I'm seeing is people dropping one onerous system -- say traditional waterfall -- and creating a new onerous system built around favorite authors and books. I think people get the "feeling" of agile but miss out on really how it is supposed to work. I mean, I'm seeing customers quoting books back and forth to each other -- even calling in famous authors to make decisions on what they should be doing. Famous authors, bless their hearts, don't know jack squat about any particular team or project and shouldn't be making blanket announcements about what teams "ought" to do. That's the same stuff they're trying to get away from. There are no perfect answers.

I come from the rational side of agile as well. This is the first time I've seen so many people so excited about giving teams freedom that they're prepared to spell out exactly what those teams should do in order to be free. If you only concentrate on delivering code you miss the other value you add. Teams can't run on manifestos and slogans.
DARPA Challenge Problems in Pure and Applied Mathematics
Good idea. I think now we are really heading somewhere. This is could be a start to fixing all the clutter and mess on the Web.
Amazing new 3D face detection technology from Japan (vid)
Modern Logo
If the S3 auth access can be abstracted to use your "normal" amazon login, that will go a long way in making it user friendly.
'Test tube universe' hints at unifying theory
It's possible to do both.

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2006-05-01
There's also the point that it's unlikely to be relevant beyond the next year or so.
I really enjoyed this article and I think he's largely right. Pride (thar) is the most overlooked variable in geo-politics. But he leaves out an important detail. The US provides much of the defenses for Europe and almost all of them for Japan. After Bosnia it is hard to conceive of Europe going to war alone. These places may be free of thar but perhaps it is only b/c a thar-ish country (The US) provided them with breathing room.
Former eGroups CEO Dies in Panamanian Plane Crash
An Entrepreneur's Legacy
I think that the chance of a "world wide" depression like 1929 is remote at this stage in human progress.

During that depression, there was very little wealth in the world, just a lot of credit based on a jubilant realization that humans had learned a trick that was geometrically generating wealth. It was a bit of over-excitement that led to a temporary stall right at the base of the j-curve.

The most important issue was that nearly all of the factors of production worldwide rested in one nation, the USA. Even those factors outside the USA were still contained in "western" culture nations. America's problem became everyone's problem.

The USA is no longer the center of the world. The factors of production are now distributed all around the world and are contained in many cultures. In addition to this, much of mankind's wealth is now intellectual as well as physical.

The shenanigans of a few rich white men who shuffle paper money and don't build anything no longer have the power to bankrupt the world.

Think of it this way; Even if every major financial market crashed simultaneously worldwide, we still don't have to reinvent tetracycline, or rebuild the Hoover dam.

Depressions and recessions might just be nature's way of slapping humans upside the head and saying "quit diddling on little scraps of paper and go build something useful."
0. Sorry I haven't replied Christmas came unexpectedly.
1. As always, the average level of the discussion here is far above average for the Internet.
2. Thank you for contributing your thoughts here. This is a deal-breaking issue for me and will determine whether or not I start a company or not.
3. It is not about greed, paranoia, or any malicious motivation. It's about doing something that's decently interesting to me, helpful to customers, and the necessary condition that you, knowing the most about the situation as a whole, should have ultimate control over the decisions that directly affect the user experience.
Chinese goods transform life in Southeast Asia
Pretty sweet idea.

The killer about gloves is that they don't actually provide heat. They just hold (some of) what you're putting out nearby.

What you really need are heated handlebars plus gloves with holes for your palms.
Why Ruby on Rails?
Where is Perl 6? The question that won't die
Digg This: Deal or No Deal?
We're on the tail end of a debt bubble. The recent asset bubbles have been (potentially unexpected) side effects. It's almost like the banks are using a flawed implementation of lisp which executed for-each when asked for map! Sorry, I couldn't resist... :)

I think production and technology do matter, and will eventually be the mechanism by which we bootstrap the next credit cycle. When wealth is scarce and people can just barely scrape by, who survives? Those who invent and innovate so people can have better lives for the same price. When you get right down to it, the only ways to do that are through new technology and more efficient production.

It's true that much of the credit for our debt party is going away, and many people could suffer as a result. And you are correct that in the near term technology and production will not save us, but it is the only way to recover in the long term.
>In 2008, Digg plans to unveil a "story suggest" feature that recommends articles and other content from Digg's vast user-submission pool based on the kinds of stories an individual user has read, rated, or shared. "We have to throw that out there in order to deal with the mass amount of information on Digg," says Adelson, adding that with such personalization, "your profile page will be much more interesting to you on the first view."

I hope this encourages Reddit to fix their own recommended page.
allowing the execution of arbitrary code is a bad idea - that is your answer in a nutshell.
Yeah, it's a pretty reasonable feature, especially because it exists for story submissions. All you can do is add it to the feature request list...
"..it's not hard to find poor societies or societies with long histories of oppression where the thar mentality is much less virulent. Instead, I argue that the thar mentality causes poverty, and causes or certainly reinforces the oppression in the society."

the author then goes out to enumerate scenarios to argue how thar mentality might cause poverty.

I agree, thar mentality can cause poverty. But again, poverty can cause thar mentality. Imagine you are poor destitute. All you probably have to defend is your honor, or that your wife (if u are lucky to have one) is not doing someone else.

In the end, I dont know if thar mentality. causes poverty or vice versa. Maybe, they are both caused by some other factor. What I do know is that the Author needs to do a better job than this, Unless all he wants is to appease western cultural supremacists. In that case, he is doing exactly the right thing.
I think if amazon marketed it properly, it could potentially weed out a significant share of the shitty hosts that are lurking around. But then again, it's probably easier to just FTP to a shitty host.
Socializing is fun. I think the author is right about that. And mechanisms that give users new ways to socialize and interact is fun. However, I disagree with the premise that there aren't parts of socializing that people would like to outsource.

Everyone has different levels and skills in socialization. Like anything, you can get better with practice. However, I can see certain social rituals being a burden. Gift giving is often tough. I wouldn't mind that a social network help me figure out what gift to give friends/coworkers. Being thoughtful is tough. We know lots of people nowadays, and it's simply hard to write a personalized note for so many people. Simply helping remembering people that you just met once before would be something I'd rather outsource than micromanage.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, you may enjoy James Bowman's "Honor" (http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/honor). I particularly like the way Bowman avoids the trap of having to provide a specific definition of honor by instead explaining various notions of honor in cultural and historic contexts.
Seed all categories -- nobody stays at a dead party.

Clarify whether "Newest" or "Hottest" is selected. I don't know which method I'm currently viewing.

It's not clear that the upside-down flag button means "comment". To me. Possibly I'm just retarded. EDIT: to clarify, I parsed them as upside-down flags much more than as speech bubbles with an upside-down flag in them. Now that I think about them, they're kinda hilarious. The icon says "Click here to say 'Down with America!'". You should auto-fill the comment boxes with "Down with America" to simplify things.

Breadcrumbs are evil and they must die IMCO.

This is just the thing for all those folks saying "You know what reddit needs more of? Stories about people being tasered. And Ron Paul. There isn't enough coverage of that sort of thing." I think you won't find many of those people here. Good... luck?
Here are my two favorite China books at the moment:

- China Road http://robgifford.com/about/

- Revolution is not a Dinner Party http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780805082074-0
Didn't understand much but you might appreciate this:
http://tele-immersion.citris-uc.org/projects. And guess what? It is from Berkeley =)
Man, good idea... unfortunately I didn't even think about personal use for S3 and I already signed up for an online backup service. I kept thinking that an online backup system would work great with S3 but not for a second I thought of using it for myself :(
Fring is interesting, but this article written really, really badly.
Sturgeon's law strikes again.
Actually it is not guaranteed that every string of bits will at some point be a substring of pi. Bad joke, since wrong.
amazing how nobody here sees the 800lb gorilla. our response to 9/11 is the classic thar mentality.

"But thar is one of innumerable cases where the "natural" response to a problem is the one that will make the problem worse in the fastest possible way."

Our natural response to retaliate, and in the process, attack the wrong country....so thar
I had the honor of hearing Yan Xuetong lecture to my group from Pitt at Tsinghua. He is the Chinese equivalent of one of the Project for a New American Century guys like Bill Kristol, with a director position at the influential and powerful Tsinghua University. Nice guy, he got his PhD from Berkeley... I do wonder if the party will ultimately discriminate against him because he was an English major as an undergrad. China's current president was a Hydraulic Engineer.

After his lecture, he took questions and I asked him to describe a modern utopian state and what it would take to create it. His utopia sounded a lot like Lennon's vision from "Imagine" and the only thing he could think of that could get humanity to unite without borders was an alien attack in the style of Independence day. I'm not sure if that answer was pragmatic or pessimistic.

learn.tsinghua.edu.cn:8080/2000990147/homeindex.htm is his website. He has the English translation of his book on Chinese National Interests posted for free there. It is worth skimming, because it became actual Chinese policy.

Also this short essay, where he very indirectly suggests that China become a more free society. http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:vluLjDhp35kJ:www.ccwe.o...
There are some tools available for doing backups directly to S3; but they all have limitations because of S3's rather weak API. In addition, the pricing structure of S3 (bandwidth + storage + a significant per-request fee) means that certain workarounds (e.g., adding indirection) end up being absurdly expensive.

S3 can be an excellent backing store for an online backup service, but only if there's some intelligence sitting in between client systems and S3.
36 Startup Tips: From Software Engineering to PR and More
CFR - The Falling Dollar: Should We Worry?
Video also available: http://www.cfr.org/publication/15090/mckinsey_executive_roun...
UN adopts Israeli-sponsored resolution on "Agricultural Technology for Development"
Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival
Definitely inspiring. Nothing quite like self made men who stay grounded.

There's one thing I'm conflicted about when it comes to the idea of creating jobs for so many people like this. It just seems so close to modern day feudalism. There are some significant differences obviously, and there's probably nothing immoral about the modern version. Ultimately though there's essentially a king (owner), his knights (directors), and the peasants (workers). This guy may have been a benevolent dictator, but his death puts all of those people's future at risk. If the new CEO isn't as smart and ethical (likely) they're in for harder times because they put their livelihoods in his hands.

I think I would feel much better about enabling 100 families to become financially independent for the rest of their lives than supporting 10,000 dependents for N years.
Can you generate an infinite string of bits that does not contain a given finite string?

Edit: no periods in the infinite string, of course
maybe you could help 100 people, but those 10000 would probably starve if they dont have a job, simply because they cant think or execute a plan well enough to achieve financial success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number#Properties_and_ex...

Sure... the infinite string of 1s, or the infinite string of 0s, or the infinite string of 0s and 1s that is made up of only decimal 3s and 7s. There are an uncountably many number of non-normal real numbers like this, even though the infinite amount of normal real numbers is bigger.
I call em DayCoders and thats all they are. Fair enough they do the work and make a living but I still find companies hiring them over people without a degree just because of that piece of paper. I think the HR departments need to get past the college education and look at the details. I will only employ people that I feel have a passion regardless of any degree.
I use Jungle Disk with S3 for storing media that are important to me like photo's. Other stuff i backup locally, but there could be a fire, theft etc. For code i use Darcs and Mercurial repositories and Jungle Disk frequently backups the repos to S3.
Alright, that makes sense, and how about pi?
I'm not sure who's more 'fierce' between the Romans and the Germans.

That's why I said fiercest and most cohesive. There's no single word for it, but the key to winning in ancient warfare was never to run away.

Ancient battles usually lasted one day and continued till one side broke, whereupon a rout ensued. So the way to win was to be willing to stay at your post and fight to the death. If you were willing to, you didn't have to.

Perhaps the closest thing to a one-word recipe would be "steadfast."

There is always technological advance, but the examples you give are really more social than technological.
Japan at that stage seems to have had a kind of degenerate warrior culture, where warriors still ruled, but because there were no really dangerous enemies left, etiquette was starting to replace effectiveness. Something similar was happening in the France of Louis XIV-- which was likewise a better place for women than the France of Charlemagne.
I was talking about the honesty of the ruling military aristocracy. I wouldn't put a lot of trust in the honesty of a merchant in a warrior society, because merchants are usually a despised class, and behave correspondingly despicably.
Amazing! Now we just need similar quality japanese to english language translation. Any takers? :-)
I wish it was even that high-minded, but though the people who planned the invasion of Iraq exploited these attitudes, they were not themselves motivated by them.

Powerful groups wanted the US to attack Iraq before 9/11 made US voters easy to convince.
Read "The Gathering Storm" for an argument to topple Saddam made before we went in (but post 9-11) There is a long list of reasons which I won't go into here. 9-11 was the tipping point in terms of domestic politics, no doubt. It also seems to be the tipping point in terms of strategic policy.

There's an interesting discussion about why democratic nations go to war. If there is a mixed number of reasons and a volunteer army, which are the actual reasons we fight? I just read read a blog entry by an Army 1st Lt. killed last year who made the argument that he was joining up to stop oppression. To do something and make a difference. I also hear a lot of folks talk about leaders with supposedly bad intentions who "got us into this." So when a president and congress vote on something, and people volunteer to do it, is it possible to assign any one reason to why it's being done?

Perhaps I'm splitting hairs. Probably get downmodded again for this comment. Have at it, then.
This is an important image. My instincts tell me there is major unexplored art territory in the visualization of data.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/processing-book.jpg
Similarly, surely this could land you in big trouble:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=testfile bs=1024 count=1024

You could end up with a copyrighted mp3 file, some trade secrets, various passwords, credit card numbers, etc

And another point...
"Converting PI to binary"

What?? What base is PI in to start with? Surely the title should be "Calculating PI and storing as binary" or similar.
The Cult of Language Expertise
Oh Yea, This Isn't Going To Get Out of Hand
I think its more a case of well if we can't do it why should you be allowed too.

Google are treading a fine line with the power they have these days. I personally don't see a problem with MS bundling browsers or google buying doubleclick...
I'm pretty sure it's illegal to place bets against an insurance company knowing that your associates are going to destroy property that company insures. I'd put it under conspiracy to commit arson though, not insider trading.