skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, I'm biased because I'm a search guy but for some reason I get more creeped out by people inventing new ways to track down other people than I do about people inventing new ways to connect someone to a product sale.

We've heard from people trying hard not to be found because it doesn't "add value" to them if that person some high school they had such issues with lost track of them.

I certainly agree though that the information Facebook has could really inform a search product. We (Blekko) did an experiment using Facebook likes from your friends to inform results rank. The results were pretty cool when you searched for a seafood restaurant in SF and the result said "250 of your friends like this place." That can give you a sense that people you know (and possibly invest a bit more value in their opinion :-) thought this restaurant was good, as opposed to people on Yelp who you do not generally know.
"Ex post facto law" was a well-established legal term of art referring to a class of criminal law either imposing new prohibitions or increasing punishments for crimes committed before the law was enacted well before the Constitution was written.

Legislative intent doesn't trump the clear and unambiguous wording of the law, but the clear and unambiguous meaning of "ex post facto law" is the particular class of criminal law that the phrase "ex post facto law" has always referred to.
Try it in Incognito?
They are refusing to provide the funds necessary to run what you think a modern government should do.

Opinions differ.
How much does Microsoft actually pay in corporate taxes to the US?

[0] https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=microsoft+tax+avoidanc...
Did Apple slash iPhone display orders due to improving yields?
I went to college in Florida. I love Florida. But their schools are no place to educate your children. Same goes for Texas.
Bay Area Tech Talk: Psychology of Testing (Free, Jan 16  6pm)
Awesome, thanks alot for your feedback. A place to find mastermind groups is essentially what we're working to build. We just don't use the phrase because most people have never heard of it.
And the weather. You guys have that great weather as compared to say, oh, San Diego.
This article inspired me to go back over the posts on my blog and look at just the opening sentences. I found lots of ones that are, in retrospect, duds. But here's a few that I still like:

> You would think iteration, you know looping over stuff, would be a solved problem in programming languages.

> Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it.

> Ever since I decided to mesh the worlds of static and dynamic typing together in Magpie, I’ve been wondering when the gears would really grind together and halt. Today is the day.

> My little language Magpie has a feature that may at first seem really limiting: all functions take exactly one argument and return one value, no more, no less.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this because I think with blogs you have a very narrow window of time to get the reader's attention before they "TL;DR" your post and move on. I usually write about programming languages, which isn't known to be a riveting topic, so this isn't easy. Going back over them, I think there is a pretty strong correlation between having a strong start and getting decent traffic.
I think I'm glad I deleted almost all my photos from Facebook last week. All I left were a couple of dozen mobile photos, and I deleted all the albums from when I was using FB for photo sharing a few years ago.
Minor rant: I requested an invite and got one but they didn't have an Android app and thus wouldn't let me sign up. They were supposed to send out another invite once the Android app was available. I'm probably just being impatient but I am actually really interested in trying their service.
If this is your game, you should consider making all purchases on a charge card that pays 1-5% on all purchases, the Costco Amex is the one I use.
Facebook Rolls Out Social Search Feature
Everything your business owns? I've never paid a state tax when living in Texas (except for sales taxes), but I don't own land there.
Hopefully you aren't fond of electricity[0], water[1], schools[2], or roads[3].

0 - http://www.ercot.com/news/press_releases/show/26375

1 - http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DM_south.htm

2 - http://www.statesman.com/news/news/state-budgets-call-for-cu...

3 - http://www.statesman.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-polit...

(Texas is my home state. I left, though I keep close ties to it through family and frequent visits.)
This is really valuable, thanks for taking the time to write it. As the sort of person who has a tendency to get caught up in small, nascent businesses (startups, I suppose ;) I've recently spent a lot of time either working for my friends or having my friends work for me. Knowing the difference is more important than I used to realise (especially as small, nascent "projects" become actual businesses) and managing the relationship (either as boss or underling, yet friend in each case) has its own learning curve.
I signed up for a free trial this morning when I had a few minutes, but won't be able to do anything with it for the next few days. I am starting to get messages that my account will self-destruct if I don't give it my credit card information in the next two hours.

I really don't like "free trials" that require you to have a cc on file, with the promise of not charging it. Believe me, if I decide to build anything meaningful on this platform, I will transition to a paid account.

Is the free trial really only 3 hours if I don't give you my cc information?
salaries are a lot higher here than in a southern/midwest state though (largely driven by the crazy costs of housing).
Hacking Science - initializing community for open, bottom-up science
Awesome, I just picked it up on Amazon. I'll give it a shot
Have you really tried those with complex and high performance production system? Those aren't nearly comparable. Btw. You forgot TyhpoonAE.
Procrastination: why we do it and how we overcome it
I would suggest that asking that someone be removed from a position of power that they are to all appearances misusing; is not vigilante justice.

In point of fact, it is the proper procedure to ask that someone who has abused the public trust and shown a lack of judgment be removed from a position that requires trustworthiness and judgment.

Vigilante justice would be hacking into her personal files and threatening her life; asking her boss to fire her is the furthest you can get from that.

Speaking of which; if anyone is thinking about acting directly against Ms. Ortiz or Mr. Heymann, I would discourage that as strongly as possible; it would be counterproductive as well as criminal.
NRA Rolls Out Shooting App on Apple's iPad, iPhone
Full stop?

How many mass murders has it taken to get to this point? How is that "drastic" or "very fast"? Oh, wait, there's a commission that might "recommend" we re-enact legislation that expired a few years ago? How is that "drastic"? How is that "very fast"?

As the GGP said, what's gonna happen first is an investigation and a review. Why the need to jump to "vigilante justice"?

The end result of "vigilante justice" is going to be more young people squandering their careers and futures, creating further justification for harsh sentencing and prosecution of "hacktivists", and probably just more work and demand for the very people they are trying to unseat.

Blowing this situation out of proportion and encouraging rash behavior is not going to solve the underlying problems.
Facebook Declares War on Google: Meet Your New Search Engine
How to Generate More Recurring Revenue
In this interview, Mark Sneider shares he secrets for increasing retainer fee income.
Getting similar error message "Reported Attack Page!" and page blocked message in Firefox.
They're "free" at the margin if you have enough budget/customers to justify writing the code to collect the write metrics in the first place. You might well be able to use metrics from your existing analytics package

Salespersons' time, of course isn't free, but it might be more efficiently convert to revenue by up/cross-selling to existing customers than trying to find new ones.
The flaw in the Enigma Code
This isn't a retroactive tax law, its the implementation of a court striking down as unconsitution a statute allowing for a certain set of exemptions and deferrals from a pre-existing tax.
In-Store Technology
> Chrome only, but still an extremely slick feature

Only for now, fortunately! The co-authors are from Google and Mozilla[1], and work's being done to get support in Firefox as well.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U1RGAehQwRypUTovF1KRlpiO...
As for the surplus claims: Of course the guy who supported the ballot initiative is going to say it's going to run a surplus.

The independent Legislative Analyst's Office, which had previously said Brown's budget would have had a $1.9 billion shortfall in November, now says that it is roughly in balance due to changes in income tax:

http://lao.ca.gov/reports/2013/bud/budget-overview/budget-ov...

If your method of balancing the budget is always asking for more money, you haven't really balanced the budget.

How is increasing revenues not a valid way of balancing a budget? And always asking for more money? Reagan raised the top income tax bracket in California from 7% to 10%. It now stands at 10.3%.

What are you going to do in a few years when those tax hikes expire, and you suddenly lose the same amount of revenue? I look forward to a few years when we begin to hear the claim in that we need to make the temporary hikes permanent, because we are running out of money again.

Considering most of the budget deficit is mostly due to California's substantial social safety net being engaged by the Great Recession, as long as the economy continues to improve, California will probably get by fine with the increased revenues of more people working and lessened burden of people applying for medicaid and unemployment insurance.
Maybe you and the OP should come to Colorado instead... 4.63% flat-rate personal and corporate tax rate, and the 3rd best educated workforce in the country.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2012/10/15/ameri...
Well hopefully with enough data, it can automatically know that you don't care about your grandma's sushi preferences, and deemphasize that information when you search.
The USA has plenty of institutionalized corruption (see: Washington D.C.) and organized crime too, so how much worse can Mexico be?
"And one of the big challenges is that the 'managerial position' (as Lena calls it) is often in conflict with the talent for making things that got your there in the first place."

No truer words have ever been spoken, especially in tech. The skills that make you a good developer or designer are usually exactly the ones that make management a terrible path. Some traits, like empathy for users/customers, lend to success in both areas, but I'm hard pressed to find another.
You wish. Here in Uruguay the system is log-jammed, and the result is that a typical case can take decades - ok, the average is three years, but still, you read all the time about cases being closed that took decades to resolve.
@ fr0sty:

I believe the point is that government action is almost always slow, perhaps with the Sandy Hook tragedy being one of the rare exceptions. Something has to captivate and horrify the nation as a whole to reach that level of outrage.

But beyond that, in these circumstances there is generally a known policy platform that proscribes a solution in terms of legislation and execution action.

Think about it. How long did it take the 9/11 Commission to come out? How long did it take us to learn the lessons of that tragedy and to attempt to implement measures to counter-act the causes and fine-tune or response. If ever there was a case for immediate action based on outrage, that was it.

In the case of Sandy Hook, the gun control measures by and large have been waiting in the wings. There have been packages applied on the state level all across the nation from which to draw a federal-level response. It was basically a case of "Okay, after this tragedy a large number of people have solidified which side of this debate they come down on. Let's ratify the gun control measures we have all discussed for decades now."

Is there such a wide-spread existing platform that would solve the alleged problems in the Aaron Shwartz case? Is there even a generally identified "problem" that a majority of people agree on? Do a majority of people agree that Aaron suicide was directly caused by the prosecution? I think many here have already made up their mind.

However I'm not so sure the beyond the tech communities there is a broad consensus or a clear case of causation. And if causation is not clear, how can we "fix" the problem, even if we had the nations rapt attention?

Finally, what is the package of changes waiting in the wings for us to ratify? Is there a commonly-held solution to the perceived proprietorial overreach? Is there something we all agree on that, assuming there is enough momentum to enact immediately, can be put into place? I'm no lawyer, but I imagine tinkering with the judicial system is not something that happens quickly.

Firing this prosecutor will just bring another who works within the same parameters of this system. Beyond the psychological satisfaction of "feel our rage" for angry people, what will it accomplish?
Let's try to eliminate the equivocating, shall we? One the one hand, we have someone who was being threatened with being imprisoned for half his life, for doing something that couldn't have possibly merited that kind of retribution. On the other hand, we have a person being threatened with being removed from an position of power so that she (hopefully) can't abuse power over others again. She most likely will be able to get another job, and more importantly, won't have to live most of her life behind bars.
FBootstrapp - for Twitter bootstrap 2.2.2
Thought Leaders in Big Data: Omer Artun, CEO of AgilOne (Part 1)
postage-stamp-sized European countries like Sweden

At 174K mi^2, Sweden is larger than California's 164K mi^2.
I would worry more about Heruku given that SalesForce is losing money.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/13/marc-benioff-has-swagger-bu...

Google is insanely profitable and uses GAE internally for a large number of products. It would take years to re-write and shut down GAE.
Yet, I don't think this is what's happening here. Well it is happening, but only to get attention. The actual advice seems based on sound science.

Like: mindfulness is good (meditation sure is), multitasking is bad (we can't do it anyway), and some mnemonic techniques work better than others (music, writing) —don't know of any study on that one, though there probably are.

While we're at it, we don't want to imitate Holmes on everything. The guy was a cocaine user, for one.
"Thanks for signing up for our beta. When Graph Search is ready you'll see an announcement on Facebook and you can switch to the new experience."
People say this all the time, but I really don't see it. I really don't think teachers are that underpaid, and I say that as someone married to a teacher. They only work 9 months of the year. If private sector employees only worked 75% of the time, it's likely they'd make less money too. Would I like it if my wife made more money? Sure. Does that mean I think she should, at the expense of everyone else's tax dollars? No.

Contrary to what you say, most people don't choose teaching because of the benefit plans. They might do it because they only have to work 75% of the time, but it isn't the benefits. They choose it because that is what they want to do. Help kids, teach, etc.

The benefits do not make sense as a reason to do this job. If that's what you're going for, you'd just take a job in the private sector, work more, and make a lot more money.
I'm torn. On one side I really like it, it reminds me of the old People Search feature Facebook used to have. On the other side for third party developers especially those who try to make the Facebook experience better, I'm afraid this is reinforcing the point you should not build 100% on platforms.

I'm sure there are many who have had this idea or are building this currently. Facebook Heroku templates given for new developers to start with, hit on the four main areas that Graph Search seem to provide.

Another example would be a query like

movies liked by people who like movies I like

In FQL the closest I would have gotten was

SELECT name, page_id from page where page_id in (SELECT page_id from page_fan where uid in (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me()) and profile_section='movies')

And even then FQL was unstable

So then you wonder, why use an app with an unstable query built on an API filled with bugs when I can faster get the result using facebook.com?
Launch Academy: Become a Software Developer in 10 Weeks
No feelings hurt my friend. For the most part, I agree with you. But I don't buy the whole "men are only motivated to sow their seeds" bit. In the short term: Yes [it does help promote genetic diversity], in the long term: nope.

There are biological hazards for doing so [STDs], and there are a few benefits for having a long term relationship with one person.

The scale of the pickiness is the problem. I don't mind women being picky locally, but when they spread rumors and attempt to destroy a guys reputation amongst large networks... thats the problem.
Under Bloomberg, NYC has turned from a police state into a full-fledged nanny state.
Unsustainable benefits are stupid.

Of course, when legislators pass pension hikes, they do so knowing that it pleases powerful unions now and the costs to tax payers are decades down the road. So it is one of the more appealing ways for a legislator to screw their state. They may even be out of office by the time the bill comes due!

Defined-benefit pensions are a huge drag on many state budgets, and paying them does nothing to improve the quality of current government services. The bluer the state, the more they are screwed:

http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-best-life/2012/11/08...
This is also on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5061347.
Note, he said "marginal" not "overall" tax rate.

Don't forget that BC has 12% sales tax and monthly premiums for health insurance.

Income tax is only one of the many taxes.
Aww, thanks for the constructive criticism!

Despite your comment, I think we're kind of getting at the same point - if you have a great place to work and focus on building a team that works well together, you're going to have more success as opposed to hiring someone with X years of Ruby experience just because they know how to code. Focus on cultural fit, the technical stuff can be taught.

Signed, nameless derp
Ask HN: Which companies are threatened by Facebook's search announcement?
If you haven't seen the announcement here's the promo page: https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch

And here's the Verge's live coverage: http://live.theverge.com/facebook-see-what-were-building-event/#/

It's a big bet that Facebook can get people to change behavior and search on Facebook. That said, one could quickly see people looking for hotels, friends in cities, restaurant recommendations and movies.

What's the fallout?
Benford's law and the decreasing reliability of accounting data
First of all, I don't know about you, but I don't come to HN and try to have a somewhat intelligent conversation just to be called stupid for expressing an opinion.

Secondly and to your point, I am only speaking of defined-benefit "If you work here for x years you get y% of your salary." This is to say nothing of the health care (which is generally better than the private sector), the hours (which if you don't work for a legislator are generally better than the private sector), the guaranteed pay raise every year, the access to jobs you can only apply to if you already have a state job, and various small perks like free or cheap parking, food, etc. These are all benefits of the job and I had to take a serious look at the health care and hours for a state job when deciding between that and a corporate offer.

I'm not here to argue whether or not defined-benefit retirement plans are inherently good or bad. I'm saying it's irresponsible and dangerous for a state to guarantee by law that they'll pay anyone a fixed amount of money for decades at some distant point in the future. This is why it's most dangerous. If the state gets bankrupted by some unforeseen catastrophe 30 years from now, it can't suspend, eliminate or trim pension payouts. Not even $0.01. By definition the fact that pensions offer better retirement income than defined-contribution plans like a 401k should be a giant red flag. The system implodes if you can't at least break even off of it, and if it was possible to make money off of them the private sector would still be using them.
The reason that I asked that is I feel that most applications end up needing something at that layer eventually anyways, but not knowing exactly what level of traffic results in too much load is a good reason to do this.
I'm a socialist/liberal who lives in California and I think the idea of retroactive taxation on anything (be it person or business), is nightmareish and should be abolished.
That's why Google increased the price of GAE [0], so it would be profitable [1], which allows them to provide an SLA[2] that I can live with. Even deprecated GAE features work for at least a year before they're terminated [3].

[0] https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=gae+price+increase

[1] http://gigaom.com/2011/09/07/whats-better-pricier-google-app...

[2] https://developers.google.com/appengine/sla

[3] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/app-engine-and-g...
Just a - friendly - reminder that the field that such ethics operate on isn't always symmetrical. At the other end of every "I'm right so I nuke you" you will find some "I'm right but they nuke me", and if you're looking for a rational explanation why rational people may consider "vigilante justice", you'll probably find it there.
Use full-disk encryption (TrueCrypt for Windows, LUKS for Linux, softraid crypto for OpenBSD, etc.) File-based encryption is too hard to get wrong - are you sure that your editor didn't write an unencrypted copy to disk and deleted it immediately after?
It makes sense to pass files by reference rather than by value. This integration example would allow you to send files as urls via the SMS protocol instead of sending blobs of data.

Mobile network bandwidth is certainly a constraint in the US (cellular networks throttling high data usage subs is a proof of that). Viewed in that context pass by reference makes greater sense.
Absurd. Imagine they were 100%. You wouldn't start a company there. What if they were 90? You wouldn't start a company there (assuming your compensation is not much much higher than it would be in other areas minus taxes.) Decrease this until it reaches the point at which you're ok, weighing all the pros and cons of there or elsewhere, with starting a company there. Of course it's not true to say they have no impact on your decision, but rather at current levels, their impact is deemed acceptable compared with alternatives.
New Delicious
I agree with you.

My comment is not in response to the petition itself, but into the threats that are going around with respect to actual vigilante justice as described in the original article and by the original comment.
I agree. I don't see how slim isn't in every way better than Haml.
Also, taxes aren't high.
Perhaps so, but that doesn't change the fact that they exist. If the State killed all new pensions they'd still have to pay existing obligations.
It's not clever, it is quite simple. The federal government has the SOLE ability to regulate interstate commerce.
Try http://hpmor.com/ The author here makes his best to explain Harry's reasoning to the reader, so we may do the same.
Freeing the Plum Book