skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously... what's unfortunate is that all your favorite movies, bands, and essentially interests that are specific and listed in your profile can post.. for example since I posted "Big Lebowski" as a favorite movie years ago, I now see "Big Lebowski" posting to keep itself current. Sure, I get that.

However what I wouldn't expect is my friends to see "Big Lebowski" related content associated with my name. Normally I wouldn't mind, but then you start realizing there is a lot of value to having many people "like" you, and who are all the people who own these accounts associated with interests anyway.

I can imagine my friends see ads via my interest for Big Lebowski, for bowling, white russians, flights to LA, etc.. sky's the limit on monetization for these guys. But that was never my intent nor would I want my friends seeing all that crap due to me!
Petition: Put a Donate button on the NASA home page
That's pointless handwringing. Firstly, people in science aren't smarter than people outside. They just have different motivations and a better grasp of the scientific process.

Secondly, as always, follow the money. If you want better medical research, the contact your representatives. There's really no other way - there are plenty of scientists, but to do the research, they need to feed, clothe, and house themselves. This means either doing profitable research (like the iphone) or grabbing grant money (which is where your representative comes in).

Unless there's a profound shift in grassroots approval of grants for medical research, there's not going to be any real change in how things are done. Until there's more grants for the research in the name of the public good, you'll see the lopsided profit-driven research, simply because it pays its own way.
Anyone else experience Hacker News go down?
Well then shut up and go do something better.

I'm not sure how to read this as anything but a passive-aggressive complaint that _other_ people aren't doing more about these problems. You try to disqualify yourself from the responsibilities you imply for others, but the fact is we can all be more diligent, if we like, and we can all do work to improve the lives of others.

Guess what? If you _seriously_ try to help other people, as opposed to just posing so, it is really, really hard. There are many excellent reasons for this. Chiefly, people are actually very good problem solvers, and are particularly interested in their own problems. So any one who has a _real_ problem, has a problem that is pretty hard, or they would have already solved it themselves.

For another you have to fight your way through hordes of posers, who want credit for helping but discover that folks have solved all the easy problems on their own. They don't want to do _real_ work, they want to look good, so they chiefly get in the way and muddy the water. And then you discover that "helping people" has become such a poser cottage industry that simply _meaning_ to help counts, and that saying anything remotely unpleasant is cause for ostracism. 'Cause all these folks have to congratulate one another, and tell one another what a difference they're making, which is all kind of difficult if someone is saying "but does this actually work?"

For example, if I explain that it's simpler to tweet a picture than cure diabetes, because tweeting a picture isn't technically that fucking hard but diabetes is a really complicated problem, I'd pop your bubble of woe at how screwed up the world is. The world isn't actually that screwed, and to the extent it is, it has been getting better pretty much daily since 1945. Barring some corners where some major league posers got in charge. If you look at treatment options and outcomes for diabetics I feel pretty sure you'd see a pretty strong and clear progressive improvement. But if the world is getting better then how can you Make A Difference? So what you want to do is complain, and so not having much to complain about is a problem.

If you want a real complaint, go out and try to actually help some people. I guarantee you will very quickly acquire some very real complaints. And that voicing them will get you ostracised by the posers.

So really, the best thing is to shut up and get to work. Failing that, just shutting up is, under these conditions, not a bad second best at all.
I would suggest a few things. There are 3 presentations / blog posts that are must reads for this sort of thing...
Measure Anything, Measure Everything[1]
Metrics Driven Engineering[2]
Metrics, Metrics, Everywhere[3]

The most common tool used for this is graphite[4]. Yelp also wrote their own which is nice called Firefly[5]. If you go with graphite like most big companies do, I would strongly suggest looking at graphene[6], gdash[7], giraffe[8], tasseo[9], or cubism[10] dashboard frontends. Graphite has a lot of "devops" community around it.

This should be enough to get you started :)

[1] http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-meas...
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/mikebrittain/metricsdriven-enginee...
[3] http://pivotallabs.com/139-metrics-metrics-everywhere/
[4] http://graphite.wikidot.com/
[5] https://github.com/Yelp/Firefly
[6] http://jondot.github.com/graphene/
[7] http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/10/08/gdash-graphite-dash...
[8] https://github.com/kenhub/giraffe
[9] https://github.com/obfuscurity/tasseo
[10] http://square.github.com/cubism/
Yes, and that's all I'm saying. It sounds as if I'm being anti-Wikileaks here...but no, I'm being frustrated with what seems like an ambiguous, unhelpful statement by an organization that Aaron probably admired. I understand Wikileaks' skill for drama, but there's enough of that already: if they have something compelling, put enough out there to convince us.
In light of hands-free phone laws, a list of things are that legal while driving
Damn, you really know your stuff, props.

Anyways now you guys all know why I didn't support non-retina devices :)
Don't put this on Middle America. I come from a long line of German bakers who settled the American Midwest. We know just fine what good bread is.
>Off to bat, don't edit iptables manually anymore. Use ufw.

For some reason this doesn't work too well in OpenVZ VMs. You have to go via iptables directly.
Well said, people need to focus on real world problems.

On the diabetes note, I'm close friends with the founders of Jerry the Bear[1], who's primary goal is helping kids with diabetes. There are startups out there doing real good, but they need to get more exposure.

1. http://www.jerrythebear.com/
We restart it every week or so, often on sunday nights.
In MATTEL, the crossbar of the E is placed in the exact center.
What would a verbal warning have been useful for? He already knew his behavior was unwanted, and that's what verbal warnings are for. He wasn't stupid, so the verbal warnings wouldn't have been the first time that he learned that there were actual laws against unauthorized network access.

Besides, what's there to warn him about, he's 100% right in what he was doing, wasn't he? To hear it from the hacktivists, he did nothing wrong (and so there's nothing to warn him about). If he did do something to warrant a warning then he was already past the point of needing one.
Free infosec bootcamp tests
Okay, wait, what? You seriously think that Google isn't making huge positive impact on humanity? I mean, please discount the following argument based on the admittedly-confounding fact that I have drunk the kool-aid and am on payroll, but...

First, I claim that the improvement from searching with AltaVista etc, to searching with Google, has made the web orders of magnitude more useful. And Google search continues to get more effective.

Second, I claim that the web, as an information-interchange platform, is hugely impactful to society, on the same level as curing diabetes, and more useful to society than the kind of incremental improvement in diabetes management that was Raganwald's case study.

Third, I claim that making hugely awesome projects profitable (or at least sustainable) is part of making those hugely awesome projects actually have impact. With no revenue ever, Google wouldn't be able to have all the positive impact it has.

Fourth, Google has done and is doing lots of other shit that is also hugely impactful. Along with, let's all explicitly admit, lots of bullshit stuff that it's fair to mock. Google Books. Google Health (which admittedly failed). Mother-fucking Maps and Earth (which admittedly were _founded_ outside of Google, but were bankrolled into awesomeness by Google ads). Maps and Earth are a big deal in solving real-world macro-scale ecological problems, even aside from the huge convenience they provide their normal users. Google.org. And in the sexy-so-it-must-be-bullshit department, the self-driving cars _could_ save hojillions of lives and help reform oil dependence.

So if you want to decrease "useless busywork", and you want to increase real solutions to real problems that affect real people, Google is doing that. And also some bullshit stuff involving social/mobile/local whatever whatever.
It's probably possible. But if they only used SSDs...
The Shuffle is absolutely nothing new. We had a device that did everything the Shuffle does in the 80s, and it was widespread, and at around the same pricepoint. The only things it lacked was capacity (though you could change tapes) and on-the-fly shuffling of songs. Plenty of them had radios, so there's a function the Shuffle doesn't have. The Shuffle is not a 'computer', it's a 'portable media device'. An LCD does not a computer make. And unlike the Walkman, it also need a computer in order to get it set up.

To try and paint the Shuffle as 'brave new world' territory is flat-out peculiar. We had an appliance doing the same thing 25 years beforehand.
Besides the unsuccesfull upload
by chance anyone knows the bandwith for free accounts?
I can't figure it out
Discovery of Quadruple DNA helix at Cambridge, 60 years after Crick and Watson
Wait a minute. Your claim is this: 'Aaron really doesn't need the association with Wikileaks'. In support, you offer only 'especially as his supporters attempt to portray his work as benign and altruistic'. I'm trying to understand how this supports the claim. It would seem it could only do so if Swartz's actions were somehow in contrast to Wikileaks in the context of those terms.

Yet you refuse to say whether you think Wikileaks' work is either benign or altruistic. Your opinion of how Wikileaks would characterise itself is of no benefit in understanding the basis of your claim.

And now, instead of answering a straightforward binary question about a claim you did make, you want me to go and ask a whole bunch of other people about claims they didn't make?

I understand less and less.
We need the FDA to regulate drugs and medical devices. There's too much potential for quackery. I don't think removing the FDA is going to find a cure for diabetes. It's a fundamental research problem at this stage. Stem cells are showing some potential as a future cure. See the article below.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/252759.php

We need more funding for medical research. PhDs should not be low-paid labor. Too many smart people drop out of research careers due to the low salaries. We should be paying medical researchers similar incomes to engineers at Silicon Valley tech firms.

California taxes are funding one of the biggest research efforts into stem cells. So the big tech firms are contributing to the effort through their taxes.

http://www.cirm.ca.gov/
And you can read that story online here: http://www.litmir.net/br/?b=98991&p=63. Start from the heading “But Is It Art?”. The two buttons at the center bottom are previous/next page buttons.
I don't know - I certainly found out a lot about North Korea from those visits. I assume you did too.
The connection is like this:

Aaron Swartz was good friends with Jacob Appelbaum. You'll notice that the picture you'll see of Aaron on Reddit is taken by Appelbaum. http://blog.reddit.com/2013/01/aaronsw-1986-2013.html anyway, point being they were good friends and worked together.

Now Appelbaum is associated with Wikileaks (former spokesperson etc.) and has been repeatedly harassed and bullied by customs agents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum , Appelbaum mentions how people from his contacts list (his cell phones have been confiscated numerous times) have also been questioned. I bet Aaron was one of them.

The assistance Aaron provided is probably in forms of software or development, probably working together with Appelbaum.
Maths prodigy Arran Fernandez is the youngest Cambridge fresher since 1773
Evidence that Google winning the Generational shift over MS
Go behind the scenes with Public Projects
An Irrational Fear of Files on the Desktop
Same with OpenDNS, Google Public DNS, DNSMadeEasy, etc.
In order to understand why this incident was even more shocking than usual, one just needs to read this snippet

The arrest shocked friends of Mr. Swartz, as well as
M.I.T. alumni. Brewster Kahle, an M.I.T. graduate and
founder of the digital library Internet Archive, where
Mr. Swartz gave programming assistance, wrote: “When I
was at M.I.T., if someone went to hack the system, say
by downloading databases to play with them, might be
called a hero, get a degree, and start a company. But
they called the cops on him. Cops.”

I find the change of perspective - from hero to criminal - from MIT quite astonishing. I wonder if this incident makes current students wary about the change in MIT ethos.
Apache Hadoop Example in Java - Up & Running in less than 5 minutes
Well, I'm not sure if I'd suggest looking at mod_security in a 'straightforward' manner particularly. Doing so will likely get you frustrated with the interaction you are likely to have with any default rule-set.

A good way to look at it is to start by installing it and a good rule-set. A good one could be the gotroot/ASL kit http://updates.atomicorp.com/channels/rules/

From that point your best bet would perhaps be one of the freely available 'getting started' guides like https://www.feistyduck.com/books/modsecurity-handbook/gettin...

Mostly though, my suggestion is to deploy it, have your application break (you should be doing this all in a staging environment), figure out if unbreaking your application can be done with scripting changes, bypassing rules, etc.
I enjoyed The Seashell on the Mountaintop,[1] a book about Nicolas Steno,[2] who many consider the father of geology. An unabridged audio version is available.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525947086

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Steno
> shut up

No. You can say that all you want, and I defy you. You're welcome to suggest that there is some better use of my time, but there is nothing more chilling to freedom of thought and expression than someone saying "That thought is too rude, too lame, to annoying, cuts too close," or whatever else and therefore cannot be uttered.

It's like "Let he is without sin cast the first stone." That's a passive-aggressive way of trying to cut criticism out of society.
I've gone the other way. I started out as a medical tech. It's the same thing every hour, every day. Usher in a patient, do a test. Usher in a patient, do a test. There's no real scope for 'using your mind', but you are directly helping people. At least I saw patients - some medical scientists do nothing but pippette things all day, doing pretty much the same thing as assembly-line factory work. I know one that got RSI of the elbow from endless pippetting.

If you want to 'use your mind' to help people, then either get a job that has some form of diagnostics in healthcare, or build healthcare products in a company in the industry. I moved from medical tech to support at a company that made our equipment to R&D in the same company. You can still do IT things and help people in a medical sense. Just because you don't see the patients directly doesn't mean that the software you build isn't helping them.

It sounds like you've found a good place to be, but I thought I'd throw in my 2c that IT is not a sort of 'by definition not helping'.
Sometimes a view of the entire landscape puts everything into perspective enough that it's much easier to go deeper on your own into the areas that you need the most.
Fwiw, Vint Cerf is often seen in a three-piece...
Glad I'm not the only one who caught this. The entire post is completely unrelated to Raganwald's post/question.
Would you be willing to touch on what the reasons were behind your department deciding to switch to a "big commercial" player?
Okay, this was a valuable and interesting rant, and I'm not knocking its general observations.

But as a specific reply to the questions literally asked in Raganwald's post, it's wrong. Maybe it's connecting with the spirit of the question, I'm not sure, but it's failing on the letter of the question.

Raganwald asked about Google, Facebook, Apple, and people "trying to remix the same five or six tired 'social' ideas in the hope of being acqui-hired". Those people mostly work in Silicon Valley. And almost all of them are immigrants to the Bay area.

Case study: On my team of 30, I think there are half a dozen people from the Bay Area, if that. And then there are Canadians, Australians, Germans, Indians, Chinese, and more (and I mean people who lived and worked in those places until a few years ago, not people whose parents were from those places). There are a lot of Ohioans, there are folks from Florida and some Carolina and Texas. Anywhere at Google, "where are you from" is a reasonable conversational gambit, because it's not here.

So, uh, no. Geography is not the reason "the greatest minds of our generation toiling away in the Googleplex [and elsewhere in Silicon Valley] ... trying to figure out how to get Scott Hanselman to click on ads [and whatever other allegedly low-value things we're doing]".
> In a way different than being a source?

Yes. Most likely. Remember Aaron was also a developer and doubt he had access clearance to have access to embarrassing classified materials. I don't see why that's not the first guess.

> 3. He communicated with Julian Assange...how? About what? about secret stuff?

Probably about secret stuff.

> Trading recipes?

So? Funny enough, I am 100% that is enough to put him on a black list of some sort in the DHS.

> Aaron really doesn't need the association with Wikileaks

Unless of course he was friends with wikileaks supporters and developers and then we got danso here telling who Aaron's friends should and should not have been.
I don't have diabetes, Scott Hanselman has diabetes. If everyone with "first world problems" followed your advice and shut up, how would we every hear about anything except AIDS, Malaria, or Gun Violence?

Which woman would speak up about diversity in conferences if the response was "Shut the fuck up and organize a conference."--Oh, wait...
"The last problem is with compilation time, which can eat into development time the same way that testing does."

The Haxe->Neko compiler is fast past any expectation, when I started using it I simply could not believe how fast it went.
"buying a house at 45 instead of 35" is an economic considerations, no? ;)

In the case you had $2M: Have you consider that reasearch problem are far longer and thus far less exciting than the ones we, programers, are used to solve?
You can make this point perfectly well without being so nasty.
I am from Myanmar (currently living in Singapore) and I don't know any of such rules.
I'm in Australia and would happily donate a few bucks to NASA from time to time. Anyone who recognises the value of expanding our knowledge of the universe would happily throw a few coppers their way.
One interpretation as many have pointed out would be

The aim of these tweets could be to imply that the US
Attorney's Office and Secret Service targeted Swartz in
order to get at Wikileaks, and that Swartz died still
defending his contacts' anonymity.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/19/3893268/wikileaks-tweets-a...
I don't think he is trolling. The idea may be related to how Licklider wanted an intergalactic network: https://www.google.com/search?q=1969+the+intergalactic+netwo...

Licklider knew engineers do what they are told and nothing else. So: give them a really big project or else they won't implement beyond the specifications. It seemed to worked since the Internet has been scalable. Alan Kay, every year, talks about Licklider's intergalactic network in his history of computing talk: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alan+kay
Ask HN: I'm a developer with an app idea, but no design skills.
I have an idea for a mobile app and have actually started coding it for Android--targeting hi-res large-display phones first with ICS+ just to keep my initial market small enough. I started writing code thinking that I'm only after an MVP so using the built-in Holo UI shouldn't matter, but now I feel that it's too simple and ugly that no one would be interested to try it out. My problem is, I have absolutely no design skills. I can use Photoshop and read tutorials to accomplish a thing or two, but I don't know where to get the perspective for my app's design--what colors it should have, how the icons should look, how the backgrounds will be textured, how the components will be arranged in the screen, etc.

Is there any online resource I can look at to maybe get some inspiration and advice? I really have no idea how to approach this problem and how to choose an app design.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheracTwentyFive
While this would certainly be nice, it's actually illegal for NASA (or any government agency) to use additional funds for purposes that are handled by what's termed appropriated funds (the money that comes from Congress passing a government budget).

There are non-appropriated fund activities in the government, but those are generally focused on a specific mission area. I'm not sure which NAFI's NASA might have that it would be able to use donated funds for, but I suspect this wouldn't be nearly as helpful as one might think.