skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's strange that hackathons have become so high-stakes, just from the practical point that it's extremely easy to cheat and extremely hard to detect cheating. I don't want to be the "let's go back to the days when the winner got a t-shirt" guy, but it's getting ridiculous. I heard a story last week about a very substantial prize being won by a team who iterated on a previous hackathon's result without mentioning so.

It might work in the short term, but I can see talented developers getting turned off by the whole thing and not showing up at all, when it becomes clear they have no chance of winning if they stick to the rules and start from scratch. A better alternative, if someone wants to put out prizes like that, could be to announce the competition with a deadline, say 4 weeks out, and then host optional hacker spaces for the final weekend.
Yeah, but one could just define a container format. It could have been done with protocol buffers in fact. I know, because I have implemented it.
Does he mean to say Apple has also approached him (products I like, fanboy)? That could be Google too, would make much more sense.
Would be awesome to have a site like this but for Sci-fi TV Shows.

Anyway I love the site, in particular the genre filter.
It's been bookmarked. Good job!

Just one suggestion, I like watching trailers on the Apple site, so a link to that would be epic.
$500.00 is just the value of the last trade. What's the conspiracy?
> I was always scratching my head over why this place needs a period and that place doesn’t

I like Fred Hebert's (author of http://learnyousomeerlang.com/) explanation of syntax on his blog:

http://ferd.ca/on-erlang-s-syntax.html

At least the "template" explanation is most helpful to me.

> then there was just plain weird stuff like one-based indexes.

Interestingly, I don't think indexing is really that common in idiomatic Erlang. In other words when processing lists, one can split them into head and tail [H|T] or uses folds and maps.
The big red button is beautiful. But adding just a

cursor:pointer;

would have made a HUGE difference to the button itself and to the User's experience, clicking on it. Sigh, when will start-ups start paying attention to UX?
In re your first bullet: If such things are important to you, it looks like you can produce fixed size packets through a variety of methods. In particular, they support overlength encodings.
The data doesn't seem to contain enough information to cluster unrelated URLs (e.g. by User Agent). Each record contains 1) a timestamp, 2) the requested URL, 3) the referring URL, 4) a boolean classification of the user agent (browser or bot), 5) a boolean flag for whether the request was generated inside or outside IU.

Although you could reconstruct who's looking at Facebook from inside IU, it'd be difficult to further associate them with some other website like Hacker News. On the other hand, the timestamps do leak some information which could potentially be used to identify patterns of activity.
If you look at many links cited 6-8+ years ago, they're dead. It's not a great long-term solution at all.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité?
Well said. The Scotsman left the building long, long ago. Someone should send the few remaining communists that memo.
Oh wow. This is the essay that solidified my decision to go into/stay into computer science. I had forgotten about it, great to read it again.
Intention vs reality.
I am not so sure about that, good organic results generally cost money as well. I have never seen my Google ads as a cost center that is forcing up prices, but positive ROI customer acquisition.
where are you looking at the source code? I'd like to see too
You can't use partitions with UDF.
Sure, but in my experience, engineers usually have the opposite problem. They're perfectly average looking white guys, but can't project the confidence that is necessary to be successful in the bar scene (or the similar situations). Online dating is a great format for people like that (assuming their personality is good--there is no helping the hopeless).

Also, let's face it, not every woman is out on the bar scene. There are plenty of women who find that social situation to be awkward and prefer the less intense world of online dating. I think if you're not naturally charismatic, going with the CW and trying to work the bar scene is a losing proposition. You're competing on a battlefield that doesn't play to your strengths while trying to meet the women who are least likely to overlook that aspect of your personality.
I think of it this way: It's just as racist as how straight/gay people are sexist :) Physical attraction to someone is a whole different thing.
China's Twitter propaganda blitz using 2 million paid commenters
JavaScript functions as strings as functions
umm. That may have been true in the latter half of the '90s and the first half of the 'noughties but it is certainly not true today. Most universities have an extensive copyright policing function in their network operations center, designed to shield them from liability.

Not to say that pirate servers aren't hanging out on Uni nets these days, but they are stealthed, and deniable.
Global variables are in fact properties of the global object. In web pages the global object is window, so you can set and access global variables using the window.variable syntax.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Guide/Va...
Hire real criminals to threaten the patent trolls?
China has had a free market system since the early 80s. They still have a few state owned companies and a tighter grip on some industries but it is nothing near communism. As a matter of fact, the rate of entrepreneurship in China exceeds that of the US [0].

[0] http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2010/sb20100...
Couldn't they just pull the plug on all of their servers? Then they wouldn't need the keys. They could demand removal of copyrighted files, but if Mega refuses to do so, they could demand the server be taken offline until they figure out how.
So I take it you have signed affidavits from every federal prosecutor to that effect? And proof that drug possession and distribution are always entirely victimless.

The fact is that I generally support decriminalisation, and that I acknowledge the fact that prosecution tends to treat those of lesser socioeconomic standing (such as the poor and those belonging to minorities) badly. But blanket statements generally don't help. Especially those calling for the blanket punishment of a wide ranging group of people whom are most likely doing that which they feel is right (never attribute to malice what can adequately attributed to ignorance).

Edit: Accidentally a word (The fact that -> The fact is that)
Gur Shatz: Five Silly Things the (Security) World can do Without
It's funny how it's so plain to us.
They should just assign each schema a unique id, and have the server error out when receiving an ID it doesn't know. Then the client sends over the schema and the server caches it until death. This means the first request bears one additional round-trip, but the average request just carries an extra few bytes of identification.
Marketing != advertising

Marketing, for a startup, means finding a repeatable sales model.
I don't disagree with any of that. But its not clear how we go from that to seizing and liquidating their property. Did law enforcement engage with them to see how they could work together to reduce crime? Somehow I doubt that.
Agreed, it's a more complex procedure to create an app, but the kudos for achievement is proportionality higher. It could therefore be argued that there is a rough balance in terms of motivation (assuming kudos drives motivation).

The fact that educators are not inherently technically adept is precisely why they need devices that can be reset and redeployed quickly and simply. If you take into account the attention span of young kids you can see why these devices have become so popular so quickly.

The target market in this context is a younger age range than the age at which programming should be introduced to the curriculum (admittedly this a contentious issue).

I'd argue that the use of iPads in this setting only reinforces the importance of learning to program when the opportunity present itself. How many of our peers were put off a possible career in programming as a result of the high barrier to entry presented by the flashing cursor and a lack of comprehension of the relevance of writing code? We need a proportionate representation of all personality types in the programming world to provide the best solutions for the non-programmers (at least until everyone is a programmer). Maybe this early exposure will attract people with insights we currently lack to careers in programming.
Here's another mind-blowing result: there are about 10^80 subatomic particles in the known universe. If every one of these particles were a computer with a clock cycle of the Planck time (10^-43 seconds) and was running continuously for the life of the universe (10^17 seconds) the total number of computable states would be only about 10^140, which is the number of states that can be represented in about 20 bytes of memory. The total number of states that will actually be computed by physical computers will, of course, be much, much smaller than this. So make every cycle count :-)
Still hoping/waiting for some sort of two-factor authentication at Namecheap. They don't offer it yet.

They suggested they were looking into it in 2011, but nothing yet. GoDaddy offers it. :)
To bring this into the startup world:

The master shrugs and says "It can't be done" and so doesn't even try.

The young carpenter slaps together something ugly with only three legs that barely stands, but since its the only table available, everyone balances their stuff on it anyway.

This seems like a select spot to insert some distinct SQL jokes... but I think I'll just drop it.
Long story but they are two different things: when you are forced to buy ads because your traffic crashes due to algorithm and UI changes things aren't as peachy as "let's spend $50K acquiring new customers and see how it goes." The small Adwords fish will eventually be eaten by ebay, Macys Amazon and other big spenders.

These days, searching for items and commercial topics, all I see is ads in the first page or two so for traffic ads are it. In fact, many times I click without realizing I clicked on an ad.

Low and behold traffic to other sites from Google is collapsing (1) and while good organic may cost money they should cost a lot less than $x to $xx for each click.

1 (for the second year in the row users are doing less desktop searches on Google and Google's ad clicks have increased by a lot so it's simple math)
Kim Dotcom on his future plans for Mega and Megabox
Yeah, people are using sequential algorithms when vision is parallel processing.
I think the issue is not your computer, it's your camera and other random electronic appliances that support flash storage....

They tend to be very conservative about what they support, and have hard or impossible to update software.
You make it sound like these issues are unique to this one motel, when it comes with the business.

> * The hotel owners made no policy changes after a methamphetamine lab was discovered in one of their rooms.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Hotels-motels-hot-spots-f...

> * The hotel owners made no changes after the dead body of a heroin overdose victim was found in one of their rooms.

http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/06/murder-suicide-whi...

> * Drug deals weren't simply occurring at the hotel; the Tewskbury PD repeatedly discovered drug dealers operating full-time out of rooms in the hotel. / * The owners of the hotel repeatedly admitted under oath that they had continuing knowledge of drug crimes occurring on their premises, and had no policies to investigate the use of their rooms.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/dec/30/hard-rock-hotel-...

> * The hotel is, let's not sugarcoat it, a blighted flophouse... There are places like this all over American and they're all neighborhood blights that need to be shut down.

Ah, now we are getting somewhere, because this seems to be the primary complaint. If Charlie Sheen does cocaine in a luxury hotel room, that's all good fun. And it would be absurd to shut down the hotel because of what Sheen did, right? But a motel that serves poor people who are not celebrities -- yet nevertheless do drugs sometimes -- is entirely different.

This connects to the point that Orin Kerr and others have been making regarding the uproar over Aaron's death. "If you want to end these tactics, don’t just complain about the Swartz case. Don’t just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country — mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring."
The same can be said of a free market, but that shouldn't stop us from comparing mostly free market economies with mostly communist economies.
Hah, as a designer I enjoyed that more than I was expecting... It does raise a lot of questions of methodology and bureaucracy.
Yes, I have worked for Apple. Anecdotally, almost everyone I met was a fanboy.
From what you write, it looks like you equate marketing with advertising (unless it's your marketing theories that include advertising as the only path to success). That's not the case - advertising is one of the tools of marketing, not the only one. If you're interested in expanding your horizons, one interesting read is Frank Lane's "Killer Brands" - the start of the book is a little too boombastic for my tastes, but the content is very good.
Most of all, it's just not an interesting way to spend your time, and it's not even a "hack", and therefore not even deserving of that title. If you want to play with technology at a "hackathon", hack on something interesting, not just the usual web 9.0 "plug this API into that platform and claim to be a disruptive innovator."
Can't speak for any of the others, but the Google chart is dead-on (at least, it was when I was there - the top three are Larry, Eric, then Sergey over there making flying cars or god knows what else).
Mayan Calendar - Code Explanation
This shit is going to be available on TPB before I can even click 'add comment'.
Cantor's Theorem: The Movie
> but it's not obvious that their focus on that aspect necessarily yields the best web RTC standard.

Best RTC standard for who?

I believe that patent-free RTC (as WebRTC provides by virtue of preferring WebM) is better than a patent-encumbered even if it has a slightly better session initiation/description protocol.

Regardless - yes, one should definitely try to map the underlying reasons and subtext of every statement. But the bottom line is:

Google has been working, in public and with a freely usable implementation, on a specification. Mozilla adopts same specification (and mostly same codebase). Said specification ALREADY works on iphones, android phones, Chrome, Firefox and even IE (with the right plugin).

Microsoft proposes something, not completely defined, only provides a plugin implementation, only for IE and Chrome, unsupported on any phone. In my book, it needs a much better story than just "better session descriptor".

And frankly, with Microsoft's past of hijacking the web standards, the office openxml iso process hijacking, all the linux patent threats and the android patent extortion that is STILL ongoing, they need to work much, much, harder before I even give them the benefit of a doubt.
"Crowdsourcing is not a panacea"

- sliverstorm
The worst I can think of is facebooks changing of their TOS, and the companies are "scary" with the kind of data they're potentially compiling but they haven't actually done anything yet (and switching to microsoft products would simply make them the scary company).

Some things that apple does like patent abuse is something that Microsoft has done as well, so its difficult to single out apple for something like that. Or facebook's lock in is similar to the Windows API lock in.

You want to give me examples of things that make all 3 of those companies worse than microsoft?
While in practice I don't think it'd be much of an issue, that's really scary.

Thanks for pointing that out.
Don't pay their lawyers (Cooley LLP) to be your lawyers.

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=81
You're missing the point. Whatever nitpicks you have with that design is irrelevant to his speculation that it's the precursor to Microsoft's current UI design language.
See dangrossman's comment below. [1] (I was shocked too.)

iwantmyname [2] is great and supports .io registrations, but you'll pay a little extra for the clean interface.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5085850
[2] http://iwantmyname.com
"Takings" must be compensated or you run into 5th amendment issues.

Two words: civil forfeiture

Running into constitutional issues isn't even a speed bump to the government at this point. That ship sailed long ago.
I only use two: w > en.wikipedia.org, r > rottentomatoes.com. Everything else is through Google or I directly type the URL.
This is by the guys who came up with FAST. That protocol is somewhat common in the dissemination of market data from exchanges. Pantor targets the financial sector and real-time trading systems in particular. It's a small company with smart people.

http://www.fixprotocol.org/fast
It's work in progress. No one is expected to take it seriously in production. Yet.
I thought these top bandwidth usage lists are compiled by ISPs, not site owners themselves.

In any case i don't think climbing those lists would be reason to disable gzip. In that case an easier method would be to just add lots of not rendered junk at the end of your html to beef up the data usage.
Yes, but the tallest trees (California redwood) have shallow root systems (a couple meters). Are there trees commonly over 100 meters counting the roots?
Here's the original ad archived: http://www.webcitation.org/6Do5yGrId

Edit: Ha, the images from the ad are still in The Atlantic's CDN: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/sponsored/0.%20M...
Transport 
Transport , Transport wien
Transport Wien , Räumungen und Entsorgungen in Wien , Herzlich Willkommen auf den Seiten des ATH-TRANS Umzugs-Transport , Sie benötigen einen schnellen, sicheren und kostengünstigen Transport in Wien bzw Transport in ganz Österrech? Hier bei uns sind Sie genau richtig wenn es sich um Transporte handelt! ,
I always had a fascination with large numbers and expressing them in mathematical notation. It's fun to use the next "step" to outdo someone you talk to, ie tetration for exponentials, knuth up arrows, ackermann function, etc.

I'd gone even as far as put on our startup's team page an offer to give a discount to anyone who can give interesting answers to a similar question as the one proposed in the article!
Of course this is all interesting. But times are very different! Radio Shack hobbyists were at the forefront. There were not SO many of them.. but because the latest chips and other doohickies were fairly expensive in today's world, allowed Radio Shack to prosper. We are both on HN, so we are a bit different than normal population... Globalization changed that, I'm in NYC, you?
Ruby: Multi Thread Web Scraping Using Mechanize and Multiple Tor Circuits
The Microsoft you speak of is the one that existed a decade ago. It has changed significantly in recent years. Its the one leading the design with skeumorphic layouts. Has some of the coolest products out there. They may not be financial success, but very well designed.
12 Business Lessons from Jeff Bezos
XML and JSON violate the following key property (which can be interpreted as a requirement):

- Suitability for FPGA implementation
8 antivirus gratuits pour Mac
Hi, I'm going to update the FAQ.
We have started comparing to GPB, please see here.

http://blog.blinkprotocol.org/2013/01/blink-compared-to-goog...

As you can see in a comment by Rolf, part of the perf limitation of GPB is the implementation and not the wire protocol.

Anders
Thanks for the link! I hadn't seen that one before. While I think I'm already thinking in expressions, Erlang's placement of punctuation never really made a lot of sense to me. Maybe that explanation will finally clear up my confusion.

So far, I agree with the note about 0/1-based indexing. It's just not used a lot. However, I find it pretty calming that indexes will work the way I expect them to, should I ever need to use them.

Now that I think about it, these two points (syntax and indexes) are somewhat petty things to point out about the Erlang : Elixir relationship, and I feel a bit bad for repeating them in the blog post. Things like protocols are way more interesting (and hopefully, are what drives you to try out Elixir). (-:
Extracting Energy from the Turing Tarpit
Great designers can always make a difference.
How Apple used its money and muscle to kill an iTunes competitor
They are not in a position to bully anyone, just like they were when IE3 came out. So they made IE4 which mopped the floor with NS4. And it still took a lot of time until the momentum changed and IE became popular.

And then they bullied everyone with IE 5, IE 5.5 and IE 6 - like they did (and still do) with Office (OpenXML), SMB, Kerberos and a variety of other products.

Of course their statement is going to be about merit - they've never said "oh, we're bullying here" even when they were. And their statement MIGHT even have some merit - but just like in the OASIS OpenOffice document spec, instead of working with the industry, they arrive late with their own underspecified and alternative specification.

It's same old Microsoft.
Surviving Regular Long-Haul Startup Travel
Please have a look at the schema exchange specification. We welcome feedback. It is too costly to include meta data in every message.
http://blinkprotocol.org/s/BlinkSchemaExchangeSpec-beta1.pdf

Anders
Some day, I'm going to get a job as CEO of The Smithsonian. I don't care what salary they pay me, but I'll make damn sure my bonus compensation package is tied to profitability.

Then, for the next two years, I'll sell off the museum's collections to the highest bidders, and then leave, having had the two most profitable years ever.

As far as I can tell, this is what passes for genius in today's corporate environment.
I have no idea why they decided but my guess is that

* XML and JSON can be slow.

* XML parser are big

* XML file size is big

* JSON lacks proper binary support

* Thrift defines a entire transport stack, so if you already have you already have a transport layer, you are adding more bloat

* Some people may find protocol buffers and thrift files too hard/tedious

* Why not? Sometimes it's easier/more fun to roll out your solution
What you call unsolicited advice in fact is part of a process to make the world a better place. You see something wrong and right it. Tell the world about, and hope to make a dent I the universe. That's actually a very good way of inflicting change. Because even if you don't dent it, at least you're getting better in the process.
Go take the course in North Fork, CA.
I'm wondering, why companies who use products like this, and pay-per-installation packages don't just have a "uncheck" for add-on toolbar/adware components. This is the case with Alcohol 52% (a CD emulator) that I used on on Windows.

IMO Non-optional installation of adware/toolbars etc. crosses the line towards "evil" malware.
I can understand the motivations of those who do choose to participate...as a creative outlet, as a way to cement or learn new skills, to meet new people, and yes - it's incentivized. I appreciate his point but see no problem myself lol.