skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's his résumé, which you ask about:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070222123930/http://www.ivygate...

Here's an article about his sister, who has been successful since age 22 investing in real estate:

http://money.cnn.com/2005/03/04/real_estate/investment_prop/...

She's relevant because an address she owns was used as the address of the charity. There's no evidence she knew what he was up to.

Students who know him considered it all to be a joke or at least not malicious:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080422030103/http://www.yaledai...

> But Won Chai ’07 said that while Charity Navigator has a right to be upset with Vayner, he thinks the humor of Vayner’s resume should be appreciated.

> “I think clearly he was trying to play a practical joke or just trying to draw attention to himself,” he said. “Whether or not it was a good thing or not, I couldn’t say. People seemed to be enjoying it. I-bankers are forwarding this stuff to each other. Maybe it’s good for a laugh now and again.”

> Pieter Morgan ’09, who has lifted weights with Vayner, said he thinks Vayner often makes seemingly unbelievable claims because he genuinely believes them to be true. Morgan said he thinks Vayner is a genuine person, despite his penchant for seemingly implausible stories.

> “I think it’s like in ‘A Beautiful Mind’ with Russell Crowe,” Morgan said. “When he tells you these stories, it’s completely genuine, which is what is completely amazing. He’ll tell you with a completely straight face that he knows the Dalai Lama, and he is completely serious. I think he is fundamentally a nice guy.”

Here's his charity site which seems to only have been active in November 2006. There was a web comment that mentioned that he used these sites to get girls and was apparently quite a player.

http://web.archive.org/web/20061129145614/http://www.empower...
So you would rather have him do nothing?
Terrible idea, you'll likely be a felon for distribution of fraudulent federal Identification.

Same for anyone who uses it.
I am probably more down than the OP, I am 30 and we are in a very similar situation, but I'm struggling hard with very strong depression at the moment due to all these factors and also losing the only love in my life I've ever had. I can't go 5 minutes without fantasizing about hanging myself. Don't worry though, not going to do it, but it's obvious my brain does not see another way out.

I just wanted to say thank you for this post. Although it may come off as a bit harsh to some readers(and I've never been a fan of the 'tough it up' mentality), I needed to hear this, and I think you're right on every point.

What I would like to know further is how you managed to do CBT, as I know that I desperately need something like this, but I can't find a competent/trustworthy psychologist to save my life. Any links/resources/advice is GREATLY appreciated.
You think this would make for an interesting Roku channel?
Targeting which browser?
You make it sound as though the goal should be to go to prison, or to become a martyr for your cause. I suppose you think suicide bombers are effective freedom fighters as well?

I'm reminded of an old quote, which I think is attributed to General Patton: The goal is not to die for your country, the goal is to make the other guy die for his country.

IOW, you're not out there intentionally trying to sacrifice yourself and take yourself out of the game. That would be silly.

Look, I'm not saying that what Anonymous did was right in any objective sense, but it is what they did, and it's real easy for us to play "monday morning quarterback" and sit here and criticize. At least they did something, which is more than most of us can claim. And, yes, members (or purported member) of Anonymous have gone to jail for their activities.
Oooh... someone should make an applescript that links into last.fm to make this automatic.
I think they abandoned Opera Unite. Some good ideas, but it was never likely to kick off unless other browsers joined in. Perhaps they should've made it more open and customizable.
Ah...the results of the race to be the "Instagram of Video".

Vine is no different than any number of recent video sharing apps. Vine does nothing new but sets new arbitrary time limits on the videos they support. Just like the others Vine will try to convince you that through focus groups they have found "3 second" videos will revolutionize video sharing and discovery, but this is nothing new.

Examples:

Threadlife: Supports 3 second videos
Viddy: Supports 15 second videos
Animoto: Supports 30 second videos
Klip: Supports 60 second videos

now Vine and its 6 second videos.

I am left wondering, what problem do all these video sharing apps think they are solving by setting arbitrary video time limits? Short videos might increase likelihood a user will sit through a whole video, but contrary to what these apps want you to believe they are not improving content quality through these arbitrary time limits. Further, time limits do not help users discovery quality content, so what problem have any of these apps solved?

The company that is dubbed the "Instagram of video" in the media is going to do the same thing Instagram did, improve content sharing and discovery. Of course, I hope my start up is that company, but even if not I think it is safe to say the company who deserves this title will not get it for setting video time limits as a result of focus groups.

Disclosure: I founded my own video sharing website with the goal to address the current problems with video sharing and discovery. I have done this by making Google Earth the UI for discovery of video content.
Look forward! Think yourself as a fresh new guy to this world. Start over again!
This is good news - thanks guys. I tried www.recon.io out for my project a few months ago and it was great but I think my trial expired or something. Going to take a look at it again and take advantage of the startup plan.

Cheers,

@Skram of @MappyHealth
"You can always go back to school or learn a new trade"

Whoa, isn't that a little flip? Depending on one's life situation, it can be impossible to do those things. They require time and money, two things people may not always have - particularly if one has children, a mortgage, etc.
Sign petition to Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal - The Hacker News
Yup, just noticed how the modern pharmacy sign on the left is in the same location as a very similar (though red instead of green) sign ~100 years ago.
> 8) Clone Tab:

It's not unique to Opera. IE8/9 and Chrome can do it.
I bought a copy of Opera when it first came out. I used it for almost two decades. I played with every new feature - tabs, news reader, gestures, per-site customization, integrated web server, etc. Over the years I've collected tens of thousands of bookmarks.

While the quality varied over the years it was always good until about 2009 when I finally had to give up on it. I could find no way to stop their integrated URL autocomplete function from causing the browser to freeze every time I hit a keystroke as it searches my huge history - a known issue they aren't ever going to solve.

Obviously there are things I could have done to resolve that problem, but once they gave me a reason to switch I took a fresh look at the browser landscape and realized my needs today are better met by using a multiplicity of browsers (Chrome/Safari/Firefox).
It's not working for me, chrome is giving 404 errors when selecting a directory. Chrome 24 on Linux. If this works, it'll be fantastic, great job!
J.J. Abrams To Direct STAR WARS: EPISODE VII
He is not wrong, but there is also a certain danger in this approach that goes unremarked upon. It is often difficult to measure the outcome you actually desire, and a lot easier to measure some proxy for it. But attaching incentives to optimising some metric - making an intermediate goal the goal in itself - tends to make it an extremely unreliable proxy for the original worthy cause.

We know that Gates is aware of this, because he is credited with having once said: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." We can only hope that he is keeping this in mind; he certainly makes no reference to the problem in this piece.

The Gates Foundation has in the past spent billions driving ruthlessly and with careful measurement toward what turned out to be entirely counterproductive goals. Simply measuring more stuff will not be sufficient to prevent it from doing so again.

Some recommended reading material on the subject:

Ritter & Webber, "Dilemma's in a General Theory of Planning" (1973) introduced the concept of "wicked problems" - http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_T...

Dietrich Dörner, The Logic of Failure (1996) covers this ground very well, including with case studies of people trying to save a fictional third-world country in a computer simulation of an aid program... with uniformly disastrous results.
I love how easy it is to read and actually understand that patent.
Or right-click the tab->Duplicate Tag, or Ctrl+Alt+T.
I'd put aging a lot farther down the list of big problems. I'd much rather him dedicate resources to stopping malaria in Africa, granting children and average people a shot at living, than to give money to extend grandma and grandpa's lives by a few more years.
20 Most Extreme and Bizarre Photos Taken With a GoPro Camera
Making primes more random
yep..
i was following the same way of thinking when i created pics.nicecomeback.com ... no more giving my photos to facebook.
I had similar experience with it. Particularly if you had your search engine set to "history search" and you hit backspace, the browser would crash. There were several other bugs causing frequent crashes too that never got fixed. I've been using Firefox for the past year or so instead and had very few crashes.
"billions", "ruthlessly", "entirely counterproductive".

Can you expand on this a bit? I haven't heard anything so firmly condemning of the Gates Foundation's efforts before, I'd value reading about it.
Sure, but we don't really know how to fight aging. However the things Bill Gates is tackling (polio, malaria) have known cures. You don't have to innovate time find a solution and innovate in executiong, only innovate in execution, which makes you much more likely to succeed.

Additionally solving childhood mortality issues will do wonders for the average life expectancy.
sounds way better in french tbh.
I must say the comments here are extremely cynical and somewhat disturbing. Speaking as a citizen from India, (still third world despite our progress), I can say that the Gates foundation has done a turn of good in our corner of the world. You might dislike Microsoft the corporation, but Gates as a philanthropist deserves praise.
What are the counterproductive goals the Gates Foundation has driven towards?
I don't like to go give advice because, well, it's often just wrong. Not my advice, all advice. But I will do it because I think this could help you:

Lower your expectations, but raise your commitments.

What I mean by that is: stop looking at your less-studious friends and thinking how much farther you should be. Stop looking at your life's circumstances and thinking how much better others have it. Strive for something more immediate: a new job, promotion, getting a meeting with someone important to you. Whatever. Then, plan the sequence of actions you need to undertake to make this happen, and commit to executing them.

In my personal experience, feeling exactly the way you described, I've found that all of it stems from not actually getting anything done. Expecting to be in such high places, but having such a small inventory of achievement. So I'm reversing that: collecting achievements, committing to completion and expecting only to move on to the next commitment.

In my experience the despair came from feeling that I was powerless to change my circumstances. This approach directly affirms that I do.

(The particular phrasing of this advice comes from Venkatesh Rao)
Credit Card Fees Take Effect Sunday
I'm not sure I understand your question. I wasn't being sarcastic.
The BS might allow me to go to law school, is one of the big things I think about.
Sometimes "free" is too expensive.

Ask anyone who has gone aboard to do good works. There's a very fine line between helping and inadvertently creating a dependency or destroying previously stable social or economic structures.

Big example is famine relief. We dump our excess commodities in a local economy. That enriches the power elite. It nukes the local agriculture. People end up worse off.
One has to put some big words on the website... The bottom line is instead of data copying this allows your applications to use references (URLs) to data at source. And since data resources are on HTTP, caching, linking, redirecting, sharing, indexing and searching are natural to do. That we think is a new approach to data integration in large systems.
It's part of human psychology that you'd do that. You shouldn't feel too bad. Hopefully Watsi can figure out how to work with that best and just more heavily promote anyone that doesn't have the cutest picture, or limit the total amount of possible recipients they show to get the most severe cases handled first.
I'd be interested in working on it as well, email me if you can't find someone.
>I don't get the negativity in this thread. Bill Gates is trying to solve hard problems and people here are complaining.

I respect Bill Gates and think his cause is noble but they are partly childish because of the idealism and the hopes to cure disease. ilaksh's post on this thread is part of the reason why though I wanted to reply to your post instead of doing so to his. It will be far more controversial though.

David Attenborough recently said that human beings are a plague on Earth.

I'll present you with three stories:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906520/planet-earth-narra...

Peter Beard, in an interview with Alec Baldwin on 'Here's the Thing', said that AIDS was a good thing in Africa because of overpopulation and it caused quite a stir.

I listened to an All Things Considered story where, not only was there a slaughter of elephants for their ivory tusks, but they would wait until more elephants would come back to mourn the slain and the poachers would kill them too. When asked, off the record, the poacher said he had to feed his family. The natural question I asked is "Why are you having kids you can't afford?" The question wasn't asked during the piece and it's something that isn't asked worldwide.

There are numerous examples of mankind ruining the environment. As the most intelligent life on this planet, we are to be the custodians and not expand like a virus.

Even if you took the approach of mankind over everything else we are now destroying the soil which we rely on and food shortages continue as the price for food continues to rise.

The answers don't come easy in this world. The best ones are the most difficult to make. I suspect Western countries will have to do the same in the coming years to limit population growth.
V10S goes to java as well. I've really enjoyed using it and the work flow is quite nice.
Its the race for eyeballs, so the eyeballs can be slapped with advertisements for crap they don't need.
Havarti: a self-hosted pip proxy/cache
As far as I understand them, the sentencing guidelines group related charges into a single charge. E.g. the "computer fraud" and "wire fraud" charges that are for some reason separate under CFAA would count as just one conviction under FSG. So even if we was convicted for 1 or 5 charges relating to the same underlying accusation you should still get the same recommended sentence.

Since I'm not a lawyer I don't want to try to analyze further but there's also provisions about whether to make multiple sentences concurrent or sequential (which can also add time).

You don't have to take my word about the maximum sentence though: Jennifer Granick was very critical of the U.S. Attorney's handling of the case and her estimate of the FSG recommendation (based on trumped-up loss calculations) was 1-2 years in prison.

There is a reason to add charges though: It can make the jury more likely to convict by helping along their sense of "splitting the difference", makes the court of public opinion turn that much more against you, etc.
"That’s exactly what happened ... Quirky staffers took to the streets to protest ..."
Timothy Lottes (FXAA) on the new PlayStation and Xbox specs
could this be a real start to internet of things? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
Google Cloud Platform sample codes on GitHub
Web inventor says governments stifling net freedom
Just like I've never been on Instagram, I have no urge to join this site, but your criticism is still misguided.

Placing a constraint on a creative endeavour is a old and time-tested way of tickling creativity. Pre Twitter, people didn't think they could have any kind of meaningful conversations without at least a paragraph of prose. Sure, it's a strained at time, but there's little denying that Twitter has taught a lot of us a lot about getting to the point, quickly.
> Mouse gestures:
> Firefox has that (with an extension), I tried it but never liked it. I tend to play with my mouse all the time, and triggered gestures by mistake

Opera's built-in mouse gestures are infinitely superior to the FF extension, and are actually very useful. Tabs and mouse gestures were the reasons I went with Opera a long time ago. They also had some useful keyboard shortcuts that were pretty handy ('z' to go back in history, 'x' to go forward, etc) which made it perfect for quick surfing since my right hand manipulated the mouse, while my left hand was naturally positioned over these keys.

Unfortunately, there came a time when Opera suffered some intermittent and annoying crashes. I switched to FF, but it was much slower and the gestures were horrible. Finally, when Chrome came into the scene, I switched to it and never looked back.

Also, since my switch to a Macbook Pro, I can use the double-finger swipes for backward/forward navigation, which are really the only useful gestures for me.
Ah, I had a feeling I was missing something. I probably should have realised laziness had something to do with it. I'll have to keep that in mind in the future. Thanks for the information, its greatly appreciated.
I'm inclined to believe that targeting education and health is actually the best way to fix inequality problems. I mean, it's not like he's sinking the money into SAT prep classes for lawrence academy students, he's attacking malaria.

Handouts don't fix underlying problems. Education and better health might.
What about optimizing for gratitude?

EDIT: Not as only factor, but as significant factor.
Something as simple as providing clean water can make a huge difference to life expectancy and quality of life. Another big need is sewer systems and toilets. So often we get caught up in trying to solve the problems we perceive in the First world, instead of the simpler, less glamourous projects that can make the biggest difference and cost less.
These days they all pretty much work the same for the basics.
> Any media outlets wishing to be eligible for this program must include within their reporting a means of secure communications

How would a journalist securely communicate with anonymous? Some type of TOR network chat? How would they initiate the conversation?
When I used to travel for work I made a big effort to avoid going through the scanners by selecting lines that weren't using them or opt-ing out. My last opt-out occurred after the new groping pat-downs were put into practice and I found the pat-down much more disturbing than the scanner. Now, I still try to avoid the line with the scanner, but when required, I'll go through them rather than get groped.

Unfortunately, this lawsuit will do nothing to change the way the TSA operates. I would have been happier to see the punishment not just be a payment of monies but a requirement to change policies and procedures to avoid this in the future. I don't see that happening.
You're right, I wasn't very clear. My point is that HN has been kind of a rallying point for some of the more intellectual opposition to anything and everything regarding how Swartz's case was handled (at least, once he killed himself).

But all of the people calling for heads to figuratively roll need to be really careful about the effect of their rallying cries. Like "having one more drink" while carrying your car keys, decisions and actions made now can spiral out of anyone's control and lead to even more anguish down the road.

Mob rule is very much a package deal, you don't just get to keep the good parts and disclaim all the rest.
It is the US Sentencing Commission website. The website for the Supremes is:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/
Great post.

I feel like giving more power to school principals and trusting them to make non-standardized-test-based judgment calls is a solution but unions are terrified of it for whatever reason.

On the one hand, the teacher's unions are the only people who stand up for teachers, a job that would otherwise be whittled away in pay and benefits until only an idiot would take the job. On the other hand, union leadership's primary concern seems to be protecting bad teachers and retirement benefits.
http://history.google.com . You can delete everything, delete just specific entries, or turn it off completely.
> people didn't think they could have any kind of meaningful conversations without at least a paragraph of prose

Still can't. (Oh, the irony!)
"a cowardly act of opportunity"

"just a shield for people who are breaking the law."

I would (naturally) call someone who disagrees with me, and acts on it, "abusive" too (or opportunistic, for example) even if he or she thought they were acting morally; moral arguements are hollow when the morality is what's being argued over. I'm not exactly disagreeing with you, just trying to say that moral judgement might be moot (except to one's self of course).

That said, we do seem to disagree on the definition of persecution. I do think people who believe in free access to knowledge, and who act on those moral principals, including pursuing transparency and accountability, are "persecuted"... Case(s) in point: Bradley Manning, Assange, and every other whistle-blower in history. I've said it elsewhere too, but to repeat myself: it does not feel like a safe time to develop network software, and even simple things that geeks do can easily be considered threatening or criminal. No, we're not talking holocaust or even abortionist-level persecution, but geeks still get treated differently. Ex: the very real possibility of 35 years for a nonviolent, technically simple, and arguably moral, scripted download indicates how discriminating IT laws are. As others have noted, murderers get less in most states. (15 to 25 years, typically, before time off for good behavior.) It didn't happen to me personally, but it's still pretty close to home and I guess I'm just not as convinced it's an aberration.

(I'm probably just thinking out loud.)
This reminds me of my final year project :)
https://github.com/imarihantnahata/Bluetooth-Manager
We implemented DYMO routing protocol over Bluetooth for Android devices and then created Chat, Messaging and File Sharing services over the basic routing framework that we created.
Google+ moves up to second place in social networks
Would have been extra nice to have a release update a week after the previous one, since am sure a lot of people were waiting in anticipation. Sure the makers now know more than previously, but would be kool to just mention something like "Looks we might not make it this week, due to these 3 issues. Check back in a week, or watch foo if you want 'real-time' progress".
The answer to that problem is education, not killing off an underclass. Educated societies have far fewer children than non, to the point that some first world countries are losing population.

The thing is, it's impossible to gain an education when you are constantly starving or sick. Solve that problem and you move towards solving the next.