skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I just mentioned in other comments, I have the packages shipped to my home, using my real name. I have never had a package intercepted.

I think I benefit from the fact that the items I am ordering are very small and fit into normal sized envelopes. From what I've read, packages are much more suspect than envelopes.
> Not sure what amazon's cookie duration is.

24 hours[0], if I'm reading correctly.

> If it was so easy to make a $1 ARPU from a blog, you'd see way more way more bloggers :)

If I made $1 ARPU, I'd quit my job and blog full-time.

0: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/oper...
It seems that SR doesn't solve the major problem for buyers: you have to name a postal address and that address will be printed on a package containing illicit goods.

Any bad experiences with customs or have you been using in-country sellers exclusively? Any tricks to obscure your real address?

(Since these have mostly been answered below already: do you stick to a fixed group of sellers or go by price?)
Here's an academic analysis of Silk Road. After crawling the site for a few months they came up with this:

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-...

"Abstract

We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road, an anonymous, international online marketplace that operates as a Tor hidden service and uses Bitcoin as its exchange currency. We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012, including daily crawls
of the marketplace for nearly six months in 2012. We obtain a detailed picture of the type of goods being sold on Silk Road, and of the revenues made both by sellers and Silk Road operators. Through examining over 24,400 separate items sold on the site, we show that Silk Road is overwhelmingly used
as a market for controlled substances and narcotics, and that most items sold are available for less than three weeks. The majority of sellers disappears within roughly three months of their arrival, but a core of 112 sellers has been present throughout our measurement interval. We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers, from public listings, to slightly over USD 1.2 million per month; this corresponds
to about USD 92,000 per month in commissions for the Silk Road operators. We further show that the marketplace has been operating steadily, with daily sales and number of sellers overall increasing over our measurement interval. We discuss economic and policy implications of our analysis and results,
including ethical considerations for future research in this area."
Broder, first article:
> Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.

Musk:
> The final leg of his trip was 61 miles and yet he disconnected the charge cable when the range display stated 32 miles. He did so expressly against the advice of Tesla personnel and in obvious violation of common sense.

Broder , second article:
> The Tesla personnel whom I consulted over the phone – Ms. Ra and Mr. Merendino – told me to leave it connected for an hour, and after that the lost range would be restored. I did not ignore their advice.

In the first article, it seams that Broder calls after the final one hour charging, but in the second article the redaction is suspiciously vague. Perhaps the conversations in the calls were not recorded, but it would be interesting to know the times of the telephone calls.
Who needs an external on/off Wi-Fi button?
What's the experience like? I enjoy taking recreational substances occasionally but don't really do it because drug dealers are generally shitty people who one doesn't want to deal (ahem) with. Is the experience with acquiring better on silk road?
I am not a dealer. As the OP said, I have a gigantic drug habit.

I suspect that, like many HN readers, I am a young guy who works in technology and makes more money than is good for him. I am single and unattached, so I've got plenty of disposable income. And I seem to be good (so far) at remaining a stable, productive employee despite my habit.
hey, you're right! I usually surf with JS off and never noticed!
There are still scammers on SR, but the forums and reputation system go a good job at reducing that risk substantially (edit: if you're smart about doing your research and only dealing with the top vendors).

I do have to meet with RL dealers from time to time, and I vastly prefer SR.
I touched on this in some other replies, but basically, I use my real name/address, try to use domestic sellers as much as possible, and have never lost a package to USPS/customs.
The Python documentation is bad
Cool concept. I got a whole lot of "friends info is restricted" but the concept as a whole is pretty neat. I think there's an opportunity for someone to use the Facebook API as a whole and completely flip upside down the concept of online dating. Privacy concerns throw a wrench in the plans but if you can get around those; you could definitely have something with the use of the social graph..
I wonder why the Milgram Experiment made the list but not the Stanford Prison Experiment...
This had little to do with morality but was interesting nonetheless.
On a plane flight about a year and a half ago, I sat next to a Professor of Electrical Engineering who worked with various chip companies and startups on chip design. The discussion was very interesting.

In particular, we talked about Intel and AMD. He claimed that if AMD's architecture was produced using Intel's fabs, the chips would be better than Intel's.

I'm not sure if he had inside knowledge or it was just his industry experience, but I found it interesting that AMD's primary disadvantage is fabrication technology and not chip design. They have to design their chips better because they are competing often 2 processes behind Intel and still compete.
What's arrogant about wanting to talk to people you consider smarter than yourself?
Was this true before the drug war?
Warning: redirect loop ahead.
I think the dichotomy you express is probably already a thing of history. The concepts of hardware and software as separate markets made sense when it was still possible to buy hardware that was not run by software.

Today even "hardware" companies like Nokia or Samsung do quite a bit of sophisticated software development, and "software" companies like Google and Facebook build datacenters and server hardware.

You can't even buy a car or TV without a few million lines of code these days.
This site layout is absurd!
$1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic.

Still, it seems like the risk far outweighs the gain here.
What does it say about r?
When I mentioned rules, I wasn't referring to social rules, such as lining up for recess or not punching little Billy when the teacher's not looking.

Instead, I was referring to what we teach our kids academically. That is, we focus more on them knowing the "facts". I believe that we need to spend much more time teaching how to think creatively and critically. Yes, facts are important. We just need balance.

I agree with you 100% that we are teaching kids to work in a bureaucracy; creating "cogs for the machine", I like to say. But I think that's exactly the problem. We need to open up new opportunities for life fulfillment as well as paths to societal contributions. But it's a self-serving cycle. We need cogs so we teach kids to be rule-regurgitating cogs. But, how many more photo sharing apps do we need? OTOH we could use that cure for cancer or alternative fuel source or other thing that has yet to be imagined.

I argue that we could be much further down some of these paths if we taught our kids to imagine, think, and create in addition to teaching them the rules.
Refactoring Malapropism
Excellent comment...thought the same thing!
News about the News
Party school.
Things like antibiotics, ssris, antivirals and other mainstream drugs that aren't abused are often available relatively inexpensively from online pharmacies based out of India due to their price controls and flexible intellectual property laws.
Ten Maxims for Making Journalism Relevant in the 21st Century
Interns At These Companies Are Getting Paid More Than You
I've never ordered anything from Silk Road, but one thing I'm surprised isn't done is using cheap/knockoff consumer products as a "carrier."

For instance, if it were well known that ordering a $295 DVD player from FrobozzCo.cn would result in delivery of a $29 DVD player stuffed full of Adderall or whatever people order, I imagine people would feel pretty safe ordering that way.

The other thing is, I'm not sure that the act of merely receiving illicit goods in the mail is adequate grounds for prosecution in the US. You can always claim that you have no idea where it came from or why it was sent to you, can't you? Otherwise it would be a popular revenge tactic to order something nasty for delivery to someone else.
From my own numbers for Q4 2012 from my personal blog:

~6900 "impressions", 577 "product link clicks", 36 "other clicks" (NFI), 8 "total items ordered", 1.31% "total conversion" (as reported by Amazon).

$12.15 in earnings.
How age discrimination is killing high tech (2001)
Www.indiansinafrica.com/index.php/site-map
Container-based virtualization is already here, but without user namespaces root privilege in the container implies root privilege in the host. That's no longer the case; interesting times indeed.
Does the US risk being seen as a dog with a loud bark but no bite here? If you're going to make pronouncements that hacking will be considered an act of war (1), don't you kinda paint yourself into a corner when you get hacked?

(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/31/washington-moves...
Perhaps the text of bills should carry the names of the individuals who actually wrote them as well.
Does the article reflect your experience?
Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units
$1.2 million is an infinitesimal slice of the illegal drug market, but if an ordinary startup handled 1.2 million in transactions per month they'd be ecstatic.

apples and oranges. This is illegal and their take is maybe enough to pay one criminal lawyer for a month.
Thanks. My curiosity is sated.
Well, if you can't afford thousands of dollars of expenses, then you can do it yourself for less. This blog post tells you how. All you have to do is invest some of your time. If you're not willing to invest either a moderate amount of money or a moderate amount of time, then maybe your brief isn't that important.
Please be very careful. <3.
I think the second article is clarifying what was meant by "after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford." For example, if the actual phrase was "You're clear to go after you charge for an hour." strictly speaking he was cleared to go (with the stipulation that he had to charge for an hour). Note that this is speculation. I am waiting to see the call logs, but I'm not going to assume that Broder made something up or maliciously misrepresented the conversation.
I've been in China on and off for ~7 of the last 10-11 years. During that time I was once asked to write an online forum / comment scanning system by an employer in Shanghai that could trace keyword usage. It was supposed to be for marketing purposes but I didn't trust that claim. Needless to say I didn't write the system. No idea who the employer was, or whether it's related. I've also met some people that have worked on the public security bureau's CCTV systems, and others who work in Beijing/Tianjin with government for computer security projects.

I think the western military-industrial and government security industry wants to daemonize China as justification for spending. Realistically, at the global geostrategic level, China is already beating them at their own game, ie. pure capitalism behind a facade of diplomacy and social concern.

Personally I would posit that the major area of conflict right now between China and the US is probably Burma, not some random server providing a pitifully limited window in to the vast bureaucratic engines of US governance.
OfficeMax, Office Depot mull merger: WSJ
Bigger than Vista? Or the red rings of death?
The point is to go out and meet (new) people physically and take a break from the online world.
In case you're wondering why this bill is unconstitutional, the EFF provides a good summary of the underlying issues and how the Supreme Court has ruled in the past:

https://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity

You'd think legislators would have read the Constitution before taking office, but yeah, I know I'm asking too much...
Essentially ...

"Competition from online retailers among factors driving deal talks"

Yet another example of how software is eating the world.
I honestly don't see the point in any prison sentences more than 5 years but less than life. There are many people who have done terrible things and deserve to be in prison forever, and for them I understand a life sentence. For everyone else, when is 5 years not enough? 5 years is a very, very long time and if we actually made an effort to rehabilitate you could teach a person a ton in 5 years. I think that for 90% of crimes criminals should be locked up for no more than 5 years and then placed on probation with mandatory psychological evaluation after that. If they are well-behaved and pass basic psychological tests, they have likely learned their lesson. The only reason I can see for longer non-life sentences is for people who serve multiple years and then become repeat offenders, they may lack the ability to be rehabilitated in a reasonable amount of time.
I hope (for your liver's sake) you stick to unit products like OxyContin or are really good at ice water extraction.
Have you ever played with Overtone? It's pretty awesome http://vimeo.com/22798433
If you also find little or no use for .bash_history, you can do this:

rm ~/.bash_history
ln -s ~/.bash_history /dev/null

(There's probably some .bashrc setting that turns off history, but I'm making it a goal in my life to know as little about bash configuration as I possibly can.)
I'd really rather something in the 11 inch range.

Still trucking on an eee PC 1000h, but I'm leaning towards the MBA 11 inch over this.
Amazon Web Services Is Going On A Sales Hiring Binge
The fact that they work independently of the newsroom and sometimes even independently of the company (as a contractor) is simply the nature of the public editor / ombudsman and how it is set up at pretty much every newspaper that has one.

Re: how the public editor at the Times is perceived: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html?_r=0. The money quote: "A writer shaken by a conclusion I was reaching told me, if you say that, I'll have to kill myself." I would hope your company's PR person wouldn't make you feel like that.

And a broader look at how journalists handle criticism: http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2010/06/why-cant-journalists-hand... but also http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/04/theres-no-problem-newsroo...

You can't really avoid having the public editor on the payroll of the organization he or she works for, unless some wealthy donor is prepared to step in and pay for one. That means we always have to be sceptical of where their loyalties lie and their independence, but it doesn't mean they don't have any.

Also, the New York Times is one of the only papers in the world that tracks errors internally, so they can easily see which of their journalists are playing fast and loose, and will let them go if necessary.

Is it perfect? Obviously not. Are journalists and editors generally really bad at owning up to their mistakes? Yep. But an ombudsman is an attempt to do something about that, not an extension of that culture.
That is a comment on the style of C that Bourne used in his shell implementation. He used the pre-processor to e.g. name { BEGIN, } END and do other Algol-isms.

Duff would apparently rather read C that was written in C.
commit systematic cyber espionage and data theft

Most nations have something like this these days (eg. Australia, France, Germany, Korea, UK, US.)

The US military terms this move toward constant low-level conflict with a focus on information warfare the RMA or Revolution in Military Affairs.

Also note that quoting five words of mandarin (五个汉字) may function may make a commercially produced report appear more authoritative, but in practice it probably demonstrates the opposite.
$ unset HISTFILE

The manpage for bash has many hidden gems
Essentially ...

"We just noticed something interesting: Amazon has about 75 job openings in sales related to Amazon Web Services, its cloud-computing business."

Amazon is muscling its way into the vast global enterprise market for cloud services.
I'm never going to achieve my dreams and accomplish what I want to accomplish

Stephen Stills famously said, or rather sang, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." Similarly, there are many dreams one can pursue, many things one can accomplish in life. If one dream turned out to be too far out there to reach, wait for the pain to pass (and trust me, it will), then go looking for a closer one. More often than not, it's right in front of your eyes. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
At least mention that purchasing power parity makes this less extreme than it sounds.
A Tale of Simvla and Svbtle
Bills like this are good for my blood pressure. Since they're so obviously illegal, I don't have to get worked up imagining what might happen if they pass.

Thank you, Representative Silverstein!
MeroCampus Creates an Online Marketplace for College Admissions in Nepal
The Era Of Giant Chain Stores Is Over — And They've Ruined America
You can write a book on the number of missteps and missed opportunities Microsoft had in the last 10-15 years. They missed the boat on everything from search, to web-mail, to social networks, to digital music, to smartphones.

>Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6

I remember when that news hit slashdot like it was yesterday. I remember because I got really angry at Microsoft and their idiocy. I actually thought ie6 was a decent browser, but there was no fuckin chance it was going to be-all and end-all of browsers. It was also the day that I really started looking for an alternative. Soon after, I installed Firebird beta and never looked back.
Avoiding Mistakes In Alternative Investments
A common argument is that it's easier to manufacture High-DPI displays for tablets and smart phones because you get fewer defects over a small surface.

But we're talking about a 13″ 1920×1080 laptop display here. The screen is not that big compared to the 10″ Nexus at 2560x1600.

Laptops really have to catch on.
The Mindset to Getting Things Done: Think Result-Oriented
Shameless plug for my html resume template, https://github.com/chucklarge/html-resume-template

I used to use LaTeX but couldn't figure out how to style it exactly as i needed.

If you do use LaTeX, use the \LaTeX function.
Essentially ...

"The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them."

and hackers are making that all happen!
It will be a part of the generated Gemfile, much like coffeescript is now.
The Existential Risk of Mathematical Error
Gotham Skies: an interface between people and residential rooftops
Here is the blog post of an application I'm working to let people visit residential rooftops.
No. I think parent is being a little sensationalist.

Graphical evidence that the war on drugs specifically is the problem: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/US_incarc...
> I don't know you, but I'm guessing you are somehow in love with javascript and invested in seeing it succeed.

I'm not. I just asked you two technical questions I was curious about, given what you said. If you had answered them, I might understand your position better.
> Most nations have something like this these days (eg. Australia, France, Germany, Korea, UK, US.)

Are you asserting that these nations have broken into non military infrastructure of some other nation they are at peace with?

You are also asserting that these countries are stealing corporate data.

Can you back that up? Do they compare with what China is doing?

> Also note that quoting five words of mandarin (五个汉字) may function may make a commercially produced report appear more authoritative, but in practice it probably demonstrates the opposite.

That doesn't hold for everyone. I agree with you that, in general, Mandarin is sort of fad-ish.
Thanks! It's perfect for me, but I get the sense that the only good todo app is the one you make yourself. That's why people without the ability to make one spend so much time switching back and forth.
China Unseats U.S. to Become World's Top Smart Device Market
I think the assertion may be that it's an IdeaPad and not a ThinkPad, lending to the consumer train of thought. I haven't ever heard good things about IdeaPad in the past, while the ThinkPad line seems to do a good job of maintaining core values of build quality and ruggedness. I'm not sure Lenovo did much for trying to carry over that line of thinking into the Idea lineup...

Maybe that has changed, but I'd have a hard time pulling the trigger on anything within that line unless I could use it first.
Zenefits (YC W13) Gives Startups A One-Stop Shop For Employee Benefits
Disbanded the IE rendering engine team.
Looks like his feed is full of vain calls for help to @christinemariek and @tolgakatas with the refrain "I'm in a lot of trouble right now." Sort of unnerving...
A little red notebook in the front seat is no match for digitally recorded driving logs, which Mr. Musk has used, in the most damaging (and sometimes quite misleading) ways possible, as he defended his vehicle’s reputation.

Personally I agree, and to the suggestion that people read the manual and blah blah blah...how many people in the real read it in detail? So this is /was more of real person test drive. Moral of the story: buy an electric car or a Tesla only for short term drives and if you are willing to go through a series of hoops to charge and care for it. From the review--and especially from Musk's attitude--Tesla would not be for me, even if I had the money.

Elon needs a rule, like holding off any comments for 24-48 hours, he needs to calm down. Driving 0.6 miles is not grounds for "he was trying to run the battery down on purpose to fake the interview." He is a loose cannon and does his company no service.
Chico does sound familiar for some reason, with regard to this guide (I also recall reading it many years ago, probably a decade ago or more). I skimmed through it quickly for a version history but didn't see one.
> I don't think that JS & DOM scripting can be pushed that much further, like I'm having a hard time imagining that say 5-10 years down the line JS applications will be able to compete with native, somewhat computationally heavy applications (which is what I assumed was the direction in which this whole web thing was going).

You're still not getting it. Native (i.e. compiled from C/C++) computationally-heavy applications is exactly what asm.js allows!

The fact that it's a subset of JS is a clever hack that gets over the backwards-compatibility problems, but don't let that fool you -- asm.js really is a low-level compilation target.
Essentially ...

"China and the U.S. also dwarf other countries in terms of device adoption. Year-over-year, China added 150 million new devices compared to last January, while the U.S. increased its total by 55 million."

Is your app suitable for the Chinese market?
Perhaps our anonymous troll was offended at Jacques Chester's implication that talking to people smarter than J.C. is an unusual occasion for J.C.