skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll likely get downmodded for this, but someone has to speak truth to poster:

There's no way to read Amazon-protected content without using an Amazon-approved device (Kindle, Kinde for iPhone) or cracking the DRM. Cracking the DRM is illegal. I don't care how justified you think you are in doing it, ethically the situation is a simple one: play by the rules or don't play. Is that really so hard?

Remember, not only is purchasing-then-cracking DRM against the law and morally ambiguous, it also gives the sponsors of the protected content artificial financial incentive to continue in their DRM ways -- a situation I think we all agree we would like to see end sooner rather than later. If you're really so indignant about not being able to backup your $6000 investment or whatever, the only winning move is not to play.
Look, if the argument is that Google products are poorly designed and so the user experience isn't as good as it could be if you had a "real designer", then take Yahoo BOSS and build your own damn engine with a nice design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrotizing_fasciitis

These are rare, but strep throat is pretty common.
The only reason to hire the majority of that IT "talent" was the cheaper rates, not some outstanding brilliant achievments or skills. I think the guy is lobbying the interests of those bodyshops, that make tons of money selling developers from other countries. Also how many H1B holders actually get "postgraduate US education"? Not so many, I am afraid.
When you summarize the article this way (and I think this is a correct summary), it's pretty obvious that Declan is misrepresenting Lessig's current position.

Declan is probably right that this was once Lessig's view. Larry saw the frightening possibility that software coders could use their powers to restrict our rights and freedoms, and saw protective legislation as the best remedy.

As Declan points out, it is clear that legislators will not remedy this problem. What Declan omits, however, is that Lessig figured this out too, several years ago.

His current view is that there is another force to counteract this encroachment on consumers' rights: the consumers themselves. Ultimately, like a good lawyer, Lessig still believes that the law is the solution to protecting rights. But rather than hoping for the law to come down from on high, he hopes to harness grassroots power to voice change from below.

This is what prompted his recent shift in academic focus to fighting "corruption" in politics, through his "Change Congress" movement. His argument is that if Congress is too "corrupt" (he has a special definition of "corrupt," I won't get into that), then good laws will never come about.

(Here's a link: http://change-congress.org/ )
Subreddits are pretty distinct AFAIK.
Thank you all for the great comments
Refreshing Firefox from, and Other Thoughts on, Emacs
I don't agree, from the blog it makes it sound like it really became an arms race - he was more interested in 'winning' than in serving his users.

Once he was outed, he realized what he'd done and came to his senses.
World's Most Reputable Companies: The Rankings
This article would be a lot more amusing if they took the opposite angle: "Times of economic growth obscure the fact that a large percentage of Americans graduate with no practical skills, and still get decent paying jobs."
apparently the is a part of Kumo, which is v2 of the powersearch team ( post acquisition ).

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235400-16.html

at a YC meetup i talked with a few of the powersearch guys and they seemed like pretty big fans of f# at the time.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/fs...
A corporation is simply a contractual agreement between people. If a husband and wife share ownership of a house, the government cannot search or seize the house. If a hundred shareholders share ownership of a factory, they are still protected from the government searching or seizing the factory.

Perhaps the judge in the Santa Clara case made the right decision for the wrong reason. I do think it's incorrect to view the corporation as a "person". A corporation is a contractual agreement concerning shared property. A corporation does not have rights, the people who own it have rights (which in practice is the same thing).
Thus, you can parallelize an attack using lots of specialized ASICs...

More to the point, you can parallelize attacks on most KDFs by building an ASIC with many copies of a password-cracking circuit. With scrypt, the vast majority of the IC area (and thus cost) is RAM.
The H-1B program has been discredited by study after study. US Innovation did not suddenly begin with the presence of foreign "talent". Indeed if you examine the impact of this talent in their own countries you'll see that there is very little innovation coming from those geographies when the talent is there. Think about it, why would a country encourage it's most skilled to come to the US in the first place? Because the best talent in the world is right here and they want their citizens to gather knowledge from the most innovative system and bring it back home. The H-1B program exports our most valuable resource - our competitive edge.
Kaizen was one of my areas of research for grad studies in Management Accounting. All of the case studies I looked at (which were usually implemented by Asian companies after the US dismissed the guy who came up with the concept of Kaizen, which led to its perceived roots as a Japanese business philosophy) focused on one thing only, and that was precisely elimination of the amount of disposables produced in any production environment: specifically manufacturing environments.

Essentially, Kaizen is summed up to be "continuous improvement" . . . regarding units of quality produced but there's another metric to be considered, and that is the amount of "scrap" or waste produced in creating X level of quality. Of course, along this route, the statistical metrics can be taken a bit too far.

There is a fine line between rigidity in standards for perceived quality and room for innovation; sometimes the line is too fine.
Sadly i don't have time to write a fuller post on this, to my regret.

But i definitely agree with Paul Graham on this subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

If one pays attention carefully there are many opportunities for projects that present themselves weekly. Some of your ideas will be bad, some of them good. But just keep thinking of things that may be cool to work on.

I think the important part of finding ideas has nothing to do with programming. You should find a subject you're interested in and something that you think would be cool to accomplish to help others.
I was born in 1980. Which generation am I officially a part of? I honestly don't know, and I truly don't care...

I didn't mean to be a generationalist, but after having taught these kids in grad school, I don't have the highest opinion of them, to be frank. And, indeed, the baby-boomers f*cked up big time... and it sucks that everyone has to pay for the mistakes of a few.
Standard Oil also lowered the cost of fuel by a significant amount, improving the lives of many across the nation.
The design is a step below PlentyofFish (ASP as well - a pattern?), but just because its bad doesn't make it effective.

I'd at least have featured members who happen to be good looking - yet still normal - on the front instead of just new members.
In the world of encryption algorithms, you never, ever assume that some guy's new scheme is bullet proof. It takes years of testing before you can firmly say that an algorithm doesn't have weaknesses.

This guy, by announcing that his brand new algorithm just made bcrypt obsolete, is only showing his ignorance.
It seems to recreate the file and return the current time, which is the time that the file was recreated. Is this supposed to be a joke, or have I let my Perl knowledge get too rusty?
Save your first programs, even print them out.

Yes! I wish I had done that. I vividly remember writing my first programs when I was a kid; alas, the code is gone forever now. I really should've printed it out.
I was intrigued by the Adam Smith quote:

>[Adam Smith] says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

I read the context around that Adam Smith quote. As I interpret it, Smith's solution was not preventing the division of labor; it was improving education.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations...generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

...

[C]ommon people...have little time to spare for education. Their parents can scarce afford to maintain them even in infancy. As soon as they are able to work they must apply to some trade by which they can earn their subsistence.

...

But though the common people cannot, in any civilised society, be so well instructed as people of some rank and fortune, the most essential parts of education, however, to read, write, and account, can be acquired at so early a period of life that the greater part even of those who are to be bred to the lowest occupations have time to acquire them before they can be employed in those occupations. For a very small expense the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of
the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

The public can facilitate this acquisition by establishing in every parish or district a little school, where children may be taught for a reward so moderate that even a common labourer may afford it...In Scotland the establishment of such parish schools has taught almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to
write and account...If in those little schools the books, by which the children are taught to read, were a little more instructive than they commonly are, and if, instead of a little smattering of Latin, which the children of the common people are sometimes taught there, and which can scarce ever be of any use to them, they were instructed in the elementary parts of geometry and mechanics, the literary education of this rank of people would perhaps be as complete as it can be.

...

The public can impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education, by obliging every man to undergo an examination or probation in them before he can obtain the freedom in any corporation, or be allowed to set up any trade either in a village or town corporate.

Smith just wanted public education. He didn't mention preventing the division of labor.
Zipf's Law and the Internet [pdf]
what do you think about this project? (extend and embrace all over again?)

why would someone use axum over hypertable and thrift?

what is the performance trade off between axum, hypertable, and hadoop(hbase).
Interesting how the last few paragraphs on Taboo relate closely to this Paul Graham Essay:
http://paulgraham.com/say.html
"The second problem is that it will likely reduce the penetration of the application. Remember, one of my goals is to help patients get better health care. I'd hate for a couple of dollars to stand in the way."

The phone costs 300 dollars and the minimum plan is, what 80 bucks a month? And this is a health app that saves people money? Free versus 2 bucks is a false choice.

Charge 80 dollars. Yes, I'm serious.
When the velocities are low you will probably observe non-relativistic two-body Coulomb scattering, which is mathematically no different from the Newtonian interaction between a planetoid and the Sun.

Dude, what does that mean?

Dude, google it if you want to know: http://www.google.com/search?q=coulomb+scattering

Can you solve the problem I raised or not?

This I believe I have already answered above.
Sizzling Hot Deepika Padukone Sexy Photos & Wallpapers
Please don't slow them down. I generally support the idea of free market economics, and the H1-B program is an absolute subversion of it. Countries need an immigration policy. We should develop one consistent path to citizenship that is equitable and moderates the influx of immigrants at a sustainable level. If these skilled workers were truly on an even playing field with US workers then I think it would be a much better result for them, the US workers, and the country as a whole.
Disclosure: I am a Nigerian hacker, living in Nigeria and working on a startup

Hey, way to piss off peers and alienate friends and potential partners. Some blog posts should submitted to a "thought" queue before being published. Wordpress should have a plugin for that.
I'm having trouble picturing any savvy investor going for something like this.
> who buys an SLR without knowing how to use it

When I bought my first guitar I didn't know how to play it.

Generally you buy things to learn them.
Oh wow, the cat's out of the bag now. I think majority of people are not aware of this side of Tumblr. The company has to though, and since it's in violation of their TOS, I don't know why they have not done anything about it yet. Perhaps they bring a lot of traffic? I don't care for these mature tumblogs as long as they are not being promoted or anything like that.
I think we should do something about the bait-y titles on HN in general. Titles should be descriptive and succinct.

Sometimes the same story is posted multiple times. One post will have a bait-y title and the other will have a boringly accurate and truthful title. Of those two, one of them always disappears with 3 or 4 votes and the other climbs the front page charts. Exhibit A:

A Comparison of Approaches to Large-Scale Data Analysis: MapReduce vs. DBMS
vs.
Parallel DBMSs faster than MapReduce

Then there are the science articles with accurate titles and hypetastic titles. Exhibit B:

Long-Distance Teleportation Between Two Atoms Achieved
vs.
Scientist Teleport Matter More Than Three Feet

So, it's not like the descriptive titles aren't already there waiting to be promoted, it's just that hyperbole always wins in the marketplace of up-arrow clicks.
I've found it a great way to learn those tricks. Once I've solved a problem, working through the way somebody else did it, perhaps in an order of magnitude less time or in an idiomatically different language, has often given me a deeper understanding of the problem. I've learned a couple algorithmic tricks that way, too.

Also, there are some paired problems where the first is small enough to be feasible by a naive solution, but the second would take far too long, and you have to figure out the trick. There's a pair that requires finding the maximum path down a pyramid of numbers, for example, and the second pyramid is several times taller.
TennisTweets.com - Tweet Your Favourite Tennis Stars
Next time you want to write a poem, just poegle it
did you recently learn how to read?
That seems to be how it always goes, though. Each "generation" thinks the previous one is incapable, incompetent, or over-privileged. The young attack the old who they feel don't understand. They rebel. Again and again.

I'm just saying that the argument is tired and over-general. "Generations" or semi-birth-year-based orderings (class of '09) have only the slightest commonalities.
A Wolfram Alpha review from someone who actually understands computational science
Many, however, just need the realization that "there has to be a better way to implement this". If you're just brute forcing the answer, and have no clue, turning to Google for efficient Fibonacci routines or whatnot is fine, because you've just taught yourself some new mathematical concept.
Ask HN: Just lost my year long placement because they have no work. Begging for advice 
I'm a student programmer (mainly c++/c# exp) currently living in England, my placement office only found very ill fitting placements (e.g IT Manager) for someone only interested in becoming a great developer (I wanted a placement where I could learn from more experienced programmers). I found a company that I thought would be great and managed to go through the whole interview process etc, then at the very last second said they can't take me on.

I'm now faced with difficult decisions. My options are:

1) Go straight into my final year at university.

2) Continue desperately looking for a placement, it needs to start in the next two months to be considered part of my course.

3) Try to get funding and continue work on one of my entrepreneurial side-projects full-time for a year, then go into my final year.

As you can imagine I'm a bit scared and annoyed, mainly at myself. I wasn't stupid enough to willingly put all my eggs in one basket, I just couldn't find any more baskets. I even had to tell my best friends at university to sign for a house without me because they'd already waited too long just in case.

I doubt 3 is a good idea, I have no cash flow and no savings, so if worst comes to worst I have no way to support myself. I also really don't want to go straight into my final year because I'll be foregoing a great opportunity and I'm dying to actually work with other developers (yes I'm looking at open source projects to satisfy that).

I've been searching every job website I can find and emailing anyone who seems like they're in a position in which they could help.

I'd love to be somewhere where I can be mentored.

I know, I know, I'm a whiny little kid who didn't get what he wanted and now expects other people to help. I'll gladly take that stigma if I get just one useful comment helping me move forward.
My first 'major' project was writing a Lisp interpreter from scratch. Looking back on it, my implementation was horrible, the design atrocious, and the extensibility null. However, I remember how AWESOME it was at the time to be able to run my code on my own interpreter. What mattered most about that project wasn't the program itself: it was what I learned in the process. I guess my point is, no matter how shitty your code is, you learned something from writing it. So don't wait for a 'firm foundation' to start hacking away, just dive in and feel free to screw up. Just don't screw up in the same way the next time you do it.
> Given that, in the US, government intervention mostly seems to consist of busting monopolies,

Oh really? How are you measuring "mostly"? I see millions of patents. I see thousands of govt franchises.

> I'm just a bit wary of the statement that no monopoly can exist without government support.

I'm confused why anyone would think that a govt that "busts monopolies" couldn't also support them.

> all manner of cartels, trusts, etc. have been devoted to nothing more or less than bringing the operation of the free market to an end, as quickly and effectively as possible.

You're forgetting that a cartel or trust can only "regulate" behavior of its members. It can't affect transactions between third parties unless govt steps in.

Yes, one can imagine a situation where a cartel owns all of the relevant resource, but, apart from patents, that's quite rare.
Why are nigerian hackers so smart?
Well, why not?

Maybe the French spend it on different, more effective things than the Danes. Maybe the French have better health care. Maybe the French have better food. Maybe you're totally wrong about the statistics. I don't know enough about the subject to make an informed comment.

All I know for sure, is that "correlation does not imply cause" is not an argument. We study correlations because when we find them, they usually point the way to interesting phenomena. If we discounted the meaning of every correlation as mere coincidence, there would be no point in searching for them at all.
Do you think Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Goldman Sachs go out of their way to hire foreigners just because they are cheaper?
Given the options listed above, provided option 1 is financially viable for you, I might suggest going with that. I know that may be disappointing, just going on to the final year of university, but that might be the safe bet.

Also, QA is a good "entry point" for aspiring developers. People transfer to and from QA from development all the time. I am in the automation side of QA, so I am kind of in that gray nether world between QA and development, since my job is to develop, but the deliverables I work on are test scripts, rather than the product deliverable. So if you are starting out, just getting a QA job is at least a foot in the door.

So I might say, that, to play it safe, given your current situation you might want to go ahead and plan on just continuing with university - if I am not mistaken I think this is still largely subsidized by Whitehall since in theory the subsidy is offset by the graduate tax - correct me if I am wrong there, but if I am right, this should be viable for you. But then, also, on the side, I'd keep my eye out still for gigs, even if just part-time, or looking towards when you graduate, and I would keep QA in mind as an option, since if you do well in that and demonstrate your technical competencies, often there is opportunity to segue to more technical stuff in QA (i.e., automation), and from there, often into development. Good luck.
I am very interested in photography. Can you please suggest a good D-SLR and a good book for a newbie? Thanks!
There's little innovation in (say) India and China because talent is not enough; you need capital and free markets.

Also, as far as I know countries do not "encourage" their citizens to go to US. Individuals choose to go to US on their own. It's not like they're embarking on a government-funded trip.
Why wouldn't they? For a profit-seeking entity, lower costs seems like a good reason to me.
I realise you're only regurgitating what you saw on a Youtube clip linked to by reddit, but you do realise that standard mobile ('cell') phone conversations don't use satellites don't you?

Anyway, RIP Fravia
Yes,

Instead of hiring a junior/mid-level American expert as an assistant, for example, they get a highly qualified foreign expert at the same price.
A corporation has legal "personhood" independent of its managers and stockholders, in the sense that if the corporation becomes insolvent, its creditors can only get at the assets of the corporation itself. You can't get this kind of protection with contracts alone, which is why a new legal structure was created for corporations.
A cup of chai
Wow. Great site.

"I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short, I was afraid."
Canon Rebel XSi.. got a nice balance. The next version was announced, so expect to see price drops pretty soon (or get the XTi, which is the latest)
Just teach lambda calculus and get it over with. That stuff's awesome without having to bring in scaly beings. Dealing with these inane pictures just adds too much overhead. I remember when we were learning about these in class - I was so confused about the ambiguities in the alligator representation, but everything became clear once we switched to mathematical notation. I'm quite convinced I would have learned it perfectly fine without these images.

This is a big problem with education today, IMO - trying to make everything 'fun' by dumbing it down and giving it pictures. Even college textbooks have started talking to me as if I were an 8-year-old. I prefer the converse - when I was 8, reading high school textbooks from the decade prior. I didn't understand much, but it was still quite interesting.
BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code
These might be good exercises, say, for getting the basics of a new programming language. But not really for interesting projects. They don't involve making configuration files, command-line or graphical interfaces, networking, etc. They're hardly something you'll want to use later.
Whether it be 1995 or 2009. Noam Chomsky is an idiot.