skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Net Neutrality is an interesting issue. I'm normally quite Libertarian when it comes to politics, and the standard Libertarian view is to keep the government away from regulating the internet and let the market work.

However, there's not much competition when it comes to infrastructure. Most of the major players have significant capital investments and have been receiving government subsidies to build out their network. So, short of a large technology breakthrough (mesh wireless networking?), there seems to be a huge barrier to entry for new competitors. Furthermore, attempts to improve the situation are being fought (http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/07/telco-wont-instal...).

Then we have the internet, which has spawned an incredibly active and competitive market with little-to-no entry cost. If we didn't have something like Net Neutrality, then this market would be at risk. Small startups wouldn't have the capital required to partner with ISP's and would have difficulty competing on their merit alone. So, the question becomes, do we let government stifle competitive practices in a market that's already subsidized and has a large barrier to entry, or do we risk stifling competition in our most promising new market?

If the infrastructure business was more open and competitive, then I'd say let the market solve the issue and keep government out of it. However, that's not the case, so I think Net Neutrality is the better option for now.
That just shows that "the best research in compilers/languages" doesn't address the important problems as perceived by the software community.
I guess I wasn't very clear, because that's one of the points I was trying to make.
Plus... there's a graphic at bottom of news.ycombinator.com to a FireFox extension: http://www.webmynd.com/html/hackernews.html
The same reasoning works well when considering whether you'd like to sign up for a service. If I'm going to have to spend hours on the phone with machines and inept customer-service people, do I really want this service? Or, at the very least, do I want to patronize this company?
I'm not talking about a difference of degree where one stimulant is "more powerful" than the other, but in the nature of the effects. "CNS stimulant" is a very vague term which glosses over really major differences between, say, amphetamine and caffeine.

I'm not sure in what sense you mean "zero sum" but it isn't true of amphetamine in the senses that come to mind.
I'm fascinated by all aspects of aviation, as a pilot (private, low-time) and a software designer. Aviation has a lot in common with software design. Computer systems would be much better if we made them with the same attention to priorities that aircraft designers have - keep it simple, make it easy to maintain, treat control systems as an extension of human behavior, use redundancy in mission-critical subsystems, and build testing and error reporting in from the beginning. Did this crash happen because of some edge case that wasn't covered by the unit tests? Aircraft and software designers both want to maximize uptime but aircraft designers are fanatical about it.
We just got a definite date on friday. We'll post an announcement soon. It's going to be at Berkeley.
Webvan in the Clouds?
The main idea of the article, namely wasting tax payers money (1), is probably the most interesting thing.

Regarding security, sure foreign spies don't need that kind of information. But how about the average "joe" who holds a grudge against him, who just wants to "scare" him a little bit?

(1)

"A great deal of taxpayers' money has been spent over the past several decades making sure he and his family are protected from security compromises. Well, it doesn't seem to be very relevant anymore, does it?"
That extra "no" is pretty ridiculous.
stucked on the last one.. could you give me a hint please?
Why'd you/your family decide to go to Australia? Is there a large former Soviet population there?
$1.5MM is impressive. i'd be curious as to how much time was spent marketing. they say "build it and they will come" but if you do an internet archive search on facebook, they had to compete with friendster who was already an established player (and myspace was too). not to mention, there were probably 2 or 3 identical ideas starting up at other colleges, particularly cornell. one fascinating thing is that facebook had tons of media coverage early on, it appears they were being disseminated by the media within days or weeks of the service launching.

i would be interested in knowing how sam got odioworks started. you hear stories about reddit, and they had a few guys making it look like an already established service (which fueled further growth). until you cross that chasm, what was done to achieve growth? these are the questions i ask every start up founder.
What if it could self-regulate drug delivery so you wouldn't have to take a pill every four hours?

What if it could track and store fine-grain biometrics and thereby better help your doctor make treatment decisions?

What if it could monitor your health, and contact your doctor if you're incapacitated?

What if it could save your life in some other way?
Would the threat of slicing off your arm not work equally well in getting you to give up your password? It certainly would for me.
"Show password as you type?"

I think that would be a bad idea. User normally go the way of least resistance. If you allow this in the next iteration of the software the default would be checked because of too many complaints etc.
Are you saying composting does not work? In Montreal, we have major universities with industrial size anaerobic digesters in the downtown core. They work there.
Actually the posted title is just the title of one chapter (#10) of a book entitled:

Flash with Drupal: Build dynamic content-rich Flash CS3 and CS4 applications for Drupal 6

Hopefully that'll help someone figure if they really want to go through the Scribd
Please don't use WEP anymore. WEP is totally broken and with 5000-10000 packets you can easily guess the used keys.

Don't do it. Don't use WEP.
Mathematica vs. Matlab vs. Python
Is it really so cheap? If so, it seems that it should be possible to create a mechanism which could cover these fees for open-source projects. Perhaps someone like Mozilla or Canonical or other open-source advocates could create a fund for such things? In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to pay licensing fees for this. But this seems a small price to pay for a standard video codec. Is there anything like this for .mp3 support?
Typically a link with no comment should present an obvious answer. A link to an outdated update with a vague answer hardly qualifies.

Thanks for the update, PG.
Teen hacker releases Windows and Mac jailbreaking programs for iPhone 3G S
A reference implementation based on what spec?
Whatever the authors of the reference implementation felt like writing. Just like all the major browsers that are supposedly "standards compliant", but without pretending to be something it's not.

(People don't want a standard saying how to play videos on the web. They want to be able to say <video src="foo.video"> and have it work for all their users, including those using free software.)
Sharurl: Lessons Learned Developing a New Startup
This sounds like it could be a movie. Who's the Clarence Beeks?
Journalistic narcissism
Comparing Human Echo location to a Dolphin is highly unfair, at least for the human. The Dolphins brain has specifically adapted to use this technique and it is quite impressive. Dolphins are actually able to see through things which block their view of an object. Meaning that they can distinguish objects without actually seeing them directly.

Here is more on this:

http://www.guba.com/watch/2000977386?duration_step=0&fie...
Weird, I'm not tagged in any of the same photos as the people who show up on mine. But I friended all of them relatively recently.
Andreessen Launches $300M firm to do investments $50k and up
Much more information on this topic including video and the alleged photos can be found here:

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1197562/MI6-chief...
As lanaer said, "<-" is really syntax sugar for ">>=" (bind), and could mean a variety of things (including assignment). "=" is binding a variable, as in "let", and is not symmetric. One could argue that a better name for "=" would be "->", as in "case".

(Comparison, which is symmetric, is "==".)
Awesome to hear the announcement. Sucks that this is the first pmarca blog post in nearly a year.

I really hope he starts back up again; many of his posts have been absolute gems.
His copyright methods are also interesting.

http://thedjbway.org/license_free.html
"I think it is a replicated result among students of gifted students that they GAIN ground intellectually during the summer school vacation"

The way you phrase that makes it sound like there are studies that show this. Do you know of any, or are you just saying that was true for you and others you know?
Actually Dan Kaminsky commented on DNSCurve and said it to be very clever and interesting but not realizable because it costs too much. Costs in this sense is the requirement of machines to realize this. If you substitute the current DNS infrastructure with DNSCurve you need a lot more systems to handle the current load.

(Info)
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2906.en.h...

(links to mp4, mp3, etc.)
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/wiki/Conference_Recording...

(mp4)
http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/congress/25C3/video_h264_720x576/2...

So dnscurve is really great, but if we need two or three times the systems to realize it nobody is going to implement it for real usage.
Happy 1000 days to HN
Thanks everyone, esp. pg, for all the great links and learning. I'm not sure we'd be on our development path without this backbone of like minds. To 1000 more days!
The main issue here is that all other services build upon the "Federation" of DNS. Meaning, e.g. google, microsoft, and all kind of other companies don't trust each other but fundamentally they are connected by DNS which allows all kinds of scary attacks.

Solving the problem with Crypto is cool, SSL Userland Certificates was also such a try but is not going to work because in this case the costs outweigh the benefits. Meaning that the increased crypto will require us to run many more machines to serve current loads of DNS usage.

There are also attempts to build crypto direct into the TCP/IP aehm. ISO OSI model as a more fundamental approach to really encrypt all traffic. If this ever will be realized on a greater scale is doubtful again because people tend to look at the costs/benefit/trouble tradeoff. (in favor of costs).
He does a wonderful job of putting into words what I, an American, like about the U.S. I'm glad somebody else sees our enthusiasm, optimism, and naivety in the same positive light I sometimes do. I just want to stress that I found his insightful appreciation of the United States the most enjoyable aspect of the article before quoting this most hilarious and quotable criticism:

"So let me look again at that holy text: ‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ Huh? But… but… Lemons are amongst the best and most wonderful gifts of nature. They are adaptable, versatile and delicious. A slice for your gin and tonic – juice to zing life into salads, stews, fish and seafood. Oil and sweetness from the rind and zest that is pure and perfumed and precious. They are a staple of what doctors agree is the best dietary regimen we can follow. So if life gives you lemons, shout ‘Thank you, Life, thank you!’ But the American response is ‘make lemonade,’ in other words – just add sugar and sell it."
Hacker Hacker News - see just the programming/math/science links from HN
Why IKEA Is Fed Up with Russia
Google code cloud punts on-demand embarrassment
As in mathematics, some of the best software research can be very hard for practitioners to recognize, appreciate, learn and apply.

Part of the reason is developers rarely get the opportunity to try out research ideas until enough success stories about them become mainstream. I remember looking into Erlang years ago around the time some folks I knew at Sendmail were looking into it but unfortunately nobody at my company would use it. It was too weird at the time. But if I were working on the same thing today I could easily reassure people by pointing to things like Amazon SimpleDB.

These days I'd like to see more mainstream publications about checking and reasoning tools like SPIN[1] and Coq[2] and techniques like Proof Carrying Code[3] so that I can convince my management and peers to try them out.

1- http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html

2- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq

3- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-carrying_code
Random selection of people I've been in pictures with.

edit: they've tagged me in their photo, or i've tagged them in mine. age of picture is all over the place, so not just recent ones.
I don't know; that sort of seems cliché to me. It also seems like something that sounds profound but isn't. I've never really found myself trying to buy something I wouldn't get if it was free.
J-w-x.com-Website Review Blo
His website review site is very useful site where you can find various reviews about different sites on net.
So doesn't Theora just win? Most Mac users seem to use Firefox, so Safari has a marketshare just a touch above Chrome. Still essentially a rounding error.
In nearly 35 years, I have not lost a watch, nor a wallet. I have nearly lost a finger a few times (don't turn on a drill while you are messing with the chuck).

I have also lost a lot of skin from different parts of my body.

For a chip to stay, would need to be somewhere inconvenient and deep. Certainly nowhere convenient that a reader could reach, unless its RFID style in which case I have other concerns...
It is unfortunate that someone so geeky doesn't take the kind of approach PG does, with the YC application. It seems to me a detailed application and a video should be the preferred way for a VC to screen deals.

I've hired great people based on personal referrals, but I've also hired great people based on resumes and interviews...

That said, I'm really excited for them and can't wait to see who they invest in and what the outcome is.
Social Skydiving with a Code Monkey Day 13: Hard (with etherpad)
Who cares? Really?

I would hope that anybody taking "cognitive enhancers" would care. It seems entirely relevant that one should know the difference between normal brain functioning and drug-induced brain functioning. My concern is that there is a trend towards not knowing the difference, and that this is being applauded.

You're too concerned about the mechanism rather than the effect.

I am specifically talking about the effect. It is different. It is not, in your words, "enhancing your natural cognitive abilities". You cannot honestly argue that it is the same as a natural state of focus while simultaneously claiming that the point is to have unnatural kind of focus.

And yes, I regard the distinction between natural and unnatural states as important when it impacts things like (say) competition for top-tier education.

That people such as you are so strongly opposed is a sign that you're not objective about the issue

I have no idea what this means. You seem to be rejecting the validity of my opinion because it does not agree with yours. That's...deft.

People willingly take far worse and far less safe drugs off the street just to get high. Those who use prescription drugs like Ritalin off label to enhance work or study performance are not the people you need to be concerned with.

Taking Ritalin to "enhance work or study performance" is getting high. The effect of the drug is the same regardless of whether you take it to study or not. Why have we recently gotten a free pass to class it up by calling it "cognitive enhancement"?

People have historically taken all kinds of drugs for performance reasons, be they legal, illegal, or legal but illegally obtained--many to famously great effect. What changed to allow us to use such different terminiology for the same act? What is the effect on our culture of continuing to do so? And why should I not be concerned with changing social norms?
I think it is a replicated result among students of gifted students that they GAIN ground intellectually during the summer school vacation, because they pursue their own intellectual interests by independent reading and aren't slowed down by the school curriculum.

Malcom Gladwell cites something similar in his book, Outliers - a study which showed that economically advantaged (high SES) kids progress in reading/math skills over the summer, while low SES students either stay within similar scores or score worse on reading/math tests over the summers. And by "something similar", I suppose I mean "the exact opposite" - kids whose parents engaged them in academic activities over the summer gained intellectually, while those left to "pursue their interests without a curriculum" fell behind.
What ho My hero, PG Wodehouse (by Stephen Fry, January 18, 2000)
I made this in a few hours for my own personal use and thought that other people might want to use it, too. It uses a Python Bayesian classifier trained on about 200 hand-labeled links and outputs a static HTML file. It's not perfect (and the technical/non-technical distinction is arbitrary), but I'll give it some more training data and see if it improves. Also, I don't mean to disparage non-technical topics with this; sometimes I just want to read about programming, though

I'd appreciate any feedback on this.
This article is slightly inaccurate in its depiction of my previous company. It didn't explain how OdioWorks makes most of its revenue and it didn't give enough credit to the person who currently runs the company. Maybe I'll write a blog article about it someday.
The problem with patent licensing and open-source software is that patent license agreements are usually geared towards shipping physical items (such as DVD players, etc.) Commercial, proprietary software tries very much to behave like physical items (one single producer, building and shipping items to to customers) so patent terms like "20c per unit" work quite well.

Open-source, on the other hand, has a most unphysical habit of proliferating without the original creator's involvement. If Canonical promises to pay 20c per CD they ship, and 10% of those CDs are imaged and torrented and downloaded and burnt and re-imaged and re-shared all over the web, nobody knows how many "units" are out there, and there's no reasonable way Canonical (or Mozilla, or any other prospective licensee) can comply with any patent license more complicated than "do whatever you want".
I don't remember what the mp3 situation is - it's probably on Wikipedia. Your fund idea is pretty good, but if it's client-side chances are you can either reference graphics card hardware on newer systems or be exempted on older ones (which might not be an issue anyway, as it's quite processor-intensive and doesn't run that well on older CPUs). You can email them on the website if you dig around.
Ask your buddies who have doctors in the family.
Wodehouse Saved my Life (by Hugh Laurie, May 27, 1999)
Passwords are better in a number of ways. If the data is really important, you can always carry around a suicide pill, and know that if you die, your data dies.

For more normal data, you have the opportunity to give up your data in tiers. If someone threatens to cut off your arm, give them a password that unlocks most of your data. You can have another password for the super-secret stuff. They are happy that they got your data, and you get to keep your arm (and super-secret data).

Basically, you can have decoy passwords and accounts, but you can't have a decoy arm-with-RFID-chip.
I am sure that's fine. People get pacemakers all the time without a second thought. What the OP doesn't want is a remotely readable chip that stores your identity.
Not sure about other countries but in Australia you go to a GP, explain your problem and he will then send you to a specialist. The specialist will consult with you and if you do your homework you can ask him to prescribe X and if you're making sense and there's no contra-indications he'll do it.
Japanese Used Vehicles for Zambia and Kenya
In Africa, Zambia and Kenya are heavy importers of Japanese used vehicles. Recently these countries have changed the import regulations for used Japanese vehicles. Pre-shipment inspection by JEVIC is now necessary for importing used Japanese cars to Zambia and Kenya. Read this article for details about the new import regulations for these countries.
Entrepreneurs should help Entrepreneurs – Scaling the Power of Philanthropy
Excellent work; I am worried that I am going to have to start my own social news site to get away from all the time-wasting general interest stuff here. This will save me from having to do that for a while.
This sounds pretty awesome. Would you mind posting some of the code?

I'd be curious to know how you're formatting the input data. If you're just using the title, all of the text parsed through BeautifulSoup, some parsing algorithm to obtain the body of the article, etc.

Not too long ago, I wrote a python script to automatically extract the bodies of articles, which you may find useful: http://blog.davidziegler.net/post/122176962/a-python-script-...
I'd love to see a threshold setting. Something like "show only above 50%" so that your visitors can adjust the visible links even further. Otherwise I love the site :)
Totally agree. This community is amazing. It is still the perfect place to separate the noise from the outside world. I hope to learn more from everyone here in the future.
I worked in Bayesian spam filters for a while at the last day job. Wonderful things, aren't they?

I've got to say, your classifier looks like it is amazingly accurate for those distinctions. I'd be really interested in seeing some of the very determinative words. (There are some obvious candidates like "Erlang" and "Twitter" but every time I do a natural language processing project I'm amazed by how our distribution of "little meaningless words" changes markedly between FeatureA and FeatureB.)
Web Infrastructure is the Entry Ticket for Andreessen's New Fund
What is the point of standards if everyone is going to ignore them?

That's the point. That's why that part was removed. If Theora had been mandated, Apple would have ignored it. If h264 had been mandated, Mozilla would have ignored it.
I saw the those Microsoft/Google exchange as two people talking past each other. I find it hard to believe Google doesn't have different KPI for Google Maps vs. say, Google Books. I mean one involves scanning books, the other involves mapping data. It's all fine and good to say everything has to be 'fast', but I doubt that's the level the development teams approach the problems internally.

Also, if MS does develop it's own edge technology, of course they would re-use it in the products were edge technology makes sense. I may not be appropriate to use it across the board, ie: maybe a CDN would help with virtual earth, but is it really necessary for travel data, which changes more often? I seriously doubt MS would re-invent the wheel over and over for all their online products. I know people who work there and this isn't how they work.
I read it as a PR piece for Lift.
Imagine the following more dramatic version:

"If you deactivate your account, we'll kill this kitten."

Same essential principle.

If you want a detailed ethical analysis, it would have something to do with saying that your friends will miss you, as though they're asking you to stay, when they said no such thing.
Backup2Mail: Now Easily Backup And E-Mail MySQL Databases Automatically
No 'Little House on the [Prarie, other locations]'? Oh dear. I grew up in Ireland, but these simple documentary novels of life in in the 19th century west were both exciting, informative, and humbling. I am looking forward to reading them to my children.
Note that this article is dated 2005. Much has changed since then--for instance, Python has migrated almost universally from Numeric to NumPy for scientific computation.