skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I understand it, axod offered financial incentives aplenty but freenode wasn't interested.

Freenode's position seems to be that they will never trust any third party, no matter what that third party does. The most oft-repeated argument on #freenode was not about the hassle of dealing with bad users (everyone, including axod, agreed with the sentiment of mibbit and freenode working together to resolve those), but that it was actually not possible for mibbit to do anything to resolve that problem.

I'm sure you don't like to hear that, but I sat on that channel for a long while reading what was being said, and Freenode were behaving like a bunch of power-tripping bureaucrats. Every time axod, or anyone else, asked "what can mibbit do, concretely, to make you happy?" the answer was either "make mibbit open-source" or "nothing", or, "axod should have discussed this with us a year ago, it's too late now".

It's a real shame for an IRC network with the legacy of freenode to behave like that. I had a lot of respect for freenode prior to this, but I don't have much left after today. The sad thing is it wouldn't take much effort on the part of freenode to regain that respect... so I'm hoping you and your freenode colleagues come to a saner decision and work with axod to resolve this in an amicable fashion.
I think the tool required to access a service is pretty darned important in determining your audience. Case 1: September 1993 (AOL on USENET). Case 2: Hacker News (intentionally plain design compared to, e.g., Reddit or Digg).

Scenario #0: people will keep using mibbit, because it's convenient and what they used before, and harass IRC channels on other networks instead.

(Sure enough, freenode's web client looks like basically a teletype in a web browser, while Mibbit's is big and flashy and web 2.0-ish. It's the HN to Mibbit's Digg.)
Dukky: A Cool Direct Marketing Program that Inoorporates Social Networking
NY man sues dating website Match.com for deception
without receiving any complaints

That's a ridiculous statement. I was in the #freenode channel for a few hours, I saw many people (other than the people coming from #startups) who were logging in to ask why Mibbit wasn't working.
The same article was posted about 2 months ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552581
I did in my examples:

document.getNodes( Node.ELEMENT_NODE, Node.COMMENT_NODE, Node.TEXT_NODE );

Although, that's still in keeping with using integers to keep track of the results. I'd much prefer something like:

document.getNodes( Element, Comment, Text )
Just yours (though that could change in the future),
No, born and raised in socal.
That's what I mean - by that quote you can see they still don't get it. He's talking about "the person" (his words). There is more than one person getting their private information reviewed. And the article says "The requirement raises questions concerning applicants' privacy rights." So the reporter doesn't get it either. It's not just affecting the applicant.
Are you saying that in your real-world experience, Twisted can handle over 360K simultaneous connections?
No need for the '' around 2 ;)
What the heck is doleaf.com? "It is just budding at the moment, do some wierd geek stuff"

Learn to speak the language of your customers.

Also, what is doleaf? Something with plants I guess, what does it do for me? I couldn't figure this out (by glancing over the homepage).
"Gravity" laws are actually common in many real case scenarios (like transportation networks, etc).
"We would like to have your e-mail password. We promise we won't read the embarrassing ones"
Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327897

Many great thoughts and comments already posted, so it's worth reading the thoguhts of HN contributors as well as this classic from Norvig.
Shirky at TED: "How Twitter Can Make History"
Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work
I am probably not the best person to comment on this, but isn't this more counter-intutive than the original addition method?

I have seen the addition stuff in many APIs like in C++ and Java.

If we start using comma separated values as you suggest, wouldn't it be more confusing? I would defnitely confuse them for being different arguments. A better way would be enclosing the arguments into an array (or something):

document.getNodes("Node.ELEMENT_NODE, Node.COMMENT_NODE, Node.TEXT_NODE")

(I repeat, I am not the best person to comment on this. If anyone is reading this, please take this just as a query from a student)
I hate PHP more than I hate my own mother

I've heard of damning with faint praise, but this is more like faint condemnation...
I read this textbook (Statistics Through Applications) for fun last summer: http://bcs.whfreeman.com/sta/default.asp?s=&n=&i=...
Unlike most textbooks, it is actually well written. It would not take long to finish if you skip most of the exercises and I think it provides a good introduction to and explanation of basic ideas involved in statistics.
Seriously you've never meet a VC/Angel in Atlanta? I see them everywhere, at the Open Coffees, at the ATL Web Entrepreneurs meetings, Meet the VC events, Startup Riots, etc etc. They are readily available. You just need to get out there. ;-)
That quote is in reply to:
"Another concern the applicant raised was that by providing the City with a Facebook user name and password the City not only has access to the applicant's page but also to the pages belonging to all of the applicant's Facebook "friends.""

I think they get it just fine, they just don't care.
Wake me for the trend story, ok? =)
If you're the kind of person applying for a municipal job in Bozeman, MT, it's probably very smart to comply with this request. Which is why cities shouldn't be making it.
12th annual ICFP programming contest begins next weekend
Just updated. Went really smoothly.
Note also the links at the bottom of that page, to other books and sites listing freely available books.
I think the conclusion fits neatly in to a different idea: more time is spent on relationships that are of greater value. (I don't equate value and returns - you could have a harmful relationship that you greatly value)

And with communication getting easier, maybe so does the realization that it is easier to find value in in-person relationships.
YouTube Search Gets The Wonder Wheel
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665449
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665094
Not on a single box, no - we run these machines in a cluster. Each chat machine scales up to a bit more than 80k simultaneous connections (each machine runs 8 processes, each of which can do about 10k simultaneous). There's some amount of IPC between all the chat processes in the cluster, but not too much, which means we can pretty much scale linearly just by adding hardware at this point.
I miss Bozeman, MT, but this is one of the reasons I'll never be returning. I guarantee that most of the population there doesn't see why this would be a big deal. Drunk driving is a forgivable offense, actin' up on the internet is not.
I think there is. The point isn't that Montana is bad or anything like that. The point is that social networking puts us in a weird light.

All of a sudden, we have this dossier we share with our friends (similar to the memories of going to a party or whatnot) that is now a dossier that companies want to see. Not only that, but there's an interesting legal issue here: are companies allowed to inspect your private property?

Can a company looking to hire someone say, "we'd like to hire you, but first you need to give us the keys to your house so we can rummage around and see if there's anything we don't like in there."? That's a huge invasion of privacy. Likewise, our social networking profiles often have privacy controls for similar reasons - and sets them up to be sued very easily.

For example, (generally speaking) a company isn't allowed to discriminate on religious grounds when hiring. If an HR person asks about it and doesn't hire you, you've got decent grounds to sue. By asking for my social networking password, they can get access to that information without asking for it. Likewise, there's all sorts of stuff on our profiles that you can't ask about during an interview without running afoul of the law.

The broader point is that there's a potential loss of privacy and employment rights here that's very serious. If someone decides not to hire me because of my sexual orientation that they learned from getting my social networking password, that's highly illegal. And this is a way of getting those questions answered that aren't allowed to be asked without it seeming like you're asking them.

Social networks are for "friends". People we want to share certain data with easily. This data is often things we don't want potential employers to see or use in judging us - not because it paints us in a bad light like red solo cups might, but because my sexual orientation, political affiliation, group affiliations, religion, relationship status, etc. are all not things that employers should have the right to use when determining whether I am a good employee.
We (#perl) banned mib_* nicks and found anybody smart enough to type their own nickname in was generally fine. Plus we learned how to extract the original IP from the mibbit host string so we could nuke ban evaders comfortably even without freenode supporting WEBIRC.

In fact, we were planning to have mibbit links to freenode#perl showing up all sorts of places in the perl community to try and make it easier for people to get onto IRC and ask questions when they got stuck with things. I've notified the guys working on that to hang fire until we work out what the hell is going on.

Most annoying, whoever's fault it is (and being an argument on the internet I'm going to default to "everybody's, and especially mine, even if I wasn't involved" :)
> But what if rather than cutting someone of completely, you just limited their bandwidth [...] Certainly a nuissance and displeasurable to the perpetrator, but it seems to me a proportionate and fair response

Most 3-strikes proposals, including the HADOPI one, say that someone should be punished on being accused of filesharing by the entertainment industry, not on being found guilty of anything. Is it fair to punish someone if they've not been given due process and been found guilty by a court of law? I say it isn't, but 3-strikes proposals, including the HADOPI one, say that someone should be punished on being accused of filesharing by the entertainment industry, not on being found guilty of anything.

Is it fair to punish someone if they've not done anything wrong, but if amember of their family or a flatmate has? I say it isn't, but 3-strikes proposals say that everyone using an Internet connection should be punished, for what one of them does. This is collective punishment, it's repugnant to the English Common Law legal tradition, and if you do it in wartime, you're a war criminal.
Agreed. I posted that hastily. I think your posts shed some light on the situation even further, in that usually when you don't need mens rea we're talking of minor or petty crimes.
Shrink-Url – Use PowerShell To Shrink Your Urls
He's arguing law in a technically-oriented fashion, and thereby pointing out that if you can find even one example of a way that a song could generate revenue forever, then the song "itself" is infinitely valuable (which is also sketchy, economically, as mentioned elsewhere). All of this argument is ultimately pointless, of course, as corner cases do not invalidate laws, and the real root problem with everything related to such things is the confusion between sets and members of sets: they're both called "the song".
"You are publicly calling into question Mibbit's integrity here"

I know nothing about Mibbit beyond their web page and their colourful representative here, but - it's not about the personal integrity of the founder, or whatever. Mibbit's whole business model is around advertising. The more page views, the more advertising, the more profit. They have no investment in any other metric. It is reasonable to assume Mibbit does whatever they can think of to boost their usage.

"suggesting that there's an incentive to give Freenode false information about users' IP addresses"

There is a clear commercial incentive to encourage usage of the service. If sending random IPs to Freenode boosts revenue, there would be an incentive to do that. That would be reprehensible, of course, but you can't say there's no incentive.
"but isn't this more counter-intutive than the original addition method?"

I disagree. The original statement (using + or using |) isn't very intuitive to most web developers. Why would you add (or concatenate?) together a text node and a comment node? For that matter, why would you OR them together? I think you're pretty close to noting a better approximation (e.g. passing in a string "ELEMENT, COMMENT, TEXT") - but that would require defining a spec for how the string should be parsed, which is also messy. It just makes a lot more sense to just use a variable number of arguments (which JavaScript is designed to handle gracefully).
Is there a problem with restoring it if when you took a snapshot the database had unfinished transactions? I guess you just would not have the transactions written to disk and would lose whatever changes were being made.

Could there be a time where you take a snapshot when the database is writing the transactions to disk and corrupts the snapshots db? or is the LV smart enough to handle that?
He's right about this rightfully being a node method rather than a document method. But if the common developer can't understand bit flags, I don't think they are going to have a long career. And I can't think of a good reason to use entityReferenceExpansion=false unless you're going out of your way to handle entities yourself (which he's clearly not inclined to do).
without receiving any complaints

This is what you would call spin....

I too saw the same complaints.
Or dumb enough..
Want A Super Cheap iPhone 3G S? Bing It.
Colleges Save Money by Cutting Free Laundry, ESPN, HBO
I read it differently; but since there's no suggestion Watt disputes this, or that Mitnick is unreliable on this, I don't understand the greatgrandparent post implication this is somehow indicative of shoddy journalism.

It's background info confirmed by at least one and probably multiple sources, and journalists specifically don't want to or need to footnote their stories with multiple named sources like a research paper or legal brief.
about 4 years of my education was overly redundant. I'd say 5th-8th grades I didn't learn anything.
I've fallen into the trap of getting things running smoothly enough that there isn't anything urgent coming across my desk. Just a few quick fixes here and there.

This has lead to more than a few days of me sitting at my desk and browsing HN in the afternoons. I soon hope to finish a program that will browse HN for me so I can go home early.
i wonder if you could get away with saying you don't use the internet?
Though if you use your real name on facebook that might not work so well...
They seem to over-react to most time-tested business practices, which is why I think it's all part of the plan. People know that they will look at things differently, and then advise that it's a good way of doing business with their only data being compiled from their internal successes.
It seems like the story was cut short. It ends with "That would mess things up" and it seems like this story should go on a lot more.
I believe our language is a lot less precise than you imagine. It is a common practice to over-generalize to make a point, and it is assumed that there are exceptions.

Saying, "all geeks" means she sees something as a trend. I suppose her wording was a little bit stronger than it needed to be, but I doubt anyone reading this would suddenly take it as a definitive guide to geekdom.

You must really hate political speeches.
You may also be interested in knowing the American Math Society has a big collection of free textbooks downloadable as PDF.

http://www.ams.org/online_bks/online_subject.html
I believe Balsamiq is from Italy: http://www.balsamiq.com/
I thought "people buying it" and "spending time improving it" happened the other way round...
Dear Grandpa, Here's a Printout of My Facebook Updates
Hm. Still, 80k per box is nothing to sniff at, especially with Python.

I've been using Ruby's EventMachine, I can get it up to about C20k before it blows up, but that's local only, remains to be seen what proper connections will do. Haven't tried multiple processes yet. As for IPC I just dump everything into AMQP, whose fanout exchanges seem practically designed for IRC : D

Hm, anyway, thanks for the info. Really cool to hear python stretching that far.
How about if the naming and shaming takes place at Reddit, Digg or any number of other online communities where that sort of thing is not only acceptable but encouraged? I, for one, would prefer not to see posts here whose sole purpose is to point out the fact that someone working for a local government in Montana made a mistake.

Besides, while this kind of practice may be particularly loathsome to us it doesn't seem to be bothering the people filling out the applications. The article says no candidate has withdrawn from consideration over the policy. Further, when presented with an alternative method to check out profiles without usernames and passwords they said they'd look into it. It seems like a simple mistake made by someone who doesn't necessarily have the most acute awareness of how social networking sites work.
Psychologists know nothing about code, so they'd be of limited use when interviewing coders. But, I'd be curious as to what they actually can ascertain about coders.
Our channels, not #freenode.
Its also easier to build something people want in the consumer space if you are in a pool of two million early adopters.
Myspace Cuts 30% of Staff
Not too mention, a large proportion of those who would complain now have no means to do so.
The best part of How to Read a Book is that when you buy it you get a free book to practice with!
Free Business Idea: Karma Calculator (Measuring aid btwn ppl)
The idea that a 14+ year-old human is a "child" is a ludicrous modern delusion. Less than a hundred years ago, they sailed the seas, fought in wars, etc.
The common developer or the common web developer? I think most web developers can go very far without ever using bit flags - especially considering that no common JavaScript or DOM APIs use them.

"And I can't think of a good reason to use entityReferenceExpansion=false..." It's all about the element of least surprise - are developers more likely to expect the syntax that they see on the page (e.g. &foo;) or something else in its place. Whatever the right answer is to that question should be made the default option and left as that.
yeah. i was just interested if palm is really releasing all their code, or if they try to get away with releasing bits.

and, most importantly, if it satisfies the GPL to have a "written offer to supply the source code on request"
I suspect Kay got into Piaget because he was a fan of Papert.
Freenode, by their own definition (lifted from the google search result for "freenode"):

Provide a friendly interaction environment for project coordination and for the support of community projects.

Freenode, as a communication platform (and particularly as a self-described "friendly" environment) have a duty, to common sense and intelligence, to make reasonable efforts to encourage communication rather than stifle it.

Being willfully wooden-headed about this whole thing is not just wrong because of the unnecessary harm it causes, it's also self-contradictory.
Really? I spend a summer working in Glacier Park, and I have a friend who lives out there, but I just can't understand what aspect of "actin' up on the internet" would be intolerable. Are they just trying to figure out if you're some type of sexual freak or pervert, or what?
In case you do

- not have the luxury to have such a large ecological footprint (taking into account all the externalities too)

- are not always connected and

- are not granted access to the full UN corpus etc.

then you can still do quite good, cheaper and smarter.

http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/

Hunspell is the default spell checker of OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox 3 & Thunderbird. Gőg hasn't beaten that yet.
From the article: "No one has ever removed his or her name from consideration for a job due to the request, Sullivan added."

This reminds me of the Milgram Experiment, in that very few will refuse authorities orders on even severe matters (in the experiment it was potentially killing someone), so why are people going to refuse it on something seen to be as trivial as a facebook password. However, this is a breach of one of the fundamental human rights, the privacy of thought which in the US has been extended, in some cases, to entire laptops at border crossings.
Other than the vast quantity of available desktop clients, as well as the now-available freenode web IRC chat?
I'd just start running everything through Tor. That's the way they should have handled this anyways. If it is a problem, block it temporarily or unregistered/confirmed users. To me this sounds more like something personal than an actual logical reason.
Ask HN: Facebook Connect & Google Friend Connect as only way to register & login
What's your opinion of using just FB Connect and Google Friend Connect as the only way to register or login to a site?<p>I know it depends on the target audience but would it be enough to cover most potential users?<p>With this, there is no need to deal with email validation and password thus making registration and login very easy.
If we're going to yackety yack about spell checkers, After the Deadline is really accurate because it looks at context and uses trained neural networks to sort recommendations. Hunspell does sophisticated stuff but as Norvig said (somewhere else), the simplest technique with 10x data will beat the most complicated technique every time.

Oh and AtD does grammar, style checking, and misused words. Embed it in your application today :) http://www.afterthedeadline.com
"Your honour, I thought he might object to being shot, but after I did it, he never ever raised the question! If that's not silent agreement, I don't know what is!"
It's PHP, it works anyway.
Another fun quote:

<nenolod> jtrucks: because mibbit users are retards and they think mibbit is the only way
I thought the "Two Corporate Browsers" observation was especially interesting.

He basically says that companies will eventually need to install a second browser for employees so they can use IE6 for internal apps and something else for external pages that no longer work in IE6. And because it's tough (not impossible though) to get two versions of IE running at the same time, that second browser will likely be a non-IE browser.

That seems like something MS might want to fix (and probably will).
http://webchat.freenode.net/ lightweight, minimalist, opensource, fast, ad free, I love it already.
BMI is a poor indicator of overall heath. However, because it's easy to find someone’s weight and height it's often used as a poor substitute for a wide range of things. Especially when looking at large populations.

Muscle mass is not really less harmful than body fat when looking at many diseases. Often what’s really important is your fitness level at other times it’s just a question of your mass. EX: Your hips don't really care about body fat v muscle mass it's all just weight to them.

PS: I would suggest individuals ignore BMI and talk with their doctor to find both their ideal weight, and what a reasanable range for their body type is.
Mibbit still works great for most of IRC, just not Freenode (Which is a fairly small %)
May people who use Mibbit do so because they are sitting behind firewalls that do not allow IRC.

The Freenode client is freenode-specific, and only works with freenode. It also lacks a lot of Mibbit's features, from the sound of it.
An Honest Open Discussion on Web Standards and HTML 5