skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
since this is user generated, how long before the cops start putting up a whole bunch of fake reports.
Great tip on the DynDNS backup service! Have you noticed any downtime or caveats from this service?
Preferring OSX to XP is somewhat of a no-brainer at this point, as XP is about 10 years old. A fairer comparison might be the Win7 RC (perhaps, I don't know about breadth of driver support).
Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”
Of special note, Nmap 5.00 is now able to map IP addresses to AS numbers: "The script works by sending DNS TXT queries to a DNS server which in turn queries a third-party service provided by Team Cymru (team-cymru.org) using an in-addr.arpa style zone set up especially for use by Nmap.

The responses to these queries contain both Origin and Peer ASNs and their descriptions, displayed along with the BGP Prefix and Country Code."

http://nmap.org/nsedoc/scripts/asn-query.html
Well, to make a non-revenue-based argument: It gets people to slow down only where there are cameras and allows them to speed everywhere else.

Without the technology that tells where the cameras are, people are uncertain whether speeding will yield a ticket and are less likely to speed. To get the same effect with camera-detection technology in place, you need to completely blanket the area with cameras.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/183180 here's a newsweek "I'm quitting FB" article

and I'm certain I've seen one on slate.com

Is Facebook really so all consuming for these people who have to quit it publicly?

Personally I love FB. It's like auto-pilot for my social life. It reminds me about the birthdays about the people I only vaguely care about, leave them a one-line message on their wall and that's it until next year.

All the people who are really in my life I rarely interact with on FB but it's great for making lots of people think that lots of people care about them.

What's not to like?
What domain registrar do hn readers prefer?
I have a bunch of domains at Godaddy, but wondering if there are better alternatives. Looking for any cheaper, less nickle-and-dime you, more reliable registrars. Are there any registrars people here really love? Any for hackers, by hackers, of hackers type services?
The idea overlooks a lot.

For example, the demand for big macs may be different in different countries, which would lead to price discrepancies.
The same thing goes for supply (# of restaurants, etc).

Also, the branding of a Big Mac is different in different countries. A McDonald's in Paris or Brussels is generally more "upscale" than a McDonald's in Chicago. That difference in branding can also impact price.

So, other than for the purposes of amusement, or understanding "Big Mac" valuations, the "Big Mac Index" is not really a valid comparison metric.
"All data from all customers is mapped into the same data table, including indexes. The schema for that table looks something like orgid, oid, value0, value1...value500. "

They make it sound like that's a good thing. It is not.
Show that to any halfway competent SQL guy and you'll get a disgusted response. Implementing a database on top of an existing RDBMs is an antipattern.
I'll definitely take a look.. thx.
It is a trend in everything that surrounds us - cars, fridges, clothes, shoes, buildings - everything is made cheaper. Compare computer case from 1990 and now - modern economy class cases are ultra light. Reason is simple - market doesn't care about 8 or 10 or 12 bit displays, so they are not offered. Cost to the company to introduce them far overweights benefit of selling it to .01% of individuals who care. Or who think that they care.
According to the a 2005 report[1] from the UK department of transport, only 3% of road accidents in the UK were attributed to drivers exceeding the speed limit. If road safety is your concern, perhaps we should address more common causes of accidents, instead of focusing entirely on vehicle speed.

[1] http://www.dft.gov.uk/adobepdf/162469/221412/221549/227755/c...
Like mr. "I can write stackoverflow in a weekend"?

Also, haven't there been a dozen articles posted here about how publicly stating your intent hinders your ability to achieve it? It was in reference to startups, but it's the same psychology at work I imagine.
Man, rediff.com is an irritating site.
This is a huge sampling space fail, but anecdotally, the other day I sent my macbook into Apple care. They replaced the logic board, heatsink arm, display, and half the case (the latter for a cosmetic issue that was absolutely not under warranty). The machine was out of my hands for exactly 22 hours (fedex priority ftw). I paid $0 for this service (applecare was $300 several years ago).

All of that to say, find me a manufacturer that will replace 70% of your system in 22 hours including courier time almost three years after it was sold. You can only do that if your reliability is way high, because you spent a lot of money on quality components to begin with, instead of poor-boying it with sweatshop chips.
Just a plug for people interested in game design, I have a shared blog about making games:

http://hackersandgamers.posterous.com/

Email me if you'd like to contribute.
OK, i'll try: (This is obviously a big topic) This database is a topic map for for several software domains: Ruby, javascript, erlang, .. There are 4 levels to the topic map hierarchy, so you'll see 4 headings on the left, separated by "_,_".

I've run this database through several fulltext search engines. The only one active and returning hits at present is Sphinx, since this is running on a pretty low-memory VPS. Ignore the other sections.

Essentially the difference between this search and, say, google, is that all of the words entered in the query must match a database record for that record to be returned as a hit. This is different from Google, which will return documents matching only some query terms. I think this returns quick feedback to the user that either they need to change query terms, or that topic is simply not covered in the database.
http://searchyc.com/registrar
easydns. not cheaper, though
True, but there is a seed of truth here in how social media has upped the engagement factor so much that it's easy for it to become a time sink with the user not even realizing it. I think society needs another 10 years to absorb the implications of social media and how to use it effectively (and for the filters to get better).
Well.

Speed in itself does not often pose a safety problem, although there are stretches of road where driving above a particular limit endangers you (e.g., you take a curve too fast and don't make it) or others (pedestrians crossing a street).

More commonly, speed differential is the problem, and rough uniformity of speed is the solution. This is because significant differences between the speeds of different vehicles leads to decreased time to react, and increases the chances that someone won't be able to react quickly enough.

And that's a problem which cuts both ways: it can be brought on by vehicles travelling significantly faster than most other traffic, but it can just as equally be caused by vehicles travelling significantly slower. This is why many freeways have two "speed limits", with one being a maximum and the other a minimum. So long as traffic is moving at a roughly uniform speed, drivers will have enough time to react to events around them.

And, really, ticketing significant variations from the normal flowing speed of traffic is the best way to enforce speeding as a safety measure.

(and don't get me started on red-light cameras, which have been shown to increase the rate of accidents at intersections)
Wow, that sounds amazing. Don't forget to emphasise the benefit to the patient, as well. Spending two hours in a small, hot tube when you've just had heart surgery is not fun.
I've been thinking about doing something like this for weeks.

It seems like at the start of my day I'll log onto Hacker News and read 5 or 6 interesting articles. However, without even trying, by the end of the day, all the links will be grey instead of black. I'll end up clicking on every link, even the links I really don't give a shit about. It's a time sink - it really is like surfing channels without feeling as guilty about it.

However, I wouldn't want to quit, I'd really want to limit myself. I'm not sure how to approach that though. Maybe an hour a day or reading random articles? How can I count that? Maybe a firefox extension.

But then how do I seperate searching for random articles from searching for solutions to problems when I'm coding or doing real work? How do I seperate those two things? I think part of what makes the internet so easy to kill time on is that it blurs the distinction.

If anyone can come up with a good plan or strategy to prevent time and life from being sucked away by the dark corners and alleys of the internet, while still allowing me to use it for interesting and productive work, please let me know. I think it would be helpful for all of us.
user = unique individual having a conscious twitter experience in a given week

and they want a billion users like that? Will never happen
No one's denying the addiction.

However, I'm sure nicotine and caffeine (not to mention wow) are even worse for most people.

It's a combination of the stimulus and each individual's reaction to it. I'm sure that the vast, vast majority of people have no problems releasing themselves from social media.
On a more serious note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language
I'm in London. I mainly need to recover some files (all sorts - mdb,xls,txt etc) on my Windows XP partition.

Thanks a lot for your help, really appreciate it.

edit: just saw your uk email id in your profile.
> you need to completely blanket the area with cameras.

With every passing year, that's easier, cheaper, and less evitable. Hm. The spelling dictionary doesn't think 'evitable' is a word.

People might as well get used to the idea that there will always be a record of what they were doing in public. More cameras and more storage mean never having to delete anything.
Oh, I'm sure he does. He's a regular contributor here and a smart guy. There's just something a slight big 'off'. Too "hey, I'm a badass"?
it's great for making lots of people think that lots of people care about them

followed by

What's not to like?

Dude, I think you answered your own question: superficial relationships masquerading as genuine ones - you know, that does bother some people.
I hope this story doesn't get killed, because the actual details are pretty interesting.
Thanks for looking. Some points: There's a lot of software snippets stored in the database. Most of the URLs in the databases are mixtures of English text (and other langugaes) and source code in multiple languages. I can't think of a natural way to present it.

Searching for software information is difficult because of this mix of natural language and code. What i've tried to do is to assemble documents that cover the issues with expanding acronyms, inject synonyms, common typos ("referer"), compound words (Active Record / ActiveRecord) and all the things that make it tricky.

And yeah, i'll work on the stylesheet, pretty gnarly.
Clickable ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-code_machine
Kill it. Make it happen.
I don't get the Marissa Mayer thread. She asked for stats on Twitter's growth but there is already Google Analytics code on all Twitter pages.
I've been with joker.com for almost a decade now. they aren't cheaper for 'just the domain' but they offer the usual extra services at no extra charge, and they generally act like a honest company. As I only have one domain, another $5 per year doesn't really hurt.

The thing is, last time I checked (a few years back) the raw costs, if you set yourself up as a registrar of .com names is like $6 per .com name per year (plus a $5K year fee or something) so asking for a .com for less than $6/year is not realistic, unless the company is using it as a loss leader to get you to buy something higher margin.

why do you have a bunch of domains, anyhow?
Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems
Shareholders voted today to officially sell the company to Oracle. And Jonathan Schwartz wasn't even in the room when it happened.
All IE needs to die for the web to move on. (Unless MS stops its strategy of blocking new web standards)
not in a 5 year time frame at least
I liked BCPL, and still prefer it to C, but I taught it to myself, and never took lectures from Martin Richards.

Most of the computing done for my PhD was done in BCPL. I still have the code somewhere, but I can't convert it to C because it uses co-routines.
I refuse to follow links to techcrunch.com (see 'ethics')

Added: techcrunch is making profit from a crime of privacy violation. this should be simply condemned. nothing else.
Why don't you tell me why paying more for the same hardware specs for the Mac should be justified?

I'm not trying to convince you of anything. The burden of proof lies with you.

Read the facts. Windows has what, like 86% of the desktop market?

I think you might be confusing facts with statistics? In any market you choose to look at, you can find a high-quality alternative to the commodity product offering that has a minority of the market share. BMW is the oft-quoted example in the automobile industry. It would be a mistake to claim "A BMW clearly doesn't outperform a Ford Taurus because there are so many more Fords on the road." Their relative market share clearly has no bearing on their respective performance.
Do animals masturbate?
it does look like another twitter astroturf, they really haven't reported anything negative about twitter. All the things they posted, could be used as a promotion to pitch twitter to investors.
Sounds fishy. They claim to have 25 people, and yet they're not paying salaries? I wonder in what sense they "have" these people.
Mozilla looks for handouts for add-on developers
I read the book a while back. It was engaging: he's got interesting thoughts and expresses them well.

But Hofstadter's idea of loops is really just a metaphor to help you think about consciousness. So far as I can see, it doesn't advance the actual understanding of consciousness.
Microsoft signs Linux patent deal with Buffalo
Heh. Bill Gates said something similar about 640k of RAM once. There's certainly enough users to fill up that capacity. Why wouldn't it be possible?
Stop supporting it and it will.
Stanford tech mentor Rajeev Motwani was drunk when he drowned
I've obviously used both

I think it's far from obvious when you've been unable to point to one concrete (even biased and opinionated!) example of why you think a Macintosh computer is inferior to the technology you choose to use.
Cut it off and I lose 28% of my visitors.

That might be fine for your personal site, but it's no way to run a web business.

Lots of people in big enterprises are stuck on IE6 because of crappy intranet apps that rely on it. They're also not allowed to install alternative browsers (or any software are at all, really)
Scalable Web Architectures and Application State
The game pieces are fairly generic, so it looks like the best games for this would be heavily card or board based. You can control the art there, so it wouldn't look generic.

The real key here is the ability to print custom card decks. Most of the rest of it could be replicated on your own without too much difficulty.
The demo looks neat - http://www.simplenoteapp.com/
Google employees spying on Google Analytics accounts would definitely be considered "evil."
yayy ess! it's good, i've been using it for a few months now. but i'm new to emacs so will take time to get used to it.

do you use it a lot?
Google tops views with second-quarter profit
You could detect IE6 and suggest an alternative browser. Many sites seem to be doing that these days. But then you have to also consider which is more expensive -- supporting IE6 or annoying your IE6 users with warning messages.
Twitter is useless for anyone who isn't a marketer/promoter. Regular people would rather use facebook.

Facebook can reach 1 billion users, twitter cannot.
Here's an idea for an iPhone game: You shake the phone above your head, and the character in the game yells "Get off my lawn!". When you stop shaking your avatar randomly starts talking about the weather or takes a nap.
That can be overlayed via AJAX after the page loads.
When I took the interview for my current place the first question I was asked is "what is the difference between the public and private keywords". After I responded with the obvious answer the interviewer sighed with relief and told me I was the first candidate that day (out of 5) that managed to answer the question correctly.

Be VERY afraid. :D
This is certainly the first time I've heard of a company with 25 employees and expanding, in spite of having no revenue and no venture capital.

It's also the first time I've seen such a dramatic information imbalance -- they want potential employees to provide a resume and salary history, but they're not saying what the company does beyond "software engineer" and "using PHP".
In my experience driving in the U.S., very few drivers maintain a safe stopping distance between them and the next car at high speeds (80+ mph.) As a result, I'd suspect that traveling at high speeds with other drivers would be less safe on average.
Spring: a versatile, open-source RTS engine for Windows and Linux
Buzz Aldrin: Time to Boldly Go Once More
Yes, agreed. It's such a nice thought, and so many of the elite tops can do it, but when your clients or customers require support, it's either get paid or don't.
I'm not necessarily against media companies such as newspapers. Actually, I hope at least a few really make it, or we're in trouble.

But Yahoo thinks they are a "media company" because they sell banners on Yahoo! Mail (...). And, frankly, I don't see them meeting the changing media needs...
What Bill Gates said was "I have a processor with a 20-bit physical address space and I have to divide it into a portion for software and a portion for hardware devices like video ROM. 640k seems like a reasonable place to make that division."
Ambitious!
I'll admit that the info is somewhat interesting. But I have absolutely no respect for Techcrunch anymore. For a company/blog that garnered a ton of respect over the last few years for helping to promote interesting new startups, they have strayed far from that ideal. That they would accept information that was obtained illegally and then proceed to broadcast that to the world is dishonorable. They can't be trusted to be responsible any more.

For any number of upcoming and existing startups whose founders and employees read HN, I can't imagine that they would want any kind of ties to Techcrunch after this. I know that I sure as hell don't.
BCPL's predecessor, CPL, had even more features: things like type inference, closures, polymorphism. It was never completely implemented. The machines at the time were too small - 4kwords being a typical size. It would probably be fairly easy nowadays.
This is very interesting then that Google gave up urge of cheating, and actually follows the rules.
Did you read the article?

This sentence is in the first paragraph:

"... we’ve spent much of the last 36 hours talking directly to Twitter about the right way to go about doing that."
If I'm reading this right, they predicted 25m users by the end of 2009?

As of July, they apparently have 40m. Cool.
The GA code doesn't track the stuff that happens via API - clients, etc.
Identity theft is a crime, right?
Well, we'd have to do both, right? Even with a warning, we'd have to at least support IE6 well enough to make the basic site usable (and we're only doing slightly more than that now, frankly). Otherwise, you're not talking about a warning, you're talking about locking them out.

And the people you're annoying with this message are generally not in a position to do anything about it. I'm sure 98% of the IE6 users on our site know that IE6 sucks. We don't need to tell them that.

Ultimately, it comes down to how much time and resources it takes to support IE6 for your particular site versus how much you would lose by not supporting it.
What Questions Can Science Answer?
There was a LISP as well.

[My school, suddenly in possession of a gifted CS centre full of Beebs, wound up giving charge of the syllabus after two years to someone who promptly decided to teach COMAL to everyone in place of (the very sophisticated, for its time, and structural) BBC Basic. Fortunately I missed out there but they must have turned out the better part of a thousand basic-level COMAL coders for no good reason. Apparently these days the same guy's got all the 14-year-olds passing tests in, but almost certainly not understanding, Smalltalk instead.]
Exactly. Why would someone make a conscious decision of exposing confidential information EVEN if it was going to make it out with or without them. Selling stolen information is unethical/illegal/immoral.
Magic Wars (YC W09) Turns Your iPhone Into A Virtual Wand
pretty much everyone who has touched a computer is familiar with who Google is

And they'll also generally think you're somehow in charge of search and e-mail at Google. :)

Kind of like having been in the Air Force and everyone asking you what kind of jet you piloted.
"They aren’t happy about it, but they are able to live with it, they say"

They may have given the green light, but it seems like the alternative wouldn't have been any better.
We have just posted the first review of Nmap 5.0, enjoy.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2009/07/nmap_5.html
The 'right' as in 'my right'? Where's Twitter on that?
I'm not in North America, but here in South America, they are definitely after revenue. I'm usually very respectful when it comes to speed limits. The only speeding ticket I got was driving by a big avenue. Basically, there's an elementary school near this avenue so logically there's a lower limit in that area. I went over the limit by 17 KM/H on a friday night (clearly no children could be around). Next block I get pulled over and get a very juicy ticket, they were obviously fishing.

I'm not familiar with the application, but from the article it's implied that it can be used to avoid sobriety check points. I don't see how this helps improve safety at all.
Java Hack: Double Brace Initialization
So you basically what happened is that you bought insurance from Apple for the price of a cheap PC and they actually covered you according to contract.

AppleCare for a $1700 MacBook Pro costs $350. Does that mean one in every five MacBooks is broken beyond repair within 3 years? Or does it mean that you severely overpaid for your insurance?

I'm aware that AppleCare doesn't just cover the parts but the labor as well, but their margin on hardware is probably somewhere around %40, so that covers the labor easily.

I guess all hardware vendors would absolutely love to sell you a luxury insurance like that and if they're not idiots they treat people paying like kings accordingly (e.g by doing it quickly and not saving on shipping fees).
Seeing all these internal meeting notes published makes me want to never write anything down.
In 2003 the St. Louis Federal reserve did an analysis of the Big Mac Index that found it to be pretty solid for PPP.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/03/11/pak... (PDF)