skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My philosophy on giveaways of this sort (and we do it quite a bit) is that if I lived in the same town, I would buy that person a beer or take them to lunch. It's not as though I'm paying them an hourly wage of $.05...I'm just saying, "Hey, that was awesome. High five!"

Everybody likes having someone buy the next round, right?
I get the same - on Windows. Given it seems to impact all OS/Browser combos I can't help but think it's something wrong at their end more than something being inherently wrong with Silverlight on your (platform||browser)
Noted and revised. Thanks for the comment.
"You should follow me on Twitter because I need to make some copies."

Am I doing it right?
I've been using emacs for about a month now. I've definitely saved a lot more time than I've spent fiddling with it.
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I love this discussion, but the thread is so long that I'm intimidated into not replying on FriendFeed. (I also really wish they had paragraphs in comments.) So, replying here:

Gates, school, startup (how ambitious is the startup? If we're talking another Google, this rises to #1), car, government, S&P.

The Gates Foundation focuses on health in developing nations, which is a prerequisite to everything else. You can't exactly learn, work, or start a company if you're sick.

School gives you the raw materials with which to found startups.

Startups innovate and come up with better ways of doing things for everyone.

The car, government, and S&P 500 are all basically a wash. They redistribute wealth but don't create it, unless you really really want that Prius.

I'm also puzzled by Robert Scoble's idea that creating jobs is the best way to benefit the common good. Doesn't he know that hiring that talented engineer may mean that he doesn't start his own startup, depriving society of his innovations? ;-)
> I am assuming Xobni offers a lot more than simply search right? If it's only search... what's there to stop Microsoft from building a better built-in search tool for Outlook? I often hear great things about Xobni, but I never got to try it due to I use a Mac. So could someone enlighten me on what else do they offer? Because it seems search is only feature I hear about...

I can't remember the name of the company, but there was another company that created a better search for Outlook, Microsoft bought them out, made the better search crappy again.

So my guess is that Microsoft has no incentive to make search good on desktops. Maybe in the future they'll buy out Xobni and then destroy their product so that Outlook search stays crappy.

EDIT: Why do users keep deleting their posts? that last post was written by Frocer.

Question to Frocer: why delete your post?
He's actually a really chill guy -- see for example the first video here:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=greg+linden
If further proof was needed that secret question "backup passwords" are a really, really bad idea, this is it. Exactly the same way Sarah Palin's account was "hacked".

People, and companies, have to take more responsibility for their own security. They can't just say "it wasn't my fault, Yahoo has that feature!" - they need to active dump yahoo, and anyone else offering these ludicrous backdoors which defeat the point of even having a password.
I’ve been going over this in my mind and this is what I’ve come up with.

On one hand you can look at it as a straight theft. If a person steals a bunch of computers and then sells them to a computer shop for 25% of the retail price the shop owner is guilty of a crime (selling stolen goods) even if he had no part in the initial theft. In that case I’d say it’s immoral on Techcrunch’s part. Because while the digital copies of files don’t have monetary value like physical computers they have intellectual property value that could do significant damage to Twitter and in doing so cause the company to lose large sums of money.

ON THE OTHER HAND, most of the great scandals both in Government and in Corporate America have been revealed by whistle blowers who essentially stole documents and passed them on to reporters. So there’s a precedent where stealing documents can actually be a very moral thing.

In the end I think it boils down to what the documents reveal. In the case of whistle blowers they're still stealing something but we forgive the theft because it’s done to protect society from a greater harm. The good out weighs the bad. So if these documents reveal some kind of malfeasants on Twitter’s part I could see publishing them as being justified. If not I think you’re probably right and this is an immoral act on Techcrunch’s part.
I only count 14 articles on http://dustincurtis.com/index.html, of which the first bunch doesn't contain any of these Twitter 'invites'. Neither does his blog. Am I overlooking something?
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We keep their data and sign them into 4-8 year contracts. Very unethical and it will kill the company one day. Not that anyone gets listened to here unless they're a Harvard MBA.
I think part of my pissed-off-ness would be that to me, the t-shirt is much less personal/sincere. Company schwag is almost the prototypical insincere, impersonal gift.
Could you expand on why you don't like Apache? I'll grant you that it can be confusing to get used to configuring, especially if you're not really familiar with how the web works, but as far as I can tell it's a pretty damn good server.

What do you prefer over apache?
I would think that HN wouldn't really care about someone crawling them as long as they were respectful about it.

Also, as far as writing crawlers/scrapers goes, a header-handling error is one of the least annoying things you can run into.
Theoretically I'm having around 500 CPUs with 3gHz each and 2000GB RAM at my disposal. Maybe I should give it a try.
Hint: University Cluster =)

Anyway thanks for the code examples, I'm pretty sure I can learn something from them.
Still, just think if you have code in the linux kernel, you could ask t-shirts from just about every company in the world including government agencies and non-profits. You'd have more than enough clothing to last a lifetime of never doing laundry :-)
I'm with you. That said, can you picture Arington going to jail to protect his source? Cause this is about Journalism, right? Right?
Dunno, it's a pretty subjective thing, isn't it? Maybe the target audience of their design on this site wasn't programmers (who all love nitpicking on usability issues) but other designers, maybe future employers who care for different things than someone with a techical or engineering background would.
It's very different from Watergate! The Watergate scandal involved the U.S. government, which is accountable to its citizens, and this is about a privately held company, accountable only to itself and its investors. Also, the Deep Throat information helped reveal a major violation of federal law. This kind of information (according to TC themselves) would only be useful to Twitter's competitors.

With that said, I still can't help but be curious. It'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out, and if some of the documents do end up released to the public, I'll probably cave and check up on the juicy tech gossip.
I heard you have to keep a very close eye on your containers in China though.

But yeah, sounds cool!
There are two main parties in the UK - Labour and Conservative. Labour would be similar to Democrats, and Conservative is broadly equivalent to the Republican party.

What is more surprising is that the fate of a hacker has become a political election issue (it's almost election time in UK), which goes to show the growing appreciation of the importance of IT to government for critical services.
Probe into US, South Korea DOS attack stretches around the globe
"select" based web servers and their modern (poll/kevent/whatever) brethren, for serving purely static content, are faster and smaller. But that's always been the case.
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I find lighttpd definitely superior :)

(not disagreeing that Apache is a good choice too - just answering your question :D)
It's called pdf and it's there. Adobe Reader supports all sorts of webbish features such as hyperlinks or JavaScript. For some reason, it's not very popular as a hypertext document format (and neither are MS Word documents, an other similar contender)
It's been 2 years since Xobni was released, 2 million was just last year, so the total number of downloads are higher. The percentage of active users, IMO, would be higher than 50% initially, then tapering off to say 20%.

The revenue they get from plus is a good start.
Lotto tickets aren't nearly as much fun as coding, so what's another 10 bucks.

Personally I'd run through a thousand bucks of computer time to play around with something or test a hunch before considering a lotto ticket.

Lotto tickets are taxes for people that are not good in mathematics.
His blog has appealing typography and layout.
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I am not concerned at all about CERN destroying the world. I am more concerned about CERN never working. How many years of a non-functioning particle accelerator will it take for us to start hypothesizing about how just how bizarre (and probably simulated) our universe is?
This article makes a bunch of very valid points, but the real issue is that health care in the US is simply much too expensive per treatment, and that the cost to society of things like obesity are enormous. That is not going to be cured with 'software' of any kind but with a lifestyle change.
> wonder why the hacker would send the documents to Techchrunch

The inference I got was they paid for them. BUT I stress that is only what I picked up - not seen anything concrete. Could explain it though.
or they just play for fun
Building a mail system into a single-threaded text editor seems a bit silly to me...

I have never encountered a system that could replace Gnus, though.

What do you use to read nntp, email and rss in a coherent interface?
Is this supposed to run on Unladen Swallow? Or does the GIL not come into play here?
are startups allowed to reapply? we didn't get in last time, but we're still making awesome progress ...
Every once in a while that a similar license discussion emerges, I see a clear pattern:

Many,many people do not understand the GPL.

In my opinion, this is the major drawback of the GPL: It's complexity. I've read it a dozen of times and still I'm not sure about some corner cases.

This leads to

a) Programmers who are not willing to use it and prefer a much simpler license, such as BSD.

b) To people spreading misinformation about the GPL that already worsens this situation.
My fundamental beef with Apache is that people wrap way too much functionality into it, to the point where their entire end-to-end web stack is two sets of processes: Apache and a database server.

On top of that it's configuration is awful, the modules are all awful compared to their domain-specific alternatives, the architecture is awful (especially wrt concurrency), the development process is molasses, and the Apache Software Foundation has all but abandoned httpd for IBM-focused all-Java astronaut architecture with as much bureaucracy as they can possibly fit into a public process.

I hate Apache because I'm intimately familiar with how the web works, and the ASF is responsible for so much web-hostile WS-* garbage.

For a while (~4 years ago) I thought lighttpd was worthwhile as a total replacement, and did a project that hacked it's WebDAV implementation for userspace filesystems (pre-MacFUSE), but fundamentally its architecture is still Apache just with sensible concurrency.

I've come to be really fond of the reverse-proxy model, and really like Nginx running in front of independent app processes using whatever HTTP abstraction is native to the language (WSGI, Rack, Servlets, etc.) along with a nice native high-level spec-focused HTTP server (twisted.web, mongrel, ???). The last web application I wrote from scratch was on Google AppEngine, and I really like their version of WSGI.
We suggested he give us our final exam four semesters later after he gave this talk.
lots of good advice. i try and do a lot of this, but its taken 15 years of development and doing stuff the wrong way. it would be wise for young jedi's to study
I dont wish to be, umm, mean. But I know of at least 3 companies (ours included) that could run this in a few minutes.

this is my code (using mighty, our python based cluster service):

import mighty

word_generator = mighty.word_generator("wordlist",(mighty.APPEND_NUMERALS,5))
phrase_generator = mighty.word_concentate(word_generator,' ')

job = mighty.match_to_hash('PROVIDEDHASH',mighty.SHA1,phrase_generator.iterate_all)
job.priority = mighty.CRITICAL
mighty.submit_job(job)

Done. Takes about 5 minutes (I wont enter - it's not fair).

EDIT: added CRITICAL as the priority or it takes longer :)

EDIT: ok so the code is a bit the wrong side of the tracks. It wouldnt take long to refactor it :)
I'd rather live in a world where I have to guard my private info then in one where I send info to news outlets only to have them self-censor it. Newspapers have a pretty clear job, and outside yelling fire in a theater I support them doing it.

Of course, checking the validity and relevance of what they publish is necessary, but that's a different discussion.
Apparently, I am not the only one who is into using the university cluster for my own personal projects ;-)

Be careful. This is not "exactly" legal, and it could hurt you. Make sure you also throw some legitimate computational work at the clusters so you have an alibi at least.
Right. I'd like to believe the people you really want reading your stuff aren't so suggestible. But I think is research for commercial sites.
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> although the original article about the hack says otherwise

This article is from May 1. The same hacker has hacked again (unfortunately thru social engineering again)
Yea seriously. This is beyond the most evil scheme I ever thought Microsoft capable of concocting. Can somebody please put this in a torrent?
There's another factor too, which the author doesn't really touch on. The likelihood of software being bad increases along with the complexity of the business logic. That's why enterprise software projects are so hard to get right. My understanding is that state regulations vary so much that any kind of medical software is fraught with byzantine complications just to do the most basic thing. So it seems to me the most logical thing we can do to lower the cost and increase the quality of medical software is to adopt some standards. Now how much of a dent that can put in the overall costs is still up for debate, but I bet it could be significant.
And assuming that he did, it was only after Zed Shaw wrote this post.

I only found out Mongrel was written by Zed Shaw when I read his now infamous rant about Rails and its community. (I'm not that a big Rails guy, but I did use it for a project).

Says something, no?
It just occurred to me that Blogabond (one of my sites) will be pretty much the LAST site on the internet to drop IE6 support.

It's a travel blog host, which means that it will always have users hitting it from a public machine in rural Laos. Having used that machine, which runs Windows 95 and shares an AOL Free Trial dialup connection with 5 of its brethren in an open-air hut on generator power, I can state with confidence that it is not scheduled for an upgrade any time soon.

You make your bed, you lie in it I guess.
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I cannot stop myself from doing a plug for my startup Wingify (http://www.wingify.com/) here :)

We have an A/B, split and multivariate testing platform ready to use. With features such as running tests specific to a visitor segment (say organic) and having multiple goals (say CTR and time spent), the platform is quite powerful. So, if any of the fellow HNers wants to setup a similar experiment, I would be really glad to create an account right away.

By the way, it would also be interesting to see how would call to actions rank if you segment traffic into these buckets: regular blog readers, new visitors, visitors from twitter. My hunch is that traffic from twitter would have behaved quite differently from regular blog readers.
I haven't read the entire report but it looks really cool. If I understand it correctly it can automatically detect and fix bugs previously found in other software. Would be really cool if you would have a huge database of known bugs which you can detect automatically. Kind of like collaborative unit-testing.
I used to use Tofu incessantly when I used Macs at home + work, I've been meaning to write a clone in some X toolkit or XUL for a while.

You have it exactly right, it jumps one column at a time XOR one screen's worth at a time. When you first set it up you tweak not just the font + colors, but the width + padding of the columns.

I used to use it on my 12" PowerBook all the time, set up with one of the Vista fonts in light lavender on very-dark gray, with two columns fit onto the 1024x768 screen with the window maximized. I read millions of words that way, it's easily the fastest and least-fatiguing reading method I've used, though the ergonomics of the laptop ain't great.
It would be better if the robber also tweeted the whole process himself :)
Please stop paying attention to Dave Winer.
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I've bought recently a http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-SPAR3E-SK-US-G.htm (Xilinx Spartan 3E starter kit).

Those Mac OSX users, what do you use for development? The Xilinx development software seems to work only in Windows and Linux.
> a privately held company, accountable only to itself and its investors.

Well, no. Companies are also accountable to their customers and to society. If they were dumping large amounts of toxics into rivers, that's something society has a stake in and where the company is accountable to it.

If Twitter were to sell access to protected updates, that's something their users need to know. If they were doing so illegally, that's something that society must know.

It all depends on the information that will be revealed whether or not it's ethical. I'm inclined to not give an "unethical" verdict too quickly. TC is at least caring about individual persons that may be damaged by the revealing of some information.
what are the alternatives to google apps? i think a microsoft solution would cost more.
I don't see any reason for that except the "perceived risk"
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> My fundamental beef with Apache is that people wrap way too much functionality into it, to the point where their entire end-to-end web stack is two sets of processes: Apache and a database server.

Fine, that's a technical point, and fair, but that doesn't make it a 'dog'. It works well for many things, and not so well for some others.

Most of the rest of what you write is vitriol and hyperbole ... "awful", "molasses", "hate", "garbage", and so on and so forth. Your "liberal with what you accept and conservative with what you output" (which I voted up, it's a great quote) goes for interaction with other people, as well.

As a member of the ASF, I'd also like to point out that the foundation goes where people want it to. Sure, there are lots of Java projects, but there are some reasons for that. Java tends to be used by people (and especially companies) who also like to be sure of the provenance of their software, and Apache projects can be very sure of that. That process does introduce a bit of bureaucracy, but it's not all that bad, really. Overall, yes, the ASF has gone a little bit 'enterprisey', but that's no reason to get bitter about it. If you don't like it, don't use it. (The FSF also has similar kinds of bureaucracy too, in order to ensure that they have the copyright for their software).

There are also numerous non-Java projects, like CouchDB, Perl, Python and Tcl modules, and 'Harmony' which is Java, but an implementation of the language itself, which requires some fairly interesting hacking, and of course the web server itself. Most of these projects are worked on by different people.

The concurrency model (models, actually), like many things, is of course a tradeoff, with no absolute 'right' answer (although I think Yaws does a pretty good job).

BTW, I do the Apache Tcl stuff, or did... I don't have much time for it these days.
In other words, because in the case of Techcrunch the end doesn't justify the means it's immoral?
The question he was asked was actually whether he would want someone to publish TC's documents. The answer is obviously no. However, that's completely separate from whether he would consider it news. It's news whether or not you want it to be.
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It uses existing unit tests, so it doesn't find bugs by itself. I does try to find which code is responsible, if that's what you mean.
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If you consider the sentence "Some passwords were guessed and..." in the above [ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/in-our-inbox-hundreds-o... ] ( guessed! ) doesn't that say something's seriously wrong with some basic operational practices by core staff (i.e., weak passwords on core business accounts - which just happen to be Google accounts)?
I give up. Something to do with the use of literal ints without width designators?
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TC's response to reactions on this issue

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/our-reaction-to-your-re...
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But some people are going to respond negatively to large numbers (or at least very large). e.g.: if I see "I have 28,437 followers" I'm likely to think: okay, this is probably some Perez Hilton type person.

But if the info could be tailored more (e.g., "2,437 HN subscribers that follow me") I would be more interested. In other words, not everyone finds following the most massive crowd a sign of value.
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