skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got my fb account disabled for putting the eternalmoonwalk.com link during the CNN Live.com/fb coverage of the MJ memorial and I didn't realize how peaceful my life became when I had no fb account - and then the phone calls, IMs, SMS, emails came in, looking for me (people thought something bad happened to me when I got dis-faceboked :P
Bill Joy was from Berkeley though.
Your question is ill-formed, and cannot be answered without further information. In particular, you haven't specified the domain of inquiry. If you're asking about the probability that a person reading your question is human, the answer is close to 1. If, on the other hand, you're asking about the probability that a group of protons, neutrons, and electrons form themselves into a human, it is vanishingly small.
Alice and Wonderland: REST and Web UI for Rabbit MQ
I am very guilty of this myself.

A bit of a story, not sure if it is to my advantage but with all the honesty going around here (see darkxanthos) I might as well.

I'm stuck in one of the worst inspirational gaps I've been in for a long long time, and I'm trying to find the 'holy grail', a self-regulating community.

I realize that HN is to some extent set up to achieve exactly that, but given the number of people complaining about the neigbourhood going to pot it seems that there is some room for improvement.

So I find myself reading HN more than I probably should, but I hope it will jolt me out of my 'writers block' into a more productive phase.

Whatever the outcome I certainly learn a lot from hanging out here!
Bit.ly Starts Warning About Malicious Links
Yes, it does ignore the ethics of the situation, because when information leaks to the public you no longer have an ethical decision to make, but a strategic decision of damage control. It becomes an exercise in pure game theory, as you can't assume that any given individual in the public will cooperate with you or be convinced by your arguments toward sympathy.

TechCrunch will only publish what Twitter lets them. In practice, in terms of who gets to make the decisions, this is the same situation as if Twitter found out they had been exploited and contacted TechCrunch to "leak" some PR for them. If Twitter wanted to do their damage control through some other outlet at this point, they could just tell TechCrunch to publish nothing, and then pick another news site and send the documents they choose to them. If Twitter wanted to do nothing, they could tell TechCrunch to do nothing, and then do nothing themselves. However, in both of these situations, once the information was published (and it would be—news is one of the most competitive businesses in the world, and one of the most cut-throat), TechCrunch would pick it up, because it would then be public and already available. The only difference, in this case, is that TechCrunch can publish the information "first." But that doesn't matter, really; as long as the information gets out, does it matter who did it first?
Still they outlasted, DEC, SGI, Pyramid and all the other minicomputer/workstation makers.
I'm not sure anything is broken, we just had plain old regulatory capture.

Greenspan himself admitted he thought that people would protect their own self interest. But those people get bonuses if their risks pay off and have no real downside if they lose. They are gambling with other people's money, not their own money.

And it's not as if self interest and lack of government bailouts prevent the Dutch tulip bubble, or any other speculative bubble.
Using a command shell isn't browsing.
The Great Google Doodle Triforce Conspiracy
I just checked
http://www.boardgamegeek.com
to see if it was mentioned there. It was, and it was compared to
http://www.superiorpod.com/
and
http://www.guildofblades.com/,
in case anyone was looking to compare alternatives.

Discussion was here
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/424272
and here
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/424309

Also, for those that don't know, boardgamegeek is an awesome resource for board game information.
so most of twitter's 20m users are marketers & promoters? I don't consider myself a marketer and yet I'm on twitter. I'm on there because my friends are on there.
@ev denied that they gave TC the "green light"

'@TechCrunch @arrington "we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information" What?! By whom? That's not our understanding'

http://twitter.com/ev/status/2676203744
Twitter Blog: Someone Call Security
Ask HN: What would you say are the most common website "categories"?
I'm adding website categories to launchly so my users can try to focus on sites that have a better chance of being interesting to them. I've got it all coded up but I'm having trouble coming up with a list of like 8 (for space reasons) that are both broad enough to encompass most sites but specific enough to be useful.

What would you guys use for a list of 8 general website categories?
Okay, fair enough. Glad that works for you. But you should understand that some people (such as myself) do want playlists, and that making MP3 players just appear as USB drives (rather than syncing with a client) would make this a pain.
Your first error is ontological: there is no known cause for being. Hence, since we don't know how being works, how can we extrapolate it mathematically?

Your second error is metaphysical: you assume you exist. You assume your existence can be validated or confirmed. However, there is no such thing. There is no way you or anybody else can prove they exist.

Your third error is perceptive: you assume others exist, and you assume animals exist. You assume the physical world you perceive is 'real'. This perception - albeit probably a very persistent one - cannot be proven to be 'real', meaning that perception is a lousy basis for ontological statements.

Your fourth error is that you're confused. You assume there is a distribution mechanism for existence, let alone a consistent and predictable one.

In short, your question is unanswerable. The only sane thing to do is to reject it as best as we can, maybe somebody learns something.
A SLA is a way for a company to say "I'm serious about uptime" more than anything else. Not to say it's not important, but it's certainly not an insurance policy.

An interesting SLA would be 'I will pay for time on some other cloud type service' but that would require better standardization than we have now.
The first person to guess Michael Arrington's email password, grab all his secret docs about his upcoming tablet computer and publish them, wins. Let's see TC swallow that poison pill.
Yes, you're correct about VirtualBox. And I left out many things from the long of stuff that they open sourced ...
Fair enough. I do like the NL idea of removing all the road furniture except direction signs.
none of us know all the facts so it's hard to pass judgement.

i think it really sucks for Twitter that TechCrunch published all that stuff. however, obviously someone without ethics has the complete set of 300 documents and is willing to send them around. maybe this soft release will make the blow easier to bear for Twitter--the lesser of two evils.

it's a terrible situation and i hope they catch and prosecute the hacker.
Yes, if the documents only related to how twitter intends to treat UGC, then you would have a point.
Streams vs. Documents
When you say, "So are you extremely lucky? Or is there some other explanation?" you presuppose that "you" are in fact lucky, and you do that because you know there are no insects reading Hacker News or otherwise thinking about this issue.
Not sure why the result is so surprising. If you are warm and confident, you are likely to appear as such in a 30 second video. If not, then not so likely. I'm not sure of all the criteria one would use to judge professional, but surely dress and appearance play a large part, and you can judge that just from a still image.

Competence is certainly harder to tell from a short clip, but I think people's impressions, both long and short term, for competence are a function of the more immediately apparent characteristics. If you wear an inside out t-shirt and have dishevelled hair, your competence rating is probably going to take a hit, even after a long term exposure.
The Long-Term Budget Outlook
When it has to do with the government, the public has a right to expect transparency. With a private organization, its different.
1. World News

2. Social Network News

3. Banking

4. Acquiring Things

5. Fixing Things

6. Entertainment

7. Learning

8. Tools
Ask HN: What Software Development Methodology do you use in pet projects?
Dear HN,<p>How do you manage you pet projects?
Do you use some methodology even though you're working on your own?
Basically the answer is yes (explicitly), you retain rights. Yes (explicitly), you can use the service for prototyping and yes, it is possible start with them and move some place cheaper once it makes financial sense.
The First Amendment doesn't apply here. The First Amendment Right to Free Speech only applies to the Federal Government, whereby it cannot restrict free speech. It applies to the states through the 14th Amendment due process clause.

Publishing these materials are not protected in any way by the First Amendment.
while the early Austrian School provided a lot of important insights, most of them have been accepted by the neoclassicals.

Neoclassicals are using some of the rhetoric of the Austrian School, but they are doing the opposite in almost every single issue: central banking, fractional-reserve banking, intellectual property, etc.
Interesting list and doesn't have much overlap with mine. What sites would you categorize as "Acquiring Things" and "Fixing Things"?
Is Crowdfunding the Future of Journalism?
I was tempted to think in terms of purchases, but really anything that you'd download (e.g. free stuff) or buy (e.g. Amazon), hence just acquiring things.

And fixing things is mostly for balance; whatever you're not acquiring, you probably have some reason to fix (e.g. looking up tech support for software you already have, trying to find a new mouse driver, figuring out how to solve a problem, looking for a good TV repair service, whatever).
I think I'll make a board game version of twitter. You compete to get the most followers, to get replied to by major bloggers, to get retweeted, and mentioned in the news. The ultimate winner is the first to get a million followers.

Who's in?
>Preferring OSX to XP is somewhat of a no-brainer at this point, as XP is about 10 years old.

OS preference is not primarily dependent on OS age.
This article is remarkably well balanced and correctly points out that both those who previously blindly followed economicists and those who blindly ignore them now are wrong. The truth of course is in between.

Economics is both a comparitively young science (at least in terms of when it was formalized) and one that deals with (or is influenced by) a very unpedictable factor, human actions. It gets many things right, and some things wrong. With time, it will be refined though by its nature it is likely to never reach the rigour and predictive power of some of the hard sciences such as physics.

This current upset is rightly forcing a reevaluation of many beliefs, but when the dust finally settles in the future, economics will emerge stronger and more accurate than before.
Goes to prove that timing and execution are more important than the idea.
Twitter's best shot at making money is to sue TechCrunch. Other than that it sounds like they don't have many ideas but need to make $68m by 2010. Good luck!
I try to be agile even when working alone. It certainly makes pairing interesting! I use PivotalTracker to manage things.
Citation needed. Google picked you up nearly instantaneously though.
Darwin already pickup up ZFS. You can mount zfs volumes in OS X 10.5. You can patch the kernel module of OS X desktop to write to them (but don't, its really slow).
I use TDD, but rather than all-out unit tests I just write doctests. Here's an example of a project created that way: http://github.com/paulgb/tilelife/blob/7e797ac287a91d48276a2...
As far as I can tell, right now Gearman is only a load balancer for small requests using a nonstandard RPC protocol. It's easy to be smaller when you don't yet have most of hadoop's major features:

* use the whole cluster for large jobs, consuming all the data right where it's stored and combining output from every machine you own (what's the point of remote work on just one box?)

* retry partial failures on different replicas of the same data (without losing successful work)

* ship intermediate values between workers (without this you don't even have map/reduce)

* roll new code and data beforehand (and clean it up after)

* avoid job starvation
I also try to be somewhat agile maintaining a backlog, tracking bugs and setting goals for my sprints, although my daily stand up meetings are a little...awkward.
"Cut it off and I lose 28% of my visitors."

Graceful degradation, dynamic enhancement, ringing any bells (and whistles)?
standards help everybody in the long run

Well, except for Apple.
Why stop at a billion, then? Why not a trillion?

I think the point is that a billion users who log in once a week is not unrealistic, it's virtually impossible.
And don't forget to mention MySQL. I just hope they'll keep it all alive or my apps are screwed!
If Twitter said "publish nothing", that's exactly what TechCrunch would do

This claim is not supported by any statements from TechChrunch or Twitter, and contradicts Ev's claim, quoted above, that they haven't given TechChrunch a green light to publish anything.

I think you're just spreading misinformation to defend TechChrunch's quite indefensible actions. I call bullshit on your claim that TechChrunch would have published nothing if Twitter asked them that.
What value is this information to the "little guy"? If the only value is "that's interesting" then essentially nothing.
The iRing
They can monetize relationships, connecting people who express desires with others that can provide.
I think Ill make a similar game except the idea will be to create a bunch of fake accounts, get a lot of followers and spam marketing links everywhere.
There's a lot of things that have an effect on the price of a Big Mac in a country, from the ingredients to how the franchises are managed. It's when you're dealing with near-identical standards in countries that the comparison is at its prime, however it's a simple way to explain and judge PPP for the average Joe.

Canada has better value than US, despite having near identical standards, why? My bet would be that every McDonalds employee receives minimum benefits (prescriptions, glasses, dental, IIRC) due to the health care being handled by the government. The interesting thing is that it used to cost more in the UK, and does in Europe still, with similar systems. In fact the UK system is more integrated than Canadian, so following the logic from USA->CA should mean the UK costs less (you don't have to cover children's dental, and there's barely any company benefit plans in the UK, at least in the sectors I worked where ironically you'd need most: construction) however it cost significantly more until this year.

So why in a system with more established care systems that remove the burden from employers did it cost more? This is where judging the prices of globalised products is interesting.

My guess for the UK would be higher taxes for the consumer, worker and business drove up the cost of the burger.
Twitter's Worse Nightmare: Facebook
Your.flowingdata - An experiment in personal metrics through Twitter
It would be smart if he traveled less than 30 years back.
For anyone who enjoyed this article, here's the holy grail of company name etymologies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_name_etymologie...
Stanford tech mentor was drunk when he drowned
I stand corrected then. Respect.
I kept thinking, wow this guy is clueless.

But, I think it's important to realize at the time he probably thought other things where really important. It's a classic case where he did not know enough to understand he needed to know more.
Apple demands Microsoft to pull 'Laptop Hunter' ad; Microsoft laughs
+1 for humor
Neat, but I wish they had per-capita numbers. I'm guessing Wisconsin would look even more interesting then.
The bottom line is this... if you're going to operate a busines in the financial services sector, you don't go dark. Period.
Monitor: Mapping a better world
More interesting than how they got thier names is what these companies were doing before their names got famous. For example on this list there are decendants from a pulp mill, dried fish exporter, and a playing card maker.
Visualization in Sports «  Visualization Blog
Interesting = value
Ask HN: best free iPhone/iPod app for offline viewing of HTML/PDF
What is your favour free app for offline viewing of HTML and PDF?

I am looking for a simple solution to be used for several hundred students, most have an iPod Touch, and some have an iPhone. I want them to be able to download some HTML (or PDF) content when they are online, ... then be able to view it, including navigating links, when they are offline.

I have read a things about bookmarking data:URI, but it looks too complicated. I know there are some nice commercial apps, but unfortunately we need a free solution. I know some universities (Stanford) have custom apps for students to use. If you're an iPod app programmer and can share some for a bare bones app (that we could customize) to download, store, and offline-display HTML, that would be way cool.

Any recommendations or suggestions would be appreciated.
Sure, but does that hold up when compared to a setup using something that sucks a little bit less than PHP?
interesting != value. Consider the most boring class you took and how you later discovered it was all applicable.
It was two Stanford guys and one Berkeley dude.
2 Votes for Stanford Univ Networks
1 Vote for UC Berekeley Networks

Bill Joy: "$%^&! I want it to be called UCBN! It has a better ring to it! No?"
Mike did not just post this.
It's a good idea, but I would drop the distributed system and focus on the game. If you can get enough users to make it worthwhile, there's probably an easier way to monetize than the whole distributed-data-processing thing.
It's basically the press release with a few extra lines, no real review or content.
The big story here, and what's circulating on quite a few of the google news reports about this incident, is the apparent "insecurity" of the cloud. If these documents were on an internal network, it would have been much, much harder for the hacker to grab them since most internal networks are firewalled.

This is a huge blow to all of us web app developers looking to sell apps since things like this will make corporations untrustworthy of our defacto security system (username/password + forgot password).

Google Docs needs a "high security" option that removes these easy access points (forgot password), and other web app developers handling sensitive data need to follow suit.

We can fill in that role through some kind of manual process of confirming a person's identity via other means (not entirely sure how, but i'm sure there's a way).
I've had luck with the open-source PhotoRec before. It scans a storage device for bits that match known file types (and it knows a lot, not just photo types as the name implies), and saves them to a new location. I'd definitely give it a try before paying for expensive data-recovery.
on recoverability:

sure you can 'repair tables' on a normal MySQL setup, but you are going to loose some rows that were cached; just like with fsck, you can make data sane, but not correct,

people tell me that now MySQL 'repair table' is as good as promoting a slave these days, but when a server crashes, the hardware is suspect (unless the console log indicates something software-only, such as an oom condition.) so restoring from a slave still sounds like the way to go.

The application I used it for back in the day was a Dspam server... it had millions of rows (keeping track of everyone's spam at a fair-sized ASP) Come to think of it, I never shut it down until we took it out of production.

Of course, a database server that crashes, regardless of the ease of recovery, is of little utility. if it's still doing that, well, forget it. That I am unable to find people who use it is quite worrysome in this regard. The thing is, it was solid with dspam, and all the synthetic tests I threw at it many years ago.

heh. I almost want to come up with some free webapp to test this. got any ideas on a webapp that would be easy to write, that would quickly attract users, and that would thrash the database? it doesn't need to make money.
Been there, done that. Licked the wounds, learned the lessons. (grin)

Look, I hope Ivan is wildly successful in his venture and that this relocation works wonders for everyone. Honest.

But the bottom line is this. When you are the Leader of a company that is taking other people's money... You. Don't. Go. Dark.

Tell your users what is going on. If you have to go dark, let them know how long and setup autoresponders (my mom even knows how to use them & she's 66). If there are any problems, state your plan to rectify them. And if you're really on the ball, have a Plan B, too.
World's First 3D Webcam Tested
Facebook's Road to 200 Million visualization
Over 50% of Firefox users are cheap pricks
Cyrket - An Android Store Application Browser from Saurik (the Cydia guy)
So in other words, if documents have "news value" (i.e. someone wants to read them) and they have been leaked (the only examples he cites are Pentagon Papers and peanut butter memo), then publishing them is A-OK.

Both of those predicates are highly questionable in this case. In the first and most important instance, these are STOLEN documents, not leaked. By taking commercial advantage of these stolen documents TechCrunch is effectively profiting from theft.

And that someone (perhaps even many people) would like to read a document, i.e. it has news value, is not a valid ethical reason (forget legality) to breach privacy, much less profit from theft.

In my eyes, TechCrunch is little more than theft-condoning scum at this point.
The Hot Jobs Where Pay Is Rising In The Recession
TechCrunch Advertiser Wall of Shame
Erm, I wouldn't say that ;) Maybe in less than 6 months, with a proper design.
The Apple remote vs the Microsoft remote
So the particular crash issues we were having were not your typical MySQL crashes (which, as you correctly point out, are usually hardware-related), they were definitely software-related with ndb. Which is obviously a huge problem, especially as the data was unrecoverable.

Before moving to NDB and after migrating from it, we had a solid single MySQL instance on the same hardware. Oh, the joys of premature optimization :)
The documents weren't leaked. They were stolen.

And I can't believe you effectively equated future business plans with torture as public interest stories, with the grudging ("have to admit") qualifier that one has "more significance" than the other.

This whole TC/Twitter episode has disturbed my faith in humanity, to be frank.
The presentation by the author at the meetup as mentioned in the article - http://blip.tv/file/2286176/
Web Fonts Now, for real
I was surprised to see the death rate for swine flu is not much different from the regular seasonal flu (according to the stats given).

wow! the avian flu is incredibly lethal, but I guess it kills its host before it can infect many others.

I wonder what is the most dangerous intermediate death rate that maximizes damage by spreading to a wide population and killing many. Any computational biology geeks reading HN who know the answer?
Torture? Business plans? Are you seriously suggesting that people can't tell the difference?
The Guardian Open Platform |
TC is becoming, if it's not already, TheMirror of tech, and Arrignton is Perez Hilton
Yeah, fine, we agree, but comparing someone to Madoff is one step short of a comparison to Hitler. It's a little too much and makes people not take you seriously.

(the thread is now officially over, btw!)