skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that is a bit of an overstatement, but it is a point well made.

Copyrights have been extended to great lengths and retroactive extensions have been passed, so they expire at a very slow rate which is not at all fixed.
Actually, that site works under English court reporting rules. He is named because he is the defendant in a criminal trial in progress.

The news site didn't 'make him a rapist' - the Crown Prosecution Service did so by having him charged. Until charged he cannot be named in a newspaper by law.
This is horrible advice, really, don't do this. The first option is to ignore anything the person is saying and ramble on about something until they leave you alone. The second option is to act like an emotionless robot. If the person making these "attacks" at you is someone you have a vested interest in getting along with (co-worker, spouse, etc) you really owe it to yourself to not hide from them with these childish tactics and to just address the issue.
True, but we're already on an even steeper slope when a person's life is essentially ruined in the name of sensationalism.
Here's another perspective on the mother of the little girl who was "randomly selected" because Obama didn't want anyone thinking he was "just taking questions from a plant".

"I have been honored to work with Kathleen Manning Hall on the New England Finance and Steering Committee for Barack Obama for over a year. She has raised money, slogged through the snow in New Hampshire and has devoted every minute of her time toward electing Barack Obama President of the United States. She has not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. Please elect her as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention to vote for Barack Obama.”
Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick)"

http://www.bluemassgroup.com/diary/11161/

David Axelrod was one of the world's great masters of corporate astroturfing before he joined Obama's campaign. Most of his work was for companies who wanted blogs to mention there products in a "spontaneous" groundswell of support.

AFAIK, he is the first president to demand that the media submit all of its questions to his press secretary the day before the press conferences so he can select only the ones he wants.
Avoiding overloading Mnesia
Is letting someone sleep over for a night without charging them money considered "rental activity"?
The Deck is by invitation only.
Bigger or stronger won't stop a bullet. Anyone who cheats in a way that seriously damages the other, in a world that has guns in it, is a f*cking idiot.

EDIT: This is known as "deterrence" if the potential malefactor is fairly bright and "evolution in action" if not.
Better gaming model: design a cargo box for the tunnel with web cams and laser turrets (or some other form of rat killing small arms). Working title: ratpocalypse, until something cooler is suggested.
6. Pretend you are better than your competition and mock them.

Check out the posts on that site http://briancray.com/blog/
How is he any better?
Something I posted a few days ago bears repeating: Running trails and running clubs are disproportionately populated with people who are more resistant to injury. Lots of people quit running out of frustration with injuries. I had a two-year love affair with running that kept getting interrupted by shin splints and sore knees. (Cue the "you're doing it wrong" folks. I paid careful attention to my form and did my best to learn from, to choose one example from many, Evolution Running.)

There's no way you can create an adequate control group for middle-aged long distance runners. You'd have to find people who had proved their ability to withstand high mileage running in their middle age and then quit for reasons unrelated to injury.

These days running is still my favorite form of exercise, and I no longer have problems with injury, but that's because I gave up running long distances at a steady pace. I'm either run/walking with my girlfriend or doing solo fartlek sessions of no more than five miles total. I could certainly achieve higher mileage, but pushing the injury envelope longer seems worth it. When your study group is middle-aged long distance runners, you are perforce excluding people like me. How do you exclude people like me from the control group?
Maybe it isn't all about your profession. Maybe you should try to know some of the basics taught in high school in order to be a good citizen. Not to say that the high school I went to wasn't a waste of time, but that doesn't mean high school has to be a waste of time.

People are good at being smug, and thinking they know everything. The best way to realize that there's actually some depth to a topic is to study it a bit. Since (from reading other comments here) none of us would have wanted to learn some of these topics, maybe we'd all still think that those other topics are all a stupid waste of time, and people who do them are also useless.
My college insisted on paying for Outlook Web Access for all student email. It was more than half bad. I still get the shivers just thinking about it.
After months and months of late-night coding sessions, created http://www.howmucharestamps.com

:)
"unlimited numbers of 128,000 x 128,000 pixel textures, terabytes of source data" (part1, 3:33)

rare to hear about images this large in routine use. cool.

----

on id's experience with developing for multiple platforms at once: build up in house expertise; have a build system that does automatic tests against each platform at once (part2, ~7:30)

---

on the future of gaming, and the cloud: imagines a 100 petabyte data store, a World of Warcraft-sized texture, people interacting with it using consoles that have no optical media, just an ethernet port (part3, 6:45)
This is the first sentence in an article about 'viral memes', so I'm assuming 'propagate' refers to that metaphor.
Awesome man, what were your swim/bike/run splits?
I'm way outside my area of expertise here, but I would think that as chemistry modeling improves it would become easier to rationally modify a molecule, or design one from scratch, that could either kill a bug or disable the beta-lactamases, or whatever, that the bugs use to disable older antibiotics.

I don't know how far off that is now. It might even be possible now. I do know that there aren't strong incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop antibiotics. There's a lot more money in coming up with some new statin that lots of people will take for 20 years than a life-saving antibiotic that will be taken for 10 days by a smaller number of patients - especially when hospitals practice "antimicrobial stewardship," meaning that they don't prescribe newer, better antibiotics unless they think the old ones won't do.
hehe, no we're building out the prototype.
Colleges: Unknown, Unsung & Unusual (1963)
Miniature Zepplins are great until the wind starts blowing. Most of the large cities are coastal.

Robots on segways are ok until someone decides they need another segway (or whatever it happens to be carrying).

Of course, I think the tunnels could suffer the same security problems, whether physical or virtual. Imagine hacking your neighbourhood tunnel to get free pizza!
Link to Smashing Magazine so they get the credit instead of the original source? Sounds worse to me.
How did you get into running? What would you recommend for someone starting out?
Heh, good point.

"5 absolutely must read books for every web designer"

"10 signs of professional web design (Or why you should drop your amateur web designer)"

"9 compelling reasons to build a single-purpose website"

Brian, I agree with your sentiment, but ... kettle, black?
As you just noted, the account is still anonymous, so there doesn't seem to be a point in requiring it.
Objective-C? Why?
It's been a while since I've taken a math class, but I'm not sure what the problem is with calling it a 21.2% improvement.

The old conversion rate was 24.4%. The new one was 29.6%.

(29.6 - 24.4) / 24.4 = .213 = 21.3%.

Is it misleading because their number of conversions is so low? (Not trying to be snarky, I have no idea)
They already use this to incite racist hatred:
http://thelambethwalk.blogspot.com/2009/08/muslim-raped-tour...
Couldn't a fail be an indicator that schools still are serving kids? "Oh, Johnny didn't really get it the first time around, let's get him to try again"? I'm not necessarily advocating this point of view, but stating the statistic isn't enough to get your point across. You need to propose a proper way of interpreting those results as well.
Is US Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra a Phony?
Given the seismic hazards, it seems extremely foolish to build data centers anywhere in the Bay Area. I'm reminded of a funny exchange I had while contracting at SixApart, back when they still ran LiveJournal.

"Do you guys ever worry about what would happen in a major earthquake, since your stuff is hosted in San Francisco?"

"Oh, we have a colo in Oakland"
Shimer is still unknown (except among some homeschoolers, I think) and still unsung. Here are some current Common Data Set descriptions of Shimer College:

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
Or ask you which institution you busted out of.
First, the article never explicitly states that the author didn't try exercise.

Second, getting up and exercising is a complementary behavior to changing your eating habits. Neither negates the other and both together are best.

With luck, the author will feel more energetic after the diet change, and will then be motivated to start an exercise program. (or just nail the early donut, shrugs)
I have used it for writing a compiler for a research project. It is a great language so far. Even if you stick to a subset of Scala fairly close to Java, even then its a pretty big win. There are lots of little goodies. For example, type inference is really nice. For-comprehensions are pretty sweet. Lists are pretty awesome. Optional parenthesis for method calls is nice. And so on and so forth. These little things make Java a lot less annoying.

Of course, the little goodies are the tip on the iceberg. There is a lot more to Scala, primarily its support for FP but the learning curve is also much harder for those features. Power at the cost of learning.

On the downside, sometimes Scala code is TOO compact. For example, stuff like operators for list operations can be fairly hard to read without practice.

Interfacing with existing Java libraries is also easy. I have not tried calling Scala from Java however.

Overall I recommend the language. Its mature enough to be used for real projects and its a lot nicer and whole lot more powerful than Java.
Sort of unrelated to the app, but your blog is very difficult to read on Windows. ClearType combined with the small size of Adobe Garamond Pro makes it very difficult to read. Maybe try a web-safe font like Georgia?
Ask HN: Your opinion.
Hi. I've been recently invited to join a startup as a founder. I'd like to hear your opinion on the idea:

Mudoo is a place for people to download music submitted by the artists. The thing is, in order to download you have to either invite a user or listen for a 20sec. ad. If you're a advertiser you can pay for a 20sec. advertisement that'll be played for only 20cents.

I've been thinking and the idea sounds good. What do you think?

..I mean I know it's not all about the idea but I'd really appreciate your opinion on this.
This isn't a prank? I find the claims dubious.

What are the energy costs of automating the burrowing of these tunnels to connect,say a small city like Boston? The Boston Sewer network is ~1500 miles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Water_and_Sewer_Commissi...) and I am guessing this would have a comparable edge length.

And then, how do you deal with breakdowns, logistically and financially? It will have more complicated machinery than mere plumbing, with finite half-lives that'll require switch-outs.

The Boston Sewer Commission charges 60 dollars per month per family unit, and I am guessing a significant fraction goes into upkeep.

Will anyone want to spend that kind of money for the slim marginal benefit of getting things a bit faster than Amazon?
Cl-perec blog series by pinterface
A/B testing is great, no doubt. The lesson of solely simplifying is just not a great outcome of such a test. It's like driving a car for the first time and then telling everybody that it's faster than walking.
I closed the window as soon as I saw that. I don't feel the need to give out my info to an unknown service.
I'm pretty active in the Dublin Group of couchsurfing and meet up with people regularly. Just last night a crowd of maybe 15 of us (most of us knew each other already, butt heres usually at least one new person there) went out in town. Its great fun and you meet great people.

I can't anymore, because my apartment is too small, but this time last year, I lived in a house with 4 other couchsurfers. We hosted people ALL THE TIME. I think over the 4 months that we hosted, we hosted 40 or so people. One weekend we hosted TWELVE people at once (there was an event on). Personally, I've NEVER had any problems and don't personally know anyone whos ever had problems. By now, I've met HUNDREDS of couchsurfers and have never heard of any personal bad experiences. Since we were all working too, often we weren't even at home. Often we gave people a key and let them come and go as they pleased and then hung out with them in the evenings. Not once did this cause problems. Never had anything stolen or broken, never had issues with privacy either (generally, people are quite considerate, if you want time alone).

Of course, I DONT have tens of thousands of dollars of tools and I don't have any firearms (besides airsoft guns) and I rarely have more than €100 in cash at home. I DO have computers though and laptops. I imagine the laptops would be the biggest target. But.. if I worry about something valuable, I lock it away.

Obviously there are risks and if you host someone or surf someone else's couch, you must be aware of the risks. Personally, I'm willing to take that risk - for me, the benefits are worth it. I've made tons of friends through couchsurfing and I find couchsurfers to be generally more open minded than others. I guess you have to be to share your home with strangers.

Couchsurfing is also not actually about free accommodation either. Its about a cultural exchange. About meeting people, making friends, learning something new. In this respect, I have found it to work exceptionally well.

Its sad when you hear of stories like this, though. It reminds you that there are bad people out there - and a site with as many members as couchsurfing is obviously going to have a few of these. I certainly hope theres not many, but I guess you never know for sure. I guess you need to be careful...
A lot of bomber pilots feel the weight of their actions, even though they are also physically detached from the killing area.

Even squeezing the trigger on a gun and seeing a guy fall to the ground is a detached experience.

Any weapon besides a knife provides detachment, because you don't see the face and pain of the person you're killing.

There were terrible, bloody wars where the majority of the killing was with axes, knives, and swords. Not having weapons that allowed detachment didn't stop them.

Feeling the weight of your actions is about the man, not the weapon, I think.
"We wrote our original benchmarking tool in Python, but during our latest benchmarks, we noticed that it was taking about as much time as the engine itself, hiding our real performance numbers. We now have a very small Objective-C program (<900 lines) that uses prepared statements in a tight loop, and times only across the mysql_stmt_execute() call."

What's wrong with Objective-C?
Looks great! Can't wait until it's ready for a production setting.
I figured someone would point that out. And here's my response:

If you look at all of those posts, they are my original opinion. I'm not simply collecting links and saying "Here it is." That's the difference.
Such things are only a matter of degree. If you're staying in a hotel you're just trusting a different set of people with access to where you're sleeping.
I had to read that about 5 times. As a father of 2... I agree completely :)
In 2007, Shacham first described return-oriented programming, which is a powerful systems security exploit that generates malicious behavior by combining short snippets of benign code already present in the system.

The only references I can find to return-oriented programing are either by Shacham (who "invented" it) or his grad students. Is this another name for a technique that's been around for a while, an academic who's making it sound revolutionary to get grants, a legitimate new tool for analyzing exploits, or just some PR crap?
RT Letter To Your Girlfriend/Wife For Football Season | My Philly Network
Well, to the Von Neumann architecture, data and instructions are all the same. Just a matter of where the Program Counter points to.

Also both XML and XSLT are interpreted. Meaning a real program reads the source and manipulates the system accordingly. I really have no problem treating the two as equivalent.
Agreed. The problem isn't requiring registration, it is that the requirement isn't disclosed until after someone submits a link. Since link submit sites are common (HTML validators, etc) the resulting error page/requirement on this site is pretty jarring to the user.
FreeRice: Hack a site to feed the world
Yes, I asked about this a while ago, with an interesting discussion ensuing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633540

As the submitted article here notes,

"Of course, finding qualified teachers to teach advanced maths courses will not be easy."

Not easy by far. Here is a detailed article about just how difficult it is to find elementary school teachers who know even very basic math

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

and how especially lacking such teachers are in school districts with mostly poor students from ethnic minorities. One finding from that article illustrates the grave nature of the problem:

"in my first visit in 1986 to a K-6 elementary
school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew
how to find the area of a rectangle."
Twitter not suing
But even in a bomber you are still in the situation. You out there flying. With a UAV, you can get up go to the bathroom or walk down the hall and grab a Coke out of the vending machine.
I think where interests of startups and government intersect, a few political submissions have definite relevance.

As was argued to me (though I'm not sure I agree it's the case with this healthcare bill but I digress), a healthcare system with more universal coverage might make it easier for some people to quit their jobs to create new businesses. Privacy concerns and government recordkeeping also seem to be of definite interest.

This particular submission deals with the difficulty in getting the facts through mainstream news networks while at the same time we also see a lot of popular submissions about the death of mainstream news (not sure if you define these as political)... there just might be a relationship there.
I agree that it's not too hard, but if I weren't an HN member I would have bounced at that point.

I think having the search bar on the homepage is a great idea since it tells me exactly what to do right when I get there. Maybe put a URL in there explicitly (like http://www.mysite.com ) that auto-clears onfocus so it's ridiculously obvious.

Some quick thoughts:

* Provide a "top tip" that is the #1 thing someone should do to improve their page. The tips offered are good, but aren't ranked, even though some are obviously more important than others.
* Give the option to have the report emailed to you. I'd like to pass mine off to my business partners.
* Possible premium upgrade: Live chat/advice on how to improve your site. People pay for SEO, right?

Final verdict: I liked it, but I don't think I'll come back a lot. There's already a lot of DIY SEO advice out there and I didn't find anything here I didn't already know. I'm a wannabe expert, though, so maybe it's vitally helpful for others.
"Digital Sharecropping"? Hah
If you sit in the front row of the classroom, you'll also get straight A's.
>> Mudoo is a place for people to download music submitted by the artists

Is it a place for amateur musicians to submit their own music? Or is this more for commercial, big-record-company music? In any case, there's already a lot of alternatives that don't have ads that are that noticeable, so it will really depend on your marketing/popularity and what else you can offer.
MemcacheDB, Tokyo Tyrant, Redis performance test
Seems a very arbitrary choice.

Shouldn't they be using standard benchmarks, anyway? It's easy to write your own benchmark to make something look good.
You're right it's not about the idea.

Is it completely off the wall an infeasible? No. Then again, if you had told me facebook's idea, or twitter, I would have laughed.

Evaluate all the other, more important aspects of partnering with these people (after all, that's what you are doing).
There is too much pre-existing infrastructure underground to automate it completely in a cost-efficient way. In general, almost all construction work other than heavy lifting is still done by people.

that said, I am looking forward to my flying car.
That number is an upper bound, based on combining the largest estimates from several different sources. It's not clear that the numbers from different sources don't overlap, and the primary sources estimate only $29-35k/doctor in marketing spending.

For comparison, Merck and Johnson and Johnson (the two drug companies I bothered to look up) spent $13k/doctor on R&D.

Incidentally, one of the bigger items included in marketing is free samples (totalling $16,800 per doctor), expensed at retail price [1]. That's basically just a giveaway from the drug companies to people doctors feel are deserving (usually low income/uninsured patients).

[1] The real cost is actually less, since the drug company would not necessarily get retail price if the drugs were not given away free.
Without yet reading the actual post, let me put my thoughts in there.

After the age of 16, make school non-compulsory. At the end of the 10th grade year, have everyone take the GED/ACT/SAT and if they get a threshold level, congrats, you can now move on.

So when kids start misbehaving, you don't have to keep them there.
The improvement in the conversion rate is (29.6 - 24.4) = 5.2%.

Reporting "a percent of a percent" is downright misleading because it is entirely dependent on the starting baseline and also because conversion rates have high natural variance. Imagine an improvement from 2% conversion (for a truly awful site) to 2.6% (for a site just as awful). That "30% improvement" just isn't. If they were intellectually honest and called it a "0.6% improvement," anyone would be able to see that the claimed improvement is well within stddev.
It did, when they built IE 5. IE 5 was much more robust and standard compliant than Netscape 4.x (and I am an ex-Netscape)
I would imagine this to be true. I have done a quite a bit of math as a requirement for getting my CS degree, but I have never been very good at all.

This finds me balking from math heavy software development jobs because I feel like my math skills will hold me back(or at least slow me down). This is sad, because many of the most lucrative software development jobs I see are generally pretty math heavy. I would venture to guess this is the same in other fields as well.