skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting question. Alcohol shouldn't be illegal because it's a major part of our social fabric in America. Business deals, hacker meetups, weddings, reunions, all have alcohol at them. Hell, the writers of the constitution consumed a ton of alcohol to celebrate when they finished. All of these examples lead me to believe that in moderate amounts, alcohol serves a useful social function. I mean, when was the last time you were at a hacker meetup that didn't have booze at it?

Another reason why alcohol shouldn't be illegal is that almost all users are functioning, contributing members of society. Meth isn't even close in that regard. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of regular meth users have a positive net effect. It's just too addictive and potent.

That being said, I think the penalties for consuming too much alcohol should be on par with drug related offenses. Further, any crime committed while under heavy influence of alcohol (assault and rape come to mind) should have it's minimum sentence doubled. And as for parents who beat their spouses and children while drunk? I'd be fine with throwing them in jail for 20 to life depending on the damage done.

A less extreme measure is to revoke a persons right to purchase alcohol after X number of alcohol induced crimes. People do make mistakes, and we don't need to throw the book at first time offenders. However, a repeated pattern of alcohol abuse is not something that should be tolerated any more than the use of meth.
"In a world where educational opportunities are often disproportionately allocated, it's exciting to think that today anyone with an Internet connection can download any of over one million free public domain books"

I've always thought the OLPC should have pursued a cheap e-reader for public works, rather than a general-purpose $100 ($200 in practice) laptop. You should be able to make an LCD-based e-reader for $50 [1] already. A $20 device doesn't seem far out either.

LCDs can also be bistable, so power is only used when the page changes: http://www.nemoptic.com/ . (They still won't look as good as EInk's electrophoretic displays, but the $ savings are non-trivial.)

[1] E.g. datapoint: Coby's portable DVD player with 7" color LCD is $60: http://www.amazon.com/Coby-TFDVD7008-7-Inch-Portable-Player/...
Does anybody else feel that stuck-in-the-mud-ness increases for every technological generation? Seems the more thing advance, the more people say "right, THIS is how it should be" and never want to move on. Diesel cars are a good example. FFS, the automobile is less than a century old for the normal person. And yet, people have these ridiculous ideas about what is the "normal" fuel to put in them. And are thus resistant to superior technology.

Also, it is MPG, not MGP.
Stanza is a great, free, iPhone app for reading EPUB books. Right now you have to open the EPUB file with the desktop version of Stanza then download it from the same wireless network on your iPhone.

I imagine in the near future you'll be able to search Google Books from directly within Stanza (like you can with several other sites). In fact, the only reason I can think of that you wouldn't be able to do so would be if Amazon were to nix it seeing as how they own Lexcycle now.
Here's another Lego adder, done with pneumatics:
http://www.kclague.net/PneumADDic%20II/index.htm
http://www.google.com/search?q=tl+dr
That's not true in my experience. I've been partner dancing for about 6 years and that's where I met my girlfriend of the past 5 years. We still dance every chance we get (we have a portable dance floor in our apartment). It's absolutely wonderful that we have something that we can learn and excel at together.

I have seen some people meet while learning to partner dance and quit, however. Not because they "bagged a good one" per se, but because some couples think that they're only allowed to dance together (which can get boring no matter how you slice it) and have a difficult time accommodating each other in the learning process.
Case in point:

Myth #1. The Design has to be Original.

"Truthfully, I don’t know if this one is a myth, or just a hard lesson for me to learn..."

What the hell? He admits he is not even sure of his own premise?
Actual deep link:
http://valashiya.blogspot.com/2009/08/microsoft-plays-god-ch...

The image is very small, even the onclick one. Also "citation needed". There is no source for the Polish campaign. Where did you get the image from, are you in Poland right now?

[edit:] Here is the actual source:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/25/microsoft-sucks-at-photos...
Adsense will allow integration of other ad networks [video]
Here is the story:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/08/getting-most-revenue-fro...

Seems like direct competition with PubMatic.
Item 6 (goodbye custom chips) is not a new trend. It's been happening over the last several years. Programmable logic has progressed and encroached on all but the high volume ASICs. If the volume is there, an ASIC makes sense. Otherwise, there's a wonderful world of FPGAs just waiting for you to explore.

Item 8 (no more chip startups) may be technically true, but I think it's just an evolution of the business model. Rather than planning for an ASIC immediately, you would begin by implementing the IP in an FPGA. This allows you to prove the design and the market. If the market is sufficiently large, you may choose to create an ASIC.

Item 10 (brain drain continues) seems obvious. Of course the capability of engineers in India and China would improve and catch up to the U.S. With the improved skill there's also an increase in cost as those with the skills commands better pay. Equilibrium will follow.
For Offsite I too use CrashPlan, to computers at friends rather than using their 'central' service.
What obstacles did you find in your production use? I am heavily down this path already.
I've found bing results to be comparable to google so far (mostly identical), but bing just lost a lot of respect from me:

search: "learn you a * for great good"

Bing returns no results .. it doesn't respect the wildcard.
Being from Poland (but living in Germany) I have to admit it's not only Microsoft's fault. The Polish tend to be backwards in many ways. For instance the Polish word for "negro" is still common when referring to people of color, especially Africans or African Americans.

When Obama became president the Poles mostly failed to call him African American stressing that the US has a "black president".

"Blacks" are still exotic in Poland even after a substantial influx of African refugees in recent years.

Even African players in Polish sports teams have to deal with racist attacks at sport events.
If you're completely new to programming (or rusty), I'd recommend "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" before PCL or ACL. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/

It's a really great, free resource for beginners that will help you get ready for the other books.
Another one to add to the list is CD Baby (www.cdbaby.com), a site owned and created almost entirely by Derek Sivers. He sold it for $22 million last year.

Looking at the site now, it's a bit sleeker and more up-to-date than both Craigslist and PlentyOfFish, but not too long ago it looked pretty much like a link farm: http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/original/0004/6518/4...
Thanks, got the mail. After a quick glance at it I'm not betting on having an easy time breaking out, since you're basing on the sandboxing primitives built into mzscheme and aren't abusing them in any way that jumps out at me immediately. But I'll look at it more later.
Or rather, http://www.google.com/search?q=%22tl%3Bdr%22

More specifically, a summary of a longish text: item 2 from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TLDR
Well, take your last two sentences and then tell me, what does the original article add to that?

Exactly. And that was the reason for my original, snide remark. He said no more than "Work on what you love" in way too many words. Which is both, a beautiful thing to say, and an utterly useless piece of advice in the real world.
Facebook Tests Mobile Payments
Just glancing through, I didn't see a mention of tarsnap, my favorite tool for backing up servers online.
that and other resources.
That's the literal meaning. Subtexts include: this is way too verbose for the information it's delivering, this is way too editorialised, this needs editing, etc. So "tl;dr" is also a judgement of the resource referred to.

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Tl%3Bdr#Chapter_1
My biggest problem is getting on track. Once I've started working, I really get into it and I can't pull myself away for anything; food, sleep, etc. The best trick for getting started is attacking some small, even trivial, task that doesn't require thinking through.
I'm with you on Where's Google, adding Where's Facebook, Where's Skype, Ebay, Yahoo! etc. etc.
It would be great to see a report like this which considers web companies, as they have been the darlings of growth over the last decade. How many of these companies would have met the $50Million revenue within 12 years?

Ebay was Net Revenues of $413.9 million in Q4 2002.
Skype $125 Million for Q1 2008
HTML and the whole dynamic web-app thing became interesting once a major party deployed a wide-spread application that used asynchronous updates.

Wait, let's go back a little.

HTML became interesting once Microsoft implemented an ActiveX XMLHTTPRequest object to enable a web-based Outlook client.

It became a stable development target once Microsoft disbanded the IE development team ('we've won the browser war so let's add some features to Word instead') and other browsers (primarily the Mozilla XUL/Gecko-based Firefox) took this de-facto standard and provided a viable alternative to IE with a more-or-less API compatible XMLHTTPRequest object.

That IE6 is still the industry standard is a thorn in the eye of many developers (including yours truly), but it has presented Microsoft with enough inertia that they now can no longer dictate how the next generation of browsers is going to behave.
Has the total chip market started shrinking yet? I thought growth from phones and other consumer electronics would easily make up for any dip in PC/server chips.
But "lemur" is rather more specific than "dinosaur." Dinosaur is just a broad category defined by scientists. If they want "Dinosaur" to include modern animals, that's up to them.

From the tone of your answer, you sound pretty confident that chickens are not dinosaurs-- perhaps you have some authoritative information on this? If so, can you direct me to it? My google-fu deserts me.
RE: "They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named"

Ballmer is just projecting his issues...he's Voldemort's chunkier brother, ya know.
ticgit keeps tickets in a git branch of a project. Yeah, it ain't mainstream, but it might become so...

http://wiki.github.com/schacon/ticgit
Microsoft Apologizes For Changing Race in Photo
Looks really useful, although I wonder is it really necessary for the C++ version to depend on Qt? Qt is a pretty huge library.
Can you use an iPhone to highlight text in printed books?
Is it feasible to use the iPhone camera along with vision algorithms for this purpose?
At the end of the day, I’m not sure that the traditional college educational process of reading a textbook, listening to a lecture, and then taking a test is a process that is often replicated in the real world of business.

Now there's what I consider a shocking understatement.

I, however, am quite sure that this traditional process is not often replicated in any real world, including business.
When not hacking, I love investigating the marginalia (doodles in the margins) of medieval Italian, English & Irish manuscripts. Google's book scanning project is awesome for this. Ten years ago I couldn't have imagined having uninterrupted access to this stuff, ever.
Whomever did, it's funny that it would appear to be against it from a cursory examination, what with using such derisive term, and yet the effect is probably just the reverse... (negative association) hence maybe even a supporter. Or proponent. A social hack of sorts.
Time Denies Issuing DMCA Over Obama Joker Image
OpenID seems to have more traction with the non-hacker populace if expressed in terms of "Log in using your Google/Yahoo/etc account."

Suits me fine personally. I love OpenID.
Snow Leopard users face compatibility issues
I know the author of this; he's a good hacker. He also happens to be the author of LOLCode.NET :-)
I think there's a bit of pessimism in your comment, specifically in regard to Apple/Opera and ignoring the strengths of Webkit. In fact, I believe the iPhone already supports some HTML 5 standards.

However I can't say I blame your negativity given the bad taste MS left in everyone's mouth.
It's advertising, so it is tailored towards the target audience. It seems hypocritical to me to make a fuss about it. Then you could find zillions of other examples (people are always pretty in advertising - discriminating against the ugly ones?).
Because "HTML 5" has very little to do with "HTML" the markup language. Most of the interesting features are accessed via JavaScript APIs, not markup.
I have to say that Number 3 ("be inspired": check your RSS feeds for 30 minutes each morning before you start work) is an absolute disaster for me - especially if accompanied by a cup of coffee. Sends my neurons flying about in completely the wrong directions.

I've been having luck with the "Pomodoro" method - I keep a cheap 30 minute countdown timer on my desk, and a simple worklog for the day open in my text editor. One of the key benefits of this for me is it stops me going down ratholes - after 30 minutes I can pull my head out of the trench and look and see if I really have been digging in the right direction.
Yeah, that's why I use Zoho only occasionally, but I still prefer them compared to Google for privacy reasons and Microsoft (for the high price and annoying interfaces) products and even the bloated Open Office suite.
Congratulations, you've just stopped one particular attack.

There'll be something you forget. Blacklisting is only a good idea if whitelisting isn't possible. (see the \w above)

eg. You forgot. javascript:alert(document.cookie) Which depends on click and in and of itself isn't dangerous but a symptom of a greater problem.

edit: except you need to allow more than \w.
It means you get a lot of different apps under one roof without the need to switch to other vendors for different tasks.
Thomas,

You say iPhone devs top out at 200/hr. What do pen testers, (not necessarily at the Matasano level) top out at?
As much as I am frothing at the mouth to verbally attack Microsoft for its anti-competitive behaviour, its crappy licensing schemes, its continuing sabotage of open standards, etc, etc - I am not going to jump on the MS-hate bandwagon just because some PR person in a regional subdivision made a bad call.

Microsoft is known for racial and cultural diversity in its ranks. It even has a group called something like 'Gay and Lesbian Employees At Microsoft'.

This is not a company that has to be vilified on racism grounds.
2% doesn't seem too bad on the face of it... until you realize over the course of a ten-year fund that 20% (2% * 10 years) of the capital invested by LPs goes to management, and just 80% to startups.
Wow, this is awesome! I'm just learning Lisp/Arc now, so this will be a very handy tool for me.

One quick suggestion...put a hook on the "onkeypress" event of the arc textarea for the up and down arrows, so that you can scroll backwards and forwards through the command history (which you could store in a javascript variable as a simple string array).
Hmm. Haiku version?
> Sure but it's only libel if it's not true.

Truth is a defense against libel in the US, but not in all other countries. For example, truth is not a defense in the UK.
The data nerd in me went straight looking for where I could download a file that had a million books in it... I guess they expect us to just get them one-by-one, eh?
Overheard at McGill:

Guy 1: It looks like we're out of a job.

Guy 2: Don't you mean extinct.
Short answer: HTML 5 and fast Javascript engines.
The Craigslist Credo: Craigslist vs. eBay
> I'm just learning Lisp/Arc now, so this will be a very handy tool for me.

I'm very glad if it can help you learn! It's mainly for this purpose that I code this little thing (and to myself learn Arc doing it :-))

BTW, see also http://lotrepls.appspot.com/, the Lord of the REPLs by Google. You can program in Clojure and Scheme (and also in non-Lisp languages like Ruby) with it.

> put a hook on the "onkeypress" event of the arc textarea for the up and down arrows, so that you can scroll backwards and forwards through the command history

Yep, this is on the TODO list, I'll work on that. Thanks.
Man with 25 IDs nabbed by face-recognition tech
prehistoric Lemur not lemur.

If you are hung up on the fact that lemurs still exist, use the word prosimians instead.

you sound pretty confident that chickens are not dinosaurs

That's because I'm pretty confident that this:

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/chicken.jpg

is not this:

http://domz60.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/dinosaur.jpg

If you really need something to prove that, I think we are dealing with bigger problems than can ever be resolved within this discussion.

They are certainly related however, and even a layman can see this even without looking at the evolutionary hip structure. That said they are far enough apart that calling a bird a dinosaur is the same as calling you a lemur.
If you use MacPorts, there's a compatibility list here: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/snc/snowleopard

When you upgrade to 10.6 your old ports will continue to work, but you may bump into additional issues installing additional ports.
They also made money on the cassette tape recorders/players.

This Sony history implies that royalty free was more of a negotiated outcome than a strategy: http://www.sony.net/Fun/SH/1-17/h1.html
Software is a craft (except when it's not)
A Simple Introduction to Obfuscated Code
Ask HN: State of the art in simulated browsing?
What's the best way to simulate browsing programmatically? I'm aware of Mechanize / Mechanoid, but not of anything else. Is there anything that supports recent JavaScript and DOM?
Go full hog - Shakespearean Sonnets!
Something I don't understand is why these sorts of hacks are always "preannounced" in advance of some conference or another. Inevitably, legal action is taken to shut down the presentation and keep the details from becoming public.

If you're going to announce a hack, announce the hack. If you're not, don't. Why go through the same song-and-dance every time?
I used to think UML was a cute, if overused, joke. Then I found out companies were serious about it. Recently I heard that my friend's gf was going for her Level 2 certification in UML. Not Level 1 you see, Level 2. Her UML skillz are literally going to go to the next level!

Meanwhile I still feel that the very idea UML can be useful, at all, is utterly perverse. The whole idea stinks to me.
Shame on GNIP for shutting their "community edition".
The article is very sensational. As an aside, I think it is really interesting to think about what place drugs have within humanity. Many people will ask the question "why do you need to use such and such a drug?" And then they will use the fact that there is no actual benefit to the drug as fuel to keep it illegal.

The fact that many humans (myself included) enjoy drinking alcohol says something about the "importance" humans place on mind/body altering substances. Obviously there is something we value about these substances and so this needs to be taken into account when this argument is used.
This is the top comment, really HN?
generally what people actually care about these days when they talk about fuel efficiency

I'm pretty sure people still generally care about cost, not carbon.
Yeah. "We let Twitter (via Kevin Rose) know about this before it went live but we think somebody saw the Test!" is a total numbnuts disclosure policy.

If one finds a vulnerability, follow the rfpolicy[1] or similar. Send an email to security@example.com, not Kevin Rose. (Seriously—Kevin Rose? What the hell does he have to do with Twitter's security response team?)

[1] http://www.wiretrip.net/rfp/policy.html
This works better in some ways than others. This thinking works great when shopping. If you do not absolutely love something you should not buy it (unless it is a necessity like insurance or food). Also works great with hobbys, movies, books, etc.

Unfortunately, it is not as easily applied with careers.
>"they get all the data related to being a cheif including how to take care of burns, fires, or things like that that don't necessarily have the word cook in it"

This seems almost impossible to pull off, unless you can tap into some dataset that already links cooking to burns etc.
Zoho quietly did it by getting funding from a source other than VCs. Growth like this generally requires cash.
beautiful merging of "machine" and "human." the lines themselves are quite emotive: i hadn't read 'normal/banal' tweets before and they're quite expressive. the algorithm that selects rhymes either happened to be doing great as i watched, or actually takes into account syllables and removes spam and urls.

edit: here's an example (4 consecutive lines chosen because they convey a strange meaning):

> Don't you hate it when you call someone back and they don't answer!

> RIP Dominick Dunne and Ted Kennedy. Damn you, cancer.

> Furthermore, it feeds on other animals and eggs. THIS IS MADNESS!!

> Somewhere between a lot of happiness and sadness.
Personally, I view colleges in the following way:

a) a degree from a top-tier college is a slight plus, because at least someone has screened you before

b) a degree from the flag ship state school is neutral, because it doesn't really say anything about you

b) a degree from a lower tier private college is a slight minus, because it indicates you might not have been smart enough to get into a better college. Of course there could have been other factors, such as location, scholarships, etc. that explain the choice. So I try not to let it bias me.

c) no degree is a slight plus, because it means you learned all your skills through self-motivation

That said, I try not to pay much attention to degree. I kind of wish people didn't list it at all. The worst interview I've done in the last year was an MIT computer science student. Some of our best developers have been from second or third tier schools.

A portfolio or a list of stuff you have actually built is by far the best thing to have on your resume.
If you pre-announce and get shut down, then you get all of the media attention without actually having to prepare a talk. It's win-win!
"New diesel engines like in the Ford Fiesta are considered to have almost zero carbon emissions"

Carbon as in CO2?
The submitted article makes an interesting evolutionary argument that depressive realism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism

is to be expected rather than puzzling.
Generally, a negotiation around a number will go more in your favor if you don't say a number first. Another view is that you should raise a level appropriate for your growth plans, and set the valuation based upon the control demands of the VC. Control is more important than valuation.
.. and quite predictable.
a degree from a lower tier private college is a slight minus

What are some examples of "a lower tier private college" to illustrate this statement?