skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
privacy must be respected, and actually should be enforced by everybody, including you. meaning: even if you know him, you should pretend that he is anonymous person, disconnecting the _why persona from the real-life person.

for example, if you know him, and you hire him, you still should ignore the on-line _why persona, because for privacy purposes, it is separate, anonymous entity, and you should not connect it to real person. that's what privacy should be.
Well, this is something I've been quietly agitating about for a while, because I have a feeling that your case is one where "swappability" doesn't help much -- once you've written your application code around a particular component, switching to another component is going to involve rewriting. How much rewriting may vary, but AFAIK there's nothing that can automagically port code, say, between popular Python ORMs.
Tom Noonan (the guy in the fez) was great in "The Wife" and "What Happened Was...". Check those out if you ever feel like watching something different.
A stray point, but it's a bit unfair to both Buddhism and deconstruction to write "After a mandala has been constructed - and displayed - it is ceremoniously deconstructed". Actually, it's swept up with a small broom, and then dumped in a river, which is something different altogether.
I use the Evernote plugin for saving random snippets of interesting text I might want one day; and for pages I'll want to visit in the next 6 months, I use 'Read It Later' http://readitlaterlist.com/

What's so nice about read it later is that it's quicker than regular bookmarks. I hit alt-w to add current page to the list, alt-w to remove it when I'm done, and that's it.

The regular bookmarks are heavyweight enough that I just wouldn't do that. (And this allows a nice division between regular bookmarks, links I'll be using for years, and RIL bookmarks, which I could get rid of anytime as soon as I finish with them. I could do that with folders, and that's how RIL works behind the scenes, but that's still more heavyweight.)

There are other features, like auto-saving the pages to disk for offline access, or a personal RSS feed, and integration with various Web 2.0 thingies - but that the core functionality is so quick and easy is the greatest part about it.
In one sentence they say the kilogram's been taken out only three times and then later they suggest it might have gotten lighter because of periodic washings. Looking at the picture of how the kg is kept I assume the latter sentence is nonsense.

Can someone explain this to me?
Which is exactly like a real world Dead Drop, and in the same way that a dead letterbox can be changed when the ring fears discovery, so can the deadSwap gateway. I'm not sure what you aare suggesting, if you could suggest a decentralized way a spy ring might exchange a drop, please let me know.
"Even if you go to a small farmer with few acres of land, and get the meal from him it is, because of the scale, much more expensive than a large farm with one pig per square meter and all being fully automatic."

And yet it would still occupy such a tiny part of our income... That's the point I was trying to make. Yes, you can reduce your grocery bill all to hell - but in the end if you break down your living costs, things like rent, car, etc, all cost vastly more than what you pay for food. If anything start optimizing there, where a dollar saved won't nearly result in as big a loss of quality of life as it would if you took it out of food.

Sure, if you are really broke, then yes, the food budget must go - I've been there myself. It just strikes me as odd when people with perfectly good incomes (even GREAT incomes) insist on eating cheap, crap food.
But of course Google would publish something that would encourage advertisers to bid on positions and drive click costs up ;)
That would make for a fantastic nerd-Swede tribute film!
Wolfram Alpha: What is love? What Alpha feels towards the internet.
I don't want to forego a stimulating intelectual discourse, but isn't it obvious?

Replace 'autonomous machine' with 'child' and it is clear a parent is responsible. For autonomous machines these are the owners. Machines may be autonomous, but if a real person is liable, then I am sure there will be plenty of checks and tests done to prevent any disasters.

In fact, the results of the accounting scandals not so long ago may be a good template. Investors were fully dependent on this autonomous, faceless, financial machine to churn out profits. That blew up in their face and they had no-one to blame. One result was the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley which set, amongst other things, criminal penalties on individuals.

That is good motivation: accountability.
Technically _why is his online persona and I can now understand/analyze your argument. But my first thought after reading the title was "OMG!!". Not fair.
They wrote it, despite everyone telling them it wouldn’t work.

Why are we programmers, as a group, so negative? When Ernest Lawrence was going on-and-on about the Cyclotron, other physicists got tired of him, but they told him to get off his ass and build it, not that he was an ignorant git and it wouldn't work. Why is it that every interesting idea in programming is met by someone saying it wouldn't work with the supporting logic inversely proportional to the nastiness of the tone?
John's comparison of _why's work to sand mandala is very poignant and apt!
Is a similar thing available for other countries?
I also did my own URL routing ...
http://code.google.com/p/django-catalyst/

I copied the chained actions model from Catalyst, and the routing is automatically generated. I also have template tags defined that construct these URLs for me (not uploaded in the repository).

I structure my views in a structure like ...

views/root.py
views/articles.py
views/users.py

views.root contains a "begin" method, that will be chained to all other requests. If views.articles needs users to be authenticated, I also add a "begin" view to views.articles (where I do the authorization required). So as an example, a chain could look like this ...

views.root.begin -> views.articles.begin -> views.articles.item -> views.articles.show

This is really far from the way things are done in Django, but it seems more intuitive to me.

What I find cool about Django is that the dispatching is really simple to understand, and it can be extended (and components aren't hard to replace in general).
I don't remember to ever read _why's texts or interact with him in any other way - but what you write here, seem close in a way, even if the very opposite in other ways, to the story of Netochka Nezvanova (http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?NetochkaNezvanova). By they way I've already posted that link as a story here.
Baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me no more.
Software defects kill people on an infrequent but fairly regular basis. Legal precedent and licensing agreements suggest that this is the software user's fault, not the manufacturer's.

So I assume we'll carry on with this preposterous state of affairs and just extend it to software-in-machines killing people autonomously, 'cause a defect in that still wouldn't be the manufacturer's fault, right?
I still fondly remember Kaylon's PowerMarks. Tagged bookmarking, with auto-generation of a default set of tags and with fast search based on parsing input to a textbox. It may still be around, but I believe development stopped years ago.

Searching on "TagSifter" turned up

http://linux.com/archive/feature/145955

which gives me it and two other Firefox extensions to look at further when it's not so late in the evening.

Maybe the combination will get me close to what PowerMarks offered.
But now he has something better than django that he can use on his next project. It works well for the kinds of projects he builds, and does what he expects. He wins.

There's no reason to contribute it back to the community, because it's specifically targeted to his needs (and therefore wouldn't be considered better by anybody outside his team). Spending even an hour polishing it up for somebody else's consumption would be a distraction.
A traceroute to whytheluckystiff.com ends with http://cewki.com , which contains a link to this thread.

_why, you inspired me to be a developer.
Does Outsourcing Your Accounting Make Sense For Your Small Business?
This question exists because humans demand a cause for each effect, and a "responsible party" for every tragedy. Sometimes, things are just "accidents."

A colleague of my dad's tripped and fell while walking down a set of three stairs, hit his head, and died. It was nobody's fault -- it was just bad luck.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram :

Since the IPK and its replicas are stored in air (albeit under two or more nested bell jars), they gain mass through adsorption of atmospheric contamination onto their surfaces. Accordingly, they are cleaned in a process the BIPM developed between 1939 and 1946 known as “the BIPM cleaning method” that comprises lightly rubbing with a chamois soaked in equal parts ether and ethanol, steam cleaning with bi-distilled water, and allowing the prototypes to settle for 7–10 days before verification.
_why is experimenting an identity change; probably he is online again (in a new domain?) with a new ID and reading now about his own 'funeral'.
This may be a better article http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/science/27KILO.html.

And http://www.bipm.org/en/scientific/mass/pictures_mass/cleanin...
Yeah. Dell used to support a dock with PCI (not PCIe) plus an extra hard drive, and the usual port replication -- was great.
Interesting. Thanks for the feedback
USDA unit bans browsers other than Internet Explorer
Politube distributes media subjects like politics, society and the environment.
Interview with Bradford Cross about FlightCaster (YC S09) Architecture
Get your ex girlfriend back
Get Your Ex Girl Friend Back - Is Giving Your Ex Girlfriend Flowers Gifts and Love Poems a Bad Idea? So you broke up and now want to know how to get your ex girl friend back... but let me ask this small question.
Netless: a network without The Net
http://web.archive.org/web/20071018035725/poignantguide.net/...
The Avogadro Project (produces the roundest object in the world)
This is exactly why such a complete self-deletion is worrying. I wasn't around in the neolithic days of the internet, but some people may remember that an early formative event in the WELL days was that a very well known and active contributor to the site deleted his entire posting history and then commited real life suicide. I dearly hope this has not happened and _why has simply moved on to other things...
Download Windows Live Messenger 14.0.8089.726 | iYiblogcu
PocketLife Chosen As Winner Of Nokia "Calling All Innovators" Award
I thought this actually involved dating other founders....
Art Or Vandalism?
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova .

Why I post that now? In some ways this story resembles, even if in other ways it is the opposite of, what I read here about why.
Interesting. However you forget one thing: Parents are not liable for damage their children do. E.g. in Germany as long as parents do not violate the obligatory supervision neither can they nor their children be made liable for any acts of their children.
Ok, Now, who did this?
Obviously, you need to lawyer up.

Since you don't say where you live, the only real advice is to check the yellow pages. See if "Legal Aid" is available.
Getting a flat tire on your Lamborghini would also be a nice problem to have. Get it? You drive a Lamborghini.

(Unless you're driving 200 mph on the highway and going to crash...)
Not every challenge is meant to be taken up.

Respect for people's wishes is important too. It's quite clear that _why didn't want people to know who he is. Fair enough, if you wanted to work that out. I don't think you should, but I could understand it. Telling the world? That's trying to wave your E-penis at the cost of one of the ruby world's best contributors.
ATT dumps Kevin Mitnick
I think, if he's posted up and said 'hey, I'm fed up with this internet thing. I'm taking everything down, can someone else host them', there'd have been a queue. Certainly, I'd have been very glad to host the Poignant Guide
“A guy walks up to me and asks 'What's Punk?'. So I kick over a garbage can and say 'That's punk!'. So he kicks over the garbage can and says 'That's Punk?', and I say 'No, that's trendy!'” -- Billy Joel Armstrong.

You're missing a few things.

Your second line is phonetically almost as good as the original, IMO, but the picture isn't as fun. Both are imitating the same (good) template and are therefore less original.

Regarding (modern) art, context is king. Most of these tweets would of little worth if taken independently. They may not have much lasting appeal (the future will tell us, I hope some of them do), but they were fun or puzzling in the context of why writing them, and I enjoyed reading them.
Great point. I only saw it the other way around, as a source of interruptions, hence the chapter on how to avoid interference. But you're totally right: being part of a larger group does help a lot in building self-discipline.

Thanks for the comment.
We also have fairly well-developed laws and case law on animal attacks. If you keep a chihuahua in a jurisdiction which does not have strict liability, and it bites someone, you are likely not at fault unless you had reason to know it was prone to violence AND you took insufficient steps to restrain it. Your local jurisdiction may have strict liability ("It is the owner's fault, period") or may have designated certain breeds as "aggressive dogs" whose owners are presumptively liable.

You could see this happening with the law of machines, too. Roomba crushes someone? Awful but lawful. KillBot9000 mistakes a troop of Girl Scouts for armed revolutionaries? You're probably going to end up liable.
It seems 'hacker' must be redefined.

Until now it was about programmers and coders -- technical people with focused mind living inside a digital world.

Now more open minded (not just digital thinking) and more free people (with the spirit of an artist) like _why, NN, Hasan Elahi -- are taking over the web.

The next web superstars won't be NASA crackers, Facebook founders, rockstar programmers, alpha geeks. We will sink back to build infrastructures on which new breed heroes will bring and open the web forward.
10 More Amazon Associate Program Lessons I Learned
The empty 'Where' page is really disappointing, couldn't they have at least borrowed the 'Under Construction' gif from the new Sequoia site?
The buzz is deafening right now, congrats guys!
Hasan Elahi
If you insist:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/karaandrade/1254260996/in/set-7...
I second that. HTC Hero seems to be as capable device as an iPhone, but without crazy restrictions imposed by Apple and carriers.

And it has 5MP camera that will make iPhone owners jealous (although not me - I had N82 with 5MP and Xenon flash for 1.5 years now), which Gruber seems to imply is needed to gain from Apple. Frankly I think he is wrong. What's needed is as capable device and slightly lower total cost of ownership. Hero comes close IMHO.
Freedom of speech is not a right if it conflicts with the rights of others. That is what i believe in.

Anyway comparing _why's actions to hate speech is just ridiculous.
You're taking the "nice problem to have" meme too far. If I were rich, any problem I have is a "nice problem to have"?

That's just silly.
Ask HN: Any exceptions or antidotes to Parkinson's Law?
I have read about parkinson's law and have seen it in effect at the medium-sized business where I work. We seem to hire similar numbers of managers as 'front-line' people, if not more. Apart from lay-offs, are there any ways to avoid this arguably unnecessary increase in bureaucracy?
thank you! morons who down-voted my comment don't seem to be able to understand...
Making it as a joke didn't work on this forum because people generally downvote short jokes they don't get. The rule about humor here that seems to work here is to make sure it's actually funny.
The autonomous machine should be brought to court and be allowed to defend itself before any judgement is passed. They should be allowed access to legal aid even a pro deo counsel.

It is not impossible actually for a legal system - that over time has passed judgement to witches, dogs donkeys, used torture to extract confessions and in some parts of the world demands its high priests to wear funny clothes and wigs - to be modified to suit the new circumstances.

In the meantime if you developing software for automating trains, aircraft or heavy construction machinery get plenty of Professional Idemnity Insurance. If you developing software for drones, missiles or nukes don't worry, there will be nobody alive to sue you if something goes wrong!
Copyfarleft, Copyjustright.
Your example implicitly means that you do agree someone needs to be made liable for the child through 'obligatory supervision' - because if you don't do that, you will be accountable.

You say 'as long as parents do not violate'. Indeed, as long as you do what is required to ensure nothing goes wrong ("bonus pater familias"), but an accident still happens, then society/German Law accepts no one is liable.

Your argument seems to point more to: How do you define someone as liable and how do you enforce it?
Yet more detective work:

http://javuh.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/javuh/javuh/Model/Ps...

He seems to have been working on the same file, in the same day, as Jonathan Gillette. Probably poking around this repository a little more could lead to an almost-definitive answer.

Also, here: http://javuh.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/javuh/javuh/Services... the @author is listed as:

11 * @author Why Carlisle (whytheluckystiff@mailcity.com)

EDIT: Still going....

He talks about a 14-year-old sister here: http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary/14.htm...

This being written in 2001, that would make her ~21 now.

Searching for Jonathan Gillette, http://www.intelius.com/search-summary-out.php?ReportType=1&...

a few relatives are listed, presumably one of which would be his sister, however, none are in the right age range.

Right, back to work now, I promise.
If I may be allowed a moment of snark: "The 19th century is calling, and it wants its failed ideology back". This is pretty much just politics, in any case.
I had not heard of this before, but very interesting!

For those wanting more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
The idea here is that if you're not happy with it you can re-submit (there's no official limit on the number of times you can request the same logo) and see what happens - Also you can get creative with tags (i.e. #as_previous_design #no_blue #etc) - being free it won't cost you. You might wanna give it a shot :-)
Virtualization and Java...the direction forward for SpringSource
New Home Designs
Bache Homes is an Award Winning Western Australia owned and operated home building company in Perth. Call 9301 0388 to start building your home today.
A video is online for the talk he delivered at the Art+Code conference at CMU earlier in the year: http://www.vimeo.com/5047563
So AT&T is basically admitting their approach to security is "security through obscurity"?

As long as you're not a high profile celebrity you should be ok because not one wants to own you...
Wolfram Alpha: the most computationally intensive joke-teller ever.
Or the world's wittiest calculator?
"The epoch of the generalist has arrived -- again. Any fool can program and most do. Software engineers are emotionally inept. In today's unstable + dynamic environment they do not stand a chance." - Netochka Nezvanova

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/03/01/netochka/...
An 8 digit, all numerals password? Really, Mitnick?

Also, it wasn't just AT&T that is refusing service to him, his webhost HostedHere.net did the same thing.

And if this has been happening over and over again for 9 years why didn't he just want to go to another service provider?
Chess is a horrible mistress to have, I keep coming back to chess again and again.
At the same time, chess can bring such highs. This high comes not only from winning, but also from a well played game(even lost one).

Sad thing is, unless you get most of your 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" at chess from the ages of 10-18, you'll never get any good. I am 2400 FIDE, but I missed ages 14-16, doing other things. The neural pathways in my brain are hard wired now, the basic tactical sense will never improve substantially, no matter how long I practice.
I am yet to find a counterexample, that is someone who started after age 25 and became a GM.
From Parkinson himself!

Organizations can be cured of injelititis spontaneously, when an individual conditioned to hide his intelligence penetrates to the top post and "suddenly throws off the mask and appears like the demon king among a crowd of pantomime fairies."

Well, this appears to me that the only way to get rid of the problem is to 'play stupid' until you are the CEO!
Well, they are admitting that their security system isn't flawless. Having Kevin Mitnick using your service is the equivalent of asking to be hacked by a particular set of people... eventually your security will get broken.

Which is not to say that AT&T has good security, all we can tell from this is that it can be broken...
"property is the enemy of freedom. It is property, the ability to control productive assets at a distance, the ability to ‘own’ something being put to productive use by another person that makes possible the subjugation of individuals and communities."

Sure. That's why the USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba and all places that restricted property ownerships are so well known for their freedoms.

How can a sane person not think twice for a second about that statement?
Approached by competitor
"only" half as dumb, I meant.
Great idea, though I'm wondering if they're offering them in PDF format what's stopping students from paying $1 each and sharing them around?
Parameterized Roles with MooseX::Declare (Perl5)
Inside Look at Birth of the IPod
WSJ on Y Combinator's Demo Day
For related HN post see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=605043
But that ignores the idea that somebody designs and builds an autonomous machine.

If an airplane autopilot sends a plane full of people into a mountain due to a defect in the software, who is liable?
when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

Inspiring. And antithetical to his recent actions, which are surely more destructive than creative. Yet who among us is not a contradiction? Like Walt Whitman, _why contained multitudes.
20k per year? He's doing something wrong...
Virtualization for Dummies - by Sun Microsystems(required to register)
Jinnah: India Partition Independence by Jaswant Singh
Lord Mountbatten: I tried every trick I could play to shake Jinnah's resolve. Nothing would move him from his consuming determination to realise the dream of Pakistan. The date I chose (for Independence) came out of the blue. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event.
"expensive doorstop collections"

If the textbooks end up being doorstops, maybe the problem is with the courses, not with the books? I like owning the textbooks from courses I really enjoyed.
This is a bit of a straw man, though - the opposite of 'bad, vapid, uninformative writing' is not 'detailed specifications'. It's writing that's good, succinct and informative. There's no reason such writing should not convey one's enthusiasm or infectious excitement about the topic.
There's certainly a lot more leeway in a general product website, especially when your product is so well-established the bad writing almost doesn't matter.
It's hardly a luxury an unestablished player, let alone someone looking for funding can afford, though. Besides, simply because you can afford to get away with badness doesn't actually make it anything better than bad. One way to read Cuban's message could be 'You're likely misestimating the point at which you can pass drivel for communication so don't.'