skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As one of the poeple who broke the anonymity of the first Netflix Prize dataset, here's my take on why this is an issue we should worry about.

First, some links:
Paul Ohm's paper on the consequences of re-identification for privacy laws and public policy: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006
Ohm's article about Netflix Prize 2: http://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impending-st...
Our FAQ about the re-identification attack on the first dataset: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html

An excerpt from our paper, showing the kind of information you can learn about a person just from movie preferences:

First, his political orientation may be revealed by his strong opinions about “Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and his religious views by his ratings on “Jesus of Nazareth” and “The Gospel of John.” Even though one should not make inferences solely from someone’s movie preferences, in many workplaces and social settings opinions about movies with predominantly gay themes such as “Bent” and “Queer as folk” (both present and rated in this person’s Netflix record) would be considered sensitive. In any case, it should be for the individual and not for Netflix to decide whether to reveal them publicly.

A quote from Paul Ohm on why this is problematic even if no one cares about movie privacy:

The "accretion problem" is this: once an adversary has linked two anonymized databases together, he can add the newly linked data to his collection of outside information and use it to help unlock other anonymized databases. ... Because of the accretion problem, every reidentification event, no matter how seemingly benign, brings people closer to harm. Had Narayanan and Shmatikov not been restricted by academic ethical standards (not to mention moral compunction), they might have connected people to harm themselves.

He then goes on to postulate the "database of ruin":

It is as if reidentification and the accretion problem join the data from all of the databases in the world together into one, giant, database-in-the-sky, an irresistible target for the malevolent.

At a first reading, this might all sound like science fiction, but it's a lot more plausible than most people think. On my blog http://33bits.org/ I have several more examples of re-identification. And let's not forget that there are companies such as Acxiom and Choicepoint which already specialize in aggregating every available piece of information about people, and then selling it.
Computing as a Liberal Art
That makes much more sense now. Thanks.
I'd say that complaint pales in comparison to things like the seemingly inconsistent application of the guidelines and lack of feedback so I think they're absolutely correct to err on the side of getting more apps through the pipeline in that case.
Maybe you are actually arrogant? How could you tell that you aren't just using your concise writing style as an excuse to offend people?
The value isn't in the listening, it's in the broadcasting.
Illuminating Dark Economies
Saying "That's the way it is, no need to worry about it" is a great way to maintain the status quo and not promote any change.
It depends on whether or not the application is resubmitted. If, after the first rejection the developer says "to hell with this" and never comes back then the throughput is increased. However, if the developer subsequently resubmits only to be tripped up on the next item then you've increased the overhead for both the developer and Apple. Each resubmission is more overhead.
If the call-able values are looked up dynamically, both branches will always run up to call().
Alas, it seems that the intersection of "brilliant coders", "criminals", and "philanthropists" is a vanishingly small set.
At least they realize it. Amazon book ratings have a similar problem, to a lesser degree. You really have to dig into the individual reviews to get any reasonable ratings info. I find, at least for technical books, that comparing the price the book is being sold for used to the new price is one of the more accurate ways of determining if a book has legitimate value.
On the next episode of Code Hoarders...
and saying "there aren't enough [insert gender/race/other meaningless criterion] in here, so let's add some" is a great way to be full of shit.
Are Apple Stores a Terrible Place to Work?
Google’s Plan to Kill Internet Explorer? Google Wave
Pair Programming Is For Everyone: A Rebuttal
Type systems have their uses, but just pattern matching is sufficient here. In Prolog:

eval(const(X), X).
eval(add(L, R), S) :- eval(L, LV), eval(R, RV), S is LV + RV.
eval(mul(L, R), P) :- eval(L, LV), eval(R, RV), P is LV * RV.

?- eval(const(6), Z).
Z = 6.

?- eval(mul(const(3), add(const(71), const(9))), Z).
Z = 240.
You're in the wrong thread.
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

That neatly explains my personal affinity towards pg, and my disinterest towards Arrington and many other "journalists" out there today.

Techcrunch is the Entertainment Tonight of Silicon Valley, and I don't find the gossip produced by either medium adds a lot to my life.

That isn't to judge him, and certainly not to "hate" the man, but it is to say that the content is not appealing.
I've used Twitter to poll peers, learn new things, coordinate meetups, find out breaking news, discover useful resources, and more. All of those are valuable to me.

In the end, it's what's valuable to you. If you can't (or don't want to) find a group of people to follow that you find interesting, helpful, or whatever, that's fine. Just because you (or sharpn, or my wife) don't find the service valuable doesn't mean that there's no value in it for anyone, though.
That's from Mike Pall's guide to the Lua source, if you're curious. (He's the author of LuaJIT.)
Ask HN: Review my web app, AreaTeams
... not sure anything is likely to drive people away from standards compliant browsers, maybe just sites that won't render in less capable browsers.

I reckon the user would blame a poorly rendered site on the author/owner rather than the browser.

Standards are the goal, and it's never been closer. However,
interoperability is more important. Writing markup, code and styles to the standards and provide at least an accessible level of operability to the less capable user agents.
I'm wondering if there's a population of users that have computers that are not that locked down, but don't have the savvy to install a browser. (My father's workplace gives him standard-User level access, but he's still been able to install Firefox.)

Additionally, this is probably wishful thinking, but I wonder if there's any chance IT departments would actually be somewhat friendly to this. Theoretically it shouldn't add much (if any) support load, since websites have to opt-in to Google Chrome Frame. An IT department could install it, still have all their internal apps run fine on IE and their users can have a better experience on the web without having to know or care about it.

(Of course, that assumes IT departments would actually want to give their users a better web experience to begin with...)
"And anyways believe it or not, iPhone is the first true Web OS. And so is Google Android."

How so? Are they executing core OS code on some cloud?
My experience is that people, starting from when we are kids, do notice gender and that the path of least resistance is to do what other people of your gender are doing. So if you’re a girl interested in programming and you see very few other girls and women programming, that’s going to be a obstacle for you to overcome.

For what it's worth, I think it is important for children of either gender to see role models of either gender - i.e. I think it is good for girls and boys to have female geek role models, male primary school teachers and so on. I think it promotes a certain amount of gender blindness, which is a good thing.

That said, the author beating themselves up about this is unnecessary - I don't think tweens/early teens (when such exposure seems to count the most) are the main audience of his book.

If you ask me, one real problem is the fact that many female geeks chose gender-neutral or male pseudonyms online. I understand why they do it, but this reduces the already-small visibility of the gender further.
Gears didn't provide users anything special, that's why it never caught on. But in this case, it provides users with a better web browsing experience. Our site doesn't support IE6 at all, in fact we just send those users to a web page saying that we'll support you guys in the "near" future. We could use their meta tag if the users are using IE6 and prompt them to install the Google plugin so that they could still use our website using IE6.
NY Tech Meetup is lame, it should be relabeled NY Marketing Meetup because that's all it really is.
Saying a research project is X years away is silly, given that you could get it done faster by throwing money at the problem.

The moon landing should have been 30 or 40 years away from Kennedy's famed announcement, but it was given a high priority.

Nuclear Fusion hasn't gotten enough funding, imho. Solar too.
"At its most basic level, Cortera’s service enables any business to rate any other business on how they pay their bills."

This isn't really a consumer issue. It doesn't reflect customer service, just reliability in re bill-paying.
oops well you showed it at the meetup. Pardon I should have said demoed rather then launched. Probably the others I mentioned did not launch there either. Though Muxtape did, pretty sure.
Sounds like this problem could be eliminated if Netflix simply asked if it was OK to reveal your choices, perhaps in exchange for a free month of service or something. I would be happy to publish my movie preferences -- if someone wouldn't like me because of the movies I've watched and liked, I don't want to know them anyway. (Same goes for anything else; hire me, sleep with me, whatever.)
You have to wonder if Google have got some sort of killer app they want to launch but IE is the problem — the sort of killer app that corporates and institutions will want access too.

I don't see that they did this to raise anti IE feeling (unless they get off on preaching to the choir).

Don't see that WAVE necessarily fits the bill but it does need proper HTML5 support ...

What do you reckon?
In his linkedin profile Shel Kaphan describes himeself as Amazon's first employee.
Courier: Microsoft's secret dual screen tablet device
Twitter Begins Emphasizing SMS Again
We have also received ambiguous feedback from an Apple developer program reviewer. With the 2+ weeks waiting period in the queue, developers deserve more detailed responses so they are not waiting with no clue if their next binary submission will appease the inconsistent reviewers.
How Microsoft of them.
Infochimps: Share and Sell Your Raw Data
Hence the first few words of my post; "something similar". The similarity is in the distributed and open nature of the data collection, instead of three opaque credit bureaus.
Courier - Microsoft's Secret Tablet?
Linux Mint 7 XFCE: Screenshots
Those sort of worms tend to cause more problems than they solve. The nimda-counter worm (or something else) comes to mind. The people who need IE6 will revert to IE6 anyway.
I'd rather offend people needlessly than use needless words

Just out of curiosity, have you ever discovered something that you thought would offend enough of your audience that there was no point publishing it?
Eh, making light of something's flaws is not the same as denying its value or strengths. I haven't been a desktop linux user for 5+ years because I hate the X Window System.

Did you read the chapter I linked to? It really is quite entertaining.
I was working on a project to do this, and I had made considerable progress. But when I decided to show it around to "some places" the reaction was overwhelming towards not to do it that I became discouraged and stopped.

Perhaps now the reaction has changed, as you seemed to receive a positive response. Or perhaps this is a selected community.

Many people in this field do not want something like this to become around though because it is such an easy target.

The other problem is many of IE6 are corporations and corporate machines. This will not help them, only other users.

I will re-investigate.
3) People whose startup failed, thought they could copy successful startups without putting in the hard yards!

But .... hard work alone doesn't guarantee success, you need to create value, solve a problem make something that people want and MARKET. If people don't know about your product/service and the benefits of getting involved, they're not going to become paying customers.
You should read up on the history of the MPAA and the movie rating process. Very similar to Apple's, as in vague on purpose. Think of it this way. If they tell you exactly what's wrong, you will fix exactly what's wrong. If they let you figure it out yourself, you may fix exactly what's wrong, or you may fix more than what's wrong. The second option is always going to be better for Apple because it gives the highest probability that your app will be more "fixed." Now as to the definition of fixed, well you're on your own there.
EU Funding "Orwellian" Artificial Intelligence Snooping System
What you've done here is to create a straw man by asserting that gender and race are always meaningless criteria. Adding more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce and to books like these helps to create more developers who don't happen to be white and male to the workforce, which aside from being good for those particular people can only lead to a wider variety of ideas in the memepool, which can only be good for those of us who care about ideas. That would be those of us reading this site, unless I've missed something.
How that happened? Maybe I am indeed going insane.
I presume every IE request will have "chromeframe" in it, which conditionally serving the meta tag[1] would require.

[1] http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/developers_guide.h...
You can't ask "Do I have enough of X?" without first defining "enough".

So... what's "enough" women in programming? Anyone want to cross that minefield?

If you're not, then you should be aware that you've started something you can't finish, asked a question you've written into the preconditions that you can't answer. That's not necessarily useless, but it's less useful that asking questions you at least might be able to answer

I don't have an answer. But I wanted to ask the right question.

As with all definition questions, there are multiple valid definitions of "enough". I am seriously interested if you think you have one.

I think this is actually a very important question to ask, despite the third-rail nature of it. If we have a "goal" of "more" women, how will we know when we've succeeded? If we can't succeed, it isn't much of a goal, and if we can't tell if we succeeded, then how can we measure progress (objectively or subjectively)?
Again repetition in short published list. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834697

"Companies succeed with single founders all the time. Just look at Digg, Craigslist, eBay, Netflix, Wordpress, Wikipedia, Amazon, TechMeme, PBWiki, TechCrunch, TechMeme, and Etsy."
Allow zipcode entry. Dragging the wee man all the way from Hawaii to the mainland so I could see what this thing did was a drag :-) Anyway, people don't always support their geographically closest team.

(I have no comment on the actual usefulness of this thing, not being a sportsgoer)
First full simulation of star's final hours
Do you imply that people who ignore some laws do things only for profit?
Not a very good title...this seems to relate to one particular Apple store.
Yes, but hand-wringing over symptoms is a great way to not actually accomplish much change. The solution to "books about programmers don't have enough women in them" is probably not "write about more women in such books".

Seibel's discussion of the matter seemed pretty fair and sensible to me, on the whole.
You must be one heck of a nice guy to hand over money without getting anything in return. Get an estimate from your lawyer before you hand over even more thousands! Whilst you appear to have a case of breach of contract, you could quickly multiply your losses through litigation, the time, effort money and distraction that it poses. You could weigh up the impact of all of these on your time-to-market. If it's a really great idea, then you might need to re-group and attack again whilst the opportunity is still good.
USE google.loader.ClientLocation; to sniff out the current location of the site visitor. I'm in California and you're showing me NYC. Not super effective.

Also (as frossie alluded to) you need an input to allow searching by location. Don't worry about zip code vs city, etc. Pass the data from the search box to the google api and it will do the rest.
Interesting read, but somehow I sensed there's a touch of persuasion in this a lot more than other pg's essays. Maybe persuasion isn't the thing... explanation? It sounded like pg's trying to explain really hard why his essay was in that style, rendering the outcome slightly verbose than his usual essays.

Maybe this is just a false impression. But it may indicate that it is more difficult to talk about oneself than about something/someone else.

[EDIT]: I found why I felt it verbose. The latter part, about pg's essays' attitude to mention facts plainly and succinctly, hence they tended to offend some people, was obvious. So I felt it was unnecessary explanation. Probably it is necessary for different audience.
How could you tell that you aren't just using your concise writing style as an excuse to offend people?

You ask friends you know are nice to read your drafts and warn you if you're being mean.
Video surveillance system that reasons like a human
A manifesto, yes, but don't forget the snappy name.

I suggest "Unconditional Programming"
Wordpress is bloated and slow under high-traffic. Tumblr and Posterous are more leaner options.
I know that such worm could accidentally be harmful. But IE6 is also very harmful. Security issues in IE can attribute for large fraction of infections with malicious software.

Drugs can have side effects in some percentage of treated patients but if they help more than hurt they are still used, especially for diseases where no good treatment is available. Just like in case of IE6.

Probably only small fraction of current IE6 users needs IE6 and would revert to it in case other than reinstalling windows after total system failure and thus involuntarily bringing IE6 back on board.
Whatever gets the job done. Can't wait for it to happen.
I agree. I think there are really two levels of privacy. I would like to keep my Netflix preferences private in the sense of not posting it on my website (or Facebook or whatever). But, if someone was interested in sinking enough effort to deanonymise me so that they can embarrass me by revealing that despite my sophisticated world-cinema sub-titled exterior I did, in fact, rent Mamma Mia last weekend - well, I would just pity them for not having a life.

In other words, privacy through obscurity is probably enough for most people in this case, and so asking people whether they want to opt out of the program is good enough - I think most people would stay in. Netflix can always pick another person in that age/gender/geographical bucket to replace a person who decided to opt out.
Actually they will be helping Microsoft run their Office Online App on IE6 which is not on the list of supported browsers but Safari is, which is webkit based. So they may end up giving an incentive for IE6 users not to upgrade but just install this plugin.
The reason I said wishful thinking and suction cups to the dead is that you are ignoring the central reason that we are having this conversation at the moment: Why are Newspapers as an industry contacting?

If your answer is as applicable in the 90s as it is now, I would suggest you explain why it is happening now and not then.

Newspapers are in trouble because both consumers and advertisers need them less today then they did before. This is a consequence of the internet and competition. There are also all sorts of other little things. Quality of journalism is part of those little things.
Of course, you could try arguing that I just dreamt that I was making conscious decisions, but that's just splitting hairs.

That's exactly what I was intimating. Some believe that freewill is a similar illusion. There is no clear way to know, except that within the restricted arena of your dreams, assuming you're an honest person, then we can ask you to dream a certain thing in advance and see if you can.

That doesn't rule out the dream being a created memory that doesn't occur until you come to "remember" it however.
I guess there is no good way to weeding out IE6 from corporate environments. Maybe MS should just revoke their licences to use IE6 and sue them?

It's interesting question in general how to weed harmful piece of software out of ecosystem.
If they feel they aren't being compensated properly for their performance then yes. In other jobs the 'stars' will tend to find work elsewhere unless they are suitably recognised.
There's a relationship in the sense that they can both be used to solve the same problem, and it's possible to write a function that generates one from the other.
It doesn't sound like it has been published. Here's the abstract from the conference where the results were presented:

http://www.sens.org/index.php?pagename=sens4_abstract&ID...
The home game tomorrow of the Vancouver Canucks, which I needed to literally journey across the country for, apparently starts at 10pm.

You need to ensure that the time zones stay local to the map shown, as well as what the others have said. Finally, link to tickets or something.
you can use this form to sign up: http://shapado.com/signup http://shapado.com/login
Download Xmarks
I'm using server side lookup based on ip and falling back to google client location, but you're right on that I should just be using google client location. Definitel gives more accurate results.
Business is More Volatile According to Deloitte
Consider the fact that he could be the one that is sued, it is best to be prepared.

Yes, lawyers are expensive, but you'd be surprised how effective a single letter from a heavyweight attorney can be, and it won't cost you a fortune at all.

But you have to explain your case to your attorney too, and that is where that documentation comes in again.
Actually, Amazon's review & rating system seems to be one of the few that works well. Seeing the distribution and reading the most useful positive and negative reviews works really well in my experience.
I didn't say people only dislike him because of the way he seems in person. How could all the random people who complain about him in comment threads have met him in person?
When people dislike something intensely, the reason is not always what they claim, or even believe themselves.

That's a bit of an logic leap though. Common sense suggests that if someone is disliked by a person, the reason is most likely evident and known. Most don't dislike as a default response.

Assertions not following Occam's Razor need citation.
This presumes that Wave will be compelling enough to IE users that they will finally install a different browser. My prediction: it won't be. But I hope I'm wrong.
Maybe it's because Amazon asks (and receives) written reviews as well. They make people think a little more. I assume there is still a bias towards the 1 & 5 stars though.
For distribution will they sneak it into google toolbar or offer an option to install it when you install Google toolbar?

Overall this sounds great, but there still is one huge problem; the average net user(majority) won't install this. They don't even know what a web browser is.
Presumably the bricks have yet to be tested?
My kid has been in day-care for four years now and has been cared for by at least 25 different teachers. Not one of them was male. How can we correct this egregious disparity?