skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, we had the Nuernberg trial which at the time pretty much defined what constitutes a war crime. According to it Waffen SS and its members were found war criminals, but Luftwaffe and Wermacht is not. Shall I remind that USSR, who probably had the least reasons to like German armed forces was a juror as well?

You see, this is a thing about definitions. If you stretch them too hard they lose their meaning and you can't usably distinguish the concepts they denote. If you call every opposing soldier a war criminal, then it does only service actual war criminals.
Excellent comment. This should be linked to every time we talk about the righteousness of this or that country.
I knew of one non-profit that lived off interest, basically. For every million dollars they raise, they can afford to hire one more worker or do X more things, based off the interest that money makes sitting in a bank.

It seems like a good way to go, if you can just raise the millions needed. Maybe some billionaire can set Wikipedia up with a trust fund...
> random atmospheric effects would mess it up.

Not in a space based laser aiming at an ICBM at it's apex, it would be about 500 to 700 km depending on the trajectory, and doing about 14,000 km / h.
His main point is the odd social idea that for-profit innovation is inferior to charitably spending is well taken. It should be noted that, for example, inferior products with superior marketing can actually damage overall welfare. Monopolistic business practices, again, can be profitable but damaging. Financial success correlates with having done good, but does not guarantee it.

The problem is that saying that spending on hospitals and universities is "pissing money away" is much more sexy than saying that "in this geographic location and at this point in time, increasing the size of the campus will have a fairly low marginal value, whereas a larger marginal value could be achieved through other means."

For the record I, too, would have preferred that the money be put towards, for instance, mitigating existential risk. On the other hand, I'm very grateful to the people who funded the hospitals, universities, and public libraries from which I've benefited.
But when I think of all the good that could be done by philanthropists who actually wanted more to do good than to look good, it makes me sad.

Shame on you, OP. How dare you infer anyone else's intent, especially someone giving so much. You're inference that they would prefer to look good rather than do good is speculative and insulting. Better you should just say, "Thank you," and STFU.
With shipping calculation there is usually two options you can use FedEx or UPS provided standard size boxes or you can use your own boxes. The latter option is what you are looking at for your problem. The bare minimum information you need about the shipping item is weight. FedEx and UPS both return your rates if you give their API the weight and addresses.

As for calculating the number boxes you will need to do that based on how your warehouse is gonna ship these products. This is the hardest part. Most people usually maintain the dimensions of the actual product. Based on this and how you plan to ship them you will need to figure the number of boxes. The shipping rates that you have negotiated with UPS/FedEx is usually a little lower than what the user will see, so this more often than not should cover your extra costs that you may incur.

Although calculating the number of boxes and their dimension is a little involved it gives you more accuracy. Which is better for you and your customer.
I was going to say "It's amazing how terrible they all look, and how much they have changed."

The colors may be the same, but nothing else is for either of those sites. You can tell that the recent versions of Google and Facebook have designers at work, and the early ones had little to no oversight from a GD.

I think the takeaway here is that a good design won't make you successful, and it's not even a component of being successful. But one you become successful, you should clean up your home page.
Space is really the next frontier, I see the moonshot as a taste of what is to come, generations of people have seen what can be done, now we need to find a way to do it better and more cost effective. The rest is spin-offs, if you think the only things that came out of the space program were velcro and some inspiration then that is very sad indeed.

have a look here for some more perspective on this:

http://www.spacecoalition.com/products.cfm
All "side" businesses, concurrent with growing up, education, sports, jobs, etc.

Age 6: Ran a neighborhood service "Rent a Kid for Odd Jobs" ($25)

Age 10: Made wax candles in my backyard and sold them to a Mom & Pop store ($100)

Age 12: Grew tons of plants at home and sold them to a nursery ($400)

Age 18: Created basic websites (HTML, CGI/Perl, PHP) for businesses ($10,000)

Age 22: (while in grad school) Coached Tennis ($1000)

Age 29: (Current) Looking to buy and sell cars, i.e. auto-brokering. ($0 so far)
This is more of a rant against non-Lisp style than a question.
This is a fair response- Though I would point out that none of the companies that do this (including 23andme.com, the one getting all the news) don't do full DNA sequencing and instead use techniques to find genetic markers that predate the human genome project.
We can't downvote stories on this site, only upvote or flag.
Hosting and rackspace matter a WHOLE lot if computers are central to your business. Would a bank get started without a vault? Can you build a house without a foundation?

The point is as cheap as possible... not as cheap as cheap...

If you're going to end up with a lot of servers: get into rackspace NOW and develop a relationship with the datacenter. If computers are at the center of your business then you owe it to your business to house them with the same care you would your employees.

Or, you could grow it ad-hoc and deal with serious downtime and expansion issues later and attendant costs. Choice is yours. I would consider how well you like stress before deciding.

Convincing people to use their own computers is epic fail if you have intellectual property issues (or think you might in the future.) If your employee is going to sign an NDA under no circumstances should you allow them to use their own computers.

Also, varying degrees of attention are paid to things like vulnerabilities and stability as well as standards. If your relying upon yourself to do IT, then you're automatically setting yourself up for connecting ten different computers in 15 different ways. This does not scale.

Then of course, you'll have the hotshot programmer who'll set up his own sourcecode repository and you'll have no end of headaches getting the two repositories to agree. If you're going to rely on computers with minimal IT staff then you need to go cookie-cutter approach in the beginning and set up definitive rules like "a server is a server" and "a desktop is not a server".
What’s the most egregious pop culture perversion of programming?
Describing the new media landscape: 4 dimensions of news
First, you shouldn't expect such an unnecessarily verbose explanation of 'pissing money away' when anyone willing to follow the argument productively would happily understand that he didn't mean polio vaccinations aren't helpful. (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)

Secondly, he does say the same exact things you want him to. He says that most people "do good" in ways that actually "[piss] money away", explaining that we have too much of things we don't need, and saying that more good could be achieved by other means.

edit to address your first point:
He directly addresses the 'correlation' of financial success to 'doing good': "When we look back on people in the past and what they did that we are thankful for, creating innovative products, processes, and organizations should come out near the top; that is mainly what made us rich." (emphasis mine)
The bad press about App Store polices play big here, and elsewhere in the tech press, but in the general press? People don't care about a developer's woes unless they themselves are developers. Only a few people care about apps they aren't getting access to due to Apple's policies.

On the other hand, if there were rogue apps out there, that would be nightly news material. Even just the words "rogue apps" should tell you that.
To be fair, they're also saying that people shouldn't pay taxes to the U.S. because Bush was evil.
The answer is that we need a VM supporting many scripting languages.

I recommend the demo where some guy is scripting in Ruby.net and following on Python... The sites can be implemented in any scripting language.
Google Granted Design Patent for Its Homepage
"it merely let those specific developers feel better by sophomorically raising the proverbial middle finger to 'thieving' commercial interests"

Oh man. Fine, you don't like the GPL. We get that. But to say the license change should have been irrelevant is to say that developers should be code-crapping robots with nary an expectation of a social contract. Some devs dig BSD. That's great. But some of us actually like Stallman's four freedoms and in certain situations need to see them guaranteed. Deal with it.
Your point on antibiotics is a fair retort to my argument- Though if I had to choose between knowing a human's full DNA sequence or posessing antibiotics, clearly the latter is by far the superior item.
But Javascript is the right language for the future? I don't think it's a "21st Century solution"
We thought seriously about turning AppJet into this, before we decided EtherPad was a better business. We even built version 1 of a virtualized php-hosting backend. In the end, we just couldn't get our hearts into it because we liked programming in JavaScript so much better than PHP.
I had never heard of it before. I wouldn't consider myself anywhere near an expert on client-side exploits but still...

I keep up with most tech-related news as well as I can and I had never heard of it until now...

I'd be interested to see how many people actually have heard about it before.
Hey, your site would be much better to read if you made the text non bold.
very sad indeed

Hyperbole is the pepper of interesting conversation, and I think the randomness of mentioning Velcro made that intention pretty clear.

For what it's worth, I'm a proponent of space as well. I just think the Burt Rutan / Richard Branson route is more likely to get people like you and I into space in our lifetimes than a government program, which by its nature sucks resources out of the economy that could be used by people like Rutan who have an actual incentive to make it affordable. NASA has had over 50 years and they've done little to nothing to bring the cost of space access down. The Scaled Composites folks, as I understand it, were able to use very very little of anything that came out of NASA (except Velcro [1]), as it was all geared towards multi-billion dollar budgets.

Like you mentioned about Google being more or less inevitable, I believe Burt Rutan and people like him are inevitable (in a free market) when the time is right and the technical and capital foundation is in place.

(And I'll again point out that we're still missing the only point I really wanted to make here, which is that risking other people's money, particularly when they haven't freely given it to you, shouldn't be called brave even if you personally believe it's somehow worthwhile.)

[1] Velcro is actually a bad example anyway; it was invented long before the space program.
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." Steve Jobs
One of the dubious features of business journalism today is that articles tend to privilege the passive investor's point of view. Hence the emphasis on things like stock-market indices.

And from an investor's point of view, a successful business is one whose stock is going up. A "hot" company that is losing money hand-over-fist but has a slim chance of Hitting It Big may or may not be a great place to work (depending on how Dilbertesque the management is) and may or may not be fulfilling the dreams of its founders, but the investor who has that company as one element of a large portfolio has every reason to be happy with it.

And if you're a reporter or editor in the business/tech press and you're used to seeing things from the investor's point of view, why shouldn't you run with a story like the one Jason F. complains about? Why wait two years publish an article about a startup that is actually wildly profitable when you can fill the news hole right now with an article about a startup that might someday be wildly profitable?

By contrast, a bootstrapped company that makes a tidy heap of profit for its two founders and three employees is booooring.
This sounds like a good rationale for increasing usage of domain-specific languages. I assume this is why software like Matlab and Mathematica (and even more domain-specific packages built on top of them) are very popular within many scientific disciplines - it allows those only interested in programming to achieve a very specific task to ignore many of the "programming" tasks and instead express problems and solutions in a way that is more familiar.

This doesn't invalidate the claim that people need to be able to think "computationally", of course.
Who's rehearsing for TechCrunch50? Calacanis video
The new retweet API should take care of this problem. My understanding is that it will collapse all retweets of a message into a single message. So, if you are following the original person who was retweeted, you won't see the retweet at all. Otherwise the original tweet is going to be added to your timeline once.
SEO Hierarchy of Needs
Poll: Did you know about the history sniffing exploit?
Had you heard of the JavaScript history sniffing attack before it made the front page on HN?

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800693)

I'm interested to hear responses as I believe that I keep up with tech news pretty well and I had never heard of this, in my opinion, fairly serious exploit before today! Others have stated that it's old news and that everyone knows about it. I'm interested to see how the cookie crumbles (so to speak)
That is actually a pretty clever way to do quick and cheap marketing research. However, not a good way to write a novel. To all aspiring writers: please do not base your novel on marketing research, if I wanted that I would be watching TV.
Perillos of Athens and his brazen bull are prominently missing. Perhaps one of the oldest and creepiest stories of that kind.
Logo Design Tips - Who is the Decision Maker?
And more from the same author ...

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/EMI2a.pdf
No. They increase payload capacity.

That Southwest airlines jet where half the people weren't onboard? That just got converted into (200 seats * 200lbs lardass Americans) = 40,000 lbs. of roses, prawns and couriered legal documents.

The fact that you're not farting into a foam cushion doesn't matter to the operator or the environment. It just means less cattle are in the boxcar.

Here's how the problem is presented: more people want to fly, but they like fresh flowers, fresh food and, more than this, fast package delivery. Your girlfriend who swears she's helping the environment by insisting on organically-farmed New Zealand lamb? Your dad who overnights parts for his biodiesel conversion? Your mom who wants domestic roses fertilized with only the freshest of cow shit? Yeah, they're dumping hydrocarbons into the atmosphere with every dollar spent.

Fuel on a 747-200 burns at ~23,700 lbs./hr. during cruise flight, more during taxi operations.

Pounds. Flight. More during taxi. You know what taxi operations are, right? Where you're waiting on the tarmac? Happens a lot, doesn't it?

Cargo gets consolidated per air carrier for environmental and operational cost purposes. It just does.

The reason why more empty seats equate to less environmental damage (at least in my mind) is that you're staying at home instead of using the extra energy to get to the airport. Those planes will keep doing what they're doing, no matter what, unless you refine your behavior.

Worried about carbon? Worried about environmental impact? Buy local only. Cut down on time in cars/taxis. Ride a motorcycle. Eat less. Drink tap water instead of anything else. Grow your own food.

Otherwise, do what I do, stick your fingers in your ears, say "lalalalala" and enjoy living in the first world.
Group asks IRS to repeal tax of personal mobile-phone use
I heard about this last year, when I read this article:

http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-h...

Basically, it uses the socialhistory.js and some statistics to estimate whether you are male or female (which is useful information to advertisers).

EDIT: Here's the HN story on that site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248558
It is peppered with sarcasm and smirks, which is generally not what you find in a good Wikipedia piece.
This site produces a HTTP 500 error for me. Would someone please provide a description of what was there?
Apple website launched in 1987? Somehow, I don't trust it that much.
Unfortunately, this is just really old news and really lame. Man, I hate using the word lame. Its not an "attack". Its simply taking advantage of a feature built into all browsers since like 2000 or before.
Why’s “Try Ruby” Back Online
Biotech has startup costs that are orders of magnitude more than software - especially web stuff. People with PhD's + lab + equipment == lots of dollars. Multiply that by years for them to make anything close to being testable on people and it's a big chunk of money.
This is precisely how I feel. I would not be willing to FTP through someone else's site, no matter how convenient it was to use. On the other hand, I would be willing to pay a reasonable licensing fee (say, $20-30 a year, w/ updates, or $30-50 as a one time fee) and host it on my own servers.

As awesome as this is, I can't imagine the target audience (people who do web programming) be willing to put their credentials for their own sites into another site. I know I don't even trust my credentials for my web server on my own local machine.
Clearly labeled sponsored links (text ads) at the bottom of a few heavily used pages.
It seemed to me that a large part of their argument was that foreigners were required to pay inheritance tax on the value of all US assets, even though they weren't us citizens. That doesn't really seem fair to me.
Great link!

A bit of Googling reveals that this exploit looks like it was authored by Jeremiah Grossman on August 11 2006.

http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-yo...

That seems like a very long time for an exploit so obviously useful to stay around...
Also, many of those people were not inventors. Creative pioneers maybe, but not really inventors.
Ok, this one calls for just a little bit of snark:

> The bar for success in our industry is too low

As evidenced by one of the most widely watched companies as of late in said industry making lots of money with a product they constantly boast "does less"?

I'm not sure I've quite nailed it, but you get the general idea.

Actually, what they fail to point out is that they are famous enough that they won't necessarily get clobbered by someone who does what they do better, because the other guys will really struggle to get the word out, whereas they have Rails, their blog, books and so on to promote their 'does less' products.
eMusic is a download service that sells DRM-free MP3s (though it's a subscription service), and they do offer the ability to re-download tracks.

(One qualification: It's limited in how many times you can re-download so that you don't use it as your personal file-transfer service to download the same album 20 times on every computer you or anyone you know owns, but assuming you don't abuse the ability to redownload it'll be there if you ever lose your files.)
Meet the Easy YouTube Video Downloader Developer
Improvements I’d like to see in the next iPod
This isn't an exploit, it is a feature of almost every modern browser.
There’s Only One Metric of Success in Business: PROFIT
There is also an ASCII drawing tool for Vim, FWIW.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40
You seem to believe that the world economy is a zero-sum game. This is emphatically false.

In this case, certainly the whole world would benefit even if a better solar energy technology (conventional or outer space) were invented. The polio vaccine helped the whole world; the reason that most of the revenue from it came to the USA is that the rest of the world thought that having those shots was more important than giving up their money.

And in economic terms, if tilting the economies of scale makes Japan a better manufacturer of solar power tech, then the law of comparative advantage allows other countries to benefit from supplying the goods that Japan will shift away from as it moves resources to the solar tech.
A big website or widely distributed software package is still extremely expensive to create and maintain. Less than a pharmaceutical company to start, perhaps, but pharmaceuticals don't have to be maintained once invented, and they're relatively protected from competition for the lifetime of a patent. Software companies must invest continuously in development, or their window of profitable operation will be narrow.

My point is that the massively profitable, "free" website run by three people in a garage is probably a myth. The massively profitable online retailer run by three people in a garage is definitely a myth. To reach the scale where non-trivial profits are possible from the internet, you've got non-trivial expenses.
known about it and different forms of it for a while.

i wouldn't really call it an exploit in and of itself, though, as you can pull the information out of the css :visited pseudoclass in a variety of ways. i'd call it an unintended consequence.
A 600ml bottle of any of the several brands of green tea I drink has about 100mg of caffeine. I think 15-20mg/100ml is the norm.
$89K is just the acquisition cost. Try getting a part for it.

You'd be better of with the Albatross, even if it is slower. :)

I share your appreciation of speed though.
Yes, exactly. That is the problem. Capital destroying companies are attracting capital due to government interference, when really they should be liquidated and bought up by competent managers.
It is old news, but CSS history 'browsing' can be used as an attack to find authz tokens in certain URLs.
Why? The US Government taxes activity within its borders. It's not different than foreigners paying sales tax on stuff bought in the US.

Now, I know next to nothing about international inheritance and estate tax policy, but I'd have to assume many, many other nations have identical policies, no?
Fair enough, an unintended consequence with a plethora of uses for the evil and not-so-evil alike though...

I feel like a little bit of a failure at the moment! My only solace is that I wasn't active in the web-development (or software at all) industry when the 'exploit' was released to the wild. I guess you can't catch everything!
Elastic CSS Framework
The one thing I've noticed from the tech events I've attended and seen videos for is that the presentations aren't always top notch. This might be due to a focus so much on the technology at the point (timeframe in dev cycle) where these companies are presenting from or just a lack of experience in pitching.

It seems to me that if you are trying to secure funding or just showing off your product you're going to want to make sure you presentation is as polished as your product. Sure they tech behind it has to impress whomever your presenting to, but if you really want to make like easier, make your presentation stick out as exceptionally good.
I especially liked the looks of these classes:

http://www.techshop.ws/take_classes.html#245

btw, I am in no way affiliated with the TechShop, just thought it looked cool and designed specifically for hackers.
Be aware: reading Zero Hedge may be hazardous to your health.