skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Rightly so, but don't confuse this anything more than a political tool.

That's what I was suggesting: They're doing this because of politics, because they think it will help. I don't hold faith in Nobel Prizes myself, but I agree with their decision if it works.

> Please don't assume that your level of disagreement with a particular party must be shared by everyone else.

The Republican party is wretched upon even a cursory glance. This is the party that attempted to make Palin, the corrupt book-burning governor, vice president of the country. The party that fought universal health care by claiming that Obama wanted death panels deciding who dies. The party whose leaders have said publicly that Obama might not be a U.S. citizen, that Obama is anti-American, that perhaps a military revolt every now and then is a good thing. The party that sided with Joe Wilson for shouting "You lie!" after Obama said something that was entirely true. The party that is against same-sex marriage because it will destroy the sanctity of marriage, that thinks the United States is a Christian nation, that preaches conservatism while throwing money into foreign wars.

I want a real conservative party and a real liberal party. As it stands, the Democrats are spineless and corrupt, and the Republicans are worse: They are disgusting liars protected only by the faulty media system we've got going.

The Republican Party hurts America, and the sooner they're gone the better.
What? Are you saying it costs nearly $10 per message or more? How can 1200 messages cost $10K - $20k?
That must have been one scary hour.
"many of his policy efforts have yet to bear fruit, or are only just beginning to do so."

That sounds like the word "premature" to me.
I wonder if anybody did something similar for Compuserve's version (ourworld.cs.com) before it closed up in July.
"Under destruction"
Your description here makes sense, though I don't see a description on the actual website. Really had no idea what it was. Not sure what Kart Me means either at the moment. Looks nice otherwise. Cool design.
i tried csscaffold, but ran into nothing special yet. despite a minor bug it just worked. the biggest nuisance is that my ide (currently netbeans) reports lots of errors in the scaffolded css file because of course it's not valid css anymore.
Say what you will about social media, you have to admit it's a great forum for getting stories like this out there.
It should be interesting to see how this pans out. There may be an agenda at play here to get a foot in the door of forcing media entities to acknowledge who is paying for exposure. This is a serious problem with media, particularly what we call news. I'm not sure this sort of regulation is the right approach though, time will tell.
he means in a purely technical sense it would "show" on TPB - they just host the torrent not the content.

It was, I think, a distinction.
I too have not built any missile shields in Eastern Europe.

Prize nao plz?
Maybe that's because Obama doesn't want to break federal law like Bush did? You can't criticize Bush for doing illegal things and then turn around and criticize Obama for obeying the law.
That's what we call "speaking in hyperbole"
Cool stuff. Bryan O'Sullivan is a remarkably productive hacker.
Ah, I see the relation you made there. Makes sense given what was said, but every time I hear someone say: "the war was for oil and revenge!" it's always followed up with: "GWB Jr. is just finishing his daddy's work". That is the revenge I was referring to.

I'm also not saying it was a war based on emotion, but that the high tension and emotion levels obviously had a lot to do with it being acceptable at the time. I'd say it was the American peoples revenge though, not the revenge of GWB.
Silly headline.
as any lawyer can tell you

As a point of order they would almost certainly tell you it a) depends on the country, b) has been untested in the majority of countries so it is neither right nor wrong and anyway it probably would count as theft in a civil case sense.

However I agree BREIN are a bit crazy - and the video they add to DVD's is inane.

On the other hand better that than suing individuals I suppose :D (even though that happens too :()
NASA blasts crater into moon in search of ice
The operative word in there is 'nullify', anything over '0' is not acceptable, and just about everybody agrees that 100% kill rate isn't going to be achievable. So effectively this shield will do exactly nothing, the only thing it guarantees is that if there will be an attack it will be a lot more massive.

Some thing during the cold war, the stockpiles were enormous, not because we needed the power to destroy the world several times over, but because launch facilities might be destroyed.

Also, first strikes will be directed against the areas involved in the missile shield, because after that the rest is wide open.

I see the whole missile defense shield as an attempt to revive the cold war because it's good for defense contractors, those guys made untold billions.
I like this suggestion. I'm not against HN having off-topic posts and discussions but I think such an implementation would help focus the discussions and keep it's participants lined up (I like the Karma points from HN to vet new users idea).

I, personally, would love to see a sister site dedicated to the broader topic of intellectual discourse.
With Chrome, it only started when I used enter. Nice demo of what one can do with JavaScript and modern browsers. As other people mentioned, flash still wins, but I view this as very impressive.

The code needs quite a bit of polish, but as the author mentioned this was a quick hack.
It 503's if too many pages are requested at once...

However, you can submit a link to the Internet Archive and they'll spider that Geocities site. I asked the IA to save all that data. I don't know if it was because of my suggestion, and it's still not a direct copy of the whole of Geocities, but it's a good thing. (Note: Yahoo links to the IA 'add url' thing, and it's really prominent in the Geocities help pages, so I think they've done a good job).

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/close-17.ht...
Inane in that Obama hasn't done anything to deserve it, yes. But it's smart if the Nobel committee wants to push the political scene in a certain direction. This award going to a young president will have an impact.

Probably not what the prize ought to be used for, but if it's effective...
I agree that he should not have won this award at this time, but is it Obama's fault that they gave him the award? The criticism should be pointed at the selection committee and not the person who received the award. Unfortunately, the news (and commenters) seem to be blaming Obama for receiving the award.
Nothing terribly exciting, but it's a big step in the research and preparations towards building a station on the moon itself.
Reductio ad absurdum and you know it.

Emotions have no bearing on correctness, but they do have tremendous bearing on actions. Mastery of the former begets knowledge, whilst mastery of the latter begets results.
I see your points, I'm curious though, why does it lead to so much strife with the EU? Why isn't defense considered a peaceful action? Was it the location? Or was it because it made them feel like they didn't have that super power anymore?

I understand it doesn't really reduce any real threat we're facing right now, but what about other nations we would be protecting? The smaller countries who don't have nuclear weapons as a defense option?

These are serious questions, not playing devils advocate here, I'm genuinely interested.
I'd say, just let HN run its course and it'll figure itself out. The more policy and rules you try to add the more soul you take away from it.

The problem is, when you let social network sites "figure itself out", the end result is, in my not so humble opinion, usually an emotional, harsh and perhaps childish community. Maybe HN has the advantage of being connected to YCombinator, and thus has a reduced risk of this happening, but the risk is still there. Besides, there are elements of HN that do manipulate the community to make it what it is: for example, not being able to downvote posts until a certain karma level has been reached (thus focusing on the positive rather than the negative).

Personally, and I think I speak for more people in this community, the existence of HN is a huge relief considering the state of today's online communities. It would be a waste if the nature of HN would be lost due to a lack of foresight in controlling this very nature.
It's been less than a day since this was announced. You cannot judge the effectiveness of a certain political move that quickly. We'll see the repercussions of this award over weeks and months.
> Other places more suited to this topic are overrun with the shrieking, thoughtless, knee-jerk reactionaries that I come here to avoid.

Correlation and causation and all that, but that correlation makes me quite wary of those topics.
You are missing:

(a) Right click on the terminal app in the dock for a list of open windows.

(b) Use command + backtick to cycle between windows in the same application.

(c) Just use tabs in the terminal app instead of opening separate windows.

So it's kind of hard to take this as a legitimate usability complaint.

Also, I am kind of doubtful that you have actually used OS X. If you had, you would surely know that you cannot use Command+Tab to switch between multiple windows within the same application. I.e., it is not even an inefficient way of doing this, it is simply not a way of doing it at all.
The pirates aren't freetards. I resent your accusation.

The current model isn't working if it's so easily subverted. The solution is to figure out a model that's pirate-proof. They exist.
I seems to have linux drivers too:

http://libdlo.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Very clever of them to mail you a sample, they'll probably make a bundle on orders from HNers ;)
It's fixed, try again: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871236
I upvoted you, and it seems to stick. So you can upvote those below you, but not above?
The submitted headline editorializes, the Times article is neutral.
Does this mean I need to adjust my webring? ;)
Or just a link to a place where you can download the drivers, since OS software is changing all the time and there are quite a few distributions.
A well-written article that provides not only a description of the current struggles of iPhone developers but points to some solutions as well. Refreshing for those of us interested in making things better instead of just complaining, thank you!
It perplexes me too, especially after Tony Blair committed political suicide by joining in with the invasion of Iraq.

Churchill established it as a lynchpin of British foreign policy, as absolute and unquestionably valid as the old "maintain a balance of power in Europe", and it just seems to have stuck ever since, regardless of the costs.
lol, yes it would
I do the same thing.

Screen 1: Laptop Display
Screen 2: 23" Apple Cinema Display via on-board DVI
Screen 3: 22" LCD or 60" Plasma (depending) via USB/DisplayLink
You could use WebDAV for persistence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV
It seems we're talking in two different places about the same subject, haha.

I do see your point, and it does seem logical. It definitely would be nice though to remove the threat of any nuclear attack from or against any nation for the foreseeable future. Though I guess a nuclear strike might be less devastating than years of war in the long run huh? What a chilling world we live in.
OfficeMedium: Web Based Intranet and Collaboration Based on Drupal
Depends on your point of view. :-) Either:

(a) The CAN bus (which reports wheel velocity and position of the steering wheel among other things) micro-controller hardware stopped sending interrupts which caused the main computer to think we were stopped. As far as I can tell this is just a straight up hardware bug with the Philips ARM chip we were using. This caused the accelerator controller to floor it because it was only seeing the last CAN message we ever got which happened to be zero velocity. Same thing with the steering (hence the big swerve).

or

(b) I failed to consider the contingency of not getting any CAN interrupts (either because the of the [very intermittent] hardware bug or because the connector got disconnected--turns out the symptoms are the same) and didn't have any code written to deal with it. Guess what I wrote that night. :-) Luckily I had all day to think about it while a new tire was fetched and by the time I figured out what was going on it took about 10 minutes to code the fix: a watchdog timer that shuts the world down if there are no inputs from the sensors for any reason.

It seems obvious in retrospect but when things are working you sometimes forget about weird failure cases.
The Creative Zii Egg is another full-access developer device: http://www.zii.com/

Note: It's a multimedia tablet like the iPod Touch, not a phone.
So this is a neat technology exercise... but to what end?

To replace operating systems with languages and VM's. Dan Ingalls, the principal researcher behind Lively, is one of the Smalltalk elders. He believes "an operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one".

See: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.h...
I've said several times that Facebook is the GeoCities of Web2.0 (and I ultimately think it will suffer the same fate).

When GeoCities was in its prime it was pretty significant. Between some of the core features of GeoCities and add-ons like guestbooks, webrings, ICQ badges, etc., there was a good degree of "social networking", for the state of things at the time.
VMs running... operating systems?
Hehe, that one had me laughing here. Ouch. Hope you put enough paper in it ;)
Yes, where is the line? Is TechCrunch a "news organization?" It's got a staff and lots of traffic, but isn't it just a really successful blog? Is Joel on Software or 37 Signals a blog or a very elaborate ad? How about Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki's which are really just ads for their own stuff. They get their own stuff for free. Do they have to disclose that?
Nat Probe – NAT Detection Tool
and then you burn the stripped video back and put it in your home theater.
Social engineer?
What Change I want to see in Twitter Trending Topics
Embedded OS for a consumer product; the units were freezing (very occasionally) in the field. Usually the units were in store kiosks (= disappointed and unimpressed could-have-been-customers).

Turned out to be a race condition in an interrupt handler, where the OS would say "wake me up when something interesting happens" but something else would sneak in, clobber the wake-up trigger, which meant "... never."

Two weeks to find it, fixed by swapping two instructions in some assembly glue.

The harder a bug is to find, the simpler the fix is.
Is it going to be streamed over justin.tv or something?
That's what I thought too. Obama has to make a decision on Afghanistan soon. Could this be a political attempt to sway his decision. It would be incredibly interesting if Obama now decides to dramatically increase the number troops in Afghanistan.
Too bad you are bound to a maximum resolution of (correct me if I am wrong) 1600x1200.

See http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.Usb%20dvi for some of these usb options
VM's running on hardware, and providing the services a traditional OS provides as objects.
I understand your position, but the thing is that there is no proof for either of the claims you are making:

* Not that they own TPB (the Swedish IRS have even concluded that they do not.)

* Not that TPB are making any money. While they must have some revenue (from banner clicks), it is not at all certain that it exceeds the costs of running the website.

It's possible for both claims to be true, but it's not proven. I, for one, do not wish people who haven't been proven guilty to go to jail. I certainly don't think that your hunch that they probably do own it should suffice.

As a bonus, keep in mind that the crime they're charged with is is something as flimsy as "aiding" unspecified crimes against copyright — that's right, the copyright crimes that they are supposed to have aided are unspecified, and nobody has been accused of committing those.
Are Microsoft licences too complicated?
My reaction is also that it's premature, but your comment is simply not true. There are many people arguing that it's deserved, from commentators like Andrew Sullivan to the figures cited in the international reaction pages of both the NYTimes and Le Monde. Furthermore, "ALL the media from left to middle to right" and your choice of publications to cite betrays a very US/anglocentric view of "ALL the media."
> C++ does not guarantee floating point operations happen the same every time...

Can you elaborate more on this? Are you implying that two identical calculations will return different results?
It appears so.

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool
They have been in the past.
Good things to be aware of, I certainly won't be doing any android development for my current job. More server-side web app type things.
How can you consistently find and focus on the next best thing?
Ok, here's one of mine, it's only fair.

Jasper L. systems administrator of an early web hosting company calls up one evening, there is a problem with the paging system.

A certain host is being paged as 'offline' but when checking the machine works fine.

So I go there bit by bit we check out the software, everything works fine, but sure enough every 10 minutes or so the machine (called 'chopper', I'll remember that for the rest of my life) gets reported as 'down' again.

But there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

After ruling out all the software bits we figure it must be hardware somehow. The way the supervisor works is it sends a ping packet to the machine, and if the machine responds it is deemed to be up. But chopper misses one ping out of every 5 or so, and sometimes several in a row.

We swap out the computer, move the scsi drive to another box and boot it. Chopper registers as off-line, but works just fine.

More confusion, finally, out of desperation we start messing with the network. This is all 10Base T, coaxial cables with little T connectors on the machines and a terminator at the end of the line on the last 'T' to make sure the impedance is right.

The terminator was on, so that wasn't it.

We went for a break at that point, we'd been at it for hours. Finally, by elimination we figure the only things we haven't changed yet are the drive and the 'T' connector, but surely that can't be it.

And it was... somehow that T connector was a pretty good filter for some bits in the incoming or outgoing ping packet
changing one of the bits, causing the IP checksum to fail. No returned ping... we replaced it back and forth 3 more times just to make sure we weren't seeing things.
Spotify is huge in Sweden, TPB's home. According to a survey, [the vast majority] of Spotify users have stopped pirating. I think this proves you are right.
Just because Yahoo spent $3.65 billion on this acquisition 10 years ago, and now they are shutting down the service, does not mean that the $3.65 billion was wasted.

The article makes no mention of technology, users, services, etc, that may have been integrated into Yahoo from Geocities - which certainly would not be a waste.

Just because they are now terminating the original service does not mean that the acquisition was a waste.
I agree. If you build it, I will use it.

(I'm guessing there's no API to authenticate HN credentials. Might be worth reaching out to pg)
Again, comparing to a BB the G1 browsing is heavenly for me.

99% of the time I can make an entire day and I charge overnight. I don't run persistent service other that twidroid. I leave wifi on full time but with the new application/battery usage thing I might start shutting it off.

I talk on the phone rarely, it's mostly twitter, email, surfing and puzzle games.
Yak shaving? That's a new term for me.
I work with both the G1 and iPhone at my job and carry both around with me, and the browser on Android just kills the whole deal.

I don't know if it's the lower DPI screen on the G1, the lack of multitouch, or just the rendering speed. I know they're both Webkit under the hood, but man Apple spent a lot more time optimizing Safari and it shows.

The new Android SDK supports variable DPI, so maybe that's a hint that newer phones with iPhone-like screens are on the way.
Why do you think they are making a killing?
I think it easy to confuse activity with results-producing activity (e.g. productivity) which is why having a mentor or even personal coach (someone who is not biased) can help.
Pirate-proof in the sense that works can't be pirated? Or pirate-proof in the sense that piracy is unnecessary because works are already free? I'm pretty sure the former is impossible.
Update: I cant get to godaddy or yahoo either so im guessing its not just me
It would be a nice addition to all profiles, if pg is taking requests / suggestions.
True enough. But still, if I have to worry about terrorists and failed states that seems to somehow be more acceptable than to have two superpowers on hair trigger 24x7, where any stupid move or misinterpretation can lead to a huge disaster.

There is a list somewhere of the number of 'close shaves', too long and too close to have any confidence that such a state could be maintained indefinitely. That was just a matter of time.
This doesn't immediately require pg's input - generate a sufficiently unusual string per user and authenticate only the users that have that hash in their HN 'about' page.
I can't argue there, I can only hope as the platform matures this changes. They did such a good job with Chrome that I'm left wanting and curious with their mobile browser, at least compared to the iP(hone|odtouch).

Luckily there is also multi touch support on the android SDK I believe as well, so at least we know they have plans to implement it.
Here's a hacky way to do it:

Provide your profile URL on signup, which would allow your karma to be seen. Then the site would give you a generated code for you to put on your profile.

Once you put the code on your profile, you go to the new site and click "verify" and the site checks your profile for the code.

It ain't pretty, but it'd get the job done.
For financial markets, Portfolio Management Formulas by Ralph Vince develops a similar strategy. It too is based on the Kelly Criterion. But it assumes you already have a profitable strategy as opposed to saying "do this system".

I'm not in any way related to the above authors, nor their books.
I once did a crawler that searched the content of a couple of large websites for phone numbers.

I did this daemon in Perl, using fork() to search multiple websites in parallel. When a new search was initiated, the daemon broke the search in multiple packages (of 5000 items to be searched). After initiating 5000 searches (keeping the maximum number of active processes at 30), I did a wait for all the children to finish, so that I can mark the package as "done".

The trouble with fork is that opened sockets are sometimes not forked very well. And I forked my database connection (a DBD::Pg). Forking a DBD::Pg connection went well in my tests, but once in a few thousand forked processes, a process would stall. Sometimes it recovered after a few hours, sometimes it didn't.

I tried setting an ALARM that would make the process auto-kill itself after some time. Didn't work. The final workaround was to monitor the child processes from the parent, and kill -9 the ones that hanged. But the whole processing became too slow.

Finally I gave up on the idea of packages and on marking the search as "done". So I just marked the search as "done" after the last child was forked.

It was a difficult bug because the client had no idea it was a bug, and waited patiently for the results (sometimes as much as 2 days). It was also difficult because at first I had no idea why my processes hanged.