skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks really cool and would be extremely helpful in my work-flow. Thanks, i had no idea this existed!
Wow. Just wow. Brought back memories from elementary school! I totally despised my computer class where we were taught logo. During the exam I walked in completely clueless. Not knowing anything and having tonnes of time in front of the screen, I started typing some commonsense words and numbers and BOOM! stuff started showing up on my screen. I passed the exam--thanks for the geniuses who made a truly simple language an idiot kid could figure out!
Component Directory Lockdown – New in Firefox 3.6
Actually, I'd argue that the real top-tier pirates never used bittorrent in the first place but always used private networks. There was a guy I went to uni with who was into that stuff and he sometimes mentioned getting zero day releases minutes after they were made available. I doubt think he ever cared for BT.
The Coming Nuclear Crisis
True, but it was so fun seeing them tweak Apple!
The difference between $0.00 and $0.99 isn't simply 99 cents. It's the difference between no money (free) and some money, which is probably the single largest price discrepancy there is.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946367
I think the proposition of a single WiMAX data network is just about dead. Hopefully the tech survives to drive things on the scale of municipal wifi projects - as it's a vastly superior technology than wifi in those situations.

But in any case, AT&T is firmly in the LTE camp.
What's GNU in Virtualization
Melting Ice Caps Expose Hundreds Of Secret Arctic Lairs
It seems like I've run across a couple implementations of Logo in javascript recently. Here's another:

http://www.calormen.com/Logo/

And, here's one that uses svg instead of canvas:

http://www.amberfrog.com/logo/

I think it'd be a lot of fun to do webapp for creating and sharing artwork made in Logo -- with a bunch of github-like social features. Or, maybe Facebook integration?
Actuate e.Report Designer Professional and Report Bursting | Web Technology I/O
SPDY has a few good ideas, one that can be implemented fairly easily is http header compression, it wouldn't be very hard to make that change in a backwards compatible fashion.

Most of the rest of the changes remind me of IPV4 vs IPV6, if it is that much better how come we're stuck in IPV4 land ? Installed base is a fantastic way to limit your freedom to make changes, if SPDY is going to require both server and client (and proxy) modifications in order to function and is not backwards compatible then I don't give it much chance of being implemented. It's nice to see people thinking about these issues though.
This Microsoft store is trying too hard
That's pretty close to 'embrace and extend'.
Is 99 cents a large discrepancy?

It may be. The discrepancy between 99 cents and 1 cent is considered to be much smaller than the discrepancy between 99 cents and nothing.

and still get pirated in large numbers

Citation needed.
Fascinating. I don't know much about wine, but I've noticed that my own appreciation of the same type of wine will vary greatly. Sometimes it seems highly dependent on what I was doing earlier in the day and what I've recently eaten. If I was cleaning, for example, perhaps some trace residue of ammonia on my hands might interfere with the taste/smell. Similarly, if I had spicy food, an otherwise enjoyable red might taste strange to me. And of course, there's a fair bit of variability between bottles for various reasons, making the whole process even more uncertain.
Exactly. People always try to make this a price elasticity issue, but it really isn't. It's about having a transaction or none at all, there is no 'slope' to the problem.
DadHacker on why C is staying
It works well enough for PDFs to warrant me keeping it. There are a few misses (no real zooming, kinda laggy and no directory structure), but having a largish eInk screen almost makes it worth it.
Is there such as thing as an e-book reader that runs free software and that can display html and also plain text?
I had Verizon when I moved to Chicago, and now have AT&T for the iPhone. What a mistake. 90% of the time I have 5 bars of "3G" but the network won't actually transmit any data. Sometimes the phone flips back and forth from 3G to edge back to 3G, which most apps can't seem to handle. I drop well over 50% of my calls, while my wife's iPhone drops close to 90%.
Yes, that's right. Your tracker has already been using the DHT to find peers for quite some time. Here's a brief explanation of trackers and DHT, hope its helpful:

A tracker serves 2 purposes:

1) Hosting the .torrent file (which is basically just a list of checksums for each piece)

2) Initial matchmaking of peers, and keeping track of "who has what"

#1 isn't a huge problem, as the .torrent files are tiny and pretty simple to find. #2 is where most of the value of the tracker comes in, because it lets each peer in a swarm find out about the others, so they can connect directly. However, once peers have found each other they'll connect and communicate directly.

In the traditional torrent model, with a tracker, your client pings the tracker every 20 minutes or so for a list of new peers who have joined the swarm. From that list, you'll attempt to connect directly to new peers.

A DHT (distributed hash table) is a nice hack that is meant to take load off the central tracker. In essence, instead of always asking the tracker for a list of new peers or who has a specific piece, you can ask the peers you are already connected to. Its kind of like an office, where you ask questions of your coworkers before bothering your boss.

This is why you can download torrents even when the tracker is unreachable, or in this case, taken offline completely. This is also why you can download torrents from demonoid without a demonoid account - the account just gives you access to the demonoid tracker, which you don't necessarily need.

I'm a little hazy on how a swarm would start without a tracker, as it seems like a decently sized swarm is needed to get the ball rolling, so to speak. Perhaps someone else can jump in?
"The fake bogeyman lets people avoid talking about the real issues."

Oh good. I'm glad we can avoid addressing who we actually are and can instead continue pretending the world works the way we like. Don't get me wrong. I think the science (there is a hypothesis) is interesting I just think honestly discussing these kind of issues is a much better way of dealing with the real dangers.
The dude looks legit - but why isn't this more well known? France reprocesses their waste into fuel - which is expensive, but would that be a solution?
The ultimate defense for slander and libel is truth. As long as Verizon tells the truth, they won't be liable for any damages done to AT&T.

However, those damages don't include what AT&T is doing to itself by not investing enough in their network. Just imagine if AT&T had a network as powerful as Verizon and kept a smartphone like the iPhone. I would switch in a heartbeat and they wouldn't have to worry about frivolous lawsuits.
Congrats!

I'll admit to not knowing much about the various usages of XMPP, outside of Jabber. Is this any different than turning text messages on for Twitter, where people I'm following == feeds and texts == jabber messages? Or is there something else cool about this that I'm not getting?
Cool. I've been enjoying sup on a daily basis for quite some time now, and it's great. C-speed search and robust emacs integration sound wonderful; it's too bad these features sprung up inside a different client... but it's good to have options. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Honest question, does AT&T inform customers living in areas without 3G coverage of that fact when selling them an iPhone 3G?
In my model, the webserver knows what the "extra few images" are and could send them to you as part of the first burst. First-order caching (no proxying, just server and client) can be handled by having the client also smart enough to send up all the caching info at once.

How to handle proxy caches cleanly isn't immediately obvious to me, but there's far more tools with this approach than the zip file approach. Certainly with work I think it could be solved. Again, to a first order, the proxy would have to accept this style too and do something intelligent with it; an old-style proxy would fall back on the current system.

It is not clear to me: Are you the one proposing this zip file thing, or someone in another group that is working on this? If the latter, I wouldn't mind seeing a link, perhaps even submitted to HN.
His analysis doesn't depend on how many significant digits there are: he's doing a hypothesis test, so all that matters is whether one number (a p-value which was not shown) is bigger than a threshold (.01). The fact that it is in most of the cases means that the variance in results that you mention has been handled by the sample size.

So I do think the results are meaningful.
Ask HN: Writing an 80App
Hello,

I've been trying to use 80legs to crawl about 120,000 pages to extract lawyer bios from the websites of 200 top US law firms. I created a simple app in Django with about 400 lawyers in the database (SQLite). The app pretends to be a who-knows-who database by matching schools, memberships to professional associations etc. Now I want to add those 100,000+ lawyers to make the app a bit more interesting.

I love working with Django and Python but I don't know Java, and 80legs requires the app to be written in Java (see this page http://80legs.pbworks.com/80Apps) Shion Derserkar of 80legs mentions that they offer custom coding and he is willing to give me an estimate. Before doing that I wanted to ask HN if anyone here used 80legs and wrote an 80app to analyze the crawled pages and if they could give me instructions and advice about the process.

In fact, I would appreciate general advice about realizing this project the best way.

Thank you.
I agree with the excellence of Founders. Many truly unique beers. I'm waiting for their wares to become available in Canada. Until then, I always search them out when visiting within their distribution area. Last found a some in St. Louis.
http://www.80legs.com/

http://80legs.pbworks.com/80Apps
I would assume the obstacle that prevented an earlier release was Rogers. I assume that Kindle must be a GSM device, and since Rogers is the only GSM provider in Canada, they must have played hardball on fees, etc.

I really wish there was some GSM competition up here. The one candidate that was supposed to be up and running this fall was Globalive, but it was squashed in court (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/globalive-...). Foreign ownership rules in an industry as big as wireless communications is lame.
Well, maybe now they will work on an actual sync solution or buy one from Missing Sync.
You're assuming here that enjoyment in life is some mathematic, static, function of number of years worked and number of years of free time. There are a lot of issues with that assumption.

First, there are non-linearities when you mix work and play. I personally know that if I wanted to do a full day of work and have two days allocated, I'd rather split them evenly between the two. That way each day I feel accomplished while still having fun and not being stressed.

Second, the above assumes that you're working just for the heck of resources, and work is inherently negative and to be avoided. If you love your work and it's innately important to you, you're not looking to get out as soon as possible. Thus, being able to work "just 9 years" isn't a real advantage.

Finally, this last argument is a personal preference, but I believe in a lifestyle philosophy that doesn't depend on delaying gratification for decades. We already did it once for 12 years for school, and if you extend by another 10-12 years, the better half of your life will be gone before you see any payoff. Life isn't saving for tomorrow, but rather what you experience today.
No word on who the wireless partner will be, which is the only important detail.

Skip reading the article unless you've never heard of Kindle.
The New Diet?
Good response...I was thinking more at the level of legal law versus technological capability, kind of like an input/output or action/reaction mechanism.

When it comes to the ethics of copyright law, it boils down to economics. The consumer will always seek to purchase at the lowest price possible, and the corporation will always seek to sell at the highest price possible. Each side is driven by the ethics of what they determine to be "fair" and getting each other to agree on this will be impossible.

Netflix really "gets" the consumer argument for movies. I absolutely think the $10/month fee that I pay (probably a bit less than that) is a bargain and would gladly pay twice as much, but in all likelihood this price is going to go down over time. If the RIAA/MPAA were to take that example and provide us with such a service, then it would make economics-driven ethical sense.
He advocates moving failures upstream to the design process because it is cheaper than failing during the development process. While that is true, it's not an either or proposition. There is no reason you can't fail early and often in each stage of the process.
Art of Problem Solving Math Textbook Series
So.. I guess you missed the whole Bell and Telus going to GSM thing?
I don't think that filesharing is necessarily a wholesale rejection of copyright as a concept. It's just a rejection of certain restrictions imposed by copyright, not the concept altogether.

In my experience, people generally believe that private consumption of copyrighted material should be unrestricted. That is, the part of copyright that gives the copyright holder an exclusive license to control distribution is overreaching, and should only apply to major commercial operations.
Temporary Access to Google Wave Preview
Ah well , TPB tracker has been irrelevant for a while anyway, this just makes it formal.

What would really be news is - completely anonymous torrenting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_exchange
I'm still pretty convinced it was voodoo magic.

I was kind of afraid you would say that. I wish they'd open-source it.

It's such a pity that Peter Seibel didn't include Arthur Whitney in Coders at Work. I suggested him, IIRC, but he didn't get in. As far as I'm concerned he belongs in the top echelon. Here is what Roger Hui, the J guy and no slouch, said (I love this story):

Someone once asked Peggy Lee who she thought was the best jazz singer. Her answer was, You mean besides Ella? Likewise, the answer to the question Who's the best programmer? is Besides Arthur?

Edit: maybe if I'd included that in my suggestion to Seibel it would have helped :)
It does seem to have been an issue with the wireless carriers:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/why-you-cant-...

"Sources say the delay may be due to newly discovered competition. Until recently, the wireless technology used by the Kindle was available only through Rogers. This week, however, Bell and Telus announced a new next-generation network that will go live in November, giving Amazon more options to choose from for their device. The two carriers announced this week that they will use the new network to begin offering Apple's iPhone, previously only available through Rogers."
Broadening interest in programming is indeed one of the core ideas behind Scratch... and not to be picky but there are more than 90,000 people who have created and shared their Scratch project on scratch.mit.edu :)
did you create a new hacker news thread simply to ask if a website is down?
Afghanistan sinks in new corruption ranking
TPB != TPB tracker. They still serve torrent and magnet files, you can still post comments, etc.
When I lived in Chicago I had the previous incarnation which was known as "Cellular One" aka "Hellular One" and then Cingular, and it sucked then too.
Marketing is something that you probably should have been thinking about well before you released the game. That said, at least you're thinking about it now. A lot of app developers think that "if you build it, they will come" and with all the noise in the App Store, that's just not going to happen.

Presumably your game has a specific target audience in mind, so the goal of your marketing efforts should be to reach out to that audience. Figure out where your audience lives online.

As a last resort, you could drop a link onto HN and hope people follow it. ;)
This is a fun analysis to see. Here's a suggestion for cleaning up the stats, though it won't help you get around people noting that there's a selection bias for the poll results themselves.

If you're interested in showing that the frequency distribution for personality types is different on Hacker News than in the general population, then the right way to show this would be to run a single multinomial test to see whether your empirical multinomial distribution is outside of the range of chance variation from the canonical distribution listed on Wikipedia for the MBTI. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinomial_test for a description of this hypothesis test.

To give you a sense of why your multiple comparisons across binomial tests is problematic, imagine that the INTP group is underrepresented because all of the people who would test as INTP tested as ENTP this time around; in this case, you run two different binomial tests, but you really only have one result, because the size divergence in one group is effectively the cause of the size divergence in the other group.

I hope that makes it clear why you should really treat your data set as containing an N of 1 and doing a simple null hypothesis test of the probability of getting your results given the canonical values for the global multinomial distribution, rather than testing based on a series of binomial marginal distributions.
On the contrary, both games have hidden information and an unknowable optimal strategy. Poker is more challenging because more is hidden, but there are similar underpinnings.
Not entirely on-topic, but I was looking through the newsgroup warez search-engines yesterday with friends and we were wondering - why doesn't anyone sue those sites?

It's a much easier target than TPB - they receive money directly from users and host the files themselves. They officially run a business based on illegal sharing. Yet I haven't heard of them having any large legal problems. Sites that get sued are usually torrent trackers can always argue they don't earn money on this and don't know the contents themselves. Why are they going after the hard to get targets, while the obvious main distribution sites are still running?
"works for hire" are an exception. The 'timebomb' only applies to people who specifically sold their copyright. In the case of works for hire, the legal author was always the corporation; the 'real' authors never owned the copyright.

So no coder is getting the copyright back on his corporate code. Similarly, almost no film or tv writers will get their copyrights back. Nor will most musical acts from the more-modern era. (Somehow, dead tree publishing isn't built on 'work for hire' contracts. So this will likely let many print authors renegotiate.)

Anyway, starting around the late 80s labels required recording artists to sign the same sort of farcical 'work for hire' contract that other authors are forced to sign.

("yeah, I wrote this while I was being paid a salary, receiving health benefits and all that jazz. I certainly wasn't building it over the last three years of working two jobs, playing dive bars and eating baloney-on-hand. I just met you yesterday, sign this contract today and it springs fully-formed from my head tomorrow -- just for you and without any of those pesky W2s or insurance forms.")

That's why the music industry didn't push too hard to get these old recordings covered -- it's a temporary blip, not a threat to their current model.
Brought back memories to me as well but I loved my computer class! It wasn't really a computer class, it was more like sit in front of computers and here are some books. This was in grade 2 for me, using Comterm MAX computers.
But it can apply to their internal dev process, where they 'release' to their testers and other stakeholders all the time.
Yep. Console games have different requirements than other projects, so waterfall actually kind of works. Your hardware isn't changing, you end up with a single, static product, your requirements can be known ahead of time...
Murdoch: Google is mortal and together we can kill it
In books and films you have a little more information.
An even then the only realistic scale is one or two thumbs up.

Suppose the only thing you knew about a film was it's director (the grape) the studio (vineyard) and a score out of 100
Really? How is hosting an MD5 hash (but not the file) for the purpose of enabling file sharing any different from hosting a tracker (but not the file) for the purpose of enabling file sharing?
I figure the array languages will make a minor comeback soon what with gpus / larrabee / etc showing up on the horizon

What specifically do you see as the fit between GPUs and array languages?
>Careful saying this around computer scientists, or you might get an earful about Turing machines, etc.

I think you mean "Turing completeness". Turing machines are a different thing.
The author has knowingly traded off technical style points for practical ones, a tradeoff I applaud. So often the opposite choice is made, resulting in beautiful little laboratory experiments that have little relevance in the real world.
Prediction is just fiction without the artistry.
Objective-C Tuesdays: break out of a loop
Very little software development is "green field" development, most of it is maintenance of some form or other. Quite a lot of "maintenance" programming is development of new features, rather than merely fixing bugs. However, very few software projects are designed with these facts in mind.
FederalReporting.gov: Recovery.gov's Dirty Little Secret
Do you have any specific suggestions? Should I use AdMob?
which means more profit to remaining pirates...
> I did not say all torrent traffic was illegal, but if you're legally distributing content through BitTorrent, you have no reason not to use a tracker.

Of course you have a reason you don't want to run a tracker.

Running services is overhead and keeping them up constantly is a pain. (One of the announcements pointed out that torrents from one site and the corresponding content remained available for months after that site went down because of the use of DHT.)
Geography. Hosting a paid warez site from, say, Russia or China is much safer (from prosecution) than hosting a torrent tracker from Sweden.
A Map of Moral Values (by Country)
Saif-cant-stand-anyone-with-girlfriend
Saif Ali Khan seems to be so much in love with his lady-love he cannot stand anyone’s name taken with her. In a recent conversation, when asked who do you think looks best on-screen with Kareena? His answer came out
Full disclosure: I work for Rackspace.

I'm a fan of the web interface to the Rackspace-hosted emails. It's fast and seems pretty easy to use. IMO, it's better than Outlook's limited web client I have available to me on a Mac.

You can get a 2 week free trial for the Rackspace email: https://signup.apps.rackspace.com/.
Not sure why you got down voted. I was a bit confused why when I clicked the title of the post, I was looking at an animated gif. I actually watched the entire animation waiting for something to happen.
"The e-reader's web browser and blog subscription service will not work in Canada, according to the description on Amazon.com, but customers will have free access to Wikipedia."
(http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2009/11/17/tech-amazon-kindle-c...)

Lame.
You could try what I did once: give yourself two columns to put answers in. When you have an unambiguous response, put it in both columns; for questions where you're ambivalent, put each answer in one. Then do the results on each column. I found this surprisingly meaningful.

Gives literal meaning to the phrase split personality :)