skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In case people are wondering what happens when you buy stolen stuff on EBay:

Three weeks ago I bought a macbook pro on EBay, from a seller with 60 sales and a 100% positive feedback, who claimed she'd owned the macbook for a year. The macbook arrived on, with photoshop still running, a dvd in the drive, and a different name on the user account than the sellers. I called Apple, and they confirmed it was stolen by the serial number. So I got in touch with the laptop's owner via some googling, and found out it had been stolen just two weeks ago.

I filed a dispute with PayPal, and the seller immediately offered me a $100 rebate, which I declined. Then PayPal resolved the case, saying that I should send the laptop back to the seller, and my money would be refunded, with a 10 day time limit. This seemed crazy, and then for 8 days they ignored my emails, and to my first two phone calls just said they'd update the dispute with the information I'd provided on the phone, but never did. Then I reached someone reasonable at PayPal, and they credited me back the full amount and told me to send the laptop to its owner.

So it worked out, but it was a huge pain, and for a long time I thought I was going to have to choose between doing the right thing and getting my money back.

Also, the owner of the laptop contacted his police department the day I emailed him with the name, address and phone number of the seller. It took a week to get a phone call with the detective, who then refsued to contact PayPal. Now he's been waiting a week to get an address from the detective that I can send the laptop to.
"I don’t know why people go looking for idiots so they can jerk themselves off over them. That’s a fetish I’ve never had."

but the fetish of looking for the people who go looking for idiots, now that's apparently very appropriate to jerk yourself over?
_Medical care_ may be in the same category as roads, garbage collection, police department etc. (although one could argue otherwise: the latter are all examples of public infrastructure, but medical care is in most cases a personal service).

However, health insurance is in no way in the same category as any of the above - insurance is a financial tool, used as a means to achieve a desired end in a high-risk situation. Saying that insurance is absolutely essential is like saying that we can't live without zero-coupon municipal bonds. Sure we can, no matter how important the things they're intended to pay for are.
Try this, http://www.youtube.com/html5 and if this will not play then it is most likely an issue with Firefox; try installing Chrome and see if that resolves the playback issue. I was experiencing the same issue in Firefox 3.5.5
The Bladerunner soundtrack has worked wonders for focusing my mind since about the age of 15. Gastr del Sol's Camoufleur LP also performed admirably during my arduous PhD write-up.
You might find some other Reich tunes equally powerful, then. Among the best I've found for programming: Electric Counterpoint, Tehillim [Original ECM recording], You Are (Variations), Eight Lines (the re-instrumented version of Octet), and Music For A Large Ensemble.

(Reich has also written some wonderful music that I find harder to listen to in a programming context, including the landmark Different Trains [try the recording that also has Electric Counterpoint], City Life, and the Desert Music [try the San Francisco Symphony recording])
I don't see why not. It's similar to my political beliefs, where I an extremely distasteful of people with extremist beliefs.

Think of it as my being against negativity. I'm okay with everything but people who put other people down. And smug assholes can defend themselves well; idiots can't, so I defend them instead.

EDIT: I don't think that's quite a cohesive answer, so let me elaborate. I like productive criticism. I've spent a lot of time here criticizing Twitter in the past, especially when it was first growing, because I really don't see the use in it myself beyond for publicity purposes. I don't write shortform very often, so why Twitter was better than a communal blogging system struck me as odd. Similarly, I criticize a lot here and very willingly throw myself into arguments.

Where I draw the line is when people make blanket statements against people they don't know. I understand that's a paradoxical concept, but there's no better way to put it. I also dislike smugness. So criticizing, say, Robert Scoble for being very overearnestly wrong and overreaching when he writes a silly article, that's fine. What wouldn't be fine is making a statement like "Scoble shouldn't ever write again," because it implies that just because somebody's wrong about something should mean they shouldn't try again. I prefer criticism that encourages people to try again, criticism that's potentially constructive.

So I support the masses, even when they're dumb, and I'll go out of my way to criticize people who've got the antiquated attitude that having somebody stupid on the Internet somehow brings the whole Internet down. That's a negativity I can do without; I'd like to see that converted into more earnest criticism in the hopes that those masses become enlightened rather than ticked off that people they don't know are putting them down.

I see it in real life, on occasion, when I meet people who're big into 4chan and Reddit, and it makes me want to hit them. I lost that smugness when I met Internet People in real life and realized they were people, not degenerates; other people carry that smugness over and act like what they type online allows them to spit on other people who care about other things more. Those other people don't care enough to respond, so I provide my viewpoint in the hopes that it'll quell things.
If you don't use eval, with, and a couple of other things, V8 and most of the other good engines will actually optimize that scope level somewhat. Introducing eval, with, etc will make that scope level and any more therein to be much more dynamic/slow.
Unfortunately, most people don't like the idea that the only way to lose weight is to control your diet. They would much rather believe that an hour or two of exercise per week, or eating 'good' foods, will let them eat as much as they want and still lose weight. The reality is that if you want to lose weight, you're going to be hungry for a while - it isn't pleasant, but that's the way the body works.

I lost 50lbs by controlling my diet, so anecdotally I know it works. But try explaining that to people, and it's like talking to a brick wall. It's a bit depressing to see the amount of unscientific nonsense spouted on this thread. If HN is this bad, it isn't hard to see why weight loss nonsense is ubiquitous in the popular culture.
this is awesome, i wish there was a translation
Main development was with Safari, WebKit, Chrome, and Firefox on OS X. Couldn't get it to work with Camino.

Tested as well on Chrome for Windows. Of course, Internet Explorer doesn't work.

EDIT: Sorry, guess that's the effect of an all-nighter. It actually doesn't load in Firefox for me, either.
Firefox does not support MPEG-4 video because of patent licensing issues. Firefox supports Ogg files with Theora video and Vorbis audio. Google has an agreement with MPEG LA and is therefore able to ship an MPEG-4 AVC decoder with Google Chrome.
I have always regretted not taking lisp. I hope this is translated one day.
I'm a huge Reich fan. City Life is incredible.
Well it's worse than that -- all armed conflict requires is a group of armed people determined to use violence. What terrorism has shown us is that it doesn't even require nation-states.

So your nation can be so inept as to not be able to control things inside it's borders (many nations fit this bill). If armed camps build up inside them and attack other countries, guess what? You're at war -- or something so close to war as to be indistinguishable from it.

If you'd like the world to work like some super-big version of your local country, where most conflicts are solved by some civil system, then you're going to have to have popular choice of representatives, mixed local, national, and world control, an independent court system built on something besides treaties, etc. The UN is nowhere near any of that.

There is the theory that democracies only compete via commerce. If you buy into that, then perhaps a world full of democracies would be the most peaceful. But I don't see that happening either any time soon.

It's just a long-shot. A real long-shot. I'd argue that in order to do away with war you would have to do away with 99.999% of the impetus for using violence under any circumstances. It'd be a world of extreme pacifists. Would that be such a great thing? Doesn't chaos -- whether war, sickness, disasters, etc -- contribute to evolution and growth? Do we really want to live in stasis? Or -- to put it in religious terms -- is heaven really such a great thing?
Team HyperX: IXtreme 1.61 for Benq and Samsung drives
I'm with you. These two are great too:

* pole

* biosphere
With longer eyeball you don't tire muscles in your eye by looking at close objects so it's actually a gain not a loss.

I'm attributing my ability to look at screen for 8-16 hours per day, every day for last 15 years to this.

Of course progression of myopia is very bad but I think it can be almost completely attributed to wearing corrective lenses. If your eye elongated to adapt and you trash benefits of this elongation by wearing glasses without changing you lifestyle then you encourage further elongation.
FWIW I still prefer Aperture over LR. LR's UI wastes a lot of screen real estate IMO.

But your main point is spot on.
Songite link: http://www.songite.com/#e0eecb

--

Glenn Gould playing Bach.

London Elektricity's Syncopated City

Most pieces by Steve Reich

The Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack by Philip Glass.

Burial's Untrue.

Fujiya & Miyagi's Transparent Things.

Apparat's Walls

Miles Davis' In A Silent Way

DNTEL's Life Is Full Of Possibilities

The Weather Report's Heavy Weather & Black Market

...

I'm not sure what the linking thread is here. For example, elevator-cheesy Heavy Weather is worlds apart from just about everything else on the list. But it all works, at least to get me into the zone.
"Supportive" means in the sense of "supporting" reporting any type of publication that aims to increase the awareness of women or any minority in the technology sector. Whether you think the publication has to meet certain "standards" is entirely subjective and based upon your individual worldview.
Pardon the snideness here, but:

As it turns out, doctors are actually human beings, who are able to form relationships and make arrangements with other human beings, whether or not this takes place within the scope of formal public policy or under the aegis of bureaucratic institutions.
Cecil Rhodes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes) had the same idea about Pax Britannica. The problem is that a lot of countries don't like having foreign invaders based on their soil.
Jean Michel Jarre

Shpongle
The average man living a sedentary lifestyle needs about 2000-2500 calories a day to maintain his weight. Another man, doing 8-12 hours of hard physical labor per day, needs about 3500-4000 calories.

The truth is that what most people think of as 'exercise' is an order of magnitude less than what you'd need for physical activity to have a significant effect on your weight. A candy bar or frappucino easily replaces the calories burned in a gym workout, no matter how high intensity it is.
True. But the player code is all there. It should work in any html5 enabled browser (Safari 4, Chrome, and FF 3.5) although FF 3.5 is having some issues with it.

This does highlight one problem with html5 based video, different browsers will interpret it differently no matter how hard standards are pushed. Flash video (FLV) saved us from that and all the horrible players like Real Media, Windows Media and Quicktime by being consistent and working across all browser as long as you have the plugin.
This is pretty neat, but I'm not sure it's really practical. I don't want to learn a new syntax just to save a few keystrokes. When I use JQuery, it's nice that it cuts down on some typing, but the reason I use it is because it abstracts away things like animations.

Is how fast I can write mark-up really bound by how many characters I have to type? For me at least, it's more bound by thinking, so I don't want to do anymore of that. And I don't even type that fast.
You could read+watch Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and pretend that, instead of a suit jacket and fez hat, Sussman is wearing a kimono, hair bow, and animal ears.
Anything electro/techno:

- Justice

- Boyz Noise

- MSTR KRFT

- DeadMau5

- Erick Morillo

- (sometimes) A-Trak

This almost the only way I can get work done, otherwise I am reciting lyrics & enjoying guitar riffs.
WebCrawler Web Search
> c) It sucks for handicapped people. Blind? Well your bad that you can only use a screen reader. No website for you. (This obviously doesn't matter for video sites)

You are right that Flash's accessibility support and the...lack of content providers taking advantage of them...sucks for all sorts of handicapped people, but it's still there and being improved on (hopefully) so it's not a total dead end for screenreaders. Plus, flash videos can be a good source for audio for the blind.
I thought this was going to be about our short-sighted vision about the future.
Sort of a misleading title presuming that all cellphones have a built-in camera.
Zynga To Remove All In Game Offers
so I suppose many here can read Japanese since they vote it up? What about a round up/review? Me no japan.
After you launch, you continue to get up at 6am (because now you have customers that need your support) and work til 12am for the next 3 years before you even see the beginnings of a "...and they lived happily ever after."

The day after a launch is just as, if not more, important than your launch date.

This weekend alone have exhibited the closure of Lookery and Findory (two startups that have been at it for quite a while) and the proof that launch is merely the beginning.
What about forgetting about weight. Unless you are a boxer or a jockey who cares. Measure size: waist in particular. It doesn't lie (and isn't affected by hydration), or lap times, or weight you can lift. It seems the focus on weight is picking the wrong variable to optimise for.
His biog says he skipped high school and went straight to grad school - that also wouldn't be possible here. He would need the correct number on his "key stage 3 year 11" exams to be entered into the computer before he could be allowed to do key stage 12 exams.

Strange how we supposedly won the cold war but the losers system seems to have been adopted.

We have had to stop accepting child geniuses into our maths dept because anybody that works with under 18s (even escorting them on a campus tour for an open day) now needs extensive police checks - 'to protect the children'.
If you know Lisp, you can tell it's an introduction along the lines of The Little Schemer/LISPer, and that it's cool. If you don't know Lisp, then you probably have better things to be doing right now, like learning Lisp :)
Yes that got it! Thanks for the quick fix.
What makes me think HTML5 is not for streaming? Streaming video technology works differently.

What makes me think companies with the concerns outlined by the OP would not consider HTML5? It would be much more difficult to control their content. Flash is great as a hard to penetrate content container. Exposing your content by using HTML + JS to display it is less than ideal if you want to serve ads/make it difficult to steal content.
When I stopped eating junk food I was astonished at how much I could snack and not gain any weight. It took almost no dieting to start to drop weight.
That's not trivial, suddenly you have to have type inference. 1? Did you mean an int? Float? Double? 8 bits? 16? 32? 64? signed? unsigned?
I'm just going to keep assuming people want to have a conversation, tptacek. Next time if you're only replying -- because why exactly? -- as a game or something you can save us a lot of time and effort by pointing that out, instead of thinking I'm going to remember your nick or style.

What you see in politics and religion I see in every discussion that goes on at HN. People have preconceived ideas, and act mostly on emotion. The question is whether or not they (and me) can move past all that posturing.

So nope, I don't see much at all special about this subject. To me it's the same as "what should I do with my life?" or "C++ or LISP: What should I try first?" or "What types of footwear do you use when you hack?" "Does Country and Western music go with VB programming?" "Has Microsoft stopped being the most evil company on earth yet?" or any one of the 1000 other issues and questions that require people of differing worldviews the chance to converse. (not debate) I enjoy having a conversation, asking questions, and learning stuff. Quite frankly some of the other topics, as emotional as they can be to some, bore me to tears any more.
Weight loss makes you more attractive, "health and fitness" provides uncertain statistical benefits that mostly occur many years down the road.
I know the crime is pretty terrible, but we really don't know the whole story. Mr. Sullivan might have been raped daily by a crazy uncle. He might have had crack put in his baby formula. He really might have been subject to all kinds of terrible abuse - you just don't know.

This is why law is complicated, why we have trials, and judges, court psychologists, social workers and other professionals whose job it is to figure out what to do with kids like this.

I really wanted to comment because I work very closely with the NYC Juvenile Crimes division - I actually built their case management database and work with their prosecutors almost daily. You rarely hear the whole story, especially in these unusual types of cases, so it's best to leave it to the professionals.

I've learned that the answer to every question in law (and actually in engineering too) is always "it depends".
Take a look at "Reading Rate: A Review of Research and Theory" by Ronald P. Carver

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Rate-Review-Research-Theory/dp...

The conclusion is, basically, that speed reading courses don't work.

You can teach people to skim at a faster rate than they'd read with maximum comprehension and retention. And you can teach people study skills, such as how to summarize salient points, and take notes.

But all these skills are not at all the same as what speed reading usually promises, which is to drastically increase the rate at which you read with full comprehension and retention. According to Carver's book, it can't be done, at least not drastically past about the rate you'd naturally read at the college level.

Check out the book for a much more comprehensive explanation and analysis.
Automatically up-vote parent comments based on the number of replies in a thread that they produce.

Sometimes, when a big discussion forms, comments deep in the thread gain 10 or more points while the original parent has just 1 or 2 points. The parent comment is usually "worthy" of the same points, but it's as if people forget to up-vote the parent. The parent should share in the karma for spawning interesting discussions.
Sahib Teri Bandi by The Derek Trucks Band: http://www.songite.com/#c30f63

(Disclosure: I built Songite a few weekends ago)
But of course, you can download full HD TV shows without DRM from other places on the Internet. I consider Hulu proper punishment for people that have never heard of usenet.
Don't you think that would encourage reddit-style pun and joke threads?
I learned to "speed read" on my own as a kid because I am very plot oriented and would want to find out happens at the end of a book as soon as possible.

Yes, you do miss details, and yes, you don't remember things as well. It's fine for fiction, where enjoyment is really the only point, but I would never do it with anything technical.
Fractals part1 and 2 now on my playlist - thank you!
'Space elevator' wins $900,000 NASA prize
Trajectory.
Mainstream media is not dying.

The article proved that in one case, Techcrunch reported substantially better than New York Times. But it should be mentioned, that 1) this is not always the case, and 2) Technology is only a small part of what mainstream media cover.

Also, in my opinion, Techcrunch is not a blog in the traditional sense of that word. Yes, it uses blogging software and sorts its articles chronologically, but it is actually an Internet media company with professional staff, etc. From certain point of view, TC is mainstream technology media. Overall, this article proves nothing more that in one particular case, one media performed better than other.
Lately I've become a big fan of AIR, they make great instrumental tracks, as well as songs with lyrics. I tend to listen to the soundtrack of the virgin suicides quite a lot. Many people don't like the atmosphere of their music, but I feel as if I get their songs. I also like the soundtrack of donnie darko, the mood is quite unique, haven't discovered it anywhere else. I don't know why but that kind of music doesn't distract me at all and makes me calm and more productive.
I find trance music extremely unobtrusive and yet motivating. Almost everything else is distracting.

I am a sworn procrastinator, yet as soon as I turn on one of Armin van Buurens radio sessions, I can do an entire days work in two hours.
vocal trance http://di.fm/vocaltrance
Here's a Spotify collaborative playlist with some suggestions from the above...

spotify:user:niallsmart:playlist:2Y7iDJaEoozuBDj4Npbm7L
I actually bought that book about 3 years ago. While I found the book entertaining and full of interesting anecdotes, the focus was on IT programming and less about quantitative finance (which is what interested me).

I also remember the book mentioning salaries and it was FAR below going rates (the book mentioned a number that was about half the going rate).

Most of the information can be had by scouring the Wilmott forums, (http://www.wilmott.com/index.cfm), and the guys who run that site offer a free PDF book (or at least it used to be free: http://quantjob.blogspot.com/2007/08/faq-1-what-is-guide-our...).
May I suggest a GreaseMonkey script that replaces the youtube-flash with the HTML5 video, inline? Like the Safari-plugin mentioned above, but for Firefox.
Figuring out why their conversion is 0.01%.
You realize of course that choosing that weight lose is the most important metric is just another form of rationalization. If you take a step back to first principles and start with a reasonable goal such as "I want to feel better and live longer" then zeroing in on losing weight is not necessarily the most effective path. For obese people it might be, but for normal people getting regular exercise and eating right (which varies by individual) will have a much more positive effect than obsessing over weight.

Furthermore, telling people to count calories and not worry about the quality of what they eat is just opening the door for that same destructive human behavior of eating whatever crap they want, just in limited quantities. This is not the road to health. No amount of engineering mentality will get around the fuzziness of health or the stubbornness of human nature. Fortunately people are capable of being honest with themselves to varying degrees, and it is possible to improve one's health by a commitment to exercise and healthy eating.