skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the biggest tricks here is the fact that every town (which you may drive for 10 minutes and pass through 10 of within a few miles) has completely different parking laws.

Brookline you can't park overnight on the street- period. Boston you can park for free overnight at a metered spot as long as you get in it after 6pm (8pm some spots). Some areas an unmarked spot is open for parking (as long as no sign speaks otherwise), other areas you'll likely get ticketed or towed. In Somerville you can park a motorcycle in any 'permit only' spot and its ok (I called 311 and asked), and Cambridge it will land you a $30 ticket to do the same- god knows about Boston.

Street cleaning is a joke and its really just a way to annoy people and raise revenue (which I understand the city needs, but if everyone uses the services- everyone should pay for them. Now if they money goes to only maintaining the roads, that is more understandable).

I agree some some comments that you don't need a car if you live in Boston. Living in Back Bay for 2 years I had no need of a car, but now that I'm in Somerville it is nice to have one.

The rates are a little bit much for some offenses.
I did say that 3 awards out of about 30 submissions was unusually high. There are always topics for which no awards are made. Many have only one award.

100 topics is about how many are in each list of SBIR/STTRs circulated on topics as diverse as new techniques in field medicine to better translation to new power storage mechanisms. It would require considerable technical range to propose to them all and succeed.

You do not get to make up your own topics. They are posted by Program Managers working for the government.

If you attempt to propose to more than one personally in an SBIR/STTR cycle you will lose. That is in part how my first two failed. I find it takes a considerable effort to put together a good AND short proposal.

Then there is the catch that you must inform all agencies of similar proposals sent previously or at the same time to other agencies (so you can't win two with one proposal).

Proposals are judged against your ability to execute upon award. The bottom line is that the odds are quite a bit lower than 10%.

My advice is go read the solicitations and then get out and meet the program managers a'la Steve Blank. You will learn a lot and your proposal will benefit from it. It is a tough process but does seem to reward determination.

One last word - keep yours, government contracting is a small town.

I hope this helps you assess the risks and how you can reduce them. Best of luck!
I think there is more to this story than people realize.

My Swedish is a little rusty, but from what I read in the media and the police press announcement, the following happened:

The Malmo hackerspace is located in a building that has roots in the squatter/anarchist collective scene. That group was organizing a party there where they were apparently selling alcohol without a proper license.

During the raid of that party, the police simply went through the whole building. Including the hacker space.

If this is what happened then the raid had probably completely nothing to do with the hackerspace and everything with their hosts.
I don't think twitter is a direct competitor with blogs. As stated in the article "One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts (and other people's blog posts, as we grow, so do they, and vice versa."So basically twitter is a tool used to generate or lead traffic to blog posts.

I read economics, business and web 2.0 blogs everyday. Some of the material cannot be covered in 140 characters or it will lack substance. What I do see on twitter is a headline to catch your attention and a link to get more information on another blog.

Twitter can replace blogs that lack substance, ie the teenage girl that writes about her boring life and stupid thoughts on her blog on myspace. This could probably be done in 140 characters or less.
It might just be me, but I found that to be one of the most baffling, mumbo-jumbo-laden things I've read. I honestly have no idea what he's talking about. The leaps in logic, the speculating and the unfounded assumptions, the inside-baseball jargon, the pulling bits from all over and smashing them together and calling it a theory -- sometimes you just have to shake your head at these folks who are so lost in the weeds.
This happens in a lot of countries. It's unfortunate at best, malicious at worst.
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What about Weka?

http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
Stressing the Web, ‘NewsHour’ Begins an Overhaul
Well, you are right in some respect. The conversation here is interesting in spots, even if Dawkins' own knee-jerk reactions to religion are tiresome.
I remember some of Wordnik's PR was an article about their PR - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05pr.html?pagewan...

It is interesting though, definitely an upgrade from dictionary.com or merriam webster.
"So it's clear that to be an effective programmer, you need to be well-versed in both the practical and academic aspects of the field. Dismissing the practical aspects by saying they are a waste of time and that some dude from a trade school can handle them for you is ... short-sighted."

That's not what I said, though. My opinion is that if you want to have longevity in your career, you need to focus on the theory. That doesn't mean that you don't learn the other stuff -- you just learn what's necessary, and move on. More to the point: when you're spending big bucks on college classes, you'd better be devoting your time to learning stuff that you can't learn from a few hours of quality time in a coffee shop with an O'Reilly book and a laptop.

For what it's worth, though, I've known many CS professors, and many industry programmers, and I wouldn't put the average of one group ahead of the other in terms of programming skill. The myth that academics don't know "industry" is a myth (but there are plenty of coders who don't know anything about algorithms).

Also for the record: I like Perl. I'm not the one calling it a dinosaur technology. I also like C++, though, so maybe I'm just old.
I gave a few thousand old floppies to an artist on Etsy. She recycled 100% of them into art items, and then sent my wife some cool jewelry to thank me for the raw material. Some of the jewelry was even made out of the floppies I sent, although you wouldn't know it to look at the jewelry. She also made some fancy photo frames and some other items.

I just came across the artist's "floppy disc artwork" by accident while looking around on Etsy, which then prompted the idea to get rid of the old floppies I had in storage. I'm sure there are other artists who use floppy discs for art material...

[EDIT: bhousel's post has some better suggestions...the ACT Recycling program sounds especially neat.]
I do not appreciate compliments anymore. I haven't for a long time. I have a complicated view I don't really wish to explain right now (maybe I'll write a blog post later) about why compliments are almost insulting, especially insulting by those people who care about "you" and who give them often (Sorry for that passive voice).

My thoughts all stemmed from the idea that compliments make people worse at what they do. At BEST they make the person continue at the same speed with a boost of moral. Imho.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I agree with you... I think the top of the homepage, unfortunately, is the most hideous part of the site.

>> "Have a background with a darker border behind the iTunes price"
It's hard to tell, but the orange-ish background highlights the cheaper price for a song or album if there's a price difference between the two stores. This used to be clearer when Amazon wasn't always the cheapest, but now it appears as though I'm highlighting the Amazon price all the time. I'll play w/ some way to clear that up.
I agree. What will the police even do with the computers? There should be laws against that kind of thing. Seriously disgusting.
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Sounds like a problem with your internet connection :-)

I think too often we lay blame on websites when usually it's a user error.
If you are designing a high availability application it is probably prudent to assume a single cluster will provide roughly 99% uptime (if the operators are good). So multi-homing across several locations and providers makes a lot of sense even for a small player.
Example: 2009 April FBI raid on Core IP Dallas data center

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546067

> [Core IP CEO] Simpson added that there were 50 businesses without access to email and data due to the raid. "If you run a datacenter, please be aware that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at any time and take whatever they want, with no reason," he wrote.

Bruce Sterling foreshadows "Data Havens"

"A data haven is a computer or a network that holds data protected from government action by both technical means (encryption) and location in a country that has either no laws, or poorly-enforced laws restricting use of data and no extradition treaties."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_haven
They do: https://www.enom.com/resellers/APICommandCatalog.pdf
Not only that, but he called their bluff... and lost.

As per a comment by Paul Buchheit himself: "To be clear, Twitter has made available a realtime replacement for the firehose (the replacement is called "birddog"). We have not yet started consuming that new API because we're waiting for the lawyers to come to agreement on the terms of use, which I hope will happen soon. I think Twitter's legal team is simply overbooked at the moment."
Open Source for businesses is a tactic, not a strategy. And open source projects are orthogonal to business products.

Most of us are working on startups where it makes sense to leverage available open-source toolkits to solve problems rather than buying prefab solutions. But for larger and more established companies it has always been the case that service and support costs are the primary driver of decisionmaking. Businesses don't buy a box of bits labeled Oracle, they buy into the support structure that trains Oracle consultants and DBAs, and that ensures that they will be able to solve their data management problems using Oracle tools. To some extent it doesn't matter whether the underlying software is or is not open source, it matters whether the toolkit and the techniques that that software represents can be used to solve problems effectively.

In situations where you need to be monkeying with the inner workings of your infrastructure; open source is a clear win, likewise when you are strapped for cash. But if you have cash on hand and a well supported solution that covers your use case; a packaged solution from a vendor may be a better value.
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This is an awesome site. thanks for it!
The Memorial..
This is incredibly speculative – it reads like a social media conspiracy theory. An interesting look into the mind of the author. The way this is written makes it seem like he wrote it furiously and wide-eyed.
The article is by Steve Gillmor. Every single article of his reads like that -- totally incomprehensible.
Data is critical. I have never built such a system as an individual. My friend told me he bought the data somewhere.
HN is one of the few places on the internet where agreement can be reached on the 6th or 7th tab. I forget that it's unique until I read comments on Techcrunch or Youtube.

Maybe we can handle Atheism here. Maybe we can even handle text editors.
I had a really hard time following what the author was trying to convey (and it seems as though I wasn't the only one), but it does bring once concern to mind: Should we be worried that Twitter owns our tweets and is keeping almost exclusive access to them? I feel like we've all grown to depend on Twitter, and it's a shame that microblogging didn't evolve into something decentralized like the regular ol' blogging or (as a larger example) the Internet.
So then the Police entered the building ostensibly to break up an illegal party, and then decided to confiscate the computers while they were there?

That sounds like a fishing expedition to me.

I don't know what the law is in Sweden, but in the US there are 4th amendment protections against that sort of thing.
Step one: Realize that even though it looks pretty, a small font size can cause your writing to be unreadable. Even in full screen, the font is still half a point too small for extended reading.
Works alright here. Safari 4.0.4 (ha) on OS X 10.6

e.g. try this link: http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/69-80/3075 (Newton's letter on optics)
Seriously. Learn to think creatively and abstractly about problems, which doesn't necessarily come from being in over your eyeballs in code. Your ability to think outside the box will help you more than any computer science class ever could.
Why do they have cut away locks to practice lock picking and blank keys and stuff like that? Sounds kind of shady.
In Mandarin it's much closer to "chee" (elongated "chi") than it is to "tea"
> Stop and let something else in. It’s a confusing skill

One of my favorite (an independent) book stores is haphazardly "organized".

The opposite of Barnes & Noble:

"Vampire" section:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/echoman/3883032294/

This is a little out there but a great story on going with your gut feeling:

http://daily.finerminds.com/mind/a-finerminds-reader-article...
For a moment I thought that was Jon Stewart. Anyway interesting site.
In case of encrypted data, can't the US government legally force one to disclose passwords following a raid? In other words they might raid a company, they find encrypted hard drives so they ask for passwords. Then does revealing passwords fall under "self-incriminating" or not revealing them fall under "obstructing justice"?
I think you might be misunderstanding what a cutaway lock is. A cutaway lock is a normal lock with portions of the casing made out of transparent material or removed entirely. Their specific function is to practice lock picking. And blank keys aren't tools with a single usage scenario. Good guys and criminals alike use them to copy or make keys. The important thing here is not to judge by the equipment, but by the intent of the owner. Most laws about owning lock picks reflect this pragmatic view.

Also, if you're attempting to criticize the activity of lock picking in general, realize that it is a long standing tradition in the hacker community. Sergey Brin is a prominent example of a "non-evil" person who tinkered with it [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/technology/10google.html
It's not all bad. You can buy "credits" and use them for whatever you want, even send them to other family members so they can post on your family page too without paying anything.
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As far as I know, that's originally from Yogi Berra. From wikipedia: "On why he no longer went to Ruggeri's, a St. Louis restaurant: 'Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.'". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra)
So the real advantage is it's a free and formal way to thrash out a business plan?
At least in the Netherlands it has been common for hackers to be interested in lockpicking. The irregular magazine Hacktic (which spawned the awesome ISP XS4ALL) used to have features and tutorials about lockpicking.

I assume it is the same for Sweden.

And if you've got a curious mind I cannot imagine why you would not be interested in it!
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Yep. For Python there's a good-enough client for the graph API called "graphy", I think it's on Google Code.
If a creationist wants access to your data you give it to them; you don't have to debate them, but there is no reason not to keep this data on your ftp...
the raid had probably completely nothing to do with the hackerspace and everything with their hosts.

If that's true, than the warrant would have been limited in scope. Clearly it wasn't since the police seized everything. You can be sure there's a larger agenda than busting underage drinkers.
I've been quite happy with corenetworks; $30 for their dual core 1.6GHz Celeron.

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You should put your hosting company website in your profile. Personally, when a user on HN says something intelligent, I like to check out their company.
Local, state, federal, and whatever other applicable laws permitting, you should definitely learn to open easy locks with paper clips (optionally a pair of pliers and a screwdriver as well). We did it on the last day of the graduate-level security course I took, and I will definitely never take the security of locks for granted again.
Links to climate data, codes, model outputs, reconstructions, paleo-records, ...
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I know that some of the larger operations get live market data from Bloomberg and Reuters. You may want to take a look at https://loginabout.reuters.com/Home/RMDS.aspx although I have no idea how much it costs.
Every single statement of his reads like that.
To be fair, GWB was a stuttering moron.
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I agree about needing both sides.

The people I've worked with that are heavy on the academic side (MS,PhD, etc) with little real world experience have, without fail, been very mediocre and have had a hard time getting stuff done. They are either architecture astronauts or they try to turn it into a thesis paper. Bonus: I once saw someone with a MS in some computer-related field remove RAM from a running computer.

My experiences with people that have had no academic experience but lots of real world experience have been just as bad. I recently worked at a place where out of 14 programmers, only myself and three others had a degree. They all, to some extent, shared some of the same qualities: they can get stuff done (in small projects), but usually in really dumb and expensive ways, and they display a poor aptitude for learning new skills and techniques, and can't think abstractly.

I don't mean to say that a degree is everything or will automatically make you a better programmer, but in getting one, you gain a foundation that you wouldn't otherwise get from work experience alone.
My understanding is that in the US, passwords fall under the 5th amendment. Here's an example where a subpoena ordering the defendant to enter in a password was quashed: http://www.eff.org/files/Boucher.pdf
here is some actual scholarship on the subject rather than opinionated garbage in the original link.

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html
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these economies of scale are often based on lower transaction costs at scale. information technology already has managed to lower or eliminate many transaction costs - and while doing so made a lot of previously unviable small business, viable.

it's hard to say how many of these transaction costs are to stay with us over the next decades, but it's quite safe to say a lot of them will go. i have no answers, but i'm really curious how this will change society.
Funny, at one point people assumed we couldn't have a civilization without slavery (not that working is the same as slavery).

If everybody ends up working for their own companies, then the big assembly halls will be filled with robots who will do the work.
From over this side of the world it appears those protections aren't actually of any use:

http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=9462

"Police seize DJs' laptops
New police chief apparently condones policy that critics call illegal and punitive"
Learn why they’re not buying
Xbox 360’s theoretical impact on PC sales
For every 10% of the 31 million Xbox 360 units sold that cause the purchase of a non-PC, it equates to a loss of 2.25 billion in market value for the PC and less than 1 billion increase in Xbox 360 market value.

An approximate net loss of 1.25 billion.
> I started programming my freshman year, and didn't realize how badly I was doing it till that class.

Now there's an interesting idea: a college doesn't have to devote huge amounts of time to teaching about version control, collaboration, and so forth. They just have to cover it enough to make the students realize that they have a problem.
I am not proposing applying 100 times, I am proposing a way to asses the expected outcome. The award size itself is not sufficient to know if it's worth the time spent, because you may not get that award. Taking the award size and multiplying it by the probability is a quick way to see if it's worth the effort. For example, playing lottery your expected outcome is less than the entry price even though awards are staggeringly high.

Does it make more sense now?
The script was then rejected by every major movie studio before Idle and producer John Goldstone turned to former Beatle George Harrison, who quickly secured the required $4 million.

Right, but besides Sgt. Pepper, Life of Brian, and the invention of the CT scanner [1], what have the Beatles ever done for us?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT_scanner#History
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Actually, any of a long list of South Park episodes. Although, for the most part, SP tends to be far more blunt and direct with its message.
In what way? Bing features pretty landscape photographs both on their main page and along the top of the SERP. Google is still fairly plain text in comparison. Not even the search sidebar operates or looks the same in Bing.
I want searching Google Scholar to have its own button in the sidebar, enabled by default. Most people won't. The sidebar needs to be customizable.
The print logo looks decent but it is still flat and lifeless compared with the vibrant new logo. I think that the new logo (as enabled by turning on this cookie) pops out of the page more and looks more web 2.0 compared with both the original logo and the print logo.
There was a previous Hacker News thread about this guy ("Steve Gillmor's Commenters Revolt"): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453250

What I find hard to believe is that continues to write these incomprehensible articles, apparently sincerely, even though he must know that his readers find them incomprehensible. I half expect to wake up some day and find out that Gillmor is a bot or that the joke was somehow on us all along.
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pg also wrote about it if memory serves.
Maybe it's just me, but I find this article slightly more comprehensible than his previous articles.
Yes, the networking is very, very effective. A lot of the people I've worked on EC-funded projects with I've ended up working with on other, more meaningful things as well.
Is Facebook a brain virus or meme ?