skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The actual article seems to raise the issue in a new way... yet it looks like "I like hammers, now this is how I want to solve this problem with my favourite hammer".

Even if he defends the design decisions, I have a problem with them:

> also is unable to support nearly a million nested stack frames, then execution of this query will fail

Meanwhile - if you get to the sets with a million elements, I'm pretty sure you do not want to test for an element by traversing a million elements in O(n) style. Additionally instead of running in a single environment, each of the `contains()` functions is a new closure (killing the cache)

Then, he wants to support many types of AdjonObject implementations in a single list - and destroy the trace of execution on every call... good luck debugging this project if any of the functions fail semi-randomly.

Yet - this is only one specific case where the TCO is needed and expected. The sets objects are not general enough to implement anything else than... sets (that's what IntSet's interface defines). So if TCO is that crucial in this case - let's go: no stack implementation in a no TCO language which doesn't violate the "don't inspect the elements" constraint. `contains(x)` is the main abstract function that initialises local `cf` with local `__contains(x)`, then does `cf = cf(x)` until the result is a boolean and not a closure. Now every object can construct whatever chain of calls it needs, there is no relaying on `cf` coming from an IntSet interface (or .contains() being available) and there is no call stack. `.adjoin()` can modify the local object's checking function in any way it needs. Still not really doable in java because it cannot return a "closure or boolean" type, but python will do just fine.

Edit: that article really bothers me for some reason... probably because I expected better from LtU - so I implemented http://bitbucket.org/viraptor/ootr/src/tip/intset.py
Not to be paranoid, but where does it say that their privacy policy won't change?

Right now, the privacy policy looks great on the surface. They are launching a new product.

But you can't deny that Google's entire DNA is to extract monetizable information from huge amount of seemlingly unrelated raw data.

That's why you have to take their privacy policy with a grain of salt.
I agree, but yes it is: 1) you can't unscramble variable names, and 2) you have to prettyprint all js, even well-written js, or create a 'compression detection' algorithm.
Well that's a whole another ball of wax, or the other size of the sword depending on how you look at it. There are a good number of cases that people are convicted on faulty forensic science many of them not nearly as egregious as the one you describe. Most of the time it still comes from detectives gut feeling, not forensics, that turns a witness into a suspect. The forensics don't come into they are trying to build a case against you. Sometimes the forensics comes from the witness cooperating to give DNA, bite marks, etc as you mentioned. People who cooperate fully only to be wrongfully accused.

The real problem is proving the forensics are wrong. Combating faulty forensics is a huge task to bear that can take years too. People who have lost 20 years in jail because the forensics were done by unqualified people or simply incorrect.

Sometimes I hear the science explained by the shows and I wonder how in the world is it true. Who verified these results? Who defines what is unique and what isn't? Particularly questionable is techniques that prove uniqueness.
And, like many of their other projects, they seem to be content to throw their hat in the ring just to keep everyone else honest.

Broken DNS is a threat. But they don't need to answer all DNS requests to protect against it. They just need a non-broken service as a credible threat to keep the other providers from sliding in that direction.
It's a link to Lambda the Ultimate. Not bad form.
I mentioned book stores and restaurants as examples of industries. I have no specific products for these industries and I was just looking for general thoughts on sales commissions and finding distribution channels.

I should also reiterate that I'm not looking to hire salaried employees. I'm looking for marketing firms that work on a commission basis (and payments will solely be based on commissions)
I don't understand how "You have to remember to put all your files in a special folder" (Dropbox) is much different than "You have to remember to put all your files on a special drive".
Why bother trying to acquire them when there is nothing technically difficult about what opendns is doing and when google has more resources and technical expertise to bring to bear on the problem? What exactly would you expect opendns to bring to the table other than a trademark and a somewhat controversial reputation?

To be honest I am somewhat surprised that opendns has lasted as long as they have, but I expected the attack to come from the akamai/cdn direction rather than directly from google.
I agree. I also think it's fair for the provider of a public service to derive some benefit from running it. The obvious questions are: Is it ethical? Is it honest? (Google phrases it as "Don't be evil.")

In this case, if they are providing an alternative to filtering and hijacking, I see that as a really important step forward. The fact that a lot of people expected those behaviors shows just how bad the situation with DNS really is these days.
That's pretty sad for the computer science education at the present time. The discipline somewhat lacks of proper education for the history for information technology and big past contribution and great ideas.
Attempts to improve the internet as a whole may not directly benefit Google, but as an internet company, they will almost certainly indirectly benefit them. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Bzzt! Wrong.
The IPCC based its reports in a lot of data open to scrutiny, not only East Anglia's. And even the problems with East Anglia data have been hugelly exagerated. The IPCC meetings were also open to a lot of dissent, particularly from Middle East oil producing countries (guess why)?

And GW deniers do have a basic belief: "you can regulate my energy from my cold dead hands".
A Pattern Language presents a compelling way of thinking about "place". It clarifies what so many have longed for in the way of community, and shows clearly what's wrong and what to change to fix it. I highly recommend it for everyone!
"Everyone not in the pocket of an ISP would agree that the net should be neutral"

I wish the ISP's would pay me. I just don't think net neutrality makes sense - why not let ISP's give preference to game traffic over email? Nobody cares if an email arrives in 15 seconds instead of 5.
I really enjoyed this talk. One of my favorite parts was a list of book recommendations Kevin provided at the end:

- call to action

- landing page optimization

- small giants

- the ultimate question (how to design surveys and define meaningful metrics)

- why marriages succeed or fail (john gottman's research on relationships)

- predictably irrational (behavioral economics)

- sway: the irresistible pull of irrational behavior
| those paranoid deniers are just like those creationists who ignore data that doesn't fit into their pre-determined conclusions

Well, I do totally agree with this! :-)
They announced recently that they're going to start making them again.
More raw material to invent hearsay: that is the address shared by the founder and the sharehoder:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=de&...
What's interesting, David links only to OpenDNS policy, but does not provide a link to Google's which would make an easier to compare…
How do we even know it was alive to begin with?
Tell HN: So, about that design thread...
A while back, I published a post on here complaining about designers in general, saying that they seemed to either be lacking professionally or producing poor work: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=955918

As you can see, I received a large amount of contact information for designers, and I was a bit overwhelmed by the choices. (Though, you might have to scroll down a bit; Chris_G derailed the thread a bit with his "NO U" post.)

I went ahead and hired Ole Martin: http://piraja.no

I've nothing but good things to say about the overall process. He was very quick in getting back to me with rates (which were reasonable, but in Euros) and progress. While he was able to maintain professionalism, the work was fantastic.

You can see the finished result here for our next startup:

http://piraja.no/dev/MTA/live/1/index.html

I definitely recommend him to anyone, and I'll most certainly be using him in the future.
That "hate" thing comes from your Utu project, I guess.

While I like the idea, I'm not sure it's a good idea to label it as such in the interface.

You might also have a hard time figuring out the genuine flaggings from the ones made by spambots...
Oh I agree - that's what I meant by "no direct benefit" to them. They explicitly have stated that they want to improve the internet because a better internet is good for them. I'm just saying it's inaccurate to assume they're starting a service for direct monetization and information collection.
Payflow Pro (by PayPal) Recurring Billing. I'm sure there are much, much better APIs out there but most of my comments would apply to any of them.

EDIT: tl;dr for my above comment: Third-party solutions are basically a replacement of a cron job that figures out when to bill someone and how much. It's easier to write that cron job than it is to keep your billing data synchronized across two systems.
Outsource your infrastructure
makes you wonder if his skills in bed are equal to his skills at investing.
HN NYC: Hackers & Founders #7 at Gallery Bar tonight from 6-8PM
Bicycle Boulevards Are Awesome [video]
The fine-grained control is a plus for openDNS.

Second, from the stories that seem to pop up, google's achilles heel is it's customer service. OpenDNS might be able to do better.
Also on Rogers - and get a noticeable improvement.
Furthermore, they tend to open source a lot of their stuff, so they don't have to be the only way to Chat, Wave, Browse, and probably eventually DNS.
There's currently an exhibit on Shannon at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn Germany: http://en.hnf.de/Special_exhibitions/Shannon/Shannon.asp

He built some very cool toys for his kids, some of which are on display there. Here's a video of him with some of his juggling machines http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBHGzRxfeJY
Tax Tips for December 2009
"What do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do?"

Not DNS redirection.
Learn One Thing: Squash
um...so do the townspeople collectively own the entire town? including each other's lots? because if a lot is private property, nothing prevents me from selling my lot to a condo builder. I think that you could have a system like the one you describe be just, simply have people own shares in the town. voting stock is a much better system than universal suffrage.
Facebook photos costs woman insurance benefits
This is really cool. I have been learning some stats, data mining, and machine learning stuff and I'm compelled by Incanter. I can see why a lisp is a good choice for statisical computing, with lists of data and easy composition of calculations.

Thanks to both the Incanter and FlightCaster devs for the generosity.
Infuriating ATM Machines
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974963
Yeah, and they mostly have no serious understanding of the technology. At least the typical sportscaster maybe played the sport in High School. He has some distant connection to the sport beyond being that of a spectator with a camera in front of him. I'd be surprised if any major tech journalist was ever a serious programmer.

They seem to be entirely obsessed with cell phones for some reason.

I think the issue is that the "tech press" is just an overgrown version of the "trade press" that exists for every industry. Somewhere out there, there are reporters writing articles abut squeegees for the janitorial industry. [1]

The "Trade Press" mostly exists to provide a vehicle for industrial vendors to advertise to their niche. They fill in the space between the ads by hiring b-grade writers who couldn't hack it at the New York Post, and get them rewrite press releases from the advertisers.

The "tech press" is exactly the same thing, only more hyperactive, trollish, and ostentatious --- to better complement the industry they cover.

[1] In fact, here you go: http://www.cleanlink.com/
Do you have any idea how confused I was the first time that happened? An absolutely terrible user experience.
Darn. http://to/life was taken. Oh well. L'chai-im!
I don't think it matters. There's no value-add in LTU's blog post on this other than the equivalent of "hay guys, this is cool". Granted, that has a lot of weight coming from that blog, but it's still just a link to a link.
Both PC World and ComputerWorld (especially ComputerWorld) are the tabloids of the industry. They just have a lot of money to spend on shoddy journalism.
> Plus, now I don't ever need to look up a DNS server again, Google's is 8.8.8.8. Sweet.

My DNS servers have been 4.2.2.[1-4] for a long time. They aren't that hard to remember.
while I agree the design could still use work, jumping on the drop shadows is silly. Designs down have to follow physics, function of design elements can be more abstract.

Just because it doesn't follow some global light source doesn't mean it's not functional. It serves a purpose by helping better highlight the colors. Would you be okay if we separate the edges with a solid black line? What if he added a gradient to that line?
My TRS-80 had 4K, so the Basic language used one-letter abbreviations for all the commands. I tried learning Z80 on it, but it was a bit too tough for me; 6502 was a breeze in comparison. fwiw, stick with it if you enjoy it!
Short C# Implementation of Peter Norvig's Spelling Corrector
> Google knows what is hosted at the servers you are looking up.

And so does every other DNS provider so long as the pages are public and if your ISP is your DNS provider then they can directly sniff your (non-encrypted) traffic too.
What does the doubling function do?  Learning math, but thinking programming
Poor George Boole. 150 years later and all he got was a lousy t-shirt and a data type named after him.

Be nice if the article defined 'made a fortune.'
If the problem doesn't exist, why do so many people find them useful?
Ask HN: Advice for Payment Processing?
I need some advice for setting up payment processing.. I know it's been discussed extensively around here but it seems like our use case might be slightly different than other typical web apps, either requiring an extra step or different solution than the average e-commerce transaction..

The basic concept: An e-commerce site with multiple vendors showcasing their products, company will take a % of each transaction (listing fee) before sending each vendor the remaining funds. (somewhat similar payment structure to http://www.kickstarter.com/)

I am looking for the best solution to allow users to checkout on the site using a credit card - I do not like what I've seen with either Amazon Web Pay or Paypal Adaptive Payments so far.. it looks like both of these require users to be redirected to their site for secure checkout. Reading the development forums for Paypal, seems that there isn't any planned support for Website Payments Pro and Adaptive Payments together (unless I'm completely missing something).

Steps to Successful Transaction:
1. Customer visits site and makes a purchase using their credit card (without leaving our site)
2. For using our site the vendor is charged a % transaction fee
3. Remaining funds after fee deductions are sent to vendor

Need to think about the best way for these transactions to happen, and also look at all of the fees involved with moving the money each time. Should funds move to vendors each time a transaction is complete? At the end of each day? Once every 30 days? Without an elegant solution it seems like this could get messy rather quickly.

Many thanks for your help!
The point was that, for most users, Google is an abstraction over URLs, just like DNS is an abstraction over IP addresses.
On internal yardsticks: "Would you prefer to be the
greatest lover in the world and known as the worst,
or would you prefer to be the worst lover and
known as the greatest?"

Which one is supposed to be better?

Some people are much better at interviewing for a job than doing the job. Others are great at the job but fail at interviews.

I started to notice a few years ago that I fall pretty extremely into one of those categories, but I made peace by being glad I wasn't at the other extreme.
Imagine, Create, and Let go
Agreed. Lots of things I couldn't quite connect to what they were saying? Particularly be a source of data section. But, this was a good topic.
From the blog post:
"Third, Google claims that this service is better because it has no ads or redirection. But you have to remember they are also the largest advertising and redirection company on the Internet. To think that Google’s DNS service is for the benefit of the Internet would be naive. They know there is value in controlling more of your Internet experience and I would expect them to explore that fully. And of course, we always have protected user privacy and have never sold our DNS data. Here’s a link to our privacy policy."

davidu,

You have excellent points but you could have made them without bashing your competitor.

This response makes me think that you are afraid of your competition and using fear to convince people to use OpenDNS.
if on windows how do I measure what you just measured?
You forgot escape & encoded and eval()'ed inline javascript in DOM that inserts a <script> tag that bootstraps another URL-rewrited dynamically generated .js. And the best part is, the .js can not be re-requested as it's it's taken cautions to prevent re-play attack.
$ whois 4.3.2.1
Level 3 Communications, Inc. LVLT-ORG-4-8 (NET-4-0-0-0-1)
4.0.0.0 - 4.255.255.255
Google Incorporated LVLT-GOOGL-1-4-3-2 (NET-4-3-2-0-1)
4.3.2.0 - 4.3.2.255
What is it that he wants?
Kevin Ham: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...
Wow, maybe I just read it wrong. I didn't see anything about DNS in my original reading.
More importantly I think, in "real work" you will often have to explain/justify your implementation and design decisions - which is also basically what you're doing in front of your interviewer.
Open a command prompt, launch nslookup to do the DNS queries.
Once nslookup type server <ip> in the console to switch dns provider, and then just type the host name to have it looked up.

Use a second window to ping the resulting ip addresses.

edit: these instructions are also valid on linux/freebsd and should also work on OSX
> If you perceive that the value of something that you have is more than you're being offered, that's the market saying "keep it".

Or, with no supply, and no demand, it could be argued there is no market--no people showing up saying anything at all.

This table is missing a line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_form

"The main criteria by which one can distinguish between different market structures are: the number and size of producers and consumers in the market, the type of goods and services being traded, and the degree to which information can flow freely."

Here we see few to no sellers, few to no buyers, and no information flow. By http://www.answers.com/topic/market definitions 4d or 5, there is no market. By definitions 4a - 4c, the market is halted, illiquid, or frozen.

I'd also argue against the idea:

> that data tells us that sellers in those places want too much money today

It may tell us buyers don't have enough money, which seems a different thing entirely.

Externalities innate to producing a type of home may put such a home out of reach of the set of individuals presently seeking to purchase a home. Building a home absorbs labor, materials, land, and other inputs; those must be paid for in their appropriate markets (not a question of 'perception'), and a rational builder/seller will not build/sell for less than those costs unless forced.
Do you think they might have meant "pawn shop"?
Google, Bing, and the Future of Search
As my name suggests I am a bit trollish myself as I am a fan of swears, passion and strong opinions.

I certainly look forward to a community where the "owner" is less able to control people's input according to their own tastes.

Stackoverflow has recently banned swearing.... because. This the kind of thing that pisses me off.
That's a stupid design decision on the part of Twitter, which the rest of the Internet is paying for.

At the very least, Twitter could only shorten URLs when messages go out via the SMS gateway, and not universally. All they'd need to do is count any valid URL as 20 characters (length of a bit.ly shortened URL) for the purpose of the limit, while preserving the actual real URL up until that limit actually mattered.

The sad and ironic part is that the 140-character limit and the URL shorteners it spawned will probably stick around, due to Twitter, far longer than Twitter-via-SMS does. I don't know many people who even use Twitter via SMS anymore; it was a cool feature initially, but it's being quickly obsoleted by smartphones that can access Twitter via much more user-friendly interfaces via TCP/IP.

"140 characters" is likely to become the "4 feet, 8-1/2 inches" of the Internet. Totally arbitrary, far from ideal, nearly impossible to change.
Foursquare.com now all on Lift, in Scala
My information may be out-dated, but Freshbooks seemed like it wouldn't have been a good fit for subscription billing back when we were looking.

Basically, it wasn't possible to create a signup form that resulted in a recurring invoice with credit card data attached. So you'd end up with janky situations where you're either invoicing people and waiting for them to pay, or charging them through another gateway, then hoping they enter payment information before the next cycle.

There's also no callback mechanism from Freshbooks to an outside site, making it extremely difficult to keep track of expiring subscriptions/cancellations/etc.

I would love, love, love for Freshbooks to also be a drop in subscription billing platform. It seems like most of the bits are there, but there's no guiding force trying to make sure it works well for that purpose.
Definitely some good advice here.

I never wanted to make this about myself, but I thought it appropriate to point out that I just received and accepted an offer from a place I interviewed with last week (one of the few fantastic interview experiences I've had). Much thanks to all the encouragements and good lucks, and even queries.

Now, please ignore this message, and return to our regularly scheduled discussion. :)
very much agreed on NPR. I don't know how I forgot about them.
I tried using those servers, and they didn't work. If I do an nslookup or dig through them, it's fine, but when I use them as the default nameservers in my network configuration, they seem to reject my requests.

Anyone know why?
On systems that support symlinks like OSX and Linux they can be made to look equivalent, but under Windows the differences are noticeable.
While this idea is nice, I have a meta-idea:

Since HTML5 introduce WebSocket, why don't we provide a plugin mechanism in browsers that allows downloadable site defined Internet protocols? In fact non-HTTP protocols been around in browsers since stone age, IE, Netscape and Firefox support Gopher in some degree. Chrome silently added libjingle for Bookmark Sync, it's even yields "P2P error" when something goes wrong. Opera has a BitTorrent built in.

Browser is container + Internet IO, period.

This idea should start within hacker & developer community first. I hope browsers could innovate as prosper as WinAmp developer ecosphere used to be. Not just a crappy HTTP requester+fancy HTML renderer with round corners, ogg-only audio, shinny canvas and 3D shit.
Unix How To: Repeating Commands in Bash