skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love re-reading this. BTW I always wondered about that PL/I ad and I finally found it! It is somewhere in this PDF:

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf

It is hilarious. PL/I must be incredibly easy if this cute blonde can handle it!
I've not really kept up with this story, nor can I rouse myself to feel the outrage shared by a lot of the community on this one... but if I were to throw in my two cents, I'd have to point to Google Flu Trends [1] and the fact that their modeling of influenza outbreak and spread are some of the most accurate and up-to-date on earth, often besting the World Health Organisation. This is sometimes used as justification for extending the length of time that Google retains data.

If this anti-google sentiment is to be believed and they are marching the corporate road to evil, I shudder to think of the information that could be inferred from collective search pattern trends.

I just noticed that the example had not been given yet and I think it's an important one in this debate. It is a seemingly benign, if not entirely altruistic, case study. What is the consensus, smoke and mirrors, or is there a real social value to be gleaned [2] from the harvest of the vast data swarm?

[1: http://www.google.org/flutrends/]
[2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning]
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Korean women are desperate to get into China?

I doubt it. Koreans look down on Chinese. They view them as dirty and uncouth.

Korea is a far richer country than China. There is no economic reason to migrate there.
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Nice to see that experience with LISP is a desired qualification for the job as Experimental Physicist at DWave.
Soviets only tell the people of this catastrophe, when independent scientists from Finland reported that radiation levels are unusually high, if they could, they would get away with this, no matter peoples' health.
This study reminds me of the NY Times article about cancer funding:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.h...
I don't quite understand why phone manufacturers see it as necessary to make it so hard to attain root.
One of the most interesting applications of running PHP on Java is that it enables you to run PHP on Google's Appengine (yeah, I know, if all you have is a hamer...)
See http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/run-php-on-the-google-app...
Someone runs wordpress on Appengine via Java: http://blog.caucho.com/?p=196
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this thread is now too massive to get any decent visibility for this, oh well.

there is a much deeper, more philosophical reason for instituting a right to privacy than just the fear of corrupt governments.

humans are adapted to signal certain values for the sake of group cohesion. we have a "public persona" and a private life. this isn't something sinister, it's a way of coping with the demands placed on us by our interaction with others. we know in practice that depriving people of the ability to hide things from each other is extremely detrimental to their psyches. most importantly, it is detrimental regardless of the triviality of the things kept secret.

when deprived of the ability to keep secrets people are forced to be "always on". they must maintain the "proper" signals at all times. this is extremely draining (yes, even for extroverts, eventually). the things we like to signal to others aren't necessarily the things that make us most happy.
Twitter Spawned 50,000 Apps To Date, Will Open Up Firehose For More
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the fact that it is a business making the donation means that it isn't personal information, it's information about the business

I didn't notice this bit when I replied earlier. If Tarsnap were a traditional startup company and there were cofounders and investors, I'd agree with you; but Tarsnap isn't that. Rather, Tarsnap is 100% owned by me, and the profits Tarsnap makes -- when I'm not donating them to the FreeBSD Foundation -- are my income.

To me this moves it from "business information" to "personal information": You're basically asking how much money I earn -- and while I know many people are happy to discuss that, the way I was raised makes me treat discussions of someone's income as only slightly less taboo than discussions of their sex life.
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Blog and Newsletter buttons look out of place. I'd put those links into the big "our blog is here" space. Might run into a human brain adblocking problem though so be careful with the design.

Some \n\n in http://www.zatista.com/product/details/4155/sequence-10

I'd horizontally mirror the "why buy art here" bubble, so it does not look like the content is asking but someone from the outside.

You need some <noscript> hints.

Nice!
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A recent study claimed that (at least in written text) youngsters were actually better than previous generations at writing for a particular audience and switching modes appropriately (kairos).

I find it amusing, but unsurprising, that something that gets people all upset (txt messaging and email "slang") is actually shown to enhance kids skills. I really wouldn't be surprised to hear the same about spoken slang.
Probably. They did wait something like ten days, afterall... :-(
Brussels meets these, though point 1 is only true if you're not buying property.

Doesn't have much of a startup scene though :-(
Gmail has had this for quite a while now.
Multiple data sources are better as any given one is likely to contain errors.
Twitter: All Developers Will Get Access to the Firehose in Early 2010
I've always wondered how forms have managed to get my address through my post code. It will be great to play with this data once it is available.
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Wish you put more thought into the name, it being commandline and all. Hard to type on qwerty AND dvorak...

Other than that, looks interesting.
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Now just let me alter those statements for you and explain to the swedish workforce why unionen et'al was one of the big reasons we now have a reality of losing volvo, saab and sony-ericsson from swedish borders. That would REALLY make a difference.
Weenis? Really?

From what I can tell, Mr. Graham, at best, might be wrong about a handful of (evidently fuzzy) facts about painting. I do not see the logical bridge from that to his status as "big ole weenis." That's disappointingly puerile.
I think the advice to learn a new language is more incomplete than anything else; it's not learning a new language that's valuable, it's learning new ways to think about problems.

Learning a new language, on its own, isn't very beneficial - learning a new language thats different to the ones you already know is very beneficial. If you primarily work with statically typed languages, try a dynamically typed one (or one with type inference). If you're used to object oriented languages, try a functional language. If you're used to monitor based concurrency, try actor based concurrency. If you're used to imperative programming, try dataflow. If to you macro means the C preprocessor, try a language with lisp-style macros.

Its about the paradigms, core features, abstract concepts - not the languages themselves. If you know C++ and Java, you probably won't get much out of learning C#, aside from different APIs and libraries, but if you instead learn F#, you would get a lot out of the experience of using a completely different paradigm for conceptualizing and reasoning about problems. Thats why I like tinkering with languages that are radically different from the ones I already know.

Of course, this means that when you learn a new language, you have to put a conscious effort into programming in that languages idiomatic fashion. Programming in Haskell as you would program in Java isn't going to teach you anything and will probably only make you frustrated at how hard the language appears to make your life.
If that is what he is saying, he should just say this. Wouldn't it be simpler?
I've tried Sage twice but have found the documentation lacking both times. I ended up going back to the individual programs that make it up (Octave,R) and an easier computer algebraic system (mathomatic).
In response to TomasSedovic (I don't see "reply" links for some reason): "dhun" is the Hindi word for "tune". So I believe some thought did go into the name :)

Edit: "dhun" has U as in 'put', not as in 'gut'.
ffmpeg is one of the most notorious victims of this. Some examples of utter stupidity that has befallen many mainstream distros.

1. Arbitrarily disabling functionality due to worries about patents. For example, disabling all of the encoders, despite the fact that the decoders and encoders infringe by and large the same patents, owned by the exact same people, covered by the same royalty agreements. In other words, package managers at best attempting to look as if they were doing something when they in fact weren't, and at worst just being outright dishonest (Debian, some others). The actual reality is that it is probably impossible to compile ffmpeg without violating a patent.

2. Disabling all assembly optimizations because they saw it in a guide somewhere, and then wondering why everyone is unable to play back anything above SD video (too many to count).

3. Disabling all assembly optimizations because the package maintainer had a broken GCC installation and wasn't able to get the assembly code to compile properly (Macports).

4. Disabling all assembly optimizations because someone felt like hooking up USE flags for every single configure option, and then forgetting to set the defaults accordingly (Gentoo).

5. Packaging separate versions of ffmpeg for every single backend that uses it (gstreamer, mplayer, chromium) for no apparent reason other than to waste disk space. Oh, and configuring them all slightly differently, of course.

6. Packaging two separate sets of ffmpeg libraries, one with basic features and one with kitchen-sink features, but only packaging one actual ffmpeg frontend, resulting in a frontend that doesn't realize how it was actually configured (since the .so files are from the enhanced version, but the binary is from the non-enhanced version), resulting in very confused developers dealing with bug reports where the ./configure flags reported by ffmpeg are wrong (Ubuntu).

7. Dismembering ffmpeg into sub-library packages (libavcodec, libavformat, libavdevice), despite the fact that they come together and have interdependencies. This caused massive breakage when someone made a change to libavutil that only affected the internal API, and so the major version wasn't updated, and... (Ubuntu and many others).

What a mess.

(Note many of the distros I listed have since fixed their practices, so it's not all bad news.)
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Thanks, did you use a PHP Framework or you used propel directly (I mostly use CodeIgniter)?
The prospects of the marketing success are closely tied to technical aspects. Any OS you go with, great as it is right now, would require upkeep. This upkeep is directly related to success of devices carrying the OS.
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Invite code - "hacker-news" (without quotes)
Lemme see, which six languages would I choose...

* C++, Java, C# or some other imperative OO language
* Scheme, Common Lisp, Clojure or some other lisp
* Haskell, OCaml, Scala or F# (and maybe Erlang?)
* Prolog or Mercury
* LabVIEW, Luster/SCADE or some other dataflow language
* Factor, Forth, Joy or Cat

This gets me imperative/OO, monitor based concurrency, Lisp-ness (homoiconic language, real macros, DSLs), functional, strong static typing, type inference, powerful type systems, logic programming, dataflow and concatenative.

Yes, there are gaps - I'd also add Oz, Python/Ruby/Boo/Groovy and J into the mix to get a more fully rounded paradigm tour and, even then, there are some things missing, though at this point you should have a strong knowledge of languages and paradigms and should be able to tackle most problems pretty well - or at least, know enough to choose a good programming language for the task at hand.
There are methods of marijuana ingestion that do not introduce carbon monoxide or other harmful byproducts of combustion into the body.
Mozart/Oz is, indeed, a very interesting and powerful language and certainly one of the more complete multiparadigm languages. After reading Peter Van Roys CTM, I told myself that I would learn and use Oz, but... it never happened.
Or disclose in a big blinking disclaimer, here is what we track and here is who we are required to give it to. With full disclaimer that is readable and not legalese, I feel that it is fully ethical to provide said information to the US or Chinese government or whoever.
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I'd say no it isn't in the aggregate harder. There are a few of forces at play that I think lead to this.

First of all you can now buy pretty good hacking tools in a can (CANVAS, Core Impact) that come complete with non public exploits. If you don't have the money, metasploit is pretty good as well. This drastically reduces the need to know the details of a particular exploit, and reduces the amount of toolsmithing required to pull off a penetration. Also, the reality is that exploits are now a business - they're for sale, for better or for worse, on the open market. If there's one thing our PWN2OWN competition at cansecwest proved, it's that for a sufficient amount of money someone will find you a hole in anything. If you have money, even if you're not that knowledgeable, being a blackhat isn't that hard.

Second, there is more stuff to exploit now than there has ever been before, both on and off the net (I'm looking at you SCADA). At least some of that stuff will be low hanging fruit built by programmers who either did not understand how to build secure systems, or didn't expect that those systems would be reachable in the way they are now. As the internet expands, and stuff keeps getting more smarts added to it, I think there is probably a trend in which new insecure stuff is being built faster than the old stuff is being secured (not that I can prove that). Things that previously weren't considered to be security critical, now are (XSS is still barely considered a "real" exploit).

Third, information about exploits, how to write exploits, and how to find vulnerabilities is now massively more available, both because of the change in philosophy around full disclosure, and because we now have more than a decade (two maybe?) of open research into the field. Bugtraq can be argued to have revolutionized security research because it opened up what was previously secret to the eyes of interested amateurs and academics. Today there is a community of security researchers who openly publish information that previously was only the domain of governments and the occasional large defence contractor. I think probably the public community is better at it too.

Balanced against this is all the research and technology on the defensive side (also helped by full disclosure), the forced public shaming to fix-their-broken-shit of various vendors (full disclosure again), and generally better knowledge of security best practices (anyone want to guess what I attribute this to?). All of which is to say that the things that worked 20 years ago are harder today than they were 20 years ago (social engineering sadly seems to be just as easy, and if anything more prevalent now) but it hardly seems to matter since lots more is easy now.
I'm not really interested in the service but I did look through the FAQ. The link to Gravatar is broken, looks like an autogenerated link, so you might want to check all other external links too. Back button is broken on the FAQ page. Also, why not have the answers on the same page as the questions and have a list of questions at the top instead of this ajaxy hide/show thing. It makes reading multiple FAQs a pain with too many clicks on shifting targets and breaks the back button. Also the frontpage seems very slow and loads stuff from facebook, which slows it down further.
Shor, I’ll do it
http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=208
In your essay, you implied that people were painting alla prima during the Renaissance, that Renaissance painters would start from a rough sketch directly from the canvas, and that they could repeatedly rework parts of the picture.

Let's check. These two paragraphs are everything I've written about the use of oil paint in the fifteenth century:

It helps to have a medium that makes change easy.
When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth
century, it helped painters to deal with difficult
subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera,
oil can be blended and overpainted. (Taste for Makers)

What made oil paint so exciting, when it first
became popular in the fifteenth century, was that
you could actually make the finished work from the
prototype. You could make a preliminary drawing if
you wanted to, but you weren't held to it; you could
work out all the details, and even make major changes,
as you finished the painting. (Design and Research)

These are pretty uncontroversial statements.
Neither implies that artists started painting whole paintings alla prima from day 1. They say oil allowed artists to work out details and make changes after they'd started. And here is van Eyck doing that ca. 1430:

http://www.escholarship.org/editions/data/13030/d9/ft1d5nb0d...

I didn't (obviously) use Franz Hals to support my statements about the use of oil paint in the fifteenth century, since he worked in the seventeenth. I gave Hals as a counterexample to this claim by you:

This is not how people painted with oil until the
19th century.
Let's not count our chickens before they hatch:

"Harry Metcalfe, who helped sites get at postcode data, said he was "cautiously optimistic" about the decision to open up the OS data sets.
"The 'how' is terribly important, quite easily the difference between a fantastic data release and a waste of time," he said.
He said it would "possibly" be enough to help websites that want to use postcode data.
"Maybe probably." he said. "It will be if it's done right."
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"Factor is to Forth what Clojure is to Common Lisp"

I disagree. Its well known in the Factor community that, as one of the core Factor devs stated, idiomatic Factor doesn't use the stack; its only superficially related to Forth in that it uses similar syntax, but it has much more in common with lisp.

Sure, Factor is stack based - like Forth - but Factor provides a lot of abstractions on top of this (many of which are inspired by lisp), which Forth does not, like macros, combinators (which help avoid manually dealing with the stack), local variables, lisp-style lists, concurrency, generics, object oriented programming, even infix expressions (though the use of a macro)... and a ton more.
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Storing search queries genuinely helps improve Google's search results. It's not inherently evil.

Agreed. I don't believe in inherent evil. I do believe that certain business structures lead to behavior that some observers would consider "evil" and others would simply call "upholding fiduciary responsibility." But that's a discussion for another thread.

And I don't buy your slippery slope argument.

And I can't make you. But you're a fool if you dismiss it out of hand. The Facebook beacon debacle is a shiny reminder of what can happen if we stand by and let it.

I have no problem with Google's handling of my information at this time. In particular, I'm not worried about embarrassing queries as much as an elderly person you love, for example, being denied insurance coverage (or only given coverage at exorbitant rates) because the company is able to argue "pre-existing condition" (or some other claim of exclusion) from private information.

But if this hoopla is unnerving, wait until people find out how supermarkets sell loyalty card information!
I thought it was because since Enron, Worldcom etc... happened under the SEC's watch people didn't think it was effective hence the call of more independence for the new organization.
Apart from an excellent holiday, this sounds like a great way to get some coding done.

Take a laptop, a few books on your favourite languages, come back with a product!
So if everyone is to have access to 'firehose', why did ms+goog pay for it? :/
I suspect you might be mistaken.

Do you just mean you've configured multiple email addresses into thunderbird and get to pick which one to use, or have you really found out how to do "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." in thunderbird?

(I use a different email address for each webapp I sign up to but obviously don't want to have to add each one to thunderbird, so this feature would be awesome)
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$ gem install dhun
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gemcutter.org
ERROR: could not find dhun locally or in a repository

hm ...
For things that only effect an individual yes but there are others like extra marital affairs with involve real damage to another person. I don't see things like that ever becoming acceptable (nor should they) yet they aren't illegal.
I wonder what their net access is like? Guess everything’s done via satellite phone, which might get a little expensive.
Wonderful article, but link entered into text field rather than URL field. http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=208 (clickable version). Beautiful explanation of the Quantum Fourier Transform and some practical aspects of quantum computing without any domain-specific math.
Sounds like the first step of the "Four Noble Truths" anyway ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths
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I suspect that's the reason for the recommendation to pack reference books. :)
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Fascinating take on things from the perspective of academia. I've always held the same distrust of the term 'Software Engineer,' given that software development is rarely as rigorous and disciplined as actual 'Engineering.'

I love Dijkstra's writings (and his penmanship, for that matter). I also quietly enjoy that most of them end by referencing my alma mater. Hook 'em Horns. :-)
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I've looked at this in the past, and unfortunately it's prohibitively expensive for longer trips. I'd like to go transatlantic at some point, but it costs 2-3x as much as flying, and in fact, even more than a cruise ship (which sounds horrible to me).
I think having regular internet access would ruin the whole point of such a trip to me. The appeal is in the refuge-less disconnect, both from the internet and everything else.