skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though its not explicitly clear, from the explanation link posted below it seems as if he did this due to some sort of allegation(s) of copyright violation?

"Stepwise consisted of thousands of files. I didn't feel it was possible to locate and remove the files that were copyright by a single individual."

(explanation link: http://abandoninplace.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/31/the-de... )
All good points and a subject to an experiment.
> Would a process post on this be of interest to you?

It would to me. I have some interest in CSS sprites, but working with them always seems cumbersome.
I really don't think this says anything about branding. It says people don't want shitty coffee, and that they recognize shitty coffee whether or not it has a Starbucks logo on it.
The way people signal they are intelligent and sophisticated changes over time. Starbucks is still fine for 6am before the train, but you'd never take a first date there; it would send the wrong signals.

The way they are tackling this problem is all wrong though. Even if they had unlimited amounts of money, they still wouldn't be able hire enough people with good taste to create a different culture at each location. All they can do is rearrange the furniture a little, and people are too smart for that.

The biggest asset Starbucks has going for it is that when you walk in there, they actually make your coffee as opposed to glaring at you and going back to reading their book. What if instead of trying to hide their biggest assets, they actually leveraged them to become like Reddit for food. That is, they'd showcase local culinary talent and various new and interesting niche beverages. But at the same time there would be a certain consistency in the atmosphere, culture, and service.

This strikes me as the ideal because you could attract people with both high and low openness to experience and neuroticism. And thanks to technology you could do it without needing to identify/hire lots of people with great taste, which is basically impossible at that scale.
It seems that the trend is that people are becoming very anti-corporation or large corporations for that matter, put up a store like trader joe's people will beg and plead for more but now large towns that don't yet have a superwalmart will beg and plead for them not to build and even stop them from building through the government.

Though it does depend on the town, that specific example usually works together.
Born Killer? Using neuroscience to study the causes and cures of crime
Several studies have shown that red light cameras do not improve road safety. Here is one: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10...

I think that this article is a vision of a dangerous future. A free society must necessarily sacrifice some measure of safety. The more information like this we give the state, the closer we come to 1984. It is important to maintain a balance of power between citizens and the police, a balance between criminals and cops. Power Corrupts.

History has always shown change to come in pendulum swings. At some point, people are going to react to the loss of privacy strongly and we will get back some measure of what we have lost. In the end, we will find some balance but I certainly hope it is not found at this end of the spectrum.
That's unfair. Thanks to terrorism the US & most western countries now laws that can decimate your privacy & can hold you in prison with little to no evidence. We put up with it because we know that by the numbers there's little chance of it affecting us as individuals.
The same goes for Dubai. Even those laws exist, you're unlikely to be affected by them and most of the time the police look the other way even if you do get caught by one of the ridiculous laws.
GAE is promising, however I already have an existing Postgres database which would be painful to convert to BigTable. Also I'll be using PIL for image manipulation, along with numerous long-running cron jobs which would be hard to run under GAE.
I bet that a web application built from this would be enormously popular.

It would also be useful as a way to create and share an online avatar likeness.
No apology necessary -- your rambling reminds me tangentially of Max Brod's decision to publish some of Kafka's writings after Kafka had explicitly asked him not to do so. The same question was at play -- whether one should interfere with the destruction of knowledge by its creator. Brod ended up publishing and for it we got Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle.

I can see arguments for both sides. Genius can be self-destructive and susceptible to manic episodes, and perhaps there's an argument where knowledge can forcibly be kept alive against its creator's will.

But it is his information, and as far as I can recall, its his right to get rid of it.
The mafia will just kill you. That makes even less sense since they have to spend money on a hitman.
I prefer both, but it depends on where I am. I prefer one-off shops or Tully's normally; but I have to say that Starbucks provides a slightly classier version of McDonald's reliability overseas. While traveling, I could easily find a Starbucks in a new city and get a mocha which, while not the best ever, was at least consistent enough to count as a taste of home (not to mention I now have a collection of I've-been-there mugs :)).
To me, what was more valuable than the articles hosted on the site, was the set of links to other articles and blog posts at the bottom of the home page. I found a lot of information there that made me a better developer.

I'm crossing my fingers that at least this section of the site returns some day.
Using FreshBooks for your web application’s billing
Yup. I learnt all these things the hard way :(.
The POSIX subsystem might have a sshd of some form, but I haven't looked at it in ages. But I generally never use Windows without Cygwin, it was that that I was referring to.
Who else has done something similar? What have your experiences been like?
counting there being less options b/c colors that aren't used yet are equivalent isn't going to get you very far. after all 4 colors are placed once it stops helping.

also you're counting wrong. there are 2 or 3 options for the third square. 2 if the first 2 squares got the same color.
I'm native Chinese. Here's my translation of the forementioned features:

"completely object-oriented, cross-platform, support Unicode, multithreading, GC, (type) reflection, statically compiled, dynamic type loading, etc"

I believe "dynamic type loading" must refer to something similar to DLLs here.

Though I'm not so sure about the whole idea of programming languages in various "human languages". It's the same doubt I have with internationalized domain names: not everyone can read/type it if they want.

It's fine if the the purpose is to teach primary school kids about programming (even though this isn't so good a reason: I know now in many primary schools in China, kids are taught English starting from grade 1), but for any serious programming it's better done in English, esp. in a world globalization and outsourcing dominate the software engineering field.

I'm a strong believer that every human being on the planet should speak at least one common language in order to have basic communication and understanding of other cultures. A few hundred years ago it was Latin; then French; now obviously it's English. And I'm quite happy to see the computer science field is standardizing on English.
"I know for a fact that most public accounts of Google interviews are wrong."

Out of interest, how do you know this for a fact? I presume you were actually at most of these interviews?
VirtualBox 3.1 released
Purchasing and using a bump key (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_bumping) is not particularly sophisticated.
This is a quick route to a contempt of court charge and the judge will let you spend some quality time with the folks in the local jail until you decide that being a smartass to someone who can send you directly to jail is a bad idea.
> A programming language is a method for conveying instructions to a machine.

The preface of SICP disagrees (see http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html ), with a quote many, many programmers can quote in spirit if not to the letter.
The increased paranoia in the US after 9/11 is a good point. But it hasn't had negligible effects. Tourism in the US has suffered because of the hassles and risks of getting in to (and out of) the country. Fewer people are coming to work and study in the US, and Americans in other countries are being treated worse as payback for the shameful treatment their citizens get in the US.

The people who have least to worry from the state paranoia are the privileged classes, races, and ethnicities (ie. wealthy whites). But if you're part of the non-white underclass (nevermind Muslim), you can bet the post-9/11 paranoia and increased vigor of the police state is going to be of some concern (sometimes to the degree of fleeing the country if you're able).

Something similar is probably the case in Dubai. If you're wealthy enough, and/or have enough connections, you're probably not going to have to worry too much (except maybe about the polluted beaches, if you insist on taking a dip in the sea outside your hotel room) as long as you don't try to interfere in their politics. But the worry of running afoul of their draconian laws and of being exploited by their oppressive system increases and becomes more legitimate the lower on the totem pole you get.
Email is a poor example for encryption -- too many factors involved. On the other hand, how many people encrypt their online purchases? It's easy to have silent automatic encryption if you build it from the beginning.
It's unusual to peer review software in computer science research as well. There is no requirement that you release the source or even the binary of your shiny new system, especially in time for review. I've recently reviewed a paper that had a reference to an open-source project associated with the paper on a well-known site for hosting such things, but the project was content-free.
I think the trick was folding it with one hand
My belief is that money is actually the only thing people really care about encrypting (or at least it will be, in the long term).
Foursquare Style Checkins: Not Just for Places
I had clusters of hosts running in multiple data centers (to be certain of staying up) and they broke them all at once and did not email me. It drove me nuts. That said, maybe they will be extra careful making system-wide software changes in the future.
I was trying to point out that you can quickly eliminate 90% of the problem space so while I did forget about some summitry's my point still stands. Anyway looking at a 3x3 grid the box limitation is going to become increasingly important.

Step 1: (1,x,x,x)
Step 2:
There are 2 meaningful options (1,1,x,x) and (1,2,x,x) because (1,3,x,x) is the same as (1,2,x,x). Granted only apply to the first 2x2 grid.
Step 3: (1,1,1,x), (1,1,2,x), (1,2,1,x), (1,2,2,x), (1,2,3,x)
Step 4: (1,1,1,2), (1,1,2,1), (1,1,2,2), (1,1,2,3), (1,2,1,1), (1,2,1,2), (1,2,1,3), (1,2,2,1),(1,2,2,2),(1,2,2,3), (1,2,3,1),(1,2,3,2),(1,2,3,3),(1,2,3,4)

So 14 options.
Dubai—A Lesson In Why Transparency Matters
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. -- Albert Einstein
PHP Redis extension
And perhaps the things to take away from this is that just because the probability of an event is zero, that doesn't mean the event can't happen.

Ah! That does seem to be the take-away here. In that case, however, how would you measure the probability of an impossible event?

I still maintain that an invinite number of dead monkeys would never type Shakespeare, no matter the resources alloted to them. :)
I need to do more research, but you could build one of these for about $200-$300 depending on volume. Assume that the storage would be an SSD connected a larger storage block.
Here's a 7" tablet for under $274 at retail: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.31523

A 12" device for $300 might be hard, but under $500 is doable for sure (even with a capacitive touchscreen).

(Edit: another version, without Android support for $211: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.27441)
His complaint about this part shows his cluelessness: @x = (1, 2, 3, (4, 5));

A serious perl developer would write this like: my $x = [ 1, 2, 3, [ 4, 5 ] ];
I imagine that loan sharks must just extort people for money by terrorizing them with physical violence much more often than they actually kill anyone. Otherwise their lending practices would cause them to lose money hand over fist.
how does it stand? you have given no argument this will make a substantial reduction when the grid size is much larger than the number of colors
Best method for grabbing contacts?
Looking for something like http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_other_networks

There are a few scripts I have found but none that look like they are frequently updated. Anyone have some working knowledge?
Nope. I'm not excusing bad behavior. I think those scientists were being immature and irresponsible. But their bad behavior doesn't change my belief that the field of climate change research is valid.

Truth be told, the evidence I've seen doesn't even change my confidence level in their paper -- because unlike "skeptics", I never felt that any one source of historical temperature data was terribly likely to be precise in the first place. Fortunately for climate science, there are many other independent sources of historical temperature data, and all show the same trend. I believe it's extremely unlikely that they're all wrong. Certainly not in the same way.

(In case you were wondering, that's a core difference between skepticism, and "skepticism". A skeptic can be convinced that he's wrong. A "skeptic" wants only to convince others.)
You'll find a much better metric here: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+php%2C+r...

Absolute number of jobs for each language.
Still. I find the most upsetting part of the article "And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication." <- that quote. That quote shows his personal feelings about what happened and it's very sad that such an amazing project could be destroyed so easily.

I don't share any of the hate the author probably does; however, I do feel extremely sad about the entire ordeal.

(ps: I, with a friend of mine, had already started programming to make some applications we thought would be perfect for it.)
FWIW, we got funded because of our TC coverage. Our investor (a Silicon Valley VC) called us the day of the post. 2 months later, the money was in our accounts.
Here's a 15" panel at $97 for a single order: http://wholesale.alibaba.com/product-gs/261192316-15inch-SAW...

Note that this a touch panel not the LCD, but they do work perfectly well
Working With RGBA Colour
The TiVo story feels to me like a particularly egregious case of non-techie misunderstanding. I'd be very surprised if any of my friends or family, even the least technical among them, expected their TiVo to choose what to delete according to their valuation of its content.

I can imagine someone not realizing TiVo will delete shows at all, and perhaps expecting a 'Your TiVo is full!' warning, but it's hard to believe someone complaining 'It deleted x when I would have preferred for it to delete y.'
RunKeeper raise round, social mobile fitness ready for primetime
12" touchscreen monitor for $249 for a single piece: http://wholesale.alibaba.com/product-gs/263506741-12-Inch-To...

That'll be under $200 in bulk, and as a screen (not a complete monitor).

Based on those prices, $400 for the complete device might be possible.
2009 Startup Executive Compensation Survey Results
Craigslist, Craigslist, Craigslist. Get cash in public, no paperwork, no fence.
It's good to hear a different view from someone with a "yachtsman friend", who appreciates the "affordable domestic help" in Dubai, and "salves his conscience by giving a bigger tip to the Asian waiter or Indian taxi driver".
Amateur: Etymology: Fr < L amator, lover < pp. of amare, to love

http://www.yourdictionary.com/amateur

People who do something out of "love" are going to be far more effective at nurturing a sense of community than people doing it for money. You can't pay people to care. They either do or don't. Given enough money, they might fake it to your face for a while. Given a chance to make more money elsewhere, they will drop you like a hot potato. Trust is a very hard thing to recover once its been broken.
I want to know how much that thing is worth.

I estimate five million. Too high?
I wonder if it any related to something that happened few years back where Rixstep was using some of the StepWise article and quotes form Scott to support its ramblings against Apple, I don't know the details but I know he was unhappy about it.
There's not much meaningful I can say about this, except to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson:

"It makes me want to grab people in the streets and say, 'have you heard this?!'"
"Instead you would doom billions to death and starvation, because during the transition time you need young people to support the old."

Not if we kill them when they reach the age of 30.
Well every provider has different access methods, of course.

Google's is probably the easiest since you can easily just supply a username/password (note: I believe they support OAuth as well, which would be the preferred means of accessing sensitive data instead of asking users for their password) and utilize their contacts API.
http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/

When I looked at this several months back, it seemed there had been a few libraries to abstract this at one point, but they eventually gave up. Possibly because the other systems don't/didn't place as nice as google. But there is:
http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/
and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb447750.aspx
Agreed, but I'd like to see it brought up to date with the current financial crises. I wonder if things are better or worse now that all projects are brought to a hold, these real estate companies are going bankrupt. Will they allow these immigrants to return to their homes, or continue to enforce the debts of passage?
Is this the CrunchPad copy? http://wholesale.alibaba.com/product-gs/268088826-touch-scre...

and http://wholesale.alibaba.com/product-gs/268087366-10-2-inch-...

It's a 10.2" screen, but the rest of the specs look pretty similar. $288 each for 50 orders.
almost all airlines and cruiselines pay much less to people from China, the Philippines, etc, than they would to someone from France or Australia.

That surprises me. That isn't how it works for any of the airlines flying out of Canada, that is illegal here. The US has much more relaxed laws than we do, and a number of issues with respect to African Americans, but I'd be more than a little surprised if that was standard practice there.

What about European airlines like those flying out of England or Germany. Do they pay less to Chinese flight attendants? My guess would be that if they were legally able to work they would receive the same pay in countries like Germany and England. Am I mistaken?

I'm curious.
That right-side expression looks very much like how a serious Python developer would create a list of lists. Hm.
Perhaps JRuby simply isn't for you. We're using JRuby with Rails, and the tradeoffs are well worth it. Performance is quite good, and the laggy startup is irrelevant to a long-running server process like Rails.

More critically, our development time is significantly reduced by using a highly expressive language like Ruby. Code is more readable, more understandable, and a heck of a lot faster to write. Plus, we can still use all the neat Java libraries like Jetty, Lucene, and JavaMail. Add in things like java NIO, and it matches our needs nicely.

While JRuby might not suit your particular application, it's doing wonderful, useful work for a lot of people. Horses for courses, as they say.
A replacement for the now dead CrunchPad?
Important Factors To Consider When Pricing Your Website To Sell
Pricing your website for sale can be daunting especially if you’re new to the business of buying and selling websites. Research is always key in any business and you’ll find that you may to do a lot of it in the beginning with this one.
Seconded.

One additional advantage is JRuby's ability to use structures like Clojure's concurrency primitives. AFAIK, there's nothing even close in the world of MRI and YARV.
You are also free to interchange rows and columns.

This should reduce the number of possible grids by a factor of (17!)^2, leaving 3.25e143 colorings.
By utilizing the potential tersity of CJK characters in the language syntax, English-speaking programmers could make their programs much shorter wrt lines of code.

Because there's thousands of CJK characters to choose from, why not just use 印 instead of 印出 for 'print', or 如 instead of 如果 for 'if'? By using bracketing syntax instead of Python's indentation, we can cut down lines of code.

Here's your example using a terser style (the strings and comments would still be in English):

#!/usr/bin/env zhpy

# 檔名: while.py

數= 23, 運= 真

當(運){

猜= 整(輸入'Enter an integer: ')

如(猜 == 數){

印'Congratulations, you guessed it.'

運= 假 # this causes the while loop to stop

}否如(猜<數) 印'No, it is higher than that.'

否 印'No, it is lower than that.'

}否 印'The while loop is over'

印'Done'
What about that Abu Dhabi story about a Sheikh Issa torturing a grain merchant on tape. I'll stay out of countries ruled by royals.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/05/09/uae.torture/index....

Edit: Wikipedia shows that sheikh can be an honorific Arab term and I meant a royal or monarch.
There's a book titled "McDonaldsization" that deals with this exact theme: the selling point of McDonalds et al is the consistency and familiarity. The chapters dealing with McDonalds specifically are pretty interesting, although when it starts extending that as a metaphor for globalization, if you disagree with the premise it won't convince you of much.

Hamburgers and french fries are a good example of where this is a good quality to have, more so than most food. Coffee is less so, especially for coffee snobs, but for people who need their morning fix all that's required is caffinated liquid marginally below your gag reflex threshold, which starbucks can usually manage. But, however just because standardization works for the _coffee_ part of a coffee shop, it doesn't work for the _shop_ part of it. The idea of a "coffee shop" is much much larger than a shop that vends coffee, and that bohemian ideal is not so amenable to industrialized standardization in the same manner as burger patties.
Ok, if you consider in on the logarithmic scale then it's almost meaningless, but the idea was:

A) you don't need to innumerate every complete grid before eliminating them.

B) How you count is important, if you just looked at the top row the boxing effect does not help and you have almost 2 * 3 * 4^14 options.

PS: You can also cull some rotational summitry's from those 14 options before you start, but again that's only important if you are trying to actually calculate it.
Excerpt:

The researchers had subjects listen to spoken syllables while hooked up to a device that would simultaneously blow a tiny puff of air onto the skin of their hand or neck. The syllables included "pa" and "ta," which produce a brief puff from the mouth when spoken, and "da" and "ba," which do not produce puffs. They found that when listeners heard "da" or "ba" while a puff of air was blown onto their skin, they perceived the sound as "ta" or "pa."

Cool stuff.
Managing stable and unstable branches in Git
The opportunity to work directly with a university professor while still in high school is fantastic. Wish I'd had it. I hope you ended up taking advantage of it with someone else. Even if you're not totally absorbed in the research, this will give you a huge leg up when you reach college.
The machines are airports detect one "kind" of thing, bomb, etc.

He's talking about detecting a unique person out of many - that's much much harder.