skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Review our idea: ip-address tracker for web-developers
While working on some of our projects we've been struggling the
problem of preventing spammers or trolls from posting. Unfortunately,
captcha is not always a solution (like for example when you have a
vote widget, you wouldn't want your users to enter captcha). Browser
cookies are not effective, of course. So, you have to track
ip-addresses and make sure one ip does not send, say, more than 10
requests to a particular action during 15 minutes. Of course the
primitive implementation is a 10-minute session of unintellegent
coding. But over time things get more sophisticated, especially when
you need to add new rules, track browser user-agents and assign each
ip a trustworthy level. So out of 10-minute boredom code it grew into
something slightly bigger.

Now we've been thinking. Would anyone be interested, if we make a
webservice out of it, a lot like ReCaptcha: with an API and, say, libs
for some popular languages, so that anyone could collect, manipulate
and validate ip-addresses in their web-project. It would work like
this (the simplest case):

1. You send a check request with an ip_address of your user to our
service using our API.
2. We check if this ip exists in our db, if no - we add it.
3. Check when was the last activity from it, then check the rules that
you set up in our web-interface when you signed up.
4. Then send you back true/false answer based on the rules and on this
ip's previously stored data.
5. Based on this simple answer your application decides what to do
with the user (so, it would take a 1 line of code to set this thing up
in your app).

The service would also provide warnings (email, probably sms) about
blacklisted IPs and a web-interface to manage IPs.

What features would you pay for? Or would you at least use it for free?
I've recently written an "An accurate description of a potential person to share some lifetime with": http://romansnitko.posterous.com/an-accurate-description-of-...

My friend says I'm gonna be sooo single.
"Google's decision was influenced by the experiences of Sergey Brin as refugee"
Simply because you don't like him or the paper doesn't make them wrong.

Agreed. But the underlying analysis for his article isn't a paper, it's a random blog posting. The guys at the Met Office publish the actual data set and they have put out papers based on them which are linked from their web site. The HadCET dataset is referenced constantly in their other work.
> you look at the '30 year bands' he's chosen they are cherry picked.

Even if it's true, that's the standard that the mainstream climate scientists have set for this debate - look at hundred of tree ring records, pick just those that support the narrative; use thermometer readings up until the 1990s, but when they start to show a temperature decline switch to satellite data and drop the thermometers; use data from weather stations that are surrounded by black-top and waste heat exchangers (building air conditioners), and - when challenged - deal with the GIGO problem by merely AVERAGING the bogus heat increase into surrounding weather stations.
Was the contractor from Kerbleckistanian? ;)
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Maybe-I-Needing-Later.aspx
Scientists were not most worried about global cooling in the 1970s. What you had were scientists who published papers positing the idea, and then having their work scooped-up, dumbed-down, by journalists and crammed into into middle-brow publications like Time and Newsweek. That's not a scientific consensus: That's the press stirring the pot.
Festival Museum Nusantara - Bismillah Slamet
The UK government's attitude to open source is not so open
Why are you linking to the Hadley dataset? This is the adjusted(and since "climmategate", discredited) dataset where the original data has been "lost",and they havn't released the source for creating it, you even say so in the comments of your own blog.

"You need to read my next post which is coming soon. I don't think this is the source code actually used to generate CRUTEM3. Looks to me like they wrote it specially for this release and it appears to contain a smallish bug to do with the use of suspect data."
Http://linuxfreedomforlive.blogspot.com/2010/01/phonik-12-su-linux.html
Self-control is contagious, study finds
I would disagree that "more resolution is always better". If the resolution is high enough then, it at least some cases, text and icons are illegible.
As3: Using event listeners on a static class
This post will show you how to use the methods addEventListener and removeEventListener on a static class. This is useful when you want to have a class which all classes can listen to events for. For example you have a class which loads some type of assets and you want to be able to know in multiple classes when that class has finished loading.
I am linking to the Hadley dataset (HadCET) because that is the dataset that the original blog poster that started this whole thing is using.

His Mathematica code downloads http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat.

In what sense is "This is the adjusted(and since "climmategate", discredited)" true of HadCET?
Isn't he paid 1$ per year and owns several billions of USD worth of GOOG?
Nope. I'll point to HadCET all I want since that's the actual dataset that this newspaper article is talking about. OK?
I would have to disagree with you when you say there are no bad tools. Try frame a house using a brick, or perhaps a sledgehammer.
Software is the same, for example, C is a bad language to use when creating a website, its possible, but not a good idea.
The Digital Music Slowdown Is Here
Predicate dispatching: A unified theory of dispatch
Or, the goons will just install a keylogger on your computer while you're away from the house. Or they'll try to exploit one of the umpteen jillion vulnerabilities in OSes and browsers to install something similar on your system remotely.

Or, they'll use a TEMPEST attack to read your screen without you even knowing it. Or they'll use a similar attack to read your keystrokes wirelessly.

Or, they'll get you in a room and use a $5 wrench on your face until you tell them what they want to know.

Breaking encryption is far down the list of techniques that are worthwile to oppressive regimes.
Agreed, but I have to challenge your use of the term "scienctific consensus", science needs no consensus. http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/the-consensus-is-fake/
Hey great work on your plugin!
But I must say I'll stick with vimperator, and this would be for the love of just one feature: Hints.

Hints allow you to select a link, either by numbers assigned to each link in your current page view, or by typing the link's name.

Maybe I misunderstood the way gleeBox works, but from what I've tested, you can select all links (with ?a) but you then have to navigate to the correct one by repeatedly pressing TAB? That's a show stopper for me.

But like I said, kudos for the initiative.

On a related note there's a standalone browser with vimperator-like features currently under developpment although the available versions are more than usable: http://www.uzbl.org . When it gets stable, I'll definitely dump firefox/vimperator :)
He also learnt new approaches from Ruby - reminds me of esr's "learn lisp to improve your coding, not necessarily to use it".

It also seems he became something of a coding god, especially in his domain, able to create frameworks he needed - on demand. It's impressive to be able to create those tools, but even more impressive to realize what you need - and then for the tools to be both actually useful and usable. Generally, it's said to be a bad idea to write your own tools - unless you can (i.e. have the ability), says Alan Kay, because then you can create just the right tool for the job. Though perhaps no one else quite understands them, not being gods, and so they need to rewrite in aspx.

I like his non-coding observation. GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE * YOU * ARE BETTER
otherwise, how can we have a discussion about it when we can't read it?

Gee, how about by paying the organization that employed a reporter to write the story......

I swear, it's like half the internet has forgotten what it's like to buy something.
Just remember: you only measure what you measure. This data suggests that Central England temperatures have only been slowly rising. It doesn't say anything about average world temperatures.

(The Gulf Stream might be one of the reasons North-West Europe is a relative stable point.)

I'd be interested to see similar plots from the Arctic.
For the Love of Ponies
Another idea
1. Delete ads by command -
del div.classname (but for that a user will have to know the classname for that div, maybe an inspect html shortcut for selected item like the letter i, ?)
or delete a.parentNode
2. Check/Uncheck checkboxes and click submit buttons (Maybe)
Ah, you are selling bullshit my friend. If your employer turned round to you after a month of work and said, 'but tjogin, all you've done is create information and information wants to be free, why should I pay you?', methinks your view on the entire matter would rapidly change.

Someone worked hard to produce that article and if they want to charge for it it's their right to.
I always thought it would be funny to have a band named "Those Guys" and the first single would be "That Song"

Asking someone if they heard the single would thoroughly confuse people "Have you heard That Song by Those Guys?
I've always been crap at tetris - I only got 880.
Definitely not for the potentially epileptic.
IMO it would be a great step forward in digital tv broadcast too. The current latency when changing channels compared to what one is used to get with analogic tv is a very annoying to me.
Hi James,

If you would like to automatically classify HN Posts into relevant category, please feel free to use our ContextSense API - http://www.wingify.com/contextsense/

PS: I'm not writing this to promote the product (because it is not actively marketed in the first place)
Sivers comments here in HN from time to time, maybe we can ask him his 2010 opinion?
Thanks. The default behavior of gleeBox is to search for links when you enter any text.

So, you can simply enter a part of the text of the link you want to go to. If multiple links have the same text, you can TAB your way to the right link. You don't need to use ?a.
Robots powered by alcohol? Bio-batteries that could power future gadgets
Haiti Situation Tracking Form (provided by Google)
I'm a real newb. :)
Thanks for clarifying. It's mentionned in the user manual, but to be honnest I just read the big highlights about the commands not the text..
Sorry sir :).
And again, great job.
Why do lawyers so often insist on writing giant running sentences with unclear referents? Engineering practice is to chop sentences up into clear, concise chunks. A sentence like that one in a technical spec would have likely have failed review on the basis of complexity without bothering to understand it.
Up-voted, thank you for reading Pallotta's book, that book is a mindbomb...
I understood they designed it to be 1/10000000 of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator (through Paris). Then they had to calculate how far that was. They spent an awful lot of time and trouble measuring a large arc of the world by physical survey, but one of the guys made a small calculation error so it turned out later that the Earth is not exactly 40000km around.

I read a book about it a few years ago, but I can't remember the title.

Nautical miles are based on one minute of latitude, so they vary as the Earth is a bit squashed.
Tip: If you are really hurting for some JStor (or what have you) access, simply saunter over to your nearest large research university and put up a flyer offering somebody $500 a semester in exchange for access to their library proxy credentials. If your inbox does not have 20 responses within a day, I'll eat my hat. (Actually you could get by for way less than that, but the high dollar figure makes it seem less sketchy. After all, they're probably also giving up access to their grades, course registration, etc.)

Also, be kind to publish-or-perish. It and tenure go hand in hand; when you have lifetime employment at 35, some sort of incentive is required to make the work happen :-)

Lastly, the reason more authors don't post web copies of their publications is that you are expressly disallowed from doing this when you sign over the copyright to the publisher. You can post a late revision, but the simple act of downloading a copy of your own published article and putting it up, is a no-no. (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/copyrig...) Pretty incredible huh.
Cheques must work differently over there. Here you get a guarantee card (usually your Maestro/cash machine card) which states the amount the bank will cover you for - retailers can then take payment up to this amount without risk of losses. If you have £20 in your account and write a cheque for £50, provided the cheque is properly endorsed with your card number and details, then the amount is credited to the retailer by your bank. This results in an unauthorised overdraft and ensuing charges.

Or are you using "checking account" as a loose term? I always assumed it meant an account one could write cheques from?
Well, the sound level is okay, but I can barely understand what he says.
Microscopes, Refractometer
It's interesting to see so many people asking for HTML5, where available, in lieu of Flash.
Yet all the major retailers have a store with dozens of different sets to choose from?!
#1 - What do you mean by deleting an ad? Do you mean to hide an element on a page whenever that page is opened?
I'm not sure how the inspect command will work, though.

#2 - Makes sense.
Firstpersontetris.com

What you need, when you need it
http://www.firstpersontetris.com - the no-www gives me a domain squatter page :(

way too addicting, btw.
"What's to stop someone from creating content you don't agree with, and then putting your tag on it?"

You could digitally sign it using secure private key (and if you want to be really secure store the private key on a secure hardware device). Use a X509 cert from a well known CA and pretty much anyone can check whether you wrote it or not.

I'm saying this is a good idea though....

Damn - now I have to go and work out how I would implement this....
who do we contact for licensing? :)
The trick would be to have a nice combination of a tag (which is always the same) and a digital signature that binds your tag to the content.
ET equation estimates number of potential girlfriends
Does it have 100% branch coverage? Because that's my favorite feature of sqlite. :) (http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html)
> the best carpenter is the one who gets the job done with the tools at hand. go php. there are just bad programmers, not bad tools.

It really depends on your subjective view of what "best" means.

The best programmer in the world can probably do a better job than you at any given task, using only the GCC compiler.

But ... I'd bet he's going to cost you hundreds of dollars per hour, and he probably wouldn't get the job done faster that a decent programmer who is using "the right tool for the job".

Good design / Low cost / Fast ... pick 2

Myself ... I could use PHP, since it's mainstream and there are lots of low-cost hosting solutions, but I prefer Python because the tools are more mature and not necessarily related to web-dev (iPython, PyQT, Nltk, numpy, Django) ... and really, I've worked with Symfony, Django, ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails and Perl's Catalyst ... the quality of a framework is heavily dependent on the language, trust me ;)
Well, if you're using C, first you need to write an interpreter, such as perhaps a Ruby interpreter, or PHP, or a JVM, etc.
Ageism is becoming an issue for me
By Peter Backus, University of Warwick, original link here ~ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/phd_studen... Reminds me a bit of Steven Strogatz work on "Love affairs and differential equations" ~ http://tam.cornell.edu/tam/cms/manage/upload/Love-Affairs-an...
I thought it was "start a cult".
In a way, Youtube is a bigger filter now than any of the suggestions in the article. There are so many videos on Youtube, so many upcoming artists performing there, that most of them hardly get any attention at all. If you're popular on Youtube, you're already ahead of a lot of competition.
I was expecting a view from the block's perspective, looking down. This was a little disappointing, but still quite interesting.
http://videolyric.com/
Both with and without get me a domain squatter page. We're down to the coralcache: http://firstpersontetris.com.nyud.net/swf/FirstPersonTetris....
I always appreciate people giving me advice on my website, even if I don't end up taking it.

Ok, here is what I would do. Dramatically simplify the whole experience:

* The front page says "Make bingo cards on your computer" in large print

* The front page has a word list form directly on it. This form can be filled either with one of the predefined wordlists, or manually.

* There is a button that says "Make Preview" that generates a PDF with the unprintable flag set. Put a gray "PREVIEW" across the pages if you are worried about nerd sons stripping out the flag.

* There is a button that says "Make Printable Cards" that requires payment and generates a real PDF. Along with the payment form, offer or require a sign up so that they can retrieve their saved cards and word lists.

Basically eliminate all the stages, even the one that takes you from front page to using the software.
John Paulson’s high-risk hubris
I withheld a similar comment, not SO MUCH from this one blog post, but from reading others on the blog as well.

As somebody who routinely works 12 hour days, I've found that I don't need any special system to make it work, I just have to be willing to do it. That said, I just tolerate it. I'm not working on anything for myself right now, and while I like the work, I don't necessarily love the way our customer / management want us to work. That means I don't have a magical system to make it more tolerable, I just do the work, as I'm expected to, and try my damnedest to kick ass at it while I do.

The main thing I got out of the article though, is that he isn't really working a 12 hour day at all. Between taking breaks every hour, exercising, taking a lunch break, etc., it seems that the REAL secret to working a 12 hour day is to not ACTUALLY work a 12 hour day.
http://urbancanvas.net/firstpersontetris/

courtesy reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/aoxr9/its_firstperso...
2 great videos that are pertinent IMO

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/270

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/534
I can play first-person shooters all day long, but this makes me motion sick, and I had to stop after a few minutes. It's a shame, because I really like the concept.
Ouch. My jaw dropped when I saw my old article on the front page of HN.

To me, posting this article in 2007 taught me two lessons:

#1: The goal of good writing is not to be understood, but rather to not be misunderstood.

Judging by the hundreds of angry comments on that original link, I failed miserably. At the time, nobody read my little blog, so I didn't expect anyone to see this post. I was really just writing it to answer a few of my Rails friends' questions. I didn't brace it for public attack.

#2: The public you is not you.

I'm a mediocre programmer, trying to improve, and at the time just trying to make my website the way I wanted it. So it kinda hurt at first to read hundreds of fellow programmers saying I'm the biggest idiot to walk the earth.

Then I just realized that my post should have been written clearer, and the reason people were so upset is because it sounded like I was attacking this framework/language that they had spent so many hundreds of hours learning. It had nothing to do with me. Only I know my real programming skills, so their comments were not really about me.

Ever since then I don't let comments get to me, either way. Neither praise nor criticism should be taken personally. It's just feedback on the post/subject. Useful for learning how not to be misunderstood, but has nothing to do with you.
Even the best carpenter in the world isn't going to produce his best work if you force him to use a blunt $3 chisel. Conversely hiring the best carpenter in the world and trying to save money by making him use a blunt $3 chisel is a huge waste of money.

Sure a great carpenter will be able to produce good work even with bad tools, but if you want him to produce his best work you have got let him work with what he considers the best tools.
Another way to help is avoid buying stuff that happens to be made in Haiti by semi-slave haitians in infrahuman conditions so you can save some cents, you can help Haiti not only when they have an earthquake!
That's too bad. I don't have any plans for other events at the moment, but if you're in New York we should go grab a coffee sometime and talk shop. jashkenas(at)gmail, if you want to get in touch.
This makes a good point however it's a bit misleading in calling it routine IMO.

I've done a little digging and this is looking like a rather massive co-ordinated effort. Call it similar to before but much much wider scoped.
CSS History Knocker
This is way too addictive. There goes productivity.
There really isn't anything specific in the article that makes it significantly dated. His reasons would be just as valid if he'd written this yesterday about the latest and greatest PHP and Rails versions.

1 - He felt he could get what he needed to get done in PHP just as well as in Rails

2 - Integration costs of One Grand Switch from existing large PHP codebase to entirely new Rails codebase were high

3 - Felt no need for most of the infrastructure Rails provides, was too complex for him to understand easily

4 - Better performance

5 - Easier integration (due to 1 & 3, presumably)

6 - Didn't want/need an ORM layer and related handholding and/or headaches

7 - Rails/Ruby were better for him to lift ideas from than to actually use directly

I can't think of anything so dramatic that's happened to PHP and Rails since Sept 2007 to really make his reasoning of 'historical interest only'. Certainly nothing like the change from Java 1.0 (a small, sluggish language released 14(!!) years ago) and Java today (huge ecosystem of products, languages, frameworks running on one of the faster VMs/JITs around).
Web Laureate Insight, "Osnapz: get all"
The Probability of Marrying Well?
If you hand pick your data set, you can probably show anything you want. I remember reading about the stock market, that if you just shift the starting and end points of "measurements" (for example about your fund's value), you could always claim an x% increase over the last y years.

So this here is an interesting data point - but it really is just that.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were places on earth where temperatures have been falling steadily, or have been rising or falling by extreme amounts.
Actually, they're pretty identical. In both cases they die of starvation. At least with exposure you have a chance of freezing to death (depending on what time of year it is), which is a better way to go.
Care to back that statement up? Does California get more services for its money than lower tax states? Do workers get better protection?

Maybe the problem really is that the costs of these services have gone up but the taxes haven't been adjusted to deal with that.
Periodic Intra Refresh wouldn't actually decrease channel-change latency--or if it did, it would only eliminate the VBV buffer latency, not the keyframe latency.

Remember, with intra refresh, you still have to wait for the column to cross the screen before the image is visible, so it's not instant. Of course, you could set it up so the user can see the image before it's fully loaded, but people might not like that either.
This is doing funny things to my head.

I'm up to 3700. :D
Ugh, no straight pieces?