skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a fine security page (except that it needs to be clear that you're holding on to gmail passwords). But, please remember: if you don't have a security response page, which tells people how to contact you if they find a horrible security problem in your application, they are within our cultural norms to write a very unpleasant blog post about you.
Quote: "But for all the buzz around virtual goods, you might still wonder why people are willing to pay for things that don't really exist."
I would think they are paying for expectations of a level of entertainment. It's an excellent method of generating revenue compared to a subscription service. It also has a built in "affiliates" program with developers working on their own virtual goods for the site.
I upvoted this because I would love to see more linguistics-related posts come through HN.
Movie Magic from "Minority Report" becomes reality.
It is ridiculously embarrassing that in 2010 when a tech person talks about "diversity" they mean "we should hire more women". Women are the majority of the population! And yet here we are.
expert sex change .com?
good feedback, we will take care of this.
I love the idea of this. Can't wait to see more. I also wish it didn't have to store my password.
I think he's talking about the screenshot posted on techcrunch, which shows harj's real email.
(I think you meant to reply to a different comment.)
ive actually thought about doing something like this after thoroughly investigating email newsletters. not sure on the formula. not sure if you make it paid.
Putting it off on funding seems a bit odd. That's kind of like saying feet are shaped the way they are because otherwise they wouldn't fit into shoes.

If there's a bias against single founders from investors, it's likely to be rooted in them being less likely to succeed. If the opposite were true some investor would probably have figured that out by now and would be spanking his competitors who didn't have that rule.
NBC's broken Olympic coverage
why not both? i dont think its a boolean question. its like saying: skip the credit card processing, but go with the vps. you cant really make money without having both.
is the purpose of the Maybe monad to abstract the concept of "evaluate to Nothing if the previous expression evaluated to nothing?

Exactly. It's a data type for short-circuiting.

Also, is 'build'/'return' being used implicity somewhere?

Not in this example -- I thought about it, but ultimately decided additional changes between examples would just confuse things. It's worth including in the definition because it's one of the two fundamental operations.

In real code, it's mostly used when the exact monad being used isn't specified. For example, here's a function which runs a monadic computation until it returns `False'. The result is `()', sort of a Haskell void type.

runUntil :: Monad m => m Bool -> m ()
runUntil comp = loop where loop = do
x <- comp
if x then loop else return ()

Not useful for `Maybe', but stateful monads like `State', `Get', `Put', or `IO' could all be used on it reasonably.
I think its a good idea; instead of going after email overload as a whole, go after a sub problem that it creates.

Please, fix the lander. It looks way too close to http://www.getballpark.com/ but only worse. If the metalab guys haven't tweeted about it yet, they definitely will. If you need some tips about it just send me a note jay (at) anomalyinnovations.com.
Well, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is I want to use your service. If it works the way it looks like it works, I'd pay you to use it. I'm guessing a lot of other people will think the same thing. That's huge!

The bad news is that "bank-level" encryption and assertions of good intentions are not sufficient for me to give you my Google password. My Google password is one of two that is not recorded anywhere. The second is for the vault that contains my other 575 passwords. I almost edited my original post to be less melodramatic, but on reflection I think it's right. For a cool grand, I would spend the time to completely separate the associated accounts (analytics, webmaster, docs, calendar, talk, voice) and any password reminders that forward into my gmail now into a separate account. Short of that, I just can't do it. I'm selfishly hopeful that Google gives you a way in without needing to store my password.
I think for those of us that have a C language family background, parallel examples in both C (or C# or Java or Python) and Haskell would be very beneficial! We have two hurdles to jump: the concept of monad AND the syntax.
I would prefer paid to ad-supported. If you're talking about the art of business on the internet, I'm a firm believer in the idea that there is an advantage to knowing about techniques and opportunities before everyone else does. A paid subscription limits the audience more than an ad-supported service would.

I mean, it's got to provide actionable information for it to be worthwhile, but these guys have been giving actionable information away for free all this time anyways.
Career in Multimedia
A minor aside: I don't know anything about the person Penelope, but one key to popular characters is to be relatable. This also applies to the persona one projects. A person with a very popular blog is likely an expert at being relatable - part of that is being an everyman/woman, and sharing the trials and difficulties, the foolishnesses and mistakes that many people can relate to and feel comfortable around. i.e. not being an "expert".

A blog might also include explicit expertise, in the form of a secondary character: a mentor. But that's not the entry point for the reader; it's not who you relate to.
(I'm assuming this is a reply to my raytracing comment)

This is most likely true. Additionally, raytracing just might produce samples that are too regular for this to work well. I haven't really thought about it :)
It's interesting that of all the various Google Data API's (which many use OAuth, I believe) Gmail isn't one of them. I guess that makes sense, since there are protocols like IMAP and POP... but for something like this it would be nice.

The Google Contact API supports OAuth, which is fantastic because so many sites want your email address and password to get contacts (for like invite friend style functionality) but it doesn't appear they store any kind of communication frequency data.
If all HTML 5 browsers supported h.264 ubiquitously, nobody would care about VP8.
Holy shit. This is the paper that I've had intuitive glimpses of for over two years. Well done.
good reddit discussion a while back.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/b1w3n/markets_are...

"TLDR: Markets aren't efficient"
Same here. When I read the article, this is probably the best email add-on I've seen in a while.

But when it asked for my Gmail password, I just can't type it in. My calendar, email, Android, etc. are all on Google.

My Google and to a slightly lower importance, my facebook account are the most important accounts of my online life.
Yeah, I'm aware that the whole point of it is the needless complexity of the latter solutions—still, you have to know Haskell to understand exactly why the latter solutions are so ridiculous (beyond merely gawking at them unappreciatively) and you have to understand Haskell even better to actually come up with the penultimately-contrived solutions.

I'd like to be able to tell those jokes without it being like making sounds in a foreign language—that's what I mean by "knowing" Haskell. You can't speak a language until you can make a witty retort in it ;)
Feedback: when I log in for the first time, I don't really have any prompts, and I'm not sure what I should do, or why I should do it. I'm thinking something like "Do you want to email XXX -- you used to talk to them a lot, and it's been a while." If you can help me along the path from "I just signed in" to "ETacts just helped me!", that would be awesome.
Just throwing a thought out there: What about an option that allows people to use etacts without storing their password. So every time a user wants to "refresh" their data, they would have to re-enter their password.

The security advantages are limited– the password has to go through you guys either way– but there may be a difference psychologically.

I don't think mail2web would be as widely-used if they didn't have a policy against storing passwords.
I might be mistaken (I'm not an expert), but isn't the article mixing up compressed sensing and low-rank matrix completion?

edit: Also, they present all of compressed sensing as if it were just that one algorithm for image reconstruction (which samples in the original space, rather than an incoherent basis). Tech media fail?
I love this idea, but it doesn't seem to handle Unicode properly. All my contacts written in Hangul show up like "=?Euc-Kr?B?Sejh/Ly3?=" :(
For the life between buildings - some notes on the iPad
It seems your problem is its own solution; I would argue that many of the productivity enhancements you cite as allowing one founder to go it alone also enable founders to go without investors.
http://codepad.org
Man in the Browser
Only in the world of cookie-cutter journalism could this be described as a "chance discovery"-- a professor intentionally tests an algorithm, hoping to solve exactly the problem described, and discovers it works better than expected.

From the article: "Compressed sensing was discovered by chance... Candes... was experimenting with a badly corrupted version of the phantom meant to simulate the noisy, fuzzy images you get when an MRI isn’t given enough time to complete a scan. Candes thought a mathematical technique called l1 minimization might help clean up the streaks a bit... Candes expected the phantom on his screen to get slightly cleaner. But then suddenly he saw it sharply defined and perfect in every detail..."
Herb Simon noted the optimal solution is often infeasible a long time ago.

He argued that economic agents rarely finding a satisfying solution to their constraints, and instead choose a "satisficing" or "good-enough" solution.

Simon also noted that the satisficing solution found by humans is often close to the optimal solution.

He got (and deserved) a Nobel prize for these two observations.

I find work of the flavor "X reduces to P = NP, so Nyah!" to be deeply unsatisfying and misleading.

For problems of human importance, good-enough solutions to NP problems can often be found in a reasonable amount of time.

In fact, state-of-the-art SAT solvers are mind-bogglingly fast (on average). They can find solutions in seconds, where the theoretical worst case solution time is many-fold the expected lifetime of the universe.

Generating a hard instance of SAT is actually hard to do. One of the few reliable techniques we know of is to encode prime factorization into a circuit. This is good news for crypto, but bad news for anyone looking to show the real-world intractability of a process by reducing it to P=NP. Few processes in nature actually mimic prime factorization or graph isomorphism.
>"So when a team lacks diversity, that’s a bad sign. What are the odds that the decisions that were made to create that team were really meritocratic? "

By what kind of a priori logic does the author presume that any given meritocratic filter will happen to have an equal pass rate along arbitrarily chosen orthogonal characteristics such as race and gender?

For any given test for any kind of ability, I would be shocked if the population selected happened to perfectly fit the hiring-brochure rainbow. It's just not very likely. It is very possible that a more meritocratic selection procedure results in less diversity.

In fact, that's precisely what happened when California passed a referendum in the late 90s to forbid considering race in admissions to the University of California. The process became less biased and the results became less diverse. My apologies to the author's preconceived ideas.

>"Demographic diversity is an indicator. It’s a reasonable inference that a group that is homogeneous in appearance was probably chosen by a biased selector. Even if men have an innate advantage at software development, the gap would have to be massive in order to explain why startup after startup has an all-male team."

Innate biological gender differences are not the only cause of differential average programming ability between gender populations. Sociological factors matter too.

While some of these sociological forces may be unjust and we might want to address them, that does not change the fact that by the time they reach adulthood the population of qualified programmers has many more males than females. Thus, a lack of diversity can emerge from a just meritocratic process.

The thinking here is just sloppy.
we will fix this asap
try this (Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 hours)

http://jonathan.tang.name/files/scheme_in_48/tutorial/overvi...
Protocols, The GPL, Influences from MySQL
New Approach to Generating Truly Random Numbers
"So how does the user actually find the best recipe for a particular dish?"

Users may have better luck finding quality recipes by going to curated sites Cooks Illustrated rather than mob-rule sites like RecipeZaar. As with social sites (Digg, Reddit, HN), the chemistry of the community and the influence of the admins can have a powerful effect on the quality of the content. It also depends on what you're looking for. If all you want is cheesy enchiladas, recipes from the popular sites will work just fine.

There are many sites (not to mention books and periodicals) which have thought and care put into their recipes, often with supplementary material which helps you understand what you're doing and become a better cook, rather than just an ingredient-assembling automaton.

Another aspect to consider is that many people like to read (or watch) things about food but don't actually cook much. That's why the Food Network has become so popular (ever notice how all their commercials are for ready-made products?). A pet peeve of mine is to see 5-star reviews with a comment like, "Looks delicious! Will try making it sometime." Pretty annoying, but some people just like to watch. Maybe that's why recipes with pictures get higher ratings.
Things That Will Make You Happier
This is certainly an interesting bit of mathematics, but I hope it won't be upheld by those on the political left as an argument for more stringent market regulation. After all, socialism is inefficient whether P = NP or not!
Inside Open Source's Historic Victory
this is a good idea, we'll talk to our users and see if this is a wanted feature.
are you interested in selling a stand-alone server license?
Best Tech Guy caller EVER with Leo Laporte - Light bit of humor
A lack of demographic diversity is only an indicator of a lack of meritocracy if you believe that bias is responsible for the lack of diversity.

For you, diversity might be important, but for your trash-talking colleagues it's probably irrelevant. (Even if you buy that a lack of meritocracy is generally demoralizing, which I think is a pretty weak claim.)
Site looks great. You've got some gradient drop-offs on both the right and left sides.

If you can't see it, here's a method I use:

Paste a screenshot in photoshop. Hit Ctrl+U and turn the saturation all the way up. Then change the hue so the whole site looks orange or green (the eye tends to blur blue together). You'll more easily notice where the gradients are cut off.
That is 99% copypaste, and you don't learn how to actually write your own Haskell programs.
I've only been watching the curling, and as a Canadian living in America I was annoyed by the lack of diversity in coverage, but it sounds like in some of the other events it's much worse.
It's always nice to have a product that would make a killer addition to a Google App. Best of luck to you guys.
Sure. And multifounder companies have non-founder support like spouses and friends as well. Doesn't mean they're not real founders, right?
Exactly! I cringe at vegetarian fed chicken and red meat, which usually means some type of corn. That stuff is impossible to avoid.
C and Java can't represent monads at all, since they don't support closures.

C# and Python can, sort of, but their syntax and object-oriented semantics make it somewhat difficult. I don't know C# well, and Python needs a lot of magic[1] to get reasonable-looking code.

Here's a Python example. It's not a direct translation, but is close enough that you should be able to figure out the original. I've included the Haskell code in comments.

import abc

# class Monad m where
# build :: a -> m a
# bind :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b
class Monad (metaclass = abc.ABCMeta):
@classmethod
def build (cls, x):
raise NotImplementedError

def bind (self, f):
raise NotImplementedError

# data Maybe a = Just a | Nothing
# deriving (Show)
class Maybe (Monad):
def __init__ (self, x):
self.__x = x

def __repr__ (self):
if self is Nothing:
return "Nothing"
return ("Just %r" % self.__x)

# instance Monad Maybe where
# build x = Just x
#
# bind Nothing _ = Nothing
# bind (Just x) f = f x
@classmethod
def build (cls, x):
return Just (x)

def bind (self, f):
if self is Nothing:
return Nothing
return f (self.__x)

def Just (x):
return Maybe (x)

Nothing = Maybe (None)

# clamp limit x = if x > limit then Nothing else Just x
def clamp (limit, x):
if x > limit:
return Nothing
return Just (x)

# multiclamp2 lim1 lim2 x = bind
# (clamp lim1 x)
# (\x' -> clamp lim2 x')
def multiclamp2 (lim1, lim2, x):
return clamp (lim1, x).bind (lambda x2: clamp (lim2, x2))

[1] http://www.valuedlessons.com/2008/01/monads-in-python-with-n...
If you don't think that more--or at the very least, different--financial regulation is necessary, then you must be a time traveler from 2006. I hope you didn't accidentally catch an episode of Lost during your stay. Talk about spoilers.
I would rather prefer to type-in my contact list than handing over my password. Why don't you make that option available?
> birthplace of the constition! home of the Liberty Bell! -- imagine what countries like Libya or Nicaragua will try to do

One of the major reasons countries like Nicaragua are what they are is because the country born in the "suburbs outside Philadelphia -- birthplace of constitution" has been sponsoring corrupt dictators there under the disguise of some "war on drugs" or "war on communism". No this is not a diversion of topic. The illusion (I think delusion) of liberty, equality, rule of law is just that -- an illusion. Police, NSA, CIA have long had the ability to spy on US citizen without any warrants. Our beloved President personally voted to provide immunity to the telecom companies that just handed our privacy on a silver platter to NSA, CIA and anyone who asked for it (Choicepoint & friends). Then we turn around and are just "shocked" that a school would pick up the cue from its big brother and run with it.

They are probably thinking: if the government is going to "protect" its citizens by spying on them, we will "protect" our children even more by spying on them harder!
yes, this is something we are considering. it depends on the demand for something like that.
I meant the latches to close built-in iSight. Come on now, how can HN have such a clueless member to think that the lid opens itself up:-)
Jason, either you are not actually reading what aaron's saying or you have an emotional intelligence worse than my mother. Just saying.

Aarons stating facts. You are responding ad hominem. Perhaps you should hold off on the reply button.
Adam on Pawn Stars
Not just "some people" but law makers and lawyers.
Precisely what i've been looking for. Thought Gist was a solution. They got it wrong, you guys got it right.Was actually planning on building this for myself.

I hate feature creep too, but important:

1. Company pages for company e-mails

2. Merging contacts

3. how to smartly import facebook and linkedin like gist does i.e. keep the people with companies, chuck the rest.

4. Updating/removing accounts etc needs some QA
Gimp doesn't have this because in addition to the image, you need explicit knowledge of where the image came from.

Suppose you have an image which you already know is a cartoon. Compressed sensing can clean it up, but uses explicit knowledge of what cartoons look like. Similarly, if you know the image is scanned text, a different compressed sensing algorithm based on scanned text can clean it up.

But if you don't know where the image comes from to begin with, compressed sensing won't work.
forget looking too close...it is it...that's a 1 to 1 copy of their template
Also, this (again, from the article) is just bizarre:

"At present, most of our audiovisual info is stored in sophisticated compression formats. If, or when, the format becomes obsolete, you’ve got a painful conversion project on your hands. But in the CS future, Candès believes, we’ll record just 20 percent of the pixels in certain images, like expensive-to-capture infrared shots of astronomical phenomena. Because we’re recording so much less data to begin with, there will be no need to compress. And instead of steadily improving compression algorithms, we’ll have steadily improving decompression algorithms that reconstruct the original image more and more faithfully from the stored data."

Someone, Candès or the author, doesn't seem to understand what they're talking about.
I think we are missing the point. We should be hacking the law not the technology. This should not be about smearing butter on your camera, but rather about suing their asses into oblivion, firing them, getting this on the news.

How about some smacking them with some "zero tolerance policy" -- a taste of their own medicine.
You can at least get started with a VPS. I consider the act of buying "proper" hosting like a VPS to be a big step up. And there's something about having those monthly hosting fees ticking away that motivates you to make use of it ..
install the guestbook sample app from happstack, start coding the next viaweb.

profit...
> By what kind of a priori logic does the author presume
> that any given meritocratic filter will happen to have
> an equal pass rate along arbitrarily chosen orthogonal
> characteristics such as race and gender?

I don't think that's a correct reading of the argument. The right question to ask is "What would have to be true about the underlying population to support the observed result that a particular startup is 100% male?"

Let's assume that there is significant "differential average programming ability between gender populations" and that this has a combination of biological and sociological causes. Even so, I think we can agree that the two populations are probably normally distributed around each average, right?

Now, is it safe to assume a roughly equal standard deviation for both curves? I'm not aware of any data to suggest otherwise.

So now we can be specific: how large would that differential have to be before we find ourselves in the part of the curve that has many men but basically no women? I haven't done the math, as it seems intuitive to me that this is going to yield an absurd result, namely, that men would have to have an overwhelming advantage.

At that point, it seems more reasonable to me to infer that we have a selection bias in our filter, than that the curves are so far apart in reality. My personal, albeit anecdotal, experience has given me no reason to doubt that conclusion, either.

So, I don't think the argument depends on an equal pass rate, and I think it stands up even if you believe in substantial gender differences, regardless of cause.
The Nature of Temptation: Why those who speak against vice so often fall for it.
I always end up dropping it because I can't think of anything for which I would use it.

What do you normally program? Do that, but in Haskell. It's a general-purpose programming language, and there are plenty of libraries to help you in any area.
The hard drive on a MacBook is strictly trivial to remove.
I'll second that. 48 hours is optimistic as heck (or I'm just that bad), but it definitely has helped me wrap my head around Haskell a little better than it was before.