skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The impact of light exposure on circadian rhythms is, as far as I can tell, entirely mediated through melatonin. Until evidence to the contrary appears, why should anyone worry about phototherapy for advancing circadian rhythms when melatonin supplements are ridiculously cheap, completely safe, and demonstrably effective?
I had to use instapaper to read it.
Am I the only one who saw the title and thought it was a stupid idea... then realized we aren't talking about Hallmark-style Gift Cards?
My friend (and the co-creator of the site) likes to point out that Facebook, Twitter, et al., are ego-strokers, and he wanted to make an ego-buster.

I don't think either of us expected it to become as successful as it has already. It's all just been a bonus.
If the collateral is human capital (not a house or car), why don't they offer loans where you pay back a percentage of your future income, rather than a fixed amount? This seems like it would automatically smooth over the worst of the variance resulting in default.
I think this is a great idea. If I weren't in a relationship and had some friends (or more likely, acquaintances) on Facebook I was interested in, I'd totally do this.

In terms of privacy, I would definitely trust this application not to leak information about my secret crushes. If they did, I don't see how they'd succeed.
What is the likelihood that this will not be cracked? Every game is. Unless what you're really selling is a subscription a la WoW, you can't prevent piracy by making your game have a super annoying DRM scheme. Ubisoft is probably pretty desperate to try such a sad move.
Since most raised bed gardening methods I am aware of tend to decrease water usage I am wondering where you are getting this "upping the watering" notion. Any citations perhaps?
Yes, it is interesting. I'm usually Still Water or My Bad, depending on how much I like the person handing out the surprise or whether I think he did it on purpose.
Having a disinterested party set the prices seems unlikely to work (sustainably/scale-ably). A bid/ask system (like the stock market) seems like a decent model, although it might be difficult to present in a way that is easy for most users to understand.

Just like in the real markets there would room for a market-maker to make money on the bid-ask spread, while providing liquidity... if the service had an API, this could be a third party, although the more obvious scenario is that CardPool itself would be the market maker.
I for one believe that this is far better than the virus-like StarForce et al. This allows unlimited installs, doesn't require disc in drive, and shouldn't cause BSoD. And if implemented well, it should be quite secure. Last part doesn't apply to AC2, where the implementation is still bit lacking iirc. But if the saves would be created directly to/on server, then crackers would need to either create their own save/load system to replace online functionality, or create their own server and redirect the traffic there. Most importantly, the executable can't just be "cracked" as it doesn't have the functionality needed for game play (=conventional save/load mechanism)
Good question. Most advertise as helping you find a life partner or date, whereas this is blatantly advertising itself as a hookup site. But there are "adult friend" finding sites so this doesnt't really differ.

I guess not.
> the friends whose opinions I really trust and value are the same friends who are going to straight-up tell me to my face if I have some flaw that needs addressing, whether I want to hear it or not

This has been one of the biggest "why?"s we've gotten. I don't think it's that simple, though. Telling a person their flaws requires timing, braveness, and an open mind on the part of the listener.

In an ideal world, people would be receptive to honest criticism, and people would be honest in what they feel is worth criticizing.

The site, though, provides a platform where the profile user is requesting feedback that a good friend may not have thought worth bringing up, had never had the right moment to bring up, or may have been afraid to bring up and hurt the person's feelings (and their friendship). When the platform is there, it's easier to break the ice.
Sigh.... the sad thing is I did proofread that. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_formal

Social event.
She knows her craft well that's for sure! And I'm glad that she knows when to say NO.
As we're sharing - and because it might be useful to people generally - I used the Readability bookmarklet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
"Your instantaneous first reaction" sound redundant. I like the current title better. Also, I'm not sure if I would have noticed it was from Rands in Repose from looking at the URL – there are no spaces or capitals, so I might have just skipped over it without processing it enough.
Beautifully put, and I fully agree.

There is a flip side though. There are people who made every effort and did everything right and still did not graduate because of things such as major family issues, accidents leading to disability, or simply failing out despite their efforts. They are then shackled to student loans without the benefit of the degree. Granted, these tend to be a very small minority but in discussing the system the edge cases should not be forgotten.
same in medicine, they collect garbage from the Internet, make a 1000 page book and become specialist doctors with it.
I've only heard those called "greeting cards".
This is one of the classiest outage apologies I've ever seen. No beating around the bush, no playing it down: "This was a long, terrible outage that cost our customers money."

If you're gonna have an unscheduled outage, at least apologize the right way.

(P.S. 5.5m PVs in 110 minutes is a little over 800 req/sec. That's much lighter than I would have expected from the entire Wordpress.com empire, but I guess it was the middle of the day rather than prime-time)
I think of the Hallmark things as "greeting cards", not "gift cards".
To be fair, it's not that the IRS has decided to treat these workers differently, it's that Congress has instructed them to through the laws it has passed.
Apple now removing apps with "overtly sexual content"
Just got the following email from apple. At first I thought it was a joke or forgery. The app is a very successful weather app with rotating pictures of women in bikinis in the background.

The App Store continues to evolve, and as such, we are constantly refining our guidelines. Your application, Hot Weather Girls, contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution. However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.

We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter. If you believe you can make the necessary changes so that Hot Weather Girls complies with our recent changes, we encourage you to do so and resubmit for review.

Sincerely,
iPhone App Review
The pants-bomber isn't a terrorist then, coz' he's just a lone suicide bomber. Yet what a commotion he did make.
I hate to think what would happen to a police officer serving serious time in a normal prison.
One can only hope that the Steam version doesn't have this monstrosity. A large number of Ubisoft's games on Steam have had TAGES on them, though, so I'm not holding my breath.
Client-side this kind of scheme could be implemented much alike a MMORPG, with the distinction that you are playing alone in your instance of game world. But still, all in-game progress could be tracked only server-side. If so, what could the crackers do when the game itself doesn't have the ability to make save files?
People wouldn't have to take loans if tuitions weren't ridiculously high.

The bulk of the talent is always going to come from the middle class, by nature of it's being 100 times the size of the upper class, and of the fact that, by and large, upper-class people aren't much smarter than the rest of us. If MIT wants to stay MIT, it'll find a way to get smart people in even if non-discharageable loans are abolished.
I played Assassins Creed 2 on the PS3, and it does not have this copy protection scheme. I bought Bioshock 2 for the PC. It has what I think is a similar protection scheme. It required me to sign up for a Windows Live account, and stay signed in to save.

I am never buying a game like this again. Treating paying customers like thieves is just wrong. All this is going to do is finish off PC game sales (which are already suffering). Unless this spreads to the consoles as well. In that case, indie games will be there.

edit: Looks like Bioshock 2 (and other "Games for Windows Live") have offline support, it is just well-hidden. Still, this is a huge annoyance, and just means the pirates will have a better experience, since the game is capable of saving locally.
(#1 - Farmer) Ten Best Green Jobs for the Next Decade
I realize this is just over a year old, but interesting in the vein of recent HN posts related to food and farming.
molecular reactions at absolute zero.... cool.
Multiple solutions at which level? WP is hosted in redundant datacenters, I assume they have redundancy most of the way down the stack as well. What do you expect Techcrunch to be able to do that the Wordpress people can't?
i seriously doubt we'd see the end of student loans, in the event that you could default on them. the banks would expect cosigners, a credit history, and maybe they'd actually look at whether or not the career options for your field of study could actually support the kind of loans you were taking out. (loaning a kid tens or a hundred thousand dollars so that they can get a degree in english lit in four years is just cruel, even if they can default on it.)

maybe kids would have to work for a year or two, to save a bit of money, and build a credit history before they'd be loaned the funds. just as well, imo. most 18-19 year olds aren't ready to be in college, anyways.
Maybe. Then again, maybe extreme actions cause people to unconsciously try to discredit the beliefs (no matter how rational) behind those actions to distance themselves from being exposed to uncomfortable truths.
- A shrubbery.
Do you have any concrete suggestions other than "building better things" that might actually lead to change that would address the issues like systemic injustice and economic subjugation in the face of endless corporate welfare?
Potentially Interesting Site for Bids on Legal Projects
> there's always going to be someone smarter/faster/stronger/etc than them

However in this country (the US) the gaps are wider and the deck is stacked more than in any other industrialized nation in pretty much every category.
If raging population and economic growth don’t cause important resources to be depleted, what will?

He doesn't get it. The point isn't that something magical happens to repeal scarcity, to give us all the [pick your commodity] that you'd like. Instead, the scarcity drives up prices (yes, prices do rise in the short run) which leads those who would have liked to buy the commodity to instead learn to use a substitute instead.

The reason we're concerned about gasoline now is because we found a better way to do things than the wood, or whale blubber, that we'd been using previously. At some point in the future, our descendants will think of fossil fuels as we think of blubber.

Now, talking outside of my specific knowledge, but just building from what I understand... I bet that if you went and looked at the price of whale blubber today, you'd find it significantly higher than back when it was used in lamps. That would be because nobody is much interested in it anymore, so any economies of scale in its production have been lost.
Hindsight is 20-20.
Politicians who put laws on the books at the whim of a monied few special interests instead of listening to their constituents, and who insist on ceaselessly driving the wedge between rich and poor in their own back yard instead of pursuing policies that would lift up the whole country?
Really? You'd be hard pressed to own all of your own infrastructure if you're Techcrunch, especially for anything approaching the cost of the Wordpress VIP thing (or even Rackspace Cloud for that matter). You know that lovely self managed server in the carrier neutral datacenter? It's still going to go down when power in one of the datacenter's grids fail and their backup generators don't come on properly. The network's still going to fail when someone screws up a config and routes your traffic improperly.

Once you own it all, you're still banking on the fact that you can do a better job than some company that specializes in what you're trying to do.

You'd be quite a bit better off sticking with some "cloud" provider and putting up a static failover cache on EC2 or something. Even then you're at the mercy of your DNS provider (unless you're going to run your own anycasted DNS) and any misbehaving DNS caches.
Maybe, but where it is compiled? On the device itself, right?

If that's the case - what kind of compiler we are talking here? A really good optimizing compiler would probably use a lot of memory, and cpu clocks.

I'm not expert, so I might be totally wrong about it. Just thinking out loud.
Myths of Crowd Psychology
i was a bit skeptical, then i checked my wallet and realized i had 2 gift cards i couldn't really use. i will be mailing those to cardpool tomorrow.

i didn't understand how this worked at first, here's a quick summary:

1) you look up the value of your cards online
2) you mail the cards to them
3) they mail you a check for the value (minus 10%)
I think a better argument is VC are only willing to bet on small amount of innovation at a time. (However, the article is worth reading he does ask some interesting questions.)

For example Zappos didn't innovate how you sell shoes. Others were already selling shoes online. They simply innovated how you treat the customer and your employees. Thats a small innovation that VCs are willing to bet on.
you don't scrape the sites individually. there are large directories that exist already.
I would suggest anyone interested try their hand in Flash, it's quite a powerful tool for rapid prototyping and even fully releasing games, and a good platform to learn about rich interfaces on.

There's also a ton of tutorials, and if you're good at it you can make some pretty decent cash upfront + residuals.

Failing that, Visual Studio + XNA is by far the best you're going to get your hands on for free.
> Most Americans are vanilla enough that they never find themselves outside the american comfort zone

Most Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck (about 60% last I heard).
I'm pretty amazed it wasn't architected this way from the beginning. Having to generate a monolithic JS file with every comment thread for every pageload for every user? Yikes.
I got an invite today. At first I thought "Oh crap, someone has something they want to post about me!!!"

Then I remembered I requested an account last week :)

That initial invitation email kinda weirded me out. However, as someone who has had a blog for going on 9 years, this is an interesting new way to play with personal transparency.

Feel free to tell me I suck at leaving comments on HN, just post it here:
http://failin.gs/profile/jaxn
http://5z8.info/dogporn_n3p6_bomb-plans

My happiness is confused. =) This is the best and worst thing I've seen all day.
Where did you find 1.5% - 2.5%?
My federal Stafford loan interest rates are at 5.6% (down from 6.8% when I first started college).
I'm a "doer", but I'm always looking for good ideas. I'll take your ideas, and you can have 1% of the profits afterward if I implement them.

Find enough guys like me, and you could actually make a comfortable living.

Not sure how you'd actually implement something like that, though. No way to prove an idea was originally yours (because, realistically, somebody has probably thought of most of it before).

I do like the idea of an ideas website, though. Maybe with a mechanism so other people can post theirs? Maybe with a donation mechanism... Entrepreneurs have lots of extra ideas, and the ones they don't have time to implement they post on the ideas site. If I make a million dollars off an idea there, I donate a couple grand to the original author.
If you're flying, you'll have to pay for onflight Internet or not play. If your Internet goes out in your house, you can't play, and if you were playing while it happened, you could lose progress.

Wrong. I'll just play the pirated version, which won't have these restrictions.
I was once a PC gamer. I continued to be one even after switching to a Mac for everything else. Increasingly, though, I found I didn't have time or patience for the hoops I had to jump through to get things to work. So I bought my first console and never looked back.
I've heard of at least one large-scale system outside of Guadalajara: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1zv_TUTbGY

It seems funny to presume that our large-scale food industry is any better at operating in an efficient and economical manner than any other established industry. Computer industry? Up-ended by garage hackers. Music industry? Up-ended by dorm room hackers. It seems reasonable to think that enough people experimenting with agriculture can do the same thing.

If you dig into the Backyard Aquaponics forums, there are plenty of people who are producing more fish and vegetables than they know what to do with, working only in their off hours.
People do become analysts for the pay (in addition to the exit opportunities). Despite the per-hour rates, there's definitely something alluring about the idea of making more (even if only marginally so) than your peers right out of college. Starting pay at VC's for analysts coming from banking is low relative to other options (especially private equity, which is generally the top choice). The bankers who come to VC either aren't good enough for better options or are genuinely interested in being involved with innovation, or at least the illusion of it.
NBC Olympic Tape Delays
It absolutely will be cracked (I can't think of a single big game that hasn't been), and pirates and paying customers alike will enjoy the DRM-free version as if this debacle never happened. Of course the simpler honest crowd that just want to buy the game and play it still get screwed.
Your thinking so does not make it so.

I fail to see any reason why being a skilled researcher has any relevance to question of one's ethics. There's no logical connection between the two. A trivial case in point: according to social science research, conservatives -- under-represented in academia and thus less likely than liberals to be "skilled researchers" -- give more charity than liberals.
I wonder what the VIP's think of this. The Techcrunches and GigaOms of the world must be fuming. Sure, it's nice to move the problem of hosting to someone else, this is the type of thing that the VIP service was supposed to handle. And I doubt the SLA that they have lack the teeth necessary to recover any lost ad revenue...
Wonder how many of those still have cable TV. Give me a break.

http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/bg1713.cfm
> only doing say 2 hours work a day

Right! However the employee actually has a couple of choices at this point... either they can have a lot of free time, start a startup, go snowboarding, etc, or they can go to their manager and negotiate. From what I've heard, both of these actually occur.

Another interesting trend is that employees tweak what they're doing and start working more efficiently, increasing a teams output by as much as 35% without working "more".

> [it] could be costly if you have an unmotivated group doing it for the paycheck

It would appear that lack of motivation shows up in lack of results and the unmotivated group quickly has to find another job. In one case, a company fired nearly 90% of a particular department, but the retention rate sky rocketed, so their costs went way down, even when you include the cost of having to look for and hire new people.
PC game hacks are not going anywhere. It's simply too much of an open system.

Currently, Valve's VAC and Blizzard's Warden suffer from the problem of fingerprinting. If you're competent enough with C/C++ and assembly, and are careful with your hooking, you can easily create working hacks with little fear of being caught.

As gaming moves more towards consoles, you'll see less and less cheating, as the barrier to entry is quite a bit higher.
This was posted on Reddit, and I thought it was actually pretty clever:

"The man represents pirates. The car represents paying customers. The bus represents Ubisoft DRM. http://i.imgur.com/zPyuI.gif
The ACM (one of Mark Guzdial's associations) doesn't even believe in non-paywall academic publication. So it isn't too surprising he doesn't like seeing software published either.
dickensurl.com
Take a snapshot of the memory used by the game, then reload that. Or, sniff the traffic to the server and try and reverse engineer the database schema or serialization format.
It's like "The Circuit" on Logan's Run. Now we just need a mandatory termination at the age of 30.
I'm a cookbook junkie and was looking forward to IV's 1500 page codification of molecular gastronomy. Then I saw this article and put two and two together. IV won't make enough money selling a cookbook to justify the expense of their kitchen and staff. I'll bet money it's all an exercise to patent cooking techniques. Cloaking it as a cookbook has allowed them to bring in some big names to help out. That's dirty pool.
Small bug, times appear in GMT, not my local TZ...
Going to have to change your app to "Cold Weather Girls" and have them all in snowsuits instead.
Google Shopper: Powerful Mobile Shopping App for Android
It's interesting to see other people collecting that many items... I can hardly name 30 items that I want to have (not including clothes), but that probably just depends on the personality. Then again, being able to put everything you actually need in one big suitcase, is a nice benefit.
> maybe they'd actually look at whether or not the career options for your field of study could actually support the kind of loans you were taking out

The problem lies in the fact with our unemployment situation there are plenty of people in "good" fields that are still screwed.
These sites don't work how they claim to. Many people will just go fishing by putting in tons of names.

What's to stop me from putting in all my friends' names? Nothing, and that's exactly what this site wants me to do from a business perspective.
This is a win for developers everywhere.
For years Americans near the Canadian border have been tuning into Canadian CBC for live coverage. Canadian CTV is streaming from http://www.ctvolympics.ca/tv-online-listings/index.html (not sure if you can get it outside of Canada).

Hate to rub it in, but nothing like being here (I live in Whislter)!
I played fallout 3 a Games for Windows Live game and you could create an offline account (basically just a nickname) and play with that I never bought dlc so I don't know if that required an online account
But if the Euro slides, the Arabs selling the oil will then be able to buy more EU products. In the end, it will all balance out - do you think the failure of the Greek national government to honor it's honds will cause a drop in demand for any of the products of the Netherlands, such as electrical parts or refined petroleum products ?

Of course, if one of the main products of the Netherlands (or Europe, or the United States) is itself bonds, similar to how some small governments fund themselves by selling collectors stamps, then you might be screwed by a general fall in demand for bonds. However that situation is unlikely to remedied by selling more bonds to buy back the Greek bonds.
Well, it is not for every comment thread for every page load for every user. For anonymous page views we cache the output so unless there is a new comment (or other changes to a thread) we serve cached (previously generated) javascript file.
New evidence about the efficacy of placebos