skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it just me, or does this fellow not seem entirely believable?? I started writing some rebuttal points, but then gave up as it would take too long.

I realize, the concept and enforcement of law is crucial to our way of life. However, the vast majority of work that is conducted by lawyers (on a dollar basis) is redundant. It is fairly well documented (in Canada at least) that lawyers have lobbied heavily, and succeeded, in shutting out paralegals from large subsets of their work.

I've dealt with lawyers on a few occasions, and it is almost always the same...they charge ungodly rates, they generally (after all, these are just normal people) have a marginal understanding of their craft.

In this day and age, a GOOD software developer has to know WAY more than a lawyer (after all, we can't just ask our assistant to figure something out for us)...not to mention, in software it seems everything changes totally about every 5-7 years.

And the ramble about standard forms, that they put so much work into refining for each particular client....you are just outright lying, period. I've been through this before. If you, as lawyers, want respect from people, then if you a re-using a contract template, you should notify us and charge us accordingly. I know you are going to charge me based on "value", but you imply that all of you are not using variations of the same template.

Long story short, I think you are lying, and you likely agree, but nothing ever will come of it. The beauty of law is that. a huge percentage of politicians are former lawers, so most of what they propose gets though legislation.

So, generally, I don't fault you for the money you make, you do server a purpose in society, but you can be faulted for manipulating legislation to make certain services only executeable by full on lawyers, etc., etc. etc. You know, there's a reason almost everyone thinks you are crooks, it's not just some stereotype we are told as children.

In my opinion, even though you are crucial in some scenarios,in the aggregate, you are thiefs (according to the dictionary definition), and your lobbying has made the world a worse place.
Dedicated servers
Gogax offers you simplified dedicated server packages. They offer different plans. Dual Core, Quad Core and 2 x Quad Core servers.
I have posted this in the last thread but I will repeat it here. This should be a classic case study in how to loose all your reputation in a large and growing market.

1. Possibly the regulators were at fault here, however Paypal acted in a very intransparent and user-hostile way. I issue with Paypal in not (at least the largest issue) the outage.

2. The whole drama lasted for a month, during this time all the communication from Paypal was two blog posts, and no personal mails to the merchants.

3. Paypal tried very hard to sweep this whole issue under the carpet, the first communication from them(on their blog, not a personal mail) DAYS AFTER the problem was there, and already known.

4. In themselves they are not big, but there some outright factual inaccuracies/lies on that Blog. (Eg it says a check transfer takes 4-5, days, which is wrong, it is sent by Paypal in 4-5 days, and can take upto 45 days for delivery)

5. Nobody at Paypal was willing to take responsibility, and provide a timeline for resolution.

Paypal was an extremely preferred provider in India, but they have lost all credibility now. I have talked to more than a few people who are not going to use it anymore.

I was a huge fan of Paypal, and used it as my preferred payment processor. Last year I would have made > 5000USD for Paypal. I will still use because its convenient for a number of people, but it wont be my preferred processor, and I hope to convince more people to use other alternatives.

And the biggest kicker is that in spite of the outages, Paypal could have been seen as a consumer friendly company if only they.

1. Were more honest about the problems.

2. Provided more communication to the merchants.

3. (Hopefully) provided a timeline for resolutions.
mmmm... seriously... nobody likes puerto rico.
Hedge Funds Try 'Career Trade' Against Euro
Would it not be possible to create a nuclear powered robotic installation on that asteroid as well? I guess the initial costs are high, but it would pay off in the long term (just move the factory once you are done, the low gravity requires little fuel)
It depends on how common the minority is, yeah. In the days where DRM required you to insert the original game disc to verify it, a lot of legitimate purchasers of games got cracked copies too just to avoid the hassle of having to swap CDs. With the internet-based DRM, I think it depends on how many gamers have flaky internet connections, or play on laptops at places where there's no internet (e.g. on most trains, buses, and planes).
Lawyers are hated because as a profession, they are responsible for creating the problems that are then "solved". If many doctors actually ran around wounding people, all doctors would get a bad rap, even the ones that were begrudgingly employed to heal.

Laws grow without bound as to their complexity, and one has no choice but to consult with a lawyer (for the better part of a grand) upon receiving any "legal" attention. That the average person is unable to understand the law and judge the merits of their case is already a violation of basic due process (nevermind the extremely high penalties that are always settled or pleaded down).

From the point of view of someone forced to retain a lawyer, the situation would be much better if both sides' lawyers didn't exist, even though their lawyer is actually helping them.
Y Combinator Blog Today , a Wordle View - mcquadrat's posterous
I don't know who Peter Seibel is and this sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
Yeah, lawyers charge way too much and don't have to know anything! And so do programmers! Why, my 14-year-old nephew knows how to write code, and I bet none of you "rock star" geeks are any better at it than him, so why should you get to charge that big hourly consulting rate? I'll have him build my website, you'll see!
I tried it for OS X, but scrolling sucks and I can't seem to adjust it. There's also some other little things I keep finding that annoy me... It may be faster than Safari, but not compellingly so.
Tree-style tabs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

Still not matched anywhere else. The bogging-down from ridiculous numbers of Firefox tabs may soon force me to switch, however.

I also like some of the highlight plugins for translation and search.
Sounds good. I'm in the area and can join. Thanks for hosting.
How prevalent are anti-depressants?

I get the impression that a large percentage of the american youth are on Prozac or others, and/or even medication for ADD. And also that the normal response for depression is medication.

In the Netherlands this is quite the reverse. Anti-depressants (AFAIK) are only used as a last resort, or as a kick-start for the healing process when it is a very deep depression.
Kids in highschool taking drugs against psychological disorders is almost unheard of, except in clear cases of ADD.
COMPUTER SCIENCE SHORT NOTES, LETEST INFORMATION
COMPUTER SCIENCE SHORT NOTES, LETEST INFORMATION
I have lats of notes about computer science
………….html…………xml…………….java………………asp…………sql
I’m not an expert, but I heard in the past that the main reason for this was keeping the battery meter calibrated – so that it could accurately tell you how much battery remained, and how long it would take to drain – more than really for prolonging life.

As far as I know, the information here is still relevant: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200303140818432...

In short:

> There is no memory and no scheduled cycling is required to prolong the battery's life.

> The typical life span of a Li-ion battery is two to three years, whether it is used or not.

> The internal resistance of the Li-ion batteries cannot be improved with cycling. The cell oxidation, which causes high resistance, is non-reversible. The electrolyte slowly eats up the positive plate and the electrolyte decays. This chemical change causes the internal resistance to increase. In time, the cell resistance raises to a point where the battery can no longer deliver the energy.
The Hackers and Founders group in SF Bay Area always looks for excuses (ahem ideas) to get together. May be you can hook up with them. They would love to have a feast for a gathering. http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/
There've been a decent number in the years in between too. Farecast (founded 2003, acquired 2008) and Twango (founded 2004, acquired 2007) come to mind as successful examples.
On a similar note, I found this book http://www.amazon.com/Solitude-Return-Self-Anthony-Storr/dp/... to be quite interesting. It discusses about solitude, its necessity and other related issues like depression in detail.
8.8-magnitude quake hits Chile
Cellphones Let Shoppers Point, Click and Purchase
Weak. I liked the other one better.
Hypothetically assume Paypal had written this on a blog post or email to merchants: "We would totally like to offer you this service but bureaucrats in your government have ordered us to stop offering it while they conduct a 'thorough investigation' as to our legality. They have offered to expedite this investigation if we can 'demonstrate our continued commitment to following the laws and customary practices of India.'"

How effective do you think that would have been at achieving expeditious resolution for Paypal's customers? I have suspicions which I cannot share with you because, hey, my day job also will need a (another) rubber stamp in the near future and I don't want to make difficulty for them.
And? Some guy posted using the word "nigger". He may not be calling people "nigger", but he used a word that is racially insensitive! Booga booga!

Jesus.
Or run

>fink install wget

That's how I got it.
The Weaponization of Mozart
We have a mini kitchen at the Hacker Dojo (map here: http://bit.ly/hackerdojo) and there are always starving hackers that work here. Feel free to stop by and use our fridge to cook for us all! We have a fully stocked spice cabinet and various cookery equipment.

You might even find your future job here... Feel free to contact me, my email is in my profile.
1. Why would sending me a mail saying that "Hey we can not make transfers to your account" instead of/in addition to a public blog post AFTER I knew the issue have made it more difficult for them?

2. Its easy to blame the regulators, however, a) Paypal has never claimed what the exact problems were. b) If it was recent change which put them in this position, or were they in violations of existing laws. c) Were they informed of the problem earlier that this, and given an option to tell the merchants.
Maybe they have no one to talk to.
The lawyers are not typically more responsible for the laws that exist than any other citizen. We all equally voted for our representation and failed to keep them from adding complexity to the legal code.
Give HN/YC: $100 Adwords voucher
Dear HN,

I received a $100 adwords voucher from Google for valentines day. Since I have no need for it right now, I would like to give away to a YC company who could use it for advertising.

I guess a few of you may want it, so just post a sentence describing your startup and how you'll use it.

I think it would be best used with someone selling a product/membership that needs targeted traffic. Thanks guys.

-----------------------------------

Terms on the back of the card:
- must be applied to new adwords account within 15 days of creating the adwords account and is only valid for new adwords customers with self managed accounts
- advertisers will be charged for advertising that exceeds the promotional credit. advertisers will need to suspend their ads if they do not wish to receive additional charges beyond the free credit amount.

Offer expires march 31, 2010. After March 5, offer drops to $75 (as per Google terms). I'm Canadian but I think this can go to anyone.

http://www.google.ca/ads/overload/
I would take that over the sweltering heat of Indian summers anyday (I really mean 44C/111F 90% humidity!) - cheer up :)
Doesn't it say "non-transferable" somewhere?
Ah, the tabs tree does look useful.

Opera 10.50 has new search highlighting, though, and the right-click context menu for highlighted text has included a translate option for a while now.
Nailgun: Making Java Practical for Command Line Utilities
Radically redesigning hospital wards (and what airplanes can teach us)
Buy gold and farmland: Investment advice by Marc Faber
It does say non-transferable, but I'm not sure that they track/validate it, unless you know for sure otherwise.
Designing more secure mobile phones
any prizes for the contest?
Case law (which is most of what you're dealing with in a civil dispute) is made by judges, whom are lawyers. Initial nastygrams (often casting a wide net with many tenuous claims) are sent out by lawyers. Lawsuits are initiated by lawyers. Statutory laws are certainly written by lawyers, to be phrased in a "formal" (obfuscated) manner.
Measuring the relative power draw due to flipping logic can definitely be done with present day simulation tools. The question is whether there is any significant advantage in saving X% of power in the processor core. In a complex system, the processor rarely sucks up most of the power. Someone should actually do this as a research and find out if there are any significant savings.

I am guessing that it will all be architecturally specific. An ARM will have a different power profile to a MIPS running the same C code. Personally, I would like to see the option of a -Op switch to GCC that selects power-optimised code paths.
I meant that there is nothing in those examples that couldn't be achieved using HTML5. Basically, the effects could be achieved using HTML5 video for the background, canvas for the particle effects, and either your choice of canvas or CSS transformations / animations for the movement of the character pieces.

It certainly wouldn't work for the vast majority of visitors, as most people are still using Internet Explorer (hence why I can't produce any examples of AAA HTML5 sites), but there is nothing shown there that is inherently Flash only, technologically speaking.
Maybe the words 'output normalisation' are the point of confusion. I am using them as in this thread

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/86kgp/xss_cross...

which is the context of my quote of larholm above and is a discussion about this page

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_(Cross_Site_Scripting)_Pr...

Perhaps this is not common usage, but within this context I believe I am correct in saying output normalization is what prevents SQL injection.

larholm goes on to say:

"The lack of output normalization IS the security vulnerability."

"You can either normalize your output for each specific location as you encounter it, or normalize your input once in advance for all current and future output locations."

"The former beats the latter, as it is impossible for you to know how the data will be output in the future."

which also seems correct.

What is "tablespace injection"? I just googled it and there are no references to it anywhere.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22tablespace+injection%22...
The WSJ link above now has a paywall up. Try Google cache :) http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:oPdlnnlrFTkJ:online.wsj...
I'd hope they're profitable, given that they're literally printing money.
Example Clojure Webapp In A Gist
youporn already has a mobile version with H264 and <video> tags.
Chatroulette Clones: A New Market for Random Connections
Location-Based Services: Hype or Hit?
The problem with that is, social network 'friends' are usually pretty meaningless. They're certainly not usually people I'd trust to recommend anything.
That's a good point, Perhaps votes really ought to count for less if you vote for a certain user's submissions all the time.

Solves the problem for both bots and humans... and androids... and any other Internet-using life forms.

'Cause really, I know the human power users are 50 times more traffic-gaming than the "spammers" or "bots" this problem addresses.
Well written. Includes a section on "deployment" at the end that summarizes various options -- including patches needed to get FastCGI working.

Specific instructions on how to deploy on dreamhost shared accounts (Passanger / fastcgi).
Scrub Yourself And Shine After A Fabulous Holi Bash
I installed it, it lost my saved tabs, and the sidebar looks out of place. I recovered my old version via Time Machine, so until they bring out a stable version, I will wait for thee.
Macbooks do the same, but I haven't found a way to change the threshold. 90, 85 or even 80% would be fine for me.
How about a response instead of a downvote? This is getting stupid.

I asked a legitimate question, which given the fact y'all want to be millionaires selling software deserves an actual response.
Within the context of this discussion: WBC on AES would mean that one would be able to execute a white-box AES software implementation, but would not be able to "read"/extract the secret key that is used.

Basically, WBC is a set of very dedicated obfuscation techniques to implement a cryptographic scheme in a "secure" way.

IMHO, The main disction with "usual" obfuscation is the following:

* Obfuscation is a computer science term that refers to hardening a given application, such that it is difficult to reverse engineer. That is, to make it difficult to understand what functionalities are implemented, and how.

* In white-box cryptography on the other hand, an adverary will know that a specific scheme (such as the AES) is implemented, and how it is implemented: the compiler and program specifications are public; the cryptographic key, and the randomness that is used at compilation-phase is private. This is similar to the Kerckhoffs-principle in cryptography, where the security of a scheme should not break down when the specifications of a scheme are known.

There have been some attempts to formalize white-box cryptography. See https://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-1260...

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me.
In the near future, I plan to setup a webpage on http://www.whiteboxcrypto.com where I will adress these issues, and explain how WBC works.

Best regards,
Brecht Wyseur
A lot of lawyer hate here. I don't really get it; most of a lawyer's bad reputation comes from their client -- divorcing couples that can't divide their assets on their own, annoying IP-holders that send a C&D for using their name in a review, etc., etc. None of these are bad lawyers; they're bad people paying lawyers. The lawyer just makes sure that what's happening is legally sound, they're not the ones initiating the action.

If we didn't have a legal system, disputes would be even less tasteful.
Perhaps I'm cynical, but I think that whether the lawyers pursue this has less to do with competency and more to do with their client's willingness to pay for their time. The client may take it personally and be willing to pay good money to tilt at windmills.
I'd love to throw a HN dinner party with you at my house when you're in Seattle a month from now. I basically live in a mansion with 6 roommates -- the continuous [living room, kitchen, dinette, dining room, parlor, foyer] is nearly 1000ft². There's a well-appointed gas kitchen, two fridges and a freezer, an enourmous backyard, etc. We actually just threw a big party on Valentine's day for my roommates' wedding reception, so now we have 2x 3-pot chafing dishes and an electric flat-top griddle for freeing up the countertop gas grill...

I could seat 30 people without even breaking out the folding tables (though I'd need more chairs to use them).

I can absolutely help you with the cooking and I might be able to teach you a couple of things. I think we can pull off more than three courses :)

It's way up in north Seattle, but it's very accessible by bus, it's right off the Burke-Gilman trail, and there's tons of on-street parking. I'm blasdelf@gmail
Niche Web Services | Website Promotion
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Hmm, it seems that fortunately the damage, while significant, isn't as catastrophic as one might expect from an earthquake of that magnitude (7th-largest on record, if the 8.8 is confirmed). I don't understand these things too well, but besides Chile's relatively good infrastructure quality, it looks like the depth of the event, and the kind of ground/soil in the region, had something to do with it.

For example, even though this was much stronger than the Haiti earthquake (8.8 v. 7.0), the Mercalli intensities are much lower:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/pager/events/us/2010t...
v.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/pager/events/us/2010r...
I suspect that reports of this are highly exaggerated by the people that think that every problem is solvable through 'putting your nose to the grindstone' and that everything else is just 'weakness.'
I'll most definitely post writeups of all the HN dinners I do.
Help for Startups – A semi-complete list of startup accelerator programs
What hackers have to say about A/B testing
Searching my email / Paypal accounts for orphaned / unlogged receipts.
Good luck, Bard.
Thanks for the research. Just a little nitpick - could you please not use URL-shorteners. It's nice to know where you're going before you hit the link.
Live stream from TV Chile http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tv-de-chile
I think you missed the point. What the author was trying to show was how different regions adapt new technology.

In my "world" almost no one uses Twitter, 4square or any other new technology/tools. This means starting a new trend and getting early adapters (from within my social circle) is extremely hard.

Twitter could never get started here.
FourSquare would of never got enough usage to prove the concept.

IMHO, this is a very important point for social (and many other types) of startups.
This seems rather untrue. "In Nederland worden steeds vaker antidepressiva voorgeschreven. In 2007 kregen 937.000 mensen in totaal 6,7 miljoen recepten tegen depressie voorgeschreven. Het aantal mensen dat antidepressiva gebruikt is sinds 1999 elk jaar met 6 procent gegroeid." (Wikipedia) 937.000 people out of 16 million (5.8%) isn't quite the "11% of women and 5% of men in the non-institutionalized population" Wikipedia has for the US, but it's certainly not "quite the reverse", either.
If you are an incorporator, director, or officer, the jurisdiction where you incorporate or are required to qualify to conduct business may require disclosure of all such parties. Your involvement could be more concealed if you were merely a stockholder or if the state where your business incorporates and any other state where your business is required to qualify to conduct business do not require that all directors and officers be disclosed. Note: You may be able to have a third-party serve as incorporator. Bear in mind that your business may be required to qualify to conduct business in jurisdictions with disclosure requirements for officers and directors that differ from those of the state where your business is incorporated.
Countersuing is a pretty common and effective method. Big companies do it all the time. Claiming you were actually first with that design completely undermines their case.
3 IDIOTS Songs