skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Investigators in the U.K. who are tracking him note that, since Dec. 1, 2008, Macjon has targeted 13.5 million Americans with the work-at-home e-mail scam. Investigators estimate his success rate at around 0.1%. That's 13,500 victims from whom he's stolen as much as $40.5 million.

Oh, the title is pure guesswork. That big, big number is essentially pulled out of thin air.

Frighteningly, Macjon is merely one of about 100 modern-day 419ers plying the trade.

Seriously? This must be a much larger "industry"? Maybe the successful ones are that few, but there's got to be tens of thousands trying their hand at it at least?

He and the others buy American e-mail address lists from about a dozen U.S. based "lead sellers."

What? Do these companies operate in the open? I was under the impression that the botnet owners that do harvest email addresses were purely criminal organizations?

The U.S. Secret Service, which used to aggressively track Nigerian scammers, no longer updates its database of 419 scam letters as regularly, owing to budgetary constraints and manpower issues.

Or, perhaps, the explosion of the scam industry and the increased sophistication of the tools make it completely useless to keep a database of scam letters? I admit I'm not keeping up-to-date with email scams, the spamfilters are winning the fight for me, but it sounds like this article is horribly out of date or popularized, and if so, what's it doing on here?

Or am I wrong? Are there only actually a small number of email scammers in Nigeria? Do they get their email addresses from a handful of legit companies?
I've been driving for a long time, a few years shy of 20, and I even polled my father who's been driving for something like 65 years, at one point as a professional long haul truck driver. If we add up all the times we've accidentally hit the gas when we meant to hit the brakes, we come up with zero cases. That's about 80 years of combined, daily, multi-hour a day driving.

Of course there are cases where this happens, usually with the elderly around a farmer's market. But this doesn't appear to be the case. Other manufacturers have had various dangerous issues, and they take care of them pretty quick.

It's the ones that are denied for a decade, then internal memos are leaked where they coldly calculated the cost of a recall vs. the cost of lawsuits from the loss of human life that stand out in history....anybody remember the Pinto?
> "I'll do what I can to get more information on what the issue is here first thing tomorrow and push for a resolution and assurance this won't happen in the future."

How about this: drop the braindead DRM. Treat your paying customers like the adults that they are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
It's by 65 Media, and unlike this one, it's not directly made by Jim Carrey unfortunately. I happen to like Jeff Bridges' site for that reason: He's making all the content for it himself. (I have no idea if someone helps him put it up on the web, but that's besides the point)

Nonetheless,if you like Jim Carrey's site, check out some others they made in the same sort of wacky, highly-interactive style:

http://www.georgelopez.com/

http://www.imaginetheimpossibilities.com/ (for the Fringe TV show)

http://www.simpsonsmovie.com/main.html
Those are the standard claims, but drowning the reader in code that consists of lots of tiny, obscurely named functions (most of which you just defined), combined with abstractions based on high-level mathematics, limits your audience to people who would be comfortable reading mathematics papers. That's pretty much the opposite of making it easier to understand something.

I like Haskell for the intellectual challenge, but if the aim is to write clear example code that will be understandable to a large audience, you'd be much better off writing it in Python.
I'm 'there'. It's way too early for a hacker, but just fine for a startup owner. :)
You should probably ask this on stackoverflow.com.
"Lessons learned from the Apache.org defacement of 2000" would have been a pretty good title. I still would have clicked, but my expectations would have been differently calibrated. As the title was written, I was expecting Apache.org to be, currently, defaced.
In addition to OpenX, check out Google Ad Manager/DFP. I tested both a couple years ago: found OpenX to be more robust and customizable, but Google had a much better UI. Both products have evolved since then. Either could fit your needs.

http://openx.org/ad-server/hosted-packages
http://www.google.com/admanager/
Do you know where I can get some? I've googled for "Hand formed room set silicone" to no avail. Any other names/brands it could be under?
Failing that, you can take your data (originally suitable for gnuplot) and make it suitable for LaTeX to \include{} via

cat data.tsv | sed -e 's/<tab>/ & /g;s/$/\\\\/'

And then you can put all this into a Makefile or whatever you prefer. :)
It's a rather complicated way to ensure that all points have y coordinate between 2 and 4, thus cutting all lines that would extend out of the "writable" two squares.

That expression equals zero if and only if 2<=y<=4.

(edit) If you try "L", the formula contains a product member (x-2) that would produce a vertical line whose points all have x=2, containing the vertical segment of "L". The final string excludes that.
As it turns out, this doesn't actually work. State derived program analysis has been shown to not be provable for all cases. Particularly when the state-space is very large, and when state transitions are non-atomic in the code, e.g. two or more state transitions in a code block.

The best research I've seen on this was done with Access Control Matrices in the Computer Security field. e.g. can you prove in a general sense that a sequence of atomic state changes to an ACM result in no violations of access control? The answer is, for atomic state changes you can prove that they are internally consistent, but not that they do not introduce a flaw in the ACM.

In other words, because proving software reduces to proving correctness, it only proves that the software is internally consistent. Basically it's a circular proof. It doesn't prove that the software is without flaw.
Yeah, like everything else here what you can reasonable ask for depends on company stage. It's not unreasonable for employees 2-10, say, to ask for a general characterization of the cap table and liquidation preferences.
Merely "clever" doesn't seem quite strong enough. Taking something already well-known and useful in some specialized context, thinking of a way it would be useful for some non-specialized target market, and then successfully marketing it to that demographic is a very elegant move, and potentially quite lucrative if successful!

In fact, if I was going to critique this at all, I'd question the choice of marketing. They're targeting younger, geeky DIY-type internet people well, which is not a bad market at all to be sure, but there's definite potential for something like this in going for older, less tech-oriented demographics (I bet I could get my mother interested, for instance).

But I suspect they've already thought about that sort of thing--sounds like they can't keep up with the current demand as it is, so reaching new markets is probably not a priority!
Open Meetings, hosted at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/

It's ugly but it works, and it's free.
Well if Apple can get away with bricking an entire physical device I don't see why Ubisoft can't get away with a game being unplayable for a while.
I don't get the reference? When did this happen?

There was the PS3 incident a week or so ago and the Zune incident a couple of years ago. But I don't recall Apple having any issue like this.
constipating

That is not a word that should ever exist... yet I cannot imagine a better description.
http://www.lyx.org
Never spend more than $1000 in a startup unless you start getting revenues, say $100 or $200 and growing.

Then invest proportionally to the revenue.

With cheap VPS in the $20 and say $500 in average design, I fail to see how you should over spend in chasing a dream highly probable bound to fail.
He was trained to do Crazy Heart; if you haven't seen it go because it's a great movie.
allow reader to upvote while reading the item in the same window the item is opened...
Ask HN: NoSQL/SQL thoughts/questions
Another possibility is that this site has a higher than usual percentage of nippophile users,

Come now, you're not even trying. If you're going to be smugly derogatory toward people who enjoy some bit of Japanese popular culture, the technical term is "weeaboo".
http://www.google.com/search?q=apple+bricked+iphones

It's been quite a while now that no matter how much you pay for a device it's still owned by the company that produces it. You're only allowed to do with it what they deem acceptable. Apple is simply the poster child for this kind of behaviour.

As long as we keep accepting that companies have a say about what we do with the property we bought from them after the moment of purchase these kinds of stories will continue.
But http://twitter.com/vidly/status/9837720666

says "Starting today, Vidly will no longer be available."
If you are using :make, and _don't_ jump out of the file (split the window if you need to jump out), line deletions and additions down the window are automatically accounted for.

As for turning it on or off, I've never had too, unless it's part of cindent.
If you've got a reasonably sized readership I'd try Federate Media.

I'm actually working on something in this space at the moment as a side project (smarter ads for tech & programming related content), but I'm not going to be ready to test with users for a couple of months. Feel free to drop me an email though if you're interested and I'll let you know when I go live.
I agree! I jumped into the article when I saw apache.org defaced....
Yes they matter. I worked on a website for a national restaurant chain for a while, and they get over 100 million dollars in online orders through their website a year. Same with pizza places. Making it easier to order food on the web brings in a lot of money. If this process is painful, it will have a definite impact on revenue.

You can also directly email customers who spend the most money (based on info in the online ordering database) and send them weekly specials and coupons on the website. This is very effective.

"Pizza Hut is getting 30 percent of its sales online. Moreover, online boosts the amount of sales – online orders are ten percent higher than in-person orders because it is so easy to check off additional or more expensive items." Source: http://localonliner.com/2010/01/29/newspapers-partner-with-a...
ARTICLE SUMMARY:

I'm a vegetarian non-smoker living in a country where nearly everybody smokes and all the native cusine has meat. I also don't like all the word-dancing involved in office-level Japanese, not to mention the office politics, and I especially can't stand the sheer pile of pointless (to me) social protocol.

Because I don't participate in most of what the natives do, I've had a hard time making friends with said natives, and I'm lonely.

There's nothing wrong with me, of course. This is Japan's fault, and they should fix themselves to be more like California.

END ARTICLE SUMMARY

Begin my take:

I'm a native Californian, currently living in Tokyo. Admittedly, I'm not a vegetarian, but I don't smoke, and I agree that a lot of the stuff here can be maddeningly irritating... if you try and apply your own value systems.

But you can't. It's a different country, they do things differently. If you try and fight that, for the most part, you're just going to end up bitter and frustrated. If you're going to live somewhere where the value systems are different, you need to figure out what you need to compromise on in order to keep both yourself and the natives happy.

The one nice thing about being a foreigner, is that because you're a foreigner, you can get away with flaunting a lot of social protocol already. If you even make a solid attempt at observing social niceties, you can totally cock them up, and the Japanese will still be pretty happy that you bothered in the first place.

Patio11-aka-Patrick, please feel to correct me where I'm wrong here. :)
writer is suffering from ennui. Just like yoga - any single posture held over a long time becomes stressful.
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA10-055A.html suggests otherwise.
You're right on the OS/Gates thing. I'll switch out "OS" for "BASIC."

If you can't tell the difference, remind me never to conduct business with you.

Thankfully it's possible to elucidate both a point of view without agreeing with it and an action without doing it :-)
Is it actually called "authentification", or is it a hilarious typo on the part of joystiq?
I've always thought if I could spend money on a graphic artist/illustrator I would hire David Brasgalla. He's most definitely my favorite. Probably expensive too.

http://www.pixelhuset.se/pixelhuset.html
I understand your point, but, it is almost impossible to brick an iPhone unless you mess with the baseband. An in this case it is the person who modifed the firmware who is at fault not apple.

In the case of AC2 people with legitimate UNMODIFIED games are being left without their product. I'm not supporting apple for locking the hardware but I don't think your comparison is fair. It would be a lot easier to compare with the Zune or the PS3 in which cases the platforms were also unmodified and suffered down-time due to a manufacturers mistake.
Hans Rosling has a good TED talk discussing this in the context of the mind set people have concerning industrial and developing nations, http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/let_my_dataset.php. He claims most peoples opinions are from data available in 50's through 70's which corresponds to the dates when their school teachers were in college.
Internet access is 'a fundamental right'
and still u have the three strikes accusation based disconnections in the pipeline.
Actually, sometimes it is. Volkswagen got sued in the US for selling cars equipped with transponder keys that were far more difficult and expensive to replace than standard car keys without making adequate disclosures to the customer. I suspect a similar lawsuit option exists for Ubisoft customers.
What if I don't know the number? I could maybe find it on the website, assuming I could get there.
The mesofacts site is an interesting one. The concept seems related to the "half life of information" which has over 7 million hits on Google http://www.google.com/search?q=half+life+of+information [Caution: you can lose a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon following these links]
What Successful Bodybuilders And Successful Entrepreneurs Have In Common
That's a good point, the existing functionality is good enough as long as you make it an "Ask HN."
I enjoy some aspects of Japanese popular culture as well, anime in particular. That doesn't mean I'm blind to the possibility others who have the same taste might be biased against essays that portray the culture in a negative light, nor to the fact that people with that taste are more common among the geek set.
No love for "Shikabane Hime" ? What is wrong with this guy?!
Something tells me that too. Their image seems to be increasingly improving in terms of innovation. I actually like Bing! and so do many of my non techy colleagues. They also seem to be doing some other cool stuff (Win 7 -- big relief to anyone who suffered Vista).
i've lived in a different culture for about 10 years, and i understand what you're saying. i'm not sure the right term is culture shock, though - see other replies, that associate that with something much more immediate.

for some people, living long-term in another culture is hard. i certainly find it so at times. and this is despite being completely aware of the issue, the validity of other belief / social systems, etc etc.

it's a malaise at a very deep level - not something that can be addressed by conscious platitudes. i don't have a solution, apart from just continuing.

[ps the way i see it, our subconscious is "programmed" at a very early stage in our development, and is much less adaptable than our conscious. what we're talking about here is the result of long-term attrition between those subconscious assumptions and an inconsistent (but, or course, completely valid) reality. in some ways, respecting the other culture makes it harder - you can't simply dismiss it (except for periods of anger - i would guess this article was written in such a time). i also sometimes wonder if those that don't suffer this are simply repressing / unconnected with their subconscious to such a degree that they are unaware... the alternative is that their subconscious somehow adapts.]
and yet there are talks of copyright infringing accusation based disconnections.
You know, he's not the only HN reader in Japan... ;)

I'm not sure what needs commenting. The article is quite in-depth and mostly fits with my experience. I can add an anecdote, perhaps, on this part: The Japanese are so serious about work that even work-related parties are mandatory. If you don't go to a company party, you're not part of the team. If you're not part of the team, it's possible you're not actually working at the company.

This is very real. I live in a university dorm and I'm friend with one of the Japanese assistants working here. He was nearly fired because he wasn't going to nomikai (drinking parties) with the other assistants and the manager often enough. He wasn't going because he had to study for exams and prepare a trip. He got a long email from one of his older colleagues saying that "maybe he wasn't cut out for the residence assistant lifestyle" and that as the youngest one it was his duty to do better to fit in the group. All that even though he was, as far as I could see, the only one to actually socialize with the foreign residents (that's supposed to be his job)...

Incidentally, my university keeps a fairly strict separation between foreign and local students. Exchange students live in the same building as the sports club members for my university (the teams are required to live together), but we're not allowed to go into their area or for them to come. People who learn Japanese here are rather encouraged to stay together and not mix with the Japanese students (except those who want to practice English). It's what they call tatemae/honne: the uni wants to give an air of internationalism, but it doesn't really matter to them if it's true or not - just that it looks like it.

I'm in a way lucky to be in engineering, so that I take all my classes with local students, but I've had to deal with many exceptions and needed special permission from all teachers I take a lesson under. I'm literally the only undergrad exchange student on my campus. To their credit however, I've always felt welcomed by teachers - I feel like a few have travelled and actually wish their students were more exposed to other countries.

I've also seen a professor say to his new undergrad students (unpaid interns) that "from now on, the laboratory lifestyle is going to be the main thing for you" (main in English). Life in Japan is defined by your group, and it mostly goes from school, to laboratory (or intern work), then to the company. At each point people are expected to dedicate a lot of time to being with their group.
State Lottery Winning Numbers
Review of Fitbit fitness and sleep monitor
Ask HN posts are not meta posts, they can be but only a relatively small part of them are.

Meta posts are posts discussing HN itself, Ask HN posts range from startup-reviews to job advice and all kinds of other stuff.
It depends a lot on the positioning of the petals. There are some makes and models where it's rather easy to accidentally hit the wrong petal, is it's only an inch or so away from the right petal.

I tend to drive Toyotas, and their petal placement has not been problematic. My mom's Subaru makes it far easier to accidentally hit both petals, which I've managed to do once or twice.
>> often beats every other C compiler out there

Microsoft and Intel are well-known to generate better code than GCC. So I don't know what you are referring to with "every other C compiler out there."
My two personal experiences with Sugru so far:

1. The stuff is amazing. As an experiment, I completely coated an 802.15.4 temperature sensor in a thin coat and threw it into an autoclave (to test the temperature claims, etc). It held up.

2. Customer service has been amazing. The Sugru I received came from a batch with a slightly shortened shelf-life because of mixture issues, so they sent me a second order for free. No questions asked, no forms, nothing. Just an email "sorry about that, the replacement is in the mail."
The funny thing is after playing around with functional programming for a bit simply out of interest I've found that I've definitely changed to 'avoid side-effects' in my 'regular' programming as well, and it really helps to do that.
Weekend Box Office Results & Report - March 5-7, 2010
I just read Rework. There is a chapter called "learning from mistakes is overrated." It cites a Harvard business study that showed that startup founders who launched a startup and failed had about the same odds of success in their second startup as someone who was launching their first.

While I've learned valuable lessons from my (many) failures it's a nice reminder that there is also a lot to be learned from our successes.
Hearing the Uncertainty Principle
Carrey's site crashed my browser
It's worth noting that there are conflicting reports about that. I've read that the missing elements from the cracked version are really minor.
As a sidenote, FM usually requires about 1M pageviews/month minimum. I had talked with them a few years ago and they loved my blog & content but from a business and advertising perspective they just needed big traffic #s.

As for what you're working on ig1, I might be interested as well. My email and blog URL are in my profile.
Good point. I just went with the default export settings--if I do it again in the future, I'll definitely do it this way.
I don't think you'd feel that way if you were one of the people unable to play your fancy new game.
The Origins of Scala
9 years in Japan.

Whenever someone criticises Japan, I'm always reminded of a comment I heard years ago that stuck with me.

"If Japan changed to be exactly what you want, you wouldn't have come here in the first place."
Although I was not actually aware there is lard in the bread, and I wish I was not aware of that.
haha i totally agree.
Clause for Personal IP as an Employee?
Where would one go for a template clause to include in an employment contract to protect the employee's personal intellectual property. As in, OSS contributions or personal projects?
Steve Jobs spotted at the Oscars?
Sure, anyone can file a lawsuit. But I doubt they'd win. (And it's worth noting that VW didn't lose that case, they settled rather than fight it)