skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes you release people (sometimes murders) because of a thing called a constitution...a case where there is liability for NOT releasing the murderer.
Man, the one huge hack I have learnt in working for corporate clients (we do PEN testing and other nefarious sneaky stuff :)) is to act and look busy/harried when you meet them.

If the high powered CEO your meeting thinks you have to be across the city meeting someone else in a minute or two they treat you with a lot more respect.

When I started with this stuff I was treated a lot like a lacky because they mostly talk to my boss and I was "just" turning up the "do" things. If you act busy they assume:

- your an important (high ranking) member of the company

- they are getting # prime star treatment from a company "executive"

- but most importantly they give you clear instructions, treat you like a real person and let you leave at a reasonable hour :)

It has even got to the point where, when meeting a client who is likely to respond this way, I often walk in pretending to be on the phone to my "secretary" [ha] giving hurried instructions or something.

Not a wonderful way to have to act, but they lap it up :(
Somehow I read plastic logic as a new kind of computing logic based on plastic. I was like how the hell you can compute with plastic. You can do it with electron, light, or bio, but plastic?
Yes, "I'm too busy" is usually code for "Your request is not important enough to me to bump the other things that I want to do off of my todo list."

So what? People can plead, barter, and argue with you if you say that something is not important to you, but "I'm too busy" is pretty unassailable. What, exactly, is so much better about giving a flat "no" - honesty? Please...you're still arbitrarily shutting down the request without giving a reason, and "not important enough to me" is as implicit in "no" as it is in "too busy".

To me, "busy" means that I have at least a hundred and fifty years worth of things that I'd like to do, and sixty years to get as far as I can with it. If you want to push your way in there, give me a damn good reason, and if you haven't, I have no problem saying whatever it will take to make you go away with as little interruption to my life as possible...
If you didn't get into YC, COME WORK FOR WEPAY :)

Seriously, though. I promise to take you to all the YC events (they usually welcome alums), so you'll get that experience.

We are still a 5 person team, so you will get the startup experience.

We will pay you, but you can still eat Ramen if you'd like.

See more details here: http://wepay.theresumator.com/apply/waxuor/
I agree that if Netflix knew the data could be de-anonymized then they are liable. Just like if I bank knows that an identity thief is the emptying a customers bank account and does not stop it, they are liable.
Thanks! its a similar concept to bestcovery, hunch, retrevo,testfreaks, etc.

The reason why i dont care for those sites very much is they are so generic, and because of that, have a hard time really addressing and comparing based on the particulars of each person's situation.

I would compare it more to a yahoo!answers specifically for tech prods/services, or even a stackoverflow system geared more towards tech products/services.
You weren't meant to take that literally. It's just to illustrate a point, not necessarily describe a real-world scenario. Notice how you're arguing my metaphor's accuracy rather than actually defending your original point.
I may have confused the issue. It's not about the flick of the mouse- it's about not having to aim (e.g., can you perform this action using your peripheral vision?). It sounds like you've become accustomed to aiming at everything and therefore don't see what the big deal is. Obviously the designers in question feel as you do, so it's certainly widespread.

As for the research, just to further clarify- they rigged a mac so that there was a second monitor above the first monitor (and above the main mac menu) that the mouse pointer could move to. When mac users sat down to use it, even knowing exactly what was going on, they consistently overshot the menu by an average of half a screen. I'd be highly surprised if resolution was even minimally relevant.
Three examples over more than a decade can be easily chalked up to coincidence.
One thing that really bugs me is when you tell somebody about some entertaining or worthwhile pursuit of yours, and they reply saying 'It sounds interesting, but I don't have time for it unfortunately.' Thereby implying that you are lazy, and they are busy. Argh!

I totally agree and have heard that before and thought the same thing.

I've walked through large offices and seen nothing but Lotus Notes on peoples' screens (and I don't mean frivalous emails either, these are 'important' emails/memos).

My experience:

productivity == 1 / count(email + phone calls)

This may be something that is specific to programmers on small teams. I think many of these metrics apply to other areas in business such as Sales where there may be a relation between phone calls or emails and results (Or similarly in customer relations or customer service).

A common exception when programming is fixing bugs. When progress is being made there may be a flurry of communication as the source of the bug is identified and fixed.
Wikipedia's AFD procedure is explicitly not democratic. The voting does not determine the outcome--it's a heuristic meant to help the admin. The criterion for keeping or deleting is consensus and the weight of the arguments on either side (insofar as they are relevant to Wikipedia's general principles). Do not mistake this admin's overview for a summary of a vote--it is not a democracy, and that's not a bad thing.
Let's assume that the author is right when he says that all companies ignore linux. What would make that such a big disaster? Is there some specific proprietary app that _needs_ to be ported to linux? I myself haven't found a task that lacks a convenient binary, but maybe that's just me?

That, and 'EMACS vs. VIM' is a dead horse. Stop beating it.
I gather this is the (reasonably old) clip with the logo designers?

Great clip - and I recommend you watch more of Derren Brown. He is by far one of my favorite entertainers because he makes very clear that everything he does is a matter of manipulative psychology and "sleight of hand".

Which makes it all the better because you spend the whole episode trying to figure out how he managed it - and wondering if the solutions (which he often provides) are actually real.

The other great thing about Brown is that he loves debunking pseudo-science and other rubbish. The section in one of his books about Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a fantastically well thought out debunking - he actually tried NLP at one stage in his early career and you can see his fascination with the idea before his final realization it was just pop psychology (his section on religion is equally compelling).

But best of all he pulls some awesome stunts/tricks. Highlights from the past include: playing Russian roulette, live.... (with blanks, but still lethal...) and (my personal favourites) "programming" a group of people to pull off a fake heist and paying for stuff (in the US as it happens) with paper instead of real money.
Whoops, assumptions about linux actually. When using ubuntu I always turn off the top bar first thing. Most of the people I know that use ubuntu do the same, but I have no idea if it's representative. I turn it off specifically because the quick window actions are far more valuable to me. In any case I run crunch-bang, which is ubuntu based but doesn't have the top bar, so I forgot about it when posting.
That sounds like an interesting investment. Is there a way I as an individual can buy something like this?
I find clojure's current approach to tail recursion to work very well. Maybe I'm just not functional enough, but I'm not sure why function calls that don't push a stack frame should be done the same way as a regular function call. Doing a tail call explicitly is fine, and seems to work okay.

Why is the demand for tail calls so great?
the only information that could realistically be considered to need security in this app is the specific leads you generate/contact

How about payment information? Should I expect an unencrypted form submission when I hand over my credit card details? My password gets submitted as plain text and emailed back, will my credit card number be handled the same? From ten seconds on the landing page, and looking at the insecure signup form, I can't tell - and that's probably not what you want your potential customers to be worried about.

I'm not trying to be negative, and from the looks of it I don't think you can actually provide a credit card anywhere on your site yet so you still have time to sort it out, but please give some serious thought to basic security before you start asking people to send you their credit cards.
One thing you don't realize about the movie industry is that parts of it actually move a lot slower than you think.

Some of these scripts (actually, most of them) float around Hollywood for years, even a decade or longer. They get pushed from studio to studio, shopped around, then suddenly a director or star takes interest in it and a project begins to form.

One can definitely infer once the wheels start moving on a picture (OMG Brad Pitt signed on to do Freakonomics:The Movie!) and word spreads that copycats definitely pop up to try and take some of the action.

You can also add [A Bug's Life (Nov 1998) -> Antz (Oct 1998)] to your list. There's some background here: http://www.businessweek.com/1998/47/b3605013.htm
The 'interactive' portion is a very cool display of data. You can view the history of the asset over time (the asset looks like it was originally created in december 2006). Over time, a large number of houses in the asset go delinquent, and then bankrupt.

It lets you experience, from a distance, the panic that the original investors must have felt as they saw their hopes for the asset melt away.

I also like it because you can see it going south long before 2008, which is when economic panic started going public.
Is not "inquiry" and "enquiry" identical in all respects except spelling?
According to "Viking Age Iceland" the Icelanders mostly settled disputed by tit-for-tat revenge killing of each others' slaves. It was all really grim.

http://www.amazon.com/Viking-Age-Iceland-Penguin-History/dp/...
NO! I've been waiting ages for the QUE. Of course it's slower than the iPad, it uses E-Ink technology. Which is one of the reasons it is in a separate product category and should not be compared to the iPad in the first place.
Let’s make the Democrats blue dark and bold, give it a bit of an angry feel to it. This is our way of getting the audience to look at the democrats in a harsh way.

Since when is blue a "harsh" color? If they were trying to give democrats an angry feel, dems should have been red.

And what the hell is wrong with increasing the interval of the x-axis to make it more readable?

I think this article is more deceptive than the graphs are.
>>If they know that the information can be de-anonymized using publicly available information, have they really made a good-faith effort?

If your premise that Netflix knew the db could be de-anonymized is correct, then its not "good faith". Otherwise, Netflix could argue it did everything it said it would do in its TOS, and didnt foresee the hackers exploit.
Whether that makes them liable or not is what Im asking. Im not a lawyer.

The reason the bank robbery example is irrelevant is banks say in their TOS that your money is 100% protected up to the FDIC limit. So, Netflix TOS said it would make its db internally anonymized, which it did. Clever cross-correlating made this not enough.
Where do you get your money, Willie?
I don't know if I'd call this an "absence" of government, just an example of a relatively minimal government. There was a hierarchy of some kind here, and a concept of laws. What looks remarkably different to us today is that it lacked a massive bureaucracy.
"so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on."

Or, they sit on similarly produced movies for years until such moment as it is economically "sensible" for them to release it. The entertainment industry has done that with dead people (Bernie Mac, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, etc.) for a long time. If they see advanced hype from one movie (in the case of Armageddon), they'll release their not-as-good one (Deep Impact, IMO) as an early-bird special to get people in the theater thinking "hey, it's just as good, whatever".

Now, there are companies (like the Asylum) that make films _directly_ knocking off upcoming movies. They shoot and produce them in months and push it straight-to-disc for the rental/retail market. That's a different thing altogether.
Drive down Sand Hill road from Hwy 280 to Stanford; check out the VC buildings along the way. Audit some classes in Stanford. Just walk in. The lecture halls are huge and no one will notice. The etl.stanford.edu has guest speaker every week.
That should be fraud, the entire purpose was to mislead.

I wonder who else has done this, or continues to do this. Seems like a major loophole for banks to exploit.
Yup. It's the size of, say, a Greek city-state, or a large-ish rock concert.

Radically open (or otherwise atypical) government structures are much more feasible at that kind of scale.
Easy. Just buy a junk bond. A REIT maybe if you specifically want a building mortgage (as opposed to a company borrowing money).

But it's not a good idea unless you are very experienced (or have someone very experienced helping you).

Otherwise you're pretty much guaranteed to loose money.

Actually no broker will talk to you unless you are a "sophisticated investor", which is another way of saying "has a lot of money", but also you need to have been investing for at least a few years.
It might not be much safer than regular bikes, but electric bicycles are great for expanding the non-car commuting range of the average suburbanite. I ride a scooter-style ebike that has enough cargo room for a few bags of groceries and looks more like a Vespa scooter than a 10-speed. The headlights, tail lights, and turn signals make me feel safer than my mountain bike. Of course, cars don't pay much attention to mopeds or motorcycles either, so it's probably just a psychological safety net.
Oh how I wish this was more actively being developed...
Since he politely didn't shill for himself above, I'll point out that lsc is the founder of http://prgmr.com/ which has crazy low prices for virtual hosting.
My biggest concern here would be going for the "Edit" menu and hitting "Close" by accident. I know I miss the item I'm aiming for from time to time.

Otherwise I could careless, people learned to use Hotmail, Facebook, and eBay just fine.
Quick! Find out which mortgages are part of the NPR bond. Make sure to pay them so they write a good news story and the whole country thinks things are great.

In other words, I'd rather look at the market as a whole not just a tiny piece of it.
WTF is this shit?
A good story. You can listen to the whole thing on the planet money podcast:

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=944...
Sorry, but themes sucks. They make it very hard to make excellent GUI applications, since you have no fixed foundation to build them on.

To build a custom control you need to be able to integrate it in the surrounding context, i.e. the theme. If you do not know what that context is, you have to spend needless energy to make is fit anywhere. This is energy which could be spent improving the GUI instead.

And whatever you do, don't go around changing the order of buttons and such in the theme. This makes it even harder to make an application which fits in its context.

Not having a theme also allows you to communicate you vision about how the platform should look and work without having the message diluted. A platform needs this vision, and of course this vision needs to be good, for it to work as a breeding ground for excellent applications.

I'm not saying that Ubuntu's new look is the right look, I'm just saying that the solution is not themes.
their success is in the long tail, not on actually reasonably popular search terms.
As far as articles on statistical quackery goes this one is as close to content free as I've seen. You can do better HN.
A problem that exists, and is easily handled by the young, even to the point of not noticing it's a problem, could be insurmountable by the elderly.
The ATM.
Everyone is still mistaking why these bonds were/are 'toxic.' It isn't that no one wanted to buy them. It's that no one wanted to buy them for the price at which the banks needed to sell them to remain solvent.

The bonds were 'toxic' because if the banks sold any of them for their market value, the banks would have had to mark down the value of the bonds still on their books. That would have shown that the banks were insolvent. By not allowing a market value for the bonds to emerge, the banks could maintain the illusion that their assets were greater than their liabilities.
So, show of hands signal to noise ratio on HN dropped significantly recently? Seeing a lot of content free articles.
HECK NO! Anyone who allows payment information to be transmitted unencrypted should be prosecuted and fined at the very least.

That's not really part of the functionality of the service, though, so I was assuming that wasn't the security you were referring to... the actual payment method has nothing to do with the level of subscription.

I don't have anywhere for you to enter credit card info at the moment, because I haven't actually hooked up the merchant account yet. I see no need to spend $50/mo on something (merchant account for LeadNuke) unless it's pulling in more than $50/mo (that's the lean mantra at its finest). However, after this post, it looks like I'll have to get that part operational.

I know you're not trying to be negative, it's certainly a big deal. Web dev (including security) is what I do for a living, so no worries.
I have firsthand knowledge of this market. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to buy bonds like this for yourself if you are not an institutional investor.
Can Hacker News help out... and make the lawyers pay?
$1 for each new follower until 3pm Pacific time, follow @IdahoFoodbank, see http://twitter.com/idahofoodbank BTW: lawyers are the ones paying for it, so let's make them pay :)
As a free software guy, I'm glad proprietary apps are not being ported to gnu/linux. If I wanted proprietary apps, I probably would have stayed with windows.
http://ask.yahoo.com/20050830.html
Heh :)

I owned a Macbook Pro, and I was quite happy with it. Their design is indeed awesome.

Until one day I spilled some coffee on its keyboard and it fried (well, the quantity of coffee spilled was reasonable :)). A friend had a similar experience, only lighter ... his keyboard stopped working. So it bothers me that it's kind of fragile.

By contrast I also spilled coffee on my 2 years old Dell (yeah, I have a habbit :)) which is clunky, loud, the battery lasts for one hour, overall a piece of shit that still works.

Nothing happened. I also spilled some Coke on it ... half the keys got sticky, but I could take it apart and clean it. Still works.

BTW ... Minis are awesome, but I need laptops.
I gave you three downvotes for a blatant attempt at karma whoring, but thanks for playing.
On the contrary, I don't believe someone has to show a bank account to share an experience or make a suggestion. I too am clued into both physical and e-publishing, adsense, etc.

But, what he is sharing is an experience, not a case study. That was the root of my comment which you replied to.
The phrase "(less) risk of spamming" doesn't sit right with me. If I don't have an ongoing relationship with the recipient, nor do I know for a fact they have solicited such messages, I am definitely spamming, not merely risking it. Then again, your target market might not believe they're doing anything wrong.
The existence of uncertainty is not an excuse for exposing it to the user
Nothing too odd: http://i.imgur.com/INgMn.jpg
This is a better explanation for the movie phenomena.

Probably where something like this occurs more is when people who have had experience working together continue working on parallel projects with similar executions even after parting ways.
And why should we care about most users? Gnu/Linux is a great platform for free software, why make it something it isn't? If you want a great proprietary platform, go for windows. Windows won the proprietary war 20 years ago, foss can't beat them at their own game. Gnu/Linux is good as a foss platform and that's where we should put work into. Not into making another windows, we'll never catch up on that front.
Really Simple History packages this in a library, and it will be introduced natively in HTML5.
How to Build a Superluminal Computer
The Machinery of Freedom is a great book. One of the few capitalist-Anarchist tomes not in the Austrian tradition, and much more convincingly argued than most.

Sadly, it is little known or read. I asked David about putting the text online since sales are so small, but the publisher still owns the rights to it.

Sometimes I think, what would the world be like without the Friedmans? Definitely a grayer, less free and dynamic place.
True, but then the question becomes: What does Netflix do now? Once they know that their efforts are not enough, what is their reaction? IIRC, they were warned about the fact that the second prize was revealing too much information, but went forward with it anyways.
> Compare the impact the US system of government has had with the impact the Icelandic form cited in this article had. The indigenous populations of North America and Australia have been around for thousands of years as well, with their "chieftain" systems of government, and similarly they just stagnated.

You really ought to check out Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#The_theo...

Specifically, he would question your use of the word stagnate.
> By not allowing a market value for the bonds to emerge, the banks could maintain the illusion that their assets were greater than their liabilities.

Fixed that for you: By not allowing a market value for the bonds to emerge, the banks maintain the illusion that their assets are greater than their liabilities.
I think this is pretty obviously an investigative human interest story, not an economics piece.
You've just managed to trigger the spam filter in my email client simply by proximity :)
Thanks for the link. I was unaware of the test. I was basing that on the news reports that said that was what happened when they tried to brake.
Complaining about noise and conducting straw polls about noise are also noise.

Many of us watched the same thing happen to reddit.

Re-read Shirky's classic talk on the topic http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
penny stocks, for a similar risk/reward profile
When I first started having to support Matlab for a group I was surprised to see how well supported it was on Windows, Linux, and OS X. All of them are able to install using a total of two DVDs and they all can connect to the common license server. There are some annoyances, but they're present on all platforms.

The numerical simulation and engineering crowd have been using non-Windows systems for a while. These people started by running their programs on mainframes, but as computing got cheaper they started putting those systems under their desks, but they still ran UNIX.

As such, I agree that it's likely just a question of how big the market is and how technical that market is.