skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's pretty impossible to identify a user just by 1 anonymous post on a website.(without the logs). I mean sure you can compare a person's typing style...but unless they always add "jambalaya" to their posts, it'll be next to impossible to be 100% sure.

The way it works in real life, is that you find a person's email address or a long term account on a forum, and then use that info to build up a full profile about that person. The longer the person is on the web, the more personal information they've revealed in the past.

i.e. 6 months ago they might have mentioned their phone #...so you can use whitepages to see their address. Or maybe they posted a link to their site..where they didn't have privacy enabled, so you can get the full name and address using whois. Or maybe they are using the same username on all sites, so you can use google to see all the forums they've ever posted on. etc
I'm not sure I'm understanding your point, but I would definitely argue that society now is better than that of the 1920s.

The medical/tech advances alone would make my point, but you seem to want to ignore those, so I'll stick with social aspects.

Our populace is more educated, less violent, healthier, and wealthier than we were in the 1920s. Heck, on Wall Street the 1920s was a decade of greed and moral decrepitude (if you get into that sort of name calling) that is possibly only rivalled by the 1980s. Go back 30 years, and you are squarely in the 'Gilded Age', where the Senate was completely controlled by large companies (to the point where the companies simply picked candidates and ushered them through state legislatures, because Senators weren't popularly elected yet). After that came the Progressive years, where we learned that our meat was lethal and other things, and women finally got treated like human beings. How could any of those decades be considered better than the current one? Sure, women's suffrage was a great accomplishment, but only because the reality to that point was so bad.

My brother has a saying... "progress, not perfection". American history has been exactly that. Sure, there are temporary setbacks (no one can argue the 1930s were better than the 1920s really), and there are local setbacks (1980s Detroit?) but the overall story is progress. Thankfully the small victories accumulate faster than the setbacks, leaving us with a better society all the time.

I guess if we need the jeremiad to motivate us to make progress, then that is fine. I was simply commenting that it's disingenuous to pretend that it's somehow different this time. If it really were different, you wouldn't be sitting around musing about it, you'd be dealing with a collapsing society.

But I guess if you realize that, the jeremiad loses it's power, so maybe it's better we keep pretending that things are going to hell.
http://fraudit.wordpress.com/
Or you! Or me...
I think that's a bit unfair. Researchers work in teams and divide labor just like everyone else. The blunt truth of reality is there are more ways to be wrong than there are to be right in both science and business.
alarmist headline - it's a minor inconvenience at best. possibly difficult to track down why there are such duplicate requests going to your site and where the empty img tag is, but it's hardly going to "destroy your site".
But by the late 70s to early 80s (when I was of the age), this wouldn't have been tolerated. You can only be "dating" one person at a time.

My time was a bit later, late 80s to early 90s - but at that time the general rule as I experienced it was that above-average women and exceptionally attractive men could get away with multiple dating partners, but it was off limits to the majority,
The teens in the local chain bookstore appear to be doing homework. It's the new library.
I wonder how he managed to walk to the store...without his balls of steel weighing him down
Proof that 1 = 0 using a common logical fallacy
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199756

yes? no?
I am not talking about nudity here. Pornography is more than just nudity. Other content that is considered not good for children is abortion photos, hard core porn, murder, etc. You know stuff that makes an normal adult go wow, that is messed up (go to stile project, or ogrish for stuff)
> no misspellings. odd. proper use of punctuation. strange. I'd say the writer fails the Turing test

That's depressing.

Meanwhile, "[space]-[space]" rather than "--" for "—" is idiosyncratic, and since HN preserves original spaces in comments, ".[space]" rather than ".[space][space]" rules a few more of us out.
I wonder where the line is between being a copy of another design and not. Just in this 99designs logo store alone we have examples of thousands of logo designs. If someone where to sit down and make a new logo design, what are the odds it would be noticeable similar to one of these?

In programming, we have "design patterns" and such, that no-one would argue "hey, you copied me!" over. What about design patterns in logo design? I'm not a logo designer, but I find it hard to believe that each and every logo design is, or plausibly could be, designed entirely from scratch.
I don't want to spam here, so if you think it is I'll remove the link, but I have a post[1] that seems to fit the arguments discussed here (especially those of tptacek, patio11, and lotides). This is what I call branding. Basically:

In summary the logo creation didn't require a lot of time, I didn't even tried different proposals (no need to do so). It just come naturally. It was modeled together with the culture and the product itself (research, prototypes, mockups, etc). It was a (design) product of a visual evolution (more on this later).

[1] I wrote it this evenening (CET), it's related to this topic but not a response, http://www.pmura.com/blog/2010/03/kuse-vision-logo
Oh, that's brilliant: "What, you can't make your car payment? Let's see you get to work now!"
The unabomber was caught by his brother recognizing his writing.

"...his brother recognized Ted's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipped off the FBI." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski
I'm going to add a cautionary note about RingCentral. I hesitate to make my first post a negative one, but they've inspired me to feel strongly enough to break the lurker barrier. My experience with RingCentral has been almost unilaterally bad, and I'm now actively looking to switch away as quickly as possible.

We have had persistent bugs and inconsistencies. By itself, this wouldn't be a huge issue, but their level one support is untrained, powerless, and seemingly reluctant to help. In all my support calls to them, they have yet to put me on the phone with someone who understands my problem and has the power to fix it.
Facebook Data Destruction
A second request wont destroy your website. Yes a second request takes a tiny bit more bandwidth, but realistically, its impact is nil.
orkut anyone?
or, they where willing to make a point about anonymity by creating a new act.
That latter quote is wonderful.
You're right, the complexity of these VOIP-based systems is much higher. But sometimes it's worth it for both cost and flexibility. I think each business needs to evaluate what's right for them.

For example, in the setup I described in my other comment, the business wanted to move away from a Lucent/Avaya Partner system they had been using for over a decade. They had 3 lines and about 15 extensions and were somewhat happy with it. The system for many years had, as you say, the "maintenance overhead of a desk lamp" but it was starting to drop voicemails randomly, the phones sucked, adding more lines meant buying one of those extension modules, etc. Plus the building was being renovated and running just CAT6 everywhere instead of separate ethernet and phone lines was very appealing.

Buying an inexpensive Dell rack server, Polycom phones, and a couple Linksys analog gateways was much cheaper than the initial investment they spent a decade ago. Since they kept the analog lines, which are useful for fax machines and security systems, there was no need to really worry about QoS initially since internal network bandwidth was plentiful. This alone fixed the problems of the aging system and they got voicemails and faxes delivered via email, shared directories browsable directly from phones, proper call parking, and a ton of other small features.

The cost benefit came when we added an external VOIP provider later. Now they could have unlimited simultaneous inbound and outbound calls for a single DID/caller ID and just pay a flat-rate per minute. At their usage, this came out much cheaper (4x) than the deals negotiated with Verizon locally. And the concept of individual lines that could be busy just melted away. The system is still configured to fallback on the couple analog lines if the internet goes out, but the rate plans have been reduced to the bare minimum so that incoming calls stay free.

EDIT: Almost forgot, another key benefit of a software switch is the easy integration it allows with your backend apps. For our internal rails-based order processing app, I implemented dial-on-click (ala Google Voice) and call history logs for all our vendors and customers (see librevox and mod_xml_cdr for FreeSwitch if you want to do something similar) in a day.

But viraptor is right, ensuring all the fallbacks work correctly and are tested takes time, and it might not be the wisest way to spend time if you don't understand what you're getting into.
Not exactly the best written introduction to the tool, but we use Sonar locally and it's pretty decent. Everything it does is done by some individual component, the advantage of Sonar is that the results are more generally accessible. I don't use it as much as I ought to because my mutant power is being able to keep our codebase more or less in my head, but it's useful for the less blessed members of the team.
This. Is. Cyclical.
Disclaimer: I work for a hosted PBX provider, but not in US, so won't recommend anyone anyways.

If you value your mental health and don't want to hire an onsite, on-call VoIP specialist do not try to setup your own PBX. Sure - sometimes it works and you can do a lot of crazy stuff with a software PBX; in reality you want it to be up 24/7 and ensuring the quality of pstn termination, local network and configuration of such setup is at least one additional full-time job for the first couple of months. In reality if you have a problem with some "prepared" solution like freepbx / trixbox / whatever and have no support contract, you're left on your own with a system you don't understand and with no telephony - not a good option. Unless you need some very special functionality, just pay for the service. Do not be fooled by "simplicity" of solutions like trixbox - if something doesn't work, you still have to learn the whole stack to know how to fix it.

Solutions like grasshopper are cool and that's the kind of service I'd recommend. What you should look for is: how do they handle faxes (only T.38 is reliable), can you setup a divert number (like a mobile) for situations when your network is down, how much will it cost to get additional internal and external numbers. Bonus point - do they support wideband codecs? It might seem stupid, but the quality difference is amazing (only for internal calls).

If you're an MS-based shop, you might want to look at hosted OCS offers. Phones supporting it are a bit more expensive, but the ability to integrate with your emails, calendar, voicemail, etc. over the phone is really cool if you travel a lot. If you have a high volume of calls, you might also look for solutions that provide reception with a virtual switchboard apps - they're a bit more comfortable for a lot of call transfers than looking up numbers.
Illegal-file sharing could 'cost billions' by 2015
I'm pretty sure the future of anti-viruses will involve signature matching one way or another, because there's no way around that.

Viruses are pretty similar to their biological counterparts ... they are pretty useless by themselves, but once they infect a host, they can use its mechanisms to multiply.

Antibiotics are targeting bacterial infections successfully because bacterial cells can be recognized (have their own specific shell, and aren't relying on a host for survival). That's why antibiotics work, because while different, all bacterial cells are alike. And antibiotics only attack bacterias, not normal cells.

With viruses it's different ... you can't attack viruses with a generic mechanism.

The only hope you have to treat a virus / stop it's reproduction is to identify a signature in its proteins, and target that. Vaccines are the most efficient because they give your immune system a heads-up, but once you caught it the only hope you have is for your immune system to fight back.

Computer viruses are pretty much alike ... you can't have a generic method for fighting back. You can only develop a specific treatment for a specific virus, otherwise you'll be in the same league as cancer treatment ... targeting cancerous cells efficiently, but doing enough of a damage in normal cells that your internal organs start failing (with a direct analogy being the loss of data).

Personally I never install anti-viruses. I'm just cautious about the sources of the materials I have to work with, and whenever I suspect my computer got infected (happens once in 2 years) I just save my data somewhere and do a fresh reinstall.
I'm not sure I'll have the time to do this, but I've had some good results running Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation on a similar problem. In my case, I have data from people playing a negotiation game and having a conversation with a human actor. I have scores from a human judge going from 1 - 5. Using LDA on the transcriptions of the dialog I can predict the results of the human judge to a correlation of .5 There was a previous study with essay's a teacher grades that got .8 with LSA. The LSA study used a much larger training corpus outside the individuals.

For slightly more details, here's a sketch of the algorithm:
Treat each comment as a "document" input to LDA. Use the theta matrix that represents the distribution of topics over each document. Then use the inverse dot product between two document theta vectors and perform k Nearest Neighbors to predict IDs. You should be able to tune the rank and k values from all the labelled data.

When it comes time to infer I suggest running the with the whole set through LDA instead of reusing the discovered alpha and beta. For some reason (which I'm not entirely sure of), my results seem much better that way.
A nice clear sales piece. We should all aspire to such a well explained benefits page.
Mark Boulton's excellent Web Design book, now freely available online.
> i also looked at the fact that he was posting comments on HN around the time that the one in question was posted. a lot of my other candidates didn't meet that data point.

Ah, very clever, another angle of attack. Never thought of that one.
I voted you up. Thanks for the link to the site, I also wanted to investigate further.

It does look like he repeats the same story a lot on that site. Here's a very similar story from 2008:

http://contrarianedge.com/2008/08/21/chinese-and-starbucks-l...

There are other presentations and interviews where he repeats these arguments. While there is definitely a bit more detail and statistics on the site, it's not significantly more. And articles like the one below where he is correcting his own back-of-the-napkin estimates don't inspire confidence:

http://contrarianedge.com/2009/07/30/reappraising-china%E2%8...

Interesting quote from him: "Maybe it is the pessimist in me, or maybe I’ve written so many “China will slowdown articles” that I am looking for data confirming my view (the confirmation bias) – that is possible, I am human after all."

And another which I think is quite a good summary of his arguments:

"I have absolutely no facts to back up what I am about to say, but it is not hard to imagine future stories about poverty stricken farmers that moved to big cities for a better life and found despair; or that inland migration (from farming to factories) only brings a onetime productivity jump as poorly educated farmers-turned-factory-workers add little to productivity improvements afterwards; or how weak and debt ridden the financial system is; or the devastating impact that pollution has on health and productivity; or how the biggest shopping mall in the world, that happens to be in China, is almost completely empty. "

The book appears to be fairly generally about trading rather than being focused on this particular question.

All in all, I'm still left thinking that there is not much more to this gent's arguments than came out in the CS Monitor article.
Ask HN: Ask IE users to install Google Chrome Frame: good or bad?
(or use a better browser)

Google does it for Google wave. What do you think?
When it comes to recognizing current infections we're always going to have to deal with signatures, though we have the ability to match on behavior as well as code. We might look for things that are run out of the users directories that modify system-wide settings, for example.

I think there's a fundamental difference and that is that we can have a central security mechanism in a computer. It's not too hard to link a program to its privileges. For example, you browser should not be writing system-wide settings after it is installed, it shouldn't be forking processes that aren't duplicates of itself, etc. We shouldn't allow a process to add code to another process unless the user deliberately gives the process a higher level of privilege.

To draw another parallel with biology, we have the ability to surround every organ with its own barrier mechanism, like the blood-brain barrier and plecental barrier (I don't actually know what I'm talking about, so it's it is a very loose parallel). Basically, we have the power to wrap each process in its own protective sheath which doesn't let things in or out unless we okay it ahead of time.

Virus prevention is the future. Newer operating systems are already making progress in this direction.
#from your book

def distance(*points)
case(points.length)
when 2
x1,y1,x2,y2 = points.flatten
when 4
x1,y1,x2,y2 = points
else
raise ArgumentError, "Points may be specified as [x1,y1], [x2,y2] or x1,y1,x2,y2"
end
Math.hypot(x2 - x1, y2 - y1)
end

puts distance(1, 2, 5, 6)
puts distance([1, 2], [5, 6])

# why would you choose to make a complicated interface that requires a complicated implementation?

# simple, clear interfaces that allow for simple implementations
# are almost always preferrable to complicated ones that save a
# keystrokes through syntax

class Point
attr_accessor :x
attr_accessor :y

def initialize
self.x = 0
self.y = 0
end

def self.with(x, y)
new.set(x, y)
end

def set(x, y)
self.x = x
self.y = y
self
end

def distance_to(a_point)
Math.hypot(a_point.x - x, a_point.y - y)
end
end

puts Point.with(1, 2).distance_to(Point.with(5, 6))
I ride with a constant fear that someone driving a car while sms'ing (or twittering?) their friends while driving will be the end of me.
The word "token" is used in two completely different contexts, so I don't think that's right.

EG:

"tokenadult" = the included minority adult

"onetimetoken" = account used once, like putting a disposable token into a machine
Facebook Overtakes Google in Traffic
> You do know that the EU economy is larger than the US economy? OK - not one country, but pretty close to one market.

Not per capita.

Also, the EU punches considerably lower than its weight. Sure, there's a large pile of money, but what can it do?
There's been some fascinating developments in this area in just the past few days. MySpace is now releasing similar data commercially through Infochimps:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_bulk_data.php

NetFlix get slammed by the FTC:

http://blog.netflix.com/2010/03/this-is-neil-hunt-chief-prod...

and Arvind & co summarize the latest research on why anonymization is (mostly) broken as a security measure:

http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/

Big Data is getting bigger...
Open Bar at The Upcoming Schmoozd Event
I picked 1920s particularly for this reason as rights for women, non-whites AND homosexuals (which appear to still face an uphill battle in the US) had massive gains socially (it takes social acceptance before political acceptance). I will not pretend rights were better but this was an era that precipitated the modern rights advances. The 1930s witnessed a return to Victorian conservatism.

Examples:

Women's suffrage movement continues to make gains as women obtain full voting rights in the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1906, New Zealand in 1909, Denmark in 1915, in the United States in 1920, and in the United Kingdom in 1918 (women over 30) and in 1928 (full enfranchisement); and women begin to enter the workplace in larger numbers. (wikipedia)

While blacks continued to be discriminated against there was increasing representation and labour gains as a result of increased migration to cities. In particular, democrats, socialists and communists all gained increasing black votes and voiced support for black rights ultimately leading to FDR's election (significant black votes) in 1932 and the New Deal which spelled significant rights gains for non-whites. (paraphrased from wikipedia and other "sources").

Until the early 1930s, gay clubs were openly operated, commonly known as "pansy clubs."[citation needed] The relative liberalism of the decade is demonstrated by the fact that the actor William Haines, regularly named in newspapers and magazines as the #1 male box-office draw, openly lived in a gay relationship with his partner, Jimmie Shields.[23] Other popular gay actors/actresses of the decade included Alla Nazimova and Ramon Novarro.[24] In 1927, Mae West wrote a play about homosexuality called, The Drag,.[25][26] and alluded to the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. It was a box-office success. West regarded talking about sex as a basic human rights issue, and was also an early advocate of gay rights. With the return of conservatism in the 1930s, the public grew intolerant of homosexuality, and gay actors were forced to choose between retiring or agreeing to hide their sexuality.[citation needed] (source wikipedia)
This may just boil down to semantics, but I would call the hypothetical "confident man" you are talking about a confident, socially skilled man.

My "confident creep" has inner confidence in his abilities (he might even think of himself as a god among men), but he cannot correctly project his confidence (though in his mind, he is projecting it correctly). He can drop any empathy and ask such a question without being nervous, but his style, dress, conversation, etc. are so awkward, it fails.

Point being: Confidence is not the only thing that matters. You actually need social skills.
Written anything? As in a note, or an email, or whatever? Or written something thoughtful and content-heavy?

Also, for learning colemak, what exactly do you track? How much time you spent learning each day, maybe?
The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) - winner of the "most innovative video award"
If you want anything more than just call forwarding, have a look at solutions not based on Asterisk. FreeSwitch and Yate are quite good. In my experience Ast. is like Windows - people complain about it, but continue to use it because most other people use it... and it's not that good compared to others. If you do want only forwarding, have a look at sip proxies instead (like Opensips) - that's more reliable and can save you one hop on the media path.