skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People often had larger families, and had children longer in the 19th century. Limited birth control... Also I think there were some May/December romances, and at least a second wife in there somewhere. I'm in my 50s.

My father's father was alive at the very beginning of the Civil War. My mother's family, while containing a few more generations :) also has some interesting stories from that period.

I've read that the last civil war veterans dies in the 1950s; it's important to remember that lots of boys in their teens lied about their ages to join the armies on both sides. Even more amazing, the last civil war widow died in 2004! Talk about your May/December romances...
I don't think that question can be considered outside of a specific product. Freemium makes sense in professional apps. As it promotes lock in right from the start. As an example consider 3d art apps. Maya and Houdini have freemium versions where the free version might as well have no limits for the beginner. So when you are starting out you learn the houdini work flow and way of thinking about things and there is a bit of lock in. Modo, silo both do 30 day trials that isn't enough time for me to learn how their software works let alone learn how to model, so they must be hoping for converts not new customers.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks.
Well this ruins my strategy to become smart. Time to move onto plan B, "reading War and Peace and telling everybody about it".
I have the same experience but I don't do it anymore. Doesn't it just mean that with certain types of music we can ignore it enough to do other tasks? Why do we want to have inputs that we then ignore? If the music is worthwhile doesn't it deserve our attention?
also check out http://communityengine.org/ as an good, open-source alternative to lovdbyless.
they are not saying that they are getting rid of all windows machines full stop, they are saying that none of their employers can use windows machines as their dev machine / work machines. They don't want to expose any private data to the windows machines. They certainly will keep around some windows boxen for testing purposes.
Thanks, I will work on that.
Hey, i just noticed it. I browsed thru their site and it looks like Jaaga concentrates more of Design and non-hacker stuff.

I'm a colg student and web developer who often works on personal projects too. I would love to work on anything social. Any place for people like me?

P.S: Just found out that there is another HackerSpace in Bangalore called Protospace (http://protost.ation.in). Their site is down tho. But their membership fee from the hackerspace page http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Protospace_Bangalore says Rs.2000-4000, sounds too expensive.
I deleted my Facebook account so didn't get to try this but it may do something similar/better:

http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/
I'll have to check it out. I don't think I've used a keyboard with Topre switches since they are even more exotic than Alps, and I had assumed they wouldn't be much better.
Actually, I think that most of us would have become medicine men or shaman.
My anecdotal experience in Japan...

I go to Japan every spring for 3 weeks or so, and I am always looking around to see what electronic gadgets people are using, so I am always checking out everyone, especially on the train.

Spring 2009...before arriving, I was quite interested to see how many people were using an iPhone. I was quite surprised to see only the the odd iPhone here and there. The iPhone had already been out for a long time, with great success most everywhere else, so I thought maybe there was something unique about the way they use their phones (the Japanese are constantly reading or typing on their phones) such that the iPhone was inferior (I still don't know the answer to this).

Spring 2010...iPhones everywhere. On any given train, of the people visibly using a cell phone, 20% to 40% of them had an iPhone. It was a pretty impressive conversion in the span of one year.

I did see the new Sony XPeria in the stores over there, it did look like a fairly nice device. But the advantage the iPhone will always have is the app store, there are some really cool Japan only apps that (for now) you can only get on the iPhone.

Maybe Japanese cell phone companies should just standardize on Android and try to come out with the slickest Japanese implementation first, then try to re-tackle the international market if they can pull that off.
Are you looking to just compile a list of the ways that someone might do this, or are you looking for a good solution?

Basically, every method listed here uses something as a proxy for a signing authority. In the real world, we have Notaries. In the online world, we often try and use some other trusted third party as a proxy for a notary.

That's what the credit card schemes are. You're trusting that the credit card company has done their homework and verified the identity of the person they're issuing a card to. Sadly, this isn't the case; I know someone who once ordered a credit card for their dog.

As with any authentication system, the first question you have to ask yourself is how important is the system you're guarding? What is the aim of the authentication?

The lower the value of the system, the less you can put into it. To sign up for an email list, you can probably just ask for an email address and send a verification link. To handle a large financial transaction with an untrusted third party, you're going to want a whole lot stronger verification.

So it really comes down to whether your interest here is for a practical application, or if it's purely academic and you're just wanting to compile a list.
The only one that comes to mind is Michael Dell (UT Austin)
I believe the Chinese government has Windows source code, and Google does not. The Darwin and BSD layers of Mac OS X are open source, so Google can at least study the code to understand the security implications of using OS X.

In other words, with open source Google is on a more level playing field against potential attackers.
Well ... she is from the USA !
It does seem like blatant promotion.
If this is the case it seems to me that things which function like readability, a bookmarklet which transforms webpages into a more readable format, should cause links to be replaced by footnotes. After all, their goal is to remove clutter so that reading is more enjoyable.
Can you include Total Commander, please?
Herd immunity? That's a pretty bad metaphor. There is not "safety in numbers" on the Mac. Safety comes from their lack of numbers. Unless you meant to imply that Macs are like the kids at school whose dipshit parents don't vaccinate them.
Ask HN: Fishy Travel Post-Booking Request
This is my first post on here, but I thought it might be interesting. Here's the skinny:

Two flights were booked with an online service, let's call it "Woohoo". The name on the credit card used in the transaction was the same as the name on one of the tickets. This person also purchased a ticket for a second person.

From my experience using any service to book flights online, they simply send a confirmation email and ticket combo.

So here is where things went fishy. They sent an email with a subject saying "3rd PARTY URGENT - CREDIT CARD AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED FOR BOOKING". The entire structure of the email is very poor and unprofessional (only writing, no logos, varying size of font, 3+ font colors, CAPS, *, etc). Now the smelliest bit of info in this email is as follows:

__________

By accepting the terms and conditions during the reservation process, you have agreed to submitting the following required information.

In order to release the tickets we require all of the following information faxed or scanned and emailed:

From the credit card holder:
1) A legible copy of a photo identification. We will only accept the following: Valid Passport or Valid Drivers license
2) A letter stating that the cardholder (by name) is authorizing WOOHOO to charge the credit card on behalf of the passenger travelling (by name). The booking number and the amount to be charged must also be in the letter.
3) A legible signature from the cardholder must also be present on the letter.
4) A legible copy of credit card used front and back

From the passenger:
1) A legible copy of a photo identification. We will accept the following: Valid Passport, Valid Drivers license or Valid birth certificate.

This information must all be faxed to XXX-XXX-XXXX attn: Web Department
You can also scan and email the information to WOOHOO@woohoo.com
__________

What's your thoughts? I can vaguely imagine the need for such a confirmation, but it looks shady! Imagine a page including a valid identification of you, the front and back copy of your credit card, and your signature getting into the wrong hands. And also, the thought of faxing a page like this is troubling. I'm under an assumption that "reputable" online companies will protect customer credit card numbers in a fairly thorough manner, but it's acceptable to fax this info along with other valuable info...? I wonder what their security is like around a fax machine.

Let me know if I am out to lunch on this, otherwise, how would you handle this? Hope this was interesting and sorry for the novel :)
Linking magnetic field and temperature
Yeah, they are "rubber dome", which scares people away. (They have a rubber dome, but they also have a spring. And they are capacitive; you don't press the key all the way down to type the key.) They are like Cherry browns done right, tactile, quiet, and no requirement to "bottom out". Topre really goes over the top with the part of the key that presses the dome; hard ABS plastic, with anti-rotation tabs, and a shape that makes even off-center hits go straight down. (You can push the key from the side, instead of from above, and the key doesn't jam; it just slides down normally. It's really brilliant.)

Oh, and this is true of both the Realforce and the HHKB Professional; same switches, different layout.
The university is bringing itself into disrepute by punishing a student who's actually motivated to create something.
I wonder how difficult it would be to implement xAuth. Presumably, the configuration for username/password could be left intact because xAuth is performed by giving the username/password.
While this is still amazing and I applaud this man's (or woman's) work, is this capable of only basic arithmetic? Or did this person actually build a turing machine in LittleBigPlanet?

I've never played LBP so I'm not sure what kind of tools they provide you with, but I'm just curious how powerful this "computer" actually is that was built.
Paragraph 20:
"There are reports of sudden disappearance of bee populations from honeybee colonies. The reason is still not clear. We have compared the performance of honeybees in cellphone radiation exposed and unexposed colonies.

Para 24:
"Previous work in this area has indicated this [mobile phone use] is not a real factor," he said. "If new data comes along we will look at it."

HUGE HEADLINE:
"Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee"

Is there a viable alternative to shitty, sensationalist, popular science journalism?
This is very interesting, thanks!
intype is actually my default editor...it's a shame the guys won't update it or open source it or something, it really is a nice, simple, fast editor
How is that relevant? He said that truly appreciating the music and learning an instrument would "help". He never said that it would improve every area of the brain and magically make you smart.
Well my experience with it is that I believe that it actually influences my thought patterns and helps my train of thought progress. Of course this is anecdotal evidence and it would seem that the article contradicts my belief, which is why I failed to allude to it in my original posting. Besides that, if my train of thought does come to a conclusion, I get to enjoy some great music until my next thought begins.
Actually, that's not what herd immunity means. Herd immunity is based on the concept that, if a large enough subset of the population is protected from infection, then others in the population are inherently more protected due to lower transmission rates.

For herd immunity to apply in this case, we'd be assuming that OS X users are more likely to take proper measures to ensure that their system is not compromised (which may or may not be the case).
It seems that a lot of its users are the former LAMP crowd. I've been using it as a distributed file server for configuration type files. Works great. The APIs are really simple and feel native to the language and it has all the basic datatypes you'd want for configuration.
Gaza Flotilla "Peace Activists" Attack IDF Soldiers
Not to mention the fact that they're trying to regulate legal and socially acceptable conduct by students outside the university.
Not the best comparison.

Your ability to compete in a 100m sprint isn't going to change drastically from one day to the other. IQ scores, however, do.

IQ score is about as dependable as a lie detector on a sphincter-gifted defendant.
Is it actually legal for the university to do this?
I pre-emptively never joined Facebook.
Good point on that. It's like applying controls on children in high school to college students.
The same point that jumped out at me from the article. Which one of the documented logical fallacies is this?
Sounds like post-modernism, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last...

I agree the future isn't what it used to be. I think it's that technology fundamentally changed our social structure, and while it was assimilating the technology, it created a gap, an unknown, that we could escape to, and which might answer perennial questions about being a human, for better or worse. But now we've assimilated it, so that gap is no more.

Perhaps we'll get science fiction again, when next we develop a technology that fundamentally changes the structure of society. Continuously improving communication wouldn't do it; that's one of the things we've assimilated.
Don't know what it would be, but perhaps a way of looking for it would be to examine our social structures, and ask what changes it copes well with, and what it wouldn't. ie. hack society.
I think he built equivalent of a logic circuit to do the arithmetic, but using apparently the simulated mechanical physics within the game. The simulated ropes, levers, pulleys, or whatever, he navigates in the second half are the implementation of that "circuit". A lot of work.
If this is equivalent to anonymous classes, then it can close over final references.

E.g.,

public class Ref<T> {
private T t;
public Ref(T initial) { t = initial; }
public T get() { return t; }
public void set (T t) { this.t = t; }
}

public Callable<Integer> makeIncrementer(int initial) {
final Ref<Integer> ref = new Ref<Integer>(initial);

return new Callable<Integer> () {
public Integer call() {
int rv = ref.get();
rv += 1;
ref.set(rv);
}
}
}

Nonetheless if the reference closed over still has to be final (e.g., I can't just give it an Integer) this is merely syntactic sugar over what Java already has. Perl had this for ages:

sub make_incrementer {
my $i = shift;

return sub { return $i++; }
}

Too little, too late. I am almost certainly using Scala (or Clojure) for any future JVM projects (unless there's a good reason not to).
Ask HN: Best place online to learn building web apps?
I am sick of having a great idea for a web app, yet no way to execute a simple version to try to get funding or help with it. Can anyone give recommendations on the best entry level language and where I can learn it online? I am thinking Ruby on Rails would be a good place to start.

Thanks in advance.
> I mocked up this simplified version of the FYC homepage in about 20 minutes

that's not fast. I could draw that mockup on a piece of paper in 2 minutes or less.
Of course. He's not legally obligated to pay the fine, but they don't have to give him his degree.
Onticology: A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology
> academic performance

> job performance

Performance involves achieving goals, which obviously takes intelligence. However, I believe that as your intelligence grows you stop seeing what you are doing in a narrow fashion and tend to think more in terms of systems and many goals that are interrelated. When that happens, you will not optimize for one goal but for many. Someone with less intelligence may outperform you on a measure of one specific goal, but you will outperform overall (overall meaning not at your job, but at your life). So performance has its limitations as a measurement for intelligence.

> others' intuitive impression of how "smart" a person is

This only works for those somewhat close to the mean. People who would be many standard deviations above the mean may be so intelligent that their intelligence would be mistaken for foolishness or others may not be well equipped to measure it.
Being involved in music, especially classical music, stereotypically gives a you cultured air. It has been proven that we generally think attractive people are more intelligent, and I'd wager the same goes for being cultured.
Shades of 'FaceMash'?

Invest in this kid's next project -- especially if he drops out to do it.
It really wouldn't matter if it was high school. If it's not created or hosted at school, the school has no justification for doing anything to the creator.
One citation, describing flaws in the current implementations.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080111062141/http://www.matasan...

Another (fairly poorly written) article about it:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hack-windows-security-snow-...

I'm sure you can find more if you dig around.

Also, non-executable stack has been supported OSX since it was shipped, but non-executable heap is new. I believe (I'm not sure) that non-executable stack is also disabled fairly often because of trampolines in GCC.

Security in OSX isn't broken, of course, but the mitigation measures are strongest in Windows, out of the mainstream OSes these days.
who do you think runs Google - the programmers or the IT staff?
[in loco parentis]
This is just one person's anecdotal experience, but: when I first saw ninite, I thought "yeah I'll definitely use that next time I reinstall". Then I promptly forgot about it.

I've probably reinstalled 8-9 times since then.

I think part of the problem is the name, which is hard to remember - have you experimented with more literal domain names?
Their petition on their website: http://www.thefitfinder.co.uk/witnessthefitness/
Sarcastic memo:

Seems like there could be some good money to be made fining final year students for whatever little offenses we can think of. What are they going to do, forfeit their degree over a few hundred (or thousand) dollars?

This will have to do until we can find a way to retroactively cancel their degrees at any time in their ensuing professional lives because they do something that as a graduate of this university might cast it into a bad light. (Or just when money gets tight).
Who are your users? Doesn't your strange name make it hard for people to find or recommend you? How about something more boring but direct like AppInstaller or MisterApp (hello, patio11!)?
Now if that's not extortion, I don't know what is.
If you are interested in Rails, try this: http://guides.rails.info/, based on Rails 3.0 which is in final beta.
If I walk into a store, buy something, and am then "fined" $300 and told I can't leave with the item I just bought unless I pay the fine... someone's going to be sued, and it's not going to be me. Of course, colleges won't admit that they are a degree store, but...
Just tried it.

It's far behind the East Bay Express for events near Oakland, Ca.

This is an appealing area. I want there to be a good engine like this because I want to find out what happening as well as promote my own events. I wish that some search engine was good at this. Goby doesn't seem to be there yet.

The busy ajax front page isn't good either. Sorry if it's old hat but search engines should be minimalist like Google.
I hacked together a gtest calculator in ruby if anyone is interested. I keep meaning to clean it up, but I haven't had time.

http://github.com/zachaysan/Split-Test-with-the-G-Test
This might clear up your confusion: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-...
Posted 2008. This video made me salivate at getting a PS3. I never did buy one. But still, pretty neat!
Breaking away from "The Man" - GridSpy goes Full-time.
Thank you for all of the feedback that some of you have sent me via email. I will take all of it into consideration. I'll take the week to implement the changes and might ask for some more feedback later.

Derek
The Django Book is a great way to start with the Python Framework "Django" - Like Ruby on Rails but in Python (and thus with more awesome) - http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/
I've been at 3 startups and if you want to _learn_, you better get a job at an established tech company with a solid R&D. Startups are too focused on "ship early&often" which doesn't leave any room for R&D. An average startup will teach the fastest possible assembly of open-sourced blocks together for yet another "big" sales call or a VC presentation. If only I had a dollar for every time I've heard "how many weeks do we need to build this?" There is a limited set of things you can build in 2-3 weeks which is worth learning.
Ok now take this whole bunch of salt, because I have no idea what Diaspora is planning, but another model might be more like p2p.

So there are no accounts with Awesomea or Crapula. Instead you have the diaspora software running on your own machine. Now Awesomea and Crapula have some social aspects on their site - for instance they want to send an update to your friends. So Awesomea and Crapula sends a request to your ip on the Diaspora port which includes the update message. Its now up to your computer to distribute that message to your friends, and Awesomea and Crapula have no idea who those people are.

Of course you'd probably want the diaspora software hosted externally, but the model could still mostly be the same. Now if Awesomea or Crapula need to compute something using private data, I don't know what happens, perhaps they can provide logic to be run in a diaspora sandbox somehow.
Loopt: Turning Consumer Loyalty Into a Cellphone Game
Big difference between "I'm gonna mess around on this windows box for an hour or two a day to see what it's like to use" and "this is my machine and it runs windows"
The Best Bachelorette Party Games
You mean intimately understanding feelings of frustration and annoyance?

ducks

Seriously though, I'm sure that the folks who are allowed to use Windows are exactly the ones who need it: Picasa and Chrome devs (and the other desktop apps they have).
Beyond Belief: Science, Reason, Religion & Survival
And then there's Edward Fredkin, who dropped out of Caltech after a year, and later (without a degree) became a full professor at MIT, as well as founding a number of companies.
Rank Better In Search Engines – Optimize Website Loading Time
Never check the patience of web user by providing a slow web page, most of the users will just quit and opt for another one.
Also, this is hard because most of the standard sites for posting events (like craigslist) don't allow aggregators to scrape their sites - well, it's obvious why they wouldn't want that...

Also, the time part is the hardest problem. How can a spider determine when an event post on the web is happening and index it - including "every third Friday" events? (not impossible but hard)
I wrote similar code for my photo sharing startup at least 5 years ago. Showing a photo's detail page and related photos based on tag and dates from that photo is a fairly trivial task. I really don't see the big deal; surely others have done something similar. They just weren't Facebook!

Now if someone had taken their name, changed a letter, then their logo and made it 3D, and them built a big brand around it, then I'd say go sue their asses off. But this? Seriously?