skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What information were they gathering? Quite possibly nothing at all. The Russian secret service plays a long game; it would not be out of character for them to have someone doing absolutely nothing for 10 years just so that they could be used to pass messages at a later date without drawing suspicion. Of course, if they saw something useful -- say, if they found out that someone in a position of power had large debts -- they might be expected to break cover to the extent necessary to report that.
So on taking a further look at the court filing I think what we have here is your basic "real world spam" business model. Unfortunately these things are all over the place as they are a proven way to generate money by sending out a firehose of solicitations for an essentially useless "service".

Looking at the solicitation it clearly covers it's ass with all sorts of disclaimers, despite looking deceptively like a bill at first glance. I don't think the solicitation itself will hold up in court as being fraudulent alone. What they are alleging is that they did not even bother to put all the names in the book, and they did not send out as many books as they said they would.

You might ask yourself how such a mailing could be successful. Well, it is a sad truth that there are many aging business owners in many small towns across this country who are not quite on the ball enough to read the fine print anymore. Who falls for all those Nigerian emails? Obviously someone. Basically what these guys are doing is vacuuming up small checks from old man Higgins who is still running the ole' TV repair shop in downtown Podunk, even if nobody much bothers to fix their VCR anymore and the new Wal-Mart has got em for $49 anyways.

At some level this is along the lines of those "Who's Who" books that select you to be in a book of awesome people, and wouldn't you like to buy a copy? That kind of thing is pointless and deceptive, but not illegal. There seems to be more going on here.

A few questions:
Why get mail at a PO Box in Atlanta if this business is in Florida and it is so legitimate?

Illegal or not, do you really think this is the kind of ethics you want in your CFO? Or was it a deal with the dark side that had to be made?
We are talking about the Push Button Reset feature and resintalling operating systems, not defragging a drive.
If you do that, make it optional. I kind of like just 'Nexting' through a random list, since I feel like it is exposing me to music and genre's it wouldn't had it known my current playlists.

Also, a search feature for me to find Yael Naim on mixest would be nice too :).

Otherwise, so far so good. Like the simplicity. Question: Is the only thing that 'More Obscure' does is to suppress songs you've heard before or don't want to hear again? The words imply a little more.

Only complaint is the registration password field needs to be obscured, instead of plaintext. Always disconcerting to type my password and actually see it, even in the privacy of my home PC.
You don't need to use URL shorteners here, friend: http://starsmedia.ign.com/stars/image/article/864/864678/top...
Utter nonsense. A smart Indian CS student would never sell his soul to an outsourcing company like Wipro, Infosys and TCS. They are mass recruiters who hire people to show more headcount. Most of their so called "developers" are very poor in programming aptitude.

The smartest Indian programmers either to go abroad for further studies and work there, or work in product development companies at home in India.

To the Author of this post: If you are a smart Indian student, STAY AWAY from Wipro, Infosys, TCS. It may be the best career move you will ever make. Trust me.

PS: Yes, I am a Indian CS graduate. I graduated a year ago.
And another thing. Why in the hell would you run a yellow pages company if your brother is already a "fugitive" for doing the same thing. Really? Don't you think that might be a sign... I mean... Really?
>Start watching Alan Kay talks. He explains.

I'm not that jazzed about the idea of reminiscing about a Smalltalk. How about instead of making esoteric references, you just say what's on your mind?

This is a thread, not a bibliography.
I don't remember much about Neural Networks from university other than it was something about half the PhD students where up to.

Does anyone care to explain the algorithm used by Brain.js?

E.g. "Standard feedforward multi-layer perceptron neural network trained with backpropagation"
Working in MacDonalds can be a good experience. You learn how to interact with people. And maybe you could get a chance to improve your English skills there.

Remember, there is dignity in every form of work, and you can learn something almost everywhere.
Things You Drink Can Be Used To Track You
Star Trek Blueprints - Ed Whitefire Enterprise NCC-1701-D Blueprints
Three fields should be ok - username, pass, confirm pass. Better that than visible passwords. If users want to add their email and other info later, have an Account page for that.
@tsally but Google does not profit nor market itself directly or indirectly from copyright infringement. The Pirate Bay does markets itself and profits(in the millions) from facilitating and the inducement of copyright infringement.

I use to download but grew tired of hoarding content and then hard drive crashes. Thankfully the content creators created Hulu and other legitimate ways to consume their content online. Maybe those who upvoted this live outside of the US?
Oh Yeah. I installed LFS once. Then I installed Gentoo. Then Arch. Learn't a lot of things along the way. Definitely recommended.
The real question is: what will biology be able to do that computers arn't able to?

Back then the real alure was that computers could compute things amazingly quickly, and later, that through the internet, we could organize information on computer networks. And that everything could scale really quickly.

We may be entering an era of basement labs, but that doesn't mean that these breakthroughs will necessarily be life changing.

IT is working on the problems of organizing people and information. This will likely produce many more people working on solving human maladies. But all these things being done in basements without any regulation or standards may lead to some health risks for first movers.
Ask HN: How obsessive are you with your code?
So.. realized today that I probably spend an hour a day refactoring code. It's usually towards the end of the day, and includes items such as renaming variables, creating/moving classes, enforcing stricter patterns, writing in-depth comments, checking and removing dead code, and other general upkeep issues.

My question: is this too much? too little? How much time do you spend on these activities? Should I spend more time upfront thinking before coding (gasp!)?
Launch:
1) You would get feedback from users.
2) You would get motivation from users to develop new features.
3) You would get the sense of accomplishment.
4) You would get running production web site experience.

If you get no feedback at all (which is a bad sign) -- it's still good for you -- move on to the next idea.
More Obscure does more!

The algorithm is not plainly random.
It factors in how many times people have clicked more obscure for a particular artist!

tldr;
When you click More Obscure, the song won't play again for you. The entire artist will play less for everyone.
What's the deal with Mark Smith's brother Charles?

"In September 2009, a Grand Jury sitting in the Northern District of Georgia indicted Charles Smith for committing mail fraud. He remains a fugitive."
No need to intentionally restrict users.
Simply promote your web site to your closest friends first and later focus on promoting it to broader audience.
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Introducing Razor , a new view engine for ASP.NET
This doesn't seem very git specific. Of its three points, only interactive rebase is one that I'm not sure is present in other VCSs.
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If it is within the borders, it's just so, not by much. Also, legalities aside, this is unethical business behaviour and I wouldn't want to be associated with it in any shape or form.

But, hey, maybe there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Not logged in, when I mouse over the "like" button in ie8 it keeps flashing.
Http://www.officialbay.com/womens-shox-nz-shoes-pink-white-p-028270.html
solid explanation; as the dissemination of this information on a public message board would further the point as to why the main stream media would not have the relay.
Ask HN BEER EDITION
yuenglinkg or hieneken?
I would assume that if someone was held under suspicious of spying that person would have been believed to be spying, gathering critical information, i make this comment with the note worthy realization that the US citizens held in Iran for spying are generally not believed to be spies by main stream america.

iamdave further notes that the transfer of the focus of the information gathering would be a security threat in itself, maybe implying a security vulnerability that has yet to be resolved, or an overt reason to detain.
Should I spend more time upfront thinking before coding (gasp!)?

Probably. But anyone who reads my blog could have guessed that I would say that.

I tend to spend a long time writing code and then never look at it again. I even forget the implementation details. It makes my life much easier -- if I had to keep thinking about how btree_node.c calls proto_lbs_client.c which calls wire_requestqueue.c which calls wire_writequeue.c which calls network_buf.c which calls events_network.c I'd never get anything done. And if I can remember all that, I'm going to think about it whether I like it or not.

Just get the code right the first time. Then you can use it as a building block without needing to worry about implementation.
I think in this case, there is such thing as bad publicity. And as much as it may be unfair, I'd be surprised if this story didn't affect Hashrocket as well (which is not guilty of any wrongdoing).
By definition, these bio hackers will come up with things that are literally life changing.

The modern computing era started out with hobbyists, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs some of the most famous examples. This started less than four decades ago, now look where we are. Imagine if we had to wait for large corporations or governments to repeatedly try out new ideas and see what succeeded or failed. Democratizing technology poses risks as you mention, but also offers great potential for innovation. I hope the upsides of this new era outweigh the bad.
As much as I love the idea of a button labeled "More Obscure", and I do love it, it doesn't really have the function that name implies.
Please stop paying attention to Jakob Nielsen.

Password masking, along with asking for a password confirmation, is what everyone expects. Any affected attempt at 'simplifying' that UI without a total transformation (like no accounts at all, not shit like openid) leads directly to anger and disillusionment when their plaintext password is staring them in the face.

Use <input type=password>. Use two of them when registering, and one when logging in. It's a basic affordance, don't fuck with it.
As far as I know, they weren't actually charged with espionage. Rather, they were charged with being unregistered agents of a foreign state -- which is a crime of omission, not a crime of commission.
When I was more a user of open source software I would've agreed with you, but as I've become more involved as a developer I've come to understand Brett's point of view.

Now, I don't think the correct approach is to tell users to shut up. That's just dumb. I do think it's important to try to convey that there are real people working on this software, with real life pressures, and unconstructive criticism is not going to have any kind of positive result. At best it will have no effect, and at worst it will cause developers to lose motivation and move on.

One of the myths of open source software is that the whole community is pitching in, and developing software in tandem with a "core team" who is setting the direction for the project. The truth is that most of the work is being done by one or two developers, and the cumulative contributions by others in the community does not come close to what they're doing.

There are few open source projects that can survive if one of those core contributors becomes demotivated or loses interest.

Most people who work on open source software do so for the love of programming, and the joy in helping other people. When you read stuff like "This sucks!", or "I wasted so much time fighting with your project today", you start to question if you're really helping people. You think that maybe you should move onto something else that would help people, focus on a startup for yourself, take on contract work, learn something new or whatever. If you're like me, there's a dozen projects you could start on today if you weren't focused on an open source project.

You don't have to treat core contributors like rockstars, but it does help to treat them with respect and remember that there are real people behind those keyboards.
This just links to the Netflix login page, no info on a movie player.
Long list, but Ext4 not included?
love it! elegant
Too much, probably. For me, its not usually not related to reorganizing my code around. But, I'll nitpick over whitespace or brackets. I won't fix formatting up if I'm in the middle of working on something, but I'll make a mental note to come back to it.

My justification (to myself, at least) is that when I encounter code thats badly formatted, I find that the flow doesn't tend to make much sense (either to read, or as its actually executed) and it needs refactoring anyway. So, I'll fix the formatting up and read the code to see what it does. And then refactor parts, if necessary.
This really starts to matter when you're working with other programmers. There's always a fine line between too much refactoring and micromanaging, so I basically try to keep things to a level where I can quickly understand what's going on with one read-through. If I can't, there's a problem, and it's time to start cleaning things up.
Very cool, but a little scary to ponder what could happen when Fluffy Bunny gets ahold of a DIY genetic engineering kit.
I like VMware fusion provided you use the isolated mode. Trying to "fuse" windows 7 into OS X is the only thing thats crashed my macbook so far.
If this study was financed by the tobacco industry and claimed to have found that smoking was good for you, would you still remain completely agnostic as to the validity of the findings until you had thoroughly studied it?
Alright, that would further the explanation you gave as to the ten year idle delay of inaction and justify the lack of explanation of intent(as it would not have been clear if it didn't exist) as these "Spies" are just falsely labeled.
I concede the point :)
I estimate the demand to be about one or two microbes world wide.
Love it!

Are you planning on releasing a desktop application?

Also:

1. Username / password fields are a bit confusing
2. Do let the users know that registering won't pause / stop the music
3. Icons Icons Icons!

Otherwise, nice job :)
This is a stupid silly question.
man these bring out the kid in me. I used to look at these so closely in awe of how detailed they seemed.
> (stuck on 80% authentication)

+1. I had the exact same issue earlier today. Very much looking forward to this, though.
This is a great idea. The use of AJAX to keep everything on one page is kinda like how MSNBC has made its article pages require as little clicking as possible. Except less maximalist. For what it's worth, I put it on my blog and referred to it as "A pretty badass HTML5 take on the Pandora model."

I'm going to try this on the iphone. I like how the design is clearly made with that in mind, while still being perfectly usable on the desktop.
Sure, all the engineers and managers thereof can code, but there aren't very many of them. Not that long ago they were bragging about having 1 million users per technical staff member — but they employ a lot more content moderators and ad sales staff than engineers.
Um, yes it is. Return it for a refund after 30 days or don't purchase the product.
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Is anyone here using any of these? I just signed up for BigDoor. To me, I think Reputely has the best website - I like how they use the phrase "game mechanics" since I already know what they are, and what the value is.
> (particularly multiple protocols over the same socket)

> "killer apps" are for mongrel2

You just said it. Bypassing any connection limitations on the browser.
For me, it is a constant, iterative process. I don't drop into the "refactor mode" you described (except when writing docs, which I prefer to do in spurts, because newer code can be volatile), but instead habitually make little improvements to the codebase as a whole. So, similar to your description, I have a perpetual obsession with eliminating duplication and boilerplate from my code. The only parts that are "off limits" in my mind are bits that I know are being edited heavily by other developers, but I'm not shy about touching someone else's code otherwise, provided the tests pass.
What is the point of a social network if only you use it? ;)
The National Debt: Apocalypse Now
"Nitro is the Participation Engine. It's also Patent Pending." (from the footer at http://www.bunchball.com/)

Hmm.
I think heroku would be a good fit for Zed. Or maybe Railsmachine (if they want to step up the competition)
I just tried it on the iPhone and iPad … and while the site loaded, nothing played, even after hitting the play button. The iPhone is on 3.0, the iPad on 3.2.

Edit Got it working, but it took a lot of clicking.
You know how Clark Kent's boss, in the first Superman movie, says "A good reporter doesn't get great stories — a good reporter makes them great."?

Same thing with programming. If you are given enough freedom to do the job right, and you can find a way to motivate yourself, there are no bad programming jobs.

Zed Shaw himself has bragged about a system he wrote which does the kind of business logic you mention -- except by his description it's a meta-programming system that can add rules almost as fast as they can think them up. That sounds like some sort of constraint solver, which is among the fanciest kind of programming around.
I agree with you, which is why I didn't say "should be required", I said "should help out quite a lot". I was responding more to the original posts implication (which I may have mis-understood) that front-end engineering isn't a demanding discipline.

I found stuff I learned in my CS degree helped me understand closures in JavaScript for example, and the compilers course I did has helped out with a bunch of things.
I actually like the idea very much. You should launch already!
I know that it works against libel, but does it work against copyright? That's my point.
Good list Jason! I'm still here, and have been watching all the newcomers to the space with interest.

We've been providing our Nitro game mechanics platform to companies like NBC, Comcast, Hasbro, Warner Bros., etc. since 2007. We also have several startup customers and even a non-profit (Hope Lab - check out the cool work they're doing to combat tween obesity: http://www.uncommonprojects.com/uplog/2010/06/08/introducing...).

We've had 3 years of development, customer feedback, and on-the-job learning, so our platform's gotten pretty good, as has our team. And we have some cool stuff planned for the rest of this year and next.

Check out our website, and if you're interested in learning more, drop me a line. - rajat
Just tried it on my iPhone. It works pretty awesomely!
"SREs don't do all that much hard-core programming"

On the contrary, some of the code I've seen written by SREs has been among the most delicate, finely tuned, and "hard core" (by my definition) I've seen.
There's a good balance of writing it right the first time, and spending too much time with the details and not the actual feature you're implementing.

With enough experience, you'll know how to start writing something such that it won't require extensive refactoring. Make sure it's good enough that if you don't have enough time, it's still good in these two major ways: as fast as possible with no redundancy, maintainable by someone else.
Yeah, I'm sure you're doing this to gauge the interest before writing the paper but you really need to improve the wording of the email. I clicked a link with a PDF icon saying "Download the PDF file", if there is no PDF file you should explain why and not just drop a generic "thanks for your patience".
On the block: squeezedbooks.com
I agree, the point I was trying to make was that deciding to _not_ buy a phone because it's fashionable is a fashion statement in itself. If the iPhone 4 is good, why not buy it regardless of how (over)hyped it is? Then again, I do see ideological/technical reasons not to buy the iPhone, for instance due to its closed nature.

I think Nokia could have challenged Apple if they had fully focused on Maemo when they first released the 770, and developed a culture of making better, more bug-free software. Now, I'm not so sure. Android has taken the place that Maemo could have had. Steve Jobs was actually right when he said that smartphones had "baby software" during the iPhone introduction - and the mobile industry didn't realize it at that point because _everyone_ were making baby software for their phones until Apple came along.

The people complaining that Apple didn't use the Newton OS for the iPhone doesn't realize that Apple would have been in the same position if they had (regardless of all the innovative features of the Newton).
People seem to like the site, but I've set myself the challenge of working on stuff that has a direct revenue model - I provide a service, you pay me - rather than advertisements. It's tough, because my instincts are to just go build something cool, and then worry about money.
Nope, Pivotal is just providing space and mentoring.
Given the amount of energy that is produced for every atom of helium you are getting this is an unlikely path to adding to the global helium reserves. We would be able to power a small country with the energy that would be produced in the course of getting enough helium to fill a small blimp.
If you haven't already, consider making the user-facing portions of the service easily localized and translated. I can see myself pitching this service to a client but the UI for end users can't be in English only.
I'm glad you like the button =P

there IS one thing it does which isn't advertised:
we actually use the "More Obscure" click data in our algorithm to select which song plays next. So by clicking More Obscure you're helping us fine tune our library so that everyone only hears more obscure music =]

We'll definitely improve on communicating that aspect of it.
Well, for what it's worth, it does send me to the movie player, but then, I'm logged in and have the silverlight plugin installed. Still don't see why this would be on HN.

(And yeah, it sends you to a "Riverworld" movie. Did they make a miniseries out of PJF's SF epos? I shudder at the thought, considering the quality of the recent Dune and Earthsea adaptions.)
My local theater's site allows you to purchase tickets online. However, in the final ordering form, in which you enter your credit card details, there's a CAPTCHA.

What are they protecting against? Automated bots sending them more and more money?