skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Buying a stock is, essentially, buying a piece of a company.

It's nice to own stock in a company that's currently profitable and get a share of its current profits; it also makes sense to own stock in a company you expect to become profitable in the future and get a share of its future profits. Stocks can be a good investment even if they don't presently give off dividends.

Stocks that will never give off dividends are a bit different. I suppose they give you "ownership" of some portion of the company's assets, so if the price is less than the value of the current or future assets represented by a stock, that can also be a good investment.

What doesn't make sense is buying stocks that don't pay dividends, won't pay dividends, and are priced high in comparison to the company's current and expected future assets. Buying stocks in that category is like buying a house as an "investment" in 2008.

EDIT: HN user jakarta said it better a couple weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581366
ORIGINAL FACTORY UNLOCKED APPLE IPHONE 4G 32GB & 4G 16GB
Well do you even have a lot of background threads, or could there be another reason? Like The Galaxy S using a faster processor?
Because despite assertions to the contrary, most Americans prioritize many things higher than low taxes when they consider a region to live in.

One might argue that some of the regions that collect more taxes provide services that help make them more attractive, but that link is speculative. I would imagine though that the services state and local governments provide are of a broader range than services provided by cantons in Switzerland which may be another difference.
there is one huge advantage to the 'forth' way of doing things, you can start processing left-to-right as you read in the data. This makes it possible to stick a forth 'processor' on the other end of a wire and to parse / run the code as it gets pushed down the wire without needing backing store the size of every possible input.

For a 'lisp' like structure you'd need at a minimum enough storage to get all the way to the innermost expression before you can start to interpret the data.

Normally not much of a problem, but if you were to make a fabric that consists of little processors stuck together with comms wires the forth way of doing it could be an advantage.
Doesn't Envion do something like this? http://www.envion.com/evp_envionoilgenerator.html
> no, mom won't use bittorrent

I introduced my mom, once a DVD collector, to bittorrent. She hasn't purchased many DVDs since and maintains a collection of hundreds of movies on external harddrives. I guess I have a cool mom.
ALL Hail the indestructible clone phone.

http://www.envirofone.com/Nokia/3315/details.aspx

I owned 2 of these, but sadly, both died the same way.. weird software error "CONTACT SERVICE" and failed to respond to any input. Which is sad, because one of those 2 survived a baptism in uric acid!
"rape of the hard work" ...?

They're literally not being heard at all right now, except by a very lucky few audio engineers at the museum.

A fixed license fee for orphan works like these would _always_ be a net positive, since they're starting from $0.
not sure what are all those dismissive comments are about. the news here is that it become exceptionally EASY to brute-force an 8 character password. 8char passwords did provide the security for a while, but it seems they don't anymore. Equipment built from off the shelf components (and not too many of them) can break such passwords today. I'm sure it will soon be used not just by NSA but by almost anyone, including some 'recovery' businesses.
Some process has to be running for push notifications, too.
Oh, come on. For decades the US increased its brain power by actively promoting brain drain from other countries, not just by reducing R&D taxes internally. It would be amusing and certainly fair game if Chile managed to do the opposite with a mere 40K per project.
You will notice he/she is quoting someone who did in fact become fairly rich, and not speaking from first-hand experience.
very unfortunate to arrest the researcher.

Indian election commission ideally should open source the hardware design and the software, and let there be debate on how to make the system foolproof.

but going back to paper vote should not be a option, we have enough backward thinking regional parties who are opposed to gender equality, education and technology
The Turing-roulette Game
Once again a demonstration that if such voting machines are to be used with any confidence then their hardware and software design needs to be open source for independent inspection. With closed source electronic voting the industrialization of election fraud becomes possible, and where it's possible a few individuals with power or money at stake will seek to exploit the vulnerabilities.
Why freemium is a bad idea for consultants
How did you find the phillipines company?
It illustrates nicely how clumsy a lot of languages are for such a simple-to-describe task. Mess with libraries, try to guess what's best to use...
After all these years I still like the plainness of BASIC.
And some reasons why you might want to do that:

* set up a machine with all packages installed on some (debian/ubuntu) server:
ssh server dpkg --get-selections| cut -f1 | xargs sudo apt-get install

* compare output of commands on two machines
diff <(command) <(ssh server command)

* test/configure software on a local machine, plugging in its input from the roduction machine where it will be installed once ready

* avoid installing software on the server entirely; pull in the remote output and wrangle it locally (obv. not so good for high volumes)

* think a bug can be fixed by upgrading some software? try it on a test machine, pipe in the required input, and see
Buzz Kill
If their bill passes, bloggers will still have to get a privilege license if their sites are designed to make money

Even though this is sold as an improvement over existing policy, it's still a bad policy. Adding layers of bureaucracy not only hampers entrepreneurship but it lowers the quality of life, a little chunk at a time. I'm convinced that future generations of Americans won't have the same freedom I had growing up. I know it sounds like hyperbole, but I really do believe that loss of freedom is more likely to happen in baby steps than is some sweeping revolution.
I realize that submitting StackOverflow questions here has become a bit of a "karma whore" (to borrow a phrase from reddit) trend lately, but I stumbled upon this question earlier and thought it might make for good discussion here.

As an extremely junior developer, I don't presume to know everything (or even much) about development, but I thought testing private methods was pretty much a given.

The argument in the accepted answer that "[a] private method is an implementation detail that should be hidden to the users of the class" seems to miss the point, IMO. I mean, an entire codebase is an "implementation detail that should be hidden from the (end) user" but it doesn't mean we shouldn't test it.

I think of unit tests as being tests of the smallest testable chunks of code, to ensure that every atomic piece of an application works to spec. By all means, test the public interface, but I think testing the pieces that make up that interface is important too.

That's two cents from a guy that has never done these sorts of tests anyway, so take it for what it's worth.
Well large corporations often get tax breaks in the US to locate a headquarters or factory in a state. But I think unless you are bringing several hundred jobs to the area, you are out of luck
Actually, I wish it were simpler still ;)

I guess it's just a difficult situation: especially with the geographical distance, a gut feeling is probably all I'll have to work with.

I'm curious though: is this not a common problem? Outside of the partner context, I don't often see discussions of trust relating to startups.

And about the value of the implementation: of course, I'm sure plenty could come up with the same or better solutions. The trick is that no one seems to have -yet- (publicly, at least) - which means that there may still be some ephemeral advantage to the first mover.
All large security vendors have R&D departments in China, Russia and Ukraine--they're the hotbeds of malware. I don't really see the problem here at all. The Russian government had the ability to buy McAfee products before (if they wanted to), too.
Wow, the monster from Fullmetal, that was freaky!

(hold down the mouse button and drag or click across the page)
Actually, Github's model is somewhat different; what they're charging for is the ability to make things private

There are a large number of potential business applications where this might be an important feature which most commercial users and some non-commercial users would be willing to pay for, and it saves the vendor the trouble of policing licences.

Customer support might well be one of those applications
Works well for me - we then sync our password file between us using Dropbox. It creates a lock file that also syncs and stops multiple people from editing simulaneously and messing things up.
The entire premise of orphan works is a scam. The issue is not even of releasing the recordings for all to enjoy. It's of a company or organization wanting to sell works still in copyright without obtaining permission from the legitimate owners, compensating them, or even having to bother trying to find them.

Works owned by large corporations are never orphaned. It's only the small independent artists and their heirs that get shafted by this scam.
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tl;dr: Dude was posting things on google buzz, for some reason it stopped posting, no one noticed including the author.
This is idiocy. There is no system in existence that I know of where you will be allowed to sit and try millions of passwords.

About the only place I can think of is encrypted partitions, when you somehow obtained the physical drive. But that usually has other, additional security mechanisms in place.

After failure number 5 most systems just lock the account. All the requirements on password complexity are sheer idiocy.
In practice I can imagine how this would be enforced. A typical cat and knitting blogger no one knows about won't be contacted. But the blogger that starts writing critically about the city waste and corruption is suddenly on the radar and will definitely have to pay the tax, and quite likely will be arrested for tax evasion.
"Buzz can tweet is not affiliated with Google or Twitter"

It's not really any of these two services' fault that this obscure addon stopped working.
Did you mean to say a few hundred visits a year? If you did or you just meant something else...then I'm sorry for the rest of my post. A few hundred visits a day is respectable. Though not easy or common, it is possible to do $10+/day with a few hundred visits/day.

Quick math: let's assume few hundred = 300 visits/day. Also have to assume the blog is self hosted so all revenue is kept in-house (unlike the bloggers in the article). So 300 visits x 5 page views = 1500 pageviews/day. That equals $7 CPM and a bit over $10/day or ~$3,750/year. Not messing with revenue from the feed or anything since this is just hypothetical numbers anyway. The change above the $10 will be enough to pay for hosting + domain costs. Alternatively, if you meant a few hundred views/day then dividing $3,750 by 5 still yields $750. Ah...I'm rambling and I doubt anyone cares too much so I'll stop.

Regarding the actual post, I don't agree with the fee either. This reminds me of a homeless SF guy trying to get back on his feet by shining shoes - SF came up to him and demanded he get a license and some other stuff too. Thankfully there was a small uproar and the city didn't end up screwing him over.
Been using 1Password across a PC and a couple of Macs myself and I love it.

As per [1] their data format is pretty open and based on the OSX Keychain format. Uses PBKDF2 to generate unique salts/encryption keys per password. Like any password management system, if you lose your master password, you’re still screwed… But (format being open and based on solid standards) it doesn’t appear (to me [2]) to be vulnerable to a similar attack (i.e, an unintentional backdoor password of sorts).

The Windows version must use some implementation of the same backend, since the data file works across platforms (they’re big on the Dropbox sync support).

[1] http://help.agile.ws/1Password3/agile_keychain_design.html

[2] i.e., with my limited experience with information security, knowledge of some best practices for password storage, and my interpretation of the data format
The Storray Engine, an excellent example of why we use databases.
Y in Practical Programs (Extended Abstract)
Inception-Oriented Programming
Copyright holders are supposed to release the works to the public domain in return for protection for a limited time.

For many years there there have been no payment and effectively no limitations.
The first thing you do is buy each of them a design patterns book and start forcing them to both read, and use eachother's code. When bugs appear, don't make the author fix the bug, make one of the other guys fix it. That'll probably motivate them faster than anything that they need to 1) write common library of code with interfaces they all agree on, 2) have a version control system they all like, 3) have unit tests to make sure there's no bugs.
great idea, but this may be a fatal flaw:

> you won’t try to be too-dumb (because you will be caught as an obvious deception)

After all if being too dumb is a guaranteed deception then programming a bot to be too dumb would mean that bot takes the big prize.
Sounds like someone needs to have a poke around techdirt.com for an afternoon.
It would also be wired for us BlackBerry users, where we get the email instantly, and then it wouldn't be in the inbox when you check it on your PC.
NASA Expanding Tests of Star Wars-Inspired "Droids"
From the description of the video: "The Japanese company Blest has developed one of the smallest and safest oil-to-plastic conversion machines out on the market today."

The first hit on Google for "Plastic to Oil" is http://www.polymerenergy.com/

They say: "System capacity can range from 200 tons to 400 tons of plastic wastes processed per month. Overall plant capacity can be easily scaled up by adding additional modules."
"HTML5 is going to evolve much faster than ActionScript."

As written, this statement is wrong.

Adroit developers are picking up HTML5's JS API's with more enthusiasm than they have ActionScript, and they'll push those API's to their limits, as they have done with the DOM API's. But the technology itself--the underlying standards--must necessarily evolve at a slower pace than a proprietary language like ActionScript. Browser vendors haven't quite caught up with HTML5's growth yet; once the the spec's final, W3C won't be moving the goalpost out any further for a long time.
Offline Gmail certainly has an Outbox. The main reason being you'll generally have no internet connection or a very flaky one. By product of it is that yu can indeed cancel emails after sending them.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to use an Outbox for some people. Gmail could offer it as a labs feature and whenever you request or end your session/logout it would send your email...
Removing email from an account once sent like above seems like a very bad user experience quirk.
Comparing Go Language with language X
I've been notified that Gowalla is also having the same problem - and unfortunately it's confirmed. I've uploaded another screenshot showing the same problem with Gowalla 2.2.1 on iPhone:

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_UrFI48Xbj8g/THD6IyfkCYI/AAAAAAAAALg/ZT...

Note that "Authorization: Basic" line - same problem with foursquare. If you're running the same procedures I outlined with Gowalla you'd see your own username:password right after the HTTP authorization line.
From Russia with bandwidth: A Russian start-up shows how 4G wireless might work
Ask HN: How do you organize studying for a course?
I need feedback on how people organize the whole process of studying for particular knowledge/skills domain, be it a university course or a new technology needed for his work/startup/etc.

More specifically, the questions without ordering:

* How do you organize the study materials and documents - textbooks/ebooks, papers, lecture notes, video lectues, assignments/exercises (+ answers) - generally the knowledge sources? The missing part for me is a way for centralized access for all these documents. The best that I've come up is a personal wiki with a page for the course and links to all the relevant documents. In theory, it should work, but it becomes a mess fairly quickly after the number of documents exceed, for instance, 10-15.

* How do you manage the tasks / "atomic" things that needs to get done next (the "Next Action" in the Getting-Things-Done lingo)? Do you use software application to handle these for you, and if you do, which one? The challenge here is mainly the multiple books/documents that need to be tracked for the reading progress, exercises done progress, etc.

The applications that I've tried using the above requirements with mixed success were: Wikidpad (personal desktop wiki), Thinking Rock (desktop GTD application), MonkeyGTD (personal browser-based wiki with GTD features), ToDoList2 (desktop todo application).

To recap, I still searching for a "solution" that allows me to follow this sort of workflow on my studies. Use case scenario:

1. On the day scheduled for study, I open the application and I see the very next concrete things that needs to get done. For instance: read Section 2.3 from Book #1; read Section 3.5 from Book #3; do exercises 1, 5, 11 from Book #4 (page 345); watch video lecture #4 and take notes....

2. As I'm crossing off the things that gets done I'm adding the next actions to be done that need to show off on the "project home page" when I return for the next study session.

3. The "tasks"/"actions" provide easy access for the study resources that are involved in completing the task - for instance, hyperlinks to the documents, files, etc.

Thanks you for your patience
Skype Etiquette
Or, it might not. Stocks have been flat to negative over the last decade. Stocks are great when they are going up. You can make amazingly high returns, but the market has this bad habit of crashing every few years or so, and if you're relying on it for retirement money, you might be screwed. I truly hope you weren't heavily invested in stocks and needed to retire at the end of 2008, or in 2002.

I've found a much better portfolio allocation that gives similar long term returns to being invested in equities, but without the wild swings:

http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-...
The nice things about this are:

a) From what I know, re-melting down plastic only works so many times till you hit a quality barrier, this can make use of the plastic that that process can't use.

b) This can make use of trash that otherwise would not have been recycled. It seems pretty agnostic about what plastics it accepts which is good, but on the other hand it also makes me wonder about byproducts in the oil and if or how they are extracted / disposed of.

Of course, at this point the price of waste plastic is cheap but it seems like if this caught on, then the oil suppliers would raise their prices for the raw plastic manufacturers, who would then have to raise prices for bottles and such, which in turn would probably lead to bottled drinks costing more. Which might even incentivize people to buy less of things with plastic packaging!

This price increase doesn't really apply much for the ton of existing plastic waste that we already have though, which can be obtained cheap, converted back to oil, then sold. All in all, this sounds great!
Why not do auto-detection?
IRS loses challenge to prove tax liability

Lawyer is acquitted after arguing income levy lacks legal foundation

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=42749
Right, you can cherry pick 10 year periods of time when the S&P did good, but don't forget about all those times it crashed. The problem with following Wall Streets advice to put all your money in stocks is that they make too much money from trading commissions to trust them for impartial advice.

Typical investment advisors tell you to buy stocks and then point out that over the last century stocks have done very well. The problem is that none of us are investing on 100 year long timelines. We are usually investing on 30-40 year timelines and hoping to have a good amount saved when we retire. If you happen to need to retire and start pulling money out in a bad year like 2008, you're screwed.

Check out this allocation for returns as good as stocks without the huge downside risk: http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-...
I think having to get a license to do business in full liability is a terrible limitation of freedom, even when it does not cost money. Taxes on business income of course are more justified, I'm complaining merely about the requirement to get a license to do business.

That being said, you probably should not enable advertising on a blog before it has a substantial readership.
Gold is a good hedge against financial crisis. Whenever the Dow has a day of selling, you'll usually see people buying lots of commodity ETFs like GLD or IAU.

The thing I like about gold is that it responds well to all types of financial crisis. Inflation risk? Gold goes up. Deflation/deleveraging risk? Gold goes up as well.
The benefits of a college degree in one graph
You can add labels to emails in the Drafts folder, so you could have an "Outbox" label if you wanted to.
Trust me, we're nowhere near inflation risk. The US is still in the middle of deleveraging $trillions in bad housing debt. The deflationary pressures will stick with us for years, if not decades, depending on how much money the government continues to waste trying to prop up a falling housing market.

While I think cash is definitely safer than stocks, you could make pretty good money investing in US treasury bonds or other "safe" investments, if you're worried about getting a better return than 1% or whatever the banks are paying for CDs right now.
> After failure number 5 most systems just lock the account.

Which gives us a nice method of blocking someone from their account just by intentionally logging in with a wrong password 5 times.

Much better method is to require user to solve CAPTCHA (or, maybe, "hashcash"-type test, to perform some time-consuming computation) after 2nd wrong guess per hour.

> All the requirements on password complexity are sheer idiocy.

Not exactly all. Sane minimal requirements like "you password can't be your name or birth date (or both of them combined)" are perfectly fine. It's very sad how many people use their birth year (yeah, just 4 digits!) as a password. And this is not because they don't care about their accounts (they do), it's just because they just don't get how insecure it is.

Just don't overdo it with real idiocy like "your password must contain at least one digit". Hey, my password generator gave me "CEvbnofFqDKNdRsW", and this IS really secure enough.
Ask how to make friends and everybody will tell you to have a hobby or join a club.

And when you do, you indeed meet people who only do these things because they enjoy them, already have enough friends and no time for new ones.

Or maybe it just looks that way to me when I'm in a bad mood like now.
Try to analyze the traffic. See if something goes to Google even for the sites that don't already have Google's tracking scripts on them.

I know, "it's all for convenience of user."
It removes the latency if you need to interact with the remote server, for example with remote repositories. I tried some experiments today with Bitbucket, and using connection multiplexing halved the time of most of my common mercurial operations (8s -> 4s).
The Five Superhero Reboots
Superheroes have been with us since the 1930s. Take a look some of them.
Just reading that requires you to be logged in.