skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, here's a specific: if I wrote my comment the way that Taleb writes books, I'd expand my remark with a bad metaphor, re-state the metaphor ten different ways, and then use those re-statements as proof by example of a broader thesis concerning the decline and fall of English literature.

The man uses ten-dollar words where five-dollar words would suffice, he can't organize an argument to save his life, and his book chapters consist of endless assertions and re-stated assertions of the chapter titles with little further elucidation. Those are but a few of my specific complaints about his writing.
Carl Herold provides excellent programming lessons at http://www.highercomputingforeveryone.com/
Is there any doubt remaining that the goal of the Iranian government is to build a nuclear bomb? Is there any doubt that they will use it? Either directly or through a proxy?
Style Master CSS Editor for Windows and Mac OS X
CSS3 Please -- Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator
The Milky Way would have also moved a bit further around the centre of gravity of it's local galaxy cluster I'd assume. This is what I was talking to my brother about recently but we didn't look up an answer. To an observer outside our galaxy what speed and possibly direction(probably unanswerable?) are we moving in on Earth?
There are also functional koans. Same idea for some other languages.

http://github.com/relevance/functional-koans

Each of the following languages has its own branch: Clojure, FSharp, Haskell, and Scala.
Ask HN: has anyone had success with odesk or elance?
I have a PHP project I want to get built and don't have much money. I'm thinking of using elance or odesk. Has anyone had any success using these services? Any pitfalls to look out for, or tips on how to succeed? Anyone willing to say how much their project cost them?
Traffic captured at Defcon 2010 Wall of Sheep

POP - 4.3%
FTP - 6.7%
IMAP - 10%
HTTP - 23%
Four Square - 23%
Twitter - 33%
i dont can't hack the ethernet telkomflash
who can help me?????
Ask HN: What questions do you ask yourself often/repeatedly?
Some of mine, wherever I am, include:
- Why is this like THIS? And how could I make this beter?
- STOP - Why are you doing this? (This is usually when I'm doing something I shouldn't be, like incessantly checking HN.)
- Will I regret not doing this? (Whenever a big decision needs to be made.)

And you?
if only i could up-vote twice... thanks!
NYU's ITP program is similar in some respects to MIT's Media Lab. I attended their spring project show a few years ago and it was very interesting. Lot's of creative types there. MIT's Media Lab is also a very interesting place with very, very smart people there. I've heard that it is difficult to get into.
Awesome story. I actually wish it were legal to threaten to kill people sometimes. Because this tactic could be put to good uses more often. :)
I work with him (http://f-i.com) and he is an incredibly talented interactive developer. His work, and these demos show an extreme attention to detail and an incredibly nice, human touch to interaction and motion.

Alright, I'll stop. Just make sure to check out the demos.

Plus, here's a blog entry he wrote on HTML5 and his experiences - http://www.kontain.com/fi/entries/94636/thoughts-on-html5-ca...
That's a beautiful demo and it runs well on Opera 10.60/Vista.
FYI, related story with video footage:
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2007/07/m...
That's what I meant...there is probably a sysadmin somewhere responsible for updating SSL certs, and a separate person responsible for updating images.
Pretty close...
Also, what's with the gigantic yacht steering wheel?
If you think people bashing gold are ignorant, then you should not be quoting Buffet, he is one of the biggest gold bashers out there.
Top Ten Most Expensive Dogs | Top Ten
Android App of the Week: Touiteur | MobileLuv
How To: Create an inexpensive hourly remote backup
I ask myself some of the same questions. Why is this like this, and How can I make this better?
Thanks for the good discussion as well. It's refreshing to have a civil thoughtful engaging conversation about such topics, for a change. Thank you Hacker News and thank you lionhearted as well.

Two quick things. When I say "heinous" practices, I'm not talking about these simple cultural practices or the veil. I was literally referring to violence extremism.

I'll agree with you strongly on the fact that most of the modern thinking you're referring to will be at odds with very traditional religions anywhere. But, all in all, I really do think the two can coexist actually and I think the United States is a great example of that. That's why I love it so much ;)
He states that the code in the screenshot is "normalized" for a better diff. I believe this involved adding underscores to all of the variable names.
I've used both. ODesk for some HTML/CSS work and Elance for some help uploading content into a wiki and in a second project on Elance writing some Java.

My impressions:

* I had a bad experience on ODesk with HTML/CSS work. The person just wanted an easy buck and did a poor job. It would have been faster for me to do it myself. (This is just one anecdote, not an indictment of ODesk.)

* I had a good experience getting some Java code done on Elance. Why? Because I wrote a very strict interface that had to be extended and produce very precise results to be considered successful.

* I also had a good experience (again on Elance) getting a small wiki updated and cleaned up.

All projects probably cost me $500.

In general, I would avoid these places if you have someone local you can work with. If not, then you have to be super super clear on what you want. If there is any ambiguity then prepare for disaster. You'll need to have clear specs, or interfaces, with very clear success criteria for them to work with.

Sometimes I find writing clear specs and managing the outcome takes longer than just hacking it myself, which is why I don't use them much anymore.
It depends. Obviously unencrypted wifi is trivial to sniff, and WEP encrypted wifi is only modestly harder. However, wifi can be configured to be highly secure, with for example WPA2/AES, etc.

Both GSM and CDMA are encrypted, but I believe both have been broken and aren't considered as secure as something like WPA2/AES.

Keep in mind though, that it's not just the trip over the wireless network that's at issue, it's also anywhere on the Internet between you and the service you're using (Foursquare in this case).
So strange. This is the past too. Commerce is easier over distance. People can live where they fish and hunt and farm and still buy Nikes from Zappos or books from Amazon. Creativity needs density, but most living doesn't. I just can't buy this premise.
Astronomy Cast is great. I wish I had a similar "not just what we know, but how we know what we know", friendly conversation type podcast for more subjects.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Turning the radio on for a second every 15 minutes does not use much battery. Certainly not as much as, say, turning on the screen for a few seconds to check whether or not you have any new DMs.

The disadvantage is that you only get updates every 15 seconds. The advantage is that you don't have to host a hack that adds push notifications onto Twitter somehow.
Before my company got bought we spent years lamenting that we didn't have the budget to purchase licenses for WI. As soon as were acquired, we were stoked to suddenly have the budget to get tools. In pure "cursed-monkey's-paw" fashion, we quickly realized how awful the tool was; and have subsequently stopped including it as part of our methodology.

I'll occasionally use it for what I think is a straight-forward purpose, and more often than not, it's more trouble than it's worth. We've demoed a couple of other web scanners, and it definitely doesn't seem like WI is alone in it's awfulness.
Foursquare's response: http://blog.foursquare.com/post/990202740/changes-to-our-aut...

tl;dr version: Implementing HTTPS, should be live in "coming weeks'.
Just do what I do: use an 8 character random password... twice.
It's nice to be able to type something short for such common actions as running a development server. I'd rather use Rake, or something similar in Python, though. I tried porting part of it to Rake, and found the syntax to be much clearer afterward to me. My guess is that more Python programmers would be comfortable modifying Ruby than would be comfortable editing Makefiles.

http://gist.github.com/543235

There are also some Rake-like python tools, but I need to investigate more.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1407837/is-there-an-rake-...
Added to my trip profile
And what if PGP were modded to use combinations of words out of the dictionary (human readable) as public keys? I have no idea how that would even be possible, but it seems to be theoretically possible, and that would satisfy all three requirements: security, decentralization, and human-meaningful.

I probably missed something.
This is odd considering it's a 24 hour store.
The article isn't very accurate. In the episode, two people can swap minds, but the same two minds cannot be swapped twice. The article says that "after enough swaps everyone can find their original body." But this is incorrect. The actual math problem solved says that by adding two people to the pool (the harlem globetrotters in the episode) you can then always find a way for everyone to swap into their original bodies.

The math proof shows this by starting with an arbitrary permutation of minds (pi) for n people, then adds two new people x and y to show that there now exists another permutation of minds (sigma) that "undoes" the original permutation. This means there's a way for everyone to get their bodies back.

Without the addition of two people x and y there is no such guarantee.

To understand the details you'll need to know about group theory. Specifically permutations. This isn't a "deep" problem. But it is awesome that it's correct and on TV!
Revenge of the TV Writers
Thanks for sharing the story. I was thinking that maybe a good course of action would have been to find some guy like the one you mention here and see if they were interested in being beta testers/consultants in exchange for getting the machine for free.

My dad and I are kind of like you and that guy, by the way. He's the shop guy with no schooling but almost half a century of experience building stuff, and I'm the one who knows all the math and computer stuff... ;-)
Actually, they don't have to be running at all times on Android either. Apps can request to have a portion of them run on a periodic, or in 2.0 and above they can register a sync adapter with the OS sync manager. The sync manager handles scheduling and running of any registered sync adapters, and can adjust their schedules to minimize used radio time, and hence used battery life.
In general, I would avoid these places if you have someone local you can work with. If not, then you have to be super super clear on what you want. If there is any ambiguity then prepare for disaster. You'll need to have clear specs, or interfaces, with very clear success criteria for them to work with.

Sometimes I find writing clear specs and managing the outcome takes longer than just hacking it myself, which is why I don't use them much anymore.

summed up, if you are not a developer already, your chances of a successful outcome are slim. I try to explain this to people all the time who have no idea of what they are getting themselves into.

It is not a place that you can "offload" your technical work without deep technical oversight. It is a site where an in-house or near-shore team can write a system, develop a plug-gable architecture, define interfaces, and solicit developers to build a bunch of plug-ins that the in-house team would have no hope of completing on time.

If you do not posses that technical talent, then you first need a onshore guy that can help provide technical know-how. He can then help you make decisions as to what will succeed on sites like that, or most likely will link you with a Eastern-European or Indian development house directly.
'Innocent Infringer' copyright defense for downloaders goes to US Supreme Court
Top 40+ Twitterrific Google Chrome Extensions
What about in your config file:

Host *.whatever.com
ServerAliveInterval 900
Host *.whatsup.com
ServerAliveInterval 60
Fake.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp
what a pathetic little child, who lacks the courage to apologize for his little temper tantrum. so to sum up, the issue is that kurzweil, an outsider, has dared to make a prediction related to biology with myers in earshot despite providing "no explanation for how we'll be 'reverse engineering' the human brain"
The ratcheting flip-flop is the best-case scenario for when a question is popular enough for some people to stick around and keep it open. Most of the time, closure is a death warrant for a question. I've seen some real "diamonds in the rough" closed because of this.
Maybe in the modern world we've developed colour fatigue from over-exposure. Back then very few man-made objects were brightly coloured, so the vivid ones tend to stand-out. They also speak for the level of craftsmanship and thus value.
Apple doesn't want innovation on the iOS platform that doesn't come from their halls, because other people might screw it up (or worse still, do it so well that it outshines areas where iOS is only mediocre.)
I find that all sodas from a plastic bottle are so much worse than a can, straw or not.
Sure there's doubt. They could just be using this as geopolitical maneuvering, plus internal propaganda. Having a credible nuclear program makes Iran's bargaining position much stronger.

As for using it, why would Iran use it? What would they gain from such a thing? One nuclear missile is enough to kill a lot of people, and of course every death is a horrible tragedy, but it's not enough to really seriously hurt another country. Hell, it takes several nuclear missiles just to properly destroy a rail yard.

Iran is being watched carefully enough that, if they used a nuclear bomb (either directly or through a proxy), it would be traced back to them, and the consequences would be dire. Nuclear bombs are far more useful to Iran as bargaining chips than as weapons.
I really wonder if all these parents today were so tremendously traumatized by their freer range that they have to coop their kids up all day to avoid that kind of catastrophe? Are there really millions of child rearing adults suffering from PTSD because they go to ride the bus alone at 9? I've yet to really understand this strange phenomenon of the shrinking roaming area.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-...

I grew up in an urban area, then moved at 10 to a very rural one. In both places my "roaming" area was several miles in any direction from my house. In fact, my parents set my roaming area in the city to a specific triangle of roads that they felt were too big to and dangerous for me to cross, but weren't too mad when my friends and I did on occasion veer outside of those lines. If I had an older friend with us (he had to be at least 13) then we could pretty much go anywhere our feet or bikes could take us in a day.

I did this until I was about 10, then we moved to a very rural area and my boundaries became very large indeed...basically as far as I was able to walk.

My parent's were aghast when they were contacted by the local rural middle school after the principle had seen me cutting across an intersection in front of the school after class one day to get to the local shopping mall to hang out at the arcade. He demanded that I either take the bus home, or get a cab to take me literally across the street, an activity I had previously performed, at a much younger age, dozens of times a day.
What is human-meaningful about destructively omnipresence stiff fathom bushwhacked parasailing jumbotron articulated sline comonad ephemeral xenophile butt headphones liquid turquoise soar classic pantheon?
What's the best way to handle this? Use HTTPS? I'm working on an app that will have a similar architecture.
Why iTV specifically? How is this different than Boxee or GoogleTV?
Use KeePass + DropBox or a network share. That's what my company does. KeePass is really solid software.

http://keepass.info/
What kind of programming are you going to do? Web, desktop? What are you doing it for? career, hobby? If you are doing it for personal enrichment then get an arduino and learn embedded, embedded is far more rewarding than any other form of programming.

If it is for money than web and mobile is where it is at and for web there is no better language to learn right now than Javascript. Get a Javascript book, a web server, and go to town.
I live in boring suburbia. The elementary, middle and high schools are a 10, 15 and 20 minute walk from house respectively. Somehow, I still have to contend with kids all over the neighborhood dutifully lining up so that the bus can come pick them up at the crack of dawn and then drive them, 2...maybe 3 minutes to their schools. It's stupid.
Discrete as in you'll never take a derivative of anything, so the parent pun comment is meaningless. At least in the subset of group theory I studied, no continuous functions were used which are the only objects that derivatives are defined on.

In other news, (bad) pun threads have come to hacker news. I guess it was always a matter of time.
$3.50 DIY TV-B-Gone Micro
Something similar is also common in very rural places. Where walking miles through the woods, or along a dirt road are the normative ways local kids find each other.
Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse
Game designer Jesse Schell discusses the potential benefits and pitfalls of an increasingly video game-oriented world. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on July 27, 2010.
But when the researchers applied that same processing power to 12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to make them snap.

I love how they position this as some sort of strenuous discovery and not simple math.
Tell that to Cisco's iPhone or Fujitsu's iPad. :-)
It's rather surprising given the propaganda on this subject, but the consensus of US intelligence agencies remains that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

http://www.armscontrol.org/issuebriefs/irannie2007
Ask HN: What's an average salary for a web developer?
PHP, JS, jQuery, MySQL, HTML/CSS, 2-3 years experience.
I've had similar experiences. My first experience on Elance was phenomenal. I found someone in Baltimore who worked wonders with a PPC advertising campaign, turning a money-waster into a profitable venture. I thought it would always be that easy.

The next 2 were not so pretty. The first was a simple content writing task (provider from Texas). The first results were on time and of great quality. Then the delays started, then the excuses (sick pet, sick child, storms and power outages, death in the family). Finally I got no response at all for weeks, and when all the milestone dates had passed I got a refund.

The last one was so-so. The next was a simple design job (provider in Pakistan)...5 HTML templates for 5-page brochure sites. The provider's portfolio looked great, and the bid price was right. The designs were amazing, but the coding was terrible...I had to have it re-done by someone else. And the designs came quickly but the coding took forever. I'm guessing the guy was a designer who usually works with a partner for the HTML/CSS coding, and he tried to cut his partner out of the deal by doing it himself.

EDIT: Forgot to include this: the final solution to my problem was finding my own team in the Philippines. I lucked out when I found an amazing project manager who put a team of 10 developers, designers, content writers, and data entry guys together and he manages everything so I don't have to. Now we do transparent outsourcing for other web design companies.
Couple of gems...

An environment that’s alive at all hours, populated by all types, and is, most of the time, pretty safe. What he was saying, really, was that New York had become the Web. Or perhaps more, even: that New York was the Web before the Web was the Web, characterized by the same free-flowing interaction, 24/7 rhythms, subgroups, and demimondes.

Hampton says he views the Internet as the ultimate city, the last stop on the continuum of human connectedness. I’d argue that New York and the Internet are about the same, in the way that a large bookstore feels like it offers just as many possibilities as Amazon.com—maybe slightly less inventory, but more opportunities to stumble on things you might not have otherwise. Whichever the case, what the Internet and New York have in common is that each environment facilitates interaction between individuals like no other, and both would be positively useless—would literally lose their raison d’être—if solitary individuals didn’t furiously interact in each.
Instapaper does this; you only have to set up a password if you want.
This is one of those things that's like, WFC?
Mostly the same, including - what should I do with my life? And, much less philosophical - who owns this? (there are so many businesses, so many buildings, infrastructure, etc., who owns it all? Where does it come from? How can I start building and creating?
I can read it to you over the phone? Or even more simply... I can just read it
It never really sank in with me until this: flash is dead.

Those were gorgeous. The mark of good software is that it inspires you think of uses for its underlying technology. As of now, I actually take "HTML5" seriously, thanks to this.

We should see more robust libraries, and even "authoring tools" in the near future.
It costs $100 per user for the Foxit pdf editor? Or the api?
MUMPS == ugly.
It depends. Where do you live? Who are your clients? How complex are the projects? How big is the company? How many other staff are there?
What am I not seeing? What am I taking for granted?
If you can spare the time we would love more UX feedback for JIRA :)
In this sense does anyone know if KeePassX is any good?

I'm interested in password storage but I have both windows and linux machines.
Interesting extension, but Chrome gives an ominous "This extension needs access to your data on all sites." I assume this is necessary to be able to read the targets of forms.
How did I manage to be such an idiot last year?, and how can I not be such an idiot this year?
Top 3 reasons call centers have difficulty recruiting
Nearly 65% of call center companies report “Some” or “Major” difficulties in recruiting new staff to work in their call center. Even more dire, only 2% of call center companies report no difficulty in recruiting new staff! In an economy with 10%+ unemployment, why such difficulty?
Like eating the bones of your defeated opponents kind-of-a-thing?
Use tokens issued for a user and IP combination. Use HTTPS to carry the auth for the user and return a token. Use the token with HTTPS or HTTP to continue talking to the server. Expire tokens after some reasonable time. Expired tokens indicate you need to reauth. If you lose a token, it could only be used by someone pretending to be you (and with your IP), so limit what a token can do via the service's API if you want.

Additionally, keeping a user's clear text password in a local datastore is usually a 'bad idea'. At least store the MD5 or SHA-2 of the password (MD5 is considered insecure now though) and then pass the hash along to auth the user before giving them a token.
Small company, 8-10 employees, 2/3 of which are developers. Front end interface development. Let's consider US and/or Western Europe.