skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author (title) is right; if Solve Media took over the CAPTCHA market, I would never look at CAPTCHA's again and likely not register with their customer's. I browse without ad-block extensions, but that in turn means I subconsciously ignore ad-like, site elements, which would include Solve Media's CAPTCHA.

I'm curious of Solve Media's affect on their customer's conversion rates.
The RSA Institute - Sir Ken Robinson – The Element
Ask HN: What android phone you can recommend for hacking
I would like to try doing things for android. Which phone fit best:

- GSM, not CDMA

- Relatively easy upgrades for Android without possibility to "brick" phone

- Not locked to particular cell provider or is relatively easy to unlock.
Templating systems are pretty useful and used in quite a few frameworks. Alot of the controls in ASP.NET basically work as templates where you define the markup and bind a list of data to the control the markup (template) is repeated for each piece of data. This is relatively easy on the server side, but on the client side it's a bit more difficult.

If you wanted to create a realtime twitter client, for example, done all on the client you'd need to fetch a collection of new tweets periodically and render them in JavaScript. Without a templating framework, you'd have to loop through the new tweets and construct the presentation using something like "innerHTML" or "document.createElement()". A templating system allows you to construct the layout of a single tweet in standard HTML, mix in a bit of the template's JS syntax, and then essentially "bind" the list of new tweets to the template and the markup is repeated for each new tweet.

Given that example, there are plenty of uses that follow the idea of replicating content over and over using the same template: Email clients, chat clients, news readers, blogs, photo galleries, classified listings, etc, etc.
here is the challenge I got when I signed up for the service: http://imgur.com/x5hoN.png

for the solution I put in 'stupid', and it worked

this definitely doesn't solve the security considerations that captchas were designed for.

Update: Ok so it didn't take long to break this thing. These guys have the plain text of the CAPTCHA in the document DOM. It isn't even an image - the CAPTCHA is rendered in javascript. See: http://imgur.com/9VO4J.png

The 'brand' logos are an image, but they are simple to OCR.

So to break this CAPTCHA, simply hook v8 up to your auto-submit bot and interpret the JS that is being returned to you. You can't read it from the client because they serve that IFRAME from a diff domain - so they base their security on the browser x-domain policy. But that is all moot if you are building a bot, or if you build a browser extension that solves these things.
Uzbl sounds like a very cool thing indeed. The mouseless GUI is something I've been slowly trying to have, and that's a very nice piece of it.
Sounds like a nice idea, although bash and GNU screen should also work. Or didn't I get the point?
My hobby is playing jazz guitar. It's safe to say I'm not going to get many instructional DVD's filled with pretty faces. (Robert Conti anybody?)
How Whereoscope (YC S10) located a market for its family-finder app
Self employed people statistically have more job satisfaction. Full stop. Call it a startup or call it a small business-- that's the truth [1]. You're tossing around a lot of hyperbole in your question-- to the point where it gets pretty ridiculous. But happiness/satisfaction is one big reason.

Another is that we're all in the same casino here, and the house always wins. You choose the safe path, and you'll die in your 80s. I choose the risky path and I'll die in my 80s. So you can pay nickel slots. And I'll play poker. Or hell, maybe I'll take a few whacks at the roulette wheel. I'll probably get a few more thrills and have a greater sense of control of my destiny.

One note: 9 out of 10 of us are doomed? Small business failure statistics are suspect... But how doomed is a software entrepreneur who fails? The failure scenario is generally, "Oh well, I guess I have to fall back on a 6-figure job."

I haven't seen any articles that preach the "undisputed manifesto" of startups (what the hell does that even mean?).

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2010/sb20100...
You can limit each memcached instance to only accept connections from a single IP address or a range of IPs. That would clear up a lot of the security concerns. Maybe instead of having everyone share the 400mb, you could rent 50/100mb chunks.
I'm not nearly as much of a hustler as either of you, but I traded three pokemon cards I got for free from a friend into 400+ cards back in 4th grade. (Pokemon cards were as good as currency for us.) I would trade a pokemon to someone who didn't care about energy cards (and would give me 10:1), then traded 5:1 for better cards, traded those cards for some star cards, traded star cards with better stats for holos with worse stats, traded holos with worse stats for multiple non-holo star cards, and kept this up until somehow I had a lot of cards. Never ended up buying a pack of pokemon cards either. My parents thought I was crazy.

Yeah I ended up accidentally sticking most of my holos into the wash on one occasion though. :(
Hot Vidya Balan, Vidya Balan, Wallpapers, Images and Photo Gallery
Vidya Balan is a Tamilian from Kerala. She is from the Iyer community. She comes from a middleclass family from Palghat, on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Vidya did her schooling from St Antony's School and later on joined St Xavier's College from where she graduated in sociology.
Transactional memory has been provided by several of the CLOS object databases. There have been logical language extensions to Lisp which see their data as in a database with transactions (Ap5 would be an example).

The JVM does not bring that much new to the Lisp world. What is new in the JVM nowadays is the concurrent GC and the JIT. Lisp runtimes prefer precompiled code. What the JVM lacks for example is easy code loading (think class loading in the JVM), instruction set optimized for Lisp and dumped images.

Clojure combines STM, concurrency etc. in a clever way and with the focus on pure FP. It's not that elements of that did not exist before, but the combination in Clojure seems to be novel.
You have no idea what you're talking about.

> show a picture of an animal or a shape and ask what it is,

Ok, so let's say you come up with pictures of 20 different animals. A spam script that picks the same answer every time will have a 5% success rate.

> or even just ask a simple math problem or riddle in writing.

Computers are way better at solving most math problems than people.
You got it right :) Specifically, in this case, it's all about how well you can upsell and how effectively you can email your existing customer base to keep them engaged.
Sounds like a happening place to work. Too bad their main line of business was aiding and abetting the theft of copyrighted material.
I actually have the blue book open in my pdf viewer right now. I jumped back into it after I re-read Gabriel's Design of Parallel Languages few days ago.
Same for Budapest - Metro only, but not the HÉV, which is the equivalent of Berlin's S-Bahn, more or less (suburban light rail), some of whose lines run entirely within the boundaries of the city proper.
Oh, you're talking about regression testing. While you have a point, I'd like to point out a recent vulnerability [1] that would likely fail many a test for two reasons:

- The bug is not concrete. It's not entirely in the kernel, and it's not entirely in userspace.

- The developers have a poor understanding of the bug. The current "fix" only mitigates the problem. There are system configurations where it can still be exploited. There are other issues [2] that arise from large address space management that are waiting to be fixed because of this.

But I agree that regression testing for the whole kernel tree should probably be implemented. (for the various subsystems, many developers develop their own test suites)

[1] http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2010/08/skeletons-hid...
[2] http://grsecurity.net/~spender/64bit_dos.c
Please: continue to see your psychologist.

Take whatever meds she tells you to.

Ask her if there are any exercises (Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, meditation, etc.) that might help.

There is a difference between fantasies and memories. If you're having trouble telling the difference, you're not likely to accept external verification in the form of any logical/technical "proofs" we could propose.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your recovery.
In theory they could prompt advertisers to create distorted ads, simply requiring users to visually decode the brand name.
The Angry Rich
Infosec Island: Year One Staff Picks - Part 2
New in Three.js: WebGL ambient and directional lighting support
Minimalist Cocoa Programming
That's so true. Over a year ago, I put a crappy PHP snippet on snipplr and forgot about it. Last week, I came back and found that eight people had saved it and three had left a comment. It's literally just one line of PHP, but it solved a problem for a couple people.
If successful this can be copied easily and successfully by anyone. But I hope it won't succeed. Instead things like openid should be more widespread so I don't have to enter a captcha in the first place.
Oh, hey, Indianapolis is also missing:
Just out of curiousity, I wanted to know what you think.. I realize that the problem is that the PKCS padding exception is timeable. Please correct me if this is naive, but what if I devised some code that did either of the following:

1. decrypt the string; if a padding exception occurs, then run a decrypt of a string the same size with correct padding. do not throw an error.

2. decrypt the string; if a padding exception does not occur, then run some instructions on a string with the same size and incorrect padding, forcing a padding error.

In both 1 & 2, we do not throw any visible errors to the user. Wouldn't this at least shrink the measurable difference significantly by ensuring that the instruction set is always going to be the same, and hopefully average out closer to a constant time, regardless of whether an error "occurs"?
Ah, very useful :) Thanks.
IngBoo: Don’t Leave Your Friends to Find a Job
I do something similar, but, arguably, lower-effort than outright cancelling my cards yearly. I use disposable card numbers.

I only wish every single one of my cards offered this service, but, most notably, Amex doesn't[1].

Currently, only Citi[2] and Bofa[3] (from their MBNA acquisition) offer it on reward cards I'm willing to use[4]. If anyone knows of other issuers who offer this on such a card or who offer it on an otherwise full-featured[5] business card, with all cardholders having access to this feature, I'd be very interested in knowing.

[1] They had it under the mark "Private Payments" but discontinued it. I don't think they ever offered it on the Costco co-branded cards, so I never tried it.

[2] "Virtual Account Numbers"

[3] "ShopSafe"

[4] At least 1% kickback payable as cash. Miles and "points" don't do it for me.

[5] Employee cards with spending limits settable online is the critical one.
I attend a private toastmasters club here at the office. I've been going for about 4 months now.

Our veteran members can give nice speeches off the cuff with zero preparation.

I've only given two speeches so far myself but it's already helping with my confidence. There is a strong leadership component to Toastmasters as well - that's where I'm really seeing benefits.
Yeah, I love watching Top Gear and attractive isn't the first word in mind when it comes to describing Jeremy Clarkson.
The problem is not that the pointers waste space. The problem is that they introduce irregular memory layout. If you want to, say, offload your data to a GPU, then having a structure memory layout is a huge benefit. But you'll kill performance if you have to chase pointers to first get the data in a format the GPU can handle. Other optimizations - such as SIMD on conventional processors - can apply.

And, for the record, C++ would not use pointers. In C++, if you place one object inside the definition of another, the whole object will be there, not a pointer. You control memory layout in C++. And if your objects are plain old data (POD), then it behaves just as C does. A C++ class that does not have any virtual members is laid out like a struct.
Ask HN: What is that site for seeing comments on various blogs?
There is a website where you can see all the comments someone has posted on blogs, I think based on the URL backlink or the name. I think the name of it was backsomething.com, but I can't remember it.

Can you help me out?
Good job!

Opening the menu crashes the app on my Samsung i7500 / Android 1.6
I always tell them to bring it to my house because I know they won't. If they ever did, I could fix it on my own time.
Analysis of 250 Winning Designs from Threadless.com
Flash runs faster, more efficiently than HTML5 on mobile
Way easier than C syntax. Even though I have long mastered various assembly languages and higher level languages, C pointers and their arithmetic still confuses me.

There's nothing worse than something like bar = *[&foo + 88] or whatever it is.
backtype?
Hacker News is a community of people who have what Dharmesh Shah calls a "genetic defect" that makes them crazy enough to start a startup. It's true. A subset of the people in the world are crazy enough to do something this high-risk high-yield, and that's us.

We preach the greatness of startups because we've put a lot of things on the line. The opportunity cost of doing a startup is great; the major aspect of this opportunity cost is time. With this time, we could do some consulting, or learn a new language, or go on dates. Instead, we're fixated on the idea of creating amazing products that change the landscape. We're attached to the concept of being the ones that enable the software your dad uses to trade mutual funds. We're enamored with the ideology of being an active contributor rather than a passive consumer of the world we call ours today.

I've questioned the strangeness of this enchantment of startups being the road to various levels of success in the past as well. Losing weight and all that stuff is all about discipline, and is an element of really any profession you can think of. At the bottom of it is just who we are and what we want to do: entrepreneurs and to create meaning, respectively.
Though, strangely enough, "astronomical" does mean what he was going for, with the same metaphor.
Yes, but how many ads can you have?
or you automatically generates a ton of variation of the same ads otherwise a spammer can just keep a dictionary with the ads images and the correct answer.
Any sane developer will track money in lowest units - eg cents. Rather than Dollars.
Learning another language requires so much time and effort that it is almost always an effort misplaced unless the language is English.

Learning a language is a few years of hard work. I have a friend who is an assistant professor in Germany and he's toying with an idea of learning German, but he mentioned to me that he was wondering whether learning a programming language, say C++, wouldn't be a better use of his time. To which my answer was: By expanding the amount of effort required to learn to speak German, you wouldn't be able to just learn C++; the comparable thing would be to go from knowing nothing about programming, to knowing enough to be able to land a job as a Software Engineer in any company in the Silicon Valley.
Global Virus Alert ZoneAlarm's scare tactics raise hackles
I am one of those "90k-salaried .NET developer" and am currently working on my startup, because:

1. Working on something you are passionate about it is food for the soul, and

2. Working for a good salary has a cap, a startup that I own doesn't.

Additionally, since I am doing my startup on the side and building it to be profitable, then I don't have to give up my salary that pays my bills until my startup exceeds it.
FWIW, I've made posts here that have been voted highly and attracted zero comments. I think the content-to-votes ratio is OK to question, but getting X votes in Y minutes or the number of comments isn't really a reliable indicator on HN, IMHO.
Yes, but now there is not language-enforced relationship between the two. That currencySymbols[i] and amounts[i] are, in the mind of the programmer, two fields in the same object is no longer expressed in the language itself.
Oracle spins own Linux for mega hardware - "Red-Hat compatibility holds us back"
For more information about this article, and applying to an IBM internship at the Toronto lab, visit http://blog-db2oncampus.blogspot.com/2010/08/job-internship-...
I got my first "real" computer at age 7...an IBM XT. I took it apart the next day just to see how it worked. I spent hours on end on the DOS command line or writing silly programs in BASIC. Upgraded every few years, getting new computers with new features. In 1990, I got a system with a Sound Blaster, so I got into MIDI recording. In 1992 I got a CD-ROM and got into hacking Sierra games. In 1995 I got AOL and got obsessed with chatrooms and warez. In 1998 I started college and was introduced to high speed internet. That was the real defining moment for me. Being able to download any song, movie, or piece of software at will made the internet the most amazing thing in the world. And since the way to access it was through websites, I downloaded Photoshop and Dreamweaver and learned web design. Since the best sites were interactive, I needed to learn web programming as well, so I walked to the campus bookstore and bought Learning Perl by Larry Wall.

In December 1999 I built my first website, Ziggles.com, a comparison shopping site written in Perl that spidered the top 20 online bookstores and displayed the results with affiliate links. I made about $1000 a month in revenue (nearly all profit since I was already living on ramen at the time) and even got job offers from Silicon Valley startups. In another year or two I probably could have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, but the bubble burst and reality set in.

Those all night coding marathons or days spent reading Advanced SQL techniques when I should have been reading Shakespeare (English major) have paid off, since I make a better living as a developer than I could working in an English factory.
That sounds a lot like expect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect ) unless I've missed something. If you use autoexpect, it'll even automagically generate the script for you by capturing what you type in to the shell.
Absolutely! I don't get asked a whole lot, but don't mind helping because of the reasons you point out and also because it keeps me sharp.

One thing that is really helpful is that I always have the friend drop his computer off at my house so I can work on it in my spare (sparse) time with all my tools at hand. Nowadays the computers are mostly laptops, but even towers are easy enough to transport (I have plenty of keyboards, mice, and monitors).

Trying to fix a computer in real time on-site or over a phone is a major PITA.
I went to Toastmasters a few years back, but before I got into Toastmasters. It's really the best thing to do if you want to get comfortable speaking in front of a group and do it well.
Three.js: JavaScript 3D engine for canvas, svg, and WebGL
A lot of the hype comes from uncertainty and lack of real confidence in the whole idea.

If entrepreneurship had a predictable recipe to follow and we didn't have to give it a second thought, we wouldn't spend so much time on the matter.
Every time someone says 'disrupt' my skill is at suppressing the desire to vomit a little.
Nice app! :) I think I'll end up using it if only because the upvote buttons on the HN website are so ridiculously fiddly to use on a mobile device...

One small quirk: I couldn't figure out how to upvote stories after logging in - I could see the menu entry to upvote comments, but there was no menu entry for upvoting on the main screen. Turned out I needed to manually refresh the main story list before it turned up.
Maybe you are lucky and have a great in-house job. No shame in that. But there does seem to be something amiss in your happy little world that sends you out gunning for startups. Why the inferiority complex?

I spent 25 years in the corporate world. The money was great but I got tired of the politics and wasted time. Now I have a startup. I am actually inventing new software (semantic web, evolutionary programming) rather than writing another business system. I spend 90% of my time on the meat of programming. I make a good deal less at this point (after 3 years of making even less!!) but I'm 10 times happier.
I guess for me it started at around 8 when my dad brought home a ZX81 (which was old then). I spent hours reading the BASIC manual and typing in stuff which never, ever ran. I found the errata for it a few years back so I guess I could go back and fix?

From there I got a C64, which was incredible, and then moved on to the Amiga. 500+ -> 1200. As far as computing goes, the Amiga years were the best of my life. Suddenly everything seemed possible. I was coding in AMOS, C and assembler on that thing - and rendering 3D cars while I ate my tea. That machine could do the lot, and since I've always been rubbish at music the MIDI thing wasn't a problem.

Mid 90's as the Amiga died off, i got access to a 486 and wrote a few things here & there in BASIC. Finally blagged my mum into giving me £3 to buy a magazine that had Borcland C++ 4.5(?) on the coverdisc. Took it from there.

The rest is pretty boring really. Improved at C, took up web dev. Here I am.

Most importantly though - I had a bloody Amiga. Man, I miss those days.
Isn't this what Seesmic did long long ago?
This reminds me of a programming assignment from college to write a chess bot.

My partner and I tweaked it's understanding of how to evaluate board positions to eek out better playing ability, but the major improvements came from implementing a more efficient specialized game tree that let us calculate another move ahead every decision.

Having one more "loop" made a huge difference against our opponents; being simply smarter or better at any of the "steps in the loop" didn't help nearly as much.
It might be just sybtactical sugar, but I would really like to see some sort of annotation for auto generating setters and getters at compile. Eclipse makes it pretty easy to make these, but it sure would clean up class clutter.
Yes, I would argue. It's refreshing to drop in #lisp and ask any technical question, of whatever magnitude, and get answers immediately.

I recommend that place to any intelligent students, researchers, language weenies, compiler hackers and system engineers. Just be informed and don't ask opinionated, loaded questions.

Elsewhere? meh, I am left to think my present company has just been introduced to computing by its $LANG_MANUAL.

There is also a lot of childish fucking around and casual piss-taking that doesn't happen among Lispers. If you expect an standing ovation because you pushed something to github, fuggedaboutit. No one will be retweeting wisdom, no one will like you on facebook, you will not be blogged about ..

Ever wonder why Lispers, and most adult programming communities don't have "Rock Star" celeb provocateurs?