skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Will look into it later. Currently, the best way to read it (both PDF and EPUB) is directly drag them to iBook. Also you could try the MagCloud app.
Heh, I was asked to do the same thing for the current system/website we're building here at the corporation I work for.

Fortunately we were able to convince them it wasn't time well spent, but it would be neat.
How well has this tactic worked for you? Good bosses are very rare, so if it's working for you, stick with that boss.
(Rant follows; yes, I know this misses the point of the article)

Tomatoes aren't meant to have a 'taste' - they're basically water and random red pulp

Gotta disagree here. I started growing my own tomatos a few months ago and they most certainly do have a 'taste' and are very little water (and a lot of tomato flavored random red pulp).

I've always been a fan of tomatos (hence growing them myself), but the ones bought in shops are generally watery and don't have a strong flavor. The home grown tomatos are not watery at all and have a rich sweet flavor. I put this to the test by giving them to friends and relations to eat and everyone who tried them agreed. This includes at least one person who said she doesn't actually like tomatos. She loved the ones I grow.

My conclusion? Mass produced (grown?) tomatos ARE (mostly) tasteless water held together with red pulp. Home grown or organic tomatos actually do taste very different (and contain a lot more pulp and less water). Some people say that organic foods dont taste any different from non-organic foods. After growing my own, I most definitely disagree.

(and of rant)
Nice, but still waaay too technical for my mom and dad...

Dear Dad,

My customers are small business people (retailers, wholesales, doctors, lawyers, etc.) who own computers that have replaced their file cabinets and some of their clerical employees. Those computers came with lots of stuff in them but need more as their business changes or they discover stuff they forgot. I upgrade their computers with the stuff they need. We call that stuff "software". They pay me. Well enough for me to buy you dinner Sunday night and take you to the Steeler's game. What do you say?

Love,
Eddie

Dear Mom,

I sit in an office writing all day long. I have a fridge and a microwave and occasionally go out to lunch with people down the hall. When it gets cold I wear the sweater you bought me last month. I love what I do. I write stuff, kinda like Stephen King or Danielle Steele, but business stuff, not fiction. My customers love what I write for them and they pay me well, so you never have to worry about me again. I showed Uncle Lenny what I was working on and he thought it was great. I'll pick you up for lunch and a trip to the mall at noon on Saturday. See you then.

Love,
Eddie
Oracle is succeeding in a few short months at a task that Microsoft (through malice) and Sun (through incompetence) failed to perform in over 15 years: the killing of the Java platform.
Looks like you didn't read the article: "overt ingratiation can backfire." :)
Apostrophes help you alot. I solved the following puzzle with no letters:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ' _

_ _ _ _

Category was "Thing".

(Err, formatting isn't helping. That's two words, with 9 spaces, an apostrophe and a 10th space in the first word, and four spaces in the second word).
> Gonzalez's actions as an informant still reduced the total amount of credit card fraud.

Did they?
There is a point that hasn't yet been mentioned here about the fundamental difference between an address book, and Facebook.

Facebook is okay to be a dead-end for contacts' emails, since the email upload is used once to find others on the service. After that, if you need to contact someone else on Facebook, you can do so with a wall post or an inbox message. The email address is irrelevant.

With an address book, you need it to be portable, since the medium is accessible from many different locations and services.

The fact is that you dont need to get your friends' contact details out of Facebook. You sign up for Facebook to make Friends on Facebook and communicate over Facebook. Not to communicate over email, etc. (And certainly not over a rival network.) When you add someone to your address book, you do so to communicate with them over email, or phone, or whatever, which are inherently completely open and interconnected systems. [Surely there is a debate to be had here about the ubiquity of Facebook as a platform and that it should be open - could you imagine Facebook Clients? But I dont believe that's a debate about exporting existing contact info.]

To that end, Google warning users about the terminal nature of their exported data is unnecessary and only confuses the process of finding friends for users (who, by the way, aren't thinking about data portability, or building up an address book/contacts list on Facebook, they're thinking about making Friends on Facebook, to communicate over Facebook)

TL;DR: This whole mess doesn't matter, and Google is only making things complicated for users.
I can see that the prisoners can do better than 1/2^100, but I don't see how they could get anywhere close to 10% success - so I must be missing something big here.
Your tagging is pretty cool. How'd you figure out for each tag whether it was a person, country, city, etc.? Did you just look them each up on Wikipedia?
E.g. http://newsley.com/articles/eu-threatens-to-block-chinese-bi...
Heroku PG Backups released
...and also has 1 in 1 chance of automated recognition.
Very cool but likely 1) very hot and 2) very expensive (seriously though, any guitarist will attest to the fact that replacing tubes isn't cheap!).
Right. And as a little experiment, it was surprising the results I got. It also implies that it is not hard to structure the sentences in a way that makes it harder for WolframAlpha's algorithms to get the right answer. But doing that for 180 million questions? I wonder what the percentage of success using only WolframAlpha would be on the whole data set.
The New Launch of Facebook for Mobile Phone | InfoMov.Com
CouchDB goes mobile
This article is long, but really good, it reads like a movie.

Gonzalez not only hacked computer networks, but also personal networks. He may not have been great at code, but he was definitely good at navigating social structures. Gonzalez was certainly a great hacker, but not necessarily good.

I'll be keeping my eye out for author James Verini in the future, this was a great read.
Terror chief tries to board plane with banned liquids
You seem to be operating under some misconceptions about antitrust law in the US. Being a near-monopoly is not illegal. Abusing your monopoly to force your way into a new market is, but simply using profits from one product line to fund R&D on a new product doesn't count.

Even if Apple has achieved a near-monopoly over digital music or sales or portable music, it's not at all clear that they have had the opportunity to abuse that monopoly. There have been cases (Psystar, etc.) that have tried to get the bundling of Mac OS X and Apple computers ruled as illegal tying, and they have failed. For the foreseeable future, there will not be grounds for a federal antitrust case against Apple.

You should try to conceive of Apple as the poster child for a successful business strategy: vertical integration. A large part of the success of Apple's expansion beyond computers is due to the fact that they can and have ensured that the products work well together, and that most of the products they have introduced have been natural complements of their existing products.

You also seem to be somewhat ignorant of the timeline of Apple's rise over the past decade. The iPod was on the market and gaining traction for a year and a half before the iTunes Music Store opened. At the time the iTunes Store opened, DRM was mandated by pretty much all the content owners. If this contributed to Apple getting a monopoly on digital music sales, the blame should fall on the music studios for not insisting that the online stores they deal with use a single interoperable DRM system, and not on Apple, who had no incentive to promoting interoperability with other music stores and players.

The profits of the iPod+iTunes Store combo provided most of the funding for the Intel switch and the development of the iPhone. Like the iPod, the iPhone was on the market and gaining traction for about a year and a half before the App Store opened. It's hard to argue that Apple's computers have been helped much by the iPod and iPhone other than by generally strengthening the Apple brand.

Each step of the way to their current position, Apple has done it by introducing products that can be at least moderately successful on their own, without the hardware/software tying you are complaining about. None of those individual steps has been anywhere as close to monopoly abuse as, say, Microsoft's entry in to the video game console market, which faced no significant legal challenges. Nor has Apple clearly erected any artificial barriers to entry for competitors. Their agreements with content producers are not exclusive, and now that DRM is not applied to music sales, there's no significant barrier to using music purchased through iTunes on other music players. To the extent that Apple has created any barriers to competition, it has only been by raising the standards for usability and quality.
More letters is actually helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPsbY8LLVlY
You are correct that the CEO cannot favor investors due to SEC regulation and simple fairness. However, the issue raised is that companies use these regs as an excuse to draw the curtains and provide less information on the whole.

This is bad for economic decision making on the whole. For example, it leads to greater volatility and securities prices that don't track value. It also places managers into a kind of priesthood with privileged access to information. Abuses ensue.
A timeless debate or are we just wasting our time?
I've often wanted my own text-based CAPTCHA for a video game website I run. I'd ask things like "What is the name of the purple weapon?" or "How many shields do you start with?" People who actually play the game could nail questions like that, while bots would be up a creek.
Then they're not really all "paid subscribers" as it says in the posting ;-)

Impressive nonetheless.
Almost certainly. ShadowCrew was much bigger than just one person. The Secret Service claims 4,000 members, but the real number was probably several hundred. Without the help of a well-established member (Gonzalez was actually a founder), it would have been much harder for the government to crack this fraud ring.
Facebook API flaw discovered
I work for a 3rd world insurance services company (Uruguay).

The stats for our website are roughly:

25% 800x600
50% 1024x768

and a wide assortment for all the rest.
Translation and interpreting is an AI-hard problem.
I've looked up this puzzle elsewhere and it is described as allowing the prisoners to manipulate the contents of the boxes they open to a limited degree.
My general impression is that the cryptographers routinely do stuff that's an order of magnitude more mind-blowing than this. [1]

More people need to read The Codebreakers.

---

[1] Alas, I just have to marvel, because for some reason my mind doesn't anagram well. I just don't have the knack. To me high-level Scrabble playing looks like a superpower.
This is a real example of crowdsourced publishing done right. Well done!
You can make email addresses private on Facebook, so that none of your friends can see them. However, people who already have your email address can use it to find you.

Facebook and Google are using those email addresses for very different purposes: Facebook uses them to identify the profiles of your contacts (the user id is the lasting identity) whereas for Google the email address itself is the relevant identity.
At one point I was getting spammed through a contact form ( http://hhgproject.org/contact.cgi ) so I added two forms of a text based captcha---the first one is a single question (that anyone visiting that particular page should know) and a hidden field (via CSS) that should not be changed. I haven't received a spam since.
Shadowcrew was an awesome place. You could get pretty much anything there. The marketplace was built on reputation -- you'd send a new offering to the senior members, who'd review you.

The coolest guy there was MacGyver. He knew everything about everything. You'd ask for feedback on the new SSN cards you were selling and he'd casually drop that the SSA used band printers back when your card would have been issued, so there should be little marks here or there.

From what I could tell, he never profited from any activity there, but being a senior member and receiving goods for review, receiving credit card blanks and numbers was enough to put him away. By the time it occurred to me I could send him a letter in prison, he was already out.

Sure, he was indirectly contributing to illegal activity, but to a kid looking for fake ID info, he was a god.
Computer Vision on Tap -- help a friend's PhD project
It's worth noting that she claims she had solved the puzzle by that point:

She landed on $900 and picked L. "I'm not sure why," she says. "I should have picked G or T, but I think because it was in the middle of the biggest word, I got stuck on it."

She would have made $1,800 more with G or T. But had she picked G or T, she wouldn't have solved the puzzle with just a single letter. She would have solved it with three. She probably would have still gone on to crush the game — Burke ended up taking it for more than $53,000 in cash and prizes — but she wouldn't have become the miracle contestant.
Show HN: Critique Quaid, my small JavaScript library
CCAN - Comprehensive C Archive Network
Bilingualism battles onset of Alzheimer’s
Keep in mind that in 2002, Russia seemed to be hand-in-hand with India when it came to outsourcing software dev. It might be a weak bet now, but was stronger when it was made. Wrong, but still stronger.
There is a way of doing this that does not require doing so. The places you have looked up might have described a weaker version of the puzzle.
Was curious about the "text captcha" service. It's a collection of questions with MD5 sums of acceptable answers.

They provide an API, but I think this is a case of a project being a "service" to keep the database of questions from being free. There's no technical reason for this to be a service, and it's not a terribly complicated product that would be difficult to scale. It's a static database!

Might be neat to create an open-source bank of these CAPTCHA questions. Maybe I'll throw something together this weekend.
Even discounting all of the logic involved in this instance, people do occasionally just get lucky.

When I was in the fifth grade, we were playing hangman in class and my friend Chingfei managed to discern "White Men Can't Jump" from only two or three letters. An impressive feat, proven by the fact that I remember this 14 years later.

A "miracle" is really something with an extremely minuscule chance of occurring, but with enough trials you'll eventually get a positive result. Even the Biblical "water into wine" could happen under the laws of quantum mechanics, but it's an insanely long shot.

Still, in this case it was logic, not luck, that played out, since no rational person would just guess at solving the puzzle so early in the game.
Even most of the original commentators, back in 02002, thought it was easily doable.
Well, for one thing, Python guarantees that objects can be dynamically modified (methods can be rebound, new methods can be added, methods can be removed.. same goes for data members. Python can do this because the methods are stored in a dictionary which gets looked up by method name at runtime). This will never be as fast as a static function call in C or even an indirect vtable-based call (indirect pointer access vs hash table lookup).

That is a single reason why Python can never be compiled to run as fast as C. I'm sure there are plenty of other features that help or hinder performance optimisations. Its all about tradeoffs. (Of course, a suficiently advanced language may allow you to choose these tradeoffs at a finer grain than the language level)
How Terry Kniess Beat The Price Is Right
Already using this. Can't stay off facebook for more than 30 min anyway...
This could end up starting a new meme :)
This is usually attributed to Einstein (but I can't find a definitive reference): "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother". Clearly he has a way to go still.
It is rather sad that your legitimate and well thought out comment gets downvoted to oblivion, apparently because it expresses an unpopularly (on HN) non-Apple worshiping viewpoint.

Meanwhile mikeklaas short, completely and wildly factually incorrect comment gets plenty of upvotes, apparently because it supports the HN popular view that anyone daring to compete with Apple must be incompetent?

Apparently, at least where Apple is concerned, HN has it's own version of group-think now?
A friend of mine is working on a project for his PhD. Be sure to click the "Help us improve" button on the top; his paper deadline is tomorrow! Thanks.
When your customer is the government, indirectly, by way of a fixed-fee contract, the actual impact of your quality is often hard to see.

In the typical model, a manager's highest priority is to reduce indirect charges and make sure as much as possible is charged to a contract.

Now I'm not saying anyone is out to defraud, or charge time inappropriately, or etc. But what makes the company money is time it can charge to the gov't. Therefore if they see you spending half your time goofing off, but still getting more done - from their point of view, their legal obligation is to make sure they are charging correctly.

I cannot imagine trying to justify charging half of your time indirectly, with the caveat that "hey, I'm getting even more done". Financially that would be a disaster for them. The only way for it to work out would be to bid double for contracts, which, given how bidding works... doesn't work.
http://www.boxee.tv

Pretty slick website. The background video effect is pretty rad.
> "2nd fruit in bear apple goat orange"[1], "7th digit in abc123def456ghi789"[2]

It barfs on these ones, but not like you predict (it's actually worse). "The 2nd colour in purple, belly, yellow, arm, white and blue"[3] gives back yellow, though, so it's not that stupid.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=The+2nd+fruit+in+bear+a...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7th+digit+in+abc123def4...

[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=The+2nd+colour+in+purpl...
Yes, I recall amazing my family with a zero-letter solve before too. It's not trivial, but I suspect we'd have an above-average concentration of people who could do that around here.

No way could I do it under pressure right now, but then, if I knew I had a Wheel of Fortune appearance coming up you'd better believe I'd be studying and practicing. It amazes me that it's so obvious that so few people do that. Also how many people play so badly from a game theoretic standpoint; spinning a $400 on a puzzle with an obvious solution and a few open letters including one triple letter, they choose one of the single letters then solve. No prize puzzle, etc.
Wouldn't an open-source bank of CAPTCHA questions open the door for an open-source bank of answers to these questions?
Also think about the way algorithms (like WolframAlpha) interpret the structure of the questions. Like some of the other commenters, switching some words around makes WolframAlpha fail.

It might be interesting to come up with a methodology for question structure that is harder for algorithms to interpret...?
Ha! Valid point!
She's got a great quote in there about luck:
"I really believe that luck is preparation meeting opportunity"
"Alas, I just have to marvel, because for some reason my mind doesn't anagram well. I just don't have the knack. To me high-level Scrabble playing looks like a superpower."

I feel the exact same way. Well put.
I don't automatically ascribe ownership of "bill@nonprofit.org" to Amy, and it's hard for me to say that she has a right to export that email address out of Facebook.

Define "export". Are you saying that she only has the "right" to use Bill's address within Facebook, so that sending Bill an email with Outlook or GMail is some sort of violation? Or is it only automated mass export that you object to?
It was difficult to find the main site from the posterous blog. Resorted to editing the URL to hackermonthly.com
love the X-Plane screen shot there!

(Millenial here)
I was referring to Oracle.
I think the quote is from Richard Feynman:

"If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood it."

Although WikiQuotes says it's unsourced: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman
Design of the Boxee Box
Too bad that money will probably be mishandled and squandered like most of the donation funds have been so far.
Oh, not that stupid, huh?

Query: The 2nd colour in purple, belly, yellow, arm, white and blue

Answer: yellow

Query: The 3rd colour in purple, belly, yellow, arm, white and blue

Answer: yellow

Query: The 7th colour in purple, belly, yellow, arm, white and blue

Answer: yellow

Query: The bluest colour in purple, belly, yellow, arm, white and blue

Answer: yellow

:-)
This American Life did a great show this summer which included a story about a man who figured out the pattern in the board on the 80's game show Press Your Luck and took them for a lot of money. Definitely worth a listen:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/m...

Now that I look at the rest of that episode, it also included some coverage of the Cambridge Innovation Center's Elevator Pitch contest, so all around a good listen for the HN crowd.
RHEL 6 makes it official: The cloud is now the place to be for enterprise Linux
True. They also have one in Chicago. However, that doesn't mean you get to work on anything you want. Different teams are in different places and you usually get assigned to a team based on where you work.
fisherman's knot ?
What is Facebook's reasoning, then, for providing an API to download complete friend lists, location, real names, and other data a user didn't wade through privacy settings to lock down?

Handing information to a company with which a user never wanted to have a relationship is bad when it results in spam-filled inboxes, which end users might notice and directly associate with FB's policies. As long as the potential abuse is hidden from the user's view, though, FB wholeheartedly endorses it.
Yeah, exactly, I think this is why it necessitates it being a service and kind of assume that it's not a static database for that reason. If you have a fixed list of questions, it's easy to get answers to those once and never have to do it again. Again, I think its a safe assumption that these are in some way generated on the fly.
Galaxy Tab - First Looks
i was wondering about that, UK is $2 whereas NL is $10, seems unfair for how close they are compared to san francisco - new york
The "normal market" I described existed in most mid-sized and large US cities up until about 2002. There are a couple special cities like New York, where the "normal market" hasn't existed for a long time; one might conclude that the rent-vs-buy calculations are being done on a multigenerational basis.

Renting is still quite a bit cheaper than buying in many regions. This is because the crash isn't done yet. Give it another 3-5 years.
Took me a moment to realise the code is so weird because he's doing this in AutoCAD. My brain blocked out most of the site and went straight to the middle of the code.
Mr. CEO: Would you hire yourself?
It's a quote by Seneca, an ancient Roman philosopher: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/4576.html
Ask HN: Where are the best places to post job opportunities for developers?