skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm with you on this one. It's way too complicated. We know that Web users have little patience for forms with too many fields, pages that take a second too long to load, text that runs more than a couple sentences, and so on. Try to make them do a complex dance just to get past the bouncer at the door and they're likely to give up and go to a different club.
Platform specific PHP bug
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I saw this over proggit and it made me laugh hard enough that I bookmarked it.

Now I think of it every time I see Atwood's name:

http://lost-theory.org/realultimatepower/ (Yes, it's a ripoff of http://realultimatepower.net)
Considering we have image recognition algorithms that can control cars driving on the road, I doubt this would be that difficult to break.

It would, however, be very difficult for anyone to correctly guess ;)
These numbers don't mean much, but it's "hilarious" because you could simply generate every image and compare them to the one on the site in about a second of CPU time.

This is actually not a meaningful way to attack current CAPTCHAs, so now that I think about it... this 3D CAPTCHA would probably be less secure than the current ones that rely on OCR.
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Atwood runs Wordpress on a Windows box. Enough said.
If you ask me, TC's proclivity toward reviewing very early stage YC startups is a bit questionable; what about those startups that are just as interesting, yet didn't have the good fortune of being part of the YC lineup? I guess that's what your 2-10% buys you, beyond the seed money.
I have a captcha idea: lets make users watch a 90-minute movie and summarize the plot in 6 words. Oh, and serve ads over it while they are watching, just to recover the bandwidth costs.
a silcon foundry uses serious games to control the flow of small one off products through their factory. Each customer can set their own price bonus for running their lot. High price, faster velocity, product available sooner. It is an open market where you are competing against all the other lots in the fab. the indivduals running the lots can then decide if it's more worth their time to wait for the 1 really valuable lot or run 10 cheaper lots.
It is a meaningful way to attack many of the current captchas, if the alphabet and the space of transformations applied to it is sufficiently small. It is being done right now, in fact.
You should take a job at Wendy's for a week.

The vast majority of society functions at a cognitive level that is so low as to be shocking. What's even more amazing is that these people are able to hold a job, earn a living, and have a family.

People who have higher thinking skills live in an entirely different world from the mainstream of humanity. It turns out that intelligence is a lot less necessary to leading a normal life than you and I might think.
The difference between typical parasites and spammers is that spammers are human. Humans aren't logical, nor are they being killed off by attacking the wrong host (hmm... idea?), so it's not surprising that the situation doesn't follow a biological model.
It's cool that somebody has created a program like this. If someone tests it, I'd be interested in knowing how well it works.
Questionable, sure, but there's an easy answer. Right now on the Techcrunch homepage there are two stories about small startups. One is a blog and one has $1MM worth of funding.

Techcrunch doesn't really cover prefunded startups anymore. They do more mainstream news about Facebook and Yahoo and Apple. As far as pre or microfunded startups go, YC is as good as it gets, so Techcrunch covers YC startups. Certainly they are much better than the average unfunded or microfunded startup.
There's really no need to be dogmatic about it.

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
>People who have higher thinking skills live in an entirely different world from the mainstream of humanity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch
From the spammers' perspective, it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation. To each individual spammer, it is worthwhile to keep posting on craigslist for the short-term even if the sum of their actions is suboptimal in the long-term.
Monads are another high-theoretical concept that needs a real-world metaphor. So far, the best one I've heard is the "nuclear waste" one. I've been trying to grok monads for about two years now.
I got a response today. The OLPC XO screens are for sale and they are working on the new touchscreens.
You can always just promote some active members into moderators...they get the prestige of lording it over other users, and you get to save money.

+ This way you'll get people into the position who are actually knowledgeable about your product, passionate about it, and aren't just doing it because it was the easiest job for the money they found
Well said. I've been rereading a lot of Orwell's stuff lately -- it's some of the most lucid writing I've ever run into, and it's aged remarkably well.
Godly.
wow thats crazy sauce. Is there a way to turn that off?
My position is that we need missiles and schools both. The fact that there are places where we can't set up schools makes clear that we sometimes need the missiles.

As far as I can tell from your comment, you agree with me. You, too, think there are people we need to kill.
You know, a lot of users don't even realize its spam. That's kind of the idea. Some of them seem to enjoy it, even.

I'm relieved that the comments on this are mostly against it. I was sort of worried. A captcha is a very delicate balance between not pissing off the good users and keeping the bad users out.

And let's not forget what seems to be the most effective method of cracking a captcha, to just proxy it to an actual user who thinks they are verifying themselves for some other site (porn). This doesn't address that at all.
An opposite view is that people don't like drugs because they see so many kids today being prescribed them like candy and it turns out sometimes thats not good for them. "Drugs are good" can often do just as much harm.
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The first time I saw this it actually was intended to get users to not sign up. It was some "you have to be this smart to join our club" type thing. A reverse captcha? One not worried about computers registering, but instead trying to filter actual users out?

Oh, and I've gotten that Rapidshare thing a few times. It seriously confused the hell out of me. It looked like all the numbers had cats on them, but it only let me type (less than the amount of characters). Do the other letters have dogs on them or something?
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Ologeez Wants To Make Finding Research Articles Easier
Change your name in Gmail? Why is it such a big deal, anyway? My email is my full name...I'll let you take a wild guess what that is.
a method to discern these from a sample would be cool. for example the "ti" in "tight" will look different than the "ti" in "ting" because of the difference between my "g" and my "n" irrespective of the "ti".

if this is contemplated in existing solutions, i betray my (vast) ignorance on the topic.

i found the original post interesting because i notice many dozens of "fonts" in my own notes. at a glance the font alone brings back the tone and setting of its scribbling/scribing/boredom/...mood and often helps me remember more than the fact or hint that it is supposed to represent- the way i perceived it at the time.

further- i have heard of ways to listen to the sound of a person's keyboard over time and know what they're typing. with enough info, you could know not only what, but how they're typing it. well-tuned, you might be able to get a machine to know how you would've written something, not just what it would look like given a one element sample of the glyph that represents the single keystroke(s).

not exactly related, but i always liked http://www.fuzzmail.org/ for adding a dimension, maybe in the extrovert direction. for me, what we're talking about would be more introverted, me recognizing myself like i'd recognize a recording of my voice. me, not the way i hear myself when i talk, but the way i know i sound.

in fact- for the anthropologists with sway over PG, it might be interesting to randomly "fuzzmail" (with willing participants, of course) the comment threads on here and see just how people compose what are very often, alternately and at once, extremely insightful/kind/thought(ful/less)/human comments.
Change the name associated with your email account to your email address.
Considering we have image recognition algorithms that can control cars driving on the road, I doubt this would be that difficult to break.

We do?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
The Brangelina Twins
The reason the Brangelina twins story interested me is reports of the estimated value of the photos of their new born children. Estimates put the value of the photos at between $11 and 20 million! Is that crazy or what!
Not sure how this is entirely different that using a library of images that are tagged with common words. Is it a cat? dog? frog? giraffe?
Maybe now he also understands why objects are often preferable. Closures are liked handicapped objects. Names are resolved when the closures is created, not when it is called. This is not nearly as flexible as an object, where names are resolved when the function is called.
Measuring the Greatness of Programmers
Mmmm.... hacktastical.
I still have a forwarding .edu alumnus account from my Ph.D., so I should soon have an Ologeez account, but my school batch forwards emails every few hours, so I haven't actually seen the site, so I'm going by techcrunch's description.

I always thought that the process of research comes to an abrupt end with publication. Allowing an archived discussion after publication seems like a good idea. During my research, I would often hear about great papers in obscure journals from other students. Or even horrible papers in great journals that had results that were to be ignored. Even descriptions like, "hey this paper is about X, but it has a great analysis of Y" were extremely helpful. Capturing this information could be very valuable to the community.

Although, I don't know if Amazon-style product reviews are the best way to record peoples thoughts about research papers. I think that some sort of Reddit/HN approach might be better. At least I find HN discussions to be much more valuable than Amazon-type reviews. The problem with HN discussions in Olgeez's context is that most posts occur in a very small time duration of less than a day. A research paper might not get a critical mass of comments for weeks or months or even years after its publication, which may hurt the voting/discussion process.
Real-World Haskell now available for pre-order on Amazon
Yes, in fact we don't have a single cordless phone. We do, however, have a regular phone with a ridiculously long cord that can thus be carried around.
Insurance Wednesday: Is Your Stuff Covered? Are You Sure?
How to make sure you're properly covered by your insurance.
I dont think either is a particularly good idea, but in the absense of both deals falling through I'd say the best bet is the lesser of two evils.

Unfortunately, that would be a deal with Microsoft - thats not to say I dont like Google, I really do... but for them to control even more of the Internet advertising space will only end up driving up the prices for advertisers.

So the end consumer will more than likely lose more in a Yahoo/Google than in a Yahoo/Microsoft deal. Funny little paradox that - being cheaper with Microsoft.
>It usually turns out to be me against the world. So I don't even bother anymore.

Funny, it turns out the same way when I am advocating the other way. :) Generally when either of us disagrees with the board about this issue, the advocates for the other side come out in mass because they feel strongly one way or the other.

Drugs are indeed bad in the average case, but some people don't have the mental willpower or brain chemistry to get by in an unenhanced state. The medical diagnosis for this would be ADHD. The problem and controversy is that the treatment for ADHD is drugs that enhance the performance of absolutely everyone which is why ADHD is so overdiagnosed.
A prediction: You know what will replace CAPTCHAs? A credit card number. That's right. Sending an email will cost 1/100th of a penny. A craiglist posting will cost 1/10th of a penny, etc, etc. Someone just needs to make it work.
I think you're right, but what would it mean if the more is chaos? Have you seen the Price is Right game "Plinko" where identical starting positions lead to totally different results? What if the more isn't nature or nurture, just pure chaos.
Windows mobile gets a true mobile VoIP client.
Holy crap. I tried that stupid captcha 15 times and it said I failed each time.

Whatever, I go to art school anyway.
The stipends available to a PhD student are actually very good, especially if you’ve come directly from the pasta & baked bean-eating life of an undergraduate.

Things must be better in Ireland than in the US with regard to grad student funding. Some of my friends get paid $1000/month as physics and engineering PhD students.
VNC gives them a very fine-grained view. At any moment I can watch what any individual employee is doing.

That information, in and of itself, isn't very actionable. I'd prefer knowing that, on the whole, 10% of my company's man-hours are spent on digg, for example.
"The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead."

If that is what you really think, you have been reading the wrong literary criticism.
I hate PHP as much as anyone, but I have a feeling this is programmer error. Of course, PHP makes programmer error really easy, but...
OK, have fun implementing an interface just to manipulate a collection when a one-liner would have sufficed.
Understanding Why Multithreaded Programming Is Hard
Doesn't anybody here remember what the Taliban in Afghanistan were like before the U.S. drove them out? Well, here's a reminder: "Women seeking an education were forced to attend underground schools such as the Golden Needle Sewing School, where they and their teachers risked execution if caught."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban_treatment_of_women

I applaud what Mr. Mortenson has accomplished, but what he did (in Afghanistan at least) only became possible after the U.S. army invaded Afghanistan and fired all those expensive missiles.
Balloon in Paris measures air quality
Rails code review by Jamis Buck and Marcel Molina, Jr.
I was obviously not talking about credentials (do quote me if I did please) I was talking about having the KNOWLEDGE, TRAINING, AND SKILL required to diagnose a human's mind.

And your comparisons are quite amusing, even if simple . . . you went from teaching, to cutting hair, and finally to programming . . . and this is in a discussion revolving around mental health care. Interesting, considering that there is simply no comparison between any of the four activities.

How dare you equate programming to cutting hair.

EDIT: before you even go there, the word "professional" does not only apply to those with credentials.
Very impressive demo.

I saw this ages ago, but I often send it to friends just as an example of how to demo software.
"... You can always just promote some active members into moderators ..."

Good idea.

Phil Greenspun advocates this approach in Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing under "Community: The Big Problem & The Big Solution": http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/community
He shouldn't be using not sanitize and not parse_str. He should be using $_COOKIE[]
Yeah ok man, I have a chip on my shoulder for stating what I perceive and asking that you quote me after you replied to my post as if it stated something that it simply did not state.

Come on bud, get real.
Magic quotes.. sigh

I think this feature is going to be removed in PHP6.
This situation reminds me of a Simpson's quote funnily enough.. let me see if I can dig it up.

Lisa: What have you done with my report?
Bart: I've hidden it. To find it you'll need to decipher a series of clues, each more fiendish than...
Lisa: Got it!
Bart: D'oh!
Hmm. I just did the classic stupid thing. I tried this trick with the email name I had hoped to get, and it turned out the guy has the same name as me! Imagine that!

I had hoped to get firstname.lastname@gmail.com

Going to bed is starting to sound pretty logical.
My favorite putdown ever received on an English paper: "eradicate that word from your vocabulary" stemmed to an arrow pointing at "paradigm".

I honestly had only used the word because I thought it was cool to pronounce "-digm".
Throwing precaution to the wind
The author repeats themselves:

Page 2 top:

"I can’t believe it," she said when she received her F. "I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper."

Page 2 middle:

"I can’t believe it," she said when she received her F. "I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper."
That's a bit like saying that you should pick your parents wisely. (Or perhaps, that you should pick your wife carefully -- but you only get three dates to decide!) It's wonderful advice...in retrospect.

The problem is, you can't judge anything useful about your adviser in the time that you have to do it. For those who don't know, at a good school, you'll get a "rotation" (a quarter/semester "working" in your prospective adviser's group), after which you'll have to decide their suitability as a mentor for years of challenging work. If you're lucky, you make a good decision, and grad school is happy. If you're lucky.

That said...there are plenty of other ways to go wrong. Your adviser is a big part of the success formula, but not the only part. Not by a long shot.

I'm happy that you had a good experience with your adviser, but I know enough miserable grad students to know that it isn't the norm. Personally, this guy's essay hit way too close to home....
The final image is rendered based on random variables /each time/ - Even just moving the light source would result in an entirely (from a bitmap point of view) different image.

So even if you could get your hands on the 3D source file used for rendering, generating all possible images is impossible.

The numbers don't refer to brute force since the answer changes on each try.

If you used the same answer 'ABC' each time you'd take (assuming perfect random distribution) 15,600 tries before getting it right.

I don't know about you, but after getting 15 thousand failed requests in a row from the same IP, I'd assume they were a bot ;)
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Except that the premise is wrong! Denormalizing will not help you speed up the database. It's a false argument. It just won't do that.

There are specific table structures combined with specific query type that can be denormalized to speed things up. But a normal table will not speed up in the slightest, in fact most of the time it will slow down!

It will slow down because if you need only 1 column out of several, the larger each row is the slower the access will be.

Denormalizing is even worse for large sites. By normalizing you can often put some tables on one machine, and others on a different one. For example screen_name and phone number, which jeff combined. Screen_name is used by the chat program, and phone number by the profile page.

Run the chat program on a totally different set of machines. All you need to send it is the user_id.
Engineers' Dreams - A Tech Fiction on Google
How the hell does this get upvoted to the #2 spot on hacker news?

This is both dumb and not news. Ranting on magic_quotes_gpc has been done to death already.

Now for some code:

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
array_stripslashes($_GET);
array_stripslashes($_POST);
array_stripslashes($_REQUEST);
array_stripslashes($_COOKIE);
}

function array_stripslashes(array &$array)
{
foreach ($array as $key => &$value) {
if (is_string($value)) $value = stripslashes($value);
elseif (is_array($value)) array_stripslashes($value);
}
}
The existence and abundance of free/open-source software seems to indicate that programming is different. You don't often hear about lawyers or MBAs or doctors or chemists or carpenters or even writers and musicians who happily work without pay just for the fun of it and give away the results of their work.
Funding the aussie social graph + why australia should copy colorado.
magic_quotes_gpc should almost never be turned on. a lot of linux distro has it off by default. it's the programmer's job to escape the db inputs. this blog article is too contentless to make it to #2.
Seems like it definitely violates Krug's "Don't make me think" principle, but if it's the best we've got then I guess it's ok for now.
Mining engineering
It's that preconception that is responsible for widespread "ageism" in the IT industry.

Do you not perhaps think that correlation is not causation? Maybe "dropping out of the education system early" is in fact a more significant data point than being 40? I'm 32 and if things stay as they are, in 10 years I'll have real trouble changing jobs in this industry. The current crop of geeks are in for a nasty surprise if they think they'll be a hot commodity forever.
But that is true of any machinery. Could you walk up to a lathe and immediately start making something?
> Object recognition is a completely unsolved computer vision problem.

Awesome, let's hand the problem over to the spammers and it will be solved within 1 year.
Unfortunately, at least where I live, it is almost entirely not allowed to fail students in primary or early high school. So, graduating effectively means "I didn't die before age N". And of course, it's a downward spiral: if you can't multiply and divide, you sure as hell can't factor an equation, and you're definitely not going to get anywhere trying to understand the graph of a parabola.
Educating, and eventually, empowering women helps on all fronts.

Interesting claim.

Not that I say that we should blatantly discriminate against women, but would you argue that the discrimination against women in our culture and history in any way seems to have inhibited the development of our civilization?

Women's liberation is a rather recent thing and I say we have still done quite well.
Jagged array
That's good compared to part time jobs and loans just to maintain subsistance level.
I think this article have just created 300 new positions in SV, and soon we will see guys commanding 80k to chat with your users while playing WOW.
One of the most sobering reads on our economic future... from our friends in Moscow...
Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning
"Platform specific bug" is only mentioned in the HN post title: it isn't the article's title, nor does he mention a "platform specific bug" in the article. Magic quotes is a side issue: his expected output has no quotes in it in the first place! "Where are his random quotes coming from?" was his question, not "Where are these random slashes coming from?" - he answered that question by himself.

But yea, $_COOKIE is the way to go.