skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok I'm guessing that there's more than a little bit of code that actually runs that algorithm.
Because many of us never were CS undergrads. We formally learnt to program in the context of another field (Mech Eng in my case - FORTRAN, MATLAB and DCL), and prior to that were entirely self-taught. Many of us have many years of experience with procedural and object-oriented styles and are only recently coming to the functional style, either out of pure interest, or out of necessity. So bear with us :-)
I think what is in question here is the "spirit" of open source. Legally you can do anything with BSD code and some companies just use it without giving anything back. That isn't breaking the law, but it isn't really being a "good" member of the open source community.

It seems to me that the issue could be related to the fact that Apple uses a lot of open source code (granted they do give back), but quite a bit of their software comes with technology that restricts usage by consumers.

The GPL (v3 even more so than v2) tries to address these types of issues. The downside being that everything needs to be shared so it reduces private company incentive to pour money into features/technology that competitors can just snag.

In the end it is one of the downsides of working on BSD/MIT licensed open source code. In one sense it is an act of altruism, but it can sting to see someone snag the code and make lots of money with hardly an acknowledgment in your direction or to take and use it to restrict people.
One of the blackhats proposed a clever outside-of-the-box solution:

1. Create a site that promises free ringtones.

2. Once a visitor enters their cell number, forward it to Craigslist, who sends a verification call to that number.

3. Ask them to enter the verification code on your ringtone site.

4. Redirect the verification code to Craigslist, and send your visitor a ringtone.

This is how CAPTCHA's got cracked as well: by embedding them into porn. ("Would you like me to take off my dress? Enter this code") It sounds hard to beat.

Any other outside-of-the-box solutions that you can think of?
This is a duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=245802.
Another one is http://www.maxmind.com/app/telephone_overview

This is a classy company, very reliable. We've been using them successfully for years for fraud prevention in online credit card charging.
Dear Plurk: We're through. Kthxbye.
Getting Started With... Intro To Various Web Programming Languages
Free ringtones might work, but I doubt a lot of people would give their phone numbers to a porn site...
Honestly, probably just a little bit. It's not that complex of an algorithm. The really complex stuff is MapReduce.
Anybody else feel the same about karma system on Hacker News?
I don't mindlessly follow everything pg says or does, but I do think the author is totally off base here.

Basically, I don't think you can "get" the hacker/painter parallel unless you really are a hacker. When I am in the right mood and sit down to code something, it is not me typing stuff and watching letters appear on the screen. It is not me transforming the state of the computer's memory. It is ideas flowing from my brain and becoming a creation. It's creative. (I don't paint, but music and coding go well together. When you hit upon the perfect melody, it just feels good. Programming is exactly the same for me.)

I don't want this post to be about me, but I do want to say that pg is not alone in thinking that programming is creative.

If all you do is write "select * from foo" into your PHP pages, though, and read "Hackers and Painters", you'll probably dislike it. That's because you're not hacking, you're code monkeying. There is plenty of money to be made by monkeying, but don't confuse it with art.
IMHO the ColdFusion requirement is more likely to get you a failed enterprise guy instead of a hacker that actually enjoys the work.
I didn't fully understand meta-learning until I started reading neuroscience books. Find some introductory text book on neuroscience (Amazon). Then read a book that explains extensively on various forms of neural plasticity. Developmental neuroscience also provides crucial insights Once you understand the fundamental mechanism of how the brain learns, all the methodology behind meta-learning can be derived. (e.g. practice science)
Because the brain is a complicated machine and only recently has evolve more complex types of learning, so I personally think it's more important to understand its limitations, (e.g. when you are not learning, or why you can learn physical skills faster than mental skills etc.)
Can we just agree that there is quite a bit of Google code that is unlikely to ever be open-sourced? =)
Samsung J800 Luxe (Unlocked) 
The Samsung J800 Luxe is a Tri-Band phone that much like its namesake looks the part of a millionaire. With its dark silver body that runs the course of the phone, broken up at intervals with white buttons and a keypad that combines both colors.
"All I'm saying is that if you're the kind of person who is irrevocably damaged by sending an SMS to someone, then these sorts of social networks shouldn't have been on your slate to begin with."

Another way of saying this: all SNSes are to be avoided if your social life has any subtleties to it at all. Which, if true - and it is so far - is A) pretty depressing, and B) a huge business opportunity for some brilliant UI thinkers who actually _don't_ subscribe to the Geek Social Fallacies.

Read danah boyd, people.
ColdFusion experience is not a requirement, only preferred and not absolutely necessary. If you've got the skills and you're interested, let us know.
Ya I agree, if you compare the two directly but you have to consider the chance of either event occurring. A highly likely crash that destroys my most important document is more serious to than the much less likely event that an attacker would specifically choose my computer.

My point is to broaden the notion of security, not to attenuate concern over remote attacks.
Companies focusing online ad budgets on own sites
When looking for your technical co-founder, don't specify the technologies. This is not a job ad. Your start-up will be shaped around your co-founder's skills, not the other way around. You want the best co-founder you can get - technologies are irrelevant.

Also, if you're in beta since march, it's a bit late to find a technical cofounder don't you think? You're looking for an early employee, perhaps?
I didn't think of that.. pretty creative, and it looks like it would work, although it's kind of sad that this creativity is going towards blackhat practices.
Yeahh.. probably true. I don't know of a single decent hacker who enjoys working with ColdFusion
Also: CUPS, Darwin, launchd, Bonjour, BLAST, Headerdoc, ...

Also they call it "open source", and say they love it. You can go to an "Open Source" webpage at apple.com and see how to download source from CVS, and how to install and run other open-source programs (like PostgreSQL and MySQL) on Mac OS X.

It's hard to imagine how a company selling proprietary software could be any more open-source friendly.
The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages (free ebook)
I don't complain when companies chose not to contribute back to open source projects they use.

I _do_ tend to try and spend my money with companies that contribute back.
This is a DNS forgery attack that, among other problems, works as effectively as a drive-by XSS. The patch for many organizations involves network rearchitecture. How many firewall rules had to change last time OpenSSH gave up remote code execution?

Is it the worst vulnerability ever? No. But your counterexamples are egregiously off.
why do all these alternative energy cars always have to look futuristic?
This may be worth considering, as far as not forcing it upon them.

I learned to code as a kid not from my parents teaching me, but from my dad buying a Vic20 and then a Commodore 64 (I ended up learning on the 64, but a few years later when the 64 was still the 'family' computer I got to use the vic20 in my room as a personal machine. It mostly played Paratrooper and Seawolf though) and very non-chalantly encouraging me to use it. I fuzzily recall that as I started to explore the Commodore BASIC, he would buy himself programming books and magazines that he just never seemed to have time to use. I suspect this may have been his clever way of giving me a leg up without pushing. In later years, when we upgraded to an IBM machine he got me some programming books and tools from a friend (REXX, which was interesting and close enough to BASIC to make it an easy transition) to give me more to play with.

Thinking on it, I suspect that the 'piano lessons' analogy might be right. Find a way to encourage your kids to catch the bug as far as hacking and poking at the system, and then find subtle ways to encourage them.

It almost makes me think there'd be some real value in a kids game that did this. Kind of a situation where the kid who is clever enough can figure out how to 'break' the game and poke at how it works, and push it along. I say this mostly because when I learned, I started playing with BASIC because the software was loaded through it. I recall one day wondering what the hell "LOAD "*", 8,1" meant and why it made the game run. And it went on from there...

My father never had any programming knowledge, in fact he was a Nurse. But his non-interfering encouragement pushed me along onto a nice little path that seems to have worked out pretty well so far.
Safety Tips when Visiting the Orlando Florida Area - Associated Content
Chrono Trigger to be Upgraded for Nintendo DS
Oh, and stuff like Lego Mindstorms might also be just the thing to make it happen.

One of the coolest experiences I had as a kid was when I was about 8 or 9 (it was 1987, because I recall everyone was also playing Faerie Tale Adventure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faery_Tale_Adventure) and someone introduced me to Lego LOGO. I remember just building a basic traffic light, and how incredibly EASY it was to do things.

Things like that might fit into my whole idea of 'find toys that they can play with, but that encourage them to hack.'
I was surprised to see Justine's first post amidst the top discussion on Techmeme. I don't think Loopt was intentially trying to trick people, but I don't understand why they weren't more prepared/careful/clear about this (especially for a YC startup). Their iPhone app launch was quite the letdown after all the WWDC hype.

Regardless, it seems like a great application with tons of potential if they can pull it together. I think it will take off once school starts again and Facebook doesn't try to butt in.
I have taken liberties
with your words
that were on
the internet

and which
you were probably
writing
for a receptive audience

forgive me
they were delicious
so righteous
and so vehement
Absolutely, I feel the same way. It's just that I think if people claim that their software is free, they should stand by their word.
It is easy to describe those terms through their role in interpersonal interaction and culture, but to either 1) make any claim about the working of the mind or 2) try to bridge the gap between symbol and signified is asking for heartache and endless rhetorical squabbling.
Android Tutorial - XML View inflation
I don't know much about Google. It seems like a fine place to work, and the people I know who are there tend to have a high opinion of it. But I tend to get worried, and slightly put off, by excessive perks. It's good to have them, but it's the work that I'll go to a job for, not the diversions.
Hacker News doesn't really rub karma in your face like the article describes Plurk as doing (headless dog?!).

Of course, you can choose to think that the karma number in the corner is actively mocking you, just as you can choose to click on other people's names to compare yourself to them. How much these site features bother a person says more about the person than the features, I think.
There is tons of stuff on HN that doesn't qualify as "news". Personally, I think that's a good thing.
I started working on this app in April for personal use. I had a very bare bones version working while I was at Startup School.

My friend @coryschop asked a question about Twitter a couple of weeks ago, and I sent him a note showing this app to him, and he got very excited about it and told me he had to work on the design for it. :)

He's been using it for a few weeks now, the design looks a LOT better, and we just launched today!

Total amount I spent to "develop" this app: $55 (logo)

Even if you include hosting fees for a decent box on Rails Machine (i.e. several months of being tested by < 5 users) I've spent < $500 on it so far.
unsubscribe.

hmmmm...didn't seem to work. anyone know how to stop every single post from the f5 corporate marketing blogs from reaching me here?
I also cringe when people use the term "codes" instead of "code".

I don't think of code as being divisible into discrete units, it's like a fluid. Like "water", you rarely say "waters". There are "programs" and "libraries" and "frameworks" that are made up of "code" or multiple "files containing code"... but they are not "codes"!

If you want to use the word "codes", you'll need to give me an adequate definition of the word "code" as a singular noun (which I will most likely disagree with).

In my mind "code" means programming language code, and "codes" means cryptography related codes.

</rant>
Thanks for the comedy relief
Advice for Students (Especially Grad Students in Statistics)
Save the date - "Yahoo Hack Day" coming up in September
I've never thought of myself as someone who could get pleasure from other people's suffering, but I guess I was wrong. I really enjoyed reading those messages.
Not to play devil's advocate or disagree with the general message, with which I agree, but Warren Buffett can live in a three-bedroom house in Nebraska. He's immensely talented, extremely well-established, and in a position where his business is entirely results-oriented, so he doesn't have to answer to anyone.

Most people who get caught up in the status bullshit don't start out that way, but develop those obsessions and complexes in order to climb the corporate ladder. They buy fancy cars and apartments to appear "hungry" to their bosses and co-workers. Eventually, they're interested in the status symbols to further their career progress, and interested in that career in order to buy more status symbols; this mixture of toxic attitude and environment becomes cyclical and, once one has a wife and kids, somewhat inextricable.
Okay, I'm sorry, really. I made what I thought (and still think) is an accurate synopsis of your posts. You disagree, and that's fine.

I don't think any further progress is going to be made here.
I don't think the primary role of a parent should be to literally teach your children to program, like a tutor. Instead, just expose them to some of the fascinating parts of computing, math, and science in general. If they're interested and you provide the right environment, they will likely be keen to start learning on their own fairly soon.
Philip K. Dick would make an excellent zombie.
FYI you might not want to take tax advice from random people on the Internet although you might ask someone who is actually qualified about something like that.
Android Tutorial Option and Context menu
Web framework shoot-out: Live coding competition
magus.pwnsen at gmail
One of the purest form of joy is other people's suffering, as it containts no drop of envy.

At least that's what I think when I deal with these people
The blog of my startup (Think WSJ News Coverage + Consumer Reports Reviews + Price Comparison + Throw in some nifty charts, all for the virtual gaming currency industry) was covering this today.

For a bit of a summary of the case and some commentary feel free to check it out at:
http://www.gamerates.com/posts/show/blizzard_wins_legal_case...

In short, Blizzard who makes the MMO World of Warcraft is suing the creators of a bot that plays the game for you (note: it doesn't hack the game, or do anything a normal player can't) as using the bot violates the Terms of Service that you click "accept" to everytime you play the game. They have ruled that such an "EULA" violation is in fact copyright infringement as the game loads into your RAM and then you are modifying the "experience" of the game outside the realms of the Terms of Service, hence a copyright infringement.

If it is appealed, I think the decision will change. It's just way too wide of a scope. Under these definitions any virus protection program that scans the World of Warcraft client could be violating the EULA as it's 3rd party and also be subject of "copyright infringement". Interesting enough World of Warcraft provides an anti-cheating tool called Warden that scans your computer for known bots which in itself could be a copyright infringement if it is violating the EULA of let's say the bot program (Glider, who is being sued) if they say in it's own EULA that it's illegal to have any 3rd party tool scan it.
I stopped reading as soon as I saw "jumped the shark". For me that's an auto-fail.
I don't want to argue too much about this, but Yahoo search existed way before Google search, yet many users switched eventually to google, and they took the lion share of search.

Also mapquest was a service with lots of users, but google's maps were such a better offering that people switched overnight to it.

You could argue that google hasn't made enough of compelling service for people to bother switching from yahoo finance to it.

As for email, is a totally different thing. I still use hotmail, mainly b/c it happen to be the first email i signed up with, and many of my old friends have that address, so it is not the easiest thing to switch. (I also do have gmail, and a yahoo email account).

While simple financial info lookup, just as search, are less sticky.
The title is mildly trollish -- I'd think only a very small portion of iPhone v2 buyers will be affected by this. In fact, the v2 iPhone is more compatible with accessories, because Apple got rid of the recessed headphone jack.
Yeah, here on HN nobody knows you're a headless dog. You have to deliberately click on someone's name to even know their karma score... and there isn't much reason to care.

And, wow, headless dog, no kidding:

http://www.plurk.com/user/gnidan

(That's just some random user's page, as linked from the front page.)

I can see how that would be enough to put me off a site for life.

And is it just me or is the "giant, echoingly empty, horizontally scrolling timeline" layout the stupidest design decision since... well, the name "Plurk", which sounds like something your dog might say if he were missing his head?
"The bigger question, however, is why Apple gets a pass, while I and others slam Microsoft..."

"I love my Mac. Period." That sortof answers your question, doesn't it? For good or ill, some people just want to get in on the Apple love fest. But don't cut off your nose to spite your face: I think Sun's actually done, on the whole, a decent job at working with and for the open source community. For both Apple and (sometimes) Google, I merely say: Beware Greeks bearing gifts.
Don't be too hasty in judgment.

My brother is a very good ColdFusion programmer. He got his start in the language because it was what I was programming with at the time. (Don't forget, around '99 when I got my start, there was Perl, ASP and Coldfusion as serious contenders.)

I ask him, "Why don't you give PHP or Rails a whirl?" "No interest." And so he focuses his effort in refining his ColdFusion skillset. He does Ajax and does CSS design with the best of them.
One of the things I like about not having block quoting is that people tend to be far more careful about what they quote. It keeps the discussion focused while also being visually pleasant.

So, "Yay!" blockquotes, but a bitter-sweet "yay" and one that includes a, "Can it be done better?"
If he is genuine about living simply (which I believe he is) then he didn't want to deal with the responsibility of figuring out how to use the money. better to make a one shot donation and never have to think about it again.

I'd do the same thing if I was old and had more money than I could possibly use.
Here's how I would think about it:
I enjoy investing.
I don't necessarily enjoy running a massive philanthropic organization.
I shouldn't have to do things I don't want to do, I'm old and rich.
Here Bill, you take it. Now I get to feel good about myself.
You are right. Google Finance sucks. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to draw a candlestick chart and gave up. On Yahoo - it takes less than a second to make the chart display exactly as I want.
Guitar Hero 2.0
overcomingbias.com

i've spent hours clicking everything the blog posts link to.
these are your bibles:
http://www.logicalfallacies.info/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

study those throughly and you will be better equipped than the vast majority of humanity.
Disclaimer: exposing the fallacies in social sciences may not win you over with your professor.
From a marketing perspective:

What is the fire burning in the pants of your market? (And who is your target market -- you've got teachers and students and school admins, please pick one.)

The first thing I see what I visit your site: "You've never seen elearning like this before." As a teacher, how does that help me?

I can tell what you're doing. You are trying to position yourself as a competitor in the marketplace. You are coming from a position of weakness when you do this.

Features page: "Just go ahead and try to outfeature us." WTF are you even talking to? How does that apply to me as a teacher? When did more features make a project better?

Forget your competition and get yourself into the boots of a teacher. Feel the pain a teacher feels when they aren't using your software.

Where are the testimonials from teachers that are raving about your software? "Last year, I couldn't get my students to stop chatting with each other during class. This year, I signed up for Studeous, set everything up and 95% of my class is logging in each day and 85% are actually talking to each other on the message boards. I'm absolutely giddy!"
Example: I tried to invite a friend and it didn't even work. She was sitting right next to me.
Do not open this link if you are at work.

NSFW. Could someone please change the title.
On average, shouldn't roughly half of investors do better than the market and roughly half do worse?
The behavior gap: three persistent problems for Internet technologies
How do you plan to compete with Blackboard? Do you have a plan for dealing with their patents on eLearning?
In practice, it's more like 25% do better than the market and 75% do worse. This is because those who do better tend to do much better, while those who do worse tend to do only slightly worse. (Remember, if you don't short your losses are capped at 100%, while your gains are potentially infinite.) Mean/median confusion strikes again.
Well, there could be a limit to the number of characters in the BLOCKQUOTE element.
Calacanis Gets Chatty, and I Like It | My Philly Network
Wouldn't take much to dethrone Blackboard at my institution.
McDonald's chicken biscuit: the best fast food chicken biscuit that you can buy on Sundays. The best chicken biscuit anywhere at any time of course is Chic-Fil-A.
Since we lie to kids maybe we simultaneously tell them to read adult literature so that they'll learn about some of the lies. Since we are uncomfortable with the truth's in adult literature maybe this is why children's literature is now so popular with parents. Annie Dillard (in her autobiography, American Childhood, I think) wrote about this. When she was a kid she remembered wondering "do adults know what's in these books they are telling us to read ?"

It's interesting that parents seem very sensitive to the contradiction of their lies in adult tv shows and movies but oblivious to the same problem in adult literature. (By adult I mean not non-juvenile not explictly sexual material)
Congrats, pg, I think you may be the first person to ever have applied 'noob' to painting. :)