skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not necessarily true. Google sends out different emails depending on the method in which it banned you. The message that was sent out rules out a few automated systems, but doesn't tell the cause. Having high ctr doesn't mean its bad. There are accounts with 20% ctr which are fine.

-Ex Google Spam
It seems that logos with rounded fonts are worse than logos with more 'squary' letters (I realize I lack some appropriate terminology). Could that be because squary fonts are more serious looking, more trustworthy?
> and if it would've had a plural, it would've been 'viri'

That's not immediately clear. Depending on whether you think it's second or fourth declension, and masculine or neuter, the various possibilities are virua, vira, virūs, and viri. My best guess is that the "correct" usage was one of the more exotic varients (virua or vira), but the word was so rare that many people didn't learn the nuances, and instead adopted it to the more common patterns. Similar to how "begs the question" is often used incorrectly, and that ends up becoming an accepted usage.

However, the plural could not have been "virii."
That would be an element of the set, not the definition.
At this point, I don't think "leveling" should be considered a game mechanic -- there are so many apps and things that I can "level" in that leveling has become... ubiquitous, I guess, and therefor uninteresting. Achievements are kind of getting the same way.

Game mechanics only work if they're interesting and motivating. When something becomes uninteresting, I don't think it should be considered a "game mechanic."
OKCupid does interesting analyses of their user data. Here's a post looking at the impact of attractiveness on messaging rates (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...). Looks like, at least for their users, the "hot girl effect" is not real; the more attractive the girl, the lower the probability of a successful response.
People who hadn't brought refrigerators before, might be a first one, though. And if there are extremely efficient, we might even switch to living inside refrigerators [1] in summer.

[1] Some people already do.
> his clear intention is to induce site visitors to make planned purchases through his affiliate links, something that is obviously completely contrary to the spirit of his agreement with Amazon.

Isn't that what affiliate links are for? Encouraging people to buy something through them.

Many review sites right glistening copy then add an affiliate link. is that against the spirit of the agreement too?
From the article: "Once a girl passes a certain degree of hotness, the amount of guys hitting on her drops dramatically."

However, I know of a different version. If (as a guy) you are seen to date a hot girl, then the chances of you dating other hot girls goes up. They want to know what you've got.

I'm guessing this applies to VC as well.
Sometimes those people are wrong, but it seems that in this case the cost is purely monetary and the budget has plenty of bloat in it where we could move money from which could make the final 6 lives be saved (it is what, the cost of two helicopters and 7 hellfire missiles? Half a bridge to nowhere?).

Given these things, I would have to disagree with you, in this case it would be worth saving the final 6 lives.
Luck = opportunity + preparation
Founder here. Thanks for the mention and happy to take feedback! Was planning on doing an Ask HN post soon.
Thanks. I'm looking at both of those now. However it looks like the CK editor's file manager integration is only for PHP and ASP and my app is Ruby.
Russian e-Payment Giant ChronoPay Hacked
It's been flat for a decade, so why now?

The Seahawks are in trouble, so he's turning to other interests?
Not only that, Google has so many adsense users that unless you are higher tier (big adsense account), it's not worth the trouble keeping you in the system. They ban all the time even when you don't do anything and someone spams your account. If you maliciously click another website for a few weeks straight, it will all get blocked/filtered, but it will also cause the system to flag the account and auto-ban. Unless you are higher tier, you get banned anyways.
The busses would be extremely heavy in the bottom, and in addition it would require a collision with a large object to tip it over.
The hotter you are the more you'll get hit on, guaranteed.

I think it depends. I've dated girls that I think would be considered 'hot' and have talked to them about this exact subject. Many were not hit on very often or they were only hit on by the kind of guys that they would never date. The I'm god's gift sort of guy (think Jersey Shore TV show ugh).

And no, having some drunk guy yell across the bar he wants to marry them is not getting hit on. Hit on would be a guy coming up and trying to have a real conversation.

From a guys standpoint rejection is hard no matter how confident a guy might be. Even if a guy wants to hit on the hottest girl he finds, he may opt for one less externally hot in order to lessen the chance of rejection. Said guy may not even realize he's making this selection.
if it's useful internally, then I can't think of a better form of branding than tidying up the formatting, slapping a logo on the bottom and knowing that it's going to be downloaded and referred to by the people most likely to require your specialised services. For that matter I was planning on tidying up and releasing the ones I created for myself to learn the framework at some point, and I have no desire whatsoever to sell my services as a programmer (nor should any sane person want to hire me).

I have to wonder what the motivation for releasing it as a 10MB(!) pdf was though.
Oh I see. I figured my number might be a bit misinformed. Yeah, AWS pricing is not simple and I'm not surprised I forgot storage and other things...

Thanks for the reply!
If you give me everything else I need, I can go for a walk when I need a distraction. I find that providing distractions is more of a signalling thing.

The couch tells me the company understands that "flow" cannot be switched on and off. If there's no couch, I won't miss it, but I would worry that the company values busywork over results.
If the article is true, the people like you are upping the chances of people who heed its advice. So, thanks?
Patent Armageddon is a GOOD thing!
Having spent most of my schooled life riding one of these busses (with safety belts), I can assure you that no children will wear them.
http://www.ofb.net/~jlm/virus.html

More than either of you two probably want to know about the subject.
All the Python ones other than GAE are in different beta stages. I hope one of them becomes as good as Heroku, Google would be incredibly tempted to buy something like that. GAE seems designed to assimilate apps into Google rather than to serve the needs of developers.
Very well said and with that, consider this:

"Allowing some customers to bypass channels may seem helpful, but once everyone becomes special, no one is special."

Well, some customers may actually be special. It depends if the customer is willing to pay for the special status. I'm sure that kind of philosophy can't be applied to all situations or kinds of businesses, but it's not absolute: it can work. I try to apply the same thinking to emergencies: I meet customer's emergency with higher price. Most of them back off and figure out they can wait for our normal procedure. A higher price is great filter to customers who have a real emergency and are willing to pay for it.
With that, you can really have some customers to be special, but not everyone.

I can only agree with the rest, very well said.
Ask HN: what apps do you know of are filling the micro-blogging niche?
What apps do you know of are filling the twitter < app < blog niche? Meaning the larger than 140 chars but small enough not to go to your blog?
I'm assuming you're a woman? Do you have any friendships with women you'd consider stunningly attractive?
Also because it has just been so. In the old times, you used to do the same thing as your parents, and capabilities didn't usually go obsolete during the course of one's work life, even less if that was at a college level.
Scala is fully supported in their latest release and I haven't run into any quirkiness. To me it feels much more natural than using Lift but that is mostly because there aren't 4 different ways to do the same thing.
No, that's too easy a cop-out. :-) How would you stop at the right number in Python code? Would you compute 100 numbers and then inspect/truncate afterwards?
The problem is he built up a kinship with his viewers which included his financial plight:

I film myself huddling around a tray of candles in the boat as the ice slides past the hull in the winter.

Then he tells them a way he makes money:

yes, I told my subscribers that I got some money if they visited the websites of those advertisers

You say that's not encouragement? Well, others thought it was enough to comment about extra ad clicking and even proudly email him about it. His response? That he "preferred" they only clicked ads they were interested in. That sounds almost like a wink-wink to me. Web visitors do not exhibit that type of behavior of their own accord if unsolicited. Ironically, they thought they were helping him out...
The Real Tech Failures of 2010
New Android Trojan Found
Uh, you have it backward. Since it's verified boot, you can't easily alter the signed OS image. This is better as it allows individuals to sign executables that will then execute natively in the regular OS.

This is how original Xbox and Xbox 360 softmods work. The regular OS boots and either an exploit occurs in the font package, music player, MechAssault or Splinter Cell (the latter two used for bootstrapping the former two) or in the 360 the xbox is "rebooted" virtually to avoid the verified boot into an alternative kernel that has signature checking removed.

Note, I know nothing about PS3 hacking either and am making assumptions based on the connotations of the word "master key", "signing" and other comments here along with my knowledge of xbox1/360 hacking.
Why, oh why, would you ever use an HMAC in this way? HMACs are great for validating your own data (e.g. "secure cookies"), but anyone who can validate an HMAC can also generate them. Repeat after me: HMACs are not signatures.
>>perl5, 6 even more

Interesting. With modern Perl use (autodie, testing, Best Practices, etc)?

Are you trolling or do you have a few specific examples of what makes you lose more work weeks a year than CPAN saves you?

Also, what would be worse with Perl 6 -- that you can say already now (or do you have Rakudo in production)?
I have a problem with people who seem to be so passionate about stuff they hate. You use the example of Justin Bieber, who my niece quite likes, but loads of people do not. I tend to ignore the things that have no effect on me, and I do not like. Other people feel the need to attack such things. They are the ones with the problem.

If you do not like something, why bother wasting your time commenting on it. Sure, if it is something that affects you, like your government or road rules, go ahead. If it is something you can ignore, then YOU are being the fool.
This is somewhat irrelevant. Google says in the TOS to not do that, but they don't ban on that alone. What you get banned for is based on data. Everytime they ban someone, they want enough evidence, so if it ever went to court, they don't look foolish. You can have no effect, or even some when asking people to click. You have to break thresholds to actually get banned. And even if there were some users egregiously 'supporting' the site, the people can overlook that and just deduct from the account. To get automatically banned means you broke some nasty thresholds.
First, let's agree on the definition of mundane as used here. To me, your use of mundane suggests the task of writing a program after high-level questions, what and why, have received high-level answers. Everything but initial brainstorming.

The hypothesis introduced in the article is that pair programming is beneficial because it improves individual skills and code quality. I'm not sure how clearly that's communicated.

Individual skills are improved by understanding your current problem-solving process and upgrading it as necessary. This isn't only about picking up skills by observing others, but reasoning about the steps you take and updating as appropriate. Pair programming isn't necessary for this, it just facilitates it. This whole being mindful thing deserves a post of its own.

I would expect that code quality would be improved because design flaws and bugs are more likely to be caught early. Therefore there's less time spent rewriting or debugging.

I'm treating this foray into pair programming as an experiment. It was literally a week ago that I began to see how pair programming could be efficient and even enjoyable. I do not plan on doing 100% pairing forever, it's impractical and probably inefficient. Right now I'm thinking that 50-75% pairing might be an optimum in most cases.
Every one of those addons is available directly from the vendor. The addons just set some ENV variables, or auto installs a plugin on deploy. Plus the provisioning apis are well documented so you could easily replicate it on a competing service so existing addon's would work with no additional dev effort needed by the addon provider (I've deployed a heroku addon).

Yep, good point on the free apps. I don't think a competitor would have to offer free apps though if they were able to lower the cost for paid installs and use the exact same deployment tools.
Reliable MacBook Pro replacement battery?
Pardon me if this is a gauche question to post here, but I couldn't think of a more suitable online community to ask.

The battery on my early 2008 MBP is almost completely toast, and unfortunately I haven't found a replacement battery by anyone that got enough good ratings over the bad ones to make me feel good about a purchase. I realize that YMMV with these kinds of things, but I trust you folks more than Amazon with matters of this kind. Any pointers? Thanks, all.

John
While a shark tries to hurt other sharks, doesn't matter me. The problem comes when a human is injured by a shark.
Great point...

While the graph does generally bare you out, one can see a few small turns on the OKcupid graph that might be a ghost of the "hot girl effect" - the most attractive female senders get more responses from guy of average appearance than from guys considered least the attractive...

You could also argue that when someone's already on OkCupid, they're already motivated to seek out someone and don't necessarily feel intimidated concerning who. This might be different than real life. But it might not be...
CB: Do you like the Rolling Stones?

Me: Not particularly.

CB: How about 3 Doors Down?

Me: Meh.

<insert about 3 more bands here, all with negative responses from me>

CB: You don't have many friends, do you?

Ouch.
WikiLeaks' Imitators Proliferate But Go Their Own Way: A Catalog of Clones
There's another explanation that is reasonable but Wired can't even talk about without someone's privacy being damaged.

It sucks that they're in this bind. I believe they are acting ethically.
That's the site I used for publishing, yes. I moved on to video tutorials, and that site remains for a few folk who still access tutorials online.

I wrote this one on Nuendo for PC Publishing:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Music-Steinberg-Nuendo-Cooper...

and self-published this one on Cubase:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cubase-SX-Complete-Musicians-Referen...

Both are tech books.

I've been writing a novel for a few years. Trashed it twice after twenty-odd thousand words both times. I think that's a good thing, as novel writing is a new skill for me. I'm learning. But I do love tech writing. It's pedantic as hell, but very rewarding when you get it right.
I think that a huge factor is also that people will treat a bus full of small children with a lot of respect simply because they might have / know children themselves.

You really don't want to live in a small community and the 'jerk that rear-ended the school bus in their F150.'.
MooTools Vs. jQuery
I'm a MooTools fan but my co-workers are jquery. I'm open to be persuaded but I need some good reasons. Please discuss, suggest, etc.
It's amazing how much money is like time.

If you have a ton of excess time, you are far less efficient and it simply takes you longer to complete relatively simple tasks.

Having tons of money before you can prove product-market fit just leads to misallocated spending and inefficient uses of money (because people force themselves to spend to justify the amount of money they've raised.)

This is the reason programs like YC & TechStars work - it doesn't take a ton of money to build an early product and prove your model works.

Once the model works - then you should spend like crazy to scale - but because you've spent the time with very little money - you understand the value of each dollar and the positive affect of each additional dollar.

Edit: For examples, check-out most of the startups that blew up in the late 90s. They raised a ton of money because they could, but it was spent on domain names, really expensive office space, executive talent, and building proprietary software for non-core functions.

My favorite example is the story of the Industry Standard - Check out "Starving to Death on 200 Million" by James Ledbetter if you want to learn more.
No. As I am not a patent attorney and do not speak legalese, I had to concern myself with the abstract descriptions only. Have you? These appear to cover what is essentially the * symbol appearing over your "notifications" icon after a timeout on facebook, or the (1) appearing on twitter if you leave it idle for long enough and a new tweet appears in your stream.

Do you think that this is unique enough an idea that others should have to pay Paul Allen's company for the rights to use it? This was something that I was going to implement on thingist. Should I not do this because I would be infringing on a legitimate (legitimate in the spirit of patent law) bit of intellectual property?

This is why patent trolling is so damaging to the community. I'm not a lawyer, I have no idea. The best I can do is read the abstract of a patent (if I can even find it) and try not to step on anybody's toes. For somebody like me, a lowly 23 year old kid making side projects in his spare time and day-dreaming about someday moving to San Francisco and getting to hang out at the cool kids table, this stuff is terrifying. Paul Allen, a multi-billionaire with a fleet of private jets and private yachts and private submarines and private multi-million-dollar-per-year-retainer lawyers might SUE ME.

SO I have a couple of choices. I can implement what seems like a completely obvious feature and risk being sued by the largest Goliath in the industry, or I can follow the written law and not.

What should I do? What would you do?
I'd also add that since the bus is so heavy and carries so much momentum, it's far less likely to stop as quickly and forcefully as a car, so the actual force transmitted to the passengers is remarkably low.

I've been in an accident between a car and a bus - it wasn't very serious, but it was a good insight into the weight of the bus. The biggest clue was the noise in that case - the bus shook a bit, but nobody came out of their seats.
Looks like there's a huge opportunity in the .NET game...one of those providers looks amateurish and the other isn't even running yet. I would definitely pursue that if I didn't have my hands full.
HN is my only "news" source. I wouldn't call most of it news though.
I have to say that I have never met anyone who was offended by Merry Christmas. I'm an atheist and I hate "Happy holidays." I know what the holiday is: just say its name. My Druid ex-girlfriend would point out to me that it was a Christian usurpation of a pagan festival and then wish me Merry Christmas after the lecture :-)

I've known more people who were upset by "Merry Xmas" than anything else.
Thanks for breaking that down, it's all, uh, a little terse.

The ..^ operator (including the right endpoint?) doesn't do what I was expecting:

> 1, 2, * + * ..^ * >= 100;
1 2 _block298

Also, this seems a little unfortunate:

> 1, * + * ...^ * >= 100;
===SORRY!===
Method 'Bridge' not found for invocant of class 'Failure'

(I was expecting some warning about the closure expecting two arguments, and only getting one.)
Considering that the person who introduced me to bacon and garlic pizza was Jewish, I can attest that this method does not always work.
Would installing seat belts actually save those lives? An accident that would be fatal without a seatbelt may well be fatal with one, involving perhaps a fire or train or semi truck.

Improving general road, pedestrian, and bicycle safety would be a far better preventative measure (or even offering more/more convenient school bus service) using any money that would fund seat belts, as car accidents are the number one killer of children.
I think both Wired and Greenwald are operating ethically. Greenwald is right to be, as a reporter, skeptical and demanding of more evidence. Wired, unfortunately, is caught in a position where they may well be acting completely ethically but can't explain why without violating someone's privacy and trust.

They both may be doing the right thing here. I hope I am right and we really do have two pretty good journalistic organizations operating with good intentions.
Resume Analysis for 2011: Tips on how to keep your resume writing fresh |
His practice is a clear case of click fraud and his above-normal click-through rates demonstrate that he was successful in that fraudulent behavior.

Google correctly identified his business as dishonest and terminated his account per agreement that the guy signed when he started using AdSense.

You try to make a case for Google trying to determine shades of gray, but it's a non-scalable, slippery slope.

The current rule is crystal clear and simple: don't encourage users to click on ads they otherwise wouldn't. By definition every such click is fraudulent because the user wouldn't otherwise perform it.

Google (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot implement more subtle rules (that weight factors like how many times someone did it, how often does he do it, how subtle the encouragement is, how many kids he has to support) in a scalable way.

Google couldn't even apply more subtle rules in a consistent way, giving fraudsters even more weapon in what is a PR game (take all the ample, emotional justification from the above post AND allow that fraudster to point to other people who are doing similar things but Google hasn't taken action against them because some fallible person applied a different subtle standard for what fraud is than some other fallible person).

As this thread demonstrates, there's plenty of people willing to sympathise with the fraudster despite clear, self-admitted evidence of wrongdoing based purely on his self-professed (hence extremely biased) version of how good of a person he is and how good intentions were and how badly he was treated by big, cold Google. Emotion can trump facts.
So they're some of the best-drafted, absurdly vague patents out there?
The man is dying, and he's really well off, what is he doing patent trolling?