skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My thoughts exactly. This post has nothing constructive to offer.

The simple truth is that CAPTCHAs are a very good initial defence to spammers. We've been trying to find a problem to replace CAPTCHAs, but we haven't been able to find one that satisfies all these properties:

1. It has to be easy for a computer to create.

2. It has to be easy for a computer to verify.

3. The problem space has to be very large to thwart precalculation attacks.

4. It has to be easy for a human to solve.

5. It has to be hard for a computer to solve.

Your math example fails #4, and the cats example fails #3.

EDIT: How do we make lists in HN markdown?
Yes, most of the results for this query wind up pointing to pages saying "be the first to review [any widget]".

As a workaround, try searching for "[any widget] sucks" and "[any widget] good".

EDIT: tying this to other discussions on the topic, it's a symptom of Patio11's observation that natural language search doesn't work very well. If you want to find something, you need to paint a picture of what it looks like, rather than asking a question about it.
Enumerable.java (http://enumerable.org) is not really a functional library, but it does support limited closures:

boolean b = a.any(λ(s, s.equals(s.toLowerCase()));

s and λ are statically imported.
Wasabi?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html
I find the notions of 'underemployed' or 'underpaid' to be pretty silly. It's non-sensical to think people deserve some minimum amount of money regardless of how much perceived value they bring to their employer.
How Wikipedia and Flattr can together change the World
Isn't this how Facebook topples Google and completely dominates the internet? By incorporating your social graph into your search results, your relationships can influence what is returned by the search.

Suppose you could create some sort of "friend" list with HN users and that were used to prioritize your search results.
If you get a result you don't like, click that you don't like it and the software will reduce the weights of the parts of your social graph which caused that result to be highly scored.
I've recently discovered the secret to frozen vegetables: put them in freezer bags. The bags the vegetables come in don't prevent freezer burn, so the vegetables taste terrible after a couple weeks. In freezer bags, you have a huge range of vegetables that are available to you for months.
If the only skill you have is doing a job a computer can do in 10 years, get thyself to a bookstore immediately, pick up the fattest book you can find and read it cover to cover.

I'm looking at you fast-food/convenience store workers. The future of work is data acquisition, data analysis and innovation/science.
How Did Apple Lure The Beatles to iTunes?
more debate :

"Retracted autism/vaccine study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds (cnn.com)"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073192
iTunes is by far the worst Apple product in terms of software engineering
Nah. They let people 'report spam' in gmail -- they're happy to admit that algorithm doesn't always guess right. Also there's already a "give us feedback" mechanism for reporting bad search results, it's just too slow and manual.
There's a lot of similarity between the latter two (rotated almost on a pivot). If Safari moved to the .app store variant, saving real estate in the top, I'd approve. Perhaps they're trying to phase in a new button layout?
The thing is, the SO scrapers like efreedom aren't spam, strictly speaking. It's just that they clone existing content without adding value, and as such are just noise in the results.

Perhaps we need to frame the discussion differently, considering what the searcher wants, rather than "spam-free hits".
Vigorously agree. I have no idea why I have such a hard time using iTunes, but I do consistently, even doing really simple and obvious things. It horrifies me.
A better question is, "what parts of Goldman do not have Chinese walls between them?"

To be fair, some information leaks over the walls. For example, consider investment advice. Within a bank, you have "Investment Advice", and you have !Investment Advice. IA doesn't really get to talk to traders, all they do is provide unbiased recommendations to clients.

However, there is another department, which I'll call "Conflict of Interest Watch" (CIW, the name varies from bank to bank) which tags every report from IA with possible conflicts of interest. So if someone in IA writes a report about Facebook, some computer system in CIW will apply the label "Warning: GS has a business relationship with Facebook." So an analyst can write a report, submit it, and read the tags to determine if Goldman is doing business with Facebook (of course, reading the newspaper is also permitted).

The SEC fines the company $200k per report if they fail to report a relationship and $80k if they report a nonexistent relationship (to prevent companies from just tagging every report as "conflict of interest", a response to Wachovia doing exactly this). A certain investment bank (maybe Goldman, maybe not) is currently devoting tens of millions of dollars to doing a better job of this.
If the phone had two cameras spaced some distance apart then you could use stereo vision algorithms to get a similar result. Maybe it would be possible to put an infrared laser on a phone, similar to the Kinect, but I expect that power consumption would become an issue (although if it's only in a momentary blast it might be feasible).

There are other possible methods, such as the "photo popup" created at CMU some years ago, but these rely heavily upon "dodgy heuristics" and often fail to give a good result.
Funding a Startup from Advertising is a Vain Dream
It's a 2 of 3 problem; We want three things 1) access to stuff 2) that access to be secure 3) no effort/time/delay for access. But in reality you only get two of those.

In general things of "value" can't be both secure and fast/easy. If it's fast/easy it can(and will) be brute forced and/or Amazon Turked.
Is adware prohibited from everything in the store? It seems like every windows application I download has some sort of toolbar bundled but maybe this isn't a problem on Mac.
Why does Apple now have three different window control
styles? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20635/Screenshots/r3da.png

Only three? That makes very consistent interface then.

Why are there back buttons ("like a browser") but you can't
right hand click to get the contextual drop down?

Back buttons are there, you know, to get back. Very common usage pattern. Contextual drop down? Not that common. Even Safari does not have it. Neither does Opera on OS X.

The navigation (Featured, Top Charts, etc) are so far away from the
other controls (Back and Forward) its insanely awkward to use.

Jus like on every web page? Does not cause much trouble though.
The iTunes ones are smaller and closer to the edge of the window
I believe blekko does
A very dear friend of mine just committed suicide a month ago. He was a very intelligent guy about to become successful.

I wish he would have left a note like this behind to know why he did it.

I realize this comment doesn't add much value to the conversation, I'm just thinking out loud. Thanks.
This is a solved problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling
What do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool where you can post questions and a lot of under-employed people will rush out and do the necessary Google searches, collating and slightly rewriting the results to yield the most votes.

Everyone is ripping off someone's content.

And just to be accurate here, SO content is creative commons (created by the community). Are those just cheap words?
Maybe. Never had any problems with it, be it Windows (long time ago) or Mac (since 2004).
But you've both just disproved your own examples!

The very fact there are articles explaining previous solutions to these problem domains is why I just don't believe anyone would ever take a year to get up to speed with something an expert could do in one day.

I can make a great spell checker or a great anti-spam program that takes an expert a day to program in less than a year by just googling it.

There are so few programming domains that aren't fairly transparent where a domain expert has such a massive advantage that a domain novice couldn't gather sufficient knowledge in a year to rival the other programmer's one day effort, given the same level of intelligence, etc.
The author is slightly confusing cause with effect here. Not reading your forums makes them toxic since there is no effective moderation. Too many people still have this misguided notion that the Internet should be some massive free speech zone where nothing can be censored except maybe spam. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Clear, effective moderation backed up by sensible but stringent policy can remove many of the pathologies that the article is talking about and transform a forum into a genuinely useful resource.
> It's non-sensical to think people deserve some minimum amount of money regardless of how much perceived value they bring to their employer.

Some people might argue that they deserve some minimum amount of money (or equivalent assistance): but not necessarily from the employer. Want to pay some teenager $2 an hour? Ok, fair enough. If you're paying a guy that who's trying to support a family, he probably needs extra help from somewhere. Advocates of no minimum wage tend to gloss over that fact.

But then again, these discussions have gone round and round on the internet for ages and they don't get resolved. I'd rather see them extirpated from this site.
That was my point really. I don't want to see eFreedom hits, I consider them spammy, so I'd like to be able to click-ban them from my results.

If Google use that information to gradually adjust their ranking overall, then fair enough -- won't affect me, I can't see them anyway.

EDIT: Even if they don't let that affect everyone else's results (because of gaming), then I still don't care, I still don't see the crap in my results ever again.
http://www.nucaptcha.com/
Offers a solution in video captchas. Moving letters are way easier to read and if fraudulent activity is detected the videos slow down to a rate which becomes uneconomical to solve.
How does that happen though? efreedom must be doing something special with SEO to get higher than SO given that SO must have huge page rank score.
Until the cost to build and revenue brought in by a robotic McDonalds or 7/11 is more advantageous to the owner than to have one staffed by people, I'm thinking that basic jobs like this are still going to be around.
1) If you don't understand tax law, should you have to pay more tax? If tax law is simplified (so everybody pays a "fair" amount), why should people who have bothered to structure their affairs in a tax-efficient manner lose out?

2) Google has an "advanced" tab. If they really wanted to, they could have a "fuzzy match" section, and a "required literal" section. They could also do some funky stuff with leximes, but it's just not worth it, even for advanced users.
How about adding some sort of a feedback mechanism to search? For instance, when I search for something, maybe some way to mark a result as spam and optionally relevant?

The obvious problem is that spammers would attempt to game the feedback mechanism. But a combination of things like captcha to defend against robots, limits on how many times you can flag/upvote sites in a month (feedback credits), and exposing the feedback mechanism to only real, active-for-a-long-time users above a karma threshold (Google can definitely figure this out looking at the search history, gmail account etc), might be strong enough to beat the spammers.

You could start this as a Labs feature, and see if it works well.
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Happy New Year◎,◎appy shopping
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Microsoft paid for the company I work for to show off the first Surface at a consumer event last year, and from our experience they seemed pretty indifferent.

There were microsoft staff on our stand to promote it, but they really couldn't be assed, instead spending their time around other Microsoft products that were much more consumer friendly.

We thought it was a pretty cool device, but visitors to the show seemed to side with the MS staff, mostly showing indifference to what appeared much like a glass table.
What I had a really hard time with was this line here:

>I suspect that since then captchas have probably gotten a bit better, but spam bots probably have as well.

He uses conjecture as if it's good enough to strongly support his stance. He can't even dedicate the effort to do some fact-checking into something relevant to 2011.

Meanwhile, I've always been a strong advocate of monitoring user actions and profiling on 'suspicion levels' which is significantly more complex than a captcha, but it gives you a set of eyes on someone at all times and can lock them out for spamming hundreds of emails about Viagra. That being said, we're right back at square one with users getting annoyed if the monitoring/blocking system isn't 'good enough.'
I am 'middle aged' (oh, God...) and have a wife and two young kids. I first had someone mention to me that I might be ADD this past April/May. After a bunch of research, I convinced myself that it might be true. Iwas officially diagnosed in August and have been on drugs since then. So it is early days for me...

The plan for me is to use the drugs long enough to cement behaviors that help me manage the condition within my current situation. For most of my life, I haven't had a 'straight-job', a marriage and two kids to raise. I structured everything so that I could basically do anything that I wanted, whenever I wanted. Now that I have to manage having family and a job (at least job in the short term), I need to have some way of maintaining consistent behavior. Right now the drugs are working for my situation.

I know the thinking-difference that this condition brings is a comparative advantage to others. I am way more creative, and much better at solving problems than others are. I just kind of suck at being reliable right now.

Personally, I have no side effects that I notice (none at all) with correct dosing and control of my behavior.

Within the first few days of being on Concerta, I had a stressful rush-job on one of my files at work and slipped into my 'work-zone' behavior (my main symptom is overfocus). The combination of the new drugs, and the adrenaline / anxiety was a strange sensation, probably what most experience when being on amphetamines. I just don't put myself in that situation anymore.

Other than that, I've nothing to report.

You might consider that it was not the drugs alone that were keeping you awake. You may have a great deal of latent anxiety that only becomes a problem once you 'wake your frontal lobe up'. That anxiety is what I used to stay sharp before drugs. Maybe massage or meditation would help you get to sleep when you start on the drugs.

I do not claim to be an authority on the research, but I believe that the statistics are that more people die from using Asprin every year than medical stimulants (not that death should be the only measure).

There is evidence supporting good outcomes for the medical use of stimulants dating as far back as the 1930's - longer than any other class of drugs. The medical consensus is that they are safe.
Totally agree. A correlated mistake is the Labor Theory of Value [1]. As if any persons' effort -- no matter how misguided, ineffectual, or undesired -- merited anything; much less a comfortable lifestyle.

Give people money because you think being a human is valuable, or because it will assuage your guilt, or for any other none economically damaging excuse. It's more honest and a better system.

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[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
Aperture is US$ 79,99 in the Store, Lightroom now seems so expensive...
Because, of course, those fries will be serving themselves. I'd say checkout staff and customer assistants are one of the few jobs that couldn't be mechanised/outsourced in the (reasonable) future.
It is a very sad story, but... well, I do not like to sound like a dick, but there are many people worse off and they manage to get by and even make other people happy.

For example I do not really even had a family AT ALL. I know people that have been born disabled, etc. It is not really fair to compare abuse with that, but - problems tend to happen and we need to deal with them.

Again - if this is his choice and this is how he chose to deal with that - that's fine, but this kind of public stunt at then end + dissing his family publicly is not really the best way he could have dealt with it.

From his post he seems to have had deep clinical depression and while his traumatic experience in the past might have been at the root of this, this certainly does not justify 30+ years of constant depression. Literally half of the people in this world have witnessed friends die, live in pain/problems, depression - but choose to keep low profile with that. Public suicide on the internet - not cool.
7 points is not massive agreement - the first response criticizing this point has more points (as of this writing - it may have been different.)
If you artificially increase the price that someone must pay for something, than either (a) fewer people will make any attempt to buy it; or (b) you'll get a glut of sellers trying to make that buck.

The OP seems to want us to artificially increase the price for certain types of labor. The result will be either that fewer of those people will be employed in the end, or that many people will target such careers in order to make the disproportionate pay.

Neither of these outcomes are desirable.

The low wage for these jobs is a signal that we don't need any more of these workers. Folks should take the clue and prepare themselves for different careers.
Seriously...

Only three? That makes very consistent interface then.

How is three good? Why are we applauding that, when, last week, Apple had two styles? I don't use Windows much but I'm pretty sure 99% of all the applications use the same window elements and style (this one: http://media.arstechnica.com/images/windows7/Peek%20-%20Befo...)

Back buttons are there, you know, to get back. Very common usage pattern.
Contextual drop down? Not that common. Even Safari does not have it. Neither does Opera on OS X.

It isn't right click, its click and hold. Same difference. Safari has it. App store doesn't.

Jus like on every web page? Does not cause much trouble though.

Lets compare Safari to App Store in terms of distance... http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20635/Screenshots/1bwg.png
Tangential: there's probably a difference between preparing food for catering vs restaurants. In catering, and presumably at YC dinners, everyone starts each course at the same time (but eats the same food). I'd imagine this to be a different challenge from providing different meals to an equal number of people, but staggered in time, as you would at a restaurant.

In any case, pasta-based meals are probably good candidates for scaling to catering-size dimensions as most of the components aren't overly time-sensitive. I could still see it ending in a disaster if I was doing it for the first time with no professional help.
Ashdod was first attacked in 2008. Sderot has been under attack since the start of the second intifada, and back then most of the time home-made and Qassam rockets were used, not "sophisticated" weaponry. And while I do recognize and appreciate the psychological damage caused to citizens, when looked at in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the damage seems minimal.

I don't think the author needed to sensationalize the point about Al-Mabhouh being a weapons smuggler for a terrorist group. I think most people would understand why Israel wanted him eliminated.
And mahalo.
Is this like synaptic et al.? I mean, do you get updates automatically? That would be great! Also, a central packaging tool helps avoiding multiple installations of the same software, when dependencies can be tracked and resolved. If that is what this is: cool.
People are used to spam buttons, and would realize that the lack of "report spam" would mean that Google might be marking too many things as spam if they think the user doesn't need a "Mark as spam" button.

People are also a lot less tolerable of spam in their inbox than they are of irrelevant search results.
It's interesting to see that the main reason for the complexity of this task seems to lie, according to the authors, in the fact that the processing has to be done on Google's servers and thus needs to scale to a 100+ million users.

Would gmail be a desktop client, instead of a webmail, the problem would be much easier. But of course it would probably never get millions of users in the first place.

Yet, I'm pointing this out because while everyone can see the benefits of moving into the cloud, it's quite easy to forget that that in doing so we also give up on the processing power of the clients, and that their cumulative total is far from insignificant.

disclaimer: I'm working on a desktop client for gmail.
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Maybe this could be implemented in the way of sticky search operators?

So for example, I could define -site:efreedom.com as an operator to be applied silently for every search I make.
For those wanting Google to put a penalty on the sites who are banned/removed from the user's view, what's to stop someone from gaming that system via Mech. Turk (or some other way)? Just pay people $0.12 to open gmail accounts and ban a competitor or whatever.

That's the only negative I can think of - other than that, I say bring it!
Bubble 2.0 - Facebook, valuation and IPO
One of the sections says "Since developers are constantly improving their apps, the App Store for Mac keeps track of your apps and tells you when an update is available. Update one app at a time or all of them at once, and you’ll always have the latest version of every app you own."

Doesn't sound like auto-update though.
If by "collective bargaining rights" they don't actually mean "a monopoly on worker representation" then there should be no problem.

For most of DollarGeneral's workers, the alternative is not a higher wage (if it were unionized), but unemployment. The "living wage" is a productivity hurdle, it's the message that: "if your productivity is not >X, it's illegal to try to find employment".
Two Haskell compilers (UHC and YHC) have JavaScript backends which convert their core languages to JS. I've added them to the wiki page.
Does anyone else feel that the word "app" is already branded to mean fast and cheap? Perhaps, it's just a perception that will diminish over time. I guess it sounds better than the "Mac Desktop Application Store".
Satellite Hacking
An increasing number of people are worried about an unidentified private person who has hacked several satellites in order to send out signals all over the world.