skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, good question. Guys, not everything that B of A does is evil, just sayin'.

Next hyperbolic headline:
B OF A TRACKS YOUR ACCOUNT BALANCE AND RECORDS EVERY PURCHASE!
NP completeness is a strawman here. It's perfectly plausible to have an efficient market where the problem of accurate pricing is NP complete.

Furthermore, the paper you reference (while an excellent and fascinating paper) does not directly bear on the NP completeness of the stock market:

> In Section 3, I discuss the prospect of opening securities markets that pay off contingent on the discovery
of solutions to particular instances of an NP-complete problems. Such NP markets would provide
direct monetary incentives for developers to test and improve their algorithms, and allow funding
agents to target rewards to the designers of the best algorithms for the most interesting problems. In
Sections 4 and 5, I discuss markets in #P-complete problems, where prices serve as collective approximate bounds on the number of solutions, and bid-ask spreads may indicate problem difﬁculty

is his summary of what the paper does (sections 1 and 2 are introductory material). I claim that this does not at all show the NP completeness of markets, and further that it's a claim irrelevant to the discussion here.

In what sense are you claiming that he proves the "NP completeness of markets"? What does that mean? Why is it relevant to whether or not to invest money in the stock market?

(sidenote: I don't think the question of the NP-completeness of some questions related to stock pricing is irrelevant or uninteresting; indeed I just applied to grad school to study problems like these. I just don't think they bear on what you're implying they do)

That said, I voted you up because of your first sentence.
This is the web right now
There is a precedence list that can be tweaked per query, and Amazon is at the bottom, so that is a bug :). In some cases, multiple things are called and the first to answer gets the spot.

Edit: bug fixed.
Could you please list a few things they do?
As the article says: Nowhere? There was no need to send it anywhere.
If the attacker doesn't have the key, he will have to bruteforce the full hash and not just 9999 values. Or what is the different use here? The root post was referring to storing hashes and not passwords (better to store HMACs and not hashes).
Developers can be in love for a looooong time
I first thought I was reading something else, but then I realized I wasn't :)
Ask HN: What is the long-term value of a pre-beta email sign-up?
I'm working on a web app that targets small businesses and freelancers. We will eventually be charging a-la 37Signals pricing model.

We currently just have a single landing page at http://properprocess.com to collect email addresses.

We're doing testing on just about every element on the page using a self-learning multi-variate testing process I developed. One component of my algorithm requires estimating the long-term value of each email address that we collect (we call it conversion value).

I'm wondering if anyone has data on what percentage of people on a pre-beta email list turn into actual beta users?

And then what percentage of beta users eventually turn into paying customers when the paywall goes up?

I realize that there are many factors to consider, but I'm just looking for some help to ballpark the value of each email we get. This helps us figure out an estimated visitor value and tells us if various traffic sources are worth the cost or effort.

Thanks in advance for any insights!
This is potentially useful information, but whilst reading it I was yet again alarmed by exactly how easy the DMCA makes it to send threatening copyright infringement notices.
Hashing doesn't have much of a use when there are only 10k possible inputs.

Even using bcrypt set to take 1 second to verify a hash wouldn't be great -- it'd take about two hours and 45 minutes to break a PIN. And yes, while this is significantly better than not hashing at all (where it takes no time to get a pin) it would be trivial to target specific people to get their pin's given the hashed database.

Sure, you could make it take 10 seconds to verify a hash, but now all you've done is make me take a day to break the pin.
I'm happy for you folks in Kirkland. This feature was done for windows pre-release, and glad it got polished enough to ship.
I use this and am pretty happy with it.
http://passwordmaker.org/

Uses the site's domain as a salt though which isn't exactly secure if whoever hacks the database decides to ignore the low-hanging unencrypted fruit and crack your password. You can configure the encryption settings a bit though and add your own pre-salt kinda deal.
I think that I speak for all when I say "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" (think skywalker)

Maybe the execution was not crystal perfect, but I think all of us would have liked OpenID (or some other free and open standard) to succeed.

Open world 0 : Corporate overlords 1
Startup Uses Social Updates to Predict Purchases
That page (http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html) needs a lot of work, generally. I don't have the greatest UI ideas for it yet, but as you might imagine, different things interest different people.
Fail. Filbuster Reform Dies in the Senate, Just Like Everything Else
They're trying to raise my blood pressure, aren't they? Patents and poor translation all in one article? Grar!
To take this joke and place it right back into reality:

Holy fuck, if a bank were to actually track every purchase I make, I'd freak out and switch banks. I always keep a bit of cash on hand so I have the freedom of buying something that isn't tracked by anyone. It's nice to be able to buy a beer without your bank knowing about it, you know?

I really really hope no bank every tries to pull anything like that. Even those of you who use cards for everything must appreciate the idea that you're able to buy things without your bank knowing what you bought, or even that you bought anything at all?
Ask HN: Review my MVP, statz.me
The idea behind statz.me is basically a way of keeping track of pretty much everything you can think of.

Since this is a "prototype" I've put up in my spare time in the last 2 months, it serves just to show the basic functionality.

There are three types of "statistics" available: increment (starts with 0 and you just add +1 whenever you like); +/- (this can work for example if you want to keep track of the success rate of your jokes:)) and Timer (to keep track of the hours you sleep everyday, for example).

You can keep these to yourself or share them with the world. A Twitter-like Follow/Following is also implemented so you can easily know what your friends are up to!

In the future, the idea is to make an API available so that anyone can make the use they want out of it. Why not keep track of how many Git commits you make? Or how many e-mails you read everyday?

The possibilities are endless :) eheh

http://Statz.ME

Looking forward to your feedback!
There is a difference between a HMAC and encrypting a hash, or a HMAC and a salted a hash.

HMAC means Hash based Message Authentication Code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC
DisplayPort is a free standard, while HDMI requires a license. Also, DisplayPort allows devices to be daisy-chained rather than connected to a single hub (theoretical at this stage, though).
Reminds me of the Causeway debugger for E, which lets you view causality traces instead of just stack traces: http://www.erights.org/elang/tools/causeway/
Anything that starts with, users need to learn <new technical concept> seems doomed to fail.
Sure, but in case of Perl the shady code is on a big pile with the good code. In Java you have projects like Apache commons that generally produce fairly good code as long as you steer clear of the experimental stuff.
32 minutes of Calacanis... on everything 
If you're a fanboy you will love this and watch it right now... if you're a jayter you'll write five comments below from fake accounts--and watch it twice.
Infographic: How Foursquare Grew 3400% in One Year
• DisplayPort is open and royalty free.[1]

• Easily extensible (packet based protocol)[2]

• More than twice the bandwidth of HDMI[3]

• Planning to replace all display protocols from internal LCD interface to the living room

• Better electrical engineering (tricky clocking, spectrum spreading)

[1] HDMI royalties are about 1/2 the cost of H.264 decoders

[2] And yet I have to plug my USB cable in to get my laptop to see devices hanging on my display. Come on Apple! Read the spec! Implement! You are costing me 4 seconds per day in unnecessary plug fumbling time.

[3] You could hang four 1080p60 displays on a single DisplayPort
>AWS I can't honestly say I have any experience with it.

I can honestly say because I do have experience with it. Maybe it was something I clicked, but that is classic bait and switch. I would have never even considered AWS if it wasn't free and definitely didn't intentionally buy anything from them (as I said, I already have linode and slicehost, which is more than I need).

I'm not sure where you're going with this. I'm not saying that absolutely every cloud services provider is terrible, I'm saying that my perception of google, and my experience with amazon, is that they are.
Can't be impossible since it was done: http://www.clickpass.com/

Nice implementation, poor sales/marketing.
I actually have done that regularly, and we consistently get - zero responses.

Look, I agree the title was silly (although did anyone honestly think we were hiring a billion people?) - but I would have gladly edited it if a moderator had asked me to. I'm a regular HN reader, the intent wasn't to spam... I just honestly thought it was the sort of silly headline that other readers would enjoy. Maybe "Myplanet Hiring, Like, Five People" would have been more appropriate.

Sorry if I offended? For something light-hearted it sure engendered strong reactions...
Is this parody or your real view?
Too many InfoSec Conferences? (Infographic Inside)
Can someone please link to a download of the OpenFinder module?
Haha I love how my cofounder and I have different side projects on HN at the same time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2139690
> For instance, how many times have you been in a discussion with another programmer that devolved into "My project is so much cooler than yours"?

Not many actually
Not everybody loves Helvetica. It's pretty boring, seriously overused, and in its own way tacky. That said, it has historical value. Watch the movie Helvetica for more details, but the short of it is that it was introduced during that time the author speaks of where people were just starting to see the potential of graphic design. You'd hire a fancy new designer to come in and revitalize your company's letterhead and they'd present you with a blank, brilliantly white sheet of paper with your company's name in Helvetica. It was stark, amazing, totally lifeless, but just so New it was easy to buy in.

Then add in that for all Helvetica's faults, it is amazingly versatile and readable. It is absolutely well designed for it's somewhat sterile purposes and therefore easy to paste up everywhere. Couple that with an air of Newness and, ironically, personalization of hiring your own print designer and next thing you know it's everywhere wnd beloved.

There's a lot more to the story, of course, but it all turns to the historical value of Helvetica being the font that a new wave of popular design championed. It was there when people wanted and needed it.

(It's also worth mentioning it's Swiss heritage and how often the relatively unique Swiss design aesthetic gets conflated with cries for simplicity, modernity, and "clean". All deserved, sure, but they certainly understate the contribution of valuing space and openness that seems to be the heart of that movement, to me. I've often heard that their design is inspired by the openness of the Swiss landscapes. Unique, beautiful, but hardly the Final Word in design aesthetics.)
Exactly. And as has been said and cited before, those who have cracked versions may never use them, or very well may never have bought it to begin with (a user is not by default a client - but they have the potential to become one). Congress put out a report stating that piracy actually (in some way, be it minor or not) helped "digital sales"

I find it frustrating that my lawfully purchased software is sometimes much more difficult to run (keys, registration, ads before it starts up e.g. EA Games) than my friends running pirated copies.
I suspect single-sign-on won't take off until we have some browser support for it.
Why should it be a parody? What’s wrong with the argument?
Brand loyalty is a big part of it too. Personally I've been soured by a laptop that had a mobility radeon with custom drivers from the manufacturer that I couldn't upgrade without using Omega. The card definitely didn't live up to expectations but it could have just been a fluke.
Ask HN: Know of a good Anemometer (Wind Speed Sensor) for a Computer?
I am trying to monitor the output of our cooling system for the server room. I already have temp gauges, but would like a sensor to indicate when the wall unit is no longer blowing. It would give me a little more time to respond then the temp sensors.<p>I would like a Anemometer (wind speed indicator) that is able to hook via USB / Serial and be read by a UNIX (OpenBSD, OS X, etc.) box. Ethernet would be fine also. It has to be lightweight as I am hanging it off the ceiling.
Mining Facebook for Gifts on Etsy
This article is very interesting, but as a comic sans hater myself, I don't think it's really the technical details of the typography that are at the root of my loathing.

I have the same hopeless feeling when I receive a letter in comic sans as when my boss's assistant sends me an email with a 1Mo gif saying "happy new year" or when I see a billboard ad where the pixels are 10cm wide because someone thought resizing the 100x100px jpg in MS paint would do the trick. Or, more extreme, when I found this website yesterday: http://taxis75.fr/ .

The annoying part is that it looks unprofessional, and out of place. It makes me think the person didn't even try, didn't even take 2 seconds to contemplate the result of their "work" and realize what a mess it is. As someone who tries to be perfectionist, not to overlook the details; seeing people making such a terrible work and getting away with it is a bit offensive. And when I receive a letter or a service note written in comic sans, I feel it's disrespectful.
I see that this is expected to, as one outcome, help reduce further space junk in orbit. I wonder what impact existing space junk - which is predominately small pieces of metal orbiting the earth at speed - would have on the sails?

Without knowing its altitude, even the 70-120 day lifespan makes it a target. I wonder how resistant a 10m^2 piece of thin polymer sheet would be to a lazy 2-inch screw hurtling into it?
Port your existing mobile number to Google Voice
A new Twitter feed for R packages
It's supposed to be a little silly - I was just trying to put a light-hearted spin on our hiring process. The type of people who enjoyed it would probably enjoy working with us.

I suppose I overreached with the title?
Checking the color of <a> gives similar information. It's all client-side so you can do 40k+ URIs per second.

Here's code I wrote to display the "digg this" button only to digg users: http://int2e.com/blog/improved-digg-integration-script/
Mahalo Pivots to Focus on Video-Based Learning
عيد الحب
HN is kind of anemic in the humor department.

On odd days I think that's a good thing ;)
They announced they'd support SMS when the launched SNS awhile back, so I don't think this would surprise anyone.
Greg Chaitin on the Ubiquity of Undecidability, on the Math Factor podcast
Putting it in the hands of the government actually fails the trust requirement. Trust is not a binary "this entity is trustworthy", trust is a set of relationships between two entities, and not everyone will trust the US Government, nor will everybody be trusted by the US Government. Even in a perfect world with a perfect US Government, that is the correct answer; not everyone is under US jurisdiction, after all, so we don't even need to get into the political issues. If made mandatory (and the only option), this is a critical failure on the trust front. It can't work, you can't tie your login system to only the US login system, and if you have to have other login systems, US citizens will be able to use those too.
I thought HMAC was equivalent to an encrypted hash.
Ask HN: Review my MVP, statz.me
The idea behind statz.me is basically a way of keeping track of pretty much everything you can think of.
Since this is a "prototype" I've put up in my spare time in the last 2 months, it serves just to show the basic functionality.

There are three types of "statistics" available: increment (starts with 0 and you just add +1 whenever you like); +/- (this can work for example if you want to keep track of the success rate of your jokes:)) and Timer (to keep track of the hours you sleep everyday, for example).

You can keep these to yourself or share them with the world. A Twitter-like Follow/Following is also implemented so you can easily know what your friends are up to!

In the future, the idea is to make an API available so that anyone can make the use they want out of it. Why not keep track of how many Git commits you make? Or how many e-mails you read everyday?

The possibilities are endless :) eheh

http://Statz.ME

Looking forward to your feedback!
Consiration of text weight translates directly to design weight all across. Text is meant to be read, therefore even weight helps the eye move quickly, smoothly across it like a well-paved road. This might not be the goal you're shooting for in a page design though!

Aliasing and antialiasing is a big deal with web design as well. Oftentimes making your designs match the pixel grid will render them uniquely sharp allowing smaller details to be visible. If you miss the pixel grid you'll deal with antialiasing tech which will induce a subtle blur. Either effect may be desirable.

Finally, it's always worth refreshing the value of detail in design. The pixel level comparison of Garamond, Helvetica, and Comic Sans can be inspiration for the level of detail required to make a truly lively design.
Google I/O Agenda Released
Please file your issues in https://bugs.freedesktop.org//enter_bug.cgi -> LibreOffice with an example attachment.

Even better, save as PDF on MS Office as it looks, and a save as PDF as it looks to you, while you describe the difference. It is very hard to find the compatibility mismatches otherwise -- especially the ones you need.
If I want a high-powered computer to run desktop Linux I go for HP. They certify and rigorously test a subset of their desktop systems to fully support Linux:

http://h20338.www2.hp.com/enterprise/cache/321143-0-0-0-121....
I actually use cash as often as possible, but not out of paranoia or privacy concerns. You can't avoid being a drop in the sea of data collected nowadays, and it's awfully self-centered to think that a for-profit corporation gives a rat's ass that you bought a beer. Using that information to determine my insurance premium? Yeah, that would be a problem.

I tend to use cash simply because I'd rather have more of the money I spend go to the actual retailer (especially if it's a small business) than the bank. As a former retail business owner, I know how oppressive transaction fees are... yes, even debit card purchases.
The Charleston case is just sad. That lady obviously needs help.

As a lawyer I can see why most of those cases were filed -- though I wouldn't file them myself!

I find the Google case most interesting. Google's lawyers clearly envisioned that happening, judging from the warnings and disclaimers on Google Maps. I certainly thought of the possibility years ago. But I think it's dead in the water.

The worst case IMHO is probably the Lindsay Lohan case. She surely has well-credentialed lawyers doing her work for her. They ought to know better.

Though the Wisconsin child-molester case is pretty wild as well. Even if it does have a perverse logic to it...
I've read anywhere from 5-40% of the beta list will pay. I'm using 5% to be safe.
It is doomed to fail. It is also the only actual solution. Therefore, there is no possible successful solution. Sometimes things work out that way.
Not if it provides a significant-enough benefit. How many people had "passwords" as a daily part of their life before 1995 or so?

Every technology is new at some point. My thesis is that keys are not that hard and technical people should actually try to push understanding of them into the non-techie realm. If they fail, they fail, but if they succeed, it would make all computing so much more secure.

Edit: I should also point out that it's not really any more complicated than OpenID, and people seemed willing to give that a fair shake, at least to the extent that a lot of sites implemented it.
hey i was thinking about taking up boxing as a sport. i am essentially waiting for my gear [gloves] to arrive. i have access to a punching bag / speed ball.

would you recommend a DIY approach to learning the basics, or is it essential to learn it from someone who already knows it ?

thanks.
I love this piece. It gave me a hard kick in the face, and I kindof liked it =)
MaxA/B - Free A/B testing plugin for WordPress
Honestly I've yet to find scvngr useful. Maybe I'm not their demo, but the app just doesn't get me excited. I've had it installed on my phone for well over a year and have maybe opened it twice? I think the idea is kind of cool, but I am not sure how it is relevant or why life ought to be modeled as a video game in the first place.
I live in the US, and I don't think I've ever seen a chip+pin card.

Most stores will take ATM/debit cards (using PIN) as an alternative to credit cards (using signature), but the ATM/debit cards use magnetic stripe like the credit cards.
Ask HN: Suggestion for crowdsourced design companies?
A few weeks back someone posted a link to a company where you specify the number of different designs you want, pay a fee (~$1000) and you are given a bunch of designs to choose from.

Can anyone remember/share the company (or companies)? Has anyone had good/bad experiences with a company like this?
Google I/O 2011 (incomplete) Sessions List
> Companies and institutions are paying
> $2,000 a year to north of a $1 million
> a year to use the Scvngr platform

I'm impressed if those numbers are legit, but a $1M contract
sounds pretty high to me for what is really an unproven platform.

Inc. mentions the Navy, could it be government pork?

Anyone have more insight?
Ahhh well, one can try :-)

We did manage to get a few applications in the hour or so the post was up, so it wasn't all for nought.
Many of these providers have bugs and quirks. It is nontrivial to support them all.
Ask HN: How to install Django through cgi-bin?
Is it possible to install Django on a webhost that only provides Python support through a cgi-bin/ directory? How do you accomplish this feat?
FYI, there are three other android clients: http://hnresources.com/apps/
and your already added to the list
Forget dual core- Is Nokia going dual processor?
I remember doing some research about this a while ago. Getting some sort of text-based emotional index isn't trivial at all, there are few hardly viable solutions (google's prediction api and Bayes-based algorithms), but they aren't really accurate. This is also been tried in the past by startups of techcrunch fame such as stockmood.com, all failed miserably. Props to twitter or anyone who will succeed at this.
Unfortunately, the next version Firefox will block this hole, and I imagine other browsers will follow suit.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-com...
Morrison's don't, which always annoys me.
Twitter Is Blocked In Egypt Amidst Rising Protests