skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is sitetalk.com a scam?
Here's some basic info:
The company is called Unaico Ltd which supposedly stands for United nordic alliance investment company, and what they do is they want to essentially copy facebook with their own version called SiteTalk and make it sort of a marketing platform with a lot more features such as an integrated webshop, entertainment plattforms, e-Learning and many more.
Their business model looks like a snowball model:
http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/242294/SiteTalk-%26-Unaico---make-money-online

The reason why I'm asking this is because a friend of mine invested 2k€ in this company and it looks very suspicious to me. It's also not very easy to find "real" facts on the internet.
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Indeed. Though I find it remarkable that a tech/startup blog has managed to cultivate such a ferociously stupid group of commenters. You expect that on the general internet - YouTube, news sites, TMZ, etc - but even Gizmodo has half-decent comments.

Who benefits from such garbage? I'd love to know if anyone here has experience maintaining loose communities like that. Does light moderation help? I feel like letting the loudmouth morons run free tends to shut out anyone who might want to write something intelligent or useful. A crappy comment section is worse than useless; it actively makes your site look bad.
5 Reasons that Facebook Likes are Not the Key to Profitable Marketing
I contacted RIM regarding the whole notarised deal. Here's what they said:

Me: As an independent developer I can afford neither to become incorporated, nor to get a notary signature. Could you explain the reasoning behind this?

RIM: We require our vendors to be 18 years of age or older. This is why we require a notary form.

Me: Is there not a way of proving that I'm over 18 other than spending £200 on a lawyer? I could send you a copy of my drivers license?

RIM: We do not except photocopies unless they are notarized. You can try a local bank or family doctor to see if they will notarize your documentation.

Me: OK, but what you ask for is a certified notary i.e. someone legally authorised as a notary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notary). Are you saying that this is not actually the case?

RIM: Correct, we would prefer a certified notary but sometimes it is difficult for people to find them so we make exceptions.

Hopefully helpful to someone. Having dismissed PlayBook development altogether, from what I've learnt since my blog post (http://rizergames.com/blog/2011/02/11/developing-for-playboo...), I might be tempted to give it another go, although the number of things that don't actually work on the simulator is still a massive hurdle.

- Luke
Already posted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2264660
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2264829
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What's awesome here (aside from living in Arizona just like the plaintiff) is that one of the defendants asked the Internet if he should get a lawyer: http://answers.justia.com/question/2010/12/11/i-am-being-sue...

Looks like conventional wisdom gets bucked again?
Quoting from PEP 303:

This PEP proposes a temporary moratorium (suspension) of all changes to the Python language syntax, semantics, and built-ins for a period of at least two years from the release of Python 3.1. In particular, the moratorium would include Python 3.2 (to be released 18-24 months after 3.1) but allow Python 3.3 (assuming it is not released prematurely) to once again include language changes.

Python 3.2 is newly released and 3.3 development has started.
The informative first half of the article was fascinating, but it slowly deteriorated from there as I read the argumentative second half. In my view, things took a drastic turn for the worse around this sentence:

Mature genetic engineering, nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, to name but a few, each hold many times the potential for systemic harm to, or destruction of our civilization; and they do so absent the inherent check on their proliferation that was present in the case of nuclear energy...

The suggestion that strong artificial intelligence and quantum computing are more likely destroyers of civilization than nuclear energy seems laughable without further argument. As with nuclear weapons, problems only arise in the application of technology by humans, not in the concepts themselves, and I see far more potential for physical and societal devastation in the application of nuclear weapons than in AI or QC.
You should have a look at - http://sitetalkunaico.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/concerns-abou... as well as, the comments as they have some information in there which you may find useful.
The entire genre of steampunk is devoted to asking the "What If?" of alternate technological history. Clearly the question is slightly less than meaningless. Understanding the history of technology and why certain things did or did not happen can help us to optimize our societal approach to technology and progress in the future.
At least 3 of your questions are answered here in this Reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/fsmuw/ive_got_lion_an...
Boo hoo, stop complaining you big sook!

You obviously understand very little about mental health, some people can't help it, really.

Winston Churchill was a very depressed fellow, and look what he did and achieved during a very dark time.
> You're thinking about this like a systems programmer.

Indeed, yes, I am. My experience in shipping systems used by tens of millions leads to that line of thinking.

> The problem is not that anyone cares about your OS binaries. The problem is that it is theoretically possible that customer data could have wound up in /sbin (maybe a script broke and did something stupid as root). Obviously customer data could routinely end up in /. Unless you can promise that there is no customer data in any unencrypted volume --- not assure that it is extremely unlikely, but promise --- then the assumption is going to be that the data was compromised, and stakeholder disclosure has to happen.

I agree 100%. No one cares about OS or app binaries, as long as those binaries can be cryptographically guaranteed to be unmodified. Given that, no one cares about them.

So, set that aside. Once that's a given, why can't you entirely isolate all user data into individual per-user containers? I can think of numerous ways that can be implemented. Chrome OS has done one such implementation themselves. Hell, union mount an encrypted per-user volume over the unencrypted OS volume. If you don't like that, find some other way. The bottom line: it's software. Implement some way to promise user data is always isolated and encrypted. It can be done and if you think it can't, you're thinking too small.

WDE guarantees one thing – whole disk encryption. That buys you nothing when one single malicious user gains access to that volume. And keep in mind: that malicious user could have been benign and even friendly to begin with.

You really do want per-user data encryption.
Google chrome viewer looks promising, but also crashes for me on some PDFs.
Revenue is income before expenses, you are probably thinking of net income.
LOCAL Q&A partnership
Dear HN readers,

wondering if anyone here who's interesting to make a company for an iPhone app startup?

I got an app running already, and need partners to rock the world!

Tks!
Freezing episode 9
Freezing episode 9 You can use special powers, "freezing" of movement is restricted called party. The main character Bridget l Pandora orbit very old meets the girl's name, but seems to be strongest in its class,Freezing,episode 9
The backlash just doesn't make any sense. Its just a weekend project getting TechCrunched, and hence getting a lot of traffic. The fact that there were similar services existing beforehand, is really irrelevant.

Sometimes the internet looks like a really strange place.
I've tried many times over the years to get excited about the semantic web, but invariably always arrive at the same conclusion as you. I also think that semweb really suffers from over engineering a solution in search of a problem. If you have a problem that it seems like the semantic technologies could be helpful for, you can probably solve it faster using logic programming and automated reasoning techniques from the 90s (ask the fast majority of semantic web enthusiasts how RDF triples can be represented as prolog clauses and you'll likely be treated as though you asked how a raven is like a writing desk). Worse yet though are tools like OWL, which is over-engineered to the point where out-of-the-box it describes logic in a way that is computationally intractable. If you where designing semantic technologies to solve a real problem you would never arrive at something like OWL.

I actually think something like semantic technologies could be more useful than the tools that drive watson and google for smaller data sets, where machine/statistical learning are less useful, but even then they are an over engineered solution.
I did love it if I can filter by .com/.net/.org domains, also a search feature would be nice.. There's a lot of domains to go through, especially if done daily.
In case anyone's wondering about the two PEPs GvR mentions:

PEP 380 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0380/) would provide a convenient way for one generator function to yield all the values of another as part of its work. At the moment you have to say something like

for x in foo:
yield x

which isn't all that bad in itself but breaks down when your caller starts sending values back to you, coroutine-style. (Because they go to foo and you never get to see them.)

PEP 3152 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3152/) uses the generator mechanism (as enhanced by PEP 380) which already provides something rather like coroutines, and adds some syntactic sugar to let you write coroutines that look like coroutines.
Agreed. It shouldn't be counted as revenue. It is such misleading reporting that leads to over valuation and bubbles.
This might be a paranoid way of looking at it, but certainly true. Stuxnet was and is deployed on thousands of computers for several years until they found it. I wonder how much else is just sitting there undetected.
I disagree. I believe Groupon should call this $760M number gross revenue, with recognizable net revenue being somewhat lower. (I'm not an accountant, but I've had some exposure to these issues.)

One of the key questions in proper revenue recognition is determining whether the company is, in essence, a principal or an agent. eBay, for example, reports net revenue, which is a percentage of its gross merchandise sales, as it only collects transaction fees for arranging exchanges between a buyer and seller.

Groupon keeps a fraction of the total dollars customers send them, with the balance being distributed to the merchant when the customer redeems the coupon.

A good discussion of the accounting standard is here: http://www.revenuerecognition.com/content/experts/9002.asp

In the rather long article linked above, it mentions three indicators that can point to net revenue treatment as the most appropriate, each of which I think applies to Groupon:

a) "The supplier is the primary obligor in the arrangement." In other words, the local merchant is ultimately responsible for delivering the product/service to the customer, not Groupon.

b) "The amount the company earns per transaction is fixed (in dollars or as a percentage of the arrangement fee)." If I spend $100 on a "$25 off $50 deal," Groupon still makes its stated fee/percentage of the purchase price of the Groupon. They don't make anything on the incremental dollars I spent at a restaurant over and above the Groupon amount, for example.

c) "The supplier has credit risk." This may not be directly applicable, but the gist of this indicator is whether it is the merchant or Groupon who is ultimately at risk to collect from the customer for the product/service. My guess is this risk lies with the merchant. (Imagine I use a Groupon for part of the cost of a meal; if I can't pay the balance, it's the restaurant that bears the loss, not Groupon.)

These issues are always a judgment call (accounting is rarely as black and white as one assumes it to be). But to my mind, these factors indicate Groupon should likely call the $760M revenue figure gross, not net.
I never cease to be amused by the irony of complaining about unhappy people.
Huh, it actually makes sense now, thank you.
Emotions are affected by action and reaction, in a cyclical and continuous feedback fashion. There is no contradiction between saying that un/happiness is a choice and un/happiness is contagious; it's just that when you're in a group, there's more than one person choosing how to act, and some measure of one's reaction is involuntary. The more negative people are in your group, the harder you have to fight - i.e. the more times you'll have to consciously choose - to turn reactions more positively.

There are a lot of ambient factors that affect un/happiness though, particularly health, environment, stress etc. The more of these things that are getting you down, the more work it is to stay upbeat. The spiral you have to fight to keep out of is getting discouraged, and not changing those ambient factors any more.
Thanks, I have indeed never programmed in perl and was feeling a bit facetious.
hello,
can you please help me get out of test account?>
I am in real trouble. i have writen to the link given above and nobody replied. please help me to get out of this.. thanks
Same here. I didn't find it a problem at all. It required a bit of piecing together, but it was definitely not difficult.
I'm not sure if you accepted Facebook credits in your previous app, but if so I'm guessing this could be one of the reasons Facebook banned you - from what I rememeber of the credits API page, you're only allowed to use them on canvas applications, not ones that use Facebook connect.
Arguably, all binaries comprising the OS and installed apps should be individually signed to ensure they're never modified, even by a malicious user who can access the encrypted disk.

Whole disk encryption guarantees nothing more than your disk is encrypted. On pure single-user systems that are never accessible by other users, that might be fine. The second you allow more that one user, remote or local, to access the disk, you may as well treat the disk as unencrypted. At that point, you need to rely on per-user data encryption and OS and app signature validation to prevent malicious attacks.
Have You Tried Twellow
So, essentially, the non-"python-is-my-second-language" crowd should wait not just for v3-as-is to gain acceptance, but until 3.3 before they start migrating, or what?

From a high-level outsider perspective, the shift from 2.x to "current" looks like amateur hour.
I was put off by having to get my forms notarized, not because it's particularly difficult, but it seems to be a completely unnecessary hurdle. After being dispirited by RIMs process, I immediately went and registered as an Android developer - simple and done within 20 minutes.

I can't comment on the BlackBerry tools (nor the iOS ones, as I don't own a Mac), but although Eclipse+ADT isn't the most elegant solution, it does seem to work fairly well, and didn't take too long to set up.

Obviously a free PlayBook would have been nice, and I would like to have gotten in at the ground-floor of a new platform, but RIM does have to take steps to ensure it's easier for developers to do what they do best - develop, not fight fires in the registration or set-up processes.
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بدر &quot; يشارك فى اجتماعات المنتدى العالمى لوزراء التعليم ويعقد اجتماعا ً
I'm genuinely tired of pseudo-happy people. Quite the fluff piece.
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There is definitely a lack of authenticity when someone is consciously and deliberately choosing to reframe an event so they can have a more positive reaction to it. The other trap you can fall into is playing this surface stuff like it's a game, and not tackling the underlying issues, rather than merely reframing them. The determined feeling of tackling a problem doesn't resemble happiness - it happens with more of a furrowed brow - but I don't think it's "unhappiness" either, which I would put alongside apathy in similarity.
I think the best thing about this story is that a Juggernaut like Google can be convinced to review and update their core business as a result of a bunch of hubub in the blogosphere. It's great that they are listening.
That's true. A plastic smile doesn't make someone one bit happier.
Hacking sniffer dogs and fooling lie detectors (Ben Goldacre)
The raw FLV video appears to be located at: http://flv.thruhere.net/interviews/10-oct-rob-pike-2.flv

There's also an MP3 link hidden on the page (search for MP3).
your product reminded me of a great Ukrainian startup Viewdle. They had won the Le Web startup competition in 2008.

their presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzvfcpLtdgg
Jason Fried on Design
There are zillions of crush apps already. It is a nice idea, but to accuse anybody who implements it of stealing the idea is ridiculous.
Firstly, ...more than people in general? All this tells us is he values the company of brilliant people, not that he values their company more than happy people.

It is true, there are fake happy people. But if you've never met one of those bubbly laughing folks who seem high on life, or one of those charismatic people who's smile fills you with warmth, I am truly sorry for you. Whether or not they are secretly dying inside, they are true gems to be around.
Keep in mind you're only liable for the first $50 in fraud on a credit card. In practice most US institutions will cover 100% of credit or electronic banking losses.

On the flip side, any SAAS that monitored your bank transactions would likely be more interested in developing and selling a profile of you than protecting you.
droz asks a good question. Who else has calculated their "fuck you money" threshold to the last penny, such that if they received that much cash from one or more jobs in a given period they can spend the rest of the year just going to expos and networking, or just sitting on some beach somewhere, knowing that all their bills and living expenses are covered?

Considering where I live, my threshold's surprisingly low. If I double it, I'd put aside that surplus for my retirement. It's good to have the ambition of living without ambitions.
No, the point of the moratorium was mostly to allow interpreter/compiler implementors to catch up. As of 3.3 the team is just going to start adding minor syntax augmentations to the language gradually, as they used to do. Anyone who wants to keep current with Python should just learn the syntax additions as they come out. The base syntax of Python 3 will not be changing any time soon.

From a high-level outsider perspective, the shift from 2.x to "current" looks like amateur hour.

I don't even know what this sentence means.
Not to mention this market segment is usually behind a product iteration, or two, due to corporate security policies. This bunch probably won't have the Playbook or whateverphoneisnext--that can actually do anything remotely worth purchasing--vetted for them until RIM's all set and done.
1) You can choose who you hang out with

2) If hanging out with someone routinely brings you down, it wouldn't be right to BLAME them for making you sad, but that doesn't mean you have to keep spending time with them. Fault can be separated from causality.
It's a shame the term "enterprise" is used as an excuse for poor quality. This isn't an attack on you I see it where I work too. Companies like Apple, Blizzard, and surely others have shown being big doesn't have to impede quality and user experience.
I really like PDF-XChange. It's fast, prints well, has multiple tab and extra editing stuff like stamps and adding text (which I never use).
Tell HN: We've built a high-performance persistent cache engine
Hello hners!

I'm pleased to inform you that we're releasing into the wild a high-performance cache engine.

It's called wrpme and it's got a nice logo!

http://www.wrpme.com/

We've been working on the beast for a while now and it's been used with success on very demanding applications (hint: it's high frequency and it's commonly regarded as the root of all evil).

Key features:

- fast

- scalable

- persistent

- low-maintenance

- multi-platforms (FreeBSD, Linux & Windows)

- low fat, low sugar!

We're keen on having your feedback, whether you think it's totally useless or the greatest software ever written.
An URL on which you can click:

http://www.wrpme.com/
So maybe the 'vocal majority' is not TC-worthy?
In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of expending ~$17 trillion and ~74 million human lives on war and destruction, we would have reached the moon in a robust and durable way by no later than the mid-1950s

He kinda gives away the answer to this earlier in the article, while explaining why the cool edge-case technologies the Romans had never took off:

the truth is that all technological advances are dependent upon a complex mix of social, political and environmental factors which we still do not understand, and thus cannot predict

The implication then is that, had WWII not happened, 1950 would have looked a lot like 1939. Instead, the world saw nearly 10 years of rapid technological advances, with nations inventing amazing new things as though their life depended on it.

Plot the rise and fall of the Space Program alongside the Cold War, and you can see the pattern again.
i scroll down a lot more than up, worried for my wrist, carpal tunnels
Agree. I've worked on search for about 10 years. One of the most frustrating things is that no matter what your view point you can always find one or two queries to justify it. Individual queries can be a useful debugging tool, but it's no way to try to assess general search quality. That can only be done by looking at user behaviour over a huge sample set (and over time).
+1 for In Our Time: The host Melvyn Bragg is a great radio host. He is from a literary background and REALLY struggles with any maths topics but he throws himself in and his struggles makes the listener feel at ease. This show draws real experts to the studio as well so you get really interesting discussion.

Another lighter but still interesting podcast is The Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox and Robin Ince [1]. It's part comedy and part science, thought provoking and a little lighter on the brain.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc
Would this work as a solution:

i) convert the array of arrays of chars into an array of arrays of integers (the letters ASCII values).

ii) create a new integer array containing the sum of the cubes of each ASCII value for each entry

iii) create an empty hash table and fill it with (key|value) pairs containing (integer|number of occurrences) by looping through the previous array

iv) sort the hash table by 'number of occurrences' and store the biggest (key|value) pair

v) look for the first match in the original array to find which chars it represents

Efficient/correct or not?
It's like TechCrunch has been infected with Winklevi.
It means that I don't know what I'm talking about; and what I'm adjudging is dissuading me from 'correcting' that.