skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This brings up some weird UX issues. How do you propose this is done?

Front Page -> IP Location -> (if different) Browser location?
This bookmarklet hack causes youtube videos to glitch 
makes some pretty trippy visuals
Understanding The “Thank You Economy”
I thought the idea was OK. Not groundbreaking, but worth reading, except for

> the lack of spaces and poor grammer.

I don't know why he doesn't spellcheck. Maybe he's going for informality, or he wrote on a tiny device, I don't know. It bugged me too.
lesson(8);
This would be a great answer to the "Real life hacking" YC question, especially with your mention of the formula behind human interaction you discuss in another reply.
Dear Designer -- You Aren’t That Special
Exactly, completely understand where this is coming from - but why in the world is this a default!?
Maybe this is for novelty protest or subterfuge. It can't be profitable to stream DVD's individually, can it?
lol so true. I was ranting about the overuse of this term a few weeks back: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-is-it-cloud-everythin...
How safe are US nuclear plants?
Please, if you like it, give it a vote up. Your vote is much appreciated of course, thank you.
Bad implementations of a feature do not make the feature bad as well. If you as a site owner allow for example a password reset based on just answering the secret question, guess what: bad implementation. If you don't inform the users what the secret question can be used for, guess what: bad implementation. If your users choose to use a question that has an answer that can be found easy its the same as having a user use for password the word 'password'. I can go on and on about how you can get something like this wrong.

Lets say that my computer gets keyloged and the attacker gets the account/password of site X and my email info aswell. Now the attacker wants to take over both of the accounts. Lets see how things will go if no secret question is involved: At best site X for a password change will require a e-mail confirmation, probably by just providing the old password the attacker will be able to change it. On top of that the site that hosts my e-mail can't be linked to something else, because of that i guess by simply providing my old password the attacker will get over my e-mail too.

HOWEVER if the sites require a secret question/answer verification the attacker wont be able to take over my accounts. And i am able to change both the password and get full control of the accounts.

Secret question/answer feature should be treated as a MASTER password. You have your casual password which allows you to identify yourself to the system etc but if you want to change some critical information of the account you will have to provide you master password.

If both the site and the user make good use of the feature there is nothing wrong with it.
Meanwhile, their home page:

"Zediva.com is temporarily down for maintenance.

"We experienced some exceptional customer growth this week as we officially launched Zediva to the public. We're delighted by the attention from the media, and the overwhelming enthusiasm of our new and prospective customers. We are, however, very disappointed that the resulting surge of customers has negatively impacted your experience.

"We do hope that you forgive us, and that you try back another time soon. We're working diligently to build capacity to serve America's hungry appetite for new release movies.

"In the meantime....please follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook where we'll update our status. "
The difficulty with such "standards" and "best practices" is that what is standard can often be subjective. For example, under Indentation, they have:

For all code languages, we require indentation to be
done via soft tabs (using the space character). Hitting
Tab in your text editor shall be equivalent to four spaces.

Umm, who died and made you king? <tongue and cheek> I don't like using 4 spaces. I find it a waste of space, literally. In ruby community, 2 spaces is generally accepted.

With that said, it's probably not a bad idea to have discussions around such standards with the understanding that there may be more than one good way to skin a cat.
Overfishing
IE9 Downloaded 2.35 Million Times in First 24 Hours
First Rock From the Sun: NASA Set to Explore Mercury's Extreme Atmosphere
The thing I don't get about Patrick's opinion is that in his initial write-up he compares his personal danger and proximity to the disaster zone with "someone ringing up Mayor Daley [the mayor of Chicago] during Katrina and saying “My God man, that’s terrible — how are you coping?”"

Well, if his argument was that distance separates him from being able to relate to the problems on the ground, why should anybody look to him for guidance on how to provide aid?
Sony To Subpoena Two Years Of PS3 Hacker’s PayPal Records
I spent a lot of time making sure the new one is better than the old design. It's got more room, closely resembles an empty notepad/text-editor, and keeps the toolbar on-screen even when you scroll far down. I couldn't do that with the old one because of how the html/css was setup. I took my sweet time polishing the UI to be as clean and simple as possible.
Didn't the war in Iraq reduce oil production from that country?
You're right, Q&A sites have been around for a while. Was Quora the first one to get the community aspects right? No they weren't. StackOverflow figured that out first. What Quora accomplished that was a really really hard problem was how to make the social aspect work across all subject areas while at the same time getting area to stay on topic. That's impressive. The only reason I can imagine someone not finding that impressive would be because they've never tried to manage and build a community.
ip geolocate on the server-side before the initial page loads, so you can show them the weather for where you think they are. it will give them something to look at while the client-side geolocation is happening (which can take a few seconds).

when the client-side geolocation returns and gets a different city name, maybe just do some fancy javascript animation to just overlay the changed parts that you got through ajax.

the ip geolocation will probably not be far off from what the client-side gps/cell location says, so the weather will probably not be much different, either. so when you swap out the updated info, it may just change the temp numbers by one or two degrees.
The illustrations look really nice! He says he uses Visio 2007: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/quick-note-on-diagrams-....
Not legal for licensing reasons how? If I buy a video from the store, I'm legally able to rent it out to others without the permission of the studios. Most large chains cut profit-sharing deals with the studios to get better-than-wholesale prices on DVDs. I won't comment on Redbox b/c it cuts too close to my day-job and don't want my comments coming back to bite me.
My consolidated response:

1) Shortages in Fukushima, etc, are not caused by lack of food or money. Japan has plenty of food and money. Japan has a temporary logistics problem with getting food to particular refugee sites, because of a number of issues, most critically that the infrastructure for delivering gas in the east got a severe monkey-wrench thrown into it and it is difficult to truck in enough to do distribution. With specific reference to Fukushima, the widening of the exclusion zone caused refugees to have to be moved twice is as many days, which also caused some issues.

The three closest ports for receiving refined gas got shut down by the tsunami　(along with most local refinery capacity), so it has been getting transported by road from the other side of the country, and that has been hampered by damage to certain roads. One of those ports will be brought online today. As that situation gets better, the shortage of supplies for refugees will ease very rapidly. They're working very hard on that right now. Aid will not speed that process: any charity chosen at random is not better at doing gas delivery than Japanese gas companies, and no part of the relief efforts is blocking on lack of money.

2) Panic is not helping anyone, and foreign panic is feedback looping right now, particularly in the foreign communities. The only reason I have talked to the media at all is to stress the importance of them not panicking and not provoking panic.

3) I respect enormously people's desire to help, but satisfying desire to help is a very different thing from actually helping. The second is very important, the first not so much.

I was on a program on the BBC the other day. Another guest was a foreign aid worker from an organization I will not name. Host: "Where are you?" Him: "Not quite sure, north of Tokyo. The map is in Japanese." When asked about their plans for doing counseling, he said that they would find somebody locally who speaks English, because in his experience at X disasters across the world there is always somebody, and do counseling through the interpreter. One could be forgiven for difficulty in finding the value of his organization's assistance at the moment.

The US military's response has been invaluable -- choppers are very helpful right now, and have been saving lives. If you don't come packing your own distribution network designed to function parallel to the civilian ones, your ability to convert any amount of desire into hot meals at a school in eastern Japan is very limited right now.

After the immediate situation is addressed, Miyagi, Iwate, and the like will have large reconstruction efforts. Japan has the political will and resources to handle this.

A note: It is a very fluid situation. My blog post was written on Sunday, 3.5 days ago. The NYT asked me for a condensed version 2.5 days ago. Please keep in mind, when you're hearing from anybody (including me), you're hearing something which was true X amount of time ago in a situation evolving very rapidly.
>Any published work is copyrighted by default.

But it is easy enough to declaim the restriction to copying if one wishes CC-SA, CopyLeft, CC0¹, PD etc.. Chomsky is likely contractual obligated, at least in part, if he holds a tenured professorship and may not be able to do this without leaving that post.

--

1 - http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/
I don't think they care. Forbes is full of yellow journalism and fake stories drive hits just as much as real stories.
Great post, David! I remember the beginning days and hearing the story as it happened. Nice to read the whole story in one well-written article. Keep it up!
It IS a meaningless phrase in the sense that it's being used.

When I was studying network engineering, "the cloud" used to encompass the broader network environment that INCLUDED the Internet as an extension of your enterprise infrastructure. Now? It's a hyperbolic, singular phrase that is limited to using the internet as an extension of your operating system without fully explaining or at least detailing for the end user why it matters.

Especially in the case of those god.awful Microsoft commercials. In their case, the way it's presented, the cloud is nothing less synonymous with social networking. Change your Facebook status from Windows? That's the cloud. Upload a picture to Flickr? That's the cloud. It's no better than that phase of 'web 2.0' that was nothing more than superficial design elements that included shiny buttons, dropping vowels and slapping the term 'beta' on everything. The web is cyclical and this is the latest cycle.

While that in and of itself isn't BAD per se, it's a phrase that's come synonymous with "rockstar" and "ninja" when talking about hiring developers. A total and complete non sequitur.
Having run a CPC network, I can say "definitely yes" - we pursue fraud aggressively. I enjoyed the article and appreciate his sleuthing, but his conclusion is completely wrong (at least for major CPC advertisers, who are almost all ROAS-driven) - the biggest advertisers care deeply about their results. I would go so far as to say that the lack of policing of the Overture feed on parked domains was a significant (if not the most significant) issue in Yahoo's poor monetization of search and eventual failure with that product.
Ah, novelty accounts. Could we please keep those to reddit, if you don't mind?
How we found the rudest cities in the world
I think he's trying to say Chernobyl was an outlier, a faulty design which melted down under completely outrageous circumstances, and due to today's safety standards it won't happen again. Therefore Chernobyl can't really be used to say nuclear power is unsafe.
All these parts happen within the index2.php of the parked domains (see the section with the title "Re-directions and generating click fraud with normal click patterns").

Take a look at this screenshot: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-R9lgD8LQfdw/TXEu7e2Sb5I/A...

and here are the detailed requests

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-qVyp1ChmmRA/TXExPKhXnOI/A...

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3KulINgZhwA/TXExPdCASOI/A...

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q3Cpp0uIM6g/TXExPsl3ycI/A...

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-zWpoE6IlyfI/TXExP36fWhI/A...

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-c0FdFkU0xX4/TXExQF5jHfI/A...

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-oLleFeARs3o/TXExQS95chI/A...

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-_-KqSY7ue5w/TXExQTVttwI/A...

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Dxp-OfM0oXw/TXExQrQsoLI/A...
Angel investors for 'low-burn' startups
But they have a standard, and this is good for consistency across their development. What may be better is "follow the standard that you are working on", meaning, don't change coding style because you prefer your own, adopt what is already there, or the norms for a project (e.g. 2 space indents for all that Ruby code we have).
My new résumé app/service aimed at hackers has integration with github, hacker news and stackoverflow. You can see at a glance what people have been up to on these sites by looking in the sidebar of any Mighty CV powered résumé. Though integration with these sites must have been switched on by the owner of the résumé for this to work.

I'm hoping to finally launch the private beta this weekend, there are still some invites left. You can sign up for one if you like at:

http://www.mightycv.com/

It has some other cool stuff like auto PDF generation and private cover letters/videos.
Not a dupe:

The other thread's url:
betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fast-inverse-square-root/

This's url:
betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fast-inverse-square-root

One character as difference: the final slash.
All the applications that have been built on top of Dropbox like this: http://frenzyapp.com/
and this: http://droppages.com/Getting+started

If they get fees from these apps when they monetise they become a platform or a framework, then the sky is the limit

App directory:
https://www.dropbox.com/apps
I got in so much trouble for a very similar web scale comment. Never shall trite jokes be used on hacker news. You'll get your head bit off. Personally, it gives me a giggle, and I guess that means I am much less mature than most consumers of Hacker News. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2104276
WebGL Shader Toy
That was always my thought too.
“When we’re talking primarily about good typographical rules and creating a balanced visual hierarchy, those things are not subjective. Those just are. You can guarantee that people will react a certain way to these things. And we’re not actually looking for an emotional connection where we might be with color and the more artistic layer if you will. That’s the nice thing about design. At its core level it’s not really subjective. It’s just a matter of good balanced decision making and not cluttering things, not overcrowding.” — Dan Rubin

Maybe, but that's really glossing over the entire history of design, especially people like David Carson. Google him for examples of his work - it's not clean, balanced, and clutter-free, yet he was pretty influential in the design world. Of course, he knew the rules before he meaningfully broke them, but that's nowhere near being "objective."
Thank you for the unbelievably sane perspective on disaster relief.

For anyone that is motivated to give charitable dollars by this disaster, consider that there is likely a more efficient charity as far as maximizing lives saved per dollar, such as Village Reach. http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villager...
That phrase is older than Hacker News. I could have sworn that it used to be on bash.org, but the best reference I can find is:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kids+are+the+...

I'm pretty sure the phrase even predates 4chan though... Mostly likely originates from USENET or IRC.
Minority businesses collaborate with HBCUs
I think the reason people keep saying she is fake is because they don't want to believe someone so young is capable of doing what she did. I've spoken to her via email and she said she doesn't care what people think about her, shes going to do what she does regardless and she has my full support.

Maybe instead of asking questions about her here, you ask her like i did?

kayla@anonleaks.ch

If she really is who she said she is that's one smart kid!
How Top-to-Bottom Re-Training Can Be Critical to the Bottom Line
I like this - I was thinking of doing something similar a while ago but didn't find much market interest at the time. I see I still have a domain called buyitwhen.com; if you think it might be a fit for you at some stage just drop me a line at gmail.
World's Greatest Extra
The cash flow app's Balance chart doesn't scale well, the numbers on the axis get cut off when adjusting for money in your account.

Same for income vs expense, using the demo on Firefox for mac.

Otherwise these are awesome, great job!
You can move the map without zooming and the circles follow.

I think the circles are quite proportional. I have a friend of a friend in Osaka who said they did feel the 9.0M one all the way down in Osaka so that circle is correct.

Edit: Actually I had zoomed in a level. I think zooming in one level is a little more accurate. I really don't think people in Korea or Eastern Russia felt it.
Learn and practice HTML attributes
I get the feeling that he's moreso responding to the fact that, in this situation, you can't compare the likes of Japan and Cambodia.

Hell, swap Japan for the US - doesn't make so much sense now, does it? It is an incredibly off putting thing to find people thinking that Tokyo is on fire and about to keel over because of what's going on up north, and while I agree with him on that front, I still agree with the parent commenter here about donating somewhere.

In reality, this is all pretty blatantly obvious stuff.
You bring up a great point - which is actually contradictory in the story. She said was hassled for being so young. I know a lot of hackers and most got started very young like you point out, and all were welcomed into the hacker community without any issues - female or not.
Agreed. Maintaining consistency is key.
Probably not, most of them are 100+km offshore.
Yes, I was in Tokyo this past weekend when the big one happened. I was feeling aftershocks all weekend long. What I didn't know was just how close the big 7.9 aftershock was to Tokyo.
University of California's diminishing budget options - what would you do?
I've found the claim that Chrome "will play most stuff thrown at it" to be a false one. Here's a Chrome bug I discovered last month while hacking a Flask application:

mkdir static && wget http://www.soundjay.com/button/beep-1.mp3 -O static/beep.mp3 && python -c "import flask; flask.Flask(__name__).run()"

Then hit:
http://127.0.0.1:5000/static/beep.mp3

The mp3 plays fine in Firefox (not natively of course), but doesn't play at all in Chrome. The same problem extends to the HTML5 audio tag (eg. <audio src="static/beep.mp3" />).
Why not use late model computers or DVD players with some sort of digital input to control playback without mechanical input? It's not the player that's limited by the law, right?
Not sure I see your point. Sure, the URL has "opcode" in it, but the page clearly says "Windows System Call Table" -- nowhere is the word "opcode" mentioned on that page.
You're right, but you can't "prove" condescension implies insecurity in any rigor. I think it's reasoning along the lines of A => B, we see lots of B, so probably A.
MIT's Gambit lab releases Improviso; needs players to train AI system
Because betting $6.5 billion to win $60 million (and vice versa) is fair?

That aside, fairness has nothing to do with it.
A very detailed and well-written document. My favorite line:

Use CSS sprites generously. They make hover states easy,
improve page load time, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Funny and true.
There's false premises in that argument.

If Chomsky wants to argue that government funded research is the source of innovation, then he should also ask, what is the source of government funds?

Government takes dollars from those who earn it, and spends it according to collective values at best, or in favor of corrupt interests at worst.

Who is to say that if those dollars were left in the hands of those who earned them, they wouldn't be spent more wisely?
Very nice! What did you use to build these?
You know I would really like to see Gruber (and Siegler) defending this. yes yes, "apple can do what it likes with its product" is a common retort, but it would be refreshing to see a different one.
I think the main point of the comment bad_user quoted is not the same you're making here.

That said, I do feel that the Japanese Tokyoites are calmer about the nuclear thing. Anecdotally, more than half of my foreign friends and acquaintances have fled or are planning to flee Tokyo (mostly to elsewhere in Japan, some abroad), but nearly all my Japanese friends have stay put.

It's not all about the news, though. While I share your perception that English-language media is being way more sensationalist about it, it's not the case that all my foreign friends get all their news from English-language media. Some of them speak Japanese, and some have Japanese spouses, but are still fleeing. Other possible factors: foreigners have less roots here, have more options to flee, and more incentive to leave (family is abroad, etc). So the total perceived "cost" to flee is lower.
so she goes to extraordinary lengths to coverup her online activity, but grants an interview to a national news outlet where she divulges a large part of her personal history?

obvious troll is obvious
as i tend to see it: life is half chance. you toss a coin, it comes out heads half the time, tails the other half. all you can do is enjoy what you're doing and know you'll have a terrific story at the end.
I like the idea and signed up. I set a small (20x20) image as my background and was dismayed to see it sad and alone in the center of a black background. Could you add an option to tile background images?