skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple Updates Software to Fix Location Data Issues - Digits - WSJ
i'm actually surprised at the amount of time people spend procrastinating on something to help them stop procrastinating...

or even more surprising might be the amount of time i've spent procrastinating by reading about people who've procrastinated by making tools to aid their procrastination...

...I'm going to get back to work :)
Why college is (usually) not a bubble
If you read my comment down below, I already address most of this. I know they exist. I just haven't used them, and thus wouldn't be that proficient. And thus to use them for this project would've been silly, as I'm not skilled at them. Don't you agree?

That and I already had a server set up that could take a lot of traffic, whereas our PHP servers? Not so much. So, for me, Django was the right decision. PHP has been the right decision for other projects, though. Just not this one.
Yep, not saying it was a secret... Tim O'Reilly had it nailed back then... but the story I have to remind myself of is that too many times we go off face value rather than digging in and listening to people like Tim... This happens all over the place and it was worth capturing the story that replays in my head each time I see a new revision of it.
Young bull viewing a herd of cows up the hill says to old bull: "Quick let's run up and ride a cow"

Old bull replies : "Let's walk up and ride 'em all"
Securing the data in transit and securing it on a device are two different concerns and it seems silly to expect a network protocol to be able to secure against scenarios where malware is at play.

If you're infected with malware, just patch Chrome in memory to report everything as SSL connected, etc. If you're already compromised, nothing Google can do can help you.
Ask HN: Should I allow a potential competitor to embed my product for free?
Hi HN,

I've been in a dilemma and was wondering if the smart folks on HN could help me.

1. Here's the situation:

- I've made a small product that solves a problem bounds better than anything else currently available.

- After 3 days of launching, I've gotten 20,000 uniques with 25% return visitors over those 3 days.

- This potential competitor is one of the biggest entities in this space, but does not focus solely on my product area. They are really more like a community outlet, combining everything to do with the space onto one site.

- In order to market the product, I've visited and posted on that said community site to gather most of the visitors mentioned above. Visitors have posted how the service is much better than what the competitor site offers, slightly angering competitor site and making it wary it might lose its advertisement revenue tied to the product.

- This potential competitor site reaches upwards of a few million uniques a month internationally. Known as the be-all end-all in this space. I.e the Walmart of this space.

2. Here are my options:

- Forget about everything, buckle down and continue refining the product, fixing bugs and pushing features while growing my user base.

- Offer an opportunity to embed my technology on their site. I would lose a lot of direct access users onto my site, but gain incredible brand recognition and an opportunity to upsell better features on my site.

- Offer to embed for free, greatly enhancing the likelihood of them accepting an embed offer with the thought that the increase in brand recognition and # of users of the product with very well worth whatever missed potential revenue charged.

3. Some other factors:

- The main monetization method I am thinking of doesn't depend on the users being on the base site.

- The timeframe to make the offer is short. The longer I wait, the more likely this competitor site will rally its own developers in order to copy my product.

- Making a specialized embed version will require some time to adapt to the new site, stealing away some development time for the main site.

- I am on version 1.0. The embed will give identical capability for the competitor site. Though this is only until I release more advanced features for the base site.

- There is no user registration involved.

I very much appreciate any consideration. Been thinking hard at the situation. I think I have come to a conclusion, but I wanted to poll the brilliant HN community before I commit to a pathway.
i have my kindle 'jailbroken' (which literally takes minutes from going to get the hacks, 1 to jailbreak and 1 for custom screensavers and implementing it) solely because I was really irk'ed by the standard screensaver images. I then used http://kindlewallpapers.tumblr.com to grab a bunch that fit my needs and loaded em up. Creating custom ones is simple as well.

My next step is to modify all of the .png screensaver images to also include my email address in case I forget my kindle somewhere.
The ultimate metric is product, not productivity, you are correct about that. One seeks to maximize their production in the course of their lifetime.

However,

1. Productivity = product / unit of time

2. Time is a constant (there are only 24 hours in a day, we cannot stretch time aside from living healthier)

Thus, maximizing productivity is practically the same thing as maximizing product, our ultimate metric.
Interesting read. But the best part for me was learning about a new free 411 service. At least once a week, I start to call Goog411 before sadly remembering the service was discontinued.
Paul - I love the original content and insight that you're providing through TSF, but please seem more interested! Engage a little more. Interrupt the interviewee and dig for a more content. We want depth. We want the info we can't get anywhere else. We want the nitty gritty details. You have a unique opportunity here - take advantage of it!
I'm jealous. 28 and in NYC here.

Rent: $1700 (tiny studio in Manhattan)
Utilities: $200 (electric and FIOS)
Transportation: $120 (subway + occasional taxi)
Food: $600
Fun: $400
Maid: $400
Clothing: $100
Grand Total: $3,520
Eli Pariser at TED: Beware online "filter bubbles" curating Facebook, Google
Show HN: Unscatter.com displays the Facebook share count for search results now.
The Visual Topography of a Generation Gap
Eh, in my experience, despite the fact that points were not deducted for getting the "wrong" result, and they were frequently told so, students still preferred to falsify data.

I think it is because if they get the "correct" result they can also just copy an analysis from elsewhere, whereas with the "wrong" result they would have to actually do it themselves.
The only power cord you might need is for your electric screwdriver to open op the laptop, remove the hard drive, and plug it in to another computer.
I hope external Thunderbolt SSD's will keep much of the same performance characteristics as the internal SATA ones, but there's no way to know that until there actually are some thunderbolt devices :). Having a good performing external SSD would be pretty sweet, as it could be a painless and relatively cheap way of upgrading your iMac.

It comes down to how much overhead you get if you go over Thunderbolt, and how good the Thunderbolt -> SATA chips will be.
I don't understand. I am sure I am missing something obvious but maybe you can help me understand.

The purpose of STS is to avoid the user accidentally going to the http address of a page instead of the https page. This is achieved by a special HTTP header that is sent from the server to the browser. The browser remembers that the server wishes to be contacted only over https, and from that moment on all network traffic from the browser to that domain will only be possible over https. No way for the user to accidentally type http://gmail.com/.

How is this different from a 302 location redirect header from the http:// url to the https:// url?
It knocked the wind out of me... just reading it again begins to elicit tears. What a remarkably candid message.
> CSS, however, is the fun where the true art of front-end design happens, so I think it's fun to play with a forgiving syntax.

It's fun to play with a forgiving syntax, but it's no fun saying the same thing 50 times.

That's why I like LessCSS (more than SASS anyway): LessCSS just feels like future CSS, a better CSS. Not something different, not something complex (it adds 4 basic features to CSS), it's a simple mechanical transformation and the output is easy to predict (I'm not fond of the &-combinator, but that's about the only criticism I have for it).
There's a little more info about what I've been up to and what I'm working on in the blog post covering this - http://company.unscatter.com/post/5196475329/may-4th-updates

I figured I wouldn't waste anyones time aiming the post at the blog and instead linked directly to example search results.
Joel has taken inspiration from Philip Greenspun, as described here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000021.html
This has actually tripped me up a lot. In many figurative contexts, like "transparent government" for instance, transparent means the mechanisms are apparent or not hidden. However, when talking about computer processes or interfaces, it always means quite the opposite, "invisible to the user". So tiles used it correctly when he commented on how SPDY usage was transparent because he (the user) was unaware of it.
> Doesn't it wreak havoc with your digestive system?

I worry about his kidneys having to deal with it.
Scala and Android Development
Hint: the definition of "autism" has broadened considerably (especially if you take into account the legal definition in the US, which is even broader than the medical one), and there is a great deal of financial incentive to diagnose a child -- any child -- with autism.

http://politicalilliteracy.us/node/51
Red Hat Ups Its Cloud Game with PaaS
Good point - during my annual exams I find that I'm usually within good levels on all other nutrients that I get tested on, but I guess I'll find out in a few weeks when my next one comes around. Every multi-vitamin is different and I'm concerned about going over the limit on other nutrients like Potassium or something of the sort(a long time ago, I found myself too high on that particular one, and I wasn't on any supplements). I simply haven't had a chance to research each one in detail.
Yeah. The voicemail transcription feature truly is like an open invitation to provide them with real-world data across a wide range of accents, phones, and people.
I am afraid that the system will never change it would not surprise me if schools still used the same teaching methods they use today, a couple of centuries from now.
The best take on it I have seen so far, http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/05/04/what_autism_...
The younger crowd is also more impressionable than the older crowd. Older investors I bet <3 to play sage and school the youngins' and the first step to get them to listen is to compliment them. lol
What did Tim say back then?

In any case, it was really well known what Google's goals were. In fact it was a pretty standard feedback technique used by all automated phone voice reoognition systems.

For Bing though this is also a branding opportunity. Google has relatively little to gain in branding with their 411 service, but for Bing it still has great upside potential.
We could still get speed ups from higher electron and/or hole mobility after we stop shrinking things by going to different materials, but yeah - that really won't be Moore's law any more.
It's Official: Nintendo Will Slash Wii Price to $150 This Month
Medical tech company creates world's smallest video camera
Staying on Focus With a Post-Mortem
An attacker could intercept that initial http:// url and provide their own destination for the browser to visit instead. HSTS prevents this from happening once the domain is in the cache (or pre-loaded).
It's generating $240,000 a year in revenue. Unless your house is worth a ton, I don't think a home equity loan is gonna cut it :)
Triple Monitor Gaming: GeForce GTX 590 vs. Radeon HD 6990
ERB is a useful tool to have in your toolbox. It's very flexible. It's capable of templating _any_ kind of text file, but since it's capable for all of them, it excels at none of them.

HTML imposes this very strict structure: tags must be closed properly. Sure, browsers can handle tag soup to varying degrees, but it's a very bad idea to have your app render invalid markup. Humans are terrible at ensuring all tags are closed properly. Computers are great at it.

When templating HTML, I prefer to use a tool the was specifically designed for HTML. HAML auto-closes tags for you. Erector (http://erector.rubyforge.org/index.html) is probably my favorite, as it auto-closes tags, allows you to write your views in pure ruby, brings the power of OOP to your views, and gives you a far more clean, testable view layer. Want to test your view? Simple: instantiate the view class with the necessary arguments, render it, and make assertions about the output.
Intel’s 3D Transistors Promise Small Physical And Electrical Footprint
I may not have been very clear about this, but that's exactly my point. I've gotten grief for liking SASS but not using HAML and I think that the two solve two entirely different problems and lumping them together has never made sense. They simply happened to start out in the same gem.
Its funny how at the end of the day basic shapes are still an important rule in technology :-)
The difference is one person tried to do something, and the other didn't try at all. The one who tried succeeded.

Which makes the whole point irrelevant and illogical. If you want to prove that a "winning attitude" is the key to success, you'd want to compare people who actually tried to do something and who had opposing attitudes and see how they ended up.

Extra points if you do this with enough people to make the results statistically significant.

Please, everyone realize that this argument is logically identical to the original blog post:

I have two friends, one who has blond hair and the other is a redhead. The blond guy always talks about hunting lions in Africa but has never gone on safari. My redhead friend, on the other hand, went to Africa and shot a lion on his first try. It just goes to show you how important it is to have red hair.

That's a BS argument, no? But if you said, "I did a study of 10,000 people who went to Africa and tried to shoot a lion, and red hair correlated with a successful kill more than any other characteristic by a wide margin," then you might want to consider dying your hair with henna before you go try to shoot a lion.
Why And How We Founded Business Insider
TSMC has plans to develop similar(not same) non-planar fab at 12nm, I think, by 2012. They call their's FINFET and showed a prototype in 2002.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device#FinFETs
An attacker that is able to MITM your traffic or poison your DNS can steal your session before you ever get to the trusted https url.

http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/
GitX is simply awesome, but unfortunately I've left the official one behind and moved to the one maintained by laullon [1] because it contains more of the features I want, and seems to be updated a lot more.

[1] https://github.com/laullon/gitx
Singapore Travels and Beautiful Beaches and Places
Updating JavaScript Benchmarks for Modern Browsers
I'm gonna make tomorrow my best day ever.
This is tangential to the main thread, but the weirdness that is hoisting surely confuses a lot of people. (To clarify: hoisting seems to me to be more or worse than just "there's no block scoping.") Just now on my the subway ride home I came across this example from David Flanagan's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide:

var scope = "global";
function f() {
console.log(scope); // Prints "undefined", not "global"
var scope = "local"; // Variable initialized here, but defined everywhere
console.log(scope); // Prints "local"
}

I'm someone who uses Javascript only occasionally, and I'm trying to learn it better. But I thought I understood scope just fine: no block scope, function scope, lexical scoping within functions and nested functions. I may have read about "hoisting" before, but honestly it never sunk in until today.

So I'm assuming that Coffeescript always compiles down to Javascript where variables are explicitly hoisted upwards in declaration? (Answer appears to be yes from a few quick tests here...)
If an attacker controls DNS (which is doable), he could just not issue the redirect and you'd happily tell your GMail password to his server.

Also, redirecting from e.g. http://gmail.com/login?user=me&pass=secret to https://gmail.com/login?user=me&pass=secret is not that useful, so this can also help with some forms.
House hearing blasts Sony's "half-hearted, half-baked" hack response
duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510757
I have an unrelated question for the Justin TV folks. Do you guys use TCP or UDP for your videos? Do you use multicast?

I have been wondering about this lately. TCP ensures all packets are delivered, but it may cause delays retransmitting packets, so I am not sure it would work with live TV. Also TCP cannot do multicast. Youtube uses TCP (AFAIK) but you tube is usually not live.

UDP does not waste time retransmitting packets but UDP does not guarantee all packets will arrive. Thus, with UDP you may have dropped packets. In the old times you would just use UDP and accept that there will be occasional quality degradations due to dropped packets, but in the old times streaming video and audio over the internet was really bad.

Nowadays the expectations are so high and the video codecs are so complex, few dropped packets could cause noticeable artifacts.

Anyways, sorry for going off on a tangent. I was just curious.
Apple to release Mac OS X Lion through Mac App Store
Here's Why My Friends Keep Quitting Their Facebook Jobs
Really annoying that they didn't just use SCTP. One commenter on the page points out that it works on top of TCP, which is supported by most routers. This, however, is an entirely artificial limitation. It is a sad fact that this type of artificial restrictions are imposed, and i say that we should fight against them. Having all inet services running over port 80 and TCP does not make the net any safer or better. We as hackers should fight for making people aware of and remove such restrictions, not accept and worsen the crippled situation by working around the problem. This is one of the key problems in the digital world today, too few actually makes an effort to fix the underlying problems. Here Google could play a crucial role, and I must say that I am dissapointed by their choice.
Yea perfect case in point. I graduate this Friday with a physics undergrad. Class of 33, 31 males. 2 females :(
InfoQ: Oracle Proposes Hudson Move to Eclipse Foundation
I think you're right about the tone but there's a simple explanation for it: ERB is the default. Everyone has used it and no one (+/- a couple people) is already using HAML and needs someone to come along and say "Hey, have you heard about this awesome thing called ERB? You can just write HTML and inline your code right there!"

I may have missed my mark in the writing because my point isn't to say that HAML sucks; my point is to say that there are logical reasons to decide NOT to use HAML just as there are logical reasons TO use HAML. What I was tired of is the assumption that HAML is simply universally superior and anyone who doesn't use it only does so because they don't "understand" HAML.

We have the facts and we're saying ERB. ;)
But that is a problem with STS too. That is why google is HSTS preloading a lot of google domains in their browser (they hardcode the domains). Couldn't they just hardcode the redirect so that if the user types http://gmail.com/ chrome replaces it with https://gmail.com?
i dunno why but the duplicate check seems to be working less well, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510757
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2511398
You're looking at this the wrong way, let's say you have some rotting hops, malt and barely and need to sell this fetid stuff. The key is to get your product associated with attractive women. if you do it long enough there will be an association. I bet the wine industry could get men drinking wine if they used the same approach.
We use TCP because Flash mostly doesn't support UDP.
Attachmate lays off Mono staff - Open Saucers let go | TechEye
Yup, but bear in mind that's between two people ($1300 per month), and after tax break (so looks like $2000 on paper, but is actually only $1300 out of pocket). It's on a 3.75% rate (7 year), and excludes principle repayment (which is not a cost). Includes property tax. So it's very comparable to rent.
Pretty sure he said that with his wife, household expenses are twice that. Rent is more like 1530. Which is still create for a house in SF.
Thanks for the advice guynamedloren. I'm still a newbie at interviewing but I'm working hard to get better at it. I really appreciate your feedback and I'll look to incorporate it moving forward. All the best.
That is kind of odd. But to get this prompt, you need to click on the printer icon to see the 'print' version of the article. And then they tell you: You print copies on the honour system; we trust that you will only make up to 5.

I've never seen this before, but it's not a bad way to do it. And if you need an ad-free version, it's nice to know that you can get one easily.
And Bing's is massively less polished of an experience than Google's was :/ I still use it, but only as a last resort.
Didn't Arrington start Techcrunch at 35 anyway?
Most people don't upgrade their CPUs. Most people don't know what generation their CPU is from when they buy.
And yet you used socialism with exactly the same carelessness and ambiguity.
well, Marissa Mayer of Google explicitly stated in a public announcement in October 2007 that it was going to be used for speech recognition algorithms. And many, many news blogs published that.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-management/google-wants-your...

Your article makes it seem like the fact that Google was using 411 for voice analysis was somewhat 'unknown' until 2009, whereas I would say that the knowledge was actually quite mainstream and, frankly, hard to ignore.

I would argue that assuming that the Bing team completely failed to see all the news articles and press releases (from Google, no less) about this for 2 years, is perhaps a little presumptuous? Maybe, as another poster mentioned, they are still getting value out of the 411 service?

I do agree with your point, and there are many many times I've seen companies do this, but Bing 411 vs Google 411 might not be the right example since Google's intentions were very clear, right from the start.

Disclaimer: I work on MS Office (completely unrelated to Bing & the 411 service, but still not what you would call an unbiased source)
If you do go the epub route, let me know know if you're interested in trying eBookBurn.com (my startup's site), and I can issue you a promo code.

You'll also get a .mobi version simultaneously.
STS solves the problem unless the attacker has a fraudulent certificate for the domain you are reaching that is signed by a CA you trust. Presumably this is far fewer attackers than those who could manipulate your DNS or are on your local network to ARP in as a middleman. Basically, two different problems - the trust only X CA for xxx.com wouldn't ever get to come into play if someone using sslstrip simply keeps you from ever going to tls.
Can we conclude that it is reasonable to not accept claims for which there is no evidence?