skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My first thought is there is little incentive for the patient to log on long after surgery (an hour is long for this situation). Perhaps consider actively engaging the patient after surgery by requesting an email pre-surgery. This cuts down a lot of user friction.

(I'm thinking now you may not be involved with the hospital. Find an online forum or manner to engage patient pre-surgery. It is much easier to identify them before when they are looking for help and info, than afterwards).

After surgery you send the email with a link with a unique id. If you are working with the hospital, you can have the patient's data associated with the id, decreasing the info required for them to enter.

Not sure from your post where you want input most. User experience? Web development?
Logically, I think on Sprint and Verizon you'd want a WiFi-enabled phone and a MiFi or other wireless portable hotspot.

Verizon is $50/mo for 5 GB on a 2-year contract on the 4G data plan.

Sprint is $45/mo for 3 GB, also on a 2-year plan.
Yes, or my own project, Gazelle: http://www.gazelle-parser.org/
You can't trust that the webview (controlled by the app) isn't intercepting your credentials.
Wow. I guess I'll be shutting down my feature-phone twitter client because of it. It's been in life-support mode for about a year, but I guess that's the end of it.
That's the question the website exists to discover an answer to.
I'd be willing to work at a lesser rate for bitcoins too. The problem is that the overlap of people that want web/social media crawlers and/or data analysis and the people that are willing to spend bitcoins to hire them are effectively nil.
The point is that this is an illusion. If the native app puts up an in app browser (which is a very common strategy), then they have access to everything you type. They can query the page for that same username and password, they can simulate clicks, they can do whatever they want. And additionally, for all you know, its not even the real page you are seeing. OAuth security only makes sense on the web.
Notice that you will have the same kind of trouble if you're using OpenID on your own domain and let it expire...

(An attacker could buy the domain name and set up a page at your OpenID URL which would delegate the OpenID to something under their control.)
This would become quite a bit simpler if they also moved to OAuth 2.0 (bearer tokens over SSL) instead of sticking with 1.1 (HMAC signatures).
From a technical perspective, what you're talking about is something that would be very brittle and liable to break because of changes Twitter make to their login pages.

It's also relying on functionality that may be treated in the future as an attack vector and locked down by either Apple or Twitter. e.g. like the changes a lot of web browsers made to cross-domain ajax posts, pop-ups, pop-unders, etc.
As I understand it, there are two big reasons they're proposing a boycott, and neither is actually to avoid paying this fee (which most of these guys consider pretty negligible).

Firstly, they're worried about a flood of me-too suits. Immediately stopping use of the feature is sort of a poison pill intended to dissuade patent trolls, who would actually prefer that the developers continue to use the feature and continue to pay up instead of just paying back fees.

Second, Apple is a very conservative company and it takes a lot of time to get them to actually respond to anything. This boycott is intended to make Apple notice faster than they otherwise would. A lot of the boycotters are also filing bugs against the API.
It's possible, but it's a big pain and it does violate the TOS, so if you ever came to their attention they would shut you down.
I would imagine that with time their control of the hand would be much closer to feeling natural than you might imagine, due to neuroplasticity.
Great radio interviews
Entrepreneurs must be leaders
Ultimately, earnings > revenue. However:

For a business like Pets.com (or Amazon, etc....), earnings is what I'd worry about (EBITDA, maybe, but probably just straight earnings). It's easy to sell $20 pet food for $10 and throw in free shipping and get a lot of customers. It's hard to sell $20 pet food for $10 and actually make money doing so.

LinkedIn (Facebook, Zynga, ...) is the kind of business where the most relevant metrics are userbase, engagement, and revenue; it's pretty low per user marginal cost (nil?), and thus scaling userbase, engagement, and getting people to pay something will feed directly into earnings; it's easier to track the sources independently vs. the sink.
There's no proof that Apple paid Lodsys for this patent. It's almost certain that they have a licence for it from a previous deal with IV who was the previous owner of this and many many other patents. Lodsys can't sue Apple so they're trying to do so indirectly by threatening the ecosystem.
and you can verify the embedded-in-a-web-view-with-no-url-bar login page how, exactly?
Teh Womenz

I'm rolling my eyes right now, just so you know. I'm sure EVERY programmer should really be interested in "teh womenz."

OTHER HOBBIES FOR FUCK SAKE

Now my head is firmly planted in the palm of my hand. You seriously can't tell them apart they're so embedded. I don't know when that started happening, but it's really quite remarkable.

People program as a hobby. It's how a lot of free software gets written. It's how people learn.

Here's a simpler guide to "becoming a hacker":

1. Read a tutorial (note: not a big honking book or anything listed on in the article. not yet.)

2. Implement the most simple possible number guessing game

3. Think of ways to improve the game and implement them

4. Get stumped on something, refer to the language documentation, or google as a last resort

5. Repeat 3-4 until you've exhausted all your ideas

6. Find a slightly more ambitious program to write. An address book is a good start. Repeat 3-4 until you have a decent address book program

7. Repeat 6 until you have a handful of small programs under your belt

8. Now pick a book to read, pick the parts that interest you, do the exercises if there are any, and take notes

9. Apply what you've learned to improve your programs; if you notice some marked improvement (readability, performance, your own productivity), retain that theory. if there was nothing gained; repeat this step or abandon it and move on

10. Start building non-trivial programs, forking open source projects, and write more code. Do some coding puzzles once in a while

For any new language, start at 1.

I am generally against starting with books. Especially for people who are interested in programming but haven't already figured out how to write and compile a few simple programs on their own. These sorts of people aren't even sure that they will like it, so throwing a thick meaty book filled with a whole bunch of nonsensical programmer-speak isn't going to really entice them. I say wait for the books until you've gotten a taste and are committed to learning more. The effect is much more impressive when you just run some code and see the computer "do stuff." That's when you realize it's not rocket-science and anyone can do it.

Heck, it's they're really, really not sure... give them Logo or http://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/index.html

Bad ass hackers just do it. Learning all the theory first is just a barrier and a big downer.
Bring a law suit against someone requires, in general, damages or some loss. Not to mention a retainer. Getting a prosecutor to enforce a law when there is essentially no harm would be next to impossible. If a law was broken.
Try an experiment: tell some people it's called "Sfalma" and tell other people it's called "The Bug Eater" and see which group is more likely to create an account within 2 weeks.
I'd guess that obscure names aren't good, but you never know.
I agree, this is a little dramatic. Another thing I'd point out is that the author is putting way too much emphasis on the login part of the experience. Is OAuth seamless? Clearly not. But it works, and it's a one-time thing. If you want to improve the user's experience, and you're harping on OAuth, you're implying that everything else the user touches is perfect. Amdahl would be disappointed.
Backrub, and its creators, were clearly government funded:

"1996 - Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub."

http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

"BackRub is a research project of the Digital Library Project in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University."

http://classic-web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/backrub.st...

"The Stanford Digital Libraries project is one participant in the 4-year, $24 million Digital Library Initiative, started in 1994 and supported by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA."

http://classic-web.archive.org/web/19971210113151/diglib.sta...

That's a huge initiative, especially in 1994, supporting many, many grad students like Larry and Sergey. There's a strong claim that without the research funding, we wouldn't have Google.
Seriously...they're not stupid.
Will this project "emulate" a human brain down to the subatomic level? Down to even the atomic level?

Both are probably far too ambitious for this project. I'd even be quite surprised if they managed to accurately simulate a brain down to a molecular level.

What this sounds like is yet another attempt at a grossly simplified simulation of a subset of what is actually going on in the brain.

It remains to be seen how useful this is, nevermind whether this will bring us any closer to AI (how would you even measure the "intelligence" of a simulated brain without any sensory organs or an ability to communicate?)
Everything you are describing being "locked down" happened within the context of the browser world, not to webviews you control. Again, once you are in control of the webview you can do anything. Think of this way: you could just implement your own HTML renderer, at which point, once again, nothing anyone builds in will matter. In fact, why bother embedding a webview at all? Depending on how they implemented the login, simply download the HTML source code as plaintext, then issue the post of the form yourself -- no browser required. Each of these is slightly more abstracted, but you get the idea.

I agree with your point that this may be brittle, but that's kind of the point I'm making -- you're getting zero new security benefits out of it and introducing the possibility that many apps use a worse technique to get what they want done. Also, if you are just manually filling out a form I wouldn't worry about brittleness too much, you're just looking for two text fields and then submitting whatever form contains them yourself. Unless Twitter actively starts trying to create fake form elements or something I doubt anything would break, and even then, is this really what Twitter wants to get in the business of building, tricky forms to swat third party apps?
Geometry aliasing
You're assuming too much. I'd take odds that people used the same pwd for both.
If swap trashing makes a system unusable, why not get rid of the swap and let the program crash? Isn't that the preferred behavior?
For me personally, I couldn't work without music. It blocks out environment noise. In a silent area it's like every small sound is amplified tenfold. It could be I'm different, but I had very productive weeks, while on the other monitor Farscape was playing for the nth time.

So I would say, let them choose for themselves what works best. Loosing concentration once in a while because of the music might be a natural stopping point, and listening to music for a short time gets the brain rested enough for a next period of concentration.
Troubleshooting Instant Previews in Webmaster Tools
Ah no posts in the demo have tags or categories but its coded up.

Once its all setup I'd like to think being distributed and having full control over your data would be a strong selling point. No more "tumblr is over capacity" messages.
That will be an interesting outcome. What if it's not?

Can you imagine how weird it would be if we backed into proving a universal consciousness existed in a different dimension and an exactly modelled/simulated brain didn't get to participate because it wasn't given a 'soul' by that consciousness?

Or the flip side where our brain model does develop sentience as an emergent property and the spiritualists have to deal with the possibility that they are just animated meat.

Or the creepy side where you take an imprint of your current brain state, impart it on the model and suddenly the model thinks it's you?

Science fiction has explored these concepts for a while. I know that personally I'd like there to be something "special" about consciousness and/or sentience but I am rational enough to know that this isn't backed up by solid reasoning, just wishful thinking.

In a highly networked, highly automated, world the idea that consciousness could simply 'emerge' from a sufficiently constructed system is deeply disturbing.

While much of what the film "Eagle Eye" speculated on with a sentient computer connected to everything seemed pretty bogus, the ability to disrupt and render unusable a wide range of systems simulataneously by a disgruntled AI is not an experience I would anticipate as being 'pleasant.'
Giving less than 2 weeks notice qualifies as a "shit sandwich". Not to mention that OAuth does not prevent any native client from getting your credentials via the web view they pop-up. It is a poor decision for native apps as it does not increase security, disables features for a time (until new version approved), makes for a bad ui experience, and gives the illusion of better security.
I agree. Quick, ugly and permanent are not qualities of a good solution to most problems, but quick, strong and pliable are. It looked fairly demolishable, too, so there might be something in using it for installations and wilderness construction. I'm thinking specifically about youth events - festivals and campsites. Basically, anything unique to the location that or that you'll be leaving unsupervised in a slightly hostile environment.
The login is the first experience with your new app. Hard to think the house is nice if the front yard is a mess.
"The antagonistic nature of chess is much easier to grasp than the cold, crystalline-like beauty of Go's patterns."

Sure, but are the long term structural patterns in Chess easier to grasp? I'm at a disadvantage here because I'm honestly not good enough at either game to really know.
I read that Bobby Fischer once snapped to a journalist who congratulated him on a well played chess match: "how would you know?" I don't know. My casual dabbling in chess and go gives me as much in common with Go or Chess masters as my BA in Math gives me with Euler. What I do isn't a weaker version of what they do, it isn't related at all.

Now, my 5 year old loves the antagonistic nature of chess, it's about taking the other guy's pieces. Kabam, got you! But c'mon, even I know that's not meaningful chess.

And these comparisons of Kasparov's genius to "accountants and merchants?" Kind or reminds me of that scene in "A Beautiful Mind" where Nash loses a go game and claims "the game is flawed." It's not flawed, you just don't get it.
I can second this. I've been running five domains through them for about 5 months now and haven't looked back.

It's worth it to switch to CloudFlare just for their DNS control panel; it's better than any I've ever used.
Ask HN: Looking for a post; please help. Biology journal-related
I don't remember what the title was or what the post was about. It might have had something to do with science journals. There was a comment that linked to a site that listed a bunch of biological journals (I think) related to statistics.
Everything else the user touches, natively, has the potential to be perfect. The developer has direct control. OAuth's shitty UX is permanent and immutable – and completely jarring as an introduction to a new user.
I'm not an expert so I could be wrong but over the last 10 years I've seen many papers on various details and behaviors of the C. Elegans nervous system. I agree we have a lot still to learn from it but we certainly seem to know enough to simulate it accurately and get the same kinds of behaviors that we see in the living worm. We've even been able to simulate much larger and more complex systems like the fruitfly eye and direction-tracking system. I really believe that all we need to have is the connectome and the rules it uses to organize and change itself. We don't need to know EVERYTHING about it.
That's something that they are working on. One example of a useful application is a text ebook collection.
As the maker of an iOS Twitter client that used to use OAuth (now uses xAuth), I can tell you it's trivial to retrieve the user's username and password from the embedded UIWebView. If someone wants to steal user credentials, they'll still be able to.

Twitter created xAuth; no one forced it on them. It's odd that they would remove it now when they could have moved everyone to the web workflow when they transitioned away from basic auth.

When one further considers that they're giving developers only 2 weeks to comply, it's hard to escape the feeling that this isn't really about security and is more about tightening the noose on third-party developers.
See http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html for a more detailed examination.
My most refreshing sleep feels as though I have skipped forward from night to morning without the tedious period of time in-between.
Dude, I am already donating 30% percent of my revenues to an organization that should be doing that.
Sure. One of the things that we do in the iPhone app is to open each of our media screens as modals, then when you bump we slide in the chat screen that shows the data that was transferred.

Modals mean slightly different things in Android from iPhone, they truly are something that pop up and should be immediately dismissed. So all of our media screens had to be slide in from the right instead of modals so using the back button makes more sense.

Another thing is autofilling out the user's contact information for them if we can. Android gives us richer information about device and user identity (only after we are given permission at download time of course). We can use this to make the process of setting up your contact to Bump a breeze.
Of course he is playing with fire, that's the only way to do real innovation. Remember that this is just a proof of concept, and a very compelling one.
As Google has become THE search engine, Facebook will be THE social networking site (which it already is). I don't think it will get bigger than being a social networking tool, and on the other end of the scale I highly doubt it will end up like MySpace...
Yes! I'm glad finally someone like Gruber shared his opinion on this. Integrating Twitter in native apps has been a huge pain for me and trying to explain clients why they can't have a native branded user/password dialog in the app (like "all" the other apps) is really tedious. For such a big player like Twitter they made it really cumbersome for 3rd partys to do simple tasks like posting a tweet.
Thanks for all your input - new pricing plans up at http://getflaregun.com/plans

Plans feels more suitable now. Getting rid of the free account feels the right move. If anyone is interested they should be willing to 'gamble' $5. I can't see many free -> paid upgrades happening so it is probably easiest to cut it out (less support, coding etc).

If you click on signup there is a form to get a one time email when Flaregun launches (it is currently in development).

Cheers,
Yes. At a technical level, CloudFlare is a caching reverse proxy provisioned via DNS.
They hire the best in the valley to come up with this <good feature> to <build their userbase and provide a cool feature to users>. Then, their lawyers patent it because a big patent war chest seems like the best defense in the patent infringement war. Sad, but a wise business strategy right now.
It's sad to see a discussion that could be of interest to computer hackers (the current neurosimulation software is decades old, horrible and could really benefit from some new ideas) ending up to the usual blah blah about self aware robots that will take over the earth.
/signoff
I want to point out that as a ICANN registrar not a day goes by where some tech person working on behalf of a customer will contact us and request an auth code to transfer out a domain name. Just like that. As if we will send one to anyone that asks. Later when the customer makes the request many times the domain ends up at another registrar in the name of the tech person, isp, web designer etc. who has been told they need to be able to login and make changes. The name subsequently is deleted for non-payment (customer isn't notified and invoice goes to new contact) and they loose control of their domain.
Impressive.

> Basically those slices are taken at 10 microns and we are
> working on fixing some of the problems (when you cut a
> brain that thin you end up with a lot of tears and
> deformations)

Can you talk about how you deal with the inherent deformations? I've spent hundreds of hours on cryostats preparing rodent brain slices for autoradiography, and getting usable ones at 15-20 microns is a painful process. Should be even worse if you need to retain morphological information...
As many others have pointed out, OAuth is extremely susceptible to phishing or snooping of passwords on platforms where the OAuth flow is done in an embedded web view, which can be considered "untrusted", vs. your browser which could be considered "trusted" because you know the URL bar is accurate, and there's no mechanism for 3rd parties to scrape passwords (well, except for user scripts / extensions)

OAuth does also remove the burden of securely storing passwords, but so does xAuth.
Sounds like a decent way to do it. With that model, you might experiment with 'sliding scale' plans - by offering more expensive packages with access to more teams (and perhaps more relevant teams; ie- location).

And a little more input on your revenue model: I think you want to go subscription, but make it long term to justify a relatively high initial price point (since you have to maximize that initial transaction due to the little problem we discussed above). Might be best to just make all plans 1 year. It simplifies things; and then you've got a decent probability your customers will renew again year after year.
Nah, I'm just a fanboi. I'm the founder of Robot Mode.
Iphone apps need to display Back, Search, and Menu buttons. With Android there is no need to display them in your app since there are dedicated physical buttons for them.
"I can’t think of any reason why Twitter would force native apps through OAuth other than to create a hurdle that steers users toward Twitter’s own official native clients" > I think this nails it.
True - Math can help those who are not innovative and problem-solvers to innovate and solve problems... but as can programming or taking apart electronics or constructing circuits.

Experimental education should be pushed. Students should be shown how innovation in programming, electronics, and the like is easy to come by and that in itself will spur economic growth. Furthermore, the barriers to entry on these such fields makes it possible and the barrier to entry are getting lower with larger and larger libs and toolkits and (hell even) arduinos.
Orijen Dog Food Reviews
Orijen Dog Food Reviews
Ugh it's finally happened.
Well, there are different layers of trust.

I trust the intent of many app developers, I just don't trust their competence to store my credentials securely. So OAuth still requires me to trust their intent, but does solve the problem of competence (as long as I trust them to implement OAuth properly which can also be an issue).
Anatomy of a thunk leak
what, exactly, has finally happened?
I know plenty of hackers who decided to dayjob in other fields, so that's B.S. Hacking does not imply being paid.
That was my thought, too. A TeX version somewhere would be great.