skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was completely unclear from the text. It might be clear if I were Edward Tufte, and in that sense it works as an open letter. But for a broader audience (I've read two of his books, if that matters) the supposed contradictions or hypocrisy aren't apparent. His 'sins' are presented, but the covenant being violated can only be guessed at. Even if it comes down to your own personal dashed expectations, elaborating on exactly what those were would make it easier to connect the dots in the way you intend.

As it is, it comes across as though there is something inherently wrong with him having what you think is a lot of money. Why should it matter? If you believe that a "Foundation for Beautiful Evidence" should exist, there must be reasons. But just going by the text that's there, it sounds like the main reason is that you think Tufte can afford to endow one. That may be a useful practical detail, if true, but it's not really a reason for him to do it. Remember: you're also asking him to do something with his time and attention, which he has no more of than you do. Why would he? Why would anybody? It might be understandable to someone who attended the course, but it could be elucidated to someone who hadn't by being direct about what you think such an enterprise could accomplish.
Striving for a lower file size is inherently a good thing, but as disk space is becoming cheaper and cheaper and it's not as important anymore. Judging from the comparison gallery at http://code.google.com/speed/webp/gallery.html, it's not very impressing. The result is much more blocky and there is significant loss in detail in detail-concentrated areas.

Case in point: the first image of a landscape has two major noticeable artifacts: the shadow of the mountain (mid-right) reveals the blocky compression of WebP. Second, the compression algorithm tends to smooth out a lot of detail. Observe how the vegetation gets mushed out. The clouds as well (mostly on the top left).

Great for video, not so much for images (from the gallery above anyway). I would like to see a better comparison with WebP vs JPEG but compressed to about the same file size and with a RAW source (to remove any compression bias).
Newegg doesn't save your credit card number. So I guess your newegg password could lead to financial harm, but only very indirectly.
I had the same problem 5 years ago. It's experiences like these that got me out of freelancing completely. It's exhausting and isn't worth it in my opinion.
> When we're talking about passwords "vaulted" in non-exposed systems used for customer support, I have a harder time getting upset about it. I don't like systems that work this way, but I see the support/security tradeoff and it's a valid one.

Worth also knowing is that many ISP's store your password using reversible encryption, because if a customer calls up wanting to know their password, it doesn't have to be regenerated. Which can save a lot of time re-configuring modem PPP credentials with your average Joe.
Zynga has already innovated outside of the ville games, since Farmville was their second big hit after Texas Hold'em.

Texas Hold 'em is a pretty minimalist form of "innovation". Take a popular card game and put it on facebook? Brilliant!

The virtual goods market is showing no signs of slowing down, $2B last year and growing at 50%+.

This is exactly what I don't believe can be sustained. There's only so long that people are willing to keep buying things that don't actually exist (hey, speaking of which, we haven't had a bitcoin article in a while...)

It might not be Zynga that is #1 in 10 years time, but it will be somebody - and atm nobody is even challenging Zynga in this space - but you seem to be arguing against a shift that is by all accounts very real.

Lots of folks are challenging Zynga in this space. Any one of 'em could have the next big hit, the thing that grabs the attention of a bunch of kids bored with clicking on cows... something with gameplay elements that are actually fun -- a game rather than a Skinner box.
My concern is that I don't see a roadmap for the missing features and there are existing next-gen codecs that already perform better than JPEG and do have those features.
I 'm not jealous of them or their profits

Y'know, I think it's perfectly legitimate to be jealous of their profits.
I agree getting it ready for "easy" install takes a lot more work than completing the coding. I wonder what feature, or combination of features, is the differentiator here? Maybe it's the speed of search, or the loose document schemas combined with freetext search, the REST API? Some more examples and benchmarks would be interesting, when you find the time :)
File system: yes. Shell: no.
Must be awesome code, huh?
Activate TRIM in Snow Leopard on your SSD-powered Mac
I think what you're saying is that Zynga is so good at business it succeeds fantastically despite its products. That translates to a great company in Wall Street terms.

Look at McDonalds. McDonalds certainly didn't invent the hamburger. McDonalds probably never made the best hamburger. But it sure as hell found a way to make money off hamburgers like nobody before.

Those other companies, those are the less capable small fries with handfuls of loyal customers while Zynga is busy expanding its empire to every street corner.
You can always save a hash, change the password, and then restore the hash. Basically, if you have direct access the the DB you can loin to someones account without them knowing or permanently changing the password. Granted, there are some minor issues with salting passwords etc, but protecting an account from someone with long term RW access to a DB and reasonable understanding of the system is next to impossible.
Have you actually done the math? It's certainly not hard to find lotteries where the expected payout is above 100%. In the big rolling jackpot games, the average payout is about 50 cents on the dollar, but after weeks and weeks of paying 10 cents on the dollar with no big winner, the jackpot builds until it's higher than the expected number of dollars coming in.
There's two types of smiling:

1) An honest expression of joy
2) A manifestation of nervous energy

A confident guy in the presence of an attractive woman will do #1. A shy guy will do #2. #2 displays the guy thinks he isn't worthy. The sub-communication is neediness. #1 displays that the guy is comfortable around women like her. The sub-communication is contentment, abundance.

Women can tell the difference.
I disagree. I have not found his comments rude, hostile, or lacking in intellectual curiosity. I think you are too emotionally invested in the discussion to evaluate his comments fairly.
"is there a public site / wall of shame for web-services that store your auth info in the clear? we need one."[1]

Can we make one?

1: https://twitter.com/#!/igrigorik/status/69120340063825920
File System Latency: part 4
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=56
If a customer calls up wanting to know their password, I would bet that they are configuring a new modem and that's why the need it. If their modem knows the password, why do they need to know it?
Part 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539268

Part 2: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2560682

Part 3: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2560684
Gotta be a special kinda stupid to bare false whitness.
When quoting it is permissible to use ... to indicate that you omitted part of the sentence. Standard grammar guides also say that when you end your sentence on a quote, the punctuation mark should move inside of the quotes. Even if it wasn't originally the end of the sentence.

That is exactly what the journalist in question did. The omitted section of sentence was the word not, and it appeared at the end of a sentence.
Liferay.com, mobile sites and responsive layouts
Like I said, it's more abandoned than anything else at this point. Drop us a note.

I'll see if he feels like digging it up and tossing it on github or something.
Hah was thinking the same thing. Going to put it to work tonight
Is "WONFTIX" a quirky Mozilla thing, or a typo of "WONTFIX"?
So, you wanna do business with Google?
I worked at DG during its last four years. I briefly encountered Mr. West a couple of times. His aura was palpable in the hallways. He remains a legend among DG alumni.

Around 1998, West started a new internet focused business unit called THiiNLINE. One of the unit's products was an embedded Linux based wireless router for the home. As a lucky beta-tester, I enjoyed wireless laptop access to my dialup internet connection well before such devices became common. At the time, THiiNLINE was considered a crazy venture. The past thirteen years have proven that West's vision was on the right track.

I had the extreme good fortune of having a Microkid as my mentor for seven years. I learned a ton from him and like to think that I picked up some of the "The Soul of a New Machine" ethos. For that, I will always be thankful to Mr. West and the Eagle group he created.

RIP, Mr. West.
"It is important to remember that this study explored first-impressions of sexual attraction to images of the opposite sex," says Alec Beall, a UBC psychology graduate student and study co-author. "We were not asking participants if they thought these targets would make a good boyfriend or wife -- we wanted their gut reactions on carnal, sexual attraction."
Well, I've never used one, but I did do a double-take when I walked past an Eclipse still ticking over in a data centre about 4 years ago.
It's not available outside the US though

Well, that would be the problem then. I should have known. Whenever Apple gives me a vague error message, it always turns out to be political.
Something on quantum computation like, Shor's algorithm: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0010034
I wasn't aware that Spirit had been incommunicado for a full year. Yep, time to give it up. We got great value out of it.

I must resist the temptation to anthropomorphize it. No, I don't feel sad for the poor rover stuck in a cold sandtrap on another planet, cruelly abandoned after years of faithful service. I do not feel sorry for it. I know that it's no more alive than the computer on which I'm typing this, that it's just a few random bits of electronics and some electric motors.

And yet... sob
Game made using only CSS
Many ways to approach this. I suggest a few weeks of tracking each and every expense, then look over it with her. She is wrong, of course, but if you can show her some numbers and get her thinking about it on her own, then you have the possibility of winning her over.
Imagine, in about 20-30 years time, humans land on Mars. If Spirit still has its data stored to disk, and we can retrieve it, then that would mean that the most expensive rescue operation in human history was made to rescue... a robot that was designed to last 90 days on the Martian surface.
World of Warcraft is an Everquest knockoff. From an investment perspective, I am mixed about whether Zynga's lack of originality is a positive or a negative.
I like this series; it covers getting a bare metal kernel running on ARM QEmu:http://balau82.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/hello-world-for-bare...

ARM is generally a lot more sane than x86 when it comes to writing close to the metal, although there's a lot less info about stuff out there. Often reading the manuals for the chipset will get you what you want though..
hostgator.com does this as well. They even display your password in their online dashboard.
I don't know where I would go to buy a modem these days. Perhaps, if I find one, I'll add it to my disaster kit.
plaintextoffenders.com
I did not know this. Thank you for pointing it out. In that case, it's probably not in violation of MA law. It does protect against grey areas that may allow malicious activity against you, e.g. billing address, etc, but it would be a hard sell and not worth anyone's time. Though, it's worth pointing out this is exactly why companies do everything possible to avoid storing PII (e.g. credit card info) even if it's to the customer's disadvantage.
That's a good analogy. But McDonald's has a couple of huge advantages that Zynga doesn't.

The first is physical space - they are omnipresent. On the internet, everyone can be everywhere. The second is branding. People know FarmVille. Do they know Zynga? Probably not.

In Zynga's market, anyone could release a great game and have a massive success with little investment. McDonald's has serious momentum; it's utterly impossible to imagine a scenario where a competitor shows up and quickly puts them out of business. Same thing applies to Facebook. Does it apply to FarmVille? Again, I'd say no.

If you see this type of game as a fad, or a mere precursor to much better games that will be offered for the same price (free), Zynga's position is quite precarious.
I don't have a style manual in front of me, but here are some sources that disagree.

If words are left off at the end of a sentence, and that is all that is omitted, indicate the omission with ellipsis marks (preceded and followed by a space) and then indicate the end of the sentence with a period … . http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/ellipsis.htm

The Chicago Manual of Style says that "other punctuation [besides the ellipsis, that is] may be used on either side of the three ellipsis dots if it helps the sense or better shows what has been omitted." Then, later, it says "When the last part of a quoted sentence is omitted and what remains is still grammatically complete, four dots — a period [or exclamation/question mark] followed by three ellipsis dots — are used to indicate the omission." And finally, "Three dots — no period — are used at the end of a quoted sentence that is deliberately and grammatically incomplete." http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/grammarlogs2/grammarl...
Where's "it turns out"?
Good point - a doctor who performs only layup procedures is probably going to have a much better track record in their reviews than someone who tackles the challenging ones all the time.

Normalizing reviews is extremely hard, so it's a bit worrying to think about what online reviews might do to doctors' willingness to take on challenging cases.
Yes, but as a daily BBEdit user, it was the first thing that crossed my mind. Evidently I am the only one.
Anyone else wonder if this has anything to do with Skype's recent acquisition by Microsoft?
I used to swear by multiple monitors, but work took back my secondary monitor then I "adopted" a 30" HP that wasn't being used, and am now 100% converted to using a single large monitor and loving it. The fact that I can scatter differently sized windows around my view area depending on what size they require, and how much of my attention they need, has definitely increased my productivity. I also like that i'm not always turning my head left and right as much.
Not particularly, and it is extraordinarily common.

Delaware isn't particularly useful for early stage LLCs, but bear in mind that your home state may be a bear to file in. Some states, like NY, require you to run ads in a newspaper.
Could be, but "one step closer to reddit with each passing hour" is a meme.
cool - i collaborate with those guys and didn't know ;-)
If you have moderate experience with Linux and can read manpages then you should have no real problem linking Asterisk servers between locations and setting up all common phone functions.

Asterisk (and its derivatives) are really quite powerful and easy to use. We use it everywhere that the commercial systems fail (like having working SIP without paying tens of thousands in licenses)
Can Entrepreneurship Boost Your IQ?
Mobile phone as home computer (2005)
#5 on iTunes U.S. Top Paid Apps chart right now
I'd like to respond to your criticism of my argument but I'm having trouble understanding it.

As for my point about Facebook, I believe that they do care about the size of the images. However, the fact that they can be trivially and losslessly reduced in size suggests they just don't care enough to invest in optimizing them. Presumably, they have more important things to be working on. This suggests that they might also have more important things to work on than switching to webp.
I've used Intel's image libs on other platforms and found them to be excellent.

No idea how well it works on ios, but according to wikipedia it's supported-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCV
Email, ftp access, ssh access. There are lots of other reasons for needing to know a password.
In that case it is likely that I've misremembered that bit of it. After all this is an incident that happened over 25 years ago.

But I guarantee that the journalist deliberately omitted the word "not" to completely reverse the meaning of the sentence.
Eric Paley: The Curve of Talent
How to make Ubuntu look like Mac osX
I hate analogies, but i have to note that McDonalds invented the fastfood business. Zynga has shown inability to demonstrate innovation and acts opportunistically. If they shut down today, they 'd be instantly replaced by other existing social games. "A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business".

That's just the view i have of them. It would be nice if we could have the opinions of a Zynga employee.
http://youtu.be/OpSVCL4vxOY
Build a “Serverless” search engine with IndexTank and SimpleWorker
I forgive myself, now I can study
And if the images as shown are really those used in the study then all the emotions just look fake. Humans are pretty good at telling the difference between real emotions and fake emotions (which is part of the reason why good actors can make so much money).

I once volunteered for a study on how the brain processes emotion in the voice in schizophrenic patients (I was in the control group... I hope!). While seventy bucks for half an hour's work sounds pretty good when you're a student, it turns out that lying in an incredibly loud MRI machine for half an hour while headphones play a nonstop series of bad actors enunciating the words "It's eight o'clock" while trying to sound "happy" vs "fearful" vs "angry" vs "neutral" is really hard and relatively unpleasant work. Anyway, the point of this story is that the actors on the recording obviously weren't really happy or fearful or angry about the fact that it's eight o'clock, so I always wondered whether my brain processed that obviously-fake emotion differently to real emotion. And who knows if that's what's going on here?

Besides, the guy in his "proud" pose is showing off some reasonably impressive arm muscles which are otherwise hidden under his baggy t-shirt -- no wonder he looks more attractive!
I agree it's not always good advice, but I do think it's good advice for someone without investing experience and of limited means when they ask about day trading a stock on its IPO day. You can of course actively manage your investments in a roth just fine, but cap gains don't incur a tax liability.
> your password is only as secure as your confidence in the company's policies and employees' integrity.

Thats always the case. Encrypted password or not. There's nothing stopping them from getting your password the next time you log in.
I get caught in a conversation with an "idea guy" about once a month. The situation boils down to:

1) The guy had an idea
2) He wants me to do all the work implementing it
3) He will begrudgingly share half the profits with me.

I've started filing people away quickly into two categories. "Idea Guys" think they've done half the work coming up with an idea. I ignore these people. They don't have answers to any questions I ask because they haven't thought their idea farther than "The next Facebook!"

"Business Guys", I suppose I will call them, are much rarer. They want to create a business and happen to have an idea to start with. They've already done research into the market, they know who the competitors are, why this idea would succeed, what they need out of me, what other positions they need filled and already talked to others who have started businesses to get some guidance.

I am happily working with a business guy right now. It was his idea, and he's done plenty of work before we even got together.

I recommend attending Startup Weekend if you want to meet some business people and see the difference between my two categories. Great experience for about $100.

http://startupweekend.org/
This made me chuckle. Its true, if you work at Google people who you haven't talked to in years, or who imagine they knew you back when, will approach you to get you to hook them up with someone inside Google who can see the value of their idea/product/company/etc.

My short answer got down to:

"So nice to hear from you, be successful in your endeavor, develop market leadership, and execute faster than Google. The correct person from Google will then contact you. Cheers!"

There are a lot of things you can say about Google but 'unaware' isn't one of them. And especially if the technology at hand is so clearly a 'good fit' with Google then you can assume that Google is aware of it and if they haven't deployed it then they have already rejected it.

That last bit is key, for better or worse, nearly everyone at Google thinks they know better than you, they are smarter than you (or you would be at Google), and anything you think you know about the value of what you are doing is wrong because if you were right Google would already do it.

Now you and I both know that with great hubris comes great blindness, but the only way to convince someone at Google that you've got an idea that is both good and that they need, is to execute on it so well that it starts causing them some pain. Just telling them about it won't get you anywhere. Trying to get a meeting where you want them to sign a deep NDA to prevent them from stealing your idea is a non-starter.

The good news is that you don't have to worry about "getting in touch with the right person" at Google. Don't spend any time on it. Just do what you're doing well and if they care, they will get in touch with you. If they don't they won't and you won't have wasted any time courting them.
Extremely impressive stuff.

Just yesterday I have been thinking of how federation and mobile will be the cornerstones for the next leap in search and doat.com nails both perfectly.

Has my vote for the google-killer-of-the-year.
First hour of Gnome 3 usage...
Setting high expectations is necessary for success
The title on Slashdot was "Microsoft Kills Skype For Asterisk", but I thought that was too speculative for HN.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/24/2010222/Microsoft-Ki...
"People’s fear and anxiety about doing math—over and above
actual math ability—can be an impediment to their math achievement."
Education is very anxious business. We have Math Anxiety, Test Anxiety, Foreign Language Anxiety and so on
Ultrasonic Anti Marten Rat Indoors Rodent Repellent Repeller 
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I wonder how challenging it would be to build a device capable of achieving non-contact suction without the tether.

Definitely super cool
> There's only so long that people are willing to keep buying things that don't actually
exist

The same argument was made about digital music, digital movie distribution, etc. ie. people want to buy 'real' things. All that virtual goods means for Zynga is that they have established a freemium model for gaming. It has come full circle from the shareware days - where the first x levels or episodes were free while playing the game further and deeper involved paying for it.

It means that gamers no longer have to pay out $50-100 for a game that they might not even enjoy, it gets a lot closer to paying for the direct entertainment the user receives.
An interview with Apple's first CEO, Michael Scott