skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Prompts Widespread Searches for Debt Relief Solutions
With the holiday season solidly behind us, many consumers have found themselves behind on credit obligations. Even before the annual festive period commenced, many were already walking a financial tightrope. Close to the brink of disaster, many dived over the edge into unmanageable an abyss of unmanageable debt. Months later, they remain unable to maintain periodic credit card payments.
Original post - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564429
From what I've heard from some people working in industry, a lot of human factors (the superset of HCI) jobs, like to see graduate level degrees. It's largely an artifact of most HF programs actually just being a specialization tacked onto something else (like systems engineering). I can't actually vouch for how accurate this information is though. (Currently at UofWaterloo System Design Eng, may be on track for a HF specialization...).

Though if you want to learn stuff for yourself, then it's a whole different ballgame (and don't get suckered into the programs which offer it as a specialization. just wasting time then).
It says right in the article that AppleCare doesn't cover what users do to their machines. Microsoft doesn't remove malware that Windows users install either.

This thing is coming from Ed Bott's Microsoft column on ZDNet, where he's been hitting this hard for the second day in a row based on an "investigation" that involved him scouring the Apple discussion forums for a couple of hours. Two hundred clueless posts on a web forum out of a userbase of millions doesn't mean there's a "malware explosion," as he described it. Why are people falling for this flamebait?
Yes, we thought about adding some social layer (purchase sharing etc.) to our e-commerce site http://www.happybuy.com/ but have always been skeptical of the notion that people want to share purchases.

We've focused on trying to help people get the best prices on their purchases (currently through price tracking and alerting) and potentially users would be more willing to share bargains/good buys as finding bargains may be something that a certain type of user would want to share, inform or brag about to friends.

However as Blippy has shown I think the model of simply sharing your purchases without a reason for that sharing does not provide any particular user value.
> What we failed to ask was, “Who cares?”

truth be told, nobody really wants to share that level of information nor be responsible for the purchases made by others in their social graph based on their recommendation. Or better yet, it could've worked, to an extent, if an amateur wasn't the driving force behind it. That being said, I have to congratulate Pud in convincing someone to plunk $13M down on his idea, vagina-selling t-shirts aside.
Woof: http://daringfireball.net/2011/05/wolf

"According to a third article penned by Bott, AppleCare reps are seeing a four- to five-fold increase in the number of calls requesting support for rogue antivirus scams targeting the Mac"

So now a handful of incidents is cause for uproar?

"Porn sites just started popping up on my MacBook Pro," one user wrote. "Is this a virus? I have never had a virus on a Mac before and I have been using Macs for years. Please help!"

So it's just adware then? Oh no!
Just remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's almost certainly too much to hope for, but my impossible dream is that this gets done up like it's the 1980s with circa-2012 CGI. A bold kind of retrofuturism we haven't seen yet in film.

Thing is, you can't take Neuromancer out of the '80s. The newness of computer networks, the ascendancy of Japan, the aesthetics of computer hardware -- boxy, whirring things with stark, green CRTs spewing masses of indecipherable alphanumeric incantations, big clunky cables, heavy briefcase-size mobile units; it's all there. And the mash-up of digital and analog technologies is no less integral than Gibson's opening lines to the book, comparing a halogen-hazed night sky to the analog noise of TV transmission.

Neuromancer didn't arrive into a world comfortable with computer technology like ours today. The book stands as a fantastic trip back into a time when technology could be dark, dangerous, and foreign, a zeitgeist Gibson leverages to dazzling effect. "Updating" Neuromancer would bring its entire shadowy world out into the unthreatening, mid-day sun.
I'm not sure what the point of your post is as it's unrelated to the comment it's in reply to. But aside from that fact, be careful to avoid confusing price increases due to shortages and price increases due to speculation about perceived current or future shortages.
This argument can be summed up by simply stating "huge installed userbase + new technology == native app competition". In terms of new tech, he mentions offline access to the application.

This argument has been made before - heck, as he says, the iPhone originally ONLY accepted web apps - and has been demonstrated to be completely wrong through user behavior. Native apps almost always have a better UI and better user experience due to their access to the underlying system API. The API access lets them make their interface components look right, lets them perform tasks in the background, lets them send messages/alerts to the user, and numerous other things that a web app simply cannot perform due to inadequate access to the system API. Until the user experience with web apps is the same as that with native apps, this argument will continue to be wrong.

On a related note, John Gruber has an excellent writeup on this topic here: http://daringfireball.net/2009/11/iphone_web_apps_alternativ...
This looks really similar to Voxound (www.voxound.com)
Is Anonymous Less Anonymous Now?
DI is not a perfect method. It's a little crackpot itself. But it's both empirically better than all the other fads and as sexy as Bush in a bikini, so it more or less killed empirical study of education. Now there's a bit of a revival of quantitative education studies, but it's too short term in it's scope (a good teacher doesn't just help the students pass the next test).

IIRC, studies showed that DI did actually help the good students, the bad students, the mediocre students, the rich students and the poor students.

It also helped "higher order" skills.

I think that from a cognitive psychology perspective (though I'm not an expert), this is because the brain needs to learn fundamentals before it can work through more advanced things.

As for "self discovery", I think students are pretty good at that themselves. Current fads just pile on the homework though (because "testing doesn't teach anything"), which in my view is a big development killer.

I'm not a DI fan. I'm not a fan of capitalism either. But if you don't know why something works, you shouldn't just dismiss it for being unattractive.
The Mac Defender malware is pretty harmless. It downloads as a zip file, and users must manually click through the entire installer just to get it installed. How many Windows viruses are delivered as a setup.exe where you have to click next about 3 times and enter your admin password just to install it?

As usual anti-mac trolls love to jump on the bandwagon and bash the platform with one of the best security track records running.
Scripting something with port knocking, when you don't actually have the compiler available, or nothing user-writeable is executable is not nice. ssh on a standard port will just work and users don't have to figure out how to activate it. Changed port will take some explaining, but could be used for advanced people.
When you're talking about SSL handshakes, where else is the latency going to come from?
Could also lead her to PR, event coordination, copy writing / editing (based on her "natural" talents of writing, conversation, etc.)

If she has any interest in a particular industry, find 10 companies. Cold call those 10 companies for an entry level position.

Rinse, repeat 10x companies in 10x industries. Leg work = results.
Not all of them may be good, but here is a comprehensive list: http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/degrees.asp.

I was considering either Iowa State or Carnegie Mellon. CM is supposed to be really good but is also pretty expensive.
"[Bott] cited an internal document titled "About 'Mac Defender' Malware," which was last updated on May 16 and says that the trojan, which surfaced earlier this month and masquerades as legitimate security software for the OS X platform"

I find it ironic that Bott's fear mongering is leading the naive to download shady anti-virus software that is actually adware. These articles are really just contributing to the problem by misinforming people. Ed Bott is the equivalent of Glen Beck.
> Justify with evidence please.

Just one example, do a search and you'll find many more:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_40/b4003001....
This, if it was true, would have been a good move for information and software preservation efforts.
> There are laws that prevent government employees from striking which drastically limits their bargaining power.

Ah yes - when's the last three times that said laws were enforced?
Most important line in the article, IMO: "But hopefully he’s taken to heart the real reason Blippy didn’t work: Sharing purchases with friends doesn’t solve a problem."

If you don't solve a real problem people have, you will fail. People may not know they have the problem, but they must have it. If you can't articulate the pain, it's time to pivot.
Indian Event Company Adopts Microsoft Tag
He is obviously not particularly thrilled with getting divorced and having to move from a city that he is fond of, to a smaller, less interesting location, so I think we can cut him some slack. This subject didn't seem to require that he write in the style of John Updike, after all.
As a PC turned Mac user for the last 3 years, this is truly the best thing about working on the Mac platform. My girlfriend is still on her shitty HP laptop and it is so incredibly painful to watch her worry about viruses and malware on a daily basis.

I hope Apple's policy around this is not going to be sweep it under the rug because it could get out of control as Apple market share grows and more effort is dedicated towards hacking the Mac.

As stupid as this story is, it is still something that Apple is gonna have to probably start paying more and more attention to, given the trajectory of Apple market share in the future and the increased effort will be taken towards the Mac platform.

I think
I've never heard about the change of meaning in this word. Could you provide a source for that fact?
AT&T Demos 28.87Mbps Downloads on LTE Trial Network
I have chronic back pain (torn muscles, annual lumbar tear, now bulging, etc). It worked great for several years, but, for some with back pain a more stiff matress (or a very light foam cover on the floor) seems to be the most beneficial. This is what I am transitioning too.

Also, Tempure Pedics (and most foams) tend to retain heat, person dependant, a lot. So much that I'll wake in hot-sweats and uncomfortable. I am now also seeking alternatives because 1) Tempur is too hot, 2) Tempur has become too soft for my needs.

A foam "cover" on the floor is working much better at the moment.

Also in the interim, for cooling down the foam, I have ordered:
http://coolingmattress.com/ from Amazon to give that a whirl.
In response, AT&T issued a statement stating that the allegations were “without merit.”

I think it would come off a lot better if they just said "We're looking into the issue and will make it right if we've wronged anyone."
Because they want to share responsibility. It's not a one way street.
Scrollability - Joe Hewitt's fix for mobile web scrolling
FTA:

> Some of the available energy is lost as heat and in the internal rearrangement of chemical compounds and other changes in entropy.

So not all of the difference in efficiency is made up in the form of heat. Unfortunately, I don't remember enough biochemistry nor thermodynamics to dive deeper into this, but I think this article is a good starting point for a discussions, which has otherwise just been dismissed with the "a calorie is a calorie" argument.
Personal preferences left aside, I don't think there is time for Microsoft to relearn to crawl. By the time they manage to do it, PCs will be a thing of the past, desktop OSs will be a relic, the server space will be dominated by Unixes and the average user will keep only a local copy of data stored in those servers.
> Yes, I'm sure the price of oil and the price of grain rising 30% due to shortages hasn't affected you at all.

The last time I looked, govt controlled the vast majority of the oil leases in the US. They just shut down Shell in AK after Shell spent >$2B to get a site ready.

The last time I looked, the US govt mandated 10% ethanol in gas, subsidized its production, and placed a high tarriff on imported ethanal.
Though I dumped on a earlier comment above http://goo.gl/5GeaM on the Tempur Pedic, it did serve me very well the last 7 years when I first purchased it. Thats 7 years of brilliant sleep, and worth the money.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tyler,_Texas is in east Texas. Big stretch to call that Southwest.

Also at 100k people it isn't exactly "small town America" as the article claims.
"Belgians won't drink it, because they only like beer that's made from raspberries, blueberries or pansies. I don't know why."

Ouch! ;) With about 150 breweries and over 450 different beer varieties, Belgium has way more than just the fruit based ones. Please find somewhere near you that has Kasteelbier (preferably on tap, but that could be hard to find anywhere outside of Belgium as bottles aren't that easy to locate here in NY) - you won't regret it.
He's essentially saying it's less of an issue for smaller companies, because they have less money.
Ultrasharp 3-D Maps
"The real reason Blippy didn’t work: Sharing purchases with friends doesn’t solve a problem."

That, and it kind of makes you look like an asshole.

The original idea never made any sense, and then they never fully committed when they decided to pivot. (The new version was much better, but they never built out the features that would have been needed to make it go viral.)

I do think there are other markets they could go after by repurposing the technology platform they've already created. For example, I could easily see the technology being used by an MLM company as a social network for their salespeople or something.

And it seems like they have a quality team, so I think there is still potential for the company despite the dubious first idea.
How one girl & the Internet destroyed a family: The Kiki Kannibal Story
This is some impressive work, but at the end of the day it's just another unecessary attempt to reinvent the wheel, a wheel that will always lag behind the original. The time he spent reverse engineering UITableView could have been spent doing useful things with actual UITableViews.

Web apps are hacks.
The real news is not that Apple won't remove malware, it's that Apple is apparently actively working to conceal the truth and perpetuate the Mac-selling legend that Macs cannot get viruses.
Yeah, I'm not going to lie, lots of the things in that list are trivial.

Lennart Poettering's position seems to be that it would be better for other systems to re-implement SystemD's interface than to port it, and in any case, he can't be bothered to do a port.
Shahid afridi thrown out of Captaincy
Record efficiency of 18.7 percent for flexible solar cells on plastics
I see, I could be wrong about the particulars of that case. I could see how someone might not notice or be concerned about the light flashing every now and then, too.

If the school wanted to disable it though, it wouldn't be impossible for them since they had access to the hardware. A thin dot of black paint might do the trick, especially if they peeled back the glass a bit, which is a pain, but quite do-able. Certainly something people in the NSA would be wary of... it's a shame that high school students should have to worry about that, too.
Designer Eyeglasses Arlington Virginia
We provide wide range of color contact lenses for light and dark eyes. Our staff is specially trained on meeting your eye wear needs and fitting you with the most appropriate quality frames from the leading manufacturers. You will get more info about Ophthalmologist Arlington Virginia please visit our website.
Results will, apparently, vary. Your metabolism may be blessed as vinegar reactive. Timothy Ferris used a glucose meter to try and track impact of Vinegar on the GI, and didn't get positive results:

http://bodezfitness.com/blog/tasso/post.cfm/post/4841/2-pre-...
Thanks so much Ed. I was looking forward to buying this when it was first posted on HN, but it was not available in my country. Now it is :) , thanks to you ! And a very Happy Birthday :)
That is incredibly short sighted. The web is universal, iOS is not.
Joe has been live-tweeting his development of this library today: http://twitter.com/#!/joehewitt

11:55 AM: "I feel suddenly motivated to write a tiny JS library that does scrolling right, or at least as close as possible."

10:20 PM: "I think we're ready to demo."

Now that's gumption.
This is a very plausible prediction. I don't like it. Frankly, more than a little bit of me hopes that this gets bogged down in development hell. If it comes out, I'll go see it, but I can't imagine it living up to the book.
MIT is undergoing a dramatic change in their AI philosophy. They are dissatisfied with the state of AI today and the slow (near-zero) progress on fundamental problems of AI over the last 3 decades. They are about at the point of throwing everything out and starting over. So right now, CMU might be better if you want to see the state of the art in HCI, whereas MIT might be better if you want to get in on the ground floor of a potential revolution in HCI.
Alaskan summer ale is a kolsch, and available in the pacific nw. Quite good, and I'm not normally a fan of anything lighter than an amber.
Thanks for your feedback.

We never claimed that our style is best or that our sense of aesthetics is best.

We do claim that filming documentary style yields the best picture and sound quality based on our technical constraints and our goal of filming a large volume of founder stories.

When you introduce more subjects in the interview it requires a wider area view. You can achieve this by having a wider lens camera or being further away from the subjects.

In our case, we do NOT use a wide lens camera and we want to be up close and personal to the subject.

We use a low-tech microphone that comes standard with our $200 camera. You have to be very close to the subject to ensure that sound quality is sufficient.

Thus we film documentary style.

These are examples of technical constraints that can hinder quality. Prior to filming these interviews, we had no idea the breadth of variables that can affect capturing good quality footage via video camera.

Because we often film in suboptimal lighting conditions, we want to deliver the best picture quality.

We use Vimeo player because their algorithms render picture quality brighter than other video players. We distribute on Youtube, iTunes, and most video platforms.

You can find all of our videos on Youtube.

For our purposes, filming documentary style reduces variables and aligns with our mission.

At the end of the day we had to make hard and fast decisions 80/20 and produce something. We have been operational for 1.5 months and filmed 80 founder stories. We have received feedback from many founders and we have consulted a few professional filmmakers to improve our product.

Things may change in the future and we are always open to suggestions.

We hope you enjoy our founder stories : )
From the article:

The Russians have achieved a low-cost, reliable launch capability because,

first of all, they used simple, damage-tolerant designs that were less than
optimum by Western standards (from a performance and weight minimiza-
tion standpoint). The Soviet boosters and their subsystems were designed to
be highly modular, allowing vehicle customization for various missions with-
out always requiring completely new launch systems. Soviet launcher modu-
larity also provided the opportunity for large manufacturing economies of
scale for many components. Either because of pragmatic engineering judg-
ment or because of economic necessity, the Soviets reused existing designs for
decades, making minor modifications only when necessary.
Their launch operations emphasize off-line processing and minimum pad
time; and their simple, rugged launch vehicles have required minimal launch
pad testing. Also, Russian boosters have enjoyed high launch rates, thus en-
hancing manufacturing economies of scale and driving unit costs down. It is
interesting to speculate on how well US industries would do if they applied
these simple factors in a completely commercially-driven venture. After all,
the reliable, low-cost Russian launch capability has been built by a country in
which inefficiency and waste have been historically endemic.
As the OS gets more popular, Apple will need to add the kind of protective features present in Windows to deal with this sort of problem. Dismissing it isn't gonna work - this kind of malware is the problem these days rather than viruses. As a savvy user, I've never found the need to run antivirus software on Windows, but it would be the height of arrogance for me to scoff at the problems others do have and blame it on their stupidity.

As is the way with these things, Apple will stonewall, but I expect eventually handle the issue. In the mean time some of the congregation will snort in derision and deny there's a problem.
There isn't much apple can do in a practical sense.

People clueless enough to run an Installer based on an web ad popup are unlikely to be reading Apple's PR posts.

Aside from OS specific code that refuses to install anything called Mac Defender, Apple has no power over this problem.
And an example with a lot of achievements: http://coderwall.com/defunkt
Funny, I learned this in nutrition class about 20 years ago. It's something that clearly has been known for a long time, yet its never been popuar in the common discourse.
> I dont' see how MS can't afford not to fill that space...
That's a lot of negatives....I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.
What pain did Twitter address?

I can come up with broad, hand-wavy justifications. But those justifications apply just as well to Blippy.
Javascript Bitcoin Miner
Are you sure you want French style transportation strikes in the US...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_New_York_City_transit_stri...

So far the MTA is still overpaid and the union is still there.

I'd have no objection to government employees striking to get more vacation - provided the agency they work for has the right to fire (for cause) and permanently replace them.
Doesn't seem to work on a desktop, in Chrome.
A positive step for Lion is that they've started actively engaging members of the exploit research community, although details are scarce on what that means or how seriously they'll take their advice.

Proper ASLR and sandboxing Safari by default would help a lot, I think.
The users who are most likely to be infected by this stuff are the same users that Apple caters to in person in their stores.
Many Apple customers (at least the ones that I know) have become used to in-store "geniuses" fixing their difficult computer problems -- setting up their email, installing software, that kind of thing.
This is going to be very difficult for Apple stores to handle.