skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to think I'm against working hard on multiplication tables - I'm not.

What I'm saying is this particular test is notorious for turning borderline kids into outright failures. I spoke with an educational PhD specialist about it once.

There are issues here of personality, temperament, and biology. If you haven't experienced it yourself or seen it up close, it's very hard to appreciate but very easy to think that you do.

Think of a skill that takes a significant amount of gentle, enjoyable practice - until it clicks. Like whistling or riding a bicycle. We wouldn't expect kids to learn to whistle or bicycle by having daily contests to see who could whistle the most notes or bike the fastest in 3 minutes, would we? No, the kids who hadn't got the hang of it yet would simply be repeatedly crashing and burning in front of their peers.

Whistling and biking are relatively easy to pick up once you have the physical maturity, but the development that enables math kicks in over a range of several years in different people.

This is also the time the kids are developing likes and dislikes and academic self-image. At this age, it's better to learn to like math and to enjoy the experience of new concepts sinking in. Pressure drills which tend to exaggerate and reinforce differences can be downright harmful for elementary school kids.
So, you don't think that a story that looks suspiciously like marketing is a piece of marketing ... because the guy that runs it works for a marketing firm?
Yeah, my first instinct is that it's really a pure ad campaign.

I'm also really surprised that hiddenapp.com didn't link to this blog on their splash page. Let's say you build an app and someone use it and popularize it, would you link to it on your frontpage? Of course; that'll give you even more credibility. It probably doesn't link to it mainly because they don't want to be associated with this ad campaign.
A nice free alternative to Hidden: http://preyproject.com/
There's something very very wrong with the city of Oakland. I lived there for one year, before moving to SF and while everybody told me I should constantly be watching my back, I mostly ignored it and was fine. But after I moved to SF, I found myself in Oakland for a party and sure enough, with a couple friends, I got myself mugged at gunpoint by three scary-looking local gangsters.

The scary part, though, is the cops' handling of the situation. Luckily for me, I was quick enough to react and hide away my most important item, my iPhone 4. As soon as they were gone (within 30s) I called the cops, and soon thereafter we had 5 squad cars show up. They interrogated us and made us write statements, but would not send a car after the suspects, who had fled in a direction we had indicated to them. After telling us there's no chance they'd recover our stolen stuff, they took off. We asked for a ride back to the bart station, to the police station, anywhere (it was night in a shady part of Oakland. We had nothing… no money for a cab, and we sure as hell didn't want to walk alone around Oakland.) They just refused, saying they had "other shit to do" and left.

The fact that I got mugged at gunpoint in Oakland comes as no surprise to me—I shouldn't have been there in the first place. However, the police's blatant incompetence came as a terrifying shock.
> Search Field - The complaint is that it covers some of the UI and you have to close it to use the page? Sooo... How does a massive search dialog work better? I've actually found very few sites that are rendered useless by that search field, but almost all are rendered useless by the giant box that all other browsers use.

I'm having trouble figuring out what you're talking about here. "All other browsers"? Safari and Firefox did away with the old big and centered find-in-page dialog box; they both use a find bar. I just downloaded Opera and checked it, too. It also uses a bar.

Regarding "rendered useless [in]… all other browsers", neither Opera nor Firefox obscure any part of the page with their find bars. Safari temporarily obscures the part of the page that exists in the space where the find bar appears, but still lets you scroll up to reveal that part if you really need to.

I realize people form an emotional attachment to their software of choice and get defensive, but ease up. This is baseless stuff you're speaking here.
I think the issue is that other crimes might end up happening during the recovery of the macbook, such as assault, battery, discharge of firearms within city limits, theft of kidneys, abuse of rented power sanders, etc.
I'd be somewhat surprised at an ad campaign depicting a minority as a criminal
> Seriously, though, if you can provide the exact location of your stolen property, how can the police not see tremendous value in following up on it?

How is recovering your property "tremendous value" to the police? They're not paid on the basis of property recovered. In fact, the more robbery and so on, the more likely it is that they'll get more money.
There's actually a better alternative to this... http://preyproject.com/
One of my all time favorite bits of software was written in Glasgow at the Turing Institute by Arthur van Hoff (later of the original Sun Java team and one of the founders of Marimba). It was a lovely user interface builder created on top of Sun's PostScript-based NeWS graphical environment: HyperNeWS.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html

One of the strengths/weaknesses of HyperNeWS was that it relied on PostScript scripting - which was perhaps a bit tricky for us mere mortals. So Arthur wrote an ANSI C to PostScript compiler (in PostScript) - one of his Glaswegian colleages named this PDB, which stood, of course, for Pure Dead Brilliant.
Considering this has been standard is every single browser, major and minor, and Google is the sole standout... yes.

And color profiles aren't some obscure thing that only graphics people care about - there are a lot of photos online right now where people look like zombies (or tomatoes) because the embedded profile isn't being accounted for.

If you Google for it, there are plenty of complaints from non-techy people who are confused why their pictures look fine from Windows Explorer/Preview, but look completely different when uploaded to Facebook.
Something I hate about Chrome not mentioned yet is that when the text is sufficiently large or the window sufficiently narrow, it flows over the right end of the window, with the result that to read it, you have to scroll horizontally back and forth for every line.

Note that this happens for ordinary <P> elements, not just for <PRE> elements and other odd things.

That is something that never happened to me in the first 16 years of my use of browsers. It now happens occasionally in Firefox, but it is much worse in Chrome.
Speaking broadly, you really can't afford to let users stuff things on to your filesystem directly. You need to fully control the location of the file in some manner the user has no access to, and the "filename" of the file should exist only as database entries somewhere mapping back to your controlled name. Probably shouldn't even be in the web server's path.

Oh, and if you've never thought about this before, odds are about 48% that you've got a JS injection on your file, too. Go upload a file called <script>alert("Hi")</script> and see what happens. The other 48% is that the shell you shouldn't be passing this filename directly to will go crazy because of the angle brackets being syntactically invalid. Oh, and if you can request files by name, can you request ../../../../../../../etc/passwd? Statistically speaking, probably yes.

It's theoretically possible to safely manipulate the filesystem from within a web server but it's a great deal harder than it appears at first; there's a lot more than just learning the parameters to the "open" call.
TweetControl: Control Anything with Twitter
I just added documentation for a new ThingSpeak app that allows you to control a device or send data to an API triggered by a Twitter hashtag. It's called TweetControl. Anything that is controllable with an HTTP-based API can be driven by TweetControl. #thingspeak #turnlightson - Any ideas on how to use this for the Internet of Things?
If you can afford a MacBook you can afford to be a vigilante and pay whatever fine there is for that.
Adding this to the pen testing toolkit. Great link.
I suspect it's because you don't really learn what grammar or syntax is until you have to (i.e. until you learn a second language). For the same reason, you don't know what is "incorrect syntax", since people rarely make syntactical errors after childhood.
What's the case#?
Create a Tutorial in One Click
New tool where you can create a tutorial in a minute and explain whatever you want and share it instantly.
My house got robbed about 5 years ago. I found my entire DVD collection -- complete with my name written in several of the DVD cases -- at a nearby used shop. The shop had a photocopy of the guy's driver's license, and the cops still did absolutely nothing. I hounded them everyday for about 3 months then finally gave up.
WHO declares cellphones "possibly carcinogenic"
I have no idea. Maybe he thinks the guy deserves /some/ privacy (as this gets spread, people would be tempted to spam the e-mail). :P
And you just moved the goal posts.

--

So I got downvoted.

Where the original goal would be being free of issues (or "Everything looks fine") with respect to the attention to detail regarding the gradient, and the new position is no longer being free of issues, but not enough of a personal nuisance for wccrawford to cause him or her to "complain much".

I'm still not sure that it needed to be spelled out like that.
just wondering what s/w do you use for mass mailing and craiglist email harvesting? without getting sandboxed / blacklisted ...
As usual, allow the smallest subset of functionality which still permits legitimate uses. In these cases they're relying on .htaccess files being allowed specific overrides - FileInfo and Options being the most powerful ones.

'AllowOverride AuthConfig Indexes' is generally relatively safe (in my humble experience) - i'd be scared to see an htshell like these with just those.
I know, I would be tempted to just break in and crowbar the fker. And, of course, steal my MacBook back. ;P
It might seem so, but I would give the benefit of doubt to the poster. A very good friend of mine had a similar experience -- his mac was stolen from his car and he had installed Prey Project (http://preyproject.com/ ) on it -- an open source anti-theft solution. He could get the pictures and location of the person, gave it to Santa Barbara Police, but, alas, they couldn't/didn't do anything. It's been almost 3 months now.
Hey thanks man, just installed it now. Seems like a neat bit of software!
Submit your resume to the Chrome team, then you can fix all this stuff. :)
I have prey on my macbook and tested its functionality by marking the laptop as stolen and can attest that the enduser has no idea that his face is being photographed and screenshots of whatever is going are being taken.
Plus its free for up to 3 pcs
#10-060348. May I ask why you want to know this?
Ask HN: Is it wrong to steal someone's design, but then change the theme?
Ethically? Legally? I've already started building the front-end and it's pretty much complete. Even though the theme/idea of the site will be totally different, should I be having second thoughts?
The author's coming from Safari, where the search field is integrated into the page yet doesn't obscure content. It's a very well done implementation that doesn't suffer the problems of Chrome's overlay tab or a search dialog.

Also, Safari has resizable text boxes. I agree, they're wonderful.
Exactly. The consumer electronics industry is enough to dismiss this idea on its own.
... and balance is restored.
There's a clothing company in Canada called Roots. Their logo is a beaver. They sell shirts that say "Roots" next to their logo.

Makes for a hilarious gift for your beer drinking Australian chums.

http://usa.roots.com/PendrellSlimFitT-shirt/MensTeeShirtTop/...
Now I kind of want to steal something of yours.
Oakland cops today have the rep LA cops used to have.
Droplo - drag&drop subversion on the cloud
tl;dr: We’re looking to get some feedback on a new web app we're building called Droplo, a
subversion on the cloud with drag&drop capabilities for committing files and keeping track of
revisions.

Link: http://droplo.com/

It’s different from Github or Beanstalk in that it’s not targeted towards the developer who already
has git installed and configured on their system and knows how to use it, but rather a designer
or creative professional who wants an intuitive, private online solution for project hosting and revising
accessible everywhere.

It's in early development stages and we’re trying to get a lot of traction around the idea. We’ve
set up an incentive to send invites to use the app for free prelaunch if you can get 5 people to
sign up through your referral link.

We have an initial non-functional, gui-only mockup here: http://droplo.com/demo/main

Please feel free to give any feedback and tweet to your followers if you like it.
Why The Valley Wants Designers That Can Code
Hiddenapp's privacy policy says they're:

Flipcode Ltd, PO Box 8946, London, WC1N 3AX, +442071938418

http://hiddenapp.com/privacy/

Google says Flipcode Ltd is http://flipcode.co.uk/
I'm curious if there is anything like this available for the iPad 2. Does anyone know?
Not that I'm against what they're doing and if I was a VC I probably wouldn't care too much - but it's somewhat illegal in this case... Certainly against CL ToS as well.
FTA:

> I reported the crime to the police

It's typically frowned upon, in a manner of speaking, to file false reports. This would be a terribly stupid campaign.

edit: I suppose he could be lying about filing. Don't know if that's a thing...
Its funny why some people want to join startups
Of course it's blackhat. They're sending unsolicited, automated spam to people who explicitly stated that they didn't want emails regarding commercial interests. There is a big difference between advertising and spam.
Clickable: http://droplo.com/
> If this or some offshoot ever makes it to the US, we should see a dramatic decrease in family law, Federal subsides for child support, and could lead to dramatic decrease in crime. That is, if it becomes as available as womens birth control.

Nope.

Just as with vasectomies, we'll see far more men claiming to have had the procedure and women will believe them.

Yes, a few men who wouldn't have gotten a vasectomy will do this, but they're in the noise.
Minno Rebrands As BuySimple, Raises $700K For Micropayments
Facebook To Reach 7.3 Billion Users By 2015 » OnMedea
Prototype Chains and CoffeeScript Subclasses
Brought to you by Flipcode Ltd., the makers of Hidden.

(I don't know that for sure, but it certainly seems that way, and there are very few details on the site, particularly a disclosure.)
40 Beautiful Examples of Black & White Photography
> There is simply never a case where what I'm searching for is in the very top right 10 pixels of a page. In your github example, why would you ever be searching for "dashboard", "inbox", "account settings", or "log out"?

I think jtaby made it very clear that he wasn't referring to cases where it covers search results, but that it covers the website's UI. In fact, those were his exact words.
Assuming that the thief doesnt live in a lone house, you would have to go knocking on doors of number of neighbors which in oakland would probably be a reason to throw police at you and your larger friends. But I guess a print out of the picture would help :)
This is the way I look at it, there is a major source of ionizing radiation in the sky, known to cause cancer, it's powerful enough of a source that it can make your face feel hot, yet other than the heat of the battery my face has never gotten hot from a cell phone, so before I stop using my cell phone I'd stop going outside. I'd bet that the heat from the battery is actually more dangerous than the transmitter.

That radiation source, it's call the sun and outputs about 100W / sq meter in the visible / UV spectrum of which UV is ionizing. To compare a cell phone outputs about 500 milliwatts, or about 3 orders of magnitude difference in output.

The fact that you can charge your cell phone with a small solar cell is all you need to know about the differences in radiation.
Lots of stuff going up in clouds - and then the MSOs starting to makes comments about broadband usage - there could be a conflict soon.
Still can't copy and paste images from Chrome to anything else on the Mac.
Latin has prepositions as well, although I see your point. I've made the same case before that Latin is a statically typed human language whereas most of English grammar depends on "runtime" information.
Top 5 regrets
Sure, most likely it is important - but without knowing more about the intended scenario, it's really hard to say. In the case of a social network, if one were to make a site which is strictly hosted, and never distributes their code, then one could use GPL'd code to your hearts content with basically no ramifications. But decide to sell the product for use on-site, and now it's a whole different game. Or pull in AGPL'd code versus GPL'd code and it changes the game. Hence my previous reference to the F/OSS licensing book. Understanding all these licenses and how they interact and what their implications are, is pretty important for anybody going down this path.
Like most of us, he "suffers" from NADD (Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder)
I'm curious as to why you think Dropbox isn't a good example. You can walk away at any time and all your data is still exactly where it was last sync'd. That seems to be ideal.
I'm using chromium 13.0.759.0 on OSX and I don't see this issue either, the gradient looks fine. Not that a gradient in the developer tools could overshadow all the positives of chrome.
Hypothesis: PG's mood is improving because YC of which HN is a part is increasingly successful.

Hypothesis: The net mood of HNer's is deteriorating because it the ratio of financially successful members is lowered as a more people join. In addition as HN grows the ratio of preexisting and external relationships among members gets smaller, e.g. the number of HN'ers affiliated with YC companies has not kept pace with the overall growth in HN membership.
Like a lot of us, he "suffers" from NADD (Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder)
That is illegal in many jurisdictions. He should let the police handle it.
blogosphere 5 years ago wouldve been slightly different, but I wonder if you were to publicize this on an internet nowadays with names of people who ignored your help requests, maybe your requests would have different traction
I really don't agree with the author's complain. Particularly the download window. I HATE when a new window popup when a download start when I use firefox. The chrome's way is so much better; you can easilly see the progress, click on it to open and even drag it. If you don't want to see that, you just close that bottom dialog. In fact, I really rarely use the download tab; only when I'm searching something I've downloaded.

I have to agree about the developer tools though, it's really not as polished as the rest. Probably because only developers use it and they don't mind as much? Or the product manager doesn't use it? I can't say.
Where did you hide your iPhone and how did you do it without them noticing? Just curious.
As someone who's been mugged before the proliferation of firearms in the states really unnerves me. I got jumped in a shady area of Dublin one dark winters night, was punched repeatedly in the face, and had my bike stolen. The Gardai (Irish name for the police force) handled it very well and recovered the bike that very night. The individual was known to them and it went on the long list of offenses that this person was generating for one hell of a court date.

Gun crime doesn't exist in Ireland like it seems to in the US. The idea that someone out to mug me and take my wallet would have a firearm pointed at me and not just their fists is, to me, quite scary. I don't know what the statistics are like for such crimes at gunpoint and while I write this I realise that this fear might well be the result of my limited exposure to American news outlets.

I guess my question is: is it justified or is this just my lack of experience of living in the states running amok ?
I had the exact GPS location of my stolen iPhone in Atlanta. It stayed in one house for several hours, I drove to that house, called the police while parked in that street. They refused to do anything, the phone wasn't "worth it". They stated that: if it had been inside a stolen car they would have sent someone. When I asked why they weren't acting on the AT&T-supplied information, the policeman challenged me "are you going to tell me how to do my job?"
This app just makes people worry even more. Worry is bad. Worry kills you from the inside. Leave it behind and carry on.

Also, get something not worth stealing then you don't have to worry about it. Anyone half decent can be productive on a piece of junk.

If you have something valuable or desirable, you have to spend $15 on an app to track it, deal with insurance companies, deal with the police, buy a burglar alarm to keep your premiums down, buy gates to protect your house, worry about getting mugged, worry about leaving it somewhere, worry about status etc.

It is just not worth it.

I live in the knowledge that if someone decided to nick my laptop, they would be seriously disappointed (and I'd be 80GBP down rather than 1000GBP + all the above down). Ironically I left it in a McDonalds in London for 2 hours and it was still there when I realised and went back. Even the staff left it there and cleaned around it.
"..if you have a lot of tabs open, you end up having to hunt for the tab you want.."

But that's true in any browser, no?

"..and you can’t read the title of the tab you’re on."

This part is true. I love how my firefox looks lately: https://profiles.google.com/u/0/akkartik#1104401391899068610.... I think it's taken all the good stuff of chrome's tab bar without the bad.
Illegal how? I get the ToS violation, but not sure about legality ...

Are you saying it's a violation of the CAN-SPAM act? Or something else?
That reminds me a lot of ESR's "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way". Two variations of a general rule, I think: if you want someone's help, make it as easy and hassle-free as possible for them to provide it.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Why are guns so terrifying, but not a knife, or a hammer, or a steel bar, or a broken bottle?
> "the US is heading this way. We've seen this movie, and we don't like the way it ends."

I grew up in post-communist Romania, and I've also seen this movie before. Immediately after 1990 (the fall of communism) money started losing their value. At the beginning money were losing their value by "only" 40-50% per year, to a maximum of ~150% inflation rate in the late '90s. It was only in the mid 2000s' that the inflation rate first dropped to single digits.

I can still remember reading Malthus in high-school, and about how he was saying that the middle-class people are always the worst affected by the economic crisis. What can I say? My parents went from a secure, middle-class position (apartment, car, country-house) to relying on subsistence-agriculture in the space of maximum 10 years. And they weren't the only ones.
Boron is a scripting language similar to REBOL
Lying? Oh yeah, they came out with it last year. I've been having some limited success with it.
I wouldn't say it is a waste of time to read, but the author does seem to complain about a lot of things that just don't matter to most people.