skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends."

I guess I did it wrong. The only friends I have from college are the same ones I had before college. I have a few facebook acquaintances too, but it would be a stretch to call them friends.
Lodsys is already targeting Android developers too.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/27/lodsys-also-targeting-an...
Perhaps I should have rephrased: few people use RSS. Orders of magnitude fewer than those using twitter. Do you agree?
I do not want to argue if this type of stuff is good or bad. But I do want to point out to you all that list of tech gods is full of similar stories. Off the top of my head:

MySpace started out purely through spam...Tim Ferris started out in online supplement sales...People complained about Plaxo doing black hat stuff... they sold ok. People complained about Zynga ripping off other games and about breaking every Facebook platform rule there was... look at Mark Pincus now. People complained about Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg stealing their idea... he does not care.
> That's a ridiculous argument.

Considering how widely taught (and self-taught) PHP is, I think that's pretty important, if only from a business perspective―if people don't learn your language, they don't buy your licensed books, and they don't need your technical support because they never built anything with it.
Sounds like you can thank California and their affinity for lawsuits for that. No one wants to be held responsible for anything lest they get sued.
Also: he may not be the thief, just someone who bought from the thief and perhaps did not know it was stolen.
Assuming this post is correct, Google is launching a "like button" that doesn't do anything useful. The value of a Facebook "like" is that it gets me into a user's social feed. All this Google button appears to do is give me a rating system for my content. Am I missing something?
I imagine it would be distracting to someone who doesn't use it daily. For me, I know where everything is and what it does. It's optimized for efficiency, not cleanliness. Bookmark buttons are grouped by subject (mail, links, security & coding, humour, news, info, music, tv & video) and I know what each favicon is for. It saves me having to type the first few letters of a given URL, which works for me.
Just scroll? If it moves it isn't your monitor. But yeah that background is a bit irritating.
Which gives me yet another thing to add as a client-side script for my new discussion site: "Your post mentions the word "salt", have you read..."
I was curious about the mention of the zombie before because this line didn't seem right: That brain simulation is a zombie. The man in the room does not speak Chinese.

I'm fairly certain that qualia--whatever it is--is not a necessary quality for the room to be capable of comprehending Chinese. It sounds like you would agree. The problem with qualia though is that there's no way for you or I to know whether the other participates in the phenomenon.

I'd like to mention that Dan Dennett has done a wonderful job of arguing that qualia is a bad term. I disagreed at first, but by the end of reading his argument I could only agree that the term is hopelessly ruined. You'll see his name in the Wikipedia article you linked. If you read his Quining Qualia[1] (I believe that is the one, though it may have been a follow up that I found so convincing) you might see the problem with arguments about whether something has or hasn't qualia.

1: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm

As far as I'm concerned, if my brain were adequately simulated in a computer it would be like a plaster mould of a plaster mould. They're not the same thing, but functionally they are. If qualia exists I'm happy to assume that it's the product of a physical process which can be simulated. If it does not then I am quite certain the thing people mistake for it can be simulated--and perhaps already has been.

My attitude on the whole qualia matter is: how important can a thing be if no one can define it well enough to measure it? More importantly, I don't believe in magic. If something special is going on there I believe it's a product of natural processes, not a cause of them. "If it's there it can be reproduced."
Lodsys bets $1000/dev that they're right vs. Apple
Especially a Glock which lacks manual safety and so you have to rely on a good holster.

To be fair though, there are holsters that go inside the pants hiding the gun and leaving only the handle sticking out.
It seems as though the programming field is in a bit of a bind because, odd though it might seem, it has been difficult to be empirical in our approach to our field. The programming domain is very complex, so there are considerable difficulties in implementing empirical approaches. Proprietary development often entails a degree of secrecy, so a lot of data is not available to be shared. There is even debate along the lines of what is valuable to measure, or what can even be measured. One is reminded of many social sciences and psychology, or even medicine prior to the scientific revolution.

What is holding programming back from the degree of empiricism found in a field like mechanical engineering? Is it that it's hard to fund or even structure meaningful experiments? Should someone be developing non-ferromagnetic monitor/keyboard sets so that we can study programmers of different levels of demonstrated ability with their heads stuck inside MRI machines? (Such research has been done with piano virtuosos playing on electronic keyboards and rappers.)

http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv.h...

Another thing I'd note, is that a lot of debate about programming is word salad full of reasons why you can't say X or Y. There seems to be a lot of the Epistemic Viciousness that exists in martial arts schools.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2i/epistemic_viciousness/
Is this 'grey' ? In the sense that it can be interpreted as 'shady' ? Hell yes. But is it "wrong" ? I don't think so.

I always thought that getting that first set of customers that will take you to product/market fit was going to be easy. What with the Twitterverse, Facebook and all and sundry. But let me tell you, from experience, it is DAMN HARD!

I guess the true test of whether or not this is 'unethical' is whether those people that signed up felt scammed after using the service.

If I were one of those people that got that email, sure I might feel a bit 'weird' that they presented themselves as 'Jill D' and not AirBnB, but after going through what I have been doing the last few weeks - trying to get customers - I can't say I would be upset.
My thoughts exactly. All the objections seem to sidestep the revolution that this drug could be. If the science is there, but some more studies are needed, why didn't the WHO back better lab conditions and make a go for it?

Either they thought it was not a viable theory for a drug, or they were avoiding it for profit/political reasons.
Am I reading this right? It cost you 20 pounds to buy a car?
Police departments in other East Bay cities pay higher wages and are lower-risk. Police departments can be brain-drained too.
Source post here: http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/-responsibility-and-acc...

Betting $1000/dev that they're right is definitely gutsy.
> There is no reason to use any other character set.

coughencodingcough ;-)

There is a good reason to use another in general:

http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/6/utf

http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/rune

Plan 9 uses UTF-8 for IPC and most simple string handling, but programs that do more involved string processing (text editors, regular expressions stuff etc), use Runes instead. Runes are similar to UTF-32, one Rune directly represents one character. Most of standard library string functions come in two varieties: using UTF-8 and Runes.
> coffeescript for PHP

Make this happen please. I can't think of a more deserving language and it'd make my day job a lot nicer.
Yes imho you did it very wrong.
"Perhaps your original point stands that in Clojure you have _better_ visual clues for picking out anonymous functions at a glance"

Yes, this is what I was trying to get at. Thanks for clarifying the examples, though. So, using _ in any expression makes that expression an anonymous function? Is _ by itself the identity function?
I'm of the opinion you should be writing your PHP in a readable fashion similar to this:

$foo = array(
'bar' => TRUE,
'baz' => 'socks'
)

(pretend you also have proper tabs as well)
If your friends +1'd something that is shown in a search result, aren't you more likely to click on it rather than the other results?
Peter Thiel Says Wall Street ‘mispriced’ LinkedIn’s IPO
I am not being facetious by this question, but did you make a product that you are selling ?

If so, how did you get your first set of customers ?

Please share.

If you have not made a product that you need to sell yet, I think you will find when you do it, it's MUCH, MUCH more difficult than you ever thought it would be.

Also, selling a service - i.e. web development/design is very different than selling a product.
Wonder if there is a way to get WBC style trolls to go up against patent trolls.
I find Chrome's omnibox better than the address bar in FF, as it autocompletes. I suppose I could press cmd-L to jump to the box and type a few letters, but the web is so optimized for the mouse that I usually have my finger on the trackpad anyway.
I'd say to you "I can haz some sense of humor"
Accidental algorithms
See, that's funny because you already own the domain.
I'd say it's almost exactly how it is. In the natural world, the 'rules' don't change, we just continually discover more, and all the attendant nuances. In the SEO world, Google/Bing/etc really do just change the rules as to how stuff works, possibly because they get angry about abuses going on. There are a small handful of people who control how the online universe largely operates, just like gods.

There's no point in pretending to 'know' things about SEO, because unless you've worked at one of the big search companies, you can't really know what you're talking about. And in the few cases you do, there's no guarantee that the same will hold true tomorrow. In face, the more people 'know' something about SEO, the more likely that particular rule will change.

And no, I don't claim to be an SEO expert - I just tire of hearing the outlandish claims from 'experts' charging gobs of money from unsuspecting hopefuls.
Check the scars. Perhaps a photo ID card certifying your procedure is in order. What a way to pick up chicks!
Anyone else getting an untrusted SSL Cert error from the link?
That's a really good question. The reported buildout is likely well short of AWS, but I simply cannot believe Apple would make an investment at that scale just to store millions of redundant copies of music files!
Take it back to reddit please. We don't need memes to communicate here.
Yeah, I'd really like to use the GPU, it would be a huge speed boost.

Was it lagging when you were scrolling down? I try to play nice with the CPU and run it at low priority, so it shouldn't interfere. What OS/browser/java version combo has trouble?
The way you calculate it above is an odd way to look at it; sure you save 1.5 hours a day - but you certainly aren't getting paid for those hours. And chances are you won't be doing side work that will pay you that $110/day with your free 1.5 hours.

The value is increased freedom. The OP has to decide what value that has to him - assigning it an arbitrary number based on what a person earns per hour is silly.

Your second point was much more valid -- if you can live in a much more inexpensive way, that's a benefit you can put an actual # on.
Oh good. So not only does it spike my CPU and kill my battery, I also get the resource overhead of the JVM. This is a reverse DDOS.

Sorry if I'm being too hostile, but I like the idea of bitcoin, and don't want to see it become associated with hijacking people's computers.
I had my bike stolen in Scotland, the police spent an hour in my house trying to convince me I had just done something 'stupid' and tried to blame in on a theft. It took the bike being radio'd in doing 70 in a 20 zone for them to believe me.
Visible light penetrates the skin rather well. That's why you can see blood vessels and bruises and strong lights through closed eyelids.

UV penetrates the skin even better, and is by far the more dangerous of the three spectra you mentioned. That's why almost all animals produce melanin - the stuff that gives our skin, hair and eyes their color. It's nature's UV blocker.
Depends exactly how you do it.

All in all, if you know where he is it's much safer to let the cops handle it. So what if you do sort it out with a few of your "larger friends"? He's probably got larger friends too, and he knows where you live.
Person B is still in possession of stolen goods (which has certain legal consequences at least in Australia)
Is that the only useful information I can pull in regards to what activities the user is interested in?
TamDenholm mentioned porn kings, and I think they are a good example of the "darker sectors" driving innovation. The porn industry were some of the first to provide streaming of videos for example. While they may not be the inventors, porn is often a driving force in adoption of new technology, it being a new format or a new delivery vector for media.

If porn is part of the "dark sectors of society" however, is obviously debatable.
One reason is using things like the Instapaper or Pinboard bookmarklets without showing the bookmark toolbar. I guess you're supposed to use extensions, but I prefer a "fire and forget" approach to bookmarking (i.e I've pressed something once, leave me alone after that).
what I wanted to say is, your app needs a designer's touch. f.ex. http://goodnoows.com/ has a nice feeeling (although I don't use it, partly because I even can't import my netvibes opml in there)
Ben Huh on the Shortcomings of How Online News is Presented
> If you can think of another way of defining "a majority" without needing a lot of CPU resources, a lot of people would be interested in hearing your solution.

Let Bitcoins equal votes.

Set up a Bitcoin account for each option in the vote; send Bitcoins to the account associated with the option you prefer. Transaction verification acts as an electoral audit.

That sort of system would give power over the money supply to those invested in the currency, which seems to be exactly what the Bitcoin community wants.
Teachers <i>always</i> know. They just sometimes choose not to fight that battle.
Has the parent been edited, or is this remarkably non-sequiturial? I read the parent several times looking for a mention of Spain, couldn't find it.
How did you make sure that that guy didn't get your laptop from somebody else?
Alameda is the city next door to Oakland. Aside from being reported in the Oakland Tribune, what does this story have to do with Oakland?
State-of-the-art password schemes have addressed the "Moore's Law" problem for over a decade now.
I don't have Java installed and don't want to install it. I wonder if internet cafes and kiosks would be interested in something like this. You could create a url shortener that place their homepage in a frame or something.
The thief returned the laptop and apologized. Here's the thread and a news article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359512

http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/23/dont-steal-a-computer-f...
What's more, if you have firefox or chrome set to remember your passwords, anyone with access to your computer can look at them through the browser's options menu clear as day.
Reading this reminds me of a quote about the charge of the light brigade

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre, c'est de la folie
I agree the 'attaboy' comments are way out of place, but there is also an over the top reaction the other way with the criticism being heaped onto the AirBNB guys in my opinion.

It was technically wrong of them to leverage craigslist by circumventing the community's own "no commercial email" request, and they should get dinged for it.

But in the grand scheme of things, when you are a tiny start up struggling to survive, this is a relatively benign grass roots attempt at marketing which the AirBNB guys even probably regret doing.

Comparing RIAA's scare tactics to this seems a little out of place, but it is right in line with Microsoft's shady attempts at astroturfing.
My biggest annoyance: open an incognito window (perhaps to do some Internet banking, or to log into one of the Google Apps accounts I've got); switch to another app; see a link in Twitter, email, or IM and click it; and it opens in the incognito window. Surely all new window events from other applications should go to the primary non-incognito window? Or at least you should be able to define the behaviour.

As an aside what I'd really like is sandboxed incognito tabs, so I can run multiple accounts on the same service (hi Google multi-accounts!) in the same window in different tabs without colliding cookies.
Rubinius uses the exact same technique as is detailed here, namely backing an Array with a Hash (LookupTable in the Rubinius case). We added this a few years ago to speed up require.
I knew there had to be some trick to it... thanks for the tip.
One can make a case about a lot of businesses being nothing but a drag on society. Few are as clear-cut as this - scum of the earth, these people are. They contribute nothing, create nothing, and expect to tax us, because they can.

Die in a fire, Lodsys. May the collapse of your illegitimate business be swift.
I'm from Exeter and that sounds full on. Luckily never had my bike nicked, but I was assaulted when I was working in a supermarket there one summer and the police turned up, basically told me it was pointless going after the guy and didn't seem to give one shit about the fact I'd just been attacked (to be fair - he pushed me into a display rather than hit me, but still).

Had a couple friends get mugged, luckily not me, in neither incident were the police even involved I don't think. People just don't think to go to them for such things such is their stellar reputation.

Also had my (push)bike nicked when I was a kid growing up which means I never actually learnt to ride a bike (my family were too poor to buy a replacement), but I guess that's a bit out of date now!

I really think things are worse for this kind of crime in a smaller town because there are more idiots who think they're king of the castle, the kind of guys who would come a cropper very quickly in a bigger city like London. Let's put it this way - I've nearly been in a fight like 2-3 times + actually got assaulted once in Exeter, never had any problems in London other than once getting my phone nicked.

I lost all respect for the police after an inadvisable night when I went to a concert in Milton Keynes and ended up sleeping rough outside the train station waiting for the first train (I was 16 at the time). The police turned up with blankets, etc. and just sat there in their vans laughing at us. Not to mention the way the MET handles protests (google Ian Tomlinson).

I would like to think most coppers are ok, but I can't help but wonder whether the police is just a destination for school bullies who want a bigger scope in which to ply their trade.
> So, using _ in any expression makes that expression an anonymous function?

Ah, I should have said - the syntax above only works with one-liners. The following wouldn't work:

scala> apply(val y = _ * 50; y * 100, 10)
scala> apply((val y = _ * 50; y * 100), 10)
scala> apply((x: Int) => val y = x * 50; y * 100, 10)

etc.

Instead you would need to explicitly surround the method body with curly brackets:

scala> apply((x:Int) => { val y = x * 20; y }, 10)
res18: Int = 200

And in this case, it's obvious what is happening.

So it's more like providing a one line expression where a function is expected makes it an anonymous function. The use of _ is simply a shortcut when you don't need to assign parameters to a local variable. It even works with multiple parameters. I.e. compare:

scala> (1 to 5).foldLeft(0)((accumulator:Int,x:Int) => accumulator + x)
res22: Int = 15

To:

scala> (1 to 5).foldLeft(0)(_ + _)
res19: Int = 15
if you're on a mac, you can move passwords to the keychain: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keychain-serv...

otherwise, set a master password to encrypt the sqlite database and then make the password timeout after a short while: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/master-passwo...
Goldman Sachs and the the $45m typo
Yeah that's valid, thanks for the opinion.

I also built http://hackerstream.com, so this is a more general problem with my design skills.

I don't have opml import either, but if you mail me your opml I'll set you up with an account (email in profile; let me know what username you want)
just convince them that patent trolls support the "homosexual agenda".

Doing that is the hard part. Good luck.
Recover Windows 7 password with Ubuntu Linux
Salts do not prevent brute force attacks. However...

NOT USING SALTS MAKES RAINBOW TABLE ATTACKS TRIVIAL.

Seat belts don't prevent cancer, but they sure as hell help in a car accident.
Of course, they just making an offer, and, like any gift, they are under no obligation to make good on it.

If they refused to honor the offer in the event that they lose, they would not likely be worried about their reputation.
I agree. As if they're fooling anyone pretending to be an anonymous stranger from gmail who just happens to love promoting airbnb.
I wonder what the legal implications of saying that would actually be...?
No need to apologize for how you feel - some people love the idea (of supporting a website with their computer power), some people hate it.

As for the resource overhead of the JVM, it's infeasible to have a bitcoin miner that uses javascript - that was how I did it initially, as a proof of concept, but it was so slow I abandoned it.
Ryan Bigg (radar) has been working on rboard (https://github.com/radar/rboard) for years. Definitely better than the *beast forks - pretty much all of those have been abandoned for a while, last time I checked (and I've run a forum on beast codebase).
Business Development 2.0
Are cracking programs optimized to do all 1 character passwords, then all 2 character passwords, then 3 then 4 etc? Otherwise how will an attacker know to only run a search on 6 character passwords?

Not to mention that a cracker always would have to computed for all possible characters (alphanumeric plus symbols) because there is no way of knowing ahead of time what character set the person used.
So? If it doesn't cause a problem... it isn't a problem.
I've used PHP for ~12 years and never found myself searching for something involving an instance of array syntax.
Try OnTime V11 Beta Now (free) - Hosted Bug Tracking
We really think alike - the captcha idea, and the URL shortener with a miner at the top were two of my first ideas for uses of an API.

I didn't think of marketing it to internet cafes/kiosks though.
Sure but this seems better:

$foo = [
'bar': TRUE,
'baz': 'socks'
]
Keep in mind they may get 100K+ in exchange of putting their lives in danger occasionally.
I agree they are in the same class with acupuncturists, in the "stuff that doesn't work"-class.
Yep, but just remove the 's' from the protocol.
I've been curious to see if/how this will affect my proof-of-concept Android app Click It/Click It Gold. I built it within 3 days specifically to test the in-app billing api just after their debut... No word from Lodsys, yet.

http://www.kefsco.com/clickit.html
The less visual noise the better.
He only comes back to correct outrageous mis-statements that could potentially damage someone's reputation or hard work - I guess accusing him of being Canadian counts as one of the above ;-)