skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We developed Genius Scan, a small scanner app for iPhone. The intent of the app was to make it easy for people to scan documents and send documents when not close to a physical scanner.

One of the best rewards we have is some of the users comments.
- "This app simplifies my life and it actually works like it says it does (weird…)."
- "My wife went to the hospital and I needed to send my in-laws her diagnosis and discharge papers(They are both M.D.'s) It worked like a charm. It saved me from buying a scanner and going to kinko's!"
- "As a student, this app has saved my butt a few times."
- "Saved my company over $1100 in courthouse copy fees last month alone."
- "When needed to have a document but no copy machine nor fax, it saved me, got a mortgage with with the bank!!! (had to send a few documents)"
- "I've used this app for the past year and it is so helpful. I am able to post assignments for my students and copy their worksheets while still in class with them. I do not have a fax
machine and this has saved my butt a few times! Yea!!"
- "As a traveling sales rep, I have to fax my figures through to our interstate office each night, when staying in motels this can get quite expensive, now I just scan and email. No more horrendous fax costs!! Thanks guys!!"

One of the best emails we received just contained:
"FYI genius scan saved my ass on Thursday and now I will graduate in may all because of genius scan!"

So while in the first place it's hard to think an iPhone app can really improve people's life, a few comments tell us that Genius Scan can have a small positive impact on some people's lives.
Also, it's interesting how many uses people can find for this app we would never have thought about.

Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/genius-scan/id377672876?mt=8
Cross Site Script Inclusion. The article touches on a lot of things (including CSRF), but the HN title refers specifically to JSON (As well as the link's '#' fragment identifier), and therefore the last section, where it shows an attack site including unprotected JSON through the <script> tag, and unless I'm seriously mistaken, this is the definition of XSSI.
I can't speak to Google's actual motivations for developing Chrome, but I think it is safe to say that taking over the browser market is more than a nice side affect. Let's not forget that Google makes their money by targeting Ads, therefore there's a lot of money to be made by knowing _all_ of your browsing habits.
There must be something wrong with me. I haven't been a "gamer" for a little over a decade, but the more of these "negative" reviews I read, the more I want to play this game. Not ironicly.
Design objects online with evolution and 3D print them
hapless, I think you drew conclusions about my remarks far beyond what I intended.

There are a couple of Python foundries in Indy that I know of, SixFeetUp and my current employer. SixFeetUp uses Plone for their work (and are extremely active in the Plone community), and of the guys I've met they're pretty damn smart. They're actually looking for a Python dev as well.

All that said, my impression of Indy is that it's overwhelmingly .NET-oriented, with a side of Ruby. I'm not sure what prompted you to launch into a general multi-pronged defense of Indiana based off a couple lines of my blog post. If you took anything I wrote as "all the programmers in Indiana suck", you're wrong. The devs at my shop are clearly talented and smart, and I love picking their brains. Same for many of the programmers I've met at meetups.

We both know Indy isn't a tech mecca. That doesn't mean there aren't smart & talented people here, or that there aren't companies doing exciting, interesting things. But, from my observations and conversations, the companies doing exciting and interesting things are almost certainly not doing them with Python.

Is that observation wildly different than reality? If so, please let me know because I'd love to get more plugged in.

Sorry that you got offended; I certainly didn't intend that.
I hadn't seen this test before so I took it on a lark.

405 points, 11978th, 530 characters per minute, 101 correct words 2 wrong.

101 wpm.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that most professional developer types can probably do within some small percentage of these scores.

From wikipedia:"An average professional typist reaches 50 to 70wpm, while some positions can require 80 to 95 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other typing jobs), and some advanced typists work at speeds above 120"
My non-tech site (small, ~10,000 uniques per month):

IE 45%
IE8 72%
IE7 19%
IE9 7%
IE6 2%
FF 23%
Safari 19%
Chrome 10%
both my companies are built with the intent to improve lives:

http://www.civiguard.com = real-time emergency communications and guidance for organizations looking to protect their civilian assets.

http://secretsocial.com = SecretSocial is the most natural way to engage people privately on the social web. No groups, no sign-up, no curation - just spontaneous connections and experiences via Twitter, Email and SMS.
>the real value of most paper currencies comes, circularly, from the fact that we've decided to settle on this set of hard-to-counterfeit pieces of paper, not a different one.

We can get more specific than this. US citizens use the US dollar because the law says that US taxes must be paid in dollars and because whenever a credible competitor to the dollar has arisen (like the use of casino chips in Las Vegas) the US Secret Service shuts it down.
Amazing piece on the current state of the industry.
General heads up: Losethos's comment is actually probably of interest to this thread, but seems to be quite 'dead'.
InDinero doubles conversion rate with video
> Because [] is not syntactic sugar for new Array

In Firefox 4 and other new browsers this is no longer the case. But right now it's still an issue as many people are using older browsers.
Show HN: Side project this weekend? Start a Labradoc project log to keep track.
Super Simple Websites
By "larger applications", I wasn't talking about jQuery, Node.js or anything built upon them.

I'm talking about real software systems with, at a very minimum, tens of thousands of lines of code. More realistically, we're talking systems with hundreds of thousands, if not several million, lines of code.

C++ can scale up to codebases that large. Java and C# can handle it, as well. Even Python and Ruby can, if care is taken. JavaScript cannot. You'll be hitting numerous maintenance barriers far before then, when you're still well under 10,000 lines of code.
Hmm why can't you construct the signal amplitude from webcam image? You don't have to capture it as digital signal...
Excessive Internet use affects physical structure of teenage brains
CoffeeScript is only kinda "another language." It's very intentionally designed to map closely to JavaScript. Try it with an actual independent language like Python, Ruby or Haskell and you'll have more trouble.
I keep managing to navigate backwards to an empty tab without wanting to.

I tried to write a Chrome extension for typing text on websites recently. But I never got it to select the correct text blocks, especially on sites with table layouts like HN.
Why China's Ghost Towns Matter for Our Economy
That doesn't run in browsers, it runs in one browser — Chrome.
I guess I misunderstood. I assumed the new TLD owners would be able to issue domains (e.g. the city of Boston buys the .boston TLD, then sells .boston domains to raise revenue for the city).
ChevronWP7 Labs will jailbreak your Windows Phone with Microsoft's approval
gnu-typist/gtypist package also contains special mode that can be started with "typefortune -n 99" command. It lets you type random Unix fortunes which are much more interesting than predefined lessons.
Looks very nice, and seems made by people smart enough to make the software multi-platform (Linux/Mac/Windows) and ship to (most of) Europe without customs hassles.

Haven't fiddled with hardware lately, but I'm tempted to get one for old times sake (today came across the logic probe I made with a LED, resistor, plastic pen and sewing needle back in my student days ;-).
I use the built-in OSX "Keychain" app. It's integrated into the OS such that if you use the "save password" feature of your browser, it ends up in the Keychain anyway.

It also generates great passwords, so now I generate a new pw for each site rather than re-using a handful of common ones.
At least Axl Rose can feel a tad less bad about Chinese Democracy now.
it's better than people are making it out to be. if you enjoyed the first, you'll enjoy the nostalgia. it's a little uneven in terms of fun and pacing (as such a frakenstein'ish project with multiple hands and such a long development cycle will lead to), but i think it's worth playing.
My first reaction was disbelief, "what? the Motley Fool doing something that is clearly unethical?" Then i googled as you mentioned, and indeed found all of these identically phrased articles.

But upon reading them i'm impressed at exactly how generic this template is. I'm not sure they're actually doing harm, because frankly, these articles aren't analysis. They don't actually offer any judgement about the stocks in question. They're basically a textual presentation of some stock data that is designed to serve as a feeder into fool.com.

I can't say that i'm okay with it, but it's not as catastrophic as i had initially imagined. Still definitely SEO spam though :\ I am disappoint.
A nice touch is that you can download and play with the GUI (using faked waveforms) to check it out.
Correct, the technical term for it is 'XSSI', or Cross Site Script Inclusion.
Can you type in the dark room? Incredible speed for two fingers :)
Would you consider a computer science student with a Macbook Pro wasteful/overprivileged?

I wouldn't expect film students to work with recycled 5-year-old Walmart cameraphones; I'm not offended by art students with DSLRs, nor people in English classes (who could technically handwrite drafts and go to a lab to type the final copy) with laptops.

If we expected everyone to work with the cheapest tools possible, I suspect the quality of the output would decline.
If that's true, then their attitude of "we don't want to be the biggest player, we just want to change the game" seems to be a habit for them, as they've said the same thing with regards to their ISP service.

I think Chrome and Firefox, together, have really pulled the web out of the dredges and put it on a path of more frequent updates and a more diverse market. Kudos to the Chrome dev team and all the people who contribute to Chromium.
Did anyone notice how this is similar to the Xnet proposed in the cory doctorow novel Little Brother. Actually this is exactly that but just not running on an array of XBoxes.
I find it really irritating for query refinement. Often I will do a broad search and notice a new term in the result snippets that I want to use in my search. When the term is a name or some other hard to spell word (or phrase), I like to be able to type it in the search box while I'm looking at it in the results. Instant ruins that for me, so I always turn it off.
Ask HN: What's public transportation like in the San Fransico bay area?
I'm a blind person and I'm looking at applying to YC with a startup idea I'm working on, however because I can't drive I'm wondering what public transportation is like in the San Fransico bay area. is there a website that has information availabke?
Kickstarter can work, but think of it as a tool for hosting campaigns, not a community you can tap. Unless they decide to feature your campaign it won't even be visible on their site... Not even on the pages for more specialized tags.

It's a good way to gather donations, but go into it assuming you'll bring every single referral to your campaign.

And ask for the minimum amount you could get started with. We had to leave thousands of dollars on the table because we didn't reach our goal.
Hug a FSF/GNU Programmer Day
How is spoofing the referer extremely easy? I can think of no way for an attack site to do this, short of having control over the entire user machine (or a significant browser exploit anyways), at which point all of your webapp security is irrelevant.
Yes, but he certainly wasn't the first one to come up with this idea.
Weirdly melodic and somber, but interesting video nonetheless.
Why do you think JavaScript cannot handle it? If you reach the million lines of code you probably have a really modular application, otherwise it's unmaintainable in any language. Being modular it can be sub-divided in many small layers which are the size of a jQuery library.

I think your experience with JavaScript comes from reading code made by bad developers. If your software is written by good people it will be maintainable even in JavaScript.
Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money?
Interesting video. I wish the narrator didn't sound so robotic though.
^Typo: from the link, it's $26,000 (!), not $26.
I wonder why won't some starving poor tiny pacific island legalize [some] drugs. They could probably make good money from drug tourism.
Seems like there has been renewed interest in psychedelics in the geek community. I'd recommend that everyone read Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said" for the history of geeks and drugs.
I have been playing in that space since 2008. ProFounder is doing it wrong because technically, people can only invest if they have a pre-existing relationship with the founders, which by definition exludes anyone found through the site. Not good.
For a number of years I've kept project logs (or "lab notebooks") for the various projects I have in progress. I've found project logs really great for reducing the time getting up to speed when switching between projects.

I've frequently recommended the habit to other developers.

Project logs are a form of documentation that really helps "future me". Because I write entries as I go, the overheard for any entry is really low so that encourages me to write more.

An added bonus, the notes I take along the way are accessible to others and they can find the way I worked around a bug or solved an error message. Also, there's always many more "in progress" projects that never make it to a site like Instructables but a project log can help others reproduce the work.

When I was unable to write project logs for a while I really missed it so I started a project to make writing them easier. And then I thought, hey, why not make it available to other people too.

So, thanks to HN's inspiration I recently launched Labradoc.com to provide "project logs to help you...and everyone else".

It fits the definition of an EMVP (embarrassingly minimal viable product) but I hear that's the done thing. :)

While I'm interested in feedback about Labradoc in its current state I'm also keen just to get people trying it out.

Keeping a project log is really beneficial, so whether you use a text file, blog, personal wiki or Labradoc I highly recommend you give it a try.

Thanks for your time!
Yeah, it's not necessarily to perfectly reconstruct the LED's signal, only the average amplitude over a relatively long period of time. Like, just sample the color of a certain pixel on each frame.
TV Tropes has a list of examples: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmenBreak
Good thought. The "double-submitted cookie" technique does exactly that.
Ignore this article, clueless author using debunked data as fact.
We also have a big community Germany that has been using wifi mesh networks and ad-hoc routing protocols since 2003: http://wiki.freifunk.net/Kategorie:English

Though all of these networks are very impressive, I don't think they can replace the big ISPs in case some one shuts down the Internet completely.
I don't necessarily touch type since I almost never use my pinky other than to hold down the shift button. I don't really see the need to learn how to hold my hands on homerow to type better, I can type about 98 - 110 wpm without any issues without looking at my keyboard.

The way I got better at typing and typing fast was to be on very busy IRC channels where getting a word in edgewise without missing any of the conversation required a lot of fast typing.

I understand that most of this was meant for the people that are hunt and peck type. I don't think it is at all necessary for people that are able to type at a rapid rate using their own style to relearn how to type.
LulzSec private log from their IRC
does anybody else hate the casual sexism in the tech community?
That's why drum and bass all sounds the same to me.

Reggaeton also has a similar situation, where everyone uses the exact same beat for the rhythm. It's called the "Dem Bow" beat.
This is an interesting video, but how does this has anything to do with Startups, Technology, Development, UX or Tech Business... This is the why I think HN is becoming another Reddit. It's a shame...
Thanks! Since it's cheap, I could eat out more often, and spend less time on cooking & cleaning...
Depends what you're used to I suppose.

The BART system is pretty good, but doesn't really cover Silicon Valley or the South Bay. San Francisco itself seems to be "pretty good", and is also a reasonable place to get around on foot. I could also see Berkeley being good, as it's fairly dense, but perhaps a bit less chaotic than San Francisco.
Whoa - why the bitterness?

Sure there are non-profits that do a lot of good but that doesn't mean what Snapdeal has done is not worthy of recognition nor does it mean CNN should not cover them. And because Snapdeal is a startup likely busy trying to make money, scale, etc, their action is "unexpected" and perhaps more newsworthy as a result. Unfortunately, "Red Cross helps village" would not be a particularly interesting story for CNN or any news outlet.

Yes - it is good PR for Snapdeal and whether it was a calculated PR move or just a good action being rewarded with press (I think it's the latter), it shouldn't matter. They did some good and if this was actually a calculated PR move, good for them for finding a PR hack that gets them onto CNN while actually doing some substantive good work at the same time.

And last somewhat unrelated point, as a fellow Indian (Indian-American), I always find it curious and somewhat unfortunate that there is a contingent of "the tribe" that can't just be happy when others in the "the tribe" do well. Can't we just be happy for the guy, the village, the company, etc and do without the scorn?
Interesting link. Certainly related to the rise of alternative copyright models, which are certainly related to technology and startups. Obviously relevant and valid HN link.
IMF and World Bank regulations maybe?
That wouldn't work, you can override the Object constructor in JavaScript as well. You have to prepend something like `while(1);` to the JSON responses you're returning.
LEDs also don't change brightness with voltage, they do with amperage and usually have an optimal amperage for the LED's design. Brightness can be controlled many ways, the most common way is to use Pulse Width Modulation. It's also a common power saving technique.

http://www.reuk.co.uk/LED-Dimmer-Circuit.htm
I've found uwsgi is great for multiple site hosting. There are numerous ways to configure uwsgi for this purpose, one of my favorites: http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/wiki/VirtualHosting. Newer versions of uwsgi also have a feature called emperor mode which is pretty slick: http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/wiki/Emperor.
I see that you've just passed your one-year anniversary here, so I guess you are now officially entitled to complain that HN is turning into Reddit, but I think that this video is actually an exploration of an interesting hack.
See here, in a democracy we can tell our federal government, which is made up of our citizens, and employs a good number of them, to build an "information interstate" system. Or even better, we can induce our states to build a federation of networks, and just keep that one less thing out of the federal 10-gallons.
Very cool. I evolved a goblin face from the "honeycomb monster" on the front page. I wish you could play with the rotation manually rather than having to rely on the gif animation.
I believe I saw something about Posterous adding affiliate codes to links unless you already have one on there.
I clarified above, but we would be hosting it. Pieces might be self hosted, but that would only be to integrate internal directories. That's something I'm going to have to look into.
If there is computer data, all it takes is a couple seconds for an industrious suspect to begin destroying evidence. MP5s or M4s would be totally unnecessary, but fast entry and pulling the power cords ASAP might be reasonable.

I'd have to be a judge and see their request for a warrant...
Warning: if the government decide to take out the Internet, that will be the least of your worries.
Spark up your relationship - apply for our beta
Serious question: do they?
Entertain yourself with Bollywood Video Songs
I wonder how file hosting sites make money. Especially those without ads.

/threadjacker
Mozilla is working on Rust https://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki/Language-FAQ. Google has Go http://golang.org/.

To run compiled binaries from such languages you'll use Native Client http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ and Pepper APIs which let you access HTML5.

Go gets rid of some insecure low level things like pointers, keeps such things in an unsafe package to discourage its use. They intend to make it seamlessly compatible with NaCl. C/C++ code needs to be modified to work there.

JS is already not suitable for lots of stuff. Vendors are stretching its capabilities with big teams of fancy programmers implementing fancy VMs with big chunks written in assembler. At Google I/O they mentioned V8 is about as fast as it will get. Then bigger teams are writing massive APIs because even with fast VMs the language isn't fast enough to roll your own CSS/XAML/MXML/HTML parsers or 2D rendering contexts. So you're forced to wait or hack together things like LESS, CoffeeScript, Stylus in an attempt to communicate with the overlords.

With the browsers becoming the operating system for many users, you need a runtime that's as powerful as a regular operating system. Google and Mozilla are major players and it's nice to see them exploring alternatives.

But even if NaCl/Go is superior technologically, it may not overcome JavaScript's business and political momentum. As usual, technology is not chosen based on technological merit, but business considerations like legacy, lock in, etc. Perhaps NaCl/Go approach will succeed but it will be too little too late. Kinda feels that way with Flash and Browsers, they're finally serious platforms but might be too far behind Objective-C, C# and Java on mobiles.
Anyone who works in technology is going to have to deal with intellectual property, as well as the laws/attitudes around the same.

Moreover, music is an essential component of culture, which means comprehension of music, or at least its recombinant nature, may improve your chances of creating a consumer product people love.

edit: And come on, you've been around long enough to have read the FAQ:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

(my emphasis)

This passes by any measure. Being well-rounded is a good idea. I love seeing content like this way more than the insipid, obvious, naval-gazing, circlejerking blog nonsense that often passes for worthwhile reading just because the author mentions "funding" or "startups" or anything else in vogue n times before the post finishes.
I don't think Tumblr are making money at the moment. I mean, they might sell themes but that's hardly going to come close to their outgoings.

I guess they're working on the revenue generating bit, as seems to be the case for so many funded tech companies over the last few years.