skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My vote is for "advance fee scam" as mentioned in the comments of the article. It plays out something like this:

He shows up at a coffee shop after a few days worth of work with a check for $1000. The actual "work" done was worth $700, so he says "just give me $300 and we'll call it even". He'll be nice and wait for OP while he goes to the ATM, but the check will be a dud.

If I'm right about this, I think there's a powerful psychological force at play. The time invested for the work will cloud the OPs judgment about whether this is a scam or not. A feeling of loss is much more powerful than a feeling of gain (I can't remember the exact psych term for this)

The OP probably scared off 'Aaron' with the "is this a scam?" email.
Looking at the example code :-

Fukime f = new Fukime("your_app_id","your_app_secret");

// Count stuff across all your apps.
f.teller.global.increase("farms");
f.teller.global.count("farms"); // get global farm counter

How secure is this? Wouldn't the "secret" be stored as plain text in the binary?
Fukime? Nooo, fukiyu!
It depends on which aspect of MSFT and Google you are enquiring about. In this instance MSFT is very responsive but ask about something where it doesn't benefit them to be responsive and you will likely get a cold shoulder. Just like how Google has been very responsive and personal with Google+ but to other requests there is crickets.
We now have a serious challenger in the race to one-up MunchOnMe for most face-palmingly bad start-up name.
The IP checksum is only 16 bits, so it will be fooled occassionally on a noisy line. Software that cares about correctness must use a proper error detection code of its own.
Mr. Soltani also claims that it is somehow improper to use
any technology other than browser cookies to track website
activity. In fact, countless online companies, including
other major analytics providers, use a variety of different
technologies to provide these services, including the
persistent technologies Mr. Soltani targets in his paper.

That's not a justification for doing it too. It's merely a lame excuse for unethical behavior.

Also, I don't care if the guys at KISSmetrics are nice, kitten-loving jolly good fellows - that has absolutely zero relevance to the case at hand.
This segues nicely into an idea that occurred to me the other day.

I was knocking around the idea of a website where you sign up with just an email and are issued a unique id, potentially with the ability to generate new ones on the fly. When you hook up with someone, you load an app on your phone or a website, and it generates a QR code. Each partner scans each others code and the website logs the encounter.

At some point, someone is going to get an STD/STI. When this happens, the infected parter can go to the website and with just a few clicks, you can send a notification to your recent (for some medical definition of recent), and they'll be notified to get themselves checked.

Now, the whole HIPAA compliance thing (or compliance in general, since the US isn't the only government affected here) would be a bitch and a half, and getting user adoption would be hard ("you use website.com? slut!"), but if it was safe and caught on, I could see it having a real effect on infection rates.

Some really common infections (chlamydia, gonorrhea) show no symptoms in a lot of cases, so just getting that easy notification could really help people identify that they have the disease, and so they could get quicker treatment.

I just wish I had the skill and finances to try it. Maybe some kid that wants to take a run at YC funding could use this as their idea?
Sure, this sounds like good advice. But I'm relatively new at developing software, and I cant really identify "stupid shit" just yet. So what are some dumb things developers constantly do?
How To Become A Comic Book Hero
In XXIV century you speak to your computer and if you're supposed to point'n'click some panels, you do it in predefined special areas - it's modal work - you're occupied with one panel at time, not with dozens of overlapping windows. It's like some old games were operated. It's fun! ..and vastly different from what we use today for working.

But seriously..
Of course, the Martian Bible also doesn't say anything about god creating life on Earth.
Hey, nice work. It looks pretty cool.

It would be great if somehow you could click on the cards to switch between them. Forcing people to click on the dots at the bottom == very unintuitive.
On Deck Raises $19 Million To Connect Main Street Businesses With Capital
Its not the people that ran out of money that would have to tear it down; it would be the bank, or whoever made the loan, that would have to tear it down.

I think thats part of the question, too. If you made a huge building but ran out of money and had to close it, who would be responsible for the building, and who would have to pay to have it torn down?
EDIT: Nevermind, I misunderstood the nature of Fukime. Fukimailife.
Even then you could just put a breakpoint in the Fukime constructor and read the raw string?

Heck, even if the authentication step was 100% secure, what's stopping a malicious user from calling increase("farms") on a previously authenticated Fukime object? The Fukime instance is shown to have direct access to "global" variables, so the user wouldn't be limited to screwing with their own data.

This kind of logic belongs server-side (and this obviously isn't a server-side API, because the examples provided are for Android and iOS.)
I thought they did this web2.0-ish thing of dropping a letter, specifically a 't' right after 'k'.
I do not think this is an advance fee scam. I think the pay-per-call commenter is closest.

Here's what I think is happening. A marketing firm has told some local businesses that it will do online marketing and other marketing activities to drive leads in the form of calls to the business. The marketing campaigns will focus on specific issues (like insurance coverage for weight loss).

It's not atypical for a marketing agency or demand generation company to guarantee a certain number of leads per campaign -- eg, if you spend $1,000 with us, we will guarantee you get 50 leads.

I think a call-based / real-world demand generation agency is stuffing the leads for their customers because the actual campaigns aren't delivering.
If this was to backfire, it sounds like something out of dystopian sci-fi.
Using this logic, nothing new will ever happen because if something could happen it would have already happened.
Tempted to use the name Roger Pollack if I do end up back on G+.
> The New Yorker has what's likely the most venerable fact-checking process in the magazine business.

Note that "fact-checking" is actually quote verification and/or finding someone else who says that she believes the same thing.

For example, the "rockets can't work in space because there's nothing to push against" bit in the
13 January 1920 NYT editorial trashing Goddard (mentioned in http://astronauticsnow.com/history/goddard/index.html) could easily have survived "fact checking".

The society and sports pages are the only places where you can rely on journalists wrt facts.
I think command-line is considered bad compared to the GUI is the lack of NLP/AI and the use of widely varying syntaxes and semantics for each command line argument.

For example, how do you know that the syntax "play 10 random country songs" would work? If it did work, would it play random (country songs) or (random country) songs? -- is country a type of music or a category to sort by?

The fact that everyone likes to classify things in different (and sometimes seemingly-illogical) ways leads to problems even if the syntax is well known - look at issues with SQL. Can you do "select id from company" on all databases?

Human communication is very difficult and error-prone, even for humans. Redundancy and back-forth is necessary to share understanding.
WATER on MARS: Is Mars Weeping Salty Tears?
Only first two chapters. But it was enough to blow my mind. Also reminded me of how my math skills had to be polished.
That isn't an urban legend - I know of 2 registrars that used to do it - One of them used to do it so you would have to acquire them off them for an increased price.

Network Solutions were exposed for doing this.
When you build an online community around the idea of absolute individual freedom, you get 4chan. And, quite in opposition to your viewpoint, this kind of environment brings out all the racism, sexism, homophobia, mob rule, and other assholery you can imagine. Still, people participate in that kind of free for all, and they're free to do so.

Outside of 4chan, people are figuring out that online communities, just like communities in real life, work better when there's a social contract. You can get downvoted into oblivion, flagged to death, or hellbanned from Hacker News, but you accept these infringements on your freedom of expression because it keeps the trolls out. Social networks (which, if you've forgotten, are designed to enable communication between people who already know each other, largely in real life) enforce a social norm (or in some cases an actual policy) of using real names. This makes people you know in real life (presumably by their real names) easier to find, and makes your behavior accountable to your real-life reputation.

Now, maybe some of these social contracts are wiser than others. But unlike the social contract that governs a physical community[1], online communities are trivial to join, trivial to leave, and not that difficult to form in comparison. This is a freedom of association that's unprecedented in world history, and really gives us the best of both worlds.

Finally, if you're all that angry about "privileged western jagoffs" forming their own exclusionary communities, you'd be better served railing against e.g. the Freemasons, rather than Google+.

[1] It's worth pointing out that most countries have very strict laws mandating that people are known to the government, their employers, etc. not only by a "real name" that requires legal action to change, but by some sort of identification number. Anonymously earning income, using banks, and getting health care are much bigger problems, and there's much more potential benefit in solving those problems than in bickering about whatever website people are using to share pictures of cats.
Technically, this is a slightly newer version of a very similar bulb Phillips has been selling for a while now. You can usually find the original model at Home Depot for around $50.
Naruto Shippuden Episode 224 English sub
Naruto Shippuden Episode 224 English subbed entitle "The Ninja of Benisu!" will be released on Thursday (August 11, 2011) Naruto Shippuden 224 Preview-Eng Sub I can't take it any more! Get Me off this ship Get a hold of yourself Bushy Brow Sensei! But These waves are indeed hard to take Then What are we going to do ? That's It. Let's Stop There! Set sail towards north-northeast! Naruto Shippuden Episode 224
Trusting vendors in the cloud age
I wonder how many of those metal lathes were originally bankrolled by Apple's billions, as a part of their organization plan to help suppliers build capacity.
Their logo makes it even worse!
The Past, Present and Future of Parallelizing .NET Applications
They're not very accurate. They get my country wrong quite regularly.

Also Amazon may know your current location but not where you'll be when you buy something. If I'm travelling does that mean that I can't buy something shipped to my home that would I could buy if I were at home.
Maybe the 'i' is silent?
To be fair, I've nobbled that particular behaviour of GNOME 3.0 because it prevents using the Super key for any other keyboard shortcuts.

Is this really the case on your system? I've always had a shortcut to gnome-terminal on Mod4+T and I can't remember having any problems since I upgraded to Fedora 15.
I would have a number of questions about this study, which was apparently run and written up by the "DRACO" patent holder.

The results are largely from cell culture so any talk about a "cure for a broad range of viruses" in the press release is premature bullshit to say the least.

There were some mice studies, along with this statement in the paper: "We have also demonstrated that DRACOs can rescue mice challenged with H1N1 influenza" - for which evidence are examination of harvested organs after two days, and three graphs showing separation for mortality between treatment and control (buffer) groups out 10 days or so (time plot ends at that point). Searching the paper, I finally find by looking at the morbidity graph that we're talking about 13 mice per group for one type of DRACO intraperitoneal administration, 5 per group for the other type of DRACO i.p, and 12 mice per group for intranasal administration.

In addition, as the authors themselves note, how much cell death could be tolerated in the face of chronic viral infection remains to be seen.

This is a very preliminary trial. There are years of work before this even approaches meriting mention of a "cure".
> This is a charged issue, and I don’t have the energy to deal with comments.

I cannot take people like this seriously. They spend x hours of energy thinking about a statement that they want to communicate and demand that said statement be taken at face value and not called into question because they "don’t have the energy to deal with comments."

Some people are jerks; it's the way they operate. Why do you think they have gorillas working the door at strip clubs? The only way to create a safe environment for people who otherwise may be verbally or physically assaulted is to confront those whom offend head-on, right then and there and make them understand that their actions are unacceptable. Sometimes that requires booing a speaker, tapping someone on the shoulder or calling them out in public/internet. Some times you'll be in the wrong, but if you have well-founded convictions and a little bit of brass, more often than not you'll be in the right. That's not a call to become your own policing agency, it's a suggestion to not be a coward and look the other way or in this case, refuse to stand up for the same principles that you claim to have and expect in others by refusing to take comments.
Thanks for the detailed answer, you've given me a bunch of stuff to go read about. My original idea came from something from SENS about moving mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus to take advantage of the better repair systems: http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens

Obviously it would be more complex than

if hash(nuclear DNA) != clean_DNA_hash) die;

but I wonder to what extent the immune system could be enhanced. I wonder if there are some techniques that could be adapted from the computer virus/malware detection field back into biology.

A recent article on creating false-positives for a virus scanner (http://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/aids8064.html) by analysing the signatures makes me think of creating 'virus pre-images' for vaccination.

Other than the specialised cells which manipulate their own genome, would there be value in positively checksumming {D,R}NA, rather than adaptively pattern-matching for the bad ones, which is (I think) how it mostly works now?

Granted, you'd be hindering the evolutionary process by preventing mutation, but if we ever intend to start messing around inside ourselves, the first step would probably be to make sure that whatever we create, it's going to stay that way, or die.
What database do you have running on the backend?
I definitely like this pronounciation.
SOFTWARE GRÁTIS PARA GESTÃO DE IGREJAS EVANGÉLICAS/CATÓLICAS
Single Responsibility Principle for the win.

Definitely comes into play in good design. One of the biggest things I've found is that to constantly look at new ways to approach a problem. Don't just assume you've learned it all.

One thing I'd like to learn how to do better is to refactor better.
The name is hilarious. Probably the only reason I checked out the website. Starting to think that it was done intentionally.
BlackHat Talk on OS X Server Vulnerability to Network Attacks
In my experience Node.js is more difficult than synchronous code. But it's also, by far, the easiest way to get something running that's massively parallel.

I recently wrote a project that needs to do 100's or 1000's of possibly slow network requests per second. The first try was Ruby threads. That was a disaster (as I should have predicted). I had an entire 8-core server swamped and wasn't getting near the performance I needed.

The next try was node. I got it running and the performance was fantastic. A couple orders of magnitude faster than the Ruby solution and a tenth of the load on the box. But, all those callbacks just didn't sit right. Finding the source of an exception was a pain and control flow was tricky to get right. So, I started porting to other systems to try to find something better. I tried Java (Akka), EventMachine with/without fibers, and a couple others (not Erlang though).

I could never get anything else close to the performance of Node. They all had the same problems I have with Node (mainly that if something breaks, the entire app just hangs and you never know what happened), but they were way more complicated, _harder_ to debug, and slower.

I have a new appreciation for Node now. And now that I'm much more used to it, it's still difficult to do some of the more crazy async things, but I enjoy it a lot more. It's a bit of work, and you have to architect things carefully to avoid getting indented all the way to the 80-char margin on your editor, but you get a lot for that work.
Unless I'm misreading something, this has prompted the competition to work with a different material (some kind of fiberglass). So even though the competition can't use the same material they have an alternative that is cheaper and readily available. I don't see the problem.
Hmm, I'm sorry about that. I know there are a few people that I want to see, which is the most important factor.
Who cares? It's still lame and violates the Law of Demeter.
I did not see a text-enabled remote engine starter on the Subaru web site, and the article was unclear if it was a stock Subaru or it they added an aftermarket "text your car" widget.

After-market "text" widgets are available: http://text2car.com/
If it's a transliteration of ふきめ then it's 'foo-key-meh'.
I really like the idea behind these books, it reminds me of how I learnt originally, typing BASIC programs into my zx spectrum from the back of computer magazines.
So you'd decline to collude with another company who approached you? What if they offered to pay?
Have you tried Haskell? Why haven't you tried Erlang? They're both good choices for writing applications that handle making and receiving thousands of concurrents requests because they have very fast lightweight threads and good exception handling and you don't need to write the kind of code that Node.js forces you to write.
What questions does it raise about my motives? Please ask the questions explicitly and I will address them, because although it reads like I should be offended in some way, I can't figure out what exactly you seem to be implying. Maybe I'm a paid shill for some wikipedia competitor?

It's hard for me to intentionally misrepresent the discussion since I refuse to visit the page from work because I don't want an image of a naked woman on my computer screen at work.

There are arguments there that say "hey, that's unnecessary, distracting, and this picture that would not be construed as inappropriate for work or school suits the article just as well". I don't recall what "the later 3 images" refers to. Assuming it was support of the naked image (because otherwise, you've presented no support of rational argument in favor of it), it supports my point: saying that people should not consider it vulgar is not a legitimate response to "we should not unnecessarily alienate users who may be uncomfortable accessing a site with unexpected naked women"
Migrating to Australia Financial Planning
Well, suppose I want to find my friend Henry Jones on Google+, but I can't because his pseudonym is Jameson Soulblighter, and since I know him from real life rather than online, I had no idea. Now I'll never get back in touch with him.

Now, it's possible that Henry Jones doesn't want to be found, but you can set your profile to be non-searchable.
checkout GrowNashville.com
ComScore Reports Android Smartphone Share Grows To 40 Percent
Schismatrix reference here
To be fair, mice are freaking stupid. They've lasted this long because they solve a specific problem miles better than anything else out there, but, they are still freaking stupid pieces of equipment.

If apple can convince me to do away with mine, I will be grateful to them.
Following Japanese pronunciation rules, it would be fu-key-may (though like Heroku, it isn't a real Japanese word).
re moat: That's certainly an interesting way to look at it, but it doesn't change the fact that Android does make money, both for Google and for carriers/manufacturers. So, again, it's not an artificially lowered price, and while it certainly augments search, it's not subsidized by search.

Your argument for maps and finance is stronger, but the analogy isn't great. For one, Google doesn't have close to the monopoly that MS had. For another, it's really hard to draw the line between the products, and equally hard to say whether Google's use of its search engine to point to its own services is unfair, if it really believes its own products are better. I would characterize their position on this issue as still some distance from MS + IE on the 'fair' to 'unfair' spectrum, but still in 'fair' territory. Of course, I never found the bundling line of argument against IE to be particularly compelling.
> That's a completely separate issue from anonymity.

I take issue with your premise. Anonymity is a scale including "real names" -> pseudonymity -> anonymity.

There are folks who want anonymity and folks who want "real names". Problem here is the "real names" supporters want to ban pseudonyms as well. I take real issue with that.

Pseudonyms aren't a recent thing. Stage names, noms de plume and masked balls have been around for millennia. The drive to purge that from our online public spaces is a real threat to society as a whole.
I'm assuming you're from the US and that attending a school reunion is a big deal. But as a non-US person who didn't even attend his university graduation ceremony I urge you not to go if the idea bothers you in the slightest. Who gives a damn about those people you went to school with? Look forward to your future and all the interesting people you will meet there.
> I'm not buying a $40 bulb, even from Philips, unless it has a 20 year warranty.

Even if it has a 20 year warranty, that's not much good because the cost of using the warranty exceeds the value of product replacement. (Do you keep receipts and product packages long enough? Then there's the hassle of doing the return.)
This is true. Chess punishes you mercilessly for blundering. I've noticed that on the whole, chess games seem to evolve pretty predictably. Obviously this makes it difficult to recover a lost strategic advantage as so much of chess play is really just systematically advancing a position while avoiding blunders.

On another note, I've never really grokked Go. The rules seem so simple I'm never really sure if I'm playing right. Additionally, It's really difficult for me to evaluate a Go board and see who's winning. On the other hand, I've never invested much effort in understanding Go.
You’re an entrepreneur. Really? (Part 2)
The UDP checksum is fairly weak, so a packet with two bit errors can pass the checksum.

Still, I would attribute hits on mic2soft.com to human error with higher likelihood than transmission errors. Human error is around 10^-2 [http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/HumanErr/Basic.htm] compared to transmission errors below 10^-9 for non-broken networks.