skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The points he made about how to improve the patent system are really good ones. I have always though a short lifespan on patents would be better for inovation.

I think patents are good for certain things but over all it slows inovation. I think we could be another 25 years farther down the road with technology if there where not so many bad patents out there.
Disclaimer: my father is a seismologist.

It is near 0% likely that the Colorado earthquake and Virginia earthquake are related as VA and CO are on different faults. It's not 0% because, quite frankly, it's hard to model the earth.

This wikipedia article on plate tectonics explains how the Earth crust is composed of different sections all sliding past/under each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics Since the earthquakes occur at the friction points between the plates, this should help explain why Japan and California has a lot, and Virginia and Colorado not so much.

One of the major problems humans have with earthquakes is the assumption that we should/can predict them. As such, whenever there are earthquakes close in time to one another, the first assumption is that the first earthquake caused the second. Aftershocks are such an example where this assumption holds because the primary earthquake causes secondary earthquakes. However, in the general case, this assumption does not hold.

The gravity of this situation is clear in Italy where seismologists are on trial for manslaughter for not predicting the L’Aquila earthquake: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110526/full/news.2011.325.ht...

The open letter in support of these seismologists is here (I'm #4580): http://www.mi.ingv.it/open_letter/
He was also thrown out of the CCC.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,780289,00...
I don't think so this particular case is just "few hours of A/B testing". They were testing pretty drastic design changes - and it takes lot more than few hours to come up with design concepts, copyright text, and then actual implementation. These were not typical "test different landing page title or action call button color" tests. These were brand new design changes. So for established companies, this is absolutely the right approach - as your product is already ready, now just increase the sales. But for many early stage companies, when product development itself is constantly evolving and demanding, spending so much time on different design iterations is not always possible. Agree, their results are phenomenal, but not sure how many companies understand this before they try.
What advice would you give to someone who did realistically want to work in, implement, and evaluate industrial-strength crypto?
What is more "tech" than 6-magnitude earthquake in the middle of Virginia!?

Is the only topic permissable here these days another software patent debacle or something?
...people who work 80 hours a week not because they have to – but because they want to

Ugh, what a turnoff... please keep this (mostly) American silliness from other countries!

Also, if someone in your company is doing it and is being condoned, it's no longer a choice for others not to put in at least a little bit over 40 hours.
Ravitch is just as radical in her views as Waiting for Superman is on the other side. Both sides vastly oversimplify things and refuse to accept reasonable compromises on ideological grounds.

My personal views are closer to "Waiting for Superman" than Ravitch's, but I (like many ed-reformers) am a lefty. Views on education issues don't split cleanly along party lines.

My take on Ravitch's NYBooks piece is here (the tl;dr version is that her criticisms of the charter school movement as "an attack on public education" are way overblown): http://tumblr.2arrs2ells.com/post/1586044918/myth-of-charter...
Oh man, they're closing offices here in C-ville now, looks like there is a worry of possible aftershocks. Hope you guys stay safe, this all probably sounds ridiculous to you guys in CA.
Kathmandu Metropolitan City website database hacked by T34mTg3R
They may spend less per child on education, but they probably spend more on social services.

Read the paragraph in the article that starts with "it's almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless."

Many American students face huge barriers to learning that originate outside of school. They are hungry, chronically ill, don't have a home, don't have a quiet space to study, don't have supportive parents, etc. No amount of school reform will fix those problems.

Check out season 4 of The Wire for a very grim account of a school in a very poor area.
I don't think the GP claimed it is a French word. Actually he explicitly said that it's not, and I don't see him claiming anything on its origins.
List of Mobile Networks implementing filters to avoid SMS spam
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These sorts of articles always smack of cargo cultism. First we say "Holy crap, country X is doing better than the US in standardized test Y!". Then we pick out all the ways in which country X is different from the US. Then we throw out the ones which we don't like and assume it must be the other ones which are responsible. Therefore, if we hold childrens' hands more then they'll do better in tests and if build a big flat area in the middle of the jungle and wave sticks in the air then a giant metal bird will land and bring us cargo.

The answer to the question of how to improve US education is obvious to everybody... unfortunately the obvious answer always seems to differ depending on whom you're talking to. Teachers' unions will say that the answer is to pay more money to teachers. Anti-union activists will say that the answer is to get rid of teachers' unions. The left will say that we need more redistributive taxation, while the right will say that we need to implement market-based reforms to force schools to compete with one another. And racists will say that it's unavoidable that the US will do worse than European countries, because the US has so many black people.

Problems are relatively easy to solve when political agendas are involved, but once you get to the stage where everybody is simultaneously shouting "This new piece of evidence clearly shows that my political agenda was right all along" then problems have become completely insoluble.
Turkish government website Hacked by kurdish hacker
A: because coding interviews are conducted like a drunk looking for his keys.
Disappointedly lacking on details.

Why did page load time go up during the quake? Was there a fiber fault that took a few seconds to be routed around? Did the vibrations cause HDDs to temporarily suspend?

This could have some interesting data behind it, but as it is the article doesn't even have conclusive proof that the earthquake did cause this outage.
Announcing the Winners of the Demo App Contest
Ask HN: Help, I think GoDaddy has hijacked my domain
I registerred a personal domain for a 1 year period from GoDaddy on Sept 1, 2010. As the expiration is approaching (2011-09-01), I decided to renew for another year. I used my PayPal to purchase 1 yr. renewal & private registration, however due to a recent (unrelated) issue with PayPal, I had a stop-payment issued from my bank so the payment failed. My payment was reverted and consequently so was my renewal order. This is fine; I planned on using another payment method to pay for the renewal.

However, to my surprise, GoDaddy has further taken the reversal and revoked access to my domain and pointed it to standard GoDaddy landing page.

I paid for the domain from 2010-09-01 to 2011-09-2011, but my service has been cut short. Does GoDaddy have the right to take over my domain in this case?

Thanks for any input
> That said, it's the world we live in. So, like every other Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I file patents.

This is patents-as-positional-good, a zero sum game that consumes resources and produces effectively no net value.
F-Secure : Chinese Government Launching Online Attacks
Specifically, I'm a freelance web developer.

They all are. ;-)

Thanks for the detailed response. Sounds great.
Evolution of Geek
E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy manages to be fun despite many design mistakes
Congrats. Very nice UI man . wishes all the best
I have spent a decent amount on apps... but I spend to put on about 6 devices (iPhones, iPads, iPod touches for family members), and any new iDevices we buy.

That Apple recognizes and allows this behavior really tells me that they don't care about profit from apps.

Apps, for Apple, are features of the real product, the hardware. Hundreds of thousands of features where the competing hardware platforms don't compare as favorably.

It was the same with AAC DRM music on the iPod (when few other players at the time supported AAC, and none supported FairPlay DRM)... these were little land mines in a music library that prevented users from switching or even considering it.
Well, I have no idea what actually happened down there, but the timing would be a pretty incredible coincidence.
You'd be hard pressed to invalidate a utility patent with some footage from a movie, because it probably wouldn't be "enabling." But design patents just claim ornamental designs.
Writing begets writing. The process of sitting down and figuring out what to say is something that gets easier and hopefully better with practice.
Also interesting: a Sun engineer uses dtrace to show HDD latency spiking after he yells at his disks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
I may eventually investigate a way to get it printed and bound in a classy hardcover with a dust jacket, similar to the photo of the book from _Why's guide site. This is one of few programming/tech books that I feel deserve such treatment.
The tag approval is long overdue... and it's nice they're making the "View Profile As" more easily accessible.
Lots of people store their .emacs files on github, so you can start plugging variations of "org-mode" into search and it'll usually hit on either filenames (for those of us that split our .emacs into multiple files) or setup code itself. Will probably be a bit messy against all of the people forking org, but it's still worth a shot.

If you want to stare into the abyss, mine's at

http://www.github.com/qdot/conf_emacs
Why not? This is traditionally the video game hardware model where you sell the hardware at a lost and make up for it on video game sales.

Some smart company out there, if done right can easily undermine the Apple dominance by lowering the cost of hardware and trying to make up for it in app sales. You would have to own the entire vertical system like Apple, which now there are two -- RIM and Google with their Motorola acquisition. Google has the best chance, they are sitting on a pile cash and can easily subsidized the losses for their hardware partners like Samsung and HTC. However, I think RIM is the most ideal as they are dealing with a chicken-and-egg type scenario with developers and lack of apps. They are desperate to stay relevant in the market, so why not do something crazy.
It's a design patent, so yes. Previous use of an equivalent design on a TV show is a good as design anywhere else.

On the other hand, if someone invents a working replicator, Star Trek will not count as prior art. :-)
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As far as the reason, you'd have to ask who works on AWS. For obvious reasons, we don't have direct access to the Amazon datacenter.

As far as conclusive proof is concerned, yes, we can't guarantee there wasn't a gravitational singularity that affected response time, but it's very likely that this was the case.
The problem with this argument is that many of us are making significant money in the Market, and we feel pretty strongly that for that 30% cut Google gets of our sales, we should be getting way better support. Hell, GREAT support. Then turning us away from a public forum is like spit in our face.

Over the last year, I ALONE have given up enough in that 30% to pay the salary of at least a part-time employee just to handle support.

People claim to THINK they know where this 30% is going - maybe to a carrier, or maybe to Google, but Google hasn't officially explained what that 30% is for - at least not anywhere that I've seen.
You can tell that the pop culture geeks put this together... still worth a smirk.

There are many more species of tech geeks than all others combined.

I'm glad that they at least branched us tech geeks before the steve urkel ubergeek.
And yet, now they have this sizable user base waiting to be monetized. It's like selling razors for cheap and making real profit in selling the blades. If only HP had "blades" to sell on top of the touch pad.
There's some truth to that. However, most of the USA is not like season four of The Wire, and still manages to have public schools that are mediocre at best. If it's valid to use fictional schools from TV shows as examples, my experience is that schools in small to medium sized cities in the USA are shockingly similar to the one on South Park.
Was the public interface you tried https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/report/ ? That's the correct place to report security problems.
Mint.com Pre-Launch Pitch Deck
"You can't get rich of advertising"
Guys, I've seen it mentioned a few times on HN that you can't get rich from creating a website supported purely via advertising, yet I've never seen the backup or source of this idea.

Is there any? Where does it come from? What's the basis for it?
This is interesting because I think what these tests prove is that people coming to the Highrise website are not searching Google for CRM terms, they are rather searching for the brand, or are coming from targeted ads... As in, they don't need to be "sold" on anything or given more information to read, they just need a button to click (are already determined to buy / now goal is to just remove barriers for them).

What works here will NOT work somewhere else. Certainly will not work on my website (http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper) where I have to sell the benefits from the start... Even my buy button is at the very bottom of the page because that forces the visitor to read that page... "Above the fold" is nothing but bounces and lost sales for me.
Looks like my server bandwidth graph during DDoS attacks.
Why don't you just shell out to Emacs for the things you need?

E.g. I have a Git repository that hosts an Org-mode file, when you push to it emacs is invoked on the server and converts the file to a HTML file that serves as a shared TODO / Bug list.

You don't have to use Emacs for everything to use Org, just have it export the data you need from the text you're editing in your $EDITOR of choice.
The tablets are being sold far below cost. BOM cost is ~$300 for the HP touchpad.
What does an earthquake do to ticket sales in the east coast? Now THAT would be interesting.
I see your point, but if it cost more to produce than the market price then nobody would mine gold. What separates gold from most other things is its durability not it's rarity. Gold from mined hundreds of years ago is just as valuable as fresh gold so the amount of new gold entering the market each year has little impact on its supply.
Poor Gruber. Your favorite director's movie used against your favorite company.

It's impossible to post a serious comment to a case that is already absurd.
If you don't get a response here, did you try reporting it through BugZilla (http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/) and tagging it as a security bug?
One thing I noticed was that under the 'best text editors' list, Vim shows up multiple times. Would be nice for it to know to combine or something.

Pretty!
Spend 6-8 years breaking it.

(I haven't spent that much time on crypto, and so as a general rule we don't do implementation projects).
It can certainly happen before patents are approved. A description in Robert Heinlein's book, 'Stranger in a Strange Land' was used as prior art to prevent a patent on water beds.
When all is said and done, I wonder if Hitler will have done more good than evil? For all the things he did when he was alive, one of his lasting legacies has been, he has made it incredibly shameful to be racist. Most people don't dare to be publicly racist anymore .. they use euphemisms like "immigrant" instead.
Automated HTTPS Vulnerability Testing by Qualys SSL Labs
Did you read the post? Assuming they're not lying, there are no changes to your existing settings for existing things, but for future posts you'll have better and/or easier control over your privacy settings. This is not FB's usual opt-out fuckup.

Me, I'm cautiously optimistic. Maybe they're learning?
Not all of company's products need to be profitable all at the same, especially for the beast like HP. Obviously they need to be in the tablet business as it's direct threat to almost everything else they've got (well, except servers).

So devaluing that space as long as they can thanks to their other businesses might just as well be the only viable tablet strategy for HP while it reinvents itself.
On the the contrary. Military discipline developed from the necessity of training reliable soldiers who don't question critical orders. Independent thinking is an admirable trait, but knowing your soldiers wont leak information is crucial.

The CIA and NSA have... (goes to look it up)... uhh, some large but undisclosed number of employees. They seem to do a perfectly good job of keeping secrets without needing full-on military discipline.

I'm not actually saying that military training would make anyone a worse hacker, though, I'm just saying that the need for military discipline would limit the number of people (especially in that particular demographic) who wanted to sign up. I have no doubt some of the NSA's best hackers are completely unable to do a single chin-up.
I am not saying I condone it, it's just an example of the mentality, appreciation and willingness that people have and are willing to give you in return for things like a great American style working environment and company appreciation.
Please at least read the link. The 2001 movie still is one of numerous examples cited in the Samsung filing and the "patent" in question is a relatively general and vague "design patent."
Picking The Right Car Insurance For Young Drivers
This article doesn't really address the issue that QNX is not a stand-out against other OSs, it is on par (in most ways what users want from their devices).

The strength which RIM will hopefully leverage will be in providing services to the installed base where QNX already exists. http://www.qnx.com/news/pr_1329_3.html (note, this list is from 2005)

If a Blackberry pairs better with your car, television and other consumer electronics, would you be more likely to buy one? As an example, Jag/Land Rover were showing some capabiltities http://crackberry.com/cars-blackberry-world-jaguar-w-blackbe...
They are using vnc in that example, but apparently the core of the dash system is QNX.
Torture in Bahrain Becomes Routine With Help From Nokia Siemens
Although I admire the courage, I'm somewhat surprised by some of the almost naive American viewpoints expressed by the writer. For instance, it's not so much "extremely difficult to fire someone in Argentina", as it is extremely easy to fire someone in the US.

And maybe it's just me, but I get a sense of a very patronizing attitude towards both his employees and other cultures in general. I strongly suspect the lack of loyalty he experienced isn't just a local cultural thing.
22 free tools for data visualization and analysis
By produce, I mean producing it using nuclear reactors/radioactivity from other elements, not mining.
It's sensitive to your volume, conversion rates, and the magnitude of the difference in conversion rates between A and B. In general, volume is good, higher conversion rates (or easier intermediate conversions, like to email submit rather than to purchase) are good, and large differences in conversion rates are good. It would take a lot of time to statistically significantly discriminate between .001% and .0012% on volumes of 5 visitors a day.

People like easy answers, though, so my easy answer is "A/B testing is worthwhile if you have 100 visitors a day. Otherwise, spend the bulk of your time finding 100 visitors a day first."
Comment on SEC Proposed Rules for Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating
probably the same thing happened here. Vibration will cause latency in reading disk. If the hd platter are jumping around the needle will have a hard time reading it. That probably explains the spike. Time to buy some SSDs ;p
There actually might be a precedent over here.

Heinlein came up with a "waterbed" for a few of his books (it was mentioned quite prominently in Stranger in a strange land) Later on a man called Charles Hall tried to patent his design, and he was denied the patent by the USPO on the grounds that Heinlein's description in Stranger in a strange land, and Double star constituted prior art.

It would be fascinating to see if this precedent is followed...
Is Samsung Aiming to Snap Up HP's PC Business?
I suggest 6 months because, really you are moving to an entirely different place and culture. You can open an office after 2 weeks if you want. I am just recommending a sufficient amount of time to understand where you live and learn how everything works.

Just my 2 cent's whatever it is worth.
Data Testing Challenge - Factual Dev Blog
Nice and very fast. Could you give us more info on what stack did you use to develop/deploy this?
25 Things Writers Should Know About Social Media
I'm going to presume you also by that imply "read all the standard texts, seminal papers, and current state of the art papers".
When I opened this up, I thought for sure that cperciva would have commented on this. Must be a busy day.

And I personally think we all own Mr Zimmerman a debt of gratitude. I don't think I could have handled the stress of what he had to go through with the US Government.
Beast Academy (for aspiring math beasts in grades 2-5)
I'm currently doing a startup in Singapore and a lot of those points definitely ring true with my experiences so far (though I've only been here for about two months).

I would argue two points though:

- If you're really adventurous and willing to take the plunge, I say you can do your research, then hop on a plane within two months at the earliest. Of course it'll be tough, but it'll be tough no matter if you did it later rather than sooner.

- While you can build a company for less overseas, one big thing you'll miss if you decide to really take your business overseas is the nice, large, homogenous U.S. market. Of course depending on the type of startup, your target market may not be geographically locked. In Singapore, you'll hear the phrase "but Singapore's market is so small!" muttered repeatedly. You could still have a startup that primarily targets the U.S. market, but you can definitely feel a disconnect that may or may not eventually impact how your product is marketed.

In the end though, I think what's really great about it is the efficiency of the experience. Immersing yourself in a new culture while building a startup will probably be one of the most life experience packed times of your life where you can grow in so many different ways in such a short amount of time. Depending on your philosophy on life, there may be nothing more appealing than this.
On Outsourcing, Protectionism and Education
Some assertions w/o citation:

That's partially because many parents see school as free childcare and don't understand the value of education themselves. This in turn is because parents are (in general) spending more time away from their children trying to "make ends meet" which itself has to do with consumer culture and living beyond means. It's a complex problem.