skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ugh. it's not impressive to the common man unless you shoot bullets at it or try and blow it up.
I've enjoyed some of the posts on the f5 devcentral site but this fell short. The premise of the article is flawed. The 'solution' presented tackles hotlinking only and doesn't prevent someone on your site saving an image to their hard drive and then uploading that image to their own site later on.

The solution tackles bandwidth theft, not content theft.
Thanks for an easy way to let my friends know when I comment on stuff here :)
Installing Xbox Media Center (XBMC) On Fedora 9 (i386)
Don't be fooled, the average Joe won't ever dig computer programming, it's the same with mathematics or physics. No matter if it is taught in school. Guess why?
OK, that felt like 1998. I had expected that a full-blown Postfix+Dovecot with IMAP, POP3, with and without SSL and TLS, on Maildirs with virtual users and DSPAM configured would be a single apt-get install.

Anyway, what's a guide doing asking users to choose between four flavors of protocols? Just enable them all. Maildirs/mbox? Mbox is ancient, no possible reason to setup new accounts using that. And the biggest WTF has got to be the actual users created. Who wants to run a mailserver without virtual users and virtual domains in 2008 anyway?
Cool find! I wonder how difficult would it be to make this a firefox plugin.
I've been considering something like this for the smartphone I don't have in the automated home I also don't have.

By mapping the room location by wifi strength and then the direction with an in-built compass it should be possible to 'target' a window on the south wall for instance and with a single press of a button open the blinds. Accelerometers could detect an upward tilt and again with a single press of a button turn on the ceiling light.

As I said at the beginning I have no current need for this sort of technology but it's interesting to think about.
TIS 100 Winner: LuckyCal
The blender stops after 3 seconds.
Jocuri Barbie
Jocuri Barbie. Jocurile pentru fete precum jocurile de imbracat papusi, de machiat sau de transformat sau jocuri populare precum Bratz.
It's down. HN effect?

(Now, as of 8:12 am, it's back.)
Google simply wants to lift it's image and prepare for the world gene data-base. nice move anyway. one day they won't be selling personalized ads/entertainment or job/hiring/mating recommendations, but health-insurance-relevant data from body to soul.
Three Observations about Free to Play Games and Virtual Goods
The lack of a page footer was very confusing, but great read nonetheless.
Not really. There isn't really any major reason why you'd need to wrap it in a macro, because it's not enough code to be worth running at compile time, and you don't need to control evaluation order.

The bigger problem in elisp is that it doesn't have any kind of remotely sane namespacing, so instead of being something like Hashtable.make and Hashtable.set (which you could alias to HT.make and HT.set if you like), functions are either scattered all over the one global namespace or are all prefixed with cumbersome-package-name-. You could alias them all individually, but at that point it really doesn't contribute much to readability.

The potential solution probably involves read macros, which (for example) convert 'STATE to (quote STATE) at read-time. Having read macros that could convert e.g. x[23] to (nth 23 x), x['key 'val] to (puthash 'key 'val x), etc. would be quite enough, but read macros are prefix, and [23]x really doesn't do it for me. (I'm experimenting with adding postfix read macros to a Scheme-ish interpreter of mine, but I haven't found a good way to make it fit the rest of Lisp comfortably yet.)
You'll have to back that statement up. There aren't nearly as many serious plane accidents as car accidents, by a factor of at least 100. At least if you consider regular airline traffic.
Keyboard sniffers to steal data
Florida Medical Billing, Medical Coding and Medical Consulting Free Consultation
Proactive Physician Services is a Florida based Medical Coding, Billing and Consulting service assisting Physicians improve their annual revenue.
Sound familiar? Battle between lure of reward and fear of failure in the brain
Inside the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies
That's it exactly. No goofy "app store", no lockdown because "maybe that might interfere with the apple expereince..." Just a skilled user, doing precisely what he wants with his hardware.

The true promise of Android, realized.
Autographed Movie Posters Craze
A monstrous crowd, fans, photographers and news reporters alike, they are all there, eagerly awaiting the arrival of their famed idol. Camera flashes go off blitzing the red carpet walkway hoping to get that perfect shot for their celebrity photos. People are screaming out with laughter and happiness.
Animated Javascript Sorting Algorithms
Who wants to run a mail server now anyway? Extremely reliable email hosting with good spam filtering and anti-virus protection costs $25 a year or less. Even if you can reduce the mail server maintenance to a half-hour per year (doubtful) and if you can keep your server running and connected 99.99% of the time (doubtful), it still isn't worth your time.
> Another reason for the higher efficiency of open-rotor

> engines is that, unlike traditional engines, they do

> not have a casing around the propeller.

"Traditional" engines? Isn't this nomenclature a little backwards, given that propellers pre-date jet engines?

EDIT: I still haven't figured out how to quote correctly here... this site seems to only use a tiny subset of Markdown.
Capitalism at bay: What went wrong and what didn't
The Real Story of the Panic Over 'War of the Worlds'
Actually Peter Thiel would be a good choice, Who better to be the CTO of USA than a Libertarian.
India’s Booming Business: CAPTCHA Solving
Where Congress Puts Its Own Money (Apple)
An Educated Email User is a Spammer’s Nightmare
While 3 years old, this article says Apple spend $287 million in advertising in 2005, and that was part of an upward trend. http://news.cnet.com/iPod-ads-cost-Apple-a-bundle/2100-1047_...

In comparison, the Vista campaign is reported at $300 million today.

I think we can say that Apple spends comparable money on advertising as Microsoft.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make this particular commercial annoying and misleading; a big disappointment from the clever ones that began this ad campaign.
Actually, I think compared to the growth we've seen, a 10% drop would be pretty sharp. Not a "game over" drop, but it's a significant shift in direction. It's grown by 25-35% the last few years.
The thing is, the vacuum cleaner moves around. I think that is part of the fear factor for cats.

My two were petrified of our shower when it was put in because it's quite noisy, but have both since learned to ignore it. One even sits on the side of the bath watching the water. They still hate the vacuum.

If they figure out that the blender doesn't move around the sideboard, they MAY get used to it, and the owner will end up back at square one. Of course, it goes without saying that every cat is different...
At last, an article on saving that seems to be actually useful.
I agree. It's really easy to say "throw away your Blackberry and enjoy life" when you don't have to earn another penny as long as you live. The rest of us just make the best of whatever situation we find ourselves in.
Thanks for the suggestions, but these don't seem right for subscription web 2.0 services.

I'm looking for options more like http://www.thinksubscription.com

Know of any? Anyone?
Paperless Office Company
Offers software that enables offices to go completely paperless. Their software creates an easy access to all of your files via any computer, it secures your documents, contains a searchable document database, increases office efficiency, and more.
It should be someone who is largely retired, like a Cinnenatus kind of person, so, for example, not Steve Balmer. He is awesome as ceo of microsoft, and the world would be poorer for it, were he to go elsewhere, in my opinion. This job is not even that technical - just trying to increase access to broadband, and advising on "green tech" issues. More a job for a marketing type than a super-technical type.
so iphone/virtual-keyboard is more secure ?
Python's email parsing
Can you recommend any email hosting companies?

I was planning on building an email server this morning on Ubuntu. I thought about using GMail before setting up a full server.
True, but it's $0.80 cheaper than the nearest alternative. At $0.10 a song, you can easily download an (or close to) an entire album for $1, and I could go for that any day of the week.
I thought the article said the engine doesn't have a casing, but in the picture, it does. Kind of makes sense though: if I understand jet engines, they must compress air, so the air must be compressed in some kind of container. This design just uses smaller containers.
TestMonkey: How appropriate
Ask YC: Credit card processing in Python?
I need to do credit card processing, (I use Python and Django), and I don't know where to start from.

So what are the libraries/tutorials I should read on to do this?
Investors taking advantage of the market downturn to push for better terms
Sen. Ted Stevens
But remember that when a plane has a serious accident _hundreds_ of people may die.
Thanks for the link! I actually saw something almost exactly like this by someone who was working for Looking Glass, but it didn't go in depth about the scripting layer, it just mentioned that you could either go with "static" classes, "data-driven" classes, or a hybrid. In my own development, I've generally gone with hybrid just because the value of flexibility surpasses any sort of performance hit, but I still keep some of the very simple stuff (object position, velocity, etc.) in the static layer.
So propeller engines are more efficient than jet engines? Is this true regardless of speed, plane size? I always thought jet engines were revolutionary, were they really just quieter?
These ads lack class, which is what Apple has always tried to stand for, in design of their products and their company image - anyone remember the Think Different campaign?

I'd rather they work on reducing the difference in price between the pc world and the mac in laptops. It used to be a couple hundred dollars difference, which I'm ok with because that, to me, is the price of OSX, but its getting increasingly harder to justify the expanding price difference.

If/when the OSX86 project gets to the point where their ISO is a no-brainer install of OSX on cheap dell/acer (etc.) laptops then Apple will have to reconsider its pricing.

The irony here (like rain on your wedding day!) is that it's actually Apple with that big pile of cash spending it on advertising, while MSFT goes back to the drawing board to come up with an O/S that more people like...
Meh, you're stretching the metaphor. Adventuring "into the unknown" doesn't have to be financially risky - you could explore it at a university or big R&D lab, without much risk of market failure.
You should look at "Io," a language based entirely on this modeling philosophy: http://www.iolanguage.com/

I have to disagree with people who say class based modeling is "intuitive". It only seems intuitive after you've been steeped in OO practices for years. (It certainly isn't intuitive to many first or second year CS students!) But prototype based modeling, on the other hand (prototype modeling is Io's term for yegge's Universal Design Pattern) is something that I think is intuitive, because there are no classes, only objects, and making a new object is just a matter of cloning an object you already have and adding to it.
I'm very skeptical. I've never heard of investors asking for more stock in a deal that has already closed. The worst that could happen is that an investor might pull or try to renegotiate a termsheet.
On iTunes, you can only listen to a snippet of a song, correct? I find snippets to be worthless; I can't make a bying decision based on them.

Furthermore, most non-mainstream music is not available on youtube/lastfm/seeqpod/skreemr/myspace/etc.
Lessig: The increasing use of copyright laws as tools for censorship.
Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?
I can empathize with the farm boy back ground of Evan Williams.
Hackers paradigm, if it does not kill you :)

Besides, it's always good to know about all sorts of things, including how to setup a mail server, even if you will never need one. I'm sure that there is something that you will learn in the process, which will prove itself useful in the future. For instance, while setting up my own server I learned some stuff that helped my while coding something using the python email libraries.

So nothing wrong in learning ;)
i disagree.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131495

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131547
http://searchyc.com/credit+card

Although it would be nice to see what some thoughts and ideas people on HN have utilized themselves when implementing a Django web app.
When pricing and quality of service change the game, they don't seem like they're much different from what existed before - the negative slashdot review of the ipod being the classic example.

This service would put online music, finally, at a price point where I could actually use it. I would love to preview songs for 10c instead of have 30 seconds of the song, and uploading my music to a web site has been what I've wanted to do for a long time - why do I have 30g of music on the hard drive of both my computers?

I'm not saying this is definitely what's going to do it, but it seems to me like it has the potential to be awesome, and remember to try and see past your hacker bias.
Not necessarily... electromagnetic eavesdropping on LCD monitors has been proven possible as well. We're all going to get exposed!

If you're interested the following is a link to a paper on Van Eck phreaking LCD monitors:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/pet2004-fpd.pdf
VC Confidential: What Compensation Should You Give Your Team?
Yes, propeller based engines are much more efficient. They don't waste quite as much energy "throwing" air out the back. It is generally true regardless of size. However, using a propeller does limit the speed of the plane. In fact, an airliner with an open-rotor engine (like the one described in the article) will most likely fly just a bit slower (around Mach 0.75-0.8 instead of 0.85 like most airliners today). The propeller becomes very inefficient when shocks start to form on it. Therefore, you have limitations in how fast you can spin the blades and how fast you can fly. You eventually reach a speed where the blades cannot generate any more thrust to keep accelerating the aircraft.

Jet engines were revolutionary, but not because they are quieter. Pure jet engines are actually incredibly loud. The only way the noise was reduced in modern airline engines was the advent of high bypass engines where most of the air going through the engine is only slightly accelerated.
There was a story a few months ago about being able to figure out which keys were pressed by the sound they made. Does anyone know how that story developed? If it was validated then I'm not sure this new attack vector really changes anything.
Data dump: PowerPointing the way to the end of teaching.
LOL!! Yes in the same way that making paper and ink is presently.
PhD Comics: Academic Salaries
This is high quality advice, which is refreshing to see in today's blog economy.

I learned a few things, and the fact that I'm already leveraging some of these tools made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside =]
Yes, but then you can only listen to it on the web. Not on your iPod or if your internet goes down or.. the list goes on.
You could also get around that limitation by just recording your audio output in software to file, but then you are being dishonest :)

I figure the web audio is lower quality anyways, so there's incentive to pay 80 cents more.
I just wish that that knowledge was embedded in the products themselves

Err, it is. Oracle, Sybase, MS SQL, Informix, all the major database products have sophisticated query optimizers. You use SQL to describe the result set you want, and it figures out the best way to get it.

Sadly the Web 2.0 world is full of people who actually believe MySQL is as good as databases get, having never used anything else. It's probably a good 10-15 years behind the state-of-the-art, at least (and Oracle et al are behind in niche areas).
Tweet What You Spend (dot com)
So what was revolutionary about jet engines, just the ability to go faster than mach .8?
Are Blogs As We Know Them Dead?
Auto Mechanics: A Good Hobby for Programmers
The problem is that computer literacy is a shifting sand, unlike other skills - teaching someone word processing years ago isn't going to help them do an effective google search today.

So while I think programming is an overkill, knowing the fundamentals might be worthwhile.
Useful, but they didn't include Google Apps. No need to deal with an SMTP server, and it's $50/year or free with ads. It's a lot easier to sync calendars and documents across a team if everyone is using Google Apps.
Academic Salaries side-by-side
India counts down for its first (unmanned) lunar misson
Definitely the best choice for Chief Tubes Officer.
"In a windowless room on Microsoft’s campus here, T. J. Campana, a cybercrime investigator, connects an unprotected computer running an early version of Windows XP to the Internet."

Make up your mind already!
As a rule of thumb, people travel 4-5x as fast on a bike as on foot. (Hills, ice, etc. complicate this, of course.)

Bikes are probably best suited to trips of about 1/4 - 10 miles, alone, with less than fifty pounds of cargo. (That covers more trips than many people realize.) Riding a bike three blocks is probably not worth the trouble, and riding fifty miles is (while quite possible) going to take a few hours.
Thank you for that link.

So a few questions after reading some of the articles for those in the know,

1. How can a Non US citizen get a Merchant Account?
2. I just want to confirm that the Credit card is valid, (or maybe get a token payment.) (I want to confirm that you CAN pay for the service, the first month is free.) Is Authorise.net good for something like this. What is a good price to charge as a token payment?
As a concept, there is nothing revolutionary about it. This was explored quite a bit back in the 1980s. It is a natural consequence of the physics of how engines operate most efficiently and is well known. So it wouldn't suggest that a GA was necessary to "find" this as a configuration.

At this point in time, CFD and the types of tools used in engine design do not lend themselves very well to applications using GA. CFD and other computational tools are very slow (on the order of hours to days) to run and still require a lot of human oversight to produce decent results (so much for physics-based tools, eh?). In addition, it's not quite as simple as a CFD code. It will also have to include the thermodynamic cycle analysis, structural analysis, and noise analysis tools (and dozens of other tools in order to properly assess a possible design). In a very large design space, this would make a zero-order random search method very inefficient. GA are best when the evaluation of the fitness function is computationally inexpensive. That's not to say that there are no applications of GA in aerospace design, but right now they are much more limited in scope.

Engine design is incredibly complex. The big engine manufacturers spend several BILLION dollars designing the "core" of the engine alone.
There is no correct way to quote. You can either use italics or quotes, but there is no markup that will trigger the blockquote HTML tag.

There is a "help" link next to the edit text box (but not the reply text box, for some reason): http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Yeah, some people on bikes are incredibly inconsiderate, but the bike isn't the problem. If more people rode bikes, the social norms about where to ride / not to ride would be better understood, and the social pressures would be clearer. This sort of thing also happened when cars where new, though then people actually got killed instead of just annoyed. See Clay McShane's _Down the Asphalt Path_ (http://books.google.com/books?id=hoFKI-yodUQC&pg=RA1-PA1...)

Similarly, people who don't know about how to ride bikes safely are far more likely to ride against traffic, weaving in and out of parking lanes and sidewalks, etc. Most people in the US have had no education about how to ride a bike in traffic safely, because riding bikes as transportation has never really been a mainstream thing. (Even two or three one-hour classes and showing people how to fix a flat tire would go a long way, I think.)
they were saying there's no casing around the propeller part of the engine, in a turbofan, the casing encloses the blades.
Another thought. I heard that putting a duct around a prop gives you more thrust ceteris paribus. Is this just not true, or maybe only true for slow speeds?
Can I Get Debt Collectors Off My Back?
2 words. Virtual Goods.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/25/can-you-guess-which-fac...
Sun to change ticker symbol again — now will be called OOPS.
Aside from hardware there are the more fuzzy areas in the embedded/hardware world where Open Source can make a lot of inroads - anything from Firmware through to VHDL/Verilog designs for FPGAs.

The later is useful because it's more accessible in a way - you have a standard Altera or whatever board, and simply upload your design to exercise it. You can also simulate, debug, etc. This puts it on the software end of the spectrum, but ongoing wins here will eventually broaden.

http://www.opencores.org/ is already doing some good work on this.
>Neither Stallman nor Torvalds are scrambling to pay rent.

I've heard rumors that Torvalds wishes he had the money Jobs and Gates have. So, yeah, a little unhappy.

>And besides that, lightning has to strike the same place 200 times before you make it to the 99.9th percentile.

That's if you're in a bell-curve. If you're in a zipf-distribution, lightning only has to strike once.
That was certainly a big part of it. Jet engines, although revolutionary, were developed only about 40 years after heavier-than-air flight began. It's hard to group all jet engines into a single category and discuss trends of the entire group. One grouping you could make is the distinction between turbojets (and very low bypass turbofans) and medium/high bypass turbofan engines. With turbojet engines (like the original designs starting from the 1940s), you had the ability to produce a lot of thrust at the expense of fuel consumption. These are the types of engines that you had in military jets and supersonic planes like the Concorde.

However, for modern airliners, fuel consumption is important. So a second class of jet engines was used that send a small portion of the air through the "core" of the engine, where it is burned and power is extracted, and the majority of the air is accelerated through the fan without being combusted. This is much more efficient (and much quieter, since most of the noise you hear is from the interaction of the high speed air coming out of the engine with the surroundings). The open-rotor concept described in this article is just a natural extension of the high-bypass engine. You get a much more efficient engine when you can increase the ratio between the amount of air that you accelerate through the fan compared to how much you send through the core and burn (this is called the bypass ratio). Since the weight and drag penalty increase exponentially as you increase the size of your engine, removing the duct around the fan becomes necessary once you get to very large bypass ratios.
Latest Orkut Hack | Hacking Truths
I liked the ad anyways!!!
It gets damn cold in Maine in winter.
Prediction: By this time next year, gmail will no longer be the primary app people associate with Paul Buchheit.
It's only old in the sense that it has been there for a long time. It's still active and updated frequently.