skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I feel stupid because I can't figure out what the author is trying to tell us. Maybe someone can help me? (Use small words, and write slooooowly...)

is it: person A has a PayPal account, and person B spoofs a Skype account and is able to withdraw funds from person A's PayPal account?

or: Same as above, but person B has a real Skype acount...

or: person A has a PayPal account and a Skype account, and person B is able to spoof something-or-other and withdraw funds out of the PayPal account....

or... ?
Again, the shell itself isn't really the issue. Can I SSH into a Windows box without third party software? How are the command line utilities for things like SQL Server? Are there any utilities included similar to common UNIX tools such as grep? Is there a command line file editor?

Object piping does sound interesting.
Are there ample warnings to, or explicit agreement with the user that his/her CPU time is going to be used by non-game functions? This seems suspiciously like theft of services.

When I run any process I expect it to restrict all its actions to servicing direct functions related to that process. Plura is expressly unrelated to ANY process/game it is bundled with.

I would personally be annoyed/angry that a program I was using, web-based or not, was using my computer's resources to make money without my knowledge. In fact, you're not just using my computer's resources, you're also drawing more power from my electrical grid, because a processor doing more work consumes more electricity. That's something that directly costs me, the end user, more money. So I would absolutely classify this as theft of service unless the user explicitly agrees to have Plura running in the background.

If there is ample warning to the user, I am fine with this, and would consider it a good idea. Otherwise, it feels really sleazy and wrong.
From the paper:

George Harrison on 12-string pairs 2 through 5: (A2 A3) (D3 D4) (G3 G4) (C4 C4)

George Martin on piano: D3 F3 D5 G5 E6

John Lennon on 6-string: C5

Paul McCartney on his Höfner bass: D3

Expert mixing masks the timbre of the piano amongst the guitars, leading to the "mystery."
Is hackthatbutton.com taken?
Mourning Old Media’s Decline *(Irony edition)*
Unfortunately the buyer wouldn't let me say. Needless to say, it was pretty nice :)
Huffduffer - delicious for podcasts - great UI
This sounds like me and my day job. At least 50% of the time.
100+ Incredible Open Courseware Resources for Science Geeks
There are a number of enlightening and challenging courses that you can take absolutely free. From life sciences to astronomy to health sciences and so much more, you are sure to find courses that will teach you exactly what you want to know.
If you mean name, gender and location, then yes, those are less likely to be falsified. Everything else - everything that actually matters such as job titles, job descriptions, recommendations - is just as unreliable.

I personally know many people who lie on their profiles. One of my former startup partners lists herself as a CEO, except we were never structured that way, and she was never the top in command. People inflate their resumes all the time - if they have a one-man consulting company, they are the Lead Architect, if they received options as part of their incentives package, they are a Founder, etc.

Just look at all the recommendations. Literally everyone is Bill Gates and Mother Theresa rolled into one. I have yet to see a recommendation that simply says, hey - this guy is a competent programmer. Everyone is "world-class", "exceptionally talented", etc.

In contrast, none of my friends falsify personal information on Facebook. The incentive simply isn't there.
I'm not sure I agree that there are complexities beyond our fundamental ability to understand (that's what the tank is a metaphor for, right?).

It might just be that if we are able to conceive something complex, we are able to abstract away and simplify it. It's just a matter of finding the right metaphors and abstractions.
Check out the great approach on the signup page: http://huffduffer.com/signup
I spent several years writing ASP applications and administering dozens of Windows servers running IIS (amongst other things). I had many of the same problems as the author such as:

"I have absolutely no clue what error 0×00001ad59add means, and I am the goddamned system administrator I’m supposed to contact"

It sucked the life out of me.
Or you could just notice that the game is fun and that you agreed to the TOS and not even care about a few extra cycles.
honestly anybody with a good ear can pick that out

According to the article, this specific chord has been debated for decades by people with good ears.
If I could create backup copies of myself and/or run copies of myself in a VM I wouldn't really care about labels on food, medicine or even FDA approvals.
Well, what I've learned from this is that people are really sensitive about their P-NP knowledge. Look at the scale of the down-moding I'm getting :)

I think I'd better stop making trying to make my point now, it apparently is not being understood.
The paper is a little bit hand-wavy about the mathematics of how CDs are sampled, how the Fourier transform works, and how frequencies are converted to semitones. But it does have references which mostly alleviates my desire for rigor :)

Once the author has a list of pitches though, the process of assigning pitches to instruments is very well laid-out. The key to locating the piano was that piano strings are hit in triplets, and each string in a triplet is tuned ever so slightly differently.

Signal processing was one of my favorite courses in college.
I only poked around in PowerShell for a day or so. I do not remember much, but I was not really impressed by it, but I would say it is usable.
Someone who's fifty pounds overweight still has strong biochemical urges to eat though they may not need to. Aren't they listening to their bodies?

More problematic is the evidence that suggests that eating changes the brain. Sure, some of that is cultural. But most of that is physical including emotional needs.
I think this is an innovative approach to getting more people involved with grid computing for major computations and a clever way to market it in general. However, I agree with some other people here, there has got to be some sort of licensing issue. As much as the whole "you clicked okay to the TOS, you gave us permission." is a tank in court, it still seems to risky. If nothing else, it would risk users no longer using the games from the providers using that service if they found out that their computer slowed down at all during playing that game because it was doing things it wasn't supposed to. Not that I would likely have a problem with it, but lets face it...the general public is slap happy with lawsuits.

Also privacy issues in the entire concept. I didn't notice any (note: I didn't go out of my way to find one either) way for the end users to directly go and see exactly what kind of materials were being processed and what data, if any, was being collected from the user's machine. That might also be a source of trouble in the long run.
Good article.

Interesting about the merchant account/billing stuff. I would think an acquiring company would be willing to work things out over time–even after the sale. After all, all the money is still going to them.
I've done some RPM packaging and it's actually pretty straightforward. The LSB hammered out most of the individual differences between distros from an installation standpoint. And once you set it up you get all of the benefits of robust package management.
Confidence of China VCs drops to new low
Maybe it's just me, but I really think people should focus more on just eating more naturally and walking instead of driving or taking the train.

When I say natural food, I mean that you should avoid things like:

- Cow Milk and diary products. It's for cows, not for humans

- Fruit Juices/Soda and other sources of unnatural sugar

- Oil

Stick with naturally human stuff like

- Meat

- Leaves and stuff made of leaves

- Fruits (not fruit juice)

- Nuts

I think one should just think before eating : if I were a caveman, how easy would it be to make this thing? And if it would be pretty hard, then treat it like a luxury, and eat sparingly. For example, chocolate.
The stock market is zero sum? That is hilarious. I guess you haven't heard of dividends?

I totally understand people being wrong about basic facts. But what motivates you to go out of your way to post your ignorant nonsense to the internet?
Death is not necessary to give life meaning.
Rotating mechanical disks are dead. Why would anyone want to use such a format when we can be using smaller and non-rotational multiple-write devices like Flash Memory on USB sticks or SD-Cards?

Discs of all types are dead. They will be replaced by non-moving part memory sticks.
Motivations for Learning
Look up Kolmogorov complexity.
One of the first things they ask you when you call 911 is if your call is an emergency. Being able to get in touch with the local police for non-emergency issues by calling 911 means you don't have to know the phone number for every local police station.
I'm afraid that information transparency tends to be a lot more effective than admonitions.

Also, it's considerably less hassle to me if I can check the calories upfront and order a meal I can eat in full, rather than make a series of evaluations, calculating the marginal dis/utility of an extra bite (is my hunger satiated? if so, do I stop eating because my hunger is satiated or continue because the food still tastes great?). There's also a longstanding norm against leaving food on your plate which can make people feel uncomfortable about not finishing.

The emphasis calorie counts put on ordering a meal which you can feel comfortable about eating in its entirety are also encouraging restaurants to switch to smaller plates, which helps change our perception of what a "normal sized meal" is. And it's less wasteful.
That has little to do with burning a CD. The particular problem you bring as an example is a small and completely optional problem that one would be faced compared to the entire task. And I could look up a solution in 15 minutes.
Not nearly enough cursing to qualify as Zed.
Libelous Email Costs Target Million
The low level APIs do not require any knowledge of the OS scheduling. The code is not complex in the way you think it is - there is little algorithmic behaviour in a CD Burning task.
It's an interesting idea but it kind feels like cpu robbery to me..
I meant because you are imagining this platonic ideal of the free market and then going out and trying to compare how real world systems sync with that ideal.

In any event the justification behind the free market being the best economic system is that it is the most efficient way to allocate goods and services to the people who want them the most. So asking whether or not this reform interferes with the free market doesn't make much sense in this case.
Interesting comments. First, let me explain that the client side runs entirely within memory; the hard drive is not touched at all. All processing or computation is done within the Java sandbox. In other words, you are not giving us unfettered access. In fact, it's quite the opposite. :) We follow everything listed at http://java.sun.com/sfaq/, whether we're running an applet from the browser or from within a desktop application.

Second, although we encourage disclosure, we leave the disclosure up to the individual sites and some have chosen to use some form of opt-out or opt-in. That being said, we also provide a TOS that they can use for disclosure if they choose. If the disclosure is done in a positive way, the users should see the benefits of getting more game features for free.
LinkCollector Portable Edition - bookmarks manager.
Mobile bookmarks manager for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera browser. Import you bookmarks on USB Flash Drive and use it anywhere.
What I'd like to read is the customer's reply to the reply :)
They have the urge to eat to excess because: their endocrine system is all wacked up from too much starch and from a lack of fasting periods (they eat too frequently; the body is meant to go the odd 12 hour stretch without food), mineral and vitamin malnutrition create hunger, and sedentism. If you fix the diet appetite will usually work fine.

A pure calorie counting approach is surely doomed to failure, anyway. Hunger is far too powerful a motivator. You have to fix the appetite first.
No actual Skype account is involved. All spoofed. Person B is taking money out of Person A's account and making it look like a Skype subscription payment. Of course, if Person B wasn't a stupid script kiddie, Person B would only hit each account ONCE instead of 10 times in a row, making it obvious that there is a problem.
Porting and certification? I wouldn't want to rely on that as a business model either.
The inconsistancy in the API is one of the major complaints.

Here is a good explanation. I can't say I have dealt with most of it since I haven't done Windows development since pre-.NET, but I am significantly happier now that I don't.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could...

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from...
Thanks for the comments. We really try to be above board, include it in TOS, and encourage disclosure to the users. I mentioned this in another response, but we even have some affiliates that do some sort of opt-out procedure.

Our hope is that the users end up reaping the benefits from this via increased development dollars or reduced ads. We have some affiliates that are exploring ways of giving some form of in-game currency in exchange for Plura time. For example, you might earn more gold, a better performing sword, higher production, or something like that.
Too Busy Bailing to Plug the Leak
Even Google isn't quite smart enough to pull that one off!
CTL - Distributed Control Dispatching Framework
Sell it to tipjoy :)
> Milk ... It's for cows, not for humans

This is one of the stupider points I keep seeing. At least some human populations have been eating dairy products for over ten thousand years. That's a serious chunk of human evolution. Only certain people should avoid diary, but more commonly they'd be fine with fermented products and should just avoid straight milk.

> Oil

Again, thousands of years of healthy people eating lots of olive and coconut oil.
You might, if you find out too late that your liver has been compromised and rolling back to a previous snapshot means you're not married anymore.
Consumer confidence at an all time low - factor this into your 2009 planning
He does say "I will be tagging new 'posts' in del.icio.us. You can subscribe to an RSS feed that will alert you when I manually tag a new post."

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/raganwald/homoiconic
Right, I agree. I was just disagreeing with the "listen to your body". That won't work if your body is out of whack and has been for years.

I'm a big believer in my nutritionist. But calorie information is very helpful and it seems profitable. I don't see anyone advocating a "pure" calorie counting approach at the expense of what you're eating.
They knew that a lunation (the time from one full moon
to the next) was 29 1/2 days long, so their lunar year had a duration of 364 days. This fell short of the solar year by about 11 days.

Isn't something wrong here?
Thanks. We are really focused on this as well. :)

Here's a blog post we wrote comparing us to Amazon's EC2 for HPC apps: http://pluraprocessing.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/comparing-pl.... Our numbers should be very compelling for certain types of applications compared to the cost of building your own clusters or using an EC2-type service.

There are definitely certain applications where this form of grid or cloud computing (I hate to use such a popular buzzword) will enable apps that weren't possible before. Previous attempts at grid computing for HPC depended more on philanthropy instead of having a scalable business model that allowed the addition of 100s and 1000s of nodes at a time.
I guess I'm the only one that found this article to be really awful. Having kept tropical fish for many years -- with much greater success than Steve apparently -- I found many parts of it hard to swallow. I don't doubt the activities of his betta, only his conclusions.

Having said that, cichlids are a great choice if you are looking for intelligent freshwater aquarium fish. Many species of cichlids are very easy to breed in captivity (removing the need to harvest them from the wild) and they tend to be very hardy. I highly recommend Kribensis and convict cichlids.
This function is purportedly quite fast, but I thought slower hashing functions were more secure because they take longer to build tables from?
I'd say, it's not so much the API itself, as much is there is just ONE API - POSIX. Files, processes and signals. This it the root of a very simple design philosophy, that much *NIX software adheres to.

Most thirdparty libraries provide a C-library that can be linked to an application - but it also provides a small tool that implements all functionality. Input values aren't "resources" or instances of this or that object. They are one of: Strings on the commandline, a piped stream or a file. And most often, all are possible. Output is a integer return value (typically just true or false), another stream or another file.

Windows does not have that single, simple API that everything adheres to, so there's no one culture of Windows development. Many of the APIs that exist in the Windows ecosystem, e.g. WMI, that I've been using to script IIS control, is perfectly well equipped to become a "POSIX-killer" - if it would just become pervasive. WMI is next to worthless when I can use it to control IIS, but not some other feature, and I can straight away forget about talking to the Win32 API altogether from Windows Script Host, and even in C#.net it's unnecessarily difficult.
Ask HN: What are some must-dos to maintain sanity of a UGC site
A UGC (User Generated Content) site is as good as its C.
While we provide the tagging, categorization features, but users may not abide by that, hence search may end up bringing irrelevant result. Like I can think of 'report spam' link, up/down-grade. What are some of the other basic methods of maintaining the sanity of data? (our site has title, description, tags, categorization - think youtube).
I assume this is a joke.

Having said that, if you are creative you may well be able to cash in on this considering the attention that your site appears to be getting. I remember, a few years ago, some kid made a page that sold ads to people for $1 per pixel on the page. The page contained nothing other than these ads. The kid was trying to make $1m and he did it - enough people were willing to pay a dollar or few dollars to be a part of his idea even if they didn't really benefit from it.

I'd look at adding advertising to the page - I'd love to watch you make a million from a page with a button on it!
If you're selling someone a company, surely you would just sell them the merchant account and company bank account as well, no? Did they sell the application but not the company?
> DO NOT use a grid.

Why not?
Will Motorola Go All-In On Android? It Has No Other Choice.
Emule protocol?

Neat, but in my opinion the killer feature for yet another BT client is making the firewall invisible.

Currently you basically have to be sys. admin if you want to run BT behind any NAT boxen.
Check this talk about obesity and nutrition. Perhaps calories are not all the same, depending on the source and how each different body metabolizes it.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=2121...

You can also research related subjects like glycemic index (or glycemic load), metabolic syndrome, paleolithic diet, protein diets.

I have been avoiding concentrated carbs (bread, rice, potatoes, grains) for 2 months, with the occasional exception of dark chocolate bars, and I shed 10 pounds quickly. My weight stabilized already, I am lean, and my blood chemistry is fine. I have a friend that has been the same for about the same time with similar results. My girlfriend also has shed some pounds although she is not that strict.

I have craved bread a couple of times. I avoided eating it and the craving went away after eating.

A warning. Changing my life style this way has been a challenging at times. Sometimes it is difficult to get enough of the stuff I eat in a regular serving at public places. My meals are generally more expensive (health is expensive), but I also eat nicer food.
Invoices have to be correct for filing your accounts. If they're issued by the wrong company you're making life unnecessarily hard for yourself.
I'd like to believe that this will result in actual change for users/customers who live in China and elsewhere, but I suspect the main reason these companies are signing on is to make it seem like they are doing something positive about human rights. In other words, it's a PR exercise for Western consumers and media.

The true test will come the next time the Chinese Public Security Bureau goes to Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google and demands that the companies hand over information about a supposed dissident or help authorities block access to a site that they deem undesirable.
Eight candles for Google Toolbar
I'm not sure we can say one way or another; something beyond our understanding may be beyond our perception.
Yes, they did.

Dropsend was the application, and Carson Systems is the company.
Yeeess.. that one game out there that's not about killing, maiming, conquering and dismembering various adversaries, I think it might be about love.
I'm guessing most of the downvotes are due to the confusion between software engineering and computer science.

From wikipedia:

Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the science of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems.

Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.

--

I think you are talking about software engineers and everyone else is defending computer scientists.
glen and ken are smart and pragmatic. This is a huge vote of confidence for cocotron.
One of the issues that I see with this approach is that for most applications the scaling issue is data scaling rather than CPU. Here's why I think you will run into scaling issues:

Lets assume you have a gigabit line out of your colo. Lets also assume that your average game client is on a cable modem with a 1megabit connection. That gives you capabilities to stream work units to 1024 clients simultaneously as an upper limit. In keeping with an average 1 megabit client, it will take 3 minutes to stream down a 20 megabyte work unit, maxing their connection. 1024 concurrent clients * 20 megabytes = 20 gigabytes. So you're looking at 3 minutes of overhead transfer out, and likely another 3 minutes or so of overhead transfer of results back from the client. So that's approximately 6 minutes per gigabyte just in transmission overhead. And it gets worse as clients are added to the system, since you would need scale out your datacenter just to handle coordinating all of the clients. Which begs the question: why aren't all those servers just doing the dang work already?

That kind of overhead limits this technique's usefulness only to applications which have relatively high computational complexity and relatively small amounts of data. And those applications do exist, however they're pretty far from the day to day needs of most companies. Sun found this out the hard way with their Sun Grid project, which last time I checked was a failure. Sorry, I really wish you the best of luck.