skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Powder is merely a standard way to pass around "good housekeeping's seal of approval", which has less substantive content than "Ron Jeremy gives this 4 stiffies". (The problem is not passing around these tokens, it's what they actually mean. POWDER, at best, punts, and is more likely to say something like "good housekeeping means good stuff".)

The standard is also full of moronic blather like "Online child protection, as well as the continuation of offline child protection, is a priority for any responsible site or service provider, whether directed at children or not."

Okay - I'm being a bit unfair. It also has stuff to produce bad results "Web pages and whole Web sites containing any type of rich assets such as video/streaming video or audio can be tagged with that information using POWDER. A search engine, content aggregation or adaptation service can then determine whether a user is accessing content via a low or high bandwidth connection and return only those pages that contain assets and images that will be supported by that user's connection speed." (Think of all the ways this will do the wrong thing.)

And then there's a new way to do stuff that already works: "A user pays an extra fee to his ISP in order to have privileged access to third-party premium content. When he accesses a premium page on one of these third-party Web sites via his ISP, the server is able to recognize him as a paying customer and deliver the content that has been described as premium by an associated Description Resource."
Gmail and Hotmail Captchas Cracked
Except, who goes out on a Sunday - the Day of Rest?

I know, many people, but still, conventions are important and Saturday is still the conventional "fun day".
There must be some overlap to share what they find with another? Let's say 2 of the threads each have half a letter. Do you just have another thread that does the matching?
Those all seem relative to the dating genre.

But really? That is what comes to mind?
"Start on a Monday, have a date by Saturday"...makes it sound like a website done by enterprise software peddlers (or AdultFriendFinder :) ). Something a bit less precise and goal oriented, and more fluid, to go with the concept of mingling perhaps? To "mingle" somehow makes me think of stepping off my routine treadmill and getting to know people in a lazy, smell-the-flowers-along-the-way setting.
Twitter too Secretive for Its Own Good?
Why?

What are they going to do different?

When something bad happens to them or they get scared, they're going to start screaming for us to help them.

When there's a problem somewhere else, they're still going to insist that we fix it and complain that we didn't do it "right". Interestingly enough, there are very few problems that they can handle on their own and the value of their cooperation is "iffy" at best (see Afghanistan).

When you point out that they're impotent, they always point to their GDP and never point to what they can do.

They'll keep selling us stuff and buying from us.

The only thing that will change is that they'll feel better about insulting tourists. So much for "old world class".
AskNews: Seeking comments on an app to bring the "knob-style" feedback to the web
I just wrote a prototype for a "knob-style" immediate feedback system similar to what Nielson uses with small focus groups during major political speeches.

My goal is to try and get a small critical mass of users by tonight to use it during the VP presidential debate, polish it off and offer it to a larger audience for the last two presidential debates.

http://opinionslide.appspot.com/
Wreckage of Fossett’s Plane Is Found
Didn't we see a recruiting tactic like this in the original Thomas Crown Affair (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063688/)?
I don't think you're quite understanding what he's saying there.

It's just a fancy way of saying the data can be made to support any opinion, so beware of something that has all this data to back it up, but still smells fishy on the surface.
I got two dells ... now ... falling apart.

What kind? Precision?
This is horrible advice.

If you're in NYC joining a startup is a bad move, unless you've just been laid off from Lehmans or something similar.

Any startup that gets series A funding right now is going to have problems if they don't make it last or make a profit in at least 2-3 years, maybe more, bailout or none.

The lack of liquidity in the markets might get a temporary reprieve from the bailout, but they'll dry up again unless the root of the problems are addressed.

I'm not saying startups can't succeed in the US right now, it's just that it's a lot harder and will get harder still.
I love how there are both "a recession is a great time to join a startup" and "it's a recession, don't quit your day job" stories on the front page at the same time.

I know the advice isn't mutually exclusive; but that was a confusing front page the first time I saw it.
Hah. Interesting. Thanks
The idea sounds great, but if you are actually looking for a date, this seems to provide more hassle than it's worth (why should I wait a week to contact someone?, why the structure? I'd rather do things my way). Have you gotten feedback from people who actually use dating sites?
Is Germany one of the nations threatening to stop buying Treasuries if we don't buy back the subprime meatballs?
You can call it whatever you like, that doesn't mean a thing to the people in the bread lines.

What people seem to be failing to understand is that the "near term correction" is going to be huge, regardless of whether or not there's an even bigger one in the future. We need to get through the first one to reap the benefits of missing the next one.

Or, we can try to avoid the current concerns as much as we can, and use the time we've bought ourselves to reform our system and negate the need for that larger one down the road.
11 Things: SuperHappyDevHouse
Is it right? 8,000 daily visits = 15m? Seems a lot of money for not so many people.
If one were to see buffet taking a completely selfish stance on this, we'd expect to see him supporting the market crash. After all, he's got more money than anyone to buy up all these penny stocks and make even more money during the recovery.

I'm worried that he does support the bailout, because clearly we're all missing how bad this actually is.
Perkonomics: Why perks and privileges are the new currency
Elon Musk on SpaceX's Goal: "To reduce the cost of human spaceflight by a factor of 100."
How the Telescope Changed Our Minds by Extending Our Eyes
JetBlue auctions tickets on ebay
The Twelve Virtues of Rationality
I don't think it's fair to describe Britain's contribution in Afghanistan (or indeed Iraq) as "iffy".
I agree, S60 isn't easy to develop, while Android is as sweet as sweet can be for developers.
This doesn't surprise me: the highly risky money speculations (all invented in the US) had to come to an end, sooner or later.

They did well as long as the US had a continuous growth, but there are now many 'New Americas' out there, which will make there own new way of life.

America: sorry, but you're getting old already...
I really liked it. Good, interesting & original take on an age-old problem.

Good name too. "Mingle" sounds non aggressive, laid back and cool... exactly what I want in a dating site.

I really see this being a success. I'm not flattering, nor am I kidding. Good Luck!
Whine whine. I have an idea. Why not make a product to sell to consumers, instead of making shares to sell to the public?
prakash, all due respect, but are those really the companies you want to quote? FogCreek and 37Signals are not the best or most profitable companies making money off these intranet, and they are not a 'way' of starting companies. They are just the loudest. Many, many companies started off like those two and are now pretty (Symantec, ZoneAlarm, Winzip). Those are the real success stories, not people who make their money by giving talks on how to make money.
From what I saw, the site looks decent. The design is pretty good, the registration wasn't painful. I didn't really get to see much.

My main thought: I have to do way too much work before I can see the benefits to using your site. I can't see pictures of people or anything. I'm not going to fill out all of this information, upload pictures, etc with no idea if there are any hot chicks on there. Try and show people the value before asking them to make a time commitment.
Missed out: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared M. Diamond
Indeed. For someone who is already skeptical about 'online dating' (and they should be with the crap out there now) i think it would be difficult to 'believe in it' enough to jump through all of our hoops!

As soon as we actually have some members and pictures, etc. we will show people a sort of small network that includes people they may be in a MingleWeek with.

Totally agree.
"Now I'm starting to see one of the posters gripe about jQuery plugins. And for me I think that is by design. jQuery I believe was designed to be a lightweight as possible. Practicing modularity at it's finest. Had jQuery been baked with all the bells and whistles, I do not think it would have attracted a large number of devs."

Doesn't the use of a plugin system generally increase lightweightness and modularity because you can move more functionnality out of core into optional add-ons?
Bots are used for two main purposes in WoW: farming and faster leveling.

Farming is much more harmful to the game than auto-leveling. Too much farming would ruin the in-game economy and cripple an essential part of the game. Farmers also often use the sale of gold and items as a pretense to phish passwords, which they then use for in-game spamming.

Blizzard should focus on fighting goldfarming and leave people who want to have a high-level character without spending weeks of their time on the game alone IMO.
Agile Open Space Conference in Silicon Valley priced for Startups
Well said.

How about downscaling the size. Sites like Twitter could be done by one person and a bit for subcontracting. Sites like Facebook by a team of 10 to 15.

Too much money and too much megabuck sponsored hype. Simple micro startups are still left out even though they are more than viable.
You would have to be an Obama voter.
I found this quote particularly interesting:

"Ted has extremely strong connections with the Republican party, and we think that's a good thing,"

Some of the executives, higher-ups, and investors that find their way into Facebook make me raise an eyebrow.
As conference prices head toward the $1,500 to $2,000 range it's good to see a two day conference for $250 on a development methodology that especially useful for startups. Some folks who attend the Bootstrapper Breakfast are signed up to attend Oct 6-7 and I thought I would pass it along, I am not affiliated with the conference.
Cool. Off the top of my head:

Can you make it move faster in response to holding down the arrow keys?

Maybe do a gradient instead of just a plain bar? Like, red on the left and green on the right?

I think vertical might work better than horizontal.

Maybe it should slowly return to the "resting" position. Otherwise

Ustream.tv has a feature you might want to look at called "Shout"....
actually, ustream may have removed the shout feature, i don't see it anymore.
He can use that on his YC app to answer "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" (http://news.ycombinator.com/w2009form).
Reminds me of a certain TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_mor...
You make some good points, but America didn't obtain any real power until after World War II. Our fortunes are actually quite recent.
Facebook Puts European Headquarters in Dublin
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
No chance that google is still paying is there?
Another job posting from Craigslist: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/ldn/783766933.html
Senate Bailout Bill Extravaganza
A taste:
# Sec. 105. Energy credit for geothermal heat pump systems.
# Sec. 111. Expansion and modification of advanced coal project investment credit.
# Sec. 113. Temporary increase in coal excise tax; funding of Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.
...
Why not? Only because those typewriter repair guys went out of their original business does not say they are worse off today.
Hah. I can raise my left, but not my right. Are you a leftie? (I'm not, so I'm wondering if that extends somehow to your... eyebrow-raising-skill).
Maybe, but check this out too: http://www.physorg.com/news142012820.html
Haha, that's pretty funny and creative. As long as nobody died, I think that guy should get a "get out of jail free card"!
The Spiegel should change its cover layout. In Germany I always fear I being mistaken as a socialist Spiegel reader when I carry my Economist around.
Cato Institute... Smart people you have to be very careful not to let them rationalize you into their particular view of world policy.
i first learned python to use google app engine. if u think u might be dabbling with mini web apps, try python so u can drop into google app engine. just fyi that gae is still immature but barrier to entry is the lowest that i've seen. curious on other's opinions about this.
http://www.google.de/search?q=%22I+trust+*%22
Wow. I read the second method, tried it, and it just worked. I don't know how that explanation helped me, but something just clicked. Now I can whistle! (Though not loudly yet...)
Blizzard is trying to preserve the experience of their product, not exploit people. It's not wrong to defend yourself, and the modern way to do that is by maintaining an active battalion of lawyers. The alternative is by physical force. I prefer the former.
"He then made his escape in an inner tube on the Skykomish River."

http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/NW_100108WAB_monroe_...
Here's an alternative technology he could have used. Doesn't have the same cachet of cleverness, but there's a lot less of an incrimination trail about which to worry.
http://www.fakecrap.com/products/groucho_glasses.html
Yeah, you've got the flavour right.. although... he tends to not buy distressed assets so much as assets that the market thinks are distressed.... a solid business (i.e. non-distressed) is very important to him. Maybe I'm just playing with definitions, but here's an example:

American Express was guilty of fraud, and things looked really bad for them, because their business is based on trust - surely their future bleak, thought Wall St. Their stock price tanked (this is just the opinion of the market; it may or may not correspond to reality). But Warren Buffett went down to the supermarket, and observed people: in fact, they still trusted American Express, in the operational sense that they still used it. The fraud didn't affect Amex's business at all.

So he put half his wealth (or something like that) into it, and made a killing... by buying a non-distressed asset at a distressed price.

And here, price is just another word for opinion.

Sorry to go on, I just like talking about it.
Nokia Aims to Be No. 1 on the Mobile Web
Designing User-Centric Web Sites
What the meltdown looks like
What is the advantage of (function($){})(jQuery) over jQuery(function($){}) ? In either case the jQuery object must be in the namespace, and neither leaves a named function laying about. According to the jQuery API jQuery(callback) is sugar for $(document).ready(callback). The ready event is usually when I want my code to run...

http://docs.jquery.com/Core/jQuery#callback
This is one technically correct (which is usually the best kind of correct), but the jQuery() invocation has one advantage that I feel makes up for adding "jQuery" to the global namespace which is that the next person that needs to modify my javascript sees my code, they'll see the jQuery right up front and know what's up.
Perhaps we could get her one of the "I failed the Turing Test" t-shirts from ThinkGeek.
Chinese Skype Software Secretly Logs Political Chat Messages
I live two miles away from where this happened. Between the social engineering aspect of this and the escape on the inner tube, this is by far the most interesting thing that has happened in our little town for a while. :)
Ubuntu "Intrepid Ibex" beta release
Google Meme Tracker...Yawn.
No more singularity is the most obvious effect.

I don't see people talking about this, but the exponential curve broke.

Sure you can add cores, but you could do that 5 years ago (or earlier) too - and you don't see AI made even by well funded organizations.

It's over - don't wait for it.
According to a quick search, "69 People found that match Demo in the state of California." I noticed 1 or 2 with the name "Demos", but other than that.....

Perhaps, since sign-up as "Demo" is special functionality anyways, you could ask the user to confirm that they're "Demoing" the account or if their name actually IS "Demo".

Albeit, 69/36.5m < 0.0002% of the population so you could probably get away with letting the user know that they're been automatically "Demo'd" and only fix it if you have to.
A transaction makes a customer
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Polici...
One of my favorite books. Helps to know a bit of public choice theory.
I’m irritated by this knee-jerk anti-bailout reaction (”$700bn to the fat cats!”). Check this diagram from the BBC (http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45062000/gif/_45062415...)

There is no $700bn going into some Wall Street bankers pockets. First off, $450bn of this bailout money is conditional.

Also, see that arrow pointing from the Banks to the Gov’t? That’s a stake in the banks being given to the taxpayers. So you’re not just losing money, you’re gaining an asset, and the chances are, at a very good price.

There’s a chance the US Gov’t could end up making a profit out of the situation when the housing market recovers, which it inevitably will. This credit bust is definitely a mess, but this doesn’t mean there won’t be any credit in the future. We need to think 5-10 years into the future. Things will recover, they always do.

The closest thing to this I’ve ever studied were the currency crises that happened in Asia in 1998 (indeed they were my savior in my final international economics exam). The big lesson I learned was that self-fulfilling prophecies can occur in the markets. If everyone loses faith in a currency, then it will crash, even if nothing has fundamentally changed.

The same thing can happen with banks. If we think some are going to fail, sell its shares, then we can help make it fail. So to counter-act that you need some pretty aggressive action, and even if it isn’t perfect, people are misunderstanding that doing nothing could be much, much worse.

If this credit problem is not solved and confidence restored, then it is easy for the effects to spill over to the main economy. The worst would be for otherwise healthy firms to stop receiving credit, be forced to lay people off in a downturn, add to unemployment, and then just make the whole macro condition worse for everyone. Credit plays a vital role in smoothing out consumption and investment cycles - so the banks that facilitate this and are otherwise healthy need to be backed up.

That's started happening in the UK (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcr...). If unemployment rises sharply, then things will get really bad.
You've got to be joking. There are so many things that don't work well or at all in iframes:

- extended permissions

- resizing so you don't have scrollbars

- inconsistent behavior in fb-sig params

- cookie handling issues that are common to all iframes
Another advantage to IFrames is that it makes porting your app to OpenSocial easier. The two platforms seem to be converging recently: Facebook enhancing their Javascript APIs, and OpenSocial building their REST APIs and working on an equivalent for FBML.
I sort of know what Buffet means. It's like in the late 90's with regards to Long Term Capital Management hedge fund:

"At the beginning of 1998, the firm had equity of $4.72 billion and had borrowed over $124.5 billion with assets of around $129 billion. It had off-balance sheet derivative positions with a notional value of approximately $1.25 trillion."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

Eventually most of this was lost within a few months of volatility caused by events not taken into account by its computer models, and the fund was ultimately liquidated, losing its investors much of their $1 Billion investment.

The fund used models determined by some of the smartest around including economics Nobel prize winners. This team background then enabled them to raise a lot capital, which was subsequently extremely levered.

From how I understand it, another problem of LTCM (besides for the flaw in the model not taking into account an extremely rare occurence) was due to the fund venturing into different types of trades that weren't fully thought-out once all the arbitrage opportunities ran out in the program's designated purview.

Another aspect of Buffet's hesitancy with "black box" trading can be found in this hedge fund manager's interview: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310284, that is, the programmers doing the modelling generally have the same type of educational backgrounds and thus the trading patterns and performance of their 'boxes' are all similar, thereby giving none a competitive advantage over the other.

At the end of the day, simplifying things, is it better to trust a brain and its computer extension or just a brain? In Buffet's case, being the equivalent in investing of grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess, he sticks with his brain. Anyone else might want to run with the computer if they can't get shares in Berkshire Hathaway. I think LTCM were just very unlucky and a bit reckless, but could have done very well, if only they had more conservative exit points in winding up the fund.

But, the main gist of my previous comment was that it didn't add much to the thread in terms of discussion, but rather just brought a point in the article to people's attention. And just from that, I couldn't see all the mod points justified. I guess this goes back to my style of modding which is: "I'll mod this up or down, but only if it's under or over valued." ;)
Maybe it's time to beat the captcha-cracking guys at their own game: use mechanical turk to "interview" people signing up for a new email account.

If you signed up via an IM session rather than a web form it would leave a lot more context in the communication, which might be useful for making a determination. You could also give the Turker additional money for an account that hasn't been flagged for spam in 30 days.

I don't know if this idea has any merit at all, but it seems like a natural response to the arms race at hand.
Awesome. I had an idea of setting up a stockmarket style auction site for tickets. Basically you could buy and sell any ticket, but of course airlines don't let you transfer tickets once you name a passenger (the cheap tickets anyway) and that's the reason I abandoned the project. Still hopeful of it happening on day ;)
Iphone-backgrounder
So two turkers will end up talking to each other during signups?

I would rather a technical solution .
What The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN are doing wrong, online and off
Grad School Enrollment vs. Unemployment Rate
> ... the list of CAPTCHA's it now understands and can bypass is reportedly fully up-to-date, and includes newer designs that ask the user to identify a cute cat or other distinct animal.

Basically, they've discovered a way to automate cuteoverload.com. And they're using this power to break captchas. Bastards.
Would charging $5 a month for an e-mail account work for you?
I agree with this point. I'm not joining a dating site without being able to see the chicks.

Simple as that.
I'm not sure what's impressive about burning through cash 2-3 years after launch. That's not a business, that's a hobby.