skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blackmail. A pornographic site could do quite well.
http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/49384-trojan-blackm...
first wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20..., now google.
"This is an intro to Python course and he's making us do all these complex progrms when we're still python noobs"

I suppose you would need to learn everything between 0 and completion in order to produce the products he is demanding of you.

Perhaps there's a point to all this learning...
> If you use Facebook, records of all these visits are linked, through cookies, to your Facebook profile - even if you never click the “like” button.

Ghostery[0] prevents this, IIRC.

0: http://www.ghostery.com/
Man I want a copy of my report. Considering they're supposedly all about eliminating privacy, shouldn't they want to make all this accessible?
"It's possible that the same thing is happening in this group of research as well."

In this case we already know that the most important mediating variables for predicting outcomes on the relevant measures are parent-child talk and self-directed play, so it's very easy to see how each hour of watching TV causes increasing damage. I'm sure some of the gap is because of
mere correlation, but it's also clear that TV watching itself is a huge part of the problem if only because it prevents the child from getting the types of interactions they need for their brains to develop properly. (whether or not the TV itself fries their dopamine system or whatever directly is still an open question.)
http://db.tt/CwK0pHJq

Thank you sir!
Coolest HTML5/JS/SVG slideshow effect I have ever seen
There are no rules stating that a business has to run on complicated software that does a thousand things.
Me too. Asks me "Who are you? We need a contact for you.". I fill in the contact form, press done and it crashes. Start it up again and it's the same story.
That is a fascinating claim, and it certainly sounds possible. Do you have any evidence or sources to back it up?
I'd think it's a deliberate design choice having it this way. If you think about it, paying only for actually used space would mean a lot smaller income for the company.

Maybe it would also erode the magic in it - people would start thinking if they should have this and that files on Dropbox or not. Or accidentally piling up huge bills doing some mistake managing their files...
Bit of a shameless plug, but we wrote our own EC2 + ffmpeg encoder, since we didn't want to pay out the ears for encoding:

http://media-nommer.readthedocs.org/

Open source (BSD), beta'ish, but very much functional. Save some money! Pull requests are welcome and greatly appreciated, as is feedback on the docs.
Mary Meeker's Internet Trends for 2011 (10/18)
Personal Benchmarking - Track your skills - Instant Recruiting - Site
Google could wipe the referrer, though.
"I think this sell-off is extremely stupid and short-sighted."

Taken at face value I think the whole thing is stupid too and I say that as someone who dislikes Apple and refuses to buy their products personally.

However, whether or not this situation is really stupid and short-sighted depends upon who you're talking about, the guys starting it off (evil, not stupid) or the herd who follows them (stupid).

The basic idea is this:

1) Initiate Apple sell-off (via analyst number games and maybe even selling off a small percentage of your own large holdings)

2) Wait for the herd to follow you, driving the price down significantly. Buy back during the dip.

3) Profit (as price goes back up to reality)!

I've heard from many different people in the finance sector that Apple stock is the go-to stock for large player manipulation these days.
these "estimates" are artificially inflated by hedge funds with short positions in AAPL.

AAPL didn't lie. they're just conservative.
Every tv-show with any amount of tech that I watched when I was a kid in the 90s featured a computer that talked and could be talked to. Plenty of people hoping this will become a reality, even if only for languages using letters (ie. not Chinese).

Any complex task that is somehow generic can easily be done with voice control and makes the UI needed for simpler tasks to be more concise and less bloated.

For instance setting the alarm clock. You could scroll through your apps looking for the clock app. Open it (ie. wait for it to load), then navigate to the alarm clock tab, create a new alarm, set the correct time and hit save. (on my nokia phone this is actually faster than saying saying the word "alarm", but my ipod touch is slow as hell)

On a computer with a keyboard a lot of this can be sped up because I can search for the application from the keyboard, I can tab through fields and use shortcuts to do things (like ctrl-n for new). But my mum can never remember any shortcuts, and she can't type very fast. And if you think that the new generation is any better...then have a look at anyone studying in the human sciences department...most of them have trouble enough using word.

My point is, if something doesn't require perfect speech recognition, is a complex yet generic task...then voice control seems like a very good solution.
No there's a huge difference between lying and what Apple does. Apple produces extremely conservative figures that take into account all sorts of negative things that can impact the quarter like some Foxconn factory blows up or gets shut down.
I like the fact that they put the Facebook site as a showcase on the Facebook showcase site. Feels like a silly Xzibit meme cartoon, so you can Facebook while you Facebook.
Nicely done, very clear and concise.

A question: is lxml what we would use today instead of Beautiful Soup?
"So the number of U.S. dollars represents the entire value of what U.S. citizens produce at any given time."

That's not even close to correct under any theory of economics, I don't even know where to start explaining that.

"What makes commodities valuable as currency is they are finite."

No, that just means they happen to exist in the real universe, in which everything is finite, which is hardly a way of distinguishing between "currency" and "not currency" (in information theory terms, that has no information in it). What makes currencies valuable, and what makes things valuable in general, is that people want them. People want the government not to smash their doors down and haul them away and put them in jail, or freeze their assets, etc. The rest of the value of a dollar recursively emanates out from that. There's a value to having a dollar beyond just the goods and services that can be obtained, it prevents Uncle Sam from destroying you. There's no value to a BitCoin; the base case of BitCoin is "zero", unlike a dollar or any other government fiat currency, unlike gold (which has industrial and decorative uses which may not stay constant but won't drop to zero for a long time), unlike anything else called a "currency". Currencies aren't arbitrary numbers.

(Not being jailed/fined/killed by something may seem like a bizarre base for a currency if you think about it, and I wouldn't disagree. I do rather wish people understood the gravity of treating "government" like a silver bullet and just firing it every which way to solve every problem, especially when turning everything into a criminal law offense. However genteel we've made it over the centuries, it's still pointing guns at people, and I'd prefer to reserve that for truly important things.)
I use Dropbox, but only the free version. For bulkier data I am just rsync'ing to my linode, with exactly the same utility to me. It is quite telling that the dropbox app uses librsync.

In other words, the value to the consumer is in the simple, reliable interface and easy sharing. They have got this right where Jungledisk got it wrong.

However, the value to investors is in the customer base and an implied CLV for those that pay offsetting the exponentially decaying cost of storage for those that don't.

In other words, it's a Ponzi scheme for storage and they're betting on Moore's law. Unfortunately, it is almost trivial to reimplement their utility; any half-decent systems programmer will instantly grasp what they're doing. So I would not invest in Dropbox, but whilst they maintain some momentum I am happy to store low-value documents on their service.
If you don't like them storing your data, then don't go on the site. They won't have it if you don't give it to them.
Ignoring the sizeof(int) could be 4, one can code a 64-bit application that uses 32-bit pointers - yes it's rare - but in reality it's a 64-bit application, but just having small pointers - it's called the x32 abi (heh, and I read about it first here from this forum)

https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/
lxml is definitely faster, but I've found BSoup to be more forgiving with poorly formatted DOMs
It's also a free resource so the phrase "you get what you pay for" comes to mind.
Your annual pricing doesn't offer any discount.

If I was a teacher I would simply purchase a month-to-month subscription and not pay for your service during June/July or July/August(depending on your school system) when there are no school days.

From a personal standpoint I would consider offering some kind of "account parking" so that teachers can suspend their account for a 2 week period during christmas break. It never 'feels right' to pay for a service when you're not able to use it.
Feature request: multipart/related attachments please, not just multipart/alternative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Related

Makes for much nicer display of email attachments in some clients.
> Even so-called educational videos do not benefit children under 2 because they are too young to be able to understand the images on the screen, the doctors’ group said.

So, we have been watching TV with my 20-month old daughter since she was around 9 months old. We watch kids shows and talk about it while we watch it together. And she knows exactly what is going on in the show and has for a long time. I'm sure she doesn't understand 100% of it, but it is obvious that she is picking up things.

* She knows the characters by name as soon as they are shown

* She talks about things she sees in the background

* Since last month she sometimes laughs when they do something that is meant to be funny

* She counts out loud to 10 with the characters on TV when they start counting

My feeling is that a constant TV in the background is a distraction for anyone, including babies. But having kids shows AND (here is the key part) watching them together and talking about it, re-enforcing the points of education, talking about the background, and asking questions about what is going on does in fact help with their development.
The linked video (in german) explains this. Apparently Facebook has a registered HQ in Ireland (presumably - as someone mentioned in another thread - for tax purposes). Since it is a registered business in Ireland, it is subject to all Irish and many applicable European laws (one of which is data privacy). The 24-year-old Individual feels it's against his data privacy rights that Facebook retains deleted messages.

Personally I find his arguments a bit flawed - e.g. in one instance apparently he objects to the fact that Facebook knows when he was ill because he can do a quick CTRL-F on the text "ill" (german: krank) in the text he received from Facebook. My question is - isn't he the one who posted that content in the first place?

Secondly, he complains that deleted messages are still retained by Facebook. Could that just be a referential integrity constraint - since most messages require 2 or more parties. Therefore, although he deletes the messages, the other party still has the message in their inbox. Therefore, Facebook cannot simply delete the message. Furthermore, since the message has him linked, even if he deletes it from his side, Facebook needs to retain that information on their side.

You know the best solution to protect yourself from Facebook's data privacy policies - get off Facebook or at least be cautious when you post! I personally love the service and think one should be smart about what they post on publicly accessible social networks since that data remains for eternity!
I get the cynicism, but military != bad. The NEED for military is the bad thing. Don't mix them up.

At its best, the military serves to protect citizens from foreign threats. Like with police, some people are bad and sometimes we have to kill them to defend the good people.

In the hands of the ideal military, technology can serve to lessen civilian casualties, save troops' lives, avoid using troops at all, or act as a deterrent. And yes, we're all aware that no military is ideal.

Ensure your military -- and police -- stick as closely as possible to their strict and just duty... any power can and will be abused. But it strikes me as naive to react against military as an abstract concept. The ostensible goal of protecting a free nation hardly seems ignoble.
We've been told they do encrypt files internally. I don't think there is any usable way to have users manage their keys by themselves. Who wants to input large encryption keys to their mobile phone every time they want to use Dropbox? And if the phone remembers the key, then it's not too far from the current situation.
To advertisers, not you.
I wonder what's in place to prevent you requesting a CD of someone else's data.
URDU SEX STORIES: Chickni Bhanji
I posted this on another thread.

"Seven Reasons the Shorts Love Apple" is an investor's must-read. Hedge funds: Riding the AAPL slingshot
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/20/hedge-funds-riding-th...

Long nicknamed the “favorite yo-yo” of daytraders and hedge fund managers – Apple’s high beta of 1.43, its prominent position in finance media and its vulnerability to rumors has made it a choice stock in short term profits, both through long and short positions
http://www.investorguide.com/article/6809/apples-aapl-mini-c...

Hedge Funds, Bloggers and the Origin of Apple Rumors
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/30/about-that-iphone-5-d...

Samsung employee caught leaking information to hedge fund manager before iPad launch
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-14/ex-samsung-worker-s...
Ask HN: Which NLP services is used by Apple's Siri?
I know that Siri app was using something from SRI technology.

http://www.sri.com/news/releases/020510.html

Does anyone knows what does Apple use? Is this something open source or do you have to license?
10 Great 3-D Typography Videos
If you are a fan of typography , you will love the Internet. There are plenty of examples of amazing 3-D typography videos all over the web, most offering inspiration to the designers who love to see others’ works. If you are one of those who likes getting a peek into the process of other typographers, check out these interesting video clips.
The beginning of the end for AAPL-mania, or a road bump?
Accessible to advertisers, not users. They don't particularly care if you can find the set of friends who visit sports blogs on odd numbered Tuesdays and like chili fries.
One might still wish to benefit from some of the undoubtedly useful aspects of Facebook without needlessly surrendering various rights to their data as enshrined in European law.
All About Dry Mouth At Night
The site focuses on after-school usage; have you thought about in-classroom texting? For instance, in classes where 100% of kids have cell phones, this could be used as a cheap, more usable alternative for response systems.

(Definitely a version 2.0 feature, though. You would get into the whole dangerous world of visualizing feedback, integrating with interactive whiteboards, audience polling competitors, etc.)
The current stock price is set by the market. It's (at least to a large degree) based on the market's best estimate of the future earnings of the company. This is certainly related to the company's public statements on the topic but as companies often "under promise so they can over deliver" it's not exact.

So now, new information has come in that slightly changes the market's view of the company's future.

How else do you think it should work?
> 2. The Bonuses come from bailout money.

GS has paid back their loan, with interest.
50 scariest movie monsters ever
they want to be the "Filesystem of the internet" - this is scary, I really hope they won't succeed.
The U.S. Almost Hacked Libya With the Italian Luxury Vehicle of Cyber Weapons
Black Friday Deals 2011 Black Friday Specials 2011
How is looking at an image of live human beings "worse" than looking at live human beings (which is ultimately an image too)?
If the child is given a remote control, does that count as interactivity since he can choose what to look at while exploring causality?

By the way, I'm not arguing that TV is good for kids. I'm just trying to analyze the argument in favor of preventing infants from watching passive screen media.
You sound like the phone phreakers of the 80s who thought they were the coolest people for getting free phone calls and had to tell just everyone.
I am generally civil and polite (though I may not be a quality contributor), but one serious problem I have with HN is the cognitive dissonance between "No humour - we're a mature, civil site" and "Random yahoos can make your comments unreadable, with no reason and no accountability - we're a mature, civil site".

There are several comments in this very post where the user is being civil and polite, yet their commentary is faded out. One of them is even dead.

It leads to a feeling of randomness, and the sense of popularity being more important than insightfulness. On a site dedicated to the mavericks, it's a curious mechanism to enforce toeing the popular line.
reminded me - in my pre-school childhood i once tagged along with my father as he was a Judge of the Election for an elections in our district.

>making sure that a bunch of non-expert voters manage to successfully navigate democracy,

the "democracy" was easy to navigate - passport (obviously) to confirm the name/address, this is your ballot (with one candidate, obviously, unanimously supported by the Party and the people), mark here, this is the comments section to let the candidate know your wishes (graphologists would later take care of anybody "anonymously" leaving any comments other than congratulations or specific requests to repair a specific sewer system)

>without influencing their votes or allowing anyone to corrupt the process.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1341504/pdf/bmjc...

"It is considered by some governments that if a person does
not agree with the views of the state, his sanity must be called
into question. Extensive documentation exists on the misuse
of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs in the Soviet Union."

>After you see how the sausage is made you'll be amazed that the republic still endures.

All the election officials were given chance to buy a nice high quality sausage ("kolbasa") at official prices. It was the first time i tasted such a nice one ("polukopchenaya") and still remember its taste :)
Maybe it's my unenlightened American perspective coming out here, but why is this a big deal?

You chose to use the Facebook service, you chose to provide this information to them, and you chose to agree to their terms of service.

Facebook isn't a government agency, it's a private organization that has persuaded people to give it armloads of data about themselves, and uses that for whatever completely legal purposes it so desires. It's not like they are taking out credit card applications or anything on behalf of these users.

What is it about this completely voluntary relationship that is so inherently evil? I really don't get the harsh kickbacks and complaints against things like "Facebook keeps records of pokes even if the user 'removes' them". So what? How is that something that is litigation or 'outcry' worthy?

How much of this data is just persistent in the system because they operate at a scale where data deletion or removal just cannot feasibly be accomplished[1]? Much like google - 'we dont delete anything'. Why should they legally or otherwise be required to verify something is actually deleted, instead of simply ensuring it's inaccessible in their system? Why is nobody complaining about NTFS or ext3/4 not actually zeroing out the file space when you delete something, and instead just 'marking it deleted' or 'removing the pointer in the inode'? How is that fundamentally any different at all?

Please, educate me, because I really don't get it.
The first thing we always try in AI is reducing it to a solved problem, so I'd be inclined to try that first.

Train a naive Bayesian classifier on 25% of the successful and non-successful applications to date. Run it on the last batch's applications. Observe if results look promising. If they do, run it against the 6,000 applications, splitting them into three groups based on how promising they looked. Group A gets the most attention, Group B gets middling attention, Group C gets attention as resources permit.

Alternatively, same deal but train with data from only the applications which went on to be successful YC companies.

There are any number of fairly obvious problems with this approach, but scarily, in many, many fields dumb algorithms beat smart people because dumb algorithms apply the meat-and-potatoes part of the classification successfully every single time. (e.g. Credit risk scoring roflstomps over experienced credit underwriters for making consumer credit decisions, partially because it is free at the margin and partially because if you think the intangibles like an applicant's character is more important than their credit history statistically speaking you are wrong.)
The company has an incentive to under promise and over deliver. The analysts are morons.
Another point that seems to have escaped notice: I can't middle click the uservoice badge on the right, or the contact link at the bottom.

ETA: The Upgrade plan > Hide link manages to replace the page with "[object Object]"; the password field is mandatory but lacks the asterisk.
You're right, but for a successful business, you need to provide a service that would normally take more than half a day of development time, or have a wider breadth of functionality than your competitors (Mailchimp, Bluehornet), or -- worst case scenario -- compete on price. This appears to do none of those three.
You're right -- it takes time/effort, you know your business better than anyone to figure out if it's worth testing and optimizing. However, the lack of complaints shouldn't be construed as approval or desire.
Thank you for using a large font. Makes it much more readable.
One of the complaints is that they have profiles on people who are not users. They can get other people to give them information about you.

Specifically, have a look at complaint #2:

"Shadow Profiles. Facebook is collecting data about people without their knowledge. This information is used to substitute existing profiles and to create profiles of non-users."

http://europe-v-facebook.org/Compalint_02_Shadow_Profiles.pd...

http://europe-v-facebook.org/02_Shaddow_Profiles.zip
That's a terrible reason for not getting the sound right. Khan Academy is free, and they have good sound.
Why does this irk you? It's a (mostly) free market and people do as they please. The stock price follows that naturally.

Before the earning, the stock is priced in at the value from 2). After the earning, the stock drops down to the price that's valued with the actual earning numbers, which is lower than 2). This should not be a huge surprise to anyone.

The apple case here is only slightly exceptional in that Apple is known for giving very conservative guidances, which is why the analyst's estimates are almost always higher than the guidance. In the past quarters, even that number was exceeded. It's just not the case here and the stock drops accordingly.

I do think there is likely potential for future growth given the extremely high guidance given for Q1, which knowning Apple, is still conservative.

disclosure: i'm long aapl
"25 billion iOS devices sold last quarter."

What?