skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought OSX firmware password could be bypassed by resetting PRAM. If true then does this invalidate their argument in FAQ about the thief reformatting the HD?
We made the CSRF depend only on the user ID, which doesn't change, instead of the session ID.
There was a debate I used to have with a coworker. He claimed that the "goodness" of an act is determined solely by the intent of the actor.

That sounds nice on the surface. But imagine two people, each of whom, say, built a hospital for children:

One guy is greedy, and built the hospital only because he knows that parents will pay just about anything to heal their children. He used the best architects and materials to create a world-class facility to help attract the best doctors, because then he'd be able to charge top dollar.

The other guy has a heart of gold, and is just desperate to have something to serve those poor unfortunate kids. So begs for funding, and cuts every corner, to create a facility.

Flash forward a year, and we see:

#1 - Parents picketing outside, calling the owner of the hotel an evil 1% because it costs so much to treat kids there (because it costs so much to run the facility, and the greedy owner wants his share too).

#2 - A pile of rubble, with weeping parents because of the dozens of people killed -- including the child patients -- when the building, with all the cut corners, collapsed.

In these two stories, who is the bad guy?

My friend claims that #1 is evil, and #2 is a hero, entirely based on the intent of each. How can that be, when #1 is successfully making kids better, and #2 has caused their deaths? Do we want to have more of #2, and fewer of #1?
As someone who very much values the clarity of content without the insidious distraction of advertisements, I would not like to see Wikipedia sell ads.

I would rather that they either continue to work through donations, or figure out how to sell their content directly.

Ultimately, I think the use of advertising as a proxy mechanism for charging customers is an inefficient historical fall-out of the constraints of magazines, television, and the web. Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things:

- A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume

OR

- A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
The real goal of user stories
Major PC makers plan to concede tablet market to Apple, Amazon in 2012
I know, I know. It's amazing how many times I broke this rule. I do better in future.

Somehow I think there should be a different design rules for labeling "persistent" (?) graphs, i.e. graphs that you look at regularly. If you look at a graph couple times a day you need to know the meaning of axes only one time. After that, the labels are waste of the real estate. I will look at the vital signs equipment to see how it's done.
Precision of Language
Why Apple rejected AMD's Llano in the MacBook Air
I don't know about indefinitely. At some point it may change. A good lawyer may argue successfully against continued use of court precedents presuming validity of granted patents. Presumption of validity is arguably out of place given today's patent system.
I completely agree. I've long thought that Wikipedia should sell ads or have commercial partnerships.

Another idea is partnering with a search engine. Add "Search for X on Google/Bing" to their search drop-downs and add a tasteful "Search in Google/Bing" on each article plus the search landing page. This wouldn't be very intrusive, many users would find it useful, and it's hugely valuable for the search engines.

It seems like such a missed opportunity. The additional money raised could be used in so many ways: investing in full-time researchers and fact-checkers, having full-time photographers, creating teaching materials, or freeing up copyrighted content. Content, afterall, is their core competency.

Wikimedia could be the Google of content if only it had the leadership and ambition.
> It might be too late, but it's nice to finally find them in the game.

I don't think it's too late - Amazon has a philosophy that seems to indicate different strengths than B&N. Apple has proven that brick&mortar stores combined with a powerful brand can work for content and device sales.

Further, in order for B&N to thrive, Amazon doesn't have to lose...
Great use of video
Dian Pelangi, Jakarta Fashion Week 2012
It's quite common for most Ruby deployments I've seen actually.
Secure Boot isn't a Windows 8 feature, it's an EFI feature that Windows 8 will require. the concern being that Microsoft will convince manufacturers to lock out non-Windows OS's from being installed.

I think that distinction is pretty important.
We already know that children from larger families generally have lower educational attainment and IQ scores, worse employment outcomes, and are more likely to engage in risky behavior.

Has the direction of causation been determined? Do children from large rich families do worse than children from small rich families? (Also: the paper linked on the words "educational attainment" in the original article seems to contradict this quotation in its abstract: "First, neither birth order nor childhood family size significantly influences the level or growth rate of wages..."[0])

[0] http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p413-26.html
I disagree. I would say there is a distinction between an error and a bug. There's certainly some grey area there, but, for example, if my code sets permissions for a directory instead of a file, I made an error. If my code sets permissions for a file, but produces unexpected results in certain cases because of an implementation detail, then that's a bug.
Life truism: you will get saggier.
Parking datapoints of the day
> you meant "inertial frame of reference"

Actually no. The speed of light is constant in ALL frames of reference, whether inertial or not. The math just gets more complicated in non-inertial frames. (That's the difference between special and general relativity.)

UPDATE: it's actually a little more complicated than that. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_light_in_non-ine...

> I'm sure that the effects are tiny for the LHC

Actually, gravity is a pretty significant factor. See e.g.:

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
yes, i see now. As a frequent reader of Wikipedia i'd like to express my gratitude to you for the donation.
And he wants to make sure everyone knows about it.
Consumer Electronics In 2012 – $1 Trillion Market?
You can't move to the Bay Area now?

Sorry - I have an ulterior motive. We're in desperate need of high-level JS/Backbone.js engineers.
Amazon Working On Kindle Fire Mobile Phone?
If I were to re-imagine SQL I'd invert the sequence of the clause and statement for this very reason (FROM TABLE WHERE USERID="X" DELETE).

As it, when I'm writing sensitive SQL to fix an issue I end up writing the where clause first as a SELECT, then issue it.. check the results, history up, ctl-a and replace with a DELETE. Harrowing stuff.
Just as a warning for those reading the comments before the linked article: at least one of the photos is NSFW.
In situations where I can't avoid it (I've come into more projects with no development database and no concept of the idea than I'd like to say), I've taught myself that starting any data modification on a live server always begins with START TRANSACTION.
Peixe Urbano
Peixe Urbano é o lider brasileiro em Compras Coletivas, sendo que foi o primeiro a lançar um site de compra coletiva no Brasil. Grande sucesso do Peixe Urbano.
Deer Season 2011
An upvote is usually sufficient. Avoid leaving a comment unless it adds to the discussion at hand.
CERN Reconfirms Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos
You selectively snipped that quote. The next sentence begins
with "Why must it be news...".

I'm not talking about holding Brin himself up for more Wikipedia funds. I'm saying that throwing a party about a gift that is (literally) the equivalent of pocket change is a bad idea. It leads people to believe that gifts like this are an example of how philanthropy should work.

And it's not, it's a big lie. It's part of a public relations push to squeeze more money out of people (like me) with far less relative giving ability. And I find that distasteful.
Edison vs. Westinghouse: A Shocking Rivalry
So the president will veto it if passed?
Event: Our Experience Building Lean
I disagree. Ads can be detrimental, sure, but they're also in many ways complementary to digital, frictionless distribution.

For example, ads encourage sharing. With a paid product, you have to gate access. But then there's a sort of implicit conflict between wanting as many consumers as possible, but wanting to get paid. And especially because it's hard to know the quality of digital media without consuming it, it's hard to know whether it's worth paying for. So there's a ton of friction. That barrier to entry stops virality cold, which limits distribution, and also revenue.

There are ways to do ads well. Google is the obvious example. Highly relevant, not particularly distracting, and take advantage of the intentionality of the searcher.

I think ads are a naturally better revenue stream for digital content. Not to say that they can't or won't be abused.
Somewhat off topic, but why are the licensing fees that MS is demanding redacted from the cited documents? Are these not public records?
Also a valid argument. I think it's the first time in my whole life that I got valuable content from 2 counterarguments in the same thread. HN is awesome!
Or take out a loan against them. Or put them up as collateral for a loan taken by Wikipedia. Assets are assets. If they're really worth something they're never really "tied down" completely.
WebP's compression is good, but there's an often forgotten PNG8+alpha format that is a form of lossy compression as well.

Although PNG8+a compression isn't as good as lossy WebP, it is availble now, and it is compatible with all browsers.

Comparison: http://pngmini.com/vs-webp/

Source code: https://github.com/pornel/improved-pngquant
Painless Traffic
Interesting! I'll have to try plugging into an external display to test your theory.
I can speak to WebGL as we've actually built some stuff on top of it. Yes performance is good, sometimes. But if your user is on hardware like Intel X3100 graphics cards, then the WebGL context will run in software mode, performance will be dismal, and you as a developer don't have any real checks to see that.

Secondly, hardware support for WebGL is very dismal right now. For example, newly shipping MacBook Air's don't support WebGL.

Third, we found so many inconsistencies across different hardware and different browsers that it made it not worth it to work on a WebGL project for the time being, especially for a small team. We wrote a number of runtime checks, but we still could not account for all the bugs, or find ways around every one of them.

If you're writing a new 2D game in HTML5 from scratch, you'll have a much larger market share by going after a slightly simpler (artistically) game using canvas, rather than trying to go for more horsepower with WebGL. However, WebGL can be useful for porting, if you'd like to see an OpenGL game you've already made come to the browser.
Wow, this is really phenomenal. It's amazing to see how little some people change versus how much others do.
Here's a solution in ~50 lines of Python: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3249937
Having Wikipedia sell ads would lead to insidious conflicts of interest. How do you know that they're not censoring edits to make articles reflect more positively on a company with which they have a commercial relationship?

It is possible to remove edits in a way that makes the diffs inaccessible. Currently, such power is used in a tiny minority of cases (e.g. personally identifying information). If Wikipedia entered into commercial partnerships with advertisers there would be great pressure to use those tools in a non-neutral fashion.
The #1 is the one who runs the society and has politicians in his pockets so they make sure that no universal healthcare is implemented and the people are forced to choose between the only alternatives you listed - i.e. scared by #2 the people are forced to go to #1 which produces more money for #1 for more political power. Repeat from the start.
Samsung phones with AccuWeather give away precise location to any app
In my experience, Friday Night PST has always worked out great for stories I post
Ron Conway Hints that Twitter Will Soon Sell Tickets for Music Concerts
I have a feeling they'll announce the Chrome port to Android at Google I/O next year (which is also a Chrome event), and it might get WebGL support along with it. I know some people were asking the devs about WebGL on Android at last I/O, so they might've taken that into consideration for the next I/O.

It would be a good time to do it, too, because otherwise Mozilla and Opera will do it anyway next year.
Aloha!

Would love your FB on our new email marketing software (www.redcappi.com).

And speaking of "doing nice", we contribute a minimum of $2 per paid account to Charity:Water for clean water!

Mahalo!
This is not remotely true. You hear about the big ones, DMCA, PATRIOT, etc, but most legislation is routine stuff that keeps the country humming along.

Saying gridlock in government is a good thing is like saying gridlock in Google's management was a good thing. We need government and we need effective government.
Since he allowed the work to be cached, I'll assume this is ok not just legally but also personally:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110514112625/http://diveintomar...
I think there would be a fairly strong uproar if they started making money off people's donated time and energy. The dynamic would change considerably.
The internet is the product of a government project and has been heavily regulated since its inception.
Angry Bonds: iPhone Game Lets You Run Europe's Central Bank
But how do you know Google isn't doing the same thing for its advertisers?
If time and attention really are the determining factors, maybe we parents should just chuck our smartphones and tablets for the first 5 years.

I'm only partly joking. I ditched my iPhone after my 2-year-old started saying, "Dadda, put your phone down! Come play!". It's relegated to my office now.
This sounds like the early days of Apple, but with more Jobs and not enough Woz.
Serious question: is Sergey Brin Google's version of Steve Wozniak? He certainly seems to be chasing the less-commercial, more-interesting ideas.
Original baby -Productos beb�
Congress declared pizza is a vegetable
By the way, if you're ever confused about what behavior is native and what comes from your config, use the `-u "NONE"` option to run vanilla vim (or macvim or gvim).
The Harvard of online animation education
Agree. Long run behavior is mostly useful when deciding between two competing alternatives in which the short-term consequences are unimportant.

I'd assert that the widely-accepted "in the end" kinds notions are noxious, and speak to a "happily ever after" narrative that has always been false. "In the long run we're all dead."

Another such poisonous idea is "the truth will out" -- sure, maybe. But once it does it could no longer matter, and there will likely be other far more significant falsehoods to worry about. Similarly, "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." When it comes to knowledge, this might be translated as "populations can remain ignorant and make stupid decisions long enough to have irreversible disastrous consequences."
you can get around this by editing remote files with your vim over scp http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Editing_remote_files_via_scp_in_vi...
The busking series follow me around the world doing it on the street
One of those niggly warts, namely UI stuttering, is significantly reduced on my Galaxy S-derived phone when I terminate any services (like IQ) not specifically related to the apps I'm running.
It seems unlikely that the type of people who shepherd Wikipedia pages in their free time would fail to notice and immediately report that type of censorship. The proof would be unnecessary - even the implication that Wikipedia was tampering with the content of its pages would have a huge effect on its reputation.
Bulk SMS Provider? Your gateway to trendy mobile marketing
Wikimedia is a not-for-profit. As long as they use the income to achieve their goals, I don't see why it's a problem. People don't seem to have any objection to commercialisation of open source software.

The great things they could do with extra income are endless.
if the renderer can leave the majority of the frame time free for game logic to run, it's done its job. Consider it this way: Chrome 15 leaves 86% of the frame time free and Classic leaves 97.6% of the frame time free

Well, if you're going to evaluate it that way then surely you also have to account for the game logic running much slower in JavaScript than in C++.

The bottom line is: If you care about graphics rendering, C++ wins by a large margin. And if you care about game logic, C++ wins by an even bigger margin.
Yeah, I can understand the need to crackdown with a team and get them on the move but the dude's ego just shines out of his asshole. The dude needs to realize the difference between cracking down and being pretentious; felt like I was reading a scene from 'The Social Network' for a second.
Hackers hit US water plant
I think but IANAL that those are considered trade secrets.
The author gives his email address at the end.
I was just thinking of a well-written "Security for Dummies". (Some books in the Dummies series are well written.)

Along with the premise that a significant fraction of the public would read it and become reasonably informed at least in layman's terms.

Perhaps that -- they -- in turn would effectively influence public knowledge and reporting as well as government and business policy and practice.
What made her freak out? Just the existence of the banner, or that she didn't realize Wikipedia needs funding from the public? How did she respond afterwards?
Performance is more to do with the framerate than visual quality - if you see blurry artwork it may be driver bugs, bad coding, sprites stretched with the wrong quality, or other things like that.
> If you want to spread that kind of negativity around, go back to Slashdot.

I'm sorry to nitpick, but while we're discussing appropriateness and lack thereof, can you avoid saying things like that? There is no constructive purpose that that mention could possibly serve.
It doesn't work like that, not even in theory. Communications infrastructure is a market that inevitably involves natural monopolies: first because of the cost structure of the industry (marginal cost curve always decreasing) and second because of network effects.
Good for Wikipedia.

Wikipedia should consider experimenting with different business models to generate money. Mozilla makes most of it's money from Google. By placing Google.com as their start page, they split the revenue generated from ad clicks - it's around 80% of their revenue (I looked at their financial statements long ago but can't remember specifics).

$500k to Sergey Brin is pocket change.
Although it's probably correct that ads wouldn't impact the content/bias of Wikipedia articles, I think a portion (at least) of the success is that it's clear that there isn't any such interference by corporations on the editorial content of the site. The moment you bring ads into the picture at least a portion of the internet will start to wonder about that. There are a lot of cynical (or realistic - depending on your point of view :) people out there who have seen people/sites/whatever chasing money change the direction and feel of a website.

I'd much rather deal with Jimmy Wales' pleas every so often than to wonder if maybe [insert sponsoring entity here] had some role of changing the tone/content/whatever of a given article.
Ask HN: What's the best way to start marketing a viral site?
I've been recently upgrading http://keepcalmand.com after I realised alot ofpeople were using the site.

(I forgot about it, then checked the stats yesterday :) good suprise)

Now, I've added facebook sharing parts, but I was wondering how you would kick off a viral site?

Thanks
Ads would be a shame I think, but maybe they could have a sponsor. Just in the bottom right corner of the Wikipedia icon, it would say 'sponsored by ____'.

I mean that's not too obtrusive but would surely bring in a lot of money. Football teams get £20m a season to put a name on their shirt so...
Not sure we'd see fewer bills passed; the cognitive load for each one would be smaller, so maybe they could work faster.

Anyway, "fewer bills passed" could be a good thing, depending on your perspective. The job of Congress isn't to pass as many bills as possible any more than the job of programmers is to write as many lines of code as possible. Less output may be better.
I think true donation should be anonymous, otherwise it becomes a promotion.
I put in a deliberate syntax error first, and then edit in the actual delete or update query. This protects me from hitting enter too early.
Because of this, we're going to back up parts of our database more frequently. A lot of our data isn't mission critical, so it wouldn't make sense to do daily backups for it. Other things, like family accounts, obviously are. We're going to back those up daily from here on out.
That's not necessarily true. If you look at the corporate or organizational opposition to SOPA, you'll find eff.org, mozilla.org, etc. These folk aren't necessarily in favor of piracy. More realistically, they're in favor of free speech or free software.
An old design of the Apple Online Store at apple.com
This is hilarious, as the whole original point of patents is to make knowledge more widely spread so that people can use that knowledge after the expiry of the patent. It seems that a point of law meant to help the little guy is instead effectively deleting the point of having patents in the first place.
Learning Lessons at the Prineville Data Center
Unbelievable photos from Prineville.
It's a 61kb script minified, and jQuery 1.7 is currently 91kb. Yes jQuery is likely to be cached but IMO it's not huge, one of the game's images could easily be 61kb too. On top of that we've seen some competing tools generating like half a megabyte of JS :P

Edit: also our intent was to compare real game engines, which necessarily add some performance overhead, rather than a thin experiment.
As Zynga’s IPO Nears, a Look at Past Controversies for Clues
Google adds facial recognition to photos.
Numis Network End of Year 2011 Challenge Vid from Deep in the Rocky Mountains
While I see your point, I don't think it's fair to chalk up the opposition to merely piracy supporters. There are a large number of people who fear the broader ramifications, and a lot of organizations, who are against SOPA and not necessarily pirates.
Django ChartIt
There is no point to a .xxx TLD. Its sole purpose is to extract wealth from an existing pool rather than create value. This is the textbook definition of rent-seeking.
This is proof that Dropbox's referral strategy is working. This guy spent $25 to acquire a bunch of new users for DropBox. Way cheaper than what DropBox probably pays for the same users.

Awesome post! Clever idea.
Well for one, it probably isn't healthy for too much of Wikipedia's funding to come from one party. $500,000 is probably about right for the maximum. There are questions of neutrality here.
You see, G+ is doing exactly what Facebook does. The brands are basically duplicating their efforts for social interaction. I don't see any difference between how FB treats page creation versus Google Plus.