skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What happens when you ask Gmail’s SMTP server for help?
Cool! Looks suspiciously like some of the displays in Google's lobbies...
"The second word is hard to break by hackers because it already failed a machine OCR algorithm"

But, from what I understand, the hackers don't have to get that word correct. The system only checks the answer to the known one, right?
If it wasn't on a logarithmic scale, the axis would be so wide as to overshadow the other axises (and there are a lot of axises in those graphs). The absolute values in the range of the "income gap" may not be important when the purchasing power in each locality is taken into account. Like when he mentions the wealth of the UAE only seemed to reduce their childhood mortality rates once education and infrastructure improvements were made. It wouldn't matter if they had even more money (or if the graph was a non-logarithmic scale). His point is that narrowing the income gap isn't some silver bullet that suddenly fixes things.
Merb 1.0 Spec change
Ask HN: Fireball in the sky
On Friday evening (11/21) I was walking home (in NJ) at around 8 PM and I saw a fireball streak across the sky. It's hard to describe the size of the ball but let's say it looked to be about the size of an airplane, but moved very quickly and left a yellow streak in its path. It was a pretty spectacular once in a lifetime type of sight...but it left me scratching my head and asking myself what the hell was that?

I searched for a news story about what happened Saturday evening and this is the closest thing I found (an incident from a different day, same week): http://www.montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=9390870&nav=LpDZ

And here is a YouTue video about the meteor from the above story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_2aX-784sw

The fireball I saw was about a fifth of the diameter, much less bright, and its trajectory was much more horizontal- it looked like it wouldn't hit the earth for a while if it kept on its path.

My best guess after a little research on the web is that I saw part of the Leonid meteor shower.

Anyone else see anything similar in the past 7 or so days?
Anecdotally I've found ReCAPTCHA's CAPTCHA easier to fill in than other CAPTCHA that do strange distortions to obfuscate perfectly rendered text.

It seems the human brain is much more adept at decoding the black and white noise resolved in a crappy scan than the artificial manipulations applied by a computer algorithm.

It also seems the opposite is true for computers.
Son of Sam SMTP Server
Where are you going to school? How are you paying for it?

Are you sure that you want to go to college?
I don't really advocate dropping out because a B.S. can be a good safety net in today's society. If you don't find college a rewarding experience, you should probably do something about it. College costs a lot of money and you need to maximize your investment.

I suppose you can slug it out at a place where you don't fit in and use the isolation as motivation to work on your own projects, but that doesn't sound like a good existence.

To me, it makes more sense to go to a place where you will find like-minded people. Being around people who share your interests will probably help you make a better company in the long run. At my school, I learned more through my peers than I ever did in class. A good peer group is essential to get the most out of college. Being exposed to the unique skills and views of others will provide necessary personal growth. College, after all, is much more than just going to class.

I think you should take some time to figure out what you really want to do.
Rijndael was selected in 2001 after a 5-year selection process. I assume AES128 was never allowed from the beginning; the alternative would leak too much information. We still think AES128 must be brute forced. So what's the chance that today they're over a decade ahead?
I'd wager that if there was innovation to be done, we would've heard about it by now. If you do it, make sure you get a lawyer who specializes in securities law (a generic corporate lawyer is not your best bet).

Seems like a lot of effort (and a TON of expense) for something that most securities lawyers would tell you is a bad idea...
Yep, stopped at the illegible header, and... are those horizontal rules bleeding into the text? The post should have simply said, "Look at what I did. Now do whatever you think is the opposite of that."
Ask HN: Any Liero Fan here?
Has anyone here ever player Liero? For those who don't know what liero is, check out http://www.liero.be/

I original Liero had not been abandoned by its developer. Wouldn't multiplayer Liero on iPhone or Symbian phones have been excellent?
the problem is that now-a-days products are so complex, you can no longer afford to wait for the product to be perfect before you release.

The guy gives an example of an old TV...but thats the thing, it was an extremely simple technology by today's standards. Now even the simplest products, requires you to mesh together dozens of different technologies to work together.

And since the web, is pretty much full of nothing but startups, they just can't afford to spend the time w/o launching asap. If they wait for their product to be perfect, someone else will release a similar product and leave them out to dry.
Agreed they have to authenticate but I don't think they perform a lookup on every single request. They probably use a key but it is more likely this key (let's call it the AJAX key) is generated from the user's dat (id, ip, whatever else) using some hashing function on the back-end. When the server receives a request it can check to see if a request is valid by re-generating the AJAX key from the requests meta data (header or whatever other data sent with the request for authentication purposes). This is much quicker and more scalable than a lookup for every request and its just as secure. Even if someone guesses your key generation method (which should be HIGHLY unlikely) you can simply change it and it will work for all users immediately, even ones who are logged in already.

Now maybe they are performing a lookup for each request but I just do not see how they can handle the load, or why they would want to given the alternative I just suggested. Google sends a ridiculous amount of data back to their servers during a Gmail session. I haven't examined the traffic extensively but open up a chat box in gmail and the Firebug console at the same time. Click anywhere in the chat box. See the request that fires off int he console? That happens EACH TIME you click ANYWHERE in the box. I guess they are doing some type of clicking heat map or something I don't know, but whatever they are doing it requires sending potentially 1+ AJAX requests per second for many users.

I am not knowledgeable enough to tell you how much is too much for a server/file system/database to handle quickly (~150 ms per request for millions of requests at once) so maybe the situation I just described is not as bad as I made it seem.
Or Recaptcha...
It's been a while since I read HHGTTG, but I don't remember this. Was it in one of the many other mediums? Time to buckle down and read (listen, watch) the rest of the stuff DA produced in the HHGTTG non-canon canon.
If you knew the price of a stock on a certain date, options would be good. And you could leverage the investment with no risk. Better return than buying stocks outright.
i see dead people
Exactly. When I saw this I immediately thought of the display in building 43 (next to Andele).

I was gobsmacked when I first saw that, it was really amazing to see all the different things you could infer from the data.
Does "don't get into debt" apply to choosing what college to attend, as well?
Insurance, perhaps? Treat price gouging as a natural disaster. Farmers pay for the peace of mind that they will be compensated in the event of a seizure.
That's an interesting possibility.

But the fact that the article specifically mentions about drive failures and that they use some of RAID to cope with this makes me wonder if they were using old disks.
It's probably easier to get all new drives and use them isn't it?
On second thoughts though, it might be much easier to tell GFS to make an extra mirror than to make sure that all disks are brand new.
So, i buy your line of thinking :)
On the web real standards usually evolve out of best practices of hackers. The "standards" set by standards bodies are standard in name only, for the most part. They publish a large specification and people keep what is useful and discard what sucks. Or if you are Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, etc you create your own proprietary stuff.

I used to worry about standards until I realized that it costs time and money when and as long as the browsers are following a single standard its a waste of energy. Now if it works in all the browsers I push it live, standard or not. If it breaks, I fix it and then push it again.

It is all a big coordination game really. An invisible hand works well enough in the web marketplace of ideas.
I think the known ones were previously decoded by humans not machines. I could be wrong. But that would make it a bit crap as you say.
A categorized Twitter could be the answer to too much email!

Allow me to group followers into categories. Business, family & friends, social media community, etc. It forces us to get to the point in 140 characters and should continue such, but add a link to view more of what the communication received from a follower says(still keeping a character limit)... if I choose to do so.
I'd be surprised if this didn't greatly help you against dictionary attacks. I'm pretty sure 90% of cracking dictionaries don't even touch that range of UTF-8. Once you get out of dictionary range brute forcing a password is much, much harder...

...although now I'm wondering how long it would take as a map reduce job...
They should make a page that allows users to view that any time.
Looks like RRDtool to me, since it says RRDTOOL in the upper right of the images. Munin uses rrdtool. http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/
"The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one."
This article was written in February 2007. The author, Dmitri Davydov, founded PickyDomains.com and promotes it from elsewhere on nichegeek.com (see the front page, for example).

The current incarnation of PickyDomains' service is at id 722 (http://pickydomains.com/node/722), and started at 15 (http://pickydomains.com/node/15). Assuming continuous ids and no refunds, 707 domains have been processed on the site since April 2007, yielding $17K in revenue for the site and $17K in payouts. It's possible there are other revenue streams -- via domain registration affiliate programs for one -- but six figures is unreasonable unless I'm missing something.
Wow. If there were ever a person my opposite with regard to memory, it would be this woman. I can't recall what I had for dinner the day before yesterday (just ate left over pizza from last night so I'm not sure if that's cheating) and over the entirety of the rest of my life I probably only have about 20 memories I can recall with any accuracy, all of which are incredibly vague and almost entirely without a sense of time other than placing them "when I was younger" or "within the past 5 years."

If something happened in the past few years I can usually answer "yes" to the question, "Do you remember that time when...?" Although I'd be hard pressed to provide any details outside of those given to me and even providing the year it happened can get sketchy. Oh, and I'm left-handed, so either there's no correlation there or I'm an anomaly. I'm with her, though, it's a blessing and a curse either way.

Interestingly, I've also found the mirrored effect with regard to emotion; even if I can recall a traumatic event that happened I never actually feel the emotions associated with it. I just sort of recall the memory as if I were an indifferent bystander watching it unfold.

At least I can remember the important stuff, like programming languages ;)
One of the topics I saw among the comments was a means of distinguishing something that needed to be done and done now (urgent / important).

I propose a solution. Allow people to send you what I call a PEmail. This is an email with a very specific project outlined. Instead of just a subject line, the PEmail has a subject line for the project's name and a time due line. Your email client then automatically organizes the incoming PEmails by when the project is due.
There's only two quadrants for me: important or unimportant.

An important email is something work-related or an email from a significant other.

If it's important I read/respond immediately then archive it. All unimportant emails get archived instantly. This keeps my inbox empty and my mind at ease.

If I'm bored, I'll read the unimportant emails.

This system is simple and makes life a little less complicated.
Ahh, I hail from a grass fed country.
Didn't see your fireball, but your description sounds a lot like the streak of the space shuttle in its reentry before landing that I saw a few times from Texas in the 1990s -- went from horizon to horizon rather quickly, like a glowing jet contrail in the night sky.
Aha! That's no doubt the answer I'm sure.
I fucking despise ReCAPTCHA. The conceited 'digitizing books' canard is so deviously yuppie-guilt-tripping. I've never found any publishings as to the results -- have they actually done anything with the returned text?

CAPTCHAs themselves are rarely the best option -- they're only useful for unauthenticated submissions to extremely prominent sites (Google Accounts, Craigslist) and to extremely popular/poorly-written software (Movable Type, Wordpress).

If I'm already authenticated, or if I'm authenticating from a high-value OpenID provider (Google, etc.) I should not be solving any goddamn CAPTCHAs. If I'm anonymous (or effectively so with an unknown OpenID provider) it's ok to CAPTCHA me, but before you implement them think first about whether anyone's actually going to ATTACK YOU WITH A BOTNET. Unless you're a high-value target for griefing, the only way that's going to happen is if your site is an identical clone in a decrepit monoculture.
Complex Systems Science: How Do Math And Intuition Help Us Understand Whole Systems?
Doggles - goggles for dogs isn't dumb. The founder just made a non-sell-able creative idea sell. He made it pay. I guess he makes more money than Twitter :)
ObBorges:

"Funes, The Memorious"

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/borges.htm
Come to think of it I almost never see any that wouldn't be straightforwardly OCRable pre-mutilation...

It'd be hilarious if the whole OCR thing was a gimmick and nothing more!
Standards are crucial to the rendering of all those pages -- but de facto standards, rather than de jure standards.
Really? From research I have done in the past, I never noticed any discrepancy in infant mortality between African Americans and white Americans in the United States.

Remember where you learned this? I'd be interested to learn more.
I mean, traditional news outlets like CNN and New York Times have not significantly changed the way they deliver news online compared to newspapers or television. And I think there's a lot of room for innovation.

Except for CNN, no one has really begun to embrace the immediacy of the internet. And even CNN has done a very poor job; it takes them an hour or more to post breaking news on CNN.com sometimes.
I find Google AppEngine's webapp to be a much improved version of web.py. It's not as ridiculously short, but it's much more polished, and the added bulk is universally useful.

I hadn't seen their indigenous templating system before -- it looks pretty slow, though not as dog-slow as Genshi.
So speed? They're not fast enough to post stuff? Ok.

What else?

I ask because I genuinely want to know what you think is lacking.
I'm surprised they don't put it in the lobby, because its way more awe inspiring than seeing searches scroll by.
Good source control check-in habits
Drop out of school sooner...like after freshman year...make sure you live very close to campus for the next few years after dropping out...spend the day working on your own projects with friends around campus (make sure you do team projects)...and the nights chilling at student clubs and meeting the motivated folks around campus.

Learn through your own individual and group projects..and keep up with industry trends...be sure to travel around (to other schools among other places) and meet other folks that have a youthful spirit.

People around you will not like your unique lifestyle...but then again, they also will not have enough money to pay off the debt for the lifestyle they say you should have (go to school, invest in a home, etc.)

Any well-defined path...no matter how prestigious...will not lead to entrepreneurial success; success comes from finding/developing a new path; blaze your own trail

Be wary of things that you "Ought to do" or "Should do"...they usually cause issues (credit: Carol Bartz for the last line)
Downright scary to me:

13% to 27% of people were willing to steal €5 from a mailbox. In a first world, affluent country.
For snoozing I use http://www.iwantsandy.com. Works really well - just forward the email and add "r me in two days", and two days later you get an email with a reminder. For private notes, I forward the mail to myself and add notes in the body, and Gmail recognizes it as part of the same conversation.
I wouldn't tell myself anything right away.

I'd listen for a long time.

I don't know yet but after that maybe I'd say something or ask something if it made sense to.
Police dash cam of Meteor over Edmonton, Canada (YouTube Video)
I saw something similar recently. I posted about it on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373585
Validation ≠ Standards

All of these parsing 'errors' have clear and straightforward ways to handle them — to the point where the browser can handle an unclosed <p> much faster than it can download and parse '</p>'.

What's worse is that making a parse tree out of markup was never a problem! Consistent CSS layout has always had problems in all rendering engines, but parsing has never been problematic in the slightest.

Microsoft was absolutely right to cockblock XHTML — removing all parsing exception handling is so damn counter-revolutionary. It's pathetic that Microsoft understands the web better in this case than the W3C.
Homes With Tails: What if You Could Own Your Internet Connection?
Well, the trick would be to just start watching the sports that didn't quite make it into the almanac. Snowmobiling ftw.
Standards are like international law -- only half the countries follow half the laws half the time.
Do you actually think the first wheel was perfectly round and that it didn't break into pieces after some time?

All those early planes that crashed, those zeppelins that took fire were the works of software engineers? What about the Titanic?
You mean, like speculators?
McDonald's sued over nude photos on lost mobile phone
0.25% CTR is pretty bad.

My experience with Facebook Ads is that you should target the ads as closely as possible or you are wasting your money. Facebook has a ridiculous amount of inventory and a user base who don't like clicking on ads, especially irrelevant ones.
"If something goes bad with food, people could starve"

I was not aware of that fact. But in which way exactly does it call for government-controlled agriculture?
"pure free market theory" (whatever it is...) is just a model, and as such it can't perfectly describe what it is supposed to describe.
Every password manager I've used (granted only a few) will generate random ones for you. Is this significantly more secure than a random 18 character string?
Whoa! A NY Times article about mastering GNU Screen! I can't believe it!
/me goes off to replace my ubuntu partition with a debian etch one and my fedora partition with a CentOS
Is Reddit a stable system? If not, will it ever be?

There is a lot of trolling on present-day Reddit.
Server-side is probably the right place to fix it, but I tend to be impatient when it comes to security.
With the caveat that only one of the two dimensions can be determined easily.
Bad idea. I only check YC news when I'm commuting, or in the evenings (ie. when I want to kill a little time). I'm also in Australia, so the US timezone centric suggestions are very blinkered.
So what we have in the first place is major corporations which are parts of even bigger conglomerates. Now, like any other corporation, they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. And remember, we're talking about the elite media. So they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates. And ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises advertising rates. So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.

Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this? I mean without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers and the product.

Now there are many other factors that press in the same direction. If people try to enter the system who don't have that point of view they're likely to be excluded somewhere along the way. After all, no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct. It's not the way institutions function. So they'll work to exclude or marginalize or eliminate dissenting voices or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional, they're dysfunctional to the institution itself.

http://www.archive.org/details/NoamChomskyNoamChomskyManufac...
Yes, I willingly visit /b/ (4chan), and I enjoy it a lot. It never fails to make me laugh. Sometimes, when the moon is right, I even giggle. Like a schoolgirl, sometimes. A schoolgirl in the noodly grip of thousands upon thousands of tentacles.

I also have over 2K karma, if that matters to some people.

I refute that /b/ is "supposed to be" a serious community. It just is what it is. And as far as I can tell, its sole purpose is hilarity. You should visit it sometime, when nobody's looking, and when the moon is right.
"How do you write women so well?" ...
Using Goldman as a representative of the market is insane--if it were the market wouldn't look anything like it does now.
It's the weekend. Anyone with reasonable news is waiting until tomorrow to release it.
It's sure as fuck not going to be Java on the desktop. Sun was one of the only companies that could have made crossplatform desktop GUIs work, and they fucked themselves over repeatedly. The only crossplatform GUI that's succeeded has been the Web.

For desktop apps the present and future is native: Cocoa on is stellar and .NET is getting better as they dogfood more. GTK isn't very good, but it's the best you can get for Xlib — hopefully a brand-new Xcb-based library will emerge soon.
I lived there for two years, and I confirm that it's a good country. Beautiful country, nice clean cities, good people, etc.

The three hours of daylight this time of year are a pain though.
Fossils Are Fine; a Live Beastie Is Better