skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Facebook Credits Alternative?
Hi All, I want to make a collaborative website that uses credits (purchased with cash) that can be redeemed at any time for a small fee (perhaps 10%). So far all I can find is Facebook Credits, but they charge an exorbitant 30%, probably following Apple's lead. I would have to charge something like 40% just to stay in business and I just don't see users wanting that.

I could easily implement something like this myself but would have trouble sleeping at night with hacking so prevalent. I think that what we are really paying for is security, at least the sense of it, because facebook can provide a privatized form of FDIC insurance with its billions and billions of dollars. We are basically paying them protection money.

So my question is, that since there is a nonzero probability of any website being hacked, perhaps we have been looking at this the wrong way. Is the main thing preventing websites from using their own credits - a lack of insurance?
Using Logarithms in the Real World
Would a TOR exit relay be better than a bridge?
When I first saw Rovio[1] for sale on eBay, one clever eBayer decided to charge $1 to let you use it. Since you could control it remotely through wifi and the camera, you were able to roll around his house.

So then I thought, what about taking this further? Like an arena where you could battle them or something? Better yet, get a warehouse and build rooms, escalators, themed areas like a park or waterfall. Allow people to use their mobile device to log in to their bot, avatar toy, etc and control it. You could do things like teleport to other parts of the warehouse, where you'd just embody a different bot. With augmented reality, you could even sell "stickers" to decorate your bot or battle car, etc. Advertising could be tastefully placed around the areas as an additional revenue stream.

Of course, prox sensors would be a must if the object of the environment isn't to bash everyone to bits.

It's pretty far fetched, but I think it would be fun!

[1] http://www.robotshop.com/wow-wee-rovio-spy-robot.html
$300 fix for rambling YouTube videos: Listec’s iPhone & Android teleprompter
But perhaps for sites which are static (in animation) and not interactive like gmail and other email systems it may perform well.
Wait - I thought -4^2 was 16 not -16. But then the 2^3^4 discussion here lost me as well.
I no longer recall all the things I've done over the past some years to beat down Autorun and AutoPlay on this Windows machine. /irony

Although I haven't read through it, yet (or at least, not today/recently), this document seems pertinent (in both the depth and the currency of its information):

How to disable the Autorun functionality in Windows

(Article ID: 967715 - Last Review: June 10, 2011 - Revision: 6.3)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967715

P.S. Although I've looked at a few other googled documents, combining the above cited document with this Wikipedia entry provides a rather useful overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoRun

In my current case, if I wish to take advantage of the Dropbox beta's features, I will need to renable Autorun on my Windows XP machine as on Windows XP AutoPlay triggering is dependent upon Autorun being active. I had to check the registry in order to confirm that Autorun is currently, entirely deactivated. The Group Policy Editor was not showing any entries -- perhaps because the registry override that is present pre-empted any GPE control over same?
Congrats to Kickstarter!! This is the type of win-win startup I want to create/work at. Gives a simple example of pg's essay about wealth not being a fixed cake to share but that it can be created (http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html).

Two things that piqued my interest:

1) They kept saying that they were refreshing the project page to say when it'll hit 1M. Surely a company like Kickstarter has created visualization tools that create nice, real-time graphs of selected projects. No?

2) "After not having a single million dollar project in Kickstarter's first two-plus years, there are suddenly two within four hours of each other." Call it black swan, non-normality, heavy tail, whatever, this shows how common (and lumped) rare events are.
"You don't have to do business with any business that offers you terms you actively dislike."

In the really-real world you often do have to use businesses whose terms you actively dislike due to de facto monopoly, collusion between big players, etc.

I hate Time Warner, but they are the only viable ISP that serves my area -- what am I going to do in protest of hating them, go Internet-dark at home? Yeah I could do that without, you know, dying or anything, but I'm not going to, so I grin and bear it and hope they don't "alter the deal any further".
Exponential to Linear Complexity using Memoization
Scale of Universe
Copyrighted Photograph
Kckr, a file change watcher in node.js
-4^2 is -16.
(-4)^2 is 16.
> Anyway, I agree that these users were committing fraud, but why ban me?

Because, explicitly or implicitly, something you were doing was encouraging people to defraud advertisers through your website. The way to stop this is to eliminate the cause (the person/site encouraging the fraud) not the symptom (today's batch of site visitors). Multiple people don't start engaging in multi-day click fraud behavior randomly -- something sets it off, something as innocuous as a forum post encouraging it or text near the ad that says "this project supported by ad clicks" -- but there has to be a catalyst, and that's the thing they're putting an end to by suspending an account.
Just a question about ACTA
Interestingly I think the OP indirectly touch upon the reason why everyone should learn to program and not just people who want to do so as a profession.

Programming is the lever which allows members of a community to surmount all the obstacles that form a barrier to sharing, collaboration and developing best practices out in the open with others.

Without programming, sharing and collaboration is reduced to the amount afforded by fundamentally human "bandwidth". Programming gives you the tools to create and marginally, but constantly improve systems to increase not only the bandwidth between two members of the community, but the number of people within the community with whom a single member can collaborate and share with.

I would say that tools like Github are the most important tools in the community because use of it ultimately inspires a lot of the discussion in the community. It takes the basic building block of what the community is most passionate about, code, and accelerates and multiplies the interactions between two to many people involving that code.

In the educational community, something similar that involves lesson plans, exercises and other teaching material would be awesome.

For example, were I a science teacher, how could would it be if it were easy to share exercises, fork and modify them, hack together individual exercises of greater complexity that not only teach underlying principles but how multiple underlying principles work together.

What tools would allow people who have a passion for teaching to come together and collaborate over material? Programming allows the building of those tools. The more members there are of a community that can program, the more likely that there will be diversity of solutions and rapid iterations of those solutions.
Using a cheap accelerometer with Arduino comes with a catch - Hack a Day
BitTorrent Piracy Doesn’t Affect US Box Office Returns, Study Finds
I wonder how well it would work as a way to access data from outside national firewalls. Seems pretty topical considering what's happening in Iran right now.
I loathe passing around links about education to anyone in the profession. The comments almost immediately go negative. The first comment on this post was calling teachers babysitters. Everyone immediately turns against each other (parents, teachers, armchair educators, politicians).

Most good school teachers don't have time to read sites like hacker news for even an hour a day. They're in the weeds --running after school programs, early morning programs, writing IEPs, planning upcoming lessons, and whole slew of other stuff most people don't even think about.

People in the tech field all have the luxury to stop working to check out a few articles on the internet. We even pretend like this is making us better at our job. Teachers do not have this kind of time. They are on the moment they walk in to the moment they walk out (and them some more before they go to sleep).

Good teachers are like full stack engineers. They have to worry about everything and carry all the wait. They're thrown into a 50+ year system that almost never changes. Their version of a startup is creating a new school, and that's still a derisive, hot topic (chart schools). Instead most of them work for the education equivalent of IBM.

But still, Academic Recess sounds like a good idea. I just signed up. Hit me up at gaelenh at gmail dot com if you want any help.
Awesome suggestion, why wait? Keep your eyes pealed, we might have something out shortly.
I don't know what Fox News told you old geezers, but anonymous is not a group. Governments can act in the name of anonymous, and I'm sure they do (surprise!). You're missing the point, but that won't stop you from spewing your condescending garbage.
I agree with the mountain out of a molehill argument. There's an easy solution to this - if the profs don't like this, sell their own notes on the site for the minimum amount.

Most of these sites let you name your own price. Set the price insanely low and donate the proceeds to the university or a charity.
To be truly great you need both skillsets. Otherwise you're merely good.

In my opinion.
Share your love for someone (and, do so before it's too late)
LG Optimus Vu smartphone with a 5-inch 4:3 touch display
The first half of 2011 was all about 3D displays for Korean manufacturer LG, with the likes of the Optimus 3D and the Optimus Pad.
That's a great way of looking at it! Thanks for the comment.
Also, cross platform. Will run anywhere node.js runs.
Report: Google to Launch 'Home Entertainment System' in 2012
I'm not sure if I was starting fresh I'd go with R anymore -- it's so hard to leave R when you've got a toolkit of 50+ packages you need though. =(
How NASA Creates Those Beautiful Blue Marble Photos of Earth
Did the 2006 Symantec Breach Expose RSA's SecureID?
Best Digital Cameras Under 200
Great, now we can never have a poster that says Hack on it because Ben Barry has one and will complain on Twitter if you do.
Anyone have a summary of the bootstrap process for this? There is no "central servers" or the like but how does one client find the next?
Sounds like basically a union??
Astronaut feels space's toll on his body
right, i'm one of those "puzzle hackers". I consider myself more of a problem solver rather than an Academic who architects an application from scratch and knows exactly what data structures and design patterns to implement without doing some extra research.

My math is terrible. My math teachers were horrible, and my attention spam limited. Complex equations make my eyes spin.
I have a great visual and linguistic memory which helps me overcome these limitations. I'm also good at envisioning somewhat complex patterns and logic problems. When i code I usually start cowboy, and optimize later. I'm not at all a great abstract thinker, and therefor not consider myself a great programmer. I'm also from a hobby PHP background for 12 years now. Maybe that says something :)
The orientation for new faculty ought to consist solely of your first sentence. Too many of my colleagues don't seem to understand this.
There are enough tools now for these teachers to find one another rather than been islands in a school.

Growing up, I can count the number of educators that cared enough to "hack their craft" on one hand. None of them knew about each other. What has changed is that these people now have a way to know one another. This also helps some teachers with hacking potential that would have otherwise slipped through the cracks to realize potential as a hacking teacher.

TBH, without a site like hacker news and places like github, how many here would still be working a lame enterprise programming job coding in VB.NET or Java in the basement of some big company where programming isn't the core business, but simply view as another job that needs to be done.
Space junk funk: The anniversary of the Cosmos/Iridium satellite crash
Don't let the haters get us down! I'll reiterate that I do believe perception is changing amongst many teachers in the field. However, the perception outside of the field is what you said...
Pilot plant converts fruit and veggie waste into natural gas for cars
The author never said that Sahil is "just some dumb kid who got lucky". He didn't say they're quitting, or blame Gumroad's success for that.

Instead, he was honest about why a well funded competitor is a daunting prospect to someone who's prelaunch, and went on to say that that's not a reason to quit. On the whole, a pretty admirable post.

Read the damned post before you spew this self-righteous nonsense.
ajjuliani at gmail
If you're looking for a cutting edge whitepaper on this stuff check this out: http://maverick.inria.fr/Publications/2011/Cra11/CCrassinThe...
Can anyone speak to how well the search function works within the Tribler application? I can't get it to return any useful results :(
Your opinion of toy language or not. Javascript is very powerful and useful both on the client side, and even server side with Node.js. I have been improving on my Javascript thanks to sites like Codecademy. Loving it too.
I wrote this about 10 years ago and hope to spend some time one day making it simpler, but it seems to have helped a lot of people judging by the emails I get... http://www.heyes-jones.com/astar.html
TOR has a blog post up about exactly what they've been able to determine about what Iran is doing:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/iran-partially-blocks-encry...

Regarding HTTPS, it appears they detect and disrupt the SSL handshake.

For those who can't access TOR's site, it may be useful to quote their post in full:

“Over the past two days we've been hearing from, and working with, a number of Iranians having difficulty using Tor from inside Iran. It seems the Iranian government has ramped up censorship in three ways: deep packet inspection (dpi) of SSL traffic, selective blocking of IP Address and TCP port combinations, and some keyword filtering. For instance, they have partially blocked access to Tor's website, torproject.org, via IP address (such as 86.59.30.36) and port 443 (which is the HTTPS port). The third level of blocking is by keywords, such as searching for the word 'tor' via regular, non-encrypted search engine websites.

The blocks on SSL are not complete and not nationwide. Where blocking is in place, initial investigations show they are identifying the beginning of the SSL handshake and simply interrupting the handshake. We continue to research and investigate solutions with the assumption that SSL will eventually be blocked nationwide inside Iran. Our goal is to defeat their dpi signatures and allow tor to work by default.

The Iran Media Program has posted their thoughts on what is happening from a journalist's perspective.

So far, it seems the majority of Tor users are not affected by these blocks. Iran is still the #2 country based on direct usage, https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=direct-users.... This number is on the decline, however.

More details to follow as we have them.”
> 1) They kept saying that they were refreshing the project page to say when it'll hit 1M. Surely a company like Kickstarter has created visualization tools that create nice, real-time graphs of selected projects. No?

I found that odd as well. Where's the websocket goodness?
Free 4.5GB DropBox Space, if you try their beta
Coding at school vs. coding as a profession
I'm in the learning phase so I can't really comment on this but would love to hear others' comments.<p>(cross-post from http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/pj7le/i_gained_a_new_perspective/)
How to Make a Computer Operating System in 12 steps
I Wikipedia has helped me understand many algorithms. It's probably something like 50% chance I will get it, but the articles so short it's worth a first look.
So if Blizzard does a Kickstarter and raises $10M in pre-sales for a new game, is that within the mission of the site? I was under the impression that it was a site for projects by people who otherwise wouldn't be able to fund them. This seems to be pushing that boundary.
Just saw an awesome documentary on Anonymous at the Slamdance Film Festival (Sundance's indie younger sibling). Interesting and well made. Would recommend it for anyone who is interested in Anonymous/Hacktivism.

http://wearelegionthedocumentary.com/
Great piece - just wish I could control the audio volume.

Curious if HTML5 can do this yet...
It's worth noting that this and other recent problems are only with Google's mobile wallet implementation, not an issue with NFC.
This just in: Web-socket powered dashboards not necessary for success.
Thanks heaps. The many lackluster/broken dir watching facilities is a major pain in the ass. I am all about keeping node slim but i really wish they would fix dir watching in node core.
Programmer nails real-time rendering of ultra-realistic human skin
2012 Mitsubishi Outlander Sport
Norvig's practical ai programming has a great chapter on search which also shows how similarly different algorithms can be expressed if you have the right abstraction
The problem with ACTA is that many of the clauses are very much open to interpretation and often times only understandable if you have all the protocols - which are not available to the public.

However there is a petition by law professors against ACTA coordinated by Prof. Metzger of the University of Hanover and signed by practically all leading German professors in the field of IT law. (See: http://www.iri.uni-hannover.de/acta-1668.html)
I am in education and agree with much of what you have written.
I don't think the "pure piracy" model will ever come to pass, but I don't see piracy going away either. The people who seek to eliminate piracy can only do so with modest efficacy by resorting to systems that severely limit freedom and have the implicit assumption that the user is a potential criminal instead of a patron. I respect copyrights the best I can, and I don't see copyright laws disappearing, I'm simply stating that I wouldn't rely on today's model of business for tomorrow when there are clear cracks and a lot of legal question marks and civil disobedience. If nothing else, assume piracy will happen and diversify (i.e. don't risk house and home on CD/print sales).

Trust me, plenty of people thought Red Hat was crazy for "selling" Linux when you could just download the source and compile it yourself. Heh, turns out that building 10,000 packages using a 233 MHz CPU takes a few days, and isn't nearly as convenient as an autoupdate service that works on a whole network of PCs.
Back in the day (i.e. when Mad Men is set and before), no-one said: "All you're good for is having kids". They didn't directly say that a lot. It was more like pointed reminders that someone was attractive. Or that someone wasn't married, or that someone is finally married (in the vein of "congrats on you finally graduating from college! you're a real person now!"). Or that someone "will make some man very happy", etc.

There is a lot of tradition of impling that the most important thing for a woman is to be married. That's the whole thing. So when you mention, in a setting with few women (and hence more susceptible to sexism), that someone is married, it might sound half like the old ways.
We are planning a similar site and we are looking for moderators... Thanks for the interest and I completely agree.
I did some very rough frequency analysis using this last night, but didn't get very much from it.

The comma symbol is more frequent than any letter usually is in English, but given the small corpus that's not too telling. It could stand for an 'e', or the coded text could be lists and they're just commas.

Someone commented on the article that he suspects the 'divided by' symbol might stand for 'i' due to its placement, which agrees roughly with the position it gets in the frequency table. Someone else has suggested that the language being masked might not be english, which is an intriguing possibility.

The frequencies aren't flat, which seems to suggest it's either not a very good homophonic cipher (he just threw some odd replacments and codeword-symbols in there, basically still a substitution cipher) or it's a very good one (he consciously aimed at misleading symbol frequencies).

The rough nature of the writing (also discussed on the article) suggests that the code was probably memorised, and thus not the result of a very laborous method.
Oh yeah, and if anyone in Iran wants to test it you can use my vps to test. 'ssh -o ProxyCommand="proxytunnel -p syw4e.info:80 -d syw4e.info:22" -v'. See if it does an SSH handshake. If it does, you can use this tunneling method. Also try the icmp/dns/openvpn, though. To see if DNS is not being intercepted, run 'dig +short www.google.com @syw4e.info' (or 'nslookup www.google.com syw4e.info' from windows). If it returns "127.0.0.1", you were communicating directly with my nameserver and you should be able to tunnel openvpn to a remote box on port 53.

I'll have to find the paper and clean it up a bit, but e-mail me and i'll send it when I find it and i'll post it on here. It's not amazing or anything, mostly just a talk with references to tools and articles and common flaws in captive portals.
How Yahoo Delivers Personalized News to 700M People (HTML5 Visualization)
I see your point, but I feel like the true success of any platform is achieved when people start using (in a positive way) for things you hadn't even thought of.
Including vendor prefixes in a release build, I said, is arguably wrong. I'm not arguing that it is - I honestly don't know which is better, as not including them has downsides too.

And, as you said, other browsers do this too (but less recently), it isn't a WebKit-specific thing. The only difference is that WebKit won on mobile and has become the dominant web rendering engine there, between Android and iOS (and Blackberry, WebOS, etc. etc., pretty much everyone uses WebKit on mobile).

The only solution to this would be to not have a single implementation dominate the market. But that has already happened on mobile, the question is now how to live with that. (And there is risk on desktop too.)
Totally - if the supply of talent becomes more: productive / wide applicable / sought-after - it only makes sense that they'll move up Maslow's Hierarchy into the highest fulfillment: meaning itself.
Well, given that this is the first time it's happened, I'd imagine the need for such a thing was small until now.
I probably don't understand the problem whatsoever. I try to understand the utter bullshit women have to go through. At least I'm trying. It is hard for me to understand, this problem. It seems like becoming so tired of being attractive that compliments on your looks make you angry would be a nice problem to have. That is a handleable suffering. I apologize for being so insensitive though.
WebGL Cloth Simulation
The National Library of Medicine and IBM Watson project
What is changing? Public education is still based on a very outdated model (at least in the US).
Smart TVs cause a net neutrality debate in S. Korea
The ABCs of shutting a company down
Scale of Universe Enhanced is the sequel and even better: http://images.4channel.org/f/src/589217_scale_of_universe_en...
Decentralize your DevOps with Master-less Puppet and supply_drop