skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dropbox is a web "sync" with a client. Skydrive is a web "sync" with a client and an API to write clients for other OSes. I don't see the outrage.
And once Google and Facebook find a workaround for that setting, they can add a fifth option: really really block all third-party cookies.

Seriously, the answer here is that if a browser wants to block third-party cookies by default, it should go all the way and do so, no exceptions. If social networks want to plaster the entire web with their buttons they can try asking browser users to change the setting back.
I see this as a predominantly moral issue. Google seems to expose itself as the people whom I don’t want to be tracked by by engaging in shady behavior. That is exactly the problem.

Yes, anyone who wants to can circumvent it anyway, but that doesn’t stop us from judging those who do so negatively†. Google can be held accountable in this case (by, for example, complaining loudly about what they do) and there is nothing wrong with doing so. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s right.

That the protocol sucks is in that context a separate and unrelated issue. It may be security theater, but that doesn’t make Google’s behavior any more moral†.

—

† Insert clever analogy here. I’m too lazy to think about one, though.
From what I remember of the relevancy they had multiple machines each serving a different set of results.

The the machines with the best results for your keyword went down the front end just displayed what it had - which often was unrelated stuff from all the other machines that did reply.

Or in other words the lack of relevancy was due to the overload, not in principle due to their search algorithms.
Exactly. Which is why I'm actually thinking about this article instead of ignoring it out of hand like I do for any article that makes a fuss about changing the tax system.

The other part (respecting who says what) is partisan politics. Republicans are set on their anti-tax stance while Democrats are set in other stances that I cannot agree with. When you are stuck voting R vs D and not issue by issue, what do you choose? Then choosing one side, I tend to believe more of what that side says rather than carefully considering issue by issue. (A mental practice which I am trying to change.) This is also kinda why I prefer power to flip-flop between R and D vs. always be one side.
I guess I should point out why this is a big deal: the previous edition of the Camel book was published way back in 2000 for Perl 5.6, and there has obviously been a great amount of evolution of the language between then and the current v5.14.

As you can see from the link, hard copies should be available in a couple of weeks and can now be pre-ordered from O'Reilly and elsewhere.

The new edition covers all the new syntax (much of which was directly inspired by Perl 6), Unicode, regex changes and best practices, in addition to general updates and refinements.
Thanks, I think this did the trick. The main problem is the email program that's default on my Galaxy Note doesn't have a settings menu in the app, let alone one where I can turn off the notifications.
So did you every figure out who onetimetoken was?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203836
Ask HN: Open Labs in the US?
Has anyone done chemistry freelancing before? I realise that there are a couple of open labs available in the US, such as Biocurious and Genspace. Is anyone aware of other facilities or labs that allow trained chemistry professionals to use their equipment to carry out work?

The reason I ask is that I've created a site for scientific freelancing and the demand for chemists is higher than I expected, however I've been unable to find suitable candidates for employers. Here are a couple of examples:

http://zombal.com/zomb/scientific-manufacturing/need-a-chemist-to-produce-nootropics

http://zombal.com/zomb/scientific-manufacturing/whole-tobacco-alkaloid-extraction
Brit student locked up for Facebook source code hack
‘Go Away Google Plus’ User Script Lets You Hide Google+
Actually, that it is more an example of tribalism and xenophobia. Why is a manufacturer inherently evil for a crime no greater than not being American?
It's not a measure of randomness--it measures degrees of abstraction from reality.
It's not the first to do want/own either. Two social commerce platforms out there already offer it for some weeks (payvment and 8thbridge, if I'm not mistaken)
Apache Lucene alternative MG4J
Well, they may have been written already, but there may be pitfalls beyond combinatorics (possibly exaggerated for dramatic effect): one part of the code you'd like to reuse works wonders, but it is written as an all-too-clever abuse of PHP4, under an unclear license; another is a closed-source library which may or may not exist for all your target platforms; and yet another is a custom-license Python 2.6 script. Now how do you reuse those; and btw what license will you use for the result? This is not Pokemon, where you just need to "catch 'em all" and you're set; integrating the pieces together could be the most expensive part.
Report: Google 'Tricked' Millions of Browsers
Indeed, one always hopes they do the right thing :P
See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990	"Apple’s great GPL purge"
Maybe the world is neither black nor white.
What are you talking about? It works every time on YouTube, so why wouldn't it work here?

Honestly though, you would be hard pressed to disprove what that quoted statement implies, regardless of whatever knee-jerk reaction it may trigger.
"... there was nothing wrong with what they were trying to do ..."

you're right, as an earlier post suggests it was half-baked & released much too early. How much of the web surface has google indexed compared to what is there?
Why even bother breaking the crypto? They say right on the site that they use HTTP for public key retrieval so a MITM would simply serve up bogus public keys to the clients.
Well, we don't know what life was like with this "extinct" plant species, so we can't really tell yet if it has practical utility for humans (for example, producing a previously-unknown antifungal agent).

However, the ability to rescue species from extinction is a very useful tool to have lying around, in case a plant critical to modern life is pushed to extinction.
Freelance Marketplace Solvate Shuts Down After Four Years and $6.3 M
Commercial tripe? Lol. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

I'm just sharing some nice mixes some friends and I have put together for working to, and paying actual money to let you listen to them for free. Have a bit of thought before you mash your banana hands against the keyboard kthx.
‘Windows support’ scammers still trying to scam YOU in 2012
Every plant can be used for something.
Hopefully the iterations on the messaging has cleared everything up. Whew!
Yes, this allows them to directly sequence the genome of an "internal" node of the tree of life, whereas normally we only get to sequence the leaf nodes (extant species).
Often, blue sky research has the best ROI. You get smart people working really hard on it. There's a lot less crap to deal with, so they are totally focused on solving the problem. And the problems are actually quite clear cut (is the plant back from the dead yet?), so a lot of management issues disappear. A well defined (yet useless) goal is easier to manage than a wishy-washy "improve it, but don't change anything".
Payvment used the actions on Facebook shops, not a public Want button. 8th Bridge created a mockup of what it may look like but as far as I know they haven't released it yet.

Obviously a lot of people have never seen a Want button for as much pickup as this announcement received.

Appreciate the comment!
He didn't say it's an "IE-only standard", he said it was an IE-only feature. It may be standardized, but that doesn't mean that it's implemented in other browsers.
The first idea (faster delivery) was actually the basis of the infamous Kozmo. Wonder if they would be able to make it today...
isn't Ask still working and much bigger than blekko or gigablast?
Fedora Project Requesting Testers of DNSSEC-Trigger
> If you eat lots of healthy food, and get even a little bit of exercise, then you will gain weight, but it'll be muscle instead of fat.

Seriously, do you have anything to substantiate that claim? I have seen obese people even in countryside where they were eating nothing but so-called "healthy food". Since when "healthy food" becomes muscles ?
maybe the RAID controller abstracted the failure away

Typically, it will. You need the RAID card manufacturer's software to talk to the card to find out when a disk is going bad.
Is Tablet-Creep in Operating Systems a Bad Thing and Must we Accept it?
One bit of trouble I have with functional style programming is something like the following example: if I have an array of people with firstName and lastName properties, how would I go about returning the person with the longest full name without adding any properties directly to the objects? It is a simple map then reduce to return the maximum length, a fairly trivial modification thereof to return the full name, but when I want to return the original object, I can't think of a good way to do this.

The best I can figure is first mapping to a nested array where the first element is the object and the second is the computed property but that seems really messy. Thoughts?
If you truly care about your privacy rather than simply making a political statement, use something like Ghostery (http://www.ghostery.com/). Even if some of the big companies care enough to respect a request like this, I assure you that the majority of tracking services will not.

If you are making a political statement, then that's fine, I agree that all companies, Google included, should do far better on privacy grounds than they already are.
2012: The Year Scam Apps Killed the App Store
Sure, in the same sense that pursuing magic space unicorns (nobody proved that they don't exist) is equal to pursuing pulsed nuclear rocketry as a means of interplanetary transport is an undeniably good idea.
> The obesity epidemic in the USA is at its core tied to socioeconomic status. Hell, the fact that state-by-state obesity rates is highly correlated with state economic strength should be very telling.

You need to check your numbers, because that's not what studies are saying. http://frac.org/initiatives/hunger-and-obesity/are-low-incom...

Quote: "Among men, obesity rates were fairly similar across income groups, although they tended to be slightly higher at higher levels of income. In fact, among Black and Mexican-American men, those with higher income were significantly more likely to be obese than those with low-income."

Shocking, it says the exact opposite of what you were trying to prove. So there actually ARE people with higher income who are obese, it seems.
...and you would be correct.
Guys, rich people don't keep a Scroogey-McDuck pile, large concentrations of funds make venture possible, as it lowers the marginal risk. Try having our current startup fueled cycle without concentrated wealth.

Can we really drive the human experience and technology higher by diluting our funds in an effort to normalize and support, as taxation would do creating obs the average can fill -- or should we concentrate and invest in those with the most potential?
New Apple guide helps iOS developers get started
Is waiting 5-10 seconds honestly "cutting into their productivity"? Even so, there's nothing else that could be done with their time while they wait beyond impotently staring and swearing at their computer?

If that's how they operate then quite frankly they deserve to have "lost" that time.
Dear HN: If you could take a free online class in anything, what would it be?
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."

--Ken Olsen, the founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation
Friday Night At The Standard: Army Girls
I must have missed the part where you "scammed" them, unless you really just meant to say "confronted on the phone". But that wouldn't get you as many clicks, would it?
Comments on the proposed DMCA excemption for "access control" measures.
Skydrive is free, and you can sync as much as you want between machines with the included Live-Mesh. The 25GB limit is if you choose to sync some of your folders with the cloud.
Skydrive is as simple to use as Dropbox, and there is the nifty Desktop remote access built-in Live-Mesh that lets you interact with any machine running it, even if they are behind a firewall.
I got one of those recently, they said they were from "Visa Mastercard", they fell apart pretty quickly when I asked which one they were from.
You wouldn't use map or reduce, you'd just use recursion with an accumulator.

If you absolutely insist on map/reduce, you can just use reduce, where your binary function returns whichever object has a longer full name.
Using ubuntu upstart to stop a daemon
We can do both; rhetoric in this country has gotten to the point where simply letting tax cuts for the wealthy expire is spun as "class warfare".
ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta (feature list and video)
Chrome Connecting To Random Domains On Start? Here Is Why
Pointing out that Sebastian Marshall may not have the achievements to back up his attitude is not that controversial, and in fact I think may have netted me more karma than anything else I have ever posted to HN. There is clearly a large, mostly silent majority on HN that thinks that Marshall is at best overrated.

However, showering intensely personal abuse on both him and everyone who might disagree with you: "are there that many morons in the community", "steaming bag of shit" is hardly a way of making friends. It's not like anyone is forcing you to read about him. Why so angry?
"Developing fully automated methods to hide traces of one’s writing style remains a challenge". How would the following 3 methods fare?

Method1: Run the text through a markov chain constructed maybe from a mixture of 0.5 your text, 0.25 Shakespeare and 0.25 Alice in wonderland. Do something like sample every third word with the other two coming as a chain. Then run that text through wordnet to do synonym based replacement.

Method 2: Do a translation to a nearby language and back again using some language translating api.

Method 3: Replace less common words with hypernyms and more common words with synonyms or possibly not + antonyms.

Might want a few heuristics to replace stuff like (, ..., ) , - , : ,[,] with each other. Also randomize space between punctuation.

Optionally Run the outputs through mechanical turk to iron out the result, leave as is or clean by self.
After 60 posts Jekyll is slow to compile? I was just considering giving it a try but this is quite a turnoff.
This is what I was thinking.
They use two remote access clients most likely because the second one gives them invisible filesystem access - you can't see what they're looking at. The first one is probably just simpler to connect and helps them get you over the hurdles of the second one (which there aren't many of)

I had one of these scammers call, who was insistent there was an XP machine with a virus. He called back three times in quick succession, the third time I repeated that I used linux, not XP, and "I know you're a scammer, you know you're a scammer, just fuck off". That seems to be what's required to make them stop.

A friend of mine had one of these calls and decided to play along - he followed all their instructions, but played the dumb user... neglecting to tell them he was in KDE on ubuntu, not XP. "Yes, I'm clicking on the button in the corner...". He had them on speakerphone while preparing dinner and whatnot, went through several staff including 'senior advisors', and it finally ended when the battery on his phone died an hour later...
When I do this, I do it with Kris Zyp's put selector [1]. Creates new elements, modifies existing ones. It's the only DOM manipulation API I like besides jQuery.

[1] https://github.com/kriszyp/put-selector

That said, I don't do this very often because the designers I work with prefer templated markup.
I agree with everything except revealing your identity. Often seen sellers hike prices when they know you can afford it/ you need it badly/ etc. when we were looking at domains to buy in Microsoft, we were told to never access it from the corporate network since sellers had hiked prices dramatically when they knew it was Microsoft on the other end.

Sad, but I totally see a case for hiding your identity or going through another entity - brokerage, low-cost lawyers, etc.
Your browser would still download the files. You can still the downloads using Live HTTP Headers, Firebug, Fiddler etc. to see what is going on in the background. So it would be like disabling right-click - deter only the least knowledgeable.
Sonastand - Battery free speaker stand for iphone
Dan says he is on the job.

https://twitter.com/#!/danwrong/status/171730032807518210
I especially agree with that last comment, people are so hyping over not making pages refresh for speed, they rather often trigger the opposite effect.
To be fair to LogMeIn, it's a privacy violation to monitor the traffic that goes on in the connections they facilitate, though they should at least investigate such warnings, and perhaps suspend accounts that have had a certain number.
My point is that for a while, somebody ran a .com which put .org in an iframe and put advertising above it.

If Slashdot had owned the .com, it wouldn't have happened.

An Australian example is crikey.com.au, who for years were troubled by people referring to them as crikey.com -- in print media, on TV, even in Hansard.
Wii Sing
Yes, it only looks at public repositories. It wouldn't be hard to look at private ones but it would require the user to OAuth so the app has access. But I'm not sure if Github supports using OAuth entirely in Javascript (like https://developers.geoloqi.com/client-libraries/Javascript) so then it would require a server-side backend to handle the login.
Twitter's implementation of the hashbang was awful. It broke the back button and it was slow. I don't think it's a fair representation of the technique.

EDIT: And based on their implementation, I wouldn't trust anything their engineers have to say about hashbangs either.
On mobile, if performance is really so good, it might make sense – I especially like having references in place – might be quite handy.
Certainly scale needs to factor in here. What can you get done in a normal hour? Now what can you get done in one second?
The map is unnecessary. Just reduce:

(* assuming: val total_len : string -> int *)

List.reduce seq ~f:(fun a b ->
if (total_len a) > (total_len b) then a else b)

It's not necessary in this case, but fold is often a lot more useful than reduce. At least the way I think of it, the type of reduce is 'a list -> ('a -> 'a -> 'a) -> 'a, whereas the type of fold is 'a list -> init:'b -> ('b -> 'a -> 'b) -> 'b. The upside is that you can construct basically any type of thing you'd like, since 'b is a completely different type. The downside is that if 'a is different than 'b, you need some sort of initial value to give it.

edit: Yes, this does require you to compute string length multiple times...but keep in mind that getting string length is very cheap in languages with good strings. (That is, basically everything except C's null-terminated strings.) 99% of the time it's not going not going to matter at all. If you do care, you can map to a tuple of (original_struct,total_len) and then do the reduce and then another map to get back to your original structure, or use a fold, as I mentioned, or write a (tail-)recursive function that does it in slightly fewer operations. (Although I don't think JS has tail-call optimizations, so that's probably a bad idea if you're doing it in JS.)
In hindsight the second solution was obvious :) But can you explain your ideal solution more? Is it something that can be accomplished in Javascript?
This reminds me of HAML. I've never really seen the benefit of adding a layer that doesn't really add much onto something that is well-known and thus easily maintainable.

Performance benefits seem mostly irrelevant, as pointed out by others.
The pattern you mention of using a tuple of key-value pairs is not that bad and it even has a name. The Perl people call it the Swartzian transform.

An alternative if you don't like that would be having the maximum-finding function receive an additional comparator argument, similarly to qsort.
Several issues: back button programability, URIs become uglier so then you need to do some parsing, etc.

The sample the pros and cons of hashbangs, refer to the discussion on this page:
http://ask.metafilter.com/187222/Whats-wrong-with-using-hash...
A person making $500,000 a year paying 10% of his income to taxes would pay $50,000 in taxes. A person earning $40,000 a year paying 10% of his income in taxes would pay $4,000 in taxes. This isn't progressive taxation, it is linear, as both parties pay the same amount in taxes. I _do_ disagree with the premise of taxes on the whole, but I am comfortable paying 'an equal share'.

Progressive taxation, which I abhorrently disagree with, is when you penalize the higher income for having earned more. Are they better able to burden the load? Perhaps, but now we're punishing success, and removing the incentives for the lower income families to strive for more, both because they're less likely to reap their rewards (due to the progressive taxation) and because the needs of the poor are better met by the taxes of those richer than them.

What this also gets does is foster more of the environment that we have, where federal waste becomes more eggregious and tax dollars are diverted even more to the benefit of those paying the lion's share, leaving the lower class even worse off, which generally leads to their crying for even more progressive taxation.

Again, this is just my understanding of how things will work. Your opinion may vary.
Ah good point I had forgotten ask. Do they still maintain their own index? I recall a while ago they were discussing dropping it as a cost saver.

EDIT - Seems they no longer do. http://searchengineland.com/ask-com-to-focus-on-qa-search-en... Apparently they have been using someone else's index for some time, but maintain their own over specific question/answer sites.
The first I thought of was your second point.

Of course, this is dependant on translation algorithms that are at least somewhat inaccurate.

You may want to choose one closeby language, and one further removed and find the equilibrium phrase. For example, translate english->german->italian->german->english, repeat until you get the same english phrase each time.
Aren't I then computing the value of total_len for my largest object numerous times? That was why I went for the map, it made some sense to pre-compute the lengths and then find the largest one. Certainly I could implement some caching mechanism but that would come with some implementation complexity?
There's only one correct position: Software patents shouldn't exist.
I think this problem comes up from the somewhat obsolete linear text nature of code. Instead of particular perfect names, we could be using tags. AbstractSingletonFactory is three tags. In some contexts I'd like to know it's a factory, in others I don't.

The bigger problem is we haven't moved on from the simple text representation of code. And this overly simple tool, text, is influencing the way we're thinking here. The Humble Programmer phenomenon in action.
Google Plusification, or it's Not About Latitude and Foursquare
This is what they do.
The History of the Universe Timeline
Okay. so your statement here, in a very convoluted way, says that high school maths alone does not make you a mathemtician, and implies that I am saying the opposite.

Of course high school maths alone will not make you a mathematician, but its still maths, and its silly to say otherwise! This is my only point here.