skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Just how important is an attractive UI?
I've been building a web application at home for a few months now and having a programmers design skills (i.e. none) means that while it works well, it doesn't look that great.
The design itself is using the standard blueprint css grid, has a top nav bar and uses the Jquery UI buttons and so on. It's not awful it's just fairly simple.

I'm getting close to the point where I want to get some trial users but I'm worried that the basic design might put some people off. You hear so many conflicting things about startups, such as "launch quickly, improve later" versus "great design sells" that I'm not sure the best course of action.

So how important is it?
PaaS is "Platform-as-a-Service." Heroku is a good example.
"Platform as a Service" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service
Platform As A Service. Heroku & Amazon Web Services are both examples. In fact, they're nested examples!
Title should be "How to manually detect if your infected".

tl;dr version:

In terminal run these:

defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment

defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

if both are not found you are clear. If found, read the f-secure article.
PhDs interested in data science job may find the Insight Data Science Fellowship a good opportunity:

http://insightdatascience.com/fellowship.html

It's a paid six week post-doctoral training fellowship in SV that ends with interviews with companies looking for data scientists.
I'm worried that if I start Googling this I'll lose a couple hours of my day to a "researching vulnerability extortion" jag.
Philosophy majors tend to be a lot smarter than the rest of the humanities.

http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended...
http://www.umsl.edu/~philo/ETS%20LINK.pdf
Surely it cannot be that basic?

If it is, then it would be relatively simple to automate this behaviour from a range of IPs and disable the accounts of hundreds, if not thousands of ad-sense customers.
The second paragraph seems like something one could test. Have you?

Fraud detection is just hard. And my expectation is that for every legitimate friendly fire instance there are six or ten "marginal fraudsters" trying to spin their troubles with Google via blog posts like the one in the link.

I clicked on this thinking it would be a clear case of Google doing something "evil", and had to read through very carefully before I figured out that it was just another account freeze. Meh. If it's seriously $40k, then sue them and figure out what really happened in discovery. That would be a blog post I'd want to read.
Finding Early Customers When You Aren't Internet Famous
[Edited at ~15min, original comment below] This "personal site" was http://guitarhero-4.com, which was a thin affiliate site using a brand name without permission (ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803696, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803746).

I think we've found the problem...

[EDIT: original comment was: Looking at http://web.archive.org/web/20110203092609/http://guitarhero-... (via http://i.imgur.com/wWyNd.png), it appears that this "personal site" was a seedy affiliate site using a brand name without permission.

I think we've found the problem...]
I completely agree with your point, but I think it's important to point at this is measured in $$ value. We are manufacturing lower volume, higher value stuff than before (high tech) but we probably don't manufacture the same volume that we did 30 years ago (measured by weight or # of widgets).
There is http://jsfiddle.net, but that doesn't cover node.js to my knowledge.
GPL actually does not care about binaries, it only stipulates that if you are distributing binaries you have to distribute matching GPL licensed source code with it.

The fact that it implies that you cannot disallow users to produce and distribute additional copies is the whole point of GPL.
Just whipped up a syntax highlighting definition for Vim:

https://github.com/74hc595/dcpu16-vim-syntax
favorite comment by far!
Especially because some bare method calls will produce syntax errors ('class' being the obvious example).

I think there's no good rule of thumb to be had here; use whichever style makes the code clearer.
What to Bring to Your First Visit with a Primary Care Physician
Hi. I have to say, I am all about moderation. It's absolutely not my intention to say "no alcohol, ever." I just think it should be distanced from the official material/tone of conferences. The article was meant to get people talking, and it has, and I felt like I had to be a bit dramatic and abrasive to get people to listen.
We Got Hacked, Here's What We Found
Some background:

I'm at a very early-stage start-up of 2, and we wanted a centralized tool to keep track of bugs, todos, ideas, potential testers and (oh my) leads/customers. And we don't need or want the overhead, and often cost (however small, we're not even close to ramen-profitable) of 'specialized' tools.

We first worked with a Google spreadsheet, but 'marking' and on-the-fly organizing items was too cumbersome. We then looked at trello.com but their 'cards' are a bit too big for our taste and you cannot position everything where you want so you can only have left-to-right 'flow'.

So I threw this last week and started using it right away, and frankly we both love it. So here it is online, who knows if somebody else likes it.

Hope nobody gets offended by the silly light-hearted tone of the web site, writing it like that has been a nice break between more 'serious' matters (our startup is in e-commerce).

Thanks for any feedback!
Maybe porn is more popular in India? I mean, the US state with highest porn subscriptions is Utah, which is also the most religiously conservative, and India's even more so.
It is a pain with FFTW since they expose all this in the API, let you save/load the details etc. A better example is MongoDB. When you make a query they try multiple query plans concurrently, note which is fastest and use that in the future with continued performance monitoring. Once diverging from expectations they run the contest again.

Compare with other databases that put an inordinate amount of effort and tuning into coming up with the one true query plan per query.
She told him to take it down and he did. Where is the problem?
That's the main problem with automating as much as possible, and having as few customer service reps as possible. It feels like talking to a brick wall when something non-standard happens.

If this issue gets resolved in light of the publicity it's now getting, it just further shows that the Google system is deeply flawed for it's users.
0x10c: Just another DCPU implementation [Java]
On a non-tech note, I read on the internet (yes, aldaily, do not have the link right now) that 1/3 of Casanova's autobiography was about his affairs with women. It came to me when the article said that a third of the internet was dedicated to porn.
Conclusion: A third of our lives are dedicated to sex.
You are probably correct, but... well, what is the fun in that? :-)

I found this http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...
PaaS is shorthand for Platform as a Service. Microsoft Azure and Amazon E2C are both examples of PaaS.

A third service layer would be IaaS; Infrastructure as a Service.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=paas&l=1
DIY Shed Plans
The particle doesn't necessarily start out in the middle.
So they just shouldn't use the code. Not go off complaining how GPL if unfair and how it ruined their day.
Ignoring technical ways to work around the thundering herd problem, the slow rollout (employees first for several days, then a subset of servers, then a larger subset) also mitigates the problem.
I've bought the book a while ago and I pick it up whenever I have time, because I know it will always provide solid and enlightening information. The quality of writing is quite superb and I have not noticed any errors at all so far.

I've learned about the ways to call a method in ruby, what private and protected means, about the hows and whys of testing, about why it's better to have more smaller, specialized methods (and what that pattern is called), and much more. And I'm not even through 1/3 of the book.

Highly recommended!
Family Breaks UK
It appears that our account rep mis-typed the URL in that email reply. My site was actually guitarhero-4.com, here's the orignal email we got from them: http://i.imgur.com/2mcfo.png

I honestly don't think that site had anything to do with the ban though as there was over 2 years in between those two incidents.
A good programmer is like a doctor or a lawyer they can't be made overnight. What you're going to get is a bunch of developers that have a very limited skill set (I.E I can program ruby/rails and nothing else) and you will have to hire a wider ranger of lower skilled developers.
Out of curiosity, is clojure used to do the front facing web components of prismatic as well or only the data/computation work?
In the UK class=job not salary. Approiximately; jobs needs a degree=middle class, owning the land = upper class.

Working on oil rig and earning 4x as much as a school teacher still makes that a working class job, the teacher is middle class. The rig manager is working class, the geologist is middle class.

But ultimately it's a personal identity thing. You can be a member of the royal family making furniture or a working class lad making avionics software!
7 Ways to Start Scaling Your Web App
You can't, because that work can't be done here economically, we've moved further up the value chain.

On the flip side, let's say you want to manufacture a new custom processor for your ipad competitor, or turbine for your new 787 competitor. You won't get those things in China, at least not without significant involvement from US companies.
I believe they meant 128 bits (16 characters * 8 bits).
Well, if you're estimating, you're not really counting, are you?
Fair enough! I've updated the title of the post. Thanks for adding the quick detection routine.
I thought the exact same thing as soon as I saw the URLs. This could happen with ANY web service that returns URLs, even a REST one with a more HATEOAS-style approach.
Actually, what you have proposed is exactly the approach that some black-hat practitioners have used to hide click-fraud.

Some guys will setup a script to go to 5 sites (for example) and click ads on all of them. Their site will be one of the 5. All of the site owners make money, as do they, and because it's distributed across multiple sites, Google does not flag the activity as blatant click-fraud.

If you spend any time a BHW you will see these schemes over and over again, along with people claiming to make hundreds of dollars per day "on autopilot"....
Virtual tax audits coming soon?
Sure, the Strand is in lower Manhattan, but you're telling me a video that features a food truck and a uke book doesn't START in Brooklyn?

10:1 the apartment was in Park Slope.
Here's a vote for cherrypy - it handles all the http / protocol shenanigans for you, but leaves the meaty business side entirely to you - which, as an experienced developer, is what I want.
He said he took it down and that Google said everything was ok.

"Debby assures us on February 12 that “your AdSense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other AdSense ads.” This is the only issue that has ever been raised by Google in regard to our account."

Are you implying that the Google rep was incorrect and that this issue ultimately manifested itself two years later?
I'm not being sarcastic. I'm simply not interested in going into more detail on this topic.

I don't think anyone who's opinion I care about on HN thinks I'm dealing in innuendo on crypto topics.
This is a bad game unless you are EXTREMELY good at bughouse.

The people in the article are not good. They are newbies. (You can tell because they play 5 minute bughouse and they play slowly. No good players play 5 minute bughouse because it's a waste of time. 2 minute is standard. If you play with more, you literally end up sitting around waiting for time to get low, for minutes, because that is often to the advantage of the team that is losing and is easy to force by either team most of the time.) Also based on their openings, which are utter crap in both bughouse and chess, they don't even know how to play basic chess either.

The reason it's a terrible game is that bughouse is all about SPEED. You must move AS FAST AS POSSIBLE AT ALMOST ALL TIMES or you just plain lose because time leads allow controlling when pieces come to the other board which is extremely powerful.

It's hard enough to make all your moves in .5 seconds on one board. If you're going back and forth between two boards, you have to literally be one of the best few bughouse players in the world -- with over 10,000 games of experience online -- or the quality of play is going to be terrible.

I'm a strong chess player, a strong bughouse player, and have a great deal of experience, but I'm still not very good at playing two bughouse boards at once. It's very very very very hard.

Doing one of the hardest things around -- trying to play lightning fast on two boards at once -- is not a very good idea for a break. To play halfway decent bughouse on just one board, you need an extremely large amount of practice so that you can defend all types of attacks by habit and intuition, because you need to stay safe in under .5 seconds a move at all times.

Bughouse is all about pattern recognition as fast as possible. Chess skill and other stuff is important but secondary. Honestly, newer players can't even move fast enough in person without knocking over pieces.

If you watch the game you'll see them sitting there thinking for several seconds about moves. If you try that against anyone competent, you simply automatically lose. That's how bughouse works.

The solution for them, btw, may be bughouse without clocks: white moves on both boards simultaneously, then black moves on both boards simultaneously, and so on. I think that would be a good game, though a very different one than regular bughouse.
I've noticed the prevalence of alcohol in the tech workplace has increased in the last few decades. In the 80s, in Silicon Valley, a Friday beer bash was not unusual, but it wasn't every Friday, and alcohol wasn't offered at other times. Back then, for me as a young person, that seemed very cool and generous. It was definitely not routine among employers generally.

Lately, I've been to lots of meetups at tech companies in SF, and beer on tap seems to be freely available at all times at every location I've visited. In some cases, the tap is right smack in the middle of the main work area.

I have no problem at all with people who use alcohol or other drugs responsibly, but it's hard to see how providing alcohol in the workplace is skillful or wise. Possibly you're promoting camaraderie, but at what cost to clarity and wholesome connection and the long term of health of employees?

It would be interesting to do a study and determine whether freely available alcohol increases productivity or other measures of employee or customer well-being, and whether it and has any health effects. I'm thinking it has to be a net negative, but I'd like to see real data.

Times have changed on campus too. At nearly all colloquia I attend, there are snacks and beverages. I don't remember that ever being offered when I was a student in the 70s - no free food then.

So, we seem to be living in an increasingly generous world. People naturally want to give and that impulse is finding new expression. Food and drink are routinely offered. I expect free housing will be soon be offered in some places. Open source software is readily available. Knowledge on the web is freely offered. This is great! It's changing everything! The pitfall is that we're also being generous in ways that may work to undermine our collective well being.
Hmm, my experience with that has been that it's not actually that fast - certainly nowhere near a hardware RAID controller.

But hey, the benchmarks don't lie. This is pretty cool! And two SSDs probably sucks less battery than one HDD and one idling DVD drive.
Not convinced by the article, I didn't see any facts or data. "Complicit" is a loaded word that should be backed up with evidence.
I'm not really using it to scrape the comments threads in bulk, I'm just using it on an individual thread at a time. So I haven't had any problems with rate limiting.

Also, unless you are hitting hundreds of threads at the same time, I don't really think you will be caught by the rate limiter. Not sure about this though, but it's something that has been discussed before on HN. Try searching for something like 'HN crawl rate', and you will get more info.
Reactive Extensions v2.0 Beta available now [Functional-ish C#]
so many different versions of free. let's just have two licenses free and non-free.
I appreciate Jeff's mature response to Ryan's article. What most irked me about Ryan's initial article was how he seems to yell "FIRE!!!" and tries to backpedal the situation. It is hard to take that seriously even when he has some good points.
Deliver restaurant food from 11-pm to 7-am.
You are speaking of social class, which is highly attenuated in the US. Economic class is what I'm speaking of.
What else could Hatchlings have done to prevent this? I know people are saying, "don't rely on someone else for your profitibility", but if you are going to work with Google what other steps can you take?

He seems to have done all the right things:

1) Found an account manager.
2) Formed relationships with public google folks.
3) Opened discussions to further integration through continued sales.
Does anyone know if this is open to anyone?
FYI you're wrong. Standard play in bughouse is neither hyper aggresive for white nor hyper defensive for black. Building piece sacrifices into your white opening is a normally a sign of a new player.

The most standard opens in bughouse are e4/e5 and d4/d5 now.

In the past, standard was e4/d4 vs e6 setups with black either playing d6, d5, or bringing our 2 knights and a bishop next. This turned out to be overly defensive by black as far as pawn structure, while Bc4-f7 sacrifice vs 1...e5 isn't actually very good (but seems good when players are newer).

Note that in e6/nf6/nc6/bb4 openings, or 1...nf6, or various others, it's pretty common for black to play aggressively and sacrifice material (especially if white is over extending). White isn't necessarily the aggressor and has no easy to to quickly punish e6 openings. White normally would get a good position with center control then apply pressure and try to win more slowly.
It's not just dinner2go but you've also got JustEat and TakeAwayMenu who do the same thing in Brighton.
"Better than ping-pong"

Careful now, that's a pretty strong statement.
Dropbox doubles referral bonuses
Sorry, can you explain a little more about this? How would e-mailing the account holder and telling them what they did wrong reveal the structure of the algorithm?
I am a puppet lover, I'm a unix sysadmin and I've been administrating and implementing modules, providers types,etc. For the whole infrastructureof my work for 3 years. The point is I live in Europe, Barcelona. Is there any planed in Europe?
I appreciate so much your initiative.
No benefits of scale for huge Chinese manufacturing ordering more raw materials?

No benefits from China holding large reserves of raw materials (eg rare earth metals)?

No benefits from Chinese dock workers getting paid a lot less than US dockworker? (See also transport from docks to factories; from factories to docks; from docks to markets.)
Accused LulzSec hacker pleads guilty in Sony hacking case
We use Bloom filters to do something similar.
Actually, AWS is generally categorized as Infrastructure-as-a-Service--although it's added a number of higher-level services that are more PaaS-like. (EC2 and S3 are definitely IaaS level. Elastic Beanstalk is pretty much a PaaS. Other services are in-between.)
Not trying to refute you, but how can that be the problem? From the email you cite,

"Please be assured that your Adsense account remains in good standing and any actions taken on this domain do not affect the performance of your other Adsense ads."

The author of the blog post states after receiving that email he took the Adsense ads off. This was also in Feb. 2009 and the account was closed in April 2011.

Does the Adsense team (or whoever) go back and look at incidences from 2+ years in the past when looking for people to ban?
That is similar, but I was meaning it less in terms of hiding click-fraud and more in terms of click-fraud-fraud, which would have a far more devastating effect on googles customers and if it was widespread enough would be horrendously bad for google as well.
This depends hugely on the audience and what's around them on the page, but I'd guess the most noticeable and therefore most clicked ad would be the Microsoft Paint, No Logo, Gold Car.

OTOH, I'd guess the 1st or 2nd ones in the list would be near the top for downloads resulting in paid conversion.

But I find these produced ones generally poor, so it's hard to predict.
We used to occasionally get to play games like that for actual money when I was an undergraduate. Every so often, grad students in economics would come around to the undergraduate houses at dinner time to announce that they were looking for volunteers for economic experiments that night.

The experiments would typically take place in the social sciences building, with each participant being put in a separate office (that was one of the reasons they were at night--so there would be offices they could borrow). We'd be given instructions on the game to be played, and the phone numbers of other offices if the game involved communication between the players, and the game would start.

Each player would start with a certain amount of game money, and when the game is over that would be converted to real money and the player kept it.

On average, if I recall correctly, players would make about $20-30 or so each in these games. That doesn't sound like a lot, but for a college student in the '80s that would be enough for several nice meals away from food service, or for 3 or 4 albums at the record store. You'd almost always get at least $10, and sometimes someone would make $75-100.
If I could only spend all my karma on upvotes for this, I would.

I regularly look at various projects that I can use. And the first thing I check is whether the license is MIT/BSD/Apache/EPL. If it's GPL I won't even look at it, if it's LGPL I might consider it, but it would have to bring huge benefits. If there is no license, I have to contact the author and ask him to include one.

I'd love to be able to just set a filter "never show me any projects which do not have a license in my preferred set".

Please note that I am not editorializing here, nor am I discussing any values. This post is about facts and about what would make my life easier.
He is very, very unlikely to be sued provided that (i) he didn't explicitly agree to a contract forbidding security research when he acquired the application, (ii) he acquired the application lawfully, (iii) he at no point solicited business from the vendor of the application, (iv) he didn't exploit the vulnerability in any way that could be construed as having caused direct damages to the vendor, and (v) he is scrupulously honest and careful about how he writes the finding up.

Contrary to popular opinion on HN, finding vulnerabilities in software you yourself run on your own computer is rarely fraught. We hear about the exceptions in the news because they're exceptional. In reality, people publish vulnerabilities all the time.

The same thing obviously CANNOT BE SAID about finding vulnerabilities in other people's web applications. Finding web vulnerabilities without permission is highly fraught. You can easily find yourself both civilly and criminally liable for doing so.