skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article cites very little evidence: a link to a single article which itself cites no published research results.

And this article on Snopes.com says that there's no compelling evidence for the claim that people require even eight cups of water a day:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp

Also, if you're pissing constantly, wouldn't that be evidence that you're trying to over-hydrate yourself? If you were actually dehydrated, wouldn't your body absorb the additional water you drank rather than excreting it?
Oops that was meant to be (CoffeeScript friendly) argument order, not CoffeeScript (friendly argument order). English needs better operator precedence.

Thanks
I have the opposite attitude, I reflexively down vote grammar nazism and a lack of flexibility for language change. Languages change organically, people spoke differently 100 years ago even and there is nothing wrong with it. It's like razing people for using the word 'like' instead of 'for example', even though they are functionally identical.
I'm kinda the de facto owner of Cheetah for a fairly heavy user of it—quite possibly the heaviest. It may appear-to-work for a small project, but you would not believe the insanity that lurks beneath the surface.

It's been effectively dead for years, anyway, and the author admitted he'd jumped ship for Mako in 2008.
I don't know any Erlang, but, from what I understood (please correct me if I'm wrong), you can consider processes (let's say these are greenlets), connected directly to one another, so all you need to do to send a message is specify whom you want the message to go to. If you want to do, for example, fan-out, you have a process sit inbetween the other processes and distribute the messages.

In contrast, with ZeroMQ you have to have/set up channels, because these are sockets. At least, that's what's apparent to me that the author is saying. Is that correct?
I don\'t see the problem with \"sanitizing\". It\'s easy: just add a \\ before every quote and the string is totally safe!
http://qcjeph.livejournal.com/110229.html
One quick correction: "an assertion is provided in the frontend and then the server sends it back to BrowserID to get the user information." isn't quite accurate.

All of the user information is available in the assertion. You can get at it locally, without having to talk back to us. We just have a web service that makes it easier to verify the cryptographic signatures on that blob. (And it is, of course, open source, so you can run your own if your language of choice doesn't have its own library for local verification.)
What's important is that the relation is being discussed. Is it related? Is it not?

We aren't asking these questions if Draw Something added 5 million users since the Zynga purchase. In fact, that would be expected.
Oh, I don't claim that complexity is impossible to recognize. It's really important to do so. But how?

Most judgments of complexity we currently make have a lot to do with familiarity. (Is the 40-line spreadsheet program at http://www.nsl.com/k/s/s.k complicated or simple?) You assume something similar when you say "obviously more complex than it needs to be". When is complexity obvious? When it exceeds what we habitually consider ok.

What we really need is an objective measurement. Do we have one? We sort of do, insofar as the research on this seems to point in one direction: shorter programs are simpler. That doesn't answer every question - you still need a way of measuring program length and defining what a program is - but it's the beginning of an objective answer.
Ah, but changing the rules will change people's behavior, changing the statistics. We will have far more people failing out of STEM fields, with nothing to show for two years of study. Remember that a third of people who start in the sciences end up with a degree in the social sciences and humanities.

Do you really want our CS courses to be filled with people who have no chance of succeeding in the major? People who cannot pass college algebra wasting the time of the class? Who does that benefit?

The problem isn't statistics. The problem is not having an outlet for those drummed out of the sciences.
Who am I trying to convert? The article answers the question asked in the beginning—a question I've been asked several times since writing the PHP article.
I completely agree that it's a lot harder than the author makes it sound – but is the comparison apt in at least one way?

Namely – most rocket science out there requires the work of a reasonably large number of contributors to actually produce a working, reliable end-product... whereas a winning game really can be made by a small number of people (or even one person) who either have the right stroke of genius, luck or skill to pull it all together.

That, of course, doesn't mean it's easy, but instead it means that the law of large numbers comes into play and more winning games will be produced because it takes fewer people/resources to make a gaming company than a rocket company. Ergo, gaming is an industry that is inherently much more difficult in which to establish a defensible competitive advantage.

Or, maybe the author really is just minimizing it all to make their point...
The main character does this to great effect in Punch Drunk Love, which also happens to be a beautiful film that I highly recommend. He purchases pudding to earn frequent flier miles.
I think it doesn't matter how hard it is. The barrier to entry is very low, and the social game market is already crowded and extremely competitive. You're going to have a varied number of people releasing hits, so the point is that you can't possibly buy out every shop that gets lucky with a hit, nor should you.
Adobe issues security update for Flash player, warns against IE exploit
This serves as a lesson to startups as well

Never offer something for a lifetime

Even if the cost of supporting it "forever" is minimal (that is, the complete opposite of what AA has done)

Things like GMail, for example. You may be tempted to do it. Don't

Always put in your terms of use a provision of termination. Of course, be reasonable, for example, allow the user to backup the data given a reasonable timeframe (e.g. Google Health)
Flask comes as a self-contained install where you can get started in 5 minutes.
I assume he's talking about the `nonlocal` keyword introduced in py3, which allows overwriting names defined in outer-but-not-global scopes.
You're thinking way too much. Trying to predict what the future will be.

What relaunched said so succinctly: build and launch. Think of nothing else. Throw away your crystal ball.

Good luck
Straw hats? Who said anything about straw hats? The kids generally wear cloth caps with a skirt around the back.

You've clearly got zero idea of what you're talking about, and are just making stuff up to grind an axe, for some unclear reason.
I think there is a 3 strikes hooning law where you will have your car taken from you. I'm not sure many would disagree with it though.
It is certainly weird how this traffic of badly informed Lispers preaching their language in unrelated language topics has increased in the last few months...

Did some people just not get Rich Hickey's memo or are they unable to drop their old Common Lisp habits?
Started iOS dev about a year ago. Hvaent written dozens of apps some with very custom UI elements.
Don't bother with clutch.io/rubymotion/mono touch. Learn the raw Objective-C/Cocoa-Touch APIs. Especially for something UI intensive like flipboard.
Check out Standford iOS programming lectures. They are on Youtube and iTunes (for free).
Making a game is sort of like making music. It's so much fun, people do it for free. It's not a big deal if you have a few dozen programmers making some roguelike. If you have 10k college sophomores making games, chances are pretty good one of them will be pretty fun, and take off. The key here is, they would do it anyway. there is not free carwashing service because someone likes washing cars. there are however tons of free games, because making games is fun.
My point is that it doesn't matter.
For example if you follow my thread of comments some are going to be rated way up and actually be pretty insightful.

You'll notice sometimes I'm also wrong and make errors. You could get a strong opinion of me either way (good, or bad) by reading that.

If we were to know pretty well each person (like they do in smaller forums or places where the nickname and history is highlighted), we'd always agree and disagree with the same persons in general (there's always exceptions).

And the person's reply was made on a single post, which I think is the way to go.

I don't know if HN nicks are small and history not as easy to follow as in some other sites on purpose, but I like it.

Now, I've been way off topic, sorry :)

Slightly more on topic tho: MS ain't perfect security wise either, even thus they've made huge progress. Microsoft research also has very interesting attempts such as Singularity or Gazelle. I don't know any other company doing that. That's one place I'd want to work for MS.
> People have been searching for the One True Language for decades.

The one true language is mathematics. John McCarthy (a math professor) discovered that programs could be represented as out degree one directed graphs (cons cells) that compose mathematical functions (lambda expressions). These simple mathematical principles form the basis of the functional programming paradigm and they have led Lisp programmers to success for nearly a half a century.
Here's a better version of the plot: http://i.imgur.com/aXQei.png

This type of plot can be confusing when the relationship isn't strong, but I think it works well enough here.

edit: there's also this plot type: http://i.imgur.com/jgMFS.png
I really, really want to buy one of these.
I actually do think it's a coincidence that the stock price is down 38% since purchasing OMGPOP. It had a nice run up based on positive news related to the Facebook IPO, so when the market began to contract in late March/April, people took their profits. There hasn't been much positive news since then, so it hasn't rebounded. In fact, the whole technology sector is down about 32% since late March (it was +20% on the year, now its only +13.9%)[1]. Basically, I don't think the OMGPOP acquisition has had much of an effect on the stock price.

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?catid=66529330
Zynga's decline has nothing to do with purchases they made and everything with Facebook killing viral channels - a year and a half ago!
a terrible way to make money.

Depends on one's situation. As the poster described his wife, it sounds - to me - like a valid opportunity.

Avon is not only a pyramid scheme

No, it's not.
Browserling (http://browserling.com/) might be one.
I did buy one, then it broke.

Once you factor in the re-installs the latency of spinning rust looks a bit better.
Moneyless World
This gonna fuel so many designers brainstorm. It seems to sit at the right level of abstraction.
It's more of a problem with hardware more interested in coding to "works on Windows" than "complies with spec."

And honestly, Startup is as fast as resume these days - the problem is applications that don't remember last known state and window managers that won't remember the rest. Why don't we fix that instead rather than chasing down all the suspend bugs?
Why Apple Won by Betting Against the Web
The credit card company doesn't lose money. They charge a settlement fee to the government, which more than covers the cost of the rewards program. So only the government (ie, the taxpayers) lose out here.
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The Future of the Book.
This story (Draw Something losing ~5M customers/month) annoys me. It's an example of not knowing the difference between causation, correlation and coincidence. In at least some cases people are making that "mistake" for link-bait reasons and to push an agenda (eg they hate Zynga).

The idea that 5M/month Draw Something care about the Zynga purchase is ludicrous. It seems Zynga has made some annoying changes to the game, at least for those that use Facebook to login, but even so.

I think the only story here is that Zynga overpaid for something that was peaking. They may purchased OMGPOP just in case it turned into something huge. There's plenty of that going on (cough Instragram cough).

I've tried Draw Something. It's amusing and I can see the appeal but from all usage patterns I've seen the game has a pretty short shelf life. A game with a short shelf life is going to lose lots of customers once it peaks. It's inevitable.

As for how easy it is to make a game, that's actually hard. I believe you should also separate "normal" games from "social" games here as both are radically different.

Normal games are like blockbuster movies. You want people to buy up big. You deliberately build up the hype. There is very little in the way of long tail in revenue in most cases (other than sequels). I consider this a fairly "honest" or ethical practice because you pay the sticker price and you have your fun.

Social games are more like TV shows. You're trying to build a persistent audience and you're all about the long tail. The part that bothers me is the psychological trickery that goes into this. Social games are really about manipulating the psychological triggers for addiction and I don't really see a distinction between this and, say, gambling addiction.

Some people spend an awful lot on these games (I believe Zynga calls people who spend over $10k "whales" [1]). Zynga and similar companies like to whitewash this with "maybe they're just rich". I believe they know better. They are (IMHO) preying on the weak and those arguably with mental health problems ("it's not unethical, it's funethical!").

Successful social games are all about Big Data. Figuring out what works, what doesn't, analyzing your customer usage and adjusting to maximize revenue and retention.

They're not even "games" really. They're just exercises in repetition.

Anyway, rant aside, I don't like Zynga either but please don't confuse the OMGPOP purchase with a short shelf-life peaking purchase.

[1]: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/zyngas-quest-for-bigspe...
> In September 2007, a pricing analyst reviewing international routes focused the airline's attention on how much the AAirpass program was costing, company emails show.

They offered this product for decades without ever measuring how much it cost? Did everybody skip that day in business school?
It seems like the biggest risk in buying an unlimited airpass is that the airline will go bankrupt. AMR did (29 NOV 2011, the last of the legacy airlines to do so...), although I'm not sure if that invalidated the passes.
Got a ref on the 5 percent part? (Ignore this if it's only for gas; I'd be interested in 5% all purchases.)
My SSD makes for a nice drink coaster.
The problem is everyone has their own definition of successful. Is it breaking even? 20 employees? Being profitable? A $1million exit? A $1billion exit? Everyone rejected by YC wants to be that rare case.
Note that if you're using Ubuntu you're using ureadhaead, which does something similar to minimize seeks during boot.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ureadahead
I think that this says more about your character than that of Australians in general. The way you've presented your beliefs makes it pretty clear that you've chosen to view things through a twisted lens.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience travelling here, and there are problems here as everywhere. But just making things up and spitting them out with vitriol doesn't do anyone any favours.
> 1. If you're blasting your data over an unencrypted wifi connection, do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

Yes, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Connecting to someone's unsecured wifi is a criminal offence; scooping data from that connection maybe in some jurisdictions.

People may be stupid for not securing their wifi. But no-one at Google is stupid. They don't have that excuse.

> Do we seriously think that this data was collected maliciously?

Not being evil isn't a magic pass for being daft. Google should have known better. The engineer raised concerns, so at least one person knew it might have been a problem. Google has lived through years of people being concerned about privacy. How can they get something so simple so wrong?
My favorite is the time Burma Shave sent a guy to Mars. http://www.snopes.com/business/market/mars.asp
"Simplify!!!"
Am waiting on a new HN submission, "Tell HN: My husband needs to get off of HN and start working so I don't have to pick up after his sorry ass, and BTW- I don't need your help. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself."
Light Table nearing funding goal, will support JavaScript and Clojure
> Cade hatched a plan to confront Mukharji at London's Heathrow Airport. At check-in, American agents detained Mukharji and escorted him to a private office.

What agents? Detained under whose jurisdiction?
If you have to be a pedant and tell people to use a multiplication symbol, then use a multiplication symbol. The symbol is × (&times;), not the letter X.
I think the parent is right. Russell was presenting the ten commandments that he would teach, in constrast to those taught at sunday school.

There's also the legendary section of his C.V.:

Awards and honours

1950: Nobel prize for literature

193?: Pronounced morally unfit to teach at university by the supreme court of New York state
She could offer lessons on Craigslist. Depending on the subject, you can usually earn 20-40$ an hour.
I've never had it work reliably with Fedora.
Reliable sleep is about the only reason I use Windows now.
A minute to the desktop is exactly why the tablets are so useful.

If I'm sitting on the couch the instant on nature of my tablet is the main reason I'll reach for that to look at something rather than my laptop.
I cannot find it but I am sure I saw an article about this the other day on HN. Below is a link to an article from a couple of years ago. I like the blog and the stories about it. I do not know how often it pops here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=717167
Good indication that the social media bubble won't last forener. Maybe a .com bubble 2.0?
That didn't start with iTunes. That was a known hack dating back to my childhood in the early 90s. My 7 year old cousin and I used to do this to get free Pepsi from the "you won a free pepsi" caps.
Not to suggest they aren't successful, but what indicates they are?
Some major credit cards used to give rewards on cash advances taken out on them.

I remember going to the casino and taking out a $5000 cash advance and then paying it back the same night. For about $2 in interest you got 5000 aeroplan, or air miles. I did that each weekend for 20 weeks until I got enough miles for my trip to Australia.
Remind me of The Curse of the Cow Clicker at http://wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/1
Point. Mind you, he follows that with:

"(I’m lying. Dealing with encodings sucks. Unicode is great. It’s complicated. I’ll write about it later.)"

I think I'll wait for the follow-up article.
My sister is a stay at home mom as well; I got her onto oDesk and she's having a good time and making more than $1000 the first month working part time while nurturing her daughter at home.
Show HN: DaemonNation
iMessage keeps AT&T CEO awake at night
All of that data has to go somewhere. All the investigators have to do is go find the quota requests and see who approved them.
I'm assuming those are "miles earned" and not "miles flown". There are usually multipliers for flying first class, various promotions grant them, credit cards, etc. However, even a low percentage of that would still be a hard-to-fathom distance traveled.
Yep. Some are white hats hoping to either make money or reputation by discovering flaws. Don't think that these flaws don't get discovered; sometimes pentest experts discover flaws and keep them in their arsenal for a particularly difficult assessment. Other times, it's a blackhat who discovers them and sells them in the underground world. If you want to experience a jolt, visit www.exploitdb.com and search for vulnerabilities in your favorite software. And be sure that for every exploit listed, there are a few that are kept hush hush.
Well, I'm reasonably sure we'll be seeing more of it for Django, at least. Since integration takes about five minutes and I don't have to create and style all the login/signup/change password/forgot password/etc templates, it's all I use for authentication on new apps nowadays.
Interesting...

http://www.monsanto.com/food-inc/Pages/default.aspx
Someone's gotta make the cam joke, and I guess it's going to be me.
The best actual cash back on unlimited general purchases is probably 2% (Schwab used to do this; Sallie Mae Visa, Capital One Venture or their 2% business card, NASA Credit Union).

5% is basically always either category-limited (Gas, sometimes restaurants) or limited to a trivial (<$5k/yr) spend.

I personally do the American Express Starwood card, since I value Starwood points (1 per $1 in general, and some other bonuses for hotels, gas, etc.) at about $0.025-$0.04. You can also convert SPG points into FF miles at a rate better than unity.

Back in the day, paying for space segment ($200k/mo) on a business credit card meant never having to pay for a hotel suite or airline ticket.

The Chase Amazon card is also 3% on Amazon purchases, which basically means 3% on every mailable product in the world. I think it also gets you 3% on Amazon Web Services purchases...I doubt Dropbox or Netflix pay their bills with that card, but it would be amazing :)
I used one of these last summer. I took a job in Toronto but my wife wanted to stay in Calgary until we had our baby.

So Monday morning I'd fly to Toronto for the market open and Friday after the close I'd fly back.

I even made a few trips home midweek for 12-24 hours of visiting time for appointments.
This needs to leap into the marketplace as soon as possible. The music player concept is brilliant, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

I wonder about the potential of a screen-less touch vocabulary, such that you could type a text message without taking the phone out of your pocket. (Siri is nice and all, but it requires the user to yield control to the Cloud and pray that it responds accurately.)
A one-hour old account with negative karma. Sounds like HN needs an auto-delete algorithm.
SEOmoz ties in with a lot of the most high profile SEO resource points.
The easiest way I've found to increase boot speed and application load even under heavy system load is to use the pf kernel patchset. With a properly configured kernel using BFS, BFQ, and LZMA compression, my system is amazingly fast. Even when compiling and both cores at my laptop are at 100% my system is fully usable. If you have a Macbook Pro my kernel configs are here: https://github.com/meinhimmel/kernel-configs
Brook Brothers makes great suits. If you go to the outlet you can get a complete 365 suit for around $400 (they're still nice, I have one). The ones in the retail store are at least twice that.

I would probably avoid the J.A Banks of the world. Invest in quality threads, especially if you're going to wear them daily you'll get your money's worth. The same goes for the shoes, a comfortable pair of Cole Haans is worth the extra dough if you're walking in them all the time.