skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
6. Spectacular Gigantic Unbreakable Security Chains

It reminds me of when I used to work in Holland and would cycle to the train station to commute to the office.

The train stations in most large cities have HUGE bicycle-carparks, literally bikes as far as the eye could see, so people would generally get in the habit of parking in the same spots.

Anyway, I had a fairly decent bike compared to most others around i.e. I bought it new from a shop so it had yet to get beatup and was given a huge cycle lock like this.

My colleagues used to say there was little chance of the bike being stolen.

One day I came back from work and returned to my bike only to find someone had broken the padlock (and it was a tough padlock) and stole the security chain leaving the bike.

I told my colleagues the next day and they laughed saying this was not unusual, often the chains are desired more than the bikes.

I didn't know how to feel as I kinda thought it was bad my bike was not stolen, given it was a decent new bike (and worth more than the security chain). I was told there is a certain etiquette where it is ok to "borrow" old, beatup bikes (especially if it is a cold night and you need to get home and live far away) and many people do it, but taking a new bike would be "stealing", the thief however probably "needed" and nice big chain for his new bike.

I like to think there is a certain truth to that (atleast for the place and time I was there) and to this day it is one of my favourite memories of that country.

Anyway, remember having a big chain is useless without a very good lock!
I wrote a userscript to auto-fill the text-based CAPTCHAs that Drupal.org was using for a while. That was just some regexp fun. This is a bit more impressive.
Monster.com Reports Theft of User Data
There are quite a few people running Google Toolbar (or Desktop) as a native executable too.
Have you thought about adding facebook connect integration and scraping from their networks page? This seems like the perfect app for fb connect integration.
Sorry, you are right. It's my bad grammer getting to me again.
1 in 4000 over a lifetime is not a fairly large reduction of risk - it's a very small reduction of risk. There's a much bigger payoff in thinking about the 3999/4000 chance that something else will kill you.
I find my day job productivity and side project productivity rise and fall in concert. Rarely does one work against the other.
Speaking of "sloppy", Bosworth's site is XHTML served as text/html and says it's UTF-8 when really it's ISO 8859-1. I only know this because it didn't render correctly.
depends on your level of skill and the school you came out of too. if you're reading news.ycombinator, please don't shortchange yourself and accept $60k, which btw, just happens to be exactly what I did when I got out. my current company offers $100k for friggin QA positions if you know C++/C (i.e. you're actually capable of being a developer). of course, my company is not a startup anymore, so adjust your figures appropriately.

what I've seen is that anything goes for a startup. it depends a lot on how well funded they are and how in tune with the establishment the founder(s) are. but if you ask me, you should really not be assessing a startup based on salary. doing a startup is a passion. why would you do one otherwise? if salary is important to you, then just stick with the small company doling out $100k for a QA position sort of gig.
cherrypy and sqlalchemy. and closely looking at werkzeug for future projects.
And you can keep an eye on them in the train. Actually, most of the strangeness in this article can be explained by the pervasive fear of bike theft.
jQuery. Rails.
I believe complacency to be more endemic than illiteracy in America. People consume news in a myriad of ways. Trying to say newspaper reading would resolve some problem is silly.
Only 55 out of 100 people can read it because nearly half of the people are not good readers. Probably because they were taught that spelling doesn't matter because "the human mind doesn't work that way."

Too many people are not getting the point of the passage "The Kingdom of Kay Oss." It wasn't written to prove "the power of the human mind," it was written to prove the necessity of rules for written communication. There is no solution for the last sentence. It's chaos!

It is trying to make the point that if you don't have rules for communication then people will not be able to communicate.

As for people thinking that rules for spelling are not important: Send 1000 children to a school system that follows the philosphy that learning to spell isn't important as long as the first and last letter are correct. At the same time, send 1000 children to a school system that follows a more traditional philosophy of education. Which school do you think will have the more successful students in college and careers after 13 years?

Please, we need to get back to the basics!
Also, Amsterdam is sufficiently small that you can get anywhere within 30 minutes

A nice follow-up to this article would be to photograph /film Dutch cyclists in heavy rain.
Sorry snowflake, the world doesn't work that way. You'd think the inability of any of you to find a single real-world example of an entrepreneur working on someone else's payroll would confirm that reality for you, but I see you choose to cling to a dream-world instead.

You're an entrepreneur or you're an employee. You cannot mix the two, and if you find the pills to start a business yourself you'll understand why.
"Pushing them in a productive direction" could be something like "You've been spending a lot of time here. Don't you think you should do something else?"

But for all the people not on the fence, you're denying them responsibility for their own choices. I can't help but feel that your stated agreement with me that individuals should be responsible for themselves is empty if you support measures that take all choice away from them.
WOW is this going to piss of a lot of website owners who rely on captchas. If you can do this in Javascript, then you can do it much better in a server-side language and hook it to the front of your spam cannon. Boo to the spam arms race getting another degree more vicious.
Meh... what should Apple get into next? Auto-repair? Apple is the smart electronics for consumers company. You gotta keep your market brand somewhat undiluted...
Sorry but that is an understatement.
Creating a three column layout is surprisingly hard and completely counter-intuitive and it gets only harder when you want liquid columns. IE is part of the problem but many of the other browsers also had their own quierks until recently.

Creating a n-column layout in CSS, in a sane way, has literally turned into a pseudo-science over the years. That wouldn't be the case if it had ever been as simple as spelling it out the obvious way and adding some IE hacks.

Even todays state of the art solution ("the holy grail") is a fairly strange beast. It admittedly gets away without the nasty hacks and negative margins that previous solutions required - but it took us literally years to arrive there and it's still far from pretty.
The beautiful mystery of parenting is that neither of us really knows if we're right, and we might not ever.

I'm not saying that my way is the right way. It might be, and I suspect that it is for my daughter, but I don't know you or your family. The premise for my ideology focuses around 2 things:
1) I don't want to be a hypocrite. I curse all the time, and while I'm mindful of my tongue in professional / social interactions, I do use foul language, and
2) I was more worried about banishing expletives making them into a forbidden fruit.
They've lost the leading edge already... and how do they propose to roll even that back? "No, that free stuff which you can freely examine and come to your own conclusions about sucks because we say so, come spend $20 on thirty minutes of generic music again?" They've lost because there's just no way to dress this up in a way that can get past the cynical 21st century consumer.
Drupal all the way or combine with Cake or CI
The Peak Of Happiness
You cannot unregister.
The problem with using biometrics at all is that you're conflating authorization with authentication. Those are fundamentally different (at least in the society we live in).

Biometrics are used for authentication - proving who you are (whether it works and can be duplicated is a different issue).Useful for a passport or driver's license.

Car keys, passwords, ATM pin numbers are a form of authorization.

For example, you may want to let your daughter withdraw money with your card or use your car. Biometrics can't be used for that purpose.
Because fooling an electronic device (which has to eventually encode your identity as a stream of 1s and 0s anyway) is a lot different from fooling another human.

In some cases, it might be more difficult to dupe a machine, but in many cases, it would also be easier.
Wait - you parsed an image using regexes?

Or is it something else?
So they stored passwords. Kind of surprising.
Here's an idea I've seen implemented in some captchas:

Instead of generating an image of text that most people have to strain to read, instead, generate a relatively cleaner image but instead of typing that in, have it ask a question to be answered.

"What do you get when you add 2 and 2?"

etc...

Would that fare better?
By teaching others, doing a great job, giving presentations. I don't see any sign of a down economy, heck I'm making more $ than I ever had before.
Posting on craigslist sucks. I got called from shitty recruiters, my cellphone gets automated spam calls now, and in general I wasted my time.
One of the proofs that the advocacy has become spiritual is precisely that engineering solutions are verboten. You can't engineer your way to spirituality, you can only suffer you way to it. (And if the poor must suffer twice as much, well, that's the price of my spirituality.)

If CO2 were a real problem and we were actually interested in solving it, engineering solutions are not a option, they are the only option if the alarmists are correct. We must not only stop putting so much out there, we must actively take out what we have put in.

Yes, I use the word "alarmist" and I'm basically a "doubter"; I'll self-label so there's no need to accuse. A small-but-significant portion of the reason why is the fundamental unseriousness of the alarmists on this point; if it's a problem, then let's fix it, not use global warming as an excuse to implement a whole raft of policies that oh-so-coincidentally you wanted even before it's was a problem and not-so-coincidentally aren't all that effective against global warming.

(The whole "we can't afford to take engineering risks we don't understand" is complete nonsense. Apparently we know with 100% certainty what is coming down the pike with our current emissions, and that is Complete Doom. It's hard to beat a negative like that and... frankly, engineering isn't exactly unfamiliar with that condition anyhow. Apparently we can predict the climate with 100% certainty unless we actually try to use this knowledge to fix the problem, and we must instead only engage in actions that by the IPCC's own admission and models will cost trillions and do next-to-nothing. See, I just have trouble wrapping my head around this whole meme-complex as an engineer; either we have a real problem and engineering solutions should be on the table, or engineering solutions shouldn't be on the table because we don't have a real problem, but trying to split the difference is just inconsistent. BTW, if you believe in AGW but you also believe that engineering solutions should be on the table then I would not label you an alarmist; I reserve the term for those who are using nakedly using AGW as a means of advancing all-but-unrelated political agendas, not those who honestly believe there's a problem that should be solved in the most effective manner possible, whatever that may turn out to be. I don't really agree that this is a problem (there are great problems but they lie elsewhere and don't have one nice catch-phrase), but if I'm wrong, hey, let's fix it! It's worth saying again.)
I like to turn projects I am working on for clients into services I sell to new clients. It seems to work ok. My clients get better quality and I get more income without extra hourly work.
I could use some help, but I don't need someone in a specific place, and don't need a full-timer.
Shutting the site down for which hours of the day? With timezones it's not exactly a trivial question.
i used to "slice" my layouts with Adobe ImageReady then customize the generated tag-soup with Dreamweaver. Then i transitionally changed my techniques to adopt full-css templating. It takes me more time but i like the way i can control several page's presentation by changing only one (ore more) file. I also find it more php (or templating system) friendly because there are less tags involved.
I find it interesting to see other hacker's point of view on that. It seems like the css way is not THE only way of doing things. Maybe you can get the better of both worlds and use tables for things that looks like tables and use css for what it's made for (i.e :floating stuff, styling fonts).

Not that tables are made to structure the content. It's just easier.
I think taking the standard read write calls on arbitrary underlying implementations to the logical limit was the big thing.

unix is nice, because you can read off a file or a socket or a mouse or a disk. This lets you do that over ... anything, i guess.
Dang. Is it cycling or bicycling or biking?...
In the early days when ebay would go down, people actually started up alternative sites to talk on until it came back up.

Recall in the old days when people had a flash intro page and you had to continue to see the real content? You could start out with some page saying "You really should be working" but they could still click through. Maybe show this for 1 hour a day.
On the importance of Turing completeness
I agree with you.

To italicize, use * * around the word.
It's only been up for 3 days and it hasn't gotten much traffic. I haven't made back the cost of the domain yet. Each click on those ads is a good amount though so I can see breaking even soon.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/HNWatrCoolr
what I don't get...is why we don't have an online library

I mean seriously...if I can get a book for free from my public library, why shouldn't I be able to go to an online library website and get the ebook for free as well?
Study Pinpoints Main Source of Asia’s Brown Air Pollution Cloud
So apparently Al Gore did help invent the internet
+1, not for the politics but his commentary on reforming a system. Although, I'm not too sure it's necessary - I feel as though most staunch idealists get ignored when it comes time to actually make the decisions.

I recommend checking out Gawande's Complications for anyone interested in more of his writing.
Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Slow It Down
I was planning to shut down during the traffic peak. That seems the obvious choice if you want to save the most people's time.
HN is a /timesink/. It is easy to dump a v. large amount of time there, without a great deal of energy expended. Much like heatsinks, this comes with advantages (less free-unthinking time) and disadvantages (can suck time away).
Allowing creatives and intellectuals to pursue their art as a profession is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern society... ...We really need to figure out a way to preserve this...

It's possible to agree with this sentiment while still believing that the music industry, as currently incarnated, is not the best vehicle to accomplish this goal.

The current shift we're seeing does seem to limit the instances of extreme success for individual creatives. This might not be a bad thing, if it provides a venue for more individuals to succeed, if at a smaller level. I think this is happening as the record companies slowly get moved out of the loop, but it's still early days and the new models for success are most certainly not yet fully fleshed out.
I'd just like to clear the air and ask the question on everyone's mind.... wtf are you talking about sir?
The authors paints with a brush that is entirely too wide for the canvas.

He's a student with no real world experience in putting together a system. Because of that, it's easy to conclude that drones create software from reams of paperwork and ninjas wing it and hack it out in a few days with Coca-cola and Ramen.

The real reality is that neither extremes is useful or done exclusively. Sitting down and putting at least some of the architecture down on paper can be useful. If you have a team larger than two people, it might be necessary to document some of the process so that people know what part they are playing.

I wish him the best of luck -- he will be tempered to neither extreme after he's spent some time working in various places.
This argument is over. Tables lost...like 3 or 4 years ago.
No; more like the new microcomputer.
webpy because it is minimalistic and very clean and easy to use.

I have aslo played around a little b it with compojure+clojure.
This, I guess: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDuemilanove
You know how the Kitt car had the eyeball that looked right-and-left? Very straight-forward, terrific starter project. Grab 8 LEDs, some resistors and you are good to go.
Custom shortcuts on the top new/threads/comments/etc navbar
John Resig dissects the neural network javascript OCR captcha code
Honest creationist Kurt Wise on transitional fossils
Python - Web.py no magic you know what's happening.
PHP - CodeIgniter same thing.
jwacs: Javascript With Advanced Continuation Support
Supposedly more drivers than cyclists are killed by head injuries - so you should actually make drivers wear cycle helmets.
CakePHP for me too. I also use Zend Framework. I like both. CakePHP is great for it's simplicity, but if their conventions don't work for you try out Zend Framework.
> Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

> The question though is whether interesting is good enough.

In my words:

"Is interesting stuff worth doing, and is using my own judgment OK, or should I stick to what tradition and authority and culture says is important?"

His best defense of reading Hacker News is not that he likes it. It is:

> I do not wish to come accross as someone who would rather be isolated

Being social is an approved activity.

Paul Graham says:

> [Hacker News is] certainly alarmingly addictive. Much more so than a newspaper. I've been wondering lately what to do about that.

He has the common attitude that problems should be solved by an authority Doing Something, and that his judgment should trump the individual judgment of each reader. And he has the attitude that if people spend a lot of time doing something, that is prima facie evidence that it's a bad thing. That is backwards.

All this is a direct result of parents who educate their kids with principles like:

- it doesn't matter if you like it, do something important (aka, approved by an authority like a text book manufacturer or a tradition)

- if you like it a lot, then it's probably bad. TV, video games, ice cream, playing in preference to doing homework, etc

- your judgment can't be trusted

- if you have a problem, don't do anything, tell an authority who will fix it. e.g., self defense is banned at school, only defense by teacher is allowed. even solving an "i need to use the bathroom" problem on one's own initiative is banned.

- you have to share and socialize or you're a bad person. Ayn Rand is the devil.
Given the section on colloquial usage,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question#Contempora...

I'd say that's rather prescriptive, maybe even SNOOTy.

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html
Make has a whole directory of projects: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/arduino/

For quick prototypes using Ruby, check out RAD: http://rad.rubyforge.org/
What are the extents of your experiences with soldering/electronic components?
The Arduino site itself has a ton of great examples that helped me get started: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage
Seam because I'm a Java guy at heart and Seam is a pleasure to work with.
On impoverishing:

If you have one apple and you give it to me then I have one apple and you are left with nothing.

If you have an idea and you share it with me then I have the idea and you have it.

Information is not oil.
That is an IQ test. It fails to reliably differentiate between machines and humans, as machines become human.
Php is, in my opinion, a "templating" language (yes, I know it's not just a templating language). Closer to "scripting" than the other categories.
HTML is flawed at every level:

It's design is flawed- rather than having a minimal set of tags they have a tag for everything and most people use only a fraction of total tags.

It's implementation is flawed- no two browsers render HTML the same way.

The way people learn HTML is flawed- some people learn to use inline styles, some people use br's to delineate paragraphs, some people build pages without head tags.

In conclusion, fuck it, use tables.
More like "Fartisan"! Just kidding, I've been meaning to give Artisan a try. Where are the docs? Give me at least a nice tutorial on setting up a stupid blogging CMS.
We did receive some traffic from it, but not quite as much as we were led to believe we might see as a result of TechCrunch featuring us. (That being said, it's certainly nice of them to have covered us!)

Truth is,the biggest referrer that we see continues to be StumbleUpon. Those guys send us lots of traffic. We love them and want to bear their children; but, given the physical improbability of that, we'd probably just buy them lots of beer.
That depends entirely on your skill level. If you're not skilled at building circuits, start my making various configurations of LEDs blink.

Making full RGB displays is pretty neat (and easy) to do with Arduino's pulse width modulation feature.

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/arduino-pwm-rgb-led-mood-l...
I don't think you're crazy, just totally wrong. As we know, the recording industry worked out so well for artists.
For example, you may want to let your daughter withdraw money with your card

That would be an example of a generic (unpersonalized) key. It's a poor example because:

1. People don't lend out ATM cards.

2. Why wouldn't I simply transfer funds into her account?

3. Physical cash is unlikely to exist for much longer.

or use your car.

The generic (unpersonalized) key, again. Why wouldn't I simply tell my car to let my daughter use it?
If someone encounters a tweet you wrote that he/she likes, he/she might check out your twitter page and possibly follow you.

And even if you don't get many new followers, it is still a way to get people to read your tweets.

Unlike a recommendation engine, this one allows you to get lots of people to read your tweets if you are willing to put in the effort reading other people's tweets.
Same problem here-- I'm at York University in Toronto, which is @yorku.ca.
Getting an LED to blink is a great first step. You'll work through most of the technology stack to get there.
Ouch. It's actually not surprising how many companies store plaintext passwords. It's a dirty little secret.

Crucial details missing: how many (all?) users affected? When did the breach occur and how long did it take them to notice? How did they notice? What is this crap about "continually monitoring" the internet when they can't even secure their own servers?
Cool idea, just need a slogan or short description, I think try to make the ads more elegant or leave them for inner pages.

I think is viable, good luck.
The bottom line is you can’t do calculus without algebra.
This is almost nine years old. http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html