skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon has a great returns policy, and good, fast customer service.

Amazon lacks in the following areas (covered in another post):

1. The price filter doesn't really work.

2. Sorting doesn't work unless you choose a category (many items are miscategorised or match multiple categories)

3. Backwards shipping policy "What the heck, let's order it for tomorrow" on an ordered item often doesn't work because it's too late.

4. The ratings system gives too much weight to lightly-reviewed items.

5. Often the dispatch date for an order is shown on the checkout page, the expected delivery date would be better. Amazon AA batteries? 5 week delivery. Ouch.
Thanks for making this. Although the best security would be a unique salt per account, that would make the portability of the app a lot tougher.

Either way, this is a great way to prevent brute force attacks from determining a user's password, as well as preventing a serious incident should a website store credentials in plain text, then get compromised.

Of course, in a perfect world, everyone should be using unique, random passwords for each account they have on the Internet... but this is a great way to protect people that are using relatively insecure passwords across the board.

I'd suggest allowing custom salts so that users can enter their bookmarklet on other browsers, enter their "custom salt," and be able to get additional randomness. If this were to catch on, we wouldn't want people adding the salt to cracking tools etc (although that would be a lot more work/processing power on their part).

Sorry this was long winded. Cool idea, nice implementation!
Well, yes, and the scathing tone of it is pretty thick, at least when I read it in my head. I was commenting on the idea, not the exact wording of it. It's just the first appropriate quote that I grabbed from the text.
.. during a time of a great liberating educational revolution, with the likes of Khan, Coursera, MIT/Harvard platforms forming..
Sounded good at first but then started sounding like an advert written by a social media promotions company
It's been my experience that the people who share/photocopy textbooks aren't doing it to screw publishers, they do it because they cannot afford to buy the book themselves. It is a lot of extra work to pirate textbooks this way; I doubt anyone would bother without a good reason.

Once again, it seems like all it's going to do is make legitimate customers jump through hoops, while the pirates find loopholes or simply fail... neither of which results in additional revenue for publishers.
Facebook following MySpace trend and going down
Don't bite the hand that feeds; I predict a drop in enrollment of classes that use these textbooks...
Thanks for the comment. Not sure if I followed the custom salt part - unless it is already implemented at the bottom of the page, where I call the salt as master password in the custom bookmarklet. Would love to know your thoughts in case you meant something else.
The Flash version is not antialiased correctly for the number of steps it transverses though the masses move at a consistent frameratem, stuttery does not apply in correlation to the WebGL example. Change the FPS setting and it works smoother, AA aside.

The WebGL one has the distinct Javascrip cyclic micro pause in Firefox depending on number of browser tabs opened. It plays perfect on the latest Chrome.

Congrats.
All standards become obsolete eventually. Mandating them by law is a sure road to legacy legal cruft hurting the legitimate aims it was put in place to help.
I personally agree that copying answers where the copier knows how to do it is a victimless act. But to take the position of devil's advocate here, one could say that there are actually potential victims.

One potential victim is an employer who believes they are hiring someone with objectively-evaluated qualifications. I think this argument is easily shot down; institutional evaluations are not actually objective, and in fact the person doing the copying is actually in a better position to evaluate their abilities than the institution. But, someone else may believe differently on these points than me.

Another potential victim is the person being copied from. They may feel socially pressured to allow someone to copy from them whether they actually want to allow it or not, and they may submit to that social pressure (and this isn't made up -- in certain circles it would be considered a little rude to not allow your friends to copy your answers). But if the institution finds out about it, both parties (copier and copiee) may get in trouble. While this is probably a rare case, it's still true that a person knowingly using that social pressure to their advantage is doing something unethical.

Anyway, I basically agree with you on this point, but it's fair to say that this issue is not as definitively clear-cut as you make it out to be.
Microsoft apologizes for developer song at Norwegian Developer conference.
Direct link to YouTube vid - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TROd29XFHY0#!

I can't believe this 3rd party marketing firm prepared this song. What were they thinking? The "I'm a developer" part is cool, but the other parts - yikes!
No, because their current economic growth is unsustainable in the long term. It's going to be very painful for them to make the necessary adjustments, and social turmoil tends to accompany any large-scale economic adjustment. That's just how human history works. People who are perfectly OK with "oppressive" regimes will still rise up with pitchforks if there's not enough food on their table.

Not to mention that China will somehow need to resolve the apparent inconsistency between their government's professed ideology and their actual economic policies. Politics cannot escape unscathed from major economic developments. That's another recipe for political instability that has proven itself virtually everywhere, and it doesn't matter whether Westerners think it's wrong or right.
Prometheus Explained (Spoilers)
I believe professors at my university may already be infringing on this patent. I was required to buy a $90 "workbook" authored by the course professor to access a "course survey" worth 10% of the final grade. Granted, you could share the book and access to the material online, but not if you wanted an A.
In my very humble opinion, the greed has gotten so out of control that it's hard for the publishers to see what is even wrong with forcing students to PAY TO DO HOMEWORK

How is that not the whole idea behind college, in general?
People have such poor toilet habits.

We need to focus while taking a dump instead of poking on our mobile phones, or reading.

We need to squat rather than sit.

We need to relax rather than strain.
I assure you Amazon is well aware of this practice and current prices account for the small minority of customers who shop like this.
Who is arguing that one should pay for every previous idea that a new idea is derived from?

That's a straw man.

The argument for paying people for new IP is that for a limited time we should offer rewards for people to add to the collective knowledge of our society.

So really in terms of your argument, the consumer isn't paying for "standing on the shoulder of giants" either. The consumer of IP is only paying for the incremental value added by the creator of the content.

As a society, we discovered that rewarding producers adds to the useful aggregate more than just hoping that they'll add the same amount of content without compensation.
This completely ignores the fact that in a real competition, you are NOT the only person entering.

If you were in a competition with 10k (or any high number) other entrants, inviting a friend will almost double your chance of success.
Some universities behave unethically. Fortunately, organisations like Udacity are likely to make this an unviable business model in future.
Maybe in that they communicated all their unsalted password hashes to hackers...
See also: http://emacsrocks.com/
This isn't really true.

All the retailers I've worked with (both brick & mortar and internet-only) see returns as a small cost of doing business. An easy returns process makes customers happy and keeps down credit card chargebacks. If you are selling on the internet, handling a small percentage of returns is considerably cheaper than having a retail presence.

You can look at Zappos (now owned by Amazon) for having an amazing liberal return policy. you have 365 days to return things and they pay for the return shipping. It's all to give you a safe feeling and buy multiple items.

In most cases large retailers force their vendors to cover the costs of returned merchandise that they can't resell (due to opened packaging etc).

One of the main reasons I'll buy from Amazon is that the transaction carries zero risk for me. If there is any problem whatsoever I know it's going to be resolved to my benefit.
This already is in widespread use, not sure how the professor expects this patent to hold up in any way. I had a 4 quarter French language requirement for my major for which I needed to purchase a $125 book, and then a $99 online fee to have access to the homework that was 20% of my grade. The real kicker? My $99 online fee only covers 12 months, 3 quarters is a calendar year without summer school, that fourth quarter requires an extra fee to gain access to the homework materials again.

My physics classes also do something similar through the "masteringphysics.com" website I believe.

This is nothing new, and it's brutal for students. I can usually get through a quarter with 4-6 classes for under $100 in book costs if I buy used, old editions, etc but once a teacher throws one of these online requirements my way the costs of a quarter skyrocket to unreasonable levels.
Lazy evaluation in a haskell infinite list
it is, but can you tell the difference between 0.5ms or 1ms? ;)
"No access code means a lower grade, all in the best interests of science."
"Students who don’t pay can’t participate in the course and therefore get a lower grade."

It's all about purchasing power, folks. You knowledge only matters a little. Please, do pirate books. For crying out loud, knowledge can and should be pirated if it cannot be afforded.
head -c x /dev/random | uuencode -

where x is the length of the password you want.
Well, there has been lexical-let in the cl package for quite a while.
Twisting someone's words but making it appear as a quote is something I normally only see on Reddit or Fark.

Could you please avoid that tactic here?

Thanks.
I made co2. If you want to pass it through your lungs you shuld pay me.

I made a joke about that one guy being fat. Whenever someoness tells my joke or some along that line he should pay me because I did it.
Zed Shaw - The Web Will Die When OOP Dies
Of course, it's also possible this professor got the patent to ensure that nobody could use this technique. Unfortunately, many courses already are :/
Sorry. I meant simple, C-style functions. I should never comment on HN before breakfast.
not useless enough.

slap a QR code on anything, document it, annotate it, discuss it.

for sure you can come up with a rev model... if people are in there too long offer Ducolax... other context-based offers and ads... let people report when stuff needs servicing
A "body-odour" matching engine
Well looks like it's finally coming true: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

What seemed absurd back in 1997 is more and more probable today.
If you ask me, TA should be the more glorious position. There's just no point in speaking the same thing in front of 200 students every (half) year in front of 200 people with little to no interactivity. So what's the point of having that person in front of the class and not some recording?

Oh, right, there isn't one. There hasn't been for some years now, but the academia has had neither internal nor external incentives to innovate. Some might say giving the students the best possible experience should be an intrinsic motivation for professors. A shame it doesn't work that way.

I think though that TAs in Coursera/Udacity are not active enough. Given that tens of thousands (hundreds?) take a course, they can't afford to be. It makes me think that this model is not sustainable either.

I mean, in our day and age, dabbling in an area of science/art should not be a hard or expensive thing to do. And if you're willing to find your own information, it mostly isn't. But if everyone wanted to dabble in computer science and learn some basics, there just aren't enough TAs in the world to provide assistance.

There certainly would be enough learners, though! And I think that's a much more sustainable model. Udacity and Coursera both have active forums, I've heard Salman Khan mention it, and even in that "Intoduction to AI class" that did not have discussion forums from the start, people organized study groups, forums and subreddits all on their own.

Let's make it "cool" to study together and help others. Social routines will do the rest.
I launched Qatapult, a quicksilver like inspired launcher for windows http://emmanuelcaradec.com/qatapult . It still needs polish and it still needs more users, but it's already my favorite launcher for windows. (change the default skin if you try, I set the default to the wrong one )
I publish a number of Chrome extensions outside of the web store (thousands of users).

I avoid it intentionally. There is no reason why Google needs to know everybody running my extensions, and nor do I want or need Google sending me users.

The understanding was that Chrome extension development was an open environment. Hence why a lot of developers use Chrome and develop for it.

I don't see how this is different to users being able to click on an download and run an executable file. Add an additional security warning if you like, there are already two (as many as an executable) and they are pretty clear about what is taking place.

What you are proposing to do (or have already done) is a crap solution to a real problem.

The web store is no safer. I searched for 'youtube video downloader' the other day and the top result was malware. It had solid (turns out, fake) reviews and registered has having tens of thousands of users. I only found this out after installing it.

I see this as nothing more than a play to control the ecosystem surrounding Chrome. I completely regret investing so much time into developing Chrome extensions. Push issues like this one or two more times and you may lose more than the developer community.
I tend to work more with document-like stores than SQL these days, so there may be more idiomatic solutions....

If you're complaining about having to update the fields in your object, I think thats kinda silly. You bought into the idea of static typing at some point, and now your data has type constraints. If you need need need flexibility you can of course make some field a Map<String, Object>.

If you're complaining about boilerplate, you can at least automate the mapping with code like:

class Util {
public static <T> T resultSetToObject(ResultSet rs, Class<T> klass) {
List<Map<String, Object>> rows = new ArrayList<Map<String, Object>>();
ResultSetMetaData metaData = resultSet.getMetaData();
int columnCount = metaData.getColumnCount();

while (resultSet.next()) {
Map<String, Object> columns = new LinkedHashMap<String, Object>();

for (int i = 1; i <= columnCount; i++) {
columns.put(metaData.getColumnLabel(i), resultSet.getObject(i));
}

rows.add(columns);
}

return new ObjectMapper().convertValue(rows, klass)
}
}
Intel:Android Still Not Ready For Multi-core Processors
I suppose you'd be forced to buy books from your school's bookstore (where they're ridiculously overpriced) to get online access pass which, as i recall from my school years, expires after certain time since purchase and cannot be reused. It's a clever way for this guy to make a few bucks off of poor students. He should be proud.
Too often people are just ignorant about the law's purpose, or they just don't understand it. I can see why too, it's a simpler argument with a lot of money behind it for the creator to say they should own what they create rather than realizing the limited time monopoly was only a means to promote the progress of science and useful arts.

I wrote a bit about it here: http://zacharyalberico.com/post/16427595132/no-infringement-...
> VBA is more verbose, and verbosity aids comprehension

I find this unlikely; are there any studies that back up your point?
I'm not an IT guy, so no, I wasn't trolling. Why exactly is it "retarded" to build your system to reject (or at least flag) access patterns that are unlikely to be due to legitimate activity?

I'd recommend using the word "retarded" with a bit more circumspection. Obviously the incoming IP address doesn't uniquely identify a client who's likely to be on the other side of a NAT gateway. But the idea that a system should just sit there silently and carry on business as usual while any one address or class-C block generates large numbers of failed access attempts seems like a good application of the word in question.
I am not going to pay for any product I can pirate anymore.

+

A copied piece of data is not equivalent to a lost sale

uhh huh?

Why not just declare that you're not going to look at anything that's subject to copyright any more? That way you can avoid paying those evil royalties to the people who create artwork, and nobody can say you're wrong.

Don't watch TV, don't listen to music, don't read any book published after [whatever the cutoff date is] and don't play video games. Sounds like that's what will make you happy.
While I think STM and Threading is cool, I think being able to run multiple python loops and message pass in the same process would be much cooler, and much faster akin to an Erlang like VM. Then again I'm pretty biased as I've done more Erlang this year than python!
How many books do we need for school? A hundred? Some charitable soul please donate $100MM so we can create 100 free books for our children's education and put some pressure in government to create laws to use these books in all elementary school across the nation. Then college, then university. Free forever.

Sorry maffias, can't fight against progress.
They're not trying to charge for access to the ideas. They're charging for the explanation of those ideas in text that a team of people crafted. They're charging way too much for it, but that's only because universities let them.
> If the artist wants money he should set up a donations account so I can pay him directly.

1. If a musician doesn't want to have publishers taking a cut of the revenue from their music they are free to not have a publisher involved.

2. If a musician wants to distribute their music for free or have a pay what you want system they can.

If a musician chooses to use a publisher or big label then you should respect that; pretending that a publisher is a worthless middleman and using it to justify pirating media is laughable. If the publisher was worthless then the musician would not be using them, would they?

Do you really think people like Rihanna and One Direction wish they could set up a bandcamp account and get rid of the publishers? Of course not because publishers provide real tangible value.

Either respect the wishes of the musician by consuming through official channels or just pirate it, don't pretend you're a noble person by wanting to "donate" to the musician directly, if the musician wanted that they would not have a label involved.
They addressed this in an update:

>In general, if you drill down deep enough on the actual sword techniques, the tree of possible outcomes gets pruned way down. It turns out that you rarely have to solve the fully general problem of one sword stopping another sword traveling at top speed at an arbitrary location in space. Which is a hard problem!

There's a longer explanation here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang/posts/24...
My Bank is a Security Vulnerability
Microsoft's experiment with STM ended up not going so well [1] [2]. Does anyone know how the PyPy implementation differs, and if it might overcome these problems? Is it just laying the groundwork for leveraging hardware transactional memory support, or is the thesis that this will eventually become usable directly?

[1]http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/05/STM-Dropped
[2]http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/01/03/ABriefRetros...
FWIW, we've had some problems with hot deployment and Tomcat. After a few of them the VM OOMs. Probably we are doing something wrong or triggering some Tomcat bug, haven't dug deep enough yet.
Wikipedia shows you don't need $100M; people will contribute for free.
That's the problem, though. If people didn't reuse passwords, if people didn't use words and personal information in passwords and if people had no problem changing them every day then a lot of problems with security would be solved. But those are not realistic expectations, and blaming users for not being computers does not solve the problem.

Slow hash function certainly help, but I think we also need something that goes beyond straightforward cryptography to address authentication issues. Something that redefines the rules of the game to be more human-friendly and less computer-friendly.

But then again, I never even heard the question being phrase this way: what do we want from "program-less" authentication and what we can use to achieve it.
I wish Jeff Bezos quit being such a dictating dick when it came to the home page. I mean seriously, I fucking love amazon, why the hell is it so fucking unintuitive and feel like a time traveling 95 site.
> Who is arguing that one should pay for every previous idea that a new idea is derived from?

IP limits production to create artificial scarcity. No matter how you look at it, after you copyright or patent something. You are limiting what can be created in the world.

> As a society, we discovered that rewarding producers adds to the useful aggregate more than just hoping that they'll add the same amount of content without compensation

No we did not. Historically, Intellectual property was created as one more monopoly privilege for the monarchy. [1] Together with the monopoly selling rice, and other commodities, were the monopoly of printing books. At no point in history did we, as a society, conclude that if we limit reward producers it would add to the useful aggregate. That excuse was only invented after the "monopoly privilege" over copying books were renamed to "copy rights". At the same time that other monarchy monopolies were destroyed.

Society never discovered that it's worth in the aggregate. You cannot prove it's worth in the aggregate. Any attempt so far to measure the aggregate has been absurd. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html
For MVPs, I have seen this particular situation (it's a B2B scenario). Your customer will use the product with their customers or users. So the MVP has to be 'good enough' for not just your early adopter customers, but for their customers as well.

Challenge then is that their customers/users may not be the same early adopter types. A work-in-progress app may reflect poorly on your customer.

MVP has a lowest common denominator aspect in this case. As in, what would be acceptable to your customer's customers/users? Seems to raise the bar on what is needed for a minimum viable product.
Those salaries seem neither especially high nor especially low... and I don't see how this relates to their lost passwords.

If there is a point you are making, can you elaborate?
I am flabbergasted. First, pay your tutition. Then you have to pay for access to all of the basic constituents of that education again?

If a teacher can't get you through a course by his or her own teaching, then they aren't worth it. You're only supposed to need those extra course packs if you're planning on skipping classes.

This is RMS prophecy coming to be and a lesson for me to always listen to crazy talk coming from well-bearded men.