skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I try to take Rand with a grain of salt, but do find myself associating to her work more and more these days.

This LIBOR scandal feels like a rather typical case. We set up stupid crooked rules, incentivize people to break them and appoint regulators to prevent the same. And when this mess blows up we blame it on "capitalism" and say we need more regulation.

I think the limits of financial and regulatory "architecture" are similar to those of software architecture; there's a tradeoff between the desired properties of a system and its complexity - and your complexity budget is not infinite. You cannot have every combination of desirable properties you can dream up. There will be combinations that are too expensive. The example here is that we want a reference rate called "LIBOR" that is set by the market, but that is defined for every point in time. That's just not possible, because markets can freeze up. When there are no transactions there is no market rate. Either we accept that or we go down the road of increasing complexity, "panels of banks" emulating a market, the inevitable failures, more regulations and complexity in a never ending downward spiral... At least that's my feeling. :)
11 French Business Associations urge French Senate to innovate now
In my opinion, the key characteristic of software that makes the current patent system not suitable is the vast amount of interdependence inherent in this type of technology. Code is not used side by side like an infantry of little computer processes working in parallel to make computers or phones go. It is rather organised and packaged in a huge network of building blocks, a pyramid of hundreds of thousands of libraries, APIs or functions heavily inter-dependent on each other. What’s more, the building blocks are usually not all written by the same people or organisations and a consistent interface is critical for enabling compatibility (often between millions of parts made by thousands of developers).

This hierarchical and networked architecture is inevitable and it is the best way to organize such complex information, however the stability it requires at the bottom of the pyramid of code means that some building blocks cannot be changed once the pyramid is built. Someone claiming ownership of the shape of a bottom-center block after the pyramid is built, someone having the power to force a bottom block to be removed and replaced with a different shaped one, no matter how simple and obvious this bloc is, does not have power over just this block but over the whole structure above it and all the components that depend on it. This means patent holders have a disproportionately large amount of power when they target such a bloc. From a possibly trivial piece at the bottom, they can control a vastly more sophisticated structure built on top which they had no part in conceiving. They know that changing it would require tearing down, redesigning and replacing often tons of dependent work and probably break compatibility for huge amounts of users of these projects.
No it's not a police-state where they are actively targeting dissidents.

It's a TSA-state where there is a massive over-reaction to bureaucratic automated scanning of communications.

Post some SMS/Tweet/facebook update with a quote that sounds to an automated script like a terrorist threat. (eg a line from Fightclub or a Clash lyric) and watch the reaction.

Even if the police bursting down your door manage to not accidentally shoot you - hopefully you are white and rich - expect to be dragged through the courts and have your life ruined because THEY can't be wrong.
I use AutoZoom for Chrome. Although the fonts here are too small for me, so too at some other sites.

It is amazing how many sites have css that does not work properly when zoomed.

I can't even read HN on my iPad because of the font issue.
Touching someone on the shoulder is not sexual assault.

How about, as described in the original post, licking someone's shoulder tattoo?
that is why i don't use fullscreen
Rachel Starr - Got ass?
I still use `:wq` once every blue moon. Only out of habit though.
File upload with HTML5, AJAX and PHP streams
Ask HN: Minimum Viable Product?
I have created a web site at www.sipen.com that helps companies and individuals keep track of their time tracking. This would be helpful for invoicing and other such features, but I have not marketed it yet or even mentioned it much. (This was created using PHP using the Yii Framework.)

The individual side is free but is missing many of the features offered on the business side. I think this may be resulting in people getting the wrong impression about the product. I have not added credit card processing to it yet or anything because I have almost given up on the whole project altogether due to a lack of interest from people I have shown.

I am asking the community here if they could give me some input on this. Should I change it and give a fully featured option to businesses on a time based trial instead? Should I keep the 'free for individuals' option? Also, what features do you think are missing that would be necessary for this to truly be a minimum viable product? I get the feeling that if I was to put this out there, it would flop because there is so much competition from similar products (even if they are not as easy to use.)

Any criticism would be appreciated as long as it can help make the product better.

Lastly, when the product is really a MVP, how can I possibly sell it? What marketing and advertising steps do you recommend?

Also, if you want to test out the company features, I have added an account for that. The username is "demoadmin" and the password is "testaccount" and there is already a basic user set up named "test" and the password for that is "testaccount" even though no information is filled in for it, and the user has never been marked as clocking into the time clock.

I appreciate any feedback.
"I feel that a lot of the blame heaped upon the finance industry is unnecessarily antagonistic (and personal)."

This is clearly a response to the defensive, entitled, and holier-than-thou attitude the financial industry had in the wake of the 2008 crisis, not to mention the lack of consequences to finance directors or serious financial reform. They closed ranks, hard, which by necessity elevates the level of the attacks against them, which therefore seems antagonistic.

Tried talking to a banker about this stuff in 2009? Impossible to have a discussion not rife with blame-shifting.
I urge you to get a look at the code and see just HOW cringeworthy it is. For science!
http://airparrot.com/
And while you're at it, put invisible texts saying "upvote" inside the link tags so I could click it using Gleebox.
> Fact is, the market should have punished the malfeasors in the 2007 financial crash, as it should be punishing the malfeasors in the Libor scandal.

Yes, it should have, but the regulators didn't want that to happen.

However, you're missing a very important part of the story. Regulators were part of the problem leading up to these disasters.

In the LIBOR case, UK regulators knew about the rigging and tacitly encouraged it because they thought that the rigging stabilized the market. (US regulators knew about and accepted said rigging.) That's understandable - many of you want them to stabilize the market and the rigging probably did have that effect. However, if you're looking for an honest market....

Things are even worse wrt the 2007 problems. Regulators were in that up to their eyeballs on both the mortgage and securities sides. (In fact, securitization was encouraged by regulators.) Fannie and Freddie were especially bad because they reported bogus stats that threw off everyone's risk analysis.

Until we start punishing regulators and the politicians who push these policies....
well you need the expansion of air, but maybe there is another way using magnetism or electrostatic or something, but maybe he is just referring to how the props are mechanically turned.
To me Newscoop is a really strong Platform. I am sure that the fact it is also opensource makes it very beneficial for the emerging democracies around the world to get this powerful tool
Mysterious Sprite Photographed by ISS Astronaut
Startup Viral Marketing Costs Real Money These Days
Thanks for post! I found this very inspiring including some of the comments, since it shows that solving a real need almost builds a business itself with grateful consumers. It also does not require the latest and flashiest software tools. I wish there was a blog that reported these little small projects that are basic and solve a real need without facebook logins flying around and asking me to import my address book.
Social Marketplace for Online Marketing -  Doublelinx.com
> Because the banks were "too big to fail," and not bailing them out would have been catastrophic. Because nobody had ever stopped them from growing so big, and so systemically integrated, in the first place.

If these banks are too big to fail (and thus shouldn't exist), what does that imply about large state govts (such as CA) and the US federal govt?

Note that regulation is, by definition, systemic risk.
JavaScript sorting algorithms can definitely be faster if you are passing a comparator function to Array.prototype.sort, depending on the JS engine. See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.tech.js-en..., where Boris Zbarsky shows that translating quick sort into JavaScript produces an algorithm that runs 7X faster than Array.prototype.sort(function(a, b) { return a-b; }) in SpiderMonkey (which uses an insertion + merge sort in C++ for Array.prototype.sort) because of the expense of making calls from C++ to JS. Chrome's sort algorithm is written in JavaScript so it doesn't suffer from this.
Wonder Girls Segera Merilis Video Klip “Nobody” Versi Jepang
Dog Disses
I know, and you don't have to. (Actually, you don't even need the copyright notice at all -- copyrights are valid without it -- but it's a good idea anyway.)

In fact, you shouldn't update it. If you write something in 2002, someone steals the code in 2005, and in 2007 you change the copyright to read "copyright 2007", then later it becomes an issue, the person who stole it can claim "Look, my version is earlier!" and you'll have to go through the explanation of what happened and perhaps provide proof of it, which is an argument you wouldn't have had to make if you'd just left the copyright notice alone.
I think there is a lot to be sad about the anti-windows opinion being linked not necessarily to windows but to the hardware. I personally love windows. I think Vista got a lot more negativity than it deserved and I love Win7. However, My windows machine is an iMac.

I've been consistently disappointed with pretty much every major windows OEM HW maker (with the exception of Lenovo where I just don't like their look and feel). There is something to be said about making people feel good about the HW they're using. Heck, my 2006 white macbook works like a champ and still serves all of the wife's needs (I offered to get her a MBA but she is happy with what she has).
Music Meta Data via API from Decibel
Ha, and there we go, so I couldn't reply to you (no reply link) within the discussion but I can by following the "link" link and then replying. What's that all about?

My main point would have to be that you have to work all of this out. Shouldn't it just be written in the FAQs. You could make the UI more helpful, like keep the reply link but disable it (eg with strike through) or have it popup a note "new comment: reply disabled for 5 minutes" or whatever. Or on pages with no downvote have a header comment in a box saying "downvoting disabled; all stories have down-voting disabled after 24 hours".

Gah, I have to stop before I get on to not having collapsible threads and the lameness of greying out comments and not having vote count displayed and ...
Ask HN: What is good healthy bounce rate and New/Returning users ratio?
we just launched our side project http://www.jackpotbuddy.com about 3 weeks ago.

Just wondering what would be a good bounce rate and new/returning users ratio?

Here are few of our stats:

Avg / Visit: 7.40

Avg. Visit Duration: 00:05:49

Bounce Rate: 23.73% %

New Visits: 67.24%
Interesting. I may have accidentally stumbled on this hack a few years ago when I was sitting in an airport.

I had downloaded the (I believe) Boingo iOS app, which works by performing an in-app purchase for the amount of time you want to use their wireless network in the airport. I followed the directions exactly as specified, but instead of getting a "Purchase Completed" message I got a "declined" message. Despite not having paid for the wireless network time after that I was still able to connect and use the Internet without problem.

It may be that because un-authorized users are sometimes given walled garden DNS settings, it was causing a bit of confusion within the in-app purchasing system that results in free wifi for me.

(My alternative explanation is that I hadn't updated the expiration date on my credit card, so the purchase was declined but Boingo's app didn't differentiate between success and error from the App Store's system so I got the wifi anyway. I think this explanation is still the likely candidate.)

In any case, I told Boingo about the bug when I found it and after convincing them that it was their job to fix it and not mine. Since this was a few years ago I hope they've fixed the problem.
Your steps to the Crisis are off a bit. You see the re bubble was and is still being deflated. That would have only hit American banks primarily, and it would have been a slowdown only - if that was all that happened.

What you are forgetting ignoring, is that the mortgages were only fuel for the CDO market. That market was powers bigger, completely levered and so the smallest misstep meant outsized failures.

On top of this you had yet more instruments piled on, where people made just plain betson market outcomes.

Oh yeah, the swaps were also insuring far more than what the underlings were worth too.

So the real estate bubble wasn't big enough to create a crisis - for that we needed CDOs and CDSs to lever the bubble.

And a lot of those write downs have happened, the banks has their PE ratios and the rest crushed in 08. They took most of their hits.

All they have now is shadow inventory, which they can't afford to let onto the market because it would depress housing prices further.

This when some Americans are too broke to live in tents :)

For the glass steagal bit, sorry but right now your aim to be above the debate is making you take a stand based on what you think is a talking point.

It's your perception that it's a talking point, but in that case why my example was someone who was on the other side of the evil banker discussion, who was saying that glass steagal was good.

And this was even before the predicted outcome - rapacious irresponsibility, was proven. While you may want to be above the debate, it's not a talking point. It's more like a strongly substantiated theory.
RIM denies split; patents up for grabs?
How does simple zooming produce that horribly mangled graphic on the left of that screenshot? That seems like a deficiency in your browser.
> with “retarded” the additional problem is that no one uses it as a positive term

Not true. In the automotive world "retarded" is used quite often in regards to your distributor, vacuum and timing. By adjusting things, your timing can be advanced or retarded. It is not a negative thing. It is simply how engines are tuned.

http://georgiajag.com/Documents/Vacuum%20Advance%20versus%20...
How many Lumia phones were sold in the US?
What are the most intellectually stimulating websites you know of?
Mounting a drive directly into RAM in Mac OSX
Mounting a drive directly into RAM in Mac OSX
> I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that I have broken no laws, no matter how small, at any time within the past week.

I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that you're wrong (at least if you're in the US).

I'm not saying that you're lying, let alone that you're intentionally doing wrong. It's just that the web of law reaches everywhere and it's almost impossible to not trip over it.

IMHO most of these laws shouldn't exist but that's just me.
Some Fosamax Users Don't Take the Drug Regularly - July 12, 2012
The design of the HTML 5 datalist
"I'm thinking of buying one for the emulation alone."

Holy hell, I didn't even think of this. Android already has a bunch of emus. Exciting!
In all fairness, that's kind of a worthless comment.

That's like a carpenter saying it doesn't matter whether he uses a hammer or a wrench to drive a nail, the real magic is in his hands. It's not a completely untrue statement, naturally, but it doesn't invalidate that one tool is distinctly better than the other for the job.

With text editors, there are a variety of purposes for each. I used to make it a point of pride that I developed in plain editors, if I were on Windows, that would mean "Notepad", or "pico" on Linux. Then I was able to see some of the more capable tools for the task available, and am a lot more productive for it.

Can I use another text editor to get my job done? Of course. If I absolutely had to, I could probably write an app with Dragon Dictate, but it isn't the best way to get it done, at least not for me. There are varying editors because people have different workflows. If your workflow is 'I type out code', well there's nothing wrong with that, but you're also throwing away potential productivity gains that something like Vim, or Emacs, or Sublime could add.

For what it's worth, Vim is free, available on pretty much every platform, and offers AMAZING levels of customization and productivity gains through its 'verbs and phrases' mechanic. That you'd turn your nose up at it for no apparent reason (that you've given anyway) seems slightly ridiculous.
This might explain the unusual rise of BTC vs. USD.

The thief might have just traded those dollars to bitcoins which makes them harder to trace.
Yeah I see what you mean. The title was designed to be catchy. Our previous app with a lot of users though was only one of our "bullets". The cross promotion idea is probably something more people can do than they realize.

Also having an app that people are going to download is super important (it sounds obvious, but we think the majority of people don't focus enough on this.)
I would've thought that no one would keep using Bitconica after their first major breach but here I am, shocked by the fact that people still kept trusting them with their Bitcoins
"If the consumer keeps buying their devices us power users ("developers") will continue to buy the hardware too. To write apps."

Such an important point I thought I would highlight it. On HN there is often talk of "good will" with developers and the effect of that. The fact is good will doesn't trump market opportunity. Market opportunity is like good looks. It gets you the girl (even if you're a dick). Helping the girl with her physics homework gets you good will but won't get you laid.
If you are really worried about performance (and the operators of of this forum should be) then there are more important things that need to be fixed besides just adding caching headers to an images (which is still a good idea). https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=h...
The Death of Legends
It's because the GIF arrow is anti-aliased. You always want to anti-alias after sizing, lest it look like that, but you can't do that in a bitmapped image.
alliteration you mean? You're right, it does sound nice.
New Data Shows Pinterest Users Look But Don't Buy
You have to do it on the server. And it's a pain to implement correctly, full of cryptic error codes. I imagine many developers skip it since it's not required by Apple.
I can't believe people entrust virtual money to sites like these which in general - but consistently - seem to be run by amateurs.
Of course it's a systemic problem. But individuals are components of that system. If you don't punish people who engage in fraud, you remove a valuable disincentive against fraud. So while the system as a whole needs to be reformed, making individuals take personal responsibility for wrongdoing is part of that.
Hate to say this but if this sort of sloppiness continues, the bitcoin brand will be trampled so badly it will never get off the ground.
the video associated with this article is very interesting http://vimeo.com/38562041
I feel badly for the people that lost money, and hope that some legal action is taken against the organization.
This only happened today and the rally has been on for more than a week.
I guess I just use it as a proxy to show how long the site has been up. I use a range in the footer on that project:

© Copright 2006-2010

Probably dumb but I do find myself looking in the footer of sites to see how active it is.
I've lost count of how many times they have been breached. Why don't they get independent pen testers and get them to test their system? Surely paying a pen tester $5k is much better than the amount of negative publicity you get when you lose $350K
It's cheaper, but there's no less red tape (although maybe a little less general paperwork). Most positions in the US are At Will so you can be fired for any non-protected reason, at any time, with no warning. Similarly, you can quit at any time with no warning.
Node isn't anything new. We all know that. The best things about it are:
1) a vibrant community which makes tons of modules
2) an architecture which forces these modules to be gasp truly modular and performant

The best language/framework in the world is no good (for many people's purposes) if it lacks a large community to support it.
I guess something like caniuse.com for Unicode chars would be useful...
You CAN'T just unplug the screen, battery, and camera from the board and then stuff it into a new form factor. The board will have to be redesigned to fit into a new form factor and accommodate new peripherals. This will take significant time and effort, regardless of whether the engineering is done in the US, China, or Zimbabwe.

> Thirdly, it's interesting that you have both insight into the margins of several different hardware manufacturers and also into the internal R&D discussions of Ouya to know that they are going to end up selling a $200 Tegra2 instead of a $99 Tegra3 device. Gosh, they should've just hired you, no?

This is just silly. I point out a system on the market with much closer specs to what Ouya is trying to accomplish (no screen, similar outputs, etc) and point out that's still twice their price point. I have seen no evidence from Ouya, you, or anyone else that they can do anything different. Until then, I'll remain skeptical that they'll deliver on their promises.

> Why so aggressive arguing that they can't do it?

It'd be awesome if they pulled it off; I'm just pointing out that they probably won't. And if I came off as aggressive, it's because of all the armchair engineers around here who think consumer hardware design is a walk in the park that can be completed on a whim in an instant.

> it's another to spread FUD that something is impossible.

Go find where I said "impossible". My entire post just points out how unlikely it is this project is going to deliver what it promises.
Every field has stars and 'everybody else'. Physicians know who to send send their family members to. Quality chef's command more respect and make higher quality food. etc. I speak from experience.

The same is true in programming.
Ha, well it was written in VB.NET, so that alone ought to make me cringe. And I was building on my existing knowledge of VBA, so...

Apparently a few years ago they had a minor panic because they realised they had no idea where the database was actually stored. I'd gotten some MSSQL space from the (outsourced) DB guys- the guy who gave me the space had also, of course, left. Fun times...
Anybody know where I can find a thermite-holding 5.25" bay?
website: http://www.invoicejournal.com/

It's actually not a bad template. To the point.
Show HN: BrainTripping - language model comedy
Too late, I'm afraid. Who, today, uses Bitcoin, except for criminals and speculants?