skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, Mandrill is significantly cheaper than postmarkapp who we use now. Anybody using Mandrill in production?
Former McDonald’s Honchos Take On Sustainable Cuisine
I tried maintaining different sheets, and it became too much work - each time a new problem came up I had to figure out where all the relevant pieces of data were and cross-reference them by hand.

I don't focus on automation because a lot of my data consists of handwritten notes, but we'll have some data-intense examples with automated entry soon.
Disclaimer: I use MailChimp for Hacker Newsletter and Wayback Letter

I guess it depends what type of newsletter you're sending out, but pricing is hardly the reason I would pick one solution over another when it comes to sending out emails. The features and deliverability that someone like MailChimp provides is really invaluable if your newsletter is an important part of your business.

That being said, I always like the idea of a self-hosted solution as an option in any segment and I'm sure there is a market for something exactly like this.
About a decade now, probably. Started with MMOs, specifically Everquest, then moved on to DRM (which, oddly enough, is what I was in Forbes for last time), then on to locks and other hardware.
If you use a raycasting method, you can rasterize a shadow map with exactly the amount of precision you need and not have any artifacts (for 2d, of course - for 3d the necessary amount of precision is hard to calculate and sometimes prohibitive).

My old game Chimaera ( http://www.luminance.org/chimaera.html ) did this - lightmap rendered at full screen resolution (1-1 mapping) in full precision, with an on-demand raycasting solution for offscreen pixels. A raycasting method also allows you to cache the shadow data for static geometry and static light sources, which can be a big win for complex scenes. (I think maybe you could cache the polar data, but it wouldn't be as easy since you can't just translate by x&y like you can with a normal 2D perspective?)
Why can't it be both? The one thing I gathered was to be passionate, but it really seemed like he wished he had more involvement with his children in the end.

He was a person, complex in many ways. I choose to follow Bruce Lee's advice, take whatever good you can learn from his life and apply it. Be that the manager style if it works, or the tale of being a better parent. I reject this dichotomy.
This argument has been going around for as long as I can remember, and I think it's incredibly harmful to researchers (whether they be security or other).

Upon discovering the vulnerability, the only real action he could take which would be universally considered unacceptable would be to use that research to go around breaking into hotel rooms (which is illegal).

If he decided to go into business selling devices to bypass hotel room locks, there would also probably be a majority opinion that that isn't really "above-board". Even that isn't necessarily universally agreed on though (as there are a lot of people who argue that providing access to tools isn't criminal)

But he didn't do that either.

He decided that this was a pretty severe vulnerability (made worse by the fact that remediating it isn't trivial), and that he wanted people to know about it.

Hoping that the vendor will sue him to prevent that information from being disseminated is about the worst possible outcome from research of any kind; ignoring the fact that you don't seem to posit any rationale for what exactly they'd be suing about (protected trade secrets? violation of a license agreement?)

The thing about "responsible disclosure" is that it isn't something that exists by fiat. It's an intentional reframing of disclosure policies by vendors to attempt to steer the research community towards doing what's in the vendors best interests.

I understand their desire to reframe that policy, but that doesn't make it "the only ethically responsible way to conduct vulnerability disclosures".

Recently, there's been a lot of news about BMW's being able to be stolen trivially through access to the OBD port on certain models. There's an OSVDB entry for it and everything‡.

That's another example where providing information to the public was considered to be very important (like the issue Cody discovered, it's also not something that can be easily fixed. It's also been ignored by the vendor).

In virtually all other regards, making research public is considered the responsible thing to do.

While I'm not a card-carrying member of the full-disclosure sentiment, I strongly disagree that releasing research publicly is boolean irresponsible.

‡ http://osvdb.org/83707
Indiegogo.com raises record $700,000 donations for bullied NY bus monitor
I was an APM intern last summer. It really was an amazing experience, and it taught me a lot - most especially that I have no idea what I'm doing.

APMers have a great deal of respect for Marissa, and she invests heavily in the program. There's no doubt Marissa knows how to recruit talent really well. That said, it's not as if current APMs will be clamoring for jobs at Yahoo. For better or worse, most seemed to be motivated by status and learning opportunities. If Marissa can offer both at Yahoo, then it could be enticing.
Ask HN: How can I write a simple ML algorithm
Hi HN,

I want to write a simple ML algorithm in python for picking out good objects out of a large set of objects.

Say each object has feature(X1,X2,....XN) which are all numeric for the sake of simplicity.Now I have a billion such objects and a training set of good objects.Now based on the training set how do I pick out good objects from the large set.

One obvious solution is to take the mean of every feature in the training set and then find out objects whose values are close to the mean or more precisely the whose sum of deviations(or should it be sum of squares of deviations?) is the lowest.But I am looking for something cooler with ML?.Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks
Asana Raises $28M At A $280M Valuation
Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Mobile apps?
Just reacting to the first anecdote: Breaking a contract that is not optimal for your business is not the same thing as breaking a social norm like parking in a handicap space or berating people regularly.

Contracts exist to serve the business. If you are smart you will employ great lawyers to make sure your contracts are at least equitable, if not advantageous to your company. To do this effectively, the lawyers will provide advice and create internal rules.

However if you are not careful the lawyers can backdoor themselves into making business decisions. The optimal rate at which parts are shipped is a business decision. If you need to break a contract to improve the business, then break it. Calculate the risks and costs, then break it if it makes business sense. That's what Apple did and the results obviously speak for themselves. Their supply chain is the envy of the entire world.
I think when you say that you pretty well reduce the vision of programmer culture in the US. How much cypherpunk influence is there in the wide swaths of programming culture that came out of Web 2.0? And how many cypherpunks have gone on to work for the NSA, DARPA, etc.? I'm not sure the landscape is so very different, and certainly one could tease out a cypherpunk influence in Russia that's much more obvious and profound than that in the United States.

There are many programmer cultures, and even cypherpunk culture is very complicated. There are some very different strains of cypherpunk thought, i.e. the divide between those whose primary mode of action as being exposing the scariest actor around and those whose effort is centered in hiding from the scariest actor around.
The Rubber Pencil Illusion, modelled in GeoGebra
People like this piss me off - and I agree it diminishes the other founder(s?) positions if not technically then at least in perception.

I know you should probably talk to him/her, but if they are this arrogant you are likely only to get the words they think you want to hear, and no action. Worst case, they realise that you've rumbled them, and they go all out to raise their profile at the expense of yours.

If I were in your shoes I'd copy the tactic. Call yourself the founder too. DON'T make things up, but state the genuine claims as to what your contribution is/was to the founding of the company.

This way you let other people make their minds up. As long as you can support your contribution claims, then that's what will eventually win through.
I'm asking because Backbone is written for CRUD apps out of the box, and real-time webapps aren't CRUD normally.
They tried that (with Brickhouse) and then shut it down as soon as the going got tough.
liberal arts were once considered the arts of the free - something that has usually been forgotten.
This is good to hear. I'm cautiously optimistic about this project and hope we see numbers grow a few orders of magnitude in the coming year.
Agreed. Just in case, here are some quick numbers so far, for the record:

Week 1: $24.80 / 12 people

Week 2: $4.24 / 7 *

Week 3: $30.08 / 19

Week 4: $110.64 / 44

Week 5: $379.56 / 71

Week 6: $615.66 / 98

Week 7: $600.99 / 110

As you can see, we slowed this past week, to be honest. Looking for advice on getting back to ~doubling each week. :-)

* In week 2 our payment processor died. We were expecting $55 / 26. See also:

http://blog.gittip.com/post/25565694263/how-not-to-get-acqui...
Pass C# Out and Ref Keywords into Java using CodePorting C# 2 Java Engine
I'd say that the difference between "news" and "information" isn't freshness, but relevancy. There's a lot of information out there that doesn't have relevancy to a user. When it does, that information transitions from simply being "information" into "news."

In terms of story, we are as a culture oriented toward story and narrative. I think that's been true for forever. Cave paintings are remnants of ancient narratives (and of the point that information (there are buffaloes) becomes news (there are buffaloes near us, so we killed them) in the same way that newspapers reflect the remnants of more recent narratives and how all sorts of information delivery vehicles now contain narratives today.

The key thing about The News today though is that it's still pretty reflective of old forms, and that's probably where your frustration with the story format comes in. Those old forms actually made sense when they were created, in part because they reflected the needs of the delivery systems.

Of course now the needs of, say, telegraphs during the civil war (which is where the "reverse pyramid" system was created) is a silly way to make your news.

Which is why what some newsrooms and devs are doing to blow up the story, to start thinking about how to put information across in ways that are exciting and new and reflective both of medium but also representational (and respectful) of the information itself is pretty damn kick-ass.

I'm thinking of something like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/11/sports/basketb...

There's actually a lot of narrative there, but it's narrative in a very different way than we'd normally think about it. There's a ton of information there as well, but it's been touched in really thoughtful ways.

Things like this, which are happening more and more every day, make me super excited.

PS. WOW that was a long answer.
There was a small international link with the tube bombings (overseas terrorist training). But I think the differences are more to do with the fact that London has always had terrorism, some foreign some domestic, and reacts differently anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_...
No, trying to even out times by matching is not what was suggested. Instead you make a sleep mechanism that ends uniformly. In this example you would always sleep until the ten second mark, valid or invalid.

Trying to make two code paths take the same time without waiting on an external timer is deep voodoo and should be left to experts.
For line of sight you couldn't cache, no, but for static lighting you certainly could.
3 Great High-End Smartphones with Cheap, No-Contract Wireless Service
Ask HN: Anyone need apps or sites device tested free?
I have access to a bunch of devices (ipad, iPhone, android mobile/tablet/TV, win, retina mac - stuff like that) & wondered if anyone needed their product tested. No catch.
I used to be a Tesco employee for a fair while, and it wasn't difficult to notice this pattern purely because those barcodes don't always scan (typically due to dodgy equipment).

It would often be the case that you couldn't see the whole code on the sticker, but could infer it by removing it and using the original barcode and a bit of guesswork.

I don't advocate the testing of this, and any observant member of staff will have no difficulty catching you out.
As the creator of FuckItJS, I have unfortunately fallen short of my "$1,000,000.00 per week" goal
It is pretty amazing to see how much the term "hackathon" has been diluted in such a short time. How did we go from a very literal "a hacking marathon" where the developers of project X get together to hack non-stop for a week on their project to "non-programmers scraping together some off the shelf javascript/css frameworks into a trivial web app for a couple of hours, and then having some marketing person call it an awesome hack"?
Moving low-hanging fruit forward at the end of the day
Other than spammers, who is concerned about sending email newsletters cheaper? Your service looks like a great tool, but I'd encourage you to ask your early users why they like using you. I'd guess that "It's cheaper than mailchimp" won't be the answer you hear.

+ You don't really want to tout yourself as the low-cost-option. You have nowhere to go but down.
I agree with DougWebb that in this case the 16-line initial version is most surely better/simpler.

The problem is that using a more complex piece of code, one that would really benefit from the structure that Backbone provides, would make the blog post really long and tedious. Maybe you could explain that at beginning of the post: that it's only an illustrative example and that the real benefit of Backbone comes when dealing with more complex applications.
Will this ever be integrated into an existing cart like shopify, so that total non developers can use it?
Having found credit card leaks in databases I can assure you that all but the most top level people would try to sweep this under the rug. I couldn't push my find up the chain until the C-level came to visit.
Oh god....the disease is spreading...
Those 319 people (74%) are contributing only $79/month. If minimum contribution was raised to US$1 it would generate more donations even if >60% leave.
'Dead Trigger' now free on Android due to 'unbelievably high' piracy rate
A little love, people! :-)

https://www.gittip.com/mattdiamond/
Cisco Cuts 2 Percent of Work Force As Part of Ongoing Restructuring
There are so many other demographics in tech that are also under-represented. African American men. Latinos. Heck, even though Asians are highly represented in engineering/comp-sci at top tech schools in the U.S. very few are in leadership positions in major North American tech companies.

Every week on Twitter or HN I see great stories about people trying to advance women's presence in tech. I don't disagree with that movement at all. But I hear very few talking about the other subgroups in the male gender that may have obstacles from going into tech.
I agree with you on the mass shootings aspect.

However...

>firearms killings _are_ a pattern, if I recall correctly they are something between 5 and 10 times more frequent in US than other first wold countries.
I personally believe that US citizens are unable to understand how dumb their attitude to weapons is,

You can't compare crime rates without controlling for other differences. Most other first world countries are much more ethnically homogenous than the U.S.

And they don't suffer from the cultural problems caused by the fairly recent institutional persecution of an entire class of people.

It's not very PC to talk about, and I think that the high incidence of crime amongst black Americans is directly caused by the decades of persecution they suffered which causes them to occupy a lower socio-economic position on average than whites, not any inherent racial differences.

But whatever the reason, whites and blacks both have similar access to guns and similar gun ownership rates, yet if you only count white americans, you'll find a fairly similar gun crime rate to the rest of the first World, so clearly, easy access to guns isn't the problem.

The closest country I can think of to our situation is South Africa (Rights recently restored to an historical lower class. Though it's still not a great comparison because of their relatively lower GDP per capital, and different demographics). Their gun violence rate is about 5 times that of the US.
This article is Bullshit. It is heights of insanity that a no name wired writer can just assume himself to be qualified to make judgements on someone who has had a huge impact (positive) on the world. I use an iPhone, iPad and a mac and I can vouch that my life is better with them than what I would imagine it to be without them. And what is the accusation? that he bullied a few? for making hundreds of millions of lives better? bullied as in asking people who are free to quit whenever to work more? The writer of this article is nuts
Need PCs to teach kids programming
Hey folks! We're a non-profit videogame museum in downtown Oakland. We focus on playable exhibits, and educating the public as to how games are made. One of the ways we do this is by offering free kids programming classes in Scratch on the weekends, and by hosting kids camps this summer.

But we have a major problem: we have only a handful of terrible, broken PCs from people's garages and such. What we really need is someone to donate an old computer lab, or to donate a smattering of new netbooks.

We need about 10 PCs, the more similar they are to each other, the better. Newer is better, as we'd like to teach Unity and modern programming languages as well. We'll install Ubuntu ourselves, but we need Windows due to the number of game development systems that are point-and-click available in that OS.

Anyone who thinks they could help should email me at alex@themade.org and check us out at http://www.themade.org

We can offer a tax write-off for the donation, and maybe even host a party for your company.
"always use the physical security mechanisms provides, e.g. door chains"

Sliding chain locks which can be defeated with a rubber band... :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7INIRLe7x0Y&t=60s
I'm speaking more of economic suffering than the excesses of the evolving security aparatus.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/census-shows-1-2-people-103940...
Writing Performant Scala
Marco is:

"I was only able to reject those offers because Instapaper is a healthy business, and the life that Instapaper provides for me and my family is better than what the big companies offered." http://www.marco.org/2012/07/20/talent-acquisitions
Ask HN:  How to be happier 
I'm terribly worried that this question will be brushed aside as ridiculously naive, but what the heck.

How do you make yourself a happier person?

I ask this question because I've just graduated from high school, and the transition has forced me to focus seriously about what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. The best answer I could come up with is "contribute to the betterment of mankind", which I think many HN users can sympathize with. However, as I tried to flesh out my response into a meaningful plan, I realized I have no idea how to make the world a happier place! In truth, I don't even know how to make myself a happier person!

In light of this, I figured that's the first thing I should do. I'd immensely appreciate anybody giving their two cents on this silly question.
So they spent a lot of money and didn't change the overall outcome? Doesn't sound effective in any way to me.
Signed up for fun! I still don't see the tip buttons once I show a widget to a viewer.
Access Hulu, Netflix, VEVO from outside the US legally
We're still talking about him, and so are his co-workers. Jonny Ive, for instance, obviously adored him, as did Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, etc. These were the folks who worked most closely with Jobs and according to the book were subject to his scorn and mind games. Yet they speak of him in glowing tones. So I think the story is much more complicated than "be mean to people if you are driven." Jobs could apparently also be very supportive and endearing to those for whom he developed respect.
I doubt it. They've shown questionable judgement merely by hiring Mayer, whose accomplishments at Google are not especially respected among those with inside knowledge, and whose priorities will shift wildly after she gives birth in October. The board will terminate her in 2013 after 7-8 lackluster months. Then they'll start shopping Yahoo to be broken up and sold as parts.
Yes. There have always been parents that are simply children who got older before they got wiser.
The Spectacle of Tragedy
Spending your own money to buy ingredients and equipment, becoming an event vendor and making waffles for free is not the same as making a copy of something that other people have created and then making it available for free.

No body is stopping people from using their own money to acquire recording equipment, write/record/produce a track and make it available for free. Of course that would not be illegal... and neither is giving away your own waffles.

As amusing as this waffle story is, I fail to see how it can be compared to illegal file sharing.
They sorta do now with the in reply to link now. Its pretty bad though.
Yes! I am working on a Shopify plugin right now actually - can you email me at danielle@refer.ly so I can hear what you'd like me to make sure to include?
Wow. That is pretty terrible. Assuming you left the comment, did you try a browser in private mode to confirm the """"preview"""" was in fact limited to only you?
I'm kind in agreement about this. $0.25 a week really is tiny.
Yes, you can print your own barcodes and name your own price, yes its been done before [1] and you can and will get arrested. As this becomes more widespread the folks in shops will get better with their software.

[1] http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/VP-of-Palo-Altos-SAP-Ar...
Likewise, implying that Mayer was somehow innovative in starting a program that was already widespread in large companies—that is ridiculous. I have yet to hear anything about Melissa Mayer that is actually innovative or impressive.
The Seven Subjects I learnt at Marwari Business School (MBS)
Khan Academy: The Hype and The Reality
mm. I don't think what you want and what Dan Sinker or Dan Nguyen are talking about is different from what you want.

There's a "Show Your Work" movement in the news+tech community that's pretty popular, and making its way into stories too. Check out http://www.propublica.org/article/why-cant-linda-carswell-ge... for example.
I disagree; in fact I come to the exact opposite conclusion based on the human brain's limited cognitive ability.

I believe that when you decouple code the way Backbone (and similar frameworks) would have you do, you may simplify the individual bits, but you've obfuscated how they fit together and interact. In fact, you've increased the number of invariants because you've made it possible for the individual bits to be put together in many different ways, not just the one way that the tightly-coupled code allows. You started with N concerns, and now you have N^2 concerns. That's much worse.

It's much riskier too... when your code is decoupled, how can you possibly tell what effect a minor change will have? It's like programming with nothing but global variables. In the tightly-coupled version, you know exactly every single possible code path through your change, and you can ensure that the new behavior will be correct. You just can't do that in the decoupled version, at least not in anywhere close to the same amount of development time/effort.