skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Distributel too.. 28Mbit down for $50 a month.. no caps or contracts
I think you're overstating the case. I found that Ivory soap dries out my skin, while Dove doesn't. The store brand single-blade disposable razors at Duane Reade tend to get badly clogged with hair, while Bic's version doesn't clog at all. The wooden spoon from the 99¢ store snapped in half after a few months of use. It's still true that you get what you pay for.
Security cameras are not immediately posted on YouTube. People have become nonchalant about recording others and disseminating the footage, it'll be even weirder if you can't see that they have a camera. How would you ever be able to drop your guard?
Fred Wilson first brought this to my attention here:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/02/clearqam-what-it-is-and-why-...

He references "ClearQAM" aka "Clear QAM".

Also note a few people commented on today's blog post (IOW, not here, but on the original post; see my comment and replies) that they tried, and it works.
This is the first "single use case marketing package" I've seen from Task Rabbit. Would be awesome if they opened an API for others to create a similar site across different verticals.
This is a neat idea, but these game captchas have some high level of similarity with in-banner-games (at least to me). Not sure if theses "catch the monkey" banners are still around but they were extremely annoying. I hope you are doing some testing to make absolutely sure that this great idea is not mistakenly experienced as some form of banner ad.
The poster is correct. There is a law, I cannot remember where it is stated and where I read it, but I have heard it and I did check when I only had cable. I got all the broadcast stations in HD no less without a cable subscription using my QAM tuner on my TV and on my HD Homerun.

Quality usually will not be nearly as good as receiving over the air though. At least that is my experience. Most cable operators will compress their stations, some more than others. It is obvious if you have seen or are used to viewing with rabbit ears.
Not quite so true -- the consumer product industry has many players, but only a few mega-winners. They're not largely winning because they "control prices"/"keep competitors away" (which sounds like there is something disreputable happening), they're winning because given the choice between a $3 bar of Dove and a $0.25 bar of white soap, Dove will generally win. (See e.g. house brands at supermarkets vs. branded products, though house brands are not priced quite that aggressively, in part because they know that they'll sell less at $0.25 than at $1.)
This is quite the oversimplification of the value vs. costs of automated testing while also being completely orthogonal to the discussion. I'd never accept "automated testing" by itself as a strong argument to prefer PHP or anything for that matter.
More than that, since they would guess one of {e,t,o,i,n}.
I'd agree that if your home never had cable, SOL.
And you're right that there's nothing in it for them to drive a truck around...it's just s/w setting to turn off your paid subscription.
However, see my comment above re ClearQAM, and link to Fred's post.
Yep, I like this as well. I'm an 18 year old cofounder/designer hacker and sent him an email to hopefully get connected. I'm always on the lookout for young people like me that have started early. (not to bash on anyone that started late, but it's cool to meet people along my same path)
What I've heard (and am about to find out) is that Master's programs in CS don't do much more than undergraduate degrees. Maybe if you're lucky you do a little more research, you write a thesis, and then you're in the exact same position you were a year or two ago.

What I'm thinking is.. Just start doing stuff on your own. Figure out things you want to make and try to make them. Join some open-source projects, start some open-source projects, build a portfolio of things that you made and code you've written that potential employers can actually look at. At this point I'm just regurgitating advice that I've heard too many times, but that doesn't mean it's not good advice.
For the price of a fast food lunch I decided to try it out. I appreciate the many supported protocols. The L2TP w/ IPSec VPN works just fine in OS X. The streaming quality was quite good and the online offerings from the BBC puts NBC's broadcasts to shame! I couldn't find a commercial either... is that really the case and I'm just a shellshocked American who hasn't seen the BBC in the UK before?
As I pointed out in my first comment, you can also just load it with pandas/excel/etc. I brought up postgres for the specific case of "queries on-demand on your web server or mobile app".
Why do we like starchy foods?
My experience is the opposite. Before I knew about the above, I bought a digital antenna from Home Depot. I got barely any signal.

Now, I get HDTV quality on a few networks.
In principle, you shouldn't be getting warnings for any of those formats. You should only be getting one when you launch an executable - it's a warning that the file you downloaded is an executable and not some random other file you can (barring vulnerabilities) open without trust.

I don't know why it cares about the executable bit(?) in this case, though.
To be honest, I'm not sure what point you're even making here. You seem to be redefining the parameters to what's strictly legal in a system you agree is seriously flawed. But that's not where the thread of this conversation started. I never claimed what Apple was doing was illegal. Someone accused Samsung of behaving "unfairly," so I pointed to Apple's unfairness. As far as the law is concerned both parties are still behaving entirely legally (as no one's been found guilty of anything yet). Accepting that, I do consider the ethics of the issue a different story.
You can disconnect from the VPN after you're done watching.
This is not the answer. My grandmother was kind enough to give me her Comcast account info so I can stream through nbcolympics.com

Their system is garbage. IE9 and IE9 64-bit come to a screeching halt after 30 minutes of live streaming and have to be killed by task manager. Firefox Nightly x64 (my main browser) does the same thing after ballooning to 600MB of RAM. In Chrome the video starts to skip after 20 minutes when RAM usage hits about 300MB. So far Chrome + AdBlock is the only thing that's been stable so far.

Which brings me to why nbcolympics.com is garbage. They've managed to take a YouTube stream, and then surround it on all sides with 2 flash ad banners, commercial breaks during live streams, many many more commercial breaks during replays, and a drunken orgy of Web 2.0 tracking systems and social medias as far as the eye can see.

They've taken the most widely used video distribution platform and turned it into a hulking behemoth that destroys web browsers.

Ignoring all of that for a moment. NBC also has gaps in what you can watch on nbcolympics.com The opening ceremony wasn't streamed live, or streamed "live" when NBC showed it on TV. I'd have to check, but I don't think you can even watch a reply of it now. I wanted to watch some archery and the USA women's soccer match from earlier. While scrolling through the list I saw a reply link for every event...except gymnastics. NBC decided not to allow replays of that.

This just grows the amount of hatred I have for NBC since the 2010 games when they implemented this system and I couldn't get the same Comcast account to authenticate. So I was stuck with tape delay everything while my friends up north were watching everything live through cbc.ca

The trial run of NBC's system in 2008 was the best run they've had. No ads, no pay wall system, every event streamed live and available for replay afterward. It worked without a hitch.
A UK-based Linode instance as a proxy works beautifully: http://bearsfightingbears.com/how-to-watch-the-olympics-live...
Yes, straw men do make for easy targets, particularly when you make up random numbers to support your point.
It's targeted primarily at enterprises and only gets updated (aside from security patches) every 7 releases (42 weeks).
Not sure it still applies as I have been out the trading game for a little while now, but in the past the big HFT's had a 20 millisecond window where they were allowed to see the market orders before anyone else. Thus they could see say a big buy order coming in and pull their offers or even take out the offers themselves, knowing that the buyer would have to pay up. This has the effect of raising execution costs for the company trying to accumulate stock for their long term positions. Obviously the same techniques would apply to the long term investor trying to close a stock position by selling.

This was effectively legalised front running of the market, something that would normally get you sent to jail. In the name of liquidity, exchanges allowed this and of course they got paid big bucks by the big HFT firms.

The whole trading game is pretty corrupt. You would expect that given the amount of money sloshing around. For example we knew about market manipulation in LIBOR for many years. It was an open secret but now the regulators are "discovering" it because the political climate is such that fewer people are prepared to live with the big banks excesses.

Still there is plenty more ongoing manipulation going on in trading even as I write this. I am awaiting the day that the regulators will "discover" these. Some of the bond markets for example have proportional fill executions. So if you have the best price and are first in the queue, a big institution can come along and show an order in vast size, which they have no intention of trading, just to get a fill of the fraction they actually wanted. You of course are left high and dry with just about nothing of your order filled because proportionally it was tiny. It is an amazing sight to behold how these vast orders come along just as the market is about to move and then instantly disappear. It is clear to any trader that someone is working on inside information, but everyone (read: big money)is in on the secret so no one is telling.
The point is that they are pursuing short-term profit and sacrificing customer satisfaction. That's a terrible way to run a company.
M-JPEG is not the same thing as x-mixed-replace.

M-JPEG is a concatenated stream of JPEG images, usually with some of the JPEG elements omitted.

x-mixed-replace is what he is using. It is from the early Netscape days and let you server side push new content. In this case JPEG images.

Either technique can be used to stream images depending on browser capabilities.
See my reply above with link to Fred Wilson's blog post.
How about calling the web services in a good old fashioned way to create accounts ? Its slow but very reliable. It can also create jobs.
The new Ford C-MAX Energi is expected to achieve more than 20 miles of electric
Ford's first-ever plug-in hybrid the all-new C-MAX Energi utility is the only vehicle of its kind that customers can drive from Sacramento to San Diego on a tank of gas and make the average commute on electricity alone
Ingenious. I imagine this would also be easy to implement in e.g. PHP. Or am I wrong? (not at my PC to check)
An ex-insider view on Yahoo in the new age
RIP Sparrow: Components open sourced for personal use only
How about just don't watch the Olympics at all? The IOC is an awful, awful organization.
That thesis reflects a common false dichotomy that many programmers (who often have only used PHP!) seem to actually believe: that anything written in a non-scruffy language won't ever ship because the authors will be too busy sipping lattes and debating type polymorphism. That persistent belief is what I (the author) find annoying.

The underlying point here is that you can get something out the door quickly and have it not be a Jenga tower held up by duct tape. I'm sure there are plenty of people who can do that with PHP and I don't mean to imply otherwise; I'm only asserting that it can also be done with Python.
Thanks. We certainly don't want to become the equivalent of 'catch the monkey' We constantly do UX testing. Early on it was an issue that people thought we were just and ad on the page, but we updated our start screen and design. By default, we also show our games in a modal window after people click submit, so they know they have to do it. With these two things we saw registrations increase by 40% over recaptcha.

We're also getting ready to roll out an update to our API that will allow you to hide/disable the submit button until the game is played. Our testing showed this helped increase submission rates even more.

Finally, we are also trying different styles of games to see what people respond to best.
>>What's in the backend?

>>Derpyhooves, a custom mail engine I'm writing from scratch in Ruby.

I know that programmers like to come up with fun names for their projects, but I think naming the core of your business after an MLP character is a bit over the top.
http://taskrabbit.github.com/
OS X Mountain Lion, Reminders, and Due Dates
> You have to work on a problem you know exists.

At the same time, experience can often mislead you into thinking that your problems are everybody's problems. Experience gives you a head start, but you should still do customer research to confirm the "traction potential" of your proposed business model.
http://textcaptcha.com/demo
IMO, they can easily give people an online only option and still make more money. 500$ for the entire Olympics seamed to any device for the next 2 years. Bean counters say that's not enough, fine 1000$ or whatever, but there is nothing for NBC to gain from not even having the option.

PS: Then again I have cable and I have yet to watch any of the Olympics this year, but I assume some people care.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4306953
Have you tried automated testing on a large complex web application? It's an insanely monumental task.

I actually mentioned Haskell in the post because coworkers have lamented not having its type system, which would immediately find problems at compile-time that we otherwise have a very very hard time thoroughly covering with tests.
You're referring to "flash orders". Those were discontinued in 2009.
If I've learned anything from the scores of Apple-rejected-my-app blog posts, it's that consistent application of policy isn't Apple's strong point.
You're quoting from a paragraph about tradeoffs in core language design. That's not the same as best practices, though the latter often exist to avoid pitfalls in the former.
Nice work! I've created a very simple table presentation of it here: http://cheeaun.github.com/twitter-clients-chart/

Repo: https://github.com/cheeaun/twitter-clients-chart
Apple may invest hundreds of millions in Twitter
Glad it helped you, but I wouldn't say "a clearer syntax for exception handling" really... more like a "way to ensure your code always works without having to actually think about exceptions". (Wrong as it may seem, I try to imagine I'm using "let" in a Lisp and then I instantly start to love the "with" syntax, although it's not a necessary part of Python :) )
JavaScript text truncation plugin works like magic
NBC, unlike most of the rest of the world, is not putting all, or even most, of its coverage out over-the-air. Many events will only be on pay channels like msnbc, Bravo, NBC Sports Network, and CNBC.
I actually like double-single, animal-style, whole grilled onions.
Apple's iPhone ripped off Sony says Samsung in court
Oil companies have reputations, and are playing repeated games, not just one off games... in addition they have incentives not to behave this way, such as the large fine and giant loss in shareholder value after BP spilled oil into the Gulf.
All of the UK-endpoint VPN providers I considered were sketchy in one way or another, and most of them had very poor speeds from the UK to the US. A VPN connection usually bypasses your local firewall too, depending on configuration, which means you really, really have to trust the people running your VPN service, and trust that they isolated their customers from each other. Linode, on the other hand, is a well-respected company with extremely good connectivity (I get 160ms pings from San Diego, CA and more than 30mbit/s transfer). And I know the guy who is running my VPN service on Linode: me.

If you're the kind of person who gladly exchanges security and privacy for $10 to $15, then those other options are for you.
I agree. But it's often a little more subtle. Here in the UK, most major supermarket chains have "own-brand" lines of major product lines; everything from bread to plastic bags. The "own-brand" products are produced in the same factories as one of the branded products (it would make very little sense to anything else), but corners are often cut elsewhere. Own-brand pizzas have skimpier and lower-quality toppings, sliced bread is poorly mixed, paper towels have fewer plies, etc. On the other hand, some products, like whole milk, are harder to cut corners on, and others, like various area cheeses etc., are unique and the product of choice is simply the one who's taste you prefer.
True. To clarify, I don't think it's safe to completely write off the fact that they could be doing something illegal (I'm not saying they are, but see this book of their alleged illegal practices in the 90s: http://amzn.to/5bbFuA). The reason why the Dove bar wins over the cheap generic brand is because of marketing, which stems from their financial advantage over smaller competitors. Likewise, their financial advantage is the result of increased sales from marketing campaigns (recall the Old Spice commercials). It's a vicious cycle.
I'm interested in who you get service from. I never get hassled or anything, but I pay through the teeth for my service!
I was thinking about a service like Uber, which people love, even though it's more expensive. When I take an Uber I don't complain about how I should be getting cab rides for free (although that would be nice) - I revel in how much better the experience is than waiting around for a regular cab.
I am depressed (clinically diagnosed as major depression) and I am a parent... a stay at home dad, owing to my lack of employment (which is the root of my hopelessness). It's awful. I hate it.

Thanks in no small part to the kid, I'm getting more outdoors time, more exercise, better diet, and socialization with the kid's friends. My mood is still inching downward.
s/who's/whose/

Signed, the Homophone Police.
So says the rest of the world.

But ISP business is low margin, labour intensive, which is not quite congruent with Google's high margin media sales model.

Like the 4 billion dollar bidding for wireless spectrum, I suspect Google's main motivation in launching Google Fibre is merely a warning shot to ISPs to shape up... and like Verizon did by outbidding Google in the wireless spectrum but still running the network according to Google requirements, the ISPs around the world will probably make sure Google has no need to enter their market, by ensuring seamless service to Google services.

So... if things work out right, Google Fibre will never stretch beyond Kansas City.
> unless reCAPTCHA deliberately distorted the image.

Isn't it obvious that this is the case? There is one word in every image that is distorted in the same way and another image that might appear in some other way that Google wants to know what the word is.
Here are the contents of the two zip files that Sparrow provides at http://sprw.me/lgpl.php:

* mac.zip - https://gist.github.com/3196054

* iphone.zip - https://gist.github.com/3196057

In other words - not much at all. :(
Maybe realted, maybe not. I read somewhere a few years ago one of the DIY stores like Home Depot or what-have-you did a study and decided that swapping out the $1 paint brush for the $5 brush didn't decrease the volume sold, but 5x'ed revenues on that product. Their insight was that someone going in and buying a few gallons of paint were not going to comparison shop on brushes (and drive elsewhere) to save a couple of dollars on a cheap brush --people would pay for the convenience of getting multiple items in one place.
Wanted by Interpol and arrested at 17, black hat hacker now an entrepreneur
He was lucky to be let off with only a stern warning.
They have incentive to get a close enough valuation. Pop too much and they leave money on the table (since they get commission on total amount raised.), drop too much and their clients may be signing up less money for their next IPO.
Realizing now that this comment came off as way too sappy.

Some companies make products that make people happy, and profit as a result. Examples: Apple, Southwest, Uber, Sonic.net, Flip etc. I would like more of these companies to exist, and for companies to focus more on customer satisfaction.

To my chagrin it's not clear these companies are any more profitable than their competitors who focus less on customer satisfaction.
Do you have any response to claims that your product is easily broken? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791

I'm skeptical of your efforts to distinguish humans from bots by mouse movements and other inputs. Anything you can infer can be modeled. It's unreasonable to expect a smart captcha cracker to resemble a zero reaction time Counter Strike aimbot.
You're right. I just updated my entry to be more accurate in this sense.
Windows Phone 8: a video preview of unannounced features
One way to avoid this issue might be to plop a hidden input box on the page if this input has text in it when it's submitted, you silently drop the registration.
ah, thanks for the update - yes it was flash trading. The other manipulations mentioned in my updated comment are still occurring as I have contacts in trading that are driven to distraction by it.
Interesting, this is psychological misinterpretation. People have a tendency to think that price = quality. There was similar scenario presented in the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion that had to do with a jewelry owner.
Why not pose questions with answers that are obvious to humans but difficult for ai.

Eg. 'What's 4 times four?' or 'How many times does the word four appear within this sentence?'
Where in there does he, or the link he references, substantiate the following claim?

The broadcast industry does not want American's to know
this, but they are legally obligated to provide the free
"over the air" stations on cable (coax) even if you do not
pay for cable service.

If you follow the link trail, you'll find this quote from the FCC:

broadcast signals that are subject to mandatory carriage
must be "viewable via cable on all television receivers of
a subscriber which are connected to a cable system by a
cable operator or for which a cable operator provides a
connection."

Which is another way of saying what I wrote above. Bottom line is: if you aren't paying for cable video service and receiving these channels, you're benefiting from the cable company not wanting to send out a tech to install a filter, not some legal requirement.
Hi, nice article of yours, thanks.

I think you could even go further: doing things The Right Way is not slower than doing them "dirty", it is actually faster.

Those "quick and dirty" guys always throw some "god machine" thing that never worked as an example of The Right Thing. It is wrong. The Right Thing is just the correct amount of forethought and architecture for the problem at hands. The Right Thing leads to no overengineering, because overengineering is wrong. Doing The Right Thing leads to things like Vim, Git, Python, Postgres, coreutils, etc. Note that none of these is perfect. But they have 1) sane basic assumptions 2) some level of internal coherency that allow them to be reliable tools one can build upon.
An analysis of who makes profits when HFT's trade.
http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3519.html

an interesting analysis - results towards the end "The Final Score"