skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, not unethical, just plain idiotic. But illegally watching a free TV station at the cost of another country's tax payers is definitely unethical.
Mysql-python for humans
I still have 'username', 'email', and 'password' fields in the form but I hide those elements with CSS, which no scraper is going to bother parsing. When the registration form is submitted the account is essentially hellbanned, they can 'activate' the account via the normal email confirmation process but anything they post disappears into the ether.

I'm catching about 100 spam accounts a day with this technique[1] and the ones that I miss are fairly easy to detect through analysis once they start using their account.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/kdp7Q.png
Poor economy has dropped U.S. birthrate to 25-year low
This is common knowledge for people like you and I (that only one of the two words only counts) but the vast majority of "average" visitors do not know this and will be unable to solve the captcha.
Captchas are hard because there's only so much an algorithm can extract from spatial information. Computers are excellent with temporal data, given essentially unlimited memory for past video frames. Computers benefit more from increased information than humans do.
Sweet. I've been using jquery dotdotdot[0] but it's behaving very strangely on browser resizes. I'll try this one out now!

[0] http://dotdotdot.frebsite.nl/
> It is an observable fact that, for any particular basket of food, we pay less than our parents did.

Is that true? I looked up prices of food for 1981[1] and compared it with similar data from 2011[2]. These appear to be grocery prices based on newspaper fliers recorded by some library in new jersey (only one data point but it was what google showed me). I wonder if there is any readily available restaurant pricing data over time.

I found this calculator for inflation[3] which is based on this data[4]. The result seems to show that most grocery food was cheaper in 1981 than 2011 in Morris County, NJ at least. Unknown food quality, and I did not look at data regarding purchase power, salaries, etc, etc. I imagine most things are cheaper now, but has food actually gotten much cheaper since our parents? I would readily agree that we have more variety, availability, and options though.

[1]: http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/prices/1981.html

[2]: http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/prices/2011.html

[3]: http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Calculators/Cum...

[4]: http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical...
I would actually watch a reality show covering this. Watching them code, blaming each other over breaking builds, accusing each other of IP theft and so on.

Another interesting thing to think about is how patents come into the picture. Are they allowed to re-invent the wheel in their own world?

If they 'invent' an ipad-like device or another otherwise patented idea in "the real world," would it make people think about the absurdity of patents?
It is absolutely fair. Apple's patents aren't FRAND and so they can ask for whatever they want to ask for and Samsung has the option to either use it or not. It's not that simple when it comes to FRAND patents because the whole point of FRAND patents is to ensure that everyone uses it so that fragmentation doesn't occur in necessary standards.
2.4% for a single patent when there are potentially hundreds of patents is ridiculous. There's no way you can argue against that. How many patents go into making a phone? Samsung wants 2.4% for each one.

And yes, it's absolutely fair (about the subsidizing). That's how the market voted and that's how the carriers decided to do business. Majority rules here. If you don't like it, then vote with your wallet. Go to T-Mobile.

As a sidenote, I'm currently using a Samsung Galaxy S III on T-Mobile. But I still think what Samsung is doing with FRAND patents is wrong.
A similar logic applied to value investing would conclude long-term investors result in under-valued stocks.
Understanding Twitter's Discovery Problem
Weekend Diversion: Triangles, a Puzzle, and Beauty
Great list. Stripping animations out is always appreciated.

Does anyone know how to alter / remove the animation from horizontal motion between spaces? Particularly when using the keyboard shortcuts, this whizzing is disorienting and irritating.

I assume it is not possible, given that animation seems to be keenly bound to the trackpad 'peeking' operation and all.
I believe in full-time standing just as little as I believe in full-time sitting. I want a desk that I can move up and down, with everything on it, in less than a minute. Doesn't that exist? I haven't been able to find one yet.
I get your points, love your writing and have a lot of respect for you in general, but on your point about soaps you're dead wrong. Aside from a few major US mainstream brands, which are admittedly pretty similar in cleaning ability, there is a very wide variety in the quality and experience of different soaps. some soaps clean better, some worse. some moisturizing, some dry you out, some neutral. some heavily perfumed, some not. some use artificial chemicals, some use natural/organic ingrediants. some smell natural, some smell chemically. some are big and last a while, some seem to degrade and shrink away to nothing very quickly. some are oily, some not. some have chunks to make them more corse, some not. variety of colors, variety of smells. some good at washing off oils from my hands, some bad. some rectangular, some oval (which effects UX and grippability.) some soaps cause skin irritation (in some people) and others do not. some soap taste bad (if you get in mouth accidentally), some do not. some will make your eyes sting painfully if it gets in it, some less so. granted, if you only take say 2-3 major US brands into account, your observation is not too far off base. But if you have experience with dozens of different types, different vendors, you'll discover a wide variety of meaningful differences in soaps. Even just (bath) bar soaps. Though I've noticed differences in pump bottle hand soaps as well.
Or refer to the old HN post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4299956
1) Asking a computer to do a computation is not such a great idea. Low powered devices (think iPads) running javascript would be at a great disadvantage to highly efficient botnet clusters that spammers own.

2) Requesting a small amount of money may work. Alternatively requesting a user to do some useful task (like Amazon Turk HIT) to get some funds.
It's an interesting perspective, but I can't agree with you that consumer products (and food) are "done".

I am not going to suggest you actually go out and do the Pepsi Challenge with pasta sauce, but I don't actually believe that there are no food brands you, Patrick, are loyal to based on taste or quality, that you buy even though they might be more expensive than another.

Is there a brand of rice you get because it comes out just a bit better than the other one you tried? Or a rice cooker that is notoriously reliable compared to another that dies after a year? Or a bread brand you get because it lasts longer before going bad?

Ignoring all the marketing, I am sure if you did an objective Consumer Reports-style study of almost any category of consumer product or food, you would find some that perform better at what they do, or taste better, or are actually healthier for you by an objective standard, or have the best combination of price/quality for you.

Coke and Pepsi are distinguishable from each other easily. A McDonalds Fry and a Burger King Fry are too - completely different. And there is such a thing as quality even if you aren't conscious of it.
I have no expertise in this area, but how about patterns? Since we're already parsing so much text, why not take strings of legible text (with a minor visual distortion), and strip a connecting word such as a preposition? The user is then prompted to enter the connecting word. Synonyms could be matched.

For example: "I can't stand all ____ your lies" (of)

or: "This is all too ____ for me to handle!" (much)

Sure, some strings would be hard to solve, but I feel like I'd be improved over time. Plus, captchas already take a few tries to solve anyway. I suppose it may impose on foreigners though.
Patton Oswalt's 2012 "Just for Laughs" Keynote Address
The readme has been fixed, thanks for pointing this out.
>"I'm still certain that..."

It seems like most people are "certain" about the impact of high frequency trading on an a priori basis as well. If facts wouldn't be inconvenient, however, run a Google Scholar search on the impact of high frequency trading or look at Chris Stucchio's discourse on the matter [1].

Consider two markets, one with high-frequency and human market making and one with only human specialists against whom you trade. Run similar value-style strategies on both; if the former outperforms the latter portfolio you pay up $10 000 (or whatever number keeps this interesting for you), else I pay you.

Fact is you'd be silly to take that bet, as would I. We don't understand the impact of HFT enough for either of us to be "certain" of anything.

[1] http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html
Yes, you're orders of magnitude more likely to die of heart disease.
Wreck-It Ralph - 2012 free download movie in HD
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And Apple is a shining example of backwards compatibility and concern for the 20%.

Prioritizing tasks, focusing their efforts, and consciously deciding not to support some users or pursue some customers is why many people on HN hold Apple in high esteem, and now someone's downvoted for explaining this?
This is computer vision, an I'm somewhat an expert in the area. I can tell that video sequence recognition is _much_ harder problem than image recognition.

For example, if you would show an letter made out of random noise moving through random noise, current computer vision algorithms would not be able to recognize anything. And you would pick out that letter immediately. Human visual subsystem is really amazing in that sense.
Backbone.Marionette Filtered CollectionViews. Here is how I did it.
Here is an example of a problem that would be hard for computer to solve:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G4y79ZbaBs
There are sitting/standing desks that are quickly adjustable via electric motor, but they're quite overpriced so it's best to let your employer buy one for you. My officemate has one very similar to the one here:

http://www.thehumansolution.com/uplift-hover-adjustable-heig...
To be fair, you can always click the 'No Thanks' button or make it visible only to yourself, or to your friends, or even to very specific people.
Try the Geekdesk [http://www.geekdesk.com/]
Wow I need to get my head in your space. I tend to view completion as the achievement, not progress. This leads to single victories amidst a million defeats. An attitude not conducive to happiness. I'll definitely make a large effort to celebrate/recognize the small victories. Separately, I am 14% through War and Peace, and still don't know who I am supposed to care about. Does that come later or have I missed something?
Proxbash - Bash script to manage Proxmox VE (openVZ & KVM)
I like it cold, and dark.
Ha ha. Imagine a world where multinationals are held accountable for their mistakes! It took an error the size of the Gulf incident to even draw the public attention. Meanwhile in Nigeria there are hundreds of square kilometres of devastated landscape because of oil company shortcuts. Nobody cares about environmental destruction in far away places. The oil companies have no incentives not to cut corners there.
But first read this and decide if the health risks are worth it: http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html
This is so stupid. Your CAPTCHA is unusable by blind people, and your audio CAPTCHA is inaccessible (you have to see the <canvas> element to know where to click to access to the audio CAPTCHA).

Do you consider that blind people are bots?
Finding dropped words in coherent sentences is trivially easy given a large enough corpus of the language. Just looking at the occurrence probabilities of the surrounding words would be enough for most cases.
Which real world do you live in? Real businesses spend a good percentage of their efforts in cutting costs. And if they have a large consumer base they push newsletters too, then yes, as an agency, I can tell you that a lot of clients will make the switch.

There a bunch of open source self-hosted newsletter systems doing well (oh, and they're mostly subpar). I like the direction in which sendy is heading and with the amazon ses edge to it, its a great great idea. If sendy would throw in a few more features like multi-user login and access control, I'll make the switch and will convince a few of my clients too.
What stops captchabots from just brute-forcing it with common words? Or, if they wanted to get fancy, something like a Markov model of English text could really help narrow down the likely missing words.
Tweaking that a bit, I think Captchas really need to change. But not with cut-off of grammar, which can be probabilistically (brute-force) broken.

One can instead start asking simple questions presented over an image. For example, "how many blue dots on this pattern?" or "what animal is this?"(with a photo of camel or something). That's certainly going to be more manageable for humans and prevent us from behaving more like bots, and them like us. Of course, until the bots evolve a little more to circumvent this.

It is so true that one often meets destiny on the path taken to avoid it.

TLDR; Use image based 'A for Apple, B for Boy' aka the 'Kindergarten training' to filter out bots from humans. Ask questions that are human, to figure out humans in other words.
Apple always removed what they found weak and this is a part of why OS X is a strong and well integrated operating system.

I can't see what all the fuss is about. I remember Apple removing many features in ten years of usage and it always been for the best.

If you can't stand this anymore, to to the app store where's there's way better options such as Reeder and NetNewsWire.
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That article is from 2011.

In July 2012, the Federal Government removed that restriction[1]

[1]http://www.mondaq.com/canada/x/186386/Telecommunications+Mob...

(This applies as long as the total annual telecommunications revenues of the new telco represent less than 10% of total Canadian telecommunications revenues, so it basically applies to every newcomer, which is what we have in our operating area)
The war to end all wars vs Iraq/Afghanistan. Not exactly the same causes, right? Fight Club was written in a pre-9/11 world, but also in the same post-modern society.
As the author of this dotfiles repository, I completely agree. These are my settings, and I’m sure not everyone will like this configuration. The idea is that automating all these OS X preferences (hidden or not) can save you a lot of time if you need to set up new accounts for yourself on a regular basis.

TL;DR This repository is meant to be forked, not used as-is.
What surprised me most was the key role that some Microsoft innovations - like ActiveX played in making cloud computing possible.
Or the cheapest version buy a fixed standing desk, and when you want to sit use a stool, or a very tall chair.
"Beverly Hill's Cop anyone? :)"
Thanks for this. "every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and move for a couple of minutes" mentioned in the bottom-line goes well with pomodoro. So, you get double the benefit - relaxed body and mind.

Standing desk do look appealing, probably they are the other extreme. But I feel I always put my laptop on book rack when I'm feeling a certain anxiety. It shouldn't be that harmful if you don't keep standing for longer duration. Sometimes, when too much engrossed in work, one my fail to listen to subtle voices of the body.
Well, surprisingly, that would only be as strong as doing OCR to get the words.

Why is that? Well, if you deliberately remove words that are easy to put back into the sentence, it's an easy task not because we humans are incredible at "out of the box" thinking, but because one or two word choices are orders of magnitude more likely than all the rest.

And when it comes to statistical guessing, computers are very good at that. Get a large enough corpus of the English language, and I can assure you that the probability distribution of the missing word, given that it's preceded by "I can't stand all" and followed by "your lies" is overwhelmingly in favor of "of".

Calculating these conditional probabilities is not a very hard task to program at all, though it does require quite some computational power and memory for longer chains.
https://github.com/baxrob/patr
I never had much problem ending an interview early. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen that after about 10 minutes I know this person had 0% chance of getting hired. They just don't have the technical skills I am looking for, let alone the other skills my bosses would need. I usually talk with them til the 20/25 minute mark and thank them for coming and show them to the door.

They don't need to know that there were other interviewers lined up after. And the others are thankful the "guaranteed no's" don't get to them.
Their goal isn't more important than my goal of resetting my password or logging in.
Pay for it. Broadcasting the Olympics costs NBC lots of money. These deals are how they pay those costs. (And if it wasn't NBC, it would be CBS, ABC, or Fox.)

One of the hazards of giving up living television is that...you give up live television. NBC is not obligated to do squat for you if it can't make money from you. It's a business, not a charity.

And stop praising the BBC. It's not free. Brits pay a mandatory tax to support the BBC, so it is no different from cable/satellite TV in the U.S.
Indian anti-corruption movement: a silent war
My Android already does this, guessing the next logical word as I'm typing. This solution to Captcha has already been broken by AI.
We have someone interested in doing a documentary already, but I hope it will be in a more serious fashion ;)
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Burgerto.me and TaskRabbit would be jointly and severably liable.
How To Distinguish Between an iPad 2 and an iPad 3
This will last about a month, maybe two, before In-N-Out serves them with a cease-and-desist. It's been tried before. There were several startups that did this at Cal in 2003/2004. In-N-Out shut them down as soon as it found out what they were doing.

In-N-Out has a very strict policy about remote burgering: if you want burgers at your place, you either go through the drive through yourself or you hire a truck to visit your location.
If they wanted to do that they'd need to have global streaming rights, which would cost much much much much more than the marginal bandwidth taken up by the fraction of users with the tech savvy to set up a proxy.
While you may think the license is good value. If we have a TV in the UK and watch it we have to pay the license. The fee is for the BBC channels alone. I can't choose to watch commercial TV only and not pay the fee. Simple solution is to scramble the BBC. But they're too used to getting their grubby little paws on money by some kind of state extortion. I'll take a guess and say that I watch a max of about 2 hours of BBC TV a week if that. That's hardly fair.

I'd rather the choice to opt out of the BBC and still watch TV.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/licen...

Perhaps it will be worth the fee if I have children (kids TV.) I love BBC radio 4 though. The radio should work out as far better value for money, but quite how they calculate it to be an 1/8th of the TV costs is a bit of a puzzle! They must be throwing money at presenters or something.
As the author of several OAuth 1.0 libraries (https://github.com/icheishvili/pyoauth, https://github.com/icheishvili/phoauth), I would like to see a completed spec.

The only real problem with 1.0 is the difficulty of implementing it correctly and later debugging it when things go wrong (aka, the infamous generic "Invalid Signature" errors). In my mind, it would go a long way if generating a signature was based on a random nonce (say 16 bytes) + client id + client secret + access token.
Apple's only consistent quality is that it is inconsistent about its censorship.

Thus, it is not only possible but likely for both the linked story and an iBookStore full of Amazon-related books to co-exist.
10 Google Chrome extensions you should install
That one is actually pretty easy to beat - the OCR is easy enough, and you can refresh the page until you get an easy question. Some of them are very simple integer arithmetic exercises.

As for the harder questions, Wolfram Alpha is better able to do them than the average human.
Working in, and having lived in SOMA, I'll take Burger Joint over either of those. I'd almost take McDonalds over Brick House.

Little Skillet now has a burger as well that's not bad.
TextEdit could have a bug in its 'guess the character encoding' code that leads to a buffer overflow, or it could have a bug handling malformed UTF-8.

Its 'guess the character encoding' code also might have a 'wait a minute, this is RTF/PDF' feature.

Of course, Apple could trust its own apps, but I think they should not (why increase the attack surface?) and that would lead to complaints "why can't I tell this OS that my text editor can be trusted?".

I also think (but have no data on it) that this "open a .txt file you downloaded" check is very rare for 'normal' users. If they download at all, it is Word documents, PDFs, movies, and applications.
HFT market making is about being more informed about the true price at the micro structure level than your counter-party. Simple as that, no black magic.

If someone trades with a HFT market maker its because

a) they are un-informed about the current true price

b) they choose to optimize execution time over best price

Its the same market game that`s been played for decades, just with different players and tools.
Just use http://tunlr.net/ 's DNS servers instead - it's the same type of service, just completely free and with no signup required.

Primary DNS: 64.250.122.104
Secondary DNS: 199.167.30.144
I just remembered it's not actually custom protocols with raw sockets that are common and don't respect SOCKS settings but rather Flash's RTMP protocol.
Just use http://tunlr.net/ 's DNS servers - it's completely free and with no signup required, takes 20 sec to add.

Primary DNS: 64.250.122.104

Secondary DNS: 199.167.30.144
Hi! I'm the Market Economics Fairy! I help supply and demand equilibriate everywhere! There are a bunch of things that can lead to markets working poorly. For example, transactions are not free. Theoretically, if a rambunctious man could persuade his neighbors to let him blast his stereo at high volume in exchange for a bit of cash, all would be slightly better off -- but since this would require repeated bargaining with a bunch of neighbors, in practice it probably would not happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs

Another problem is that humans and fairies are not omniscient, nor are we perfectly economically rational, no matter how much the sparkles in our hearts may ache with yearning to be so! Perhaps there is a way to replace NBC with something far better, and in order to make it happen, all we need is some hard work and a few billion dollars of investment money, carefully applied. If only we had the foresight to take such a gamble -- but in this imperfect world, none of us have the clarity of foresight needed to make such a huge gamble reasonable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

And that's before we need to worry about ugly stuff like regulatory capture and violent coercion! If you can improve any aspect of this situation, I will shoot abundant glitter out of my wand in your honor, and the world will be improved!

Sincerely, the market economics fairy!