skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Help us monitor the communications of private citizens all over the world, even if they use encryption!"

( Need I remind you of this? http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/ )

Hey it's challenging work! Just like devising new algorithms for helping Wall Street rape the world's economies!

It's exactly what a true hacker wants and needs. Tinker with your favourite programming languages and tools! Go crazy with mathematics! Help us rape the little folks!
Right, exactly. A to-do list is certainly a positive, helpful tool; requiring one to function can be a bad sign, and obsessively seeking out Productivity Hacks is even worse.
Feels like the New York times ?
504 Gateway Time-out , that is a big improvement
For me, I'm usually avoiding it if I feel burnout, or am really really sexually frustrated. If I take care of the 2nd, I find I am motivated to do almost anything :)
Link to an 'Enhanced' version because I've got some time to kill: http://i.imgur.com/7tCn1.jpg

Not going to lie, I hate when CSI magic can work...
Comparing productivity porn (PP) to fast food is not very helpful.

It would be more accurate to compare PP to reading about nutrition...then not following the advice one reads, despite being well informed.

Of course it's easier to do things when you are motivated for a specific, deadline-based project. But there are grey areas in life, and "dips". PP is helpful for those. Techniques learned can lead to positive action.
Improving Search Engine Visibility
So, put a fresh coat of paint on a product that failed miserably? Why is that a good idea?

They didn't pay for the data and SEO linking, they paid for the name and buzz in the media. In my opinion they are not using the old data on purpose, they don't want to have anything in common with the v4 at all. It's not modified Digg, it's a completely new Digg. This is how I'm reading their message.
Lawyers happened.
Cormorant's deep underwater dive filmed
Select Relevant and Attainable Keywords for SEO
Dude Taylor Swift is awesome. I can relate.

But good eye on that. ;)
HTML Canvas Deep Dive (Interactive Book)
Ask HN: Looking for a great Web Site Designer. Who do you recommend?
Hi,

We are Gerger (www.gerger.co), the creators of Formspider (www.theformspider.com), the Web 2.0 framework for Oracle PL/SQL developers. We are preparing a new version of our product and we would like to renew our product web site www.theformspider.com along with it.

Our product Formspider is for a specific group of developers namely, the Oracle PL/SQL developers. It's mainly used in mid to large size companies to build Budgeting, Accounting, Order Management, HR, ERP etc.. software.

Current Web site was done by us a year and a half ago. It's nice but building web sites is not our focus. The site is also showing its age.

Formspider impresses our users with its simple and elegant design. It is perceived as an unusually high quality, very innovative product built with care and attention to detail. We would like our new web site reflect these facts.

We want a simple yet beautiful design in our web site. Readable large fonts, excellent copyright, gorgeous pictures, icons and screen shots should provide a enjoyable experience to the visitor. We don't want run of the mill, stock photos, icons and text anywhere on the site. Each page needs to be individually crafted and be of excellent quality.

The entire goal of the web site is to reflect the high quality of our product.

Our favorite product, company web sites are www.apple.com (you should have seen this coming at this point :-) ) and http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/

We've been struggling to find a freelancer or a team that can get this done. I thought of asking you on HN hoping that you can help.

Best,
Yalim
I fully agree with "2.", as tabs in source code are a pain. However, I don't see what this has to do with the discussion about removing delimiters. Could you elaborate on that?

Regarding "1.", I have yet to find a really good formatter that works well in all edge cases. But pretending there is one, re-indenting copy&pasted Python code is just a matter of selecting it and pressing a few times ">" or "<" until the code is at the correct indentation level. (Replace ">"/"<" with "tab"/"shift+tab" or whatever keystroke your editor provides for adding/removing indentation.) There's absolutely no need to carefully re-indent it line by line, and it's almost as fast as running the formatter.

I agree that the ML languages (Haskell, Ocaml, etc) have a quite liberating approach to delimiters. You need the delimiters almost never, yet the code is unambiguous even without relying on indentation. It would be great to see some good comparisons between Haskell and Python regarding their approach to (almost) eliminating the need for delimiters.
One great thing about the US is that states can act like laboratories for testing different laws. Massachusetts has some of the toughest gun laws requiring someone to obtain a gun permit before they can own a gun.

Massachusetts also is second only to Hawaii in the lowest firearm death rate:

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-...

The firearm death rate in MA is 1/5 - 1/6 the rate of high death rate states.

I looked into what it takes to get a gun permit in MA and was surprised by how common sense it is. As long as you have a record of no violent felonies and no current restraining orders you must take a gun safety course. Then you need to submit a signed statement to the chief of police in your town from two adults saying you are an upstanding person. This way the police know who has a gun and they are probably best able to judge if you should have a gun.
Ask HN: Secure Alternatives to Dropbox
Please provide us with your recommendations

Consolidating suggestions here:

1. http://www.tonido.com/

2. http://owncloud.org/

3. https://www.aerofs.com/

4. http://www.bitcasa.com/

5. https://spideroak.com/

6. http://www.sparkleshare.org
There haven't been many lately. Here's an old one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905
What 4 big cities are you on about? I'm sure there's fibre in a lot more than 4 cities in the UK.
I'm 25 miles outside Glasgow, in a little village called Renton and I have fibre from Virgin Media - 100/5
Google Docs vs. Apple Notes - In Search Of the Elusive Offline Cloud Writer
owncloud?
Gonna happen unless we fight like Hell and even then it's gonna happen.
You have to be kiddding. HP is littered with useless social buttons and ridiculous drudge-style headlines. It is terrible.
I'd very much like to see this happen. A lot of posters seem to be missing the point.. the idea is use the TV spectrum to allow mobile broadband to become a viable main-use broadband, which would set a decent minimum standard across the whole country without the need for re-cabling etc. For those of us with already fast internet, it would allow decent speeds (and theoretically prices) when travelling.. awesome (and IMO more useful than 1Gbps home internet). (note to ROW: we don't have LTE etc yet).

Today, giff gaff offer unlimited mobile broadband for £10/mo (+texts and a few calls), although TOS states use on mobile only.
While we are messing around could we grab some of that TV bandwidth and run a looping broadcast of the most heavily trafficked media data for the last 24 hours to be cached locally ? Ceefax on steroids...
How do you make a poll?

Edit: It looks like they've beend disabled - http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
I would agree if the criticisms were super nitpicky and obscure, but honestly any site a front-end professional made in a day or a week would not include may of these errors.

These are pretty strong signs pointing to the fact that at least one person coding this site is very much an amateur. Which is a pretty serious implication for the future.
FB New Low (20.87)
Does this rule also apply to the number of Facebook users? Is it more like 300 million rather then 950 million?
I can not upvote this enough.
I've met so many artists who are passionate about their work.
But lack of organization, and lack of awareness of their daily inefficiencies stop them from succeeding.
You think USPS is a pretty good service? Have you ever used them? I HATE going to USPS location. The staff is rude and slow. It takes forever to get even the smallest thing to be taken care of.

Compare this to UPS/FedEx. Generally, there won't be any lines and you can be in and out in less than 3 minutes.
Are there no comments? To me that's half the reason I go to a site like reddit of hacker news, maybe more.
The polygraph to me is about the ability to lie without being detected. Psychopaths pass them with flying colors.

You tout that as a "good thing" -- you've proven you can tell lies, come join our team.

What kind of people do you end up with in the end then? -- yes people who are tough, but also psychopaths, people who can lie well and can then easily turn on you and sell that $150M spying project to someone else for $50k.
If sight is independent of visual awareness does that mean we should be searching for a new test for drivers?
It would be nice to have a postal service not running billions of dollars in tax-payer funded deficits every year that was more reliable. A private for profit entity where innovation could improve service would be a very nice change.
She doesn't think she does, but if she lists that couch on ebay as well she is technically in breach of craigslist's terms of service, and if they decide to enforce it then she is going to be forced to care.

Not that I expect them to actually try to enforce it in that way, of course.
>zuck had a great twist on that and a million other thing fell into place.

I'm don't even know what the twist is. People seemed to leave Friendster because it was slow, then left Myspace because it made you sick, then joined Facebook which was like Friendster with active development and also initially seeded with smart people.

The only innovation I can see is that the company was run by a developer who showed that he was going to experiment with and build out the platform continuously in order to attract third-parties to invest in it.
No one ever has gymnast's block. They spend time reading about the Top 5 Ways To Lose That Belly Fat instead of putting on running shoes because running is hard work and they don't really want to be doing it. If they wanted it bad enough, they'd be doing it. Likewise, there aren't dozens of Architect Hacks sites to help architects find the right paper for their blueprints.

Indeed, do, or do not. There is no try. (14 New Ways To Try after the jump...)

[Edit] On the other hand, we might just all be dopamine addicts. We spend 8+ hours a day using a tool that also contains everything ever in the history of the world, and wonder why we're distracted so often.
I guess the experience varies widely. I love USPS, very accessible and affordable, send anything up to 3 ounces in just a few days anywhere in the continental USA for $1.60

However I absolutely loathe, beyond description UPS. I wish Amazon used anything but UPS for prime, it ruins the whole experience.
"The application which just shows pretty pictures, formerly known as XScreenSaver"

The goal to avoid user confusion and scams is a good goal. Even if there are a few millions XScreenSaver users (wow) on another platforms, there are orders of magnitude more potential new users who should not be mislead. How to avoid confusion is a good question, but accepting the old name doesn't appear to be a provably best solution.

Can't the name be different but the application appear in searches based on the reference to the name of XScreenSaver somewhere in the description?
Top 35 Startups in Tech - July 2012
I was offered a nice contracting job at a USAF base. All I had to do was run a single large Oracle server (Sun Enterprise 10000). I asked "what does the system do?" The recruiter told me the database handled the parts ordering system for foreign countries that need to order replacement parts for F-15 fighters that the US ships to them.

I turned down the position for ethical reasons. Somehow, I'm not comfortable knowing that I helped facilitate the export of US weapons systems to foreign countries that history has shown us are likely to use them to bomb their own people, or innocent people in their neighboring countries. The fact that most of these F-15s end up in middle eastern countries seems to be standard operating procedure for the US government. Then, later, when the next dictator they propped up starts bombing innocent civilians, the politicians will act outraged "who knew that by supplying weapons systems to a dictator he would ever turn them on innocent people?"

Sorry, but I don't want the blood of innocents on my hands. Working at the NSA might not directly be as damaging, but you better believe that people will die indirectly because of something you helped work on. Do you want that guilt on your conscience?
There should be a who's hiring thread later today, that would be a better place to post this: http://news.ycombinator.org/user?id=whoishiring
This made me think: do browsers assume square pixels? So that an N by N pixel image will appear square when displayed? Or is that the responsibility of the OS?
Color me skeptical, I predict those who pay for more IOPs will howl even louder. I think by now EC2 users have learned that EBS doesn't act like a typical disk drive so treat it like one.
Bitcasa? AeroFS? (Both currently in Beta, the former in public beta, the latest in private beta).
It's the 9th most popular site in the US.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/craigslist.org
Big Farm Rules the Roost
The new Digg took longer than 3 seconds to load so I didn't bother.
Anyone can run a "pretty good service" with massive shovelfuls of taxpayer dollars propping them up every year.

The US should remove all the mandates from the Postal Service and all of the subsidies and open up mail delivery for competition from FedEx and UPS.
That sounds eerily similar to the UEFI Secure Boot system.
The book is certainly opinionated — it's state-produced propaganda.

As for the blog post — it's a blog post. It's opinionated in the sense that making fun of Stalin's tetchiness carries an implicit opinion, but other than that, there are few opinions expressed.
Googledrive?
Top 3 Themes in Mobile Advertising Tech: Timing, Targeting, and TV
Ars Technica and the Dash API
This is awesome. I've recommended HelloFax dozens of times in the past year and a half or so for the awesome collaborative signing flow, and only a handful of time for the fax - though it's a lifesaver when I need to fax things.

The more widespread adoption electronic signatures get, the more convenient life will be in general. And more secure too - we've obviously understood secure digital signatures for awhile, but the cultural shift has just taken forever to move online.

I'd be curious to hear from the founders if there are plans around expanding the scope/security of signatures, and some of the worries around mutually-compatible implementations?
That is quite a welcome move. The play store can be a legitimately scary place. I have a few apps on there and I get e-mails every few days from "advertisement networks" that all claim that they will increase my eCPM 5x to 10x, that they will be non intrusive to my users, that they have high profile partners and innovative revenue sharing schemes. They just need me to add this little library of code to my apps.

Now I always refuse these offers. It's too difficult to figure out who is legitimate and who is not. However, these offers are so frequent and sometimes they even look interesting and original such that I can imagine some developers would be willing to try them out.

Every time I buy an app on the play store I wonder: Has the developer succumbed to the temptation and let a shady piece of code with spyware or adware in their app?
Honestly I have no stake in this, but I'm happy CL is doing that change. 3TAP and Padmapper and just trying to build a "buisness" sucking up posts from CL and tried to find doggy way around it. CL don't want their post used somehwere else, no fancy UI it's their right and it's now becoming their clear LEGAL right. I have zero sympathy for padmapper I actually think their buisness practices are disgusting (CL offered them a licence they just dind't want to pay).
*that techcrunch missed out on
yes, if that 1$ (hell, make it $10) buys me privacy & if they cut the ads
though I agree the idea was poorly worded
Seriously? Having to pick up a package at UPS is usually the worst customer service experience I've had that week. I'd be pleased as punch if when they failed to deliver, they'd just drop it off at my local post office. I have spent over an hour in UPS more than once.
Two great LED bulbs compared to previous picks
Is this legally enough for Craigslist? Wouldn't they need a full copyright assignment in order to pursue copyright infringement claims?
Arguably, there is a minimum threshold that needs to be exceeded in order to even make these evaluation

Arguably? How many separate things are there in the world that kill 5 or more people in the US each year? An awful lot. IIRC the number of people killed in newspaper related accidents in the UK is about that high.

Society only has so much attention, people only spend so much time learning about the world every day, and people only have so much capacity for worry. To the extent that we use up our worry on things that aren't important we lose the ability to worry about the things that are. I don't expect all the ink spilled on this shooting to save a single life, but if a similar amount of popular attention was devoted to teaching people what drowning really looked like it would probably save about 50 lives every year[1].

If you're going to cross the street it doesn't make sense to split your attention between looking to either side for oncoming cars and looking up for falling objects. Falling objects are very rare, and to the extent that you waste time worrying about them you're more likely to get run over.

[1]http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/
While I agree that it's possible to show a lack of vision, the possibilities you've outlined here baffle me. I'm already able to work from home effectively on my ~8Mbps connection and can very effectively video conference. There are very, very few technical reasons why people don't work from home, and far more cultural and political ones.

If you imagine we are dealing with a limited amount of money (which, let's face it, we are) there is far more benefit derived from providing everyone with a 2Mbps connection than providing people in inner cities with a 1Gbps connection.
At the risk of adding MI to your TMI, I completely agree on both counts.
Apple's CPU lead Jim Keller heads back to AMD
And then those sites will tell CL to sue the users who entered it into their site.
Oh god that is very embarrassing. How does someone so incompetent get to such a high position?
Thank you. We are not hiring. We are looking for a freelancer or a company to do the work. Would that still be the right place to post?
Hasbro WWF Figures Price Guide
I know the experience. When I started learning programming, I needed randomly access 1 of 50 objects. So, using Excel, I created something like: obj1=new foo(1); obj2=new foo(2)..., and a giant if ... else chain.

In general what I find works for this problem is that when you are doing something that seems like it should be easier, it probably is and you should look it up or ask in a forum.
funny thing is, I just embraced Trello and it helped me instantly, proving the author's point quite wrong in my case. I'm writing a compiler, and while doing this I come up with new ideas, extra features to implement and so on, every 5 minutes or so. Instead of trying hard at the end of the day to remember all of them, now I just write them down immediately. Those lists do not contain chores, but things I am very happy to work on, or as the author says, care deeply about. And now they are not just spread around in my mind but nicely organized. Hello productivity boost.
If someone doesn't release on Android because the money they get from sales isn't worth the time it takes to port, that seems a perfectly reasonable approach to take.

If someone doesn't release on iOS because the money they get from sales isn't worth the various negative aspects (e.g. frustration of dealing with reviewers, giving support to a business model they disapprove of), that also seems a perfectly reasonable approach to take.

I don't own a Windows box, or an Xbox or PS3. If I said I was being deprived of video games because Call of Duty doesn't run on "linux on a netbook from 2008", I don't imagine I would get much sympathy.
As ck2 mentions, our experiences with USPS may be location specific. My experience is the exact opposite of yours, my local USPS shops (I patronize two locations almost daily) have been outstanding (adding postage to letters that need additional postage and leaving a note in my PO box asking to reimburse them, routing mislabel mail to my address, etc), and my experience at the local UPS/FedEx shops have been underwhelming and their hours generally suck.

I've shipped something like 3000 packages via USPS priority mail over the last 3 years, and there have been a grand total of two that have gotten lost (and I'm pretty sure that one of those two was a customer ripping me off). That's a much higher success rate than I've gotten with FedEx & UPS, at lower prices.
As in no, you didn't consistently get within 10% of the IOPS you provisioned at their promised 99.9%? Or were there other problems?

I'd be pretty surprised if they were going live with this without being able to deliver, especially since this is likely to be very popular with people using EBS for databases under fairly consistent loads. It's one thing for I/O to suck when they're not actually promising anything, but it's quite another when you're very specifically paying for a performance guarantee...
Hell no. I wont pay to them when they already have pretty much all my data.
I recommend Tonido. You can do private sync without relying on online cloud storage systems like dropbox and drive.
Polygraphs measure your ability to clench your rectum (www.youtube.com/watch?v=bScv6kfxRyE).
There is also a freelancer thread. Keep posted, it should go live in the coming minutes.
Champions Declared in AI Poker Tournament
While it has a touch-screen, my Samsung Galaxy Y Pro, a qwerty keyboard phone with a 320x240 single-touch screen shows that Android works, for the most part, great with landscape aspect ratio screens, single-pointer pointing devices, and physical key navigation.
You didn't address the monopoly argument at all. There is behavior that is fine under proper market conditions, but is considered under anti-trust laws to be anti-competitive when one has a monopoly (or near monopoly).
There was a mall rampage where exactly this scenario played out. A civilian with a concealed pistol identified the real attacker but hesitated too long to take the shot and was gunned down (by the rampage attacker). In general civilian gun carriers are very hesitant to take even clear shots.
As I've mentioned before, the USPS is an environmental disaster. 6 days each week thousands of trucks set off to deliver millions of pounds of unwanted paper waste (junk mail) to homes and businesses all across the country.

Every day I clear out my mailbox and 95% of the contents goes directly into the recycle bin. I have tried all the DMA removal forms, various generalized opt outs, etc., but the junk mail keeps coming.

Recently with paperkarma (an IOS app) I've been able to reduce it somewhat, so now junk mail is about 75% of the contents of my mailbox on a bad day.

There is certainly no reason for daily deliveries. I'd be happy with once or twice each week. This would save massively on fuel and labor costs and would not degrade the service significantly since the trucks could still operate between cities every day if necessary.

The USPS and the paper direct mail industry should both have gone away long ago. Alas, it's illegal for any companies to offer standard letter delivery services, so the USPS is also a monopolist, with all the expected bloat and inefficiency.