skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Other operating system vendors are free to arrange with hardware manufacturers to include certificates for their operating systems. It's not an antitrust issue that other OS vendors were not able to get their act together in order to do so.

On top of that, they have the option of piggybacking on Microsoft's certificate. Microsoft will even subsidize the cost of getting a certificate from Verisign to allow that.

Finally, Microsoft is using their market power to force OEMs of x86 computers to include a way for users to disable Secure Boot and to add new certificates.
i do get (painless) migraines from time to time

What is a painless migraine?
I've been hearing the claim around here that photos of people convert better than images of products. This article endorses landing pages with few or no images, and specifically suggests pages with only a product image.

Anyone want to comment on how this article stacks up against conventional wisdom?
Yes, but that would make them responsible for any malicious code that any other distro used. That would mean they would have to do security reviews of every other distro if they wanted secure boot to remain secure, which is not feasible at all.
NBC, the Olympics, Advertising and Evil
AdMob Clicks Result in Least Engagement
Aerial Police in the form of Predator Drones isn't too far off.
How about envy of people who are much younger than me but are far more successful ... damn kids!
I can tell you how I experienced it.

I did Astanga yoga (also refered to as power yoga) for many years. Such a class would consist of some 10 - 20 students and 1 - 2 instructors. In this form of yoga at no time do you close you eyes (expect for the final relaxation time).

Contrary to what you might think this particular form of yoga is very very psychically hard. Although you move slowly you are never still in a relaxed position. You move a lot of small muscles and carry your own weight for 1.5 - 2 hours.

The concentration needed takes all your focus until you know the series of movement of the back of your hand. For me this took about a year. After this I would occasionally slip into a kind of mindlessness. I would "come back" and be conscience about this mindlessness at some point near the end of the session. It very much felt like 1.5 hours had passed in an instance. I would not be able to recall any detail or anything the instructors have said and I would feel immensely relaxed and full of energy. It was a great sensation.

I suspect this has something to do with how you breath during yoga. It kind of resembles the way you breath when you are deep at sleep. It takes a long time to learn and I have a feeling that the breathing is actually the most important part of yoga.

Besides swimming this is by far the best workout I have ever done. Being a programmer it does wonders for a body which spends most of the time sitting down in an office chair. If you get the chance I recommend that you try it out. You will be very surprised how hard it is - and how rewarding it is.
One kind is called "visual migraine" or "ocular migraine". A simulation can be seen here http://www.knownjohnson.com/?p=73/ . I tried to explain this 15 years ago to a doctor, without success - and then one day I read about it in a website, and apparently, I'm not crazy and also not alone in the world with this phenomenon.

See also: Restless Leg Syndrome.
> No where is it claimed by anyone that Apple copied Samsung

Except in the PDF linked in the first sentence of the first paragraph.
My instinct would have been to head straight to a doctor.
Another thing Outlook.com needs to fix immediately is the MSFT branding.
I'm having a hard time seeing any aspect of this in which Twitter was right.
There's probably a form of meditation that is just spacing out.
when your sight goes, basically :o) (maybe that's not the correct term - i once tried to find out if there was anything when wrong with me, and when i explained the symptoms that is what i was told it was).

[beagle3's link is a very accurate description of what happens; it makes it really hard to use a computer, otherwise it's not a big deal, since it doesn't hurt]
Introducing the Multi-Channel Funnels Reporting API
Did you even read the article? It requires permission, just the same as existing Flash methods do.

This could be very, very interesting video conferencing and the like.
Words cannot express how terrifying that sentence is to me.

Jeez. Hyperbolic much? Turn the knob down a bit, you might some day have to talk about the time the doctor found a black mark on your chest scan, or when you were robbed at gunpoint.

At the end of the day, we're talking about stuff. Physical things.

You're talking about stuff. I'm talking about getting stuff done and being productive by having my preferred tools continue to exist, continue to be improved, and continue to be preferable (to me.)

If you're being loyal to a brand, does that mean that the brand owns you?

No. It means I'm invested in the brand. Similar to the case if I had bought stock in the company -- my return is productivity and user comfort.

...they should invest in themselves and in each other.

Presumably by doing real work, with actual impact? And with the help of the tools which make one productive.

I hope you won't mind if I have a continued investment in doing work and creating value for myself and others. Sorry that it involves caring about having good tools.
I heard someone suggesting going through the mechanical process of writing (even if just random uncoordinated phrases), when faced with writer's block, to get the brain in the mood.
Re: On Living Below Your Potential
A migraine that someone else has.
I assume it's going to use a sandbox. Plus it requires user permission.
Microsoft now limits passwords to only 16 characters
Thanks for the detailed response. It sums up some of what I had heard/suspected, and the theory about regaining spare cycles is appealing.

>there aren't any big secrets here you are simply training yourself to stop thinking without going to sleep

This is definitely the first hurdle I encounter. The handful of times I have attempted this, I end up thinking about not thinking (isn't that silly?), or a song comes into my head, or I hear a noise in the distance, and attempts to clear out those thoughts lead to, well, more thinking!

I struggle with even imagining what it's like to not think about something. Something new or something old. Anything at all. I will note that I also have trouble sleeping for the same reason, and when someone describes "the feeling just as you fall asleep", for me that's a synonym for stress and frustration. I can never really remember how I eventually fall asleep.
I was afraid your story was one of a stroke. we should have a good thread on sleep deprivation. (e.g. someone should submit a story.)

visual hallucations are pretty standard after a certain period of time that isn't even so long. (i.e. I would get them around, say, the 28 hour mark from when I last woke up and started staying up by pulling an all-nighter. So if I get up at 7 every day but then simply not go to sleep one night but try to start the next day - by 11 AM it's hard not to hallucinate. In case you get up later the following is equivalent: If you get up at 11 every morning after calling it a night at 3 am or so, then if one night you don't sleep at all then working past 11 am and on by 3 PM you will be very out of it and may easily hallucinate.)

I'm very skeptical whether there is any amount of productivity to be had what-so-ever as for me, personally, it would easily take me 2 minutes to do 30 seconds of (any kind of) work at the end of that time, even moving a box from one place to another or whatever. So I'm very skeptical how a 3-4 hour nap at 22 hour mark could possibly not make up for lost time after waking up.

going on 3 hours of sleep each night for several days (e.g. 2-3) is possible and easy.

like I said, it would make an interesting thread and someone should submit a story on this subject (sleep deprivation and whether it's even worth working after a certain time mark).

as for your story, it sounds like a simple dream/waking dream. it's really hard to tell dream and non-dream apart under conditions of sleep deprivation.
News Corp's The Daily (iPad news app) lays off 1/3 of its staff
The Main Driver of GDP Growth: A Strong Rule of Law
Registration is required to read. Boo.

The article seems to not be available in Google's cache, either.
How to Get Away with Stealing (VICE)
Maybe he doesn't want to risk jail time. And that's not even supposing he doesn't want to aid the distribution of it.
I'm sorry, but what? You're telling me you're an engineer, and your very first reaction to this was not to immediately call an ambulance?
Firewalls (which may be beyond your control and that you may not even be aware of) between you and the other end often drop connections that have been idle for a while (anything from 5 minutes to a couple of hours), especially if the firewall is busy tracking tens of thousands of active connections.

The outbound firewall of our company drops my outbound ssh connections if they are idle for just 5 minutes. Adding:-

Host *
ServerAliveInterval 60

in my ~/.ssh/config file prevented most of the drops (the rest are explained by proper network outages or my DSL connection at home flapping.)

A corresponding ClientAliveInterval setting in the sshd_config file also helps mask the problem [EDIT] if I ssh home from a machine at work that doesn't share my home directory ssh config file.
You disagree that it's a humor piece and not a guide? Yes, revising is incidentally a good thing for writers to do, but this is quite obviously satire if you read beyond the first sentence of each rule.
Shourouk Handbags
I didn't see the post before he edited it. Did it originally say that he pirated the Pluto theme??
How We Raised $100k on Kickstarter In 3 Weeks
From here[1]:

The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly.

Looks like your latter situation is exactly how it went down.

[1] http://blog.twitter.com/2012/07/our-approach-to-trust-safety...
Do you have paid or non-profit apps accounts that are tied to the gmail? I don't see ads on my non-profit apps/gmail
Taxi Service Katonah
Taxi Service Katonah: BCS Limousine and Car Service has been offering affordable, on-time, safe, and reliable JFK and Laguardia Airport Transportation, Limo & Car Service for Westchester and Fairfield.
The article is pretty light on the details, so I'll try to add to it. In my prior career as a cognitive neuroscientist, I analyzed an fMRI data set on blindsight patient GY, and read up on the blindsight literature at the time.

The neurons in the retina don't go straight to the occipital (primary visual) cortex; they all synapse onto the thalamus first. From there, the vast majority of exiting neurons go on to occipital cortex, but a few percent go off to other regions, such as the superior colliculus, amygdala, MT and FEF.

It's been shown in diffusion studies that people with damage in thalamus or prior to it, don't show blindsight effects, while people with post-thalamic or occipital damage can.

Now, the really interesting part is that, these non-occipital signals are enough to help people perform tasks at above-chance levels, but not enough for them actually be aware. Nobody knows for sure why. Conscious awareness is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Top candidates are information integration theory, higher-order thought theories, and signal-detection-based theories.
Do people honestly see long-time LINUX users dumping their laptops / Desktops for Tablets / Smartphones?

GNOME/Fedora and Ubuntu are not targeting long-time Linux users. They are targeting people who have never used Linux.
If you want to get your mind blown about the "other" one, read "The emergence of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" by Julian Jaynes. It argues, e.g. that schizophrenia is a disease in which communication with that other self becomes an internal (voiced) dialogue that sounds.
I find historical narrative to be an effective way to learn, but just reading names, dates, and important events is boring. You have to pretend like you have a time machine.

An effective historical lesson takes you back in time and puts you right at the scene of the development, almost allowing you to have a conversation with the characters and follow along with their thought process.

That being said, I appreciate this straightforward approach just as much, and find that having a good understanding of the core concepts first, makes adjusting the settings on the "time machine" much smoother.
Some engineers can have a (dangerous) tendency to want to either fix themselves or diagnose themselves.
I'm guessing he is talking about this:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/ocular-migraine/AN01681/

I get them from time to time; the only down side is the inability to read until the flashing zig-zag hallucination moves out of my field of view. Generally much preferred to a migraine headache.
Does it handle horizontal scrolling with the trackpad? That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
That's neat. So, out of the people who took the survey, 1/2 were curious and 1/2 mis-clicked. How many even bothered to take the survey?
What's neat is that 0.08%, the reported CTR, is higher than on some regular ads.
Hong Kong is famous for having products that look almost exactly the same but have names like "Levvis" or "Levy's" so that they can claim, no, they're not knock-offs and pretend to be surprised anyone could be confused.

Samsung was dangerously close to the line.
Outlook.com down
And...... it's back already... and it's gone again...

Looks like Microsoft have done something popular again, finally.
True, and I pay for it for blekko.com, but there was no amount of money I could give them that would let me have the old gmail interface back. That was sad for me.
While the book seems interesting enough, the blog post feels bit overly opinionated. Or maybe the book itself is like that?
Unlikely, TC typically delivers <10,000 mentions to your site if the article is about your site. For a mention I doubt it generates significant traffic.
Top patent court struggles to decide when software is patentable
The blog post clearly apologizes for contacting NBC about the tweet content.

"we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are. This behavior is not acceptable and undermines the trust our users have in us. We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content"

Also, the blog post says the account would have been restored as soon as Guy Adams responded to their email and acknowledged the TOS. Complaint retraction or not.
Show HN: AzureFS – command line Azure cloud storage explorer for Linux
Any tips on ad retargeting?
We're about to launch a new product, and we're expecting (hoping for) a bunch of traffic from HN and other tech sites.

In the future, I'd like to be able to buy ads to target the initial wave of visitors. We're a SaaS product for developers, and so these visitors will be our perfect target market.

Does anyone have good experience with ad-retargeting services? Any tips for how we can do this on the cheap?

thanks
That's fascinating. It makes sense, in an odd way. His eyes are still functioning, but the brain can't process the incoming data, so things get remapped to areas of the brain responsible for other types of functions.

I have a bit of the opposite problem. I have a mild form of Charles Bonnet syndrome. The visual hallucinations I experience aren't extremely frequent or complex. I may have one every few days to every few weeks, and they usually only last for a couple of seconds. Mostly I just see abstract shapes (usually the same shape - kind of a glowing horseshoe). Once or twice, I have seen chairs.

Here's a great TED talk on it: http://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_rev...
Well, here is a partial explanation. The eyes developed as a sense organ attached to the midbrain and only later were wired to the forebrain. The midbrain retains complex circuits that we use in our reflexive behaviour. We use these circuits more than we would suspect eg while walking along corridors or while turning away from an object thrown towards the face. A stroke in the forebrain would leave these neural pathways intact. Hence the sight without concious vision.

Of course in reality these things are much more complex...
Eying Profits, Singularity University Tightens Grip on Student Startups
Sleep Deprivation Makes You Work Slower: Study
Seems to me the only possible solution is a network of trust. Start small and build outward over time. This was the approach Facebook took to solve the "real identity" problem on the Internet at scale.
I don't use keystrokes to switch between windows. I look at the list of the windows in the "taskbar" and directly click on the one I want. However I do use keystrokes to switch workspaces.

Switching from a current emacs to the 6th terminal window isn't particularly practical for me using keystrokes (ymmv). I also drag and drop items in the taskbar so they are in the order that makes sense for me.

I gave up on extensions because they kept breaking, and of course the moment there is a gnome version change they all stop working.
IMO modern web browser internals are more complex and less fun to work on than 1991-era Unix clones.

I'm not being defensive of this project, I'm being critical of the direction web architecture is going.
Did somebody already buy North Social?
Right, I'm not claiming that my suggested alternative is able to avoid what I might provisionally call the AUE theorem†; I was just suggesting the alternative as a way to separate out the "dumb" everyone-shares-one-infinite-distributed-hard-disk block-transfer layer, from the "smart" only-certain-people-can-see-certain things layer. The lower layer is an infrastructure protocol, with about as much Ethical impact as the Internet itself (to be specific, it could be compared to, say, BitTorrent.) The upper layer is where ethical responsibility comes into play.

We can probably convince your mother to download an app from the App Store that integrates just with the lower layer--hey, it's just like Dropbox, but bigger! [Well, as long as anyone and everyone can read random samples of your data if they like...]--because the upper layer, with the encryption and signing, will siphon off all the stigma of not-so-above-board usage of the protocol and attach it to itself. It's no different technically, but it is very different socially.

The advantage of having one reviled app on a larger infrastructure is that that reviled app gets to "hide" its blocks among all the above-board usage of the infrastructure. Like another poster in the thread said, if you go onto Freenet or the Tor Directory, the links to CP sites are plain and obvious, because it's a large part of what's going on there. But if you could look at your own disk usage as a node in this network, I imagine the number of encrypted blocks as compared to, say, plain-old MPEG frames of TV shows, would be vanishingly small. (And it's be relatively impossible to define which is which, either, since this infrastructure has no "index" or metadata; it merely is a big bucket of blocks named by their content hashes, of which most--not just the encrypted ones--are meaningless unless you have another block giving the order in which to string them together to make a file.)

† "Anonymous, Uncensorable, Ethical: pick two."--named after the CAP theorem of database design. Well, it would really be the AUE conjecture for now--but I'd love to see someone prove it either way; it seems like the sort of thing that is amenable to that.
has been done many times and the last great attempt was shutdown by facebook, I think they were scraping fb or something... cant remember the name
Ask HN: would you tip people in irc if it were really easy?
I have been helped by so many people in irc channels, I often wish I could click on their username and tip them instantly. Does anyone else want this service?
An often used approach is to think of and feel your entire body. You start with the pinky toe on one foot. You just focus everything on the toe and try to "feel it". When you believe you can eel it you move on to the next toe, eventually to the foot, the lower leg and so fourth. In this way you move through your entire body in detail just concentrating on what you can feel. It usually works for me when my mind is overflowing with thoughts and I can't sleep.
>The concentration needed takes all your focus until you know the series of movement of the back of your hand. For me this took about a year. After this I would occasionally slip into a kind of mindlessness.

That strikes a chord with me, actually. Just after responding to ChuckMcM's comment, I realized that there is one way I can achieve a state of non-thought: Whenever I'm physically struck by something, clearly not injured (and thus not worried), but still in pain enough to be distracted. Somewhere in those moments I'm too busy with the sensation to think, and my brain finally shuts up.
There's a Feynman story about him trying to experience the moment of falling asleep.

I tried the same thing, and had some interesting experiences. Around bed-time, lie down in a relatively quiet, not too bright place. For me, a hardwood floor with thin carpet works well. Close your eyes, and try to breathe slowly. Whenever you have a startling thought or start to feel impatient (why isn't this working?) just remember that all you need to do is to breathe slowly.

Over time my mind gets quieter and quieter. I may focus on the greenish patterns inside my eyelids (similar to photo-luminescent plankton). These patterns may swirl and move like a fluid-simulation.

If I'm lucky, at some point I'll realize that I'm asleep. I've never experienced the transition -- just the realization that, yup, I'm asleep. In winter this is accompanied by an overall feeling of warmth. There's also a feeling of disconnection from hearing and motor. It's not that I can't hear, but if there were crickets or bird noises outside, I realize it's gone suspiciously quiet. It's not that I can't move, but it feels like I'd have to surface first before moving.

Often the reaction to the realization "I'm asleep" is to startle and to wake up, but you can train yourself not to.
American Booksellers Assn, B & N seek more influence in Apple ebooks case
The novel Blindsight by Peter Watts is partially about what blindsight and other similar phenomena can tell us about conciousness. If you like the article, and speculative fiction in general, you'll probably like that novel (although the ending is horribly bleak).
Inquiry into international IT industry ripping off Australians