skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fixing your own laptop, and the importance of do-it-yourself to society
If you dont put anything of value in iCloud, you dont care enough about a reset: you could just setup a new account.

Having every underpaid store clerk being able to reset the account of every customer, is just dangerously stupid.

Just not having a reset feature is even better.
Besides: banks videotape their customers. We would have the culprit on video.
Indeed, but even companies who don't offer a phone-based customer support service can be susceptible to basic social engineering.

When Facebook was still granting new users access by checking that their email matched a school's domain, I was able to make accounts at multiple schools by sending a forged email (claiming to originate from the school domain) to Facebook support saying something like: "I never received the confirmation email. Will you please activate my account at fakename@targetschool.edu?"

And it worked 90% of the time.

I wonder how many websites nowadays would be susceptible to a targeted and personalized forged email to customer service (especially since emails are frequently used to prove account ownership).
I see people here mostly talk about effects fasting has on health but not much about effects on mental/physical performance.
If you live longer but you're less effective in what you do, fasting turns into a much less attractive choice, at least for some people.

From my very non-scientific experiments, I can tell that my bullet (1 min) chess rating suffers a lot when I'm restricting my calories.
It's really hard to measure how fasting would affect a more complex activity, like programming...probably the impact is smaller but there certainly is an impact. With restricted calories, I usually need to add caffeine to the mix to suppress my hunger and make it easier to concentrate.
Efficiency rarely correlates with headcount and budget. 9 years ago, our IT budget was $11 million. Today, it's a hair over $60 million. Adjusting for inflation, we should be around 13 million.

Most of the added budget has gone to bloated off the shelf software applications, retaining duplicate/redundant staffing from a pseudo-merger, and mismanaged consultants.

The OP has added a lot of facts in replies in this post, indicating that his staff was relatively lean (1 staffer for every 50 users).

But be careful in drawing too many conclusions from one instance of anectdata.
Something that runs on the JVM. Personally, I'd pick Ruby on JRuby.
What was the observable behavior recognized in your colleagues that prompted the judgement of them slacking off?
Biometrics aren't unbreakable and can be spoofed quite trivially in many cases.

Here's a professor spoofing high-end fingerprint scanners with gelatin and a printer: http://vast.uccs.edu/~tboult/tmp/fingerprint-boult-koaa-medi...
(sorry for the sensationalism at the beginning)
'Building a large webapp today'

Do you mean starting to build a large webapp today?

I would recommend Ruby on Rails or Python/Django - they allow for fast prototyping and easy collaboration.
I bet you could go through the same process with Thomas Friedman:

1. Come up with a principle long-since scientifically proven false.

"Hmm, how about 'The World is Flat'"

2. Write a book called "My Dull, Platitudinous Travel Diary"

"Indians in call centers can talk with Americans! Amazing!"

3. Now change the title of that book to the long-since disregarded principle.

"Everyone will want to read this because the editors at the NYT are
inexplicably required to keep me on staff, offering me undeserved
credibility for the rest of time!"
Population density is certainly part of it. Manhattan has about 4x the population density of San Francisco. But 24 hour subway service can be practical with lower population density. E.g. Chicago has a lower population density than San Francisco, but has 24 hour service on the red line (along the lake shore) and a very robust commuter rail service. The key difference is commuting patterns. In the Bay area, people commute haphazardly between suburbs. In NYC and Chicago, everyone from the suburbs commutes downtown in the morning and back out to the suburbs in the evening. It's much easier to have an effective transportation system when everyone is going in the same direction.
The main difference between CSP in Go and the actor model in Erlang is that actor mailboxes are many-to-one whereas CSP channels are many-to-many. If you were to model CSP using actors, channels would be actors.
Thanks for posting this. I was amused by the other conversations going on here, but this actually changed my mind about him.
What about Wt?

http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
Aren't there major geologic fault lines near this project?

http://nymag.com/news/articles/08/06/GeographyofDisaster/map...
Most people here have had good advice. The only thing I would add is that there's a difference between vision and delusion. Visionaries have a strong and clear focus, but are grounded enough to recognize the merits of their competition and work within the ecosystem that customers / users already enjoy. Delusionaries pour scorn on their competition (or even claim to be so revolutionary that they HAVE no competition), and try to create a walled garden or vendor lock-in with zero install base. Even Apple made iTunes for Windows.

My first job out of college was at a startup. The founders were reasonable people who were heavily influenced and invested in by a delusionary, who saw their company as a vehicle to realize his "vision" of how technology should work. As a result we never really managed to grow beyond a couple of million in revenue, and that mostly from what amounted to R&D outsourcing from large firms with technically naive execs. Said delusionary repeatedly vetoed our attempts to make our product more relevant to a wider range of customers since it would compromise his vision. I bailed out of frustration, and a year later one of our customers just outright bought the firm to acquire the founders. I heard the delusionary was very satisfied with his exit. :p
Oh man. Hook up a GPS unit and heart rate monitor to each sheep and you have a population model for how the knowledge of danger is spread within a group.

I'm literally salivating.
How to get traction?
Not sure what you mean by "parallelizes better". However Erjang and Kilim on the JVM have managed to outperform the Erlang VM (thanks to a shared heap they provide zero-copy messaging unlike the Erlang VM) and with InvokeDynamic Erjang should be getting a nice performance boost as soon as they integrate it.
I've fallen foul (and from anecdotal evidence, many of my peers too) of the availability displayed not reflecting the actual state of things

I suspect the website uses a materialised view that only refreshes every hour or so.
Rafflecopter: Create great Give always for your blog.
Pick what ever gives you and the people you are working with the greatest productivity. Chances are it will get rewritten later on to address the problems you encountered.
The sheep who cried wolf?
Pirates of the caribbean: free download movie in HD
FYI the text is very hard to read on a 13" mac and chrome.
http://imgur.com/fsbj9.jpg
This isn't what you wanted to hear but, with an $800 budget, put design on the backburner. Read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839022 for some DIY visual design help.
There's lots of people stuck with this problem it seems. I was talking to my wife today about going in to work earlier, but my client comes alive only in the afternoon.

That, coupled with hectic hours has killed off my motivation. My side project has worked for a few clients and i eat my own dog food for my website, but man, i'm just tired at night.

I'd say start with the big idea, then chunk it and do it bottom up.
good luck.
Not to comment on Gladwell specifically, but it seems to be well-accepted that lifespans in excess of the average retirement age are a huge cost to the system, particularly because of the disproportionate sums used in the very last few years of treatment.

It may be cruel to say so, but it is logical that longer lifespans are costly.
> > I don't fully understand this compulsion to explain anything successful in the weight-loss field, ultimatlely, in terms of calorie restriction.

> Because any other hypothesis has to explain why it violates the conservation of energy and matter.

Umm, no. None of the weight loss diets violate the conservation of energy and matter. (The "I lived on just water for 10 years" diets do.)

Feces contains calories. Therefore conservation of energy isn't the only limiting factor - conversion and usage matter too.

There's no "conservation" argument that says that conversion effectiveness is a constant. Heck, there's no argument that says that calories/pound is a constant.

> But the direct cause of weight loss in IF is that you simply do not eat as much.

Nope. You lose weight when your body "releases" more mass than you're taking in.
That's good advice if you want to lose weight, but a number of IF studies were calorie neutral (double rations on non-fast days) and that's why I find it interesting: it's triggering some of the same benefits as CR but without restricting calories, which means it may be a much easier lifestyle to maintain.
http://i.imgur.com/4tXan.png
> A highschooler could also write Rebecca Black's "Friday" (indeed, one did)

Actually, the song was created by ARK Music Factory, as described on their Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARK_Music_Factory

Rebecca Black's parents paid a couple thousand bucks for the privilege of having their daughter sing it and make a music video around it.
The story highlights something I think anti-rail proponents always miss: the lifetime of this infrastructure is far beyond what ordinary businesses deal with. Parts of the NYC subway are a century old, and parts of the London subway are pushing 150 years old. Decisions like spending extra money to build express tracks on the Manhattan subway system are paying enormous dividends at a time when the people who made the decision have been long dead.

Not only do these time scales lengthen the amortization period of these projects, but they dramatically influence peoples' choices. You can't just base your decision to build a subway line on present commuting patterns. People will adjust their lifestyle to take advantage of the new infrastructure, especially over the century-long timescales involved.
I agree that the SHAME project appears to be too hyperbolic.

But that article was based on research paid for by tobacco industry, and heavily promoted by tobacco industry.

One of the reasons that cost isn't considered a factor is because tobacco companies have successfully introduced FUD into the discussion.
I am a farmer

This makes me curious. What brings you to HN? :)
The motionCAPTCHA author seems to be hilariously clueless. Read through the comments on the site from a year ago. A bunch of people, including Aaron Swartz, point out that it misses the fundamental point of a CAPTCHA (being a task that's easier for a human to carry out than a program) and his response to each is some variation of "you need to read the README more closely", or "I'll have a more production version that uses a regular PHP fallback out in a month".

I've been checking in every once in a while to see if there was actually a "secure", "production" version deployed. Figured I could throw together a bot to defeat it in a few minutes and that would be good for a laugh. Doesn't look like there has actually been any development done in a year though.
For a 'large' webapp I would honestly go with Java. A good stack is Jetty for the http server, and Jersey/JAX-RS for the web framework. The JVM is unbeatable, and you will have an easy time onboarding people since everyone knows Java.

It's not as 'hip' as Rails/Django but you will be very productive and you will have the benefit of the plethora of Java libraries out there that are performant and reliable. Not to mention the great profiling tools.
Breaking News: Mass shooting at sikh temple.
I don't think so, but I'm all ears to suggestions. I was playing around with string search where the haystack is large, fixed, and searched for small needles whose total volume is thousands of times larger than the haystack. My goal is to optimize the number of lookups per second on approximately ~2.5 billion keys, and each value is 4 bytes long; and for this particular application I can lookup the keys in each hash bucket super quickly once I know the values.

The benefits of B-trees over hash tables don't matter in this application, as I don't care about adjacent keys after lookup, and the input order of my keys is not going to be sorted in any way so once I find a leaf it's not going to help me with subsequent lookups.

In this setting it seems that any B-tree access is going to require traversing several new nodes in addition to the first node, and those internal nodes are extremely likely to be both cache-cold and TLB cold. Whereas with a hash table I only have a single cold memory lookup to check the hash bucket, then a single cold memory lookup to validate the key at the bucket matches; this cold memory lookup for the validation is also likely to warm the cache for the subsequent matching work, and this small amount of subsequent matching work would likely be required by a B-Tree as well. Any thoughts?
What info do you need?
I hear ya, but it would require laying a second track along the entirety of the BART system.

This is a woulda/shouda thing going back 60 years to the original construction of the system. Even if we gave BART billions in funding, there are certainly better uses for that money (Build a rail line into OAK, extend service on all the currently-approved-but-unfunded routes, extend to San Mateo, and deal with some expensive, lingering issues with the transbay tunnel.)
Pro-tip: virtually all non fiction books start off as articles, though the New Yorker has a much higher rate than other news orbs.

Typically, in a long form story, the printed matter is directly dependent on just about 1% of the body of research and interviewing you actually did.

To put it another way, think of how much the LOTR movies left out.
For those who loves explosives and don't have time to watch it all: fast forward to 3:35 :)
Show HN:PhotoChron - A daily timelapse app I wrote to record my son growing up
I wanted to track my son growing up so I built an Android app to let me take regular photos and build them into a timelapse video. I thought HN readers (especially parents & narcissists!) might be interested in it.

The result is PhotoChron ( http://http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.photochron ) and I've been using it for the past year or so to track my son growing up - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Nr7pw-I0g

As I've been using it I've added more features, which include reminders, face detection for photo alignment & importing photos from your phone gallery. It's a free app compatible with Gingerbread and upwards.

Feedback and comments welcome.
>It's not completely fair to compare Firefox's default design decisions with Chrome/Safari/IE's design decisions, which are more than just defaults.

What do you mean by "more than just defaults"?
Absolutely not. The burden of proof is on Shachtman.
What are you even alleging? What is the rat?
In a somewhat related adventure, I am scheduled to give a talk soon (hopefully the same talk twice) about managing a security assessment project. I am hearing about this same sort of beheading happening in the infosec departments from various clients. The impact on me, personally, is that my client contacts are stretched so thin that they don't have cycles to prepare and make the best use of my time. I'm planning to have handouts with checklists. So this topic has been very much on my mind, lately.

One of the things I've learned from Tom is to keep track of how I spend my time. It is tedious and frustrating, but not unlike dieting: without data, you just have no proof. If I had found myself in the situation that the OP describes, my first reaction would have been to keep a running log of every task I had done, including start/stop time and a description of the work done. I've written scripts to do this in the past that generate PDF timesheets -- you could probably use Trac somehow. I'd keep this stuff on a device I owned, and bring the logs to my reviews. Yes, this adds to the stress. Yes, you'll get criticized for it. But when someone who has no clue why the carpets are always clean starts swinging that axe, you'll be wearing armor.
> Because any other hypothesis has to explain why it violates the conservation of energy and matter.

This comment is so infuriating. I may not be a genius, but I did manage to eek out a degree in physics. I think I, and anyone here on HN should be given the benefit of the doubt that they can figurer out if energy conservation is being violated.

Simply from a principle of assuming that the person suggesting the hypothesis is not an _idiot_, you could infer that any of these alternative hypotheses do _not _ violate energy conservation.
I had never heard the last aphorism in the OP before; it got the biggest laugh out of me:

Remember the old joke among social scientists – “Predict the future? It’s hard enough to predict the past!” However, those social scientists haven’t realized that it’s easy to predict the past as long as you’re talking about one story at a time.
Unfortunately, there was no continuity in my access pattern, so it's worst case all around. Doing random reads in 48 GB of ram really made me appreciate just how well caches work these days, and the penalties when your workload does not try or can not use the cache. It also made me start to think of DRAM like I do a rotational hard disk: a large time to seek to a new location, then extremely fast speed to stream off of that location.
> Mars has LESS pressure. So the landing would be easier here, so it should have been tested?

No, having less atmosphere is a disadvantage in this case. This means just parachute wont work. Hence the whole sky crane thing. There is no feasible way to test the whole EDL (entry, descend, landing) phase here on this planet because simulating entry into mars's thin atmosphere is not possible out of computer simulations and whiteboards.
Just to put this out there -- since nobody has really mentioned it -- ruby (as a language) doesn't have the greatest performance. You can do some tricks with GC to speed it up (Ruby EE might be a faster option), but you're still looking at 50x slower than C (python is 40x, Java 7 is around 2x, Javascript on V8 -- Node-- is 4x). So if you're planning on doing a lot on the backend, you might want to consider breaking off your logic/processing into java or lisp or something and using a rpc/mq system to send it tasks from your RoR/Django app....but then again...you might not want to start with too many moving parts :)
And kids. You'd be surprised to know what kids are capable of only if you talk to them in a matured way. Throw them in the deep end intellectually and be very amazed at how much they can think.
Alaska and Hawaii didn't become states until 1959.

Arizona, which is on the continent, didn't become a state until 1912.
Why isn't this part of every password-reset procedure? "We'll mail a reset code to the postal address you gave when you created your account"

This would mean that the attacker would have to commit mail fraud, which (a) is quite difficult; and (b) carries heavy penalties in law.
I agree that ruby is slow, and I actually recommended Java, but ruby execution is not going to be the bottleneck for a webapp, the database is.
Doesn't Mongrel2 operate this way? The front-end handles the open connections, and the backend can choose to send data to any connection. (I have no first-hand experience with Mongrel2, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

It does seem to me like this separation is the right way to handle the problem.
Rails is nice, but it's really really slow. At my job we use Jetty as the server with Play or Lift as the framework -- I think most of the devs like Play better, though. Really easy to run as an unprivileged user and do backends through nginx as well.
Mountain Lion Migration
This is an excellent article--if you aren't familiar with Armin's writing, you should read all his stuff, he always writes insightful long-form posts which do a tremendous job of making complex topics understandable.

I'd like to just point out that in regards to this article, the whole pub-sub pattern for handling realtime web applications applies not only to python, but to all languages and frameworks. Putting your core application logic behind a pubsub channel is an excellent way to maintain a stateless architecture for large applications while keeping complexity low.
> What happens to the isolated Erlang processes when the VM fails to allocate more memory from the OS?

It suspends your process, then logs into newegg.com and buys more memory sticks for your sever. You know it is just a regular VM and doesn't have magic in it. If you use up all the memory on your server you are screwed probably.

You could set up a monitor to see which erlang process is eating memory and what rate and then decide what to do, kill the process, restart the whole node, or report someplace.

EDIT: see http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/memsup.html
There may be no foolproof system, but there are systems:

1. ABP: Always be paranoid. No two passwords are the same. Don't make domino accounts such that when the security for one fails, everything else fails. Limit the number of online accounts.

OR

2. Be open: live a life where you are always mentally ready to be hacked and obliterated. Don't be stupid, but don't track to fight being hacked all the time.
In all fairness to Apple and any support desk, it ain’t hard to bypass a control system were one human talks to another exchanging information that is mostly in the public domain or bypassed using emotional based social engineering (sounding as if in a panic and your mother is in hospital for example). Support is human.

I helped a friend set-up a account with some provider the other day and one of the security question was the classic choice of mothers maiden name, favourite colour or favourite number. All of which are hardly secure as they can be obtained or educated-guessed a lot easier than most, but that’s another discussion. He wanted his favourite football player's name, so I told him pick mothers maiden name and use your favourite football players name. He knows this, and even if somebody who knew his mothers maiden name would still fail on that security check.

What could Apple do; And they will do something I suspect. Well they could add voice recognition to there support call system or/and add preregister calling numbers only (excluding device phone numbers already to cover losing said device) like your office phone. But they will step up-to the plate and hopefully turn this around, any good tech company will do that (even if it is going oops and we added password salts now - they evolve).

The whole aspect about all this that concerned me was how you can have what you perceive as a cloud backup that can then be taken away as well as your copy of the data. That is a lesson for the user more than Apple though. But will be reassuring to find out they have a backup system and maybe also concerning. That is a individuals perception of thought for them to ascertain for themselves, everybody is different.

I might also add that the chap who initial got hacked and subsequently also had his twitter accounts hacked said in a tweet that he is leaving the hacked tweets in the same way he does not go about removing scars on his body. Shows a insightful mindset and in many ways shows that pride was not a part of this and in that we would probably not of read about this had he been burdened by pride. Respect has to be noted there for him stepping up and going, this happened before he found out how it had been done and without knowing it was not an act of his own doing.