skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a good point about how the campaigns do have virtually of the resources to put together a sophisticated emailing system...but it may not be a question of pure resources, but of logistics and ingenuity.

Here are two things that I think we can assume:

1) The campaigns have enough data to draw a good guess of who/what you are like, even without you giving anything more than your location, gender and age. This was true at least a decade ago when campaigns (and other third-parties) had access to databases such as subscriber data.

2) The campaigns have the resources to tie this data to individual identities, even if you haven't explicitly done it yourself when signing up for a newsletter. The matching won't be 100% accurate, but the campaigns can be reasonably sure that you are this particular Jane Doe at this address who is 28-32 years old, who subscribes to Rolling Stone and Harper's, and who drives a 2-door sedan.

Then what?

There has to be a middleman who can use this granular data to write a coherent message that leverages the insights from the data...using a model that makes many permutations across the most common combinations of characteristics.

This is similar to how Google can tailor search results for "what's a good movie" for a near infinite combination of user characteristics...but producing discrete databits (search results) is a different problem than producing a coherent fundraising letter.

And while money/resources/desire may not be an obstacle, the question is logistics and other practical concerns that divide the data from the content producers. There are many industries (such as the medical community) in which money and brains are no factor and yet have unsophisticated ways of dealing with information.
When I first got an HP Touchpad, the touchstone stand, and the keyboard I understood what the "post-PC" era really was. It was perfect: physical keyboard for productivity, yet a touchscreen with a tablet interface, and the mouse had finally seen its end. The Asus transformer was the next big step, I think. Again, keyboard and touchscreen, but this time a 19 hour battery. If it allowed dual booting it would be perfect.

So when I saw the Surface I thought "yes Microsoft gets it!" Then you use windows 8 RT and realize they're about as out-of-touch as ever. Behind that nice tablet interface is the same old windows. Ever try using classic windows interface with your bulky fingers? That's exactly what you have to do with essential apps like Office or anything written > 3 months ago. It's the exact reason tablets didn't catch on in the early 2000s: windows wasn't designed for use on a touchscreen.
I don't know how things are today, but in 2009 it was possible. See, for instance, the paper Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud:
Exploring Information Leakage in
Third-Party Compute Clouds at
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/cloudsec.pdf

From the abstract:
Using the Amazon EC2 service as a case study, we show that
it is possible to map the internal cloud infrastructure, identify where a particular target VM is likely to reside, and then
instantiate new VMs until one is placed co-resident with the
target. We explore how such placement can then be used to
mount cross-VM side-channel attacks to extract information
from a target VM on the same machine.
Scared yet?
Tracking down an IP through a Facebook account. : hacking
I do miss real-time search. Unfortunately, I get an error when trying to add the extension through the Chrome Web Store.

Ubuntu 12.04 (w/ GNOME 3) / Chrome 22.0.1229.94

Error: "Package is invalid. Details: 'Could not load extension icon 'images/128x128.png'.'."
To clarify: I'd think using arrays for mapping out roles to users is probably a bad idea. That's really a relation. On the messaging side, you could make a case for the id's of the users being rolled up in to the message, but that assumes that you don't track anything about the messages on a per-recipient basis (like, "delivered, received, received time, etc.).
Fantastic and inspiring. You should really consider getting this book: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve-Skiena/d... It's super fun to figure everything out for yourself, but I guarantee you that if you read this book, it'll blow your mind and have you off to the races trying a hundred fascinating things.
Do you show the free quota in the UI as well? Or is there any option to tell it to always stay below the free quota?
And it is 5-10x as expensive as Glacier itself...
Also, assuming Arc stores your data in a 'standard' way, I only have to worry about Amazon going out of service. Here there is also the risk of this small german company.
Tax purposes :)

Only half kidding. In the UK, as a contractor/freelancer, it's easier to make the case that your company is a going concern in its own right (rather than a simple tax-avoidance shell) if you have projects other than the main one you're working on for a client. Particularly if you're working on-location for extended periods.

I also want to learn new things, build up a portfolio and eventually start a software company. So I guess all of the above?
Works fairly well on iPhone. Just tried on Android emulator (don't have an actual phone handy)... loaded it up as a web app and also did a trigger.io android build. Some minor css issues, and it looks like it's getting a bunch of extra space at the end of the content area that isn't happening in desktop chrome or on ios though...
The FSF will have to grow up first.
Can't you use xrandr while using the nvidia drivers? 'xrandr --output VGA1 --left-of LVDS1' works nicely for my laptop.
I wonder how much effort the Skittles factory puts in to ensuring each bag has a selection of all the colors. They certainly have some large high-volume plant to do so.

It's funny to think of this carefully-crafted machine undoing the work done by another carefully-crafted machine.
It is pretty clear from his own graph that this stopped working in october '10. which was an eternity ago in terms of financial markets. algorithmic trading has increased manifold since then, so finding another arbitrage opportunity like he did is only going to be more difficult.
doesn't include city names, but here is a python script that pulls up-to-date country names, codes, currencies, etc from standards bodies: https://github.com/ewheeler/current-countries-of-earth
I did not use DRM to protect it, so I guess someone bought it for 99 cents and then converted it to other formats and pirated it.

Even if you use DRM, the DRM can often be stripped off and then pirated. This is possible on the Amazon Kindle Store at least.
At some point anonymous is going to figure out the bgp 'hack' is actually exploitable, unlike taking the root name servers offline and we see a network routing outage for several days. I wish it wasn't so but sometimes that is the only way these things get fixed
Well put.

Risk management is probably the single most important thing to understand in trading. Unfortunately, it's something that lots of people learn late, if ever.

Folks get caught up in the romantic notion of betting it all and winning big, but end up losers. Meanwhile, the consistent winners they aspire to be are exposing perhaps 0.2% of their roll at a time.
Copyright protects only the most literal copying of a specific embodiment of a design. But when dealing with an embedded CPU, writing the VHDL isn't the hard part. The hard part is the circuit design. Compare this to a piece of enterprise software. The conceptual design is easy. Writing the 2 million lines of code is hard. Copyright works well for that.
I'm not sure "boredom" is the best word. Maybe "need", or "creative outlet." When I don't code in my day job for few days/weeks I find my self coding, anything. Similar to how I suspect writers feel the need to write, and musicians to make music.
Rust now has a REPL
Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of "Object-Oriented Programming"
Yes, that trick is still used on iOS. Windows Phone and the Windows-8-style-UI or whatever they call it today use lots of drawn out animations to mask load times, but it isn't enough on the Surface. You end up wasting quite a bit of time watching loading spinners.
I started the infrastructure for this kind of thing a while ago. It's BSD licensed.

It is a software implementation of the Viable System Model (VSM), a model for autonomous systems developed by Stafford Beer. It provides structure, communications, auditing and alerting for autonomous systems.

Part of it is base code for dealing with stocks and options, treating securities positions as autonomous systems that have the scaffolding for running simulations on themselves. It's in Smalltalk and runs under Squeak and Pharo. It can be found at:

http://home.rbcarleton.com/rbc/software/smalltalk/VSA/

I won't try to advertise it as a complete solution, but it might be the start of one.
>Those are crackers, not hackers.

No, crackers are people that bypass software copy protections.

Arguing about non-formal language definitions is absurd anyway.
On 10.8.2 it works. Is there any shortcut for opening files by namespace names? Or of exploring the namespaces in a connected project?
Curious why such a specific time period. Is there a source for 1680s? The 17th century would probably be sufficient otherwise.
Surface isn't bad, it's early. I played with it over the weekend and liked it in general. It's also clear that it'd benefit from some bug fixes. It'll get better if MS doesn't drop it before they've been able to work out the kinks.
not to show a direct favoritism toward Microsoft, but his review reeks with personal bias:

"my first thought was, Boy, that’s heavy! When I looked up the specs, I discovered that the Surface is only about 20 grams heavier than the iPad 3, but somehow those grams make a difference."

"I’ve used many keyboards for the iPad, and the touch cover seemed just as good as those—meaning I could type on it somewhat more quickly than I can on a touchscreen, but it I wouldn’t call it a pleasant experience."

Don't get me wrong, there are some legitimate gripes in terms of speed, functionality, and as the reviewer points out - focus. The reviewer even admits that Microsoft isn't advertising this as an iPad killer, rather it's suppose to fill in the gaps. Though, throughout the article, the only thing the reviewer does is try to replace their iPad:

"In the years I’ve been using the iPad, I’ve come to recognize that it's good for specific tasks. I’ll write short emails on it but not long ones. I’ll use the iPad to shop for stuff on Amazon, but I won’t use it to buy something with lots of variables, like a plane ticket.
To a lot of people, these limitations feel restrictive. The Surface was designed with those people in mind: It promises that you’ll be able to type faster, to use a pointer, to actually get things done and not feel like there are certain things your device just can’t do."

If the reviewer had made an effort to include the surface in parts of his or her life like buying a plane ticket, or shopping for something 'with a lot of variables' then we'd see how well the surface lives up to it's charge.
Poll: What method did you use to vote, or how do you plan to vote?
Obviously staged, obviously edited, obviously fake.
Did you create a new term or is this one I haven't heard yet?
I'd expect that instead of eval, you'd want to run some sort of unit test for effectful code.
Voting machines need to be a lot better than this or not exist at all, but does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration? Seems more like a crappy touch screen.
Ridiculously hard proof of easy theorem
Sadly, there is no way to fire JS while scrolling on an iPad, so we could either serve the iPhone style docs (which look severely out of proportion, especially on landscape), or accept that the phone will only update on stop of the scroll.

We chose the latter, but will work to improve the docs everywhere in the future.
They are planning to improve it, but there are issues along the way:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/NVIDIA-wants-to-remov...
How to improve the click-through rate in your email newsletter
This is a follow up post to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4734797
I wish I understood more of this but still really cool!
The "Clockwise/Spiral Rule" (a C tip)
Text-based Multiplayer Shooter
Signing up just to say that NASA regularly texts me.
The shenanigans you seem to tolerate during elections are just incomprehensible to us foreigners. The number of horror stories I've heard in the last couple of weeks regarding everything from just weirdness of the system to blatant manipulation is farcical.

It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.
I hope this is a hoax.
Google Chrome’s Latest Release Promises To Save on Battery, 25% For Some
2012 Election Results Map by State - Live Voting Updates - POLITICO.com
Election Tech and Startup TV
There probably is no point in it, since there are enough general purpose distros already, which can be perfectly used for gaming, and benefit from improved drivers.
Don't do this with your own money. Found a startup building HFT tools, and then raise money for it, and use other people's money to test your tools.

If the tools work, sell them. If they don't, tweak them, try it again, and sell them until they do.

This is risk management.
Shouldn't there be location info for each city? A long/lat field?
PR Gig for Startup Launch
Our startup is launching a new collaborative gift product on Kickstarter in time for the holidays. We are looking for people who can help us with our launch by leveraging their networks and skills to drive awareness to our kickstarter page. We are going to launch later this week after the election hype is over.

We'll pay you $75 for about one day's worth of of work. We're going to hire a few people for this gig so please feel free to pass along this opportunity to your friends.

Our website is postbound.com, and when you email us we will send you a preview of our kickstarter video and project page so you have more context.

email: jobs_at_postbound_dot_com
yay for opensuse. when they delayed 12.2 a few months back i switched to ubuntu on both my laptop and desktop/firewall/mail router/fileserver. but while i really like ubuntu on the laptop (seriously - unity is great), i missed the way that opensuse's yast simplifies / unifies service management on the main box (am i the only person in the world that expects to be able to configure lvm over raid on install - ubuntu server couldn't handle what seemed to be quite a reasonable config...). so when 12.2 came out i switched back to opensuse. it's great, and i wish it were more popular with american audiences - for me it's the perfect mix of ease of use and power.

sorry, a bit off-topic really. i just feel frustrated that it's seen as a second class citizen compared to ubuntu and redhat, when in my experience (having worked with both those and others) it's by far the best for my kind of server/do-it-all use-case.
For now its an edge case. Thats partially the case because we put such stringent restrictions on the kinds of assistance we can offer, but even in America there are claims of corruption with giving out government assistance.

http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2011/nov/15/ame...
Hey Google, if you invite me to Wallet Card beta I will Nexus-ify my life
How to sell to large customers
Microsoft confirms Windows Live Messenger retirement in favor of Skype
On a 64 bit Fedora 17 machine, I needed to install the following packages before getting LightTable to run:

glibc.i686 libX11.i686 libXrandr.i686 glib2.i686 gtk2.i686 alsa-lib.i686 nss.i686 GConf2.i686
Because it's not true?

Android is the OS loaded on 75% of the phones shipped in Q3. Not sold.

For instance: iPhone5 was not shipped for the vast majority of people who purchased it when released in Q3, even though they purchased it in Q3.

This is lying with stats. It's annoying as hell.
This was my thought exactly. If someone was going through the trouble of altering votes, it would make no sense to make note of this within UI elements, it could just as easily "secretly" change the votes for 1/8 (just my theoretical magical number) voters and alter the results just enough without being noticeable.
I'll give you obviously edited, but why so sure about the other two?
Hence the keyboard and trackpad.

There is a benefit of having both the desktop and "Metro".
I own a Surface and disagree with everything in this article.

The Surface does have quirks, but as a v1 device from a company that has NEVER designed a commercial PC let alone a tablet, I think it is nothing short of fantastic tech.

I just sold my Couch-MacBook over the weekend because the Surface satisfies every single casual at-home PC scenario I have.
There are environments that have been behaving just this way for decades (emacs elisp buffers, Satimage Smile for AppleScript text windows) and no one complains or claims it's not well worth the risks. How is typing in any destructive code anywhere or command lines at the shell and just hitting enter different? If you don't know approximately what your functions are doing, you should never call them under any circumstances.

In practice, this has just not been a legitimate concern. Yes, you have to look both ways before you cross a busy street; people are pretty good at looking both ways.
Improved drivers benefit everyone. Even Wine based games will run better. So kudos to Valve and Nvidia for working on it.
Definitely early. Not helping matters is the fact that all the Microsoft employees getting free ones don't receive them until December. They should have gotten them early even if it meant delaying the launch in my opinion, at least then there would be more software available.
Google Chrome finally gets Do Not Track support
Regardless of whether it's good or bad - what took them so long!? What have they been working on...
Looks like a calibration issue. They should have included selecting other candidates in the list. While not good enough (voting machines should be "perfect") calling it "altering votes" is a little much. It shows you that it has registered the wrong candidate, I would call this incorrectly registering input.
Evidence, citations? Not at all obvious. On the surface, looks quite real. And I've had enough touch-screen devices to know that mis-calibration is common, so it's plausible.
Very true, every time you hire someone or spend money on Adwords you're gambling that you'll net more in $$$ or at least lifestyle improvement (in the case of a new employee) than your cost. That is, if you're in business to make a profit, not just spending OPM to build your brand. Even acquiring a customer is a gamble.
I can't even give obviously edited. Ever used a lower-end Android phone? I have, and this looks like a video directly from one. Jittery, frame skipping mess.

Edit: Also, it's been verified and taken offline. http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...
I'd say a little bit of each of the options.

I do it for different reasons at different times.
Wait. This is not HFT. There's a huge difference between automated and high frequency trading. What he does is only automated scalping at best (or at the fastest).

Automated trading is more on strategy, while HFT has more to do with volume and speed. With automated trading, you predict price movements. HFT involves being a liquidity provider. You don't use market technical indicators in HFT, you wait for some really huge orders.

HFT firms won't bother him. Those are dealing with an entirely different set of algorithms. He should have contacted brokers instead.
Windows Phone and the Metro UI in general uses a ton of animations to make it seem "smooth" and "fast", when in fact you're just watching animations for the same time period it would take to load. But underneath all that, the overall responsiveness of the OS seems to be slower than both iOS and the latest Android versions.
Treat, a Shutterfly-owned brand, is looking for iOS devs, web devs and QE
http://www.shutterfly.com/about/positions.jsp?jvi=ojGFWfwk
http://www.shutterfly.com/about/positions.jsp?jvi=odfyWfwG
http://www.shutterfly.com/about/positions.jsp?jvi=oETSWfw5
http://www.shutterfly.com/about/positions.jsp?jvi=owlIWfwf
http://www.shutterfly.com/about/positions.jsp?jvi=oMTSWfwd
>And that, I think, is the main reason the Surface falls short: It lacks focus

I see this as a general problem with the tech sector today: there is a lack of underlying vision that leads to innovation. How can Microsoft focus on something when they are chasing the moving target of Apple? Worse yet they only see what Apple is thinking/doing years after the fact.

The worst part of all this to me is that Apple isn't even trying to compete with Microsoft in this niche. Apple has left open a large space of power-users (I use this term loosely - people who type a lot fall in here - or users who want a full OS) who want tablet functionality. Microsoft should have done a better and quicker job of filling this niche.
I wish they had also taken video of them selecting Jill Stein to see if the entire machine was calibrated incorrectly or just the Romney/Obama section.
> I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine.
Ask HN: How did you calculate the right time to leave corporate america?
What kind of calculations or metrics did you use to finally get up and leave your day job to fulfill your desire to create a startup?

I see all over about the 6 month or 12 month (savings) rule, but then a ton of different articles saying those metrics are garbage.

Can you all share your experiences of when you got up and left? What metric did you use personally?
Yep. That's clearly what's happening, and given that there's instant feedback, the user would know there's a problem, and either ask for a different machine or adjust until the system represents their actual intent.
Sure, his program could easily have been done in almost any language. He wasn't competing on speed, which might have excluded languages like Python.
Show HN: I built a dead simple, secure password manager.
It sure looks exactly that way from the video.

I've used that exact type of machine to vote in North Carolina (but this ballot is not from North Carolina). You have all sorts of people pounding on the screen all day.

Remember the reason we all wanted electronic voting after the year 2000: because it gives absolutely clear answers, not necessarily better answers. (Even the best systems have errors because there are humans involved.) You don't have to debate whether that smudge counts or does not count as a vote.
Why Everyone Wants to Fire The Founder
How a 20 year old founded DC and Triangle Entrepreneurship Week
Everyone's been spoiled by iPads etc., I guess. Old touch screens used to do this all the time. My Palm Pilot had a calibration app I'd have to run every few days/weeks.

If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.
Seems like the obvious solution would be to close off the broken voting machine.
I saw this earlier and I noted that news agencies seemed to be reluctant to post it. CNN has been on this from the jump. I think people are afraid of it being revealed as a fake. There is some serious validation that needs to occur if this is the case.
Ok, so now: how do I improve my open rate?
Not Exactly Tim the Enchanter
'Start-Ups: Silicon Valley' recap
Yeah, all it will take is a few more users taking videos from their phones of a similar thing happening, and then this things goes ballistic... especially if some people can't select Obama and Obama loses.
apache hadoop is also now available as HDInsight

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technolog...