skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two things that stood out to me:

Given that the most common 50 passwords are known, why not reject them outright? Simply state to the user: your password is too easy to guess.

Passwords should always allow spaces in order to allow people to use easier to remember passwords, a la xkcd.

http://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generator
I'm generally on your side in this argument, but I want to point out that not all human beings are ugly and petty, although many may be.

When it comes to finding human beings to spend time with, you have to use the same intense sense of value, judgement, and love of a good product, that dcurtis applies to flatware selection.

We are our own greatest products.
I was sort of with you until this:

> What's wrong with understanding flatware?

This is exactly the thinking the supports rampant materialism. Materialism isn't just owning a bunch of stuff, it's being defined by it, by which I mean your thinking about yourself and life is deep set into the things you own. If you're spending hours reading about flatware and justifying it as educational or explorational, you're falling into the trap.
Dustin and I walk similar paths. Last year I got rid of everything I owned, sans a medium daypack of stuff, and traveled for 6 months. A year later I own more things than can fit in my backpack but am very much a minimalist.

My philosophy of ownership is simple. If I need something I'll almost always get the best I can afford. Why not understand what you own? Why not own quality? I don't mean spend hours researching every small purchase but certainly spend a little time looking into something you'll use over a period of time.

I don't need a cabinet full of plates or a closet full of clothes. Why not own higher quality, fewer items?
I got this very email about a month or two ago and was pretty startled that they'd just up and let anyone take over instead of having the admin determine a plan for the group if he leaves or doesn't keep his payments up when he creates the group. It was totally out of the blue and there wasn't even an opportunity for him to send out one final message or let people know what was going on.

Given the way the site looks and functions, I'm surprised there isn't a more popular alternative. If anyone knows of any, I'd love to hear about it.
Consider, if you will, that your wife's purchase of an expensive handbag is more purposeful than you imagine. First, women's clothes tend not to have pockets, so a reliable and comfortable bag is rather more important for ladies than gentlemen. Second, your wife understands that her handbag is also a social signaling device, and understands how to communicate in a completely non-verbal medium.
The Facebook Loading Animation in CSS
I just tried to list my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but was unable to post my listing because "Only places in certain regions can be listed with a zero price." Might be helpful if airbnb specified those regions.
Modular Blocks CMS gears up for beta
Something to look out for. This looks like it could be a good alternative to ExpressionEngine.
Nice! The stacking capability is definitely something I'd thought about adding in a future version.
And now I was removed too. Yay.
The better answer is that all firms are hierarchies. (Arguably: Thats not a flaw, its a feature).
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Just start culling a little bit every few months. The funny thing is that it gets easier each time, even though the things you are getting rid of become more important (since you've gotten rid of the really useless stuff already).
Whitelist the things you actually need and use. Probably:
1. Five sets of clothes
2. Laptop
3. Phone

Donate everything else to a good charity. Especially the valuable stuff. (Assuming you have good finances and don't really need the money)
Strange that Google didn't announce this when they announced Chrome 23. Does WebRTC come with the Opus codec?
That's great to hear! We've also fixed up that broken link, thanks for letting us know.
I enjoyed the post. I really liked the idea of living with a single backpack.

But, how exactly do you decide what is the best for you? You say that you "developed a blind trust in the things you used".

Blind trust in what?

If that blind trust is towards the products themselves, then how will you know when something better for your purposes comes out?

If that blind trust is towards the company/person making the product, I'm afraid that is not an interesting or new concept. It is called brand loyalty or "fanboyism" in slang and I think this is actually the opposite of what you would want. Brand loyalty can prevent you from finding the best of everything.

We are not living in the Samurai age, where there is one excellent sword maker and you shouldn't consider swords made by others as long as you can find that guy and afford his swords. We live in a fundamentally different world, where almost all kinds of products (especially consumer electronics) have very short lifecycles.
Perfection is meaningless when it comes to material goods. They're always a means to an end.

Dustin would probably argue that finding a well-designed product is a better means to the end (of forming relationships, living, loving, friends, experiences, adventures). It's a plausible point, but it's empirically wrong.

No one in the history of the world has ever gone, "the one thing I regret most is not spending 40 hours researching to find the perfect set of flatware."

Following this advice is difficult for me. I usually find it very difficult to not do the same: obsessing over the best bed sheets, the best cutting boards, the best computer, the best Linux distribution, the best jeans, the best bike, the best books, the best newspaper, the best way to cut onions, the best suit, the best $MATERIALGOOD.

Because of a recent housing disaster, I lost virtually everything. It has been very liberating. All those hours spent obsessing over stupid shit? Worthless. The friends, family, and relationship that helped me get through it? Worth everything.

A shopping list, Target, Ikea, and Amazon can get you everything you need to live a materially comfortable life in 10 minutes. Everything else is just a means to playing an unwinnable status game.
Did you read the full article?

He's not claiming to be an 'arbiter of quality' at all, he's using the flatware as an example. He specifically says that it's up to each person to determine the best things for themselves:

> It requires that you find the best thing for yourself, which means you need to know what actually matters to you.
Don't be sorry, but think about it. Your goal as a VC is always to maximize profit. If the US capital gains tax rate goes up, that doesn't change your outlook on US based investment on a per-case basis, it just makes all of US investment look "worse" compared to other countries with lower tax rates.

And honestly, that would probably not even be that bad. One of the major reasons techies talk so much about immigration reform is that people with ideas want to go to the US because that is where all the money is because nobody wants to invest outside the borders due to a combination of many factors, but tax rate is always one of them. A higher capital gains tax rate makes other markets more appealing, and I don't have the exact numbers on what other markets would be most appealing at what % hikes, but I can't imagine taking the tax rate up to even 40% would drive investors out of US markets just on the basis of how convenient America is for tech entrepreneurialism already, it reduces a ton of the risk factors involved you described.
Do you think you're too good for us to use capital letters?
I've seen the study regarding cannabis use and psychosis and it is interesting, but I just want to clarify that I meant there is no physical dependency mechanism for cannabis compared to other classes of drugs such as opioids.
If providing a 64 bit binary is a "port" for this product then I suspect you have more tough love forthcoming. Really, the rest of the universe can just "build" across architectures (and I recognize that you probably can't control your partner's code and need to do multilib for the games, but really -- you couldn't make it work on your own code?). But this thread is long enough already. Just realize that you're not inspiring confidence here... Also look at Skype on Fedora for an example of a 32-bit-only multilib aware commercial product.
HostsMan says that it works on windows 8, just use that: http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman
What?

They had already met once. Given the context, it sounds like a continuation of the conversation, casual in nature, from a biz person to an engineer.
It should be noted that on the mobile Android and iOS devices you do not see ads on the homescreen, nor in system apps (eg settings). You don't even see them in vendor provided apps like News and Weather on Android and Weather on iOS. The only way to see ads is to deliberately install an app, or use a web browser.

Windows 8 is crossing that line by showing you ads through no additional action of your own. The real debate amongst commenters here seems to be whether this is a major line, or just another one in the long list of those already crossed.

You can visit many parts of Europe to find less visual clutter. Even here in the US my county bans all billboards except one, so it is quite jarring being elsewhere in the country and seeing how prevalent they are.

I must admin being astonished at American's tolerance of advertising. Somehow people are averaging 5 hours of TV watching a day, yet the broadcasts seem to be non-stop advertising briefly interrupted by snippets of programming. Web pages seem to be substantially similar.
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To sum up the video: We're able to read the paragraph I posted because of the context of the words, the letters weren't so jumbled up, not all the words were jumbled up and the 4 letter words were easy to read.

Good points and it's important to be clear about that.
Prior art for an icon for "clear-all-fields?"
How We're Building Founder Chemistry
I like Dustin, and I love what he's doing with Svbtle, but he has this – as I see it – irrational need to own and experience "the best". Maybe there is such a thing as the best cutlery, and maybe the cutlery he bought is it...but it seems like such an empty, odd, materialistic goal. 'First world problems' writ large.

I first noticed it from this tweet (http://twitter.com/dcurtis/statuses/246843440179056640) where he asks about "the best ramen in Tokyo". Anybody with any cultural, historical, or indeed culinary understanding of ramen can see that this is totally missing the point.

My question is, why continuously talk about and seek "the best" as opposed to, say, "really good"? There's a kind of arrogance entrained in such a mode of thought.
Yep, totally possible
Real life-and-death issue that requires a mathematical solution
Ask HN: Should I minor in computer science, or work more on side projects?
It's time to pick classes for next semester, and I'm still not exactly sure what to do. I am going for a double major in Physics and Economics, the Elon Musk route (still not sure if I plan on going the full 4 years), and I have thought about also going for a minor in computer science or maybe something else.
If I minored in CS or something, I would want to start down that road now, rather than later. I'm already pretty experienced with programming and computers. I know PHP, Javascript, HTML, and learning Python at the moment. I don't know these extremely well, but I can do anything fairly easily with them if I use Google (by the way, does this count as knowing the language well?)

I always have some sort of side project going, and have tons of ideas floating around in my head that I want to build (not necessarily involving computers). If I minored in CS or something, I would have less time to work on side projects because of increased workload.

Is minoring in CS (or something else you suggest) worth it in this situation? Will I learn anything, and does it mean anything when applying for a job at a startup/other company, especially if I tell them I learned how to program decently on my own?

Thanks!
Yeah, that's fair, but shipping with ads isn't the point. The point is to replace desktop apps that aren't capable of serving their ads or contributing to data that will improve their ability to monetize said ads. That, and to prevent someone else from doing the same.

I agree that it's not a the most overt of plays, but for that matter, it's not like Android injects ads into the home screen. Google's smart enough to know they'll kill the goose that way.

It makes the default search engine theirs, the browser theirs, location data theirs, any usage data–however aggregated and non-personally identifiable–theirs, encourages you to store your files with their cloud service (vs. doing it yourself or using someone else's who can't leverage it for ad revenue, e.g., SpiderOak's), and so on, all things that will drive up competitive CPCs and CPMs.

It's about the land-grab that's going on right now, with the major players afraid of seeing the potential future balance of power shifting heavily to someone else, and with the downsides so high, they all want to get in while they can. Think of it as online advertising's own little cold war (but without the awesome fighter jets, spaceships, and submarines!).

Nearly all of Google's revenues still come from ad dollars, and everything they're doing is to make sure they make progress on two fronts: expanding reach, and mitigating the fact that the growth of mobile is killing the revenue they could previously made from desktop activity.

I had dinner with a Google exec last week, and he said to me, "the meme the made the rounds is right: we hate Facebook, but really only for what it's made us become. I miss the days when we all focused on search."
Human beings can be very interesting, but if exposed incorrectly, they're also dull.
http://www.fda.gov/RegulatoryInformation/Legislation/default...

"The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 was passed after a legally marketed toxic elixir killed 107 people"

1908, when over-the-counter headache pills might kill you:

http://books.google.com/books?id=nssSAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA4-PA6...
Webscript.io : Potential Webscript security breach
webscript.io was launched last week, just saw the mail from the Support, and they are having a security breach already

======
Planet Rational's Amazon Web Services credentials have been inadvertently exposed, potentially leaking Webscript user data. (Planet Rational is the company behind Webscript.) While we don't know that any data was accessed, we do know that it was possible.

What we recommend

We recommend that any credentials used in scripts (e.g., Twilio secret keys or email passwords) should be treated as though they have been compromised.

We also recommend that all users change their passwords. To change your password, log in to Webscript, visit https://www.webscript.io/settings, and click the "change password" link.

(Note that Webscript only stores password hashes, generated with 12 iterations of bcrypt and a random salt.)

What happened?

We made a human error despite a review process meant to catch such errors. One of the Webscript examples shows how to use Amazon's S3 service from Webscript. In building that script, we made use of our Amazon credentials, and we inadvertently published those credentials in the example code. These credentials have already been changed, but there was a window in which the credentials were visible and active.

In the future, we will never use Planet Rational's AWS credentials in any examples, and we are adopting a more rigorous checklist-based process to make sure we don't leak any secrets in code examples.

We are very sorry for this. We take security seriously but made a mistake.

In addition to this email, we will be writing a post on the Webscript blog (http://blog.webscript.io) about what happened.

If you have any questions or concerns, please simply reply to this email.

Sincerely,
Steve Marx and Todd Proebsting (Planet Rational founders)
Nitpick: even for quantum mechanical effects. The equations have no randomness in them. As far as we know, the laws of physics are deterministic. It's just that we can't know in advance which Everett branch we will subjectively experience. We could (in principle) compute what proportion of Everett branches lead to what outcome, though.

Probability is still in the mind. Not in the territory.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/ (In case you didn't already spot me.)
I had the following experience, which I considered quite useful.

I was traveling and in the meantime let a friend stay at my apartment. For this, I moved all of my belongings to the basement. After I returned, I shared my apartment with another friend. It was small and quite full, so I only took back the bare necessities from the basement.
At some point I noticed that I had taken all that I needed from the basement, and that the rest was mostly unnecessary. So every once in a while I go to the basement to take out some things and throw them away.

The good thing about this approach was the following: Don't go through your stuff and think what you can throw away. Assume that you want to throw everything away and pick what you want to keep.

It's much easier to decide to keep something than to decide to throw something away.
This is quite possibly the finest linkbait article I've seen in a long time. :) (tldr: returning the base model because it's SO AWESOME that he wants a higher end version).
What did you end up doing with your code? Would you be able to run it today with the low-cost broker APIs?
This particular feature may been less a function of Apple design philosophy and more a function of Siri being built on top of a contextually-sensitive disambiguation engine.
Airbnb should go all the way and start renting out trailers in the desert. Attach gigabit fiber as well, big opportunity in that. With self-driving cars and self-flying drones on the horizon there'd could be a first mover advantage for a short while.
I think the article writer doesnt differntiate between the Win OS itself and the content–free apps that comes installed by default in the modern interface! I think Microsoft has a full right to put ads on these apps as they are 1)Free 2) They are an interface if thier content–based websites which have ads anyway.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=104241 "they were willing to accept Opus support, it's just not a priority"

Opus is already in the tree for "chromoting".
Dustin: "The long term durability of each utensil is also important, and so is the slipperiness of the metal against food. Yanagi thought about these things."

Product page: "Yanagi Flatware... the essence of Japanese design. Warm and organic, yet minimal and sophisticated, it is made of 18/8 stainless steel." (Product page)

It may look nice but will it last? The stainless steel is graded at 18/8 which means it's more likely to rust than flatware graded at 18/10, not to mention sterling silver.
100% agree with you. I love the concept of Persona, but it has a serious cold-start problem. If I could implement it and nothing else on my site, I would, but unfortunately the reality today is that most users don't know it.
What if you just like learning about how objects are made? I'm fascinated with the creative process... Suddenly we're being told, as geeks, that seeking understanding is wrong?! I really don't get it.

I will make sure that I stick to appropriately cool objects and product design that doesn't include flatware.
Bad argument made worse with terrible analogies.

Rounded rectangle "portable display devices" are hardly new [1].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipboard
For clothing, I learned a nice little trick.

Go to your closet and turn all of your hangers around backwards, so that the tip of the hook is facing you. Go do it now. Also, add a reminder in your calendar for one year from now.

Now, each time you wear a piece of clothing, when it goes back into the closet, put the hanger in normally (tip of the hook away from you). When your reminder comes up in a year, donate to charity any piece of clothing that still has a backwards hanger.
The first-party apps can be removed. You just right-click on it and uninstall.
But why? I know nothing about flatware. What about the history of how it evolved? Why do we have a spoon and a fork instead of a spork? You could learn a lot, perhaps of design, that could help you in a completely unrelated area.

That plus I use my flatware a lot.
I agree. Especially with the "hindsight" part.

http://www.worldwidestore.com/images/full_size/41611.jpg
Looking for problems to solve? Watch this daily.
"Gmail Man" ad hypocrisy in 3, 2, 1 ...

Wondering how are they going to sort things out when Gmail is ad supported (perfectly fine with that, although no ads via IMAP / Android app) vs a product you're actually paying for.

I almost felt sympathetic for their efforts with their new ecosystem. Close, but no cigar. Windows 7 stays till supported. Which, for the Professional version, is actually 2020 aka more than the average lifespan of the hardware itself.
Indeed, just to give some props to Nokia, my (now retired) Nokia N8 running its latest Symbian OS does the same thing for its alarm functionality and tells you the time duration before ringing.
That's a hard one. When there's no standard it's always tricky to be the canary in the cage.
I'm guessing a word is out of the question.

Whatever icon you go for, be sure to test it. In my experience, many discovery problems come down ambiguous or vague icons

Jared Spool has 3 short rules about icon choices: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2009/06/28/old-news-about-ico... worth a read.
That's my point - I expect it to get incrementally better between major releases[1]. That doesn't seem to happen - at least not on the response handling. Voice recognition seems to improve slightly, but that's the nature of having lots of training data.

[1] On new functionality that requires resources installed on the phone (the new sports scorecard things, for example), I understand that only happening on new releases. When I say "take me home" and it only starts navigation sometimes, it clearly has the ability to start nav based on something, so I expect that to happen more reliably.
MasterCard rolls out credit card with display and keypad
Is this an advertisement for cutlery?

Tune in next week when we will be told what the best toilet paper is.
Yeah. Please see my other comment. It's not about putting ads on the home screen like we all assumed in the 90s to be the logical conclusion of where we were headed ("one day your car will be free, but it'll be covered with Marlboro inside and out!"), but mobile device usage is increasing and cannibalizing at blinding rates, and the more they can control every aspect of the experience, the better they'll be able to stop the bleeding (which will happen, however good their takeover is), and position themselves for the future. The last thing Google wanted was to watch was Apple and Microsoft slug it out in the mobile OS business, add a dominant share of mobile use to an already dominant share of desktop use, watch mobile become the new desktop (and they touted those stats internally for years before they announced them publicly), and almost certainly wind up the next Yahoo: a company all but a handful of others would be happy to be, but no longer the dominant player, or even a terribly influential one, at that.

(And what county is that, if you don't mind my asking? Sounds like paradise, right about now!)
I did, and that qualifier struck me as little more than a figleaf.
That flatware has design issues. I went through a lot of knife/fork combinations. The little "nubs" on these serves a few important purposes.

1. It gives an easier point to grip, particularly for people that have problems gripping.

2. It stops liquid (e.g. a juicy steak) from dribbling down the fork on to your hand.

Of course, it doesn't look at cool...