skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you want an api to generate file preview images?
I'm trying to come up with an idea for a hackathon (hackpr.eventbrite.com) and thought it might be cool to make a service that could generate a thumbnails of any kind of file.

You send the url of a file and the service will give you the url of an image preview of the contents of that file.

I have an idea on how to do it but was wondering if you guys were interested in using something like that. What is the point of building something nobody wants to use.
Asset X + liability X = net Zero Equity change

Accounting 101

Returns only increase if there is positive drift to the underlying asset walk. In other words, this only makes sense if prices are OK. If prices are fundamentally "off" (ie, housing bubble, stock market bubble), your going have your "correction" magnified.

Just worth being accurate in thinking.
I understand that. And I believe you.

But my feeling is this: even though hull will take my privacy seriously, facebook, twitter, will not. By integrating those services it will not be completely up to hull to secure my privacy, specially with the low tactics used by facebook.

I think is relevant to share this feeling I have. Nowadays I find myself agreeing with RMS more and more.
It's a civil issue why would anyone go to jail?
The Bull's-Eye Theory Of Forecasting: Shoot High
+1 for reminding me of tbl. :-)

EDIT: Wanted to say, tbl nailed it for me that whatever conveniences WYSIWYG formatting might offer, it is never a good substitute for typesetting (a strong opinion to this day -- I still prefer typesetting for documents that need to 'travel')

And yes the letter(heads) came rather nice too.
I think that Apple/Google/Samsung each still think that they can somehow "Win" the patent war. It should eventually become blindingly obvious to all of them that they can't.
Contre Jour an HTML/JS game from MS
[In Canada] The File Sharing Lawsuits Begin: Thousands Targeted at TekSavvy
It's a crash bug. Bugs happen.

It is not a design flaw. Sure, this specific vulnerability would not be there if the remote sync feature wasn't there, but people like features.

Chrome has a pretty good security track record. I'm not worried.
Lester's Time Has Come Today
you could just disconnect from the internet, and the browser stopped crashing.
I heard stories about hospitals locking cables into wall sockets because else people will use the power to charge there phones. So I think it can be disruptive. But I agree its a bit over the top to use the word disrupt in the context of the article.
Yes definitely. I'm here for the technical discussion which I think is unsurpassed.
Just like megaupload was a bandwidth monster, you would be surprised with the hardware and bandwidth requirements these sites have once they become popular ....its not a system you run on Amazon AWS ... And investment in network protection you need to defend against DDOS ...?
I wrote a VT-100 emulator for my Atari ST so I could do the same thing with the school's Data General Eclipse MV-8000.

Much nicer being able to complete assignments within walking distance of the refrigerator. :)
This is civil, but if they broke the law (overcharging the Government on purpose) it can go criminal. If they want to pursue it of course.
tl;dr: tl;dr
I couldn't agree more.

Linkbaiting is starting to piss me off soooo much.
Currently getting "500. That’s an error. " page. Seems like even the bug has crashed too...!
CSS Fonts Module Level 3
We're a social platform.

That means developers will build social apps and networks on top of our product.

The choice of being integrating with Twitter or Facebook, and exchanging data with those networks is something the application will decide to do or not.

On the other hand, We will never sell the data on our platform, because it doesn't even belong to us, but to the developers using our product.
Chrome Sync is, AFAIK, not a push service.
Something polled a Google server, it returned a bad answer, it crashed the browser.
Why is this important?

Because it's entirely possible that Firefox or Safari, for example, could have been crashed by contacting the safebrowsing server, and the safebrowsing server returning an answer that crashes it.

Firefox also does remote firefox update checks and plugin update checks, etc.

None of the browsers you mention are "independent" of internet servers anymore. They are meant to function independently, as is Chrome, but exactly the right remote bug could likely crash all of them.
You don't sound like an ass!

I was just wondering why something which is almost universally seen as good (or great, even) is running donation drives to get 4 petabytes. (To bring them to a total of about 14 petabytes.)

(I guess I'm comparing to Megaupload's 25 petabytes - which are still(?) sitting in racks not being used.)
I am similarly troubled.

We back up so much of our tools and data, but without a working browser, we're sunk. Especially non-technical people.

That a huge percentage of the internet clients in the world can be simultaneously removed from accessing the internet, either intentionally or accidentally, is troubling me this morning.
This would be an issue if they were the only game in town, last time I checked they have some pretty stiff competition in package delivery, UPS being the one that comes to mind.

Look at it this way, if they are overcharging for delivery but are still getting business then they are charging appropriately for their market.
Angelo and the Window
It's a Stream Cipher, which is an approximation [1] of a One Time Pad, which allows the key to be much shorter than the plaintext.

The hardest part is how to generate the pad from the key.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_cipher#Loose_inspiration...
> "Given the fact that you are losing value on savings due to the central bank increasing the supply of money, you also have to take into the account the amount of time it took you to save up the 100K."

Presumably the hypothetical subject isn't saving money by stuffing it in a mattress. In which case the interest rate on their savings should have been at least able to track inflation.
Most metropolitan areas are like that. I just did the opposite; I moved from metro DC in Maryland to a smaller city in California, and have rarely felt more welcomed.

As with everything, it's what you make of it.
I've been in the same situation. Fortunately for me, the project wasn't very serious and I had no expectation that it was any more than a dry-run. If they're not pulling their weight, and there's no chance that they will in the future, it's worth being direct - being "nice" isn't always the nicest thing to do.
Seems like an attempt to drive traffic to the Jelastic site through content farming (blog posts targeting keywords, etc.). As least they could use authors who know what they are writing about. Doesn't cast Jelastic in a good light...
I don't think anyone suggested taking him along, but even so you could take make pitstop in 2009 and pick him up if need be.
Ten Years of Funding
I put up a landing page and "Showed HN" a few weeks ago created on unbounce. The general thought was that it seemed spammy. Yet, many of the items on the checklist were covered...what gives?
How to Flush Your Reputation Down the Toilet
To your knowledge there are no crash bugs in the Firefox sync code? How much are you willing to bet you're right? I seriously doubt an entire module like that has absolutely nothing wrong with it.

It's pretty ridiculous of you to point at a single mistake in implementation and blame the entire sync feature.
And even that mainly works in big corporation vs big corporation battles. If a big corporation goes after a small company, the small one can only hope to win the lawsuit, and that's if they can even afford the lawsuit. Otherwise they'll just have to pay the full asking price of the "trollish" BigCo.
4 Ways to Promote Friendly Workplace Competition
With European Union patent, wonder if Europe will end up the same problem. A special "court" of appeal and a system immune to the European Court of Justice and sound very similar to the US system.
That argument has been used for about 4 decades now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists and yet corporations still contribute huge amounts of code to free and open-source projects. e.g. http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2012...
How to shut down Internets
Reading | Socyberty
I'm certainly missing some background but if I had the time I'd work my way through it just for the hell of it. The problem he attempts solving here is extremely important so I welcome any attempts made at it.
This is how I interpreted it as well, but I'm not a lawyer, either.
And hasn't the market decided? Users are buying both Android and iPhone devices, and to a far lesser extent WinFones. Since Android has far higher market share than Apple, it seems like this should be perfect. Yet for people who are actually buying apps online, Apple seems to be doing quite well.

Perhaps you're idea of letting the market decide isn't really focused on the market so much as developers...
Leveraging the collective online voice
I can only think that transparency to a group of intelligent people would be cause for success. If you hired these individuals to build your product, you must trust them to be smart people. If you can't trust them to understand your job by explaining it, you shouldn't be trusting them with coding.
I never realized that before: since the trolls don't make anything, they could never infringe. Wow.

Shouldn't there be a requirement to have an actual stake (i.e. sales lost) in order to file a lawsuit?
"Review my startup" posts should be moved to
http://www.pivoted.co
Once rolling, there is no stop to the war until there is a winner declared by media.
This article defines "troll" far too broadly, in including any non-practicing entity. The whole point of turning something into a property right is to be able to trade it, and have the new owners enforce the original rights. It's conceptually no different than someone who buys a farm, doesn't plant anything on it, but sues people who trespass through it. The law doesn't require you to do anything with your property rights.

There are practical reasons for this. My law school alma mater, Northwestern, developed and patented the drug that became Lyrica. They sold the patent rights for about $700 million. Northwestern was not going into the prescription drug business. That would be utterly ridiculous. Treating patents as a property right allowed them to take the invention and "exit" by selling it to someone else. All research universities use this technique heavily: Stanford, MIT, etc.

Now, you may not agree that propertization is the right tool for inventions, but the fact remains that when you're discussing a property right it's irrelevant what someone trying to enforce that property right otherwise does with the property.

IMO, "trolling" should be limited to those who assert frivolous or weak patents to get quick settlements, not people who try to enforce legitimate patents. This is completely orthogonal to what sort of bar you think there should be for legitimate patents, or whether there should even be patents, by the way.
Now It Is Personal: American Airlines Customer Service & Emergency Policies
How about focusing on making the internet a better place? These tips generally do the opposite.

Funny that notification control's goal is to prevent web services from spamming you, but all of this advise is about how to spam other people on the internet.

The focus of all these things seem to be entirely self-serving, without any focus on really providing value to people. Instead, figure out how to help others so they actually want to share your content. If you can't do that, the work you are doing is not worth doing — and indeed harmful.
This site is pretty similar to Reddit, so I'm guessing that they would have very similar monetization strategies:

http://profy.com/2009/01/03/reddit-figured-out-how-to-moneti...

Incidentally, Reddit isn't as profitable as you might imagine, given its immense traffic and highly specific demographics.
It is frustrating when people look at the complex trade-offs between developer time efficiency and software performance and see only a dichotomy between good and bad programmers. Better programmers are just that much more efficient with the more efficient tools.
DIY PlayStation Controlled Tank Developed By Syrian Rebels
Ask HN: App portfolio site now that Kickfolio doesn't do that anymore?
Kickfolio used to offer a nice overview of your apps when you gave them your iTunes URLs - they automatically pulled your apps' icons, screenshots, and even positive review remarks. Now Kickfolio seems to have "embraced the pivot" and is going a different route. My old "portfolio" is now giving me a 404.

Is there a different site where I can easily and quickly create an elegant looking "portfolio" of my iOS apps?
Darn, because my next project is for startups.
Well, as a religious person, I admit I chafe at it, but I'm pretty sure I could fake my way through it. I'd be a lot more worried about accidentally running off my mouth.
It's pretty amazing how few California, or even Bay Area, natives there are working in tech in that same area. People have always flocked here for jobs and money, but the scale is just so much larger this boom. It's pretty shocking when your company of 100+ has only half a dozen native Californians.

Not necessarily a bad or a good thing, it's simply quite the surprise compared to almost every other career in the area. The flock out of state isn't much of a surprise either, considering the massive spikes in rent and cost of living even in the historically lower income areas.

Even I'll admit to considering a move, despite being a native for more than a few generations. It's just getting too crowded, feels even more so than just 15 years ago, and the cost premium is starting to look less appealing...
Can anyone explain this? If you tell me a candy bar costs $2 (e.g., that's the posted price), and then at the register, you actually charge me $10 and I don't say anything, can I sue you later? I realize that's a ridiculously simplified example, but it seems in principal/by analogy the same.
Concours iStonSoft iPad et iPhone to Computer Transfert
I don't actually have panic attacks in open plan offices anymore. I used to, but I'm pretty well stabilized and I don't need medication most days. But a lot of people have this problem a lot worse than I ever did and they shouldn't be marginalized just because they can't handle horrible office environments.

I don't let it get to me. It's not personal, and I know cognitively that no one's really watching me. (I spend more "web time" in open-plan offices because I can't get into flow.) It's just creepy. It probably reduces productivity by 80%, but surprisingly that doesn't seem to matter, because modern work environments seem to cripple everyone about equally.

What open plan says to me is that my employer cares more about my personal availability than productivity. Which is not worth taking personally, but it is a depressing statement.
Is it possible that Unbounce landing pages themselves are considered spammy? You're asking "I followed most of Unbounce's advice when I created a page with Unbounce... why did it fail?" before asking "is Unbounce's advice correct in the first place?"

I don't know the answer either way, to be completely honest, but my personal view is that that particular style of landing page gives the notion that "this site is such a new idea in my head that I haven't even begun it!". That's my opinion, anyway.
>This is not the sort of adaptation to eliminate falsehoods referenced here. The bible includes elements cribbed from other religions, it is not rewritten to be factual.

Both things happen.

Religions also take things out of their "canon" as the society evolves, precisely to take out old mistakes.

The way the Catholic church does not endorse slavery or the "Spanish Inquisition" as it once did, for example.
I have safebrowsing and auto update disabled since FF3.6
When people speak of "abstract math", they generally mean mathematics, because they use the term "math" far too loosely. In a very real sense, a person can be taught to "do math" all the way through Calculus III, Linear Algebra, and even Differential Equations and still not have any real aptitude for mathematics.
Competition is always good. But... Why interfaces are SO ugly?
The premise of this article is that we'll all move back to the JVM because database access on spinning disks is slow, and when we all get SSDs then the speed difference between interpreted, dynamic languages (Ruby/Python) compared to anything on the JVM will become significant. Before it was insignificant because database access time dominated the duration of a request.

I completely disagree.

If equally slow database access makes the language comparison useless, then equally fast database access will be similarly pointless. The slow, dynamic language gets the same speedup, and now can return a page in 50ms instead of 300ms; the static language on the JVM returns the page in 30ms instead of 250ms -- that doesn't matter for serving pages to people.

Ruby and Python have become popular to use for writing web applications because the development process is pleasant and forgiving to newbies.

If you need to scale a site and really squeeze out performance, then you're already going to employ smart caching strategies and maybe move off the dynamic language as well (e.g. Twitter). If you get a "free" speedup from SSDs, you have even less need to switch off the slow, dynamic language.
> invites start january 1st, 2013.

Assuming I actually get the invite on Jan 1st, it's the first time ever I felt like I didn't sign up to a beta black hole.
And this is the reason why day by day, more game only work on online mode, and don't save even a cache in the local storage.
I'm confused how this would be effective.

1. Insurance works because the risk of X happening to individuals in a group of insured people is low individually, even if over the entire population it isn't. This ensures the number of actual payouts are low. Here, the risk of troll lawsuits happening to all insured companies is high. Thus, you'd have to pay out to almost everyone.

2. Insurance also only works (for the insurer, anyway) if the premiums cover the payouts. Given the typical award is tens of millions or hundreds of millions, you'd need both lots of companies, and very high premiums.

To cover a single $100 million award, you'd need 10k companies to pay 10k each in premiums. If 100 million gets awarded against each of 5 companies in the lawsuit, now it's 50k premium per 10k companies.

ISTM it quickly becomes infeasible as long as damages are so high.

Note: General types of lawsuit insurance are already available, but they exclude patent infringement. Patent infringement/litigation insurance is also already available, but it's expensive as hell, per the above.
Is there any advantage (speed?) in using something like Awk over something like Python?
It's completely appropriate for an art piece about the limitations of the 1960's mainframe era to end with a demonstration of how little we have actually progressed.

Brava!
I would LOVE to work in an office like that. Mine is so noisy, it drives me insane and I cannot concentrate on my work.
I fail to see how much of this is that useful to most startups. It seemed more about how to create and push mass amounts of spam in the hopes of hitting it big. I didn't see much in the way of actually increasing your interaction with potential customers. It's just a numbers game about how many eyes can I get in front of hoping something works.

I'm sorry, but I just cannot possibly take someone who uses the term "growth hacking" serious. Much like job postings using "ninja" or "rockstar"; it's just a blatant attempt to appear cool or hip in a strange way.
Great explanation, thank you. Always fun to know about non-determinism at the hardware level.
This article defines "troll" far too broadly, in including any non-practicing entity.

Did you get past the first paragraph?

The phrase that I saw used in the actual article itself, rather than the leader, was "patent-assertion entities" which is to say companies whose primary line of business is suing for patent rights.

That said, some of them are suing on behalf of entities like your law school alma mater. But the entities doing the suing have no other business.
Actually that is an oppertunity for those who are good at convincing people to go to the sites that normally don't advertise on porn and show them the advantages (cheaper rates).

I understand that you don't want a brand like ms. Fields cockies next to a gangbang, but that is soley for ads that promote brand adwareness -- those that directly sell products could properly advertise on porn sites with little risk. I doubt anybody will discount bingocardcreator because Patio11 got a great deal on ads.

(In fact people are known to be less rational when turned on, so it might make sense to put less "need to have products" closer to the porn).
Zohhak - JUnit parameterized tests
The conventional wisdom is to start with a niche, do well, and expand. They may not be impressive to you yet, but certainly some of them have the ability to do more that what you can see initially.
> I find your reaction fascinating

Ooo fun, -4 on the Karma for that comment.

My comment was not related to porn so much as to the obvious link-bait and predictable "0_o pron!" pile-on. Smells faintly of Reddit with a soft lingering bouquet reminiscent of DIGG of yore.
Basketball: Basketball Horse - Free Online Games
Ask HN: What words/phrases/concepts do you see in most Hacker News threads?
What words, phrases, or concepts appear in virtually every Hacker News thread?
FTC Investigating Cellphone Apps Over Privacy Concerns
The main thing that changed in the industry is that now these adult video streaming sites basically serve you the content for free, and like television that's paid for by the advertisers, it's paid for through affiliate fees. These are mainly affiliates for the online gambling companies who don't have access to other advertising channels, and a bit of adult dating. The issue is that conversion from this type of content to gambling doesn't make perfect sense, so it's often a better idea to produce content that are a natural fit to gambling instead.
"Real Artists Ship"
— Steve
Stanford MBA price tag hits $185K: Highest in the world
S2S anyone? Startups to Startups!
<3, thanks for the kudos
Meet the Dancing Otter That Helped Obama Win the Presidency
The problem for me is that it NEVER just becomes background noise that I can ignore. It is just constant, never-ending distraction that significantly reduces my productivity.
Or maybe, having been called out, they'll pay whatever it costs, and then fix it once, and it won't happen again? Sorry, but I'm not impressed by mindless cynicism.
I'll start with this:

The word "orthogonal". I see it in numerous comments, especially the longer ones.
GazeMetrix Image Recognition Scans Instagram for Brand Products & Logos