skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The flickering was highly noticeable on my MacBook Air until I lowered the screen brightness. An interesting side-effect of the rapid switching is that whenever I blink, I could see the artifacts. Or when rapidly moving my head. I figure persistence of vision and peripheral vision might have something to do with it. Also smaller tile size appears to reduce flickering.
I don't see why they wouldn't try to become the premier business Android device. They have the knowledge/talent to create a well integrated device. They simply made some bad bets, whereas iOS and Android were the right bets. Now they should acknowledge that and co-opt Android to catch up. At the end of the day they make money on the hardware side of things so this does make sense.
Real World Code Sucks
Ah, this is what made Risk so frustrating at times. Many a good friend was lost to that game.
I think you are over-estimating the technical capacity of most users of SnapChat.

This provides 'good enough' security for most people's uses.
How does a normal user record the screen on iOS?
Well, I'm one of the fortunate few who managed to escape from graduate school (Masters and PhD) in 4.5 years in an engineering field. I am the first to admit that I am very, very, very lucky in a variety of ways that made this possible. But one of them is as follows.

I similarly have a hard time focusing for long periods of time. Like many people, while I'm not manic-depressive, I have manic-depressive tendencies. For a week or two I feel depressed and don't want to do anything. Then for a week or two I'm really excited about research and get a ton done. Then back to depressed. It's just the way I am, and my situation doesn't seem very unique from talking to many of my friends. Sometimes research is inspiring, sometimes it's frustrating and tedious. I think much of that is perception, and that really all that's changing is a fundamental chemical shift in your moods.

In any case, what I realized back in undergrad is that when I'm in a depressed mood, I don't work. At least, not on creative, difficult, interesting stuff. It's just impossible, intimidating, frustrating, and a waste of my time. All it does it work to prolong my depression.

Instead, I focus on what I call cultivating boredom. I do things like read hacker news until I've read all the articles. Or god forbid read slashdot. Or NPR. Or meditate. Or much better; practice karate, go for a walk, take mind altering substances (you know, like nicotine), hang out with friends, cook, that sort of stuff. Sure, I still take care of the little logistical things that need doing, but I don't try to do creative work when I'm in this mood. It's counterproductive.

Instead, I basically use up all my avenues of distraction, and eventually doing that creative, hard, difficult, complicated work becomes attractive again in comparison with sitting at my computer reading facebook. This process takes about 3-4 days. Then, I suddenly just... flip. And then I'm manic again, and I'm roaring through piles of highly creative work that is of incredibly good quality.

So instead of wearing myself out doing superficial tasks, I try to actually let myself rest and most importantly, become bored so that my mind can recover. This is the only way I have found to work productively as a graduate student.

It's only anecdotal, of course, but I probably worked an average of 25 hours a week. I'd spend two weeks straight working 9-10 hour days and then coming home and writing grants and papers and thesis. Then I'd burn myself out and do literally nothing worth even remembering for two weeks. And after two weeks of that I'd be bored and really excited about working a ridiculous amount again. And in this way, I managed to graduate in 4.5 years, in a lab where the median graduate student was in their 5th year, and many were in their 7th year. It's quality of work, not quantity of work, nor time spent in lab that lets you graduate.

Anyway, worked for me. Might not work for you. Try at your own risk. But I've never found another way to work that makes me happy, lets me get through my depressive periods in a reasonable period of time, and which produces high quality creative work products.
Do Coding Standards Make a Difference?
You're making a fool of yourself. Try again to look at the basic concept. For EVERY POSSIBLE cleartext of the correct length, there is a key that decodes your ciphertext to it. Every. Possible. Cleartext.

Pick whatever method you use to decide if a cleartext 'makes sense'. EVERY POSSIBLE message that fits your criteria will be output during the brute forcing process.

You don't seem to realize just how nigh-infinite the number of different keys there are. If I give you a kilobyte blob of one-time-pad data, it could be any [sub-minute-long] sentence that has ever been spoken or ever will be spoken in the history of the human race, in any language.

.

I can explain it a different way, that will explain how you can kill the signal. Okay so the original message has 0s and 1s.

1. What happens if we take a 1 and have a 50% chance of flipping it: we get a 0 50% of the time and a 1 50% of the time.

2. What happens if we take a 0 and have a 50% chance of flipping it: we get a 0 50% of the time and a 1 50% of the time.

3. What happens if we know someone had a 0 or 1 and had a 50% chance of flipping it: we get a 0 50% of the time and a 1 50% of the time.

4. What happens when we try to figure out the original bit: Well both 0 and 1 have the same output, so it is fundamentally impossible to figure it out without knowing if they flipped it.

5. Repeat for every bit. Store which ones you flipped. Congratulations, you have a one-time-pad utilizing the XOR method of application.

.

Also you're right that adding noise as in addition won't mask a signal, but we're not 'adding'. We're looking at the signal, and the completely random noise, and marking down whether they match or not. If I tell you that bits 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 matched my coin flips that doesn't tell you a single thing about what my data was.
Wow, totally orthogonal answers, both of which answer an interpretation of the question you were asking. Were you asking (a) how to set up your own debit card that works with the current system, or (b) how to MAKE your own card, from scratch?

(I'm a guessin "(a)").
But it's very easy to write an app that's called "SnapChat Self-Destructing Image Saver" and then the feature becomes pointless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cow_problem
There are video-recording devices that are not iPhones.
An iPad lover’s review of Microsoft Surface
Same effect is seen with LED brake lights or even Christmas lights... they appear to flicker if you are moving when you look at them, particulary if they are in your peripheral vision field.

I'm particulary sensitive to this; back in the days of CRT monitors I could not use any with a refresh rate of less than about 75Hz without being consciously aware of the flicker.
E17 is out
It's been a while since I've used Firefox as my primary browser, but in my experience, long running use of Firefox used way more memory than Chrome. Because of its process per tab architecture, Chrome has always been able to clean up unused memory much better than Firefox. To me that's more important than saving memory on individual tabs, because I leave my browser open for weeks at a time.
Question:

we actually have not shown this to anyone just yet

Did you at least iterate this with people before going out to build it?

Feedback:

The site design could use improvements. I'm at a lost on what the site is about if I didn't actually read what you wrote here. That said, not only is the messaging not clear, it doesn't indicate to me why I would register an account (no visible discussion forums, etc) or what I can even do on the site.

And launching with potentially tacking multiple shows (assumption base on what is written above) is very scattered and unfocused. I would recommend focusing with a handful (maybe even one) show, and capturing the community with that and then expanding. There are fan sites (not exactly your angle) that do this and do extremely well.

EDIT: I noticed the dropdown only covers two shows for now but I strongly recommend starting with one.
What Wikipedia can tell us about the future of news — Tech News and Analysis
Well, if they're using systems like Amazon SES for delivery, they might've been trying to save some processing time and bandwidth by combining multiple recipients in one email (this is a perfectly normal way to send group emails). The key, though, is to put the extra recipients in the BCC field. My speculation is that this was a rookie mistake (maybe an intern or new hire tasked with the Christmas email?), or maybe Pingdom isn't used to sending marketing/mass emails. (Most of their emails are transactional, at least as far as I know).
It's amazing how well my eyes reconstruct the original image from the demo http://persistent.info/web-experiments/temporal-dithering/ I had to blink (to capture a "screenshot" in my eyes) to see that the distorted frames were really there.

Now, obviously, the way my eyes do it is temporal averaging. Thus, a camera with a sufficiently long exposure would capture it just the same. What it does prevent is screenshots, taken internally by the device - which generally don't do averaging or have a concept of "exposure". Of course, that could be implemented, but it's not standard at present.

He mentions using more than two frames - a less precise approach is to just add massive random noise over an indefinite number of frames (a noisy video of a static image), and instead of taking care that they cancel out, just rely on statistical convergence. Depending on how much noise is added, it gets more difficult to see the original.

I guess there's a risk that only a little noise is added in some frames, revealing the person. So perhaps instead of adding random noise, you use offsets of a legitimate face. This would make either single frame actively misleading, and perhaps not obviously distorted. Your eyes wouldn't be deceived (I think...), because they average the pixels, like a long exposure.

Also, one could selectively apply the technique - as google street-view blurs out people's faces, but nothing else. This might reduce the flicker.
Even if it were to become a commonplace way to time-protect images, I can't really see Apple making their screenshotting functionality actually deal with it - they'd be doing it just to circumvent this simple security system, it wouldn't have any other benefits. On Android, though (and jailbroken iOS), I can definitely see people writing mods to break this right away.

I don't think that this technique (even in a more complicated form) could ever be exploit-proof. Even with more randomness or noise, a computer can ultimately compute the same averaging that our eyes are doing, and could always get the source image back.

There's an even easier exploit too: just record the screen with another device.
PLAYMOBIL Pirates Ship and Toys in Gameloft’s new Android Game
Absolutely lived this. Resonated with the last year and a half of my life trying to build a sustainable business off open source software[1].

[1] http://theopenphotoproject.org
This is cute. I don't know if I want one, but it's a cute idea.

Your reward structure is screwed up, though:

$99 - QUICKEST BACKERS · 1 God-i · At $100 off of List Price
$149 - EARLY BIRD SPECIAL · 1 God-i · At $50 off of List Price
$189 - IndieGoGo SPECIAL · 1 God-i · At $10 off of List Price

I think you meant, $99 gets you $10 off, $189 gets you $100 off. I see 4 people have already signed up at the $189 level -- I guess they didn't read carefully :-)

I think I would want to know what the list price was going to be before I would chip in for this.
Ask HN: What technology should I use for my new project?
Question for my super geeky HN Friends:

I'm building an app. At a very high level, it will be an Android app that pulls and sends some JSON for a picture-rating system. I expect this to scale quite a bit and may become very popular. Given that option I am thinking I want the best technology for the job, even if it's something I don't know and will have to learn. Here are the options I'm considering:

Node.js service
Asp.Net Service
PHP script

Database:

Most likely MySQL or MS-SQL.

My question is, what do you guys suggest? I know that NO-SQL stuff is all the craze right now, but I don't feel really comfortable with keeping a lot of data in one of these stores without knowing a lot about them. I have extensive experience with MySQL and MS-SQL and trust both of them can do the job great.

The interface on the other hand is much more open. It's just going to be pushing text (images will be hosted on S3) so anything that serves text quickly will work. Heavily leaning towards Node.JS for this, but I'm not set yet.

Any advice or input would be great. I expect at least a couple thousand users right from the start, so it will need to be pretty fast. If it takes off it will need to scale up, which is why I may do a Node/MySQL arrangement on Linode so I can just scale up the servers as needed.

Another note: this isn't going to make much money, if any. So a pure .NET/MS-SQL solution may not be the best choice if I have to keep buying expensive servers for a project not likely to ever gain revenue.

Anyway any thoughts you guys might have would be great!
It saddens me a bit how many consumers think this way. They like the stupid pond-drop lock screen too which is good for nothing but killing battery.
> Building an application that lets users discover new investment opportunities in the stock market by seeing portfolios and following the trading patterns of fellow casual traders.

You very clearly haven't thought this idea through, or you don't understand equities.

* If a trader has a small stake, the information in his portfolio won't be worth sharing. It will constitute random noise in a business famous for the level of random noise.

* If a trader has a large stake, publishing his portfolio and his moves will have nothing but advantages to him, and nothing but disadvantages to his followers.

Consider Berkshire-Hathaway. The reason Berkshire-Hathaway does better than the DJIA year after year is because of all the uneducated fools who follow its moves -- too late for them to benefit, but just in time for Berkshire-Hathaway to benefit (because the latter already has a position before news of its trades becomes public).

To put it simply, publishing one's trades is only advantageous to the publisher, never to the reader. Experienced investors know this, so they won't bother to subscribe. Inexperienced investors don't know this, so they might subscribe, until they realize their mistake, then they will bad-mouth the enterprise.

Bottom line: before embarking on this plan, you need to learn how equities work.
This man had unimaginable genius!
I don't think that this style is fantastic. This means that the pair of success/error callbacks is not reified, so there isn't a single object to pass around or manipulate. The result is that composition is harder. In order to create higher order asynchronous operations, like those in Async.js [1], you need to either pass two arguments or use an array or object to pair the error handlers together. This is particularly important if you want to return a pair of handlers from a function.

In the two-callback model, the most common way to reify the handler pair is with a {success:...,error:...} object. This is much better than function(x,y,z,success,error), but still has the problem that you now need to override two handlers if you want to wrap some completion logic, regardless of success/failure. For example, if you want to close a file handle, win or lose, you need to provide two new functions.

Composition greatly benefits from a singular object. The Node.js approach is the (err,data) callback. It's an extremely simple and successful approach. The other approach are promises/futures, which internally can be implemented with one or more callbacks, but provide a nice clean interface for composition. You could get that with success/error objects, but you're exposing the internals rather than an interface, like you should be doing. A good promise interface would let you choose an implementation without tying you to any particular callback model.

[1] https://github.com/caolan/async
Flickr gives away 3 free months of Pro service to current subscribers
Type-o, I meant 500 thousand...
For me the flicker gets better by reducing the block size and it's imperceptible at 1px - there is the occasional run of negatives or positives but that can be fixed with vsync
In general I agree with your ideas, but I think there's a missing component: general use case. Most people only need their computers for email and web browsing. We can further simplify that and just call it - communicating.

Sure, a developer or designer salivates at the idea of more screen real estate, but that's because there's a practical use for it. PC Manufacturers follow, not decide, the needs of their users.

I love my screen real estate because I actually need it. If I just browsed Facebook, wrote a word document, and maybe planned out my finances with a spreadsheet - I'd have a hard time justifying some giant monolith of a monitor. I think this is a largely overlooked factor in the success of the mobile market.

I don't know if everyone's forgot this already but when the iPad first came out, most people were thinking: what in the actual eff is Apple thinking. Sure we all knew it'd sell because, well, Apple is Apple. But if I recall correctly most people were scratching their heads asking, "so, it's a big iPhone right?"

And guess what? It is just a big iPhone! And it succeeded NOT because it was the next "cool" thing but because it was designed to do what most people needed their computer to do, namely, send pictures of their grandkids to each other.
Vizio makes bloatware free laptops:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np3N10Awd64
Google is now making the "X Phone" With Motorola
I was assuming that this was all behind the Great Firewall and I was assuming that this is legit in the sense that Tom is doing this with Skype's knowledge. I.e., if in China, either installer will fetch the Tom-Skype package.
Apocalypse 2012 T-Shirt
On my iPhone the flashing alternating images were extremely visible. I'll have to try it on my computer later. One thing is for sure this won't work well on slower computers or mobile devices.
Grandmaster ensures survival of chess genes
Thanks for the feedback. No, we havent taken this yet to any particular fansite or community yet. The building it was primarily driven from noticing scattered communities all still on traditional style forums.

I do agree it would play best if we go with one or a few shows initially and try and attract some of its currently existing communities. I definitely agree also that the site needs a better indication as to what its all about and why someone should register/login.

The dropdown on the main page is driven off of what topics exist for shows currently.

Thanks again for the feedback and gives a general direction on where to focus my efforts this next week. Cheers!
One instance of this behavior (involving the Firefox toolbar) is referenced here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-s...

Administrators on the English Wikipedia set up a filter to simply block edits which were tainted by that bug.
What prevents a serious camera company like Nikon or Canon from rolling and and owning this market? Is a couple $bn not enough to get them out of bed in the morning?
The Game Nation Theme Park GN Insider Vol.1
Nice work on your first website. What kind of feedback are you looking for? There's a ton to discuss :)
I believe the relationship is drama->pageviews->revenue.
Hmm - is there any way to implement a version of this effect which uses more than two images, or even one which generates a new random image for each frame?
Dear ScottBurson,
Thanks for your comments.
The List Price will be $199, so QUICKEST BACKERS will get $100 off, EARLY BIRDS $50 off and IndieGoGo SPECIALs will get $10 off. I know for sure that some people signed at the $189 level to support the "God-i" project.
I will follow your advise to include clearly the List Price.
Thanks again for your time to review. Mr.Q
Thank you for that wiki reference, I'm adding 'smart cow' to my lexical bestiary.
Digital consumer video cameras predated GoPro by more than a decade, and the market was split between electronics giants. You wouldn't bet on a billion dollar company emerging from nowhere in THAT market, would you?

But, apparently, when you build a great brand, find a solid niche and make something consumers WANT to buy - as opposed to need to buy - great things can happen.
'Alien-Like' Skulls Excavated in Mexico
Paying For Downloads Is Lame, And We Had No Idea Were Doing It
Donate your location to charity with app
You could also use a variant of the effect to do something similar to spot motion, so that one or a few features would appear to move in an otherwise still picture.
@Patio11 A dumb but important question. Is this book about latest buzz, "Growth Hacking" or Market Research(Finding a Niche/Market) for your next product by using available tools?

Please clarify.
They never took it seriously to begin with, and now that its clear that this is a serious market, they're too late. I wouldn't put it past them to invest additionally in GoPro (or some competitor).

Separately - who are GoPro's competitors?
The orcs were mostly CG, I think that has more to do with it. If they were people in makeup and masks, I suspect they still would have felt uncanny. In fact, the orcs in the large battlefield towards the beginning were mostly costumed, and felt uncanny, while the band of orcs later were CG, and felt OK.
http://i.imgur.com/LFPrb.png

23.0.1271.101, 10.8.2 non-retina
Here's a weird thing about randomness that has always bothered me:

In quantum mechanics, if you measure two incompatible observables (like position and momentum) of a system, and then repeat that experiment many times, you will get two lists of real numbers. QM says you can predict the distribution of these numbers, but you cannot predict the individual numbers themselves. The popular way of thinking nowadays is that "the universe is just inherently random".

So I posed the question on the Physics Stack Exchange: how do we know these numbers are truly random, and not the result of some as-yet-undiscovered pseudorandom number generator that is nonetheless deterministic? Luboš Motl (Czech string theorist) replied (a bit abrasively I might add) that yes, the numbers are truly random and plenty of experiments have ruled out the loopholes. Now, there's no way to determine if a set of numbers are truly random, so how he made this bold matter-of-fact statement is beyond me.

Einstein initially believed in "hidden variable" theories, undiscovered properties of quantum systems. Most of these have been ruled out by experiment (this is what Lubos mentioned), but really, this doesn't apply at all to my question of whether those numbers are random or not. Superdeterminism seems to still allow non-randomness, but for some reason, most physicists (notably excepting Gerard t'Hooft) have discounted superdeterminism as nonsense.
It would be awesome if we could bind gestures to shortcuts, I'd love to use this with KMPlayer, Clementine etc.
Thanks! Feedback of any kind is great to hear honestly. Overall, the concept of a news/live-comment system is what we were focusing on. I believe content-driven sites are a great way to get into web development, but also wanted to introduce something new that wasnt just another blog built on a free template. The subject matter is merely a product of being within our interest and we can drive content enough until the site gains traction.

Overall, I realize its tough to gauge with no activity and a wealth of articles/comments to review. I plan to spend some time trying to gain interest in this from active communities as well as make the sites message, intent, and value clearer on the front page.
Jealous??