skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
your handle is humbledrone and your opinions are humbled. Boy am i impressed!
Marin Software files for IPO (Search / Social Media Optimization Software)
This was in response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026802
Excellent! So you mean to say that my schoolyard days of being hated for liking computers are going to come back to me as an adult?
sorry if this a n00b question ... how are they able to target just the right elements on a page across pretty much any website?
That's so true! What I see is, there's so many creative people using Photoshop, putting so much money into Adobe. They could contribute with their own views, ideas, needs, etc. Gimp would become ridiculous good just because of that!
My understanding was that nicotine is not a MAOI; but tobacco has other MAOIs in it: http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#fn2
New Tool, Allows You To Bribe People To Read Your Email With Real Money
Yea it's obviously a fluff piece. At the same time, what kind of details would you expect? As with any anti-fraud it's going to contain a lot of heuristics and stuff that needs to stay secret in order to be effective. So they could probably provide details about how all access is audited, but the real neat parts of what makes it work wouldn't be disclosed anyways.

It's also not clear how Kill Chain helped at all. If they discovered the user, then they could have deactivated his credentials, right? Or are they alluding to that they use live user activity as a sorta honeypot to see if there are other compromised users?

This quote was pretty funny: "An attacker only has one time to be right to get that information out of the network" -- really? Cause I thought usually we think of it the other way around: the defenders have to only mess up once to lose.
Strangely, I do not see this article as anti-tech at all. In order to be a part of the proposed counter-culture you suggest you must first have an understanding of technology that one could only achieve after working with it for awhile. Reading this, I could not help but thinking "so this is what the next phase of geek will look like." Rather than being counter-tech, it is just more discerning. Now that geek is mainstream, we must segment further. A more natural progression rather than a counter-cultural movement.
The masschallenge is open 
The masschallenge is open
On the contrary, it has happened, with unexpected consequences:

...in little more than a single generation, this long relationship with nature has withered in a culture that finds Americans giving themselves up to the indoor ease of the technological way of life. Today’s average American spends most of the day indoors or inside an automobile traveling some hellish commuter road between workplace and home. Experience of his own natural habitat comes largely from watching beautifully photographed films on television. In Sterba’s word, he has become “denatured.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/visitor...
download R: http://www.r-project.org/
It's also exactly what a sufficiently knowledgeable person would do if trying to deliberately damage the li-ion battery.
I really like their quickbooks integration.
How We Put Facebook on the Path to 1 billion Users
It is scary.

But it's a shame that we're expected to distrust journalists working for a reputable newspaper.

Journalists get special legal protections; newspapers get special legal protections (at least, in the UK they do) and asking them to tell the truth doesn't seem too onerous.

Telling the truth is a professional ethical obligation for journalists, and it should be a personal ethical code for most people, and it's just weird to me that we should be asking it of journalists.

(And I'm in the UK where we have scum writing for news papers.)
How the U.S. minimum wage stacks up globally
The lock button on a BMW is completely driven through the CPU. When you lock the car with the remote, the lock buttons inside the car AND THE DOOR HANDLES do nothing. Anti-theft measure I suppose.

Salesmen have to remind every new customer about this, since sooner or later someone locks themself or someone else in the car and the remote has walked away...
Doesn't matter.

At some point you hit memory limits, disk IO limits, or simply a connection limit. It doesn't matter what limit:

If you have some requests that are longer running than others, random load balancing will make them start piling up once you reach some traffic threshold.

You can increase the threshold by adding more backends or increasing the capacity of each backend (by optimizing, or picking beefier hardware if you're on a platform that will let you), and maybe you can increase it enough that it won't affect you.

But no matter what you do, you end up having to allocate more spare resources at it than what you would need with more intelligent routing.

If you're lucky, the effect might be small enough to not cost you much money, and you might be able to ignore it, but it's still there.
Perhaps prove/disprove is a misleading choice of words, but with those terms, the null hypothesis is never proved.

When the null hypothesis is rejected, it is because our test results are below some very small threshold of probability given the assumption of the null (this is then taken as "proving" the alternative hypothesis for the purposes of this test). When the null is not rejected, our results might be just above that threshold, which by our method doesn't reject the null (and neither proves nor disproves the alternative) but certainly doesn't prove the null either. We never prove the null hypothesis: if that's what we were trying to do it wouldn't be the null.
> "spend it on things for which you have no say"

Yes you do, you have a vote. Each party standing for election presents a set of policies some of which include spending policy. The elected party then has a mandate to spend as per the policies outlined. That's how democracy works (well, how it's supposed to work).

If you really had "no say" then that would be a dictatorship?

And let's think about this a little further. Let's say the government doesn't take any money off you and everyone has to fend for themselves. Now, some people with more money are in a position to manipulate those with less money, and we are suddenly ruled by unelected corporations etc. Some argue it's like that already.

This is all pretty standard left vs. right stuff.
Balanced launched API for next-day ACH deposit
No one begrudges a company trying to monetize, but there's an expectation that there will be some communication beforehand.

I'm sure if they sent multiple emails and if OP discovered the matter through official communications and not by looking at the page, then he may have been OK with it but more importantly wouldn't feel like a bait-and-switch was pulled.
Farming is geographically limited and it is a rather large employer in the US. Oil has a effect on more industries than just energy. Tesla would not be able to build their cars with oil products. It's disingenuous to not look at actual employment numbers and reach of industry when trying to say something factual isn't.
If it's a taxpayer-funded database it ought to be free. However, privately created databases shouldn't necessarily be free.. It costs money to assemble data, even public records, so for someone to do the work of compilation and have that work be unprotected will provide a disincentive for people to create the databases in the first place.
> If you're using Heinz' trademark to sell a different product they can sue you easy.

No. If you're using the Heinz trademark in such a way as to confuse and mislead the public, then they can sue you. Otherwise probably not.

Consider the example of Apple Computer and Apple Music (once owned by the Beatles). Two businesses, no conflict, so no lawsuit.

Once Sun Computer threatened to sue me because I had a Web page named "Sun Computer" (the page computed the position of the sun: http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/sunrise/). My argument was that I wasn't trying to confuse the public, and my use of the word "sun" was legitimate because it referred to the astronomical object by that name. Their objection was that my use of "Sun Computer" as a page name caused my page to appear above theirs in the Google search listings.

I decided their position had merit, and I renamed the page. My point is that it is all about the degree to which use of a trademark or trademarked name would confuse the public and hurt someone's business, not use of a trademark per se.
Though a lot of people do not believe it, they declassified Project Mogul which seems to explain it.
Whatever it was that I thought I signed up for, I explicitly did not sign up for an advertising tag, especially not a stealthy one, and on top of that not one that looks like an active endorsement on my part.
Do we really have to make up stories and cool new names like DevOps to get the coders to talk to the server admins?

I guess we do, I guess we do...
The crux of the article is this:

Amazon joins Walmart in push for online sales tax not out of some newfound concern for "marketplace fairness," but because Amazon's business model is changing in such a way that now Amazon stands to benefit from this tax.

In order to provide faster shipping, Amazon is building warehouses throughout the country. These warehouses constitute a "physical presence," which requires them to collect sales taxes, in any event. So, if Amazon is going to have to collect sales taxes under the existing "physical presence" doctrine, it may as well try to expand online sales taxes to whack its smaller competitors who don't have a 50-state network of giant warehouses.

Sigh!
Title change to "Adobe taking 10 percent of earnings from iOS apps published using Director 12"
Physics Paper of the week: Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts
More information, please. Who are you? What do you do? Do you have a blog? Code? Prior projects? Are you an axe murderer?
Everything you have always wanted to know about the Playstation
That quote is often wrong.

For example, there are "freemium" business models where the users are segmented by usage level, or by need of additional features. In those models, the "free" users aren't being sold, they're just potential customers and advocates.

Further, this sort of breach of trust isn't limited to free services. There are paid services that start selling advertisements as well.
I think this is totally fair thing to try out.

But, then Broder should have mentioned it in his article, like: "I drove around for a few minutes on empty while right in front of the charging station to see what would happen. But Tesla's battery outlasted my patience and I decided just to charge instead."
Will We Ever… Simulate the Brain?
Really glad you find it useful, and you're completely right that I need a section on compatibility. The nice thing is that for browsers that don't support Blobs, Amazon allows you to just upload the file as one giant chunk with the same multipart API. I'm not absolutely sure yet (I still need to do some testing), but this should mean that browsers versions as far back as IE 5 will work - only basic XHR compatibility will be required to function. I'm planning on covering as many browsers as possible, I just haven't found a great way to go about this yet. Is there a better option than http://spoon.net/browsers/?
"If our caches are always coherent then why do we worry about visibility when writing concurrent programs? This is because within our cores, in their quest for ever greater performance, data modifications can appear out-of-order to other threads"

I've read the opposite from various sources such as JCIP - a single unsynchronized-nonvolatile write could never be noticed by other threads (i.e. processors). I don't think that case falls into the "instruction reordering" category, does it?
Could this be used for updating windows live tiles in an app?
I know I often drive around for several minutes trying to find a pump at gas stations I have never been to. Those damn light up awnings are just so hard to find.
All well and good, but what about when you say you'll ship the SDK? When you tell Wired and other interviews publicly that you'll have it out, and then you never say a thing. I even emailed and got a response from Eric himself saying "working on it."

The cost of clarity in communication with your user base is $0. Really. All they seem to care about it KickStarter and the whole episode reeks of amateurism which is not what you're supposed to be $10M later. Put up a post. Say what you're doing. Don't let it fester.
I think you are taking it far too hard. If you don't like it, turn it off or switch. Ads showing up in your comments page is hardly the end of the world. Lighten up.
Perhaps it's based on the content of the page and whether they have ads that tie into the content?
RESTful next-day ACH API from Balanced
Spanish Researchers Re-Discover Inertial Navigation
Quoting from the end of the paper:

"Source code and a phase diagram generating Python script are available under the M.I.T. license on github.com at https://github.com/mattbierbaum/moshpits . An interactive Javascript version of the simulation is available at http://mattbierbaum.github.com/moshpits.js ."
The Tesla logged data is definitely available to the user -- there are apps available to help the user interpret/exploit the results:

http://www.teslamotors.com/it_CH/forum/forums/model-s-iphone...
It's not a bait and switch - that's hyperbole at its finest. It's just something you don't like that you weren't notified about but still optional.
I use disqus on my blog for comments. I just checked and I'm not getting what he's getting, and I do have one post that gets ~40 views per day. Weird.
I think Disqus is a great service, and I suspect that this business model will work fine for them, but it's obviously not ideal for everyone.

The economics of hosting comments are interesting -- there is real engineering effort in doing it well; there is product value to some degree of aggregation (spam & bot detection, etc.); the operating expenses are real especially at a Disqus-style scale, but it's not clear that many people would pay even a small subscription fee.

Makes me wonder about the viability of either a federated (not fully p2p, but "local" aggregators), either with or without actual coordination between members of the federation on spammers, e.g.. I'd probably swallow the cost of hosting comments for a few thousand "neighborly" sites, if it meant i had a good commenting system with no commercial interruptions, and be happy to subsidize "good people".
Batch Image Upload with Drag & Drop in the Django Admin
I have to disagree even as someone relying on Disqus in a few different ways.

First off, they did provide notice. I received an email about this at all the addresses I have an account under. Maybe the the author didn't and that sucks but this seems like an edge case and he is one of the exceptions, not the rule.

Second, you can turn this feature off which brings me to my next point. Even if they do decide to change this can you really blame them? The thing is we're all using the service for free and on top of it they're willing to share revenue with users. I mean we can't just expect every free service to never monetize. Could they have done it differently? Sure but lets not give in to the temptation to be armchair CEOs here and proclaim that we know that a different model would have worked better for everyone. I give Disqus the benefit of the doubt that they did their homework and decided that this is the best way for them to monetize and still do right by their users.

I use Disqus on my personal blog and I use it as part of an app I'm quite passionate about. In my app (link is in my profile) I use Disqus in much the same way Tumblr does where you enter your short name and your public pages can have comments. As someone using them in these two different ways I empathize with the author especially when it comes to my app as I don't want the ads associated with anything I'm personally doing but at the same time I'm not blaming Disqus either. I use them, in both cases, as an alternative to rolling my own. Their platform is far richer than anything I could do so even if they didn't allow opting out its still a win for me.

In the end this outrage is unnecessary. Disqus made no secret of this, reached out to us, provided a way to opt out, and even offered to share revenue! On top of that they're still a totally free service that's offering us value. The author himself says his blog will no longer have comments because of this. Why? I'm sure he can create a commenting system himself but obviously Disqus is delivering value in a way that's pretty tough to replace.

Come on guys, its one thing to not like these ads but to not use Disqus in protest really isn't hurting Disqus as much as it is the person who stops using them in most cases. They definitely acted in good faith on this one and we need to stop acting like every free service on the web owes us the service we want, how we want it, when we want it. This isn't a charity we're talking about here, its a web startup. I follow jaquesm's blog and I agree with most of his thoughts but I can't get behind this one.
I'd love to see a cultural movement towards anti-urban, anti-density enabled by technology. You're not alone :)

In my view we would use technology to empower people to form stronger community bonds. The author mentions food industry tech, and that's a major part of my vision also. I think we need to move towards a locally grown seasonal food source instead of shipping food to all corners of the globe just because we can. That's just one piece to the puzzle though, there's obviously a lot more planning that would need to go into it.
Why would you ever believe a company that says it exists to make you happy? Companies exist to make money, that is literally true. There is no other purpose. It just so happens that making people happy is often a reasonable way to make money, but if making people happy doesn't maximize profits, then eventually something else must be done.
I wouldn't know, I've redirected all the disqus hostnames to 127.0.0.1

This has saved me the bandwidth otherwise wasted on ppl's idiotic quips and now, ads.
You don't think Disqus is offering a service? Do you know what the last S in SaaS stands for? This comment makes no sense.
Like many cliches it is proving itself as being true again and again.

So one reason that it (maybe) doesn't add much is that everyone knows it is tue, but doesn't want to think about it.
IPad - Primal desire
I've built fairly large haproxy based infrastructures, thank you very much. Doing this is not particularly challenging.

Actually what I'd probably do for a setup like this would be to balance by the Host: header, and simply have the second layer be a suitable set of haproxy instances balancing each by least connections.

Immediately vastly better than random.
A team that's always eager to assist.
Tip - the human in or near the car reacting to the first opening...
Can we please have some tips on how to market it?
Good point, but keep in mind that if they're a business, then the ultimate goal is to make money. It's kind of like the formula prescribed in Fight Club which refers to whether or not a car manufacturer will issue a recall: the decision will most often be based on which result will net greatest economic yield. If the profits from doing X are more than the expected losses (say, due to customer attrition), then that's a good "business decision".
You can still be the product if you're on the free end of a freemium model. LinkedIn is an example.
Firebase - Making the Switch from Amazon Cloudfront to Fastly
I thought the anti-tech counterculture were called the "Amish"
Office for iOS May Make Billions for Microsoft But Could Doom the Surface
I worked at Amazon for two years - a company where all devs are also ops.

I ran screaming away and swore never again.

Nothing quite achieves the warm fuzzy feeling after a grueling 10-hour dev deathmarch and then getting woken up at 5am by your pager. Nothing quite inspires confidence than week after week of major ops priorities getting sidelined in favor of feature development, resulting in even more late-night firefighting, resulting in groggy, angry engineers in the mornings.

Dev and ops should frequently sit at the same table. They should not be one and the same. I'm not sure what flavor the blog is promoting - I've seen people proselytize for both. DevOps seems to be used interchangeably between "all devs are ops" and "devs work with ops", which in my mind are very very different concepts.
Method Rocks!
Responsive Design in Email issues (css and inline styles combined)
Hi,

I'm having some issues with an email I'm making. With quite a few ISPs stripping out CSS I've combined CSS and inline styles to try to combat it.

The main issues are I ended up using "display:none;" on the inline styles to make some elements appear in the right order, however because I had some other styles relating to it in the @media css it ended up displaying, to combat this I ended up using "display:none !important;" on the inline styles which meant that the @media css didn't end up showing up.

So I guess the question is whether anyone has experience of combining css and inline styles which have worked successfully across other mail clients?

The code is here if anyone wants to have a look -
http://makeyourownmarket.com/test/test-doc.html

Thanks in advance

Steve
The problem isn't "magic" per se, and the problematic components already have very clearly defined singular responsibilities (an API doesn't get much simpler than "dump" and "parse").

Security problems often happen when two components that are perfectly safe in their original contexts are tied together in a way that their designers didn't intend. These parser problems are examples of that.

So it's actually a good thing that frameworks like Rails try to tie together many components for you "magically". The integration of all those little simple pieces is always a chance to screw up security. It's better to do that hard work once, collaboratively as a community, than to have every developer make those risky choices separately every single time.

It's the same cost/benefit analysis that explains why you should never roll your own crypto. Anybody can make a system that's "secure" enough to keep themselves from breaking it, but that's not nearly good enough. You increase security by increasing scrutiny.