skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once the block gets low enough, there might be things visible even while facing sideways or up:

X X
XO X
XO OOX
XO OOX
XO oo OX
XO oo OX
XO OX
XO OX
XXXXXXXXXX
I've created a weekend hack that allows you to specify a minimal grammar and then generates text (which can be code) using it.

It's called Choice Words (https://github.com/fdb/choicewords) It can generate poems but also generative designs (see the README).
Hi!

> I enjoyed your talk on abstracting the grid into it's own layer by adding extra markup.

Thank you very much!

> I was wondering if you've read Grid Systems in Graphic Design?

I haven’t actually, but I’ve always fancied myself a copy. Recommended?
Thanks for the fixes guys. The string of security fix releases go both ways in my head: on the one hand, I'm happy that people are actively tackling the issues as they arise, on the other hand I feel that the handling of JSON, XML and YAML looks overly complicated and that some intrinsic aspects of Rails make it even harder to keep under control (as exemplified by the half-dozen fixes over the past few weeks).

Anyway, Rails is now more secure than it was yesterday, that's a great thing so yeah, thank you very much.
but that would be another system to maintain. I'm happy to outsource this to MixPanel or some other company. My needs are pretty generic. I appreciate your response though.
The proper price of your product is the value it represents to the users of said product. Find the number that accurately reflects this value; use the evidence you gather as part of your marketing approach. "Going too high" is not a problem if it saves your customers money on comparable services.
I would LOVE to export the game history to a screensaver.
How entrepreneurs really succeed (2010)
wtf?

I'm right, he's clearly a try hard with no idea what he's talking about.
Mental health conversations are really tough because no one wants to be stigmatized. Depression and anxiety are issues that millions of people deal with but unfortunately acknowledging personal issues with either is seen as a sign of weakness rather than strength. That'll change as more people in power lift the veil by discussing their own challenges.
If your account is current, it shouldn't make any difference. If your account is not current, there is always the civil court system, debt collection, etc.
Well, previous behaviour has everything to do with sentencing. Seriously, they don't just look at the case and go "41 months!", they weigh everything up and go from there. The likelihood is a security researcher with a spotless past wouldn't have gone through it, prosecution would have pushed for a hard sentence of course but the final judgement takes into account everything.

Basically, the prosecution wanted a harsh sentence to set precedent and weev gave them the ammo to do it.
This is the copied idea of intro.js
Shame on the author of this repository for copying the intro.js idea.
Did you actually read the slides? Most of your comments and complaints are addressed and sound like non-nonsensical fud in context.

I wasn't a fan of stdlib async until reading these slides.
First American Bitcoin Exchange, Tradehill, relaunches
> Voice a concern over the direction some policy appears to be taking? Slippery Slope.

Most of the time I see people calling out a "slippery slope fallacy", they're often applying it erroneously. The actual fallacy is in asserting that a step in a particular direction logically entails a further step in that direction; it is fallacious in most situations to assert the slippery slope as a deterministic necessity.

But that has no bearing on whether or not the slippery slope actually exists; just because it isn't logically entailed doesn't mean that, in the empirical context of the matter, a step in one direction doesn't actually make a further step in that direction more likely.

There is an empirical slippery-slope phenomenon in political debate, related to the concept of the "Overton Window" [1], and it exists contingently irrespective of whether or not it's logically necesssary.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Dev and QA Doing Security Testing: I've Got Management Buy-In, Now What?
I use a notebook, and a nice Pilot G-2 pen with a Mont-Blanc cartridge in it (a hack). That's all. Everything goes into the notebook. I plan each day the day before, and next week on Friday. I have monthly goals (flexible) that are defined at the start of last month (meaning that my March goals where defined on the start of February). The same for tri-mesters, and years. I also have a five year plan, but its mostly a simple statement of where I'd like to be.

Here is an example:

Today at 5:00 pm, I will sit down and write what I have to do tomorrow in order to get to my weekly goal. Say: build tests, finish writing some class, deploy to server, etc. That way, when I start tomorrow morning at 9:00 am sharp, I simply start doing whats on the list. No need to get settled. Just log in and code.
I would hope or presume that Firefox's tools eventually do get this level of polish, though. Chrome (and even Safari) has had quite a bit of a head-start, and neither of those were shining examples of great UX at the beginning.
Well of course! That's different.

/petulantchild
Great post.

Shipping seems analogous to compounding interest; each atomic unit of work that you push out to the world is like an investment, collecting interest in the form of public feedback reinvested into future work.

Which reminds me, I need to start shipping / investing...
Are you guys working with Upverter on potential ways to collaborate? Just wondering. Looks like an awesome project! Good luck!
this joke thing isn't really about Java as a language though. its about a very weird/bad and surprisingly common design anti-pattern. Java was used to do this joke because its utterly typical for this type of work, but certainly you can have this kind of disgusting enterprisey garbage in just about any programming language.

nobody makes jokes at the expense of well written Java software because its well written. we all know that the language is perfectly fine, and in alot of ways quite good, when it is used by sensible engineers.
Cool Thanks
If You Have an Android Phone, You’ve Got a Friend (Video)
If I could get into a PhD program in trusted computing/tamper resistance (which basically consists of...Cambridge University; nowhere else is doing worthwhile academic work), I'd seriously consider it, but since I dropped out of undergrad, not so much risk of that.
Just as I was thinking about switching back to FF because Chrome's memory hogginess was getting to me.

Seriously, not letting me have javascript off by default is a deal breaker. Nobody with basic internet savvy should have that on except through a whitelist.
It'll be interesting to see if the Republicans can hire high-quality talent required in sufficient numbers from as deep a pool.

Meanwhile, though, the capabilities of third parties will fall even further behind those of the increasingly entrenched duopoly.
CoupleVIBE: Mobile Implicit Communication to Improve Awareness for Couples [pdf]
Good god, this is stupid.

The damage was trivial, yet he is threatened with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in damages and up to twenty-five years in prison.

Really? The prosecutor is seeking the maximum statutory penalty for this? Somehow I doubt that.

All the Administration needs to do is to rely on the ancient common-law principle called the “rule of lenity.” This states that ambiguous criminal laws should be construed in favor of a defendant.

BY A COURT. The rule of lenity is something that is supposed to guide the behavior of judges.

This is lousy journalism, which misleads the audience in an attempt to pander to their sensibilities. There is no way the author of this piece ran it past a lawyer.
I did too, but Google instant changed things. Try this:

1) Set your search engine to Google (if it isn't currently)

2) Remove the search bar.

3) Press ctrl+k (cmd+k) and start typing. You'll be searching on Google's site, by far the best search experience with Google Instant on.

The only downside is that you need a reasonably fast, low-latency connection for it to work well[1].

[1] Fine with decent Internet service, but what a downside it is on a lesser connection. The ~0.5-1 sec delay was unbearable on a 3Mbps DSL connection with average latency.
I don't disagree with you. My point is that it's important to understand the context. The federal courts are absolutely clogged with appeals and habeas petitions from "bad people" who clearly did whatever they were charged with. People who are just trying to get off for serious crimes by grasping at technicalities (because they're in prison and have nothing better to do anyway). For all the skepticism about the police, they don't like losing prosecutions and as a result tend to go after slam-dunk cases.

For the courts charged with maintaining these protections, it can be hard to keep a hard-line stance in favor of 4th/5th amendment protections in face of a docket that is chock full of actual criminals who actually deserve their sentences.

It's an explanation, not a justification.
I don't believe it is the founders who are being engaged...
I was toying around with the URL in some of the source and modified a few of the sources to be facebook rather than faithinhumanity. After a few tries, I got an interesting security message.

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=343797409063...
Sure, you can always design for the 99%. Over time, however, you will be designing for the 50% -- after 70 iterations to be exact (that's log(.5)/log(.99)). Companies that do this end up with a very loyal, very small user base. Is that what a browser vendor wants?

The article points out some problems -- the options for changing how cryptography is used should definitely be less accessible; but also points to non-problems -- the options to disable images or Javascript should stay right where they are.
I used gevent at first for a project that needed Async I/O and it worked really well, but then I switched to Erlang and I realized how poor a choice Python is for such tasks. The language really needs to be designed from the start for it (like Go, Rust, Erlang &c... Haskell wasn't designed from start for it but because of it's functional purity, bolting it on was "natural" but - it isn't so for Python IMHO).
Refactoring code for 1.4 in Python. Here are the fixes I've had to make so far (so everyone can reference):

--Adjust imports

Change: "from rethinkdb import r"
To: "import rethinkdb as r"

--No more connection.run()

Change all your connection.run() to .run(connection)

For instance:

connection.run(r.db('test_db').table_create('test_table'))

becomes

r.db('test_db').table_create('test_table').run(connection)

--No more global connections

This one sucks IMHO. Took more than I'd like to refactor (still in progress). You have to explicitly pass a connection to every run() command. So this:

r.table('test_table').run()

becomes

r.table('test_table').run(C)

where C is a declared connection.

More notes as I find them....
they don't contain more information. they contain more explicit declarations of that information. dynamically typed languages leave that information hidden because it is inferrable (or irrelevant).
It is not prioritising my workflow but not changing already working software.

Idiot proofing is often necessary when the end user have to be spoon fed software and it is done by someone else who is perfectly capable of finding the said software on the internet form its official source, installing the package, finding the "easy mode" form its official source and clicking install button when the software prompts you to do so.

Alternatively, a version of software can be shipped by "easy mode" installed and enabled by default, just like how you choose which OS/localisation combo to download. Difference being that, software ships with rich configuration options by default and you can access them when you need it just by disabling "easy mode", not downloading something. No need to overhaul existing UI which is familiar to millions already, and prioritise people who cannot be trusted not to fiddle with options they don't know, just because you can.
Not an issue for HTTPS searching.
Price is not tied to features but to perception of value. Meaning that a plastic spatula (one feature) has a lower perceived value than a golden spatula (one feature, too). But its made out of gold. The perceived value is higher.

Pricing depends on a lot of things. Start by looking at what your closest competitor charges.
> LuaJIT is being used in various commercial games. You may not see that real world code, but it is out there.

I didn't say otherwise, I know LuaJIT is used. What I did say was I have not seen speed comparisons on such real-world code - but I would love to see a link if you have one.

> and the code base was small enough that their security guy could actually audit all the code

A small codebase is indeed good, but JavaScript VMs have very large teams of people working on hardening them, both reading and reviewing the code and applying methods like fuzzing to look for security problems. The fact is that JS VMs are likely the more hardened of anything out there, simply because they are used in web browsers.

> with Javascript, you have to go further and first decide which Javascript implementation to use.

Lua has at least two implementations as well, mainstream Lua and LuaJIT.

> They also said they are using the standard Lua interpreter and not LuaJIT because stock Lua happened to already be really fast and fast enough for their purposes right now.

That's cool.
Ethics discussion aside, it is really cool to hear about a massive project that a single person performed in secret.

I see all of these job listings for "big data" projects with hot startups and here is 1 guy generating a billion records in 1 hour, for fun.

It kind of reminds me of the MIT students' Stealing Profits from Stock Market Spammers presentation, because they waited 3 years before talking about it. Source: http://defcon.org/images/defcon-17/dc-17-presentations/defco... (video is also on the website)
They'll be cancelled out by false positives, eg 'I try to maintain my my faith in humanity. Sometimes I succeed.'
Except that, for no good reason, it's awkward to read in a window narrower than the authors'. (Edit: and middle-click is broken.) I'd lose my faith in humanity, if I were persuaded that web developers are a subset.
Google was never open.
I really like the design, personally.
Well done!

Curious about the heading font used, FluxRegular.woff: does anybody know the source of the font, and the licensing? :)
In addition, per Crockford, shouldn't we be using "===" instead of "==" in a best practice demo?
If you're not happy about the results, here's a way to restore your faith in humanity: http://www.quora.com/Cancer/Can-I-use-the-internet-to-save-m...
quite possibly the coolest blind collaboration ever.
The code's on Github, and the data is all publicly-exposed through Firebase. Go nuts!
Yep, kudos to tenderlove and others for putting in the work to make this framework secure by default. The changes in Rails 4 should help more with this as well (strong parameters in particular).
If you usually avoid the first unheated water coming out of the pipes before your morning shower, collect it in a bucket. You can then use it for flushing the toilet, or whatever.
Wishful thinking is not design...
What Would We Do If the Internet Crashed?
or use http://smalltalkhub.com in the first place :)
If you've got nothing to go on but second-hand information that you can't validate yourself, then it's perfectly reasonable to use qualities like "credibility" and "authority" as a sort of Bayesian indicator of the likelihood that the statement is a valid one.

The "appeal to authority" is only a practical fallacy in a situation where it is feasible to directly evaluate the claim against reality itself.
Google was never completely open. But they were supportive of open standards before. This is a serious trend reversal.
This is new? I've been doing this for years. Its called find the origin of the pain. You don't sell software to the IT team. You sell it to however needs it. Pretty obvious. Just be nice to the IT team because they will be the ones calling you when shit hits the fan. I like to send them small gifts in the form of specialty food. Like cakes, and stuff like that. They always appreciate it. Just don't send them pens...
Uber drivers protest for better pay and treatment in San Francisco
The judge who said that the 1st amendment doesn't cover shouting fire in a crowded theater used it as an argument to jail people for handing out anti-war fliers.

So it's not even appropriate for me to say that it's a slippery slope, because it started at the bottom.
Wow! Really interesting, and weird. We aren't using anything Facebook-related besides the like button and we don't even have a registered Facebook app or secret keys or anything. All the Twitter sourcing is done on the server so I'm not sure how you stumbled onto that security message
Where do you buy this plan? AT&T and Verizon are willing to sell me plans that cost just as much as on-contract plans. T-Mobile is willing to sell me much cheaper plans, but randomly loses service all around my city all the time.
Sad, but true. This is just outrageous.
Only if you're not signed in to Google. If you are, Google no longer sends your search terms to the website when you click.

Ironically, people in incognito mode do not want to be tracked, but via this method, are much easier to track in terms of matching IP addresses to search terms.
Two cool ones:

http://i.imgur.com/86rjhY4.png

http://i.imgur.com/Hfh4Vt9.png
Does this support fuckit? https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs
Turning Google into a new advertising medium
And you don't think the life expectancy for a 15 year old being 52 didn't have to do with deaths due to disease/violence?

Let's look at a familiar group of people who had zero access to antibiotics nor modern medicine. America's founding fathers:

"For their era, the 1787 delegates (like the 1776 signers) were average in terms of life spans.[15] Their average age at death was about 67. The first to die was Houston in 1788; the last was Madison in 1836.

Secretary Charles Thomson lived to the age of 94. Johnson died at 92. John Adams lived to the age of 90. A few—Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Williamson, and Wythe—lived into their eighties. Either 15 or 16 (depending on Fitzsimons's exact age) died in their seventies, 20 or 21 in their sixties, eight in their fifties, and five only in their forties. Three (Alexander Hamilton, Richard Dobbs Spaight and Button Gwinnett) were killed in duels."
The Story of the Sale of vWorker.com
Learn how Ian Ippolito created a massively successful exit for his company.
Design Responsive Websites Visually
I'm not sure exactly what people are asking for here. There's a lot of complexity in the phone network implementations out there (scroll to the bottom of this page to get an idea of what's out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_HSPA )

I've owned a few unlocked phones and found that switching networks is largely useless as my phone is unlikely to support the best data features from another provider.
Thanks!, I used to play with GP back in the university. It's really fun!

However, GP is more like an oriented random search where the space of search is really big. Here the space is somehow filtered by humans, where each hypothesis had been generated by a human and not by a machine. It would be interesting if the machine could evolve those solutions that are not quite but close to be the proper one :)
3 Real Lessons from the Mailbox Acquisition
Ask HN: What technology/APIs do banks use to read and process cheques?
Hi guys,

I've done some assorted googling on terms like "bank image processing API", "image processing API", "bank cheque reader" and so on...

Unfortunately, I haven't found a satisfactory answer. Has anyone here developed using a tool like this, or know anything about it? I'd love to know how this works because:
A. I think the technology is fascinating and has the potential to be utilized in a variety of applications
B. I've recently gotten into bowling, and would love to build a simple app that lets you take pictures (or scan) your bowling score and do some fancy stuff with it (of all the uses, this is what I want to do... ;)

Thanks!
Yes, but he can't just rewrite the law by making a speech, as the author suggests. He's charged with the faithful execution of the laws, not their interpretation.

If you read court decisions where a law is criticized by a judge or justice as unjust or unfair (but not necessarily unconstitutional), they never say that prosecutors should stop bringing such cases to court; they say that changing the law will require Congress to act.

To take a current example of the dichotomy, the Obama administration has filed a brief with the Supreme Court asking it to overturn DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), as it's the administration's belief that the law is unconstitutional - but in the meantime, the administration is still implementing DOMA as written, because until the SC rules against it (if they do) it remains the law of the land. If two married gay people file a joint tax return, the IRS will send it back with an apologetic letter and tell them they have to file separately and so on.
Except that Gmail and Facebook are US companies.
I tend to think that using a belgian/czech/italian (you get the idea) website, my data couldn't be easily exported/sold outside the EU.

I am currently building a data crunching company in the EU. I chose, both from a legal and marketing standpoint, not to export any of my (customers') data outside of EU. In fact, I chose not to export any data outside of my country's borders.

It simplifies (a bit) my legal paperwork, but it also serves as a marketing claim along the tune of "we are doing no evil with your data, and not putting them into the hands of anyone else".
Extremetracking == the same as Google analytics + IP addresses tracking + more detailed info per visitor's IP

Extremetracking offers free tracking - which offers free .js tracking widget for site. The problem with "free" tracking is that it exposes all your visitors + all their search terms + all their referrers to the whole world - which is what this article found out.

I bought Pro for 1 month to see if I can squeeze any more business out of that compare to Google analytics.
Unfortunately it does not offer visitor cross-reference data (what other sites given visitor visited).

"Pro" plan keeps your log data confidential.
Yes, definitely looks like it: https://twitter.com/asbradbury/status/312984696852185088
AT&T hacker gets 41 month sentence
No way, really? Are there small (sub)communities on the internet that are vile? ...
And he should have used a CHAIN OF RESPONSABILITY pattern instead of the IF/ELSE to handle each case , and the FOR loop should have been handled by a STATE PATTERN , finally the system.prints require a full BUILDER to decouple datas from rendering triggered by COMMANDS , that work is indeed "amateurish" , especially without a SERVICE LOCATOR.
Possessing email addresses should not be a crime.

Identity fraud for a list of emails? Really?

It's insane even if you assume they were pristine and never received any spam before weev came along and "stole" them. Furthermore, the list was never sold, distributed, or published.

An excerpt was sent to the media.

They kicked around the idea of spearphishing, of spamming, of pastebinning it, of selling it. In full knowledge of the value and leverage that this data allowed, they contacted the media and deleted their own copies. It profited them nothing.

The idea that this is akin to trespassing is simultaneously both obtuse and dangerous. There were _no_ access controls; ATT themselves said in court that the information was published (by them) on the web.