skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The company website says that cost-per-page is $0.01USD (http://www.ondemandbooks.com/hardware.htm). This thing is really cool!
You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer,

Did he not cover this by adding the stickers?
Animals can tell right from wrong
Shuttle VIA Nano completely fanless box
I think it is okay to email the user a new randomly generated password. There's not much difference between that and a link the user can click to create a new password. I suggest not putting the username and the password in the same email -- ever -- even if it is randomly generated.

It actually may be better to send a random new password, rather than a link, because then the hacker needs to at least guess something, in this case, the username, so it may be more secure.

For added security, you can make the random password (or the link if you want to do it that way) expire so the user has to be a bit prepared. That reduces the window for someone reading their emails to jump in and steal the account.
The novelty is not the device, but the business.
Rich mobile browser Skyfire launches version 1.0
You should check your facts.

China had writing and philosophy well before Athens.
This is no different than buying a poster of some sports star. You can hang it on your wall,...

Except Apple is telling you that you can only hang it on walls painted with Apple branded paint.
Ask HN: I want to pay people, not just accept payment. What are my options?
So, accepting credit card payments is a single (admittedly, long) line of code for most languages if you're using most gateway+merchant bundles.

Some, like Authorize.net, let you accept ACH transfers.

Is there anyone out there that lets me MAKE ACH transfers with a few lines of code?

Or am I forced to live in the stone age/use paypal?
Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing [2006]
According to the article, the IRS only has instructions dealing with collectible coins that are out of circulation. The coins he used were still in circulation.
your search is a little broken, neighborhood got me 2 results with new york, and then "neighborhood new york" got me 0 results. you're going to want to push tags i think, you've got "favorite bar" and "best bar", you want either favorite or best. Also i think a tag cloud would be good. i think its a clever idea, and could morph into a popular review site, i think you'll probably need some kinda forum to keep people there.
Ah! I think a better way to describe VCs focus on teams is this: "A great team is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for us to be willing to invest." The thing the OP is saying that the team is usually the first/most obvious problem with the startup. It takes about 10 minutes to get a sense that a team sucks (bad salespeople, abrasive, confused, misguided, insane-- whatever), while due diligence on a product/market can be a pretty big task.

Most investors judge the whole package (market, timing, traction, product, team).

Whether general feeling of team quality is a measure of anything useful is an interesting question. Most of these guys have pretty endless deal flow. Like a company that has way too many applicants for way too few job openings, they look for early ways to thin the herd.
This is from

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mkb23/

There is not currently a description in the displayed text of that page, but if you view the page source, you will find one.
It sounds like you didn't really read the post. His father "invested" (although it was more realistically a gift/loan) in his band. Years later when he started an entirely new and different business he reused his old bank account/business entity out of laziness/ignorance. His father had no ethical claim to that new business/money.
...which is great, until you want to use one paradigm and you also want to take advantage of a certain library, and you discover that the library uses a completely different paradigm. Either you put up with an impedence mismatch between your code and the library, or you discover that in this language all paradigms are equal but some are more equal than others.
Inside Patagonia's fabric lab: recycling fabrics
Weak Have Stronger Hearing
He won a previous case and it looks like this case is not over yet.
It's nothing. But I wholly agree that many of the comments here and elsewhere are very much in the vein of "man wouldn't it be great if python was OCaml?!!", which is about as useful a comment as a hole in my head.
He didn't fail yet; he's still on trial.

He will probably be convicted for hiding assets, though.
But instead of "OpenSSH, pf, git, xorg, most "djbware", Samba, the *BSDs, or the entire GNU project" we would have well licensed and well designed software, etc, while something else would have been aweful and people would spend time solving that problem...
i think its very un-hackeresque to obsess over labels - since they do nothing, no offense.
The Coyotos Secure Operating System
Wow, that was fast, I'm still sitting in the keynote.
Actually, the free market will even aggravate such abuse automatically. The fact that they are legal tender is a very special property of the US Mint produced coins. If there is a lot of utility in them, their value will go up. (And there are a lot of people who think that getting out of taxes is dandy.) This will increase their scarcity, and since the US Mint isn't motivated by profit, they have no reason to make more and prices will not come back down. This will cause early gold-payroll recipients to be holding coins that appreciate tremendously!

However, the US mint will also prevent this from growing beyond a certain point. It can reduce the supply of such coins any time it wants to. Also, there's nothing to prevent the US government from creating a special "transaction tax" that only applies to the use of such coins.
Here is the conundrum that the IRS is in..

The US Government has placed a face value on the coins, a 1-ounce gold coin is marked 50 US Dollars. The intrinsic value of that coin today is right around $1000.

IF they argue that intrinsic value should be the determining factor, then what is the intrinsic value of a paper $20 bill (really about 5 cents of paper and ink)?

IF the IRS states that face value of the $20 bill is established by the US Government, then the face value of the $50 gold coin must also be taken at its face value - after all, the face value of the coin was established by the same government that established the paper bill's value.

I hope I have explained this right... the IRS cannot argue intrinsic value vs. face value without falling into a ditch. I think this is what the defense is counting on.
I am adopting an approach more similar to a Classical Scholar, similar to this: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/odonnell1.html

For the newest fields that isn't an option though, I think his suggestion is really the only way.
Formal Proof
Great idea, perhaps too late.

Like adding jets to a zepellin or a turbine to a steam boat.

I haven't touched a book in years, and won't in the foreseeable future.
Tipfight adds competition to charity fundraising
I highly doubt Wordpress.com is storing the passwords in a reversible encryption, or in plain text. It seems to me that when the user hits that page, the password is generated and displayed.

Yes it should be https at the least, but aren't you going to go in and change the password immediately anyways?
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both had experience and prior (minor) successes. Bill Gates had rigged - excuse me, programmed ;-) - the course scheduling program at his prep school to seat him next to all the pretty girls, and had done decently as a consultant doing traffic-light control software. Steve Jobs had a prior profitable business with Steve Wozniak selling blue boxes.

The thing is, many readers of this site have had successes of similar magnitude. And very few, probably none, will ever create something like Microsoft or Apple. So a VC might see someone who created a bunch of websites, some even mildly successful - but lots of people created a bunch of websites, and the vast majority of those won't grow into a billion dollar business.
Uh, yeah, but if all he did was place a low value on the coins, then his business is going to have artificially high profits, so the net result is that he goes to court over paying corporate income taxes instead of payroll taxes plus paying his people enough for their Federal taxes.

For example, if he earns $60, and his expense is paying someone $50, either:

a) He pays them $50, they pay taxes on that $50, and he pays taxes on the $10, or

b) He does his coin trick, they pay taxes on, say, $5, and he pays taxes on $55 (because he gives the coins a low value).

If all he's doing is buying something at one price, writing down its value, and giving it away, then anyone can do this. Try it with shares of a privately-held company, or golf club memberships, or anything that doesn't freely trade.
It's not inconceivable that PyPy could grow into some of what I'm talking about, although there's so much pushback from the Python community that I doubt it. However, as far as I can tell, PyPy doesn't have a parser generator written as part of normal Python code; it has a hand rolled recursive descent parser and a hand rolled lexer, which is not quite the same thing.
Actually, there are several excellent counter-examples to OP's sports examples (that further support his point).

Two years ago, the Golden State Warriors implemented a fast paced "run and gun" style offense to offset their liabilities. They made the playoffs (and knocked off top seed Dallas) for the first time in years.

Last year the 1-15 Miami Dolphins brought back the left-for-dead Wildcat formation into the NFL and went from last to first.

The critical missing piece? Heavyweight management that knew what to do. Golden State's Don Nelson and Miami's Bill Parcells were both brought in specifically to "shake things up".

The problem isn't that underdogs don't take more chances.

The problem is that underdogs don't know how to do it.

Being an underdog startup is tough enough. Not knowing how to compete is even tougher.
The cloners weren't growing the market, they were cannibalizing apple's own hardware sales. Jobs knew that, and canned them as soon as he got back in the big chair.

Another poster says the structure of the program prevented the cloners from providing a sufficiently varied product - that may be true too.
a comma is not a substitute for "and". people need to stop doing this shit.
The Technology Bill of Rights, take two
Example of bad programming
Sigh. Everyone has an opinion about website registration and password storage, and most of them have never actually administered a large website.

Was your original signup https? No? Then the hypothetical attacker who is reading all the traffic on your connection already has your password. Would you happily login to your account from the WiFi at Starbucks, or from the public machine at the local library? Yes? Then the hypothetical attacker already has your password.

Emailing passwords to new users is USEFUL. It undoubtedly saves Wordpress hundreds of support requests PER DAY. That is real money saved, and it must be balanced against the insignificant risk of being "hacked" by someone reading your email on the wire.

ANY ability to reset a password via email is insecure. The email is plaintext; it must contain enough information for the recipient to get into his account; therefore, an attacker on the wire can get into the account. It doesn't matter how the password is stored or how the password reset is accomplished, it's equally insecure. There is NO SECURITY DOWNSIDE to emailing a user's password to them vs. having some multi-step reset procedure.

An attacker which can read out the passwords from your database already owns your site.

Finally, complaining about the activation key (which is a hexidecimal hash value) is insane. It's far more secure than any other passwords on the site at all.

Finally finally, I think Wordpress does store passwords as one-way hashes, so most of this guy's argument is moot anyway.
Noah Shachtman gets a downmod for no research. We have some idea of what the components of the mind are now. We can relate all of the branches of mathematics and science to specific areas of function with an evolutionary basis.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Mind-Works-Steven-Pinker/dp/039333...
Of labels and limits
Tipfight = twitter + tipjoy + UFC
It hasn't been a problem for me. There are a couple arbitrary precision libraries for Lua, so I just use those when it would matter. I've used:

* lbc: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/#lbc
* GMP wrapper: http://members.chello.nl/~w.couwenberg/

and there are more linked here, under "Math": http://lua-users.org/wiki/LibrariesAndBindings

Lua uses doubles by default, but you can change the numeric type quite easily via luaconf.h (http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#lua_Number), if you need to work on a platform for which doubles are too large, if you'd prefer to use 64-bit longs, etc. Lua is designed to be small enough that you can just include the whole language in your source tree as a library, if you need a custom version.

Think of it as a 200k .dll/.so that gives your C program a scripting interface / config file parser, a generational garbage collector (for the Lua portion), and a great string and hash table library. (The standalone Lua interpreter is just a thin wrapper to add a REPL to the C API.) Lua code also works well as a data serialization format; it's very similar to JSON, and the Lua compiler has been tuned specifically for rapidly compiling data dumped as Lua literals.
They're running out of soylent green
Reading only the headline: how many thought this was a joke? I mean, really, a huge AI/neuroscience crossover result coming out of ... a DoD project?

Sadly, it's not a joke; just a really bad idea and a not-funny-enough blog post making fun of it.
If anyone actually believes slapping a sticker on their computer will cause Apple to lose a lawsuit... then I have a title and offer to the Golden Gate Bridge I'd like them to consider.
Americans became increasingly unhappy between 1975 and 1995 (not just women)
Mint Map: Real Estate by State
However, Apple failed to certify more powerful clones (i.e. clones that were better/faster/cheaper than their big iron) on a reasonable timeframe.

As I remember it, the opposite happened. Power Computing skimmed the cream off the Mac market because they had faster Macs than Apple.

Cloners also contended that Apple was opening up the boxes to steal their trade secrets.

That's an odd complaint considering that Apple gave them the OS, the ROM, and the chipsets to begin with.
Yes, but legal tender does freely trade. So, what if you decided to pay your workers in cash? You contract a company to handle this for you, and hauling all those bills is a huge pain in the butt, so they charge you $X over the value of the bills that get handed out to your workers. What if you had each stack of bills individually wrapped in a satin ribbon, resulting in an even higher service fee? Aren't you doing the same thing?
I agree, the main issue here is that they're not using SSL during these steps, and the second is that they don't recommend changing your password from the generated default.
Great looking website. Its very clear what you're offering, and it sounds like a great service for rich media moderation.

One suggestion: On the pricing page the default tab is for self-moderation. Personally, I find the outsourced moderation offer much more compelling, and I would lead with that.
If this page is correct

http://www.geocities.com/motorcity/downs/9828/fergy_12.htm

it was probably somewhere near Waterloo

> This was the first tractor built by Froelich who with
> others formed the Waterloo GasolineTraction Engine
> Company. This company manufactured the Waterloo Boy
> tractors starting in 1914. The Waterloo Company was
> purchased by John Deere in 1918 and became the John
> DeereTractor Company.
I don't see any conundrum. I don't know what the actual IRS rules are, but common sense tells me that if I am paid with some commodity (dollar bills, silver coins, buckets of crude), then my income for tax purposes is the market value of that commodity. A $20 bill has a market value of $20. A one-ounce gold coin marked "$50" has a market value of about $1000. If aliens shower us with free gold, and the price of gold drops to $40 an once, then we can start caring about the face value of the one-ounce gold coin.
How convenient for a web company to present a graph with no units or measure of "user experience" and, surprise, the web is almost as good as the desktop now. How... made up and fake.

How one earth did they measure "user experience"? What is responsible for the up and down fluctuations (note, on a logarithmic scale) in the relatively flat line for "native" user experience?

Finally, of course Google's own Chrome is the best.
Without wanting to get into too much back and forth, a quick response to these:

Parsing: hand writing lexers is an enormous PIA and the problem with a hand written recursive descent parser is if you want to change the grammar for whatever reason it is more involved than if you had a grammar generator.

Regexps: the problem with re.VERBOSE is that you're still writing essentially assembly language for a state machine, in the end, and it doesn't solve problems like "I want to search for this user input string, interpolate it into here and escape it for me please." Or even more interesting ones like "I want to compose these regexps, because I'm having to write a lexer by hand". You can use a separate escape function, and generally build up this layer of essentially scar tissue around the fact that this feature of your language is not really well integrated into the language, but that has its own issues. Better to solve it cleanly IMHO.

Databases: I have no experience with SQLAlchemy; it didn't exist when I did the DB project.

Continuations: I could probably have gotten away with using coroutines there. But Stackless was still an experiment, and not a particularly promising one, and generators didn't exist in the language at the time. I still think CPS-conversion would have been cleaner.
When random isn't fair
Weebly Launches Free WYSIWYG Virtual Storefronts (YC)
You might be able to do it for less, but you'd still be spending thousands of dollars to do it. Plus you don't get support.

I think the sweet spot for hackintoshers is the exact market Apple is avoiding. Basically a cheap version of the Mac Pro but more powerful than an iMac. For just under a grand you can build a sweet quad core machine that blows an iMac out of the water and probably comes close to a base Mac Pro in terms of power. If I had to spend more than a grand, I would probably just buy the real thing.
I can understand the feeling, but I'm just the opposite. For me, no place is really home unless it's got lots of books on shelves.
Comments welcome about the site design! How can I get the activity twitter updates to attract more users? How do I keep users returning once a day?
"Would you happily login to your account from the WiFi at Starbucks, or from the public machine at the local library? Yes? Then the hypothetical attacker already has your password."

This isn't true if the website uses https (since we're talking about sniffing, not man-in-the-middle).
Incorrect. Consider a file test.py:

print "hello"
x = 1 +

Note the syntax error. Running it, we see:

$ python test.py
File "test.py", line 2
x = 1 +
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

If syntax errors were runtime errors, we would see the effect of the print statement. This is not a top-level effect: the same is true even if a syntax error is under a function.
I'd like to take the opportunity to suggest a variation of this for business/startup related Q&A. The few existing sites I know of, are full of spam/misinformation/product promotion, so there seems to be a clear market for ex-geeks/new business owners to freely exchange information.
the gold is more than a commodity, it is legal US tender. its illegal to scrap pennies for their precious metals. why is it different for the gold coins, which you must do in order to pull the market value out of them?
Wordpress defiantly encrypt there passwords in some unreversable format using a salt.

I don't think SSL is really necessary for a community site like the wordpress one.
This old Usenet article has some deep insight on the subject:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.poems/msg/92dca7ff68...

"Feminism is itself a set of social rules that dictate what people can and cannot do, specifically to hinder the male gender. For example, feminism says if a man owns a company, he cannot just hire anyone he wants. Instead he must hire people in accordance with the social rules of feminism. Your attempt to portray feminism as some sort of gender-neutral attempt to lift all boats is as transparently dishonest as the silly lies Patriarchy has told women for thousands of years to keep them in their place. Just be honest and say feminism is an attempt to curtail some freedoms currently enjoyed by men, and transfer them to women."
It is impossible to store passwords in a one way hash and also email it to a user and show it on a web page at some point in the future. That's the point of a one way hash, it can only be encrypted, not unencrypted. No one should ever be able to see what that original password was -- even people with access to the database.

Lots of peope use the same passwords for multiple sites. If I have access to your WP password and username and other sites you visit, I could hack those too!

I haven't looked at WP's code, but if the blog is accurate, then those passwords must be at best two-way encrypted.
>hey need to be looking into a consumption tax to replace the income tax

"Replace" is the key word here. From what I understand, the VAT in consideration would go along side the current income tax thereby increasing overall taxation.
Except that if you email a new password anyone can reset someone's password by only knowing the email. It can be a real pain. Imagine being on the customer support side when an unknown third party keeps resetting someone's password.
Here's an article that tries to do just that, although it doesn't address the software side of the equation (and it's a bit dated, since it uses Harpertown instead of Nehalem processors):

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=942&tag=nl.e550
I could see this working really well if you did it with opposing charities, e.g. RNC vs. DNC. The charities wouldn't even need to endorse it, necessarily. Could be huge.
It is also technically far trickier to do all the payment processing and take cuts and make sure everyone is paid and happy. This way they can let Paypal/GC do all that work and focus on making a great product.
The problem is the nebulousness of "market value." What if someone finds out that one of their payroll bills has a highly sought-after printing error that makes it worth 100X the face value? Then, what if it's subsequently discovered that it's not a real example of the printing error, but that the error was faked? How are you going to determine market value? Most of the time a regulation or a contract will name some widely-used index. Unfortunately, the most widely used index for legal tender is "multiplicative identity."
A series LLC is another option: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_LLC
Startups making easy to use stuff that actually solves someone's problem? Hm.

Interesting.