skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it'd be easy to get around this for a single site.

But the people writing bots really do not want to have to tweak their bot for any single site. And most of the people using bots cannot write their own.

I've been using a very simple negative captcha for many years with great success. I just don't get bot spam, and before I put it in place I got lots of bot spam.

There are some gotchas, though -- the main one that this project doesn't seem to know about are form-fillers, like Google Chrome, RoboForm, etc. -- i.e., bots that you want to be able to use your form.

My first version of a negative captcha tried to be sneaky -- I called the field "name" or something like that, and called the real name field "name2". This was a disaster; the form-fillers all put values into the name field, and suddenly tons of users (especially Google Chrome users) were unable to submit comments to me... and so quite probably a lot of them were unable to find a way to even tell me it was broken. Problems like this are a very good reminder to always use helpful, kind error messages even when you think you've just caught a spammer or some other nasty. You may have caught an actual customer.

My current version names the field something obviously NOT a standard field name, and gives it a label which is also not a standard field name (this was important), and I even clear the field with JavaScript on form submission just in case. The name of the field is hard-coded, as are all of the other field names on the page.

I have been ready to roll out more clever versions, but the years go by, and there's still no need yet.

Unless you have a site that's a big target for bot spammers, I highly recommend you just roll your own, and leave it extremely simple unless the spam returns (someday it will, presumably, but it has been at least 6-7 years and I'm still on the so-simple-it's-silly version).

This library could work with some tweaks and simplification, but currently I'd worry about form-fillers in real users' browsers. It hashes all of the real field names and makes the honeypot fields look valid. So a user who is accustomed to having their name/address filled in will first find that function is broken -- next they'll find themselves accused of being a bot when they submit the form (after tediously filling it out by hand).
Yeah but still its SAMSUNG is faking it.
I wrote up my thoughts on this: http://whoo.ps/2013/09/29/cognitive-drain-theory-of-why-paid...

Slightly revising my position: The order in which people would choose this doesn't really matter
Yeah, having 30k in passive income for the rest of my life would be a DREAM. I don't think I'd retire, but I'd certainly start doling out my skills to nonprofits for significantly reduced pay. I don't think I could live on $30k/year, but even if working for nonprofits only netted me another $20k/year total, I could live on that - and save them a significant amount of cash that they'd have otherwise had to pay.
Are you using MySQL in your example?

> id is an incremental value, I choose 11 as a length
for this primary key but this value is defined
by the number of pages you’ll need to index

This is a bit confusing. You'd generally be better off with INT UNSIGNED as it doubles the range for auto-increment columns.

Also the visited field would be better to be represented by a timestamp, choosing the right datatype does matter in large tables.
agreed - these guys, like Raspberry Pi, are making a bet on Moore's Law - that's been a good bet for forty years and will keep being a good bet for a long while yet - certainly long enough to make the cost of interpreted JS insignificant
I G+'ed this link with the same remark. If this pans out and has the right ductability we need, this could revolutionize megastructure construction.
University is not a way to give people jobs. It is a way to prevent people from getting jobs. These universities have a problem now. They were not capable of preventing the poster from getting a job in computing, game platforms and other such enterpreneurial fields, because there is no "Medical association of game programmers" demanding that you first waste a decade of your life. They cannot control the internet and prevent people from leading their own lives as they please. So, now they are frustrated ...
This is awesome. I have always been interested in hardware programming, but always hated the languages I had to learn to do it properly (java, c++, c, assembly, etc.).

Technology is reaching a place where I can eventually start doing embedded programming with Ruby. I can't wait for that to happen - I am sure it will.

Makes me very excited for the next 10 years.
I agree. It's hard to see the usefullness of a degree in a poor 3rd world country if you wasn't born in one. Nowadays it's possible to be an entrepeneur with somebody elses money, the internet, kickstater and the apple app-store, but all those things are unavailable in india.

In a huge 3rd world country, a degree is obviously useful. It's a gov-issued certification, a way to transfer trust from the person having the degree to the government. You don't need to trust the guy because the government says he can code. If you don't see why that's useful probably you never had 10000 applications sent to you.

The problem with degree inflation is the same as any other kind of inflation, it lowers (devaluates?) the value of the degree.
the first rule of negative captcha is...

been doing this for years, works wonderfully.
Turn mailto links into clean contact forms
750k is a bonus to you and you should spend it wisely as in use it
to lighten your burden in a long run.

30% - Emergency Fund
40% - Investment Fund (Low & High Risk)
10% - Education Fund (Your children's education)
10% - Penny Fund (Use to cover your exceeded monthly expenses)
5% - Health Fund (Use to improve your health. Eg. Get a gym membership, eat health food, medical checkup)
2.5% - Entertainment Fund (Use to spice up your relationship with your wife, children or anyone important)
1% - Charity Fund (Do not give it all in one go. Give genuine tips and lend a little help to those out the streets)
1.5% - Do whatever you want to do with it.

Anyway this is just an example of how I would spend the money if it's given to me
Never seen any manufacturer use 'Gb' for RAM instead of 'GB'. It's probably Samsung's intention.
This website is like a Web 2.0 version of Columbia House. It's called "negative option billing" and they've never been stopped from doing it either. Heck, it was only in 2011 that they actually lost a class action suit.

Companies are going to continue to do it because they aren't likely to lose. Best we can do is name and shame everyone involved.
+1, CS can be learned in few hours and any questions on what each constuct produces can be quickly resolved in coffeeconsole for chrome

Verification: lead development of 50MD and 300MD mobile html5 apps for major UK TV's and even people who did see CS first time were able to pick it up quickly. I had literally about 5 cases when I had to answer some chat questions on how CS works, and about the same count when I corrected/optimized some CS usage in a code review.

The productivity gain was impressive. In ducktyping, but esp. in __understanding__ the code quickly.

We're not going back.
"Honest startups"? Have you lost money yourself? You seem really bitter about this.

Sensible startups will never have a problem raising money, that's if they even need it. A lack of local funding does not mean that funding cannot be secured from sources outside Ireland -- plenty of Irish startups have done that btw.

I think your view of what's going on in Ireland is tainted, and it's not the same as the property boom or the financial crisis associated with it.

For one thing, there is no "startup boom" in Ireland. At least not in the same way as there was in property. The level of investment isn't even in the same ball park. Most startups can't even get a bank loan of a few grand, for starters. And banks are not cozying up to founders in the same way they did to property developers.

There are no dodgy dealings going on behind closed doors, and no one has the ear of a Minister.

You're not going to see your average taxi driver borrow to invest in a startup because he's suddenly rich on paper.

And unlike the finite amount of land available to develop in places like Dublin, there are no such constraints on good business models, with good market potential, backed by a strong team.

Also, I don't remember there ever being a property "scene".

What we need is a healthy startup ecosystem. I've been active in the "startup scene" since 2007. I've seen the growth of startups, I've seen the rise of a strong tech community, I've seen the rise of all the accelerators. The level of investment has risen, but not at the same pace or scale. These are some of the necessary component for a healthy ecosystem.

And like in nature-based ecosystems, things die to make way for new lifeforms.

Anyway, I'm rambling now... need coffee :)

Your view is your view, but I don't see things the way you've painted them.
been doing this for years, the way we handle it is to hide the element via javascript. then most screen readers won't "see" it, but generic form bots aren't that smart.
History and Moore's law would tell us that at some point we won't have to fiddle bits for every single embedded project.

Is that time now, maybe not. But it seems like a great tool to prototype with. I'm really confused how enabling a whole legion of programmers to get creative with hardware invokes such bitterness in you.

I'm sure what you do is very special, and this is no direct threat to that.
Well, probably because it doesn't work.

In our experience, the overwhelming majority of potential employees either have jobs already (and so don't have time to work on contact for you while you determine fit), are getting a job soon (and understandably don't want to turn down a full time position so they can contact for you and maybe get a job later (or not)), or just are offended that you won't commit to them and wasn't too try before you buy (which may be silly, but I admit I felt exactly that way when someone wanted me to do contract to hire).
For that I'd recommend tinc [1].

1: http://www.tinc-vpn.org
On the other hand, you may not like your job, and dream of doing some other career or starting a business. But you don't because the path of least resistance is getting up and going to work everyday.

Meanwhile, your dissatisfaction of your job results in poor job performance, and you get let go.

Now, with the easy path no longer there, one starts making the changes one only daydreamed about before.

Of course, this doesn't always happen. But I've seen it happen several times.
I cannot agree (I mean I do from a pure techie point of view) but last week I got my hands in a Raspberry PI for the first time and knocked up a traffic light demo for a school in Python, with LEDs directly shoved into the ribbon cable.

I have not been so child-like excited for years.

by throwing a wasteful amount of computing power into just turning on a light, we put this in the reach of more and more people.

we could have web servers in assembly language, and it would be more efficient use of computing resources - but that's not been the optimal way and it won't be here either
I think that strategy is called "security through obscurity."
You might not learn much by going to college, but looking at it that way you might not learn it anywhere. To learn you need many things. Things like interest, ability to spend time and effort doing and learning things. This is not just restricted to college. There must be some motivation to learn. For us, learning is tied to money in a very direct sense. For students, their motivation might be curiosity.

Let me ask every one a simple question. If you believe you didn't learn much at college. Now that you are out of college why haven't you turned into a knowledge bank? If you ponder at that question long enough you will eventually realize there is nothing really wrong with college anyway.

Coming to your original point, unfortunately degrees matter in our society. Like you I believe that we must do away with that system and look at learning and the ability to perform instead.

Here in India, you can't even get a job interview if you don't have a degree. So we are stuck in this degree system, and probably will be decades to come.
that's true, but this form of captcha is more user friendly, as the user isn't even aware it's there.
Why is the size of RAM always in powers of 2?
Easy mr. Patent Lawyer.. Read this: Lodsys can be sure it will continue to draw Judge Gilstrap as long as it files its cases in Marshall, Texas. The other judge who considers patent cases filed there is US District Judge Leonard Davis; but since Judge Davis' son William "Bo" Davis is Lodsys' lawyer, the company's cases will all be redirected to Gilstrap.

I think this is grounds for further investigation.
It seems to me that it is because the hiring process is a short-term one. The rationale for firing someone can happen over hundreds of hours. Sometimes you don't know that someone will be a bad coworker until they've been a bad coworker.

Hiring processes optimize for people who are good at getting hired. Working with someone (if you're willing to prune the bad coworkers) optimizes for people who are good colleagues.
As a, possibly self proclaimed, security expert I'm not particularly impressed with the blog posting. Why? The premise is that Computer Security is a pinnacle and now the protagonist is looking back, it looks a bit lame and has a feeling of being duped!

In the posting you could probably replace "Computer Security" with any other vocationally targeted course. So let's pick "Competitive Baking". Baking is hard (seriously, try it yourself), you need to achieve consistency, be meticulous with picking the ingredients and develop a reliable process. Nobody is just going to give you the recipe so you can say "I'm the best" (apologies to Peach).

Specialized, "getting you ready for the industry" courses developed and taught by an academic isn't going to make anyone satisfied or achieve excellence. The academic probably hasn't worked in the industry (in the USA they've probably spent lots of their time trying to get tenure) and, when developing the course, was just projecting what they thought a "real job" would entail. Most academics will not have the experience to do that. This is alluded to in the blog entry (point 2.) where programming was required for an internship. The tone suggests that this was a "surprise".

In the real, non "Ivory Tower" world of computer security, programming is required. Computer security requires creating new or changing existing programs.

If you are just coming out of college, hiring managers are looking for what you can do in the future. Experience is something someone can bring to the table NOW, college grads are unlikely to have that experience. So, if you have a broad and comprehensive understanding of the fundamentals; all the hard theoretical computer science things, you will have an outstanding base from which to build on.

The other path to a job is by savants who get their skills by doing (and demonstrating) and figuring it out themselves. Savants are rare.

In the end, it is all about what you add to the frosting on the cake. (see baking above. The cake is not a lie).
great point.

This might be a controversial point, but I've always wondered why people are so insistent in thinking that the Founding Fathers somehow had some timeless advice on how to run government and that nothing they could have believed has any chance of being wrong.

We're always talking about how other models of thought or industry are outdated (people on the whole prefer Freud's vision of the mind to Descartes'), so why does Washington get a free pass on everything?

I'm a fan of most aspects of Founding Father's ideals (still not sold on bigness being bad), just weird how much hero worship goes on for 250-year old ideas.
Re-read my reply above. You're comparing a fraction of Gretzky's contribution to a fraction of all the professional hockey players, even if you only look at forwards. Even then, he ends up 2-3x better than this already elite group.
> Colonizing Mars is completely irrational, correct. But so was going to space in the first place, so was sailing around the Earth, so was any sort of flight.

No, no, no. Those were not irrational.
I was curious when I saw that Cygnus was/will be destroyed on re-entry , while Dragon is reusable. I don't know anything about spacecraft, but that seems like a fundamental difference in engineering in favor of SpaceX
I agree it's perfectly possible to get somewhere as an entrepreneur without a college degree. But it's hardly detrimental to have one either.

And I'm kind of sick of the US-centric view that all college degrees cost $100,000+ -- many high quality degrees in other western countries cost as little as 10-20% of this figure (and often are paid for in a deferred payment scheme). As with so many things (like healthcare) it's just another area the US seems to have gone insane with.
I think the problem is that the syntax looks too much like C and most people assumed they already "knew" Javascript without bothering to learn it from scratch. "Javascript - The Good Parts" should be mandatory reading before touching the language.

At the same time it's a double edged sword - because it looked so similar to C, it most likely was so successful.

I'm talking historically as someone who was the typical C / Perl programmer back in the 90s when the web took off and made this exact mistake.
Three critiques:

1. Browser auto-completion of forms will break, because that typically uses the form name to identify the data that's expected, and this plugin hashes the form name.
2. The page would not be cacheable, because the hash key changes for each request.
3. The question of form-labels isn't addressed in the plugin. Perhaps the "real fields" do have labels - at least they should - but the negative-captcha fields don't? That would give a clear signal on fields to avoid. If they were to have labels, what label should be used? A dictionary word? That would have usability/accessibility implications.
To me, the situation appears to have been carefully constructed to have avoided any realistic probability of warfare against Syria.
Just like you even I wanted to dropout and start something I wanted or wished to do. My parents aren't too conservative. But my dad told me something which I believe is very true - "Getting a degree is highly rewarding. If tomorrow your business crashes, you'd at least have a degree to back you up with a job. Degree is for your secure future not to please the society around you". No doubt this is true. And as my dad said, its more for you than anyone else. But again its more than that, getting a degree pays more than just societal status and a more savvy future. That being said, I personally want to know each and every specific topic in full depth. And I believe that can only happen with a proper mentor over me and like-minded peers around me. In other words, in a "university". Plus college helps you with many other things in "life" and not just academically. But then it depends on what you want to do and accordingly it matters if a degree is worth it or not.

I hope students (especially) take this post in the right gesture. Dropping out is not the best solution always. Doesn't work for everyone. Its not cool to dropout because Zuck, Gates and Jobs did. You "have to have" a strong reason why university isnt the best option for you.

+1 otherwise for the post. Good to know you had the support you needed. Doesn't happen with everyone. All the best ;)
I don't have very much hope for Thunderbolt. It seems to be going the way by Firewire.

The Thunderbolt Cables cost like $40 a pop, adapters can cost more as well. Its a far cry from just being able to plug a GbE port directly into the darn thing.

As stated before, Thunderbolt is roughly comparable to the Surface Dock. You can connect an external display and Ethernet port through Thunderbolt, but you have to pay through the nose on extra wires and extra adapters. (or $200 for the Surface Dock).

BTW: Surface Pro prices are much cheaper. $1030 gets you the 128GB model now. The SurfacePro has 1080p screen. Not a single Macbook Air model has a decent resolution.

I think at the end of the day, what decides it is how much you want the 1080p screen, Stylus, Windows applications (and Windows Domain Joining for those business users), and portability.

Price-for-price, Surface Pro just gives you more than even the cheapest Macbook Air. Its just a better deal frankly.
Love how the investor who authored that subthread was a founder of Betfair, and is trying to defend how ethical the JustFab business model is.

... his credibility level on this topic is over 9000.
Twenty years ago I read exactly the same about using the abomination that was perl/CGI instead of the so called correct C. And history tells us that the prototypes that were made to test the concept where, most of the times, good enough to stop further development in the academic way. This product (or a similar one) can empower lots of people in ways that we cannot imagine yet.
Not all hardware has to be made by hundreds of thousands and be able to tinker with real world devices will be a bigger asset than we think right now. The web we know now hasn't been developed from tall towers but from the trenches. New ideas will flourish and then great developers will be needed to optimize, refine and scale projects that will change our view. At least that's what I hope.
International agreements of this sort are usually nothing but attempts, masqueraded in positive-sounding language, to erode foreign sovereignty for (fun and?) profit. Some would say, this is exactly what EU was.
Agreed, social engineering was key. Just this morning I was explaining (in Mandarin, in a Thai taxi, mind you!) that the best and worst feature of Bitcoin was mining as a solution for the initial distribution problem.

Is this exactly what, in hindsight, crypto-currencies probably needed to get started? IMHO, Yes.

Is this a good feature going forward? IMHO, No.

Does it matter anymore? IMHO, No ... as there will be loads of alternatives and Bitcoin and related ecosystems have cracked open a wedge of reality that can never again be shut.

In short: MVP crypto-currency of its era? Maybe. Very good fit for the era? History says yes. Very good fit for the future? IMHO, probably not... but also, not going away soon. Whatever one's views on Bitcoin, it's hard to challenge its credentials as a damn good hack that changed the world. I'll be proud to tell my grandchildren that back when it all started I (ab)used my admin powers to undelete Bitcoin's Wikipedia page, despite the shit-storm that caused! ;) Hahah.
Because when you add a wire to address bytes, you multiply by 2 the number of addressable bytes.
PHP + MySQL is the most unfortunate technology stack for this project.
Ubuntu installs cleanly on Surface Pros. The only part that doesn't work is the WiFi driver IIRC, but people have found workarounds for that.
Very valid point. In the case I witnessed it wasn't any particular person's fault but rather the longer-term consequence of bad "culture fit" allowed to simmer.
And this is on hacker news because?
Really loved the article Ashwin. So true. Specially the para:

For some reasons, Indians just can’t deal with the fact that someone without pedigree can get somewhere in life. It’s unbelievable that you can be a good programmer, successful businessman or great marketer without an {insert random college degree here}.
Has it been attempted? In case not, https://github.com/tantalor/visible-js
Could this take advantage of Google's new QUIC protocol, or get any benefits from it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC
Maybe they're not competing with Phillips or GE, but with Lego mindstorms.