skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My bank displays an overlay every time I log in, asking me to install some dumb antivirus from some dumb company in exchange for $25 (#notabubble).

It was annoying me, so I sent them a message saying I had installed the antivirus (I hadn't, it's Windows only and I use OSX at work and Linux at home) and asked for my $25. They appeared a few days later in my bank account.

But the darn popup kept appearing every time. A month or two later, I messaged them again, saying I had installed the antivirus. A few days later, $25 in my bank account.

Oh well. If you pay me for your dumb popups, why not. I plan on messaging them again in a month or so :) (can't make it too obvious)
First look: iBuyPower's Steam Machines prototype
The Amiga did catch on everywhere but the US, pretty much. 5 million or so sold was an amazing feat at the time.

But in the US, Commodore had badly burned their dealer network in the C64 days, and they always did better outside the US and so focused their supply to Europe when they had problems meeting demand.

Unfortunately, staying in that market when it was relegated to high end niche (TV studios etc.) in the US, and largely low end in much of Europe, was a long shot. And then Commodore pursued a massively destructive campaign of hiring and firing managers in the US (which, to be fair, they had a tradition of since early in the Tramiel era) to try to find someone who could build up the US market.

But they ruined their chances further by drastically under-investing in R&D, and continuously second-guessing their engineering teams, who were likely to an extent hurt by their proximity to the toxic US part of the company.

Commodore was an odd beast in that the international subsidiaries were always mostly independent - they ordered the stock they wanted from the parent company, but decided what they wanted to sell and how. Germany also got to design some products (and there were manufacturing there). Yet most of the product development were managed strictly out of the US where their product wasn't selling well.

The A4000 was a pretty good demonstration of the consequence of the US management feuds coupled with putting engineering on the chopping block regularly: It was late; it was slow; it was expensive; it was ugly; it had IDE (the Amiga world was pretty much entirely SCSI, as IDE was CPU intensive in comparison, which was not what you wanted in a system that was already lagging in terms of raw CPU performance; this is what you got by putting managers used to PCs in charge of making decisions about Amiga projects - they saw SCSI and saw "expense" rather than one of the things that was vital to making an Amiga perform well at the time)

Before that, Dave Haynie had his "A3000+" pretty much done: Sam CPUs as the A4000; better memory bus; SCSI; space for an on-board DSP; AGA like the A4000. And fit in an A3000 case, which was actually pretty.

This was par for the course for Commodore, unfortunately. I'd like to say it was a great company, but frankly, while Tramiel did a few strokes of genius in his day, most of Commodore's history is a history of being given fantastic opportunities - often through brilliant acquisitions - and scuppering them with a gusto that would make some think it was intentional (there was/is a long lived rumour that towards the end Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali were intentionally causing share price volatility to profit of it, rather than actually trying to grow the company).
5 Benefits of Having a Smart and Successful Wife
if you're asking whether functions in Mathematica are first-class values, then yes. everything in Mathematica is first-class. functions are just symbols that have associated pattern-matching rules in the form f[___], otherwise they are the same as any other symbol.

you can do, for example:

RandomChoice[{Plus, Times}][2, 3]

where the result will be either 5 or 6. in more explicit form:

If[RandomReal[] < .5, Plus, Times][2, 3]

example of an "anonymous" function:

(#1^2 + #2^2 &)[2, 3]

square of all numbers from 1 to 100:

#^2 & /@ Range[100]

simpler form:

Range[100]^2

all pairwise products of the first seven prime numbers (among themselves):

Times @@@ Tuples[Prime /@ Range[7], 2]

etc.
I respect your beliefs, but I disagree that it is immoral to give people a tool that swaps ads for your own.

It's not nice but I think once you send someone some bits, you give up any claim to control what they do with them in the privacy of their own home. Even if they swap out the ads.

In fact I would argue using physical violence (police) to enforce what you deem to be "proper private use" of distributed bits is immoral.
What's your range for determining whether somebodies resources should be diverted into task A or B?
To me, Kim Dotcom's activities are reminiscent of one of those villain crossover movies -- Alien vs. Predator or whatever. I don't bear Dotcom much good will, but if he damages the copyright maximalists while they're taking him down, I'm happy to see that.
War, Poverty, and Oppression are better today than they have ever been at any point in history. Moral Decay is far too vague and subjective to be usefully compared, but since it is often used as an excuse for Oppression, I feel confident in saying that it's an excellent thing if it is continuing unabated.
All custom fonts look off in Chrome on Windows, because Chrome on Windows uses a different font renderer than every other browser, including Chrome on other platforms. Last I checked the official Chromium bug (which is almost 2 years old now), someone talked about starting work on using DirectWrite in April. Hasn't happened yet.

If you want to see how the site's supposed to look, load up Firefox or Internet Explorer.
Come now. We don't have a society in which everyone is equipped to debug a company's website for them. The point of oversight in medical markets is to manage the risk that innocent people are victimized by a company's mistakes, negligence, or pursuit of profit.
DragonFly BSD 3.6 released
That is rather the point, isn't it? Without the vocal support of libertarians who like it precisely because it can't inflate or be manipulated, would it ever have become his popular?
While CUBLAS is available out there, it is not something that can be run on such a wide array of hardware. This is probably of great interest to startups wanting to do things on things on FPGA's and mobile devices. They now have a well optimized open source math library to use as potential building blocks, and it has an Apache License. CUBLAS is only good for NVidia cards. So I actually think this could be a big deal, and could potentially reduce the popularity of CUDA over time.
Oh, the infinisql_*.h is because I deploy all header files as part of "make install", when what I really should do is boil it down to just the api header. The api is for stored procedure programming. Yes, I have it on backlog to fix. I give them all that name in case somebody installs to /usr/local (which you probably oughtn't) it's clear what application they all belong to. Yes, I could create a subdirectory, too. But the fix will be when I clean up api.cc to only have to pull in the one header instead of several of them.

#line statements because I get compiler messages from time to time putting things on the wrong line after having imported headers.
Libsass – C implementation of a Sass compiler
There's a perfectly rational reason for shaken (車検), though most HNers won't like it. It's designed to help a few parts of the auto industry value chain, from manufacturers (who get a domestic market which is, basically, forced into a 6-year upgrade cycle) to smaller-scale exporters (who get a constant stream of perfectly usable cars for essentially scrap value, then resell them to emerging markets for significant fractions of their off-the-lot value, because "everyone knows" that Japanese cars last forever).
While I'm all for sticking it to the man, isn't this a legally dangerous thing to do?
Which "Silicon Beach" are you referring to? Miami? Santa Monica? Or the original, Santa Barbara (dating back to the mid '90s)?
> Google Support is unbelievably awful - anyone got any sugggestions?

Don't use Google.
Office is ubiquitous because it was better than all of its competitors, and largely still is.

...which was entirely a result of their abusing monopoly power.

god help any part of the technology sector they choose to target.

With the march onward past Windows 95, they set in motion a plan that kept progress in personal computing from advancing for about 15 years.

Now, I don't believe they sat down and actually said "We are going to halt progress for 15 years." They just sat and grinded on their install base without any reason or motivation to innovate.

Let's not let that happen again.

Microsoft is in no way a good thing for the world. The only saving grace at this point is they are full of silly old people who can't think in a world where everybody has an iPhone in their pocket and an iPad at home.
related:

"My deadly disease was just a 23andme bug (mntmn.com)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6796219
Yes! Let's smash it into a nearby astronomical object when its usefulness runs out!
There is no double standard. The definition of a Medical Device is quite clear:
http://www.fda.gov/medicaldevices/deviceregulationandguidanc...

Besides this not being part of the FDA's charter, what you're ignoring is that articles assist you (correctly or otherwise!) in self-diagnosis. An article does not in and of itself diagnose you with a disease or condition and thus can't by any stretch of the imagination be considered a Device.
> It is imperative to understand that everything was wiped out from our servers and getting functionality back is priority #1.
The wallet part of BIPS was a free service to make payments easier for users.
Web Wallets are like a regular wallet that you carry cash in and not meant to keep large amounts in.
Hence we offered a paper wallet as a cold storage alternative for those who wanted a safe storage solution.

"Oh, we never said that our food is screened against infection - if you wanted that you should have checked out the premium section!"
Natural supplements are effectively marketed as medication (despite a label indicating the FDA has not evaluated the claims). Many people I have spoken to genuinely believe natural supplements to be actual medicine based on the way they are marketed.

The issue with incorrect diagnosis is might lead to incorrect or ineffective treatments. "Natural supplements" are the incorrect or ineffective treatments themselves: the unregulated claims they make is very similar in substance and effect to the quasiregulated claims that 23andme is making.
I see. Thanks for the heads up.
Food and shelter are classic examples of necessary goods which the government provides through taxation to those who can't afford them.
And what is a good strategy for this when deciding where to live (both on macro and micro scale)?
But that's actually less efficient! You are making negligible amounts for each small USB miner, and whoever you are giving them to is probably spending more in the electricity than you are making! It would be just as profitable to ask those million people to just give you a penny every day or two.

At least with larger setups, you get to pool your costs, and your power usage would be more efficient.

Now, the counter to this are the micro-mining setups where you are using very little electricity, such as using a flashed router or Raspberry Pi to host your USB miners. In this case, you could even probably run it off of solar in most places to make running costs actually zero. You'd have maybe $100 more in initial costs (for solar), but you'd have no ongoing costs, only profit.

BTW, your username is funny to me - those are my initials. It's like I'm having an argument with myself. It's been known to happen.
Let's remember XV
I think it's a teacher thing. All the best teachers I've observed, both in my life and famous ones, have mastered the teaching of intuition. This is not limited to physics or even the hard sciences. I'd also say that there's a causal link between those who can teach material well and those who truly master a subject matter, so your latter statement is correct.

I've been doing 8.01x and 8.02x on edX - both are taught by Walter Lewin[1] and I have found him to capture the same principles of understanding intuitively the material. Indeed, reading the discussion boards of the subjects I routinely see people laud the homework material for being challenging but when they finally crack it, experiencing a deeper understanding of and insight into the fundamental nature of the subject matter.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lewin
Without the clarity of being able to hear someone's voice and see someone's facial expression the mind finds ways of over interpreting what's written. On top of that, there are individuals who interpret every little thing in your text as a clue to your emotion and intent as if you had painstakingly crafted each individual letter. Sometimes I use periods when I text, some times I don't. Sometimes I spread a thought across multiple texts, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I use emoticons when I text, sometimes I don't.

You can't count on any of these non-verbal and non-muscular artifacts as reliable emotional or intentional clues. But you can certainly count on yourself to find meaning in the meaningless.

None of this is to say that sometimes it doesn't happen, but sometimes it doesn't.
Nice! I use AdBlock to shun the ads but something like CB2 [0] will still show up. The most irritating ones for me are AllThingsD [1] and Forbes (I'm surprised no one has submitted it as yet) which have an intermediate landing advertisement page before proceeding to the main content.

[0] http://tabcloseddidntread.com/post/68095629679/now-shopping-...

[1] http://tabcloseddidntread.com/post/68051843383/or-just-close...
Bucs know market doesn't favor them for A.J.
I was a juror on a (6 week long) product liability lawsuit this past summer, and it came out that despite the fact that an expert witness for the plaintiff asked to see punch biopsies to check for neuropathy in the supposedly injured leg with a control sample from the other leg, the plaintiff's lawyers only sent him the punch biopsy from the leg claimed to be injured. When this came out the plaintiff's lawyers claimed they did this because they wanted it to a be a "blind study". I almost wtfed out of my chair.

It was pretty clear to anyone with half a brain that the plaintiff had no actual case and the issue he was suffering from was related to preexisting degenerative arthritis and nothing to do with the product that supposedly injured his knee, but sadly based on nothing more than emotional manipulation by his (very good) lawyers of the jury he came very close to winning (ultimately it was a hung jury, but the majority of votes were in plaintiff's favor).

Sadly, people are right to doubt the fact that many of the jurors have the context to value Diffie's testimony over the plaintiff's expert witnesses in this case.
I've tried like hell, I mean I've really tried, been trying to use Ubuntu, but it just keeps failing me. Like copy & paste isn't reliable! Something that should just work, just fails for me all too often.
A popup by any other name is still terrible.
Agreed. Santa Monica is is a solid spot for media startups or a handful of mobile apps. Some good work being done in the recommendation / metasearch space, and a handful of crowdfunding startups. Safe to assume everyone funding you has ties to Hollywood, since that's the majority of the VC money down there.
Yeah, all that stuff bugs me too.

I am curious, are there web analytics that let publishers know that a page was seen them immediately closed?

(Or that say your video was stopped after 3 seconds?)
One of the sites I thought up while high has done over $1 million in Adsense profits over the past 10 years. Doesn't mean I'm a millionaire though, it's expensive living in the Bay Area.
To echo this, this guy [1] has a fantastic series on buying and refurbishing property in Japan and talks about what you're mentioning.

It's actually surprisingly fascinating. He also has some interesting videos on the recycling culture in Japan including videos of open air recycling centers full of perfectly working appliances.

1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZfoMTPXZXE&list=SPE0D149A2A5...
Yes, but how many general purpose chips have been made that aren't useful for anything any more - 386, Pentium, etc. After their useful life has ended they just end up on the scrap heap anyway.
I am curious, are there web analytics that let publishers know that a page was seen them immediately closed?

Yes, it's called Google Analytics.
Just move to brooklyn, that's what I did... best of both worlds.
This font rendering issue is one of the most frustrating things about using Google Fonts. It's actually the reason I've stopped using the service completely.
is there anyone on the planet that actually looks at these things?

Yes. I mean, I don't have the data, but sites like Upworthy (who are featured) make 25 different headlines for every post, then test the hell out of them to see which one performs best. I'd be amazed if they didn't bother to also test the performance of popups like that.
I think you've wandered a bit far from the original point with this talk of racism. More back to the first, I think it's an unavoidable fact that if you create something you are allowed to dictate the terms of using, consuming, or experiencing that thing. That means I can make something, and then I can require people to pay to use it/see it/experience it. And I don't think we can get away from that.

I also don't think we have can say that violating that right is an act of integrity.
Gotcha. Tab would probably be a safer key to use rather than space.
Posting about it on HN might be :-P
this is good advice, but I'd also include a "teaser deck" as an attachment. I've had great luck with ours - it basically boils your entire company down to a story that you convey with no more than 5 slides. Each slide has an image and no more than one sentence/thought. Most people don't read more than a few sentences of text in an email, and the ultimate reductionism required to get to a good teaser deck is great practice for refining your own thoughts. Use the teaser deck to get the follow up meeting or call, and that's where you can dig in and explain.
What do you guys plan to do differently than services like Angie's List?

Also, why so much SASS/CSS? Those line counts seem awfully high
A few years ago I was tinkering with Haskell and looked at a framework call HAppS which kept all its state in memory. Doesn't look like the project has really been active lately.
If it's a site I visit regularly then:

1. I already subscribed/signed up/know about.

2. It's a really annoying advertisement which could have been shown in a sidebar or, really, anywhere else.

If it's a site I don't visit regularly I'm just there for the content - usually via a link from somewhere else - and I'm extremely likely to close the tab or at least completely ignore it.

I'm trying to think of an example where this kind of pop over has been helpful but can't
Are regulators not people? Are they infallible? Are there no obvious market mechanisms that will punish con men peddling their inferior products?

Lessening risk is far more important than not stifling innovation

I don't think this unqualified statement makes sense.
Shouldn't the opportunity cost of the benefits of innovations not produced, weighed against the risks present in allowing a market to produce them, play a factor? And this would no doubt be different for each and every possible innovation.
Does anyone have numbers indicating the extent to which tuition subsidizes research funding or vice versa? I (and most HNers, I'd assume) wouldn't shed many tears over seeing the extraordinarily exploitative and inefficient institution of college education go through disruption. My experience has been that online lectures, course material, and forum discussions are more than up to the task of replacing their physical counterparts (pause+rewind is a killer feature, and the discussions in online forums are miles above anything I experienced in section/recitation). Hands-on labs are about the only thing that ought to have a marginal cost in this day and age. But I hate to think what disruption could do to academia.

There are a handful of big (sometimes existential!) problems lurking on the horizon which absolutely rely on academia because incremental progress isn't amenable to monetization. I'm most worried about the drug industry. It's imploding (google "inverse moore's law"), leaving the basic science required to get over the slump in the hands of academics, and I don't want to wait 50 years for high-efficiency gene therapy (or let China grab the market) just because the research is tied to an outdated educational system. I know there's very little anyone can do about it, but I need to know the extent to which college tuition subsidizes said research before I can form a solid opinion on disruption.

EDIT: Got off my ass and googled it. The NSF estimated in 1994 that 9.5% of research funding comes from tuition [1]. I would like to formally submit one internet-vote in favor of disruption, along with one internet vote to increase research funding to compensate :)

[1] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib97313.htm
Second language speaker here, what does this sentence mean?
Salesforce Hackathon Log Records
You're talking about demand, which is orthogonal to competition. There are plenty of inelastic demand industries which are still quite beneficially served by competitive markets. And that includes things in the realm of goods and services that are quite literally life saving.
For the slightly less "adventurous" in terms of music, here are two great alternatives that provide modern remixes of Amiga and C64 music. I often find that the remixes are better at evoking the feeling I remember in cases where the originals often feel underwhelming when hearing them again. I think the originals are in general easier to listen to for those of us who grew up with the sound (I do listen to quite a bit of the originals too, as well as other chiptune / retro music)

http://remix.kwed.org/

Quality is varying; sort by rating, and check out some of the IK+, Delta and Commando mixes as "easy" introductions where the original tracks have kept well)

http://www.amigaremix.com/ is also great, but the irony is that because the Amiga sound is/was so much more sample driven, I find that there are fewer remixes I like; often because the originals are good enough that bad remixes are much more obvious.

daXX is a consistently quite good arranger to look for (also for C64 remixes). There are many other good ones, but daXX is good for consistency across the board.

Reyn Ouwehand is also highly notable, especially for being a guy that composed original music for the C64 and Amiga (such as for Last Ninja 3), that then went on to a career in the music industry, and has continued to do remixes of C64 and Amiga tracks as a hobby.
How Much Would You Pay For Gold Headphones Designed By Jony Ive?
Not really. I could buy them on DVD too instead of iTunes. The point is that copyright enables the production of these beautifully produced cartoons using a business model that's a simple cash transaction. No advertising, no privacy-destroying user tracking, just cash in trade for a product.
Citation needed on there being less ridiculous patents being filed, because I doubt it.

As far as Google Search goes, standard advice for any tech company to their employees is don't go searching for patents, just submit potentially patent-able ideas to legal. This is because if someone has a patent on something and you violate it and they can prove that you knew about the patent via subpoenaed records then you owe them three times as much as you would otherwise, so the more ignorant you are of existing patents the better.

And on the legal side of things, IP lawyers just search the USPTO records directly, not through Google Search.
Entrepreneurship is Hard but you can't die