skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not having a TV when you have kids is borderline abuse IMHO

Then I say, "why would anyone want to force TV on their children", then you say, "I don't want to force it, you're misunderstanding". I feel like we've had this discussion before, you're trolling [1].

Borderline abuse is a serious accusation, but then I'd argue providing a child frequent and regular unrestricted access to TV (or internet) is borderline abuse, so maybe we're even. I don't think you're arguing that, though, I'm just strawmanning. My kids are as involved with pop-culture as any four and three year old should be, TV will never be necessary for that. As they grow TV is going to be less and less relevant (IMHO), so the point will be moot.

Side note, just had a funny conversation with son last night trying to explain what a television station is (he watched "the spongebob movie" on Nick Jr. at the doctor's office), "it's like a website that shows movies all the time, but you can't choose them" was the best I could do.

([1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503251)
I advise looking into setting up zoneminder. You can get it from http://www.zoneminder.com/ . It is a free linux program, it will integrate pictures from a variety of cameras and save them in a searchable way via a web interface. You can make it trigger on motion, and only save those shots, and it will make little avi movies out of sequential stills from an ordinary still camera.

In my experimentation, I found that ethernet based "web cams" worked best for my application. I used the cheap Airlink brand sold at Fry's. The quality is not good, but good enough to see who is in a room. If you need to read license plates in a parking lot they will not be good enough.

I believe a decent small business could be made simply building and installing zoneminder boxes. I tried to get set up to do that but never really got that first customer.

Another business opportunity is in higher quality cameras for zoneminder and similar applications. Security cameras are really 15 years behind in picture quality, and to get decent quality you pay thousands of dollars. I tried to use one of the common consumer cameras, via the control-by-USB mode, as a security camera, but the control by USB mode is buggy and unreliable on most of those cameras.

If you made a simple ethernet camera like the Airlink 101 sold at Fry's, but had auto-focus, at least 3 megapixels, auto-correction for low light, I think they would sell well.
I think we agree completely that the use of GPA as a measure of ability is limited. To be fair, though, I never asserted that GPA would predict who would 'have a better social life' or who would be 'in better shape.' In fact, I might predict that these would be negatively correlated with GPA. Also, I'm not sure I understand your story: did your friend actually have low grades, or are you just saying he was highly successful after attending a less famous school?

In any case, I hesitate to offer my own examples: I don't have a sufficiently large sample size, as I don't hang out with people who had low GPAs.
How many times do you need to kill the entire World's population? We have nukes enough to do it several times. Even if you favor having nukes, there's no need to have so many of them. They're a waste of money.
'threats... I'm not very good at them, though I'm told they can be quite effective...'.
Same here, it's either that or 1 blank tab if I closed all my tabs last time.
GPS in a well-covered area is accurate to around 10m or so. Combine that with a smartphone's internal compass and it knows what direction you are facing, so can pop up a floating box in roughly the right direction. Simple idea, and quite a nice indication of where things in the Augmented Reality space are going.

*

Other augmented reality examples:

-------

- IBM 'Seer' app for Wimbledon 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZoDmqcZ34

- Google Sky map for android: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6znyx0gjb4&eurl=http%3A%...

- US postal service using augmented reality: http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i388...

- Augmented reality t-shirt / twitter mashup: http://www.squidder.com/2009/02/17/papertweet3d-augmented-re...

... and there's a lot more products out there - google for: ARSights / D'Fusion / Layar /
Project Natal / Releas3D / SixthSense / Wikitude

*

Development kits / APIs:

-------

ARTag - http://www.artag.net/

ARToolkit - http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

FlarToolKit - http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit/en

NyARToolkit - http://nyatla.jp/nyartoolkit/wiki/index.php
i actually plan on writing my own SO clone this weekend with my own compiler that i plan on releasing under the GPL so its funny you mention that
good observation of contradiction; i just hope it was not in defense of this sentimental nonsense and instead, an insult to the quality of TechCrunch.
I'm talking about Huxley's most famous work, Brave New World. I sounds like you haven't read it. I really suggest that you do, it is a fantastic, albeit frighteningly accurate (seriously drug companies, soma? you named your anti-anxiety medication SOMA!?!?), peak into the future.
I think the main problem is the visual artifacts introduced by the time-domain dithering done to compensate for the 6-bit DACs, rather than the lack of color resolution itself. This affects everyone, not just artists foolish enough to use laptops.

The fact that, to a first approximation, one can no longer buy a laptop with an LCD of the same quality as those made 10 years ago - at any price - is disturbing all in itself, and suggests that technology is marching backwards. What's next, the abolition of 44.1KHz audio?

Compare a 1980s keyboard to a modern one. It is entirely conceivable that the UI technology we will be using in a decade or two will be of such abominable quality that one might be ashamed to design it into a children's toy computer today.
How is a non-hacker end user supposed to run a tarball? How are they supposed to know what the installer is? Why make it so hard?

Why can't Firefox do what Skype and Miro do (below)?

* If the user string contains Windows, provide an MSI. In these OSes, if you click on a MSI package, it installs.

* If the user string contains OS X, provide a install image. In these OSes, if you click on an install image, it installs.

* If the user string contains Debian or Ubuntu, provide a dpkg. In these OSes, if you click on an dpkg, it installs.

* If the user string contains Fedora, RHEL or SuSE, provide a rpm. In these OSes, if you click on a rpm package, it installs.

* Anything else gets a menu with all the above options.
If you're familiar with Emacs you can use Org-mode. There's actually a pretty good video from its creator that shows you the main features:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM
Ahh, I get it. The user isn't actually sorting, but providing input values for a segment of text, that a sorting algorithm might use.

I was having visions of trying to parse sentence breaks, and then having users shove the good sentences in the article to the top, and bad ones down. None of which made any sense to me...
Is this not like the approach of the protein folding game? Though they are directly for science and not for profit but the data that you generate is sent to them.

http://fold.it/portal/

I could see it working if you had some disclosure on how and what data you are automatically generating and sending back.
1) Indian Railroad
2) Coca Cola
3) Siemens

Good guesses?

Hmmm no, Indian Railroad only 1.4 million employees, compared to Wal Marts 2.1.
that would be incredible! the news as significant facts (where the editorializing was simply the process of selecting what information to share or is news worthy), and editorials are the editorials; clearly separated! I'm all for it.
I totally forgot about org-mode. I have a few friends that use it and love it. Maybe I should go ahead and dive into it.
Remind me to stay on your good side.

We pulled a similar prank on a guy working on implementing 'verified by visa'. Every morning he'd walk in to the office and read the same news site. So, three days before completing the project we cloned the news site and posted an article that VISA had decided to abandon VBV.

He walks in to the office, starts reading the headlines (-- expletive deleted --) slams his coffee down and walks out of the office.

To his credit within 20 paces he started laughing like mad, knowing he'd been had. Pretty clever dude, it would have taken me a bit longer... :)

To protect the guilty and the innocent alike, no further references, but rest assured that a few words were addressed to VISA execs that were not exactly pc.

Lots of fun with the DNS.
Ok, so he made changes you wanted to make but didn't get around to? Simple solution:

git pull ...
That's the 3rd time I've heard about it today, so I'll look into it. It looks really good.
Prototypes are a huge win not just for language expressiveness, but for interpreter implementation too. My language, Nasal (http://plausible.org/nasal) uses the same tricks to implement "objects", "classes" and "modules" in script code using precisely the same internal mechanics.
How the browsers stack up for running 3D content
3D browser-game company Muse Games takes a look at the current state of 3D in the browser.
Because then you've just landed yourself in update hell. You'll need to take care of Firefox updates yourself instead of letting the distribution packaged update system take care of it.

This is a real problem with running Firefox on corporate networks. The users don't have admin rights, so they can't click "Update" when Firefox wants to update itself. And administrators can't push the updates out through WSUS. Therefore, the most vulnerable vector on your computer (the browser) gets to remain in an un-updated state.

I think there is a group that repackages Firefox into msi format, which helps a lot. But as far as I know it's independent from Mozilla.
not valid; this site and its participants go out of their way to encourage quality discussions. perhaps this effort does not always succeed, and surely we all fail in many ways, but it is the direction and the intent of our efforts that makes all the difference.
How Can We Stop Phishing Scams?
Many of these emails are usually addressed to “Dear Your Bank customer- the moment you point this move back. The prime reason behind this is the scammer located your email id from your company site, and included the address in the list of potential victims.
And we only have to wait 250 million years!
Hey buddy, I wanted to go to the moon once. I didn't make it.
I've seen it demonstrated on Nokia devices before, but it's more available to the public with an iPhone.

I find it clever that they were able to circumvent one major obstacle of doing augmented reality. Usually, you need to interpret something about the video view from the camera in order to figure out where to place the 3D models in the scene.

Instead, they rendered it entirely ignoring the scene, and just used orientation and distance to display the subway signs. That works great for cities like New York or DC, where it's pretty much a grid with no dead ends.
Yes. A great big one too.
Speaking of which, I wonder how much time developers worldwide waste by having to manually click OK on alert windows to continue execution? I much prefer console.log();
I don't like getting searched either. A long time back, when I was thirteen and moved back to the US with my family after living in France for a year, we had to do the full-on customs interview. They let us take our Mac home, but we had to come back to the customs office a week later to prove that we'd purchased it in the US. Fortunately, computers aren't exactly considered exotic and expensive things anymore.

I had a little apprehension taking my laptop over to Europe and back, mainly because it would feel very uncomfortable to have someone open up my computer and click around. And I really don't need a lecture from a customs agent about my lack of unit tests, heh.

But ultimately, I'd guess that almost all business travelers carry a laptop these days, and since electronic communication doesn't need to travel physically on a laptop anyway, it seems like one of the lowest priorities for a customs agent. It's easy to get in a huff, but ultimately, many of them actually want to do their jobs well, and wasting time on laptop searches would probably be a major distraction from what they view as their real work, anyway.
You could do a load of damage with DNS redirection. If you look at the market penetration of Google Analytics you'll see that a very, very large number of sites are embedding JavaScript pulled from google-analytics.com in web pages. Now imagine if you redirected that one domain and served your own JavaScript. You could include the GA JavaScript as well, but add your own stuff which would then run in everyone's (within that DNS area) web pages and your JavaScript could start doing all sorts of nasty things.
I've read and upvoted the parent post first.

But I think you're right.

Truly caring and sensitive people are becoming rare these days and it's not easy to identify the main causes.

But I think mass media are to blame, at least partly, for the commercialization of people private lives. It is so deeply hardwired in our psyche that even on the web this (commercializing our own self) has become almost a requirement for success.
"seriously drug companies, soma? you named your anti-anxiety medication SOMA!?!?"

You do realize the name doesn't come from Brave New World right?
Nope, doesn't seem to. The UK, for example, has approximately 6 million public sector employees as of Q1 2009.
Absolutely, I don't think it will be long before there will be a major hack like this at some large ISP. The temptation is just too large.

DNS is one of the weak links of the way the web is put together, and javascript embedded from third party sites nicely exposes that Achilles heel.

Another reason to mistrust open wifi connections :)
So is apple approving apps like this now? I was under the impression that they made use of undocumented APIs, and as such, aren't getting into the app store?

If they are approving them, then I'm getting right on this bandwaggon!
Yep. So if the last three times you read something about Michael Jackson it ticked you off, the system doesn't rank segments of text tagged with Michael Jackson very highly the next time you search for related questions or statements. To take it a step further, if you and I track closely when the keyword phrase is "Sundance Film Festival", and I just read an article I found hilarious, it's probably something you would enjoy as well.

There is a bit of arm-waving going on here, I admit. But it's just a blue-sky concept right now, so a little arm-waving can be forgiven (hopefullly).
I just showed this to my wife, followed by a "this is awesome".

And her response. "Can't you just write it down or type it on the computer after you weigh yourself?"

GAH. No.

This product was made in the name of geeky coolness and therefore, writing down your weight is no longer an option.
Yeah, mine's Perl, and running on a slower processor, so the difference feels about right.

Of course my main calculation is only one line:

$hamming_dist = unpack("%160b*", sha1($attempt_phrase) ^ $challenge_sha);

:)
I've read it, but I don't agree with your interpretation. The society in the book discourages love and attachment - this isn't love, it's just cheap entertainment. It's "Your Favourite Childhood Stars - Where Are They Now?" with a paper thin excuse. Admit it, if the girl wasn't a cute, white cherub no-one would care.
I think it's funny that "owning a television" is so often perceived as a lifestyle choice. It's especially odd these days, when a television is typically just another LCD monitor.

"I don't use a broadcast, cable, satellite, or fiber video delivery service" doesn't have the same smug ring to it. And you could be watching the same content over a data network anyway.

This stuff is all merging together, and it's time to stop being so judgmental about home appliances.
Wal-Mart, China National Petroleum, State Grid Corp of China, Indian Railways, USPS, Sinopec, China Telecom, Carrefour.

Save yourself 8 page views.
This guy on Youtube has some Feynman lecture videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/carlosjerez23

Are they the same ones?
Sure am glad I spent 25 minutes applying last week. :-/
At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I would really like a 2 year old version of /classic as well.

news.ycombinator.com/getoffmylawn would work if pg needs a URL suggestion.
The problem I have with this response is that the News apparently targeted anybody they thought would make a good story, not just people who were probably doing things they shouldn't. If it were politicians and business people, for serious research, okay—but the Guardian article I saw said a number of celebrities were also spied on.

Journalism is not the same as tabloid "journalism".
Please note that we're also looking for some everyday racists from the 1950s to see if they've changed their minds since. Names and addresses on a postcard please.
This really cracked me up:

TechCrunch, one of the most respected blogs in Silicon Valley, ...
You wouldn't even need to do too much damage on the client side for an effective attack vector.

Imagine redirecting scripts for googleadservices.com and implementing their JS code with your own publisher ID there.

That would make some of those adsense cheques Markus Frind has shown off look like lunch money.

EDIT - if you really wanted to make something like this cool, you would instead use the publisher ID of some random charity (or even cycle through an array of charities) that could be easily obtainable by viewing source code in pages.

Just a thought...

EDIT #2 - Or, some more Internet Justice - just have it ignore the clicks that would otherwise go to domain parkers (with the revenue heading to charity). You cut off that air supply and eventually a lot of domains will start becoming available again.

That way, the Internet Wins.
I have a site with 20.000 uniques per day and the 3 month average rank in alexa is 7,771 so it seems pretty accurate.

Before alexa changed the ranking system it used to be on the top 1000.
Fall From The Top: The Danger Of A "Personal Brand"
So you are telling us that someone modified the source code you released as 'open source'?? That Bastard!

And he didn't discuss this with you before? That's absolutely disgusting!!
There were fades? I gave up when I realized I'd have to click "Next" 8 times.
Obviously not a DVCS user.
http://www88.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=government+employees
I just mute the TV during commercials. If my wife has the remote, she tends to surf to another channel instead.
Actually, in most companies that is exactly what it does.
Im a big fan of disclosure so that would always be the plan (the thinking being would I play the game if I didn't know what the data was for - answer, nope).

Thanks for the link - that looks like along a similar line,. My initial thought was a web game but I suspect a decently addictive MMO (esp if it is "free") might generate a bit more :D
Many things implement something like this, or have in the past. It turns out critical mass is extremely difficult to obtain; it's not the traditional meaning of "boil the ocean" but it shares many of the same characteristics. Even very large and funded efforts did not succeed.

You also will face extraordinary resistance if you become large enough to matter; many people will consider it a violation of their site, and will claim it's illegal. Eventually some will try that out in court, if you make money. You'll get people like me claiming it's unethical, and pointing out that if you do succeed and legitimize the idea that it's ok to lay things over other people's sites regardless of how they feel about it that you can count on Comcast and AT&T jumping on that capability to use it in ways you won't like, and that in the end we're all better off leaving web pages alone.

But, really, my main point to you personally is that this has been tried repeatedly and if you want to build something successful you really ought to examine the history and figure out what it is that would be so different about your approach that it might work.
Yes, but the amount of TV I watch a week is becoming less and less.

In the last week, I've watched maybe 3 hours of television (both TV/Web stuff) in total...
IIRC, and this is secondhand from folks at MIT Instrumentation Lab, it was a simplified version of core memory. Ones were represented by cores and zeroes by the absence of cores, so the memory woudnt need the write cycle after the read to restore the state of the memory and there was no need to boot the memory.
I still do want to go to the moon!
It's interesting that they've used VirtualBox to run the emulator.

Really clever.
While I applaud the move it seems like a bad idea to throw open your SDK to thousands of developers months before they can actually submit applications.

It's likely thousands of applications will be submitted in a short time frame leading either to huge waits before apps are released (and fixes for those apps are released), or "bad press" apps such as Baby Shaker sneaking through.
How to judge the candidate you are interviewing
Don't forget YQL, the weather APIs, Pipes, and Flickr. I personally think BOSS was a bit mishandled, but it has really great potential, as does YAP/YOS.

Yahoo is one of the largest collection of professional web developers, and they take that seriously. Of course, their money is in Average Joe offerings like News and Frontpage.

I do work for them, and for a developer offering team too boot, so this is quite biased, of course ;)
Great comments, and I agree with all of them (although I do not consider myself deterred. After all, the point was to get feedback, see if anybody was interested)

The best comment so far that I've heard is to begin implementation in a walled garden in niche subject area. See if that works, then expand a bit at time into larger (and foreign) sites.

There's a fascinating question here about who owns what part of the content. If you write something, you own it, but if I say something to my friend like "check out jerf's last blog beginning about half way down -- that really pissed me off" obviously that content is mine. Now the interesting part is: who owns the connection between those two concepts? I don't think it can be you. ???
Well I did like the video of the interview, though it was sentimental nonsense, sometimes nonsense is fun too! I infact liked the boy's answer when asked the same question - he said he really doesn't know, then when the interviewer probes him again, he said he might, but then again he might not :), that's quite pragmatic from such a young kid !

http://archives.cbc.ca/science_technology/space/clips/758/
For plenty of things GUIs are not the way to go. I know I'm showing my age with this, but the command line / batch environment is so much more productive for many tasks than a GUI based environment.
Agreed. I wonder at what point intelligence and knowledge become an arrestable offense. I own a set of lock picks. If I were to carry these outside of my home in the UK (since I am not a locksmith) I could be arrested for the offense of "going equipped"

---

Section 25 Theft Act 1968

(1) A person shall be guilty of an offence if, when not at his place of abode, he has with him any article for use in the course of or in connection with any burglary, theft or cheat.

(3) Where a person is charged with an offence under this section, proof that he had with him any article made or adapted for use in committing a burglary, theft or cheat shall be evidence that he had it with him for such use.

---

Am I "going equipped" on a daily basis?
Firefox Add-ons Contributions Pilot (allowing money contributions)
7 times (fencepost error).
Which, in a way, makes it seem less impressive to me. They could've dumped the video feed, and it would function the same. So it's less augmented reality than clever use of the accelerometer and compass.