skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They look very cool but I would assume they suffer from some of the same problems that made geodesic domes somewhat impractical for living spaces. For example, round living spaces are aesthetically pleasing but it's not the most efficient use of space and there are real problems with integrating all the rest of your stuff - tv's, appliances, furniture etc - none of which is going to fit very well. Some people reportedly dislike the acoustics in domes which tend to carry even a whisper from one side to the other. On the plus side, these foam things would certainly be more weatherproof than geodesic domes which were notorious for leaking around the many seams.
Thought the exact same thing about that Word pie chart when I read the "death of word" article before.
Been through that a few times.

Your path depends on if you want to sell/license a patent (and thus have less control over the end product, company, and profits), or if you want to build a company (which often, but not always, tends to require that you develop more than one product, at least over time).

The bigger issue (IME/IMO) is not so much the differences between building a software product and a hardware product on the tech side, but on the legal side. Product liability issues are going to be more "real" when you have a real product, especially if it falls into a pseudo-medical application as your example above does.

Your best bet is probably to lawyer up early on and learn the ropes that way. Depending on your friends/family network, you may be able to find a connection to a decent local attorney who would be willing to work with you on a discounted rate in exchange for some share of stock or profit.
Where in my post did you gather that I am against profit? I'm very much business oriented. The way these schools operate is my issue. I was trying to convey how they take advantage of young lower middle class children, I suppose I failed?
In a way I agree with you.

But in another I dont. Those things: treaties etc. are honours of state. BUT the prosecution of Turing was simply the application of law - a law adopted by an even earlier generation and inspired by societies homophobia.

In that sense the role of the government isnt quite the same.

If the aim of such an apology is the start of a wider work against homophobia then I am 100% behind it. But it isn't really - so it's just empty words.
As an MBA-in-training I resent that! I would NEVER rename services to something that asinine. Although I'm not in marketing... ;)
Pronouncing "Java" like "Yava" is definitely a Dutch thing - I was building a Java based financial system for a bank in the Netherlands and it took a while to get used to the way they pronounce it too :)
Fake Steve Jobs must be ready to explode right around now.
current and foreseeable medicine is not quite there yet

That's the key point. We all know eventually the singularity will arrive. And we know we have PLENTY of work to do today to make things a little bit better but still be far short of the singularity.

So it's wonderful to be a cheerleader for progress, but it can also be kind of annoying on occasion.
Thanks, I was trying to figure out why it formatted it like that.
This is a classic case where a law passed to deter certain very serious activity (willful copyright infringement) now finds itself being applied to new circumstances where it falls with a particularly heavy and disproportional hand.

The remedy needs to be tailored to the nature of the wrong - that is, the law needs refinement, not jettisoning. This can come from Congress or perhaps from judicial refinements via statutory interpretation.

It will not come from some wild approach striking down the concept of statutory damages as unconstitutional. The article is way off on this.
Advice for vague startup ideas
When I read hacker news and techcrunch I get ideas constantly for potential web services that I might create. Sometimes I take an idea seriously and google it. Sometimes I go further and think about technical issues. I wanted to ask your suggestions for a forum to discuss such projects. I tried to ask freelancers at guru.com and elance.com but understandably they want to make money on real assignments, not spend time discussing half-baked ideas. I am in New York and I don't have access to an environment of hacker friends or startups to discuss such things. Thanks.
I am planning to change my sleeping schedule tonight as it happens. I have just enough time to try this and see if it helps. I have changed my schedule before, so I will have past experience to compare it to. I will reply to myself tomorrow morning to let you know if it seems to help or not.
i would say it is of maximal strategic value. knowing who calls who is the ultimate social graph. note the analytics news out of ibm re snazzy.
If I have a full meal I barely can stay awake. I know that the body switches into a different mode to process the meal and extract the proteins etc and for this it drains me of other energy like focusing. It is interesting how my productivity increases with hunger. That's why lions sleep 20 hours a day. After a massive meal they can barely do anything but digest.
So I think mammals' first thing of the day is to go out and find food. Once food found and eaten there's no point to stay awake. I really think that a meal concludes the day not starts it in the animal world. Although providing the body with just enough to keep it fueled and in a way that it won't have to put you to sleep to extract the proteins we can make ourselves do more and take hunger & sleeping off our minds during the day.

To stay fresh just don't starve or over-eat yourselves. It works for me.
A better rat trap improves the lot of low Hindu caste
Hmm. Seems like the title of his article should be "Please only use pie charts in certain situations which I will now proceed to describe in some detail."
"In addition, pages give reference points during conversation, stuff like "check out the first sentence in the third paragraph on page 3" which gets very unwieldy without pages.

Isn't that why we have URLs?

As to legal requirements, perhaps Word is insufficient for a system with such strict legal requirements? Maybe a wiki-ish system that strictly enforced all the necessary requirements without requiring humans intervention? But I guess you are saying that the way the laws are written actually require actual pieces of paper to exist. In which case software doesn't help.

I'm curious, though, to know if that is the case or if businesses have sprung up specifically to meet the legal requirements of electronic document management for those vertical industries.
I fail to see how the second example is more secure due to the abstraction. Simply adding a salt to the MD5 call would have around the same effect (probably that's even what Authen::Passphrase does...).

So is this a rant about abstraction or security? It is possible to make the original example safer without using abstraction. But the abstraction is important to make the applogic neater...

I feel like the author is making 2 separate points at the same time - and confusing them slightly.
MySQL Tools Giveaway
Webyog, a leading provider of data management tools, and Six Revisions have teamed up to offer prizes totaling close to $1,300 USD, to four lucky Six Revisions readers.
AIUI a judgment in one EU state can be enforced in any other, but issuing an EU-wide arrest warrant for non-payment of a civil judgment by someone neither domiciled nor resident in any member state is, IMO, rather unlikely. Even if one were issued, it would be solely for the purpose of bringing the person before the courts (generally in the form of an enforcement officer) to answer questions relating to their assets, in order to assess if/how enforcement of the judgment might happen.
yeh sorry I realised this after posting. thanks for the correction (I think my point still stands, I dont know).
Dan Kaminsky & Kevin Mitnick Hacked
"The first is that the big-filtered-list depends on jumping from the mouse to the keyboard and back (if I'm mistaken, the means of using the keyboard exclusively are not obvious enough)."

Well, the obvious one is to permit the cursor controls to work in the filtered list, which is trivial and reasonably intuitive. See also the Awesomebar, where left & right move around in the text box but up and down actually move the focus. There are other possibilities, but probably none that good.

"This implies that the list's contents (or at least their order) is dynamic in nature and this is very destructive to the ability to memorize the location of commands."

A valid point, but part of the idea here is to toss out the entire "memorize the location of commands" in the first place, I think. Build a system whereby users swiftly get taught keyboard shortcuts (even if they are "[command key], w, e, b, DOWN, DOWN, enter" in some cases) and the need to have locations memorized goes away.

Personally, I'm unconvinced the "location memorization" is of such great value we need to contort the rest of the interface in order to not throw it away.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739070
Bill

I am going to give it a try too; but we won't know if it has worked for 2 days. Tomorrow(Tuesday EST) you'll wake up and eat, and that is the trigger to alter your sleep schedule. If you wake up naturally the following day (Wednesday EST) you'll know it worked.
These guys make cellphone mesh networks.
http://www.terranet.se/
Well the apology doesn't come from the person for the person. It is from the State and the State has no predecessor, in a way. I know it sounds like a formality, in fact it is: it is a symbolic message with more than one meaning:

1. State can be wrong
2. As we could have be wrong in the past, we could be wrong now.
3. It is a good thing that we recognize that
4. People who are in a similar condition today, shall no fear anymore
5. If we ever try to do something similar, you can remind us of our apologies, at least.
Is it just me, or has there been an increase in the amount of attacks on apple hardware? Either that or I just seem to be more aware of them.

Apple's increasing popularity seems to be attracting more hackers to target the platform. This attack combined with an iTunes Buffer Overflow attack could lead to fair amount of serious security breaches.
Really? You think cities are the equivalent of industrial farms? That the human experience is exactly like cows huddled in their own shit with no room to turn around? Like pigs forced into quarters where they go crazy and eat the tails of the pigs in front of them? Really?
I always wondered is there a downside to a mind like that.
Why Schmidt Had To Go
But is user generated content for commercial use? I mean if bots are submitting it fine, but how do you go about a human submitting something to a commercial site? It's easy if the site says it owns all submissions, but what if it doesn't?
I'm the author of the article. Let me clarify (this is hinted at with the asterisk footnote at the bottom of the post) what happened here: the record company elected, under the copyright statute, not to prove any actual damages and instead use "statutory damages." At that point, they didn't need to prove anything at all other than "infringement," which would include his own use of the music and of his making them available to others, regardless of how much infringement there really was.

That's part of what's so preposterous about our copyright regime: it permits copyright holders to elect, at their discretion, to pursue an amorphous claim with fantastically huge damages that doesn't require they prove much.

It's like if a slip and fall plaintiff could elect "statutory damages" of millions of dollars if they proved nothing more than that the defendant spilled something on the floor. Such would be swiftly declared unconstitutional.
Startups: Founder’s Syndrome is a Health Hazard
Please see my reply below -- your distinction isn't relevant, because the record company elected statutory damages, thereby eliminating the need to prove any actual damages from "sharing." The downloading itself is all they needed.
Actually Puppet is written in Ruby. Even more, there is ShadowPuppet gem (http://github.com/railsmachine/shadow_puppet/tree/master) which replaces the puppet's DSL with ruby classes and functions to directly manipulate Puppets manifests, so its all Ruby all the way down.
Graduate education is the most effective form of contraception.

This is a wildly different situation than existed even 100-200 years ago. Gregory Clark has some historical data on the industrial revolution, if you're interested.
I like to refer to things like this as "the brick that broke the camel's back". "Straws" that break the camel's back should be reserved for an insignificant annoyance that sets you off after a long period of building up grievances; calling it the brick implies the long buildup of grievances but also that this one is pretty significant. (And it tends to get a chuckle, which is a plus in my book.) I think this is a pretty significant finger in the eye from Apple.
Well, it's a relationship that is certainly mutually beneficial in 1,000 ways. Public outcry is undoubtedly the only reason they're doing it.
Isn't the extra security gained by salting rather illusory? If you lose a copy of your database, which is one of the two attacks under consideration, any individual password is discoverable. If you store the password and the salt in the database, that is all that is needed to play "guess that rainbow table".

If you have someone with access to your server or source control go rogue, every password entered into the website should be presumed compromised.

(Why attack stuff from your database, necessitating a costly rainbow table, when you have write access to Ruby code? The most obvious solution to me is just turning off Rails' feature to strip passwords out of the log, but given that you can monkeypatch anything you darn well please from anywhere, you have literally unbounded access to the cleartext params[:password] to steal any time you darn well please.)
I salt passwords with the first half of the username at the front and the second half at the back. Is that significantly less secure than generating a random salt for each user?
If there are only 2 wedges it works pretty well.
Business Resources for Startups (Wiki)
Ah, gadgetry and latest Agile scoop is fine and fun, but would your average blogger do reporting when next Chechnya flares up, or do time-consuming and hazardous research on mafia connections in his southern-Italian hometown?

Reporting of this kind takes time, equipment, connections, travel, bribes - which all translates to money that have to appear somehow.
Sounds like a major pain in the ass.

Are you happy that you did it? How did it work out?
Wow, so just because the current design of hospitals is so bad it breeds microbes that cause incurable diseases, nothing else that isn't that bad should be improved?

If someone can afford organic food and doesn't wish to partake as a guinea pig in the experiment if low dose pesticides have long-term harmful effects, why shouldn't they?

Reality is that it is impossible to determine if low doses of toxins or chemicals with hormone mimicking effects have adverse long-term effects in people. Anyone who wishes to be a guinea pig in the experiment can line up.
By not filing a suit in the USA, Sethi can say that he's won all his lawsuits, or, more meaningfully, Arrington has lost. Sethi might consider it a good trade to not get any money from the lawsuit in return for tarnishing Arrington's name.
You could do a lot worse than post your half-baked ideas here. If you frame the question properly, I bet you'd get some good advice.
I would recommend that you start with a provisional patent application, before disclosing any information to potential partners. A provisional application (which exists only in the USA, to my knowledge) is essentially a placeholder, giving you one year to file the complete application. Since it's essentially a disclosure of the substance of the invention, you can draft it by yourself -- there are sites on-line that will file a self-drafted provisional application for as little as $200. Again, the most important purpose of the provisional application is to capture all relevant features of the invention in enough detail to prove that you are in possession of the invention -- for your lumbar support, you would probably want to talk about the shape and the physical properties (softness, hardness, elasticity) of the materials involved.

If you decide that the idea is really worthwhile, you can follow up with a complete patent application (which will cost you a few thousand dollars) any time within the next year. In the mean time, you have some proof in case one of your vendors tries to misappropriate your invention for their own.
I suspect that we just have different needs, and that's fine. I use google docs for quick access to simple documents, and it works very well for that.

I'm just disturbed by the trend to less feature-rich word processors, when I would like a program with greater power and features for serious writing.
What about GPS and other devices used directly by farmers. Do you have any idea how much hardware/software goes into modern ag equipment?
Be careful about this, I have personally had a (as in one) horrid experience, YMMV. (I've done this 3 times, and yes it works however I fasted for a full 16-17 hours.)

Back story: I irresponsibly slept for 2-3 weeks. Racking up a sleep debt of sometimes 4 hours per night. So by the time that I decided to reset my schedule I was about 24 hours+ in sleep debt. Needless to say I used this exact method, I didn't eat for 16 hours before, and I had to get up a 7 so I stopped eating around 3PM. This was a bad idea, I didn't have a very filling lunch, and after a while if you've done this before you note that not eating makes you very very very sleepy. I left work around 5:15. I fell asleep around 5:30, unfortunately I was still driving at the time. The car veered into the oncomming lane (it was empty) and went up the curb, on which was a small hill. I was still asleep when this happened, and then the car went up so far it couldn't sustain, and it flipped back into my lane (this happened at 40-50 MPH). Needless to say I awoke scared shitless as I was plummeting towards the ground and my airbags were deploying.

I escaped the accident with just some cuts on my hand from the shattered glass from the side windows. My car was totaled. The officer who came on site gave me a 200$ ticket. My father took me to the hospital, where I was given a CAT scan and everything checked out fine. However I had no way of getting to work. The car wasn't worth much it was an 11 year old Ford Escort Coup. Blue book value was around $4,000. The moral of the story is, be thankful for what you have, sleep responsibly and take care of yourself.

The accident was last Monday.
Melatonin is natural and works wonders, and you can eat!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin
What didn't you like about Farber's book?
"Pages are dead"... but his article is divided into two pages?
No. Cities are more likely to breed human disease than lots of small hamlets. That's all.

The argument being put forward is that anything that creates disease is bad. My argument is that a lot of what we already have is built with that trade-off against us.
Fake Steve Jobs: So Woz Calls
The conference paper: http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/CHEN/BHUSA09...

I submitted it the other day but somehow it got 0 points: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737186
I'm sorry, but I'm an engineer and I have a fetish for numbers. Could you quantify the harm that is being done by the methods you oppose? If not, then we really don't have a basis for making decisions.

In fact, this tirade looks like a bunch of over-the-top descriptions meant to appeal to peoples' emotions and prejudices - that is, baseless fearmongering.
> Sometimes it seems like Houston doesn't so much have an economy as a local oil-money leak.

This stereotypical perception of Houston is false, as it does have a diversified economy. For example, it is home of the Texas Medical Center -- the largest medical center in the world. In addition, is also as industrial center for aerospace, as NASA's Johnson Space Center is also located in Houston.
Good grief man.

Glad you are ok. Obviously this is a great lesson to anyone - if you are sleepy don't drive.
Pieces of advice for aspiring designers/UX engineers
The third conflated point is a rant of Perl over PHP.

"His language convinced him to do it wrong, and now he is pretty much stuck. And that's bad."

PHP doesn't convince you to roll-your-own over use-someone-else's. The author could have just as looked to use PEAR as you looked to use CPAN.

http://pear.php.net/packages.php?catpid=1&catname=Authen...

http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.authentication.auth-ht...
OK, here's the real problem that NOBODY seems to be grasping. The point of failure is the few sites that are already storing someone's email, username, and password in plain text.

Every other site on the planet can start encrypting, using salts, hashing, etc, but the site that will be attacked is the site that emails back passwords to their users in plain text when they use the "forgot my password" page.

Why would a hacker waste their time elsewhere? They will create an account, use the "forgot" form, and if they get their password back in plain text, they know they have a target rich database.

The ONLY true form of password protection once again lies in the hands of the USER who MUST create different passwords at every site if they really want their identity protected. Sorry. If you don't know how to keep your passwords in a protected database on your PC, learn.

After all, if a hacker is already in the database stealing passwords, they've got your data too if they want it. Might as well spend your time protecting your identity elsewhere.
Gov. Arnold is more liberal socially and fiscally than most Midwestern democrats. California is so blue-state that its republicans wouldn't pass as republicans in most other states.
Well it should be even lower than $0.99. I would be shocked if Apple is making zero profit for their iTunes store. They are probably charged something like $0.75 a song per person. This should make for a good baseline for these cases.
Has anyone built an iPhone app compiler/VM for Linux?
Linux is often bashed for lacking games. The hottest new gaming platform is the iPhone with a pretty standardized API in objective C. Has anybody tried making these run unmodified on Linux?<p>That would be huge, because if it were effortless for developers, Linux could very quickly start developing a large ecosystem of fun, new games.
It can also depend on what you eat from what I hear. Some foods can wreak more havoc on blood sugar levels than others.
Ah, interesting. So for you, the fact that you where eating large dinners and not much of a breakfast was throwing your sleep out of whack before?
If you include some random data in the salt, it's impossible to create rainbow tables out of it. Thus the attacker would have to bruteforce every single password, which will take its time (specially on bcrypt).

Salting doesn't make it impossible, it just takes longer time.
It's not as "off" as you think. Punitive damages limitations have already been applied to common law copyright cases, and numerous courts have considered, but not ruled on, their application to the statutory regime.

But there's a more basic issue: it doesn't matter if the damages arise by statute or common law, the constitution protects the defendant all the same. Congress has no power to override a due process protection.
Really? Care to provide anything in the way of evidence or justification for this emotively-charged comment? Or does it simply reflect your own wishful thinking?

For every pg and Pirate Bay fanboy screaming at the top of their lungs about how this is going to backfire and how they'll now fileshare just to "stick it to the man", there are 100 casual filesharers who think: "You know what? Maybe I'll just switch over to iTunes. Or Spotify. Or YouTube..."