skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My theory on why apps are priced too low is that it's because of the expectations set by the prices of the initial apps on the store. The first apps on the app store were priced really low and this set the trend that continues today. A lot of the initial developers can afford to price them really low because a good number of those apps were novelty apps that took very little time to develop.

So now even developers who do take the time to develop polished apps will still need to take into account the expectations of users for their app's pricing.
As someone who has actually done this before, it's pretty easy. PNG has R,G,B, and A. So you can effectively get 4 bits per pixel on Least Significant Bit Substitution.

You can fit a lot of data into image, whether plain text or binary, depends solely how you encode the data.
If you use a complex picture its basically impossible to detect visually, even if you enhance the lsb's.

What works pretty well for detection is doing chi square analysis, but even then, if you fill the rest of the bits with random data, that method fall short.

I don't really see how this is an effective means of transferring and/or sending torrents. The .torrent isn't illegal or something to worry about, its downloading the files it points to that "sometimes" is.

Cool project, but serves no real purpose.
You may want to take a look at our app, http://twist.flaptor.com/

It's like Google Trends for Twitter. Instead of queries, we track what people say. You can see how a keyword explodes and becomes a trend in an hour or two.

For example, yesterday someone saw an amber alert. It turns out this person was the mother of @ddlovato, who has 600k followers. You can see the mother's tweet, ddlovato's mention 18 minutes later and a subsequent explosion of retweets until they reached 0.4% of all tweets during the hour (that's probably in the thousands).

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=child+abducted&span...
Funny - "Hey there, spam is using twitter!"
I am quite serious here. You already have the URI's, and you should be able to write this script in under 2 minutes. This reminds me of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=703585

The amount of time spent defining what you want is surely going to be equal to this.
They'll only include an individual customer's favorites if the customer has authenticated with a particular application.
Microsoft, on the other hand, gets paid for every memo and presentation, even though they just "wrote a cog". It's not unreasonable for Zed to desire something in return for writing a cog, even if he perhaps has not been using an optimal strategy for achieving it.
The article says economics (well, graphs of stock prices) are scale free. Is this true? Seems hard to prove, can anyone point to any research?
Why doesn't this take into account the size of the block you're getting back? 1 pixel from the L1 gets you less data than 8 from the L2, etc.
I would argue that writing the email will require just as much thought because you have to define what you want.

Regarding delegation, it is a good point. Knowing when do do something yourself is always a challenge. In my opinion, these tasks are far too trivial for a 'hacker' to give to someone else.

Personally, I have a directory named "doodles" that is full of 2 or 3 line programs that do this kind of thing.
Ask HN: Concrete examples of honest people with anything to fear from the GPL
GPL-related debates seem to be rather short on actual examples of anyone who has anything to fear from the license, who wasn't already doing something obviously questionable (see this for an example: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=610764) Would anyone care to provide some?

Edit: "My customers/managers/colleagues fear the GPL" is not a valid criticism. Anything with a similar amount of well-funded FUD thrown at it will be similarly feared.
Now, suppose your application also needs to do SSL. Python has a module for that, but what happens if you use it? Well, now you’re also interfacing with OpenSSL, which has a viral advertising clause in its license.

He's not the first to notice the OpenSSL license issue[1], but luckily there is a very easy solution -- the GNUTLS[2] library is available under a less poisonous license, and has Python bindings[3].

[1] http://blog.pierlux.com/2009/05/12/pythons-hidden-poissoned-...

[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/

[3] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-gnutls
3D CSS Effects with Safari on Snow Leopard
The hum of the Earth
Getting started with Wolfram Alpha
This is gonna sound strange an probably not a discussion for HN, but I found the study interesting...

I'm a cat person, but I also like dogs - I just don't have the time or space to give them a good home. So, meanwhile I'll suffice with cats. I always make it a point to train my dogs with the utmost respect and obedience, had them most of growing up just like cats, so I usually put in a lot of time training dogs, but we haven't had one in about 4-5 years.

Maybe this study does 'suggest' or show something (I haven't seen the data), but I know my cat doesn't control me. At least anyways, when it comes to food. There are some that I can see where they are trying to manipulate, but heck, what would you do if you were starving? I usually leave food down (dry) all day and night for my present felines, unless it's wet food it doesn't smell, and I only give them wet food when I feel they deserve it (maybe once or twice a week), based on the type of day I've had. And reiterating, I'm a bastard when it comes to discipline, so it makes sense when they give my wife more attention...

They'll cry when they want to get out of a room that I've locked them in for their safety on some occasions, but that's about it - and when that happens, there's no doubt I'm firm and stubborn, so based on the study, my cats don't yet have the cry down for us, lol.. are they stupid? Maybe. The article says that they've only figured out the call for food - nothing else. Funny? definitely. But evil? Some are, the current ones I own are not, but I have had owned troubled cats before, I've also owned troubled dogs before. My local radio show host insinuated from this and other studies that cats are evil; there's another article floating around about whether they're "Little Satans" and if they get the "concept of nukes" to watch out.

http://atheologian.blogspot.com/2009/07/study-suggests-cats-...

LOL

Ultimately, I love animals, and like any good hacker, a cat while typically nocturnal can certainly be a worthwhile companion while hacking away in the wee hours. My advisor when I'm busy at work:
http://img194.imageshack.us/i/myadvisor.jpg/

So maybe the topic of hackers owning animals has come up before -- care to share any thoughts on your pets with respect to this article?

Cheers
I remember reading that he invented duct work used for heating and cooling.
I think he just wants to ignore any criticism aimed at Stack Overflow. That's the impression I get from his comments on the meta site, anyway.

"LALALAL ITS FINE LALALA"
If you use Damien Katz's Negative Captcha, you can even skirt the captcha, if your users aren't malicious: just have an invisible honeypot field called "email" for the botspam to fill out, and call the visible email field something else.
it'd be foolish to say that the war in Afghanistan hasn't played a role

A role in what? Attacks on the US? That seems far from obvious. One thing that it certainly played a role in is opium production, which the Taliban prohibited. It certainly played a huge role (to the tune of billions of dollars), and big power shifts in the international drug trade...
Only now, in hindsight, he realises it annoys him that of the great many users, not only do none credit him, but some even blame him. That's pretty harsh.

Is it? How many people using Linux know who, say, Ulrich Drepper or Alan Cox is? How many of the Apache installations in the world give Brian Behlendorf "credit"? That's just the nature of writing open source software -- IMHO the whole idea is to write something that other people find useful, and give it away.

And honestly, Zed complaining about a lack of attention and props is outrageous. The guy must have an enormous ego. Compared to most authors of open source software, he is far from anonymous.
I'd agree that science has a positive impact, but you need to subtract the atomic bomb, climate change and I dunno, processed food (others may have different examples) from any positive impact to work out the net impact.
If hospitals can survive a power outage then I'm sure someone could find a way to make the police survive through one, too.

I assume, however, that they have some sort of power back-up, right? If that's the solution, that would be very cost-prohibitive for multiple precinct houses.
Similarly, Microsoft's competitor to salesforce.com (Dynamics) lets customers host their own servers while salesforce does not.
If the scientific community's portrayal in the media only tells the story of one side of a controversial issue, that is going to make the public think that the entire community agrees with that stance. How often are things portrayed as "scientific fact" or some other such when they are still widely debated within the scientific community? Each of those issues erodes the public's trust of the entire community, even those that are adamantly declaring, "We don't know yet" about the issue.
Nice presentation. I need to make a website for a group of mine, so I was kind of interested, but when I saw that Drupal was being used, my enthusiasm dropped. It seems that all CMSes have big security flaws. We got hacked about 40 times when we were using Joomla!, so I'm wary of anything similar.

There are an insane amount of add-ons on the page after you select the app. I don't think this is good; there are just way too many options. They should be categorized, or something.
Corporate laptops make no distinction of work days. Digg's recent survey shows that a most of their users who are on IE 6 are so because of work.

http://blog.digg.com/?p=878

There are also a lot of bots that label themselves as IE 6 which inflates the effect.
While I think offering the hosting for such things is a neat angle, I don't know how relevant it is(or how you plan to make money). A default Wordpress install now allows you to search both its theme and plugin directory and install them without ever leaving the comfort of your administrative backend. I'm not quite sure what is available for drupal and the others in terms of plugins and such but it might be a good idea to market to those users in your screencast as apposed to the wordpress users who already have the features you offer available to them.

Most of the other services you have listed are also offered as 1 click installs by many web hosts with similar $/month price points for the paid hosting.
I guess they didn't get the joke.
Yes, L1 and L2 are made from the same 6T SRAM. The access time of a cache is proportional to something like the square root of the capacity since signals may have to travel to the opposite side of the cache and back. Because of locality, it's better to have something like a 3-cycle L1 and a 15-cycle L2 than a single 12-cycle cache.
German electronic health card provider loses private keys
True, but I think one point the article makes that I find interesting is that people need some avenue for discussion of meta topics. We're naturally driven to justify our actions (there's a good book called "why?" on the pervasiveness of this psychological need.) In the case of HN, we don't just want to flag articles, we want to explain why we think the article is on or off topic. Doing so gets you modded down, yet people seem compelled to do it anyway.

So perhaps some sort of meta-discussion mechanism (a separate page, or the ability to add a comment about why you flagged something, etc...) would be of value? OTOH, the level of discussion is better here than most sites, so perhaps we should leave well enough alone.
To me this looks like the old outsourcing myth in a new(?) disguise.

The question remains: How do you find sufficiently qualified and trustworthy partners who are willing to remain on standby for tiny one-off tasks like these?

Moreover many of his bullets just make no sense whatsoever.
How am I supposed to outsource "Fixing Post-Launch Bugs" (on my code-base)? Creating Unit Tests? Database Development?

I have personally witnessed more than one startup fail spectactularly because the CEO drank a bit too much of the outsourcing kool-aid. Over here in the real world it still takes quite a bit of time to bring a contractor up to speed, even on small tasks. In my expirience outsourcing makes more sense for slightly bigger chunks, to justify the overhead, instead of the teeny weeny bits.
The gross impact equals the net impact, because the pluses are so big. That was exactly the point I was making. Without science we'd have nothing.

The atom bomb and global warming are peanuts compared to the upside of science. So there's no subtraction to be made.
I'm not sure why that was downvoted.
I have had several cases where someone with a similar email address to mine signed up for Myspace, Bebo, and CareerBuilder with my email by mistake (I think it really was a mistake). The stupidest thing is, these websites gladly reset the password for his account by sending it to my email, giving me access to all the data he had put on all these websites: names of friends, home address, place of employment, some possibly embarrassing forums he frequented, etc.
if you are trying to make money through dual licensing, GPL is a better route because commercial entities that want to use your software now have to get the commercial license in order to make their products commercial. This is not true of BSD licenses, and commercial entities can use your software anyway (OS X).

I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when I give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's going to be free, it should be completely free.

Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that all software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant philosophical/political change just in the software industry appears naive.

If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical reason to go with GPL rather than BSD), it should be addressed as a whole: looking at it in sciences, software, literature, all of it -- for if it is true that we don't need it, or are hampered by it, I don't see how it only applies to software. I'm far more concerned that companies are patenting found genetics than I am that this stupid iphone which erased all my music this morning because I had recently formatted and it thinks it was synced to another computer, and how the new firmware breaks it from musicmonkey again, and now I can't transfer my flac files, and have to use their junky itunes instead -- yah it sucks, but the genetic stuff is even more troublesome - philosophically.
I've noticed a few corporates who still need IE6 for some internal web apps also installing firefox recently due to not being able to have two versions of IE installed.
Spammers exploiting trust in shortened URLs
A good practice I use is to give users a "trial period" (usually 24 hours) before they must verify. Users can sign up for the site and immediately start using it, then next time they check their email just click the link. Many people will check their email at least once per day anyways.

Or, if they don't check it and try to log in after 24 hours, they get a message saying they need to verify their email address and the option to re-send the verification email.
Replacing Education With Psychometrics
Excellent video. Does a great job of explaining how it actually works.
especially since Texas more or less dictates what goes into high school textbooks

Only as long as Texas doesn't go too far out there and the parents in other states are not too involved with school.

If Texas really goes out on a limb, and you have parents in say Vermont very actively engaged with their kids' school, I bet we can finally split the market and get Texas & Co. off our backs.

And that is better for everyone (except kids in Texas) and also more likely then us being able to pull Texas towards reason.

If it only hurt their children, I would still be disturbed

Sure, but how can you help someone else's child? How could the government rescue children from their parents? I don't see any way in a non-creepy world.

And as far as America's innovative edge goes, the US or key parts of it, still produce amazing discoveries, and they do it with a lot of immigrants. It would be nice if we added more home grown brains, but that's all it would be: nice.
you gotta wonder how difficult it was to convince each and every person in the dorm to agree to this...
Search Results Smackdown: Blogger vs. Violinst with the same names
Blogger rivals famous violinist in search engine results, challenges him to dance off for exclusive rights to name Daniel Hope.
Dawn of the animals: Solving Darwin's dilemma
Is that true in all cases? There's dispute about who owns sports statistics because the leagues are trying to claim they have licensing rights to them.
what if you paid a quarter to buy it and then every time you lost, you had to pay another quarter with the new in-app purchases, just like an arcade game? if you beat the game on one quarter, you'll own it and not have to pay any more. if not, eventually you'll "put in" 8 quarters and own the game.
The Lesser Evil: Nuclear or Coal?
"The GNU Hurd is under active development. Because of that, there is no stable version." -- http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
There's an excellent TED talk by J Kunstler about livable cities and how we stopped building them: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
Order & probabilities: una de las imágenes ganadores del Concurso 169 de 500×500
I agree, WordPress is not the best example now that it has the "plugin installer" in the administration control panel. I will probably change the app used in the video tour.

However, WordPress is the exception, not the rule when it comes to automated plugin installation. Even for apps like phpbb3, which have a mod called "automod" which installs mods automatically, the user still has to download the mod, and then upload it to their server, unzip it, put it in the right directory etc... Flooha eliminates all of that busy work.

The real exception is apps like MediaWiki (which runs Wikipedia) and osCommerce. The add-ons (extensions, contributions, etc...) for those apps often modify core code files and it is not as simple as uploading and unzipping. It can be extremely painful to install the easiest add-on for some users who aren't extremely comfortable working with source code.

Thanks for the tips!
"Generally speaking, I am not a fan of the meta."

Ironic that he should say this, considering that a considerable portion of his communications relate to meta-discussions.
> It took me exactly 90 seconds to get the request to him

Depending on how you code it's likely to take you more than 90 seconds to: Fire up the editor, switch into mental design mode, create the initial script structure, write the script, figuring out authentication/cookie management issues, picking the right regex (or selector), and then debugging the typo or the 2 unexpected problems that came up (as they will on average).

I think you can see the time and mental differences between that and:

"Here is the URL and credentials, can you log in, visit each page in my gallery and send me a zip with all the pictures?"

In the end you'll be more proud of a script approach, but that doesn't give you what you wanted in the first place-- i.e. avoiding the drain on your time when you have more important things to do.
Riding a Twitter trend: #firstdraftmovies - an adventure in three days
I have a funny feeling you do not charge money for stuff. When regina123@aoll.com can't log in after paying $30 for the privilege to do so, it is my problem.
Drupal is the only CMS currently offered, but hopefully this will change in the near future. Drupal is considered MUCH more secure than Joomla!, which is one of the reasons why I started with Drupal. All CMSs will have security issues at one point or another (or any software for that matter.).

"There are an insane amount of add-ons on the page after you select the app...They should be categorized, or something."

Maybe there should be less per page, so the user isn't initially overwhelmed. You can drastically reduce the number of results by using the search box at the top. Also, you can use the "filter & sort" box on the right to filter by category. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
I don't see why you assume it is anti-Darwinists. I suspect a sizable fraction of that 16% are other anti-scientific types.

There are the "science gave us nukes and pollution" environmentalists, the medical anti-science types (vaccines -> autism, acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy), and some even weirder types.

I've had people express anti-scientific views to me while extolling the virtues of this product:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_ball
Certainly Spot had Data well-trained.

(I know I'll probably be down-mud for that, but it'll be worth it.)
Econophysicist?

Does he study the supply and demand for pendula and inclined planes?
Wonder if he ever got through to Phil...
I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when I give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's going to be free, it should be completely free.

Free to whom? If you want developers to retain all the rights, there's already a license for that -- "all rights reserved". If you want users to have rights, then the GPL is the best choice.

Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that all software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant philosophical/political change just in the software industry appears naive.

So because something wildly improbably and likely harmful won't happen, you refuse to use the GPL? Perhaps you don't recognize how bizarre your argument is, so lets apply it to a different situation: Maybe if I thought bicycling stood a chance to ever make it so that all transportation, or at least the majority, was human-powered and long-distance travel was dead...then I would use it.

If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical reason to go with GPL rather than BSD)

Nonsense. If somebody doesn't care about copyrights at all, they would release their software into the public domain. Obviously this is an uncommon choice.

The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use.
No need for that. Mothers with toddlers usually have a little mobility and heightened desire to socialize — being online is about perfect way to do that.
Wrong opinion.
Yep. Then the fine upstanding email services get your email into their inbox precisely because they're religious about who they let use them. Which is, of course, the whole point of the exercise.
Has anyone here actually used Office Web?

A lot of the discussion here is assuming that MS have produced web apps that are as good or comparable to the Office desktop apps. It's not clear yet whether that's true.

The most recent thing I saw was a demo video in which they were talking about two web Excels, one in html and one in Silverlight which had more features.
I wouldn't be so sure. Global warming and the atom bomb are just the first of many existential threats we'll have down the road that might leave us worse off than simple primitivism would have left us.
While I was not the one that downvoted you above, comments speculating as to why you were downvoted are typically discouraged here. (I'm guessing you're somewhat new here since your karma is in the double digits.) They don't really add to the conversion.