skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i've been using defensio (http://defensio.com/) for about a year and have had great success with it. over 11,000 spam comments with 9 false positives, and no annoying captchas.

comments flagged as spam by defensio require an email address to go into the database (if it wasn't spam it doesn't require an address and will just post to the site right away). the user is then emailed a link that they have to click on to make their comment show up, which then notifies defensio it was a false positive.

eventually i grew tired of the email bouncebacks from the spam submissions, so i started caching the ips that submitted the spam and automatically blocked access to the entire site from the ip after a number of spammy comments queued up. the comment spammers just flood the site with spam very quickly, so their spam count exceeds that quota and they are forever blocked just as quickly.
(Do you not find this completely unsatisfying though?)
Personally I like them down the right side. Makes better use of a widescreen monitor, since most pages are still vertical in nature. Also can see way more tabs at once. If you want to see what I mean:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8045
Netflix Competitors Learn the Power of Teamwork
Zip Fizz and Mountain Dew
Airport travelators actually slow passengers down
It is important if you ever plan on writing software that works well. For example, I am working on an application that draws routes on Google Maps. There are points that comprise the route, and the points have data associated with them. I wanted to be able to mouse over the map and have the nearest point on the route highlighted and populate a headsup display with the information it contained. This is a non-trivial problem to solve efficiently. You can do it the naive way and just linearly search all the points on the route on every mousemove event, however, that can be hundreds of thousands of comparisons a second for a long route. However, if you use an efficient data structure for multi-dimensional searching, like a k-d tree, you can find the point in 20 or so comparisons for a large route.

The best part is that data structures like a k-d tree are rarely covered in higher ed CS programs. However, if you have a core competency with algorithms and data structures, finding the appropriate data structure or algorithm and implementing it becomes so much easier.

Even the simplest data structures to implement, like a linked list, come in handy. In the same application, I had need for a linked list structure however flash has none. However it was trivial to cook up (after all the work on the k-d tree), and 30 minutes later I was in business.

stevecooperorg said it best: if you want to just glue crap together, then probably not. However, even "gluing things together" can be assisted by these concepts! My mapping application could be considered "gluing", however to do a novel job and make it more than the competition, you have to have the extra bit of knowledge.
On the flipside, cheers to T-Mobile for not squashing this fantastic app on their Android phones. I love my G1.
I get the benefits and the importance in the long run of the accomplishments made by this research team. Nonetheless, that doesn't take away the sensationalistic tone of the article.
I grew up on adventure games like this. Making them semi-multiplayer is a really cool idea. It reminded me of an adventure game MMO that's been in development forever (http://www.blackmasquegames.info/).
Although this list includes Michael Jordan and Jesus, for some reason, I am not profoundly inspired. I feel my time has been wasted.
Whoever wrote that doesn't get web application development.

Your precious "framework" comes undone the moment you deploy the app, IME. Framework couldn't tell you jack about your application usage patterns, because hits, as they come in, land on various web servers; some lean mean ones for static data, some chunky and familiar ones for the little backend logic, and some way way up front, multiplexing the incoming traffic. All the juice goes to databases, them too, in various layers, logs, and various levels of caching, etc.

It might start as an RC airplane that you have total control over, but it eventually becomes more like being a traffic operator in a Real World airport control room.
That's what science is: Coming up with bullshit (or "theories" as scientists call them) and then finding evidence for and against.

As for scientists "spouting off", I think you sound pretty paternalistic saying that lay audiences need to be protected from scientific theories, no matter if they are unproven.

As for whether the article argues "we'll never know", the gist of the article is that there is no way of answering these questions without having a time machine- That suggests they preclude the possibility of answering these questions. Then it knocks scientists who at least attempt to come up with theories, given the limited data, which is exactly what scientists _should_ try to do.

(That being said, evo psych folks clearly have been sloppy in popular expositions just how shaky the foundations of the discipline actually are.)
The Dos Equis ads never fail to amuse me on account of the alleged college application essay I read sometime in the early days of the web.

EDIT: Apparently written, in 1990, by musician and author, Hugh Gallagher, as a satiric personal essay turned internet meme.

3A Essay

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang-gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat.400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA.

I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet been to college.
I'd recommend people who work with PostgreSQL also take a look at PL/R[1] and RPostgreSQL[2].

1- http://www.joeconway.com/plr

2- http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RPostgreSQL/index.htm...
I could see how that would be nice, though at work no widescreens and at home I usually dual monitor it with the laptop.
I don't think it is unethical. If they came back and offered all the customer's who switched 2 years free to switch back, after you were out of pocket for serving them for a year free, would you feel unfairly treated ?

Inducing people to break a contract seems to me to be going a step further, but even then I would say it depends on the details. Inducing someone to break an abusive cell phone or ISP contract doesn't bother me. Inducing someone to break a maintainance contract with an individual, say an independent plumber, would probably be wrong.
So, are they systematically working through old forensically-based cases that have DNA-positive samples available to check if they screwed any other ones up, or is this all on the shoulders of the convicted?
So, you have a job where you are required to show up for 6-12 hours per week, 8 months per year. For this you are paid between $60k and $200k per year. As part of this job, you are expected to publish papers which document your original work for the benefit of mankind. Any professor who doesn't put any and all work they do while employed by a public university into the public domain (or the closest thing allowed by their university) is the lowest of the low. I can't describe how I feel about such a person without a very large amount of swearing.

Suppose someone came to your house and tell you that they want to work on a way to make your electric bill go down, but unless you give them some money up front they won't have enough time to both hold down an outside job and work on your electric bill. Then, after a while, you ask them how it's going. They tell you that you can see the results of their work if you pay them $50. That is exactly what some people do, except they collect less money and collect it from way more people. Dirtbags.
I don't know what they mean that the US has the shortest population in the industrial world. Japan is industrialized, and the average Japanese is shorter than the average American.
AH: Did applications ruin Facebook?
Here is my take: I used to really enjoy FB. It was a fantastic way to connect with friends - simple and easy. Once they began to introduce applications, everything got much more complex and cluttered. I am not some luddite - this is Hacker News after all.

I think connect is a solid step in the right direction, but the applications have to go.

Your thoughts?
Good news, was getting oracle was going to own to many of the techonologies in my stack :) mysql, java, jruby.
Whoa, it looks like a garden variety internet cook has managed to get himself into a fairly powerful position and hold it for years. At least, that's how it appears from Googling.

The internet anti-bullshit machine should make short work of this, assuming there is actually something to do and all of this guy's wealth and status isn't just psychotic delusion.

Just spread the meme around and he'll self-destruct under scrutiny.
I love this article and if you have not read "the monk and the riddle" please please do so. It should have a great impact on you.

I felt like I had become a mercenary CEO in a missionary CEO's clothing at my last startup. That's when I left. I was passionate about being passionate. Money is always a factor, but it's a common denominator. Create a company with value and customers that youre on a crusade for, and odds are money will come out of it.
I am quite happy to invest my time learning Android. Apple has taken Microsoft's place as the biggest bully on the block.
It occurs to me that it also might be due to efficiencies in different industries, and the industries that are being hit in this particular recession are different than the previous. and so on.
Broderbund divulged my email address to my university's alumni association
Four years ago, I bought software from www.broderbund.com using broderbund@mydomain.com email address. I never agreed to be on their mailing list or newsletters and did not give them my permission to share my information with anyone. My university's Alumni Association just sent an email to broderbund@mydomain.com saying "Greetings from the Alumni Association! Did you know that as a graduate from..."

I know how underhanded alumni associations can be when trying to track down past students but I did not expect this from Broderbund. There is absolutely no way that the broderbund@mydomain.com email address was posted anywhere by me. My university's alumni association certainly wasn't dictionary spamming. The only conclusion I can draw is that for some reason, Broderbund gave up my contact information to my university. Of course I can't prove that they sold it or gave it away for free but I think this is a pretty crappy thing for a large software company to do.

I gave them my credit card information, home address, and specifics about my home construction when I bought their 3D Home Architect software. How do I know that information wasn't shared with anyone else? What stops them from selling/giving the same information to mortgage brokers across the country? Is there a legal recourse I can take at this time? I thoroughly feel like my privacy has been violated.
The white MacBook instead uses mini-DVI cables, which aren't included and cost $30 from Apple.
Golf Equipment
Most people who are defaulting on the loans essentially pay nothing in taxes (excluding the payroll taxes, which allegedly are separate).
I think your concerns could be better answered one-on-one than in this forum. Contact info on my website in profile.
If Charles really believes this then he needs to assign a bit more priority to some of bugs / feature requests that revolve around java integration. I wouldn't mind using JRuby to replace various java oriented tasks but the lack of various features such as full support for annotations makes it impossible.

He's definitely right about one thing though - JRuby has to some extent missed the bus here - Groovy now does just about everything I need and it would now be a big sell to win me back to using JRuby (which was not true 1 or 2 years ago).
As an iPhone developer, this makes me really pissed. I was working on a (non-GV) app I was modeling off of GV mobile, and quite frankly I'm scared to submit it now.
WTF Apple. The really scary thing is these rumors I keep hearing about the secret ninja app reviewers that call you instead of giving you something in writing because they're afraid it will get press.
It's not like they could (on the handset level) even if they wanted to—you can install applications on Android phones from any source, since they don't have the draconian application installation restrictions that the iPhone does.
I detest seeing friends' quiz notifications in my Facebook feed, so I block each quiz as I see it, have had to unfriend one friend who seemed to post nothing else, and continually post links to all my friends about how nefarious Facebook quizzes are. That helps all my smarter friends learn to spread the word to their friend networks about how uncool it is to take Facebook quizzes.

The latest concern is all those nasty ads on Facebook.

http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/07/facebook-ad-endorsements/
Excel shoutout in 5...4...3...
I want to recommend all of Hadley Wickham's R packages, actually. Ggplot2 is one of the best R plotting packages around, easily, but --- since one of the biggest initial problems with learning R is figuring out how to use the 20-or-so built-in functions to manipulate data to the right shape --- I have to doubly-recommend Plyr and Reshape as well.

I think that's the real way to learn R. Play with it until you're thoroughly frustrated, then download a few packages like Reshape and learn them. They'll probably have better documentation and typically have some really specific use cases which will help you understand how to use R toward its strengths.
I hate to jump on any sensationalist bandwagons, but shame on Apple.

Of course this a techcrunch article- so I have to ask: is there any other side to this they are leaving out?
IPhone Document Scanner
During my co-op term, I had a job in a Canadian federal government department (Statistics Canada). I worked maybe one hour a day, and that was enough to get all my projects finished on time.

There were many jobs there that had loads of free time.

The rest of the time was spent surfing, working on little programming projects, and learning new languages. If only I could tell my younger self to direct all my free time and energy into a startup.

Of course, I had to sign away any intellectual property rights to belong to the government... but how enforceable is that? And no one would ever find out if you didn't mention anything anyways :-)
Does anybody know what the rules are regarding ad-hoc distribution?

I believe that you can install your apps without going through the App Store if you have a developer license (either for debugging or through the ad-hoc process), right? So, now, could there be a network of people with developer licenses to deliver some open-source apps in that manner?
I was.

James Joyce not being a writer till 32? The man wrote the "best" novel of all time.

Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky in three days? Hot damn, perhaps my own situation isn't so bad.
Boring Leadership
programming input meets business idea
Good day! Can I get your input?

1. I have a couple of web-based biz ideas (who doesn't!) that I'd like to build.

2. The ideas mostly involve simple database interactions. Basically, gathering and presenting data. I'll eventually need to address things like user management, performance, & security.

3. I am not proficient at a particular web framework / language

4. I am proficient at SQL, know html/xml in degrees, and know slightly-more-than-nothing about javascript. OO experience is very limited at best. Have done a little with PHP, (OLD) ASP, and Unix

5. My goal is not to have a perfect app but rather to get something going and go from there. I want to acquire first hand build experience. Thus, options like elance or hiring a programmer are out for this exercise.

6. I'm dedicated to putting in the time to learn (and fail) but certainly appreciate using tools, languages, etc with limited ramp-up times.

With this said, any suggestions for languages/ frameworks / tools to use?

Thank you!

P.S. the last thing I want is another PHP vs. Ruby vs. Python vs. whatever holy war discussion
has there ever been a case of an organization that big voluntarily giving up power

It depends on what you mean by voluntarily, but here's one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Day_(South_Africa)
http://www.deskography.org/desks/top-rated

Most notably - http://www.deskography.org/media/desks/images/brian_desk_jpg...
I didn't say that it was illegal; I said it implied it. I'm not sure how much more firmly it can be said so I'll just repeat what you already pasted: _especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose_
if you want to learn something, try rails. if you want to go with something familiar, use codeigniter or cakephp.
I do this, as well. And during/after exercise, I'll drink a 50/50 mix. I don't know whether it's the "proper" approach, but it keeps my stomach settled whereas a lot of plain water can start to feel "heavy" particularly in the stomach. I'm thinking particularly of long (outdoor) cycle rides, back when I did that.
Bum wines. Usually Cisco RED. http://www.bumwine.com/
I've found that for better or worse, most of the real world involves compromise and taking the good with the bad. So while I'd love Apple to totally open up the iPhone (I'd also like a free yacht) on the balance, I personally choose to have an iPhone instead of a G1 or whatever else. The upside is bigger for me than the downside.
I don't think that's Apple being evil, that's Apple being ahead of the curve. They've always done that and I've thought it was generally admirable, although sometimes it puts you as a customer further out on the bleeding edge than you'd like. (E.g., I was very much unready to give up PCI when Apple decided to ditch PCI-X for PCI Express. However, it was clearly where the world was headed.)

They've done the "lead, don't follow" thing consistently since Jobs came back. Ditching ADB and serial for USB; ditching SCSI for FireWire---I groaned at each one of those calls, but they turned out to generally be the right ones, just a year or two in some cases before the market was quite ready.

However, all that is quite different from the bullshit with the iPod video cable discussed in the article. That's just outright consumer-hostile behavior, and it's not traditional Apple ... it seems to be something new, which has only started to happen in the last few years, and mostly in the markets where they are dominant.

I still like a lot of Apple's products (I'm writing this on a 15" MacBook), but it's as much evidence as I need to not want to ever have Apple dominate the PC market. They're a wonderful company when they're the underdog, but a harsh mistress when they're in charge.
I didn't just grow up with adventure games like this, I grew up with these specific adventure games.

It looks like they actually implemented the old Sierra game interpreter in Flash. I recall there being an open-source clone of the interpreter under the same name, actually.

Activision Blizzard owns the IP for these old Sierra games. I wonder what with Lucasarts recognizing the value in their back catalog (e.g. releasing some of their classic games to Steam, remaking Monkey Island, and porting the latter to the iPhone) if Activision won't actually re-release or even remake some of these titles to modern standards.
Come on up to Ann Arbor-there's loads of oppertunities here. UofM is expanding and we've got a best of breed engineering school going on
I would have thought Oracle would have been a safer choice What's 3 extra engineers to a behemoth like Oracle? ("Two out of the three developers making this move have families; we want to make sure JRuby will get to the next level, and we had to make a decision")

Whereas their salaries are serious money to EY.

I'm curious why they thought EY would be a safer home for them.
Seems like this might be an anti-trust issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act
What is the acceptable and responsible limit to what you can spend to fix a pet, and why?
I have used Asterisk for many systems and even modified some of the C code in it. I would not say it is as horrible as it is portrayed here.

I started to set up a FreeSWITCH system, figuring if it was a clean redesign I might as well get on board now. Then I discovered it used XML in config files, which made me question the developers credentials and I never looked at it again.
I personally thing that government involvement in the market, granting monopolies is actually harmful and we should abolish all intellectual property. Now it is proper for the government to stop fraud so trademarks and plagiarism would still be valid government concerns, but deciding what deserves and does not deserve a monopoly would be out of its reach.
Sure is. This will do it:

setup(runner='strace_runner')