skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For anyone that wants to skim them:

"I hope everyone reads this book and learns about the cruel business of selling pets." - Bowser, a dog

"I can confirm I make money - making you feel bad about yourself." - Marketing Executive

"We've finally been bested in the battle for best book with 'onomics' in the title." - Freakonomics

"Buying this book was the best decision I ever made." - You, in the Future

"I didn't really care for this book." - Your Childhood Nemesis

"You know what the world needs? Another book." - Priceonomics Middle Management

"Under no circumstances should anyone read this book." - CEO of De Beers

"Finally, a book that helps me steal bicycles more efficiently!" - Bike Thief

"Nutella really is healthy. Hahaha, I can't even say that with a straight face." - Food Industry Lobbyist

"An intellectual tour de force of staggering proportions - Priceonomics" - Winston Churchill

"After reading this book, I think I was duped into knighting a scoundrel." - The Queen of England

"No this book is not tax deductible. Why would you even ask that?" - Your Accountant

"Any press is good press, right?" - Actual Seal Clubbers

"With my endorsement, this book will reach the tipping point before you blink." - Galcolm Madwell

"Until this book, I had no idea why people started calling me Chilean Sea Bass." - An Arctic Toothfish

"Mandatory reading at the Zoolander Center for Children Who Can't Read Good!" - D. Zoolander

"Do not buy this book. Contains almost no practical information about bullshit or manure." - Farmer

"Yes, the oligarchy needs something to spend its money on. " - Art Dealer

"Finally, a book that passes judgement on my life's work!" - A Bordeaux Winemaker

"You mean I wasted all my savings on a diamond ring?" - Dudes Everywhere

"Can I interest anyone in a 'free' credit report? Lol." - The Experian Corporation

"Of course pizza is a vegetable! Don't listen to those troublemakers at Priceonomics." - US Congress

"Finally a book I can enthusiastically give two thumbs up!" - Friedrich Nietzsche

"I only read the title, but I entirely disagree with everything in this book." - Internet Commenter
I literally had the same thought after I unsuccessfully tried to get through a captcha for 10 minutes.

It was for a contact form on a vendor's website. Ended up going with another vendor who had identical product
And sadly really resource intense and thus laggy on all systems I tried it on :/
I don’t really understand why they do that. Isn’t there more than enough demand? They don’t have to create weird incentives to attract the wrong people! They want people to attend who will actually get the most benefit (knowledge about making things on various Google platforms) from it and benefit Google in turn, not anyone else.
The recession is a tiny little 2% blip, if you're one of the ~85% of people who were not laid off and didn't have any trouble finding a job. And it's a very large 2% blip if you're one of the people who are.

My point is that perspective matters - a lot. By the numbers, this recession is worse than any since the Great Depression. By the numbers, this recession is only a small percentage of the total U.S. economy. Which numbers are correct? Well, they're actually the same numbers, what matters is how you use them and what conclusion you're trying to draw.

From my personal perspective, the recession was great. It meant I could actually get decent rents in the Bay Area for the first two years after I moved out here, and I could pick up stocks for relatively cheap, and I had no problem getting a job. I realize this is not the perspective of many other people, and the numbers help tell me how many other people. And one of my professional startup interests is finding better ways to help people manage their careers, so I'm quite interested in hearing other people's perspectives (if you have stories or want to vent, feel free to e-mail me...I'm quite happy to listen, my e-mail address is in my profile.) But understand that numbers always require interpretation - whether the graph is misleading or not depends entirely on where you're leading people.
Got the cardboard demo app to fire up on my Nexus 4 using a magnet. Waving it around the headphone port seems to trigger the 'switch'. Was curious about how it did motion tracking. Seems all the demos use the accelerometer for tracking. Was sort of hoping they worked out how to use the camera for motion tracking.
Now all I need is lenses, an nfc chip, laser cutter, and proper weight to strength ratio cardboard!
There are a few adjustments to the data for getting a better impression of the data. For example "real" data attempt to minimize the distortions that come from changes in prices, while the raw "nominal" data measure economic activity. Another adjustment is for the seasonality of data. Here's a graph of some a few retail data series, where not seasonally adjusted appear with the seasonally adjusted data. [1]

Here you can take a look at the most recent release of the Employment Situation.[2] It states that the survey of businesses indicated 217,000 more people working. Now, look at the table of the data.[3] You have

May: 139,192 thous
Apr: 138,272 thous

=> Surveys of businesses therefore indicated that 920 thousand more people were working!

So, what's going on? It is that no one cares about reporting the seasonal cycles in employment, because it isn't news that helps you understand economic trends. So, people actually look at the seasonally adjusted data.

May: 138,463 million
Apr: 138,246 million

=> 217 thousand more people

In order to come with the seasonal factors the Census (and BLS and BEA) use an autoregressive integrated moving average. Back to your original question, what does it mean to say that winter sucked? It means that people's prosperity was lowered by the winter, just like it always is, but while the seasonal factors usually remove that effect this time they are part of the seasonally adjusted data because the seasonal factors are derived from past data with less severe winters.

Really it comes down to the fact that a single score is inappropriate for an understanding of the economy. GDP measures GDP, and something else with a different methodology would measure something else. You can find the fallacy acted out online with sites that purport to improve the data with adjustments without explaining the tradeoffs that come with adjustments by definition.

[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=RSCCAS,RSCCAS...,

[2] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

[3] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm
lenses are $250??
Google VR with cardboard
Book Is Netflix For Oysters
Does it have full screen mode yet?
My killer app for this needs webhooks, or some sort of event notification when mail arrives. Bonus points for making that condition a stored procedure/filter.

Until then I'll probably run out of "quota units" polling the thing..
and obviously, not "google's new graph database".
Here is a brief introduction

http://google-opensource.blogspot.hk/2014/06/cayley-graphs-i...
That is an excellent new features guide, but it really needs to be placed alongside a release announcement on the front page. Also these 2 links seem similar but are really different, a bit confusing:

https://www.eclipse.org

https://www.eclipse.org/home
What are these utilities and how would I find them? It might be worth investing in some SEO experimentation to make sure you're stuff's actually findable by those who'd be interested.
This is a Google initiative mirroring their Android OpenHandsetALliance. I think that worked out pretty well for them...
A bit off topic, but your comment did lead me to think that there may be a alternative way to curb NSA civil liberties abuses: treat it like an island.

Right now, one of the biggest problems with the NSA for civil liberties is that it routinely cooperates with other domestic law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and local law enforcement.

With this is mind, we may also want to consider pushing for laws that isolate the NSA from domestic law enforcement by making any communication between the NSA and domestic law enforcement a crime without oversight from the public. A policy like this would not be without precedence, since we use a similar mechanism, the "chinese wall", in the financial world to separate departments of financial institutions that have a conflict of interest. The beauty of a "chinese wall" even though its not 100% effective is that there is absolutely no ambiguity in the mind of the individual when they themselves are doing something illegal/unethical.

The citizenry of this country should seriously consider erecting such a large wall between the NSA/CIA and domestic law enforcement that one cannot talk to the other in any form without mediation (at work or outside of work) without it being a felony.

A policy like this would go a long way to preventing abuses like parallel construction since it makes an activity at the human level a felony. Policies that aim to police organizational behavior are never as effective as policies that aim to police the activity of rank and file employees, since the enforcement of the former suffers from diffusion of responsibility. Specifically saying "Activity X is illegal and you'll be held responsible regardless of whether or not your superior(s) commanded you to do something" is a great way of curtailing institutional problems. Show me a corrupt institution and I'll show you that it is an institution where none of the crimes are policed at the level of the individual at the bottom.

Isolating the NSA is as important for freedom and liberty in the world as passing laws that police its organizational behavior.

That being said, we should still push for curbing all the civil liberties abuses currently practiced and putting rules in place preventing future abuses.
I like Google products in general, but their UX is pretty mediocre and often counter intuitive. This vapid guideline is yet another example. I have my browser open fairly wide, and all I see is one paragraph of text.

Yet, if I halve the width of the browser while maintaining the height, I get more a lot more content. That's not really good responsive design.

I click introduction. Again, huge meaningless illustration and not even a shred of text in sight. What illustrations there are, don't even correlate to the accompanying text.

Now, once you start driving into Layout, Style, sections, things get more meaningful. But in order to get to those content, you need to use the hamburger icon to toggle the left nav, because left nav is collapsed by default.

This is a kind of design that invites 90% drop off rate.
Why software builds fail
Show HN: CrowdVit.ae - Quora for Resume Feedback
Not entirely sure, I'm less familiar with the decision-making processes in Geo. I suspect it's similar, where the goal of keeping things fresh and interesting made them take the product in a different direction, which naturally will piss off all the customers who started using it because they liked the old product direction. I don't personally like the new Google Maps either, but understand that a company's first and foremost goal is to go after new users, and making existing users happy is only important if they'll leave if you don't.
> In fact, many people have reported that spending time in VR, and taking a break whenever motion sickness creeps up, actually reduces motion sickness outside of VR. As in, people are saying "After playing in my Rift for a few weeks, I can suddenly read in the car for the first time!"

Is this because the VR experience is causing your brain to recalibrate your vestibular system [1]?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_system
Yes, the goals of the reCAPTCHA project are to filter out bots and to digitize the text of the world (not necessarily in that order).

The mission statement of the reCAPTCHA project is "Protect your website from spam and abuse while letting real people pass through with ease."

I don't think anybody is passing through the audio captchas with ease. Nor are they helping to digitize anything.

I think that the use of captcha's as a reverse turing test was always secondary for reCAPTCHA anyways. If someone can write software to solve the visual captcha's, that is a great accomplishment. Once that is accomplished, we will need a new type of reverse turing test. Perhaps we are approaching that point.

I'm interested to hear the perspective of users with a visual impairment on the audio captchas.
I kinda thought this was a joke at first... something about thinking outside the box.

Has anyone tried it?
I'm not sure what this API enables that can't be done over IMAP. IMAP may not be as familiar as JSON-over-REST, but it's supported by virtually all mail clients and providers, which makes it about as open as you can get.

Already the Gmail IMAP implementation is non-standard in a number of annoying-but-workable ways. I've been suspecting for a while that they're going to kill it or lock it down, the way they did for XMPP and Talk[0]. I really hope this isn't the first step towards that.

As bpodgursky pointed out, this sentence is troubling:

> It will replace IMAP, a common but complex way for applications to communicate with most email services, limiting the number of apps that can work with Gmail

Emphasis mine.

[0] I admittedly had no evidence for this speculation before today, just a worry.
Google has been adding lots of widgets to email recently, like RSVP on invitations, itinerary on flight booking emails, etc. These are pretty useful features and I believe a lot more are possible with the APIs being opened.

However, I feel the access control is very coarse grained. For example, RSVP widget needs access to only event related emails and itinerary needs only travel booking emails, but the API spec does not allow for such fine grained control.

IMO, given that google is able bucket-ize emails into travel booking, event, etc., and even user-defined labels for any custom grouping, allowing access on such buckets would be nearly as useful and much more user-privacy friendly. For example, an accounting app could still access invoices from my inbox to update my accounts automatically. Google could even push for microformats kind of annotation to make emails semantically richer.
This is a very neat idea and I hope it works out for you. :)

That said, helpful.io is priced high relative to its competition and I worry that this business model really will only work for advertising/etc supported products rather than SaaS.
No mention of Lamborghini, though.
Ooh, thanks, I'll add that to the list.
Facebook Editor
Maps typically describe their purpose honestly and plainly (e.g. The Americas circa 1805). The "honest and plain" intentions of the laws produced in the US are rarely provided.
Google has figured out something "better". Basically they use all the data they collect on you to determine whether you're likely to be a bot or not. If not, you most likely won't even see a captcha. (And if so, you'll get a difficult one.)
Yes, I'd really like to hear their perspective on this. I listened to a screen reader once and found it very difficult to understand as well.
If you can figure out how to put enough memristors in parallel, the transfer speed is essentially unlimited. It's the access time (latency) that is crucial, and makes all the difference, because it is inherent to the technology, and cannot be changed regardless of how many elements you string together.

This explains it well: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html?HN_...

Several new non-volatile memory technologies have achieved latency down to 100 picoseconds. This is an order of magnitude faster than the L1 cache on a CPU (SRAM).

CPU power will again becomes the bottleneck, instead of storage. We will have to build completely new CPU architectures to make us of this though.
Its almost sad that the goal is "reliably generating cash" instead of "making something better for humanity." Working to prevent me from having to pull my phone out of my pocket is not anywhere close to where our technological efforts should be placed.
Choosing where to place the antennas largely affects the who can sign up for the service. Antenna placement does not cause me clicking "record channel 4 at 7:30 pm" to become "record channel 7 at 9 am".

Try again?
I think the automotive industry is finally catching on to all the new technology and new apps/utilities/data sources. Comparing a car in 2020 to a car in 2010 will be like comparing 1960 to 1995. I really hope OpenXC from Ford plays a big role in this initiative.

http://openxcplatform.com/
They are now listed as unavailable on Amazon in the US. When I looked, the lenses were only about 8 Euros in Europe, so presumably the $250 was some scalliwag attempting to cash in on the Google Cardboard hype.
correct. simple back-links no longer have the weight they used to (and in some situations can actually harm your SEO).

Backlinks must come from other reputable (in google's algorithm's eye's) sites before they carry any weight.

So, this would mean, tldp.org has a lot of top-ranked linux/bash and related sites pointing to it's pages.
Interesting that the research confirms my own observation: dependencies are usually the most common reason for build failures especially when moving from a build on dev box to a build on shared infrastructure.
From this comment thread, it appears that giving away free stuff can't please everyone. One comment complains that some cardboard isn't good enough, while yours bemoans Google giving away stuff that's too good.

I think the idea is to get devices in the hands of developers; people that will play with it and report bugs or blog about it, people that will code up a little app to see how it works on a watch, and so on. It does create incentives for people that just want free stuff to go to I/O, but it's probably a lot simpler and cheaper for them to just buy it when it's released. If you're not a developer, is a smart watch with no third-party apps that useful to you? Probably not. Being an early adopter is rarely sunshine and rainbows.
Thanks!

I don't believe their pricing is final but you should jump in then and let those building Helpful know your thoughts :-D

Jumping into the product's chat (https://assemblymade.com/helpful/chat) is a good place to start
would be curious to hear some of the things you have in mind?
> I don’t really understand why they do that. Isn’t there more than enough demand?

There is. But they also want developers to work on their products. What better way to get them started than to give them away at a developer conference.
I've recently seen a bunch of them with just one number. Just a single 7 or 4 on a white background and nothing else. Kind of scratch my head at those ones.
What a great resource! I did not know about this before today!
Apparently, if you have good cookies you get an easier captcha

find accessibility:
https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html
Nice! I am playing with the idea to put it on my site for fun. :-)
The intent of the law is to allow over the air broadcasts (seen as a public good) to exist without completely undermining the ability of content creators to get paid.
Well don't use the bottom half....
Is it not obvious in the first case that "secretary" is the unknown word? Clearly ocr wasn't able to read it due to the fading. Likewise, the cut off words spanning two lines in the later versions are obviously the unknown words. The author states right at the beginning that he understands there is a control and an unknown word; he then proceeds to "hope" that the obvious unknown word is the control in the first case, then skip numerous captchas where the control word is straightforward and the illegible word is obviously the unknown. This certainly sounds like willful ignorance for the sake of a blog post.

Also, '“Onightsl”? “Onighisl”? Are those even words?' No, my understanding is that dictionary words are never used as the control, so as not to be vulnerable to dictionary attacks.

Edit: I'm not suggesting that these captchas are in any way good; they do clearly have issues. I'm just saying that storyline in the blog post seems contrived. To me it would be more convincing if presented in a more genuine manner. However, perhaps he was simply very unlucky.
Well anonymity isn't the purpose of captchas. Captchas are intended to provide human-confirmation with the least friction possible, mainly for rate-limiting of services. Having to establish you are a specific individual takes effort, but just typing in a random word is simple. Anonymity is just a by-product of the frictionless [simple] part.

You can still come up with new ways to verify someone is a human for specific uses where you want anonymity, but they will always be part of the tech arms race if you want them frictionless. To avoid them getting more annoying you need a way to authenticate an individual identity, as that allows you to rate-limit access.

You could, of course, do TOTP and totally preserve anonymity. Unless the TOTP service provider is compromised, in which case all bets are off (but perfect-forward secrecy might solve that?)
Similar outcomes? Maybe you should compare cancer and heart disease survival rates (the two biggest killers in the US).

The US does an incredible job with a fat, unhealthy, diverse population, even if we pay dearly for it.
I don't know how you would solve that problem, other than not having one at all, which of course wouldn't be fair. Having the audio clearly describe the solution would make the captcha useless.
Change the way you get your breaking news
That last bit is really interesting. If it works, it would be worth it for me just for the that effect, even ignoring the potential fun and amusement.
And every time they enter it to log in, up until the moment when it's hashed and (maybe the memory is overwritten with zeros before being) garbage collected.
Gun control is literally Hitler!

:)

Edit: In all seriousness, the article's title is simply wrong. It's not New Jersey's law that's keeping them off the shelves, it's right-wing terrorism.

> "Raymond says he received multiple death threats. Both stores quickly backed down on their plans to sell the Armatix gun."
> Captcha's are not going anywhere anytime soon.

You're probably right. But the fact remains that captchas aren't good enough. They can be partially automated; blackhats can use captcha solving farms which will be at least as accurate as the average human (probably more accurate, I imagine).

A better solution might employ heuristics similar to DDoS mitigation techniques. I really don't know, but there is a need for something better here.
Welcome to the world of common law. It's not source code with precisely defined rules. It's a set of values adjudicated by judges attempting to issue rulings that most would consider fair.
Appurify joins Google
The World’s Most Advanced Mobile Device Cloud is joining Google.
Dropbox, deepfreeze.io and limitations of the sync model.
Maybe we need a dead man's switch on our phones? If you haven't entered your passcode in the past x hours, it self-wipes?
Play with a 3D CAD program inside this post
And it might actually be reliable instead of standing in public saying "OK Glass" three times like an asshole to get the thing to respond.

Oh yeah, and how we aren't getting upgraded to the 2GB version even though I paid $1,600 for it during their "one day sale." Its almost like Google is trying to kill Glass.

That'll show me to walk around outside like a tool, defending Google as I wear Glass.
Could be pricing algorithms gone wild, too. For a really extreme example of this, see: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
I had an idea, and built it