skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whether it's a sampling bias or not depends on the conclusion you're trying to draw. I agree that there is no reason to think that the women considered were unrepresentative of women in tech; my point was that women in tech may not be a representative sample of the gender as a whole.
Ask HN: How to stop bots/spammers in their tracks on an entry form?
We're trying to come up with a solution to a major spam and bot issue we've been having. Basically, we have an entry form for people to fill out asking for basic information (name, email, address, etc. --sometimes we ask for just email).

Our forms are posted on thousands of websites and domains, and so we've started to see incoming spam and bots executing the forms, submitting fake information.

So far we've employed these things to stop them:

1) IP is blocked after 3 submissions from the same IP.

2) We check the http referrer to ensure its coming from the expected page. If is not, we kill the entry.

3) If an email has already been entered once, the system won't record it again.

4) We've added captcha, but most of our customers don't want to use it since it reduces form submissions.

Our form is submitted via AJAX request. Currently the bots are submitting the request to the AJAX file and the HTTP_REFERRER is coming from the expected page, and no information is coming across that would suggest they are using a proxy.

I could be incorrect, but it appears as though they have a macro set up that is rotating through IPs using a new one each time, and automatically filling in our form fields, and submitting them, exactly as a human would do.

As of late we've seen these bots submitting our forms thousands of times, all using the same type of address (like @yahoo or @hotmail) but the submissions are all coming from different IP addresses, so we can't detect and block them. After entering some of these IP's into an IP checker, it looks like a majority of them are coming from proxy servers.

One idea we've come up with to try and stop the spam is that when a user types into one of the fields, javascript invokes a cookie. When they go to submit the form, if the cookie isn't found, we drop the entry. Would this work?

Any suggestions/ideas on how to best combat this would be greatly appreciated!
Cool, any use-case in mind?
Emerging suggests positive change currently and into the future. The only positive I can see from the story is cheap real-estate?

There's no indicator, in the article at least, that anything is happening in Detroit to turn around job prospects since the car industry keeled over. So you wouldn't go there for work. Also, according to protonfish, Detroit has terrible infrastructure and sounds like a shitty place to live. So you wouldn't go there for the lifestyle.

All of which leaves me wondering: what's so great about Detroit that it should be considered an emerging market?
Just one other thing I'd like to mention before everyone moves on to another topic. Not all of the unix commands are equal, and some have features that others don't.

E.g. I mainly work on AIX, and a lot of the commands are simply not the same as what they are on more standard linux flavors. From what I've heard, this applies between different distros as well.

Not so much the case with standard programming languages that are portable. E.g. Python. Unless you take in to account Jython, etc.
Well, for JQuery I have been reading tutorials on W3schools and practicing with toy web pages and using some for my personal website. For Ruby, I have been reading the pragmatic programmers book, as well as documentation, and I was playing around with the language by writing a text-based RPG. For PHP I needed to learn some basics to get my wordpress site online, but I also have been reading a book on the LAMP stack, and the w3schools tutorials are very helpful. For Android, I am already familiar with Java, so I have been reading the book I mentioned, as well as the documentation, and working through the practice exercises, as well as tinkering with them.

I don't work on these all at the same time, but since I am out of school for 4 months in the summer I have had a lot of time to spend a couple weeks working on one project, and then a couple working on another, and so on. I don't have a schedule for myself, but I try to do some programming every day. There are a lot of technologies I would like to learn; I have a whole career in the future to specialize and learn something VERY in depth.

Also, I'm a quick learner ;)

EDIT: Forgot to add Git to the list in the first post. Something else I started using this summer.
Hi Michael

Thank you for creating this resource, I used your book to learn ruby on rails.

I think all of the changes you made make sense to a person new to rails and they solve problems/walls I hit while progressing through the book:

- setup/configuring rails. In my case I was using non standard hardware, a web IDE eliminates the issue

- default stack: while going through the book, I was also referring to the official rails documentation, which uses defaults like mini-test and not rspec. Juggling two testing frameworks as someone new to web development was overwhelming.

- test lite: same as above

- version specific features: removing another point of failure is good

- highlighting lines: not sure, but it's good to see innovation
Just remember, live the present! So follow your dreams, it must be difficult to say no to Google. But it will be more difficult to regret all your life, that you did not follow your dreams when you can. Just keep in your head, you only live once, so follow your DREAMS, it's your life you have TOTAL control of it, and never regret from any decision you take and took because all of them are Correct in the time you take or took them, there are not incorrect ones just less accurate, and more accurate ones, but you only will discover that in the future! So good luck! and be sure whatever you choose will be the CORRECT decision.
But I'd wager that the vast majority of Americans don't live in cities like that. It sounds like Citymapper is nailing its niche, so for people that fit that profile it's a much better experience.

But I live in Austin, TX. No one is taking a bus or train or bike anywhere. Especially not in a hurry. Virtually everyone drives everywhere; with Google maps on Android I can often do that in a single voice command and zero clicks.
Replay 2: Stupeflix’s redo of its video app for iOS is now playing on the iPad
Which is more arrogant:

1. Forming hypotheses on admittedly half-assed reasoning, performing small verification experiments, gradually scaling them up in order to see if predictions match observations, and iterating upon failure

2. Declaring that nothing we ever think of will ever work well enough to be worth trying in the first place

http://joyreactor.com/post/578357

You see #2 all the time in the media, especially in science fiction. To me it comes across as a desperate attempt by scientifically ignorant authors to extend the purpose of their story beyond that of mere entertainment. It's a noble goal to strive for, but actual safety analysis is boring, difficult, and far beyond the scope of your typical techno-thriller, so it inevitably gets half-assed into the predictable form of a bunch of chase/destruction scenes followed by the inescapable conclusion that goal X is simply too dangerous to be worth investigating -- in fact, it's so dangerous that the scientists were arrogant for investigating it in the first place. Retch. I actually wouldn't be particularly bothered by this plot device (I like dinosaur chases and zombie hunts, too) if people didn't go and project the same vapid thought process onto real-life scientists solving real-life problems. But they do. Parent post is a case-in-point.

Either do the bookwork/coursework/reviews/calculations necessary to leave constructive criticism or leave the floor to people who have. Don't stand up and claim that your ignorance is better than someone else's knowledge. That's arrogance.
I think it was really this statement which made me crinkle my nose.

"As a woman in tech who has been called all of these things before, there is some validation in confirming with data that the pattern is real. But as a leader in tech, I’m aghast at how closely under our noses we let this live."

Her past research would seem to suggest that this finding was all but assured. But to be fair, that could just be my reading if it. I have a lot of respect for Kieran's work, so that also has something to do with it.
They could probably do this for the cities in Europe, but the US cities have still some work to do.
No, it's actually more complicated. Biological machinery doesn't push molecules at random. Sure it's a lot to work out, but we've been doing it for the last 100 years with a lot of success. Google up some things we can make bacteria do nowdays.

By the way, the primary obstacle to controlling the weather is not the molecular-level interactions, it's the power requirements. Given enough energy generation, we could control weather using today's technology, just as we can do indoors with air conditioning and various experiments like "hey, let's make a cloud indoors and make it rain". Hell, your friendly neighbourhood nuclear power plant produces clouds and rain as a part of its daily operations. We just don't have enough raw power to do it on planetary scale (and we'd probably screw ourselves over big time if we had), as this article [0] kindly explains.

[0] - http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html
My favorite is Triscuits. They break down fat content into (I think) saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated, or possibly some other trichotomy. The sum of the by-category numbers is quite far below the total for "fat".
Because they spent time working on it.
Bingo, it applies to a wide range of areas. Sometimes it is better to exclude examples when explaining a concept and let people think about it for themselves a while.
It only takes a single successful demand before an append-only log because untenable.
Then get fixed. If someone can restore a vitrified brain into a functioning state, they can probably restore it to full function.
Let me make myself clear: I am not debating the possibility that revival could one day turn from the science-fiction it is now into a real technology. I am pointing out the leaps of faith people take to translate that reasonable scientific conjecture into actual life (or death) choices. Thinking about whether there is a god or isn't -- and trying to learn the truth -- makes you a philosopher; it is changing your behavior based on the assumption god exists and other presumptions about Her that makes you religious.

And freezing yourself, as I've mentioned in numerous other comments on this thread, is a choice based on assumptions other than technological -- for example that the future would be hospitable to people born and raised in our lifetime. I'm just thinking of how miserable Mark Twain would be in this age of Facebook, and how much misery Hemingway would experience in our era of reality television.
No, it's actually not. For one, dimensions aren't numbered.

Time is only called "fourth" because we just add it as an extra to the 3 spatial dimensions we perceive intuitively. Not because there's some specific order.

There can be an arbitrary number of special dimensions in mathematics (hence hypercubes, etc).

And according to some (quite prevalent) physics theories, there are actually more than 3 spatial dimensions in the actual reality -- string theory calculations give 10 spatial dimensions.
Ease of key exchange does not justify publishing what is effectively a public ledger of who I start communicating with when.
What happened to the other post on Hal, that was at the top of the page with nearly 200 votes? Did people actually flag that off the site?
Speaking of plastics, one of the disadvantages of it is that it doesn't bio-degrade. Do you think the closer we get to natural fibers, the more they will bio-degrade easier?
The military unmanned delivery aircraft are all tail sitters (500 pound payloads). I hope Google's drafting behind all the existing R&D there. The military stuff out there is crazy - hummingbird-size ornithopters, 2 ounce helicopters that can fly for 30 minutes with an encrypted HD video uplink, etc.,
Because not everyone has the same use cases. A positive change for most users can be a negative for a few, and you don't ever want to be perceived as saying "We're super excited to be screwing you, 'cause we don't care about your needs!"
http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975 is a good piece covering the history of this feature.
Show HN: A Fix to YouTube Vertical Videos
The style of this page is horrendous: there seems to be absolutely no margins on the side. Very difficult to read when it's stretched out from side to side like that.
So like a love hotel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_hotel), but sans coupling. Or like a capsule hotel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel), but with attached shower.

Even on non-prime real-estate (which does that exist in SF?), I don't think you could hit your $20 price point with the amount of housekeeping needed for a bed and shower. Even if you could, after a week your staff might hate you. :-)
An eruption has started north of Dyngjujökull
> Why are people like you even on this website?

Nononononononono. Stop that. jacquesm is continuing his long and proud tradition of mostly well thought and insightful comments. He just doesn't agree with you or me on that topic and, like you and me, has some strong opinions. We're trying to have a somewhat productive conversation here.
I'm glad there's (eventually) an obvious way to disable shake-to-send-feedback, but I agree wholeheartedly with the article. Who thought that was a useful feature to have in an app that you use while moving?
The logical next step would be to predictively send these drones up with the most likely packages that the customers could possibly order.

The mobile app would then tell you here are 50 drones with a 10 mile radius - & here is the list of items that are on them - so forget same-day delivery how about same-hour delivery?
It's hard for me to just take a nap on command in the middle of the day. I wish it was easy for me because a nap would help a lot.
Nice to see the testing toned down a lot.

Previous versions had way too much emphasis on testing, something I'd say unfortunately even 70% of real working Rails developers don't do in real projects.
React.js, the Rails way
I always had difficulty finding the correct amount of time to nap for where I would wake up feeling refreshed and not drowsy, until I read about Dali napping with a spoon in his hand. The idea is that you hold the spoon off the bed/couch so that as soon as you start to drop past stage 2, your hand releases the spoon, it falls to the floor and wakes you up.

I now do this combined with a caffeine nap (green tea) and it works perfectly. There's a point where I deep in my conscious I realize I'm dropping the item. As it hits the floor my eyes open, and I feel refreshed almost immediately afterwards. The time for me is about 25-27 minutes from laying down to the drop.
This assumes all requests are made by the owner of the e-mail address, with sufficient understanding to give consent vs. e.g. an e-mail provider that fails to understand the privacy concerns.

Even then, as pointed out by others, this does not preclude the user from withdrawing consent to continued use of the information.

It may or may not become a legal problem. But they really need to consider the privacy implications and have lawyers that actually know the relevant national laws throughout the EU member states to evaluate it.
Popular gamer’s real-life SWAT raid livestreamed on Twitch
This is also worth checking out for folks interested in recording technology:

http://www.otrannex.com/papertapes/
I think there's some basic assumption that we disagree on but haven't identified explicitly yet. In order to try and do that, I want to ask you: do you disagree with any of the following statements, and if yes, could you tell where and why?

- an example of nanotechnology exists and works, it's called "life"

- this particular technology is in principle able to do the tasks required to revive a properly cryopreserved person, even though it does not do this now

- it is real for humans to learn in time how to make this technology do that

- current preservation techniques store enough information to revive a human using sufficiently advanced nanotechnology
> it requires understanding political, historical, and social issues

A good primer on the social context of engineering is L. Sprague de Camp's "The Ancient Engineers", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158385

"The first engineers were irrigators, architects, and military engineers. The same man was usually expected to be an expert at all three kinds of work. This was still the case thousands of years later, in the Renaissance, when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Durer were not only all-round engineers but outstanding artists as well. Specialization within the engineering profession has developed only in the last two or three centuries."
Just lay still for 20 minutes and let your mind wander without distractions

Just. I've never been able to do that. I'm always thinking, even when I am exhausted. (Usually then, about how exhausted I am.)
It's not easy to get your life back to together. It's very difficult already. These offenders are punished enough already, society should not be making it more difficult.
As we learn more, I agree that higher level approaches will certainly find application. But to the idea of creating industrially useful quantities of spider silk, what's really going on is engineering an entire production workflow. For example, we've heavily selectively bred Bombyx silkworms, to the point that they are true domesticates: they cannot survive (or even eat) without direct human maintenance. (Note: there are many varieties of wild silkworms as well, many tended for fiber use.) This is incredibly labor intensive, and the fact that we continue to do this speaks to the high value placed on silk. We could engineer another domesticate biofactory as a spider, but that seems likely to also be incredibly labor intensive. But who knows, maybe an arachnid equivalent of Bombyx mori could spawn an entire spider silk industry?

Still, the desire to use bacteria as protein factories holds obvious allure for industrial scaling. Of course, that means we need to engineer not just protein secretion but the entire process from gland to spinneret.
This is already happening with crack vs coke, but I assume you know that =)
Uber will buy Lyft. Not that I want that to happen, but it seems likely.
Do you agree then that all those non-technological assumptions can be included in one's utility calculations and that people can give different estimates to how friendly the future would look like? Or do you believe the probability of a bad future is so big, that betting on benevolent world is a leap or faith?
This is basically what meal-delivery services are doing in San Francisco. They stock up on meals in delivery cars and anticipate where the demand would be and drive there.
Who is awesome? ^ This guy. Thanks!
I found this, I don't know of it's what was posted earlier:

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2014-August/...
Show HN: Versus: Performance Brain Training
Watson may be overhyped, but it isn't a replacement for off the shelf machine learning algorithms. Watson is more like a search engine that takes advantage of a lot of natural language processing. It is for answering questions in natural language and searching through huge amounts of literature automatically.
Cryopreservation works for sperm which have been revived after 21 years, which IMO is positive evidence.

The issue is not the possibility of some sort of revival if everything works perfectly so much as the approach and mindset of people involved. After all mummification may in some cases have sufficiently preserved flesh to allow for cloning, but that's not a meaningful resurrection for the person or animal who died. Similarly, unless the tissues are sufficiently preserved so memory's can be recovered it's a pointless exercise and even at the temperatures involved decay still occurs.

Which IMO is what crosses into religion territory. The actual estimates of the probability of success and the lack of basic research into the actual degradation that occurs over time.

PS: At no point did I suggest religion was a bad thing or any of this was impossible etc. It's the mindset where the parallels are clear.
Well currently there is a bug where yes sites can know it is you. I have an accounts on a site and when I use guest mode that site knows it is me and auto logs me in.
Fundamentalists Are Not Traditionalists
Actually it's possible to enter the legal profession without a law degree, apprentice under a practicing lawyer and then take the bar and become a lawyer. It's the path President Lincoln took. While it's not as common now as it was in his day, it's still a well-trodden path in many states.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/education/edlife/how-to-le...
Style difference? yvg makes money from a built-in 1-2% dev fee on his (binary) miners. They are fast, support many pools and protocols, and are robust enough that you can pretty much start them running in /etc/rc.local and trust that they'll still be running a month later. I don't know what his total crypto income is, but I suspect he's doing OK. In contrast, you'd cringe at the horrible code I cranked out for some of these miners. Quality, high-performance, and delivered fast: pick two. It wouldn't surprise me if his business model was, in the long term, more profitable. He argues that it is. I haven't wanted to lock myself into providing support for software long term, so I picked a very different model.

I believe, though, that there's a mix of both in many situations. I think some of the miner devs release some code openly as an advertisement for their skills and then do some contract work. The shady ones probably have opportunities to collaborate with coin developers to pre-develop a secret GPU miner for a "CPU only" coin so that the devs can instamine it. There's at least one I know of who's customized his code and sold it to a botnet herder.

I love the question someone raised earlier: If someone can get a huge advantage that "kills" the coin, it's a flaw in the coin design. Is there a way to have the coin dynamics incentivize developers to make fast code and release it? That's one to chew on...
You can create Wii U games with HTML5
Hi there - I just quickly went over your posting history on HN, and I'm interested to have a chat with you. I'm on jay.makeleaps on Skype !
I can see where you are coming from. I understand that innate perception, no matter how well intentioned, is a really hard thing to observe and think critically about in ourselves.

I just want to ask you about the last line. you truly, truly have NO opinion about what you read there? you don't think there's anything amiss or disturbing at all about the apparent pattern? I confess based on that and your answer to #3, you sound a bit, well like a robot--someone so deeply embedded in your own logic that you cannot see the larger picture. I don't think you're a hopeless misogynist at all, but I do think you might be missing something.