skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is an empirical point about the brightness for you: http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/06/macbook-pro-backlight-com...

A Color gamut argument is something that I cannot attest to but the colors on my MBP are vibrant if that matters. I also have it plugged into a 24" Dell Ultrasharp and the colors look more believable(aka White looks white and does not have a tinge of yellow. FWIW, I did not setup my screens with a calibrator as I do not have one.)
> this is the fault of daniel drucker dmd@3e.org

The 14-year-old wizard himself. A net.legend!
Ack, a sticker would be worse.
I think it's no secret that one of the reasons Apple products appeal to many people is that Apple promotes a left-wing political worldview.

When I am looking for a product to buy, I don't wish to have a political debate or have someone make any assumptions about where I stand on various political issues.
Tell HN: Google is Down
First time I've seen this. GMail has been down plenty of times but this is something rare.
Isn't what both of you are describing a filesystem in itself?
Thinking that doctors could be scared that their job looks easy makes me not only excited but all more hungry for this sort of software. This is the same thing labor said as it was mechanized. All sorts of other fields that changed to be technology reliant are the same. The idea that medicine could become "easy" could change this world maybe. Medicine becoming a job for more and more spread out is exciting to me. I hope we can make physicians near obsolete and direct professionals at research to better medicine.
Hi,
I don't really get what your site is about. It just get news/content from other websites and displays them?
I like the design though :).
Yah I believe that. We don't have access to the Music Genome and we can still build a decent rec engine. When you have millions of users you can assemble pretty good features if you log the usage properly.
Google's been down before, but this is pretty big. I can't get into News or the search proper right now.
Everything's working fine for me. Could it be a network issue between your ISP and Google?
Advertising Should Not Be a Zero-Sum Game
I did a trip there last month and it was excellent to see the equipment close up. Will be fascinating when it starts up again.

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/09/geek-side-trip-cern.html
Why is 6 "ugly"? Each number k for which the player playing at that point will win leads to 2k being a loss, meaning that 2k + 1 is a win. Whereas if k is a loss, then both 2k and 2k + 1 are wins. So part a) is really easy, because we can just repeatedly halve the numbers to figure out what the values should be, and part b) is also easy, because our proportion of wins to losses in the limit is described by a simple markov chain.

[edit: another minute's thought... actually, the obvious implication of the above is that every odd number is a win, and therefore losses are only those numbers with odd numbers of 2s in their prime factorizations]

In any case, I don't see why these questions belong on Hacker News. They're the sort of fun puzzles that make for a good high school math camp quiz (a clever high school student should figure most of them out in an afternoon), but none of them contains any deeper insight or relevance, as far as I can tell.
He asked for probably very close to the most he could get without a counteroffer. Most likely Amazon's lawyers are full-time and don't bill by the hour, but they have better things to do than send letters back and forth three times before finally agreeing to pay the guy $200 or $300 or whatever.

That said, it is kind of bad etiquette to rub it in someone's face publicly when they submit to your demands. The guy gets his new kindle, $200 for his hassle, and 15 minutes of internet fame, but maybe at a slight cost to his long term reputation. If I was thinking of working with someone and googled them and saw this, I'd avoid doing any sort of business with them if possible.
It also has it where it counts: depth. Almost everything I work on is helped by better depth: writing, coding, browsing. After a while, even the 1600 pixels of the 30" seem shallow. The iMac sure is wide, but it only has 1440 pixels in depth.

I know why they're doing it -- 16:9 widescreen panels are cheaper because of the demand for TV panels (it's almost impossible to get 4:3 panels these days) -- but I think it's a pity.
I did YC this last summer and it worked out great. I am 39, so close to 40. Age does not really matter- you just need to be able to work hard on something for free for a while.
Often older people with the talent to do a startup just can't bear the opportunity cost of the well-paying job they would give up.
Not where I'm sitting, western europe.

If you need it:

http://74.125.79.106/
not a good idea for designers and people that need to ensure what they see on their screen is what everyone else sees.
Not in San Francisco it isn't.
The fact the Apple is _not_ the only company that prominently highlights the effect of its product on environment only proves that they are significant number of people out there who actually cares about the environmental impact of the product they are purchasing.

I have a hard time understanding why anyone would be "irritated" by this.

I am interested to know which "position of your worldview" was violated by apple's promotion of environmentally friendly product.
Why complain? It's a little funny: the latter paragraph ends "... without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher", which, apparently, the former paragraph grants. No?
It's not 1900x1200 though.
I waited until I got home to read the article because I thought it was NSFW...
at this point there's no real reason not to use a random password generator for _every_ site. There are plenty of apps out there for auto login, and / or most browsers will do this for you. Yes, there's some pain syncing with mobile devices but this will go away at some point (modified oauth to validate devices?).

Password schemes like this are still inherently breakable; as soon as someone gets your key password then the rest is trivial to figure out - so why bother with the complication?
Bravo! How come you don't have more points for this comment? Or am I the only moron who never thought of this?
They're providing information about their own products on their own website. How is that "a political debate"?
From India, a Homespun Brand of Hospitality
You really should study the curriculum for a particular school. Last I looked, CS programs vary widely. Find a school you like and can afford and see if the program looks like it suits you. Also, there is whole lot more to college than just your degree program.

If you post several potential schools here, you may get detailed feedback from those that went through the programs.
I posted a similar screed about iPhone/Twitter apps that send passwords in the clear or with broken encryption a few days ago: http://scott.wolchok.org/plaintext.html (HN post at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877460)

Not sure what is difference that made people care about this but not that, but open to enlightenment.
Without education, people won't learn. I'm a fan of thoughtful UX but, frankly.. this is an area where caving sucks. Sorry. I'd have spent the time improving my password recovery service.
Haha, you're not likely to find anyone sympathetic to that perspective in this forum. Anyway, Apple has a fairly explicit leftist worldview itself, and it's never been a policy of SJ to be all things to all people.
Introducing Nook, the most advanced ebook reader
How to host an (un)official Windows 7 launch party
I think they also prompt new users to reset their password on first login too...
I'm pretty sure somewhere in my resume there's something relevant to this conversation

Hey, what a coincidence...me too!

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Webmin-Learned-Stop-Worrying/dp/1...

I've also been a contributor on an alternative DNS server in the distant past...back when it was fashionable to hate BIND.

Meanwhile, the reason I brought up djbdns is that it has automatic best-practice behavior for a lot of basic DNS config issues, like matching PTR records, or setting up reasonable TTLs and SOA field values. It's right there in the data format.

BIND also has reasonable defaults, and there are tools (Webmin, for example, just to throw something out there completely and utterly at random) that make it easy to get all of the "reasonable default" things you've mentioned right.

You're going to have to add this to the list of topics I'm insufferable about.

OK. But you're still wrong.
About a month ago, I filled out an application/request with an NGO (Acumen Fund) about opening a local chapter where I live (Melbourne). My understanding that if they get enough requests, they'll try to get a local chapter going.

Now I got a response that they want to extend a 'special invitation' to use their 'to register on our brand new community site' where I can get involved and maybe new chapters will materialise.

The timing seems pretty convenient. I suspect that the request/suggestion form was really a list building excercise for the community site. It's a Ning. Those things need to cross a substantial chicken-egg hurdle before they are any use to anyone.

I admit, there was no blatant lie. It isn't really exactly the same thing. But it is sending out feelers & building email lists. They could have also put up a big 'join our community' button on the site that led to an 'sorry, under construction' page after you "sign up." Maybe they did. It was a little bit sneaky. I still joined & even started a group. I'm not angry with them. I'll even mention it to others.

BTW: http://community.acumenfund.org/
It's a Comcast-centric thing, it looks like.
Because if you really are that important your nemesis will go to a lot more trouble than that to crack your security. Camouflage is about using simple means to hide in plain site.
Right, it's all about where you go.
Well, it's even worse than that.

Many modern touchpads support multitouch in hardware but it's disabled in drivers [1].

I believe it has something to do with Apple sitting on multitouch patents. Even Android phones were supposed not to have multitouch because of Apple.

-----

[1] For example Synaptics ones in Thinkpads. You can get multitouch using modded drivers.
Still getting love at .com.au
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=%22jacob+aldridg...
Are Artificial Sweeteners Really That Bad for You?
I do agree, but I don't think it was undeserved. They had a chance to replace a device that was considerably less durable than advertised, but refused to do so.

Judging by other reports in this thread (and other good things I've heard about Amazon's customer service), there's a decent chance they would have replaced it if he'd feigned ignorance and claimed it "just stopped working" - which means he told the truth from the outset.

His offer of a $400 settlement seems like a very reasonable number (I assume he had to pay to replace the ebooks he'd bought for it, plus the time without the device, and the $200 he'd paid for the replacement).

The only mistakes were on Amazon's part: selling an unreasonably delicate product, presenting evidence that supposedly proved its durability, and failing to replace it when it didn't live up to their claims.

A replacement device plus $200 seems very fair to me.
BTW, I think the whole idea of liberal vs conservative is also offensive as it assumes that people fall into two groups each of which thinks alike on a whole host of issues -- as if their worldviews were a result of brainwashing.
Ok... but I didn't just say I was right, I offered a reason why. Why am I wrong about BIND? I'm not as up on BIND 9 as I am with 8 and 4, but last I remembered, BIND didn't automatically match PTR's to A's (one of your examples).
(In theory, as I don't run a storage farm) RAID6 might help here since if the disk rotation triggered a failure you'd have a second parity disk to fall back on. However ideally all the disks in an array would be from different lots.

Or, I believe that on some RAID controllers it is possible to add a third disk to a RAID1 pair, which means you could build the new disk before removing either of the old ones, thus there is never a single point of failure even during the disk replacement operation.
Good idea. I was thinking about Missouri S&T, SEMO, and UMSL, but any other unusually good (or bad) programs people know about would be nice to hear of as well.
It is Firefox, though. I can sell a used Ford car and advertise it as such, even though Ford is not my trademark.
As a CS major at Berkeley, this is not the case. As the above poster said, the curriculum varies widely depending on the college.
Legend has it that one of the early ESS systems ran into something like this.

Telephone switching systems have functionally zero downtime. They're designed to be fully modular, entirely hot swappable, the kind of thing Erlang was built for and give Z-series a run for their money. So you have this hulking room-sized[1] brute of a telephone switch which cannot ever fail and if it does so must always do so gracefully and with plenty of warning.

And one day it just falls over. No warning, no graceful failover to a redundant system, just poof gone. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth the root cause is identified: n drives were capable of failing without issue, n+1 failed simultaneously.

At this point, stories differ: this was either the beginning of a "no two drives from the same manufacturer" policy or the end of the career of a PHB who vetoed said policy on grounds of excessive cost.

[1] http://www.montagar.com/~patj/phone-switches.htm
How exactly is stating that a product has less impact on the environment in any way political? Is there a brand of politics I'm not aware of that says that building piles of toxic waste is a good thing?
Apple makes an LED? Can I use this for lighting? What is the heat output? When does Jesus come back? Do you do anal?
Would you mind describing your course load or some of your assignments? Mainly what I'm looking for is a frame of reference to steer me toward or away from this as a major.
Alas, in construction circumventing the established order is generally known as a code violation, and frowned upon.
If the key is embedded in the app and you don't keep the source on the server, reversing the binary (if the attacker even thinks to steal it) is enough of a hassle to deter most people. And maybe the attack only allowed them to copy the database.

It's not foolproof, but for stupid free websites (that's what we're talking about right?), storing encrypted passwords isn't an automatic gimme for the attacker.
The majority of patents applications (and issued ones) I found are assigned to Shazam Entertainment Ltd, there is not a mention about Columbia.

Issued Patents (Wang, Avery Li-Chun):

1. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

Here a search from the inventor at the AppFT (Patent Applications):

A. http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

4 most relevant applications:

1. Method and System For Content Sampling and Identification

1.1 http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

1.1.1 TIFF image (rename file *.tif): http://aiw1.uspto.gov/.DImg?Docid=us20080154401ki&PageNu...

2. Method and apparatus for automatically creating database for use in automated media recognition system

2.1 http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

3. Method for High-Throughput Identification of Distributed Broadcast Content

3.1 http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

4. Robust and invariant audio pattern matching

4.1 http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
until your computer crashes and you find yourself locked out of every site on the internet. No thank you.

+ what do you do when you aren't using your own computer. Want to check your email at work? Nope sorry, gotta provide the 25 digit randomly generated password.

Nothing is unbreakable, if someone wants your password they'll get it. For the password generator case they can just break into your house and steal your computer. Or organize a group of mercenaries to take hostages at AT&T to gain access to your packets....hey we are talking about a nemesis right?

And here is an added bonus...how do you know that random password generator app isn't sending all your passwords to a master file? Whoa, did I just blow your mind?

Different passwords is all you need for protection. That way if the company loses your username/passwords, the bots that will be using that information to check the passwords on other sites, won't get a hit.
From the site: "They basically are here to earn a living. But you can imagine the health implications."

It's not obvious to me that these poor people would be better off not recycling the e-waste. I certainly wouldn't fancy doing it, but if the alternative was starvation for my family I might consider it.

I'm not at all sure that it would benefit the people of Ghana if there was no e-waste.

As for dumping toxic waste that's a problem enabled by government/courts that don't function properly.

Further it's not clear in the video how the e-waste gets there. There's the implication that the West simply dumps it there, but clearly the governments of the West don't do that, nor do companies like Apple. Probably what happens is that Ghanian companies import it from e-waste collection companies in the West.
It's a pernicious myth that passwords on "free" websites don't matter, because no money is changing hands. Most people use the same password for random apps as they do for their email account.

I don't even want to get into the rat-trap of "what kinds" of attackers are stopped by reversably encrypted passwords. There's no kind of attacker that can reverse a properly hashed password, and so that's what you should use.
I have run into this problem myself. It is actually a problem with the Solaris ls and related utilities, and not with ZFS. I solved it by compiling some relevant GNU versions of utilities like find, which have some important performance improvements on this front.

As for working with many small files, in my experience ZFS has been far better than xfs (I do not use reiserFS due to previous stability issues I experienced with it). One particular example was a user who had over a million files in one directory. This caused all our backup software to fail. After moving to ZFS, I could send and receive these files between servers without problem. I could list the files easily enough as well, after installing the aforementioned GNU versions with Blastwave.

I believe there is a GNU version of ls in Blastwave as well that Steve could try.
"I see runaway inflation as a serious threat to the united states, and I think it is very possible."

Do you have any historical evidence that it's happened in our system or in other systems like ours? The main flaw I see in your argument is your conflation of mild inflation with runaway inflation.

The kicker is, runaway inflation would happen just as readily even under a gold standard if major new gold sources are discovered, or if another major power sells their gold reserves. We have even less control over that risk than we have over the Fed.

"All money is simply a barter system..."

Yes, except you have to have a common medium of exchange that's widely accepted, and a situation without legal tender laws would eliminate that.

The thing is, once you define what currency you accept taxes in and what currency legal judgments are determined in...you have legal tender laws by definition.
Those are obviously in cache.
Open Source’s Dying Narrative
NIGGERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Where is Richard Stallman and what did they do to him?

Now, on a more serious tone, a program dies when nobody uses or is interested on it. MySQL will inevitably die someday, replaced by something better, much like MySQL itself replaced mSQL. The GPL will make its source available forever, protecting users who may be interested in continuing it.

As for PostgreSQL, it saddens me to say its BSD licensing provides no such protection. If people lose interest in it, it will probably evolve some more in the form of EnterpriseDB and the source may be lost or locked up forever.

Isn't Drizzle a worthy successor to MySQL?
Companies try to make tough products. They want to show that they tried for and tested for such things. All you're asking for is more fine print. Fine print makes America stoopid.

(Don't stick your head in this bucket, you might drown.)
Useful for checking if a website is really down:

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Your newly-created files are still in cache.
I managed to get to about 30 seconds with 65,000 files on a local ext3 file system. The file names where all of the same length and with a ~100 character long identical prefix. I re-mounted the file system before the ls to eliminate caching.
Steve Gillmor: Why Google Wave Sucks And Why It Doesn't Matter
Apparently P = NP now...
Instead of "last buzz" you probably want to say "latest buzz". Also the (no comments) on the right of everything bugs me, better to show nothing? Or show it if moused over only.
I've thought about this a lot, and I think it has to do with the fact that phone hardware doesn't need to be as interchangeable as computer hardware. There's just not that much demand from OEMs for swappable commodity phone hardware. So in a situation where hardware doesn't matter as much, Apple wins by controlling the entire platform and user experience. I think this will probably change, as we are starting to see, now that phone manufacturers can get a smartphone operating system for free.
Keiretsu Forum To Drop Fees For Early-Stage Startups
Because I'm not talking about BIND at all. I'm talking about DNS. I don't care what DNS server people are using (we also support PowerDNS, and we also get questions about djbdns, even though we don't support it). These are the mistakes people make, regardless...and it's due to fundamental misunderstandings of how DNS does what it does, and rarely has anything to do with syntax (most of the people I interact with are using Webmin, which hides the configuration file entirely, and so the semi-colons and dots are irrelevant because Webmin always gets them right; and Webmin can also automatically manage PTRs).
My Quick Hack: Readable YouTube URLs
I work at a medical device company that does a lot of software related work. Making their work look easy is NOT an issue. The big problem is that insurance plans typically don't reimburse time spent with technology. For instance in Diabetes treatment a doc could look at your results and provide good feedback via email or phone, but there is not reimbursement code for this. So you take half a day off of work to have a 10 minute meeting with a doc.

Most docs would love more tech in their practices.
By now they might as well change their name, they've had so much bad press that if you google keiretsu forum you get this on page 1 now:

http://calacanis.com/2009/10/05/jason-jihad-keiretsu-forum-m...

And that link is rising rapidly. If Jason Calacanis keeps this up he'll be running them out of town yet. Pretty amazing really, considering the relative sizes of the parties.