skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can't actually understand startups without understanding the people behind them. This is a hard lesson born from experience: when I was younger I was just interested in the mechanics, and thought that if I learned enough about the technology, the business, the financing aspects, etc. I'd find success.

What ultimately happened was that I gave up (temporarily, it turned out, but it took me 6 years to pick it up again), because I didn't understand myself. When the stress picks up and you're knee-deep in building a product, a lot of the decisions you make, of necessity, have to be on autopilot. And if you don't understand your emotions and the emotions and background of everyone else in the ecosystem, you'll be fighting that force instead of working with it.
What would you recommend / advise then?
In 99% of cases, whether or not you're a bot can be determined before you interact with the box. It's mostly just a vector to download the script that does the actual detection based on mouse and keyboard patterns while you're using the rest of the page.
The Pig Apple: A History of NYC's Illegal Pet
Hopefully they'll do better than Facebook!
The Original Smart Aleck
#1 is false. Ask Google or Apple or JPMorgan Chase -- who get sued frequently, yet don't bother with arb clauses

#2 is true in most instances, but in order to find out you have to actually go through the entire arbitration and pay your lawyers' bills

#3 is very true, but that only adds to the idea that it's unethical.

Companies put them in because the corporate defense bar thinks this is the new hotness -- and few of those folks have ever actually litigated any of these clauses.
Who doesn't? Maybe a better question is - who doesn't use emails?
We don't have one yet - but that's a great idea. We'd like to support basic auth somehow.
I know about increasing the mass of something dew to relativity, but I never heard of decreasing the mass of an object.

To increase the mass you need energy, to get the energy you have to decrease the mass of another part of the ship (the nuclear reactor or the battery), so the total mass doesn't change.

(And it's actually more complicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_special_relativity#Cont... )
Well, for starters,

start env = function
| [] -> ()
| line :: lines
when String.length line > 4 && String.sub line 0 3 = "+++" ->
header env line;
modified env 0 lines
| _ :: lines -> start env lines

is a bit elitist way to write a 2 argument function as a combination of 1 argument function and a lambda function. So let me rewrite:

start (env) (list) = match list with
| [] -> ()
| line :: lines
when String.length line > 4 && String.sub line 0 3 = "+++" ->
header env line;
modified env 0 lines
| _ :: lines -> start env lines

So the function `start` takes some kind of state `env` as a first argument, and then it takes a list as a second argument, here named `list`.

If the list is empty, [], it does nothing.

If the first list element, which is a string, starts with "+++", it calls two other functions: first header(env,line) where `line` is now the first list element, and then modified(env,0,lines) where `lines` is the rest of the list, not containing the first element.

If the first list element does not start with +++, it recurses to the rest of the list.

So this is not a filter: After first encounter of "+++" it calls those two other functions and stops.
Would you pay to get rid of ads? Meet 'Contributor' by Google
Can you link to a proof for these "computable numbers" being a countably infinite subset of R? :)
I think it's assessing your risk level based on what you put on other sites. For example, I received the street address captchas which are easy to solve and allow for some margin of error (missing a number). However, when I solved it incorrectly a number of time it brought me to those distorted text captchas and really warped ones too. I'm assuming if you build up enough trust level then all you have to do is click and you go through.
Well, physics tell us that any conventional way of interplanetary travel with reasonable timespans (days/weeks instead of years) is also a weapon of mass destruction due to energy levels involved. So we need to pick - either we deal with it, or stay on this rock forever.
I don't know about the 730, but the 780 had a PDP-11 (/03 I think?) in the cabinet which was in charge of the system console, and bootstrapping the VAX processor with code from an 8" floppy disk.

Funny how their (then) new system needed its predecessor to get it up and running...
sorry, I am getting x1000 traffic, and I am still working on it. I made a video version of the interactive piece: http://youtu.be/IJZX5XaK0Xc
Grand Theft Auto Online’s neighborhoods are defined by those who “live” in them
> Half the difficulty of running a business comes from customers with a sense of entitlement not understanding this.

I'm not sure you understand the network effect and how that ties into Github's business.
Meh. American government/supreme court are the ones who removed your rights.

Slack is a corporation and should try to (within the law) remove as many of your rights as possible to protect investors and shareholders. If you don't like it, you know what to do.

Re: Slack. It looks very nice but it's not very difficult to copy it's product as yet, it's USP as with most of these things is timing. I would suggest there must be a few competitors that you can replace it with already?
Business Intelligence has never been sexier
This stuff kind of seems like an overkill to me.

I think asking really simple questions that only a human could understand seems to get the job done most of the time.

Perhaps something like: "What is the opposite of bad?" or "How many planet Earths are there?"

I've used things like this for a handful of projects and have never had any problems: https://github.com/kiskolabs/humanizer
I had no idea! Thanks for sharing this.
Gotta love how Canada surreptitiously took over half of the eastern seaboard.
What I find funny is, people mostly turn to Stack Overflow to find workarounds or answers "in the context of x and y". It is a very organic way to do support.

And IE, up to IE8, used to require a lot of workarounds, so pretty much the whole community has already turned to SO for debugging.
The argument is as silly as "we're still using Von Neumann architecture, clearly nothing groundbreaking has happened since the 40s".

I'd say it's as good as it ever was right now.

Nice selection of very different approaches: http://operatingsystems.io/
Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded research.
Looks quite beautiful.

Wondering why these frameworks always need a build tool written in ruby, javascript, ...or OCaml? Anyone know "gulp?"

I'd prefer a build tool that does not require runtimes to be installed, i.e. something in C, python, even perl for example.
Not all questions have a single, definitive answer. Many engineering questions have trade-offs that need to be evaluated and different people have different experiences with those trade-offs.

SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"
Show HN: IRC Library in Rust
the FTC does not have plenary power over all contracts. There are certain "cooling off" periods for specific purchases (cell phone service and automobiles come to mind) but as a general rule? No way. And really really no way in this context.
http://random.irb.hr/signup.php

This one is better.
He will abstract it. His style is to implement first, then figure out the abstraction, not the other way around. Plus he's done this before and probably has an abstraction in mind which will make that style work even better.
I could totally believe that is based purely on observed activity coming from those IPs (as opposed to some intentional act against Tor)
You're probably talking to the wrong Haskell people :-P
So you agree with the article that "[...] the Internet isn’t the main culprit (the trend began in the 1960s), [...]"?

I would argue that even if the internet didn't start the trend, online communication has been an enormously more efficient technology for one-dimensional community.
No way is it fair use since they are doing entire articles.

Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics.

The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright.

Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it is essentially impossible without academic access.

I ended up going to the Library of Congress and do the research there.
When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod.
The advantage of lexical scope over dynamic scope is predictability. You can reliably* read a javascript program and map each variable access to the scope of that variable (so can a compiler, which accounts for no small portion of the speed of modern javascript implementations).

With dynamic scoping there are no guarantees about where you'll find any nonlocal variable. In practice this caused enough difficulty that the programming language community has moved steadily away from dynamic scoping.

You make an interesting parallel with prototype lookup, but it's worth noting that the prevailing pattern of prototype use mimics the traditional class and instance rubric. In that situation it is also fairly easy and deterministic to pin down where in the prototype chain every identifier is defined.

* with the exception of code which uses `with` statements and certain forms of eval, which is a big part of why those constructs are strongly discouraged by the community
man, your document sucks!
considering what medium is - yes precisely.
That type of solution really breaks down once you have a big enough target on your back for the botters to go after you.

What is the most widely used project you have successfully used it on?
its hard if you don't have the context to know this though. you may never think what you are using is insufficient if you don't get out of your comfort zone.
Yeah, we tried this on our product forums and it didn't really help at all. :(
Not the comment-er, but here's a rough sketch.

Definition: A computable number is a real number x such that there exists a total computable function f:Q->Q for which, given any r>0, f(r) is within r of x.

Proof: There are only countably many total computable functions, since each can be described as a finite string of symbols from a finite alphabet. Hence only countably many computable numbers.
Providing an function version of `&&` let's you use that function in more FP (functional programming) contexts, e.g. a data transform that does multiple map/apply/reduce transforms to a data set.
Introducing NuPIC Studio
Not really, botters just haven't had a reason to automate it yet. If they did have a good reason to automate it, it seems like it would pretty easy to do so.
I mean look at this page:

https://api.dartlang.org/apidocs/channels/stable/dartdoc-vie...

functions and properties are simply listed, with no explanation, example. I won't call this document.
> I'd prefer a build tool that does not require runtimes to be installed, i.e. something in C, python, even perl for example.

Since when does python or perl not require a runtime? It may be more common that OS distros include a perl or python runtime, but that doesn't mean that its not required.

(And, of course, its quite possible for a tool in any of those languages to be packaged in such a way that it includes the necessary runtime in its own distribution rather than require it to be separately installed.)
Certainly an improvement. But captchas remain user-hostile and generally unnecessary.
The 19th and 20th Century were, in many ways, the era of philosophical ideas being taken more seriously than they deserved.

Marx and Engels took Hegel more seriously than he deserved. Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved. Hitler took Neitzche more seriously than he deserved.
One word: convenience. You can do object oriented programming in C, so one does not "need" C++?

moc allowed a nice syntax for signal and slot (invented at a time in which C++ compilers did not support templates). And now it allows QML.

The disadvantages are not as bad as one claims. It's not so hard to integrate moc in any build system.
Well, we'll get there pretty soon : http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+opposite+of...
Why Mark Cuban opposes net neutrality: ‘I want there to be fast lanes’
If they use gravitational waves, it's a gravitons thruster. It's essentially like a photon thruster (aka backlight). One of the problems is that the ratio of momentum to energy is fixed at 1/c, which is 3.3E-6 N/kW. It's very low and I guess they are getting more than this (and I guess that it's a measurement error).
Here is a key difference from prior CAPTCHA services :

"reCAPTCHA offers more than just spam protection. Every time our CAPTCHAs are solved, that human effort helps digitize text, annotate images, and build machine learning datasets. This in turn helps preserve books, improve maps, and solve hard AI problems.
"

They're using captchas to solve text analysis and digitizing problems.
Um… what you need to do is not do that. This is not incredibly technically sophisticated compared to some of the stuff I've seen, but it is still not a toy!

Analyse it cold (from what I've seen from this, IDA Pro will be safe), or use a suitable simulator.

Mainstream VMs are not designed for secure encapsulation and are very detectable: at least one of the loaders in one of the samples of this is specifically looking for VMs (and that's not unusual at all with any half-assed malware).
Hghech startup
What kind of publications are helpful to read in order to open high-tech startup?
Hadley Wickham writes R packages faster than I can read the documentation on them.

A true 10xer.
Such a bad idea. The format of StackOverflow is very tightly defined. I bet all support questions don't fit that format. Then what?

StackOverflow should speak up against companies doing this.
Can you imagine if every scientist sent Wikipedia 20% of their journal fees? What would they do with that much money?
Oh this is going to be fantastic. I cannot wait until the public see what kind of junk is produced by these "researchers" in their original form.
That's spot on. Questions like "How should I do this" are harder to answer, require extended research and investigation, and a lot of communication back and forth. Stack Overflow is not a good platform for this. What it is is a great platform for finding solutions to simply expressed stumbling blocks, or nuggets of domain-specific knowledge.

The problem is, being a good site for both things would be difficult. There are plenty of places out there that cater to extended discussion within expert groups. Forums have been around in one form or other almost since the dawn of the web. The problem with these is that they're bad at one-shot Q&A (as the answer to a question might be pages after it was asked, or not there at all, or out of date, and it might take you a long time to work this out). This failing is exactly what Stack Overflow is about, and exactly why it's not good for deeper engineering questions.

I'm unfamiliar with the state of IE Web Dev support at the moment, is it currently a good forum for extended discussion?
If you still have a link to a deleted question/answer, archive.org is your friend.

It's a shame that the SO community is constantly killing interesting and useful questions, just because "they don't match their format".
On Debian and Ubuntu, you can install the "pepperflashplugin-nonfree" package to download a copy of Chrome and extract the PPAPI Flash plugin therein and install it.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/pepperflashplugin-nonfree
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/pepperflashplugin-nonfree
Yes, publishers should work for free. plonk
Love the work you've done Bryan, but your response above does nothing to engage the salient points made in the link && elsewhere. Yes, we have better ways of getting performance metrics than truss, circa Solaris 2.5…and thank you!

But that isn't what this is about.
At our company we are about to decide between these two: VersionOne and TargetProcess.

I'm not affiliated to them.
This seems to be following Cloudflare's (and Incapsula's and all the other competitors) approach to bot detection. Basic automatic, silent bot challenges (non-invasive Javascript and DOM tests) which, if failed, give a one-time captcha prompt.
I'm a pretty huge fan of Linux Libertine for serif, although I'm not a fan of the Linux Biolinum. If it had a paired sans-serif that wasn't ugly, it'd be my 100% go to for general purpose documents.
That works on a small scale. But, when your site gets enough visitors, it is worth it to a spammer to spend five, or ten, or fifteen, minutes figuring out all of your questions. So, it's a potentially useful trick for sites only targeted by very dumb bots. But, the bigger your site, the less likely it is to work. My sites aren't even that big (anywhere from 40k to 250k visits per month), and this technique isn't tenable for most of them. I do use it on our wiki (mostly as an experiment, since CAPTCHA isn't as accessible as I'd like), which is the 40k visits/month site, and it needs new questions every couple of weeks, or we get hammered. And, all of our sites have other mechanisms for preventing spam, as well.
Instead of the overzealous closing, why doesn't SO create a "Stack Overflow Opinions" Stack Exchange site where they move the offending questions?
It is completely unlikely MS couldn't purchase SO? I can't imagine their valuation is entirely out of Microsoft's acquisition budget.
reCAPTCHA has been around in that form for a long time already. This post is about a new system they're planning on rolling out to replace that one. This one won't require any text input for (most) users.
I'm guessing StackExchange is partnering with them in this move.
Yes, because the average person has the willpower to go walk over to their thermostat all the time -- especially when they leave / come home.

Not a chance.
Sony Pictures gets massively compromised
If there is competition to the physical line access, then it might make sense. But in most of USA, there is no competition for that (generally coax) line. I only have comcast and can't choose between them and some other ISP's business rules.
It varies greatly on the project you're working on. There are people out there trying to automate account creation on web based email's for the sole purpose of email spamming (same with social networks). And with complex botnet proxies and the TOR project, false accounts are getting harder to detect.

They have created interesting methods to combat Captcha images. They even have outsourced OCR services, where people in other countries are paid to solve ocr 1 image at a time. [0]

[0] http://deathbycaptcha.com
I'd amend that a little: use a matrix when you're actually calculating statistics (internally to the function). Clean your data so it always fits in a data frame when you load it. Lists are for representing things like data scraped from html before converting it to a data frame.
Could P = NP?  Possible polynomial time algorithm for subset sum?
There's an annual contest for spam community. It's organized by Botmaster, the producent of Xrumer software.

Basically, whoever answers most of these questions correctly, earns $15,000. People submit MILLIONS of answers.

This list is then incorporated into the Xrumer itself.

I can tell you that these things are easily broken:
a) Answering questions and building global list of answers, as in this case.
b) Reading image captcha - spammers send it to Pakistani manual solvers for dirt cheap.
c) More complex puzzle captchas can also be broken in software if a lot of websites implement them.

What works the best is using non standard html form field names. Also, try to not use text labels for the fields ( no "password", "captcha" etc. ) - because the software will try to match the best field by text surrounding it. It is better to use image for labels.

This solution will stop spambots because they simply match form field names. Unless someone specifically targets your website, in which case there's not much you can do.

From the most common of captchas, Mollom seemed to be the biggest pain in the ass for spammers. Mainly because it banned suspicious IPs ( you could solve the picture correctly and it wouldn't authorize it. )
Why has "community engagement" broken down? The author phrases it in terms of "omg kids and their cell phones, lol" but it's at least worth contemplating:

- there was a massive campaign of neighborhood destruction from post-WW2 era to perhaps the mid 1990s, resulting in atomization, suburbanization, and quasi-military occupation of the remainder. There is a robust hypothesis that city living is at the root of civic engagment and that, eg, the Great Migrations explain the timing of the civil rights movement. Suburbanization is basically that in reverse. The atomization that happens when you geniunely can't trust your neighbors is as well.

- "civic engagement" of a kind retrospectively judged to be "wrong" now goes on your Permanent Record. It's potentially unsafe to organize to do many meaningful things.

- major institutions have lost their ability to be as exclusionist as they historically felt necessary to prevent entryism that fundamentally changes the nature of the institution. Instutions historically leading "civic engagment" become ineffective or lose their original purpose.

- relentless focus on vacant aggregation-friendly metrics amongst our elite. You can put "volunteer hours" on a spreadsheet, thus, you get the optimal number of "volunteer hours", rather than civic engagment per se. Elite high school & college-age populations simply lack time for meaningful civic engagement, most of which is indistinguishable on a spreadsheet from "hanging out" - ironically, "chilling on the agora" is essentially what civic engagement breaks down to.
It's late for me as I just finished my CS studies, but I realized recently that the university is nothing but a more formalized Hackerspace with much, much more expensive equipment. I'm thinking about re-enrolling, for biotech this time, to get access to the lab.
Fake Pterosaurs and Sock Puppets
GitHub enterprise on AWS
You always need to do the server-side work, no matter where the data is rendered or cached later. Like I said, it's a tradeoff.
Have you seen if OpenConnect is capable of connecting to your VPN?
http://www.infradead.org/openconnect/
"With over 40-thousand questions tagged "Internet Explorer", and dozens more asked every day, it has proven to be a great place to find reliable help."

The announcement makes it seem that they are proud of how many questions are out there about IE issues.
That matches up with what they claim on their site:

CloudFlare does not actively block visitors who use the Tor network.

Due to the behavior of some individuals using the Tor network (spammers, distributors of malware, attackers, etc.), the IP addresses of Tor exit nodes generally earn a bad reputation. Our basic protection level issues captcha-based challenges to visitors whose IP address has a high threat score.

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/203306930-D...
I agree. Considering most people with IE will be regular computer users and not power users, I can see their questions being downvoted to oblivion and their questions closed.

I consider myself a power user and I already have one account that was "suspended" due to too many downvoted questions of mine.
I read a few of his posts after seeing your comment. They are quite interesting, thanks.