skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree completely with the spirit of what you write, but I wonder about something:

> If you're not a techy, you have my sympathies, but at least get yourself a blog going and start writing like it is going out of style

That's really night and day from the techy option of hacking on stuff. I got my first job because while I was unemployed, I spent my time learning my way around Linux and Perl (this was in 1997) until I had enough experience to be employable at the relatively low rate I was more than happy to accept (and which subsequently went up pretty quickly when I proved myself).

My wife, on the other hand, has a doctorate in biochemistry. While she might get a little mileage out of writing a blog were she unemployed, the advantages would probably be minor compared to the disadvantage of being out of touch with a laboratory and not able to read expensive scientific publications.

Point being, I think that sometimes we forget just how easy it is to get involved with stuff in the tech world. With an internet connection, a $500 laptop, free tools and mostly free documentation, you can do world-class work, and communicate with pretty much anyone you want to about most anything. How many other fields are like that? Hopefully, the world will head in that direction, because it really is a wonderful thing.
This is why I worked full-time through undergrad and graduate school. By the time I finished grad school (in computer science), I already had years of experience on my resume from full time employees and short term contracts. It's my solid work experience that got me my current position after graduation, not my MS in CS.

I don't expect the entitled American youth to sacrifice like that though. Now I understand why H1's are so popular, they have experience, work them to death for less pay, and the joy of not dealing with entitled American youth.

Even outside of tech, for example in the medical field, hospitals are paying for massive amounts of SE Asians to move here for nursing positions. The hospitals can't find people for these good paying jobs, so they have to go outside of the US for people to fill these positions.
I'm using Gmail for my domain and received zero spams in well over a year. My email address is all over the web. What are you using for your spam filter?
Of course, I dislike being downvoted. If I think it was because I was misunderstood or misinterpreted, I will post in response to the downvote. Clarification sometimes gets the original post upvoted, as well as the clarification. If it's a case of "Yeah, I was trying to avoid getting into that because I just knew it would go over badly and now I've been downvoted, confirming what I thought" or a case of me just not saying something well because I was having a bad day, I generally leave it alone. No point in pouring gasoline on the fire, so to speak (which is generally what's going to happen if I am already sticking my feet in my mouth because I don't feel well and now I am all defensive and trying to "clarify"....downward spiral ensues).

On the one hand, I often do wish people would converse with me and tell me what they "heard" that they think it's a bad comment. In many cases, it turns out be a misunderstanding. The vast majority of meaning in face-to-face communication comes from facial expression, body language, voice tone and context. The actual words are a very small part of the meaning conveyed. But on the 'Net, the words are about all we have. If two people come from very different backgrounds, misunderstandings are practically guaranteed.

On the other hand, an Iranian friend once told me that there is a saying in Iran: "Silence is the only good answer to stupid people." I would modify that slightly to "Silence is the only good answer to something stupid." We all do stupid stuff at times. It isn't proof we are generally stupid. It's just part of the human condition. An anonymous downvote, though it may be upsetting to the receiver, is probably a lot less destructive to the community than being able to put a name to the criticism and having to try to express the criticism in words. Running battles between two members who just don't ever agree on anything can be very destructive to a forum. I think the capacity to downvote helps avoid such outcomes.

I am still getting a feel for how HN works. But so far I am finding that the system here seems to do a better job of minimizing some of the negative social crapola you find everywhere. Conflict of interest will never go away. Interpersonal friction between some members is inevitable. Spammers and all kinds of other undesirable stuff is also a fact of life. There has to be a means to address that. Warm-fuzzy 'let's only upvote people' solutions won't work. It has no teeth.
Stanford Engineering Everywhere: Natural Language Processing
I'm waiting for an IDE and toolchain equivalent to Qt which is impressive. This would trigger the mutation of the masses.
I think the secret to success is sort of fourfold:

1) Shipping -- more important than anything else, hands down. And don't just ship products, create assets which can get bigger in the future.

2) Learning -- not just about your industry (that should be a given), but about everything that's important for understanding the world and how it works. And not from the Internet, from mentors and books.

3) Writing -- post stuff on your blog that helps other people and makes you look smart. Maybe even write a book or two depending on whether your interests are conducive to that.

4) Networking -- Know at least 500 people in each of the major US cities where your business operates. Know at least 6 superconnectors in each city who you can ask for help if you need it. Know at least 2,000 people total.
Can Less (Time Online) Be More?
Funeral expenses can be quite high. I can't think of anything else, but if you want to cover all your bases, that's something to consider.
I signed up for a love film (uk version of netflix) subscription to for a similar "scam" (not facebook or game related). In that case I was toying with getting the subscription anyway (and I still have it 8 months later and am very happy I took the plunge).

However I do think that was a lucky experience; I saw something I wanted to try out, got it and got a freebie in the process. Win win.

I liked the follow up Techcrunch post where the Hot or Not guy is quoted as saying that the idea isnt in itself a bad one (affiliate sign ups) - just that the industry has slid the wrong way. Im sure he's correct; It worked for me and it can work for others too. But Im guessing that the number of times it is easier to just scam people is higher.

Good on Arrington for having a good public bitch about this.
Python lets you instantiate Random objects with a pre-set seed, so you don't have to risk doing anything that might affect the global state. Try this at an interactive prompt:

import random
r = random.Random("myseed")
r.random()
r.random()
r.random()
r2 = random.Random("myseed")
r2.random()
r2.random()
r2.random()

Both sequences of random numbers will be the same.
Natural Cure For Prostate Cancer
Ask HN:where can I find audio courses?
Well you may be wondering why I would like courses in audio format if I can have a good set of video lectures of most topics.Here are my reasons:

1)I don't own a fancy iPod or any video player.I just have a good philips mp3 plyaer (go gear series).Which I like and is all I can afford.Don't even think about mentioning my cellphone as its a very funtional one,no multimedia in it.

2)Easy to download.They are like 15-16 or at the most 25Mb and a very quick download.Video lecture take 5x the time,besides I prefer streaming videos rather than download it.

3)Thats all I can concentrate on, while on the college bus.I travel for like 1 1/2 hrs up down (totaling to 3 hrs of wasted time listening to songs).Even if I had a fairly decent video player, I couldn't even begin to concentrate on the 3-4 inch screen.Its just too small for me.

I searched the internet and interesting (to me) course I found in audio where Game theory at open yale project[1].Thats about it. So I ask HN, do any of you use such things?Can anyone give me good links to other open audio courses.

My interests are mainly in electronics and mathematics.
Of course I said " lost much of its meaning" not "all of its meaning".
If spam is still a problem, its pretty obvious your spam filter isnt working properly, that was kinda the point of the article
i create a hack for a laptop to make our own page
it's their problem

Isn't that the point of the article? That you are offloading work onto the peopel you ostensibly want to get in touch with you?

(I'm not saying it's wrong for you to do so, just that your statement seems to line up perfectly with the author's premise that obfuscating your email address is taking your problem and making it their problem).
This is talking about third party apps, not facebook itself.
The two main suggestions to allow people to contact you without getting lots of spam:

1) Use Gmail. Google has written their search engine to know how to detect spam so they know how to stop spam from reaching your email address. I don't think I have ever had even a single spam message even reach my spam folder, and that's thanks to Google. I could put my non-obfuscated email address all over the place and not have to worry.

2) Write a custom contact form. It is not that hard if you know even a little bit of PHP. And if you don't you can always use Zoho forms or some other free online form creator. I never put up contact emails because they are, in my opinion, just as unprofessional as an obfuscated contact email. Contact forms are much more professional.
The author suggests that using a form makes the problem go away. My experience says that people who can't de-obfuscate an email address frequently can't type their return address correctly. The obfuscated address gives them feedback in the form of a bounced email, and thereby gives a recovery mode. The incorrect return address in the form gives no recovery mode at all.

To me, that's conclusive proof that the form is worse than the obfuscated address.

Further, there's a balance to be achieved. I've analysed the types of people I want to contact me, and of those who can't work out my address there are two types. One type is those that I really don't care about - nuisance, spam, content-free, or time-wasters. The others that I do care about usually have a different route to me, one that's specifically tailored to them and made as easy as possible. That one has a specially designed anti-spam measure built into it.
They fixed a lot of the right things, yes. And they left a lot of things untouched, which is inexcusable for a company with their resources (sure it's a fresh coat of paint; but dig down just a little, and you can still find horrible, awkward interfaces that were untouched since 1995).

My friend bought 7 Pro for his extremely fast PC built in the last couple of years. But within hours he decided to remove it (back to XP) and wait until he buys a new PC. I'm sure the hardware businesses love that, but what kind of value is that for a multi-hundred-dollar OS?
OP has it all wrong.

e d w 5 1 9 AT g m a i l

is not meant to upset anybody.

It's a IQ test.

If you can't figure out how to contact me from that data then you'd probably be wasting my time anyway.

Self-solving problem.
They're not exactly a top-tier institution, but they look legit.
I can't use gmail because I have the requirement to create email addresses on-the-fly. I have my own domain and can do that. The result is I need good spam filtering.

My filtering now achieves around 99.6% filtering, and about 1 detected false positive per month. It would be interesting to see how gmail copes with my 2400 spam per day, and what accuracy it achieves, but it's a non-starter because of how I use email.
I visualize the situation like a search tree. As you travel down the tree away from the root, you become increasingly isolated from other branches of the tree, and you can't even talk to distant leaf nodes because you lack the same vocabulary and shared set of theorems.

Yes, we share some parent way up the tree, but we can't go all the way back to that as a starting point because it'd simply take too long to progress from there back down to the interesting leaf node.

This vision makes me wonder when mathematics will reach a point where mastering the material required to understand a leaf node will take greater than the average life span.
And what do you do when someone mis-types their return address?
You may find 80Legs worth checking out.
I like to hear people's feedback so I don't waste my time on something that wouldn't be wanted.
Android being an open source project negates most of the scary anti-competitive possibilities. A handset maker could ship an Android device that was completely independent of Google services. It's a fair playing field for Google's competitors. If Microsoft wanted to they goto a handset maker like HTC and offer the same revenue sharing model via Bing and other Microsoft services bundled with an Android handset. Inversely you could build a handset not running Android and still use Google services on your own OS. If Microsoft had adopted a similar level of openness and equal access they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble and probably got the same exact results in the end. IE was a better browser than Netscape at this time. It would have won on its own technical merits. ActiveX and these other Microsoft proprietary schemes failed on their own merits despite IE having enormous browser market share. Even with IE being bundled on Windows it hasn't stopped Firefox and WebKit based browsers from growing in popularity. Microsoft gained nothing from their anti-competitive moves. I don't think Google will repeat the same mistake.
Beijing's first snow of season 'artificially induced'
Good question. People love rankings. What is the most prestigious online degree ?
"Perhaps men of genius are the only true men.... Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all.... And the rest of us -- what are we? Teachable animals."

Huxley on Sidis
You are perfectly right.

I was talking about source of patio11's problem which arose from modifying global state.
I do this all the time with plus addressing.
This is a very neat set of observations and a good description of how software and government work.

One point that isn't raised is the notion of switching, and I suppose it applies to government, too. As a user of a program, if it becomes so frustrating that you can't stand it anymore, you usually have the option to switch to at least one other product, pending the migration of your data. In the case of government, that may not be so easy; there may be many things that only the government does (in whatever inefficient, established way). I suppose privatization or moving to another country would be the analogs of "switching".
I use a custom domain, but have it set up to forward all addresses to Gmail, mainly to use their spam filter. I'm not sure what your particular use-case for the on-demand addresses is, but you might be able to set up some Gmail label rules to sort it for you on that end too.

The only downside is that you have to manually verify your custom domain's 'sent from' addresses in Gmail, so you can't easily reply from arbitrary addresses.
could you document that traffic?
US Futurist: Super Rich may evolve into new species
Wrapping Solar Cells around an Optical Fiber
WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet
Amazon’s AWS Strategy Becomes Clearer Every Day
As a business owner I can attest that a phone number equals a bank account.
Daily we receive phone calls that are designed to trick the unwary into agreeing to being billed for worthless services.
After the third or so time an employee had been conned into a free website deal or a listing in a worthless business directory. I called my phone provider in a rage and demanded a third party billing block.

To which they replied, "No problem sir, most people don't even know we offer that service."

Obviously the phone company gets a cut and for that reason are happy to act at middlemen.

One would think that an honest broker would require you to opt in to the system, rather than merely providing a virtually unknown opt out option.

Facebook is doing the same thing as the telcos, for their cut.
Wasn't a major point of the article that Facebook is making a lot off the third party apps?
Add a plus to your name whenever you put your email address into a form on a website. It will continue to show up as though the +whatever were not present.

Kev+myspace@gmail.com, Kev+facebook@gmail.com, Kev+untrustworthysite@gmail.com

If you start getting a bunch of spam to Kev+myspace@gmail.com, filter out all email to that address.
I always thought this sort of systematic obfuscation ( /@/at/s, /\./dot/s, etc) was as machine-readable as an actual email address. I've just gone on the assumption that there are spam harvesters out there using regexes that catch "bob at domain dot com" as well as bob@domain.com.
Programmers might not be interested in politics, but politics are interested in programmers.
The problem with Microsoft wasn't really that they were trying to be a monopolist. It was that they were using their leverage to do harm. So far I have not seen Google ever try to force a purchase by tying parts of their system together, ever try to break the web to protect their business model, ever try to lock out the competition by means other than being better and cheaper, or ever sell users out contemptuously as soon as they had control.
Remind HN: DST ended this morning
Daylight saving time ended this morning, don't forget to fall back an hour.
Basically, there's a method for companies to charge your phone bill their unrelated services. When you initially use a service (on a whim, perhaps) you are often subscribed to the service. In some cases, this is probably OK, maybe some people really want to be attached to a nonsense service, but the much more likely case is that someone used it without realizing there would be recurring fees.

This is a PC World article on the subject from 2007.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129285/mystery_cell_phone_cha...
Cars are sometimes quite unintuitive. A lot of website do a better job.
Sure, there are. But given the huge number on unobfuscated addresses on the web how many bother? Ten percent?

EDIT: This experiment shows it to be much less than that (based on volume of spam received) http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfus...
The theme still disappoints me. Camino's not much better; Safari still beats anything on the Mac (I'm still using it as my default). But they finally added smooth scrolling, which was the major killer for me earlier. It made using Firefox a pain.
That video is a chilling cautionary tale.
But you're not a spam bot author. Based on what I've seen, most spam bot authors are pretty bad programmers.

Also, I would debate that these are high value targets. I'd wager that people who go out of their way to obscure their addresses are much less likely to purchase fake pills or fall for a phishing email than the average user.
There are a lot of tools that can create CSS/HTML. I've heard a lot about psd2html http://www.psd2html.com.

There's also an article on alistapart.com on how to make photoshop create better html/css, if you're interested, at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/quickcssmockupswithphotos...
Sometimes people care more about what they love than they do about whether they can support themselves with it. Please don't assume every person passionate about the arts is spoiled and rich.
I try to use that all the time, except that everybody likes to roll out their own email validation, and they are all wrong, they do not allow the + sign as they should.

The RFC is extremely permissive, even spaces (yeah, spaces) are allowed in email addresses.
This fellow seems a little intellectually insecure to me, his style of writing / communication displayed in both the youtube videos and his theory, he appears to be making it complex to illustrate that he's capable of grasping complex things, rather than needing to illustrate actually complex ideas.

The finishing points about "god" without ever really nailing down an empirical definition of the term beyond "indeterminate omnipresent universey type stuff" strikes me as kind of disingenuous also.

Still, I don't doubt he has some mental agility, and it certainly looks like the world has dealt him a harsh hand, and I'm quite familiar with what circumstance can do personally.
Test Scores and Wishful Thinking
What exactly is a very person?

Unlike you, I don't pretend I know enough about the circumstances of Hirst's cases to lay down judgment. I know next to nothing about the art he produces, just enough to understand that perhaps he's doing something more impressive than I think he is. With that as context, there's a possibility that there's more to the lawsuits than the media is showing, and so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
Given the large number of blog, wiki and CMS engines which use the same cargo-cult security idea, it's probably considerably higher than 10%. If you're getting paid to harvest addresses, wouldn't you write a single regexp to increase the number of good addresses?
They both use HTTP.
NoSQL East 2009 Redux
Nope, the pin is purely a verification step for the points you're getting in return for the scam-signup.

The legal 'opt-in' step that the scammer claims gives them the right to bill you, is the 'enter your phone number for an SMS' step.

The opt-in probably won't be enough to satisfy the watchdog organisations that overlook this kind of stuff (ofcom in the UK for example) but it will be enough to broadside a legal complaint of simple fraud (ie, police involvement), and thus send the complaint to the watchdog authority...

The reason they do this is, if they can avoid the police shutting them down with a 'simple' investigation, then they get months upon months as someone like ofcom investigate, and during that time they can rack up the profit, then 'run' (declare bankrupcy and hide the profit) when the watchdog authority appears to be about ready to issue a fine.

(IANAL either, but have worked in the premium SMS industry, and seen this kind of 'ofcom-stalling' trick)
Code Generation with LLVM, Part 2: Fast Objective-C Forwarding
The golden age of infinite music
I would work on my dream/future project of creating software that functions like the human brain!
Sure I would, but like most half-way decent programmers, you couldn't pay me enough to code spam bots.

I've blocked a huge volume of comment spam on my sites by blocking certain malformed HTTP headers. The authors couldn't be bothered to check if they were getting it right. I don't think most spam bot authors are A) very well paid or B) very good.
If you code in a style that uses data literals (lists/arrays and dictionaries/hash tables) to represent how an important part of the code is going to work -- e.g. a table that maps letters or keywords to argument lists used in some corresponding function -- then monospace fonts and block selection go well together. You can tweak one column at a time without upsetting the others if you set it up properly.

(Python's PEP8 is meant to take care of abuses, like lining up all the equal signs in a series of assignments or keyword arguments -- you wouldn't think of those as columns of data in a table, so there's no point in formatting the code that way.)

Also, monospace makes punctuation more prominent. Bjarne Stroustrup's C++ reference book uses a mixed font in its code examples, with monospace punctuation characters and proportional-font identifiers. It's weird but effective. I suppose if your code doesn't do exciting things with punctuation characters, and doesn't embed tables of data, then a proportional font would be just fine.