skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pedophiles don't tend to be the sharpest tools in the shed

It feels good to say mean things about our enemies, but I find it implausible that someone's credibly found a link between pedophilia and low intelligence. (Presumably people don't admit to being pedophiles, so you can't find a random sample of them to study. You can study pedophiles who get caught, but presumably those are the least intelligent pedophiles, so you can't draw conclusions about pedophile intelligence from them. I think it's safer to assume pedophiles have a normal distribution of intelligence.)
Http://www.watchcopiez.com/
Yes, he used to work for Wilson Sonsini.

This is when I'd like to have a yelp for service providers, or a "karma keeper". Today, a lawyer at Wilson Sonsini did some bad karma. Another day, another partner there will do a great thing. Can we keep the score somewhere?

Eventually the scumbags would rise to the top and we'd all know better.
What's the equivalent performance you could get from a modern $300 nVidia graphics card? Serious question, as I have no way of guessing, though I have a hard time imagining the modern nVidia won't spank the PS3 every which way. (Or possibly two $150 cards.)

I suspecte somebody's playing up the PS3 angle for publicity, the only question is whether it's the FBI or Sony.
If there was ever a call for "Dear Lawyers: I read your letter. Go pound sand. Sincerely," ...
There is a lot more secret sauce out there than you hear about. By definition you don't hear about it. There's rarely any incentive for companies to talk about it. Many people inside a company might not even realize what it is at their company!

A great example is PayPal. According to Max Levchin their custom fraud detection system was the only reason they were able to stay in business.
The scrollbars of Wave remind me of this demo I was months back - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PnXY4wjuH8
How Google can guess what you are thinking
Dating sites is an interesting example because OK Cupid does exactly this. They send occasional emails with a "Login Instantly" button which contain an authentication token.

In general, if someone can read your email, they can steal almost any of your accounts. Are email accounts generally that insecure? I trust any major Webmail provider to not steal my bank account, but is trust the only thing really keeping our bank accounts secure?

If we really are that insecure, then people are probably going to attack your bank account long before they attack your random web-app account. If your site isn't guarding valuables, it's probably perfectly "safe" to send authentication tokens in mail messages. No?
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Another problem in my mind is that we have a dependency created between me being able to access a particular email account and me being able to access the website I want to get into. That is, what if I originally signed up with my not@any.com address, but I'm at work, my work blocks the webmail interface that would have allowed me to access my not@any.com account and now I can't login to the website I really wanted to get to either.

This topic has been up for a whole hour and no comment from tptacek? What's going on??
I disagree. I've done quite a bit of online dating, and professional photos (a) don't show your fun side, and (b) often look quite different than how you look on an average day. What this results in is me distrusting them -- before I meet anyone, I need to see a candid shot of them in natural lighting.
The okcupid data and your last sentence contradict your first paragraph. I was over-reaching when I said "not approached by very many men", but okcupid's data implies that there exist women A and B such that beauty(A) > beauty(B) AND suitors(A) < suitors(B). This probably seems unfair to woman A, that her less attractive friend B attracts more men, due to the fact that men find A intimidating. But the fact remains that beauty and suitor count appear to be non-linear at the high-end of the scale.

That said, woman A and woman B are both probably approached by more men than a majority of other women, but their relative success is non-intuitive.
I agree with the OP -- from my experience, it's very difficult to tell how a person will act on a date, personality-wise, merely from their photos, profile, and non-video chat. And personality is such an essential part of a person for dating.
Likewise, who created programming languages? :)
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That strikes me as unethical and even depraved. Is that why you have children - so you can run experiments on them that would never be permitted otherwise? It reminds me of B.F. Skinner keeping his daughter in a box, except that story was untrue.
'human language' actually means very little among linguists. If he were being very precise he'd say 'natural language'.
Firefox implements HTML5 async attribute for scripts (in 3.6 b3)
fudged_hotness = 10.0 * ((hotness / 10.0) ** (1 / gamma))

Then just crank up the gamma correction to 3.0, and your 3.5 out of ten is now a reasonably-attractive 7.0472987320648917 :)
New Dyson fan has no blades
Fascinating new fan from Dyson has no fan blades. Cost: $300+ (gulp!)
What alternative did you chose, btw?
In America, starting a successful business is the surest, most controllable path available to you for making a million dollars in less than 42 years.

Sadly, this is just not true. Getting a high paying job (doctor, lawyer, MBA, programmer) and living well below your means is the easiest way.

There are lots of great reasons to start your own business, but they are not because it is "sure" and "controllable."
Well, there's a bunch of Lenovos that aren't Thinkpads. Wish they'd split it out.
pretty cool. i think there are lots of things that could potentially capture kinetic energy to generate electricity (light switches, doors, windows, pens, cellphone movements etc)
Microsoft Reveals Internet Explorer 9
The only evidence that the author gives for the proposition that reading code is key to writing good code, is indirectly, by analogy to the arts. But music, painting and poetry are completely different subjects. There may be similarities between (say) poetry and code, but it is absurd to say that, since reading poetry is important for poets, reading code must be important to coders.

And there are plenty of reasons to believe otherwise. For one, extensively reading code is rare among coders. All good poets are very well-read in poetry, but there are many good programmers who rarely read code other than what they intend to modify, or as documentation.

Also, unlike a poem, a unit of code (say, a function) has a very well-defined goal. Coders don't need to develop an elaborate aesthetic sensitivity to judge whether their work passes their goals - unit tests and benchmarks will do just fine.

Nor do coders need to read code in order to learn about clever coding techniques. Partly, this is because code, unlike poetry, contains very few clever things per line. Partly, because there are simply better ways to get such information: books, blogs, articles, HN, proggit, stackoverflow, and so on.

It may well be that reading code is very helpful in becoming a better programmer. But I'd like to see some evidence first.
This looked like blog spam, so I searched for the first paragraph and found this:

http://queercents.com/2006/09/07/netflix-and-a-living-wage/

Bizarre.
I'm confused. What does this program do that necessitates a browser plugin?
Mentor : Mentee :: Mentos : ?
Heh. I didn't realize I left that unclear. I started a software company.
Entirely separate from the question of how much homework is optimal: my mind boggles that some parents don't consider educating their children to be one of their responsibilities.

"[H]omework, spelling words included, “is not a part of our family life,” [a Halifax health-care worker] says. “I don't see why 6 1/2 hours of formal schooling isn't enough for an eight-year-old.”

After growing up in an Asian neighborhood and then going to good schools (which are almost by definition very Asian neighborhoods), then moving to Japan, I find my brain just totally vapor locking on this statement. "Thats funny, it almost sounds like she's expecting all education to take place at school. Ha, hah. Wait BOOM. She can't BOOM Is that even allowed?!"
> Because we're adapted to it and we're messing with systems that are not well understood.

Well, at least we try to understand them. Nature doesn't even do that. Bananas--in any form--are new; a 10,000 year old irreproducible hybrid. Corn and cattle have undergone extreme selection and no small amount of random variation in that time. Nature produces viruses and parasites and mutations on proteins and poisons, none of which have us in mind. And it does it much, much faster than human evolution is going to be able to adapt to changing available food sources. Our generations are long, and little things like cancer at the end of life just don't hurt our offspring that much.

In a contest between engineered food -- whether cloned or GM -- and food that's just been genetically drifting for a few thousand years, I'll take the engineered food every time. Sure, the engineers are working with systems far beyond their ken. I get that. But nature wouldn't be shy about doing even relatively obviously dangerous things. Engineers might make sweeter apples and we discover many years down the road that some protein interaction upsets some delicate balance if you eat them with too many fish and it causes your teeth to turn blue. But nature might decide to make an apple all cyanide and not just the seeds.

Humans are pretty robust and adaptable. We can handle the random, arbitrary garbage nature throws at us. We wouldn't be here if we couldn't. So I'm sure the mistakes of a few engineers who trying very hard not to hurt us won't amount to much of anything.
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If you take this idea and strip out the silly email part, you have the core idea behind OpenID.
"... top 40% of beauty."
US is a fork of CPython. Their aim is to make it faster without changing anything.

PyPy is a completely new implementation. Now, I know that they have been pretty fanatical about testing everything, but it's still a risk.

Google has a lot of old Python code. They want to it to run faster, but without anything changing.

Perhaps some googlers are working on PyPY as well.
People are upset about how insecure email password reset is.
Creating a World Without Poverty
They also have tools that collect strings from your HD.

I can't find the source either, but this slashdot post has more details
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1449178&cid=30152...
Look on the bright side: If 80% of men classify as "worse-looking than medium" then they are actually on a more level playing ground with each other.
> But when Amanda Cockshutt's middle child, Malcolm, was asked by his Grade 7 English teacher to write five pages a week on his feelings about a book, the biochemistry professor told the school bluntly: “He is not doing that.”

> The teacher tried to justify the assignment, but the clincher for her, she says, was that other than a cheering word of praise, the teacher wasn't even correcting the mistakes

> When she was told she would have to teach her son cursive writing because there was no time at school, she never opened the book.

I know some people will chime in to say that kids have it 'too easy,' but it looks like in some cases here the kids are getting 'busy work.' If the teacher isn't even grading the work, then what is the point? If the teacher is giving the kids more work then he/she could possibly grade, then there is a disconnect somewhere that is to the children's detriment. If a kid is supposed to be writing 5 pages per week, and none of it is getting corrections from the teacher, then what is the child learning? I know that homework is supposed to be 'practice' in a lot of cases, but without corrections there's no point.
I've only skimmed this, but it looks like a great post, covering an area of database security almost everyone overlooks. There is no reason your app needs to run with carte blanche access to every table in the database, especially when your app is primarily driven by reads.

I've been on pentest engagements where clients have survived rather horrible SQL injection vulnerabilities because the database handle the injection happened on had no meaningful privileges.
This is remarkable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A3IM06xgr0&feature=relat...

Dyson is one of those companies, that like apple, is pushing the limits on industrial desgin. Very cool.
I don't think the data indicates that at all. According to the graph, ~6% of women are considered very attractive (5) and receive ~18% of the messages. ~15% of the women are considered pretty attractive (4) and receive ~28% of the messages. That means the population considered pretty attractive is 3 times larger, but only gets ~1.5x as many messages. Thus, those considered very attractive do indeed get more messages than those considered pretty attractive.

The graph is somewhat misleading in its portrayal, but I think if it did indicate your suspicions, the author would've surely said something about it.
Start a business become a millionaire. It's like saying to a VC we just need to capture 1% of this $100 billion market.
No, it's only a 5 point scale.
That is an incredibly naive viewpoint given how agribusiness behaves.

Their modified crops cross pollinate with standard strains and "become" the modified strains. Then they sue the farmers for not paying the license fees. They threaten to not supply farmers with GMO seed if they use normal seed for their other crops.

Similarly they attempt to patent strains that have existed for centuries in order to become sole providers. See the Basmati / Texmati rice case for just one example http://www.no-patents-on-seeds.org/index.php?option=com_cont...

They have made every effort to remove other options from the farmers and are creating monopolies through questionable business practices and IP abuse.

It's a dirty business all around and it's a clear indication that the patent system is broken. Commodities are cheap, because they are commodities. Simply because anyone can jump on in and have a go at producing them. That's the free market at work, cheap and lots of it.

Contrast commodities with the protected patented good. Expensive and a limited supply typically, since you can only get it from the IP owner or a licensee. Why innovate if you don't have to and if you do, make sure it's patentable and stretch it out.

If patents were fair and equitable all around then people would not be trying so hard to turn commodities back into patented goods.

It's not tenable and it is the cause of our current economic malaise. It's a high tech world and the path to economic growth is blocked because as soon as you computerize or mechanize, you run into a wall of intellectual property that you can't get around without gobs of money for lawyers.

The software startup world was the wide open frontier ten years ago, a place where you could make money with just an idea, but it's gradually getting the life choked out of it by IP law.

Sorry, I did not initially mean for this to become a patent rant, but it is connected to everything I have been thinking about for the last year or so and it's really pissing me off how far it's tentacles go.
This was already discussed and debunked: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=878046

Basically, the conventional fan is in the base. I am more impressed with the marketing spin than the product itself.
we sort of did this with Ramamia. ACtually in the first version, there were NO passwords. You would create a family, then register your email to it. From that point on, the cookie kept you logged in or you clicked the email login link. People liked it, but enough also wanted passwords that we added them soon thereafter. The real takeaways were:

* Give before getting - we let you use the service before we ask for your email.
* Make logging in via email simple. ie- Someone in your family posts a photo, you click on the link and you're logged in.
* Don't get rid of norms (having passwords), but its okay to have new ways to get around it.
Are there implementations of this in any other languages? A quick google search for 'libcloud ruby' didn't turn up anything definitive.
1: bottom 20%; 2: 20% - 40%; 3: 40% - 60%; 4: 60% - 80%; 5: top 20%

Am I missing something?
Agreed, just pointing out that almost any business can be started to fulfill one of the goals you pointed out, especially useful and memorable, from a corner store to a trash collection company to a collections agency. It's useful to someone :)
I think it comes down to children being assigned up to 4 hours of homework (some of which is not reviewed by the assigning teacher) on top of 6 1/2 hours of in school time. Anyone who puts in 10 hour days as an adult feels the stress fairly shortly, never-mind a child under the same strain for 9 months.
Zappa?
Realistically, browsers aren't going to implement this, whether it's a good idea or not.

But I could see this working for websites in the lowest tier of security (like HN). Set a cookie for a year, and if you lose it or move to a different computer, receive a secret link via mail.
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Keys recover, software keys
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Herodotus 2.2 gives an instance of a similar experiment tried by Egyptian king Psammetichus. Here the children were exposed to no language. Eventually they uttered a word ('bekos') that was deemed to be Phrygian.

http://old.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScience/hdtbk2.html
Developers only now realizing that Android is not a platform
So true. I wish they would say no exposed blades but alas marketing is a powerful force inside a company. Also the ignorance of the typical consumer is a powerful dictator to how you market.
Well, men (but not women) apparently give grades on a bell curve, so you'd expect 40% three stars, but only 5% 5 stars.
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I have 3 contentions with what you just said.

1. I do not think languages that are under-used have less value than languages that are used more. If this man values Klingon, he ought to be able to teach his kid the language.

2. Using your own assumptions, you can make similar arguments for teaching "lesser" languages like Spanish or Chinese in an English speaking environment. I think that is a dangerous and scary proposition.

3. Most children are able to pick up the english language outside of the household (ie. every single 2nd generation immigrant from a non-english speaking country).
Digital cash requires no intermediary like a bank. Also, it's still an active research area and not totally solved.
http://code.google.com/p/lambda4jdt/
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This is the case. Rating someone a 4 or 5 generates an e-mail to that person. So the only reason you rate someone a 4 or 5 is if you want them to come check you out.
I like the direction you are going.

Access to your website stays in my control. I'm not depending on a 3rd party service, OpenID, or anything else, it's my own personal email account, and that email account's ability to receive email is all that's required for it to work.

1) I enter my email address on your site.

2) My browser plugin sees that I've done this.

3) It checks my email for the link from your site, returns to your site, logs me in with that secure link, and I never had to enter a password.

This feels very similar to OpenID, only I don't need to rely on a service that's a part of the OpenID movement, and my password stays with me, my domain, and my email account wherever I choose to host it.
Wow, I can't imagine working like that. At my workplace, when working out problems, I almost always go to others' code first to see how they solved similar (or identical) problems.
Windows 7 Hacked (Again) for Keyless Activation
Lo! Yet another Windows 7 activation hack appears. This ones a little more creative in that it doesnt require an OEM key at all, and instead bypasses the verification DLL completely.
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Well, first of all, there's the standard "Europe is not one country" disclaimer, let's get that out of the way. The UK and Ireland are probably better than continental Europe in terms of startup costs.

My point is basically that, all other things being equal, for an American (such as the guy who posted this), you're going to have an easier time of it staying home, since 'home' is a pretty good place to do a startup.
What a total nonsense article. No mention of rainbow tables which could probably crack the passwords of 90% of the dreaded child pornographers in seconds with any machine. Indirection if you ask me.

Remember Jaycee Lee Dugard?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Lee_Dugard...

"On April 22, 1992, less than a year after her kidnapping, a male caller reported to the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department that he saw a girl who closely resembled Dugard staring intently at a missing child flyer of herself in a gas station in Oakley, California, less than two miles from the Garridos' home. The caller, who left no name, reported seeing her leave in a large yellow van, which matches the description of an old yellow Dodge van that was recovered from the Garrido property in 2009. The license plate was not reported and the sighting was investigated only cursorily.[32]"

"In 2006 one of Garrido's neighbors called 9-1-1 to inform them there were tents in the backyard with children living there and that Garrido was "psychotic" with sexual addictions. A deputy sheriff spoke with Garrido at the front of the house for about thirty minutes and left after telling him there would be a code violation if people were living outside on the property. After Dugard was found in August 2009 the local police issued an apology."

If the "police" really cared about this type of thing, they wouldn't have the person with seniority in their division fuddling around with PS3's. This type of story is just to make the public feel good about what is being done. If their goal was to actually catch people, they'd approach legitimate "hackers" and make them an offer they can't refuse, but instead, they must give these types of jobs to people with union seniority, who are of course the ones that know almost nothing about it.