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jfriedlyon Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

https://github.com/echelon/laser-testbed

You can also find more stuff that he's done at his website, http://brand.io/

jfriedlyon Stanford researchers to open source model they say has nailed sentiment analysis

I read the paper when this first showed up on HN[1]. The most important thing they did was to create a training set with higher granularity in the data than much of anything previously seen. Based on their training set, their algorithm was able to achieve 85% positive/negative accuracy on sentences, but previously state-of-the-art algorithms moved from 80% accuracy up to 83% accuracy when adapted to their training set. While their algorithm appears to be better than anything they tested against, this is fundamentally an incremental improvement, not groundbreaking research. The real win here came from using a better dataset.

[1] http://nlp.stanford.edu/~socherr/EMNLP2013_RNTN.pdf

Edit: formatting

jfriedlyon He got 1%, we can't hire him

Would you care to send me an email? I'd love to ask someone who worked at one of these companies a few questions.

joelfriedly@gmail.com

Thanks!

jfriedlyon Ask PG: Why is everybody hellbanned?

I can't seem to edit this now, but someone else reposted the link to Python 3.4.0a1:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155530

Their submission currently has 34 upvotes.

jfriedlyon Ask PG: Why is everybody hellbanned?

Their posting frequency dropped significantly over the past year, probably as a result of never receiving any upvotes. At the time they were (presumably) hellbanned, they were posting at a rough average of one post per day, and it's much less frequent now. They seem to go for a week or two period in which they'll post several links, then forget about HN for a while.

I won't try to defend all of their posts; most of them are things that I don't even find interesting. But it seems that someone basically used banning as a method of cutting down on uninteresting material.

That may even be a good way of maintaining the signal-to-noise ratio on HN: if we ban the users that post many uninteresting links then the community won't have to see them. But it wasn't a tactic that I was aware of before today.

jfriedlyon Ask PG: Why is everybody hellbanned?

An example:

First alpha release of Python 3.4 is out (python.org)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155423

It probably linked to [1], but all we can tell is that it was something at python.org. The post was by plessthanpt05, an HN user for about two years with 838 karma. All of his/her posts from the past year or so are dead (about 60 of them). They don't appear to be a bot.

Python 3.4.0a1 isn't something that would interest everyone on HN, but it certainly doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should have been killed.

[1] http://python.org/download/releases/3.4.0/

Edit: more details on plessthanpt05

jfriedlyon HP D2D / StorOnce Storage unit backdoors

The password can be easily found by googling the SHA1 hash.

jfriedlyon Nebula One

This should be to https://www.nebula.com/nebula-one (without the trailing slash)

jfriedlyon The Lie Hollywood Loves to Tell

According to the statistics site that the OP used, 54 million Americans are single. [1] Ignoring the 62 million Americans that are under fifteen, we find that only 21% of American adults are available. [2] So if your area's ratio is 9:10 and ~80% of the people are taken, you end up with a 7:12 ratio among the singles (ignoring homosexuality).

[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/online-dating-statistics/

[2] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

jfriedlyon Expedia: Bad for the Traveler, Bad for the Hotel

> I tried and the link is down.

lunabluehotel.com seems to have gone offline yesterday, I suspect as a result of a traffic spike following their blog post. From their twitter stream:

> Seems that our website, http://www.lunabluehotel.com is currently down. We have a call in to find out why & solve the... http://fb.me/15notFYoE

(Note the link at the end of the tweet is also broken.) They also posted on the 23rd that views of their wordpress-hosted blog post were spiking:

> We just noticed that views of our Expedia blog post have gone through the roof for the 24 hours or so, all coming... http://fb.me/zyw2aX7R

jfriedlyon You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.

This sounds eerily familiar. Around a decade ago, a data analytics company called Pharmatrak was actually found guilty of breaking federal wiretapping statutes for doing something very similar. [1] In their case, they had built a network tracking HTTP GET requests to pharmaceuticals companies websites with a web bug [2] and attached cookie. But because some of the pharmaceuticals companies were using GETs as the method on HTML forms (remember, this was ten years ago), the users actually ended up making GET requests with personally identifying information in the URL encoded parameters. Since these GET requests were logged by Pharmatrak, and neither party (the users nor the pharmaceuticals companies) had consented to giving away personal information to them, Pharmatrak was found guilty of wiretapping.

Pharmatrak eventually won on appeal though, arguing that they had no intention of collecting personal information, which exonerated them because only intentional eavesdropping is a crime.

The company in the OP's article could make no such arguments though. I suspect that their main difference is that they make no assurances of confidentiality to the websites using their software the way Pharmatrak did. Which 1) is just really creepy, and 2) sets them up for trouble with users in California, because California's wiretapping statutes say that it's a crime unless both parties agree to it. [3]

[1] http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets001737.shtml

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug

[3] I'm not sure if this applies to police, but it definitely does to private parties: http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/california-recording-...

Edit: Added third reference.

jfriedlyon The Most Dangerous Equation [pdf]

I don't think so. "Statistically significant" is a relative term and when testing an entire population is infeasible (as it often is), we instead sample some fraction that we believe is "statistically significant" on the assumption that it will accurately reflect the whole.

The point of this article is that a sample only accurately reflects the whole in some ways. Variability in particular scales with the square root of the sample size. And since misconceptions about variability have been at the heart of many controversies (male vs. female intelligence, school size, cancer risk, etc.), De Moivre's equation is important; even dangerous in the sense that ignorance of it has led to billions of dollars wasted.

jfriedlyon AntiSec leaks 1,000,001 Apple UDIDs, Device Names/Types

They wrote in the release that they wouldn't give any more interviews until they saw "Adrian Chen get featured on the front page of Gawker, a whole day, with a huge picture of him dressing a ballet tutu and shoe on the head, no photoshop."

Chen, a journalist at Gawker, actually did it: http://gawker.com/

Not even bothering to submit this as a story to HN because I'm pretty sure Gawker links get auto-killed (with good reason, the Gawker article is crap).

jfriedlyon Udacity and the future of online universities

Thanks for this, keeping track of them all in my Google Calendar was just cluttering it up and hadn't provided any benefit yet. One typo:

Summary of Stanford's online course offerings(not affiliated with Stanford)

should be:

Summary of Stanford's online course offerings (not affiliated with Stanford)

jfriedlyon Twss.js

We made our IRC bot respond to TWSS jokes, but ours was just a dumb match from a set of few thousand jokes that we scraped from offline. You can look at the code at: https://github.com/jfriedly/jenni

Now that I took Stanford's Machine Learning class though, I think I might just duplicate what this guy did for our bot.

jfriedlyon Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production

From the site's Green Arrays Architecture paper [1]:

Our architecture explicitly omits a clock, saving energy and time among other benefits.

Also, they quoted instruction execution time as being as low as 1400 picoseconds, so 700MHz equivalence is probably the best case, not the average case.

Edit: They also say in the architecture paper that their goal is one billion operations per second, or 1GHz.

[1] http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB002-100...

jfriedlyon Cracking OSX Lion passwords

If sudo works the same way on Mac's as it does on Linux, then anyone in the sudoers file could give a rogue application root access.

jfriedlyon Xkcd Password Generator

Google released the world's largest corpus and did us a favor by analyzing it for n-grams. For example, they found that the phrase "serve as the initial" was over a 100 times more common than the phrase "serve as the insurance". [1] For $150 you can buy the 24GB data set yourself, so it's a fair assumption that makers of password crackers could reliably guess common phrases first. [2]

[1] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-ar... [2] http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=...

jfriedlyon 33GB of public domain JSTOR articles, and a manifesto

I believe FB blocks links to TPB. They actually changed my password and sent me an email saying that they thought my account had been compromised when I tried to do it once. However, as alanh said, a little redirection will work to post it.

Edit: Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090507/1152134782.shtml

jfriedlyon Is There Anything Good About Men?

the statement "the British Empire did a lot more good than harm" is a disgusting, privileged statement...

Where was this quote even in the article?

jfriedlyon Show HN: HN GeoIP Search: Find who and what on HN is near you

You should be able to use any of "Slough, UK", "Slough, United Kingdom,", or "Slough, England" and the system will identify your country as everything after the comma. It should then search for your query exactly and for what it identified as your city, performing API calls on both users and items, for a minimum of four queries. Sorry about it not getting your correct location in the first place, the best GeoIP database available has only about 61% coverage in the UK.

jfriedlyon Show HN: HN GeoIP Search: Find who and what on HN is near you

Not yet, although I may be able to add that today. In the mean time, I added code to make it also search nearby suburbs and the greater San Francisco area. It should work for any of several other suburbs in SF too.

jfriedlyon Show HN: HN GeoIP Search: Find who and what on HN is near you

There's now a wrong location link at the top of the page. Thanks for the feedback!

jfriedlyon Show HN: HN GeoIP Search: Find who and what on HN is near you

It's Django with a postgresql database hosted by dotcloud (EC2 instance)

jfriedlyon Show HN: HN GeoIP Search: Find who and what on HN is near you

I added an exception to fix this. You should see results from Pensacola now too :)

jfriedlyon Show HN: HN GeoIP Search: Find who and what on HN is near you

I didn't know about that but I think that would be a bit over my head. This is my first web app and it uses strictly IP's to get location. If you can tell me where you're located though, I might be able to help you with the 404 you're getting. A lot of the bugs are very specific cases that will only show up for one or two cities in the country.

jfriedlyon (debunked) PayPal vulnerability allows access to any account within 30 seconds

He also noted:

  @Alex Khomenko told me in another place, that there may be
  a secondary authentication on password changes from the
  forgotten password link, in the US PayPal. If true and
  currently in place this would mean that the US is not
  vulnerable, although they may still have the email bug

He said he doesn't use PayPal himself and that he only requested a change password link when he was trying to contact them about "effective spam". Perhaps he supplied them with one of his email addresses and it happened to have a counterpart at a different subdomain (like example@email.com vs example@email.com.au)?

EDIT: Formatting.

jfriedlyon Producing Open Source Software: The Book

PDF download link is broken. It looks good though!

EDIT This link works: http://webyes.com.br/wp-content/uploads/ebooks/book_producin...

jfriedlyon Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

If anyone still wants to read this, the page has been taken down for some reason but I pulled the cached copy from google before they lost it: http://opensource.osu.edu/~jfriedly/mirrors/working-at-micro...

jfriedlyon Show HN: Breakup Notifier

Well, if Facebook unblocks you, you might want to look into adding another feature: relationship creation notifications for specific users.

Target user: People like me that don't check Facebook everyday, but would still like to receive an email when their friend finally makes it Facebook-official that him and the girl he's been talking to for weeks are dating.