skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked on the digital archiving project at the Library of Congress. In that case, it was mostly wire spool recordings, wax cylinders, and LPs, but many of the same principles apply:

- This media can be fragile. Less so with VHS or Betamax, but it's something to keep in mind.

- It's not usually just a single copy and drop it into an archive. Most of the time, they'll want a super high quality, uncompressed master for long term preservation. This is with the hope that they never have to go back to the physical media.

- Once they have that copy, they create lower quality versions for day to day display, usage, study, etc.

- When you consider the "work" (in the artistic/archival sense, not the effort sense), it's not just the video. Quite often they'll want image scans of the media itself, container, etc. This is because the video itself may have been suffered damage due to physical damage.

- Next, you need to document the whole process down to the brand and settings of every single device. If it's known (or discovered later), that a particular piece of equipment distorts media (plays faster/slower, changes color palettes, etc), you need to know that and potentially correct for it at a later time.

- And finally, don't forget the metadata! A collection isn't useful if someone doesn't capture the who, what, and when. This is often the most painful part because the settings above are often set once and forgotten. This requires manually transcribing information written on the media, watching it, or a variety of other methods. Most libraries farm this out to interns. My new company - Clarify.io - hopes to help with this aspect.

If you're interested more in the mechanics, please feel free to let me know.
Feedback is welcome and would be helpful to improve the site. Thanks!
Growth strategies are only amazing before they're adopted by the masses
Based on what they can do, extensions should be naturally trusted to the same extent as the browser itself... I think this is a feature, not a bug. Besides, AFAIK with extensions being distributed in the form of source code, it's not hard to inspect one to see what it truly does, and it only takes one person to find out and tell everyone else.
Hello! I've been customizing my OS X installs since 10.5 with various programs (ThemePark, (S)artFiletool, and most recently Alex Zielenski's ThemeEngine[0]). I'm a fan of the `platinum' theme from Mac OS 9, so I've been creating a system-wide OS-9 theme in my spare time this past ~year. I have .car files available for Yosemite and El-Capitain (the version I'm currently using). The Yosemite files are (mostly) true to the old OS 9 aesthetic, but I thought I'd change up the look of the traffic lights on el-capitain and release it at some point [1]. I have the source files for each different design I've done, along with the Assets.car (the replacement for the deprecated [and absent in 10.11] SArtFile.bin), SystemAppearance.car (change highlight colors in menubar and right-click menus/make window masks sharp instead of rounded [yes it also affects the GraphiteAppearance.car window masks]), and the GraphiteAppearance.car (used for the platinum traffic lights) files. At some point I will finish both of these and release them, but for now (I just finished my summer job working for one of my professors/I'm on vacation at the moment) the Yosemite theme remains slightly incomplete, and I've got some more testing to do on El-Capitain. Also gotta port that Yosemite-System-fontpatcher project to work with the new San Francisco (let's not get that confused with susan kare's 1984 `SanFrancisco'! [2]) typeface so I can finally get Charcoal/Chicago as my system font again like it was in Yosemite...

[0]: https://github.com/alexzielenski/ThemeEngine

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/fpZemvX.gifv

[2]: http://i.imgur.com/Q1tZknV.png
I've used iPage before. They were down pretty regularly every day for me. So much so, that I abandoned it after less than a week. I've since moved to a Digital Ocean server and Namecheap for domain registration, and I've never looked back.
Actually, 6.0.3 was just released: http://a2central.com/6499/the-source-awakens-system-6-0-3/

Exciting times for IIgs hackers!
You might have a bug in the code.

>>> horizontal = chordCalc([[-1,0],[1,0]])
>>> distance(horizontal)
2.0

All good so far, but

>>> diagonal = chordCalc([[-1,-1],[1,1]])
>>> distance(diagonal)
1.4142135623730951

shouldn't this give 2.0 as well?
Everyone involved with Flask just seems to be super cool. Great read!
#rem-ote? (remove-the-dash to see the tag)
I have the experience of working remotely. The biggest problem is in communication. I think that's why most companies don't accept remote.
> No reason that recently graduated PhD/postdoc can't start a company built on their work.

Except for the minor problem that any IP generated through their work is owned by the university. And if the IP's valuable, it typically flows straight into the hands of Flagship, Polaris, Third Rock, & co. The professor might have a say in what happens to the IP, but the students and postdocs have zero leverage with the TTO. And how could they? They are replaceable cogs in the machine (and often in the US on a student/work visa) - Bob Langer is not.
And clojure's reach grows larger!
I've been playing with PilOS:

http://picolisp.com/wiki/?PilOS

It is PicoLisp running on bare metal. It's easy to get going with qemu to experiment. The creator of PicoLisp, Alex Burger, had created a flight simulator way back when on PicoLisp. He is working on porting such things to PilOS. Interesting times...
Comcast outage in several major US cities
A Guide to Secure Data Encryption [PHP]
Avant | Chicago, Los Angeles | Full Time

https://www.avant.com/jobs

Fast-growing personal lending startup with plenty of benefits.
discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9993353
FYI your careers link 404s. Going by your site the actual link is http://careers.true.com/
Haven't you been paying attention? We're living in a police state.
Great insight into how free-speech, freedom of press and privacy laws work and have evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. Having lived on either end of the pond as an average citizen, I know the American Press enjoys greater and truer freedom. They hold the legislators accountable. The British press, on the other hand, felt malleable, made to bend any which way the government choose. The BBC creates invaluable programming, but also is bound to the government by the purse. It always felt like the government meddled with its affairs. And now some great to get some historical context into it as well!
Lacona: A Siri like, text based command utility for mac
Evidation Health | Full-time | VISA | ONSITE in Menlo Park, CA or Santa Barbara, CA

http://evidation.com/careers
We're helping new types of digital health products find their way to people who need them most. We have offices in Menlo Park and Santa Barbara and we're well-funded by venture firms who deeply understand healthcare. We're looking for teammates in software engineering, data science, and product. The team is a pretty unique blend of backgrounds: search, mobile targeting, data, health outcomes, traditional healthcare, and precision medicine. There is a lot of learning on all sides.
Which is completely fair - I do however. In theory one could make pretty PDFs that allow for decent cut and paste, work across all screensizes, work both in single-and-two column view, allow for full-screen viewing of images -- but I think it's much easier to pull that of as an epub (essentially html+css).
The issue with this is updates. In most of these cases with malicious addons, the addon was safe initially, then the author slips in some tracking code / spyware etc. at a later date.

While I might inspect a source for a single sketchy looking addon at installation, inspecting every addon every time it's updated (sometimes weekly or more often) is absurd, and that's why you get cases of adware slipping by for months before anyone notices.
Would you consider doing a reddit AMA? HN doesn't quite seem like the right place/format for it.

Although, I'm gonna cut right in line and ask: what's the most interesting thing you've archived? If you're not sure what we'd find interesting, some suggestions are - content, medium and difficulty.
Hackers Exploit ‘Flash’ Vulnerability in Yahoo Ads
> Remember VC economics and the power-law distribution of returns. One big winner pays for a lot of small losing bets.

The calculus is actually quite different in biotech. With proper scientific due diligence (read: late-stage cherry-picking), there are usually more (but smaller) winners and fewer (but larger) losers in biotech than in tech. The absolute number of winners may still be smaller than the number of losers, but there isn't a tech-style power-law phenomenon. This is partly because the needs are often very well understood in the life sciences, so the size of the opportunity isn't that uncertain. It's whether or not the science will pan out that is uncertain (which can be very costly to find out and with little recourse - you can't easily pivot on a therapeutic, particularly if that happens late in clinical trials).
Let's tell everyone how to think and how to act instead of actually contributing something of actual use (like code) to the open source community.

This certainly won't backfire whatsoever.
First, he did not call the founders unprincipled, he said that this is not a principled way to run a business. I know that's splitting hairs, but I think the distinction is important. Granted, I just told a doctor about a grammatical error in her Emergency Department's mission statement, so this may just be a symptom... :)

Second, the surrounding events do matter. They claimed to be raising money to build a product. Then, their efforts bogged down because they tried to build an entirely different product than they originally promised.

Where I'm from, we call that lying. But, for fun, let's check out their own words:

Q: Why did Matchstick select Microsoft PlayReady ?

A: Matchstick intends to offer DRM on its platform and bring premium content to its users in the quickest timeframe possible. Microsoft PlayReady offers a mature technology, has relationship with premium content providers and is quick to deploy on the Firefox OS platform.

Funny how a solution that is so 'quick to deploy' could sink the whole ship, hey?
I saw this new test feature for VS, it was basically inline debugging. Very very cool. Can't dig the link up right now, but I'd love that for PyCharm!
Doing nothing! Trying to become skilled enough that I only have to work a few hours a week in the future.
Cuba's Underground Sneakernet
This seems like a trivially parallelisable problem. You can buy used VCRs by the pallet cheaply[1], although servicing and possibly retrofitting them into good condition is probably the major bottleneck here.

[1] https://govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=1045&acct...
Is Our Universe a Fake?
To clarify: the hash for the sensitive resource can be salted, making the hash unique and avoiding de-duplication. For non-sensitive resources, eg jquery.js, we can use an unsalted hash and get de-duplication.

Another benefit of identify resources by their hash is that we don't need to request them from a specific host. Instead, you can get them from any CDN that has a matching resource.
Not always. Many DRM mechanisms require trusted hardware components to work. That is hard.
MixRank | San Francisco, CA | Full-time Data Engineer

Big data, distributed systems, data science, and web crawling— a few of our favorite things!

We're a small team in the heart of SoMA, San Francisco that's really into data.

Work with us on big data problems in a small team environment. We're hiring full stack and data/systems engineers. MixRank is a perfect environment for anyone interested in web crawling, big data systems, analytics, data analysis/mining, machine learning, and data visualization. You can learn about all of these things the hard way: in the trenches with us, as we scale.

https://jobs.lever.co/mixrank/b3ec68a6-afff-404c-ab20-86c568...
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Javascript (Node and front end), C, Python, SQLite, Linux

Résumé/CV: jacklew.is/JackLewisResume.pdf

Email: jack.lewis@live.com
They promised Netflix.
I disagree.

If they were principled, they would have followed through with the original product. Instead they used the money to start building something slightly different. It was a bait and switch.

Giving people's money back is saving face to avoid a huge backlash.
Try Spacemacs: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs
Do you use JetBrains products for VS? If not, you're really missing out.
Money train?

The inspection vehicles are fucking terrifying. It's like seeing a sunrise coming through a tunnel.

The snow-blower trains on the lines that run outside, however, are awesome. A huge propeller-like turbine thing on the front, roaring along, sweeping the snow off the tracks. Very cool to see.
You're definitely right, sometimes you do need to install odd stuff on Windows to get certain Python packages to work.

It has seemed to get better lately. I usually use Windows, and I've been getting along great lately with Python dev work.
A year-long web app effort that made absolutely no money
They need DRM to support most Chromecast apps (that people care about)
Global labor arbitrage marches ever onward.
ACA is 0.10 an hour. If the worker works long enough s/he apply for Medicare. If you want you can offer additional benefits. This is obviously not true for full time employees.
You're very correct about updates, but on the other hand I wonder what type of addon needs to be updated at such a high frequency?

Although making a way to easily see the changes made with each new version, something diff-like, would alleviate the problem.
More like it is old enough that what number of copies were printed are owned. I personally perceive value, and I am willing to buy in at certain prices for the pay-off in knowledge and convenience. For instance, driving to a college, spending umpteen hours copying pages for a sub-standard replica of a book that I can have delivered for $130? I will buy it and do something else with the time saved.
I was looking at buying an old Lisp book, 'Common LISP Modules: Artificial Intelligence in the Era of Neural Networks and Chaos Theory'. I already own a copy, but not where I am living for now. It was $3 on Amazon. There was a thread on HN where I mentioned the book, and the author himself wanted a copy, so he ordered it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9877314

I checked back on Amazon, and it was over $80. Demand drove price. It is still on B&N for $86 right now:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/common-lisp-modules-mark-wat...
Case in point: Kaspersky (respected antivirus software) is doing disturbing things with extensions and plug-ins.

Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky Total Security are adding an extension to your browser called "Safe Money" and an associated plug-in called "Online Banking" that protect your banking transactions. It opens a separate "protected" browser tab, verifies credentials, checks for spoofing, etc. This is all fine, I think.

However, I was annoyed to discover that it acts as a man-in-the-middle to monitor the HTTPS traffic between me and my bank or credit card site. I suppose Kaspersky wants to check for malicious content sent by a fake bank site or whatever. But I don't want Kaspersky scanning/storing/analyzing my bank transactions and bank passwords.

Kaspersky does not tell you that they are doing MITM, or what they're checking for, or what (if any) info is sent back to their servers for analysis, or what (if anything) is stored.

I removed "Safe Money" and all of their other extensions and plug-in[1]. I still use Kaspersky, but if a security-oriented company is engaging in shenanigans with extensions and plug-ins, then what do we expect from less trustworthy companies?

[1] You cannot remove Kaspersky's extensions and plug-ins directly from Firefox. If you disable the Kaspersky extensions, the next time you restart Firefox, they are re-enabled. If you set the Kaspersky plug-ins to "Never activate", the next time you restart Firefox, they are back to "Always activate". Kaspersky has gone to a lot of effort to make it nearly impossible to remove their extensions and plug-ins once you install them! It took me a long time to get rid of them.
"Installation of a C extension does not require a compiler on Windows or OS X"
This is the real advantage.!
> doesn't support undo nor does it need to

Anyone who's ever fat-fingered an rm command will disagree with you there.

Your comment reeks of some kind of "brogrammer" machismo and it makes me irrationally angry.
Agreed! Awesome post.
There should be infinitely many "solutions" to this if you are allowed to define the sampling method arbitrarily.

Intuitively, one would think that random points are uniformly distributed, but that is not maintained in two of these solutions. If you randomly generate two points in [0,2pi) with a uniform distribution then you will quickly get the 1/3 probability empirically or provably by the limit.

However, if you are allowed to derive the second point from the first (such as the cross section example) or create some other dependency, then you are given great liberty as to what the resulting "probability" will be. Sure you can even guarantee that every two points on the circle will be present "eventually" but infinity is very large and how you approach it will determine your eventual outcome. Here we could subsample preferred points first and actually derive any specific probability (0,1) and maybe even make it sound reasonable. This behaviour will even be maintained into the limit, but it is certainly not intuitive, at least to me.
Google has a great (perpetual?) cash cow from advertising. That's what allows it to pursue all these other ventures.

But, does it have the right leadership? Maybe Stanford PhD's aren't the right people to make decisions about social products?

Also, Google appears to be the antithesis of the Steve Jobs idea of "focus is about saying no". They flail around doing all sorts of random stuff without any rhyme or reason. Granted, they are willing to "fail fast" and walk away from a lot of stuff they shouldn't have done in the first place.

I think Google is still in need of "adult supervision". But not too many people are able to say "NO" to multi-billionaire founders with voting control of the company. We'll see how their recent CFO hire works out. Wall Street is hoping she will help them focus more on making money and less on wild tangents.
To hold down wages?

If there were any shortage, why are IT wages absolutely flat?

If there were any shortage, why the famous pickiness exhibited by every company in their interview process?

http://cis.org/no-stem-shortage
> The Unix shell, one of the most successful user interfaces ever developed

By what measure? Cause it sure isn't widespread end user adoption…
Thanks for the kind words for Cumulus!

- nolan
You don't have to sign in to use Visual Studio? I've downloaded it twice and didn't see a way to use it without signing in. If it's there, it's hidden.

Windows 10 sends your typed text to remote servers. That's a keylogger. You can opt out, but most users won't. Other companies do it and I criticize them too.
Actually, yes, '!' is not allowed in Java identifier.
Make absolutely all payment and money transfer records completely public, and then we can talk about freedom of surveillance.
"other operating systems"

like windows 2000? thats been the default windows behavior for more than a decade
CS academics would have no interest in the majority of YC software startups, because most of them are not innovating in CS, they're just using software as a tool for business model innovation.

Biotech startups are fundamentally different in that they're driven by scientific advances, which is exactly what life scientists in academia are trying to produce.
Have to agree that Active Patterns are an incredibly useful F# feature.
Why I’m excited to own 0% of my startup
So Kickstarter companies aren't allowed to pivot?

Things change, other groups get involved. That's just real life, hell, look at Oculus.
Which packages specifically did you have to rebuild?
Don't get me wrong (the comment was really rude and insensitive) but I'd like to explore this social context for a second. How would, say, a jockey react to a remark such as "you are too tall to be a jockey". Being tall is usually considered a desirable trait, yet, I can easily imagine a jockey would be upset with such a comment. I know the context is much more complicated when attractiveness of women becomes the topic mostly because of our civilization's poor history of gender inequality, but it would be interesting to explore the borders of this space of offensive social assumptions. I have, myself, heard I'm "too white to be Brazilian" and that left me somewhat confused.
Show HN: Count.life, a minimalist motivational calendar
Many of the tapes are BetaMAX.
Show HN: iPad app to store web articles offline
I agree.

There's probably also some element of "it isn't the best general solution, but it's super convenient for some particular group of people, e.g. python users".
Observations about Tech and Silicon Valley
ZeroCater Is Hiring a VP of Engineering and a Head of Product
You guys have to have the worst "apply now" form experience of anyone on this list. I gave up.
I don't think so, like say you had a point outside the circle, and from that point you equally selected angles to slice the space in. You would get systematically longer slices than if all your slices are cut parallel to each other (and you ended up with the same number slicing the pizza).

edit: I worked it out and you're right, I get the same answer as the ninja one.
https://github.com/ark-lang/ark
I love these kinds of old blog posts.

I admire the approach and dedication, but it feels a bit redundant. Aside from the future dated directories, some creative use of the find command could achieve a lot of this.

The problem really reminds me of inheritance vs. composition. Like inheritance, file hierarchy encourages narrow classification and makes shared traits difficult to manage. Tagging for file organization seems like a much more elegant solution, letting an article or files categorization be a sum of its basic properties. Services like Pocket have adopted that approach for a reason I think.

I haven't looked, but I'd love to see a tag based file system tool. One could easily imagine having a nested tree of tags where one would be able to navigate down to a file via multiple directory paths.

Edit: Evidently, this is called a semantic file system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_file_system
and
Tagsistant looks a lot like what I was imagining:
http://www.tagsistant.net/
Proof of a ‘Gig Economy’ Revolution Is Hard to Find
Great opinion.

I do agree $ is very un-Java, either.

But I don't want "shuffle" to be in-place method by default. I agree with @jdmichal that it should return new copy.

In this case how to design the in-place way is not obvious.

I'm the main author of fig. This project is started for just a week. All of your suggestion are very supportive and I'm checking the feedback to make fig better.
What I Learned About Life After Interviewing 80 Highly Successful People
> Grants are a pain to apply for (there's a reason that full-time grant-writers exist) and the feedback loop is very slow

Case in point, I saw this on the retraction watch twitter the other day: http://aushsiblog.com/?p=252

There was a grant application rejected because the header font was 13pt rather than 14pt. Most of us have to deal with some level of petty bureaucracy, but that level is just absurd.
It would assign a probability approaching zero as the plane approached infinity, yeah, I agree.

But I think I have a way around that.