skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slinky looks very neat! I do feel it inhabits a very different niche from devd, though. I have no ambitions for devd to compete with tools like Grunt, Gulp or Slinky.

Devd has a simple job: it just serves files and triggers livereload when files change, and is completely agnostic about the build process. That means it works very well as a complement to Gulp - in fact, this is one of my primary use cases for devd. My gulp setups are simpler now: I've ditched Connect and node livereload libraries, and instead gulp JUST renders files to disk. It's early days, but having two sharp tools each doing what they do best seems to work well.

I should add that I definitely don't think there's one "right way" to do this stuff. I love the fact that we're free to explore variations to see what works and what doesn't. The more things we try the merrier!
The system only distributes requested objects. If no one requests spam objects, they won't be replicated or distributed, thereby not wasting resources (in theory).
How to Free Download MP3 Music to iPhone 6S/ 6S Plus
So, we would blindly host other people's pictures. Does noone see the danger in that?
Kindergarten to Grade 5
anybody knows a company which imports them big style to europe?
Who has multiple spare smart phones just lying around? And with working Internet access? Surely it's cheaper (and more private and secure) to just use cheap IP cameras?
You're attacking a straw man. There's a difference between a limited choice offered by a particular company and a limited choice in the marketplace. No one is arguing for the latter.

OP used Apple as an example so let's stick with it. If someone wants to buy a laptop to browse the internet, use e-mail, organize photos etc. they learn very quickly that MacBook Air is for them. Then they need to pick a screen size (11" or 13"), decide if they need more storage than in the base model and they're done. Apple is essentially a curator, which is a very valuable service. But we would be much worse off if we only had Apple clones on the market.

People around here know much more about computers and smartphones than an average consumer so these examples are not convincing. But consider microwave ovens. Recently I had a displeasure to look for a new one. If some company decided to scrap their entire line and settle on two or three base models with clear differences between each, it would be a great benefit to many costumers.
true, but big companies will usually take care of visa issues if you're hired full-time (or join as a summer intern and convert to full time). yes, it's hard to quit to join a startup; but those foreign students would've had a hard time joining a U.S. startup even without a Ph.D. due to visa issues.
> I think the Republican stance comes from the perspective that you can never really "negotiate" with a body that writes and enforces all the laws.

OK, Medicare, fair enough. But that's quite an excuse. Why, then the government should be forbidden from negotiating any type of price reductions! Let the government pay $10,000 for a pen, and $100,000 for a flashlight, eh?
I love that it has bandwidth/latency simulation built in as a core feature. Super useful.
In San Francisco, Glimpses of a Changing World
Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.
ipfs doesn't rehost a file unless you explicitly opt-in to do so.
Just what I need, even has the folder-index view that I need. Python SimpleHTTPServer has been getting stuck sometimes for me lately when used through Chrome. Maybe the way it loads resources in parallel changed or something.
yep, and doesn't use prepared statements for DB queries..
9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings
If you're developing software and there's a lot of "trench work" that usually means you're doing it quite badly.
Word of Life Church’s Path from Bible Group to Lethal Sect
In the general case, we think evergreen updates are an excellent idea. It's important to note, though, that it's easy to stop syncing from the upstream repository. Notification plus manual update is totally possible. Most people won't want to do that, but some will.

With SaaS web apps, it is of course impossible to turn off updates, which annoys the heck out of me.
Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of “Spaghetti” Code (2013)
For the statistics: In French prisons there are 3,5% of women.
I agree. In fact I would say "OAuth has made possible everything". Sure, something better will come along soon. But I'm quite happy we have OAuth now.
That's Mueller-Brockmann design.
However, either case is an equally valid reason to uninstall the app.
So, this is like eMule?
What's the benefit of this over eMule? Faster/better/hype?
99.26% correlation is observed between the Divorce Rate in Maine, and the Per Capita Consumption of Margarine

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

You say this implies causation... I have my doubts in any sense of the word implies.

For sure, a correlation could lead to something to investigate, but look at enough data and you will find plenty of correlations that mean nothing. A lot depends on how the correlation is discovered (number of variables involved etc.).
Legacy code?
> Passwordless works for users whose email providers are not also major OAuth providers, which is nice, but also pretty niche.

Eh. Screw company emails eh?
Many measurements == little change? It sounds vaguely familiar of overloaded computing systems. Maybe we'll run timing attacks on whatever the quantum world is.
Oh, what a fantastic idea. Just take an old smartphone that the manufacturer stopped shipping security updates for ages ago (if they ever did it at all), and get it to record what goes on inside your home. What could possibly go wrong?

You might want to look at http://androidvulnerabilities.org/ to see the sorry state of security on Android phones. The older they get, of course, the worse it is.
So Git for example doesn't scale and is impossible to keep clear of spam?
"emergent classicality" is my new favorite phrase.
One thing I didn't like as a user, is that to a typical user on my university's installation, it was possible for any third party to invoke the auth flow in a hidden iframe, meaning they could silently log user IDs if the user was signed in to CAS, and potentially have a sort of super-cookie to track people with or discover real-life identities.

The user's recourse is to tick a checkbox on the login page to warn on each subsequent authentication. I made a userscript to always select that option and also add a shortcut key to quickly approve from the confirmation page (since it came up quite often when navigating through the myriad products that run the university.)

I did think it was cool that they allowed third parties to use the system, but wish there were some easier way to prevent abuse.

I don't have a lot of knowledge of other auth systems, but the CAS architecture did seem pretty simple -- maybe too simple for some usecases. I know my university sent extra user data (besides just the user ID) to HTTPS sites on *.university.edu, so potentially that could be used to deliver user info or tokens to retrieve more later.
Isn't this kind of issue not much different than if a UPS truck was stopped and its driver inside a building making a delivery? Someone can just break in and take a package.
I guess this is just for use against insurgents with off-the-shelf quadcopters? Parrot was likely not designing its quadcopters with air-tight security in mind. Civil UAVs are unlikely to be attacked and, worst comes to worst, losing the occasional quadcopter is just a cost of business. Military-grade UAVs, on the other hand, are going to be designed with an expectation that they'll be attacked by sophisticated opponents. Finding exploits would be tough, as the link would probably be encrypted and the design would be secret.
Ironically behind a paywall.
> In that case all you've got is an in-memory queue that evaporates on a system crash.

https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/Aries.pdf

> Remember that merge operations are O(N). Then remember that there are N of them to do. O(N^2) is a horrible algorithmic complexity.

No. Mountains of actual math refute this. LSM-tree merges are O(N log N). This is an Actual Fact.

Read more, kids.
Looks like a cool project, but this post appears to violate two HN rules: an email signup can't be a Show HN [1], and promotional voting is not allowed [2].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
You can do this with a few lines of code in Firefox OS. For example, I did a SMS gateway server lately: https://github.com/SunboX/fxos-HTTP-SMS-Gateway A WiFi enabled camera wouldn't be much different.
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10436803
I actually think this NY times link is better because it provides more info and context, FWIW

Edit: Actually the NY times link was posted after this, so I guess it's a dupe of this, not the other way around :)
The scientists encouraging online piracy with a secret codeword
I actually did, but only with <map>, never <input type=image>.
Would be nice if the repo came with a dockerfile where you could just "docker run -d" on your server and it would do everything automagically. You'd just need to point nginx at it.
If you can grasp pointers, recursion, asynchronous programming/callbacks in less than a week (as a concepts, not apply-able skills) you have it.
While in theory, I agree that this could really give underdogs a way to crowd-fund against well funded adversaries, I think in practice, the added obstacle of needing to organize will always give singular entities that are already wealthy the upper hand to jump in with large sums of money and turn the tables. This is exactly what has happened with the Citizens United ruling. In theory, it gives everyone equal chance, but that's assuming that wealth and prosperity and the ability or organize is equal amongst all interested parties. And that is turning out to be very far from the truth.
OMG. Give me a frickin break. OAuth is hard? Get serious, get a CS degree, then come back here and tell us OAuth is hard.

Complaining that it is a weak standard, however, is an argument that holds water.
Do you enjoy programming?

If so, you will be good at programming. If not, you most likely won't.
It's 2015, there are not "security issues around hosting php applications" otherwise half the internet wouldn't work.

There does seem to be a "cargo cult" attitude to PHP amongst a large part of the tech sector.
African Innovators
Let's call this 'crowdsuiting'.
Oh, wait: somebody has
http://crowdsuit.com/
What if it was a decentralized system with authentication? Could a community of users host content internally, and add a users public-key (of sorts) to some global "allow" list?
I use IP Webcam[0] which can do motion detection and capture. I've recently been experimenting with combining it with FolderSync[1] to sync to my OwnCloud instance. For real time monitoring I can of course connect directly to IP Webcam's web interface and watch the feed, toggle the flash, etc. It'd be nice if someone made a unified solution to do this that doesn't include uploading all of your data to someone else.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pas.webcam...

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.andro...
Amazon Brings Its One-Hour Delivery Service to the Bay Area
Cold war files show UK fear of US H-bomb
Champerty!

Champerty is the (largely defunct) rule against funding someone else's lawsuit.
I always thought that was a funny word. Champerty. But TIL that it comes from the fact that in "England, litigants could hire ‘champions’ to represent them in ‘trial by battle.’ By the late 13th century, these strongmen were being compared to prostitutes, and their prevalence hastened the movement of dispute resolution to the courtroom. During the Middle Ages, this concept of ‘champerty’ — assisting another person’s lawsuit in exchange for a share of the proceeds — emerged as part of the larger ecclesiastical taboo against usury."
There's nothing wrong nor insecure about choosing not to use prepared statements. There does seem to be a very conservative/cargo cult streak amongst some tech people that there are only pure ways to do things. For example there is nothing wrong with building a SQL statement as a string and passing it to a database. If it's programmed correctly then it is exactly as secure as a prepared statement.
> As with any other tech - the important thing is who holds the keys.

I may not agree with your whole post, bit this is key.

It's about control of your own hardware and it's gradually being taken away. One piece at a time.
Seconded.

Quality comes only from quantity. And quantity can only happen if your efforts result in bruises you can tolerate.
The connections at a top PhD program are unbelievable too.
Anyone who's upgraded their phone or replaced it because the battery stopped holding charge. Internet access would be free via wifi which most people have in their homes.

So I'd doubt that an IP camera is cheaper. If anything, a phone sounds like an ideal low cost IP camera just due to the enormously bigger size of the market and the piles of unused ones lying around.
Right on. Enjoying it helps you accomplish the many hours that will bring you way beyond a natural. There is a lot of evidence that mastery is through practice --- not natural ability.
Should we really keep using the word "incentive"? It keeps presenting any success as something that doesn't belong to them. If they've worked hard for it, it's theirs, whatever the incentives.
Online Dating Horror Story
what i really don't quite get (amongst a large number of other things as well), is how you could have observed an atom without disrupting it's quantum state...
Quantum theory: Hidden no more
Forget trying to work out if you have any 'natural' ability (though since programming is a man made invention you can work out if you have any natural ability in the field by testing your problem solving abilities).

Get going with it. Find an open source project that interests you and contribute. There are a few things that are bad about github but as a platform it really allows you to find issues in software you're interested in, fix it and then submit that fix.

If you work for someone that's ideally the situation you're in, you're working on a software problem that interests you implementing new features or fixing bugs and submitting them.

HTH
Even though the article claims this, 26 days would be 7% and I cannot see this being true. They must use some creative measurement that measures 10% of us emissions or something like this. There is no way that the emissions are more than the weight of the burning material plus oxygen and there is no way an island can burn thru so many tones every year
German flexibility
Maybe that folk wisdom originates from demons and the Nephilim, back from before the Deluge - that is, from our highly advanced ancestors who could manipulate energy and matter much better than we do before their planetary-scale hydroengineering project turned into a disaster?
Project Euler does have a lot of good puzzles, but as parent comment says, they're more math related. If you don't like them (FWIW I never managed to get into them) you shouldn't necessarily think that programming isn't for you, as it can also be about building neat software that people use. As others have said here, you should try to get a feel for if you enjoy programming and what sorts of things you enjoy programming, because there is a lot you can do with it. If you don't like the math side, try building a simple app or web page and see if that interests you
Thankfully most people no longer have to deal with 'segfault' related bruises! :-)
If only they would go after political robo-callers.

It will never happen, but I like to dream big.
I was surprised to see how simple it is to locate the gun once you've identified a crater. I thought that would be the problem, rather than crater identification.
could you freeze someone/something in time by watching all those atoms?
If I understand correctly, what's going on is... Suppose you have a system rotating between state |0> and state |1>, like f(t) = cos(t) |0> + sin(t) |1>. If you measure at time t, you get |0> with probability cos(t)^2. After measuring, the system starts rotating again, but reset to |0> (assuming you measured that). If you measure n times per rotation period, the chance of measuring the state |0> every time (i.e. of effectively keeping the system in the |0> state) is (cos(τ/n)^2)^n per period. That converges to 100% as n gets large.

So, by measuring more and more frequently, you can effectively stop a system like that from transitioning between states.

It's an interesting example of measurement unavoidably affecting quantum systems, where the problem clearly isn't due to kicking or perturbing the state.
Controversial Cybersecurity Measure Moves Forward in Senate
Exactly, this is THE question!

Even if you were somehow very good at programming but you hatted it, would you choose it as a job? I'd drop it immediately, don't waste your precious time on it.

This leaves one other option: If you loved it more than any other job but you sucked at it, what would you do? I'd say: Do yourself a favor and find a job where you do what you love. If you prove my advice to be bad, you'd be the first human who made it through childhood without the ability to get better by practice, so don't worry. (And certainly don't think you have be on the Linus/RMS level to do meaningful things.)

(The options for sucking and hating and for loving and excelling are obvious ;))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354852 was about this. I think there might have been others too.
Layman question: what constitutes observation in the world of quantum physics ? The article suggests that stronger light means less quantum effects, but isn't observation a binary thing, so something is either watched or not.
That's fine, though, if the story is good and hasn't had significant attention yet. Otherwise too many good stories languish.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
It seems to be a huge problem that random people can store crazy pictures on your computer.

Maybe it would have been better if the images were stored encrypted in some manner, and decrypted on the client.

However I applaud the initiative and newness of this!
Git's not that decentralized, though. You've got centralization at a technical level (everybody contacts the same server to push code) and at an organizational level (if you want to add code you need to be the repository owner or someone authorized by them).

That brings up an important point, though: you can make your system partially decentralized, and gain many of the benefits of a totally centralized system with a fraction of the complexity.
>If you define "pie" as real wealth

Ok...now define real wealth.
I think XKCD (like usual) sums it up the best, this time in the alt-text of [0]:

"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."

[0] - https://xkcd.com/552/
> people have been talking about population explosion since forever

No, that's not true. Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay less than 200 years ago. The oldest human writings are only a few thousand years old. That's the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.

> How can you predict what will be relevant in 100 years?

Because I can do math. So I can understand that exponential growth cannot be sustained in a finite universe, let alone a finite planet. I can calculate how long we can continue at current (or historical) growth rates before we run into various limiting factors.

For example: the carbon biomass of earth is ~10^15 kg. The carbon mass of homo sapiens is about 10^11 kg. Our current doubling time is about 60 years. That works out to about 600 more years of growth at current rates before the biomass of earth consists entirely of homo sapiens. That's a hard upper bound on how long we have left if we don't slow our growth rate.
This is a little weird. Jack Dorsey is not a majority owner of Twitter and so he can't do whatever the heck he wants. Most companies would ask the board for approval to issue more shares for its employees - this did not happen. So then the question is, 'why does Jack feel compelled to donate his shares more than any other Twitter shareholder?'

One reason could be Jack is a philanthropist and believes in giving back to people who may have contributed to his success.

Another could be Jack expects a return in investment. But how much? Twitter market cap is ~19B. He is giving 1% of Twitter to employees which is 190M. He owns 3% therefore he was worth 570M. To make his money back, Twitter must rise from 19B to 25B. Can 190M invested in its current developers achieve this?

Probably not. Jack is most likely trying to save Twitter. The third option is Twitter is in big trouble and only Jack can see it. This could be a last ditch effort to make short term investments to save the company by investing in the people that matter most. It's a bold move that could pan out in their favor.
>correlation does not imply causation

Perhaps we should say, “Correlation correlates with causation.”

(Because causation is a subset of correlation.)
Or, is it just the hope that - oh that place cannot be that bad? Or is it really not this widespread as people make it out to be, or as it seems to be (to me at least)? Just curious

I did my PhD in The Netherlands. I had an awesome time, both professionally and socially. I worked with great people, had a great social life, and wasn't paid badly (for Dutch standards).

Afterwards, I was in industry for a short time. Upside: people directly use what you create. Downside: in most companies (outside Google, Microsoft Research, etc.) urgent customer demands prevail over research time.

Given the relatively negative experiences I went to academia again (this time in Germany), and am enjoying it a lot: enough time to work out and test ideas, I enjoy teaching a lot, regular travel, a reasonable pay, and not much overtime.

I might explore the other side of the fence again when my current position ends, but I am happy where I am.
NYT headline: "Jack Dorsey Gives One-Third of Twitter Stake to Employees"

Article body: "Although no employee is being given additional stock directly" ...
If you're interested in this, also have a look at the slightly cheaper "Understand Your Genome" events Illumina puts on which include a full sequencing. They should be publishing a 2016 calendar soon, the catch being you have to sign up on their schedule rather than get clinical results right away.

https://www.understandyourgenome.com/
http://www.illumina.com/company/events/understand-your-genom...

When I was researching the cost of full-genome sequencing, there was also some competition from China, in trying to drive the cost down from five to seven thousand to just a thousand. So that might end up being an option.

Also, there's an online project at http://ensembl.org/ to take a sequence and try to analyze it based on current data on the human genome so DIY approaches (skip the analysis, just give me the raw data at the best accuracy and cheapest price!) can be quite useful on their own. I too look forward to the day when it's less expensive to sequence, as that much data might help us notice patterns from multiple samples sooner... Or not. :)
10 Inner-Demons an Entrepreneur Has to Fight Everyday
Lots of people have said that you need to like programming.

You don't necessarily need to enjoy programming. But if you're also not particularly interested in the results of programming, or the ways that you might get better results, it's probably not for you.

I don't know of any particularly good tests for aptitude, I suspect general intelligence is probably more predictive than anything else.