skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The characters are intricate, but I don't know what the information density is (pixels per word); I think they have fewer charaters per idea in Japanese, and more essential pixels per character.

Interestingly, that appears to not be the case for Japanese, quite the opposite in fact. There was a research a while ago about the speed of spoken language that I think can loosely be applied here (number of characters per syllable depends on which Japanese alphabet is being used). The research concluded that Japanese is very low density (and thus spoken very fast).

http://kottke.org/11/09/the-speed-and-density-of-language
Yes. I know a guy doing his PhD on this.
I've really felt the need for an API into my bank transactions lately. There are a bunch of visualizations I want to do that Mint etc. don't support.

BTW @jamesallison The interface looks great. Good work!
The game: "Return to the play area"
Me: "Or else what?"
Ask HN: Your browser-to-server (XMLHttpRequest/WebSocket) free wishlist?
Adding value for the browser environment / JavaScript programmer without a dedicated server or framework or for just plain convenience.

Like health check a remote non cors-enabled endpoint. A simple HEAD request to a remote url for client side load balancing or for creating a quick page that monitors remote endpoints health. Or how about the ability to send an email - maybe enough restrictions (no attachments, limited size, throttled) could be put in place to prevent potential abuse.

I am very good at creating/scaling/maintaining the server side. So what services would be useful?
>you can make as many changes to your service as you want without any coordination.

I'm really not sure that's true. If I change my classifier endpoint, even with the same API it's important people know that they might get different results for the same input. It might be really quite important for peoples analysis.

Their system might not fall over, but that doesn't mean I don't need to coordinate with them.

Perhaps I'm missing something in what you're describing though.
We already have energy sources that are much cheaper than coal when you take all the costs into account. If you start demanding that renewable energy must be cheaper than coal when coal gets huge effective subsidies and renewable energy gets none, that's an artificial constraint that makes the problem unsolvable.
Shame it doesn't display a graph on exit of when people left.
Very likely. The $40,000 acreage next to me just sold for $400,000. That would make mine worth $1M right now!
Thanks for this suggestion. We want to make it clear that Fair Source is not Open Source. We've updated the summary in the header: https://fair.io. Hope this is clearer!
>you need a huge amount of capital to start and you are regulated in a way to prevent fast growth. These 2 things pretty much rule out the 'standard' way of doing startups.

Mondo have raised 2 million pounds and "are looking to raise around £15-20 million before its full launch" so not that much more than many startups. Not sure about regulation preventing fast growth. I guess it slows it a bit.
IIRC from some resarch I did, a decent card provider will reject a magstripe transaction from a terminal with EMV capability if a card is known to also be EMV capable... At least, it could in theory.
he's calling malware that tries to steal banking credentials "Banker". He mentions it waits for legit banking apps to be run, then it pops up fake phishing dialog boxes over the top asking for credentials which it sends off to a server on the web.
(dev here) Hi, thanks for your comments. Python support is in the pipeline (currently at alpha stage). You can learn more about the status of our language support and ways to contribute here:

https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph/.docs/config/toolcha...
Monitor PostgreSQL activity in real time – Introduction to pg_stat_activity
In addition to that, they have almost no accountability for breaking your checked bags or the stuff inside. One time we had an industrial plastic tool case get damaged. It appeared as though the fork from a forklift had rammed into it and punched completely through... damaging several pieces of equipment inside. This was not "normal wear and tear" like a scuff on the outside. This was right fucked up... but they still tried to screw us over. We needed this tool box to do our jobs and didn't have time to wait for them to put the claim all the way through and send us what they thought was a suitable replacement. We needed to buy a new one now and get reimbursed later. They fought us on that but finally gave in. But they did manage to screw us by not coving ANY of the broken equipment inside.
To be perfectly honest, though, the 'standard' way of doing startups is a terrible idea when you're talking about people's savings.
It's more a series of interviews than a true documentary but, that quibble aside, it's a great window into a world that really hasn't been well documented otherwise because it happened outside of the main thread of the Internet's evolution. I see one (self-published) book on Amazon about BBSs but there really isn't much out there.
> First, what is a "user"? It is not defined anywhere in the license.

To the extent it is defined, it seems to be defined exclusively as internal users (including commonly-controlled organizations), which might have...interesting...implications if the licensee chose to use their (potentially modified) software in SaaS, rather than internally.
Yeah we thought about that, but is it reliable? We were really not sure we could always get rid of the cold start issue.
Ask HN: How to value small side projects? Can you sell them?
How can you value a side project or a small website you have built. I am working on a few things right now, and while I have the stupid and naive attitude of "fuck money", I can't really use my cellphone because creditors call it on a schedule I personally would consider "aggressive".

At some point I am going to have to sell something so that I can afford to keep working on what I want. I am not talking about a million dollar exit or some angel round. I am talking about getting a project or piece of software or website to the point where I can sell it, and how to attach or appraise a rational value to it.

I am looking to build something (or possibly if I can bear it sell something I have already built) for ~$1000 - ~$10k. Are these kinds of sales possible or likely?

* where could you list something like this?

* does it have to have users, or just be functional software?

* how could you sell something, if you had to do it, and where would you list it?
Stack Safety for Free [pdf]
In the security industry, the typical term for malware that primarily intends to steal credit card data and bank accounts is a "banking trojan", or "banker" for short.
It's stunning how bad many card issuing systems are (as noted in the post, AmEx et al). When I was in college all of the administrative buildings, student common areas as well as many of the student housing areas were controlled by magstripe. Meals were also kept track of by card.

I knew from people losing their cards which continued working some places but not others there was a relationship in the issuing. I got a reader, decoded the card (zeropadded student ID, issue number, and XOR checksum).

I found other places to find the student ID number, and could enumerate a few issue numbers. I built this spoofer: http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Magstripe-Emulator/
Then I could get into my friend's apartments (as a POC with their permission of course).

I disclosed and got a thank you (I built a good relationship with my IT dept over the years), but never figured out if they fixed it.
> The code is functional but messy, your OS detection could use a little fine tuning too.

Feel free to submit a pull request if you can improve OS detection, it certainly is primitive.

> But the real problem is that there's more instances within your script of code getting pulled from the internet with certificate checking disabled

I have just pushed a commit with a better approach.
Super-charging React with ImmutableJS
The fluency of today's world
There's always the SQLite-esque approach in the form of OFX and related formats.
As I understand it, this is not "somewhat unpleasant" or something a pedant would notice, but absolutely horrible.

Most elementary students would notice and dislike kerning like this https://static.flickr.com/55/134612871_dd482da6a2_o.gif .
This is pretty handy. Thanks.
Am I the only one getting a bit fatigued by all of this now? I think when we hit containers I just got a bit tired of going even further down the rabbit hole. Yes I might get a little more performance or stability or whatever from a container vs a full VM or a unikernel vs a container but it just gets more frustrating to manage in my experience. Anybody else feel the same?

When I just had a full VM with a full stack running on some hypervisor I could treat it just like a physical machine so management tools worked pretty much the same (with a few little exceptions). When containers came into the mix it just hit me with so much more work to admin. Unikernels seem like a lot of work too.

Am I alone in thinking this??
Similar, and we specifically took pdfork into account by trying to make sure interface-compatible userspace wrappers for pdfork could exist using CLONE_FD. (For instance, we made poll() on a CLONE_FD file descriptor set POLLHUP in addition to POLLIN, since poll() on a pdfork file descriptor sets POLLHUP.)

However, last I looked at pdfork, it didn't solve the problems we needed it to:

1) Most critically, processes created with pdfork still get picked up by standard waitpid/wait4 calls when they exit, which means you can't separate them from a global wait loop in the parent process. That makes it impossible to handle the child process from within a library without interfering with the parent process at all. (Similar to the problem that a process can only have a single process-wide SIGCHLD handler; those two problems together motivated the creation of CLONE_FD in the first place.)

2) It requires special calls like pdwait4 rather than just a simple read.

3) It defaults to sending SIGKILL when closing the fd, and with capsicum enabled it only allows that mode.

4) pdwait4 didn't actually exist in a functional form yet, so to work with current BSD you'd have to call pdgetpid and wait4 instead. (Which you can't do in Capsicum mode, or from a process other than the parent process.) This may have been fixed since the last time we looked at it, though.

5) pdfork only provides the semantics of fork, rather than the full semantics of clone.

All that said, I'm a big fan of Capsicum and the way it rethinks core APIs and resources to function around file descriptor handles.
I have accounts at Chase, Citi, Capital One and a small credit union. All of them support exchanging of statements through OFX.

I wrote a small Python script around ofxclient[0] which downloads daily statements from all of these accounts and then merges them into a GNU Ledger-formatted text file. I was inspired to do this when GNU Ledger was on the front page here about a month ago[1]. I keep the ledger itself version controlled using git. It's been working great -- the script not only downloads the statements but also identifies certain keywords in the payee name and attributes those against the matched expense account.

[0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ofxclient/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510394
Deconstructing a Scala feature: Generalized type constraints (without a PhD)
I have no opinion on this particular case, but I strongly disagree with the broader point you're making (which seems to be that commerce exists outside of the realm of ethics and that 'anything goes').

If a shopkeeper is distracted, you should not be able to steal candy bars with a clear conscience, even if you believe the price of those candy bars to be unethical.

Dealing with unethical people does not relieve you of your duty to behave unethically. And commerce is just another facet of social interaction.
Good thing docker is totally committed to delivering a non-shitty experience for doing build-in-builds or at least chained minimal builds! Right?!
Looks like a great paper. Going to read it closer tonight.

But where's the code?
Blue Origin’s New Shepard Space Vehicle Historic Rocket Landing
Oh this definitely happened. Of course it did! I had an econ professor that gleefully talked about how he'd hire female architects to get lower wages / better quality at the same wage.
Except for the whole 'matching trajectory' bit.
This is super cool and fast, I'm impressed. Thought I would note, it looks like the catch rates of all the pokemon all incorrectly display 0%.
Dell Promised Security … Then Delivered a Huge Security Hole
Just know that Nintendo already shutdown a lot of Pokédex apps just like yours (a friend of mine was the main dev for one of them).

I don't agree with them, but I guess it would be better for you (and the project) if you couldn't be traced back.
I agree. I've tweeted @Simple to see if they want to add anything to this thread. Although for a while now, their blog and Twitter feed have been filled with more "goal" posts/tweets than feature related things. And like others have said, their plans for an official API are probably non-existent.
As an avid golfer may I say that this was exactly what I was looking for when coming to the comments. Thanks for posting these resources.
You can download daily statements using a client like ofxclient[0] and then transform them into a ledger appropriate for GNU ledger. From there you can pretty much extract and export whatever it is you'd like to know.

[0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ofxclient/
All my code is position independent and my compiler only makes position idependent code.
My OS is ring-zero-only. Just in time compilers do not need a linker in a single address space -- they just insert the address of the function call.
Despite the downvotes, this is actually a decent hypothesis, even if tinfoil-hatty.
Serverless = using someone elses servers?
Houses with big lawns in the SF Bay Area. (Per capita.)

I mean, land is a finite resource, and what with population growth that's happened in heat-riddled places like Phoenix, I think the overall per capita quality-adjusted land ownership has declined.

This is more of an orthogonal population matter, though.
Pretty cool! One suggestion: On phones, make the search accessible from your popout menu. That way I don't have to scroll waaaay up to get to it.
Hmmm.... It broke when I was asked for a good cheap smoothie on the town. Now I feel alone again.
You're giving an explanation as to why it could be happening.

But you're not providing any factual information to support the allegation that it actually is happening.
Blue Origin's rocket is returning from a bit above 300,000ft and roughly zero speed. Falcon 9's first stage is returning from a similar altitude but at mach 6.

That adds a lot of difficulty just in terms of getting rid of that speed without destroying your hardware. Plus you need to aim from a lot farther away. The Falcon 9 includes hypersonic grid fins to steer towards the landing site, for example. (Failure of these due to running out of hydraulic fluid is what caused the first landing attempt crash.)

Just getting to that state requires a lot more of the rocket as well. If getting to that altitude is the equivalent of going mach 3, then the Falcon 9 first stage is putting in the equivalent of mach 9, so that's 9x more delta-v, which means the rocket needs to carry vastly more fuel and be vastly lighter.

All in all, the Falcon 9-R is trying to optimize for two things at once, which is always difficult. Landing a rocket vertically is not that difficult. Landing a rocket vertically while having that exact same rocket also be useful as the first stage of an orbital launcher is way harder. It's a bit like building a flying car: there are good cars, and good airplanes, but trying to build a machine that's good at both is far more difficult. Hopefully SpaceX's effort works out better than flying cars have.
Refactor JavaScript Application to Use Microservices with Backbone and Marionette
I'm thinking that for my smallish deployment setup I'm just going to do things the tried and true way for a while until the practices surrounding containers stabilize a bit and I don't feel like I would be playing catchup every week. The amount of time I would have to spend setting this stuff up is huge compared to the benefit. It's all still fascinating though to keep up with from an observer's standpoint.
I dev Droid and iOS natively, and am playing with instant run now. iOS simulator still faster than Instant Run on a real sized project. Instant Run just helps to bring more parity, but is still not there yet.
The two figures illustrate two different ways to cover an equilateral triangle with sides slightly larger than n with n^2+2 unit size equilateral triangles. Other than that, there is no link between the two.

As mathematics papers go, this is easy to comprehend (incredibly so) but I can see that people who aren't used to the culture in mathematical literature of leaving out the obvious (http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/151782/when-is-somet...) and the trivial (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triviality_(mathematics)#Tri...)
You still make the false claim that "The Fair Source License works just like an open-source license when the usage is below the Use Limitation."

Fair Source never works like an Open Source license. It works like (because it is) a source-available proprietary license which allows local (but not redistributed) modifications. Below the use limitation, it is also a free-of-cost license. But it never works like an Open Source license, and it doesn't even work more like an Open Source license below the Use Limitation.
I'm surprised the above was downvoted.

Seems to me it can be paraphrased as 'whatever is going on with the climate, a big current issue is that our current level of oil consumption is geopolitically destructive and unsustainable; thus, the conclusion remains that we do need to reduce oil consumption, and the best way to do that is to cut down on the wasteful and destructive overuse of automobiles'.

Regardless of one's opinion regarding the relative importance of climate versus geopolitics, I think it's a reasonable argument and the prescribed action is a good idea either way.
It is indeed under-researched, so it should be researched. The fact that nobody is working on it at all is insane.
Reading it right to left you might pronounce it "bilarabia" which means "in arabic". Even though I can't recall any at the moment, I know I've seen numerous logos with dual meanings like that.
The Outcome Mind Trap – A Startup Business Lesson from the Battlefield
I'm not sure if I discovered it the same way as researchers did, but when I was in college I used to play a lot of Beerpong. I wasn't very good for my first year and a half so I went home and made a new year's resolution to "Be Better at Beerpong" (yes... this is a true story).

For purists, I guess I'm playing beirut where you toss the ball into the cup, not beerpong which you play with actual paddles.

After that I broke things down.

1) You can only hit one cup at a time, so you need to pick a cup. Just aiming at the mass is virtually assuring a lower percentage of made shots.

2) Reduce moving parts. It's a ping pong ball, you don't need to move your whole body. The shot should be a motion of only the forearm.

3) Imagine the dotted arc that goes from right inside the back rim of the cup you're aiming, across the table, and through the ball you're holding.

4) Toss the ball along that arc.

It worked incredibly well. I'd win money and games nearly constantly and quickly became the best of my friends. I still wreck them every year or so when we're together and in the mood to play.

Since then, I've dropped most of the steps. Basically I just aim for a cup, and I can hit it. I can do it with both the right and left hand. And usually all I have to do is focus right on that spot below the back rim of the cup I want to focus. If I focus for too long I'll probably mess up, but if I just look at it for a moment and toss the ball in, it works like a charm.

Sounds very similar to what they're saying in this article about focusing in the milliseconds beforehand. And as you continue to obtain quality results from your process it gets easier and easier.

I mean, shit, the choices are... make it or don't make it. Seems like the choice is clear ;-).

And that's my anecdote for how I approached a drinking game my friends kept beating me at and became dominant at, that very much reminds me of the way shooting a free throw is described in this article.
Fermat's Library is not only for math, it has a few CS papers already, for instance http://fermatslibrary.com/s/bitcoin. If there is a particular paper you would like to be annotated, you can suggest it and maybe you'll get lucky :)
Nope still going to some proxy site.
I am an OSI board director. Generally the OSI does not comment on licenses that have not been submitted for approval. FWIW, I reviewed the license and I agree that it is clearly inconsistent with the Open Source Definition (and with generally accepted notions of what free software and open source licenses are).
Try going to the left ;) as rflrob has said, it will spook you into returning but do not heed the warning!

EDIT: There are even more coins to the left!
This is how Samsung Pay works, right?
edit: And LoopPay which I guess Samsung acquired.
Well, there goes the last reason to hold on to my Simple account. The API is what I was hoping for.
Marshall and Eric McLuhan's Laws of media address the technological impact of the latin letter, and how it was extended to other technology.
http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp...

Marshall McLuhan's book The Gutenberg Galaxy is a longer approach to specific conversation around how latin characters led to the printing press which transformed society into the industrial age:

http://www.amazon.com/Gutenberg-Galaxy-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/1...
The point is that there's a serious opportunity cost. By prioritizing customer service (to some degree), airlines can't charge sell space to businesses moving cargo for a higher margin.

The coffee shop argument doesn't really work because you can't keep scaling it. At a certain point people want space for books. But given that there's a space shortage on international flights, there's probably room for airlines to make more money by charging for freight instead of taking your luggage.
have no fears brother -- i also got stopped at a cheap smoothie out on the town.
Depends on your use case and what language you are currently using. We are using nodejs and have built our own collection of libraries: https://github.com/MitocGroup/deep-framework

And here is an example: https://github.com/MitocGroup/deep-microservices-todo-app

Based on our experience, currently AWS Lambda is amazing for data / content / asset management use cases. Cold start is a known issue, which I hope AWS will solve sooner rather than later, because a lot of customers are complaining about it ;)
Been having fun playing with Lambda to power various Amazon Echo skills[1]. Definitely easier than having to deploy with something like Elastic Beanstalk, or even App Engine.

We're also using this at mParticle Inc. to allow anybody to add themselves as an integration[2]. The point being that Lambda is a super-easy way to write _some_ server logic, even if it only serves as a proxy to something more complex.

[1] https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-sk...

[2] https://github.com/mParticle/mparticle-sdk-java
From the article:

> Even core modules in the Linux kernel don't apply to every installation. Things like USB drivers are useless in a virtualised "cloud" environment, but are still included in the kernel.

You don't have to compile them in, or load them as modules, if you don't want. Or am I confused about what they're trying to say?

I've been using Linux for long enough to recall when you had to recompile your kernel in order to add device drivers...