skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What level of pen smoothness does a keyboard correspond to?
I bought the first one and it was brilliant. I've known Daf (the author) for a few years now, he's also the author of the amazing Burp Suite[1] - if you're a developer do try the free version then consider getting the pro suite, which has a stupid volume of features for a relatively small amount of money.

WAHH should be standard reading for anyone that wants to learn about Web Application attacks. I'd also highly recommend the Shellcoder's Handbook (although that could do with an update too).

I will definitely be buying both the 2nd edition of WAHH and the try it bits too when it comes out.

[1] - http://www.portswigger.net/
You can't force people to fill bids and asks at pre-freeze prices, as that would just lead to participants being horribly arbitraged against (and even if Mt. Gox were the only way of trading Btc for USD, it would still be a terrible idea); so the only other option is to suspend trading. Well, now what? Btc will still be traded; the market price will still move; but you won't be able to see it happening on Mt. Gox anymore. The effect would be to harm the liquidity of holders of Mt. Gox accounts, not to reduce volatility; and in fact, by reducing volume, volatility would likely increase. The site would lose its business in a few days or hours.

My theory of what could rapidly reduce volatility in Bitcoin: liquid markets in futures and vanilla options. It's an easy way of generating more volume. It provides price stability to businesses accepting Bitcoin as payment. Empirical evidence exists that the more options purchased by hedgers, the less volatility exists in the underlying: http://www.terry.uga.edu/finance/docs/pearson.pdf.
Old and proven is the new new thing
> there are already competing exchanges being set up on 4
> more continents that will allow liquidity between bitcoin
> and other currencies

Anyone got a cite listing the four countries?
What exactly is the "this" you are referring to? This article is pretty much an official acknowledgment that a problem exists and needs an investment of developer resources. The situation won't get better until/unless stakeholders make an investment of resources. Clearly someone is going to have to pay for a lot of hours of time spent by developers who are competent to work on arm arch stuff in a "global" way. I'm not too familiar with the details of the various multi-stakeholder alliances and how they get their funding and decide who to hire to do what, but it sounds like the Linux Foundation (or whoever) needs to support a few more developers with a job description more focused on the kernel itself rather than just relying on the companies contributing what they did to get specific devices ready for shipping.
Are you talking about Scott Forstall?

Despite having 0 tweets, he has 40K twitter followers:
http://twitter.com/#!/forstall/followers

It should be possible to determine from that information that he has influence.
My reason for using vi/vim is that it's the lowest common denominator text editor. You'll find it by default on most any Linux or BSD system.
> In my opinion, if you want to get good search engine results just provide good content

And then other sites rip off your good content, and then Google notes a bunch of sites have the same content, and they penalize your site for the duplication.
|Looking for a job though already feels like being disloyal.

Not to be offensive, but you're brainwashed. You should be thinking about yourself. Why are you sacrificing your career, happiness, quality of life, and opportunities to a company that sounds like they're using/abusing you--low pay, no equity, bad work environment.

If they're so dependent on you, then you should be compensated accordingly. Your value to the company and your pay are directly related.
You can include a transaction bounty (traditionally 0.01 BTC) with your payment which the verifiers receive if they're the first to verify your payment. Effectively, this puts your transaction at the top of the priority queue. When you're connected to a healthy number of peers, this can bring down the verification time down to seconds.

Another approach is to have "trusted sources" which are Bitcoin banks/ewallets. If your customer is using a Bitcoin bank like eWallet to send a payment, you can pretty much assume that the transaction is valid based on the source, without verification.

Either way, this is merely a short term problem. As more Bitcoin infrastructure springs up (more banks, more verification hubs, more incentive on transaction fees rather than mining, when mining gets too expensive) then these problems will be organically mitigated. If the Bitcoin infrastructure were to remain the way it is now forever, it won't scale for many other reasons (like requiring peers' wallets to store significant transaction history that could grow at the rate of gigabytes per hour with "real world" volume).
Sounds great - I've got a national parks web site that I'm planning to re-launch in the near future, it would make a great feature to add.

What I don't have is any knowledge of is the costs of the imaging hardware you'd need - it would have to be fairly ruggedized to deal with the trail dust or if the backpacker fell. I don't know if consumer-grade video cameras that mountain bikers use would be good enough.

I'd start with the most heavily hiked trails first, South Kaibab and Bright Angel in the Grand Canyon, Half Dome in Yosemite, South Rim in Big Bend, and so on.

Luckily myself and a lot of my friends are trail runners, so I could probably get a few of them to do video trips in exchange for airfare :)
There are interdisciplinary PhD programs that are now gaining popularity. For example, I work on protein structure prediction in my graduate program, which involves lots of programming, robotics algorithms, machine learning, HPC, etc. as well as biochemistry, statistical thermodynamics, and molecular biology. If I were to drop out right now, I could find employment as anything from a software developer to DNA sequencing technician.
IRobot Teams with Google; Tablets to Ignite A New Breed of Robots
Every single story about facebook has a post like this, and I'm so tired of reading them.

First of all, why would you even consider competing with Facebook? You do realize that outside of the valley, there are companies not packed to the gills with ruthless nerd geniuses that would be much, much easier to disrupt? Facebook isn't even ossified like Google or Microsoft. They'd just reimplement your killer feature in one of their hackathons.

P2P social network won't work because it's way too hard to do any analysis on the data of the system as a whole. How would you implement a newsfeed? It would be a nightmare.

Regarding having two categories of friends, it's already doable with friends lists. You can do exactly what you are saying with a friends list for acquaintances/grannies/whatever. Or you could just not accept so many friend requests.
There has been talk of such a meeting for quite a while and I think the founders realize the need for this. However, like most things at this company, its actual realization is long in the indefinite future.
> I would refer to that as a "liberal democracy".

It would be nice if everyone adhered to the rule you are describing but that simply isn't what happens in the real world.

In acutal usage the unadorned term 'democracy' almost always should be interpreted to mean 'representative government with constitutional protections for individual rights'. Obviously the 'representative' part comes in all sorts of flavors as well as the 'individual rights' part. Rarely does anyone using the naked term 'democracy' really mean 'direct majority rule with no minority rights'.
I've tried hard to love vim, but as a programmer's editor, for C++, it's just awful.

Now, many of the problems are because C++ is awful (hard to parse, for indenting / formatting), and C++ compilers are awful (20 page error messages).

In particular, I tried half a dozen packages and none could tame C++ template error messages, while xcode, visual studio and cde in eclipse all mastered this years ago. A shame.
Low salary and benefits may be acceptable at an early stage, but there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't get any equity at this point. Personally, I say hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Start looking for a new job before you need one. It'll be much better than living on unemployment.
> Automated cars that can be remotely controlled by the government

Google automated cars + OnStar-Law Enforcement partnership.

> - Eye-based identification everywhere

Google already uses it in their datacenters. It's hard to say if it will catch on, but it's not unreasonable to expect its widespread use in, say, 2030/2040.
Ask HN: Open source HR management platform
Does anyone know of any open source packages that allow new recruits to create profiles and then receive further instructions? Thanks!
دردشة عمانية شات عماني في الساحة العمانية ساحة العرب
Dvorak has actually been shown to really be no better than QWERTY - http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/3
The McGurk Effect - An Illusion you will never overcome.
Baby products value for the dollar
An honest attempt to improve the umbrella, perhaps, but it looks both ridiculous and claustrophobic. (edit: Why do we describe small spaces as claustrophobic rather than claustrophobia-inducing? We don't describe spiders as arachnophobic or wide open spaces as agoraphobic, do we?)

There must be a better solution to umbrellas getting inverted. Why do they even have to bend that way?
The Future is in the Cloud
Adding to that, I think that the NET ("No Electronic Theft") Act made it so that trading in copyright infringing works could be considered 'commercial' in some circumstances, though I don't remember the details offhand. This would go hand in hand with point #1.
Sobering that the U.S. only barely qualifies as a "full democracy".

Also, how the hell did North Korea score 1.08? What do you have to do to score a zero?
No equity. Are you fucking kidding? Why exactly are you taking substandard comp then?

Stop being a sucker. Personally, I'd tell the owners 10% or two weeks, their choice. Be willing to be negotiated down to maybe 3%. If they can't do that, then they can find a new lead dev.

And get some health insurance. I just broke my ankle (well, not really -- I popped my foot out of the ankle socket, severed 2 ligaments, tore a 3rd ligament, broke two bones, have $1k of titanium holding stuff together while it heals). The bill is $50K and counting with tons of physical therapy and another surgery to come. I'd seriously question any employer that can't at least buy minimal coverage for employees. Sometimes shit happens out of the blue -- I at least did this snowboarding, but my brother did something similar slipping in a parking lot -- and you'll have a medical problem that requires spending a lot of money. Make sure this doesn't ruin you, either financially, or physically by not getting the care you need when you need it.

edit: start here http://yclist.com/ I bet a ton of those companies need a full stack web dev.
Umbrellas have been in use for thousands of years. Until we get head-mounted lasers that vapourise every incoming raindrop (probably not a great idea in itself) we're pretty much stuck with 'em.
they likely won't feel the slightest bit disloyal to you when the funding runs low/out. If they've hired other people on after you at a higher rate and haven't adjusted your salary, they're already being 'disloyal'. If they can afford multiple other developers, they can get you up to the median salary level.

I'm too cynical about this - get your issues on the table, and either get something (more money, bonus/profit-sharing, equity) or get out.
Wasn't the movie set in 2050 or so? IIRC Hal Finney reviewed it at the time as plausible for the next few decades but ridiculously conservative for 50 years. I thought that was about right. (I didn't expect to see self-driving cars quite so soon.)
What is a web framework (typically) but a router, some sort of MVC scheme and other various libraries?

Hopefully it's modular, then I would just use whatever components I wanted and leave the rest.
Ah, I'm relieved. I found it hard to imagine that Dr. Apostol would have misspelled Paul Erdös' surname (as in the webpage), but it's correct in the PDF.
Move it into the immediate future.

Equity is something you want, and the founders aren't going to give it to you unless you make it clear that this is important.

I don't know what your relationship is with the founders, so your lack of equity could be simply due to inexperience at the time you were hired. That's not to say you aren't being taken advantage of, but it's easier to negotiate if you don't start from an adversarial position.
I'm pretty sure Puppet uses Fabric for its fundamental foundational layer.

Hmm, doesn't look like it:

$ git clone https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet
$ cd puppet
$ grep -r 'fabric' *; echo $?
1

EDIT: Puppet is written in Ruby.
You must have read different accounts than I have. Yes, they all say that it's difficult to deal with the schedule mismatch. But then they also say that it's also difficult because they are soul-crushingly tired all the time.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464142 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652650
I really like the idea, and would definitely be interested, but to be honest, I probably wouldn't be willing to pay. Maybe an ad supported version, and you can pay to remove the ads or something? It would be nice to be able to take a quick glance at a trail, and see what it looks like.

It does look like google has started to do this:

http://blog.cheaptents.com/street-view-google-sherpa-cam/
It's not about interest in the product, it's about interest in the job.
I'm only aware of a handful of senators (maybe the macaca jackass, or perhaps santorum) that have been in any way hurt by not knowing how the internet works. I wish they were so incentivized, but they seem to be following the incentives they have.
I'm not sure Facebook thought that in 2004. Besides, it's all relative. Some people reading this will think, "Gym? Bring it on!!" Obviously, a successful path would somehow diverge from previous failures.

Also, I think the article is more about addiction to HN and not so much startup advice.
Yes, it has people with degrees, but no, it does not have many rich people. It has a few, and if they buy not-too-expensive houses and seem Pittsburghite-friendly, they are venerated. It did well in the recession because its economy is based on education and healthcare; this does not make it particularly good for startups.

Yes, it compares well to other cities of its size startup-wise, but we're comparing it to SV, which is not of its size, so nevermind.

Yes, there do exist nice restaurants, but we're comparing it to the Bay Area, and the mean, median, and top 10% quality of Bay Area restaurants is ridiculously high, so nevermind.

Pittsburgh's weather is worse than Seattle's. Yes, it is #2 to Seattle's #1 on the country's least-sunny list, but in Seattle, it just rains a lot, and whether or not it's raining, the air is palatable. In Pittsburgh, it's either freezing your nose off or making your eyes water with humidity.

The thing about being morally opposed to rich people is an instance of an observation I've heard from multiple people other than myself: Pittsburgh's message seems to be, stay here and be one of us, and don't think you can be any better than us, because we don't think that's possible, and in fact find the idea offensive.

Which is not exactly a startup-ish sentiment.
One odd note: "equity ... promised to me 'as soon as we are profitable'". Early employees are typically given large amounts of equity in lieu of a market salary and benefits --- because the company hasn't got the money to pay market rates yet. There's ordinarily no need to wait for profitability, or even for funds to be available (beyond what's required to pay for the legal paperwork). And even without fully worked up contracts, it's still possible to at least have a written arrangement of how equity will be divided and up as and when things are formalized.

So, if you're getting below-market rates and no equity, well... at the very least, that's unusual. If you can't get straight answers about why it's unusual, that could just be a sign of general cluelessness --- but management being that clueless doesn't bode well for the future of the business.
Forgive the noob question, but I would be curious what people use to deploy WSGI applications in the wild. Is apache+daemonized mod_wsgi (possibly running behind nginx) a typical solution? The article mentions gunicorn, which I am likely going to give a try to see how it performs.
I'm not sure it's 'dangerous,' unless you're seeing through the eyes of a government, credit card company, or financial middle-man. Bitcoin empowers people, and removes companies or governments out of simple value transfers.

It's as though someone has created another Napster, except everyone's a 'node' and music isn't transmitted, 'wealth' is. Bitcoin is only as revolutionary or 'dangerous' as you want it to be.

HN folks may be interested in some of the discussions going on in Quora: http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin
> https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Currency_exchange

Additionally, glbse I believe will be open sourcing their server (the client is already open).
Looking at the difference between the Microsoft Kinnect and the Apple iPad demos, the marvel is how Microsoft manages to make something really amazing both boring and uncool, while Apple spends 15 seconds and inspires. Fortunately, the Kinnect is a great enough device people seem to have discovered it in spite of their marketing.

Don't miss the "What's around the corner" video.
This is also true for middle income students. I qualified for $1,000 of aid at my local state school, and enough aid at a high caliber liberal arts school to make the difference on the order of hundreds, not thousands of dollars.

I went with the liberal arts school, and haven't been disappointed. I'll have debt, but I've have a job lined up to pay it off.
I think the article has it backwards. The movie used technology that was being developed and took it to a logical conclusion.
Telescopictext
What was the point of the Dick story?

Movie adaptations of science fiction short stories often have a way of missing the point. Sometimes it's an improvement, sometimes it isn't.

The bit about Minority Report that I didn't like (and I think this point was made by somebody else at the time but I can't remember who it was) is as follows: the movie starts off by saying "Let's suppose that there's some psychic system that allows us to predict crimes before they occur!" "Gee okay movie" I say, "that sounds pretty implausible but I'll go along with it". "And then" says the movie "the big twist at the end is.... sometimes it doesn't work!"

It feels like a cheap sort of ending because, well, I never would have thought it could work until the logic of the story demanded it. It feels like the movie is trying to make some kind of point about free will, but it's not only keeping its thumb on the scale, it's also keeping its other thumb on the other side of the scale, making the discussion pointless. Free will is nonexistent, it says, because of this hypothetical device which could never exist in the real world. Except, oh wait, the device doesn't work because there's free will. The end.
Fundamentally, you first need to ask yourself a few questions

* Do you have faith in the ability of the CEO and CTO to execute on all the things you don't have visibility into?

* What is your best alternative to this job? I'd put your resume out there and see what bites you get.

* What is preventing you from bringing these issues up with the management directly, vs. posting on HN?

Not having equity NOW is a big red flag, as are the communication issues with the team. Substandard salary and health care is forgivable in certain stages of a company, but only if you have substantial equity.

I think based on your answers to the above, you'll know what you want to do. If you do decide to stay, you should make it a positive negotiation with your management about wanting more visibility into the business side (so you can contribute more), and to get at least the equity part resolved now.

IMO with no other data, if you live in the Bay Area or are willing to relocate, your best bet is probably to find a new job with a winning team. Assuming this was an early career move for you (full stack involvement with a company which may or may not be doomed), it's probably worth taking a role in a well-run engineering organization and business for a while to see how THAT works (Palantir, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Quora, ... even pockets at Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.), and maybe then try to get a cofounder or full early tech hire (with equity, etc.) at a funded startup. You should be able to save quite a bit of money while working for one of the larger companies, enough to give you more flexibility with later jobs. You might also decide that you'd rather do your own startup, in which case you could consider something like Y Combinator.
> "Waiting until we're profitable" is merely bullshit, just note :)

This is true. There is a non-bullshit way of telling someone they'll get their reward 'as soon as we are profitable'; it's called equity. But if they aren't giving the OP equity, it's bullshit.
I agree that math in high-school should emphasize more on the creative part. It is harder, but for those students interested in it, showing to them what math is really all about seems to be the only way to keep them motivated. And math competitions help a lot in that regard, at least in my country (Germany).
a) That number comes from Flurry, the leading iPhone analytics company. For further context on the history of that number (with more accurate renditions and exactly what was last stated to me from Flurry), please read this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/dvzcr/remember_that_s...

b) I am not even certain how I would count the proposed flawed number: I track unique devices by UDID that see my server, and yes: 18.7 million people is an easy number to claim are jailbroken. 1.5 million of these devices use Cydia every day, and 10 million of them every month (edit| damn it: I said "week" here at first; 5 million per week).

Seriously: jailbreaking is popular, and 10% seems like a "non-issue" number when you go around and start asking random people "have you jailbroken your device or know people who do?".

So far, my favorite story of this is of a cab driver I had while going to a conference in Vegas. She had an iPhone, and was clearly very very non-technical. When asked if she had jailbroken her phone, she didn't even know what that /meant/, and when I explained to her that I had developed "Cydia", she hadn't heard of it.

However, later in the conversation, she started mentioning how much she hated AT&T, and was glad she was using T-Mobile, at which point I realized that all this time I had not been asking users enough questions. I asked her if she was, in fact, using T-Mobile on her iPhone, and then answer was "yes": she had bought her phone from an unlock parlor.

After a few more questions like "do you have a brown icon on your phone that looks somewhat like the App Store?", I realized that she in fact had a jailbroken/unlocked iPhone with Cydia installed on it (and she had even used it a couple times), but was simply not technical enough to recognize that state using any of the terms that I normally have access to while conversing.
I've been tooling around with emacs, having plopped down vimpulse and viper on it. I get slime for clojure, the power of elisp for modifications and so on, as well as my preferred editing style, which is modal. It's not for everyone, but it works for me. It helps that my life isn't terribly busy, and I enjoy taking the time to make everything work together. Of course, caps rebinding is a must for either.

It's been fun, either way. Time will tell if it ends up being practical.