skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there is no much sense indeed to use node right now as a complete backend solution. There are much better ways to push out html and do db queries ;)

This being said, there are lots of use cases where node shines. In short - anything related to push or massive number of connections.

So if you are building a chat server it doesn't make much sense to write it in rails or django as your server will die as soon as it gets even slightly popular; and fixing it at that stage will not be tuning this or that. you will have to rewrite it. probably in node.js ;)
I've seen pie charts with the computing power of several mining pools and the total. I believe you can find the IP of a miner that has a lot of computing power.
I agree with Jon. Dave McClure reminds me of Albert Passingham, the son of a single mom who helped encourage women to stand up for equal pay. The role of Albert was depicted in the film Made in Dagenham http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371155/
The second comment there (and the people agreeing with it) are the real problem. They actually think things are more secure if nobody talks about them being insecure. They're more worried about troublesome security issues than the safety of their own information.

So I'm going to solve their problems: If it ever comes to a point that internet services are too hard to use because of the necessary security measures, I will happily create a low-security site of the same type. You can give me your info and money and I will happily hold it on my insecure site so that it's easy for you (and everyone else) to access.

Problem solved.
... that has been consistently lead of the pack in terms of productivity and simplicity.

How can you know this?
>Banks are regulated by law and have the funds insured by FDIC.

And following the train of logic, what prevents you from regulating a bitcoin bank?

Crypto-currency is kind of like cash. Yes, you're a fool to try and run an entire economy with cash, but that doesn't mean it should disappear!
Ironic that the site is barely usable and lags like crazy on the latest Opera on a quadcore machine with 8 gigs of RAM. If this is evolution, I prefer to opt out.
{tl;dr} Improve your on-boarding experience (interactive tutorial game) and improve your help tools (in-game community support/commentary, discussion area, etc). Study what companies like Zynga are doing in the online game space and figure out how one of any of their more complicated games get so addicting. {/tl;dr}

I started looking at the Developer Channel videos about the sim and I gotta say you weren't lying about the steep learning curve! sigh If I were in your shoes, I'd be out looking for money to secure a badass UX designer. A site like this REALLY needs an experience that immerses the player into the game and GRADUALLY shows them the ropes. This sort of thing is very difficult to get right because there are so many moving parts. The "progressive reveal" is a great tool a designer will use to help the user jump on easily without getting "fatigued".

I really think this is the sort of product which could do well with the very hardcore sports fans, but you'd have to create some support to get them over that initial hurdle. An ideal solution would be a tutorial game which walks the user through the features and common strategies.

I'd try to develop a community around it and let users collaborate on their experiences and strategies. Promote improving your game with things like contests or tasks (max number of completions in a game, lowest salaried super bowl winning team, etc) and generate content that gets players thinking about how to win these challenges. If you have the budget, attempt to do some real-world tie-ins. Ex: Winner of this season's superbowl gets tickets to the real deal.

The driving factor of each promotion should ultimately get players "better" at the game. And providing tools to help each other improve the on-boarding experience (and bring their friends) will help your user base grow more easily. As much as I loathe Facebook platform games, many of the games that Zynga publishes there are very complicated and require some user training to get them up to speed. I'd study those games VERY CAREFULLY. Look for patterns and how they provide incentive to continue playing.
S3 websites made simple
For most of history 30-year-old women and off-color men were considered property.
What exactly do you mean by "let him use the name"? Do you have a trademark on the word "Baby"?
From Lulz to Global Espionage: The Age of the Cracker
Just wondering, have science and free markets ever resolved a tragedy of the commons situation (except for destroying the resource)? I think the "original" solution for the sheep and lawns was to erect fences, which seems to me to be a purely political solution. It doesn't seem so different from issuing CO2 shares.
> Colleges, being businesses, will naturally tend towards catering to their customers.

There was a time when people thought about universities as not being a business. Of course, in the present age everything is a business so I shouldn't be surprised at all.
I've lost count of how many times I have tried to do something in Rails which was trivial in every other framework I have ever worked with; struggled; gone to #rubyonrails or a mailing list and asked for advice; and had people tell me that I was "fighting the framework". I understand the benefit of not having to make every single decision from the ground up when you're getting started on a project, but sometimes I worry that working with rails is actually warping my thought patterns to fit its myopic vision of how web apps "should" work.

To phrase it differently: I feel comfortable with a framework or community forcing me to change how I achieve some higher-level goal. But when that convention prevents me from doing something, period, I start to worry.
Fabulous interview, very inspiring from someone who has been with the Mac platform for decades.
Chrome has almost this, it's called "Duplicate Tab". It does what you'd hope: gets you a new tab which is a copy of the old one including its history.

I agree, it would be better if you could combine that with "Open link in new tab", since that's how I always use it.
> Or security on all of these websites really sucks

Most plausible hypothesis
OTR supports this for pidgin, and has a proxy for other clients: http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/
> Or security on all of these websites really sucks

Ding ding ding, we have a winner. I know nothing about the specific cases here, but web security is generally a joke. Very, very few companies take it seriously and have a proper security methodology. Without this, it's like stealing candy from a baby... with no arms or legs.
Ask HN: Freelance designer looking for work
Hi guys,

I'm a freelance designer (masswerks.com) and am looking for remote work. I'm going to be heading into my junior year in college in the fall and have only secured 2-3 clients so far which isn't enough for the amount of rent I'm going to have to pay. I am constantly replying to ads on craigslist, krop, 37signals etc, but have only had a few leads.

Any help would be appreciated. I do the design & have a partner who handles development if needed (php, js, ajax etc).
Ask HN: What have been the biggest hits for websites that end in .co .me or .ly?
similarly, which TLDs do you think have the best future prospects?

(other than bit.ly & about.me, looking to hear some other solid examples. thanks)
Doubly so in the UK. Here, the police can presume without proof (and have done so) that any cash in excess of GBP1000 is the "proceeds of crime", and the onus is then upon the owner of the cash to prove that it isn't.
"professors work on such different areas that they can't even communicate"

Having worked in an Electrical Engineering department I'd say they had the same problem - it's not so much they couldn't communicate but the hyper specialization that academia encourages means that they just aren't interested in each others domains.
If I may

"the framework which I have found to consistently lead the pack in terms of productivity and simplicity"

(this is a true statement for me, personally, though I haven't done much on the Python front)
The "next facebook" has to come along eventually. I don't know how it'll distinguish itself from old-facebook, nor how it'll get traction to start with, but I'm sure it'll all seem obvious in retrospect. On the other hand the chances of any individual facebook-replacement taking off are fairly small.

If I were rich I'd set up a YC-equivalent in which I'd sling $30K at anyone who claims to be building the "next facebook". Think you can do it? Think you've got a new approach to the problem? Great, here's $30K, I'll take six percent, see you when you get your first hundred thousand users! One of 'em has to pay off eventually.
The point is that is a little bit harder and more traceable than having to manage files(all your money) yourself. There is at least a semblance of security and the bank/govt will make good if someone breaks into the bank and steals all the cash there.
Mainframe is not dead - Avis merger simplified by 40-year old IT platform
Would using SPDY help?
8 Qualities Entrepreneurs Seem to Have In Common
Opinionated software should actually change slower. Why? Because if conventions/defaults change quickly you break constantly or even worse, you quietly break. And of course since your unit tests are often written in the same language, you now have double the problems.

With less opinionated software, changes actually rarely break you since it typically requires opt-in/code change to pick up the new capabilities.
This is similar to something I experienced in trying to start a computer club at my university. I was the president of the club last year and I was trying to involve people with what, I guess, is classified as "hard CS". I wanted to get some students together to build some complex but formidable piece of software.

However, most of the feedback I received was that "it would be boring" or "too much work", even when I gave them the chance to pick the project. Instead of making something they would rather host LAN parties and such.

I however, wanted to dabble and give students of all experiences real exposure to CS. Not have an official gathering of video games, but maybe, to create a game and show what CS is like.
Note that Gmail automatically saves your draft as you type it. So while this will offer some protection for the message while it's in transit from Google's server to your destination, your unencrypted message draft will still be sent to Google's servers (and given Google Apps' distributed architecture, I'm not sure you can determine where that unencrypted copy could end up or when it'd be erased).

Perhaps a way around that could be to enhance a text input field so that only the final encrypted message is written to it, so Google's app does not see the plain text.
Comcast Is Bringing Skype to TV
Graphene meets silicon with conventional fab techniques
I would propose having a look at Treesaver http://treesaverjs.com/
I think you could get there with appliances that existed in the 60s or 70s, but in many cases you simply aren't going to duplicate functionality of a modern device any other way. An MP3 player needs an IC to decode the MP3, if nothing else.

Although this makes me wonder if an analog MP3 decoder made out of maintainable parts is possible. It would be awfully big, though.
The comparison with meth is closer than you think. As the other comment says many people Facebook more than they enjoy doing so. If you really charged them for it, to establish this value, they've vanish in a second.

Not that I'm saying it's inherently un-enjoyable, but FB develops the best system for FB, not for its users.

Not just that its all about ad delivery, but FB is famous for time wasting games that keep you coming back even when you aren't having any fun, using guilt trips. The value FB is creating is for advertisers, and only secondarily for the users being advertised to.

And it's not like FB created the social-networking value from nothing. They consolidated a lot on one page. Enabling chat and homepage in one package, etc, has value, but that's essentially it. The value of FB is email + chat + games + photos + single-package convenience - inconvenience.

The convenience of service consolidation is balanced by the inconvenience of FB being a monopoly (if something goes wrong you can always get another email provider, try getting another FB provider), the inconvenience of them sharing your personal info with developers, the lack of differentiation between family, friends, and acquaintances, etc.
It's pretty fluid and totally usable on my dual-core with 4Gb of RAM using Firefox 3.5.19 (actually, IceWeasel) under Debian.
So basically he is pleased that Harvard is turning into DeVry and not actually teaching CS.
I've tried that but it comes out feeling kind of weird. Also, most people don't have a pointing device that allows for horizontal scrolling. But it is totally workable.
The passive startup founder
I think this is a basically unfair description of the reality.

Lomborg is not some gun-ho republican right-wing that denies there is a problem. I is just in disagreement with what most people find to be the right reason.

He is as liberal as they come and he just happen to have a different take on what the problem is and how to solve it.

Calling him a troll is sorry to say this but absurdly unfair and shows more about you than him.
Thank you point me out. Definitely, I need to implement PBKDF2 (and add salt to password). I planning this, but weekend is too short and finally I just put SHA256 for key derivation.
But, until you describe, I do not recognize what the principal difference between hash and password based key derivation function, thanks.
"I'd far rather see people have one superficial course in a subject than know nothing about it at all."

This is called high school.
On Firefox (and now Chrome apparently) web developer plugin.

http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Tools -> Web Developer -> Resize
Until you plug into a compromised computer and type the password? Or does it include protection against that?
A brand gone wrong (and how HN & Reddit helped us)
No one is going to get past the idea that "college equals job" until it's not true anymore.

The conundrum we're in now didn't start with higher education catering to customers who wanted future wealth. It started with employers offering high-paying jobs realizing that higher education was a sign of all the qualities they wanted, so they started mandating it. Universities adjusted accordingly.

I'm pointing out the obvious, of course, but it's because I've seen a lot of people say things like "we need to get over this idea." That's not going to happen until there is a ready supply of high-paying jobs that don't require college degrees, or until someone finds a method for achieving a high-paying job that doesn't require college but is just as straightforward and successful.
This is one of the casualities of the Bitcoin monetary policy.

(Obviously I'm simplifying, your money gets pooled with others and deposits and withdrawls happen from a pool of money, you don't get your own money back when you withdraw, but lets compare two hypothetical banks with only 1 customer each)

A dollar denominated bank takes your money and invests it. They use it for mortgages, or they put it in bond markets or equity markets. They make a profit. Some of that profit gets returned to you as interest. They also provide for safe keeping of the money. With interest rates near zero, we forget this, but thats the real reason for a bank. If it was just a safe place to keep money, we'd be paying them.

A Bitcoin bank couldn't work. You give them some Bitcoins. They transfer them to dollars, make some investments. Now you go to withdraw some money and they have to sell the investments. Since Bitcoins are deflationary, they can not make you whole without incurring a loss. There is no money to be made in operating a Bitcoin bank and giving interest so long as the exchange rate of Bitcoins to the real world keeps going the way its going. Everyone should just sit on their bitcoins and hold them.

Now if you just want to make a safe deposit box for Bitcoins, that's would work. And you would have to pay a fee. But there is a difference between a bank account and a safe deposit box, and I don't see bank accounts working with bitcoin any more so than they would have worked based on tulip bulbs in the 80s.
Hey guys,

We sincerely appreciate the feedback. You guys are a tough crowd, but I'd expect nothing less from HN readers. RescueTime users are our bread and butter and that likely will not change. We need our users to power any model that we setup. We appreciate the comments and feedback - keep it coming. Thanks for reading this far down - for more info go to www.rescuetime.com/intros or blog.rescuetime.com.

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to email me at jason [at] rescuetime [dot] com.
The Economist Debates: Are we in a new tech bubble?
Please, create this game, I will buy it. You had me at the assless chaps gun.
It'll work as well in GCF as it will on Chrome in WinXP, which is to say, really well! There should not be a difference between the two.
Ask Amir Taaki About Bitcoin - Slashdot
Stockpickr: The Controversial Deal That Built A $10 Mil Company
If you use T-Mobile, data will work, but the fastest you'll get is EDGE (at the moment, that's not actually as bad as it sounds; presumably because the network is less congested than AT&T's, the speed's not too much slower in 'real world' use). [Source: I'm using an unlocked iPhone I bought in the UK on T-Mobile in California right now]
Man, Zoombinis, those were the days. A few friends and I all "played" it in our elementary days; however I am convinced that the lessons I learned there about binary numbers, problem solving, and spacial and mathematical efficiency stick with me to this day.

As was written in this article, many students apart from CS never fully understand number bases, which is unfortunate. I applaud this attempt and others (Zoombinis, etc) to teach some of these basic concepts at an early age.
Sounds to me like a BTC bank should be set up, with corresponding accounts. Instead of 'you' holds all your BTC, your BANK holds most of your BTC in a secured location, and you can make withdrawals to your account on demand.

Of course, this would effectively require an insurance corp also set up in such a fashion that integrity of the bank could be configured.

/hmm... maybe I should do this!
The Cable Internet Racket
"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

It's amusing that he used this image while criticizing other people's writing and intelligence. Does he mean that stupid people are sharp and smart people are flat? Or does he mean that smart people need some adjustments before they can perform at their best? I know what he was searching for, but if you're going to be a snob about writing, you'd better come prepared to express yourself gracefully.
Arty Bollocks Generator
Example please.

Rails is very opinionated about the things it handles and how it does them, but I've never had a problem rolling my own solutions and integrating them in. Not every model has to inherit from ActiveRecord, arbitrary code runs just fine in lib/ What's the problem?
How much design is too much design?
CS experience really differs. I worked at a company that had its Sales department outsourced to Canada, and its CS department in India. When I was working Sales (for the few months) the most common first-question I got was "Are you in India!?!", and the most common exclamation I heard was "Thank god!"

The worst CS experience was Paypal. Most frustrating experience in the world. In case you've been lucky enough, it goes something like this:

- Long wait
- Non-English speaker picks up
- Non-English speaker repeats a script to you
- You ask a question
- Non-English speaker tries to answer your question with a scripted answer that doesn't apply
- You can't understand, so you ask for clarification
- Non-English speaker repeats scripted answer that doesn't apply
- You phrase your question in a different way
- Non-English speaker repeats scripted answer that doesn't apply
- You rage, and ask for a manager or someone who speaks English
- Non-English speaker tells you no one is available
- You rage some more, and demand a manager
- Non-English speaker hangs up without answering your question.

If you have to call customer service, tell them you have a claim issue with someone overseas. They'll transfer you to a department that actually speaks English. :)
The Little Book on CoffeeScript
"Thank you. That was a lot of fun."
I am an adept computer user who is also a moron. It stands to reason that there are also very intelligent people who are not very good with computers. I believe this is what the author was getting at.
It's trivial. You can buy a SIM outside Retiro for like AR$5, or in a proper store for maybe AR$10. Might take a little more finagling to find a micro SIM, as most phones are still on the old SIM standard.

Here's what will kill you: getting data. Under what circumstances are you relocating to Bs As? If you are official, like you will get a DNI and everything, great, otherwise, this is the problem area. Most prepago plans in Bs As price data at piratical rates, like...a AR$20 card may include say 5MB data (on Claro). You open Google Maps and there goes your data allowance. I haven't found a provider with a decent deal on prepaid data.

There is, of course, normal postpaid accounts with more reasonable data allowances and pricing, but you can't get a postpaid account without a DNI, usually. Occasionally, you hear about someone wandering into a Personal or Movistar store and the clerk giving them a plan and saying its no problem, but that's rare.

Alternatively, if you're company or something is sending you there, you can see if they can get a phone plan taken out in the name of someone else at the company, with the company guaranteeing the payments. Because getting the DNI takes forever anyway.
OT: I expected this to be about smart matter (or wellstone). http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_matter But html is cool, too. ;)
Arbie, I really like this a lot and is an area I'm particularly interested in a solution for. I'm going to email my thoughts instead of posting online.
Thanks! That's a very clean reader compared to what I have seen from other offerings like Zinio.
Are you sure about that? It could take a long time.

Would you have bet on Apple if you were trying to find the next Microsoft? (Would you even consider Apple the next Microsoft?)

What about Google? I don't think there is a "next Google".

Will there be success after Facebook? Of course, but I don't think it will look like Facebook. So I don't think looking for "the next Facebook" is the right course of action.
I won't be able to do anymore of these for now. I usually do this every 2-3 weeks so if you'd like a hand, just keep an eye out or follow me on twitter where I usually announce it there.

Cheers!
Furthermore I would never encourage anyone to do nothing but stay in achedemia for long periods of time. That is unless the job demands it (my wife is a Speach Language Pathologist and cannot work until she has a M.S. in SLP period) however I don't have a masters. I was considering getting one eventually in a field like AI or something but I would want to ensure I go to a very respectable school where I am guaranteed to find some awesome research projects to work on.

End-of-the-day a Master is for a specialization you want to work on for specific type of jobs. Generally past a B.S. is not required in 99% of the market especially if you are good.