skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two bits: Not that it isn't really elegant, but the jump from js to coffeescript does not result in a big enough gain for me to want to do it (as opposed to say, the jump from c to python). It foists an extra mental space on my team, as they have to learn to think in both languages, but doesn't give them a different programming environment with different problem solving tools. If we could totally dump js it might be more appealing. As it is, I see coffeescript splitting the js dev community by making code sharing more difficult.
A new Golden Age of gaming
Hi, this is Paul, I liken the JS/Coffee debate to those wanting to figure out whether to learn Swedish or Danish, the languages are similar, and in fact swedes and danes speak to each other in each other's language, because they're similar.

Disclaimer - I'm still in the pub, What I'm trying to say is, I understand JS, I'm still happy to code in js, but I like teh coffeescript. Let's learn to speak to each other
> Why do you think IE6 is still around?

I really don't, at least not on the scale it was a couple of years ago. I expect there are a handful of organisations who are still stuck in IE6 land, but it's no longer the limiting factor it used to be.

> When you're talking about a product that needs to be upgraded frequently to continue to do its job and to maintain security, I'd say the answer is "not very long".

I guess I lack sympathy because, ironically, the vendors are still using old and underpowered tools and casual processes for their development, which is why we need so many security patches. Usually, those tools start with a C and end with the word "compiler". Often, the development processes are trendy, "Agile" things that emphasize prototyping and pushing rapid updates over clear specs and systematic designs, and that treat techniques like unit testing as some sort of divine correctness guarantee instead of a back-up to good basic development practices.

Well, you reap what you sow. If you don't invest in tools and processes that can build robust software that requires little maintenance, I'm going to bitch if you don't invest in supporting your existing software either.

We've had programming languages much better suited to application development than C and its derivatives for many years now, and there is really no excuse for still writing things like networking software using a model that has a terrible risk/benefit ratio for that kind of project.

It's also a common fallacy that writing code significantly less buggy than what we put up with today needs heavyweight processes that cost more. There are many people in many industries who do it every day and have the metrics to prove it.

> Unless you choose to use bleeding-edge beta functionality, your sites will still work just fine.

Sure, but unless people are going to use that bleeding edge technology, why push out new versions of the browser with the corresponding functionality changes? It would be far safer to push only such security patches and bug fixes in existing functionality as are necessary, and make functional changes at a pace that allows for the whole industry to develop sustainably and actually take advantage of the improvements.

> Can you point out what FF5 has done that's so terrible and backwards-incompatible?

Well, so far it seems to have broken quite a few plug-ins and it looks like some of the typography engine bugs are back again, but I've only been using it for two days so I haven't yet tried it with most of the projects I'm involved with.

In any case, shipping one version without breaking anything is nothing to be proud of. You have to ship every version without breaking anything, and neither Firefox nor Chrome has a good track record in that department.
No. It's hundreds of people dying at a time with nothing that any of them can do to mitigate their fate. People are really poor at assessing risk, but marvelous at concocting horror stories.

(I can see that you are not from California. At 60mph, you are in serious danger of being rear-ended.)
Not unique to PHP in the slightest. In C

sizeof(int, 2)

will return a parse error, because sizeof is an unary operator despite looking like a function (the parentheses are mandatory when using it with a type name). In PHP, isset is implemented as a "language construct", essentially like another operator.
AFAIK, no. Anybody can pay LinkedIn to see any profile's extended data. They have rate limits and things like that to maximize revenue and prevent abuse.

This startup somehow convinced LinkedIn to let its users get at a subset of this data without a separate charge for it users.
Mainframes in our cultural DNA: gone today, here tomorrow?
Actually it's unclear by reading this blog post alone what are you trying to say.

It becomes clear if people read the end of your previous post[1] where you say:

"For corporate deployments, there has to be a stable branch. I bet someone is probably going to make a nice business out of creating and maintaining a stable branch…"

1. http://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/21/firefox-rapid-release-proce...
Oblong has built the future of computing
Jake, Wil, you're crushing it.

I still want you to fix my email problems, though... :)
A variation on this is to use a random salt with each password that you store. Your auth process then becomes: 1. check the username 2: if the user exists, prepend the salt stored in the user row to supplied password, check against stored hash.

At the very least, you will make it harder for someone to crack all of your passwords by computing one table with a single salt.
Actually once it's been proven that robots drive much better than humans (which is not very difficult), people will want to probably outlaw human driving.
We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned
We just completed our first Facebook advertising campaign, corresponding with our trip to TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference. Startups test theories, so we treated this first attempt as an experiment. Here is what we did and our results.
A Deep Dive Into Location with Android
I think by "cool software" politician meant "cool dev tools". When you're a hacker, it's easy to get them confused, and it does seem like a lot of cool tools are Unix only. Go comes to mind; it was basically Unix-only at first, if it isn't still.
For what it's worth, if any of you haven't heard Kind of Bloop yet, it is fantastic. Seems like HNers are basically the target market for it, too.

Coming from knowing Kind of Blue very well, it's fascinating to hear what other people take from Miles' songs, and I've caught things from Kind of Bloop that I had never noticed in the original. Highly recommended.
As they have the Web code base, you must assume that they have the salt to the hashing... If they actually want to get these passwords, all they have to do is generate rainbow tables using SHA1 and the appropriate salt. We're back to relying on the length and bit depth (range of characters) of the passwords you are trying to find.
That's why I bring up the fragmentation issue. I actually found coffee to be very pleasant to use, and if it was more standard I would jump head first and never look back at JS, but as it is, I got very frustrated jumping back and forth, and decided to convert all my coffee back to JS (not that it's hard).

To reiterate, I actually love coffeescript, but I see the fragmentation as overall hurting the JS developer community.
Ask HN: Quasi-Legal Startup Idea. Thoughts?
Right now several states allow the sale of food out of ones home with very few restrictions. This is even allowed at the federal level within certain limits (sales volume, typically). We've been throwing around a new startup idea that would likely cause the selling of food out of a person's home to be quite easy and probably pretty lucrative. While I'm not against this personally, this IS illegal in some states (to include California). We could try to free ourselves of the liability through a Terms of Service agreement, but we're afraid it will appear that we're encouraging people to break the law.

Am I thinking too far into this? Should I, as a small startup, be concerned with such legal issues when just starting out?

Point to consider: Supper-clubs continue to gain popularity (even in California where it's almost certainly illegal) and despite how easily the activity could be stopped, they seem to enjoy a worry-free existence.
Shoot, I'll do it for you for free.
> As for who pays for all this, the ISPs and copyright owners will share the costs of operating the program, sources said.

After reading this, I still don't understand how the RIAA/MPAA are convincing ISPs to get on board. What's in it for the ISPs besides a bunch of angry customers?
One indeed might wonder at the people who need education programs for a browser.

seriously, the only major ui innovation since netscape 2.x? 3.x? was the merging of url bar and search bar.
Sorry about your bad experience. I run cygwin okay (not everything works, for example pip doesn't work), and nodejs dev in cygwin has been very pleasant for me so far.
super, genial, what is incredible is that it confirm out first estimation.
A very interesting project. I've whipped up a little test program(https://github.com/regomodo/handy_scripts/blob/master/echopr...) in Python and found either the codegen or echonest to be a little buggy. Daft Punk fingerprints come back with some very unusual results. http://pastebin.com/8Tfvd0SZ
lol. Once we reach 10k users we'll sell their email addresses and go on vacation.

This is the equivalent of holding up a sign that says "Homeless - need beer to put kids through college"
Is IE9 faster in the rendering demos than Chrome?

However I am going to argue one thing that was mentioned in the article. Chrome is not just about being fast. Its fast executing, fast updating (patching vulns and keeping up pace), more extensible than IE (at least easier to get extensions), sandboxed and significantly more secure than ie , and a way for google to push some good technologies out. Its also cross platform, so any computer I go to I can run chrome on, ie is windows Vista/7 only not even XP which chrome runs on.

I also feel is a good thing that video card vendors will get a swift kick in the balls to get their act together and make their drivers secure and decent finally. Though I cringe at the thought of what the state of webgl will be on linux with ATI drivers.
First Self-Propelled Endoscopy Device 'Swims' Digestive Tract in Hours
Trust us. It will be very fun! We just need a bit more time. :)
Twitter Voice Search in Turkish (Türkçe)
It was your idea. I just rewrote it from my point of view :)
They were my elves. They lived in the woods after all :)
lol. I wish I could have paid for my college in beer!
Nowjs does looks cool - however I think Darshan should be giving Node.js more credit when he talks about the startups that "couldn't/wouldn't" have been built without their tech.
Ask HN: Is a Ponzi scheme ethical if everyone knows it’s a Ponzi?
Bitcoin has been a real education for me. I’m convinced that the virtual currency itself is legitimate, but some of the biggest bitcoin ‘businesses’ are gambling and Ponzi/pyramid schemes.

Here’s an example of a self-described pyramid, where early participants double their ‘investment’ from the deposits of later participants. At some point the pyramid will collapse, and those on the bottom will lose their money.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20087.40

This is a pretty honest and transparent Ponzi, since all deposits and payouts are logged on a public Google Spreadsheet:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiID-eW4QPZ_dF8ya3VvQVYzSHpIbzJKVWlMeUxYcnc&hl=en_US&authkey=CPOghYEL#gid=0

Since the game continues until there have been no deposits in seven days, it could go on a long time.

Q1: Is it moral to start a game like this as long as everyone knows how it works?

Q2: If you’re an early ‘investor’, is it ethical to play this game even though you know you’ll profit at the expense of others?

Q3: Does it make any difference if you’re playing for dollars, euros or bitcoin?

Bonus Q: If any business relies on unsustainable growth to survive, is it legitimate?
Well, one thing's for sure -- it would change learning forever.
What's the Future of Synthetic Biology?
If you are using "salts", you have to make them random for each stored password. But if you are doing this securely, you don't care about this detail, because the bcrypt library took care of it for you.
Cringley might be wrong, or right, but at least he writes intelligibly.
Do people not realize that "real-time" actually means something specific, you can't just claim something is "real-time" because it's fairly fast?

Nothing against this project, specifically, but I've seen this a lot lately (especially among Javascript programmers).
Technically, username+randomstring@* should be normalized to username@* ; plus in email address is part of the standard.
Really excited to start playing with this. I've been hoping for a more socket focused framework that meshes well with the node style
Didn't know about this service. But it look awesome! I'm going to try to start using it tomorrow at work :)

Whats the limitation on the "free trial" version except the 7 emails/day ?
How 30 cents/click became $307 in customer acquisition cost
can you file an issue on echoprint-codegen or write us at the google group so we don't lose that? That definitely shouldn't be happening, there's an issue somewhere for sure.
Not to mention they would only have one version of chrome (the latest) to support and not multiple versions of Firefox that are still installed on various desktops around the office.
Yes, I would say anyone who thinks that farming is simple grunt labor has never seriously tried to grow food to feed any number of people.

Farming of course involves physically exhausting work, and yes, that's the easy part (at least from an economic standpoint.)
Rottentomatoes comes home.
Do you code? How about you send me the source to your best known, commercial product, and then I'll reformat the source, call it a derivative work, and sell it. That's cool, right? Of course not

I see this as being not that different.

It's completely different. Look at clauses 1 & 4 of the Copyright Act as sited in the article. The spirit of this 'derivative work' concept rests on the contribution of the derivative work to the general state of the art (does it add anything?), and the effect on the existing works (does is take food out of the original artists's mouth?).

Taking source code and recompiling it and redistributing it without making any contribution yourself is completely outside the idea of a derivative work. Even modifying it in some significant way, if it deprives me of my livelihood, probably doesn't work.

Pixelating a Miles Davis picture is absolutely a derivative work, especially as an adjunct to an 8-bit rework of one of the man's albums. There's no substitutability at all between this pixelated version and the original picture - it would have exactly 0 (zero) effect on the demand or availability of the original photo of Davis.

To me, simply taking a picture someone else took, and digitizing or pixellating it, is not something that I would consider "derivative". I liken it to sampling music to be used in a "derivative" work. In the vast majority of those cases, the samples have to pass through the proper licensing and be released for use before they are resold.

Yes - and I'm against requiring licensing for music resampling as well. The test should be substitutability and contribution, not establishing arbitrary control over the way intellectual property is allowed to evolve and who is allowed to reshape it.
Good question. No solid answers here, but my guess would be some combination of more redundancy, better and more active lawyers, and the large players not talking about it when it does go down.
That is fair enough and all your points were very good. However despite the down votes and everything else I stand by what I said. As a user I doubt most devs are as competent as the ones here and I would never trust a site with a password that I depend on. Do that there would need to be third-party auditing to make sure that they adhere to the standards you described.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that the state of web/Internet security is very poor right now and I don't believe bcrypt is worthy pursuit (sorry I am really not trying to troll). Since Mt.Gox was just hacked my salted password is on pastebin and then someone attempted to break into my gmail account but that will never happen because I use two factor authentication.

Maybe that is the best solution to all of this.
Immortality is essentially a question of understanding a collection of cells well enough to transfer their state to a more robust medium. Performing experiments on cells is relatively cheap, and medical research is generally very well funded.

On the other hand, a viable starship would require a considerable amount of energy. We'd need to be comfortable travelling within our own solar system, because we're not going to get the amount of energy required from Earth. The best option so far is probably to park some 100km wide solar panels close to the Sun, store up energy for a year, and then use some rather large laser beams to convert that energy into a million ton blackhole. We'd then have a portable generator powerful enough to get us to another star.

So my guess is that we'll figure our immortality long before we can seriously think about building a starship.
Haha, I think 10,000 email addresses might pay for 1 beer.
The answer is actually much simpler than that:

Any mediocre programmer will write unmaintainable code in the long run. At some point one of three things will happen and always do, no exception:

1) They get too frustrated to work on this POS that they wrote and leave.

2) You give them tasks that eventually become impossible to be completed and fire them because they can't do anything you ask for in a reasonable timeframe.

3) They entrench and keep working, you ignore timelines and code complexity hiring more mediocre programmers to help the ones who need help. You just wind up paying money. End of the day your product works BUT the second any competitor with 1 good programmer pops up your entire business is screwed since with 20 developers you can't keep pace with a single dude having close to zero expenses making pure profit off of any money being made, while you wind up having to hire sales and more programmers, paying insane amounts while your competitor(s) slowly chip away at your business until you cant maintain enough clients to feed your ever growing maintenance needs.
To citricsquid, hipchan and others -

NowJS, and the free open source product "Now," is just one small piece of Flotype the company.

We haven't launched and haven't disclosed the business-side of NowJS (tl;dr we have an enterprise product that's extremely complex). So trust me, it's not just a "dump open source js" project.
The WikiLeaks of Money
If it's fast enough to make the user feel like they are interacting with the system in real time, I think it's a fair label.

At the end of the day, what is real time anyway? The sounds I hear and the light I see have taken time to get to me... all of experience is touched by some form of latency ;)
I buy it.

I don't think we'll all be sitting down in front of a C compiler, but I think a lot of people will spend their days configuring software to do things that it is not pre-programmed to do, using logic that is in line with the programmer mindset.

I like to look to agriculture, because computers are becoming quite prevalent in the industry and is a good indication of where the technology is headed in all industries that have not been traditionally computer dominated. The modern tractors are doing a lot of automation that is programmed by the farmer, depending on their own requirements. Like: "When the tractor gets to this position in the field, raise the implement. Lower it when it gets to _this_ position." That is programming.

I do agree we are a long way off from having general purpose robots, but we already do have robots everywhere we look. These agricultural tractors I speak of are robots that are being programmed, not operated, by farmers. That is just one of many examples.
Canada's Top 600+ Startups
Don't get me started :-/
And a full refund if the LHC site you linked is wrong too!
dgunn - We came across similar issues developing the first online notary service notarynow.com. In some states its fine, other states have a problem with it. I would pursue the states where it is legal, make sure your terms and conditions are locked down, and go for it. If users from other states pick it up, its a good problem to have. Paypal, Uber, AirBnB and my company have all been able to get regulators on board after the fact.

Its scary to have to think about getting shut down by the government for an idea that everyone will love, but I think in the end you can succeed. You will also have a hard time getting a lawyer to say yes (and probably won't get a legal opinion). If it takes off, dealing with regulators and supermarkets (who will want to shut you down in the name of consumer protection) will be a good problem to have.
I started with the main, loud evidence -- Al Guru and, at the time, the main IPCC technical document. Flush. Bubble, bubble.

It's possible to do some good work in 'climate science', and maybe there is some by more than just the one guy at MIT or the one in Georgia. If they do good science, then maybe Nature would publish it. Here I mean they can do some good science which, however, is a very long way from really answering the main question, are we about to cook the planet? E.g., the MIT guy did some diffusion in a column calculation. Looks okay, but it's a very, very long way from an answer to the main question.

But generally my view would be as you put it that on 'AGW' -- anthropomorphic global warming? -- science is broken.

Why don't I get rich and famous debunking the alarmist nonsense? Because the alaremist 'science' is making various approximations. Maybe with their assumptions, their arithmetic is correct. E.g., if do the energy balance arithmetic carefully and get it right, then okay. Nice work. If it says no changes, good. If it says big changes, then, sadly, the work is good only until the changes start to become significant. If they do everything correctly on energy balance, then my objection would be, in the case of big changes, using that analysis to say what the climate will be in 10, 50, 100 years. I could say that, and maybe it would get published, but it would hardly make me rich or famous.

Broadly Al Guru picked a 'good' problem, that is, like the Mayan priests who scared people without enough solid information do debunk. Again, the solid science we want is not available. With such science we could debunk the alarmists by saying in rock solid terms what the climate would be year by year for the next, say, 500 years. I can't do that. No one can do that.

So, why is science broken for AGW? The fundamental reason is that no one can really get a solid answer to what the climate will be decades into the future under various scenarios of human activity. The shorter term political reason is that the 'climate science' community was started heavily by VP Gore's direction of the funding and, then, the interests of the IPCC to find a way to send money from rich countries to poor ones. So, there are lots of vested interests and not much science solid enough to settle the issue.

So, again, note (1) the temperature is, as far as we can tell, now just where it was before the start of the Little Ice Age; (2) from the good temperature data we have now from satellites, apparently the planet is not getting warmer now. So, what to do? Just keep watching the data and the science, If there is any that is very important, and then readdress the question once it begins to look important.

But there's a big HUGE thing NOT to do now: Wreck the world economy over very inconclusive science.
Perhaps all their employees live in the US, so they consider it not worth the trouble to fly someone to Indonesia whenever a server in Jakarta needs rebooting.