skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am familiar with bilinear pairing and did not know it was available commercially! Pretty cool.. On first glance it seems cumbersome to highlight text first and then apply. Why not just automate the process for the entire note? Also how are you making sure the recreation of the connection key is authenticated?
Yes, my daughter is too young to use Google. I will probably break the TOS and allow her to use Google when it gets older. My point is that this isn't civil disobedience or corporate disobedience, this is just me breaking the TOS. I'm cool with that, but I'm not going to pretty it up and call it civil disobedience.
Redesigning the iPhone lock screen
Thanks a lot. This is really useful. If I can ask " Did you enjoy filling the data during your college days? Is there something motivating/de-motivating to input data?
These aren't incompatible, though. Building something that "grows", even to very large scale, is not that difficult, and still leaves the door open to evolutionary improvements and changes to the fundamental architecture over time if they become necessary.

The key is, when designing your growth architecture (and I don't consider it overengineering--a few simple decisions allow you to scale pretty well to a fairly large load), is to code to interface rather than code to implementation. If things evolve/change over time, you've already got half the work done for you because things don't spontaneously break on change.
I also get updates on Facebook if I've been tagged.

And if you remove the tag, no one can tag you on that photo ever again.
>What you wrote in another message - "why pay taxes to a government that you feel doesn't represent you" - is the biggest thing that's wrong. You have to pay taxes because it's the law, and the government is the government, until you vote the next one in.

The upper classes are the worst tax avoiders. It's unrealistic to expect the lower/middle classes of the Western world to pay higher taxes and get less.
I have been playing with computers ever since I remember. My first CPU was 8 bit. At that point I was 7. I have not stopped my obsession with it. In the meantime, before I reached 18, I had disregarded laws that will not allow me to access sites.

I have not paid much attention to these laws. Thinking back, though, I think I should not have been spending too much time playing around on computers, but enjoying playing outside.
In my experience, languages don't make a codebase more complex. What makes a codebase complex is how many subcodebases you have. In particular, I avoid touching my company's JavaScript code not because I can't do JavaScript but because it's difficult to learn an entirely new set of APIs.

If you can allow multiple languages to share common code like you can on the JVM, then I say it's ok to go crazy.
From some posts on the Google+ discussion forum (https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/?h...): Google+ will likely have an 18+ requirement throughout the Limited Field Trial as they are still building the safety features for minors. Over the years there have a been a number of poor interactions between social networks and the laws regarding minors, and Google probably wants to try to head those off as much as possible.

Probably due to US law, the same posts say Google+ will not be open at all for people under 13.
Mercurial: how-to guide to distributed version control
MongoDB {name: "mongo", type: "db"}
I bought an iPod classic for this very reason. I don't want to have to take off my gloves in the winter to operate a simple machine. Real buttons have the benefit of being usable while the device is in your pocket which is nice as well.
When I said ceremony, I did mean working around architectural up-front decisions.

I was arguing in favor of 'growing something' as opposed to 'designing something' with regards to a hopefully growing userbase.

Language choice may be of lesser importance as you say, but I do feel that some languages fit the growing strategy better while others have a more design up front feel to them.
My guess is capacitive buttons have a lower failure rate than physical buttons. It's probably a decision born of cost.
The end of the euro for dummies
It's basically impossible to have a lazy imperative language, though, because "a sequence of statements" is the definition of an imperative program, and laziness leaves the ordering of that sequence undefined.
It is incredibly easy to design for growth when looking in a rear view mirror. For example, it is easy NOW to see that Twitter's problem was scaling, and that they should have planned to grow their scalability while evolving their user experience.

However, at the time it might have gone the other way: Perhaps their user base and volume might have increased at a slower place, leaving plenty of time to evolve their scalability, while their user experience might have required relentless change.

In which case, they should have planned for their user experience to "scale" rather than their infrastructure.
These are arbitrary distinctions; as Heidegger said, language is language. As long as they're Turing complete, the only difference between "programming" and "templating" (and "natural") languages are what they're used/optimized for.

Element A containing Element B can be generated by function A taking Element B.

The CoffeScript program converts a set syntax/grammar into JavaScript; but the syntax is just syntax, and its clean, smart design lends itself well for compiling code other than JavaScript, just as JSON is a useful serialization format in other langs. There are benefits in using the same syntax for representing structure, content, and presentation, as long as the concerns are still properly separated.
> ... without a government healthcare sector ...

You are very mistaken about health care provisioning in the US.
This sounds slightly misleading to me:

The primary driver is honestly encapsulation, so we can iterate faster as a company. Having a single, monolithic application codebase is not amenable to quick movement on a per-team basis. So when we decide to encapsulate something, then because of our performance concerns, its better to rewrite it in the JVM for most systems, than to write a new Ruby system.

It sounds from that like their primary driver for using the JVM is actually performance, but that they only decide to rewrite components when encapsulation drives them to do so. I can't see how the JVM provides any encapsulation benefits over Ruby for new systems.
OK, fine. We won't run out of oil, it will just be prohibitively expensive, especially for fuel applications.

(I've always thought it was a shame to burn such an interesting chemical feedstock anyway.)
>Which is probably multiple books and a number of years, during which your effective cash flow from an activity that takes up a staggering amount of time (and benefits others in the meantime) is essentially zero.

That's pretty much what most artists go through now, isn't it? I'm not convinced that copyright does a particularly good job of solving that problem. I'm not saying I definitely think copyright should be abolished, but it does at best a very mediocre job of rewarding artists.
Are we sure that nobody has a patent on the circle? These days...
Waiting with excitement for this to get into Debian. Even testing is at version 1.8.
One place I found that capacitive buttons have worked well is on the newer xbox models. The power and tray eject buttons are capacitive and it works well there.
I wouldn't buy that because I'd either use a VNC, or rip the DVD. I also wouldn't buy anything with such reasonable negative reviews. Air Video is for videos in general, so it is what people will look for. I'd suggest moving on.
A friend of mine recently got a lenovo thinkpad and it had a BIOS flag to allow swapping of the Fn and control key, sadly the physical keys are different size so you can't swap them to match the new function but at least it's an option
Clothing. Granted, I hate buying clothes in person too, but not being able to try things on makes it seem like quite a gamble.
I think one of the problems is that there is just too many choices, something better would be where you just tell your budget, and are given the top 3 options in your budget.
I have been Google's customer. I have managed over twenty accounts with them. The largest has spent about 4m to date (the rest amount to much less). The situation is no different there.

Customer service per dollar spent is lower than anywhere else on earth.
I don't know about you, but the only way I know anyone's birthday outside of my immediate family and girlfriend is via Facebook.

This could be fixed by using the correct date but putting an earlier year.
Too bad sparkbuy is shuttered.
No, it does not mean that redis is busted. It could be your client crashing (e.g. the OOM killer decided to pay a visit), the network between the client and redis failing (but not for other clients!) and so on.
There are many reasons why the redis.del can fail and result in problems for the application.
While I disagree with the "just lie" approach here, I think saying "I fail to see any situation where teaching a 9 year old that its sometimes ok to lie won't be incredibly confusing to the child" is pretty silly. Kids are much, much better at compartmentalizing things than most people think they are. After all, we teach them to pretend early on, but they very quickly grasp the difference between pretend and reality. Teaching them to lie in one context won't cause them to grow up to be sociopaths.
The problem with that is I'd never be 100% sure that the 'top 3' options presented were actually the 'top 3' in terms of quality, and not the 'top 3' in terms of which company spent the most on advertising
"Prizes.org is offered by Slide (part of Google Inc., located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, USA)."
No, no. Stupid and ignorant adults are a wildly profitable resource for corporations, advertisers, and marketers. That's not exploitation; it's capitalism. But the children, they must be protected.
Essentially implied by what Mitchell has said, but it's good to point out that pure functions have referential transparency, which means that for a given input, the function will always give the same output. (So, `myFunc 7' always yields the same answer), which makes it easier to reason about your code and have more reliable tests against these functions.

More reading here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_programming#Pu...
Well that's certainly the biggest problem I'm trying to tackle. I'm thinking of various approaches: one is to provide much better filtering and sorting tools. But the other is to just recommend the best product for a given price and one more important factor.
Tools and supplies for my bladesmithing hobby. The supply sites that do exists have really terrible web presences and they still do much of their business with paper catalogs.

Most of the stores don't have items categorized more than one level deep nor by the properties of the item. There are all sorts of options for something as simple as an anvil or a pair of tongs.

God help you if you need handle hardware. You have to go through 40 pages of little, crappy pictures of items to find what you're looking for.

When you go to checkout, you're lucky if you can complete your order without reloading your cart a half-dozen times.

Then there's the whole quality thing. There are vanishingly few reviews on these sites. If you could aggregate reviews on similar items, it would be great.

But a problem with aggregating reviews is that a certain part might be imported from China on one site and the same part might be laser cut in house on another site. There's no real way to tell the difference without having the two items in hand.

Edit to add some links to examples:
http://www.knifemaking.com/Default.asp
http://www.piehtoolco.com/
http://www.usaknifemaker.com/
First, this is not civil disobedience, it's corporate disobedience.

Not really. The reason it seems fuzzy is that the modern US government likes to offload its regulations onto corporations and other entities. In the interest of "protecting" children, they subject online service providers to penalties for allowing children access. In turn, these services must restrict access by children in order to protect themselves from the government.

Thus, although the direct object of the action is Google -- a corporation -- it really is an act against the nanny state.
Any idea if and when Google Profiles will be available for Google Apps? Anyone?
It's more appropriate on a device you're not as likely to brush up against accidentally, or need to interact with very deeply.
Anonymous hacks Apple server, pastes usernames and password hashes
I'm staying away from clothing for now, because I am neither super interested nor knowledgeable about it. I feel it will take a vastly different approach to sell clothes than other product categories.
Show HN: TripLingo Dari (AKA know anyone in Afghanistan?)
tldr; We made a FREE version of our iPhone language-learning app for troops in Afghanistan & you can get it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/triplingo-dari/id446506749?mt=8

-------

In May we launched our first 5 language-learning apps for iOS that are created specifically for travelers. To celebrate July 4th, and because we could, we hired a special forces translator to help us create a version of our app designed for American military workers in Afghanistan (all 94K of them).

Many folks in Afghanistan have their iWhatever's with them, so we figured there are a lot of people that could use it, since learning some of the language can help immensely in building trust and rapport.

We took the Defense Foreign Language Institute's "Survival Guide" for Dari, (about 50 pages of PDF files) and then had the translator update the content and then record audio for each file. It only took some minor changes package it into our app. The biggest change was disabling the "Slang Slider" for many of the phrases- we want to make sure someone knows exactly what you mean when you say "Don't shoot!".

If we included all of the phrases, we couldn't get the app to fit under 20MB without doing something nasty to the audio quality (and if its over 20MB you can't download it over 3G). So we split it up into two- one version is for people in medicine, and one is for everyone else.

In total, the app includes over 750 phrases, 1600 dictionary entries, 600 word-bank entries, and articles about the local culture.

They're the only free apps we have right now (unless you count Pirate?).If you know someone over there, it could be useful to them:

Dari Version: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/triplingo-dari/id446506749?mt=8
Dari Medical Version: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dari-medical/id447155027?mt=8
Product Page: http://www.triplingo.com/products/afghanistan

Oh, and uh... happy 4th!
Great explanation, actually. But one question. I thought functional languages were "pure" throughout. I mean, I thought the whole point of a functional language is that there are no side effects and every expression returns some value. How is "pure" distinct from "functional"?

edit: BTW, Haskell DOES have a steep learning curve, and the inherent recursion breaks my brain. Even simple things like:

`combos = []`
`combos = combos + 'foo'`

hurt, because counterintuitively (to me, anyway) this winds up in infinite recursion. I'm very used to OOP so this sort of thing is hard on me. I'm old though.

edit: I'm a little bummed out by the downvotes on my original question. It was an honest academic question I had and was answered splendidly. I was not attacking Haskell whatsoever. I apologize if anyone took it as anything other than an honest question.
Well that's the wrong way around. Verified people should be able to DM anyone, and they should have the option for DMs to either be from followees, and verified, but not everyone.

Awful site, the signup/login covers half the story without a x button.
It's gotten to the point where I'll only buy game on Steam, because I know the experience will be 100x better then any of it's competitors. (GFWL for example, is the worst piece of software I've ever used)
I don't doubt it. The problem is that consumers are still viewing them as a high-end feature instead of the cost-cutting measure they are, so they keep showing up in high-end products with prices that could support the superior and more costly physical buttons.
Currently, used vegetable oil is rarely just thrown out. Used oil can be used to make soap, cosmetics and many other goods. Most fast food chains and other large consumers of cooking oils sell their used oil to companies that then resell the oil for other uses.
Yes sparkbuy was a great site. There's http://decide.com and http://shopobot.com in the same space, but their focus is on predicting when to buy a particular product.
Looking back, I think working at Mass General Hospital put me in that mindset. Being in the MGH environment will convince you that you can only really be an effective doctor if you go to a top-tier school. That idea is obviously not valid, and I understand that now, but I was clearly in a haze last year.

Thanks for your very relevant question.
How do you solve that problem now?
I too have no problem writing a single <div></div>. But trust me it gets old. In a new from-scratch project (which is completely stand-alone and won't need to "integrate" with anything or be touched by other coders who "can do html but not coffeescript") after having done the first 10-15 templates I was looking at my CoffeeScripts... then back at my <html/><templates/> ... then rewrote them all to the tune of:

renderTemplate: ->
"div":
"span .some-class":
_: ["Hello, "]
"strong #dyn_id":
_: ["#{@getName()}!"]
"subTemplate":
foo: bar
subTemplate: (args) ->
blockquote:
_: args.foo
getName: ->
"user name from DB or whatever"

(Then hand-rolled my own very simple JSON-to-HTML "renderer" in 20 minutes plus generating a CS class file to be compiled to JS for each template -- all really simple stuff.)

Looks scary coming from years of HTML coding right? But HTML looked scary at first too.

Now:
stylesheets are Stylus, templates and logic are CoffeeScript both server-side and client-side. I haven't been such a happy coder for a decade. Config files are a simplified Stylus/Coffee-like format that gets transformed to JSON. I'm actually using the CoffeeScript compiler here so in effect each config file gets transformed into a node.js "module". That means they could be turned into config "scripts" if necessary.

What I loved about Lisp in theory: code is data, data is code. Only the parens sucked for me. Now we're approaching this ideal again, slowly and emergently but surely. :)
We use GAE as a paying customer. There is absolutely no solid line of communication with anybody on the team when something blows up.

"Use the forum".

Yes Google, that's a sound idea, why don't I post a bunch of a business proprietary information on your user forum...brilliant.

A little over a week ago we had a user post a Wormwall to Reddit and it had something like 130 thousand requests in a couple of hours. Because Google (unbeknownst to us) caps GAE accounts to 12 instances, we ended up scaling to precisely 12 instances, then crapping out. A full 60% of requests to our site were not even served.

I know, I'll get on the GAE site and look up some kind of professional support number, or email address or something. Nothing. A few hours of banging around (all while our site was literally catching fire) and I finally found a form where I can request an increase in instances.

9 days later? Nothing. No response. No increase in instance cap. No communications whatsoever. A complete and total black hole.

It's so absurd it's ridiculous.
It's done through the key agreement process itself. If you have the primary private key (SkyKey) you can create the decryption key through the ID input. So if I send something to you, it would be (my SkyKey + your ID "JangoCuni") = unique AES key. To decrypt, you use (your SkyKey + "my ID") to get the same unique shared secret (AES Key). Of course, you use the shared secret value to encrypt the content encryption key.

We tried automating the process of the entire note but we found that people really wanted to put their own language around it. When we hijacked the entire note folks didn't recognize it and it's a lot more "trustable" (is that word LOL) when it comes from a friend with some of their language.
Its interesting to hear designers on a rant about capacitive buttons. Switches are the bane of most electrical engineers because they cost a lot and they have a finite lifetime. So generally they are thing that is going to 'kill' the product. And because they are both mechanical and have moving parts (in the non-capacitive variant) when they break the users just push harder trying to get them to work and that can crack traces on the circuit board and end the life of an otherwise working piece of gear.

Capacitive buttons can be 'tuned' (which is to say one can adjust how sensitive they are) somewhat depending on their antenna design and the ambient conditions. What is really hard for them is in a high emf environment (think lots of fourescents and shag carpets) there is so much charge available at your fingertip that even turned waay down they fire with the barest touch, reverse the circumstance like a modestly humid day out in a field somewhere and they are lucky if they can see your finger at all. If you're finger is wet (and thus charge will tend to distribute more evenly around you body) they are nearly worthless.

I recently saw some interesting 'piezo' buttons where they were effectively capacitive buttons but covered by a bit of piezo material so that you had to push on them to get them to activate. But while better in many ways, the cost difference between a button that is just a trace on the PCB (essentially free) and one that has a bit of piezo material in it (even if it only costs 2 or 3 cents) is easily someones salary when you're activating 500,000 devices a day.
Have they been sued into oblivion yet?
I think that the country size comparison is slightly broken. For example, compare the USA to Australia, and then scroll sideways on the map. The Australia overlay is much larger than what it should be.

Other than that, the site is pretty cool!
I use my nose, it works well if you can aim it.
Thanks gaustin. I certainly didn't know it was so hard to buy stuff like that. This UK site looks quite good - http://anvils.co.uk. Would something like that be useful?
The idea that Google (or any major tech company!) has ever even considered selling user data is highly damaging to our industry. I don't expect that kind of baseless paranoia on Hacker News.
What would be really awesome of Google to do then is, if they do lock an account out due to an age-based TOS violation, still provide access to Google Takeout (and add Gmail to the supported services list) so the kid could at least easily get his data back.

IANAL, so I don't know if he technically would not be allowed to access Google Takeout either via the TOS, but if Google's lawyers could incorporate an exception of some sort for age-based violations, then this would at least be a super nice thing for them to do.
Click Track lets you see who clicks on links you post on Facebook
Why don't we let kids drive cars?

Because they could kill other people with them? I don't know, what do you think? I guess that's just like email, right?
Rare Earth Minerals Discovered That Build iPads
There's a big difference between children's picture books and college textbooks, though. College texts are clunky, overpriced behemoths that are discard year after year for superflous installments. Owning a book in hardcopy becomes worthless if the student is unable to annotate in it and treat it as his or her own because they plan on reselling it afterwards to get some money back.
IOpener, How safe is your iPhone data?
> Otherwise, this is a bit one sided: We lend Google space, we do the work of adding the button, but we get nothing in return.

You get the whole purpose of the button for you in the first place, users encouraged to share your content.