skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the update; I was wondering about the connection to Sprouts.
Reminds me of Orb, now called Orb Caster - http://www.orb.com. It was pretty awesome to play with and a good combination with a WinTV PVR card, but I never found myself in a situation where I would actually use it. I never really needed most of my media outside of the home. Admittedly, that was before 3G and smartphones became commonplace, but I doubt it would have changed much. At least not for me.
Mobius Forensic Toolkit v0.5.8 Released
I appreciate the feedback, and we're still thinking about how best to do it. I'm hoping at some point twitter will implement a more granular way to ask for permissions.

As for direct messages, I believe twitter will stop asking for that either today or tomorrow.
I'm a big fabric fan and use if for server bootstrapping and deployment. I've tried to get into puppet a few times but it always seems overly complex to me. Is puppet useful if I'm only running a handful of servers or is it designed for 10s (or 100s) of servers?

I noticed he used puppet and fabric in this article so it made me interested what puppet it doing better for him than fabric.

Is there a repository of examples? Like just bootstrapping a debian box with nginx/apache/postgres (or mysql)?

Thanks!
It's all relative and depends entirely on how much you put into it and how much your employer does the same. I've had friends who've taken unpaid internships and have gotten entirely different experiences out of it.
On top of that how would Amazon identify if I live inside Omaha 7% (state+local) sales tax, or just outside Omaha 5.5% (state only) sales tax? Nothing changed about my address between when I lived in an un-annexed suburb and after I was annexed.
TDSS rootkit infects 1.5 million US computers
JSON is meant to be a serialization language, not a config file language. Therefore it strips out all the things that it doesn't need. If you want a config file language then use YAML which is a much better candidate.
Which is still barely 20% of the social programs spending.

We'd have to start another 8 wars of a similar size to reach that cost. Also : dropping defense to 0 is not enough by far. Dropping 1 of the 2 major social programs (and ObamaCare), however, does solve the problem.

(the problem here is not that current spending for social security is so much more than defense spending, it's that projected deficits and hidden liabilities are too large, and thus these programs will double their spending in about 10 years. Anyone can make the simple observation : we can't pay for that)

And there's no choice : whether or not you castrate defense spending, ObamaCare has to die, and either social security or medicare/medicaid has to go.

Choosing is going to be ugly.
Ask HN: Who are the world's thought leaders?
Absolutely agreed. My point is just that it's not an entirely unintuitive idea in the general case.
Hmmm...for me, when I click to view the comment on Google+, there is a string in the URL ?gpinv=randomchars that I'm assuming functions as an invite. (currently 404)

Seems to be different for everybody. Who knows...this whole process is a disaster :-)
Yes. It absolutely murdered skype. I work with some friends on a project that has weekly meetings, and we've been doing them via phone conference calls. We have simply been unable to find something to handle conference video chats that didn't cost an arm and a leg. Google+ is going to be a major (positive) change in our work flow.
Review of Intacct : popular accounting cloud based app
Having moved on from Java to JavaScript on the server, I strongly disagree with the first point. I've had the pleasure of rewriting a webapp I had previously written in Java in JavaScript and found the latter to be much more compact and easier to maintain, largely due to JavaScript's dynamic nature.

My only gripe with Node is the obsession with the asynchronous programming style and overly eager use of callbacks. However, there are workarounds, such as my Common Node library (http://olegp.github.com/common-node/).
Well, for one, how do we know that he doesn't have an anonymous account? And for two, if he only had an anonymous account, it could reflect badly on him as well - recall the Scott Adams sock puppet fiasco from awhile back.
I'm not sure what I find worse - the fact that people sell invites, or the fact that people buy them. Sigh
While I do prefer text configuration over guis, I had two thoughts that kind of run counter to his point:

1) There's nothing inherent about guis that prevents them from having a space for comments. Perhaps gui designers should consider leaving spots for comments in complex config situations.

2) A lot of the comments I see in config files are little notes about what this or that setting actually does... comments that are generally not needed in a well designed gui. But then again, I am not a sysadmin. YYMV.
I love your articles, but this one hits the sweet spot. Thanks for another great article.
You are coming up with a blanket judgement based on a small subset of a post (and in my opinion, not interpreting it as the poster intended). It read to me like he was talking about production usage, not tinkering. Node.js is slower and more resource intensive than Erlang (if you're comparing just async/message passing models), less productive for _most_ programmers than RoR or PHP, not as battle tested (security/stability) as Java, and fewer 3rd party libraries than most.

I don't even know about the state of development tools like debuggers and profilers. My understanding is that Node.js still has stability issues (memory leaks or GC bugs?) and doesn't utilize multi-core machines very well, either.

I'm all for tinkering, and I expect Node.js to be very successful and as an additional benefit to improve the V8 engine. But you're being overly sensitive to call this mild critique (albeit with a bad title) trolling.
Perhaps people could specify their own custom namespace.
Ask HN: How does Google select text for header/subheader of search results?
I can't think of a better way to word this. When you search google and results appear, where does google get the text for the header and subheader? Is it just the first text from the page?
Agree completely. Was a business or rather "non-tech" guy - taught myself HTML4-5/CSS2-3/jQuery + basic C# - coded the entire design, UI etc [and still do it] - and do basically every server install, git, software setup etc etc. This effort was enough to find me my other technical co-founders who wanted to be involved. You've got to put in the effort otherwise you don't get respect in my opinion.

I've always held the view that any business venture you go in - you need to understand it from the ground up. If you're in tech - learn tech. If you're in construction - learn how to build 'something' [house etc]. If you're in finance - learn finance. Understand that "build a twitter script for me" - can't happen in 2 days [I think this comment is on "par" with the original poster's question. I smile now when "non-tech" people say to me they are building a web startup "exactly like twitter in scale in 5 days using NoSQL and the latest caching techniques" .... right ... haha]

I find the concept "strange" of "i have an idea but I don't have technical skills - but because of this idea that gives me the right to own 99.9% of the company". There isn't an " i " in the word "team". If you're a co-founder - it's an inherent facet of the word that you "co-found". The only exception I can see is that unless someones invested a whole heap of cash and others haven't - this is what changes the equity split. But that's up to the team to figure out.

Call me old fashioned - but thanks Henry Ford

"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."

And thanks Thomas Alva

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

The list goes on. You get the gist.
Intriguingly enough, without outsourced jobs from first-world countries, economic development in the third world would be even slower and labor standards poorer due to the lack of employer competition.
Aw man, I just made a new Yahoo account and tried to do this and then realized Google Plus is not accepting new invites.... oh well.

I recall when Gmail was invite only and a lot of people wanted invites. People were even selling invites on eBay for a while!!! LOL... not for much money but still... it just goes to show that people will do anything for even a tiny bit of money.

So we will see how Plus works out. I am still unsure what to think about it, but either way, it seems cool. I just wish I could get an invite myself!!! :'-(
Circles are to groups as tags are to folders.
New Argentina away blue 10 Messi soccer jersey
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The biggest argument of this article seems to be that to google means to search, but why can't they change this concept? Besides, I think they are trying to position this as an extension of Google, rather than a competitor to Facebook.

I think the biggest challenge will be getting everyone's friends to join. It is a tall order.
The c preprocessor is a hardcore place to start programming.
I think you de-stress the 'having an idea' too much. Having a truly great idea -will- attract a co-founder. Well, if they hear it. It's not a magic spell.

Also, being the 'idea guy' might be over-rated, but being the 'vision guy' is definitely the bee's knees.

At a previous company, 1 man was the vision behind the entire product. I can't tell you how many hour-long meetings were ended in 5 minutes when he showed up and made it all clear. (This was after things got really busy and cloning him started to seem like a good solution.) You could bring any question about the direction of the product to him and he would have a good, clear answer.

Without him, I really doubt the company would have been a success.
Mageia-cal Win Over Humanity - Linux notes from DarkDuck
Why skin is a better lens than glass
Indeed there is a disconnect between the Google+ "streams" and the old-school Buzz, which does know how to interface to Twitter. That's probably one of the worst problems with the service (which is still technically in "trial mode", for what it's worth).
It's been like that for almost ten years now I think. You can read a little bit about it here, "Premium Pension" is the type you want:

http://pensionsmyndigheten.se/AboutYourPensions_en.html

Basically, part of the blob of income tax you pay on your salary is a "pension fee". When you retire around the age of 65, your final pension depends partially on how much you've paid in pension fees in total while working. But you don't set aside that money, instead the pensions fees people pay now are used to pay pensions for retired citizens, and future pensions will be financed by the future workforce.

But then you have the "Premium pension" which does allow you to set aside part of your pension fee and invest into private funds. Generally the systems is a failure, most people don't care about choosing funds, so they automatically end up in a government run generally mediocre fund. A small percentage are investing soundly and successfully, a larger percentage are investing badly, and most people get screwed by high commission fees of the various funds.

On top of these systems there are of course ways to save additional money for your retirement, there are some tax benefits, and you are free to invest pretty much however you want.

But yes, it is interesting that we have more privatization than the US in this, it doesn't happen very often. :-)
Please read the thread carefully.
Quick question. How do you get a Google account with a username in format firstname@firstnamelastname.com? I would love to convert my Google account over to this format. I own a domain name that I would want to be the domain portion of the email address. Tired of using @gmail.com.
So is VxWorks. Your point?
I'd say Puppet is useful even if you're running one server, especially when you use it with Vagrant. If you use it for EVERY bit of setup on your server (no manually installing packages!) you can be sure that your development VM and production server are both the same environment.

Puppet is declarative, Fabric is imperative. With Puppet I can say:

Make sure the directory /var/www/foo exists with permission 755 and owner foo.
Make sure the nginx vhost "foo.conf" exists in sites-enabled with content X, and this depends on /var/www/foo existing.

With Fabric you have to handle all the edge cases. What if /var/www/foo already exists? What if it's owned by someone else? You have to manually code all the 'mkdir' and 'chmod' commands instead of just saying "this directory should exist like this".

Right now there's no public example repo, but I'm planning on cleaning up and open-sourcing our Puppet/Django/Vagrant skeleton this week so we can use it during the Django Dash.
FBI searches LulzSec suspect home in Hamilton, Ohio
On the blog...

"If you have some .class { width:25% } that will make 4 columns grid (25% + 25% +25% + 25%). The problem is that you can't have precision px margins (gutter). So in the past you had nested divs or .something-like-this{width:24%; margin-left:1%}..."

"With calc() that problem is solved now we can have .class{width:calc(25%-10px); margin-left:10px} . And with that we can have the flexibility of the % and the px precision."

This was never a problem if you separated your layout markup from your content markup, like so.

<div style="float:left;width:50%">
<div style="margin:12px">Hello, world</div>
</div>
<div style="float:left;width:50%">
<div style="margin:12px">Hello, world</div>
</div>

Bear in mind that calc() has terrible support [http://caniuse.com/#search=calc]. Box-sizing fixes the problems addressed by this "framework" without deferring to an expensive and inappropriately used calc() property.

I see no reason why anyone would use this over a grid model such as this [https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/blob/master/core/grid/...].
I keep seeing this in my comments so I might as well respond for posterity, especially since this is not a sound mathematical argument for pi.

> zero crossings for sine waves are at integer multiples of pi

This is actually a strong argument for tau.

The sin wave measures the height of a circle at the angle given in radians. "Integer multiples of pi" don't immediately show you that there are two very different zeros: one going up, and one going down. Using tau shows you that explicitly: on half turns around the circle sin(tau/2), you're at 0 going down; on whole turns sin(tau) you're going up. You (literally) "come full circle" with integer multiples of tau—those 0s are equivalent.

The argument is the same with e^(i * pi * x). See Section 2.3 on tauday.com and the chart under "Eulerian Identities." Each integer increment corresponds to a rotation in the complex plane. The reason it's on the real line at 2, 4, 6 is because it takes two rotations to get back to the real line.

At 1 rotation (i), you're fully imaginary; at 2, fully real, but negative; 3, fully imaginary again, but negative; 4, you're back where you started, real and positive.

This is what it would look like with tau, and it's exactly what you expect: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+e^%280.5*pi+*+i+*+...

Elegance is not just whether something is "pretty," as in, hey look, integers! It's also whether it has strong meaning.
Indeed, MP is GORGEOUS right now! I just had to take a walk to clear my head, lots of emails coming in from this post ;)
It used to be the case that the header and sub-header's were created from <h1> and <h2> tags on your website. That is why it is advised to only have one <h1> per page. I'm unsure whether or not that is still the case. Google are constantly changing how they display and rank results.

I would advise doing some research into search engine optimisation(SEO).
Qr Scanner
A lot of good points are brought up here. But the writer is calling for an overhaul of the entire company culture, focus, and business priority. I'd like to see a resonse from a similarly positioned employee to get a feel for how difficult or damaging some of the suggestions may be.
If anybody requested an invite to Google+ through the blog they should be sent out now (8:30am Thursday PST). If not, contact me via the About Me page.
I hate to repeat this, but you need a google profile to get this working. Please read the thread carefully and re-send me your email.
Just yesterday I learned about http://project.friendika.com/ which looks like a nice distributed network too and maybe without the Diaspora troubles.
Good post.

Speaking as a technical guy, my default position is to be turned off by co-founding with a business guy unless they have an amazing track record. I like the advice of earning a technical co-founder.

I just wish more business guys realized their ideas aren't that special, aren't a magic way of printing money and just coming up with the idea doesn't entitle you to 75% of a two-man venture. It doesn't even really entitle you to an extra 10%.

In the beginning, your job is probably going to be to find a place to work, deal with the guy who's installing the Internet line, buying computers, buying food, buying and assembling furniture and generally just making things work. That's all very unglamorous work but, depending on the venture, it's quite likely your (alleged) business skills will be of very little value (while you're building a PoC/PoS/MVP).

I don't think I'm alone (as a technical guy) in generally finding business guys to have an inflated sense of self-importance who often want to treat technical people as an exchangeable/replaceable commodity.
> I have yet to figure out why they can do it and most of the rest of the world seemingly can't.

It helps a lot to have a small country with an ethnically homogenous population, extremely low corruption, high tax morale, and high public trust of government offices and institutions.
Scala and Category Theory
Very cool how they built a member-base before even launching
That only works in an absolutely frictionless labor market. Meanwhile, in the real world, there are many sources of friction.

Yes there is friction, but how does that effect whether internships are a good idea? By far the biggest source of friction in technology hiring is the lemon problem[1], and internships actually help get around that by providing references. You could credibly argue that unpaid internships are a good idea only in highly frictional labor markets.

As to location, well, if there aren't any jobs in your industry locally there won't be any internships either, so that's a distinction without a difference in this discussion.

[1]http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
Japan is about to hit the wall though. They've lived off of a culture of savings, and those savers are all retiring, so Japan is going to see a reduced ability to finance its debt domestically. (This is also already beginning to impact the U.S. ability to borrow from Japan). Japan's house of cards is going to collapse in the next decade, and Japan's long slide of mismanagement into the second tier of the global economy will be complete. In just a generation they will have fallen from first place to trailing Korea.
Funny - since I almost cited the article that (I think) you have in mind. The article I remember wasn't an actual proof though: it was a reductio ad absurdum, used in a review of a book about Homer that used statistical methods. The reductio was, in a nutshell, to show that by the same argument as the one in the book on Homer, the reviewer could prove that Milton didn't write Paradise Lost.

In any case, here's a JSTOR reference to the article I'm thinking of: http://www.jstor.org/stable/641985. (I can provide a pdf copy if anyone wants it. Check my profile for email.) I wonder if this is the one you're remembering.
To add to this, RIM also takes -forever- to make some decisions. I don't believe I'm able to disclose specifics for legal reasons, but even though RIM was a partner for years, they took months and months to respond to an offer that other mobile companies JUMPED at (for good reason). There is -definitely- something wrong at their senior level, and the majority of BlackBerry users I know are only holding on out of ignorance ("it has business features"), or because of BBM (which will soon change due to Apple's messenger). There has been zero intelligent innovation out of this company for years, and my friend at RIM makes money shorting their stock. The entire culture is out of whack, and I doubt they can restructure this by themselves.

I remember an article here a few days ago, about how Silverlake (I think it was Silverlake) did some crazy restructuring. RIM is dying. Their best hope is for an external firm to step in and overhaul things completely.
sorry, i was getting the wrong end of the stick on that.

That is a good idea but your original point might be right, empty fields could be a bit strange. I'll give it a try and see how how it looks (probably not till the weekend - client work to do).
Yes, YAML is very nice. Importantly, it reduces to key:value for the 90% of config files that don't require any hierarchy while still allowing hierarchy if you need it.

I'm not sure I buy the serialization argument, though: it's a human-readable serialization format. One of the big advantages of human-readable formats is that you can craft data objects by hand (for automated tests, initial bootstrapping, etc). Comments are very helpful for those situations.
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens with technology like this when it gets combined with others such as graphene, memristors, etc.

I agree with rkalla that tempering one's hopes towards it is probably the way to go, but it's always nice to see someone pushing the envelope.
Exactly what I'm thinking of. If you assume two different people wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the same logic shows the Paradise discrepancy.

Damn, that Latin degree pays for itself more and more.
Tell HN: Free TitanFile accounts now come with encryption too
We launched on March 17th and thanks to hackernews it was a success so
more infrastructure means that we can now offer encrypted storage and transfer on our free accounts as well. Blessed be cheap storage.

TitanFile is the easiest way to send and receive confidential documents over the internet, with reporting, identity verification (via automated phone call) and certainty of receipt.

Our data center is in Canada, what that means for some of our paranoid clients - is that documents transferred using TitanFile cannot be audited by US government.

If you decide to give it a shot, use CANADA60 as a coupon code for 60 days of premium plan access (no credit card required, that's just wrong for a trial run)

http://www.titanfile.com

Read-only HTML5 viewer is coming soon and we are looking for feature suggestions.

Thanks peeps!
No. Google+ has shipped.
Thanks for your comment wccrawford. The other day I was thinking very hard about why I admired a former colleague of mine so much but couldn't pin it down to something concrete. Reading your comment made it suddenly all clear - it was the vision. Just like how you described it having the "vision guy" in any meeting cuts out a lot of unnecessary crap and made the team focused. It's very hard to understand or even describe how powerful this is unless one has experienced it first hand. Lucky me!
The Fresh Smell of Google+
Thanks Bartek. I would say that was one of the keys to our initial success.
As someone who interned twice at RIM during their peak (Van Halen concert peak), I got the feeling my second time around that their best people had already left after making millions off of their stock options. Some of them to start up their own projects. I'd like to see it turn around, it was a great environment when I was there, I was able to get the bulk of my experience at RIM. Sort of feels like your old elementary school is closing down :(