skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. Inquire within.)
This last week has been absolutely ridiculous for me. I'd like to make it up to myself by doing something meaningful for some strangers. I like this community a lot and want to see if there's anything I can do to make you a little more successful. No strings. To give you an idea of what I might be able to help you with, let me tell you a few things I've done to help others...

- Last night, I volunteered at TEDxMIA's screening of TEDGlobal where I fulfilled their video stream management and multiplexing fantasies,

- I've built network operations center monitoring software for proprietary wireless protocols. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnleO8H4lyY)

- I regularly brainstorm with others in the SoFL entrepreneurial and tech circles as we look for ways to grow our community and attract talent to our market.

- I'm an early adopter, enjoy playing with new tech and can provide strong, constructive, specific feedback.

- I understand good design from bad design. Aesthetics are not lost on me.

- I have a family and juggle a mediocre work-life balance that's gradually improving.

So if there's something I can help you with, just ask here or @mikegreenberg on Twitter. Be specific about what you're trying to fix/solve/accomplish. The more details you provide, the better I can help you out. :)

Cheers!

PS: This is how it went last time I did this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649226
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2544886

PPS: I have a day job and other things going on today as well, so please keep your requests to things I could do for you inside 10-15 minutes so I can help more people.
Why does it say "Time to get your OpenID at the bottom, next to the sign up button? This could be a major typo/branding issue...?
> I get the feeling that some part of your business is a semi-manual process. Semi-manual processes aren't wrong, per se, but there are many more opportunities for things to go wrong manually than there are for them to go wrong with automated systems. As you find where the pain points are, automate where required.

There are some manual bits to it, yes - I don't think it's something that will ever scale up hugely, but I think I can charge more for it, and automate it more and more, so I'm fairly happy.

I am documenting everything as much as I can, and then looking over it later and adding more detail, but the thing that spurred this posting was simply that all the documentation in the world won't help if you've got people who don't reply in some sort of defined time-frame. I'm not expecting immediate, but within some sort of bounds. Not having much experience with this, I just don't really know if that's all you're going to get with someone a long ways away who doesn't earn a ton of money. If there are people out there who are pretty dependable, I suppose that means I need to be a bit more brutal in trying people out and then discarding them, which isn't much fun.
> Anyone who truly believes that the "authorities" in China are any more capable than the "authorities" outside of China isn't very smart at all.

For the last 50-60 years, they have proven very capable of keeping 1.3 billion people under a communist regime that arguably lacks most of our understanding of constitutional legality, considering how they came into power through the "War of Liberation" and considering the lack of human rights.
Or C#, which runs on all of the platforms you named and a few others as well.
to pepper both Beth, the pediatrician, and Emily, the pediatric cardiologist, with an endless series of random questions with which I was too embarrassed to bother my own doctors

It's your child's health! Why are there any questions that you are too embarrassed to ask his doctors?
Although this comment is being downvoted, I stand by it. Why would you spend time producing a third party addon which you know will almost certainly be obsoleted by a "native" version. This application has no future. Google will expose these feeds via RSS themselves.
Open-Source Is Simply Part of my Team’s Job Description
1. What's already been said about design.

2. Where are the benefits? I see plenty of features listed, but no clarity around why I need this, or who should use it. Think about who has a problem with verifying ID (your Gumtree example is a good start). Replace Register | Share | Confirm with these target groups and the unique benefits to them. E.g. Buying online? Buy in confidence, knowing that the seller is genuine. Selling online? Stand out from the crowd as the most trustworthy seller.

3. Pricing plan. Do I need an ongoing subscription - I understand that you want me to have one... ;) What about one-off or short-term pricing. When I ebay I tend to do a large batch at once when I finally get round to clearing out that cupboard. If I believed this would help my sales appeal to more people, I may want a one month account. No need for it in the intervening months. Plus, if you charge £10 for a one month account, £2 pm looks more appealing.

4. Focus on your target market? You can only think ebay/Gumtree traders, but wonder if there are more applications. What's wrong with focus on this market to get started and expanding in the future? Deciding to be all about trust in online trading would reshape the way you structure the site.

5. Copy. Think about getting it professionally rewritten. Like your design, there is nothing inherently wrong with it, just that it could be more polished. It's amazing the difference a professionally written copy can make.

Is there a market? Catch-22. If OkayID is widely recognised and trusted, then ebay sellers (for example) will have to have it because buyers will expect it. To get widely recognised you have to get sellers to adopt it. You're creating a market; another reason to tightly focus on one market at first.
TDD is horrible while learning a new language
A little bit, yes.

I'm also heavily invested in brass, which will be more valuable should any kind of domestic situation occur that requires physical gold or silver be used in place of cash.
I remember an old blog called konbini-life where this guy reviewed the strange stuff he bought at local konbinis (candies and other weird "barely" edible things). The blog is now dead (but was quite popular at the time, he was even featured in the Japan Times), you could try opening something similar, i would read it :)

Also, yep, at the moment it's too soon for a/b test.
> Every financial asset you own, whether it is paper money or a number in a bank account, is somebody else's liability.

Gold is a form of money with no counterparty risk; if I own gold it's nobody's liability.

One complication is that some central bankers and governments try to suppress gold being used as money through enforcement of fiat money monopolies at gunpoint...

Edit: I am incorrect in saying gold is a financial asset.
Founder Stories Volume 01: Slicehost
Yes, debt makes sense when talking of investment. However, borrowing is a bad choice when you are just trying to pay operating expenses. This is the dilema: nations have shifted from borrowing for investment purposes, to borrowing to keep the lights on.
Any ACID database will work. Make sure your app uses transactions properly.
Thoughts on Chrome OS.
Yes, there are definitely many people in your situation, and you will probably be better off visiting their local stores. They can import in bulk and can provide a good selection, it clearly is superior to sending random things from abroad individually.

Many places do not have such stores though, for example as far as I know in Finland there is just one such store in the whole country. I believe there are still customers left for this service as well.

If this turns out to be an unnecessary service, I would be open to accept that result too. I still feel I would be better off having started this experiment, I am learning much about how to approach bloggers, how to interface with PayPal and my new label printer and so on. Nice learning experience in any case.
After almost 20 years, math problem falls
Argentina vs Uruguay Live Stream Online quarter-finals of Copa America
"Hijack"?

I believe it's pretty intelligent for PayPal to integrate new potential currency exchange models into its continuum/plans. "Hijack" implies something stolen, which seems to me an incendiary overstatement of their actions here.

Just a thought.
Princeton's EE department has had such a vending machine for a while. It dispenses various electronic parts for student projects. The cool feature was being able to place an order via a web interface and then enter a code at the machine to collect it, and all your parts would drop at once.
Presumably, one cluster (or whatever google calls them) is honoring it, while a different cluster isn't.
> Imagine if nuclear silos were built today and powered by Windows and attached to the internet - insane, right?

As Stuxnet shows, it doesn't really matter if the machines running Windows are connected to the internet or not. They'll be compromised one way or another if someone wants to badly enough.
I think that the Action Bar in 3.0 (and 4.0) is supposed to solve this problem. It's basically on top of every screen, and clicking the app's icon on the action bar is supposed to take the user back "one level up" in the screen hierarchy.
This has to be at least like 5 years old given that Michael Eisner is listed as the CEO of Disney.
IMO, the left swipe + a letter to search is easer than the app drawer when you actually have a lot of apps. Most common apps, fit on the home screen swipe to the right once for folders of lesser used apps or swipe left once to search for a half remembered app.
A little bit on Javascript magic inside C# code
You are not a baboon. Social structures are unique to each species. You are rationalizing and justifying your decisions. You don't have to. If it works for you, that's reason enough.

> Perhaps more nuanced thinking on this topic can bring down the level of alpha worship we have in our culture.

There are no alpha/beta males in human society. An overwhelming majority of males get access to females.

Do you mean admiration of more aggressive males?

I'd say that's flat out wrong. We send those to jail and execute them.

If anything, we admire people who get things done. Nobody cares how you do it. If you don't admire people for what they accomplish, then what do you admire them for?
Narrative. Salon had a good piece criticizing wired in light of the full logs: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/14...
That's interesting. I was thinking of a high class tier already anyway. I would like to start a kind of "corporate class" subscription option where a slightly bigger amount of only the best possible candy is sent, using the most convenient shipping option, with beautiful wrappings and so on. The cost would be much higher, clearly over $100 / month for just one monthly package.
I think c++ is great to learn on, but I hate working with it day in and day out. It's also close enough to objective-C and also to C# that it's going to remain valuable to learn.
It is a language that will be used well into the future. There will be no 'the' language. These things are silly.
"There's little motivation to do well when you essentially bend to the will of your clients."

The motivation is a killer site to put in your portfolio, potential future projects from that client or friends of that client, and certainly tackling new challenges.

And the trick is not to bend to every situation. There are plenty of big companies that respect outside talent. HBO/Target/CNN off the top of my head.
Ok. It's now on GitHub if anyone is interesting in following:

https://github.com/alfie/MySQL--Replication
How an Entrepreneur Can ‘Get Lucky’ in a Startup
I am limiting this prediction to mass-consumed applications of technology.

If we extrapolate (obligatory: http://xkcd.com/605/) present trends it seems that the platform of the future will be the web.

This will require fast internet connections on computing devices (whatever those will look like in 10 years) as pervasive as water and electricity in the rich world. And we are getting there.

So the language of the future will be based on this platform. The obvious choice then would be javascript. But javascript has a lot of problems so most likely someone will invent a language of the form javascript++ within a few years.
Are you thinking firebird is a good choice due to this: http://www.firebirdfaq.org/faq43 ? You can still have hard drive corruption and when you restart firebird can go into a bad state
They list their sources at the bottom of the page.
Architects design systems of systems, developers build systems, programmers write code. While it may be true that the former can do the job of all their successors, it is not true in the reverse. I won't disagree that programming is what we do, but every time I see a position for a "Programmer" there is a distinct lack of respect for the trade behind it.

Now, I have to ask, why the down votes? This is supposed to be a place for constructive commentary. This has been happening more and more lately.
Our standard practice is that all software we build for clients is published as Open Source. This leaves things like templates and configuration out, of course, but still every project grows and improves our toolkit.
As people are pointing out in replies, debts are bad is probably not the right answer. However, debts are much more dangerous than our current analyses are telling us does seem like an inevitable correction. Debt calculations based on smooth probability distributions underestimate Black Swans, and the evidence of this has been pretty clear for a while, it's just that if you give our highly intelligent financial analysts five to ten years of clear sailing, they'll talk themselves into forgetting it again. For various reasons, this is probably not a solvable problem. (Mostly because, during the periods of clear sailing, underestimating risk means you make more money, and over time simple greed will cause more people to do that, until... kaboom. In a way the problem is that we don't have enough crises.)
This article looks incredibly old. The dates in it, 1992 and 1997, along with the webpage itself, makes it seem ancient. Why was this posted?

Also, there's not much point in sending anything to James R. Cantalupo, since he died 7 years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/20/business/james-r-cantalupo...
And Michael Eisner hasn't been Disney Chief Executive since 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Eisner
Why Google+ is Poised to Fail
At TransLoc we use a multi-master setup. At its heart it's two nodes replicating from each other. Our data is divided into several databases. Each database "belongs" to only one master at a time. For example if we have nodes A and B, and databases w, x, y and z, we would have A be responsible for writes to w and x, while B would be responsible for y and z.

If B fails, we have a monitoring system in place to tell A that it is responsible for w, x, y and z at once. The monitor sets read-write permissions for databases y and z on A (through user permissions), and then notifies all of our application servers that things have shifted. The applications for their part include a piece of common code that monitors for changes in the cluster and allows the application code to cope with these changes. For web requests, if failover happened in the middle of a transaction, the request fails. For long running processes, the process will have to go to the top of the event loop and request a new database connection, etc.

So far it's worked fairly well. We are able to achieve high availability with it, since our master nodes are in two different data centers. There are definitely issues with this approach in general, but it works for our work load.
In Fantom we model DateTimes with both an absolute time in nanosecond ticks and a relative timezone:

http://fantom.org/doc/docLang/DateTime.html#dateTime

Works great for dealing with timestamps in absolute terms, but also when you need to deal with local time.
One time I complained (aka ranted) to Apple about the movie trailer page, and actually got a response back.
Do you like coffee? PM me your address and I will send you a pound of the best Guatemala Huehuetenango you've had all week. Just came out of the roaster a few days ago fresh. I work at a roastery. This is my 1LB/week employee coffee. I think what you are doing is cool as hell.
Those had usb ports and were compromised by thumb drives.

Government spec motherboards shouldn't even have usb headers.

Sure it's possible to program a mouse or keyboard to inject code but way way way more difficult than a thumb drive or internet connected PC.
What do you think are the biggest unsolved problems in the computer security field today? What kind of solutions would you like to see?
This is how vulnerable your Facebook Page can really be
Most impressive thing for me is at 1.00 "Sensitive Couture for Interactive Garment Modeling and Editing"

So much potential.
I thought Google+ was going to add public circles and the ability to share circles?
I think the article's discussion about the importance of groups is interesting but the headline is silly. Google+ is a 2 week old field trial. I too want groups (shared circles?). Perhaps Google+ will have groups before it is officially released.
But no one wants that flow. If I wanted that flow, I'd buy an iPhone so that I have to completely stop what I'm doing and switch tasks (not that I dare say anything bad about iOS multitasking).

I don't want to get a text, reply to it and then have to relaunch my previous app. A tap of the back button and I'm back to doing whatever I was before I sent the text.
Just as a side note, have you heard of sparked.com? It lets you do microvolunteering like this too.
I doubt you can (even remotely) compare the stress levels and omnipresent threat of losing rank and life an "alpha" baboon has to face with a heightened thrive for perfection and possible ADHD.

> While the new study does not have a direct application to human health or social structure[...]

I think ultimately the "alpha worship" we see today is nothing but a new marketing term for the old and very human desire that has always been there: to FINALLY get what one has always desired and self-help on how to be "alpha" is nothing but the snake-oil of the hour.
That's cool. I use many different means to communicate too, mostly for work.

But my friends and family members? For personal messages, like stuff that really matters, they send messages on facebook. My brothers, my sister, my mom, my dad—I can't remember the last time any of them emailed me anything. Maybe a travel itinerary. It could be that my experience, or the experience of my friends/family, is atypical, but I think there are a lot of people—tens or hundreds of millions—who use facebook that way, as their primary communication tool.
I agree in that in my current situation I would not be willing to pay this much for such a service. But I am trying to look beyond my own situation, imagining all those people in all other places in their lives. For some, $23 can be reasonable sum to pay just for the surprise element alone.
What is Chip carrier
Chip carrier is the form of the chip which had been developed as an integrated circuit. The chip carrier is the one which acts as a transistor through which different integration activities could be p
The problem as I see it, and the article briefly hinted at this is illiquidity. Western Europe is extremely rich (in terms of capital stock) but has a relatively low income (in terms of capital flow) and extremely low income growth. Without structural reforms (improving infrastructure, decreasing frictions in the labor market, reducing entitlements to incentive work, etc) you cannot increase income or income growth levels.

But, by increasing public claims on private wealth and opening the country up to foreign direct investment (read: selling the Sistine Chapel to China to rent) you can tap the capital stock. This should be increasingly seen as a way out for wealthy yet cash-poor Euro countries.

Without structural improvements in the US it will also be the only way forward 30 or 40 years for now. Be prepared for a "Sponsored by India" sticker on the Washington Monument.
> I don't understand why it's not a crime to have sensitive information on [[vulnerable]] computers (...)

Easiest question under the Sun:

it's legal and considered perfectly OK because the software, network gear and configuration comes with the right documents. As long as the documents say the right procedures were applied during development and deployment, it's considered OK.

What do you expect, particular software and network gear being declared too vulnerable merely because everybody with relevant experience know and have experienced how vulnerable it is? Bureaucracies don't work that way; never did and probably never will.

We may want to have a way to counter such useless documents to make our countries' infrastructure safer, but that's not the easiest quest under the Sun anymore...
This is a fair argument to make: "Remove unnecessary layers or complexity when learning new languages." And I also don't TDD when learning a new language - in the beginning.

However TDD (when done pragmatically) is actually a great way to dive into a language. The thought process of mocking the file system is actually _where_ you learn about the language/libraries/frameworks. You have to understand those APIs a little bit before you can properly mock them.

... like how do I run the tests?
I run into this a lot when I code as well. But I have to remind myself that I don't need a runner from a framework in order to do TDD. Don't even need a framework.

There is nothing about TDD that says you have to use any unit testing library. It's a process. And if understood properly and used pragmatically can be an excellent way to learn a new language.
That seems great for batteries and power supplies, although I don't see a lot of need there. For keyboards, I'm not interested, none of those keyboards looked great. And for power supplies, especially for mac power supplies, why not just have enough available in general?
Looks interesting. I was trying to find "the catch" there. 3.49 pounds sounds like it would hardly even cover the shipping cost. Perhaps they have figured out how to keep their costs really really low and somehow also managed to do really really big volume.
75% Google+ is Male
This is just FUD, perhaps this article was written after someone received an amount of money to write it?
All online coupon codes in one place. And no, retailmenot doesn't cut the mustard.
Thanks. I've already started writing some future posts. I intend to get the next one published again on Friday.
I'll generalize this and say that TDD is terrible whenever trying to learn new tools. It seems to work really well when you're using the same tools you've always used--frameworks, plugins, gems, libraries, architecture, server stacks, whatever--and the only new area of research is the domain logic and implementation thereof.

I'm running into this exact thing right now on a new project that uses some tooling I haven't used before, and I'm doing an awful lot of yak-shaving. Some of it I would have done anyway just writing code with the new tools, but writing effective tests really does require a certain base comfort with the tools.