skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did a bit of looking into bcrypt-ruby after hearing about it here. It sounds good, I like the idea of the "cost" attribute.

However, I note that Coda Hale appears to have no interest in supporting his bcrypt-ruby gem for Windows. On his blog he says essentially that he doesn't use Windows and hence has no motivation to put any time into getting a pre-compiled bcrypt-ruby to work on Windows.

I can totally understand where he's coming from and as I do all my dev work on Debian Linux, it's not a problem for me personally. But my partner is a Windows user and it would be a problem for him.

The closest I have found to instructions on getting bcrypt-ruby compiled on Windows are from the bcrypt-ruby README:

You‘ll need a working compiler. (Win32 folks should use Cygwin or um, something else.)

So does this mean that my partner would then have to use the Cygwin environment for all his dev work from this point on?

And a random comment from Coda Hale's blog:

bcrypt seems to work with the Windows One-Click-Installer too. It was easy to compile it with MinGW (I just had to define the missing types u_int8_t, u_int16_t, and u_int32_t). All your tests pass. So you might consider to offer a precompiled version for us Windows users.

I am not a C programmer (getting more experience with a compiled language is on my todo list, just no time as yet) nor am I a security expert. My past experience with compiling stuff basically extends to typing "make" and "make install". I don't really understand what "I just had to define the missing types u_int8_t, u_int16_t, and u_int32_t" means.

So as much as I would like to try and incorporate bcrypt-ruby into my current Rails project, I can't really justify this added overhead of getting it to work on my partners Windows dev box with near zero support.

If anyone has more info, that would be great. But otherwise, I will - for now - be sticking with salted SHA256.
A random RFC with no commentary? I wonder if this is the hacker community equivalent of tossing peanuts to squirrels.
OCaml is non-Unicode by default, though there is Unicode support in extlib (http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/).

I, too, am curious about a Haskell implementation - I suspect it would be comparably efficient to the OCaml one. As for optimizing the Ruby one, the major speedups come from being able to parallelize processing (not sure how feasible this is in Ruby) and OCaml's static typing system (Ruby loses big here, speedwise).

I also wonder how fast it would run in Lua; probably somewhat faster than Python. I don't have the time to rewrite it ATM, though.
1 I have no idea, but since they are growing fairly rapidly there's clearly a good, untapped market

2 Yes, I think some people could/would switch ... especially if we offered slightly lower fees and a few missing–but key–features. Also, there's no reason a person couldn't use both services.

*3 Definitely not a substantial lock-in (see above)
HearWhere Lets You Discover Live Music In Your Neighborhood
and Pixlr looks like photoshop which will save many from learning a new interface.
Dude. I got something like 30 or 40 tools and toolsets that I use on a typical project. For each of these categories, there are multiple contenders.

My source control system does what I want it to do. It doesn't get in the way of production. I understand p2p offline/online editing but we don't need that right now.

I come on HN to play. I've already spent too much time just talking about the tool than the value of the tool itself. As a value provider, I need to concentrate on my users and how much value I can provide for them. There are lots of distractions.
Look around you.
It's the people.
Dumb and ignorant.
Neurobotics - Talks about how brain signals can control prosthetic limbs (video)
The problem of unqualified people responsible for making decision is not limited to software companies.

A misconception that can cause this is the belief that people are interchangeable. Sure, smart people can learn to play almost any role. But, practically, someone learning a role will make more mistakes and take longer than someone who already has some success in that role.
That didn't last long. Anyone aware of any other leaked copies please? wikileaks.org?
Well... there are hundreds of cities where people live fairly close to a reactor, with the same lethal outcome in case of failure. They live there 24/7 and you're opposed to an idea of spending at most tens of hours a year right next to one?

The biggest issue is radioactive contamination in case of an ordinary plane crash, and parachuting a reactor doesn't sound like especially convincing solution: when planes crash, it is usually because a lot of things go wrong onboard, with parachuting system possibly being one of them.

I think we'll be much better off investing into development of new generation of speed trains: they can easily be made electric (thus taking advantage of cheap nuclear energy), riding on electro-magnetic fields friction-free at crazy speeds.
Microsoft's cloud strategy?
Crazy JavaScript Web Framework
Ask HN: What data about users and how they use your website do you wish you could collect?
I'm interested in what sort of user browsing/usage data you folks wish you could collect from your website (numbers, visual data, etc). What features can't you currently get from another service, or could be made more useful?
"Seems you've been missing a lot of work."

"Well, I wouldn't say I was missing it ..."

That movie help motivate me to quit a boring cube job.
I read it. I refer to it occasionally as a field guide to decode the behavior of management, politicians, and other people with power. A few years ago I found some clues in it on how to deal with an evil boss.
The Bet That Blew Up Wall Street
Lol. Funny cross-reference!
How long's it take to join a mailing list and get the content the way Calacanis requests? Seriously, guys. Just do it, it's worth the 25 seconds.
I don't think you'd sound disingenuous by simply stating things as you've done here: You had no idea you'd get such a strong response and can't possibly handle that many testers at one time. Clearly, hundreds of beta testers mean that you'l have to spend hundreds of hours responding to their requests. You'll never get out of beta. It's better for everyone if you get a product they can use to them faster.

I don't think anyone will deny you the right to make a living based on the fact that you said something overly specific in the past.
The Shape of the Cloud
I'm always vaguely amused when people claim to have invented Delicious years beforehand.
Not that there aren't plenty of dumb people around, but the ignorance part is practically unavoidable. Even smart people have little incentive to be well-informed when there are a large number of voters. This "rational ignorance" is a basic defect of democracy.
What's your email? I can forward it to you.
One thing that I can't get via Google Analytics (the only one I use) is how long a person stays on one page when they "bounce" immediately. I have often thought there should be an easy way to build a little javascript ajax call that polls every 5 seconds or something, and whenever they leave - it would stop polling and you'd know they were gone.

There are so many details we already have (keywords, page of entry, etc) - but the bounces frustrate me a lot. If they are bouncing after 2 seconds, that's a problem. If they are bouncing from my info page after 60 seconds, that's a totally different problem: it means they liked what they read, but I somehow couldn't entice them to stay.
"Why would an organization like Stanford [put] this on the web and give it away for free??"

Because Stanford students like me pay the ginormous tuition that covers those costs and virtual losses of revenue. ;-)
So true. I won't even buy a computer if it comes pre-installed with Vista. Linux and/or Mac please.
If you think SEO is bullshit, you are probably isolated in web-app-make-believe-land and think the only way to build an internet business is coding an ajax heavy service, getting viral growth, and being acquired.

This is not the way most internet businesses operate. Most depend on search engines to deliver prospective buyers to their site.

If you think SEO is easy, or completely self explanatory, you have clearly never tried to get a site ranked for a semi-competitive keyword. The vast amounts money associate with commercial search terms makes ranking highly competitive and the constant updates to Google's algorithm make it a constantly moving target.

Maybe all this anti-SEO sentiment stems from jealousy. Good SEO sites can make millions and have a much higher probability of success (compared to web apps) when orchestrated by an experienced SEO.
Review my side project: www.recreationparks.net
I'd like to get everyone's thoughts about this project. I'd also love to know about other data sources that I should mash into this. I think there is value in exposing public data sources in a structured ways, plus, you know, it'd be cool if the AdSense went somewhere.
What experience doesn't alter the brain in some way?
"What's up with the assumption these days that everything done in our work is supposed to be fun? It's work. "

That's ridiculously self referential. It's not fun because it's something which is defined to exclude fun?

It's not "work", it's "creating value" and there's no rule about creating value requiring laborious, menial, maddening, un-interesting work. Particularly not IT/knowledge/computer-based work.

I don't assume it should be fun, I demand it should be fun. (Well, I don't, but someone else should on my behalf ;)

(Also, I know there must be troughs, it can't be peaks all the time. I'm just in the middle of some frustrating, dull, un-interesting work too)
I am the creator of this plugin.

Who cares about the name. I wanted something unique that would get people's attention and return unique content when searching. I also thought it was funny. People need to lighten up a little bit if the name bothers them. It's not like I put the name "authgasm" in helpers that you have to use all over your application. It sits in your plugin dir, that's all.

Anyways, regarding encryption. You can encrypt the password any way you want. Use bcrypt-ruby if you want. It would take no time at all to set up. Checkout the acts_as_authentic documentation. You can provide your own "crypto provider" and have it do whatever you want.

Lastly, I don't use Sha256 straight up. I add in salt. So reverse lookups are out of the question. Your last option is brute force. There is no encryption / hashing algorithm that is safe from brute force. Granted some might slow it down more than others, all that is doing is setting up more hurdles to jump, not 100% secure.

But I really like bcrypt, I'll look into it and maybe switch it to the default crypto provider. But, I really think for anything that is not being used in the NSA, Sha256 + salt would work just fine.
I agree with you, but on the other hand, it's worth keeping the 90/10 rule in mind: if you can get 90% more performance up front with only 10% more effort, go for it. Caching images instead of generating them on the fly is pretty low hanging fruit.

(yes, I made up a 90/10 rule just to make my argument sound better).
tada:

http://tinypaste.com/pre.php?id=4ea66
Matchmine Flames Out Suddenly - "Matchkey" Recommendation Technology Never Caught On
I agree that the original poster needs to calm down, but I get the impression you should calm down, too. I've been avoiding getting involved in the generational battle that seems to have been sparked here over the past week, since I didn't want to add fuel to the fire. But this comment struck an unhappy chord with me; it just seems a bit too indignant.

I think the problem I have is that the assumption it is based on is wrong. I can only speak as a representative of the millenials, but the motivational power you have identified is incorrect. I am not working off of the assumption that everything I do ought to be fun. Given the discussion I've observed here so far, this seems like a gross exaggeration of what has been said.

The primary motivation for me is to be productive and build things people find useful. It seems that this is the same primary motivation of the original poster, too. If things are uninteresting, if they are laborious, if they are maddeningly menial, but they need to get done, then I have no problem getting them done. If, above all of that, they are pointless or otherwise seem like a counter-productive waste of time, then I will get demotivated, and my productivity will slow. As a result of my productivity slowing down, I will become unhappy and start asking questions similar to that of the original poster. I like getting things done, and when I feel like I’m running in place, it begins to make me ask why I’m not just standing still. Your position on this seems to be that I should shut the hell up and just keep running, if I know what is good for me. Can you be so kind as to explain why it is good for me, or those who have ordered me to keep running?

Obviously, if fed with an endless stream of menial work, my motivation will suffer as well, but I suspect that is not where the original poster is at right now. If it was, would you still be yelling at him to suck it up and get back to work? At what point do you decide that there really _is_ a field somewhere else with greener grass? I hope you are not so cynical as to say the grass everywhere is indistinguishably parched.
I'm surprised you say that. More significant crime than hacking an email account or "pwning" a government computer is committed everyday by teenagers in at least an order of magnitude more. From drug dealing to happy slapping. And the later even though is related to Internet (filming and uploading the video), it is just an amplification of a very old tradition, bullying. Nothing new.

Instead of increasing the sentences and applying broken-window policies (a new form of fascism), the social problem needs first understanding and then defining good policies (from family level to national level.)
Did you read my comment before replying to it?

albeit the fact that they the B-36 bombers themselves ______were powered by kerosene_______ despite the availablility of nuclear power since it wasn't intended to be anything more than a proof-of-concept flight
i believe he's writing something about the semantic web.

from his talk at OSCON:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMYJ18tggRs#t=14m2s
RFC 1149 is one of my personal favourites...

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
Osama's gona love getting his hands on these bad boys.
"... Securitization was based on the premise that a fool was born every minute, Joseph Stiglitz ... told a congressional committee on Oct. 21. Globalization meant that there was a global landscape on which they could search for those fools -- and they found them everywhere ..."

What he left out was the bit where "I know more than you do" - instead of the essential financial transparency of banks, finance is supplied by non-regulated sources. Where the risk history of where the finance was coming from is removed. To end consumers, all this meant was cheaper finance. It doesn't mean "fools" could be found everywhere. It means the real risk was externalised. You can read the results here ("Mortgage Meltdown", ABC, 4Corners, 2007 ~ http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/s2389716.htm )

The Structured Finance industry today is what the Junk bond market was the '80 ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_bonds#Debt_repackaging_and...
I were sure a grammer nasi wouldn't be able tolerate that.

At least they must be grinding their teeth, anyway. ;)
Awesome, you shouldn't even consider using a plugin / gem unless it has a good name. The same applies with books. Unless you like title / cover you shoudn't read it.
I don't think anyone would suggest raising it that much. I just want to get rid of the concept of capital gains entirely, so it would then be taxed at the personal income rate (up to 35%ish now). Or maybe not get rid of it entirely, so as to help the middle class save/invest, but do tiers.

There's a big difference between loopholes and tax evasion obviously, and the alternative minimum tax largely closes loopholes. (The AMT currently has its own problems, but is a step in the right direction.)
I believe analytics shows you average time on site...
That's what I always do. I wonder if you could make a browser plugin that just did this automatically. Can plugins clear cookies?
I do not think the barriers of cloud computing is such lower that grad school students can do some crucial innovation. Though the comparison to 1996's search engine is very interesting. As I am also doing some field work in cloud storage, it is very insightful that amazon made the first move, but not the most correct one.
I think it's more that genuine economic growth is a stick-slip phenomenon.
I have often thought there should be an easy way to build a little javascript ajax call that polls every 5 seconds or something, and whenever they leave - it would stop polling and you'd know they were gone.

That would cause a DDoS.
Market not ready for idea

- "We got out marketed." Seems people are happier with this then we got out-invented. I'm not sure exactly why. There seem to be a lot more companies out there that say they got out-marketed then likely. Actually, I don't even really know what that means.
Also, thanks to github, if a plugin is popular enough it never really gets abandoned. Look at the engines plugin. The author of that plugin rarely does anything to it, but people fork it and keep it up-to-date.
I like the site quite a bit. It is very functional and serves a good, specific purpose. The search appears to work well, which is nice.

Something to consider, though not trivial, would be tracking local websites to note events at the different parks. Also, an easy thing to mash in would be weather with regard to outdoor activities.

Nice job!
I think this measure time between pageviews. IE bounces recorded as 0.
Traveling by zip line
Very nice. I needed to quickly edit an icon png and this tool did the job quickly, without getting in my way.
Further musings on the network effect and the cloud
As with a lot of such things, it is only true if a lot of people don't believe it is true. The very reason Flickr etc succeeded in 2003-4 was because dotcom became such a dirty word by then. I have to admit even I was very skeptical at that time so I played my microscopic part in helping them succeed, by reducing the amount of noise they had to contend with!

So if hundreds of start-ups hang on with grim determination that times will get better, times won't get better, the start-ups will just prolong their agony. The very reason some survive to emerge stronger is because others made way for them.

Be honest: isn't it harder today to get attention than it was in 2003? What does that indicate for the average start-up, however good it may be?
Goddamn it, why do we still feel the need to emphasize "the most powerful FEMALE" executive bit? Isn't it enough to recognize that she's damn powerful without taking her out of the general pool of executives and thereby not comparing her to male executives?
It's the same state that made Palin their governor.
+1 Insightful, mod parent up

(no, seriously, this is a really important point)
Microsoft Azure Aims to Re-define the OS
Serves a purpose. Simple as that. Good job.
Black holes may not grow beyond certain limit
This is the same incredibly myopic belief I held until I was 19, when I got my first full-time sysadmin job. You have no idea how expensive it is for a company to lose a server root user to a teenager; it is, in the best case, several days of lost time. At a conservative FTE of $85k, a couple days of sysadmin time is over $1000. Do $1000 of damage to someone's house and see how the legal system treats you.

That's the best case.

I think it's you who doesn't understand the problem here. I stand by my assertion: it is worth considering that we have created a system that encourages dumb kids to incur thousands of dollars of civil liability and serious criminal liability.
If in the event of a plane crash I die but the reactor is safely parachuted to the ground I'm going to be pretty unhappy.
I think the difference between 1 and 2 is which side of the cash register you can see. I'd love to be the second player (producer) in a high margin category 1 situation, and I sure do like being a customer in the #2 scenarios I'm exposed to.
What would be really cool is if you build a small one, using air in a balloon as your rocket source.
I'm interested to see how well the service fairs when it launches and I'm just as interested in seeing the response from those developers who are being able to test the platform. I think that this could potentially be a "step in the right direction" for Microsoft to stay relevant in a world that's changing how and where data and processing is handled. However, unlike many speculators who talk about how someday the "Cloud will completely engulf the world," I don't think that will happen anytime soon. As available as the Internet is and the number of providers grow, there still is going to be a need for localized data processing and handling to a certain extent. This is one of the places that I agree with Microsoft in saying that it needs to be "Local + Cloud." The concept of it all strikes me as something best used to enhance local applications to have access to more information, seamlessly, and dynamically, and be able to tailor that information to meet the needs of the end-user.
Ok, I know it looks dark out there, but to me Jason Calacanis is basically like Jim Cramer - it pays to bet against him. In my opinion the huge amount of stimulus out there just takes time to filter down to recreate optimism. Governments are under pressure to take action NOW, but anything they do is going to take 6-12 months to take effect, so they keep piling it on. So they take action after action, until BOOM another bubble. Those who have jobs are paying half what they did 6 months ago for gas, plus we're looking at 1% interest rates, copious availability of government credit. Plus I think world wide, there'll be a celebration next week (Bush is Gone!). It might be restrained, but I think it'll happen.

I, for one, plan to buy a new Canon 5d ($3k) at the end of November. Even if my job evaporates. Especially if my job evaporates.

Plus that whole Digg to 50 m uniques? Trust me, not going to happen. At least not without new leadership.
This could be one of the best posts that I've seen here on Hacker News. Great job Preston.
I don't think it is between page views.
My site is a one page ajax heavy site, so I can only have analytics on the landing page.
The time on page shows around a minute average (changes per day), while the bounces shows nearly 90%. Doesn't fluctuate as much.

Not sure how they do these measurements. But what is really needed is a tool that can measure on ajax sites.

For now i've started counting server side requests, and it really is showing how unreliable Google Analytics is.
Really depends on the site. But the list is endless.

There are lots of things that would be useful to know.

Here is an example

So, say you want to know how regular users of feature X, to get to it. There are lots of questions you might want answered.

Say you find 5 - 10 'paths.'m (eg google search for 'site.com'>homepage>pagex>login') You might want to see the general pie graph of which paths get used. Google analytics can probably handle this. But what if you want to know about 'users' using this path. Do users migrate from path A to path B over time? Do users form their path in the first visit & stick to it? Are users erratic in their choice of path? Do users of the site that joined after redesign (sub segment) use a different path. Are users of more advanced features (sub segment) more likely to use path X.
The voting was confusing. I saw a list of things and a checkbox and assumed that a checkbox meant that that park has that item. Maybe have "yes" and "no" instead.
Visualization Lab from NY Times and IBM
I think that after X amount of time the page 'reloads.'