skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, thanks for adding good insights into what would (and would not) stand in court.

Would a 5th Amendment right (not witnessing against herself / self-incrimination) protect the owner of the ISP against a charge of obstruction of justice?

i.e. Owner of ISP refuses to post the canary after a gag order. She is not named as a defendant in the investigation. But she can defend herself against obstruction of justice charges: plead the 5th, and thus she is not compelled to falsely affirm the canary.

It's not clear this would work, either, but there might be some pretty solid precedents that could be used in this way.
Federal regulators want brake override systems in all cars
People aren't "starving" in the sense that they are dying. But they are being fattened up on a diet of cheap carbohydrates and salty pre-prepared meals. In my small city, folks living in the poorest areas are a 30-minute bus trip away from a market with fresh produce.

In inner-city communities, the unemployment rate is over 30% in many cities. 30% of the able-bodied population does not have a job of any kind. 40 years ago, those same communities in my city were filled with people working in various industrial facilities, one of a dozen local financial institutions, small retailers, etc.

Have fun in the upper middle class ivory tower. But when the market for whatever you produce implodes due to an infusion of some low-cost commodity-type competitor, be happy. You may be 50 then and unemployable, but you can take pride in the fact that you'll be able to live out your retirement in a room somewhere, and that you'll no doubt have a color television, microwave and maybe internet access.
"Intolerable for real-world use. A toy language."

Seems like a silly thing to say. I wouldn't write avionics software with it, but there are a billion websites demonstrating that it's pretty decent for real-world use. At least as good as any other language, I'd guess.
Is o_O the best HTML binding library out there?
http://weepy.github.com/o_O
Draw Something Zyngafied
Even if you won't see great results you will be able to understand and communicate more clearly with your tech founders / people or understand their arguments and needs better. It will definitely not be wasted time.
Pinterest Clone Pinspire ‘Tampering’ With Users And Pimped By Spammers
There are two types of people who generally read the TOS. The type that are specifically looking to make sure that there no deal breakers (for them at least) before using the service. Thes people already have a list of deal breakers and are searching for them.

The second group are reading out of curiosity and just checking to see what's up in the TOS.

Group 1 really benefits from the full text while group 2 just wants a simplified digest version. So I think it's great they did this. Plus having the digest and full text on the same page lets them say later "it's all in the terms" if someone wants to play ignorant.

(There's also a third type of TOS reader. The infamous blogger who skims TOS agreements all day looking for some fake controversy to drum up)
I wasn't at the meeting. I could have gone, but decided not to.

The only reason I can find for the OP to explicitly call out Yehuda is so that maybe he'll actually read the article and consider the advice it contains. If the article's intent was to bring attention to this type of behavior, then mission accomplished.

I think the OP wishes she had taken a less passive approach to this when considering the sequence of events in retrospect. Sometimes, it's hard to be "in the moment", and only afterwards do you wish you said/did things differently.

Truthfully, I wish she had said something about this to Yehuda right at the meeting, but after it was all said and done and not in front of everyone. However, I don't know how he would have taken it. I could see the situation getting uglier at that point. Hopefully, he can/will learn from this for the future. No one is beyond criticism. We all have things we could be better at.
I can definitely attest to IndexTank's fantastic customer service making a difference. We used the service for our startup. I remember dealing with Ignacio. Not only did he take the time to help us when we were using the free service, he took the time to look at our site (and give us a much needed ego boost by calling it a good idea). He took the time to understand the idea and figure out just what we needed. That is not going to happen with AWS...
Not in this case, but it's commonly accepted that == is "broken" in JavaScript, and === should be the equality operator of choice most of the time.

The one case where I sometimes use == is if I want to check for "null" or "undefined". Even then it scares me.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/TPM
You read ONE side of the story. Maybe the programmer ended up butt-hurt that someone corrected him and wanted revenge. In any case, don't use such strange language until BOTH sides of the affair have provided their recollection of the events.

If he was at a local user group in the first place, then I'd say his timing was awesome, cause despite his obvious rockstar status in the community, he still spends time helping and creating at the base level, and he should be thanked for that.
Good question. Meteor is an application framework, like Ruby on Rails. Firebase is a database, like MySQL.

We both think that application development is going to radically change in the future and we're both building products that promote a new way of developing apps. We're stoked about Meteor and see our products as very complementary.
Well, there are some pretty good reasons beyond faith to think that there's no practical upper limit on human wants.

First, there's the drive for status. No matter how rich everyone is, demonstrating that you're slightly richer (usually to obtain a mate) is deeply ingrained in our psyches.

Second, there's the historical precedent that people have been wrong about the "problem of overproduction" since the start of the industrial revolution. They continually fail to appreciate how wealth creates new demand, which creates new wealth, which creates new demand.

Third, we rich westerners are walking existence proofs that at least X level of per capita consumption is possible. While this doesn't prove an unlimited cap, is proves a cap much higher than what the world has today.

> I think that it is possible that the work of a small proportion of the total population could provide for the whole, with the right degree of automation.

I'm not disagreeing with that statement. In fact, we've already achieved what you're describing. If you told a farmer in 1850 how productive the farmers of 2012 would be, he would assume that most of us are unemployed, because we have in fact reached the point where a tiny fraction of the population can use automation to "provide for" the whole. But of course we've invented entirely new forms of economic activity to keep the rest of us busy now that we don't need to all farm.

I'm arguing that the same process is happening to wide swaths of our present economy.
This looks awesome -- a better option than an api-only Rails backend. Realtime pub/sub is also a big plus. Security is a concern with any 3rd party storage, but most uses I can think of wouldn't store missile launch codes in here anyway..

It's also worth pointing out that Firebase grew out of Envolve which supported millions of users, so you know these guys can handle scale.
Phrases like "Kittens will die if you abuse this service" make me uncomfortable. Just replace it with "Privacy & Terms comming soon".

I continue to read unprofessional things like that in the startup environment.
I'd say leave the humor to your customers. Just my opinion. People always talk about "scaling". A phrase like that does not.
Even the most minimal benefit structure in the US has got to outstrip free housing and food at Chinese rates. FICA employer contributions, state disability insurance, etc.
Prototype Mac 128k w/ twiggy disk drive on eBay
Starting bid is a smooth $100k. Apparently the only complete twiggy drive mac in existence? Great photos.
"Dude" I think was Andre Dhondt (http://phillyemergingtech.com/2012/speakers/andre-dhondt) I think he tripped up he was live coding and everyone could see him thinking and hitting backspace live.

I personally think it's blown out of proportions because everyone there helped debug and got it working. #6.
yeah, i'm willing to give my email out for a invite, but i just hate when it asked me for my fb credentials, even though, i give fb very little info about me, etc., i would rather just use my email.
That's like saying why doesn't someone create a combination hammer and screwdriver. A proper tool for every job.
Well said. Upvote on me, Sir.
"It took contacting them again, insisting on a response, to get an explanation."

Which was...?
From reading all the comments on here as well as the events, I think it all just boils down to common courtesy and etiquette. Some think etiquette goes out the window as long as the point is valid (the end justifies the mean). Some think a little more tact needs to be observed, some grace and choice of words.

Some are good in their field, but not good enough for others to over look their fault. Some are so good, people will continue listen to them even if they are brunt and aggressive - they can tune it out or shrug it off. We've all made these choices before. The bar for tolerance shifts depends on the speaker/interrupter.

Personally, I think the HN title is weak and a low blow - from the article:

"But if he, or anyone, pulls that kind of shit, be better than me and stand up and say something."

So the author did nothing at the event, decides it's more productive to slander this person on the internet, then he's not making it hard for others to be better a person than he is.
How to Prank a Brogrammer
Another great step in the right direction.

That being said, I do believe the hardest part of all these attempts to abstract backends is authentication and security models. It seems to me that most of these services launch before figuring out that critical part of the puzzle.
Congrats on the launch of Firebase and absolutely love the code demo; it hooks you in.

At the end of the demo you are asked if you'd like early access. Definitely.
You are bragging as if you invented that bug :)
So what happens when Zerobin or SnipURL is ordered to take down "all posts from the same client IP address as the post with the shortened URL of ..."?
Computers with dotjs or greasemonkey could also sneakily get your stuff, being all the compromising code invisible in network traffic and even inspecting the page source. Something to consider if using an untrusted computer (and not just keyloggers and the like).
things that work in most cases, but not all cases, are exactly where bugs come from

If I didn't have such a low pain tolerance, I would get that tattooed on my body somewhere prominent.
> It does not throw it away on an obscure whim.

So you could have predicted this yesterday? Just because it's codified somewhere, it doesn't make it clear, or anything other than a whim, or a product of circumstances, at best. That's not how languages should be defined, even if PHP clearly demonstrates that they can end up that way by chance.

Rasmus' lack of foresight does not make it reasonable.
I think programmers generally care too much about correctness at the expense of feelings, community, and personal relationships.

Maybe. Or, maybe like other engineers we care more about having things that work than your hurt feelings. In Inviting Disaster [1], Chiles talks about how the most successful engineering cultures don't cover up mistakes. They expose them and correct them at the earliest possible instance. This does sometimes require people to have a thick skin. It's not comfortable to realize that you're wrong. But, frankly, I'd much rather be correct than comfortable.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should personally attack the person who's wrong. But, from the article, that's exactly what happened. Ms. Selle doesn't say that Mr. Katz personally attacked the presenter. She just said that he questioned the presenter's methods and approach. I think that's entirely valid. I see it at scientific conferences all the time.

I do agree that interrupting the presenter was uncalled for. Mr. Katz should have reserved his questions until the presenter was done speaking. But I don't think he was incorrect in asking the questions that he did.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Inviting-Disaster-Lessons-From-Technol...

EDIT: accidentally forgot link
It's nice to see Amazon entering this space as they do have the expertise to keep this up and running as well as provide the scale needed as apps grow.

What i always tho is the ability to run search queries that also involve dynamic grouping (like grouping by random combinations of facets) and providing those aggregated results.

Only thing i've seen that can do this "on the fly" is SenseiDB. CloudSearch/Solr/etc seem to need preprocessing to get this right.
I don't see ZeroBin fulfilling any useful purpose for the following two reasons:

1) The encryption and decryption features do not provide data confidentiality to users because the encryption/decryption environment is not controlled by the end users. The host retains complete control over the algorithms used and the input and handling of keys and plaintext. Users would need to verify that the client-side environment is safe to use on every single page load.

2) The host will still be legally required to block access to encrypted messages once someone sends them a URL containing the key. Furthermore, the host will still be liable to produce log files identifying users. Extensive case law exists in multiple countries to support these two statements.

Similar comments were made in the HN discussion of CrypTweet[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611453
General Board 2.0: Leveraging Disruptive Thinkers
I agree.
I find it ironic that a post that attempts tell us all how to be kinder to each other and invokes the words of "How to win friends" would call someone out by name in a public forum.

Even if the author was doing it to "make sure that he saw it so you could teach him a lesson", just saying "Last night at Philly.rb, a guy was giving a presentation on meta programming and he was rudely interrupted by another programmer. Lets talk about why this kind of behavior is bad" would have been enough. It would have been a good thing for all of us that have the same tendency to hear, and wycats could have seen it and said "oh, my bad, I can see how that wasn't very nice" without being called out infront of his peers.
Any reason you don't host those static files on a public 'web enabled' ec2 bucket? We do that for http://www.incubatebang.com and it costs us like $1.40/year for hosting
It's been a good week for the real-time-web.

We might need a snappier name though, because this sort of real time is a lot more real time that the type of real time people are already used to.
A few people are saying that this[1] comes from a desire to show how smart you are.

I honestly think it's not about showing other people how smart you are, but that it's a desire to be correct. It's something that a few people do really struggle with. It has nothing to do with whether other people are around or not.

Some people need to correct mistakes. Other people need to ((close braces.)

[1] Interrupting other people with corrections.
"kittens will die if you abuse this service" means "we have no reasonable method to stop you abusing this service".
Hoboken, NJ is an oft-overlooked area. I live there and am a 10 minute PATH ride (or ferry) from WTC. It's a town completely full of yuppies so there are plenty of eager roommates. You alternatively might be able to find a studio under 1k.

edit- to find a place, CL is pretty legit here. There are also brokers, but nowhere near as bad as NYC.
Report: Drinking Alcohol May Enhance Problem-Solving Skills
What about simplifying the actual TOS then?
ok, but do you get that the person you were responding to was a woman who didn't like how the blog was representing her?

do you get why I think it's weird that you dismissed her complaint because no 5-year-olds were present?
Domain Names prominent in Micrsoft ZeuS botnet seizure
On Linux, the need for hardware sources became more visible because of this:

"/dev/random vs /dev/urandom"
http://www.onkarjoshi.com/blog/191/device-dev-random-vs-uran...

/dev/random is hardware entropy dependent, and if application users use it too much (and we all know that many application developers don't do what's minimal stress for hardware or what's optimal "I just make it fast, it works for me"), every such application can block too often. Especially servers are problematic because you can't accumulate the entropy by measuring keyboard or whatever. That's why Intel made RdRand. And their competitors made some similar solutions even before that.

Good detailed discussion also on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random

In short, hardware RNG in the CPU is a very good thing.

Of course, whoever doesn't need cryptographically secure randomness should anyway just use plain old pure software pseudorandom number generator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator
Free micro-payments via mobile, with any UK bank account.
Good point. This was on while we were in stealth. I've removed the whois protection.
This is an individual choosing to give to charity. I am an individual, and I'm choosing to give a little bit of stock in my company to charity. So what's the problem?
Java Leads Programming Language Popularity
Why does one have to point to origin.meteor.com to host on a custom domain?

Does using "meteor bundle" also require pointing to origin.meteor.com?
I really hope that they're simply consolidating Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and CISE (Computer & Information Science Engineering) into a single department and keeping existing faculty.

As a 2010 graduate (CISE - I wanted a mix of engineering and liberal arts), this is quite troubling to me. I remember when they announced that they would be laying off a number of faculty members (mostly lecturers) -- some of whom were the best instructors in the entire department. Now they're getting rid of research in the name of teaching? What a farce.
Yep. University of Calgary went the opposite route a few years back and shut down the computer engineering degree stream. I'm actually not sure what the effects of that were, I'll have to ask my coworkers (some of whom are graduates of that degree).
I have apps disabled. I also don't have the FB Android app installed.
Quoth the project page;
"Admins can still remove a document upon injunction or infringement notice… but have no way to tell if the same document has been posted again."
Updated the Pingit app today, and it's now available to members of any UK bank.

I think this is a big step forward in UK banking, a market which has been moving far too slowly over the last decade.
If Google's Really Proud Of Google+, It Should Share Some Real User Figures
Here's two links to the example pages

http://weepy.github.com/o_O/examples/guide/index.html

http://weepy.github.com/o_O/examples/todos/index.html
On this day in 1976, Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake for $2,300
Show HN: PumpUps.com, Birchbox for the supplement industry
http://pumpups.com

We built this over the past 7 days. We went from idea, to validation, to securing partner supplement companies, to building this MVP in a week.

Pump Ups are packs containing premium supplement samples as well as healthy snacks and foods, sent to your door for $15 per month. We're trying to make headway into the $28billion+ dietary supplement industry.
compatible "with well over 99 percent" and Google is bailing because of the remaining incompatible sites????
So it seems like we made this announcement a little early. We wanted to gauge initial interest in the general concept, but we didn't state this clearly enough. Sorry about that.

If anyone wants to remove their invite then please get in touch - rich@roo.md

We're looking to launch properly in the coming weeks as soon as we have a viable product. We'll update again once we're actually ready.
The business side typically boils down to product management, marketing, or business development. All 3 areas involve making relationships and getting things done (closing deals and/or shipping). It's easier and probably quicker to learn while doing. Not sure how to price? Price at different points and go with what yields the most profit. Being scientific and prioritizing the customer experience goes pretty far.
As a fairly experienced programmer, where are all these business guys who are so psyched about learning to code??? Any in AustinTX?

I would be seriously psyched to pair with a motivated total "noob" because I remember how exhilarating the first few years are, and how great it is to have your mind blown weekly or monthly by some subtle concept.
CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover
Wow. So essentially you're saying people are too stupid to know who to donate to, so instead, let's have large corporations do it. They can be manipulated by special interests for the betterment of society!

I'll pass on that.
And of course GPU vendors also employ similar techniques. It is not uncommon to see the same chip in multiple models, with lower-end models with parts of the chip disabled either due to defects or for product differentiation.
I didn't say it's perfect. Neither .doc or .docx are read perfectly by any software, Word included.
Want Breakthrough Ideas? First, Listen To The Freaks And Geeks
Would something like this help? https://www.acm.org/sigs
I don't think they are trying to hide anything per se, the company grew from envolve.com. Seems to be pretty open here http://www.firebase.com/about.html

They'll probably remove the whois protection once they fully launch.
very nice. Not a puzzle player but will ask my wife - she is. As for the UI, the game play is good, though the transparencies were confusing and distracting (again - not a puzzle person). The music was nice, but the drum beat seemed like tinny static hiccups. ;) Next round stuff: new font and main menu (white on black and bulky font not too slick). I realize you were focused on game mechanics and playability so congratulations Andrew! Keep the great apps coming!
that's great dude but you didn't actually answer the question.

"If women's interest in CS is purely fixed by human nature, how do you account for the precipitous drop over the past decades?"

a 37% drop over a few decades is a pretty dramatic change.

your argument is based on zero data and a whole bunch of rhetoric. not only that, it completely ignores the question.

if it's all about human nature, how do you explain a dramatic recent change? (and realize that if you really want to take the discussion to the grand, sweeping level of human nature, three decades becomes a tiny, tiny timespan for such a sharp drop.)
Hey, I like your app! I would use it again if I could expand the map to make it larger. Would be the perfect tool for finding a movie.
Although the SV community is very progressive and perhaps this generalization is no longer relevant but it would seem easier and less risky to be a non-programmer than a really bad programmer (i.e. a novice).
This caught my eye. I've been looking forward to mybasis and wish these things would merge.
Instagram to Wall Street: You failed
Microsoft's largest cloud deployment in India
The idea of casting everything to float is just wrong; a string of digits without a dot should be converted to a (big) integer, without any loss of precision. Anyway I just can't fathom how anyone could think weak typing is a good idea; it might make some superficial things "easier", but you'll soon shoot yourself in the foot with it.
Let's ride this bull
I just asked them twice on their chat to describe their infrastructure and they won't do it, at least yet.

I realize this is in beta, and it's early, but am I the only one who would not trust my data to a service where I can't get at least some idea of how they're actually functioning behind the curtain?