skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something I always tend to ask folks:

"Living the life you want to live or one society expects you to?"

Fortunately I was given a severe life lesson not too long ago - certainly made me more selfish but at least it taught me to do what I enjoy, and ignore the nay-sayers.
Async, embeddable HN share button
The death of the current paradigm is in physical devices, haptics, ergonomics. This is definitely an enabling technology for this.
Let's say I wanted to continuously (every few seconds) check the server and update the data in local storage if necessary. In the past I've used changesets to do something like this. What are your thoughts on continuous updates from the backend?
MySQL 5.6 Replication - Enabling the Next Generation of Web & Cloud Services
Will the Minerva Project's proprietary model hurt open education?
Show HN: Working on my wife's idea
Why pay any more than the minimum 50 cents when the effective price per chapter of the complete book is 49.5 cents? A free first chapter would probably be better at getting people hooked (assuming it's actually a good book)
Google Glass Battlefield
Die WYSIWYG Die. Let's Focus on Content Instead
Should You Choose a Domain Name For Users or Search Engines?
I think the amount of torture, kidnapping, murder and other government "evil practices" hasn't increased as dramatically in the past 10 years as public exposure to these issues did.
WTF is this, and what is it doing on my HN front page.

Is it just me or have the quality of HN content taken a sharp nosedive in just few months? Another Erlang week seems to be in order.
Contactless (credit) cards insecure
Original publicity: http://www.channel4.com/news/millions-of-barclays-card-users-exposed-to-fraud
What trouble are you having with HSBC? I've just spent about an hour on the phone with them to open an account in Australia and all I'm required to do now is go to a Local Branch near me with my ID / documents - the account will be ready in a week, two weeks max.
I have to get out of jail.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\BIBLE.TXT

took each
man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males.

34:26 And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the
sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem's house, and went out.

34:27 The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city,
because they had defiled their sister.

34:28 They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that
which was in the city, and that which was in the field, 34:29 And all
their wealth, and all their little ones, an
I thought it was closely related to staying within the boundaries of VPAA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
Also: You can write clean bug-free code, but there will still be at least one person on the planet who think your code sucks.
It seems quite a stretch to call a database of movie and product ratings a "social graph." Amazon is building something extremely valuable; they are doing it above the radar, not under it; and it doesn't strike me as a social graph.
Reclaiming your commute
Are you suggesting that people will buy LoTR no matter how high the price? Or are you suggesting that if LoTR is priced too high for someone who wants to read it, they will give up on reading rather than entertain themselves with some other book?
It takes the author to the end of the piece to admit that no, in fact, they did not build a computer using swarms of crabs. Right after he admits it's false he, he asserts it is true again...really...link baity bad writing for an MIT blog.

"To be fair, the results were mixed. While Gunji and co found they could build a decent OR gate using soldier crabs, their AND-gate was much less reliable.

However, it's early days and they say it may be possible to produce better results by making conditions inside the computer more crab-friendly. (No crabs were harmed in the making of their computer, say Gunji and co.)

So there you have it--a computer in which the information carriers are swarming balls of soldier crabs."
In a billiard-ball model one would construct a NOT/inverter with a crab source that normally flows straight to the output but can be misdirected into a drain by crabs coming in from the input. Of course you need a crab source for this, but this is little different from electronic transistor-based computers, where the inverse of Vss is Vdd and the Vdd comes from the power supply.
Sorry that should've been updated. There isn't actually a min price.
> such as Arithmetic coding

Isn't range coding widely viewed as being a legitimate workaround for the arithmetic coding patents? I guess in a year or two the question will be irrelevant, as the last of those patents will expire soon.
I've actually used Wikipedia that way - as a locally stored database dump. Evopedia on the N900 made this easy, even though it also took a major part of my SD card to do so.

Very useful when traveling in a world where 3G roaming is still prohibitively expensive, much like it would probably be for intergalactic hitchikers.
1 - Everyone has something to offer! Maybe you can offer feedback on an entrepreneur's concept, in trade for hearing more about whatever you want to learn about their business?

2 - Ohours has the ability to cancel and send messages to people who request appointments, so I always say go for it! Let the host determine if there might be a better way to spend time. A no is better than missing the opportunity when they might have been thrilled to talk with you.
I am becoming quite frightened with the direction that, seemingly all western nations (USA, Canada, UK, Eurozone, Australia) are heading toward. All are implementing authoritarian fascist policies on their communications simultaneously in what I think is an effort to pre-empt or be able to crush any sort of "Western Spring" revolution.

If this continues we are definitely heading directly into a Orwellian-style dystopian future, where a World Government is capable of spying and controlling every action of society.
I think part of the problem is that many, if not most people using email don't have a good understanding of what
email is and is not.

Email is not a reliable messaging system. It gives enough of an appearance of reliability that most people using it think it is reliable. But if you have ever had a very important message disappear into a black hole with no notification, you learn not to treat email as reliable.

Email is not private. But most people do not realize this, and act as if it is. The quantity of proprietary business information and very private personal information transmitted by email is astounding. Governments can, and many do, slurp all email messages. Email "providers" such as ISPs, Google, Yahoo, et al have all your emails, even those you think you may have deleted. PGP/GPG are attempts to add a privacy layer, but have failed because they are too difficult for almost everyone.

Email is useful, for what it was intended for. If you expect it to be something it was not designed to be, then of course you might think "email is broken".

Today there is a need for a reliable and private global messaging system. SMTP is not such a system, but it is still used as one because it's "good enough" and so widespread that nothing better has been able to displace it.
Digging through code a bit, it looks like plupload accomplishes the resize by handing off to Flash or Silverlight, so I don't think it would work in a pure JS environment without either of those.
Right, yes, but the (semi-serious) point is that we don't have a crab grid in the same way we have a power grid, so actually implementing this (which is what the article is about, rather than just theory) might be hard. For the crab computer to "run" arbitrary computations it would need an arbitrarily large source of crabs.
I feel bad for anyone who considers this sort of thing "fun"
There is absolutely no reason they would have to to log ip addresses to prevent account sharing. They can easily limit you to one logon at a time or simply ignore sharing and limit each account's bandwidth, preferably rounded to the megabyte or coarser.
IBM APL2 was the 3rd or so language I learned. At Merrill, I remember workspaces with tens of thousands of LoC, possibly over 100K. Also we used to have "each" contests and obscurified APL contests, where nobody could read anybody else's code
I suppose that when you're younger and moving often, acquiring a library can be a problem. I live in a smallish Manhattan apartment, but I've been here for years, so I designed my space to accomodate my books. I take great joy and pleasure in having my library there to surround me at home, available to browse and grab at will. Scrolling through a menu on a little screen will never fulfill that same need for me.

I definitely agree about the advantage of e-books when I travel, which is why I sometimes buy light entertainment that I don't care about owning in e-book form.

Reading in the dark is one of the worst things about iPads, however. Light that is reflected from a page is much easier on the eyes than light shone directly into your eyes, even if it's white on black. I wouldn't presume to argue with your personal preference, but I find the eyestrain of a glowing screen in the dark to be a considerable drawback.
Their features matrix claims that it can do JPEG resize in HTML5 in both Firefox 3.5+ and Chrome, but not Safari or Opera, which makes it sound like they have something non-Flash/Silverlight working (otherwise there'd be no Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera difference). Haven't dug up where that's implemented, though.
What amazes me in the US, is we have a political environment where restricting marriage to a man and a woman is a huge political platform, but data privacy is barely even on the radar.
The Cancers In The Ruby Community
So this seems to be about using IP tunneling that is terminated at a commercial tunnel provider who promises anonymity, to hide your real address. As opposed to the usual meaning of VPN referring to IPSec or similar for confidentiality/integrity, and/or tunneling into the soft inside of the corporate "intranet".
I used K professionally for a bit. The people who love it dearly love it, and it is exceptionally great for any type of linear algebra or relational database problem. One of the interesting insights I was made aware of: in K, the slowest operation is usually no more than an order of magnitude slower than the fastest. Since all of the operators are 'approximately the same speed' it's much easier to reason about a program's performance. It's also the reason K programmers obsess over the character length of a solution, often the shorter solution is the faster one.

On the downside, I found K to be very polarizing with respect to interoperability. There is a K way to do something and 'the other ways,' and attempting to bridge the gap leads to a lot of headaches. Part of it is that K is so good 'inside' that not as much effort is given to interacting outside of that world. The K programmers I know are aware of this, and I think this is more of a critique on the size of the community rather than its mindset. They're focused on solving actual problems rather than the gardening involved to keep the language friendly.

One nice thing is that K programmers tend to be higher up on the intelligence side of things[1], so if you meet someone who knows it you're probably in for a great conversation.

[1] like look at this crazy shit http://www.nsl.com/k/ray/ray.k
You're right, headline should've probably just had "Online Encyclopedia".

Can't find anything on how Alan Kay envisioned authorship of the Intelligent Encyclopedia, but it wouldn't surprise me if he looked at a democratic encyclopedia as Leonardo may have flight: lacking the exact design but having faith that it would work "eventually".

In the late 1890s, Lord Kelvin said,

I am afraid I am not in the flight for "aerial navigation". [...]
I have not the smallest molecule of faith in [it] other than
ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the
trials we hear of. [1]

I wonder what computer scientists thought of a general purpose "all-you-can-edit" online encyclopedia in the late 1990s. The quote from Vannevar Bush in a sibling comment mentions a "profession of trail blazers" contributing content and links, which sounds more like Nupedia or Knol. As McCarthy with m-expressions, Jimbo found out Nupedia was superfluous.

[1] Often inaccurately summarized as "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible"; http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Thomson
Since the author of this article is an "e-book publisher" (ugh), I think your assessment of his viewpoint is spot-on.

He's a middleman who delivers a vanishingly small amount of value, and is worried about being made redundant.
Original publicity: http://www.channel4.com/news/millions-of-barclays-card-users...

Though the story moved on since then to reveal other credit card providers were also susceptible and that it is a general problem with the specification.
knos, you change handle too fast.
Nice job, same boat as me. I'm excited to see Google's write-up of D. Good luck in Round 1!
Show HN:  chel.la, Coachella photos via InstaGram's Real-time API
Here's a simple site I threw together to collect photos from Coachella via InstaGram. It's using InstaGram's Real-time API to receive notifications when users upload new photos from Coachella, Python via Flask on the Server and a combination of dojo and 320 and up on the client.
Good question, I'll try an answer:

Personally, when I ask myself this question, "Oh no! How could this be happening to my goverment/society, we are supposed to be better than that"; I simply remind myself of all the terrible moments in past generations -- McCarthyism, American-Japanese Internment Camps, Vietnam, Kennedy Assassination, South American US-Friendly Puppet Dictators -- and tell myself, "Nothing has changed, it's always been like this, its just now with the Internet, you know about it whilst it's happening".
I think it is all still a little sketchy. There's a lot of uncertainty regarding the patents so most people seem to just stay away from it.
BootMed Plus 1.0 Released - Download for free for a limited time.
I'm not arguing the existence of Watcom C++ 9.5/386 :) But let's be clear the first version of Watcom C++ was released in 1993. To suggest the demoscene started there is ludicrous.
There is one thing I have found to be "broken" with email. Or rather, a manner in which it is commonly poorly/mis-used. Group conversations.

In the work environment, little is more frustrating than not being addressed/cc-ed on some important/critical conversation. Someone leaves your address off, and "Bam!", you're out of the conversation.

I call this the "submarining conversation". It dives below the water, and you remain unaware of it unless or until it surfaces. (Whereupon it often causes considerable disruption. E.g. An entire section of specifications that you were never made aware of.)

Or you are added to an assignment and have to spend time and effort chasing down the various email conversations that have comprised its efforts to this point. AND... once you have them, gluing them together in your head and/or on screen or in text, in order to come up with a coherent and not overly redundant picture.

Google's Wave I saw as a genuine effort to address this. Actually, it is really an iteration on the centrally stored, group conversation. For example, web bulletin boards that were "all the rage" about a decade ago.

Wave added decentralize-able membership controls and sophisticated authoring and version control. Things very useful in a work or similar environment.

It didn't need to be email. But it could better fulfill a role too often filled poorly by email.

HOWEVER, Google slapped a ridiculously bogged down and unintuitive user interface on top of it, then said "figure it out". And so, it died, at least as a Google product and with respect to gaining Google's potential momentum.

SO, I'd say there are some applications of email, that could better be done other ways than through email. But this is not email's fault. It is the result of the limitations of users, both conceptually and in terms of the limited scope of tools that -- particularly in many work environments -- they are supplied and permitted.

P.S. Such organization of conversations pertains not only to contemporary work, but also to compliance and audit-ability. When trying to determine later what happened, with email conversations one it left to obtain, search, and/or reconstruct any number of email archives, hoping that none of the archives nor individual messages have been irretrievably lost or deleted.
Please don't do this. There are already few enough people paying attention while driving. Just because you are in stop-and-go traffic doesn't mean you can stop paying attention.
The reference to http://www.taskrabbit.com/ was exactly what I have wanted. Thanks for the link.
Am I missing something? Aren't Bootstrap and JSMin open source? Instead of focusing on coding philosophies, someone can simply fork JSMin's source and make the appropriate patch, or make a fork of Bootstrap that has JSMin friendly code.

Regardless of our many diverse opinions, Crockford and Fat are entitled to maintain their own libraries in whatever fashion they desire. The fact that they made the libraries open source means "if you don't like my code or the way it works, here's my code, customize it and leave me alone".
Glad it works for you. However, I would never be able to blog this way. When I blog, it's a continuous iteration of what I have written. I write something, it doesn't make sense, then I go back and make it better. Personally, I would find it impossible to create quality content by just starting to speak out loud.
hmm, selling a linux live cd - is this legal?
Self-introspective code is trivial, and it's been done before. I suggest looking at LISP :)
> but there is definitely a fundamental problem with email that can't just be solved by a couple of perl scripts and rules

And what is that problem? Yeah, email makes a poor to-do list, but if everyone around you is eating soup out of top hats, then you need to rethink soup bowls, not top hats. Tinkering with email doesn't help you make a better to-do list.
Isn't it crazy that Wikipedia launched not before 2001? (And wasn't relevant till 2003.) It is so ingrained in my Web habits that I have the feeling it existed already in the 90s.
That was definitely the rumor, but I think it was mostly speculation along the lines of: Google makes their money from ads, so of course their phone will be wall-to-wall ads.
I don't quite agree with the options listed in the article. I still believe finding a great technical co-founder is the right answer. How you find one is what should be discussed. But maybe I'm biased, since I run a meetup whose goal is to help find co-founders. I believe that if you are passionate and a "doer", technical people will want to follow you.
> In the work environment, little is more frustrating than not being addressed/cc-ed on some important/critical conversation. Someone leaves your address off, and "Bam!", you're out of the conversation.

Internal message boards are a possible solution to this.
People problems in startups
I imagine that having a solid set of system libraries, useful abstractions, and a fixed ABI helps a great deal.
Whats the new Tech Crunch?
I used to be an avid Tech Crunch reader. The site show cased interesting startups.
But now I dont find it interesting anymore. The editorial quality has gone down. The article selection has also changed.
So, what are some sites that cover good web/mobile startups nicely?
Understanding metaclasses (Python)
Update: Bootstrap fixed their code as Crockford prefers. From fat's comment circa 11 am PDT:

fwiw, this was patched in bootstrap way before i even encountered this issue - otherwise i wouldn't have closed it outright.

Sorry for the confusion everyone.

You can see the code here in 2.0.3: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/blob/2.0.3-wip/js/boots...

I still maintain this is a bug in jsmin, but as others have pointed out - mark and I do our best to make bootstrap flexible with other great tools out there (like jsmin). This includes adding semicolons where necessary or changing minor stylistic things.
Episode 0.7.9 - Adhearsion, telephony, and XMPP with Ben Klang and Ben Langfeld
Are these pieces paid for? The writer's company link (just.me) takes to a very crude homepage with an un-styled Google Spreadshet form requesting subscriptions.

There's nothing new in this article and a lot of speculation.
Brendan Eich: The infernal semicolon
Yes, of course. There's some caveats if it's based on some existing distro, but in general yes.
Shouldn't "classic" hacking be the days of yore in Bell Labs? When I think hackers I think Ritchie and Thompson working on C and Unix. The definition of hacking you're thinking of is the media's definition, i.e. the clueless one.
Language popularity in Code Jam 2012
I know someone exactly in the same boat as you (i.e. not legal status and needs to get married if they want to stay and be hired legally). He does things through 1099s as well. There are seriously legal repercussions and as a result, he can't be legally employed. Been programming for a really long time and even has his CS degree. Unfortunately the best he can do is contract work.
Looking at the ten most recent messages in my inbox, I have a political call to action, two invitations to apply for jobs, two newsletters from companies about their services, two informational newsletters, an invitation to a meetup, an account statement and a request from a friend to host a website on my server.

Half of these are not to-do items in a sense other than "please read this text". They don't even want a reply.

* The political call to action is an annoyance; it wants me to sign a petition against CISPA. I plan to write my congress people directly instead. I don't know how I got subscribed to these, but writing this comment reminded me to unsubscribe.

* I don't want to read any of the four newsletters. I might want to read them some day, and ideally, they'd be filtered in to a "newsletters" folder and not show up as "new mail" when they come in.

* The account statement is something I want to have but not act on. It shouldn't trigger a "new mail" alert either.

* I have no desire to apply for the jobs. I'm kind of curious as to where these people got my email address, as they appear to be actual employers and not recruiters.

* I might go to the meetup.

* I wrote a reply to my friend, agreeing to host her website and telling her what she needs to do to make that happen.

How do you propose to improve my experience?
Which Browsers are the Fastest? Real User Performance Data
It seems to me there's a lot of push back from users on the use of interstitial on desktop websites. You think they will be better tolerated on mobile?
Some studies say distracted driving is age dependent and I think I heard somewhere else some are just better at multitasking safely, though I don't remember the signs or how to test for this -awesome- traight.

http://www.mendeley.com/research/effect-cellular-phone-upon-...
Cybercriminals the main threats in March, fake LinkedIn invitations and offers
He links to another article which states clearly what he was trying to say: Don't look for a technical cofounder; earn one.

http://www.humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-asking-h...
Highres video of Debris: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxfmxi-boyo
Could have but didn't.

Implementation > Ideas
That certainly may be true. I'm merely of the opinion that driving warrants all my attention - no matter the traffic conditions. Full disclosure: I do listen to music/podcasts on long trips, so you may consider that I'm breaking my own rule.
Apple's Genius Bar Replacing White iPhone 4 Models With Refurbished 4S Models?
This seems like a terrible idea from a safety point of view.

If commute time bothers you, move closer to work, or work closer to home. Use the extra time to blog.

Personally, I'd never work somewhere I couldn't bike to. Its significantly more fun than driving, and I never sit in traffic.