skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What's up with the HN experience?
Ok, so I'll admit I'm sorta new here, but I have to ask: why does the "Unknown or expired link" message appear so much? Why isn't there a notification that there are new replies to my comments?

With the population of HN being heavily biased toward people with the skillset to make HN better, why is the experience the way it is?

I don't need crazy chrome (digg) or heavily customizable themes (reddit) -- just a "next page" link that works after several minutes... I can't be the only one, right? Or is this a historical thing that's kept around for nostalgia?

I hope I'm not ranting too much. I ask because I care :) I'd take HN over /r/programming any day, even in its current state.
$100,000 prize for Apps that use US Green Button Electricity Data
Whenever I come across a site that refuses to let me sign up with a secure password, I either leave right away or send them a short mail first.

There were times where I had to rely on password managers too, though. Banking sites are one common place ...
How much does SEOMOZ Linkscape infrastructure cost?
I just tried my password in your service and here's what I got [0]

one quintillion ,
three hundred ninety four quadrillion ,
seven hundred seven trillion ,
thirty six billion ,
eight hundred fifty one million ,
four hundred thirty five thousand

years to crack.

Good god.

[0] - 1394707036851435000 translated by http://www.webmath.com/_answer.php
A different take on the exploration of serious themes in video games
The best screw is the one which I have a screwdriver/drill head for! (Thus PHP is still the best language for a newbie on $5/mo or less shared web hosting!) But really I agree with your point that these metaphors and analogies into other fields hurt the discussion since it changes to being about pointing out problems with the analogy rather than about whatever the discussion was originally about.
I think it's a round-about way of saying "We don't take (American Express|Discover|Diner's Card|whatever)" without actually saying it.

Modern processors accept just about everything nowadays, but this was less common even a few years ago.
Thank you.

The danger scenario of a grow-slowly business is that you usually rely on clients, and sometimes they can become so demanding that you never escape the mediocrity of ad-hoc client demands. You want to avoid providing "custom" services that usually end up with you doing their grunt work without being able to automate it. You also need to constantly be looking out for better clients. Good clients aren't always the ones who pay the best. They're the ones who will let you do things right and who give you the freedom to actually grow, rather than living in a maintenance slog.

There's always a boss. The appeal of a VC startup is that your boss wants your company to grow at 100+ percent per year. He wants you to play the anti-martingale strategy.

I think the problem, both for a person and a company, is that it's hard to find a "boss" who is looking for serious but not ridiculous growth. A corporate boss won't let you rise faster than him, and large companies get sluggish and stupid. So the typical job results in a boss who won't let you grow (personally) more than 3 or 4 percent per year. A VC wants you to triple your valuation every year. It's best to work for people who are on board with "get rich slowly": a 15 to 20 percent increase in the value of your knowledge base and skill set (and 15-40% growth in the business imprint) year after year.
Actually, your own analogy is very apt. When correctly applied, all kinds of screws can perform the same task fine. The difference lies in how the screw is driven.
I actually had a problem with this at a web dev job I did, where I wanted a JS entropy estimator and coded one in maybe half an hour (though it was a bit of unexpected time to debug it). Mine was considerably simpler than the above and would basically use lg(character class size) * length, but would notice when you switched character classes, too. So it was expecting, for example, numbers at the end of the file and would only reward you entropy(letters) + entropy(numbers).

It was at least a disaster when it hit the management who were doubling at the time as user testing -- "this should be a secure password and it's not!" applied to passwords which didn't sound very secure at the time. This was fixed by reducing the entropy bounds to be regarded as "safe" or not. (The result was that "password1" became a "strong" password, if memory serves me correctly.)

Before that, I got another interesting gripe from one of my dev colleagues: "'aaaaaaaaaa' [10 a's] is not secure, but 'aaaaaaaaaaa' [11 a's] is, wtf?!". I was reluctant to do anything more complicated as a waste of my time but there is a reasonable expectation that if you do something like this, you do it very well.
If you form a corp in California (even a single-owner LLC) you will owe a minimum of $800 in taxes next year (and every year until you dissolve the corp) regardless of whether you make money or even do a single thing other than file the papers.

I don't know what the situation is in NY (the other state they cover).

This is still a nice offer for serious startups, but make sure you're aware of the tax implications in your state before you form any sort of corporation.
I used PHP awhile back, but how much of its inconsistencies can be resolved without fundamentally changing the language's positive features? That is, not caring about backward incompatibility. Like, I can't imagine the inconsistency of "==" has any bearing on PHP's flexibility.
Well, they're good for the same reason that hex/Torx is, and I think most people have a set or two of those.
Now that both ?= and or= throw errors with an undefined variable, is there another idiomatic way to write Ruby's ||= in CoffeeScript?
I think there may be something to this. I'm used to programming in PHP and Objective-C and going to Ruby just throws my brain for a loop. I just can't grok it, and reading someone else's Ruby code confuses the hell out of me. I'm more of a designer than a programmer, so take this all with a grain of salt, but coming from a C-style language background I totally feel like a different part of my brain needs to turn on (or off?) to program in Ruby.
Yes.

A number of studies have shown that overweight people can make a difference just by walking around their home a bit more, and doing things in a more active way. For example, instead of sitting down to watch TV they could stand and do some ironing while watching tv. And then, when standing and ironing they can bounce a bit. Many of these seemingly trivial actions build into more exercise and better weight loss.
> Are the yuppies with gym memberships and hipsters with their organic vegan raw paleo diets somehow immune?

Well, yes. As a paleo dieter, I can tell you I can't be eating more sugar than someone from the 1850s. My guess is that anyone conscious enough to be on a raw-vegan diet, doesn't either.

> This alleged environmental cause seems to primarily affect the lower income people.

My understanding is that refined carbohydrates and vegetable oils are cheap. Who was it that said that if you have $1.5 to spend on food, you're better off (calorically) buying potato chips than broccoli.

> Also, Taubes' insulin nonsense has been debunked. Lets move on.

I do suspect that it's simplistic. It's much better than the popular notion of calories-in/calories-out, though. That's why I said that it's controversial, but that it's the kind of thing, that's more on-the-mark than simply blaming sedentarity as a primary cause in obesity.

> The fact that exercise causes weight loss has been borne out by numerous controlled experiments. Something I found via a quick search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car....

OTOH, exercise makes you hungry. What's more interesting is whether exercise is effective long-term to cure obesity. I'd suspect not alone, but that it certainly helps.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1914974,00....
Oof. Embarrassingly enough, I just bumped us to 1.3.1 -- there was an overly-strict patch that would prevent compound assignments to undeclared global variables, like this:

global.value or= 1

... which should now compile properly as expected.
It is shocking to me that as a reporter, you wouldn't even bother asking why they're using a heavily protected and trademarked word for their name.
The biggest WTF was that "tied to Apache" section. Being running nginx + PHP-FPM for years, even before FPM was accepted as official SAPI.

I guess that people still think that they know better than their sysadmin regarding how to set up a production environment (regarding to the php.ini rant). Maybe because the sysadmins know that expose_php = off turns off those pesky easter eggs. Or they are better at Reading The F[...]riendly Manual (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.expose-php).

Had a good laugh at the complaints about PECL libraries that provide "everything but the kitchen sink". Last time I checked, it was still "The PHP Extension Community Library". People should complain about that particular project, if they need to. It has nothing to do with the internals team.

Wondering how he could forget about the <script language="php"></script> bit.
You are thinking of "homophone" rather than "homonym." Baseball bat and vampire bat are homonyms.
If you want the previous global behavior (make sure you're on 1.3.1) ... explicitly say you're making a global:

window._ or= require "underscore"
Yes. The availability of a bunch of easy-to-Google tutorials, libraries, hacks, workarounds etc should be included in the overall utility of a language.
I see people who drive to the gym. They park their cars as close as possible to the gym door. This is not in poor weather.

(not making any comment about the article.)
50 Things About College
I mentioned my setup in another post; I'm running on a residential Comcast line, and since my traffic is low I can get away with it. YMMV :)
Twitter saves kidnapped man
I feel exactly the same way in the Plateau area of Montreal. I'm in Society when I go walking around, at any hour of the day or night.

I was recently in Calgary, and felt alone amidst giant buildings. It was quite off-putting.
If you aren't German and can't log in, discovering such combos is a bit difficult. Once I figured it out, no problem.
I use HXT to parse HTML. AFAICT, Hexpat doesn't do much besides parse the XML file into a tree. It doesn't have the niceties that Nokogiri or BeautifulSoup do. For example, I can use Nokogiri to get all the links on a page like so: page.css("a").

HXT allows me to come close to this:

tree >>> getXPathTreesInDoc "//a"

But I haven't seen a single Haskell XML parsing library that is as nice as Nokogiri.
That sounds really high? That's more than 10% of the population of the USA, all using Skype at once.
PHP is like living in a big city. There are all sorts of things wrong with it, like homelessness, noise pollution, traffic, bad neighborhoods, corrupt politicians, perennially-under-funded public transit; the list goes on.

And yet there's nowhere like it. You could move to some ideal community somewhere, and maybe you visit there now and then because it doesn't have all those other problems, but all the arts and culture, all your favorite restaurants and bars, all the meetups and hangouts and friends and co-workers make your city worth the downsides.
SafeShepherd: Defining Safety as a Service
How to Start a Software Company
I wasn't suggesting that it was valuable because Mark Zuckerberg cared about it. Quite the opposite actually. I was suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg cared about it because it was valuable.

If it had no potential to be a sustainable business, how could it be a threat to anybody?
Running Samba exposed to a public network isn't the only issue here. Even on an internal network, this would allow file/directory permissions to be bypassed.
(Adios Censorship, Hola ODDNS) Internet Censorship: state & solution
Not sure this is a valid analogy at all; PHP is a tool, not a type of problem (insert joke here), so rather it would be a choice between brands or types of screwdrivers.
It took me all of 5 minutes to integrate Pusher.

And I need something that is going to last 2 years without problems. Sorry but non-differentiated functionality like sending emails, push, analytics etc is exactly the sort of thing to outsource.
Have you tried Python? My own biased opinion is that Ruby is a problem for some people in the same way Perl is a problem for some people: too much syntax. (I happen to like both Perl and (more so) Python but not really Ruby for other reasons.) Edit: Oh, and PHP was my first language. My feelings about PHP are more or less expressed within this submission.
Honestly, because Cantonese scanned better. Mandarin equally valid :)
I never seem to have these quality issues that people are complaining about elsewhere in this thread. About the only thing I can give them flack for is the horrible, horrible UI design.
The arguments in favor of PHP that I continue to hear run along the lines of "everybody's using it" or "it's not that bad if you know what you're doing" or "it's great because it's the Swiss Army knife of languages."

It's hard to argue with those sentiments. And I think the root of the argument stems from the diverging convictions of two distinctly different camps of hackers. There are grease monkeys who love tinkering and see value in a tried-and-true tool that works everywhere. And then there are the craftsmen who strive for elegant code and choose their tools carefully. (There's truth in both of those aspirations. Let's not get carried away in value judgements between the two camps.)

But hearing "PHP sucks but I like it" sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me. There are some great aspects to PHP that other web stacks and frameworks could learn from. Yet there are some major flaws that actually get in the way of productivity. I hope we can keep the discussion constructive and learn from both camps in building the future of web programming.
Except then the zip would need to come before the city/state visually, which sounds awkward for most uses.
Microsoft's Xbox 360 follow-up rumored to pack 16 CPU cores
Exactly, though I'm not sure you're making the point you want to. I have dozens of Phillips screws at home, and at least two Phillips screwdrivers. I've never heard of Robertson screws.

I could get a new set of screws and screwdrivers, but it's a lot more difficult and expensive than just using the Phillips stuff I have lying around. Depending on how important my project is (am I making a load-bearing shelf or am I putting up a poster frame?) the answer may differ.
> "You don't need a library or a framework to talk HTTP."

With 'library' typically meaning 'extension' in PHP parlance, you do. The socket methods are part of the Socket extension, cURL is an extension you have to compile in.

The only reason you'd not actually notice this is because, unless you compiled your own copy of PHP, it will have been done in the default install bundled with the OS, or in xAMP, and will have automatically been injected into the 'global' scope.

This is all just daft, though. You could go on forever with the "it can't do X but it can do Y" schtick, with any language.
This is very nice. You're definitely beating people on UI, but not yet on functionality. Google's path feature, linking advertising campaigns, etc. Though I'm sure these are things you're thinking about.

Please keep me up to date. Add my email dave AT quipvideo DOT com to a mailing list if you have one.

Also, how are you liking Node + Mongo for this project? We use it at Quip.
Can't we all just get along?
Well, the thing is two cores running at, say, 800MHz burns less battery than one core running at 1.6GHz. So you get the similar (but not quite the same) processing power for less battery power.

You also get less heat dissipation. Great clock rates on handheld devices are currently out of the question because they would overheat, and handset designers are reluctant to make the device big enough to fit a heatsink.

Random corroborating source (with annoying popup): http://www.wirelessweek.com/articles/2011/07/devices-multi-c...
Mercedes-Benz to offer over-the-air car updates
Well done. Handled like a boss on both sides.
Well, no. In "password" you have one common word -- let's say 1,000 options, 2^10. You have two spaces which can go in any of 9 places, for 9 * 8 / 2 = 36 different places, plus I suppose the 1 and 9 for zero and one places.

46,000 options for 15.5 bits of entropy, only. Even if we assume that there are thousands of different "strategies" by which passwords might be chosen, that only adds ~10ish bits or so, and doesn't bring it under the useful thresholds.
In Houston, where I grew up, older people (retirees) used to drive to their nearest indoor mall just after it opened for the day and walk laps around the inside the mall. They wanted to walk but they didn't want to do it in the heat. Some of those old guys, my grandfather included, could really move. I'm curious to know if that's still common.
Ask HN: How/where to find hacker/programmers when your not one yourself?
I work in a nearly completely creative field and don't have much contact with hackers/programmers. I did my undergrad in business/film and got my MFA in film as well. As someone who is contemplating taking the startup plunge, I wanted to try and find like minded individuals who were a technical compliment to myself. Maybe as CTO/Co-Founders or maybe just smart people who would answer some of my rudimentary questions. I have a very clear idea of what I want to do based upon my domain expertise but don't know how to implement it and would like to chat with some knowledgeable programmers about where to even start.

I live/work in LA and would love someone to bounce ideas off of and just go from there. The question is: where to meet smart hackers? Certainly places like here and reddit are jumping off points. And then also good schools like CalTech/UCLA (in my area at least) etc. But are there meetups? Or places where programmers would be more receptive to fielding questions? And of course there's also the catch-22 of without being a programmer how do you spot a talented programmer?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
you can hate Facebook all day but the handling of this issue shows that they have very good understanding of how to deal with exploits reported by white hats
If you don't care about backwards compatibility you leave a lot of users in the lurch. PHP4 to PHP5 took years to migrate over and Python 3 still hasn't taken over from Python 2. Perl 5 and 6.

If you can't get syntax/semantic changes adopted in a single language then getting a whole new language adopted is a non-starter.

I think the core PHP developers should take a long look at the inconsistencies of the language and formulate a plan to reduce/eliminate them without breaking backwards compatibility. In some cases, it should be relatively easy but in others it will be very difficult. The inconsistency of "==" would be hard to fix while making sure old code still runs correctly.
sigh

Lawyers ruin everything.
I think the point he's trying to make is that you can choose PHP and you're never going to hit a wall where it can no longer be used because the project is getting too big and serious.

That's a strawman argument to be sure, but I think it's reasonable to point out given the oft-repeated claimed that PHP is fine for small-scale hacking but is inadequate for "serious" software engineering.
Coming Soon: Ads in Your Instagram Pics
I can't wait for all the applications that are going to be possible with this technology. I haven't been that excited for a particular browser feature in a long time!
I would claim that a programming language is more like material than a tool. You can easily switch tools during the course of the project and discard them once it's done, but it's not that easy to replace faulty material. If you want good results, you should invest in quality material.

(Of course every analogy holds only up to a certain point.)
I'm no security expert but people seem to be quite happy to output all sorts of data to the Android log.
perhaps a folding bike?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brompton_Bicycle

not cheap but easily transportable indoors and out. you can store it by your desk in a bag. i see them all over dublin as it's cheaper ultimately to keep your bike by your side than lock them in a public place. and also been brought on public transport.
I fucking love this. I know that it doesn't work for a lot of people outside of the US, but with some modification it can definitely work for certain countries and communities. Fork and individualize to your needs.

My partner and I are currently working on a startup where location is everything, and we're very much on top of trying to make it as fucking simple as possible to do the basic tasks. Don't annoy the people that might give you money, as it were.

This will be a very useful tool in our belt.
But would that decrease your conversion rate for your site/ application?

There is a line between gracefully telling your user their password could be better for their own security and irritating them enough to leave your site.

To be honest, while most everyone here knows more about password security, most of us that do not use a password manager probably have a couple simple go to passwords that we use to try out all the apps HN users dream up and share. (...and more secure passwords when needed)
Instagram Was A Bargain Content Buy for Facebook
One way to view Instagram acquisition is to view it as content acquisition.
If you consider Facebook as a social content distribution network. Then what facebook needs is content.
We all know web is a visual medium, and photos and picture are a great content for this medium. Photos enables us to grasp so much in one snap. Even better than video can ever be.

Buying Instagram gave facebook a large network of high quality content producers. Most Instagram photos I've seen have a higher quality and broader general visual appeal than average friends and family facebook photos.

In the same time you need to look at how Google+ is becoming the photographers choice to promote their photos. Most photographers I know have at least 10X the amount of G+ followers than they have on Facebook.

One of the reason is that G+ does a much better job at preserving the quality of uploaded images. Facebook manages an enormous amount of photos and they have been forced to compress these images to manage storage and bandwidth.

The second reason is that google beat facebook to the punch by being first in having unlimited followers. As a result most photographers (including myself) have a larger G+ followers than on facebook and prefer to upload images to G+.

Instagram acquisition suddenly gave facebook access to a select group of photographers-an unlimited amount of above average photos. Granted there is going to be a huge overlap with existing facebook users. But Facebook could have never afforded to lose these high-valued group of content producers to Google and potentially risk loosing all that content.

It was a great move by Facebook and in a few years everyone would agree it was a bargain.
It's Probably Your Fault
I want to see a networking protocol between ships so that fleets form in order to take advantage of multiple "cores."

So for example, you'd have the difference between a single-celled organism (standalone ship) versus a multi-celled organism (a fleet), with a fleet of ships delegating work to specific ships. So 10 ships run the "scout" programming in a perimeter, 5 act as resource gatherers, and a few others as transports within the protected space. Perhaps some act as brain cells which tell ships when to change roles.

All of this is happening even when no members of the fleet are actually playing.

This just boggles the mind with possibilities and I can't wait to start playing this game.

Furthermore, you have people trying to break into space protected by fleets by attacking networking protocols--in a game!
Autoscaling MySQL on Amazon EC2