skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I intend to publish an API. What can I do to reassure developers that I won't behave like this if they build on my platform? Charge money?
How can I contribute to Ruby on Rails?
The "why?" has already been answered. So I'll just add that you're free to change it, if you're not afraid of rooting the tablet: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1749501
Coming up with an idea is hard. There are no shortcuts. Your original idea was not great. Clearly your board and your investors believe in you. Likely in their heart of hearts, they probably expected the FIRST idea to fail.

Now is exactly when they expect their ROI. So, do what YOU think is right. Get out of your comfort zone if you have to (maybe you already are). Search, brainstorm, seek.

You have investors because they believe in you and trust you with their money. Do not let them regret it. My guess is that you're already well equipped to pivot and find that next idea.

Tactically:
Follow the money. In your previous effort - how did the money flow? Who paid who and for what? What were the pains or frictions involved with exchanging money. Solve that problem if it's possible.

Spontaneous meetups are probably reasonable at conferences, or colleges, or fairs. Can you pivot to a particular niche?
> With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct.

Outside of math (and by extension, mathematical models and virtual computer systems), there is no such thing as "correct". We have physical models we tend to rely on because they give good predictions.

But there's no "correct" explanation for physical phenomena. Newton's mechanics were "correct" until Schroedinger and Heisenberg showed they weren't. And I'm sure within a hundred years, we'll have an even better model than modern quantum mechanics.
Meet with VCs, Business Angels, Founders, etc. for some months regularly and keep them updated about your startup, maybe work with them on a project, do some freelancing for them or become an employee at their company. Then they get to know you and your skills. Then pitch them an idea that gets them exicted that they themselves can understand. Something in their space.
> Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ...

Yes, and it is also a hallmark of bullshit and the content-free.

The reasoning that "All X have the property Y. I have something here that is Y, therefore it must be an X" must be a classic logical fallacy, no?
> Grown-up companies have full-time professional DBAs

I don't know if I'd call them "professional," but they definitely have full-time DBAs. ;)
the main point of our app is to give something to users that is easy to follow. Screencasts are difficult to follow as in you have to play/pause/play pause.
Ask HN: Would you be interested in HTML to EPub as a service? 
We needed to create EPub documents, and couldn't find a service anywhere to handle this, so we made our own.
Would anyone be interested in that? If it's really needed, we could make ours into a public service.
Awesome Feedback Tools and Services
And you become very zealous when the penalty for not protecting the currency is your own painful death.
I'll start believing that Pistorious has an unfair advantage when professional athletes start hacking their limbs off.
I'm torn between getting a Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7. I have a lot of Kindle books, but also a lot of video content purchased through Amazon as well. I feel that the Nexus 7 is a better device as it's not locked down to Amazon's eco system, but the lack of a Amazon video player for Android (without having to sideload the apk that is) leaves me in a weird predicament.

My wife has a Kindle Fire, I love the form factor -- my iPad 1 is getting long in the tooth and isn't as "portable" as the KF -- but I'm still bothered by the lock-in of the device.
i don't see any advantage of using it
Several comments in this thread relate to Pistorius' prosthetics and whether they give him an unfair advantage.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport have ruled that there is no evidence that his prosthetics constitute an unfair advantage over his preferred 400m distance. The initial IAAF testing showed that he used less energy at full speed, but this is not relevant to sprinting performance, which demands maximum power output. All below-knee amputees are at a significant disadvantage during the start and initial acceleration of the race, which is vital in sprinting.

Personally, I think the most obvious evidence that these prosthetics do not constitute an advantage is the times of other athletes using identical limbs. Pistorius is whole seconds faster than his nearest rivals. If the limbs constitute a meaningful advantage, then why is Pistorius so uniquely quick?
I'm curious: For the applications at CERN, would BSD really make much difference to Linux?
Well, I'll be joining Facebook in a few weeks. I am a bit of a laid back type and don't know if I fit into their culture of moving fast.
It is a bit, but it's important to have both of them there, so that you can accurately filter by gender.
Also, If I would hide one of them, and then you search for that person, you won't get results
Facebook has a good abstractions at all levels of the stack. This allow engineers to work on all parts of the stack without having to worry about low level implementation details. I have not written a line of SQL while at Facebook.

If there is some domain knowledge needed then I can just rope in an engineer from the appropriate team to review my diff.

It's also worth noting that on product teams engineers tend to gravitate towards the parts of development they are more comfortable with, or enjoy the most. They are not forced to work with te full stack just for the sake of it.
Now it's all I can see.
Is This the Most Racist Travel Ad Ever?
Free or cheap tools for startups
If you end up adding IE support, check out this hack to get multi-stop gradients in IE for the hue slider: https://github.com/bgrins/spectrum/blob/master/spectrum.css#...
Very cool, Thanks
始吾於人也，聽其言而信其行。今吾於人也，聽其言而觀其行。

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3063174

It certainly would be delightful to see a trove of internal documents from the current regime in China, with opportunity for the whole world to examine the inner workings of that regime. I daresay many current issues about effective development policy for third-world countries could be better understood if we all better understood what is going on in China behind the Great Firewall. That would surely be of benefit to the common people of China themselves. For that matter, we might better understand what is going on in Syria just now if we had full access to internal documents from the regime in China.
One bit of feedback: it's hard to notice that the Advice box has changed every time you advance a level. Can that be made more obvious? (here's what I'm talking about: http://cl.ly/251P3i2t1k1p3C3U0D0u)
So You Want to Be a Security Expert
Or, you can state your case, or proposition, or manifesto in the opening paragraph, like good writers have been doing for thousands of years.
ACLU launches phone app to help motorists secretly record police stops
Po' lil' tink-tink.
Unified Dropdown Menu: One Menu to Rule All Links
For the record: http://alexgaynor.net/2012/jul/04/why-personal-funding/
Although less obvious, there are other areas in sport where these issues currently exist.

One of the more recent controversies resulted in the ban of LZR Racer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer#FINA_rule_changes), a swimsuit which resulted in an abnormally high number of world records during the years it was available.

Whats to say that track shoes can't have similar performance aiding effects? It may be time for sporting officials to limit the equipment athletes can use. NASCAR does this successfully -- they have stringent specifications regarding the cars/parts that can be used to keep the races competitive.
The Chinese will take what you do, and do it better. This includes patent trolling.
I'm blown away by how good technical books look on Google Play Books on the Nexus 7 (and maybe all tablets?). I normally use a 2nd generation Kindle and can never read tech books on there because of the code wrapping lines and the monochrome text. But the difference between a tech book on the Kindle app and the Google Play Books app (both on the Nexus 7) is night and day. I highly recommend at least getting a sample of a book and trying it.

You can also zoom out far more than you can on Kindle, which probably helps it look so great.
Agreed. It is just like saying that pens and paper had an important role in the discovery... Great news.
Here's a blog posting from Bruce Schneier on getting started in computer security:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/07/how_to_become_...

There are links within his blog posting to other tools.
I live in the United States and grew up in Canada. It certainly is not in the curriculum here, and has been a surprise to everyone I've mentioned it to around here.

If you grew up somewhere else, it may be common knowledge there.
Wow, very clever usage of overlapping semi-transparent gradients to get the square of saturation and brightness variations. Good job!

Too bad it isn't possible to draw color wheels in pure CSS, AFAIK...
Fantastic.

Needs a pause button.

Note that some of these changes were forced by rules changes. So I don't know if "evolution" is quite the right word.
It's going to be little hard for Apple to find much sympathy this time around.
Pyburrow - Python 3 web crawling library
Patent troll stalks travel site Hipmunk
Great presentation - Love the Arctic Fox platform - we use this for all our presentations & recordings (1000 hours of content)
> this outage is the most worrisome of all AWS service disruptions that I know about

I don't think anyone was especially happy with it. I think AWS, as an entity, is probably just as unhappy as its customers.

I was happy with their response, and I was happy with it during the outage last year, too. They're adapting, and I believe they're constantly getting better. It's still a pretty new thing, this utility computing service. You can't reasonably expect them to expect the unexpected. I'm quite sure that even if they didn't apply the "5 whys," or make them publicly available, they are doing something to address the control plane issue.

I'm confident that the service will improve. Some things just need to be battle hardened.
The first why is actually the what, and the last why is unanswered, so there are only 3 whys... kind of disappointing based on the title :(
How To Print An Organ: A Closer Look At 3D Bioprinting
+1 to this idea, particularly cleaning up the URLs. You should also setup a "browse" type page for users to browse through the topics. So if I went to http://iorad.com/tutorial/topics/microsoft-word/ I'd get a listing of all tutorials based on microsoft word. That'll help your SEO for searches like "Microsoft Word Tutorials"

Also, while clicking around your site I got quite a few ColdFusion errors with the full debug output. At the very least I'd set restrict debug output to your local IP's within ColdFusion Administrator.
A lot of people didn't see the problem in splitting the horde of websites into categories (Yahoo! directory) before Google came along.

I actually agree with the demarcation between sites for some of these concepts, as it gives opinion and other background concepts a place to flourish (cf, programmers stack exchange).

But this tendency to want to create a perfect little taxonomy and then track down every bit that defies your view of that taxonomy is an unfortunate side effect, IMO. It happens far too frequently that good questions get knocked down that hole inappropriately, and it's never a good experience for the users when it does.

I'm honestly surprised that the site has never found a better way to deal with the problem. When most users who encounter a problem like this for the first time feel insult at the site's action, perhaps there could be a gentler way of redirecting their energy?
I'm personally not in support of this decision regardless of whether or not the prosthetics provide Oscar an advantage.

I think a sport such as a running race is a test in how fast the very best people in the world can push the limits of the human body. Removing limbs and replacing them with prosthetics while impressive does not fit that standard.

It's not a level playing field.
Staying in Shapewear
Thanks for that suggestion. I will look into altering nginx to do that.
Yes that is tough.

Maybe you could create a kickstarter for meetups? Someone can schedule a meetup, and depending on how many people sign up the meetup either does or doesn't happen? It's very hard for my local subreddit to schedule meetups, but if people could just throw out dates then it would be much easier. I'm not sure what the monetization strategy would be, though.
GlaxoSmithKline admits to massive fraud, bribery of doctors and more
This could definitely be true. Ironically, maintaining operational security would be very easy in such a plot, since the cast of characters is very small. It could have begun as a simple honeypot and then evolved into a propaganda strategy.

When you think about it, none of the information released about the US has created any outrage at all on the part of the American public or media.

The few times there has been any outage it's been the standard "tempest in a teapot" kind of ranting that characterizes most political debate, which is largely done for unrelated/indirect reasons and goes away pretty quickly.

I think that the view of the US Government is that social media has made a widespread propaganda strategy an inevitability. No longer can the US rely on the domestic media cartel's message shaping to be adequate to suppress dissent.

I think the goal is for US citizens to feel free and empowered to use social media, but to have mechanisms in place to use it as a monitoring and intel-gathering mechanism and also to leverage it to wage specific propaganda campaigns as needed. These campaigns are subtle and I don't think we've seen any serious ones so far, though I do think that the so-called Arab Spring social media stuff was a trial run which was likely deemed a massive success.

Wikileaks has not yet proven itself as an institution. I believe that over time it may prove itself to be a solid, reliable entity with effective controls to prevent manipulation, infiltration, etc. We'll see.
"From 8:04pm PDT to 9:10pm PDT, customers were not able to launch new EC2 instances, create EBS volumes, or attach volumes in any Availability Zone in the US-East-1 Region."

"The control planes for EC2 and EBS were significantly impacted by the power failure” in a single AZ."

neither of these things are reasons for the disruption, but side effects of. not much "why" happening in the article all together.
New version of Andriod Play store for Non Jelly Bean devices
You need to know how to play that game. It can be a lot of time investment, but like my dad always said, "People aren't going to call you and offer you a job, you need to go to them."

The same is true with VC funds.
It'll be in Go 1.1, around the end of the year.
Not just computers though, a computer with an open source operating system that most hackers on this site would like to see more adoption of. This is a triumph for the open source community. (Not to impugn their previous achievements of course, this just goes with the current trend being the Higgs potential discovery)
Prior art doesn't mean it was obvious, but it does mean the patent was invalid. It doesn't matter, for patents, whether you knew about the previous creation of the thing in question, your creation of it still can't be patented (and if the previous one was, you are still infringing - although you may not be "knowingly infringing", which can affect the penalties but not whether you infringe in the first place).
> With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct.

But that's not where you started out, you started with (at least) two hypotheses that fit the facts:

> I mean everything that's considered evidence of evolution could also be considered evidence of teleology

Comparing right to wrong would be quite a straw man.
You are valid. I wrote a whole post about this but the reply didn't seem to work so I lost the full reply.

I did write most of my ideas to "underwater"'s comment.

Basically, my position is more on the fact that if you need things done quickly, then a full stack guy is the one you need. You can fix/abstract the code later. In fact, I encourage that. But to get the ball rolling, you're gonna need some quick and useful (sometimes ugly spaghetti) code.

Its a trade off that must be made, especially you're rapidly building your product.
Google Analytics Official Android App released
HN: I'm looking for an item highlighting an app for utility/power companies
Tried searching for it, but I can't find the proper combination of words to produce a query good enough to locate this thing.

Essentially, it was something that could be used by utility companies to provide customers with a highly interactive and attractive portal to pay bills, visualize their energy usage, compare their kw/h with that of their neighbors, suggest energy saving tips (such as turn your thermostat down two degrees today), and the like.

Can anyone point me in the direction of this thing? There's someone in my senior staff I think this will really impress.
Find conversations on Twitter - Conweets
This is a new twitter app which lets you find conversations between any two people on twitter! Give it a try
Microsoft Moves from Followership to Leadership
What part of, "I've decided to quit" do you fail to understand? I'm not sticking around.

It was not the moderation itself. It was the discussion on meta that convinced me that what I was interested was so far from the norms that were going to be enforced that there was no point in being present.

As for trying to "help us figure out how to do that" - there could be nothing farther from my interests. As I said in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4197385 I've never enjoyed being around the kind of people who enjoy debating and enforce rules for what is worthy for their community.

But if you should manage to change the culture, maybe it will show up in a story on Hacker New. Then I might give it another try. But not now.
No, sorry, I had my account deleted in April 2011, and I can't remember what they were. (And last I went hunting for my user page, based on my old user number, it seemed to have been deleted.) I'd long given up asking by that point.
> Mutation happens randomly, then natural selection will sometimes prune out bad mutations. That's all.

That is not all. Beneficial mutations sometimes occur; and because they provide a benefit they spread through the population [caveat below].

Bostrom's question is valid: if some change to the brain's chemistry could provide a boost to intelligence, why hasn't a mutation providing that change already swept through the population?

There's nothing wrong with the question, and it does have answers, e.g. constraints (no simple set of mutations can provide the specified change) or tradeoffs (the change would result in a net fitness loss; intelligence isn't everything) or just insufficiently large benefits (any rare gene, e.g. a new mutation, is likely to die out by chance simply because it's rare; providing a larger benefit helps its chances of survival. [1])

[1] http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1544/1195...
Salted Password Hashing - Doing it Right
Or, the far simpler and more plausible explanation:

We live in a world with a massive amount of networked, easily accessible data. Combine that with terrible security and controls, and leaving the final responsibility of data remaining "safe" to the end user (often times just an anonymous cog in the corporate machine) and we have the perfect mix of problems to result in non-public information being "leaked" to the outside world.

If you've followed the Wikileaks releases (as I have only in passing) you'll realize there is tons and tons of useless, boring information in there, interspersed with some interesting nuggets. Often times it requires relatively complex mining methods to comb through the vast quantities of data. If the government was interested in false-flag information planting, there would be far, far easier ways to achieve it.

Just one guy's opinion.
This is a problem in community sites that want to keep their focus. For example, politics stories are not welcome on HN, even if people here want to discuss it.

Why? Because, in any place that people congregate, they like to talk about unrelated. Unfortunately, if you don't do the tree trimming, the site will degenrate into something else. For example, see how Reddit is almost a completely different site from five years ago(and not in a good way to me) and there is almost no way to fix it after the fact.

So while you have my sympathies that you were collateral damage, I can definitely understand why the moderators did what they did.
I'm not sure I read your final remark correctly. Do you mean to say that using Skipfish or sqlmap has no place in a professional pen test or that a professional pen tester should not subject his clients to the raw results from said tools?

The latter I agree with, the former I don't. Any automated security scanner has its shortcomings - combining the results of various scanner products generally has a positive effect upon the quality of the test. I've often been in a situation where one tool (commercial or otherwise) indicated or hinted at a vulnerability while all other tools (commercial or otherwise) used did not indicate anything.
Why the Higgs Particle Matters
Apica Launches New Blog Devoted to Excellence in Cloud Performance
craig.is/killing/mice lol.
What I wonder, is if sensitive agencies have started to seed emails with slightly wrong facts, like a golf hater which discuss their golf rounds, allergic people discussing dinners that would have killed them, homosexuals discussing mistresses, etc.

If the email archive is published, there are obvious wrong facts about people found by "spot checks"...
Don't brainstorm. Have everyone take 30-60 minutes and quietly write down a list of ideas that they have. Then get together and go over those lists.

Brainstorming will only limit the ideas that you come up with.
Nice idea and great execution, congrats. I tried it for a while and I already discovered some friends who got married (and I was not aware of it) and some other friends who are not divorced.

I would love your web app even more if it would provide me with a list of updated events. I don't check FB very often and it would be lovely to just use your service once in a while and see, in a glance, who got married, who got divorced, etc.
Forgive my ignorance, but if you're using prepared statements for all your SQL queries using user input, aren't you by definition safe from any kind of injection?
YouTube-mp3 Situation update
Poor guy really thinks he can win against Google and the RIAA..
What concerns me is that they "pay" it by further leveraging other, government-granted monopolies (patented drugs, techniques, and devices).

So, essentially, their customers "pay" it (including the government itself -- Medicare, for example).

My opinion is that people need to go to jail. And corporations need to have monopoly rights stripped or curtailed. THEN, problems such as these may lessen.
We thought about that. We wanted to make people define a minimum number of attendees. But that's more of a feature, not a product.
Git is a very simple and powerful system covered by a hideous and complicated CLI. The simplicity is simply hidden.
Our product, JotForm, is a free/cheap tool for startups.

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Very clever. Unfortunately, the rounded corners aren't being drawn right here (Firefox 15a2 on Linux), there's blobs of colour being drawn.