skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a huge deal and has been since Google stopped passing referrers for signed-in users last October. That's because...

1) If it's a privacy thing, then Google is happy having a leak by giving these terms to advertisers

2) The data is not provided in a way that can be used by third party ad retargeting terms, giving Google a competitive advantage

3) Publishers can't use the data to better target with landing pages

4) Google Webmaster Central data only goes back for a short period of time, and if you haven't constantly been downloading your data, all your historic traffic information related to a term has gone poof.
> At the end of the day, calling something "right" or "wrong" comes down to a subjective call

But the idea is to not make that call at all. That would be prescriptive.

> Some people say "aks" instead of "ask", but the vast majority of people would agree that's wrong.

I'm told that's a regional variation. In other words, in some places, people speak like that. That's descriptive. so is "most people speak like that in region A and don't have a problem with it, and most don't in regions B,C,D,E".
It could potentially be a major business model to clean this junk up too. Satellite insurers will eventually asess the risk high enough that it will be profitable to pay someone to take care of it. Onward oppression of the working class!
Apparently the NFC opens a link to a QR code.
Conversely, if a two people team can hash out their problems together, there is no sign of trouble yet. That's probably a good time for them to address the fundamental flaws/weaknesses/risks of a two people team, one of which I described above.
And so we move from discussing pedantic points of language to discussing tangential points that are even more pedantic. :)
Stylish HackerNews
EHealth faces challenges
NFC is a subset of RFID. There are many RFID frequency bands.

Android devices can read most 13.56mhz tags... but none of the other bands.
I don't post on HN often, and forgot the username I used last
time I posted. I don't work for them.

Personally, I don't see a strong use-case for the product and it wouldn't be something I'd be interested in.

If I did work for them, I would happily mention it in a post.
Doh, I'll update the MDN links to go to the en-US locale by default. Sorry about that :(
Back the Stack: Django
Also, very few things up there are made to be durable in the face of collisions. That adds weight for, until recently, no apparent value. So even small pieces of debris are very dangerous to useful equipment.
Acqui-Hire: Are We That Desperate for Quality Product Design Talent?
Post is long on waffle and short on suggestions. It's always been possible to host your own photos, but users go to facebook for the convenience. Even assuming you made some open standard for photo hosting, and made sure there were a ton of compatible, easy-to-use providers - a huge undertaking in itself - what would be the incentive for facebook to let you use them?
You need to test it with a search. It's not that you don't get referrer data. It's that you don't get search referrer data. Do a search on Google, see if you get the terms you searched for embedded in the referrer. That's what we tested; that's what was removed.
I've seen no indications that the TV and movie industries have been more successful than the music industry in stopping piracy. The only thing that slows video piracy is access to bandwidth.
> By stature I mean anyone in position to talk about proper grammar vs improper

Scoolteachers but not linguists is a very particular use of the word "stature".

> I say it's not an Americanism but rather merely incorrect use of language

Which only occurs in America.
Gittip does not allow the giver to identify himself. This isn't exactly "patronage", IMO, it is like dropping a few coins in a street performer's hat on the way to work. That's more like "charity", except worse--you cannot deduct it on your taxes.

BTW, I like gittip. I got an account the other day (https://www.gittip.com/cjdrake/). Just not sure about the definition of "success" here. Probably a few people could make a nice side-income from donations, but we're going to have to keep our day jobs :).
Good point. I've edited the headline to make it clearer.
I had forwarded your article to a friend a few hours ago, and he asked me if it had been open sourced. I told him I did not know, but from what I have read of your writing, I was sure you would be most helpful to anyone following in your footsteps. Just the information you have already passed on is invaluable.
The plastic NEVER goes away and is always increasing, not decreasing

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html
Some Lesser Known Truths About Programming
what would be your incentive to use facebook if they didn't? :)
I like the "buffer approach" (fake landing page and plans) personally, although I have never implemented it so far.

I don't feel cheated - instead I'm glad someone is verifying the usefulness of something before building it.

Life is short so I can only hope more software will be developed that way :)
The stars animation behind that logo seems to be using quite a bit of CPU...
When is a Founder Really a Founder?
I also see the benefits of having a Linux distribution over Windows 7(or 8). The driver hurdle is annoying on Windows. I recently helped a family member install Ubuntu 12.04 (this family member is not technically inclined at all!), I sat back and watched her install Ubuntu. No driver installs, no "enter in your license key" crap, no activation crap. It all just worked out out of the box. Even her wireless. I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn't needed anymore.

You and I may see the Linux desktop, but most people don't. Which is very sad, in my opinion. It'll come, I suppose. I just have to be skeptical.
That's kind of circular. If the government has the authority to create a law to do X, then the government has the authority to do X, full stop.
I love the concept of this product, especially in the context of contact exchanges and "business card replacements."

If implemented and adopted by the masses, something like this embraces the digital realm without forgetting the physical.
Have been messing around with BrowserID since it first went public last year (with a node.js backend) and I love it. Its so much more straightforward to implement than oauth and openid, and the fact that it's tied to your email address is perfect. I'm definitely going to be using it as my primary auth system going forward. Great job Mozilla!
We are in alpha stage with Forward, which we call "the open source platform for custom e-commerce" -- but it's not just about online stores. It has components for building communities, blogs, user management, roles, login, etc. We are using it to build our own blog/forum/chat/community at getfwd.com.

It's a lightweight system for building web apps in general, but it just so happens to have a few e-commerce APIs built in (which comes in handy if you ever decide to offer community subscriptions or sell t-shirts).

Obviously this won't help you immediately because it's not available to download yet, but will be in less than 4 weeks.

Here's a simple example of how you'd build a login page with it...

{if $params.account}
{get $account from "/accounts" [
login => $params.account,
role => "any-required-role"
]}
{if $account.errors == false}
{$session.account_id = $account.id}
{redirect "/welcome"}
{/if}
{/if}

<form method="post">
<input type="email" name="account[email]" />
<input type="password" name="account[password]" />
<button type="submit">Log In</button>
</form>

You can read more about it and sign up for the beta at http://getfwd.com
Actually, scratch that. You shouldn't be getting a referrer at all. We'll check further, but you should check with Google searches.
How Kickstarter’s new rules could affect product-design projects
Memristors are aiming for flash initially, not DRAM. They probably don't have the write endurance to deal with DRAM-like loads. Also, DDR4 is an interface spec that has very little to do with the actual RAM.
> The app downloads your emails into their server.

They need to do that to back up the emails. The product may not be something you are interested in, but it doesn't mean the execution is flawed.

> Yes, they store that actual password. Which is ridiculous.

They have to in order to retrieve the emails. Blame the standards!

> Yes, good for them for that, but still there are others where they store passwords. And that is not acceptable.

See above

> But that also means that they outsource the security part of things.

> Which doesn't lend faith to the idea that they know about security.

> And if someone realises how to control their application, all the passwords will be hacked.

This isn't something with a black and white answer and I respect your opinion on this. I personally feel that they may know plenty about security and have decided that this is the most secure option. For example, I wouldn't write my own crypto, because I know enough about security to know how hard it is to do right.
Very well done!

Besides the all-domain permissions which you might want to constrain a bit, I'd also remove the button which doesn't do anything. Chrome lets me hide it, but you could make me forego that step too.
Quantcast gives the boot to Hadoop's HDFS
All of the stuff this guy says. My dad's been running a robotics engineering
company - http://www.primeengineering.net - for nearly as long as I can remember
(well, he worked for a company that was bought out by Siemens prior to that).
I've been inundated with the knowledge of what it takes to produce doohickeys at
scale, whatever those doohickeys may be, since I was like 5. It's fascinating,
and I wish more people were cognizant of all that goes into our modern society's
niceties.

When he installs new equipment, there's a sub-day shutdown usually, to install
massive lines of equipment into a warehouse. He's always busy on, say,
Christmas, because a warehouse can typically just barely manage to afford to
shut down for 16 hours on that day (or other holidays) since the warehouse
employees want to be at home with their families. If there are problems with
the installation (and there always are, because tolerances on everything are so
tight) then they have to be resolved right there in a crazy short timeframe.

I wrote some PLC software for him back right out of high school, to manage a
heat element for a shrink wrapping portion of a particular line. We got a
certain input from the other components in the line (so the spec said) to
specify how long we needed to run before cutting, in milliseconds. Their specs
lied, and they weren't sending us anything remotely like a serial data stream
specifying the time before cutting, so while everyone was installing the
hardware I had to derive from the data stream we could see what the timing
needed to be and 'test' it (more 'run some plastic and cut it and measure it'
tests than unit tests, yes?). It was super stressful, but it was also insanely
fun. Once the install was done (16 hours on the dot, loaded the code as the
timer ran out) the machinery started and has run uninterrupted for on the order
of 12 years now. Most people aren't aware that this is the sort of thing that
goes into modern manufacturing :)
I've learned over the past few years that building something without any known interest is a recipe for complete failure. I have a trail of burned out wreckage behind me to prove it.

That said, there very much is software in the works here but it's not quite ready for prime time, hence the beta invite page.
It's not really a "password manager", it uses signed assertions instead of plaintext passwords. It is similar to client certificates, but with a much better UI.

Plus, your keys are stored in the browser, according to callahad, so Mozilla doesn't have to know where you signed up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4232774

Also, in the future you probably won't even need to contact Mozilla anywhere in the process: your browser will store your certificates for you, natively.
I think the system can still work with a few extra bucks each month. At least, is a way of showing people working on open software that someone is caring about what they are doing, which could make them keep doing it.

But yes, I agree that the possibility of leaving day jobs is very small... Also, long-tail economy can develop, with top 10 getting a lot and the rest of people getting a lot less...
Customizable Music For Your Project
I won't lie, I work here; but I think a new, production-ready HDFS competitor is genuinely of general interest to the Hacker News community.
We are working in this space. http://www.codesonic.com/ Our spaced repetition framework is designed just for hackers. I've personally seen my coding skills go through the roof while using it in beta. The time saved just by knowing stuff rather than looking things up is an incredible boost to productivity and problem solving.
Of course. But is it worse the flaws with than any business that handles cash? The idea is to use bitcoin's 'offline' functionality to bring it up to about the same security of regular cash.
NFC requires you to physically be at the location and QR codes don't. For example, you can take a pic of a QR code and upload the picture for anyone else to scan. NFC only works if you're near :).
China's test created far more debris than any previous incident, including the US incident you point to. Furthermore China created that debris in a much higher orbit so it will take much longer for it to naturally fall out of orbit.

That single incident is responsible for something like 10% of all debris in orbit that is large enough to be tracked by NASA.
While I agree with your point, the extension will need permissions for all the sites it's contacting besides Hacker News (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). I'm guessing Gwendall figured he might as well put a lax permission while developing to make it easy on him. It'd still be a good time to clean this up.
Someone needs to make a Persona Persona. We're our own worst SEO enemy :)

The Firefox themes were renamed to... background themes. It's just that the addons team (which owns getpersonas.org) has been hard at work on the new Mozilla Marketplace, and the Persona team has been hard at work on Persona. A few of the Persona devs are going to hack on this next month and try to get a disambiguation page deployed. We don't want theme-seekers to get lost, but we also don't want to lose people looking for the authentication system, so a straight 301 isn't ideal.
If I lived in one of the areas with particularly bad maps coverage or a metro area where I wanted transit directions all the time, I'd have very likely stuck with iOS 5 for now. But as someone who lives in the suburbs and hasn't yet noticed any errors in Maps in my area, the turn-by-turn directions alone actually make iOS 6's Maps a huge upgrade for me. That's aside from the other features/enhancements that it brings.
>> all of those things come in in the first 20 minutes of being active.

> Makes sense

Does it? I'd say the last twenty minutes of exercise is what counts - it's the difficult part.
Hacking Twitter for Customer Feedback
Don't worry about team dynamics. Worry about founder quality.

In our experience, 3 is as good as 2 if the people are as good. It's harder to find 3 good people than 2 though.
I think he ripped it out recently and replaced it with perl5 solution...

January 2011, in fact. I couldn't afford to keep babysitting it to keep it running. I haven't tried since then, so things may be a lot better now.
Nice, great way to organize information.

I would add that Orgmode in Emacs is used by many in nearly the same way. Freemind and mindmappers in general are basically just visual outliners. For me, you get enough of the visual aspect with Orgmode (and OP's example doesn't even really use special visual aspects of a mindmapper) and the kicker is that Orgmode has features that make it more useful than Freemind. Two that come to mind are (1) orgmode search/agenda functionality allow searches that isolate a specific set of nodes in the agenda -- with each agenda node potentially from different part of document, or even spread among multiple files, and (2) in Emacs you're doing all of the editing in a first class editor.

Orgmode does have import and export capability for Freemind, check out the commands beginning 'org-freemind-'. To convert OP's python.mm file to org you can open it in Emacs and then run command <alt-x>org-freemind-to-orgmode .
>No more password column in your database...

Who has liability when a user of mine says their account got hacked? The email provider? My site? Mozilla?

If one of my users has $100 go missing from their account, then they are going to expect me to replace it, not the email provider, not mozilla. I don't like the idea of shifting security to a outside platform, because I still retain all the liability when things go bad, and they always will (key loggers, spyware...)

Sites that deal with financial transactions will be reluctant to adopt this for sure.
And? Cryptography is much easier to build, test, ship, and even export after 9/11 than it was before it. I shipped commercial security products before 9/11 and it was a nightmare. A huge portion of all desktops ran insecure crypto simply because it was too logistically challenging to ensure that they had good crypto and were easy to sell in Europe and Japan.

There is simply nothing to this analysis. The crypto policy fight happened in the late '90s, and crypto won.
I told them that they need to rename it with a 301 several weeks ago. They haven't. sigh
This is what I love about HN - I throw my hands in the air at the whole world, and suddenly people I respect are giving me a fix.

Just the things I was looking for. I suspect we all really know many of these - especially TV!

The one I would not have guessed is accepting the pace. Things take the time they take, given everything else in your life. A friend has just got me to restart an OSS project based on us agreeing slower, more realistic output from each other.

Just pottering along and celebrating the wins - I could get to like that.

As for makers involving children - I can see that being the most rewarding portion - just this afternoon I picked up my 3 year old from pre-school and we wondered into the churchyard. He needed an item beginning with S, and so we stripped some bark for twining, tied a cross piece to a stick and added leaves for hair.

He had a stickman to take in tomorrow.

I did too much of the making, but he enjoyed it I think. Its a start.

Thank you.

Good luck with the Babbage replica.
A year and a half ago I started doing triathlons and moved all the way up to doing a full Ironman this year. Due to the amount of training involved it's an awesome motivator to get you in shape and control your daily plan. Highly recommend it (even if just doing sprint/olympic/half distance) to anyone looking for a structured approach to staying healthy.

I also think it's a great way for entrepreneurs to exercise their minds. The full Ironman is extremely long and takes long term determination. It's not something you can simply hack together (as some people do by minimal training and walking 6-hour marathons). So in a way it allows me to go through a long term process of building up my body (i.e. a company) and make tweaks along the way to improve the performance. I can't tell you how many times I've failed along the way and get better as a result.

Although there is no real way to quantify this, I would say my ability to focus at work as drastically increased. I much more confident and happy as a result.

</infomercial>

Curious - anyone else on HN do triathlons?
> Thus continues the reddit-ization of this website.

You know what was even worse on reddit than the memes and inside jokes? The posts whining about how much better the site was before X happened.

This is the internet, no one will listen to whining. If you want to preserve the nature of HN, find something constructive to do. If a comment is so devoid of content that you cannot constructively turn it into a useful conversation, downvote it and spend your time building a conversation somewhere else. Complaining is easy, but it just adds to the noise that you're so concerned about.
Are there any websites with implementations that don't prompt directly for Mozilla's site(i.e. asking for your preferred BrowserID provider)? I'd like to see how clunky the interface becomes when there are more providers(such as if I want to become my own provider) than just Mozilla. Is the user then confused by asking for a provider..ala OpenID? Am I correct in presuming Persona is an implementation of BrowserID?

I'm not likely to use this myself as this little gem from Mozilla's privacy policy (https://login.persona.org/privacy) gives me the shivers:
"As part of the normal operation of the Persona service, Mozilla will retain a log of which sites you have disclosed your email to."
The original name, "Browser ID", made it clearer.

Basically, your browser knows your identity, so it can automatically authenticate you with any supporting website. You never have to set up an account with the website and you never have to enter a password.

That's my understanding of it anyway.
That was very clarifying, thanks!
Apple can afford to outbid them but not profitably in the short term. It may still be worth a short term loss for long term gain but that hasn't been Apple's strategy up to this point; they have always aimed at profitability from launch so far.
NO BUG FOUND: (Spoiler Alert) You haven't activated the Orb of Flounderment which is in the Antideulivation Room.
Ask HN: What are your side projects? 9/12
I couldn't help but realize the remarkable design similarities to http://www.blogic.com. I'm curious if it inspired you.
Congrats, really, for doing this.

A few months back I was a bit uncomfortable with the approach. But today it really makes sense to me, both as an implementer and a user, especially if there is at least a bit of beta in place behind.
That's a value judgement you have to make, similarly to using any service hosted by someone else.

1) Is the potential loss of privacy worth the advantages of the service?

2) Do you trust the company providing the service?

3) Could you do a more secure job of it than the company?

It's not a service I would personally use, but I have no reason to think the company providing the service doesn't know what they are doing.
Usually one starts at the eye and traces back through the scene. But the converse is also sometimes useful, and the terminology is slightly ambiguous (different people have called different variants "forward" and "backward" at different points in time...), Wikipedia has some details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing#Reversed_direction_...

> Am I completely wrong here?

No.

> Is my whole world a lie?

Yes.
This is already happening. I don't have a citation handy, but about a year ago, I believe Barnes & Noble was saying that its Nook Tablet was outselling the e-ink Kindles (this was before the Kindle Fire was introduced).
So, in your mind, a nearly zero cost repurposing of the 404 page is equivalent to reducing the speed limit by 75-95%? Not saying it's a good idea to apply this, but the detractors are blowing the cost way out of proportion.
Interesting changes to the API. We now have an observer API, instead of just a function that invokes the login window.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/navigator.id

I believe this merges the old BrowserID Session Management parts with Persona, or am I wrong?