skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Caulking your distributed algorithm implementation
The Beginner’s Guide to CSS
A Stuxnet Future? Yes, Offensive Cyber-Warfare is Already Here
"If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically."

3 years ago, HN was great. Amazing in fact. What's changed in 3 years? Certainly not the system. The user base has changed, grown, degenerated into stereotypes and punch lines. There is an old saying that I believe succinctly explains what has happened: Garbage in, garbage out.

I keep seeing people writing about wanting to "improve HN." Every time I see this I think, are these people mad? It's dead Jim. He's been dead. We can all sit here and prod his body and make recommendations for how best to make his arm into a grappling hook or some such nonsense, but at the end of the day, the patient is STILL dead.

If there is one thing I would do to improve HN, it would be to write the death certificate and move on to finding or creating the next HN.

Also, I thought the article was excellent, albeit long.
Asahi Associates - Chevron Has Paid Frade Spill Fine.
Asteroids in C++
The people taking issue witg using referral links for something when they are actually being referred should just type it into google themselves. There is nothing malicious about it.
I find it pretty horrible for actually reading content on the site. When I try and read a review[1], I find the flow of my reading constantly broken by huge images and the copy jumping all around the page.

It's a pretty site, I just don't know if the design is right for the content in certain cases.

[1] http://www.polygon.com/game/medal-of-honor-warfighter/2686
>I comforted myself that I was at least a step above the nutritionist.

How is this person a "step above" a nutritionist?
A collection of CSS grids
A Simple Invariant
The one million tweet map
From DICE to Danger Close: The Man Who Changed Medal of Honor
Yes, I agree..

Found this [1], which might be helpful. The linked python program shows really high numbers for me though. Hopefully it's incorrect or I just misunderstand what the numbers mean.

[1] https://communities.netapp.com/thread/13445
So it's syntactic sugar? What a shame. The whole point is having the language handle it so its default behavior is well-known and uniform and not implement umpteenth patterns and validations[0].

[0] e.g assert_valid_keys (raising ArgumentError on a mismatch so it's really only for options={} pattern: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Hash.html#method-i-assert...
Seth Godin On Education
In Part 5, Stephan teaches us about Explicit and Partial Specialization
I fact both can run Word (!) because Microsoft ported Office to ARM but I guess that was not your point. I wasn't stating it for the average consumer. Here, let's try that: Windows RT has only "this fancy new UI" but cannot run old programs. Windows 8 can run them all. See? Quite easy to explain.
I agree, but I'm not sure that there is any other way to establish positive discourse -- for most posts there are the enthusiasts and the middlebrow detractors, and virtue may often only appear after both of these positions are raised and discarded in favor of an hopefully Aristotelean mean. This is also to say that appropriate discourse depends largely on the context (i.e. what has already been said on the topic), and not simply on a single right answer (as in the sciences).
Apple, Android apps blamed for teen smoking. Is that so?
Marblar, pitching scientific solutions in search of a problem
But if nobody agreed to share their subscriptions, then how would advertisers get word of mouth?

By people talking with each other naturally?
How Windows 8 changes the game for PC security
Are you sure?

I know a few cases in German studios.
Pssst - Statistics on the Types of Clojure Function Arguments
Some good life hacks
Cpplinq: An introduction
He was talking about the "cool factor", presumably as measured by the kids.
Let's Fix The Stupid Job Crisis
Diigo Domain Hacked - use diigo.net
I was only being semi-serious but there are certainly a good many titles that could be written in an ambiguous manner.

The original author may want to use that title but that's not to say the person who posts it to HN has to.
X86/ARM Emulator
It might be slightly odd bringing up the topic of women in programming but in a few decades it might seem archaic that we were even worried about the problem.

Kids today (both male and female) grow up with so much technology around them. My bet is that this will drastically influence the number of women entering technology focused career paths in the coming years.
Yeah, but why bother targeting RT when you can just continue to target plain old Windows? You still run on Windows 8 either way, but you gain Windows 7, Vista, and XP users in exchange for losing the RT tablet users. Unless RT tablets sell beyond anyone's wildest dreams, that's still going to be a net win for a good many years to come.
Can't see anything. Tested it with Chrome and Safari on OS X but all I see is http://i.imgur.com/V8FZe.png
weird
gonna check right now!
thanks
Listing tranforms GitHub into dating site for coding geeks
It happened to me a bit earlier - I think I had to force refresh or something.
Is everyone missing the point? I don't know how else to say it, the percent of overall sales of Windows laptop/tablets from Microsoft is likely to be very small. I think it's simply wrong to act like the OEMs are cowering.
This article, and the concept of Liberty Dollar are interesting to compare with BitCoin.

Whereas the head of the created currency is looking at hard prison time (20 yrs), there is no real one entity involved in BTC.

My next question: will BTC be popular or threatening enough that the US treasury take hold and launch lawsuits on counterfeiting as they did in the Liberty Dollar case? And if so, how might they go about it?
Obama vs. Romney: The email faceoff
The 5 Vital Research Steps for any New Business Idea
Christ your comment is both rude and ignorant. You have no idea what the tech being proposed was. The point is photographers have huge data volumes to deal with. A similar problem exists with media companies who need to transfer around massive video files - and there is indeed a niche indistry that specialise in providing fast file transfers (e.g using UDP not TCP).

Your sarcastic and insulting commentary is not needed here.
Working fine now :)
could you try again
Windows Development in C++, working with menus
Gold backed currency is overrated

If you disagree with me you can go and convert your savings into gold (but you are probably doing it already)

Remember, you still need US dollars to buy oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar
US gov't agencies embrace collaborative software development
I fixed it
I just removed the IE detection detection. (The demo doesn't support IE 8 and less)
Thanks for the report
My understanding is that "precursor event" has a specific meaning in seismology, i.e., sentence 2. is more restrictive than 1.

But I'm no expert, so I'll be grateful if someone with the knowledge could clarify.
Ask HN: How do I go from abstract concepts to a pitch
tl;dr: How can I go from a huge, abstract concept into a presentable pitch?

Hey folks, I need your help. I've been thinking about how we present ourselves in the internet and some ideas have come out of these meditations:

1. Tastes define people. You can get a good picture of someone by knowing what they like and and what they don't.

2. The systems that deal with this kind of data today are infants. They're mostly binary ("Like/Don't like") or linear ("this movie is 4/5 stars"). This info. tells me what you like but not why you like it. Advertisers and others rely on the premise that you know your target, but knowing only what they like is far from perfect. The why can give you a lot more information to understand the individual.

3. Understanding more about individuals is useful from a commercial point of view (greater segmentation and higher rates of success) and from a personal point of view too (I get to know you better).

4. Having a multi-dimensional representation of people's tastes can give me a ton of information that I'm currently missing and this can be lucrative. AFAIK there are not many people working commercially on this [0].

I think it's possible to build a successful product on top of these ideas, but if a friend asked what I'm building, I wouldn't know how to compress these thoughts into two phrases that succintly explain what I'm trying to do.

=> How do you go from a set of ideas like this to something you can pitch to someone else?

[0] OkCupid (and probably others) take a binary or linear approach and then merge the results into a matrix that helps them make predictions. It's better than a simple 0/1 but it's still making decisions on a superficial level.
Can This Girl Find Love on a Coding Website?
Liquor seems to be a common theme in these stories: someone should open a bar outside of YC...
Not A Child’s Play: Mattel Pursues Community Impact, Not Corporate Philanthropy
Masterminds Behind PHP Tackle Mobile Development
I love subtle flairs like this. It's something that a lot of people would only notice if removed and I think that's an indicator of good design.
Why QA needs to change
Kickstarter: Mailbird - a Sparrow-like email client for Windows
The problem is that most celebrations of small businesses suffer from a fallacy along the lines of (exceptional service can only happen at small businesses[1]) => (all small businesses will have exceptional service).

1: And that's not even true. Amazon (the physical bit, at least) have outstanding service. Whenever a shipment doesn't show up, they refund it, no questions asked, even though it shows ask being delivered at my office address (presumably lost between the reception and me). They've sent me two new Kindles, not literally no questions asked, because they did ask, and I admitted to having broken it myself by accident - they just didn't seem to care about the answer. Pret-a-Manger (a sandwich chain in London) has consistently blazingly fast service and unwavering cheery staff.
"Abandon Windows and Office? Sure, it sounds like madness."

And it is. It's not an Apple bubble that John Siracusa is living in (if that is still his opinion). It's a consumer/fashion/leasure products bubble. Microsoft is an enterprise software company, and the enterprise is all about managing slow transitions and dealing with a heterogenous hodgepodge of technologies permanently.

A company like Microsoft that can build on a broad base of ubiquitous products that their custumers just cannot throw out over night has a very good chance of surviving by evolution not revolution.

What could be Microsoft's undoing is if they start to look too much like a desperate also ran in the consumer space instead of telling its enterprise customers how they can transition to the cloud, use virtualization, do big data analysis, manage compliance with regulations, allow secure access through mobile devices, etc.

I think what makes Microsoft try so desperately to be a consumer play is that they remember the past when they undermined IBM's power through a partly consumer driven grassroots strategy. They don't want that to happen to themselves and that's what their paranoia makes them focus on.

But there's an important difference. Apple doesn't want to be in the enterprise space. They are completely uncompromising about that and for good reason. Apple's strength is to control the entire experience and that's just not possible in the enterprise.

Microsoft should certainly help businesses to manage Apple gear, but most of all they should take on Oracle and SAP much more aggressively. Both are vulnerable to a competitor that understands the enterprise, makes software that people don't hate and doesn't overcharge as egregiously as these two do.
html5? how irrelevant.

The only thing html5 about this is the doctype, a header and a footer tag.
The maps are svg not canvas.
PHP Developers….THIS
> ... Compare to Twisted, which is built on libevent, or to Node, which is built on libev/libuv

Or compared to AnyEvent which works with [m]any event loop - https://metacpan.org/module/AnyEvent
Whatever asshole compared this guy to Rosa Parks needs to get some perspective.
Linus Torvalds promises 'no fingers' to Nvidia - just don't ask him about Nokia
This was an interesting read, but it'd be useful to know roughly what age the children were. I'm not familiar with the US school system, so I don't know at what age careers days are usually held.

She showed the children a Python program with a while loop, and says they "got it". I've tried explaining iteration to a (bright) seven year-old by using indented text and they found it hard to comprehend, but the equivalent in a graphical lego programming environment was obvious to them.
I feel sorry for people whose parents force eccentric names upon them. Random and Xtra? Really?
Well, it seems KISSmetrics just had to pay 500K$ for doing just that. That being said, I'm also wondering which specific law they broke.
The math of faster-than-sound freefall
Understanding Android app permissions
"All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in
the constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation."

- John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
Ubuntu 12.10: Windows 8 for the open-source crowd?
Aren't you losing 2-3% of the transaction every time this occurs (because of your CC fees billing me)?
Uh, why isn't it just slides with a voice over? I don't think seeing Zuckerberg's face is really making anything he says more valuable.
Minimizing Downtime from Lengthy AWS Outages
No, they'll go after the exchanges and, failing that, users of the currency.

I think any assault on Bitcoin would have a lot more in common with the tactics of the copyright cartels, than this. The decentralized nature of peer-to-peer sharing and Bitcoin is more relevant than the fact that the Liberty Dollar and Bitcoin are both 'currencies' depending on who you talk to. Numerous lawsuits, harsh penalties bordering on unconstitutional (not that it really matters), and selective media exposure of same.
I haven't logged into facebook for a long time but this seems to be what's happening.

x) Disallow users from merely being a fan of the page, instead replacing that with "like"

x) Now make it so businesses can post to their page and the post shows up in the newsfeed for those who like the page. Previously only friend updates were shown. So liking a page has the side effect of getting spam by the company.

x) Facebook has now successfully facilitated spam, which is necessary for

x) Their new spam-prevention algorithm, leading to the end goal:

x) Now that Facebook has facilitated spam and we accept limited posts, the antispam filter can be circumvented by paying Facebook.

Voila, Facebook is now the post office, and spammers pay the post office to bulk spam you. Imagine if you went to local businesses and said, "Hi, I like you guys", that resulted in spam to your snailmail mailbox. You said, "Cut that out, that's wrong." So they fixed the problem they created, but now that the businesses are hooked, they can charge them for the ability to send out spam.

Facebook could easily make it so users are in charge of their filter, but this is counter to how Facebook wants to make money, so the UI is horrid for this and no one does this in practice. Imagine a UI where users rank friends of order of importance, with an easy UI, and the most important friends of mine are the ones who I am more likely to see. O wait, I have just described g+. Facebook will never have such an intuitive interface("close friend" is horrid), where you the burden of filtering is put on the user. Facebook wants to control that filter.

Eventually it will get to the point where you don't even need to like a page, you will get spam from the highest bidder, decided by auction. One of the main purposes of 'like' was to get users accepting communication from companies, once that was done, then they went in to monetize the link, before that it was just friend to friend chit chat, which doesn't pay the bills.
> Remember, you still need US dollars to buy oil.

Good thing, then, that gold is very easy to convert into US dollars.

"the fluctuating value of the dollar makes it very hard to gauge whether oil prices themselves are rising or falling… Oil today at 2 grams, is about the same as it was in the early 1950s; but if you measure the price in US dollars, you would get the impression that it is about 30 times more expensive today!"

http://pricedingold.com/crude-oil/
October 21st AWS EBS problems, how to avoid in future
I have highlighted this in my AWS setup posts that it is not a good idea to rely on EBS alone for all operations http://www.acmedata.in/2012/07/03/amazon-aws-website-deployment-part-1/ I clearly mention that EBS is prone to failures. There are several ways to keep service running even if EBS fails completely.
I'd love to like such a trend, I just don's see one. Can you name a few sites from this trend I seem to be missing?
I've been waiting for Polygon, but sadly it is far from being well designed imo. Few things that jump at me instantly when I try to read Polygon: tiny serif font but giant line-height in article texts (I hate waste of screen real estate, and I'm not even using a laptop or a tablet), spacings and paddings between page elements so vast I feel lost in the woods, sticky logo/menu line at the top (come on, I can find +1 button myself), images way bigger than I'd like them to be without lightbox view, no proper labeling of check-boxes (tried to sign up / login) and some other questionable design choices. What bugs me most is fading text in the descriptions on the main page.
Content wise (which is more important compared to design anyways), it may just be too soon to speak about quality/objectiveness. I like The Verge though, so all my great expectations about the Polygon's content stand until proved to be wrong. Congrats on the (re)launch.
This whole "you need US dollar to buy oil" is a silly argument. You need US dollars to buy ipods too. Luckily money is fungible.
Do not forget about the netsplit scenarios. In the case you have two datacenters, and one has network problems, you will end up in a split-brain scenario. Both datacenters may believe they are available or down. A way to solve this, could be to use more boxes and majority voting, with something like apache zookeeper. But none of this comes out of the box.
Downvoted, eh? Yeah I suppose we can compare the struggle of an entire race to break free from systemic and institutional oppression and exploitation, to a bunch of illiterate college students playing at economics.
The OS X ecosystem is in desperate need of a good music player software à la Foobar 2000. It's a shame people are stuck with iTunes.
Some code obfuscators will introduce illegal programming constructs. Most VMs will tolerate these but the decompiled source cannot be recompiled without fixing these. Not saying that's what happened here, but it is an option.
Why not just sell it first to the people who will pay $329, then drop it down to $299 to catch everyone else?
How many Big Macs for a barrel? Honest question.
I don't think there's any sort of strong a correlation between growing up with something and wanting to work on it professionally. The entire western world has grown up with cars being everywhere for the last 50 years or so, it doesn't seem to have greatly affected the gender ratios in the car mechanic profession.
This bit confuses me:

At his federal trial, witnesses testified to the Liberty Dollar’s criminal similitude to standard American coins. They said his coins included images of Lady Liberty and cheekily reversed “In God We Trust” to “Trust in God.” Then again, his coins were made of real gold and silver, as American coins are not, and came in different sizes and unusual denominations of $10 and $20.

They may be similar to US coin, which is, if nothing else, dumb. But if they're made from gold and silver, wouldn't they be more valuable than the coins they were confused with? Is that not solid proof against mens rea? Gold is $55/g, silver is $32/g. A US dollar coin is 8.1g, a quarter 5.6g.
I agree with you 100%! Take for example John Carmack who was mentioned by the article. He's mid 40's still codes like a 20 year old.
Carr mentioning the 11 assaults per month by unlicensed cabbies in London, as if it's a knock on the Uber approach, is completely backwards.

An Uber-style system -- mobile-dispatched and mobile-paid -- is a stronger system of regulation than traditional city licensing, especially against threats like assaults.

Those assaults happen because the traditional system fails at enforcement, tracking, and providing an adequate supply. That causes riders to risk taking random cabs... or equivalently, leaves them helpless to distinguish the dangerous cabs.

In an Uber-like system, bad actors can't get assigned riders. Rider and driver can visually-authenticate each other via photos from their trusted devices -- much stronger than the 'mimeographed license taped to the window' system in legacy cabs. And more info is retained to investigate and resolve disputes after the fact.

So it is the malfunctioning legacy system that bears responsibility for those sorts of assaults/rapes. The legacy cab system is also responsible for other problems that have plagued it in the decades before Uber even existed, problems like rider/driver cash thefts, underservice at peak times and disfavored neighborhoods, and overcharging tourists. These will all be far less prevalent under an Uber-like system than the traditional system, and this improvement doesn't require a drain on city commissions and police.
I think it may eventually boiled down to http://www.aliexpress.com/
To be clear, the market is already a niche (Taskrabbit, AirBnB, LawPivot, etc). I was advising you to find a smaller segment of the market to start from. This should be something you're familiar with, and should have a decent concentration of said niche. For example, I don't advise trying match Eskimos with Popsicles that they want (not enough volume). Finding "your niche" is sort of easy, try graphing your time weekly and see what activities you do. Then rank your activities based on the strength you have in them. The top one is your best niche to attack in your local market.

Pinterest pulled a Steve Jobs - it was their job to know what consumer's wanted a year in the future. They were able to see that the coming smartphone explosion would combine with people wanting to be social, and what evokes a lot of emotion? Looking at old photos with friends. Add some filters on top to hide any bad picture taking skills/catering to the masses, and you have a billion dollar idea. They also provided a billion dollar execution, by exiting within two years. Pinterest was a case when all the stars align in the startup universe, and they also worked really really hard to build the telescope to see them.
I got one of those emails too once. I still can't figure out why. I did post to LKML a couple times in the past, but I haven't done anything kernel in over a decade. And a random Google recruiter emails me to congratulate me on my experience and offer me an unspecified position as a SRE. Not only do I have zero experience or interest in sysadmin and large server type stuff, they don't even have any facilities within 400km of me. What the fuck, Google?
Get a bag of quinoa, few cans of chickpeas, a bag of lentils, and a can of mixed beans. Cook the lentils and the quinoa (google for good instructions on the lentils). Mix in the chickpeas (already cooked in can) and mixed beans. Store.

Bulk bake some fish, chicken, whatever, for protein (or your favorite vegetable protein source). Store.

One of the healthiest dinners imaginable (quinoa, chickpeas, and lentils are wonderful) is now as easy as placing these two items on a plate and microwaving.

Sure, you'll get bored after a while, but just mix it up next time.