skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice observation. I believe there was a recent paper that touches on this topic:

http://phys.org/news/2012-03-quantum-physics-matrix-efficien...

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n3/full/ncomms1761.h...
The same way it gets done elsewhere - you find a person who's an expert at that kind of stuff and tell them to get it done :)

The parachute-in often happens for teams that don't have a whole staff of low-level engineers around. Either small studios using an off-the-shelf engine (that can still be customized), or studios in a large conglomerate. (EA e.g. used to be quite happy to ship experts around. At least back in my day.)
Bitcoin and Natural Disasters » Coding In My Sleep
What particularly annoys me are the article titles in popular news sites, that often are plain lies (that articles themselves later correct), intended to lure people into viewing full articles. The point is, people don't read all the articles, but they do skim the list of them, and they remember lies from the titles.
> Why can't we authenticate the issuance of new certificates out-of-band?

Authenticate with who, Verisign (the ones that have the authority to determine who owns the domain)? I guess making it out of band alleviates some situations where Verisign gets hacked (but not where Verisign is untrustworthy, which you could argue is the case for recent US domain seizures), but the number of domains requiring certificates is high enough that they're just going to end up checking the same database.

> Also, in a TACK+TLS/CA world, Libya could not have surreptitiously swapped out BIT.LY's certificate. In a TACK+TLS+DNSSEC world, they can; stub resolvers don't verify signatures in DNSSEC.

Huh? In a TLS/CA world, Libya could get a legitimate new certificate (although I guess this could be noisier); in a TLS+DNSSEC world, Libya could produce a valid signature. TACK has the same effect on both, protecting some but not all users; invalid DNSSEC signatures are irrelevant. (But in general, the stub resolver issue is one such practical problem that I'm here not worrying about.)

As I said, I believe that Convergence doesn't really help as long as the trusted third parties are validating using DNS, and the only way around that is a new DNS root designed from the start to be decentralized and cryptographically secure.
The Case for Price Gouging
Thanks Mr. Graham. Please read Pando Daily next week :)
For another alternative supporting javascript look at JGate.de. We have AppJet still running.
I wonder if pop culture will ever reboot the concept of reboots to make future reboots all pleasant and optimistic. This already happened with comic books- after the grittiness of deconstruction in the '80s with Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, etc., there was a trend of reconstruction comics that hearkened a return to the heroic Golden Age.
DDG works great for general searches, but for anything technical, I can plan on doing the DDG search and following up with "g!". I have DDG set as my default search engine and get tired of the double searches, but I want DDG to work better.
FYI Disney's princess culture arguably dates all the way back to 1937, with Snow White.
You don't think one of the top news stories is going to be 'omigod google is down, type yahoo.com at the top'?
mostly those who 'still'.
Lebbeus Woods, Futuristic Architect, Dies
I would not consider that to provide adequate notice of a change in the TOS. If it's just a link that never changes, you won't have been notified if it updates.
That's quite a lot of conclusion from a little theory. I'd like to think that civil, thoughtful people will continue regardless, maybe that's naieve.

There's a space-time component to this, so like most logic diagrams it throws a monkey wrench into the works. Suppressing rude comments may actually coerce folks (like me) into trying to be more civil than they might. This can actually breed more 3's from 4s for instance.
Why Mobile Web Accessibility Matters and Best Practices
He's right * 100. Some of us can't understand being "internet social" just to get us more fake friends with fake laughs.

Your grandpa didn't need to update his status every 10 minutes and he was the fucking man.
This question is basically a medical question, so it is best answered with the principles of science-based medicine in mind.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/about-science-...

First of all, do we have a clear evaluation criterion for "better" outcomes? If the question is about writing better code, is there agreement at the start of an experiment about what "better" means? I'm not experienced in evaluating software code (I'm much more experienced in evaluating psychological and medical research), but it seems to me, from reading HN, that better code could be code

a) that is able to pass all the unit tests with an earlier deadline,

b) that has a smaller total bug count when subjected to code review,

c) that solves a problem that other programmers in the same workplace didn't solve until later,

d) that works around an intellectual property claim by a competing company more convincingly,

e) that meets company stylesheet requirements more exactly,

f) that can be maintained by less skilled subsequent programmers,

and perhaps other criteria.

Any sound experimental study has to meet a lot of other criteria

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

to be worthy of believing, and in human drug studies the criteria include

1) sufficiently large sample size (n = 1 just doesn't do the job)

2) treatment-control design (so that some subjects of the experiment get the drug, and some subjects do not)

3) double-blind administration (the subjects of the experiment should not know if they are getting the drug, nor should the experimenters know which subjects are getting the drug)

and many more, especially

4) rigorous statistical analysis afterward.

As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that."

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

So anecdotes along the lines of "I took this drug, and I wrote much better code" can be completely discounted, because we don't have access to the coder's before-and-after work product (nor to the coder's detailed dosage history) to know what really happened.
Well, they might not give a shit but a story does stick. Same goes for that whole Chronicles of Narnia sagia, which is criticized for containing too many biblical references.

I don't think lightly of these things, as in fact- reading is a way of brainwashing too.
...not really. On Android I do find it burning CPU/battery quite often so I updated settings to only sync when plugged in and on WiFi. It is a minor limitation for me and can do a manual sync if happen to need something from my PC and am on the move.

My biggest bug bear is it asks to upload my photos every frickn time I log in despite having deselected in settings and pressing the 'never' option.
The bit about fireworks resonates especially: unless you've got good equipment and know how to use it, photos/videos of fireworks are almost always rubbish. The whole point is that they're huge, loud, dramatic and fleeting - none of which you can easily record.
The future of free
No worse, but it's not like Apple is a beacon of morality either.
The title here is very different from the title on the article, but it seems like a better fit for the content.
Social is neither the next giant leap forward, nor is it the downfall of humanity. It's kinda like Gmail.

The printing press is neither the next giant leap forward, nor is it the downfall of humanity. It's kinda like hand-copied books.
> I've almost given up on being able to ride Pirates of the Carribbean and being able to experience it the way the Imagineers wanted you to.

I love the way you write, but even more, that you live in Orlando, riding the rides that way. (In Las Vegas, my kids and I used to ride Star Trek: The Experience every day, all day, for the whole 12 hours, for days on end...)
I have a similar issue so use different browsers for different accounts as my work around. So at any one time I will have Opera, Chrome, FF and Opera Next open.
What are their weaknesses? Do they mostly only deal with cleaning companies rather than individuals? I know that with cleaning there are certain concerns when it comes to being bonded and whatnot since you're going into peoples homes, but I don't know a great deal about it. I'd love it if there was a nice site I could hit up to find a cleaner in my area or get bids from multiples for what I want. For instance, the few places I've searched out myself around here insist that they come every week, won't even take laundry down to the laundry room, etc. There are more and more sites every day that would let me locate people to do work without having to pay the overhead necessary to keep an entire corporate structure oiled and upright even though they're not providing any service technology couldn't do better and for almost no cost. I just don't know of any for cleaning, and I expected this to be one of them... was a bit disappointed when I found out it wasn't. Even if they are hugely successful, I can't imagine them expanding to West Virginia any time soon.
(We're getting far out to the margin of the thread, and as we do so, I get more and more terse, if not in language then in thinking).

Regarding your first question:

To a first approximation, everyone that needs a TLS certificate already has one.

The concern about authenticating requests for certificates is about attempts to get certificates issued against entities that already attest to having them.

An entity that already has a cert can authenticate new requests for different certs; for instance, they can put a PGP or S/MIME key on file with the CA, and that key can be used to authenticate new requests.

Actually, every tool in the web authentication toolbox, from S/MIME through 2-factor auth keys, is fully available to CA authentication, which is a good thing.

So the question then is, why should ability to answer an email sent to a domain trump every other authentication mechanism we could use instead?

To your second question: my point is just that Libya can more quietly hijack BIT.LY under DNSSEC than they can under an HTTPS CA model.

I agree that we need better trust anchors for peer-to-peer verification than DNS.
Dosage is an important consideration, though. I know someone who used to use pot as a programming aid, but he had to be very careful with the dosage. By using very small amounts spread out over the day, he could maintain a flow state that let him churn out code for hours and hours. He didn't find it all that helpful for design and planning, but for large projects that involved an overwhelming amount of fairly boring work, he found it to be a helpful tool.

The problem was that if he used too much, he'd be pretty much useless until it wore off some. Smoking a plant is not exactly what you would call "precise dosage administration", so this was a fairly significant issue.
That's exactly what it is
24 employees? There has to be more than that. I think I saw more than that just in their hiring videos.

edit: i think you may be referring to instagram. it just confused me because you titled your post with FACEBOOK in all caps. =)
You might start by moving infrastructure out of the hurricane. Off the east coast would be nice, but at the very least outside of a mandatory evacuation zone [1].

Alternatively, you could design some type of system that would allow you to fail over to a geographically redundant datacenter. Joel claimed in 2007 [2] that they had such a system, and touted it as a selling point of the reliability of the hosted service. What has happened to it is probably only something that a Fog Creek engineer can tell you.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4718653

[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lHEK939...
It's as true as how photographs stole the souls of 19th century Native Americans.
I agree to an extent. I think if you look at the average user (generally not someone on HN), you'll see that it is cheapening their experiences. When preteens can quantify how popular they are based on the number of "likes" they get, it is bound to change "social" behavior.
Video of djb's talk which mentions DNSSEC amplification: http://vimeo.com/18417770

Slides for this talk: http://cr.yp.to/talks/2010.12.28/slides.pdf

(Also http://cr.yp.to/talks.html Ctrl+F "DNSSEC")
Not at all! "Squatting" implies acquiring a trademarked domain in hopes of selling said domain to the trademark holder. These are all generic domains that I've acquired with the goal of building projects of my own, as well as helping others establish quality brands.
Author Daniel Tudor Explains Korea: The Impossible Country
Citation needed.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2010_US_total

We spend a lot on education, not so much on cops.
I was. Back when FB was 2 years old.
So, I ran into this problem -- found out that you have to have the same password on the developer center as you do for your Windows LIVE account. If you have a more secure (or just different) password on the former (e.g. because you have a grandfathered Hotmail account) then you need to change both to be the same to finish the registration process. I suspect that there's some hokeyness in the back-end where the developer center logs in to your Windows LIVE account to mangle something or other.
The hardware/software split is too simplistic a view. The companies have their various strengths and weaknesses. For example, the graphics stack on iOS embarrasses Android's. It took how many years and how many hardware advances before flagship Android got scrolling as smooth as the first iPhone?

Another example: Google released Renderscript in early 2011 (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-r...) only to deprecate it a little over a year later (https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.1.htm...). We can cherry pick examples all day long, but the bottom line is that each company excels at certain things.

It's interesting how Samsung is basically stuck to Google at this point. I'm sure they'd love to switch to their own Bada or Android fork and capture more of the profit, but Samsung is absolutely abysmal at software.
Apple gets away with it because they launched the SDK a year after the first iPhone, by which time it was extremely popular. Developers wanted to jump on the coolest platform at the time with millions of users, so a $99 fee wasn't too bad.

Microsoft doesn't have that luxury, as it's struggling to attract both users and developers. Discouraging hobbyists, students, and curious developers from just testing it out for fun is a terrible idea.
I think the better take is to not treat YC as the gatekeeper to your success,

1. Its hard to get into

2. tons of great companies have been started that didn't go through YC (in fact with a few exceptions almost all of them)

3. its a great opportunity, but most of the companies that get into YC, don't amount to jack

just getting in doesn't mean you've made it, and there is no reason you can't make if you don't

calculus is similar to what I'd tell a high school kid about going to Harvard, if you happen to get to go cool, its a great opportunity, but you shouldn't treat that as the gatekeeper to your success
Ahh, nerd message boards. Not even The Princess Bride is spared.
PenFM: Returning as an Engineer
I would not even touch it if I was _paid_ $ 15 for getting it.
A group of scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago have shown that moderate consumption of Alcohol may boost creativity.

... and there is of course the Ballmer Peak

http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2012/04/13/1199/
I'm in the same boat- Microsoft's message feels like it's "Hey developer- come make apps for Windows and help us take back the market!". The thing is, I don't feel much love for them or have a strong desire to help them re-establish their monopoly.

I fear that if Microsoft does dominate a market again, it'll just get bored and let it rot (IE 6, Windows Mobile, etc).
Still over-priced.
As far as I'm aware, Python is vastly more popular for scripts than Lua. At first, I assumed you were just Lua guys, but apparently you're a Python fan as well, at least to some degree.

I imagine it must have to do with easy of sandboxing or something, but why Lua over Python for scripts?
What if it included the date of most recent update? Worst case, you could store the user's most recent TOS agreement version or date identifier, and force them to agree after logging in if they want to continue. This seems to be how Apple operates for the App Store.
verbiage (plural verbiages)
1. Overabundance of words
2. (US) The manner in which something is expressed in words

Using the second definition, this quote makes sense only with the inclusion of "excess".

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/verbiage
I misread the title as empathy encourages analytical thought, which would make sense, because in order to empathize one has to have enough analytic ability to see how another person is thinking, if that makes sense.
Start with less
doh! I replied to my own post instead of editing it in place. This is getting pretty meta. <:)
I don't think that has been done - that might be worth exploring and would definitely be cool...
I'd avoid it.

I tried using HelloSign and HelloFax to take care of some contracts while travelling, but the messages sent look like spam (heavily branded, with almost no control over the content of the message), and the document is not sent as an attachment but requires the recipient to register and login to the service.

They're so focused on their viral coefficient that the service is miserable to use.

I dont mean to be so critical, but I exchanged a number of messages about this with their support line, and all I got back was bullshit answers, such as requiring a login gives "better security!" and so forth.

EDIT: The key word I'd use is that the messages are unprofessional. If you're trying to conduct serious business, it's not really suitable, because of their attempts at virality. When it comes to using an API, do you trust these guys to make customer-centric decisions or will you get stuck with something else?
Define drugs. I know Ritalin is an invaluable tool when it comes time for me to sit down and hack, but can also be counter-productive in limiting my creativity.

I think it would be self-evidently false to suggest that no mind-altering substance could lead to a state of consciousness more conducive than the baseline for a given activity, but I would stop short of recommending any particular drug for programming. If it works for you, do it. If not, don't.
Why didn't they just run Hadoop on a sample of the logs instead of the full dataset? It seems like they were just looking for popular related queries anyways. Any ideas?
Apple Shake-Up Signals Tim Cook Era
It's time to pack in the comments defending the putative purity of the word "irony". I've seen numerous people get up in arms about some incorrect use of the term, followed by them giving the "correct" definition. I'm yet to see two "correct" definitions that match each other. How...

... ironic.
This feature seems like such a no-brainer. Ngen (Native Generation, .NET's precompilation) has been around for years.
Python's my language of choice just in terms of language features, but Lua is significantly ahead in terms of embedding and sandboxing.
I believe for enterprise/B2B services sales guys are the "growth hackers" and I believe for them it must be how many million dollar checks you can get over quater/year. However, I'd love to hear from anyone with enterprise sales experience on this topic.
Article doesn't mention the obvious one either - he didn't do with an exit strategy in mind, or necessarily to make a pile of cash, just to do what he loved.
Harry Potter? Twilight? Final Destination? (Oh, wait.)
Title should be "risk-averse". Pet peeve. Adversity has nothing to do with it.
"It's cool guys, Arthur supports IP too."
Taken at face value, Dropbox's indicator is particularly interesting:

> ChenLi Wang, who runs the growth team at Facebook [sic: Dropbox?], said that the leading indicator of an engaged Dropbox user is when they put at least one file in one Dropbox folder on one device.

Basically - the leading indicator is any use at all. The other business' all had, relatively, a much higher threshold.

This is probably because Dropbox is immediately useful and stupid-easy to use.

Of course, it's hard to take this at face value since we don't know how everyone is defining an engaged user (and each definition isn't directly comparable to the other services' definitions).
Oh please,

The movie industry may not call them VC's but George Lucas didn't make Star Wars out of his own pocket money. It took a crap ton of investment money for him to become successful.
Here you go:

http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestal...
Well, INTC could adopt the same IP-based business model as ARM and then give up 98% of it's revenue:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=revenue+of+intel+vs+arm

So the folks at INTC are doing what you'd expect, competing on discrete components and application-tuned architectures. A key example of that is the recent Merrifield-based chipset for smartphones which is obviously a key initiative:

http://www.intomobile.com/2012/05/14/intel-merrifield-system...
Can you explain your reasoning in a way that does not also lead to the conclusion that nobody would ever pass a law outlawing the direct sale of automobiles to consumers?

Those laws exist. They have no basis. They are ridiculous. They are nothing more than protection for the business of car dealers, and no claim is even made that they provide other protections to consumers as far as I know.

Also, laws are not programs. They do not specify their goals with absolute precision. They are generally broad, and get solidified through established case law. The DMCA is a perfect example. It outlawed 'circumventing copyright protection mechanisms' and did not define what such things were. If I set a single bit in a proprietary file format that I believe indicates content is copyrighted, is that such a mechanism? No one knew. Then came RealNetworks v Streambox. They faced the exact situation I described, a single undocumented bit in a file. Their product provided a capability that was well protected by case law in other situations - they let you schedule recording and time-shifting of streamed video content. You could not copy that content or transfer it to anyone else, it was locked to the machine which recorded it. They won their case. And they won every appeal by RealNetworks. Until they ran out of money. So they couldn't respond to the Nth appeal, and it became established case law by default.

A law against circumventing the publishing industry would go the same way. It would forbid authors from directly selling books, music, videogames, and any other form of content they could come up with to consumers. I would hope that this would be seen as harebrained and insane, as it is... but consider the viewpoint of those in office. The Internet is seen by them as a bustling marketplace filled with the rabble. They see the publishing industry (really the distribution industry) as a centuries-old pinnacle of our culture representing a noticeable portion of the GDP. And they see the rabble tearing it down. They have no faith that an entirely decentralized anything can function, it goes against their very nature. They likely see protecting the existing industry as a choice between being a world leader in the publishing market and being worthless chaos bordering on anarchy, sacrificed so a bunch of shortsighted peons could get movies, books, games, music, etc for almost nothing, devaluing the entire market.
I suppose this explains why successful marketing often involves telling a good story.