skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or by social media standards. I know it's a rather over-used meme now, but I'm again reminded of Instagram's $1b buyout vs. this.

This seems like a good blue-sky venture for a scientific philanthropist. There's a lot that could go wrong, it might not work (though as pointed out elsewhere, this isn't all theory - they have tested the heat exchanger in real life on a proper jet engine), but it could be a big win. If only someone like Gates could put down $400m for a chance of a big pay off later.
We're planning to add a demo to the home page. Until then I created a demo on my blog: http://sam.odio.com/2012/10/31/buy-me-beer/
Simple -- Announcing Photo Check Deposits
Rudius is a marketplace for freelancing, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing. But, we do things very differently. Check it out to learn about how the new model benefits both freelancers and the employers!

I'd sincerely appreciate any feedback!
An HTTP Status hack to rule them all
Here's something I need which I would pay 2% for right now - the ability to email someone an invoice. I'm stuck with PayPal, which I hate.
We are working hard on a better footprint editor right now. It will probably be released in one or two weeks. If you have trouble adding a footprint you can always send us an email and we'll add it for you.
Ah there it is, my daily dose of "programmer snarkily trivializes a complex field". I was wondering what took so long.
http://xkcd.com/956/
Ask HN: Which industries have the most to gain from software (or hardware)?
From the recent "How to get Startup Ideas" article:

"So if you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a class on, say, genetics. Or better still, go work for a biotech company. CS majors normally get summer jobs at computer hardware or software companies. But if you want to find startup ideas, you might do better to get a summer job in some unrelated field. "

As a third-year CS major in college with a couple of software internships under my belt, including one at Google, I'm thinking right now about which industries would be the best to dip a toe in and see where they could use some help from ideas from the tech world. One area that's clearly been exploding is bioinformatics - I've spent some time at a lab doing research in the area, and it's an interesting field. What are some other ones that people might not immediately think about?
I've been learning to code on my own for 6-7 months before applying for Dev Bootcamp, and I've tried pretty much every resource. At a certain point, although I've made some serious progress, I hit a wall. I could build things and make them work, but I wanted to follow the best practices and know good from bad code. Dev Bootcamp really filled the gaps in the my knowledge.

That said, Dev Bootcamp is not a necessary condition for learning to code. If you have a specific learning style, especially if you're good at reading books, you can learn on your own, although it might take longer. If you do well with networking, personal branding, build a few projects, and contribute to the open source community, you can get the same result.

I cover all these options in my book, including Hacker Schools all around the world and a lot of online class and resources that are completely free.
Is anyone else excited at finally being able to work in an immersive 3D environment? We'll no longer need two/three/N screens, we can either draw up as many screens as we need in the VR area, or just resize and position windows as near or far, and make them as large or small, as we like. I'm looking forward to decommissioning my screens.

It seems theoretically possible, does anyone know if it can happen?
There is, of course, a huge difference between making a few things, and having someone manufacture a few thousand things. It is interesting to see people learning these skills under such pressure. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for a training class on manufacturing.

I was a bit confused about their comment on the display "We tested every available (non-proprietary) display we could get our hands on." At their volume most manufacturers would hand over details of connecting to their display.
Top SharePoint 2013 Tweets at #SPC12
Agreed, 2% likely isn't end state and we plan on searching in the space below it.

It's easier to drop the price (or give volume discounts) than raise it.
Stripe so far has been really developer focused and so they've really targeted themselves towards that audience (home page, docs, marketing, etc.), unlike PayPal which is more consumer friendly. I think there's a lot of baggage that comes with being a consumer facing brand that Stripe doesn't have to deal with, at least not yet. That said, there isn't anything preventing them from doing so; it's definitely a risk for Stripe-based businesses like this, but Stripe could always just acquire or acqui-hire whoever does the best job.
Something that most people who aren't in product engineering don't realize is that sourcing small displays is incredibly difficult if you are not building smartphones. All of the nice displays you see coming out and going straight into phones are simply unavailable to anyone looking to build a lower-volume consumer device (where "lower-volume" here means less than a million). If you want to build a product with a small display (and don't even get me started on touchscreens), you are stuck with old technology, very limited choice, and high prices.
Yeah, I'm torn between thinking it is sarcastic...or a facepalm and loud sigh.
He was talking about the data from the entire mission, not just recent findings. The whole thing has been blown out of proportion.
The liquid nitrogen is just used for the ground tests. On the Skylon itself, this cooling capacity will come from boiling the liquid hydrogen fuel.
The reward for mining a block just halved; it'll continue to halve as the supply increases, so that 21 million is not the endpoint so much as it is an asymptote.
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks! This looks great.
Transaction fees will be one factor, and are already built in. Pay a transaction fee and your transaction gets processed faster.

But also, miners who can't be profitable anymore will drop out. As they do, the mining difficulty will decrease until mining becomes viable again. On the other hand, the first special purpose mining ASICs are starting to be offered, and people with those will be able to mine more efficiently.

I'm not expecting the bitcoin price to change significantly, since I figure it's determined more by the demand for bitcoins than by production costs. Looking forward to seeing whether that's correct.
From the link:

"Walker said he used his actual street address in England but entered Arkansas as his state with the Schenectady, NY, ZIP code of 12345."

In fairness, that's fraud on Walker's part not on the Obama campaign's part. There's a limit to what kind of checks you can feasibly do. By the sounds of it, requiring a billing address in the United States seems reasonable.
Coincidentally, I know of a new web service (http://amazd.com) that lets you record your highlights as you're reading an article (in the most natural way I could imagine) so you can save the parts that were insightful. That's the only reason I usually highlight text when reading these days.
I don't know what your requirements are (U.S. versus Foreign, etc.), but WePay has a nice email invoice solution:

https://www.wepay.com/online-invoicing
You need to state your pricing structure clearly. Saying that you charge 2% over what Stripe charges makes it seem like you are hiding the total cost of transactions. Using Helium would cost people 4.5% plus 25 cents, am I right?

I also see that you are testing the response from HN. Well done. But the landing page for HN and regular visitors are the same. Why not run some quick tests with all the traffic?

You might have branding issues with the project Blimp (getblimp.com). The founders are really cool guys, but do chat with them about it.

The design is top-notch, though a button or link that scrolls down to the area with more information should be tested. Right now, the first impression you get is that this is an empty landing page.

A demo would also be nice.
very cool.. the Odio family always up to big things :) love the simplicity + the design + the use-case. releasing this as a wordpress plugin would be killer - the entire shopping cart space is very muggle-unfriendly. that said, you're going to have to do alot of volume to make 2% worth your time - payments are coolest when tied to a marketplace, but your diff advantage is to not be a marketplace. you're going to have a tough time recouping the $$ you'll have to spend to gain the mass-market mindshare you'd want to drive that kind of volume. at the same time if the business turns out to be the bees knees, big guys will be quick to copy and out-spend you in marketing, while small guys (eg ribbon, gumroad) can quickly add "embedding" as a feature. i love the product (and the name!!), it's just a tough slog to "be the next PayPal" these days. quick feedback: your "effortless for everyone" is exceptionally well done, i would move it above the more standard 3 column descriptors.
Within any one particular A/B test, the changes in the true propensity to convert over time don't matter, since you're randomly apportioning folks into the alternatives, such that the only difference in the samples is whether they're exposed to A or B. Over the course of an A/B testing regimen, this doesn't apply, and you should be skeptical of results reported like "CR went from 10% to 15%", but a string of winning A/B tests is virtually statistically certain to be driving true wins and clients love hearing the change-over-time thing, so even if you're getting a tailwind from the environment one tends to report the numbers anyhow.

It is a poor allocation of resources for most clients to continue to run original, unoptimized pages just to be able to satisfy one's curiosity as to what portion of an improvement observed over, say, 6 ~ 24 months is due to one's own effort and what portion is extrinsic to the business. There's both a direct financial cost to maintaining old code branches and a regret cost of not giving them the best you're capable of serving. Round numbers: to add one sentence of clarification to this blog post, Team Obama would have had to give up ~$5 million in donations.
I've been following you guys for a while, and really love your sense of design.

As for the product, is this a direct competitor to Gumroad?
Nobody is, that's why it's usually pissing everyone. A "Party" button might have done a better job.
Well, I'm really ignorant, when it comes to meaningless sentences like organisation and about being able to abstract logical servers away from physical hardware. You're probably right.

On the other hand, I'd been involved in a few projects, which includes optimization of a big centralized databases, so, I think, I know a bit about flows of data, access patterns and where the bottlenecks are (hint: around serializing and scheduling low-level I/O operations).

Try to look under the surface structure, which plain words are.)
The Stripe Button is a step in this direction: https://stripe.com/docs/button
Yes. It was very simple. We just put the URL to the vendor hosted platform's POST endpoint in the donation form's action attribute so that if you didn't have JavaScript the form would POST like a normal form.
> The main problem is that there is no distinction between organic and biological molecules, so you can't make a sensor that distinguishes them.

For a given molecule, life tends to strongly prefer either the left-handed or right-handed version.

Curiosity's gas chromatograph can tell them apart. If it finds a strong handedness preference for several chemicals, then Mars almost certainly has life.
That's really interesting to know, your app looks awesome. May I ask how long that took you and did you make this in JS? I'll try raising the price of mine for a week and see what the results are thanks.

Link to Blu Graing Calc: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/blu-graphing-calc...
I wonder if it good UX that the site is designed around first-time-to-python users (and sponsors maybe?) and recurring reasons to come back such as events and the blog (the actual python users) are way down in the footer?
heh. i just made a post the other day looking for advice for starting a hardware project. I'll check this out more later but it looks like it could be useful!

Plug: if anyone has experience making hardware projects (start to finish) and has some free time to lend some advice or would be interested in hearing what i want to make and
maybe team up. email me!: me@jonovono.com
Nnnnnnoooooppppppeeeeee
"Five hours in the lab will save you a whole hour in the library."
I am confused on this, you mean "a whole day" or am I missing something here?

What I do to cover my this stupid problem is I work a lot. I always repeat myself and it is of course frustrating. (for example I studied Dynamic programming 3 times from scratch, solved 20-30 problems each time, but after 1-2 months I completely forgot how to solve.)
I go to a small school that still grants all-campus email access to everyone. It develops a culture of communication all its own, and often hosts vigorous and even nasty arguments. And while the role it plays could be filled much better by other technologies, email is a common enough technology that everyone can take part.
What if the Martian puppy started licking Curiosity and started to reprogram the cameras and antennas to communicate with us like an interplanetary telephone system?

That would be a pretty conclusive proof of live even though Curiosity wasn't designed to work in that way.
Well, it's not important because the difference, generally, between the Pi and a random computer is similar to that which can be expected between any other two random computers.

The thing with the newbies I get - they want to google "web server raspberry pi" and get a really quick and easy step-by-step, but I'd really like them to at some point get the idea that this is a general purpose programmable computer like their laptop, PC, phone, whatever, and that they should expect it to be able to do basically anything.

I get the benefit of the specific howto, but I've not yet found enough pi-specific problems to make me think that's more important than getting the idea that it's a proper computer and not just some cut-down thing that can only do a good enough impression of one to run a web server and python or whatever.
Return-Path: <>
I think OVH had a similar issue back when they were giving away test servers. I wasn't on the list, but I heard from several people that the official question/reply address would send emails to everyone on the list. Needless to say, with several thousand people on there, it got spammy fast.
The great thing about Android is that I can use the platform on top of the line hardware without buying this phone if I want. Glad I went Samsung Galaxy S3.
I should have been clearer that I was just passing a cipher to get any response at all. Without the cipher, it hangs after the client hello send. I've updated my question to reflect it.
Is your startup enough good?
Atari Opens up Development Kit for HTML5 Atari Arcade
Here's one of my pages made on the site - with the option to allow visitors to move assets turned on.
Scroll & Drag!

http://peterbasmalord.com/ream

(full disclosure I work there!)
Sheesh $15 thats pretty steep for a password manager, then again "Keeper" is a top grossing app on IOS and makes $9.99/year off of its customers. Thanks for the advice I'm going to try the $4.99 price point.
The IP address and name are irrelevant. Should US citizens living in Pakistan be disallowed from making campaign contributions because they have arab sounding names?

The only thing that matters is whether the donations come from a US credit card. As far as I can tell all of these farcical contributions came from US credit cards.
i just saw freshplum- if you did helium as a way to <ahem> get freshplum into the air and with quick notoriety.. then i take back everything about being the next paypal - you did exactly the right thing. also i agree with others - bundle your pricing and state one clear %.
This breaks even the Guinness Book of World Records's email debacle from a few months back, in which some thousand random Redditors had their emails all exposed: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/05/guinness_world_recor...

That was.... not a fun day.
Sorry, it was meant to be a bit of fun and I wasn't expecting it to get on HN front page (developer).
This Quora board has been compiling all the articles and interviews with members of the Obama tech team:

http://www.quora.com/obamatech
Review: Rackspace Cloud keeps IaaS simple
HTC Calls Up a New Marketing Chief
Mathematica 9 is released.
sorry about that, I had an issue on the site, the first page load led to a 404. On refresh, it worked. :|
Decontructing 3 WordPress Business Ideas
Show HN: Coinfly - A simple invoice service on Stripe (no monthly fees)
We would love to help you with this! I'll send you an email.
Mathematica 9 Is Released Today
Hi David, that feature is on our list of things to add soon. If you shoot me an email I'll let you know when we have something for you.
So, we should just stick with files, or else we get EJBs? Sorry, it doesn't follow.
500px Arrives On iPhone
Though I don't have a great deal of interest in this one particular course, Codeschool is all sorts of awesome. The breadth of (relatively modern) languages/technologies they cover allows everyone to enjoy a piece of the site (although they obviously lean toward the Ruby/Rails crowd). Envylabs really pours a lot of love into the courses and it shows. At the end of their courses you feel (or at least I did) as if you just did half an O'Reilly book in an hour and are ready to take on the world.
I can sympathize with how my question must sound ridiculous. But I have tried many combinations of parameters to OpenSSL and curl with no luck. It's looking at this point that the problem is due to an MTU below 1500:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/189752/cant-connect-to-certai...

But if that's the case, that's a serious problem with their OpenSSL implementation, because there is no way to control how packets are split once they are on the internet. All SSL should require is a single socket connection that can send and receive bytes, regardless of underlying protocol.

My frustration with this is that we shouldn't be seeing these types of issues this late in game with something as fundamental as SSL. This bug never should have made it into a stable release, and if it did, it should have been fixed immediately.
what makes you think it's a problem? the fewer bitcoins in circulation, the more they will be worth. And being (theoretically) infinitely divisible means that the tiniest fraction of a single bitcoin would still be enough to go around if all other bitcoin was somehow lost.
I used to work for a company that provided IT systems to about half the colleges in America. Your characterization is actually very shallow compared to the reality.

The reality is campuses are some of the most annoying places in the world to try to get IT stuff done. Each department is a fiefdom that thinks they are the most important people in the world. Each fiefdom expects the campus IT group to only care about them, and all technology decisions are made by committees consisting of those people. This is further exasperated by most professors and administrators having a massive fear of change and just wanting to teach like they've been teaching and research like they've been researching for 30 years. Imagine the English department having serious weigh-in on technology topics.

As far as the talent of the workers, in my experience you have a group that is worth every below-industry-standard penny they (don't) earn, who are hoping to not be noticed. But you also have many amazing, talented, extremely dedicated people who could be earning much, much more, but believe in the mission, so sacrifice pay to help support it.
This is a fixable problem. BIP 0037[0] for example tries to mitigate the size issue
with bloom filters, so you no longer need to download the complete block chain
to be able to verify transactions.

[0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0037
Nice! looks very impressive.
The reality at most colleges is that money is short. It may be morally repugnant, but it is what it is.
"Do geeks always back their answers with science?"
I don't think they exposed our emails. They just exposed a gateway to mass email us.
I was a big user of exmap a few years ago at a previous employer (THALES), where exmap was used to do a lot of things to systems being tested/certified for CENELEC SIL-4 (safety critical) usage. I wrote portions of the online testing systems, and the full system tests for these components used exmap in our test systems to corrupt text segments, copy stuff where it shouldn't be, etc. exmap was essential to testing.

PM me privately your details and we can talk about what you want to do with exmap; at the very least I can explain to you how its being used in an industrial testing context, and there may be people still working there, maintaining exmap code, that would be interested in your situation, who nevertheless do not read n.yc.
All languages have pitfalls. Including the author's beloved Java. For example:

String x = "foo";
String y = "foo";
// Appears to work but compares references
System.out.println(x[0] == x[1]);

There's no substitute for knowing your tools well.
Nice! /proc/<pid>/pagemap is basically an alternate to my kernel module. So I could do a pure userspace solution now.

Can anyone recommend visualisation tools using pagemap? I'd like to get the exmap functionality (per-process 'effective usage' and also ELF-section/symbol resolution.

If that already exists great - if not maybe I can enhance an existing pagemap tool.
Broken iPhone? Call iCracked (YC W12), the aspiring AAA of smartphones
The wealthy.
Ok, glad to help. I agree with your defense, and e=3 is the obvious assumption for most situations.

You're right that RSA with e=3 can be as secure as e=65537, assuming an application where you use proper encryption/signing padding and verification. But it is more brittle in that partial failures in padding randomness or encryption of related messages can lead to compromise. Unless carefully reviewed and appropriate fail-closed measures are not present, it's better to avoid e=3.
There's already a couple of ways around this. One is the 'online wallet' set up, where someone already has the complete block chain online, the other is the bootstrap approach, whereby although you still download the entire chain, you can do it a lot more quickly via Bittorrent or the like.

But generally, I imagine most people would go with the online wallet approach if they're not comfortable with the drive space requirements.

I also believe that it is possible (theoretically, at least) to essentially just start somewhere further in the chain, in a way. Having said that, that would probably remove you from the option to mine at the same time. Maybe?
Creating a Company Culture that Thrills Customers at WP Engine
Regarding pricing: We talked about the wording internally. It was decided that different people pay different stripe fees (eg volume discounts) and stripe may change their fees in the future w/o notice, so it's best to simply state what we charge. I've added a link to Stripe's pricing page to make things a little more clear.

Regarding the demo: we're planning on adding one to the home page. Until then I added the button to my blog: http://sam.odio.com/2012/10/31/buy-me-beer/
How Facebook’s Top Engineer Is Trying to Read Your Mind