skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you Smarter than an NFL Quarterback
"Can you do better than NFL quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers (35) or Tom Brady (33) or Peyton Manning (28)? How about Tim Tebow (22)?"
"Programming is for people that pursue a career in the IT industry or science. Is it a nice skill to have ? Sure, just like carpentry or mechanical engineering."

And we never expose anyone to the beginnings of those disciplines in school, ever, do we?
Agree. s/girlfriend/roommate/ and it doesn't sound "unreasonable" at all
Show HN: Frizzle
"Can you do better than NFL quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers (35) or Tom Brady (33) or Peyton Manning (28)? How about Tim Tebow (22)?"
Because Serbs are awesome!
Formatted more nicely: http://gist.io/4154289

By the way, check the page first, give bloggers the traffic their content deserves!
It is covered in the blog post. (This is not a critique, just an hint, I understand that reading a very long blog post is time consuming).
City-state Security
The most fascinating part of this article to me is getting the perspective of two southeast Asians on language popularity. Also interesting to learn that golang.org is blocked by the Great Firewall.
As much as a good looking GUI would be nice, please don't do it at the expense of speed/performance and please don't over do it. There is something to be said for a clean simple, but polished look.
ShowHN: buddycloud, a distributed social network
Today we’re releasing a dev-preview of buddycloud and would love your feedback.

buddycloud is an extensible open source distributed social network. A user’s identity looks like user@domain.com and users share content in "channels".

We started buddycloud because of the growing “closed-ness” of existing social networks. For example Twitter’s increasing API contortions about what one can and can’t do with their API or which quadrant one is supposed to operate in. We also think it’s important to build services against a known protocol that works against any buddycloud instance on any domain (not paid-for APIs). Naturally this called for a completely decentralised design built on open standards like Atom, Activitystrea.ms and XMPP.

Each buddycloud-enabled domain runs a suite of servers. Each buddycloud server uses DNS to find, connect, and sync content in realtime with other buddycloud servers. This content can be any kind of structured data or large files.

Today we are releasing open source implementations of the following buddycloud servers: the buddycloud-channel server (shares your channel / your activity stream with trusted followers), a media server (shares anything from a small avatar to a multi-TB file), a push-server (email and mobile updates), and a taste engine (“channels you might like”). Some of the team are working on more servers that will let you suck content in and out of existing social networks.

Our reference implementations are written in Java and node and use Postgres for storing data. The web-client is built on backbone.js. There’s also a console client written in Python.

Next tasks: client speedup using IndexedDB. Following permissions, Android, iOS and Firefox OS clients and release buddycloud.js.

We really hope that some of this could be useful for your project:
- https://github.com/buddycloud
- wiki https://buddycloud.org
- demo instance at https://demo.buddycloud.org
- channel https://demo.buddycloud.org/team@topics.buddycloud.org
You're right. I apologize. Last time I flipped through wrapbootstrap, it seemed there were only a dozen or so themes. But I was wrong, I was only looking at the most popular themes and failed to notice the others. It looks like you've got a lot of nice new themes. I look forward to checking them out.
If you don't need to use any Mac OS specific software then you could get a Windows laptop, the hardware is generally cheaper.

If it must be an Apple then the Air is more than suitable for a bit of coding.
Does HN have a resident theoretical physicist on hand for comment? All sounds great but id like the opinion of someone way more knowledgeable....
"You are using Internet Explorer, an unsupported browser :(

You should download Google Chrome so you can get started!"

Just a warning from a high-school teacher: this is a non-starter in a lot of schools. High-school IT departments have a lot on their hands keeping kids on approved sites, and (for historical reasons, as I understand it) IE is one of the easier browsers to deploy in such a way.

I know you probably don't want to develop for IE, but if you want to hit the market at large, you'll have to. I can probably get my IT department to put Chrome on for an approved list of students, but not every school will be willing to do that.
Easy answer.

If it's my child or someone I know, save him/her.

If they are all strangers, save the greater number.

If I know both the child and one or more people among the set of 3, prioritize based on genetic or family proximity.

The point is, this can be solved algorithmically and/or game theoretically.
Random Hacks Dec 2012 – who will you hack for?
ARM is 22 years old today
I've never understood what it is that university administrators can do outside the academic sector. As far as I can tell, they're basically the most useless bureaucrats on Earth.
Actually, a truly compliant UTF-8 decoder should reject all degenerate forms, because they can be used to bypass validation checks, and the spec does not allow such forms. A four-byte UTF-8 sequence is sufficient to represent any Unicode code point (and then some), so no compliant decoder should accept any sequences of 5 or 6 bytes.

Note that Kuhn's torture test page deliberately includes a lot of invalid sequences in order to make sure that they're gracefully handled. Section 4 is dedicated to degenerate encodings like this.
* "Ask HN:" How to post your questions to "Ask HN:" 
My question is landing up in "news", but I submitted to 'Ask HN:", I am new to HN and your help is highly appreciated.
US Air Force Develops "Fly-Bot" | UAS VISION
They are more than a problem & annoyance for merchants. They are completely prohibitive to a lot of services. Chargebacks essentially mean that a merchant has no guarantee that they get to keep a payment till 6 months after it has been made. In market where goods are easily resale able, this adds significant costs in fraud and fraud prevention. My guess is 5%+ for the more vulnerable merchants. This hits smaller/new merchants disproportionately. It also raises the required skillset for being an online merchant.

To minimize fraud merchants will often refuse risky business like international orders or orders where the billing and deliver addresses don't match.

There are several interacting "margins" limiting ecommerce. Merchants not skilled enough in fraud protection. Market to fraud prone. Low margin markets where 2.5% processing fees + 2.5% fraud + 2.5% fraud prevention make it unserviceable. Move any of the boundaries and you will allow more merchants to exist.

Are they great for consumers? There are invisible effects that ultimately hurt consumers. A site may refuse to deliver to you. It may hold back shipments until the fraud checks are done. You may be paying more. A site may not exist at all because they were unable to deal with chargebacks.
Is he not caching his blog with Redis?
The problem is that handling 1 unit is very different from 2+ units, in terms of coding patterns, whereas 3 is not so different from 4+. In the latter case there's already probably a loop to handle multiple unit characters, which will in many cases work without change for longer sequences (and if not, probably the code probably requires very little change to do so).

So whereas it's rather common for programs to mis-handle multiple-unit UTF-16 characters, it seems much less likely that programs will mis-handle 4+ unit UTF-8 characters.
Proving Quantum Computers Feasible
(1) because it isn't their content and they profit from it

(2) because we need a free press, which is a greater good than the income of some corporation

The press has a function that is a cornerstone of modern societies, if the press collectively goes bust we have a serious problem.

It should come as a noteworthy thing that the government (an opposing party here) should need to protect the press. You could easily argue that it is to the governments advantage not to have a free press at all. And yet, they value it enough that they propose (misguided) legislation to protect it.
Isn't the point of bitcoins that you don't have to pay tax on them?
There's something poetic about the fact that I can't connect to a post apparently titled, "Offline first..."
I think his enthusiasm and attempts are good things.

But. His post is just that - his expression of enthusiasm. There's not much of anything else here yet. We have nothing to discuss but his enthusiasm.

Having seen these kinds of ideas consistently end up as "well... it got hard" a week later, it triggers my grumpy "sure whatever let me know how it goes in a month" reflex.
From their website:

Fort Knox-level security.

Video content is protected with our BrainTrust™ DRM, and is unplayable except by a legitimate owner. All aspects of the platform feature a near-ridiculous level of security.
I agree about cartoons. The creation of movement is essential part of the uniqueness of given art piece. But I'm talking about endeavors that aim to create virtual version of reality, some games, movie fx etc.
Security flaw on BT website allows you to add services to any account
Well, pointer size is a concern and pretty much every RISC architecture suffered a slowdown when moving to 64-bit pointers. It's just that x86-64 added so many good things that it made up for that disadvantage.
We do, just like programming, so whats your point ?
Both "books" strike me as sparse content veiled by (superb) visuals.
Yeah I think this is it. LeapingBrain has to show the media industry that they have DRM, but they don't actually need the DRM to be good or effective. Its just something they have to do. Why faff about putting lots of effort into it?
50 ways to make a better mobile website
From what I gather on their post someone used a vulnerable Wordpress plugin to write onto the web server's filesystem, overwriting the latest.tar.gz file with it's own hacked version. You should be safe if you didn't update using that file.
How To Make Your LinkedIn Profile Look More Professional
The serf-lord relationship is convenient for many and does have economic benefits. Thankfully, when the arrangement becomes too one-sided, you can always leave the castle.
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As a general rule, you get what you pay for. Further, allowing anything on the site is going to lead to the same problem as all the others: as a developer you open the page to see an endless sea of requests to make a facebook clone for $5.
BT Releases Survey Results on DNSSEC Deployment
And I'm saying that the view should be "if my girlfriend doesn't help maintain the relationship, then I'm leaving, and if I'm too demanding in what I need from the relationship then she leaves." This only works if there's no stigma associated with breaking up, which is the modern view. (Not only that, but I support nationalized health care in part so that each person in a relationship can leave without being dependent on the other person's insurance or other medical coverage.)

Therefore, I do not think it's proper to reduce the issue to a trade-off between working vs. doing more chores, because that provide no insight into the underlying complications of a relationship.

I gave some clear counter-examples for why that simple viewpoint may not be reasonable: non-work based income (e.g., disability pay or trust fund), going to school, or simply that the other person is making enough money that they can easily hire people to do the work. My wife, btw, gets disability from the Army and is going to school full-time, so I can easily relate here.

I can give more examples. Suppose the wife has a take-home pay of $45K and the husband wants to be a concert pianist, but there are no jobs open in the area. So the husband practices 6+ hours a day (in the expectation of a job for the future). Is that non-paying practice "working"? What if that husband also does occasional piano lessons at $15/hour, bringing in $150/week? Are chores now exempt because there is some paying work?

Let's say that the wife has a take-home pay of $88K, which is easily enough to support a couple, only the wife wants a larger house while the husband wants to volunteer full-time at the local animal shelter. The wife could demand that since she brings home the family income then he should do more chores around the house. In that way they wouldn't have to pay the house cleaner to come in, pay for laundry services, nor buy as much take-out, and so save up in order to buy a bigger house (which the husband would then need to clean). That she can demand such is clear.

But it's also clear that the underlying issue here isn't "doing chores" vs. "bringing home the bacon." So saying that "If my girlfriend did not work, I would ask her to take care of all the chores and meals" is a uselessly simple statement. And I don't even think it's true for you or for the original poster.

Suppose you become seriously ill and can't work for a year. Your wife gets a job, while you're unable to do all but the most basic of chores at home. Would your inability to do the rest of the chores be sufficient justification for your wife to divorce you? I didn't think so. Though in truth, it is stressful and quite a few marriages don't survive this sort of incident, I don't think the main reason is that one person couldn't do all of the chores while the other works.
Dont know about the US, but in Germany everyone will be exposed to programming in some part of their school career.

Of course there are possibilities to totally avoid it, but if you do that you probably have a reason.
Can't agree with this more.. And he is just talking about logging crashes. One of the best debugging tools you have at your disposal in a large system (a lot of programmers contributing code -- bugs can be anywhere) is logging the same stack information in a quick fashion under normal operation in strange circumstances so as not to slow down the production software. The slowest part of printing that information out is the symbol resolution in the binary of the stack addresses to symbol names. This part of the debugging output can be done "offline" in a helper viewer binary and does not need to be done in the critical path. We frequently output stack traces as strings of hex addresses detectable by a regex appended to a log message. The log viewer transforms this back into an actual symbolic stack trace at viewing time to avoid the hit of resolving all the symbols in the hot path.
I want to teach every American sexagenarian how to reverse dunk, taking off from the free throw line. My "Show HN: Hacking Levitation" will be along shortly.

Teach kids math, teach kids to write, and let those who care to find their way to coding. The schools are doing badly enough on math, reading, and writing that this is the area that requires concentration.
Huh. I'm a NoScript user, so that might be it. Thanks.
My dad was a welder. It would be hard to convince me there is money in that unless you have a big upfront investment. Exactly what we as programmers don't need.
Elevated freeways sway back and forth noticeably when it's windy?
eval(gzuncompress(base64_decode('eF...

Classic PHP injection hack.
Pattern Matching In Clojure
It might be that it's simply Firefox's JavaScript interpreter which hasn't been optimized for 64-bits. As far as I know other JavaScript interpreters don't suffer from this problem, and with LuaJIT, which should be fairly similar to a JavaScript JIT compiler, at least I have the numbers to back it up: http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html
Good lord ...
Ask HN: Do you use formal methods?
I'm currently taking a formal methods course at university and a couple of names thrown around as users of FMs were Microsoft (for static analysis of drivers) and Altran Praxis. Coverity were also mentioned for performing static analysis of the internal LHC framework for CERN and the Mars Rover kernel for NASA.

I was wondering if any HN users at smaller companies made use of formal methods, and in what kind of contexts?
s/girlfriend/mother/g and is it still unreasonable? Your widowed mother lives with you, and doesn't have job or enough income to live on her own - do you kick her out if she doesn't make you meals three times a day?
Putting quotes around "safer" doesn't make it any harder to make mistakes in C.

The point isn't about abstracting away the machine, but about reducing the amount of code that has no safety guarantees.
You have a point but several of your examples will allow the person to not have to find a job at a big company but they either have a big up front cost, a very low ceiling on potential earnings or both. Programming has neither and that's what I was talking about. Sorry if I didn't express that clearly.
Thinking Clearly About Personality Disorders
>This is a conflation of the idea of a desire to publish, with the theory that that publishing must be de facto available on any platform in it's native format.

No, it's a conflation of the desire to publish with the desire to target the best electronic devices for reading (tablets), with the best format for _each_ platform (native), with easy 1-click access to monetization (already stored credit cards and people known to buy things).

None of the above are solved by a website.

And much less it solves stuff like background updates, large volumes of data and pictures being readable offline, etc.
You misunderstand. LeapingBrain dont need the DRM to be good, they just need to persuade the media industry (filmmakers) that they have DRM. Why bother to do more than that?
Show HN: The Coming Wave: Exploring Women, Innovation, and Social Technology
I was thinking more of something like Rust, where only a small subset of your code would be poking at memory manually. Then when you do get a mysterious crash, you only need to look at the unsafe portions of your application (or perhaps at the compiler).
Excellent news, good luck and good progress. Good to see such rapid progress to this release !
Entrepreneurs Love the Learning and Ramen Noodles
Review Of Help Scout
Such a '90s cliché. Cheaper does not always mean better value, and it is often at the expense of build/longevity.

Apple does overcharge on memory/disk upgrades (as does MS, just look at the ahem 32gb Surface with 16gb of free space).

But generally I find Apple a solid buy.
That's fair enough. It's just misleading to paint in broad strokes with terms like "Republican" if the evidence supports only a narrow slice of that. It turns into spin at that point.
And, lo, a thousand steam punk enthusiasts cried up with joy.
I was looking at the source when I noticed that the formatting of http://creativeguidebook.appspot.com/js/fbk.min.js actually spells out "WE ARE HIVE". [1]

[1] http://www.wearehive.co.uk
This man knows his gondolas.
I don't understand why everyone loves and wants to emulate the metro look so much. I find metro to be really really ugly. Am I missing something?
This is the nature of these online job arbitration sites. Everyone who wants a project done is dreaming of some foreigner who can live very well on $1/day (as if that were related to value of their work) and will produce code as good as professionals from their country. Some of the older sites are much worse. When I saw your examples I thought you were going to complain that it was too expensive!
Holly jumping Jesus … I just got my 15 minutes of shame/fame over the internet. I linked my “just write down what you’re thinking” blog post on dzone.com and somehow it got posted on Hacker News and from there … Shit just hit the fan. It seems that writing “I’m writing my own OS” as a blog title can be translated from “I have spare time, I want to try out new things” into “Fuck this shit, I’m going for a revolution!!!” It’s time consuming to answer all the comments I’ve gained, so I’m writing this post as an answer to all of you.

http://gusc.lv/2012/11/im-writing-my-own-os-intermission/

And thank you again for inspiration (even the cynicism is inspirational ;)
I don't think you have the evidence to back up that assertion. Certainly the world is changing, but people simply like making and sharing stuff. How much money have you paid for the entertainment you get from Hacker News?
On production servers using virtual machines to run our software is not advised.

Nevertheless, we would do our best to please a customer looking to host our software on an EC2 cluster, with the appropriate warnings. ;)

A bit of context: we sell a "real time" non-relational database (http://www.quasardb.net/). Our customers come to us for speed and reliability and therefore build dedicated farms to host our database.
It's more a question of trying to fit everyone into the same mold. Literally teaching every student to code makes about as much sense as teaching every student to weld, or play piano, or learn Latin, or <insert other specialty skill here>. Not that knowing any of those things is bad (most are probably beneficial) but it's ignoring the individuality of the students.

Not every kid is interested in programming. Schools would do better if they could do a little more to nurture the abilities and interests of their students rather than try to fit them into a one-for-all standard curriculum.
While enterprises have the ability to act as city-states, controlling their own destinies, consumers won't. Facebook vs. Diaspora is the canonical.
Dit zijn de populairste voornamen voor je baby
Finland's Education System Best In The World
Those LuaJIT numbers are really microbenchmarks with small working sets though, and wouldn't show the cache effects of increased memory usage.
Sweet Krispy Kreme worker surprises man on quest for rejection
Make Your Ideas
And what's that supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that Google is using it's leverage over Mozilla to get them to not compete with Google's browser? That sounds sort of incredible to me, given that Chrome isn't a profit center for Google.
Just a heads up, but I think (assuming it's not somebody else on the page) the formatting of your GPL quote means that it doesn't break automatically, making the comment page very wide (at least in IE9).
They're being downvoted because they're wrong - the stuff talked about here will affect any kind of program at the machine level.

Having said that, I wouldn't downvote. The question is sparking a clarifying conversation so it's arguably worthwhile even though the premise if wrong.
Apple’s profits exceed the entire PC industry
Almost everyone I know in the trades makes more money than the people I know in software.

I'm talking about really skilled plumbers, electricians, contractors, etc. Not high-school dropouts hanging drywall so they can buy their next hit of meth or case of beer.
Given that you are learning, mobility could help you going to meetups, friends houses, et al, to learn. That said, the lighter the better. Go with a macbook air.
I only use Firefox for development now, mainly for Firebug (and related plugins) but now I am starting to use the Chrome dev tools much much more. The only plugin I am missing to fully ditch FF is Selenium IDE.

I stopped using FF when I left my previous job, synced up my bookmarks before I left but then was unable to retrieve them because I had not written down the access guid. I'll just sync with my Google account and be done with it!

> I would imagine the Firefox developers spend their time optimizing the parts of their browser that users would most likely use. I suspect that they are not terribly worried about an action that users would take (at most) once every six months.

I wish I could use that excuse at work, but it doesn't work like that.