skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shameless plug for my friends: I got an advanced copy of some chapters from Traction Book (http://tractionbook.com/) which is where I read about the traction vertical 'Engineering as Marketing'. I think this is an awesome example of that.

I started using Balanced today, everyone is incredibly helpful in their IRC channel, and integration is a breeze. It's a solid service.

What's worth noting about Balanced, you can use them solely for payouts, while continuing to use some other gateway for processing. https://balancedpayments.com/docs/overview#id2
Microsoft's anti-Android Twitter campaign draws ire, irony
Interesting, that's actually the first thing I thought of, and not the pianist (I did not know about him).

It may sound crass, but I may as well ask: how's Brubeck (the framework) coming along?
What about a much, much better Siri?
NASA-NOAA Satellite Reveals New Views of Earth at Night
New enterprise.github.com
The godawful syntax (UPDATE vs INSERT). The godawful semantics -- it's not closed under composition, for instance; too, it is not set based, which means all kinds of hideous contortions with DISTINCT and whatnot.

I don't have much time for the K/V stores (save Redis) but I'm also sick like unto death with SQL.
I up-voted you just now but it seems that conservation of karma means I will soon be down-voted.
My first startup failed because I invested in the wrong developer company who took my $10K and left me with nothing.

Yes, I hired local and I even checked references. This company operates 2 miles from where I live. It couldn't get any safer.

They slowly quit working on it and then quit and started ignoring me until I sued them. I won in court and got a judgement to collect my money.

Apparently this doesnt matter, and the owner of this company simply continues to operate, just without paying bills, such as my $10K judgement against him/company.

This was 2008 and my full time job just laid everyone off, about one month after committing my money to this startup.

I later foreclosed and went through quite a storm of financial loss, and life changes.

All while developing my next startup ideas!

Wooohoooo, I'm still alive and I know my persistence will pay.

So, my answer? Evaluate your loss if you can truly evaluate it, grab the obvious mistakes and make sure you dont do them again.

Millions of people every day don't attempt their own startups due to what happened to me. Fear. Fear of loss. Fear of exactly what happened to me. It's incredibly discouraging that people/companies can get away with this, and it effects more people than just me. See... when i tell my story about failure, 9 out of 10 people get further away from ever overcoming their typical fears about starting up. I'm the only one who "should" fear the future... yet, Im the only one taking more risks.

(sounds like i might need a new set of frands, huh?)
The Python docs[0] for the random module also state, quite clearly, that "the basic function random()... is completely unsuitable for cryptographic purposes".

[0] http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/random.html
Yes, that's what it means :) We've put this in place for 2 reasons:

1) The 1st year at dotCloud is a big step for us, and a lot of people didn't make it in the past. Making it means that somebody has truly proven his worth (since he or she wasn't fired) and has adapted to our unusual culture (since he or she didn't resign). By attaching perks like this to the anniversary, we emphasize its importance.

2) We don't want people to join for the vacation. We take a lot of breaks because that's what intense, hard-working people need to avoid burnout. But the majority of people on the job market are not hard-working and intense enough for our standards - we're hoping this will help us filter for them.
I was wondering where you got that phrase. Too good to be true that you pulled it out of thin air on the spot. Sounds like Balanced should be a case study in your friends' book. ;)
Google Nexus 4 Goes On Sale In UK and Germany
As a person who suffers from black floaters in his eyes the black UI elements are always welcome. The elements by themselves might not be less distracting but they make my floaters a lot less distracting.
Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in new biopic "jOBS"
Very cool to see North Carolina lead the way in implementation of products like Archive Social.

Seems like an easy technology to build, but it doesn't look like your team has taken any short cuts.

Kudos
Link to actual results page: http://transparency.org/cpi2012/results

My question is, how do they classify "corruption"? And how did they get surveys into North Korea?
What a trash comment.

Actually, it's not. You just disagree with it. Sometimes when you disagree with someone's conclusions, it's hard to see the merit of their reasoning.

We need to...

There are two complications to this. One is that the "we" of Linux development has never and will never have the kind of coherence that it takes to appeal to an extremely large audience. (Even calling it "Linux" isn't always agreed-upon). There are a great many people working on Linux or making things from Linux, but they are not all going in the same direction. This is both a strength and a weakness.

The second is not so much a different reason as it is an example of a major weakness of this style of development: It's a demonstrably inefficient way of addressing the needs of certain kinds of users. The list of things you say need to be fixed with the Linux desktop, which is quite typical and also quite incomplete, has also remained constant for more than a decade as year after year "of the Linux Desktop" passed by. Although the situation has improved, "We" have not moved on to a better class of problems because most people working on them want to use the terminal, or at least don't mind editing text files for configuration, and correspondingly are not very good at addressing the needs of people very much unlike them.
You could still use a local copy. DVCS rox.
Awesome! Too bad I gave my TI84 to some girl, after leaving college :(
Can white-space Wi-Fi really work for cities?
That's weird...I know of a local business guy who got so angry on a known person who reviewed about his business and gave a slightly negative feedback. Wonder how all the other business owners feel when they get a bad review from a known person.
I would not be so sure. It really all depends on how much physics you want your "physics engine" to have. Rag-dolls? Not likely. Quake 1? Sure, you could do physics to that extent on an 89. The 89's are more powerful than you may suspect, unlike the 84 (seen in the article), they have Motorola 68k's.

Here is an idea of what you can do with a 84's Zilog z80 (warning: long animated gif): http://benryves.com/images/nostromo/bsp/2010.11.28/Walkthrou...

(corresponding blog entry: http://benryves.com/journal/3739423)

You can get a lot more out of an M68k. (Actually, to be fair, the M68k calculators' larger screen size works against them, but if you are willing to sacrifice graphics you can easily surpass that demo.)
Have you tried switching to the fork-and-pull-request model instead of everyone directly committing to the main repo?

(It's how many, many open-source projects run, and GitHub has a good write-up of it here: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests )
Space mission reveals moon's 'battered' history
Cloud9 IDE is actually a very nice cloud-based editor that already hooks into Github and others.
You have to be careful there, because some of the largest consolidated insurance providers are nonprofits that are incentivized to maximize overhead (to the benefit of internal executives and managers). The ones that aren't have to compete with the ones that are.
Tesla Motors - Your Questions Answered
Sorry about your experience. Unfortunately, grad school in Economics is a bad environment for positive feedback even if everything is on track.
Oodle joins the QVC family
Registration plate lookup would be a chicken/egg problem here in the States. You need proof of insurance in order to get your registration, so on a vehicle that has no plates, there's no number to give, so wouldn't be able to get insurance. VIN is really the way to handle it, and once you get through the "quote" stage to actually buying it, all the insurance companies can take any VIN (and your info, of course) and spit out how much it actually costs. On a state by state level, I don't imagine it would be difficult to build a system to accurately compare rates. The fact that each state has its own system of minimum requirements, as well as what can be covered, and insurance companies are isolated to a single state (the larger insurance providers are actually corporations with wholly owned subsidiaries in each state) increase this complexity when dealt with on a national level. It's extremely similar to the issues with comparing health insurance plans.
He makes some useful observations and good points after that.

But most of what he says is on my "List of Reasons to Never Use PHP Ever Again."
Asterix: The Great Unsung Fantasy Hero
The Health Benefits of Multivitamins
So let's begin by discussing who needs to take multivitamins. Are they essential and needed by everyone?
I use IDEA and not eclipse, but for the last 2 versions of IDEA it seems to get more and more buggy and feature wise, eclipse seems exactly the same.

Then of course there's the obvious reason that with the community edition there's no appserver support. Eclipse has that.

At this point I'd use eclipse if I was familiar with it. I'm just too used to the key mappings of IDEA to deal with the switch over.
Congress Demands United Nations Keep Hands Off the Internet
Definitely interested in more details about NK. I generally think of corruption as bribery, and NK seems like the sort of place where government officials would mostly not take bribes, what with the gulags and whatnot that no doubt lie in store for anyone who gets caught. But perhaps my picture of the place is upside down, or there's more to corruption than just that.
Also this: https://github.com/ConradIrwin/jist
I've got a pet theory here that this is going to be a trend over the next few years. A lot of companies github's age were built on the "we misinterpreted devops as noops" attitude, which works great for a few years, but somewhere in the year 3 - 5 range the entropy and technical debt compound faster than a non existent or small/inexperienced ops team can keep up with.
Top Claims Made by Creationists to Counter Scientific Theories
> .. RStudio ..

Looks great. Downloading it now. (Thanks for the heads-up!)
Tell HN: Free Idea
Etsy is a top 50 site, according to the official Alexa browser extension for Google Chrome. There are 18 reviews of Etsy on Alexa.

Build an extension with a user model built in, such as one's Google account, automate on installation. Alexa's toolbar icon is dynamic, and so is yours. Users click once to access the popup, select from various checkboxes, rating the site's dimensions, and clicking away— 3 to 5 clicks. There may be a textarea which activates a star rating system, or a karma voting system, after she's typed in 100 characters.

Compete with Alexa, sell for 1BB to Google.
What if the power goes out? What if your main development PC goes down?

The question is really how often does this happen and how long is it out for. Personally I don't remember the last time my internet was out for more then an hour, and that wasn't even in the last year.

Google Docs must have the same problem, how do they mitigate it?
Yes! I thought I would never find this again! Thank you so much!
Large scale networking changes like this are so challenging to pull off, one missed cable, one mis-configured switch, and blam! everything is nuts.

Only because industry best practices are incredibly fragile. A little DRY would go a long way towards eliminating misconfigurations.
Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole
Understanding The Law of Demeter in Ruby
The advantage is that they don't get a bunch of huge attachments.

But over the years I've come to the realization that attaching photos is still the best way to share photos with grandparents.

Scenario 1 (attach to email)

Grandpa receives an email with an automatically generated thumbnail and clicks the thumbnail to see the larger version.

Scenario 2 (everything else)

Grandpa receives an email with a link. The thumbnails probably don't show up because images are turned off by default and that's how Grandpa rolls. Grandpa clicks the link which opens a new tab and shows similar thumbnails to scenario 1. Grandpa clicks to see a larger version.

---

Granted, you can provide a bunch of additional value (like ordering prints and whatnot) in scenario 2. But it comes at a very steep cost.

Disclaimer, I'm a founder of OpenPhoto and work about 30 yards from the Kicksend team. I personally use their app and think they're on to something. But I'd be lying if I didn't say it's a challenging road (for them and us).
11k Citi employees fired. Help get them hired in tech.
The Two Thousand Year Old Computer
I appreciate the comment. You are right that, on the surface, this is something fairly easy to say you are doing. There are lots of tools like Backupify, etc that store social media content in some way. The problem is that its virtually impossible to make sense of the data later on because most of the context is lost (i.e. comments are not associated with their posts, you cant view the full-sized photos, etc). It's also a challenge to preserve these ever-changing, non-standardized data formats over the course of several years, while maintaining searchability and accurate presentation of the data.
For anyone interest in R without a background in statistics: I would highly recommend learning the two in parallel (if not statistics first).

R is first and foremost a language for statistical computing. You really aren't going get much out of it without working on some interesting data/stats problems. Plus for most hacker types I think being able to play with the statistics you're learning about with R can be a great learning aid.

However not only is it beneficial to learn stats with R, it is imho dangerous to learn R without some stats. There's already too much research being published with were 'p-value' means "the thing that t.test() output that I was told needs to be in the paper".

Because R lets you play so freely with stats I find it a great tool to gain greater intuition about certain mathematical principles, but there is a temptation to let the tool do the work and the thinking for you.
TrueCrypt's plausible deniability system is dependent on a passphrase instead of an auth key iirc.

Another likely difference is that truecrypt works.

Neither will stand up to scrutiny for the purposes of deniability. It's obscurity which is effective in the scenarios that the docs outline below.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability
Interview with Josh Harvey of StompRomp
For Uncle Bob Martin's birthday, we announce ver 0.12.5 of Gitnesse.
It's hardly a 'drop-in' solution if you have to change all your UI views to inherit from the NUI equivalents.

I could never use this based on that requirement.
I've talked with many friends in a similar situation as yours (econ phd) and they all faced the same issues. Some advisors don't even care if you are coding in Python or in stone tables, as long as you "have three stars in your results table". Your comments about the quality of the computations also reminded me a lot about Ken Judd's (often ignored) arguments about paying attention to all these implementation details.

Good luck with your current goals, and I really hope you are more successful than within the limitations and issues of academia.

PS: Just out of curiosity, what were you interested on, regarding your IO research?
Organic metamaterial flows like liquid
Sorry, I still have no idea how HN handles our profiles and where the information we put in that box ends up going! You're very welcome :)
I was thinking the same thing. Without knowing whether the founders agreed with the Board decisions to a) share the models with Best Buy and b) pursue an ultimately ruinous legal claim, it's hard to know if First Round were part of the solution or part of the problem...
Rackspace CTO: Services & OpenStack - Not Price - Key To Winning Cloud Computing
Seriously, does Best Buy not have a legal department? How could those people think it was OK to discuss stealing their idea in easily discoverable email, then actually steal it? And then, when the lawsuit comes, not even settle, but go to trial, when there's mounds of evidence that dooms Best Buy? Someone is not doing their job there.

Best Buy is one of those companies that is just all-around mediocre, in every regard.
J.M. Coetzee wrote a novella called Youth: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/04/fiction.jmcoetze... – it features a great section about programming at IBM during the 60s, and although the book itself is not wholly about computers or programming, it does deal with some of those themes (isolation, poetry).
We can waste an incredible amount of time making sure the foundation is secure. Or we can plan for the shifting sands, like Google building commodity-hardware-failure into their business plans. Larry and Sergey didn't try to make computing hardware more reliable; they planned for it to fail.

To the contrary, many complex things are sexy. The iPhone is greatly complex, both in software and hardware, but it's still sexy. By the way, what if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were happy just running a small electronics store in Palo Alto?

Interesting to see your opinion of "reaching for the stars". Also interesting to see you write 2x as much about what "isn't reaching for the stars".
A friend introduced me to this, an amazing device that caused the rewrite of many a history book. More than a thousand years would go by before anything similar could be built again in Europe.

A compelling video from the BBC can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YeQ_497Uko
Welcome to the club of STP meltdown survivors!

Unfortunately, large L2 Ethernet networks is not scalable and prone to episodic catastrophic failure. You can read more here: http://blog.ioshints.info/2012/05/transparent-bridging-aka-l...

One way to make L2 network somewhat stable is to replace many little switches with one big modular chassis for hundreds ports, like Cat6500/BlackDiamond.

Or, to minimize L2 segments and connect between them in L3 (IP routing).
Assuming standard liquidation preferences and a relatively small(?) amount of capital raise given first-round involvement, it's most likely that the founders probably saw a few million bucks each.
MPAA: Megaupload Shutdown Was Massive Success
I may be missing something, but checking your logs does not fulfill exactly the same function as an external check.

I mean, if X% of your requests never make it to the logs cause ELB is messed up/dns is fucked up/disk is full/nginx dies/grasshoppers then you'd happily show that everything is ok, since no new 500 status gets pulled from the logs.

So internal and external checks should be compounded, imo.
There is an entire, large, class of people for whom 300 miles range is more than adequate to cover a regional trip, if there is a place to charge the car overnight (e.g. at the hotel parking). Anything further is a plane ride + car rental anyway, so it's not a big deal. Your use case differs. To think this matters to a statistically significant group of people is merely logical fallacy.
Zite too seems to be working in the same space of ML-aided personalized news magazines.
[shameless plug]

Hey github, sounds like you need SevOne. You could have diagnosed this issue with one TopN report and been done with it.

[/shameless plug]

edit: See following thread for a full explanation .
Could someone explain the process of how those emails were handed over? Is Best Buy obligated to do so, or was it a private investigation of some sort?
C++11 function composition library
Merchants should refund an equivalent value of BTC, not the same amount paid.
I would be very interested to know how this compares to Pixate.

Pixate appears to be a large project and very ambitious, so I am surprised to see NUI appear, seemingly out of nowhere.
Great stuff Anil! I think this nails the archival piece of social data. How can this be extended to use the archived data for insights i.e. run data mining algorithms (think SAS on social data). There are few players in that field but if both of these utilities can be coupled, this will be a powerful tool.
I think part of your problem was that PhD economics programs are so narrow, and this is part of the problem with economics generally.

It has ignored too much of what is occurring outside its discipline, and turned in on itself and neat models that do not actually describe how the world works.
I love Unsquare Dance. Short, but quirky. Awesome. I can remember listening to Take Five and Blue Rondo A La Turk on the radio with my Dad!

Wish I'd been able to see him live. What a great man.
This is the kind of situation that I think screams for OpenFlow[1]. It seems issues like this would be easier to avoid and faster to troubleshoot.

1. http://www.openflow.org/
(I'm a co-organizer, w Luc.)

The bootcamp is being taught by "Erlang/OTP in Action" co-author, and ErlangCamp instructor, Eric B. Merritt. It is based on our "Erlang Essentials" material, which we use at ErlangCamp to get ErlangCampers up to speed fast.

In addition, for more experienced Erlanguatans, we are planning hands-on on, technical mini-hacks/workshops to run in parallel to the "Erlang Essentials" bootcamp. More details forthcoming, as they develop, but we aim to make them interesting, informative, and fun.
GitHub Enterprise
Heh, many production sites still use Cufon, mind. :)
This is unreadable on an iPhone. Which is kinda amusing given the title of the post.
Hi Brian, cool, congratulations on making it this far! Do you think the several hours latency to the bank account deposit is going to expose people to too much exchange rate volatility?
When there is a lawsuit, one of the pre-trial phases is called "discovery". During this phase, both parties can compel the other party to hand over documents and information relevant to the lawsuit.
Shameless is exactly right. Any inclination I may have had to even consider looking at your product just evaporated.
Just started this now. It's really awesome. Only wish it was a bit faster.
This is a very, very good point. Though, many of the functions that R provides just won't make any sense at all if you don't have an intuition for the statistics behind it. I have found myself reading the papers published about specific functions in order to understand the results.

Do you have any resources that you suggest for beginners in statistics looking to learn on their own?
>but maybe the inconvenience would be motivation?

I need to limit the number of times I give myself extra work as 'motivation' - you get to the point where you spend all your time shooting alligators, and don't have any time at all to drain the swamp.

I mean, sometimes this is better than just not doing it? but not in this case, if you ask me.