skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depends on the kerosene lamp. I have a flat-wick lamp that I picked up for about $10 (at the supermarket as an "emergency lamp") with about the same size and with a similar chimney as this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SwissKeroseneLamp.jpg

It is very easy to read by, easily lights up the whole room in a decent warm glow.

The lamps that people use in these countries are very different from that, being made with makeshift wicks and founts and generally no chimneys. Even so, the light they put off is much better than your average candle.
I thought Java was supposed to be "bytecode for the Web." How is this different? What pain points does it solve that Java Applets don't? (Besides this being new and shiny, while having an applet on your website makes people think you're from the 1990's.)
Why can't assistive technology figure out what a label with a single nested control refers to? The browsers seem to do it just fine.

Once a website reaches a certain scale (especially with rich web apps), global DOM id's become an almost impossible headache to deal with (because of multiple views which duplicate id's, coordination of global names across hundreds of files, etc.).

Global id's are basically an antipattern, whereas labels with nested controls have always seemed pretty workable.
So, this time last year I was in a kind of a bad fix. I was completely broke, homeless, and living in a country where I didn't share a language with the majority of inhabitants. Also, at the time that I became unemployed and homeless I had managed to contract a (relatively mild) case of MRSA.

This all was somewhat stressful. However, it's important to be mindful that things can always get worse, and that your happiness is not actually dependent on having a job, place to live, or food. Although the last one does tend to occupy your mind, most people would not actually be harmed by skipping a meal or six.

You can let money, or the lack of it, determine your happiness. You can let your health, or lack of it, determine your happiness. You can let whether your favorite sports or political team determine your happiness. Or, you can have a sense of perspective, trust in yourself, and let happiness be a goal to reach no matter what fate has in store for you.

I can't help but recall the lines of "Invictus" here, but I'll refrain from quotation.
It would be really embarrassing if they didn't revert. I'm in.
The Common Core Must Include Computer Science
Whatever, I do not think this is a good logo. It is really like an art of child.
Not sure about working for long uninterrupted sessions(I tend to believe that short, self-scheduled breaks increase my productivity, as per the pomodoro technique), but I think the notion of loading a 'context' into your memory is spot-on. I know that, at least for me, it is difficult to even begin working on a problem unless I have that initial context in my head; without a full understanding of the problem at hand, I feel like I can't do anything well.
Wow, this is particularly true when you're not rapid prototyping. An aha moment happens when one is able to reverse think a complete chain of events leading up to a catastrophic failure because you saw a tiny UI/UX bug on the surface.

Paul has written such splendid pieces that should resurface from time to time. This thread has happened [1] to YC community before.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2988835
If your startup involves displaying mathematics on webpages, use this.
Facebook Uploader aka Fu Makes Sharing Pictures to Facebook on Windows 8 Simple
Cool. I'd also love labels for PR-generated issues.
Slides of Fluentd (lightweight but robust log collector)
Do you have any good pointers or references for Android dev in these kinds of environments?

No, not really. I haven't really done much of it myself, just seen a lot of chatter about it. The specs I see, compared to the average smartphone app, have a lot more in the way of very specific UI specs and binary protocols, and less in the way of reposting tagged pictures to Facebook. So it's a different part of the system to study.

I can recommend http://commonsware.com/ for coming up to speed on the system in general. One of the best references out there, and it stays up to speed with a rapidly-evolving ecosystem.
The gradient is what kills it for me.

Is it supposed to represent a buffer, spinning away as you shovel tuition in until you can load "the real world"? :P
This reminds me of a difficult linux-Xwindows type question that I've had for years:

How can you paste from the secondary clipboard buffer (usually this is by using the middle mouse button), via the keyboard?
Someone's been playing with 53/Paper's circular color mixer...
Seems to be going around. Stanford did something similar just recently as well:

http://www.change.org/petitions/stanford-university-bring-ba...
NICE TUTORIAL
The standard explicitly allows a <label> to contain a single input element, http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/label.html:

The label element may contain at most one descendant input element,
button element, select element, or textarea element.

So it seems odd that it's considered invalid here. Of course, it's not unusual that the W3C is contradicting itself...
I remember when one of the house placement land rushes occurred on the server I played on at the time. I had saved up for a Tower deed, and stay up ALL night in preparation. Had friends waiting to camp my spot with me and so forth. I got my spot, got my tower, then a friend of mine told me they were selling on Ebay for $600 to $1,000 depending on the placement and size of house. The Tower being the second largest structure in the game, I ended up selling it two days later for a cool $800.

I was 14 at the time I believe. I used my dad's Paypal account that I had convinced him to get months before, so he had never used it, and then had to explain how I made $800 on the Internet selling virtual goods. My parents insisted I was actually selling drugs for a good month.

Good times.
Good idea, will make links open in seperate tabs.
Social media benefits to police investigated
The strategic thinking behind the move is brilliant. Even if the logo cost $100,000 there is an argument to be made that more people will be able to connect with the brand and hopefully will donate. I'm quite certain that this type of move could be majorly profitable. But as hackers we know that a solid idea is not enough... the execution is what truly matters. The UC system's idea is awesome; the execution is pretty bad.
This is very similar to how a lot of writers that do split point-of-view write their stories. "Load" all the information needed for a particular point-of-view, write all of theirs chapters, unload, and repeat.
Usually? Which ATs are you describing? We care about this sort of thing and weren't aware of that constraint - a quick Google doesn't highlight any obvious issues with Jaws or NVDA, except for this [1] in 2003. But since then there have been huge changes in assistive tech - pretty sure the whole ARIA thing didn't exist back then, and there's probably more choice in ATs now than ever before.

1. http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t155840-nesting-inside...
I just created a GitHub repo with the initial ruleset in Markdown format.

http://github.com/johndbritton/nomic

If you want to start a new game, you can fork the repo and begin accepting pull requests from your players.
You can also see a listing of active games by checking out the network tab.

https://github.com/johndbritton/nomic/network
Ontract: Analytics For Student Data Like Mint.com For Financial Data
I want you to read my very first comment and reply back if you thought I was incorrect in any of my reasoning. If you did find an error, then think about how you would reply and what reasoning you would use to support your argument. On a separate sheet of paper, do the same thing as before only this time, do not support your argument with reasoning or evidence, add sarcasm, add some disrespect, and generally make you statement sound like you are a complete asshole. Compare your results.

The fact that I have to explain to you what manners are, or why they make the difference between me treating you with respect and me treating you like a complete piece of trash, is frankly bewildering. If you wouldn't respond to a coworker/colleague like that, then you have no business responding to me like that, or anyone else for that matter. If a coworker/colleague had responded to me as he/she did, they would have had more problems then just a nasty comment.

Good day!
Wow. That's awesome!
Yes 100% this.
Thanks for the detailed response. I am testing security systems now for use with a payments solution, so k and g+ won't cut it.

The user experience of passwords to secure financial information is too poor for us to use it and that's why we're exploring and testing other options with side projects
It is for me, and it's annoying.
Agreed about bored dogs having the worst behaviour, and the rest of your comment is spot on, but I'd like to correct a common but incorrect belief that you bring up:

> It requires you to act like the alpha dog (which is a very awkward feeling to most people) in order to maintain the behaviors you want.

The "alpha-dog" theory has been totally disproved by dog behaviourists. It was an extrapolation from a single case study in the 1930s, of captive wolves. It has since been debunked, and is not even applicable to wolves, never mind domestic dogs.

All the dog training which is based on this (such as Cesar Milan's submission-based training) holds no merit, and is far more likely to be detrimental than positive, as it relies on terrifying the dog. Note that this was only debunked in 2000, so a huge amount of dog training and research needs to be revised as a result.

Much more detail here: http://www.whole-dog-journal.com/issues/14_12/features/Alpha...
I don't believe in any sort of anthropomorphic "god", nor do I put any stock in any particular religion or religious text. Beyond that, the phrase "something higher than myself" is pretty vague and doesn't mean much to me.

I heard a saying once that went something like "the meaning of life, is a life of meaning". My interpretation of that is that I get to choose the meaning of my own life, and that it's my responsibility to do so. Given that mindset, and my very individualistic, libertarian, almost Randian[1] viewpoint, I don't see any use for seeking any sort of "higher power" or "higher purpose". I am my own purpose, my own end, and I am sufficient.

Aaah, I was also heavily influenced by reading a lot of Existentialist[2] stuff a while back too, and I sort of see things in a "when I die, you all cease to exist" world-view. Except not quite, which is why I do care about things like helping the poor and leaving the world better off after I leave. So, yes, I am very selfish in the Randian sense, but my selfishness leads me to want a world that's more free, less conflicted, and more rewarding than the present world, even for as-yet-unborn generations. It's hard to explain why, but none of it - in my view - reduces to any sort of spiritual notion or need for any external force / influence / god / whatever you want to call it.

As to the issue of "what about comfort in the face of tragedy" or whatever, I have adopted a somewhat Stoic[3] (if not in the strictest classical sense) viewpoint as well. That seems to play well with the individualistic, existentialist mindset I have. As a wise man once said "Keep buggering on"[4].

Anyway, that's just me. YMMV. :-)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Philosophy

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

[4]: http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/biography/biography/ch...
I agree with the power of holding a program in one's head, but I also consider this a (the?) serious bottleneck in the software engineering.

I hope we discover a scalable alternative to holding a program in one's head. It doesn't need to be as good as holding a program in one's head, it just needs to approximate it.

(Edit: see also Design Beyond Human Abilities by Richard P. Gabriel.)
I feel like we should do random tools startups should use, not just marketing and customer success.
In my experience anything involving photos or cameras can easily be replicated and backed.

Expiring qr codes is an awesome idea. I'll definitely look into that thanks
The book that this game originates in ("The Paradox of Self Amendment") is actually a very delightful and thought-provoking book. If you're into self-amending systems (law, software, etc), you may enjoy reading it. It's all available online here: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/psa/
That's a good guide. Thanks for the share.
We have - it's called an API. The way to work on big programs, too big to hold in your head all at once, is to break them into a bunch of little programs, each of which does something you can hide behind a simple interface. Then you hold all of the library in your head at once, and possibly repeat the same process.

The complexity comes in that this really does just approximate holding the whole program in your head, and sometimes you find the API is not adequate to what you want to do. Then you're back to square one, except with a codebase that by definition is too big to hold in your head.
The key question, is how does the authenciation server know that you are who you say you are?

I am not trying to make so,etching that's unbreakable, in the end, nothing is. I just want something that will take more than a few minutes for a talented hacker to crack.

Can you please explain bait more about how these crypto keys might work?
I showed this comment to a shelter volunteer, and they were livid. They felt this would attract the wrong kind of people to adopt dogs: dogs need loving homes, not people who view them as kitschy party tricks.
I'd really be interested to know if simply saying passphrase/pass-sentence/etc instead of password would encourage more complex 'passwords'. Saying password in my mind gives the user the impression that they can only use a singular word instead of a phrase or sentence.
The total price is the same, the PC version includes several DLCs, while on iOS you buy them separately.
In my experience, this is PG's most helpful/ reassuring technical essay.

Recently I was working on/ creating pretty complex algorithms with gargantuan cobweb of edge cases. Not only did I had to work for 15+ straight hours, but in order to maintain productivity fasted (bar caffeine, few nuts & water) every alternate day to keep the steam going.

Incredible times, and rather close to reaping the fruits now, but there is a pretty good chance that I would not have been here had I not read and internalized this essay- was grappling with several decades of CS research though in much less theoretical setting.
I always reverse the shortcuts to that copy is:
command + shift + (3/4) and save file is command + shift + control + (3/4)

Some other os x screenshot tips:

- hold space while dragging a selection and you can reposition the selection's origin

- press space to switch to window capture mode. This captures the whole window even if it is obscured.

Fun fact up until recently (mountain lion I believe) the capture window icon was a holdover from NeXT. I wish they'd left it alone, the new one isn't nearly as cool :)
Good start, but ui/interactions/color schemes can definitely be improved
I put info like this in a password manager for sanity (Keepass, I work on a PC).

One easy way to manage it is make a folder for each hostname, and add things like mysql root password, ssh port, public IP, pivate IP as different entries relating to the all aspects of managing the host.
It's not just Microsoft. If you tie yourself to proprietary technology on the web, you run the risk of having the carpet pulled out from under you. Sometimes that risk is worth it; most of the time, it is not.
Show HN: My weekend project on appstore. Based on "Don't break the chain" rule.
How the Best Apps Onboard
Good starting point for this stuff:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-sen...
>You may argue that it's simpler (I'd argue it's not)

I would argue that when you're creating dynamic content, dealing with IDs is inelegant. If I already have a reference to a DOM node, I shouldn't have to assign it a unique ID just so I can tell another node about it.
Agreed. I've never watched a Netflix program on my laptop because I refuse to install Silverlight. Flash it bad enough, but, for the most part, I have to tolerate it thanks to its huge market presence. Silverlight never had that, and I certainly wasn't going to help make it.
Let me try with embedded ruby:

<%= label_tag :is_premium, 'Toll free? (e.g. 1-888--*)' %>
<%= check_box_tag :is_premium, true, params[:is_premium] %>

Am I doing it right?
Persona is great, but it's another variation of o outh and they share many of the same problems. That, and it's not seamless
Ah, I remember playing an online game of Nomic back in high school. Someone actually keeps an archive of dead Nomic games, so the eye-bleeding '90s web design is still alive: http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/macronomic/. I take full credit for the painful color scheme. All static HTML hand-edited in BBEdit; I think I had a bunch of macros defined to help make it easier to maintain.
I have gotten advertised speeds for DOCCIS in New York City. This statement by the Time Warner COO removes 80% of the goodwill I have felt towards Time Warner for the good albeit pricey service. Being his customer makes me feel ill.
IIRC, they have a written (or maybe unwritten) rule that they will not drop support right away. It's probably to encourage adoption of Microsoft's standards and software by enterprise. If a major company adopted this and Microsoft gave them a 6 months notice, they'd be pretty upset and less likely to do business with them again.
I'm not entirely sure how the Mega entropy gathering system works, but I can take a guess.

Through the sign up process try ask for users to both enter information with the keyboard, and click buttons with the mouse. There's not a whole lot of randomness in either action, and relying on it too much could start to reveal things about the user in the encryption key generated.

For this, lets assume I can predict the random numbers with minimal computation. That's realistic. PHP session variables can have their random seed extracted in a very short time frame using similar methods (<30 minutes).

They would first be relying on the randomness of the path that users take with their mouse between buttons. That's unfortunately fairly predictable, most of the users will click on the buttons in the same order, and probably take reasonably similar paths to get there. If we could work out the probabilities, the key search could be focused on the most likely path a user might take.

So we move on to keystrokes. There's not a whole lot of variation there either. If we use the keystrokes themselves, we might begin to reveal personal information in the key. I'm sure you wouldn't want your password baked into the keys you are relying on to protect your freedom / anonymity. The length of keystroke is what they would use, how much time the button stays down and the distance in time between keystrokes. There's some randomness there, but I wager that most people type with the same sort of characteristics. If they're on a touch screen device like an iPhone, you get no real timing information except for delay between letters.

There's no denying that it is still brute force and very unlikely, but using attacks like that could be the difference between decades of computation and hours
Wow, I remember Agora from back when I used to play Nomic. If it's still around, it is indeed the oldest living Nomic, as far as I'm aware.
>Once a website reaches a certain scale (especially with rich web apps), global DOM id's become an almost impossible headache to deal with (because of multiple views which duplicate id's, coordination of global names across hundreds of files, etc.).

The most effective way I've found to deal with them in those circumstances is to have them generated automatically at runtime when they are absolutely required. It's still a terribly backwards way of doing things, but at least you can ensure their uniqueness that way.
I faced that issue when reconfiguring it on outlook and it is very annoying. The only thing we can do is wait 3 months ( they flush off the account, as they say ) or just make sure you delete all accounts first and then close that account if you hadn't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890741
With every recommendation of Linode, lets not forget their lack of transparency towards customers.

Little is known of the specifics in the Bitcoin-related Linode security incident. This was all that was released: http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-incident.h...
>"In a perfect world, there would be no bullying and there would be no people like me and there would be no sites like mine," he told the Betabeat tech blog. "But we don’t live in a perfect world."

Woah, people actually use that to validate their actions? This must be the worst fallacious argument I've ever seen. What an idiot.

Edit: Thanks for suggestion
Tim Cook thinks different though ;). He also re-instated the charity giving.

Either way, even if Apple makes a few dollars less on each Mac the publicity alone is worth it. "Look, we make things in USA." Remember BP's, Beyond Petroleum?

--- edited to add "less"
bump. I'm playing
You do it without thinking about it.
Apart from the fact that you mean the "royal society", yes, both true. They also came into conflict about priority with respect to the calculus. And surprisingly enough, that debate rages on.
One good test for this is if you can explain in abstract terms, and preferably to a non programmer, how the program works.
> I would have rated myself above average. :-)

Yeah, me too :-)

(Class of 1980)
It's actually an indictment of our programming tools that they require one to hold so much of the design context in one's head. If they were better (more expressive, easier to interact with) they would help to solve the problems rather than require superhuman feats of endurance.

pg does mention that succinct programming languages help, which is true, but they don't go nearly as far as they could. Like him, I use Lisp for that very reason, but Common Lisp is 30 years old -- why hasn't the state of the art advanced since then? It's really quite shameful.
Dead week? MIT has dead Thursday and dead Friday. There is no week.
The Tripartite Identity Pattern: Account, Login, and Public IDs
but it is a joke
> So, how do you fix it if you accidentally make it non-functional yourself?

You don't. I think it would be worth the risk of such an accident if the setup really deterred theft.
This driving thing is already a kitschy party trick. And I teach my dog wacky tricks mostly to show friends when they come over, but it doesn't mean I don't love him.

I think the only reason it invites the idea that it would attract the wrong kind of people is because I used a beer example. But if dogs came knowing how to fetch drinks from the fridge, I think few would complain.
The problem is no matter how complex, passwords themselves are not good enough

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/11/ff-mat-honan-password...

A bit long winded but he does make his point
I didn't say it would push things to infinitely annoying. But the needle gets stuck leaning that way.
Tap the right edge of the screen to enter/exit Preview mode. Tap the left edge of the screen to save. Cheers!
Features are not the issue. The interface is make or break.
Kids get some flu shots, Larry Page gets some press. Who isn't a winner in this situation?