skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Transparency: I'm a co-founder at Perfect Audience and we believe strongly in the benefits of retargeting for the end user, for the advertiser and for the content publisher.

I don't see a moral issue with retargeting because at its heart it's anonymous - all we know about a user is a string of sites and maybe search words. However, as soon as that data is correlated against personal information, as soon as the real world data and the digital paper trail are correlated and identifiable it becomes sufficiently creepy to me. Who knows - maybe 5 years from now this will seem innocent and benign compared to the mind-reading banners on the bus stops but this seems like a line in the sand I am willing to draw today.
> where do we draw the line?

That's a question art philosophy has been tackling for a few thousand years, without a conclusive answer :)

And yes, anything can be art, given the right circumstances. And it's not necessarily a "problem" that it is not art to you. Art is defined by the viewer as much as the artist. (And the critic, and the gallerist, ...)
I can see how being a big part of society would exert pressure to realign with society's default approach towards anonymity (1) but I don't see how that would imply any final status of online anonymity. Other forces might exert pressure in the other direction. The technology itself might resist some pressure. Access to certain technologies changes the societies themselves.

(1) And of course society in general used to be and still is pretty anonymous. I can easily buy a newspaper in almost perfect anonymity through regular channels, apparently I need to take special precautions to get the same status online.
I lived by SmartPlaylists. I basically ended up just dragging and dropping them into Spotify, thus making them static DumbPlaylists.

With a Spotify-like service I doubt you'll miss them, tho.
Exactly.

It would be difficult for me to defend the statement "random consumerism isn't art" and quite easy to say "random consumerism is shitty narcissistic art"

I think the art/artists subject came up from this post on the blog: http://randomshopper.tumblr.com/post/36593869254/addressing-...
> this is a welcome removal

No, it's not "welcome", because separate "downloads" are (1) no burden on people who don't use them, and (2) actually a useful feature.

In many cases, a tarball of the repo contents isn't the same thing as a distribution tarball, because the latter often contains various generated files that may be more annoying for the user to generate than is justified for somebody just interested in compiling and installing the software. Making a distribution tarball typically involves generating those things and packaging them together with the sources.

Some repos contains generated files as well to work around the issue, but this is ugly and causes its own problems.

> Github are nailing it

Er, removing useful features may be good from a business point of view (github may feel the support burden, etc, isn't justified by the usefulness), but I don't think it deserves to be called "nailing it" (unless "it" is the user, of course... :] )....
It's not uncommon for people to try and stream 2 Netflix movies at the same time though a single internet connection.
And in other news, the sky is blue and Barack Obama is the president of the United States once more. Google have access to some of the best engineers money can buy, they're certainly not broke and can afford to invest into better infrastructure and the means for implementing it, not to mention they don't have a legacy customer base or legacy infrastructure to consider either.
This is paramount -- if you can't offer a spam engine as good as the one in Gmail, then you've lost before you've even started.
I think it depends on the size of company that ZP wants to target. I did a payroll processor evaluation for my startup 2 years ago and the upfront pricing and lighter (less time consuming) sales process that surepayroll offered compared to paychex and ADP was one reason we chose surepayroll over those companies.

Surepayroll also offered much better online tools and better pricing than either Paychex or ADP at the time. Now that Paychex has acquired Surepayroll it's good to see another online friendly option being built. Now if somebody would just build an online friendly way of managing 401Ks for small businesses.
For a lot of projects the gh-pages 'is' the official website. Smaller projects have never (until now) needed another location to host a full project, you may disagree that github aims to be a place to host open source projects but gh-pages, a hosted wiki and issue tracker suggests otherwise.
Kind of a pain for us (http://mosh.mit.edu). We have some distro watchfiles that look at this location, and we'll have to get them to switch to whatever new location we move to.

(Ironically a few weeks ago GitHub made an unrelated change to their URL scheme that broke all the Debian watchfiles, including ours, that look for new tags.)

Some advance notice would probably have been helpful, instead of immediately killing this off. On the other hand, it's not like we're paying them to host our project.

Like most Unix software projects, we do want to prepare binary .tar.gzs of the Mosh releases, which have a ./configure and don't require autotools (unlike the repository, which is for maintainers and requires autotools to build). We wouldn't want to use a tag download of a .tgz as our authoritative release because there's no reason to think the sha256 will be stable.
So, how feasible is it these days to do all of your browsing through a VPN? Not that a VPN's going to save you from the attacks mentioned here, but hey, maybe it's time to start getting serious about my privacy.
You got more than I did. I just got a stack trace after clicking the [Create] button.

OpenERP Server Error
Client Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/odoo/source/web/addons/web/http.py", line 195, in dispatch
response["result"] = method(self, **self.params)
File "/home/odoo/source/web/addons/web/controllers/main.py", line 724, in create
params['create_admin_pwd'])
File "/home/odoo/source/web/addons/web/session.py", line 28, in proxy_method
result = self.session.send(self.service_name, method, *args)
File "/home/odoo/source/web/addons/web/session.py", line 95, in send
raise xmlrpclib.Fault('AccessDenied', str(e))

Server Access denied.
You might want to check out maldet[0], it does a good job of finding this kind of malware. It supposedly has functionality that'll clean base64 encodes and gzipped base64 but I haven't managed to get it to work. I've posted a comment detailing the problem but the mod hasn't allowed it to be posted yet. Suffice to say, don't trust the cleaning function. I'd love for someone else to test this though.

[0] http://www.rfxn.com/projects/linux-malware-detect/
>"Curious - do you see price as being the only differentiator?"

Perhaps it's an approach unique to me, but pretty much, yeah. If I can define exactly what I need in a service, and the service provider can assure me they can meet those demands, it's all about price.

Which was my point with regards to ADP. It may be clunky and unpretty, but it does what I need it to do: pay my employees, accurately and on time (disclaimer: I hope, still in implementation!). Flash and prettiness is nice, but if it's superfluous, it has to be free.
That is really interesting (great link too!). As coders ourselves we've had the same experience: spinning up something simple is usually pretty straightforward. What we are a little more curious about is the ability to bring simple sentiment mining to non-coders (IE: your support or social media guy) via off the shelf tools.
Finding Your First Freelance Clients
Big fan of placehold.js for web placeholder images.
Ask HN: Server daemon, web service or other?
I'm building an app that requires an adapter/bridge that resides on a server and interfaces with the database. The adapter allows limited database access to third-party servers. I'm trying to determine the best method to implement this adapter.

I could build a traditional daemon process using C. I'd prefer to avoid this, since working with databases in C isn't my favorite activity. I'm also decidedly mediocre with C and haven't done anything serious with it in ages.

I could build a daemon using a scripting language like Python. I'd feel more comfortable doing this, but I've never daemonized a script before. The code would also have to include network code to be accessible by third-party servers. Is this a good or bad idea? Or nothing unusual?

Lastly, I could build equivalent scripts, but serve them through a web-server. The advantage is that I can defer networking to Apache/nginx/whatever. The downside is that the implementation becomes reliant on an existing web-server, and can't be installed on a system that doesn't have one running.

Thoughts? Am I just over-thinking this?
Google would've helped you out there... but they've been back essentially largely since 12/3.
There is an internal property of a software system wherein it is better suited to accomodate the future (new requirements, change). Better suited means it can accomodate the future more efficiently and stably.

Two software systems may delight the customer, for example, but one could be far better positioned to evolve, grow, delight future customers and more customers.

The ability to create such systems lies with some not all and usually comes with experience.

What is this ability called, if not craftmanship?
It's sufficient to disable third party cookies and not browse cookied by major social networks to prevent this right?

Ignoring the part where you can be "tracked" by company, but that's just looking up public IP records.
lol, thanks man - it's alright. The title of the post was not quite on target. Startup for startups are alright if it is something compelling.

I wrote something on "review my startup" for another site where there was a a list of categories for tutorials, and under the javascript category were videos for JAVA. Between that and the 2 posts this morning for startups curating conent for startups I just found myself annoyed, like "really, is this what is has come to?". I did sign up for user diary, a start up for startups but it struck me as compelling.

Your apology has been upvoted.
you should

Why do people feel the need to tell others what they should or shouldn't be doing when there clearly isn't a right or wrong way? Some people found it useful, GitHub decided to discontinue the feature but your opinion on what others should be doing isn't relevant. It's certainly closer to their core feature set than web site hosting and I don't anticipate that going away anytime soon.

you should be getting it from the official website

Oh, so from our GitHub hosted sites?
This seems like the sort of thing you'd do if you found out people were abusing your service to host arbitrary files. Get rid of the ability to directly upload and download things ad you force them to step up their game. Who's going to maintain an actual repo for their warez, right?
Hey there. I get that you seem to like this product. I'm not even knocking it. I'm just telling HN what I experienced with the demo they posted.

As far as the product not being released... The guy is advertising a huge "SUCK IT SAP" website bragging about the new version of their software being released in 9 days. Not exactly an alpha version here.

I fail to see what the size of 'your' specific company has to do with anything. Anecdotal evidence is just that. 'Your' company might have the technical resources to fix bugs in open-source software, but that can't be a serious suggestion. That's like saying every enterprise out there should keep technical staff on-hand to patch the linux kernel. That's silly.

I posted a screenshot in another reply but in case you care, here's the bug that basic, and I stress that word, testing would have caught.

http://imgur.com/fp8oW

Easily reproducible in two seconds by simply using the interface.
Wait, this will affect hubot (https://github.com/github/hubot) as well right? The README tells people to download the latest version on https://github.com/github/hubot/downloads
What about those of us who prefer the simpler time module (which works mostly in epoch time)? It would be a simple change to extend FreezeGun to cover that module in a similar way, surely?
The Chill of Lonliness
Considering the development model used by most modern web browsers, I'm pretty certain those who do this type of fingerprinting in the real world will long ago have adjusted their matching algorithms to be aware of this. I doubt they even care if they get a fully unique fingerprint, they probably just define some percentage of matching as being "close enough to a likely match" to report you as being someone they have seen before.

Just mentioning this lest anyone get the wrong idea that setting your browser to update frequently might be a defense.
Japanese Only
I feel like GitHub should not be the place where you host your distribution tarball. As was mentioned, GitHub is about source code and collaboration and the distribution of that source code.

It's just not inside the scope of what GitHub does, and in that sense I think this is an improvement because it makes for a more focused product.
Remember - music existed before money. Selling recorded performances is relatively new - how long have records been around? I doubt the first users of the tech in the early 1900s spent enough on records to support any type of professional musician, let alone create Lady Gaga like stars.

Yet, somehow, there have been professional musicians for likely thousands of years.

Record companies solved the distribution problem. The Internet proved them obsolete and for the next few years they'll continue their death rattle until they blossom into something that looks like Spotify (which is replacing radio as well), or someone else will fill their shoes (as Spotify is doing today).

And then no one will care about programs designed to put lipstick on my 80gb mp3 pig as iTunes does... Unless they roll out their own all you can eat service :)
>If you need a compiled binary, you should be getting it from the official website

Many projects use Github pages as the official website, Twitter Bootstrap for example.
What should they be expected to do? Distribute via BitTorrent and hope everybody that wants to use the project has a torrent client installed (and are able to even use bittorrent at their place of work/school)?
It's just not as convenient for maintainers or users, who just want to grab an archive and get on with it.
IMessage Colbat Thorium Bomb
Thanks github team!!

When I'm learning a new framework / lib / language I love to look at other people's gists for good (and bad!) working examples. That said, I would LOVE the ability to sort search results by date / number of comments / forks etc.
By the way, downloads of source aren't going away (i.e., get a zip or tar ball)! Just the "upload anything and make it available" feature. There seems to be a little confusion about that.
Well, there is this: https://mixpanel.com/people/
Exactly. With music you pay for distribution. $10 to stream me a large catalog for a month is good. $10 for 14 tracks is not good.
I always enjoy reading Panic's blog. They always have something interesting to say.
Yeah, I think it's incredible that he thinks $10 is too high. Perhaps he means '$10 is too high for a limited and poorly organised music selction'.

I would have no problem paying double that each month for Spotify, and upwards of 3-5 times that if it had a music catalogue and organisation structure similar to iTunes. Granted, I value music more than many people, but $10 is what a cheap lunch costs, for unlimited music on demand.
"You are very likely to roll your own packages of whatever software is critical to your business, as you'll need custom patches and so forth."

If you care about taking advantage of prompt security updates from your distro provider, you will do this as little as you possibly can. Otherwise you need to pick up that burden yourself, and since most of us aren't security pros, it is a weight that should be assumed with great reluctance. You're no doubt familiar with the dilemma: Are you going to attempt to maintain stability (which isn't at all guaranteed) by backporting patches, or annoying your ops people by forcing version upgrades?

To a certain extent, how bad this gets is a function of how out-of-date your distro is. This is where having packages that are 4 years old can bite you -- you end up rolling your own far more often than you really should. Overuse of tools like virtualenv leads to the same problem.
This sounds eerily familiar. Around a decade ago, a data analytics company called Pharmatrak was actually found guilty of breaking federal wiretapping statutes for doing something very similar. [1] In their case, they had built a network tracking HTTP GET requests to pharmaceuticals companies websites with a web bug [2] and attached cookie. But because some of the pharmaceuticals companies were using GETs as the method on HTML forms (remember, this was ten years ago), the users actually ended up making GET requests with personally identifying information in the URL encoded parameters. Since these GET requests were logged by Pharmatrak, and neither party (the users nor the pharmaceuticals companies) had consented to giving away personal information to them, Pharmatrak was found guilty of wiretapping.

Pharmatrak eventually won on appeal though, arguing that they had no intention of collecting personal information, which exonerated them because only intentional eavesdropping is a crime.

The company in the OP's article could make no such arguments though. I suspect that their main difference is that they make no assurances of confidentiality to the websites using their software the way Pharmatrak did. Which 1) is just really creepy, and 2) sets them up for trouble with users in California, because California's wiretapping statutes say that it's a crime unless both parties agree to it. [3]

[1] http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets001737.shtml

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

[3] I'm not sure if this applies to police, but it definitely does to private parties: http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/california-recording-...

Edit: Added third reference.
While you can see this data from Facebook--and yes, that's jarring-- what you're allowed to do with it is something different. You can't sell it, you can't sell it to an ad network/exchange, you can't retain it after the user revokes permission; you can't even sell derivatives of the data.

Facebook Connect is the most benign of these sorts of things there are-- it's access to data, and the implementors of its widgets and API-- have an onus to protect it.

Now, of course, there's plenty of bad actors out there, and I'm sure it's sold and exchanged, but technically and legally speaking, you're forbidden from doing so.
Would you mind expanding on this?

The genealogical data is one of the main things I'm looking for; 23AndMe has been "OK" and AncestryDNA has just been a waste.

I'm wondering if it would be worthwhile to pay for a data import onto FTDNA.
>"I think the article is referring to much bigger implementations"

Absolutely. I can imagine the kind of work an implementation like that entails.

Maybe I misunderstand "lock-in". Nothing is preventing me from switching providers, since there is no reliance on proprietary measures anywhere along the line. Switching from one implementation to a different one is as easy as re-doing the labour (not that that is "easy", as you point out). But that's the bare minimum that I can expect to do anyway. I certainly can't have less work to do the second time.
Logo-to-Brand Colorizer Demo & API
Won't help.
Maybe github doesn't want that, but it's very common practice for small/simple projects to have only a github presence, and no dedicated website of their own at all. It's simple, easy, and keeps everything in one place.

Again, this change may very well be in github's interests, but it's also going to make life more annoying for many gibhut users.
I only wish I could have learned programming at an earlier age.. I didn't write my first line of code until my first day of college in my Intro to CS course and I have to say, prior knowledge of programming would have come in handy! I applaud anyone willing to introduce programming to kids at a younger age!
I can't speak for all of those other sites, but at Chartbeat we're vehemently against tracking any sort of personally identifiable information.
All college admissions and personal branding are determined by age 16 at the latest. Records considered prior to the seminal test given at that age include: early high school grades (ages 14 through 16), extracurriculars and sports (ages 3 through 16), and middle school placement tracking (ages 10 through 13). These are all factors either directly or one step removed in the process.

So the question has to be asked: Are these brands as childish as what formed them?

This "elite school" concept could probably be considered a "simulacrum" in the Baudrillard sense. Let us stipulate: working for Goldman isn't the only way to make money; it is for the people who are branded by these schools. Would your parents or friends be happy to hear you're starting a startup that anybody without that branding could start? I think not. Your destiny then rests on increasing your liquidity by working the same 100 hours a week (doing nothing, mind you, because Wall Street produces nothing) for people who are also members of your brand. Then you get to live your ideal life in your Manhattan flat: meet your trophy wife: with a weekend house in East Hampton: re-live all the mistakes your parents made: propagate and create dysfunctional children...

The corollary then asks: Does the brand define one's life as their Geworfenheit? With such fixed determinism from such a young age, were you ever truly free? Is your quest for freedom what these employers are truly capitalizing on?
I'd consider that a feature :)
Recently, I've been addicted to Ticket to Ride (board game).

If you like music (or have kids), check out Tiny Piano (shameless plug, as I'm the developer).

For typing notes, I like Daedalus.

Also consider checking out the Anomaly graphic novel. You get the first chapter for free. It's interesting to see if this could be the future of graphic novels. (It's a big download.)
Since Windows 7, hovering over an open application in the taskbar has done a similar thing. I sometimes wonder how it almost always manages to pick the dominant colour, even if it isn't necessarily the most common one.
This really sucks.

I've been using the downloads page to distribute binaries and/or source distributions of a few packages, as it was a logical and easy place to do so.

For example, my biplist Python package has the versions available here:

https://github.com/wooster/biplist/downloads

Which are listed in the relevant pages on PyPI:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/biplist

Now I'll have to migrate all of these over to some other location. Where? Who knows. Maybe BitBucket.
Plugins are managed (quite nicely) via GitHub downloads. This includes official and third-party plugins. The official plugins can migrate elsewhere, but it will be difficult for the third-party plugins.

http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/modules/plugins...

"The ability to install plugins from github allows to easily install site plugins hosted there"
I know HN doesn't believe in a comment where an upvote will suffice, but the first thing I searched this thread was for "pull request" and by golly, I think they would be a great addition also.
Technically, you got more than I did. =)
Whoops, horizontal scrollbar on 1024*768.