skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem I see with this article is that it trashes one particular company and the VC backing of that company and attempts to use that to make a larger point about vc-backed e-commerce companies in general.

So OK, maybe that company isn't great. Maybe the VC's made a mistake with that particular investment. Or maybe the founders and VC's know something that you don't. Either way, one's observations about a company should be limited to that company and not be generalized to the entire space the company is in, unless of course there is sufficient compelling data.
Errant Google domain traced to Turkish cert authority
Yep, we use lists to organize links and you can set them to be public or private.
> Is there a open source Common Lisp library that you'd like to see better documented?

I was talking as a long time member of a different programming community with similar attributes. (Smalltalk - since 1998)
"How is it that referential transparency..."

That was incorrect, I meant: "the kinds of metaprogramming associated with homoiconicity are mutually exclusive with referential transparency".

A macro could not, for instance, take a variable name as an argument and return a result that's based on the value of that variable and maintain referential transparency. So that would be a pretty weak macro system.

I suppose there may be other uses for homoiconicity, but I don't know enough about lisp to comment on that.
The 19th Century Painting That Most Blockbuster Movie Posters Are Based On
>Man, those textual pop-ups are annoying!

Amen. I find it hard to get upset about the takedown notice when I want to take it down for melting my eyes. Perhaps this is unfair of me, but there it is. Thanks for the clutter-free link.
I Wish iOS and Android Had the BlackBerry 10 Keyboard
I'm not sure why I'd pay for the gold plan when you can just click through to the site anyway. Ditto the Pro plan, actually. Perhaps you could give people more review credits the more they pay?
Google: Do as we say, not as we do.
Thread title mentions boobs...ranked #1 on HM. I don't really mind, but that is kinda weak for std HN purposes.
By 'they' I mean Lionsgate.

For a period the video was up, but with advertisement revenue going to Lionsgate. They were getting revenue from something that was largely someone else's copyright. In spirit, if they think they should be getting money, then Buffy's copyright holders should too.

Of course, neither should automatically be getting revenue, fair use and all.
I see human poop all the time in SF.

My favorite is this:
http://ghettosf.tumblr.com/image/29770959816
Now there is a disruption possibility in that market if someone took the time to do actual biometric and customer search and some innovation in production methods.
Analysis of the Sindarin dialogs in The Hobbit
I'm a fairly fanatical Codecademy user, so this is not news to me: I've been testing these courses since at least two weeks :)

Unfortunately this means I'm having all sorts of data integrity issues: for example, I can't access the third lesson in the Parse track, which is showing 9/4 exercises done. I'm also having trouble finishing several exercises in these courses, due to puzzling errors and, possibly, flawed tests.

But, wrinkles aside, I think these lectures are a brilliant way to generate leads: I subscribed to pretty much every service that has course on its API (Parse, Twilio, NPR...).
>On the other hand, laws exist to prevent people from submitting takedown notices in bad faith.

Realistically these laws are hard if not impossible to enforce. There's absolutely nothing stopping someone from filing a fake DMCA under a fake name and getting absolutely no retribution for their actions. Ask any up and coming YouTube content creator and they'll probably tell you they've been hit with fake DMCAs in the past, which immediately results in the user's video getting pulled.

After that point, the damage is done. Even if it comes back later, especially if the content is time sensitive, the troll won.

Considering that you have to prove actual bad faith (rather than just negligence) and have to have someone's actual identity to initiate a DMCA countersuit, the protection offered in the internet age is laughable.
Sure there is mate, it's called "Flash"
Check out https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

It downloads and installs multiple versions of windows VM for Virtualbox with IE6-9. It also installs reset points so when the activation is up you can just reset all your VMs and use them again until activation is up.

It's really useful if you do web development with a need to test on IE.
> [...] and can probably avoid the need for passwords altogether.

Probably, yeah...

In the case they only have read access to the token DB, and need write access, or read access to another part of the system, it becomes an attack vector.

It is not a cargo-cult measure, and it doesn't add much complexity (just re-use your password encoding logic).

The same goes for session tokens, BTW.

> [...] nor would I ever recommend that they do it.

Maybe you should reconsider that. I know who you are, and how knowledgeable and experienced you are, but in this case I think you're just wrong.
Birchbox and ipsy appear to be doing quite well, in terms of sheer scale. But yes, it seems like 2012 was the Year of the Subscription, and most are floundering, gone, or have switch business models (I am actively watching the space). Just pointing out, there are some budding successes.
A more technical solution would probably do wonders for this problem - both in initial measurement and custom solutions thereafter. Even going in for a fitting won't yield you the right results, and a lot of women are just too self-conscious for one to begin with.

Human fitters are trained differently at various locations, and VS in particular doesn't seem to adequately train their employees (or maybe because most locations are in malls, working in intimates isn't exactly her career choice so she's are more lenient/awkward about it). I was grossly misfitted at a VS like many others I've met, and the girl was pretty careless about the whole thing (didn't take her time, was 100% sure she'd done it right despite telling her I wasn't quite sure - ironically citing the fact that most women are wearing the wrong size to begin with). Additionally, well-made bras that last easily run into the $60-100+ range, so a lot of women pick up the cutesy bargain-bin ones that aren't shaped well to begin with.

And depending, it can end up being a lot like jeans where sizing will vary with different brands and styles even though it shouldn't.
set you back ... about $65

It's a running joke with my housemate that her bras cost around $40 each (starting price) whereas I can buy a 7-pack of briefs for $10.
If you're very interested in your question, I highly recommend Ed Glaser's Triumph of the City[1]. Short answer: Density is valuable, and developing a new dense area is difficult. No one is going to pay for a skyscraper or a cute, tiny Victorian house in the middle of nowhere because the demand isn't there. You have to build where people are, but neither San Francisco nor the peninsula suburbs want to let that happen.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health...
Slight self promotion; here is a CLI tool I made to help clear up local and remote branches easily - in case it is still useful to people:

https://github.com/elliottcarlson/git-delete-branch
Indeed, you're right. Downtown Oakland is much better than West Oakland, and better than Civic Center or the war zone/train wreck known as 16th and Mission. That being said, the crime rate and homeless population is still substantial enough to be a serious hindrance to development.

See downtown Brooklyn, where a similar situation/vibe exists - not the worst neighborhood in NYC by far, but also sketchy enough that the monied working professionals aren't interested. They built anyways, and now that neighborhood is in a weird limbo where the buildings have trouble attracting tenants, but at the same time generating enormous class and racial tension due to their mere presence.
We're actually re-designing the public profile views. Soon the profiles will feature all the latest links instead of separate lists. We're also changing the view of the links quite radically... More about that soon.

What comes to blog embeds, we already made prototypes of list embeds but will try to push this as a proper feature some time in the future.
Thank you for the feedback. I'm too not 100% sure about the frames but got pretty many requests about it. Will be thinking about it.

I'd love to sell credits like this but this is a drawback of a 1-to-1 exchange ratio; it's fair but there's no margin you can capitalize on. But I'll think about what you said.

Thanks again.
Game Jams: The most fun you can have while programming
Ask HN: Which current tech company will have the highest valuation in 10 years?
[disclaimer: I'm married to the original tech/product co-founder who is no longer with the company]

For the first time, I see a HN thread on a startup I know very well from the inside, how can I resist jumping in.? :)

First, the OP is factually incorrect about one thing - True&Co doesn't have a subscription model. You get a bunch of bras in a box when you order from the site, you keep what you like. This is the same as the Warby Parker model as well as other successful startups where you need to physically experience things.

Second, I'm not sure why the OP feels such animosity towards the company or the team. There are many snide comments in there, especially around funding, which seems out of place.

Having said that, the women's intimates business has a few big incumbents and a huge addressable market. In the beginning, True&Co took a very 'software eats the world' approach and tried to use machine learning to fix a problem that a lot of women have.

I'm not sure whether they still use a algorithm or whether they focus on tech anymore but at the time, I liked the algorithm Aarthi and her team had built out - it had great results.
My gut reaction to this was negative. As much as I like GitHub, I sympathise a lot with Linus Torvalds' concerns about the way it encourages low-quality pull requests [1].

However, thinking back through my own experiences with the kind of minor pull requests I've occasionally made to projects in the past, I can see this being quite useful. Have you ever actually cloned a big repo like the kernel's? Even the Node.js repo takes a fair old while. If you're just trying to submit a correction for a minor typo or omission in the project's README, then this feature lowers the barrier from minutes to seconds. Hopefully that will be a net positive for the community.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56599...
“Papertab” paper tablet is your flexible friend
I like the idea of automatically generating a set of test cases, but requiring you to fill out the tests. Even better if I can run

my-lang --gen-test-cases input.lang

and it outputs stub tests for the edge cases.
There's a reason Rigby and Pellor can charge £100 for bras. They don't have an algorithm. They have well known name; great (apparently, I've obviously never tried it) fitting; etc.

PS: If the blog owner is reading please consider better contrast (off white background and darker text) and larger font size.
This post reeks of jealousy.
1. The offer is clear, but as they say you need power before you can reason with others so, say you are SEO expert, your critical view of any related field would be most welcome, other might get ignored. So I'm thinking you would want to hire freelance experts for different fields, once you do that, or get them on-board you would be ready to give feedback of high quality. Best is to set a revenue share, 20-80%, in case sales happens, if not nothing. This will bring you lot of customers.

2. yes, its a steep price to ask, compare it to the fact that online lockers cost way less than that, yet hardly anyone gets premium occasionally!

0.99 and 1.99 per month sound more fair, given low quality feedback sites are absolutely free.
I'm taking this course next semester at UVa. Can't wait!
Assuming every student has a laptop anyway[1], this basically caters "to students who don’t want to carry a laptop while walking late at night from their dorm or off-campus housing to the library".

What's the point of getting one "for five hours of use" to take it off campus or home if you have a laptop off campus or at home?

What dire need exactly does this solve? Put computers in the library for people who, well, work in the library. If you want to work elsewhere, do bring your own.

[1]: And I know of no student who does not own a laptop[2]

[2]: Cue anecdotal evidence of that one person of a student body of thousands of people without their own laptop...
"lisp it is up to the developer whether or not a function will be referentially transparent"

Although that may compromise the ability of the compiler to detect mistakes even when the developer writes all referentially-transparent functions. Not sure about that, but I suspect that it does in practice (currently) even if not theoretically inherent.
Good rant if you have a sucessful product to sustain your experimentional and fun lifestyle. For the rest of the crowd: keep calm and do work.
Go, the language for emulators
We recently launched in Canada and Australia. Also we are hiring:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4859122
I think that we can agree that any reasonable audience acting in good faith SHOULD understand, but I think we can also agree that most audiences are not made up of reasonable people acting in good faith, which likely predisposes failures of understanding.

I'll get specific with two mechanisms of failure that I've seen. Let's say that there is a euphemism treadmill that starts with the word A then proceeds alphabetically to K. A was created in 1852, and K is "the current euphemism du jour". Your favorite word is E, created in 1960 and popularized in the 70s, replaced with F in 1981.

Mechanism 1:your audience consists of people born after 1981 who are unaware that E is even on the treadmill at all, and they don't understand that E->F->G->H->I->J->K .

They have an opportunity to act in good faith and say "lmm, the word E is incredibly offensive to me. Did I misunderstand you?"

And then you could reply "Yes you misunderstood me because political correctness ruined the word E, I actually meant the current euphemism du jour which is K."

Another case is a person who is aware of the treadmill and does understand you, but decides that they are more interested in being offended than continuing the discussion. They will then decide to talk about their poor little feelings instead of whatever the discussion was actually about.

If you want to get a point across to that specific type of idiot, you need to use their language so they can't get distracted with their "feelings". Same thing goes for the rest of their irrational customs, and probably most of yours and mine as well. When in Rome.

One thing to note is that old words sometimes really are so offensive that their meanings should be either treadmilled or redefined. Homosexuality was the technical term for an illegal mental disorder that the computer hero Alan Turing(Turing machine, Turing test, WWII Enigma decoder) was chemically castrated for. Bill Hicks has a short bit about Jesus not wanting to see people wearing crosses when he comes back, I would think the same would apply to people who survived homosexual persecution:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcM01akD0SA&feature=playe...
>They should have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Says the healthy young guy. :-) Many people receive extended benefits at a significant cost advantage through group insurance.

Also most employers pay a significant portion (if not all) of the premium of these benefits! You and I may see a health questionnaire as a simple form where you answer "no" to everything and sign it, but many, many people not much older than you aren't able to do that.

>Imagine if the employer in Canada dictated where I can live, or what goods I can buy...

Um, your employer does dictate where you can live, since most roles expect you to come to a structure of the employer's choosing, and what you can buy through your paycheck. Regardless, there is no dictation here at all. You are being offered benefits, often paid at least in part by the employer as a condition of employment. It's like being offered a cell phone or a car allowance.

>You are still not even accepting the option of no extended plan at all.

As I already stated, this option does exist and IS USED. In almost any company of significant size (i.e. above 10 employees or so) you can refuse all coverage. All you have to do is do so with a written form. You can do so for Health and Dental in ALL cases if you are expected to pay the premium and have coverage elsewhere, inclusive of personal coverage.

Why in god's name you would turn down what in many cases is free money is beyond me, but that is your prerogative. To suggest you are unable to do so in Canada is incorrect.
The world needs more deleters of code!
thanks for testing! so glad to hear you like the lessons and are signing up for the APIs!

Could you try the Parse course again? I fixed an issue a few minutes ago that may have cleared up your problem.

And please continue sending in tester reports on the other bugs you mentioned. We & our API partners would love to fix them up.
I don't think you can get by the trust issue, but a redboxish booth to be placed at stores might work. I know I would really like to order jeans / pants customized to fit. Not sure if I wound stand there in a booth in my skivvies to get scanned. Imagine being topless for a girl would require a fair bit of trust.
> This past summer, together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I even screened the remix for the US Copyright Office at the 2012 hearings on exemptions to the DMCA. Afterward my Buffy vs Edward remix was mentioned by name in the official recommendations by the US Copyright Office on exemptions to the DMCA as an example of a transformative noncommercial video work.

It's definitely fair use.
Well, I work solely with VIM now, but I have worked with Visual C++ 6.0 in the past and later with Zend Studio 5 & 6 version and then with Komodo IDE. I never touched Java, but I briefly came back to Visual Studio when doing some projects in C# and then when learning F#. There's also DrRacket, formerly DrScheme, an IDE for Racket, which I use sometimes and love (I used it instead of Emacs for other Lisps too btw). Ok, to the point: you are wrong.

Take my VIM for example, which I use for Python and (Java|Coffee)Script development (along with Erlang and a few other languages for hobby projects). I have a file list/tree/browser with NERDTree. I have a list of classes and functions in currently opened files with TagBar. I have "go to definition" and "display help/docstring" through Rope, along with four different auto-completion modes (partially built in, enhanced with SuperTab and a few other plugins, including Rope). Similarly I have support for refactoring from it. I have "find in files (quickly)". I have "fuzzy file name matcher" with Command-T. I have three different linters for Python. I have access to git log, blame, status, add and everything else with fugitive and diff is pretty, side-by-side one thanks to vimdiff. I can open remote files easily (this is built in). I have a bar with snippets (with placeholders I can fill in when pasted, of course) with SnipMate. I can open command line (like bash, ipython or coffee) in a window or tab with Conque. I can easily evaluate bits of code thanks to IPython (and thanks to their recent refactor, it's really paying off!). I use zencoding when I have to write HTML structure. And these are just things I use most often.

Now, I use VIM, which, I assume, means to you that I don't use an IDE - but what is the difference between, say, Komodo IDE and my VIM (aside from my vim being able to display in the console) really? It's IDE all the way down to unix shell and all the way up to git integration... And I'm old enough to be called a "grown up". Of course, I assembled my IDE myself from pre-made and some custom components, but it's IDE nonetheless.

The thing is that IDEs are there for a reason. Every single feature I mentioned above is a timesaver to greater or lesser extent. Every one of them increases my productivity in some common situation - and we're talking about Python and back-end (mostly) web-development here, which has much less repetitive, tedious tasks than, say, writing MFC app in C++.

Anyway, if you want to program in Notepad - feel free. Just don't, really don't, try to convince anyone to do the same by saying that notepad is somehow superior to Visual Studio for programming. It isn't. You'll understand this when you have to immediately fix a bug in production code on the server with something like nano, joe or mcedit and you introduce three other errors in trying to do so due to unbalanced parens, messed up indentation and a huge number of other issues that IDEs (yes, VIM included) protect you against. Well, I guess you need to grow up first to get access to that production code, I mean afterwards ;)
Right, I agree with you that I am not filling the shoes of what I should be doing, and that is one of the reasons I'm not happy here, but that's not due to lack of awareness or effort on my part. I have never had issues communicating to non-technical people before. My previous managers have always commended me on my communication skills. In the past I consistently raised issues and potential areas of for improvement, explained the significance, and came to agreements with the product and project managers on a reasonable balance between continually improving our systems, maintenance, and adding new features. There is also another huge factor that complicates things, that is out of my control -- our systems are tied to a partner company and to a large extent they have determined our technology because our apps run in their servers, on their datacenter. So we've been stuck on Windows 2000, SQL Server 2000, running COM+ stuff, because those guys never upgrade their crap.

However, some projects to improve systems and to finally start looking at decoupling from the external partner are FINALLY showing up on the roadmap for 2013. I spent all of 2012 on a brand new project where I enforced my vision of how things should work (totally modern tech stack, automated builds, cloud deployments, etc). That project was a big success.

So if I were to stay one of the things I want to know is how I can convince my manager to get out of the way more, and let me handle a bigger role in planning and executing the projects. Because even though the projects are coming up, he is already starting to try to "mentor" the jr dev's by trying to get them to "own" specific new projects and feature areas for things that we'll do in 2013. I strongly disagree with this approach; I want team ownership, but with his hub and spoke approach (my +1 being the hub) to managing, there is no real development team. The Jr. dev's practically never increase their skills because they spend so much time on legacy code and tedious operational stuff that can be handled by interns (i've recommended this before, buy my manager doesn't agree).

Your point is well taken though, and it's something I've been thinking about. I would welcome any advice on how to arrange a better environment for myself at the company, that would allow me more autonomy in leading the developers. How do other lead developers at small startups handle this kind of situation? Who assigns tasks directly to developers? My manager micro-manages, and assigns individual tasks to individual developers. I know that if I got to lead the team myself I'd have been able to incrementally upgrade parts of the system to free up the Jr. developers' time, and by today they'd have a lot more free time to work on even more new features. How do I discuss this kind of thing with my manager without offending his clear need to maintain strong control over the Jr. developers?