skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like TACK as a technical solution to this problem, but there is also the possibility of improved regulatory oversight. My question is why there isn't a stronger, official governing body for inclusion of certs in browsers. Right now it looks like MS, Mozilla and Google are the de facto deciders of whose certificates can be bundled by default in a browser. This basically decides who can be a root CA. The problem is, as three un-coordinated entities with no formal relationship, they have no procedure for putting the toothpaste back in the tube - they can't revoke a certificate, because there's no procedure.

Personally, I would promote the creation of a separate body for managing root CA certificates, in which any browser vendor could participate. Members would agree to bundle only the certs approved by the body. The body would collect from participating CAs a certain portion of the monies paid for certificates - somewhere between 25% and 50%, to be released when the certificate expires. This serves as a sort of escrow for services rendered - customers can be confident they will get n years of use out of a certificate, even if the CA vanishes. Top level CAs would be responsible for remitting payments from intermediates they authorized. This would form a fund to facilitate the movement of customers, in the event a CA became illiquid or was deauthorized - sort of an FDIC for SSL certs.

If a breach of trust occurred, or a CA went bankrupt, had its assets seized by a corrupt government, etc. this body would have the authority to blacklist the CAs certs after a window - 30 to 60 days. They would notify all of the CA's customers that they were being issued new, free certificates from a still-authorized CA of their choosing, with the payment for the new CA to be issued ( at a lower than market, but not insubstantial ) from the depository insurance fund. The body would provide customers with a list of approved CAs by country, and while the remitting process would likely be a nightmare the first time, at least people would have a timely way to get new, valid certs. Customers would complain a bit about the work to deploy new certs, but that's the cost of running (actually) secure infrastructure.

This would achieve a few goals:
- browsers would be obligated to bundle a common set of certs, with a common approval and audit process. This should be less work for new CAs to get approved
- CAs would have a financial incentive to stay secure - a breach means we can legitimately revoke your authority, and you no longer own the cash we held in escrow
- browsers would have teeth to create a 'death penalty' like Mozilla proposes, and better yet, they would all have the same criteria
- certificate owners would be less conflicted between user security and their financial interests - the escrow would reduce their losses if a CA became insolvent
I used teamtreehouse.com and codeacademy.com. I was saying in another comment I'm not a beginner anymore.

But I will look to meetups, I don't know why I hadn't thought of this.
Thanks for the direction, I'll definitely check that out. Hopefully they have some of these baked soon, I did like a lot of the other features as advertised.
Ask HN: Review My Start Up Idea - Traffic Ticket Insurance
Parking in cities sucks and driving around with the ever growing number of camera speed traps is even worse. IMHO cities are using them to generate revenue instead of furthering safer road conditions. DC, where I live, gen. 55 ML last year: http://aol.it/SPgnZT

Anyways, what do you think of creating an insurance pool where people pay a nominal monthly fee ($9 to $15) for the peace of mind that if they get a speeding ticket, the ticket will be covered.

First objection -- "the expected utility calculations show this as loosing deal b/c the losses of a traffic ticket are pretty predictable (e.g. you are not loosing $250K in a home fire, just getting a $250 fine)."

Agree with this objection, but I don't think it breaks the deal. 1) The start-up could pair insurance with another product like savings offer to obscure the monthly investment an individual makes, and 2) budgeting a monthly cost is possibly better than being at risk of a budget breaking ticket.

Second objection -- "moral hazard: people will drive more freely with the insurance knowing that their tickets will be paid."

We wouldn't be insuring against rises in premiums; there's still an incentive to drive responsibly. From a quick search I found two other people who tried this and failed. I suspect b/c they had few good ideas about marketing. Personally, I would pay a reoccurring $9 to insure against traffic tickets and maybe a little more to also include parking tickets.<p>But would you?

And any advice on what other road blocks :) would help. Also ideas about branding? Right now I'm considering RescueTicket, if I go forward with this, as the name. Last, I could see a big play towards transparency where there's page that shows monthly subscription revenue and monthly payouts--in the spirit of Peldi's great 2008 Balsamiq blog post: http://bit.ly/WfjA5I
It's more like calling someone a whore versus calling them a prostitute. It's not less black, it's less specific.

"Fraud" is a specific legal conclusion that requires a certain state of mind. Someone just reviewing a paper isn't in a a place to level the highly specific term "fraud" versus the more general term "error" because he doesn't have any evidence about the author's state of mind.
Irish papers defend charging for links
The argument goes that internet dating has made commitment less attractive, and divorce more common.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. In the future we will have fewer people clinging to abusive partners and putting up with destructive relationships. Online dating provides more options.

On the other hand, a lot more children are going to grow up without both their biological parents. Is that such a bad thing? I'm not convinced it is, but I've never really bought into the concept of family.
EmployTown Interview with Pyschotic Resumes Author Nick Armstrong
The biggest problems with reddit aren't so much how to read it, but rather what can be read there.

Most of the major subreddits are no longer worth following, unless you're interested in hipsterism or curious about the meme-of-the-hour.

The smaller subreddits generally have limited traffic, resulting in very slow discussion. Email mailing lists are far superior for discussions with this size of a community.

Censorship has become an issue within some subreddits, too. It's not about getting rid of blatant spammers any more. Far too often we've seen contributing, albeit unorthodox, members of these communities banned for expressing views that may be controversial, but still worth expressing.

Software won't fix these major problems. They're issues with the community itself.
Zero-Day Vulnerability in Symantec PGP Whole Disk Encryption
Yeah, no doubt. That's what bothers me; sometimes, your doctor is prescribing treatment that could harm you, even though they may not know it.
Caja and Narcissus are definitely comparable parallels, but Continuum is unique in that it fully implements the ECMAScript object model, runtime, and standard library (except for a few things which are still in progress). I would say that Continuum is the only one that qualifies to be called a "JavaScript engine" in its own right.

Narcissus is a meta-circular interpreter that puts a thin layer over the host engine, and requires that host engine itself to have some ES6 features (it can only actually run in Spidermonkey and V8 with the --harmony flag enabled).

Caja is more of a wrapper that protects access to capabilities than anything. In fact it specifically avoids fully parsing source code itself in order to be performant. Its goal is to sandbox code, not interpret it.

Continuum implements the ES6 Object Model and nearly fully implements the internal algorithms of the ~450 page ES6 specification (aside a small handful of things which are a bit out of date or remain to be implemented). In fact, the only thing it does not implement itself is RegExp, which it currently wraps the host engine's functionality to provide. It even fully implements the Date internal algorithms (https://github.com/Benvie/continuum/blob/gh-pages/engine/bui...).

Additionally, it self-hosts much of its own code. All of the ES6 standard library is itself written in ES6 (https://github.com/Benvie/continuum/tree/gh-pages/engine/bui...) and is executed in the virtual machine each time a realm is created. Roughly 25% of Continuum's code is written in ES6, while the other 75% is written in ES3 (I plan to reverse this ratio in time).
A better strategy for hangman:

http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html
Seems like everything he learnt should have been common sense.

- Do better market research

- Do the maths before proceeding

- Know all the ins and outs with shipping your product

- Don't give your product away
7 Ways Middle School Debate Changed My Life
HTML5's limitations are at the hardware/browser level, not due to a lack of Sencha development prowess.

This is a carefully constructed scrolling demo (which still shows evidence of lackluster behavior -- look at when he goes from vertical to horizontal!), which doesn't show much other than what Sencha (and any other framework) has been able to do all along.
Why not use a modern statically typed language instead?
I would ask yourself what an algorithm really is. It's not just sorting or searching. It's really just a recipe of things to do in the order you have defined them to get an end result.

Pretty much every web dev related thing you make is an algorithm at the end of the day.

Think of something as simple as a contact form. What's the algorithm to make this work?

1. Get input from user.

2. Validate input from user.

3. Setup mail headers.

4. Setup mail message.

5. Call a send message function.

Those steps can be expanded on to handle invalid input or errors in any of the steps, etc..

Your programming language will likely have #5 done for you too, but whether or not you're the one implementing the functionality has no bearing on the situation.

It's easier to teach the material when you're dealing with basic data structures like building a stack or queue in C using an array rather than some higher level web dev task.

Btw, I'm just someone who spent a few years not taking any CS courses and then took a few online courses to learn the things you're talking about + more. It was probably the best move I've ever made.
Excel is the most common statistical analysis package on the planet, bar-none. When you need to deliver code to people who are numerate but don't program then Excel is the best thing to use. Sometimes you just need to give someone (a manager) a tool where they can test out a bunch of different scenarios but you don't have time to make a polished application. Even for "big data" applications sometimes seeing the numbers in front of you in cells is quite useful.
In the end he lost 10k. How is that great?

And thanks for pointing the date out, I had missed that!
Looks great. But on my Nexus 7 it shows the sidebar in portrait mode but hides it in landscape.

Edit: Wow, just tested it for a few minutes. It's amazingly fast, works great.
There's No Evidence Online Dating Is Threatening Commitment or Marriage
Hackers and Anti-Government Protests rage across Iraq
Robots play Ace of Spades
I've been using PJAX as well. Basically, when you click a link, jquery/pjax intercept the click action, make the request to the server, and on the server-side you look at the request to see if it came as a PJAX request. If-so, you just send back the "partial" section of the page that's being loaded/updated. At the same time, you use push-state to update the URL in the address-bar to conform to the page you've loaded. If the server doesn't detect that the page was a PJAX request, it should respond with the entire page contents - header, contents, footer, etc.. If somebody copies and pastes the URL into a new tab, your site will behave the same was as-if no PJAX header were passed - loading the entire page. This is the same way a search-engine spider will behave. They should "see" the same experience content-wise as a user navigating the site using PJAX.
You have no proof for those two claims.
I second this, Nokia Maps is awesome and the many times I used it, it has not let me down and the experience was good. Also I've noticed that my Lumia can very quickly get a GPS signal vs iPhone and some Android phones I've used; this is very useful when you need a shortcut.
I'm looking for a tutor not to develop my skills just for the sake of it, but to develop my skills in certain areas of web development so I can build this website I want to build. So not so much as reviewing code or giving directed tasks but guiding me and giving me resources I can use to learn from. The arrangement would be over Skype, maybe once or twice a week for an hour. My timing is flexible.

I have quite a bit of experience with HTML, CSS, and a little of javascript. I've been exposed to Ruby on Rails. I want to learn server-side programming, how to add webcam chatting, for two.
Yes, "I'm sorry" always carries the connotation of "this won't happen again" with it. If you are sorry all the time, it doesn't actually mean anything.

Like everywhere else the basic design principle of contrast also holds in the tone of error messages.

If you shout all the time, nobody will listen when you really mean it. Likewise, if you are sorry all the time, nobody will take your apology serious.
"if this is the direction you'll be taking with these articles, then don't bother"

But this thread on the book is a pretty good resource on issues and gotchas for newbies.

I largely use Python, I've dabbled in C and always mean to learn more. K&R to me is the touchstone for that, just because so much of programming culture stems off of it. I find knowing these historical patterns helpful for understanding how programmers talk.

For someone like me, respectful critique of its style and decisions helps separate the good from the less-helpful. Whether Zed intended to start that discussion or not, it's still helpful.
Global Broadband: Issues in Speed
Why? Certainly there isn't time in the day for every need and desire, but cultural norms aren't a particularly good reason for repression.
>However, if there's one thing to learn from history, it's that situations change and usually in unpredictable ways. I have no idea what possible up-set to the computing landscape could arrive and make Webkit unfeasible, but I'm pretty sure something will change eventually, and wouldn't it be nice if we had a backup plan?

Sure, but that "backup plan" wouldn't be another similar engine codebase, like Trident or Gecko. I can't fathom any future technical case where those would do but Webkit would not.

But I think I covered that in my comment concerning alternative engines. Make one if you have a real need to implement something different to cover a new situation or provide something not there today. Not merely to keep your own mostly same implementation that introduces slight incompatibilities and standards lag. Current alternative engines do the latter.

>Also, consider what might happen if Webkit were the only browser engine. Sure, Webkit moves at a fast pace now, when it has competition from both other browsers and native apps, but consider that the two biggest supporters of Webkit both benefit directly from people using native apps over web-apps. Sure, they benefit from web-apps too, but Apple in particular gets actual revenue directly from native apps, so if they didn't have other browsers to compete with, maybe Webkit wouldn't be as shiny and cutting-edge as it is.

I don't think this is true. For Google is isn't true at all: it makes more money from people using the web than from people using native apps. As for Apple, well, they started the whole webkit project, and they don't make much from native apps anyway. They make their money from devices (which are used to browse the web also, so need a top notch engine) and laughably less from selling native apps (it's just a side business for them). Plus, all this time with native apps and the like, they have enhanced Webkit and mobile Safari the same.

But, let's say that what you say is true: if some companies indeed favored native apps instead of web apps, wouldn't that make even more important that all other companies that care about the web flock to maintain ONE and only engine, instead of working each in it's own engine?

That way they could make it as good as it can be, remove compatibility issues and generally make the web attractive and achieve progress and new features faster.

>The thing is, if Webkit were the only browser-engine, even if you did come up with some completely different engine, your idea would be useless. You wouldn't be able to achieve compatibility with existing sites without mimicking all the weird bugs and corner-cases of Webkit, which would not be feasible, and if your idea is so completely different you can't just fork the Webkit code and add your idea on top.

The thing you describe as bad is actually BETTER than what you have to do today.

Because today, if you come up with some "completely different engine", in order to "achieve compatibility with existing sites" you would not just have to "mimic all the weird bugs and corner-cases of Webkit" but also those of the other major engines.

Better to have just ONE engine to mimic, no?
You need to do things like not dispatch to valueOf and toString for coercion. You basically just need to get rid of dynamic coercion dispatch, and do what you said (annotate types) and that's all that's really needed. But the ECMAScript runtime is pretty substantial so having a minimized subset of that runtime would make it possible to self-host most of the higher level interpreter in ES6-like code instead of having most of it implemented in ES3 (as it is now). This makes a significant difference in verbosity of the code. As converted to ES6, I estimate the code would be half of what it is now (currently it contains ~23k lines of ES3 code, 7k lines of ES6 code, so 30k total).
Are you kidding me. My MacBook has Bluetooth. What is the iPhone's excuse?
Have you join Google+ Community for Data Scientist
> Do they value an audio plug over a clean dashboard?

"Clean dashboard" is the apparent reason, but there is in fact no difficulty to have a clean dashboard with an audio plug, or put the plug in the gunbox.

There is another reason behind it, an industry agreement, a friend working in this field evocated it in front of me. They just really do not care if it is convenient or not.

Other examples: In supermarket, they put the water bottle packs near the end, because they do not want clients to come, buy a trolley of water, and go home. (It is like that in France, not sure in US) So everyone is extremely annoyed and has to put water packs over eggs, strawberries, clothes, and many other fragile stuff.

Next example: we are told that files are "inconvenient and messy" and many UX guys swallowed it straight. But it is just a big lie. Files are badly needed in Apple products, and I heard some are uplownloading their pdf attachements through dropbox just to use them on their phone or tablets.

Back to cars: I own a Suzuki minivan, very cheap, but in many way more confortable than my previous car (a WV Golf) just because the seat is higher on the road and the inside volume is much bigger. Real comfort is not made of leather and crafted door sounds (yes, cars door slping sound is crafted carefuly), it is made of room around the head and further view on the road.

Back to the OP: treating your users properly is obviously good, but adding too much sweetener on error messages is not the way to treat them properly.
Yes, I thought that most of what the article stated was well supported, but they made a leap from "people are more likely to leave relationships that aren't that great" to social values suffering. I'd rather be single than trapped in a marriage I don't really enjoy.
So instead of not providing any service, why not offer the desktop service with caveats, or stop just supporting one rendering engine.
I just looked in clarity.fm. It doesn't look to me the mentors in Technical Advice are programmers but center more around business. Is this true? I'm looking for an 'engineer' not a 'salesguy'.
Counterpoint: I'm young, but I still measure my core friendships in decades ...

I'm not going to settle for a life where 'romantic partner' is not a core friendship, one which I can rely on in the same way as my lifelong friends and close family.

I think that a lot of people feel the same way.

To me, that's more persuasive even than the 'think of the children argument', and much less likely to change.

The 'think of the children' argument is pretty strong here. We all know the stats: kids from single-parent families tend to grow up in more negative environments, tend towards worse outcomes.

But maybe society can solve that problem! For instance, if a kid's parents are divorced, but are constantly in caring relationships, maybe society can evolve to a point where those kids aren't disadvantaged, and where they have a relatively stable upbringing.

But that won't change my mind about 'romantic partner' belonging in the category of 'secure, long-term friendships.'
Yes, I am. I got confused over what you meant by " It will warn you if you use any >1.4 features" - I thought you meant language >1.4, not bytecode spec >1.4. Thanks for setting me straight :)
- Rob Malda joines HN... Check.

- anti-ms league attempts to rewrite history... Check.

- Anime on the front page of HN... Check.

Fears of HN becoming reddit are overrated, but the chance of becoming slashdot instead looks to be > 0.
Not to mention:

- lightweight ABI, accessible from just about any other language on the planet.

- huge existing base of liberally-licensed code available for re-use

- basically the only language that is not a) legacy-stamped or b) bloated beyond learnability after more than two decades of use (or, in C's case, twice that.)

I seldom use C myself, but its strong points are undersold by the "garbage collection is to slooooow" kiddies.
ah, good question!
I think "boasting" is the correct word. Loud, self-important, maybe pretentious? But not in an unfriendly way, rather in a silly one. Think of an overdone John Wayne gag.

To be honest, I think this has more to do with subconscious cultural references, rather than the sound itself.

E.g. the sound of en_us always evokes Italians speaking in gibber-american-english[0] rather than some martin luther king jr's speech.

[0] stuff like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1joXNHs4_ME
Email mailing lists are far superior for discussions with this size of a community.

Are there some worthy mailing lists for discussion out there? I´ve heard this opinion before, but I´ve never seen specific lists mentioned.
The World’s Largest Public Hacker Database
Links should not open in new tabs on the iPhone. It takes two extra taps to close the image/story and go back. Nice job!
Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.
Now you have to really hope that your romantic partner sees things just the way you do.
Not really. The OP was talking from personal experience. Besides, it's his blog. He is not a journalist, and the integrity that you are insisting upon is just a fallacy, as are the trite car analogies.
> Very reliable, great tooling and it's the fastest VM out there for any language.

The JVM also has a very rich open source ecosystem. If your language-of-choice runs on the JVM, very likely you can leverage any Java-based library right out of the box.
I actually meant "language features that require bytecode spec >1.4".
Varargs and enums perhaps?
I would also like to know this. The mailing lists I'm on consist of calls for papers, low paying job postings, and out-of-office messages.
Doesn't render well on my gen 4 ipad, and only looks ok in comparison because the photoshop version isn't very good.
New way of mind mapping and visualisation. Boost your productivity 200%.
you will not beat instapaper.