skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point on the drawback of creativity. I suffer horribly from that. I'll spend weeks or months trying to solve problems in unique/clever ways when there's already a clear solution if I just took a day to read and understand it.

That feeling you get when you do figure out a new way to do something though...I like to think it's worth it.
Show HN: Yammer for Classes
Is there a K&R for SQL?
Just as K&R is primarily about C, not programming or computer science in general, I'm interested in a tutorial on SQL that leaves relational theory to other texts.
Writing Augmented Reality Applications Using JSARToolKit
Documents and Files Sharing Between the Google Apps Domain
Not to defend everything Meetup does, but conference registration is not really what the site is intended for.

Your usage pattern unfortunately just happened to look quite a bit like that something that they may think poisons the dynamic (recurring meetups of people with shared interests, not mainly driven by an organizer's self-interest) they are trying to create with the site.

I'm not saying your event was exactly pure self interest or bad in any way, it just isn't something that to them looks healthy for their site. And it doesn't fit the intent of meetup.

The fact that you had a poor description is the final problem here that leaves me feeling little sympathy. Every project, conference, etc. should have a clear description provided by the creator, at least if they want it to be well received. Maybe that's a lesson learned.
This is something that I've struggled with my entire life - how to be honest with myself about what my shortcomings are and how to overcome them.

For me at least, it's been incredibly difficult and at times impossible. I've come to believe that there is something deeply rooted inside the human psyche that refuses to completely accept that we are imperfect.

Of course this isn't always unwanted. If we didn't have a certain amount of pure egotistical madness, how else would we attempt our dreams? The real trick is to figure out what parts you'll have to have help with in order to get there instead of blindly believing we can do it all.

This is probably why YC is so fixated on funding partners. You need someone with a very high level of self-awareness to be able to tackle the challenge on their own. I suspect that those individuals are fairly rare.
Very nicely done. Beat me to it. :(

I am working on a library which takes a data definition, renders the form and then validates it before submitting it via ajax. It supports various hooks like manipulate the data before submission etc.

IMHO form rendering (in a standard way) is also a common pain point along with form validation. Anyone interested in this type of library? Any inputs will be highly appreciated.
Looks cool, but the demo right at the top of the "examples" page has two things that IMHO aren't as "UX aware" as described on the landing page:

- The "website" field requires the http:// part of the address
- After typing three letters into the "message" fieldarea, an error pops up and tells me the message needs to be at least 20 characters long, while I'm still typing away

I realize this could be tweaked by the user but the demo shouldn't have such logical flaws for a script that's described as "Super #UX focused". ;)
The anecdotes here could be used to justify a range of different theories:

'Being Daring is the Secret Ingredient for Success';
'Innovation is the Secret Ingredient for Success';
'Not Giving Up is the Secret Ingredient for Success'
'Giving People What They Don't Know They Want is the Secret Ingredient for Success'

and so on... Can I have my book deal now?

EDIT: I'd also like to use this opportunity to invent the new verb "to Gladwell", which is to make up a spurious set of keys to success using the flimsiest of anecdotes. Hence my next book - 'Learning How to Gladwell is the Secret Ingredient for Success'
You're right about the result being 60 bytes, not 20. (Getting old. Can't convert logarithm bases in my head any more :-(

But you're wrong about this:

> if each particle, at each step, made a two-way choice, that single particle could run through that 10^140 potential states in no time flat

No, each particle can compute 10^43 states per second, or 10^60 states in 10^17 seconds (10 billion years). I think that's where I got the 20 byte number. It's 20 bytes per particle, 60 for a universe of 10^80 particles computing in parallel.

So if you find you need more than 60 bytes to do anything, that just shows that you haven't properly optimized your representation ;-)
> "Well this is a cynical take..."

Passing off SoC advertorials as content was pretty cynical too. Most of your responses just re-state the original nothing-speak.

Tellingly, the memo is gone and the words "sorry" or "apology" don't appear once in the original.
A quick summary: Students sign up with their .edu email address and then search for their classes. You can then collaboratively manage homework due dates and have discussions with classmates.

We're starting simple by focusing on the collaborative due dates, but our larger goal is to help increase communication between students and instructors, hence yammer for classes.

I would love feedback!
I mean I wouldn't hire people for serious projects from a surprise packet.
From a non-designer's simple point of view, this flat thing is insanity. Designers I find are very willing to follow latest fads and trends without really evaluating or thinking about it.

Someone rebelled and wrote a blog how skeuomorphs are bad, put some pictures of leather textures up for everyone to laugh at. The next thing you know, you get OS UIs (Windows 8), websites and a whole bunch of other interfaces where you have no freakin' idea what to click. It all looks flat and so I end up mousing around elements on the screen like a drunk person stumbling in the dark trying to find how this thing works.

How about a little drop shadow on that button so it looks like, you know, a button? "Oh but it looks like a real world button and we shouldn't have to mimic the real world...blah blah.." -- I don't care about the philosophy of design or whatever the latest thing came from Apple labs, I want to get my stuff done and just knowing what is clickable is helpful.
A Scientific Formula For Writing Perfect Blog Posts
No, because a static content blog can be served directly from memory. You could probably handle HN traffic on anything.
Ha. The Jekyll theme (changeable) or my face (less changeable)?
As noted above, it is hard to do a "fair" comparison between Amazon and the others due to the fact that Amazon offers a bit more consistency. Linode and Digital Ocean benchmarks are all over the place depending on how much CPU or IO that their neighbors are using.

Another thing to consider is the number of mistakes a company has done. While Amazon and Linode have been around for years... Amazon had the Virginia fiasco this past year (Netflix outage), and Linode had the bitcoin hack. Digital Ocean has only been around for a few months, so their security / reliability is basically untested.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/real-clouds-cru...

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-worth-22800...

With those caveats in mind, it is then possible to look at the inherently flawed benchmarks and work off of them. Serverbear is a good resource for comparing those things.
Quite possibly.

Though I'm not sure how much this could be generalised since complex validation rules are effectively computer programs in themselves.

Not sure what your approach to this problem is, but perhaps one way to do it would be a validation engine that is inherently functional by design.

Of course, ideally it should be something that can plug in to popular web frameworks easily.
With a high IQ things that lesser IQ people deem creative are to you common sence, so with that I'd say the answear too this is the classic yes and no argument.

But in general IQ and creativity have no direct corilation and if anything EQ (Emotional Quota) would be a more relative guage than IQ.
Those thing give UI something called affordance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
What makes you qualified to start a space company? We need a bit more on the specifics.
Multidocument updates with MongoDB
Here is a set of articles from 2006 written by the founder of one of the leading design studios in Russia - artlebedev.ru. The read is very interesting, but unfortunately only available in Russian.

Part 1 (general): http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-1/
Part 2 (military) : http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-2/
Part 3 (culture): http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-3/
Part 4 (Roads & transport): http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-3/
Hey, Nice product.

What are the + points which this app has when compared to istudiez.
http://istudentpro.com
I found the giveaway is in lowercase t, s, c and uppercase R. Helvetia tries to snap most terminating edges horizontally.
I went London-Shanghai (and ultimately Osaka) last year; one of the most affecting parts of that journey was going through the deserts of Kazakhstan and north-west China (e.g. https://www.cliché.net/photos/2012-04-02%20Trip/SDC16011.JPG and https://www.cliché.net/photos/2012-04-02%20Trip/SDC16084.JPG - hosted on my home connection so will be slow), which you miss by staying on the trans-siberian line. It's also a chance to see a really different side of China (as a European it's easy to imagine China will all be the same, being a single country, but of course it's as big and varied as, well, Europe) - and the route I took goes right past Baikonur, so there's always the chance of a rocket launch.

It's no good for going to North Korea (you finish in China, and as noted the line Beijing-Pyongyang is closed to tourists), but if you were just thinking of a big rail trip like the trans-siberian, have a look at the route via Kazakhstan too.
Would love to see something like this, and if it's useful and easy to drop in, I'd use it.
I'm from Argentina and learnt with se same method, also tv series helped with pronunciation.
What's funny Jason is that we met through a mutual friend in 2011 on one of my trips to SF. RideJoy had just launched and you were looking for talent. I was interested in your startup but wasn't interested in a job.

> I don't count freelance development as "doing tech" as it's equivalent to being a "day-trader" vs banker or "youtube star" vs actor.

For every big name actor there are 1000 serving food to make ends meet. For every investment banker managing billions there are 1000 working in cubicles analyzing obscure sectors and securities. Are you implying that their work is more desirable and/or more real than a successful day trader or YouTube star?

I get what you're trying to say and I completely disagree. I think my clients, many of which are startups who happily hire freelancers, would too. I really dislike this condescending attitude some startup founders and investors have. If you're a freelancer, run a "lifestyle business", or bootstrap with a real business model and and target long term growth you're looked down upon. It's bullshit.
In what ways are they not-ever communist? This sounds a lot like a no-true-Scotsman claim, but I'm genuinely curious.
> The power of Ayasdi is its unique ability to automatically discover insights — regardless of complexity — without asking questions. Ayasdi’s customers can finally learn the answers to questions that they didn’t know to ask in the first place. Simply stated, Ayasdi is ‘digital serendipity’.”

It’s a bold statement, however by using algebraic topology Ayasdi has managed to totally remove the human element that goes into data mining — and, as such, all the human bias that goes with it.

---

Don't companies with massive datasets already do this in some way? Google's system for piecing together what people "really want" seems such a large, open-ended inquiry that it seems some automated insight discovery must be done.

Also, wouldn't a machine that generates automated insights require another layer of meta-analysis to be able to sift through which insights are actually usable? Using the example of sports statistics, you could generate an infinite number of trivial relations between players and plays and teams...it seems that at some point, a human with real domain knowledge has to go in and program a filter system, which seems to be about the same amount of work as the inquiry-generation that this software automates.

Finally, why all the emphasis on visualization? Visualization helps to illustrate to humans the possibilities of investigation...for a machine that can supposedly ask (and answer) all the correct questions, isn't visualization merely eye candy?

It'd be great to see a concrete example of this software in action. Perhaps feed it the NFL play-by-play data that was posted on HN a few weeks ago and see if it can generate usable strategy.
Mega was second: The first client-encrypted file sharing service, Securesha.re
So what's the best dating method for us sweaty, drunk guys?
Into the Unknown: Mawson's Antarctic Trek (2013)
hater's gonna hate.
Does anybody know why Google didn't refuse these charges? This sets a really awful precedent.
The point about intrinsic vs extrinsic is important.
I certainly know people who have always been motivated throughout schooling and academia to achieve high test scores.

What you can sometimes observe with these people is that once they get outside of that framework they find motivation difficult.

They will learn quickly if they see the possibility of a high test score , a promotion or a leader board rank of some kind but find it difficult to understand the point of doing something just to see if they can or where the reward for success is uncertain.
Making Instant C# Viable – Full projects » Code Monkey vs. The World
Another little tidbit you can use in addition to fail2ban is to just change the SSH port. I generally use something in the 2000 range - 2022, 2222 etc. That way your poor VPS isn´t even handling all the people knocking on your SSH door.
Not very cool to just delete the data and blow up their event like that, but I think the issues are: it would be confusing if a lot of people started using meetup.com for individual events instead of groups, and probably screw up their scaling as well as their business model.
pretty sure that it's only in the real tail that IQ loses its predictive value, well above 1 sd

go read steve hsu
Sigh.

This Competition is open to all members of the TopCoder website, who have agreed to the terms thereof, and who are at least 18 years of age. Competitors must be:

(i) a U.S. citizen,
(ii) a lawful permanent resident of the U.S.,
(iii) a temporary resident, asylee, refugee of the U.S., or have a lawfully issued work authorization card permitting unrestricted employment in the U.S., or
(iv) a non-U.S. resident authorized in the country in which the member resides while participating in this Competition to perform services as an independent contractor.

Oh well.
Windows 8 Pricing Returns to Normal in February – Is $200 too Expensive?
Typo in the "Super Free" section on the home page: s/developped/developed
I would think this type of sharing would not be as much of a concern for copyright holders since a private group is not really mass distribution.

As soon as the sharing group got big enough to notice, then there could be agents in the group reporting infringement.
Data binding solves this generically. It allows you to build state machine trivially Stuff like angular and ember do this amazingly well though it would be nice to have a nice standalone library. (no idea if one exists)
Some commenters here seem to suggest that the advice on that blog post is somewhat outdated or suboptimal. I'm curious, is there something like a commonly agreed on best practice for securing/hardening a modern Ubuntu production web server? Would maybe anyone care to provide a bullet point list of the most important steps?
iStudiez is a traditional personal student planner. You have to keep yourself organized and maintain it, which seems backwards to us.

All of your classmates have the same due dates as you, so why not work together to keep each other organized? Since Tabule is collaborative, you automatically see any due dates a classmate adds. If you have a question, you can just comment on an assignment to ask your classmates.

But since we have to solve the chicken-and-egg problem and lack a large network right now, the biggest immediate advantage would be the fact that adding due dates is super easy thanks to our natural language engine (much like Fantastical), rather than having to fill out a form for iStudiez. Most of the time, when I was a student, I would just end up putting due dates in a Notes file because I didn't want to bother with a form.
I hate to be Donald Downer but ... it's not done, yet.

' close to finishing the core version '

'expects to begin testing its openStudent software in elementary schools this spring, with a full launch to follow in 2014. An advanced version for middle and high schools is slated to roll out in 2015.'
Mystery Cable Activated in Cuba
This is essentially an argumentum ad hominem. It is an irrational position to take. Arguments should be judged on their merits, not who's mouth they came from. I'm quite disappointed to learn that HN is censored in this way. I had no idea.

Does anyone know of less draconian social news sites which still try to maintain a high quality discussion?
How Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a House Majority in 2013
Change happens behind a single event. That event becomes "the cause".

You can't change society by starting from an abstract concept like "justice".

We didnt get the civil rights movements from the concept of "slavery". We got it from a bus incident in which the conductor acted like every other bus conductor in the nation.
Intelligent Agents Find Meaning of Text
I don't think that analogy stands. You can tell there's something different between them, specially on a full page of text, without knowing what typeface it is at all. Helvetica is slightly more elegant. That said, it is no surprise that it's hard to tell the difference since one is a rip-off of the other.
Anecdotal evidence: Worst school assignments for me was making stuff up. It felt so stupid my brain actively rejected those. Memorizing - second worst. Understanding, problem solving - pure bliss. Mensa member here.
For what it's worth, Calibre will convert it for you ( and manage your library. ) it's a bit of effort to use but its something you rarely have to use. http://calibre-ebook.com
Do you really want to get into body counts? Cause I'm pretty sure communism wins that battle. Don't worry, I already know that no true Scotsman...
" By taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source tools, Saanich officials expect to develop openStudent for under $5 million, with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million."

They estimate that using their old software would cost $100mm over ten years. They're reducing that to roughly $15-20mm.

Government software is lovingly expensive. The state I live in spent over $30mm to rebuild a purchasing application. And it doesn't even work!

Go figure.
I've been searching for that because it's really a strange decision.
The thing is: Why should I?

Why can I ilegally download a Windows 7 .ISO, apply a serial key and have it work?

Why can't I do the same for Windows 8 legally?
Not a fan of articles that say "Here, type this command" and "Put this in that file" without explaining what's going on or even linking to more information.

The section that suggests putting

tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults,ro 0 0

into /etc/fstab might as well be quoting a line of ancient scripture. What does that do? Why does it solve the problem described? No answer. Likewise, the part about sshd begins "make sure these lines exist to secure SSH:" but does not explain what the 5 lines that follow do or why it is important.

I prefer guides that explain what they are telling you to do and why, providing a basis for real understanding. To that end, I'd recommend Linode's "Securing Your Server" guide[1] over this.

[1] https://library.linode.com/securing-your-server
Caramelized onion Quiche with Valdeon Blue Cheese...
$97 million for this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCeSIS. The BC government was milked. A system for a few thousand school administrators costing that much and could not handle the load? The ineptitude boggles my mind.

Awesome to see there are some smart people out there fighting back.
I never had whitebox testers...

But I know that blackbox testers have one advantage: they can do things that are really unexpected.

Since they don't know how the thing work, they don't know what to expect, and can do whatever they want, and sometimes whatever they want was not what you had in mind.

As a programmer I do test every possible code path sometimes. Yet some people seemly find "impossible" code paths, sometimes finding bugs that are not even my logic fault (ie: sometimes it is a bizarre combination of factors that break things for no clear reason, like the legendary tale of the CEO that crashed the system every time he entered the lab... or the 500 mile e-mail)
> Clearly Orange has no idea how the internet works and what’s their involvement in it. The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a server, nothing more.

Clearly Nathan Campos has no idea how the internet works.
Negotiations about charging for traffic is normal business, and has always been.

> The user fees should be equivalent to their connection speed, not their usage, which apparently is something that ISPs can’t understand too.

This is practiced for some land networks (in France, most of them) because the traffic is still good enough and most people are not generating so much traffic, but this can not happen on mobile network because of the much limited capacity. Limiting the rate is the way to guarantee that the mean traffic does not explode, saturating the whole thing.

> French President Francois Hollande warned Google on Wednesday that his government would legislate a so-called Google tax if the company doesn’t reach a deal with French media companies.

Orange is not a media company, and the rest of the post recognize that and talks about ISP.
Censorship breeds ignorance
My submission was dead when I tried posting this in the url. Take two.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5087289

-------

From: Audrey To: Joe Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2012 5:56 PM Subject: Re: dead account

Hi Joe,

That post was killed because it came from prisonplanet.com, which has been the source of too many inappropriate or off-topic stories in the past.

Cheers,

Audrey

2012/12/27 Joe

--------

Should we not judge value based on the merit of argument and not person?
rlwrap seems cool at first blush, but you quickly realize that for anything nontrivial (e.g. context-aware autocomplete) you need to use readline directly
> And so I told Bill Bowen that he had a great opportunity here to not wreck somebody’s life. And of course he thankfully did the right thing.

MIT take note please.
This article abruptly terminated as if author got hit by a bus.
I would recommend first reading the nsa best practices guide for RHEL servers. It's a good starting point in securing a Linux machine.
Oh, another old counter-culture guy who egged on an impressionable kid. How sad that Aaron's attempt to strike a blow like those of his mentors was so squalid. Kids, I'll tell you since these heroes won't: if your "hack" involves picking locks, buying multiple computers to bypass a download limit, and violating terms of use, it's not a movement and it is not heroic. Don't let these lazy essayits lead you down this path. Find your own cause, and make it worthwhile.
True but I have a lot more faith in a tightly integrated 8 person team than some off the shelf bloat-ware customization project.
That was great. I fricking love trains.
I don't know whether it's the secret to success, but among startups we've funded the lack of it is almost perfectly correlated with failure.
10 Usability Heuristics