skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a few suggestions:

1. Make it more personal. Who are you? Why do you care? Why are you NOT just a suit looking to represent someone and earn an income?

2. Don't ask questions to make your point per se; e.g. instead of "Are you..." & "Have you...", begin with a short description of what your website is. In fact, the last two sentences are the most compelling, not the first two.

3. Show passion. You just described experience with victimization. Translate that into passion and sympathy for other people.

You're not a lawyer. But I could have confused you for one. Lawyers are not generally trusted as a identity group - individual lawyers have to prove themselves competent and trustworthy. But before that, they are very often treated with suspicion by the public.

That's too much work for you or a startup. You don't have much to go on right this second - secure user trust by playing to emotion with your experience. That's front page worthy.

I hope that helps, David.
Java tops 2012 list for most dangerous software flaws
Overall it has gotten much easier to report bugs and submit patches to open source projects, and I give that credit to Github.

The thing is, to most people who aren't geeks, Github sounds like somewhere you want to avoid, where nasty hackers meet to compare notes on their cyberstalking victims or something.

The geek community seems to have an almost comical ability to come up with such terrible names for projects and not even realise it.

(And I write that while posting on another site that sounds like somewhere nasty hackers would meet to discuss writing viruses or something.)

I think it's very telling that many of the comments in this discussion speak positively about OSS because you can fix things yourself or there's an open system for submitting patches. I wonder whether the people posting those comments have even considered that the overwhelming majority of people using big name OSS software like Firefox or LibreOffice today aren't programmers and aren't going to report bugs like a programmer.
Being someone who has always just jumped in and tried whatever I found interesting, it really is amazing see how immobile people often feel. I've had discussions with several people who believe that they cannot try anything without the backing of an educational institution, of which they often do not have time/money available to explore that option, leaving them doing nothing at all.
Horizon Calendar for iOS has been released in the app store.
I think the reporter is mistaken. Hostnames never could contain underscores, though sub-domains can.
One important stroke of luck is to believe that it's not luck.

I've been gestating an essay about "useful lies" for a while now. Some things that we know aren't truly true are embraced as if they are true because of the utility of doing so.

So for example, believing that success is not related to luck. It's untrue, in my estimation. But if you truly accept it you wind up with silly notions like Insha'Allah and nothing much gets achieved.

Or take realism/legalism in law. Sure, judges are biased, judges affect policy yadda yadda. But actually embracing that reality makes the legal system work less well. Meanwhile, "strict and complete legalism" is a bit of a nonsense, but judges who embrace it have higher utility because their judgements are more likely to be respected and accepted.

The reason I haven't written it is because I've kinda written it already[1] and I can't think of a better way to explain what I'm trying to convey.

I'm also deeply uncomfortable with being caught between the essential unknowability of complex systems and wanting all events and system configurations to be explicable. Reading Hayek after Dekker has been a very unhappy experience for me.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/
Making Websites Location Aware With HTML5 Geolocation
Agreed, the killer app for this will NOT be something that works well with a mouse or regular touchscreen.
I'm a big fan of the novella format but also serial novels (Ender, GRRM, etc) so think this is really interesting.

plympton.com are doing serialized fiction, you can get it on the Kindle, though I have yet to read any.
Perl 8, of course.
For those of us who bought IntelliJ IDEA during the end of the world sale because people told us it does everything RubyMine does... When will IDEA do these things?
Who needs a home lab when you have AWS and other on demand cloud computing providers at your disposal?
> And employees who wait to be "trained" on interesting new technology instead of learning it for themselves aren't worth hiring.

> At the "rockstar" level, all learning is self directed.

This is a bit of brain damage that is, as far as I can tell, limited to programming, for various weird cultural reasons.

Go to Goldman Sachs and ask them how many of their "rockstar" traders learned the craft at home on their free time. Or go to a top research hospital and ask them how many of their surgeons did the same. Or go to a top architecture firm and ask them how many of their architects learned skyscraper design on the weekends. They will probably all laugh at you.

Rockstars can be created through institutional processes by identifying, nurturing, and systematically training talent. All industries have their rockstars, but ones more mature than the software industry have saner and more efficient ways of taking raw talent and nurturing them into rockstars.
I definitely was. It was a great trade show. Please let your brother-in-law (and anyone else) know that we are always looking to speak with farmers. We're always look to learn about what new feature might make their work easier. Feel free to contact me at any time!
I started (as an intern) at the startup I work at now having never touched Ruby or Rails (other than to write maybe 10 lines total?) I started committing meaningful code within 3-4 days (working majorly part-time). I've written virtually the whole website, now, learning a lot of Javascript along the way, too. I also had no experience with Django or any other full-stack web framework. It's not that difficult.
So, I didn't play Psychonauts until last month. It runs silky smooth on my 5-year-old machine (high-powered machine for the time). So your problem isn't the game, it's some interaction between the game and drivers, or something. Maybe take it for a spin on a crappy laptop or something. ;)

And this game has no nostalgia for me, but it is amazing. The gameplay, which is mostly 3d platforming, isn't the stand-out (though the gameplay is better than I expected). The amazing thing is the writing, both in terms of dialogue/voice-acting, and in terms of the plot. So awesome. It's surprising how few really good writers there are in gaming, and how most gamers apparently don't even notice, and so the standard is so low. And then you play a game written by Tim Schafer and/or the OMM guys, and boom.
Matt,

He forgot to mention that he crashed our blog for 3 days while working on it, left it dead, and we had to restore it from a week-old database. Then we forced him to move the development to a separate server. Then we didn't trust him. All these details are also in PM.

He also forgot to mention that he has tons of negative reviews, and his score is 4.2 in the last 12 months, hardly a perfect score.

But as I said before, I cannot care about the developer, time lost or even the money. You are the CEO, and you refuse to answer a perfectly legitimate complaint. Freelancer.com does not provide protections to users like me. I was left without the deliverables, without the money, and without an opportunity to leave a feedback. The project that I started and paid for was closed by a person I was confronting! What kind of a fucked up system is that?

Michael
Have you tried installing the IntelliJ ruby plugin? http://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/?id=1293
I don't think storing passwords in any format in source control is good. Like someone else said, it's mixing app logic with deployment.

We use a combination of Google's open source Keyczar [1] and a relatively new Python keyring [2] library which uses the Keyczar crypter to read/write keys to a keyring storage backend, where the backend interface can be implemented with local crypted files or a cloud service.

[1] http://www.keyczar.org/
[2] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/keyring

We built this Python wrapper called appauth around of the concept of a Keyring service by application domain.

e.g. pseudo code:

import appauth
auth_service = appauth.AuthService('my-web-app')
db_creds_cfg = auth_service.get('primary-db')

Inside of db_creds_cfg, it can be a free-form dictionary that provides whatever details is needed to get into a resource:

db_creds_cfg['db_host']
db_creds_cfg['db_port']
db_creds_cfg['username']
db_creds_cfg['password']

I put in some honest effort to find an open source solution to this, but failed to find anything with a simple install process AND programming interface. Is there any interest from HN if we choose to open source this?

Furthermore, we use Google Authenticator on our servers to require two-factor auth: http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/, on top of disabling password auth in favor of signing in with ssh keys. All log files are then either set to permission 600 just to be super paranoid.
Not really. I'm talking to you because I'm a middle-class male, who studies technology/science in the year 2013.

That's pretty lucky.

Does that make want to give up - throw my hands up in the air and say - What will be will be? Hell no.

I merely appreciate the gifts I've been given. I try not to attribute any success to my own hard work and study, and I try to do the best with what I have got. Knowing that my existence is particularly random/arbitrary doesn't really change what I do. It merely changes how I see the world around me.

Same way I view the universe really. Its existence is fairly random. There really isn't really any point to it. It'll eventually die, and so will everyone else I know. Does that make me say - What's the point - nothing matters? Not really.

It makes me cherish everything I've been given (life/liberty/health), it emboldens me to enjoy the little life that I have been given.

Life is pretty amazing. It's also pretty random. I revel in the arbitrariness of it all while I can.
Presumably it's padded if it's not a multiple of 16 bytes, because that's the AES blocksize, and not just some off-the-wall requirement that the data be 1000 bytes long. I'm also hoping that your encrypted format has one more field, which is an IV that changes each time the data is encrypted.
Being born in the USA is only a stroke of luck after the fact of achieving a measure of success. There are so many types of walks of life experienced by tens of millions in the USA that consist of suffering unimaginable to a person doing well. Poverty here is especially harsh because, spatially, you're so close to those occupying privileged positions and living their dreams, that it always seems as if it could be you, and it seems that way to those on both sides of the divide.
Wow, this thing is incredible, one of a kind. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets put in a museum eventually.
I'm not sure what's the differentiating factor about this company. They give no information about the company, even on their homepage. How can they manage to employ everyone on the team page without a product to sell? Do they have investors? It certainly seems they have the technical credentials, including metallurgy (the main problem IMO). What's their plan to be approved by the NRC? Or are they trying to sell directly to the military (which doesn't need NRC approval)? And the biggest issue - "In our reactor these byproducts are removed or converted". How? After studying this process intently independently, separation of the waste stream is the hardest thing to do cheaply (unless you use a storage tank to wait until Xe gas is created, and take that out).

I'm sorry for all the questions. I would love to work at this company, and I plan to work in this field eventually. I definitely believe salt based reactors are the way forward due to their passive fail safe technologies. But they need to address the problems in a concrete manner - there are a lot of naysayers out there. If they acknowledge and discuss, even vaguely, the materials used and the separation of the products, I will have much greater confidence in this company.

Also, check out FLiBe that does almost the same thing.
Despite what he says, I'm sure it would be possible to design a study that gives an idea of the amount of 'hard' mental work is optimal per day. It might be necessary to do different studies for different tasks, though. I imagine the brains capacity for learning the violin might be at a different rate to learning Python, for example.

Even if the study's conclusion is that "it depends on the person", that would still be a useful result.
I think this guy is right. Although a bigger problem is that PGP is available in two flavors: free and very expensive.

The problem with GnuPG IMO is that real obvious use cases (healthcare) are out of bounds because it isn't FIPS certified and isn't usable by mortals. Having an implementation similar to OpenSSL with an API, and use case that attracted organization willing to sponsor FIPS validation would be a big step forward. Your doctor could securely send you test results. Your credit card company could send your bill directly.

Consider: The #1 solution for email encryption in hospitals/healthcare is Zix. This is sad -- their solution amounts to attempting to transmit an email via SSL, and falling back to sending you a link to a webpage. Cheesy.

Unfortunately, that's not the way things are, and usage of PGP are generally limited to security professionals, paranoids, and crypto geeks.
"I could set up a Mosaic home page"

Classic. :)
Thanks I will try that and exercise.
"It's easy to find an unused domain name"

Oh, how I wish 12 year old me had foresight. And money.

(I have more of the latter now, of course, but probably about the same quantity of the former.)
>"Let's see you fight your way out of being an AIDS infected baby born somewhere in Sudan."

Oh I certainly agree with you that there are people born in terrible circumstances, much worse than anything I will ever experience! But I fear you are setting up something of a straw man by picking out the worst case scenario. The truth is that people are born into a range of circumstances some of which are easier to work with than others. But being dedicated to doing the best with what you have is important if you want to get anywhere in life.

I know that good choices and the willingness to tolerate a lot of pain can send you out of the rural south to a tech job in California given enough time. And I know that bad choices and shortsightedness mean you are living off government benefits in a skeezy trailer park, a parent before the age of 20, and never leaving your home state.

I do count my blessings. And I know there are some circumstances which I would not be able to overcome. But I can't believe that a person has no agency in his life.

You seem convinced of your position. I wonder what evidence convinced you of it?

(And I often find racial stereotypes to be numerically ignorant. The complete distribution is not described by the mean or the outliers.)
Show HN: Faceamish - A social network for Amish people.
I read every issue of Wired cover-to-cover as a teen, from issue 3 until around 1999 when I decided that the magazine was past its peak.

I remember reading this story quite vividly. I say this not to brag but actually in humility: I'm quite embarrassed at my own failure to take action. When I read the article it was immediately clear to me that this was going to be a Very Big Deal, and I simply sat on it.

Now, Wired was not some underground zine and it's not like I was privy to anything secret or proprietary. After all, getting covered in Wired is often the beginning of the end; see Bruce Sterling's article on Burning Man for proof.

Sometimes I feel like there's no way a photograph taken today could be special in the way Kodachromes of Afghanistan in the 70s seem to be. Too many cameras, too little soul. Yet it's obvious that in 20 years most of today's photos will be long gone and the ones that remain will seem fascinating windows to a different time.

Every time I think that the .com domain space is saturated it only takes two years to be humbled on the race to the bottom.
Whenever these kinds of discussions come up on HN , I notice two cognitive biases which always end up derailing the discussion .

One is where people think that they're infact quite talented and deserving of success its just that their luck wasn't favorable .

The other group is people who've worked their way out of pretty difficult circumstances and find explaining away everything as luck unacceptable at some level . This makes people want to believe in a certain position and triggers long arguments . Its a similar thing to the nature nurture debates that happen frequently on HN .

Let me give you guys an example . One day a friend told me that theres a really cool site called Hacker News which I should check out . I initially didnt understand most of the stuff people here were talking about but suffice to say that its changing my outlook on things . So maybe just maybe if I ever make it big wouldnt this count as luck ?

Another thing being that I have an interest in music . But when I was young I just never got around to learning the fundamentals . I'm teaching myself now but if someone musically knowledgeable was around me when I was young I'm quite sure I would be quite deeply into music by now .

Let me go deeper . Why this interest in music ? I had a small keyboard I always used to play with . What if it wasnt there ? Then later on more recently I saw someone play live which rekindled my interest and started me learning . If I hadnt seen that maybe I wouldnt be so interested . So yeah luck pretty much nudges us down different streams . But your swimming ability matters too ...

Life being an infinite graph search over an almost infinite search space of possibilities a randomised algorithm seems to be what nature prefers . Thats how evolution works by using luck to its advantage .
The ultimate lucky stroke could be , that evolution gave rise to our species in the first place but then you could say that the rabbit hole goes far deeper ....
Be Castro during Cuban Missile Crisis [video-5min]
I've built a few different discussiony things. When I was building one for the Long Now a decade ago, I was going to put in threading. Because features are good. Stewart Brand, who started The WELL, talked me out of it. His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly.

My default now is to leave them out. There are some contexts where lots of argument is valuable, but generally it's just a strain on the social fabric without a lot of upside.
also sharejs.
Thanks for sharing that config line. I had quite a few of those pgp_* lines in my muttconfig and had never seen anything about the correct/modern setting.
I think iOS doesn't allow normal programs to fork().
We only watched them for Milla Jovovich btw. Literally every fan in the theater just sighs at the end and says "wow that was awful, see you for the next one."

It's an addiction. Even though you don't like it, or believe in it, out of tradition you have to keep doing it. Similar to what Catholics, Jews, and Sonic Fans do.
Anyone can write "stringly" typed code in Java or Scala.
Wat. SCM doesn't necessarily mean development. Many, many people version control their deployment configurations (e.g. /etc/puppet/master/*)
I second this, took it for a test drive and just found it too slow and cumbersome, it seemed feature rich and useful though... just too damn slow
A much better idea would be to write a universal set of software for every platform, in the least amount of code possible, using the most powerful language, and increasing the amount of features in line with what users want.

Where would such a mythical piece of software exist? On Microsoft's servers. It would be cloud tech, accessible from any platform, and would be far superior to any port Microsoft will cook up for 2014.

The only foreseeable downside to this is lack of internet translating to lack of office productivity. But in almost every scenario I think that obstacle is overstated.

That's the future of the office suite, not wasting money and effort doing market research and porting code from Windows to Linux (I can recall a handful of times that has worked natively).
> Being born in the USA is only a stroke of luck after the fact of achieving a measure of success.

I suspect that US-born tech entrepreneur "successes" would come close to outnumbering all other countries of origin put together.

And being poor in the USA is still streets ahead of poverty in almost every country on earth. In the USA it often means an unpleasant life. Elsewhere it frequently means you die as an infant. It's pretty hard to become a tech CEO at 20 if you died when you were 5.
I prefer using environment variables, and then enforcing this in the Makefile: https://gist.github.com/ChimeraCoder/4728823

If this is the first target (or a prerequisite of the first target), then running 'make' will ensure that those variables are set to non-empty strings.
I'm excited about the Leap because I rapidly transition my hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back again. That takes a lot of time and the mouse is hard on my wrists. I would much rather "mouse in the air" even if I lost some precision. My productivity would soar.

Furthermore, my pinkies and thumbs take a beating pressing the command, control, and shift keys. I would much rather wave my thumb or pinky in a particular direction to get those modifiers. This may not be possible with the current Leap, but will no doubt be possible soon.
Agreed, I've never understood the system. Publicly fund the research, but not the access. The journal's should be non-profit, and the journal should charge a nominal fee. The rest, the government should cover.
"Girlfriend Impact" -- bleh. Yeah, I know, 99.99whatever9% of IT workers, esp in the ops role, are guys, but would it have taken so much extra thought to put "family impact"? Or even "balanced life penalty"?

And I say this as someone who has spent a ridiculous amount of money on tech books in the past year (probably four figures) and who is giving up 1.5-2 nights a week, on average, to tech meetups.
I've been enjoying his new show Revolution, in a, "how much worse can this get?" way.
"Go to Goldman Sachs and ask them how many of their "rockstar" traders learned the craft at home on their free time. Or go to a top research hospital and ask them how many of their surgeons did the same. Or go to a top architecture firm and ask them how many of their architects learned skyscraper design on the weekends. They will probably all laugh at you."

The difference in all these fields is that the practitioner, to learn, needs to things that cost significant amounts of money (trading/building skyscrapers), cause people to live or die (surgery) or go to jail or be executed (law), or need to do things that require significantly altering the real world to create an artifact(setting up skyscrapers). Hence the need for supervision, and systematic training with a lot of 'apprenticeship' feel.

In most programming, the real rockstars (say Carmack or Linus or whoever) are self taught, and did learn on their free time, because all you need is a laptop and the internet and you are ready to go and creating a significant artifact (a programming language, a game, an operating system) needs only knowledge (easily acquired from books and the internet) and time.

Not to take away from your larger (and valid) point that company training can be effective. But your analogies are a bit 'off' and that affects the power of your argument (imho, feel free to ignore).