skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm very curious to see what the technical review turns up tomorrow.

This feels like something that would have been connected to the Salesforce acquisition 3 years ago, and then making the service less efficient in order to increase profits or revenue targets on paid accounts. Not to mention saving money on the free ones.

It would be a little bit like Tesla not only selling you the Model S, but also selling you the electricity you charge the vehicle with. At some point, they make the car less efficient, forcing you to charge more often, and then claiming they didn't document this very well. Frankly, there are only so many people who will be a capable enough electrical engineer (or in Heroku's case, a sysadmin) to catch the difference and measure it.

The apology should be, "we misled you, and betrayed your trust. Here's how we're planning on resolving that, and working to rebuild our relationship with our customers over the next year. [Insert specific, sweeping measures...]
Next up on http://what-if.xkcd.com/18/ : How many Nerf darts would it take to stop a meteor?
>It was pretty neat as he could navigate with his eyes closed and stuff like that!
Sounds interesting. Can you find it?

As a related note: considering the problems a magnet implant can cause you (as a person who recently had an MRI scan I'm quite happy I didn't get one), why not make something like Northpaw for sensing magnetism? Make it a ring that vibrates or a flexible wristband that contracts and expands in response to magnetic fields.
I think a lot of people underestimate how powerful a single well configured server can be. You don't need Heroku/AWS for everything.
It's not really about Macs per se, it's about the Unix toolchain and unlike Linux, Macs have Photoshop, etc.
If I Was CEO of Posterous (written in 2010)
http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-posterou...
What about bloggers that want to be developers?

Can you do a writeup/tutorial for your setup?
Why build your own blogging engine when so many open source solutions already exist?
Yes, very true. I think the main difference that I would imagine would be psychological. The sensation of having something external vibrating against your skin, as with a magnet superglued to a finger, is different than the sensations being internalized.

When my magnet responds to something, it feels like I am responding to something. I don't feel a sense of separation from the magnet.

That being said, supergluing a magnet to a finger is probably the closest one can get without getting the actual procedure. Which obviously isn't for everyone, heh.
That's too bad, I was hoping they had made all Java plugins "click to play" or whitelist only.
Tangent: scrolling is horrible on my gnexus. I have no idea where I am on the site, and every time I scroll up or down I find myself lost somewhere else.
Arguably, if asm.js (and perhaps WebCL) takes off, you'll be able to implement custom codecs at near-native speed without any need for a download or the risk of plugins...
requires $5 per month subscription.
He joked. This doesn't work with the Russian court system.
Love his point, "it was more than a fan letter, though, it was a reminder there are Makers out there. There are real humans who think up and create the things they love. Perhaps it's also a reminder that they can be Makers as well if they choose."
Prospects for a Green Mathematics
I prefer not jabbing things under my skin. This bottle of oil, steel wool, and a magnet is fun.

(http://www.discoverthis.com/project-magnetic-field-bottle.ht...)
Simple, documented, and slower - you had to do everything in JavaScript. Web Audio API retains the ability to use JavaScript but provides a nice set of fast primitives.
> Sounds interesting. Can you find it?

Sorry, I looked, but search results are polluted by Northpaw/Eric Boyd - it might have been the same guy though, maybe when he was prototyping. I remember someone doing blind figure-8s on their bike.
Let's be honest here... 6 AM? It's a good time to be asleep.
Some onshore jurisdictions can be laxer than the offshore sort
Ask HN: Would you purchase Arduino-based products?
Think electronic locks, drone planes, RFID-based toys, data collectors, and more - but they'd be in a "project box" built with an Arduino, rather than a custom PCB.

I'm contemplating starting to sell some of the things I've been tinkering with, and I can imagine that a number of others would be interested in doing the same.

Thoughts?
Not a surprise. I saw posterous as a better option for Tumblr, but after they create the "spaces" version I felt like lost. The original idea it was simple and worked, but after they got traction I think they lost the vision, and after twitter bought them they totally mess up. Well, good luck at twitter.
Ah yes, NGLayout :)

And of course moving from XPCOM to a more direct smart pointer implementation, and various other stages along the way.
Awesome, just got back, found it working, and signed up. Thanks again garry.
15 Free jQuery Plugins for Responsive Web Design
From a self defense perspective, how much more can a lethal gun do than a paintball gun loaded with pepperballs?

Is the ability to kill necessary?
Nope, but nearby in southwest CT.
Well for one you wouldn't have to maintain the VPS or blog software...
It also feels like BS to me. Multiplying the information density of the average syllable with the average number of syllables spoken per second should give the amount of information conveyed per second. The claim is that this is constant, but the table given does not support this.

Let's make that calculation:

Japanese: 0.49 * 7.84 = 3.8

Spanish : 0.63 * 7.82 = 4.9

English : 0.91 * 6.19 = 5.6

Mandarin: 0.94 * 5.18 = 4.9

That would make English carry 47% more information per second than Japanese.
Jupiter and the Moon Have a Close Encounter in the Sky February 18, 2013
You designed an iOS app, not a Mac app. That it happens to live in the menubar doesn't actually mean very much ;)
> What if, as part of a patent application, the USPTO published the claims in a public forum, and allowed the public to put forward suggested implementations.

Interesting idea.

> After all, how many useful NPEs are there?

For all intents and purposes, the investment vehicle that funded Spaceship One is an NPE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Aerospace_Ventures

> Companies would double down on requiring engineers to not read patents, as some companies already do to avoid triple damages. In my ideal world, we continue to stand on the shoulders of giants.

I think a lot of frustration with the patent system comes from independent inventions that nonetheless infringe on a patent. The obvious solution is to make independent invention a defense of some sort.

There is a trade-off, as you recognize. The less you can defend a patent against someone else developing the same technology, the less incentive you have to disclose anything that would help them do so. As an inventor, I don't want other people to "stand on my shoulders" unless they are required to compensate me for my contribution. You see this heavily in areas where patents are for whatever reason hard to use. E.g. Intel doesn't use patents on its process technology, it uses closely guarded trade secrets.
I am not completely sure what countries bound France nor the exact date of D-Day, because I don't value rote learning of insignificant stuff. Memorization of random facts is as useless as knowing nothing. I would appreciate much more if you can talk at length about one single topic and if you understand it pretty well.

I do agree that some people boast about their ignorance but that is another problem entirely.
Sounds like the original version of Wuala.
> Can you do a writeup/tutorial for your setup?

Sure. I can just open source the site after I remove some private stuff and improve the documentation a bit.

I have a similar site (my old web design partnership vertstudios.com) that already has an open source mirror[0], but it doesn't have source file inclusion or tags like my joequery site.

[0]: https://github.com/joequery/Vert-Flask

The article linked in the repo has information on setting up nginx and uwsgi when it comes time to run the thing live.

Keep in mind that my site's workflow isn't perfect by any stretch, but it's perfect for me. That was my main point.
It is interesting that this wouldn't be assumed considering the reverse is so obviously true. The world is designed for people with the median amount of human senses. If you lose one completely or have a sense that isn't as perceptive as most other people, there are a variety of challenges that you will have to overcome. However, you do get to avoid some of the everyday annoyances that the rest of us have to deal with.
I've never heard of ScreamingMonkey or IronMonkey, and I'm a member of Mozilla's JavaScript team...
I don't trust it. After having to get another VPS and build (read: piece together) my own Posterous-like system (it's not half as good) I've already paid $$$. Paying these guys 5 bucks more with no way to know the same thing will or won't happen doesn't seem sane. The system doesn't even WORK yet! How dare they.
http://easyendorse.com : Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5.3, Redis, Git + GitHub, jQuery, Akismet, MaxMind, Mailgun, Stripe - all hosted on Rackspace Cloud.
The IPO Market is Broken
I would. Especially the thought of certain products being extensible beyond purchase. I'm in the process of contemplating doing something similar leveraging platforms like Pi, BBone, and Arduino for different collaborative components.
The web has been pretty successful, in spite of its inelegance. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Because you always end up building your own database out of flat files and that is always worse than using an existing one.
To add to the different choices, use octopress [1] with github pages [2]. I was evaluating various choices when I decided to create my own blog, and I found it was the only solution that:

1. Does not cost me anything

2. Lets me use my custom domain name

3. Gives me control over the generated HTML, but also gives me a starting point in the form of some decent looking themes [3].

4. Actually works (I'm looking at you, bitbucket).

5. Gives me control over my content. Github decides to close its service? No problem, I got all my content and its history in my local git repo, so I can migrate it to anything I think is better.

If there is another option that fulfills these criteria I would like to know.

[1]: http://octopress.org
[2]: http://pages.github.com
[3]: http://octopressthemes.com
Hi martinced. Interesting points.... Security curiosity has me asking which firewall program are you using?
Shit, this is disappointing. And I was hoping we could announce a villain in this story before the weekend -- and now you tell me that it is more complicated than that?

Now I have to go back to being upset about there being horse-meat in lasagna.
You start running out of browsers quickly, and seperate browser users gets tedious fast. I really wish there was easy same browser sandboxing that can save cookies and so on. Double click the gmail icon, and gmail comes up in a browser user devoted to just gmail, and shows up as a separate process and separate app. All of the 'make a webpage an app' apps that I've tried still share browser state amongst the main browser user.
A Real-World Mobile Strategy Cheatsheet
The beauty of this approach is that browser vendors don't have to execute these quirky expressions optimally. They are standard JS, so they will already work.
But really the problem ain't Java but Java applets.

Don't know about you but I find it fascinating how many comments fail to make a distinction between the vulnerable 'javaws' (i.e., applets) and the far more common 'java' vm. This 'mistake' illustrates both java competitor astroturfing and simple ignorance on the part of those commenting. Are there other potential reasons so many don't know or intentionally obfuscate the difference between java and javaws?
"Moral high-ground" has nothing to do with it. As stated in the article, there is absolutely no ethical obligation to play along. The expectation that everyone should follow along is absurd for the reasons that I laid out, but those points are not about morality or ethics.

I have laid out how to perform this "hack" ethically however: If, and only if, an anonymous unanimous vote performed would there be any ethical obligation to go along with it. Without that it is not a "hack" ...unless your definition of "hack" permits coercion. If coercion is considered unnecessary, then there is no reason to not hold an anonymous unanimous vote.

Each participant must be given the opportunity to opt-in, without any coercion whatsoever. Is that really an unreasonable ask?

If I were handed a ballot for this prank, I would vote No. (Why do I want to take the test? Many reasons, some I have already covered, some I have not. Frankly it is no ones business but my own and has no bearing on the ethics of the situation) If they then proceeded to attempt it anyway, their failing grades would not be my problem. If they neglected to hold the vote and assumed my participation, their failing grades would similarly not be my problem. If they held a vote, and I voted Yes, but then took the test anyway, then I would be the jackass.
Nice hack if you didn't have to repeat this each time you update you bookmarks.
Just wondering if it was done already so I don't reinvent the wheel.
That's 11am in the UK, noon in Western Europe, 4:30pm in India, and 8pm in Japan.

Also, it'll be 3am on the West Coast, so some people will still be enjoying their Friday night.

http://everytimezone.com/#2013-2-16,-60,6be
I use Evernote for important stuff, Readablity for articles and pocket for interesting stuff.
Request for Proposal: Literacy Courseware Challenge
I look at this and think, again, that JS really needs a way to override attribute and indexing operations, like Python's __getitem__ and __getattr__.

There's not many things I miss after switching to CoffeeScript from Python, but this is one of them.
However, it's still a pain for a small team to keep those recipes up to date and invest time to tweak configs.

That's why I love a product like Action.io (http://action.io), which allows all dev-boxes to be kept in sync and create clones when needed

(disclaimer: I work with action.io team and it's still in private beta)
When I started working on Posterous in 2008, I intended to work on it forever. It didn't work out that way, and I left in January of 2011. It was a venture-funded company by then and we were committed to super-growth, not sustainability. We never started charging for the product.

Posthaven is the result of my experience with that. I know the world needs a simple, clean, well-lit, easy place to post. One that doesn't force us to make the same kind of product decisions that we had to before.

I promise you we are focused on making this a long term project. It's not a startup and Brett and I are committed to making it work over the long haul.
Aren't those Geocities Plus sites still up?

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:geocities.com
Tunguska Event - a blast from the past [ Meteroite hit on Siberia 1908]
* The mobile device becomes the desktop computer. Sit it next to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor and it transforms into the desktop. No wires needed!

* Home robotics are common place. Autonomous lawn mowers and leaf gathering. Even autonomous vacuum cleaners that actually work graduate to most households.

* General purpose CPU has a thousands of cores. Core i12. And it'll sip 1 watt.

* The wireless Internet is everywhere and our cell calls become IP calls.

* China has 5000 miles of maglev trains. Some will be "low-speed".

There's lots of cool stuff that will happen in the next decade. Medicine... detect the first few cells of cancer as soon as they occur, more robotic surgery, personalized medicines, ...
We just fixed a major problem with our HAProxy instance. The floodgates are open and everything is working awesome now. Please come back and give us another chance.

We had no idea when Posterous would shut down -- it's been a project Brett and I have been working on in our spare time for a while and we had to literally scramble to get this into launch-ready state.

We fixed it (in case you're wondering, make sure your HAProxy Maxconn setting is high enough, say 1024 connections, if you're serving static assets behind it in addition to dynamic content.) and we hope you'll give us one more shot.
>Own your domain name. If you want to post content, anything more substantial than cat pictures, things you may want to come back to in the future, you should own your domain name. It's cheap and ensures that your links won't have to change even if you need to move to a new platform.

I have been meaning to get a set of personal (as opposed to project-centered) domains for a while for exactly those reasons. Should I get the .me and the .name along with the .com? What best practices would HN recommend?
> But with the biological piece of the disease taken care of, a big part of the battle is already won.

I completely disagree. IMO biology is responsible for a very very small part of the problem of addiction. As somebody who lost his mother to liver disease stemming from her addictions, these types of treatments lead to even more dangerous outcomes.

A week in rehab will remove the biological dependence of alcohol.

My mom's addictions started as a teenager with food. Food was her indulgence of choice. After years of trying to rid herself of the consequences of that addiction by dieting, she turned to weight loss surgery to help. Sure, she lost a lot of weight but this merely relieved the symptoms of her disease and did nothing the disease itself.

Years later she no longer possessed the biological ability to be addicted to food so she turned to alcohol instead. The weight loss surgery combined with only 4 years of alcohol abuse (with several stints of sobriety) was enough to ruin her liver to a point of no return.

I don't dispute that this drug could be effective for the newly sober individuals who need a little extra push to remain sober. A doctor that administers this vaccine without careful followup and psychological treatment is doing the patient a disservice.

Let's not kid ourselves, this "vaccine" does nothing but mask the symptoms of the disease leaving the patient troubled, alone and without help.

Addiction is a lifelong disease and it needs to be treated as such. Without proper treatment (psychological help), the disease will morph and before you know it have ahold of your life once again.
> The browser as application development platform is one of the two most important developments in software development in the last 20 years.

OT, but I'm curious what your other important development is! <:)
Couldn't you get the same benefit by just using the Arduino bootloader and including a USB connection? That way things could be reprogrammed in the arduino environment and you could still use your custom PCB. If nothing else it would be much cheaper, and you wouldn't be constrained by the arduino's size/layout.
A link to (possibly an old version of) the source for those interested: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/lib/news.arc
Did Javascript evolve from another product or scripting language?
It was a great, innovative platform. Media handling was excellent.

I'm sorry to see them go.
I think this is such a sham analysis. I came away not understanding what the core tenet of the piece even was -- it seems that HFT is the villain.

What really drives the IPO market is (a) the business cycle -- i.e., how many new companies have been successful enough to attract demand for an IPO, and closely correlated with that, (b) equity multiples and relative valuations -- i.e., how attractive it is to sell equity at that point in time.

What the author doesn't mention, which is perhaps one of the real forces between a relatively smaller IPO pipe, is a significant change in regulation that makes it harder to be a public company. (Sarbox)

She also doesn't mention the enormous pools of capital available to the secondary market that provides liquidity well ahead of an IPO. It's no longer necessary to IPO for early investors / founders to get rich. See Evernote and Surveymonkey, among others.

Finally, she wants there to be more aftermarket support for company stock (presumably to fight off the evil high frequency traders making the market unstable) -- but that's exactly contra what an IPO does! You become a public company and you no longer control who your owners are. It's no coincidence that in many countries public companies are called "Anonymous Societies".

Anyway, if you can't tell, I really thought this article was BS and needed a place to vent.
"While Pineapple doesn't intend to be the next Facebook (whew!),"

What about the new Yahoo!? didn't know it but I'll give it a try :)
Oh C-D nozzles. Hands-down the most useful thing I learned in undergrad.
Yeah, as far as i'm concerned, jashkenas is still BDFL for DocumentCloud's major libraries.

I've taken over maintenance of the main DocumentCloud platform and document viewer repos, as well as docsplit.

And although I've been shirking on jammit, but I intend to cut a new version of the gem soon.
Agreed, it would be cheaper, and there wouldn't be size/layout constraints - but I'd rather let people continue to hack with the products, and for that reason, it seems to make more sense to me to keep the Arduino in the picture.
Another less permanent way is to get a magnetic wedding ring. Saw this from the guy who implanted an RFID chip in his arm:

http://blog.holyscraphotsprings.com/2011/12/reasonably-price...
I think we're in a silly place now, where we're both vociferously arguing a point we probably agree on. You have to do a good job, yes. You can't phone it in. But you don't have to work routine 70 hour weeks. You don't owe that to anyone.
> Don't use Flashblock or Javablock or similar extensions, they hide the applet, they don't stop execution.

For Flashblock on Firefox, at least, this is incorrect. And if it were true, you would lose the main benefits of using Flashblock to begin with: better security, privacy, lower CPU and memory use. Which makes using such a plugin rather pointless, so I doubt any blocking plugin works this way.
Also, I really dislike the custom string parsing implied by things like: .select('age > 20').

This is a place where CoffeeScript or LiveScript really shine. In LiveScript it would look like:

users.select (.age > 20)
We couldn't win either way. I got a super pissy email from David because he thought I was covering Posterous too much, as I think you recall.
And yet, here you are, on a site run off a flat file database.
If threads or processes or distributed computing is being used under the covers, does it still count as multi-threaded programming? I could go out and design an machine/OS that didn't use what we would think of threads (think Atari's Transputer [1]), and all these implicit threaded schemes would still work with my new construct. Now, we might not have transputers, but some of us get to use GPUs and such (still niche, but growing), where the unit of parallelism no longer resembles a thread very much.

My point was that multi-threaded programming hasn't taken off because it hasn't needed to. We just get some really smart experienced guys to write our infrastructure that encapsulates thread use and all of us get to reuse that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
Google sues BT in UK and US over alleged patent infringement
I should have clarified that I meant Chrome, my post was originally Chrome only and I added in Firefox and Safari with an edit

Chrome extensions are nothing more than loading a JS file onload
I have run many personal servers. They all come and go. They get hacked. I lose interest. The content goes away forever, except if I'm lucky enough for it to get picked up in http://archive.org. Posthaven is like that, but you don't have to hope. It will get archived.

Self-hosting is great and I don't think we'll ever replace it. But for the vast majority of personal content out there, you want a caretaker. I hope you'll think of us when you do.