skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. I did not make an account to try it out, so the following suggestions are for this kind of scheme in general.

1. The mailed login link should be only good for a single use.

2. This should be handled as a service by a third party site (similar to the way OpenID works). The mailed login link would link to the third party site, which then redirects to the destination if the login is valid.

The idea behind #1 is that if someone gets into your email, they should not be able to simply follow any old login links you've failed to delete. Best practice would be to delete the mails as soon as you click the link, but people will forget so the system should be designed with that in mind.

The idea behind #2 is that someone who gets into your email should not be able to tell from your old login links where you have accounts. If he could, he could simply go to those sites and make then initiate sending a new login link.

3. When you tell a site to send you a login link, the site should assign a random PIN to that login link and tell you (on the website) that PIN. The login link validator site should require you to enter that PIN before redirecting to the final destination site.

This is to prevent an intruder in your email from getting to an unused login link before you do and using it.
Teaching critical thinking is not as difficult as recognizing it. Epistemological lock, as is prevalent in today's climate, makes it all too easy to dismiss divergent opinions, particularly popular ones, as not arising from critical thought. Even more insidious, however, is how easy it becomes to preemptively accept desirable or convergent opinions as clearly critically reasoned even when they are not.
They're not very popular on HN, but there's a great sit-down discussion between Mark Suster and Steve Blank from a while back in which they touch on this topic, among others:

"Let me know the last time (traditional) venture capital led an innovation. [...] As an industry, venture capital is now being disrupted by new entrants rather than the existing players. Everybody from Dave McClure to Andreessen were outsiders who were entrepreneurs themselves." (http://youtu.be/BUD2gxU5LPM - quote is at 49:30)

VCs are fast followers who are all racing to find hot ideas that have already started to take off, but it seems that most of them are no better at foreseeing and driving real innovation than even any of us.
Ask HN: Anybody use BancBox?
We are currently researching solutions for setting up a marketplace payments system (ie. we collect money, send to customers and keep a percentage).

I've come across BancBox (http://www.bancbox.com/) and surprisingly there is almost nothing on HN about this startup. Does anyone have experience using them?

For all the love Stripe gets on HN, I'm surprised (and a little concerned) that there is virtually nothing about this service.
The economists never get it right.

Being in China for more than 30 years I can tell the Chinese growth model is really simple:
#1 An international economy and market so that we have a common currency to measure. The government also controls foreign exchange so that the "valuation" can be bumped to a high level.
#2 A billion slaves so that you can get things done really quick and nobody would ever challenge.
#3 No cost. In China pretty much everything is owned by "the public", so that those "country owned" companies can get the land and other resources with a very low price or even free. Labor is cheap. And you don't need to clean up the waste you produce: you can just throw them anywhere. The companies have no incentive for efficiency improvements so that the resources consumption is fast.

Before the "economic reform" in 1990s #1 didn't exist so you only see the growth in recent years.

This is a damn simple business and even a dog can make a lot money out of it easily. It is not replicatable (#2/#3) so it only happened in China. This is of course unsustainable. The minerals are exhausted, the environment is polluted and most of the people are still poor and the population getting old due to the one child policy. I would say we may see a collapse in the future 5 years or even less.
Products: Ship ‘em & Kill ‘em Fast & Frequently
Rather than running about insulting old people by assuming they have "no real experience with piracy" you might want to change your argument to "old people have a different experience of piracy than the one I am trying to replace".

Last time I checked the backbone of the early release scene was still Usenet - clearly the playground of the hip, young & funky - no old people there.
Inferno's <{} construct dispatches processes in parallel, and gathers output in coherent blocks. I use it in credo to parallelize all the dependencies for a target. I rely on mutual exclusion to avoid building a target twice at the same time, and on cached checksums to avoid rebuilding when there have been no changes. See the sh-inferno scripts map, credeper, and cresum in the project http://github.com/catenate/credo
Sorry for the late reply, and sorry, I'm not in the UK.

I'm using UAVP-NG (http://ng.uavp.ch/).

It's open source, there is a custom operation system (NGOS) and half a dozen hardware revisions and also a few side projects such as a 4x-BLC. There are over a dozen people actively working on that project now and I believe they've created a nice, easily extensible, platform to base future work on.

On the downside, it isn't the cheapest project. For students like me that can be a bit of a hurdle. Also, you're likely not going to get around soldering the PCBs yourself. (It looks much harder than it is.)

But do have a look around and check the various projects out for yourself before you pick one.

BTW, if you have any questions, please do shoot me a mail. I like mail. Or drop by #uavp on Freenode. The people there are mostly harmless^W^Wvery friendly (as long as you've read the FAQ first ;) [edit: And now we're waaay offtopic. Sorry.]
Could someone hack one of these up for San Francisco (Muni and BART)? Or is there already one? I use 511.org but it's not great.
Google flexes its Googleplex with planned expansion
Tulio, a graduate of Last Mile, is a really great guy that was funded via Kiva Zip: https://zip.kiva.org/loans/376 Not only is he working towards other inmates, but he's learning programming.

Hopefully, we'll get some more borrowers from Last Mile.
Interesting. I didn't realize that there were specs like ALPS for defining how to implement this kind of thing. Isn't it still a little difficult to do this for APIs that don't neatly fit into some kind of generic profile (e.g. microblogging)?
Agreed, I may be wrong but I can't remember anyone being sent to prison in Western Australia for hacking.
God, Racket is awesome.

If you have the energy (and it DOES take energy), go through them all and understand why they work. It's fun and it will teach you a surprising amount about programming languages. The thing I yearn for most day-to-day is probably "match", especially combined with list-no-order.
Hmm. Works 100% reliably for me. Wish I could say the same for my email, which works about 10% of the time on my phone.
> Passion doesn't need to be about programming. Passion and curiosity can be targeted at other areas.

Of course. However I think this particular thread is about programmers who are passionate about programming, and how that relates to their ability as programmers... :]

[AFAICT, passion in general is good for mental health, and I'd even wager it's correlated with intelligence. It's indeed a good thing to have, but passion in general won't have quite the same effect on one's profession as passion about that thing in particular will have...]
Yeah, plausible deniability. I know a work place which demands them for email. Evil.
Ask HN - How successful are YC companies hiring via HN posting
We see a lot of hiring posts here on HN submitted by YC company. How successful has that been in hiring folks who participate here on HN?

Curious to know the conversion rate (if that can even be computed!)
And here's our reply: (disclaimer: I'm the social media manager at Namecheap and a huge fan of Imgur)

We were in contact with imgur about a matter regarding child pornography for which we are unable to provide additional details. We sent six emails requesting that they get in touch. Since they did not respond to us, this resulted in us temporarily disabling the domain, though we should have made additional measures to get in touch, and for that, we apologize, and our CEO is also monitoring this matter closely. At Namecheap, it is critical that you always keep your whois information current and ensure that the emails on file are email addresses you check regularly. Again, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience but are happy to hear that everything is back in order.
My wife purchased this book to use in her elementary school computer lab; tragically it likely won't be used as IT won't install Python in her lab. (More accurately, she has requests put in from October that still haven't been fulfilled, so she gave up hope.)

That said, I've found it to be a very cute resource as I prepared a short presentation on Python for a programming techniques course I'm auditing at my university (I'm getting my PhD in math, but do a bit of web development). Reading through it, it's very appropriate as a first book in programming, the first part of the book structured as follows:

* Calcuations and Variables

* Strings, Lists, Tuples, and Maps

* Drawing with Turtles

* If / Then / Else

* Loops

* Functions / Modules

* Classes / Objects

It follows this with a few advanced topics, and a walkthrough on creating a couple of simple video games.

While it's written for kids, I've enjoyed using it as a resource occasionally while the internet was out at my home. Highly recommended!
"Was added just recently" - not sure about being added to the traceroute program, but I've been using tcptraceroute for years.

It is very handy.
Oscars put online voting problems back in the spotlight
The particulars of the electronics inside his device haven't been detailed (likely to prevent copycats)

More likely because this is hardly a new idea and people have been doing this for decades. I remember reading in an elementary school science book how some farmers used to run fences under power lines going through their fields to get some "free" energy out of the electrical grid. This did not go over well with the electricity utility.
Sounds super-useful! Could you share an example or two?
Yeah, those terrible people who invent accounts to create a false level of activity for visitors are terrible people. I mean lying to users is probably one of the worst things we can do.

Get off your high horse.
I suppose you're right, but it's still kind of amazing to me... I can't think of any time, since I was a young kid, when I haven't had a zillion things percolating outside of what I was "supposed" to do (and I'm not the entrepreneur-type in my family [that's my brother], I'm a lazy sod ><). Even when the amount of work ramped up in college, there was always stuff on the side too. Most of those things were super dopey, of course, but they were mine... :]
> anything worth doing in this life take some smarts and years of slavish devotion

Sounds like prison life is well suited to catch up.
News and the new amplification reality
Requesting feedback on Intro to OpenCL slides
Work out. Sign up for classes in kickboxing, Bikram yoga, anything that will kick your ass.

On top of what the other commenters said!
The author cherry picks countries to suit his he mentions 19th century Chile failing while embracing free trade, but Argentina in the 19th century also embraced free trade and reached 1900 nearly as wealthy as America despite starting with a less well educated populace.

I'm not sure why he lists Japan as a protectionist success here either, since Japan was famously importing as much as possible in this period. They also were far more keen on importing laissez faire British advisors.

Not to say that protectionism can't work. As a backdoor way of transferring money from farmers to industrialists it can work, but if your country has the beaurocratic sophistication to engage in direct subsidies those will work better, as they did in Japan or the USSR.

Another benefit of tariffs in practice was that they allowed the government to raise money relatively efficiently, compared to other means of taxation then available. This allowed a larger government, which allowed more advanced commercial institutions. Good luck getting someone to enforce a commercial contract in China in the 19th century! But again, most modern states can pull off having an income tax, so this isn't as much of a concern these days.
I'm a complete outsider, but my impression is that union jobs are done by workers contracting per-movie with the studio/production company, whereas VFX are created by houses like ILM or R&H with (mostly) salaried employees.

In any case, if the current situation is: a) bad conditions/benefits for workers, b) companies going bankrupt, and c) bigger movie budgets without comparable revenue increases, then the entire industry is in trouble, because improving any of those points worsens the other two.

This is not entirely different from the ongoing situation in the videogames industry, where there are studio closures and layoffs weekly, and many feel the entire model of big budget AAA games is already collapsing.
You can compare the trivial differences all you want, but the truth is, they are real differences in the way you think about your code and programming.

Indexing starting at 1 is not only irritating, it's mathematically difficult. Certain concepts actually can't be described (as easily) with array indices that start at 1. It's not a trivial argument.

Similar with white space; having to write code which obeys white space and tab rules is not the way some people like to think. As much as I love Python (and I do), I find it more restrictive and less fun than Ruby. It's not just superficial, it changes the way you think, and what you think about. Of course Python has its advantages, lots of them. But it also has its own style, which may not be everyone's song and dance.

I do program in both Python and Ruby frequently, and I have to say that it has nothing to do with experience or comfort, it's truly a judgement, and a valid one at that. Nice try :)
T-Mobile was a sponsor at the Firefox OS app day in Mountain View and had a speaker devote some time to why they thought it was a good thing.

While that doesn't necessarily mean a commitment to carrying devices running it, it'd an awful lot of effort to go to if that weren't likely at all.
No one particular thing... the only point is that passion isn't enough to make you a good programmer (or good anything I suppose).
Since Y Combinator is too competitive to get into, can someone recommend a suitable crime that I can commit in order to be sent to San Quentin? Preferably a felony whose prison sentence matches the length of the program. Given that the incubator program in San Quentin accepts 1 in 5 applicants from the general prison population, as a developer I think I'm a shoe-in for being accepted.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and I look forward to submitting a "Show HN" article once my SQ W2013 startup launches. Goodbye, ramen noodles and sleeping on my buddy's floor... hello, three hots and a cot!
I'm Namecheap's Social Media Manager and just want to be clear that the issue here stemmed from trying to contact Imgur regarding child pornography. We made 6 separate attempts to contact Imgur before the domain was disabled. We do admit that perhaps we should have been more aggressive in contacting Imgur , and this is a matter being looked into by our CEO, who added the following to the Imgur update:

"I'm the CEO of Namecheap here. Just want to let you all know that I am personaly looking into this. The domain was taken down by an overzealous abuse team member who had no knowledge of who imgur was. Although we did send 6 seperate emails over the last week, it should have still been escalated. I am reviewing our policy to see how we can avoid this type of situation further in the future. To the folks at IMGUR, I want to sincerely apologize for this situation and the extreme inconvenience this has caused you. If you can connect me with someone in your company. I'd like to give you a personal call and discuss the matter further."

We know that these incidents are unfortunate but are learning experiences for everyone involved. We hope that those of you who are using Namecheap continue to do so and let us work to make the experience a better one for everyone, and we hope that those of you who have not yet used Namecheap don't let this one incident from keeping you away from us. As you can see, we are doing whatever we can to make it right. Hope you can (continue to) give us a chance.
The irony was not lost on me... Heroku posts a video of Rob Pike discussing intelligent routing (load balancing) using concurrent go a week after the "random load balancing fiasco" [1]. I chuckled.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5215884
You absolutely should! It really is true. Plus you actually have more dexterity—you can't really hold anything with gloved fingers anyway. Mittens > gloves!
Peer-to-peer housing site connects foreign tenants with landlords
It may also be that productive people are over-represented among those that work from home. Or, those for whom working from home increases productivity…tend to work from home. (Another commenter mentions survivorship bias, similar idea.)
Good question.

In the Lulu interface I have the prices set at $15 for the print book and $9.99 for the PDF/ePub versions. It appears that something weird happened with EUR and USD. Originally I had these priced in EUR and switched currencies.

Apologies for that, I've reset everything and it looks right now.
Rob's been trying to get people to understand the difference since the early 1990s (Alef, etc.). It's not something new, nor unique to Go. In fact Go is a response to the desire for concurrency; it's not that Go popped out of nothing and then Rob decided that he consequently needed to "sell" it by pushing concurrency.
An article about how a journalist couldn't get an interview?

What a load of horse-piss. It happens all the time, but most journalists lack the hubris required to turn it into a story about themselves.
For very large projects the build system can quite easily become the bottleneck when just changing a single file, which also happens to be the most important use-case for developers. In extreme cases a no-op build with make can easily get to 15+ seconds.
There is an upside to getting occasional calls from recruiters at work - your boss knows you're in demand. ;-)
If the solution is so simple why is it so difficult to explain? Would it be too much to ask for OP to simply describe the solution? OP can, for example, assume we know what encryption is.
I'm not sure about `tcptraceroute` but `traceroute -T` seems to be using SYN packets with tweaked TTL value [1].

There is an even more interesting technique - injecting packets with modified TTL into a currently running and valid TCP/IP connection. This often can be used to detect network setup behind NAT on the server side. I think the most famous attempt was 0trace by Michal Zalewski [2] but there are many implementations. Oh boy, one day I even created an Nmap script to do this [3], those were the days :)

[1] http://linux.die.net/man/8/traceroute

[2] http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2007/Jan/145

[3] http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2007/q3/186
Like many foreign policy documents of the early cold war -- clearsighted and to the point and very depressing.
Syntax is hard? Somewhat, but that's not the problem.

Syntax is not intuitive? It's not bad once you've read the docs.

Complex Makefiles with huge included boilerplate libraries (e.g., the Android build system) are completely impossible to debug in any reasonable way? THAT is the problem.

As soon as you do anything non-trivial in your Makefile, you've created something that, when it fails, the reason will be COMPLETELY opaque to anyone who isn't intimately familiar with the ENTIRE program.

The implicit connections that a Makefile makes for building are great for JUST that part. As soon as you try to use them to write a program, you have to commit all manner of write-only-code abominations. I know because I've both DONE this and tried to debug OTHER people's code.

There is NO good way to debug Makefiles. And that alone means that they should be consigned to historic projects only, to be replaced by SOME kind of a better system.
How Differential Steering Works [video]
Douglas Rushkoff leaves Facebook.
If you can work your way around WordPress and know how to integrate it with your project, I highly recommend the PaidMembershipsPro[1] plugin. It takes care of all the issues you've mentioned and it's free (if you don't want support) and dead simple. The only downside is you gotta know advanced WordPress.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/paid-memberships-pro/
The Economist doesn't think they are very socialist:

> The idea of lean Nordic government will come as a shock both to French leftists who dream of socialist Scandinavia and to American conservatives who fear that Barack Obama is bent on “Swedenisation” ...

> EDIT: (oops this graf was only about Sweden)

> So long as public services work, they do not mind who provides them. Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Sweden has a universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools competing with public schools. Denmark also has vouchers—but ones that you can top up. When it comes to choice, Milton Friedman would be more at home in Stockholm than in Washington, DC.

There's more at
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571136-politicians-b...
You are correct and I will expand:

A grid graph is also known as a lattice graph, in which the graph can be embedded in R^n with a regular tiling. A square grid that is shown in the post is yet a more specific type of lattice graph.[1]

Though the if one uses a square grid graph in which you move around from tile to tile, you are actually traversing the dual graph of the tiled visualization.[2]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_graph
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_graph
"Yes, I'm leaving Facebook myself - largely because the values and practices of the company running this website are just too inconsistent with those I've been espousing in my books, particularly Present Shock. Companies can misrepresent you based on your "likes", showing you in ads for things you may not even know about.

It feels inappropriate for me to be soliciting likes - and your vulnerability - particularly when I'm so busy arguing for people to maintain agency and authority over their digital selves. So I'm no longer going to use Facebook.

I have some readers who very much want to maintain a page for a Rushkoff community, and I am not going to stop them (any more than I'd stop a group creating an anti-Rushkoff community) - but please, proceed on Facebook at your own risk, and with knowledge that you are not in command of how your name and likeness are used here (much less the information collected about you).

I really do appreciate your willingness to find out about what I'm doing, and encourage you to visit my website or subscribe to my rss feed."
I wonder when exactly this will happen.
> In extreme cases a no-op build with make can easily get to 15+ seconds.

Most developers will never see such a system. Optimizing for that kind of scale at an early stage has all the problems of any other premature optimization. It's most important to just get the build system out of the way so you can get your real work done, and you do that by writing makefiles, since makefiles are universally understood.

Now, when a project does grow to the proportions you mention, you can start looking at alternatives --- but I'd argue that these alternatives should amount to more efficient ways to load and evaluate existing makefile rules, not entirely different build paradigms. Make's simplicity is too important to give up.