skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like a well-thought out platform that could work for school systems. It looks like News Corps funded some idealistic, passionate people to work out a solution that no other company seems to be attempting at the moment.

Amplify is one of the better concepts built on Android that I've seen. They even demonstrate using Intents to aid a student's workflow, and integration with Khan Academy.

It might someday be an entrenched drag on the education system like textbook publishers, but a vision of how technology can improve education is something we need. Right now a lot people are just incredulous that schools give students iPads. It's a low bar and hopefully Amplify raises it.
I'll echo this sentiment. Been listening to a lot of music from Mali and being really productive with it on. Highly recommend Khaira Arby, Ali Farka Touré and Amadou & Mariam.
How to tell if a site stores passwords in clear-text?
http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/ppa-for-netflix-desktop-...

Just FYI - that should help you with netflix on linux. Worked for me, and I haven't had to boot to Windows in a week ;)
Let me know when chrome lets you simple resend a network request. Also when I can write lengthy JS programs on the console and check their effect on the page.
Also they don't get the attention the hot languages get.

However there are some Perl startups, for eg: Lokku, Blekko, Moonfruit, DuckDuckGo, CareerJet & Adzuna
> I thought it was basic enough to be studied at about that age in the rest of the world.

Where do you think GP went to school? Neither the post nor the profile indicates a location.

Edit: I should say that I don't know for sure that you don't know from some other post GP made.
The challenge for flat UI is to create depth and I love the depth you gave to the vector icons
Wasn't Apple using it for iCloud? Or was that just a rumor?
It's nice and small but it's almost impossible to read the keys in a dim room. I think remotes have to be backlit to be usable.
Azure is quite scary good but the main problem is that people really don't understand what it is. If they actually work through that, I fully believe it will win.

We have a couple of Linux instances on azure to give you an idea how odd it is.
2004 - "There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

It amazing how the payment/delivery medium sets prices in software. There are a lot of SASS products where a substantial number of customers pay that much. Apple's App store opening the $1 end of the spectrum is another great example.
Energy backed currencies? Energy is in a constant state of flux from low to high-entropy states. And 50-100 years from now, energy will be the one thing that isn't in short supply, given that the sun sends more of it our way per year than we've used in human history: see http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf - page 10: 480 exajoules (EJ) strikes the Earth per 90 minutes. Convert that to the yearly number, and compare to worldwide energy consumption in the year 2001 of 430 EJ, bearing in mind that we didn't use much before the 19th century.
Our road to Silicon Valley "The last few years have been a roller coaster"
And node.js http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/
I'd also make the identifiers non-guessable.

I'm having quite a nice conversation with kokpo at the moment but I don't think he meant to invite me ;)
Overcoming Short-termism within British Business
I tried 5 random names (each more complex and more unique than the last) and each one failed...
Is there a better modern sage than Woz?
I haven't heard of those before. All I've seen on the high street are CFLs and halogen bulbs. The prices seem pretty good on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3D...
I work in a smallish company, with about 30 coders. I would not say that "Microsoft has" us, but C# and .Net is our primary software development environment.

We all read hacker news.

If you divide coders into two distinct categories - ".Net devs" and "hacker news readers", then you are mixing up at least 2 different things that aren't that strongly related.
Tried to create groups with non-us character in it (ö) and get the following message:

Page unavailable
Sorry, but the requested page is unavailable due to a server hiccup.
Our engineers have been notified, so check back later.
I personally find ambient noise to be distracting, but I have to say I love the simplicity and cleverness of this idea. Well done!
How To Do Mass Enrolling Of Yubikey With LinOTP
Failed! "sdf" may exist, try another name
Failed! "sdkjfhjkshf" may exist, try another name
Failed! "kjht7y248i23uh" may exist, try another name

Great minds think alike, right? (edit: formatting)
It's quite scary expensive.
I got a better spec'ed server on Hetzner for 1/11th the cost of an Azure instance:

http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/newmovie/what-istheserv...
I own the "The Big Book of Hell" and have looked at it as recently as 5 years ago (although it's with my brother now so I can't check) and I'm pretty sure these are indeed verbatim copies from the "School is Hell" portion.
Social Media Development
I'm surprised they are still in business. I had to add them to my email server blocklists due to the sheer volume of spam. It was typically being added to mailing lists that had nothing to do with me.
What bothers me is if they have my password how many other Google authenticated apps also have it?
The "bumps" are getting smaller and smaller as amount of transactions and amount of users grows. As BTC dissipates through hundreds of thousands of hands, a single person's decision to sell or buy affects the price much less. The only reason for general panic would be a global problem like successful attack on the network or on popular services like MtGox, Coinbase etc. As times goes on we are having more exchanges, they get compliant with all the regulations, and most importantly, we have more businesses that accept bitcoins, so the demand for BTC-USD exchange slowly goes down (it's far from being small, but as BTC economy grows, the need for USD goes in the opposite direction).

I would not expect big crashes due to pure speculation. And I'm quite confident that amount of money, people and experience in this game is big enough to ensure much more stable growth than 2 years ago.
> Of course you can be nice, but then code and product quality would end up affected.

Why? This attitude baffles me. You don't have to be a dick when reviewing someone's code, terrible or not.

> The person being reviewed knows it's not personal

It absolutely is personal if you make it personal, i.e. start personally insulting the author.

"How could you be so stupid to write this this way?"

"This is really idiotic code."

"Sorry, this dumb way of doing things is dumb, and I don't approve of dumb things in my project."

All of the above are personally insulting comments. You should not make comments like them if you value being civil.

There are plenty of ways to reject code without being a complete dick. For example:

"This is pretty neat, but I don't think it fits in here because _________"

"I really appreciate the commit, but _________ doesn't quite work with _______ idea."

"This is a great start. Could you change _____________ to meld better with ________?"

All non-confrontational ways to say "sorry, this isn't good enough" while also offering positive feedback.
I'm not big into the Wiki world, but it's also struck me as odd how different pages refer to the same facts and yet are totally disparate. If one page updates, does somebody manually have to go update the other page? Does a bot do it?

This looks like a great response to that. I just hope they've made it easy to interface with.
It's tidier than AWS and GAE, better performing and slightly more expensive. Tooling is good, support is excellent (I can get someone who knows arse from elbow on the phone in 2 minutes flat). Some of it is a little odd, but it makes sense eventually. API is a little clunky though.

We have some kit in it (Linux and windows which might sound odd), but it seems to be pretty reliable. Our AD forest root servers are in it and two OpenLDAP roots for clients as is our web site (which is 3rd party PHP).

It basically does everything. It's sort of GAE's app model and AWS's server + network model in one.

We did have a network/vlan issue but they sorted that on the phone in literally 10 minutes.
Great find. Silly me, should've checked Quora first.

Indeed, the first examples that came to mind were the iPod, as well as Android which has arguably "overtaken" iOS at this point.

To be fair though, for my original question I wanted to try limiting the scope to only startups, and more specifically startups that have almost the same product.

Perhaps that's nitpicking too much?
Who is more honest: BTC advocate who has not invested in BTC, or the one who did? (Regardless of what you think about BTC yourself.)
I just switched from ubuntu (after 8years) to macosx (iMac) and I am disappointed. My Mom uses Ubuntu since 4years now btw., even her Canon printer works.

Macs don't just work.

I wanted to sftp into my servers. It took me 3 different tuts to implement a feature linux just have.
The CiscoVPN still not working for me, needs a shared secret, which linux didn't.

And then the finder, wtf? I couldn't believe it - no tabs, no split view - it's 2013 apple.

iCloud is not intertwined with filesystem as Ubuntu One shows - right click files/folders and sync it.

And the keyboard-layout is borderlining ridiculous- let's just make it different than all other established OS do.
Key "End" and "Pos1", instead those 4 (page)up/down keys just seem to jump to absolut end/start.
@-kymbol on L - why? Pipe-symbol, lets just hide that.
Ruzzle Lego Mindstorm Nxc NodeJS Solver
but apparently touchme wasn't taken!
So your whole program just crashes because the prime server was not responding? I think that changes the semantics of isPrime quite a bit.
> When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck. I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily.

As a non-Mac-user (and fellow ThinkPad user!) that occasionally gets roped in to that crazy land, I feel your pain. MacPorts seemed the most useful option before, simply because it seemed a direct port (heh) of the BSD ports system. Honestly the whole thing reminded me of trying to get stuff to work on Solaris 10-15 years ago.... if you can just get your compiler working it works great, just set up /my-usr over here and make sure nothing from the real system ends up in $PATH.

Lately I heard that MacPorts isn't cool any more so I didn't use it for my most recent Mac-oriented client project that needed some installs. I am a stubborn goat, but if I've learned one thing it's that when the trendy open source crowd on Mac wanders off, good luck getting anything to work, especially because Apple loves to change things. So I looked around and it seems Fink is a really nice option. So far everything went great. If you are familiar with Debian it's like that, and it carefully segregates everything into /sw, so just make sure /sw/{bin,sbin} are first in $PATH and you'll be good. I was recently reminded of Gentoo Prefix and wish I'd tried that out.

Now here is the thing that cracks me up. I am of all things a Gentoo partisan. My workstations? Gentoo. Servers for my business? Gentoo. Client systems? Gentoo. LAN server for a moderately technical friend? Gentoo. And I do get some gentle mockery from friends for how much of my CPU time is spent on compiling. Yet here are the Mac acolytes, with the most consistent hardware and OS platform one could ever hope for, and they always have a fetish for compiling things from source. Are they showing off that they know how to do "./configure && make && make install"? Well congratulations, you got my respect for that, now please make binary packages. I mean shit, the only reason I am into Gentoo is I got tired of that rigmarole and managing $CFLAGS manually on my precious Slackware boxen.
this is cool, any possibility of the source showing up on github?
Yep it is expensive, bit hetzner are unreliable, their kit performs poorly, their support sucks and you can't deploy a sql server instance quickly (the latter is quite useful if you use sql server).
Executing coffeescript in a nosql database - a useful idea?
Square has managed to stay ahead of the competition
In the US.

Lots of copycat companies are competing to do what Square does outside the US. It will be interesting to see if Square manages to compete in those markets if and when they feel ready, or if they'll be forced to chose between buying out the local incumbent or leaving the market.
Unfortunately, there's no explanation given, and that would have been relatively easy. Because thermal radiation is often much more efficient than convection, surfaces frequently fall below the ambient air temperature by radiating their heat energy directly into space.

The phenomenon called "radiation fog" is a side effect of this -- the fog forms over a surface that becomes colder than the air above it by direct radiation into space, which causes condensation of water vapor in the adjacent air mass. If the surface was the same temperature as the air, this couldn't happen.

Radiation fog:

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/jkl/?n=fog_types
Question: can you run Winamp in Wine?
You know, I half expected all of these "pictures from a developer's life" to be realistic by being all the same: me at my keyboard. Working remote or not, that's basically what you are going to see while I am tapping out code.

"When I’m deploying code to production": picture of me looking at my computer.

"When I try to fix a bug at 3 in the morning": picture of me looking at my computer.

"When my regex returned exactly what I expected": same thing.

Maybe I need to mix it up. Instead of a picture of me writing code, it's a picture of you writing code?
Oh I think Azure will do well. And win in the Enterprise market. Look, outside the bubble of the bay area startup land - the world is different. MS Office is everywhere; SharePoint is everywhere; Windows Server is everywhere.

MS is positioned very well. In the Enterprise world. Not consumer world.

Outside of the xbox (nd that has it's issues as well) MS has already lost the consumer market.

Consumers don't buy PC cause of Windows. The get Widows becuase it's the default OS on the PC they are buying. Most care-less what OS is running as long as they can check their email, play a few game and look at look/listen/create media.
Reading this comment thread, it's as if Mac OS X is the most horrible operating system in existence.
Apologies, but: pet peeve alert! The Dutch electronics multinational is actually called "Philips", with a single 'L' in the middle. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips.

I often see it written with two 'L':s, I think it's mainly due to pronunciation by English speakers.
I usually put 2 or 3 quiet electronic/trip-hop songs in my playlist and then I use the last.fm similar tracks to fill up the playlist, works quite well:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/177896/WP_Shot.PNG
And yet "locate" is banned by default.
Easily answered:

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&...

I think the above translates to "no, not really."
One issue I noticed immediately, if you resize the window while in chat, the input box overlaps the chat.
"I fully believe it will win"

Why do you believe this? Just because it's from Microsoft?

NB Not being snarky - really curious as to why people would think this.
Ev Williams: Medium Wants To Help Build A Sustainable Journalism
A great and simple idea and a service that I think a lot of small companies would actually pay for if you execute it well. The front page of HN will be a good load test...

However I'd also be concerned about security - if you're trying to sell this as a service, you'd need to password protect groups somehow and ideally serve on https. Can't see this on the site right now but presumably you're planning to offer this? Perhaps this is just an experiment, but having no guarantees like this would not reassure me - ideally chats should be namespaced too so that there are no issues with collisions of chat room names.

There's no way I'd type anything useful into a chat like this without basic security in place and being reassured about how the data was stored and deleted. Chats are just too prone to leaking information because they're so informal, so it's even more important than email in a way. In fact I'd probably prefer to buy the software and run it on my server to be sure about that if actually using it.
I created a small Jekyll plugin to add full-text search using lunr.js for the generated, static sites.

https://github.com/slashdotdash/jekyll-lunr-js-search
I don't know, that's why I just talked about "the rest of the world". I'm just surprised that this is not as common as I thought it was. Cultural blindness, I guess.
Could you allow verbatim text for code as well?

Keep up the good work - it really is pretty engaging at the moment.
I think it's more like, look at openssl, the crypto Swiss army knife. How is a regular person going to use that?

But if someone did just asymmetrical key encryption with one algorithm and then spent time engineering it so that a normal person could use it without taking Dan Boneh's Coursera class, there might be more people using PGP.
Future of digital learning? News Corp.’s “Amplify” debuts tablet for K-12
That is correct. All of the Top500 computers combined, all 500 of them, would not be sufficient to perform a majority attack on the Bitcoin block chain.

The global network hash rate is currently 35 Thash/s.

A typical GPU found in a supercomputer (Nvidia Tesla K10/K20/C20xx) does roughly 100-200 Mhash/s.

A typical modern CPU core does roughly 1-2 Mhash/s.

You would either need 175k-350k GPUs, or 17.5M-35M CPU cores to attack Bitcoin. If you look at the Top500 list, they have maybe a few tens of thousands of GPUs combined, and about 10M CPU cores (watch out, the core counts in the list combines CPUs and GPUs, I found this out when making sense of the numbers years ago: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=14 )

Plus the network hash rate is predicted to increase by at least +20 Thash/s (to 55 Thash/s total) in the next month due to Avalon finishing delivery of their first batch of ASICs. Bottom line, no, all Top500 computers combined could not attack Bitcoin.
Just thinking that debugging a huge DOM is a waste of time after each refresh. If there's a way to visually select/click elements on screen to directly zoom in onto the part of the DOM tree, that will be kickass.
Awesome, laughed a lot thanks!
Well it's probably on the top 5 list of most horrible commonly used desktop operating system in existence.
What do you mean by "may exist"?

Failed! "asdjoiqndiqnw09d21eh09n20dnqdqddqw" may exist, try another name

Are you using a bloom filter or something?
This comment may get lost... I have a lot of the same problems as others on this list. I love FF but use Chrome for developing, it is so much nicer. I don't get a lot of FireBug or whatever it is called. I use the DOM Inspector a lot (with the right click -> inspect this menu)

But what I'd like is to be able to mark a set of CSS rules and see if they are ever run. Put a breakpoint on them. Then browse around my website and see which are used and if any are superfluous. When taking over another website from another team, de-crufting the CSS is a pain.
typed in three choices of group name: one a dictionary word, another a university module code, the last a random selection of about 20+ letters. All three choices returned the same error message - that this group may already exist.
"CRI is not a good indicator for use in visual assessment, especially for sources below 5000 kelvin (K)."

Bulbs in question are 2700K and 5000K. Does your conclusion still hold?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index
"Outside bay area and startups world, windows servers are gold standard."

Not so sure this is true.

Unless you mean to include the whole software industry in 'startups world', but the likes of IBM are not really startups or bay based.

You might also like to think about whether 'gold standard' or 'default' is more accurate.
This Developer Harlem Shakes Your Website
A next generation Mirai ? Wow... wasn't even aware that this company trully still exist, since they seem dead for almost 10 years now (no update or anything).

Funny thing is that, since it's in Common Lisp, when there's a problem, you were dumped into the debugger, which was scary... only now do I know that it's an amazing opportunity to access the underlying system in fact !
> MERCURY IS TOXIC. DO NOT TELL PEOPLE THAT IT IS NOT TOXIC.

I don't see why this has capitals?

The point was valid it's urban legend / vaccinations cause autism style rubbish about breaking light bulbs being bad.

When do we get exposed to mercury in real life that we need to highlight mercury is bad in capitals? To stop people breaking light bulbs and licking them? We all know not to drink from a thermometer. I though the point of HN is we didn't have to talk at grade school/reddit level.

[Edit] And you don't need to ventilate a room after breaking a CFL. http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/environment...
I want to avoid making a new submission so, if you really enjoyed this, you can find more at http://thecodinglove.com

Note: I'm in no way affiliated with it.
Hetzner has never failed me, it processes 3k+ C# redis commands in <1s which was 8x faster than my previous old Linux server of Leaseweb (costing 4x more). Although my old Linux server did quite well with over 480 days uptime and processed more than 10M commands.
http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=838
In cloud-speak, that's more than 99.99999% uptime.

The current Hetzner server is looking good over 176 days uptime having processed more than 9.7M+ commands:
http://www.servicestack.net/RedisAdminUI/AjaxClient/

There have multiple Azure outages within the same time-frame my Linux servers have been happily chugging along.

It's trivial to setup PostgreSQL/MySql on Linux. I personally don't deploy my own stuff on expensive SqlServer instances.
Dear Lord, am I the only one who finds the video unbearably annoying?

Mind you, didn't stop me from buying the bundle, though :)
Thanks for the hint, this is truely useful!
Perhaps us .Net devs are the silent majority?

Windows pays the bills for a lot of people.

One of our clients has 17,000 windows desktops, 3,500 windows laptops, 500 windows servers and a team of 80 people looking after it all. None of this is connected to the internet or is tongue-wagged about profusely. There are thousands of companies that size hiding that no one hears about here be use they are not clever, vc funded or bleeding edge.

The world is built on lots of things, but a chunk of it certainly is built on windows, possibly more than you can see with the naked eye.
I would be careful with feeding chicken to chickens.

Might get you kicked out of a startup for animal cruelty;

if it is led by a Zuckerberg ;) (at least according to The Social Network film)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf-NRQvu1HY