skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Liferea supports Tiny Tiny RSS sync, so that could be it. You can host http://tt-rss.org/ and use Liferea as desktop app (and may be the web interface for mobile).

In fact that's the only part that I really liked of Google Reader: it was the perfect backend (I got used to the web interface, but the real experience was with the native apps).

It would be nice to have a "standard" API for RSS sync that could be implemented by servers and clients. In that way we could host our own RSS backend in the same way we run a SMTP and IMAP servers to have our own independent email infrastructure.

Tiny Tiny RSS API could be a good start, or we can agree on a Google Reader compatible API.
Mathematizing a fields is a bit of a double edged sword though and I think needs a great deal of skepticism and caution. Yes, if you do it right you can get insights and prove things more rigorously. If you do it wrong, the mathematics can easily become divorced from reality: it really does require ongoing skepticism and awareness of the connection between whatever mathematical abstractions you've built and reality.

In computer science, assuming constant factors in algorithms don't matter is a useful approximation that makes it much easier to do mathematical analysis. But constant factors are very important in practice.

Also, plenty of academic economics research has gone off the deep end with more and more elaborate mathematical models based on assumptions that don't jive with reality.
> Self publishing is stupidly easy and a heck of a lot more profitable.

The tradeoff used to be that if you'd go to a publisher they'd do your marketing. Every creative type I know of is not only utterly n00bish when it comes to marketing but also regards it as a disease you wouldn't touch with a long pole.

But these days even famous publishers expect authors to do their own marketing [1]. Every last bit of it.

So yes, go self publish! Take a course on marketing while at it. Does wonders.

[1] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521
"The disadvantage is that execution of Scheme code on multiple processor cores is not available."

So you're throwing away most of the computing power of a modern CPU. But other than that it's totally awesome I'm sure, after all who needs computing power.

Sounds more like a toy to me.
Obviously it is early days for the project. It is currently very laggy and playing even SD videos is temperamental, but the project has huge potential and I'm sure with this much interest things will improve quickly. I look forward to seeing how things progress. The team has my support. Thanks for doing this!
I agree to date chat hasn't been done well enough: cross platform, fast effective UI. Looks like LeChat is making inroads, and I think the focus on search is a very good idea.

How are you planning to monetize everything that everyone says? (I presume you're planning to do this, since you have all the data.)

If I quit LeChat, what happens to what I've said? Do I get a copy? Can I remove it from histories?
"If the director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no hope."

I couldn't help but laugh when I read that.
Ubuntu unveils its next-generation shell and display server
AFAIK all of the mods are YC insiders, so they'd know Marz by name.
My experience has been the opposite. I get very few spams per month in gmail, but other mail providers I've used had done far worse spam filtering (walla mail, yahoo mail, netvision).
First, in education, sorting algorithms are used as prime examples of well-defined problems with well studied solution.. they are not taught because every student is expected to work on sorting problems for the rest of their life. It is usually the first part of a course on the design and analysis of algorithms.

As for my answer: Most of my time is definitely in the usual grind of software engineering: designing, testing, maintaining, etc... However, at my lab we have been engaged in a number of projects involving network protocol engineering and the development of formal code/model verification tools. As a first step toward the development of systems like this, you must be able to construct a precise formal model, and then show that in such a model, then so-and-so properties hold true (including memory usage, upper/lower bounds, stability [in cases of routing algorithms], intractability of certain values [in the case of secure protocols], etc...). If you are developing software for usual line-of-business type applications, you'll do much less basic algorithm development than if you are, say, developing the routing software for a wireless ad-hoc mesh network.
Yes but Reader adds information about what people actually read and their engagement. I would think that alone would have tremendous value.
A lot. I work with large amounts of data so relatively minor changes in algorithmic complexity can determine if a method is practical or not.

Recently I found a great new dataset but it didn't work well with our database - the naive method of doing lookups was at least 10x too slow to be practical. Studying the underlying algorithms of our database helped me find a solution that took up 10x as much space but was 100x faster.
RSS is a good example of an area where having an application be backed by a service brings huge value to a lot of people. If you want to access your feeds from multiple different machines, synchronization becomes awkward with a purely local app. It gets even more awkward if you want to do it from multiple different platforms.

You could use some commercial non-Google service as the backend instead, but those could equally well get cancelled.
You could maybe host your own service and have full control, but the installation and maintenance is a huge time sink. And in both cases the amount of applications you could choose from is likely going to be smaller than with Reader.

There can also be other benefits in sharing the service with other people. For Reader, the infinite feed history was a biggie for me. It really was quite amazing to subscribe to a 4-year old podcast, and have easy access to all the 200 podcasts from that period even if the current feed only showed the 10 latest ones.

(I used Liferea for a while maybe 10 years ago, and even contributed some code at the time. But ultimately even the web-based RSS readers of 2005 had a better workflow than a local RSS reader. Sure, the UI sucked and you were completely at the service provider's mercy. But at least it was possible to access your feeds both from work and from home.)
digressing from luvit...

how does the stack copying technique (as used in lthread) compare to segmented stacks (as used in go)? The swap technique is very simple but I would assume that the stack copy shows up in profiles and is significantly slower than the segmented stack technique... Are there any benchmarks?
Can you show some code that is the result from this process?

It seems really interesting, although I've always consciously fought with the tendency to overformalize problems I don't yet understand well.
> This company will be a success; my life depends on it.

Don't put so much pressure on yourself. Statements like this are not healthy.

Failing at a startup -- or any other business venture -- doesn't mean you're personally a failure. The number of startups that fail is huge -- especially if count ambiguous success cases like radical pivots or acquihires.

The fact that you're doing a startup at all means you've already differentiated yourself from a lot of programmers out there.
What could have been?
Maybe time to think about even attempting to narrow your Google exposure.
Google, as is their right, has taken a lot of unilateral actions lately. Shutting down Google Reader, killing the Chrome RSS extension, killing caldav support, not allowing incoming contacts from Jabber and, claiming people have joined Google Authorship (when they have not). It may be time to consider some unilateral actions on our side. For example you can add the block of re-direct to local maps to your /etc/hosts to try and cut down your visibility just a little bit.

127.0.0.1 www.googleadservices.com

#127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com

#127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

127.0.0.1 a.srpx.net

127.0.0.1 dms.netmng.com

127.0.0.1 pixel.everesttech.net

127.0.0.1 altfarm.mediaplex.com

127.0.0.1 144.xg4ken.com

127.0.0.1 adwords.google.com

#127.0.0.1 plus.google.com

(edit: commented out blocks that broke too much)
Seems like a variant of the old MS strategy of "embrace, extend, exterminate". The open source movement was in part motivated by a desire to limit Microsoft's control over software users in the nineties.

Perhaps it's time for an organized "open internet" movement to build protocols and communities that resist the tendency toward centralization of data and control of user experience that's increasingly evident in the services offered by the big players (and even the smaller ones - today, I wanted to post a comment on a blog article, only to discover that the latest version of Disqus has disabled OpenID support).

I think walled-gardenism on the internet has far more dangerous implications than closed-source software ever did, and it's really sad to see this spreading meme of building walled gardens as the only path to commercial success infecting Google.
Game development is hard. The average engineering role at a games company involves a lot of work on hard deadlines.

It's also tough for some engineers because there's usually a very clear product vs engineering divide -- you're implementing stuff other people come up with, and when they change their minds you throw it out and do it again a different way.

That said, making games is also a ton of fun and is a great way to be exposed to a lot of interesting engineering challenges. If you like games and you can put up with the issues above, you should definitely consider it.
At BitGym we solve vision and sensor problems, and it has to be efficient because the result will run on an iPad. So yes, we spend a fair amount of time on it. Maybe 20% of our heads down time.
> We can use an alias on Facebook

I'm not following. How does one use alias on Facebook?
[After-post update: I've no idea why this got auto-dead'd. Ideas?]

What is the way out though? Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody.

Google used to be happy divining long clicks from access logs. Then, they said "screw privacy!" and started explicitly tracking every outbound search click (I'm ignoring all your email, calendars, contacts, and phone data they have).

Twitter used to be happy being just messages, then they click-nabb'ed every link. At least the interaction model on twitter is mostly benign.

Facebook does mephistopheles-knows-what with everything they have. It can't be good. They're in an unspoken competition with Google for who can get users to voluntarily exploit themselves over the widest personality surface area.

Then there's the hundreds of spy-tracking JS, ad networks (Hi, Google/DoubleClick!), ad markets (Hi, AppNexus!), mobile networks logging every URL you visit (Hi, Verizon!) and everything else tracking almost your every move across the Internet.

Why don't we just make it illegal to have a webpage without embedding https://js.gov/tracker.js and give the information to everybody in realtime?
But why disable something that you don't have to even support, most (if not all) blog time sites provide an easy way to provide RSS.

You are alienating maybe a minority, but I think maybe a more valuable part of you readers - large part of HN readers use RSS (at least it seams so based on latest Google Reader deprecation).

There is no value in removing RSS, you are just crippling your site.
A little off-topic, but how did you generate/get the loading animation on the demo page? Looks very neat!
The conclusion of the 3.9 merge window
I find it more baffling that the author doesn't have a way to know the exact number of books sold by the publisher.
He created something that moved 4000 units . $12,000 for 4000 (~$15/unit) units is pretty darn good. If you spent a year or two developing an iOS game, your haul would have been half that.

It looks like people don't buy books at high enough quantities to make it worth the effort.
What is node.js?
When people have great search at their disposal they actually start relying on chat to keep their important assets. This enables nice dynamics--the more history they have over time, the more valuable it gets.

If you quit LeChat, or at any other point in time, you can download full history in plain text and in JSON format, which retains important metadata.
Pro football players have to earn a life's salary in a few years before they get worn out. $2 million over 50+ years isn't really that much.
And the irony for Schneier would be, if you share this article on Facebook or anywhere, or heck even leave a comment there at CNN, you'd be tracked.
Just change your name to a fake name. There's no magic.
100% of my time is spent on cache invalidation and naming things.
Hi, I'm the developer of newsbeuter. I absolutely agree with your last sentence in that's what many users expect from an RSS reader. That's why newsbeuter supports Google Reader and TinyTinyRSS as services, and soon will support Feedly as soon as I can get access to a test system for their Google-Reader-compatible API (aka "Normandy"); support for other services will follow.
This is a really cool gem, great work :)

The only issue I have noticed is some of the domains it generates are not actually available because they're too short, for example 'im.li' or 'li.in'
For a while, I thought that luvit is completely undocumented. But then, I found out that one just goes to nodejs.org ...

So far, I mostly like it. Recently, I used it to build a PoC for an in-house testing tool for embedded devices and decided to slap a web interface onto it for fun (just like Twisted provokes you to add an NNTP and an SSH interface just for fun).

What I'm a bit unhappy with is the decision to be incompatible with the rest of the Lua world. From what I read in the mailing list, it's not just "sorry, that rock uses blocking file IO" but rather "Lua is Lua, and luvit is luvit".
Career Management
We use Scalatra. It doesn't do too much/get in the way.
Seems like OSE is slowly dying :(
Well then Facebook doesn't really work or does it? Facebook works best if you keep it confined to your friends and family, the people you know in-person. Having a fake name would defeat that purpose.
The luvit page notably lacks a link to libuv - the I/O engine behind it.

https://github.com/joyent/libuv
Please share a link to an example paper published by a pure math department.
Yeah after reading some other articles, it really does sound like someone on the inside gave them access to the security system, as opposed to them hacking into it without help.
It all started as a noble idea - Identity Cards in Uganda
For the record, using chrome:

- disconnect blocked Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter

- ghostery blocked more than 20 scripts from 10 different classes of trackers (e.g. there are 5 different references to DoubleClick resources)
Assuming your funding round is high enough (a few million dollars), then yes. You raise money then pay yourself.

If you're smart, you keep the money to grow the company and don't pay yourself $250k/year. Under $150k is safe. You don't want to be worrying about your own expenses while running a company, but you shouldn't be out buying new Audis or Teslas as a baby founder CEO.
"Honestly [sic] I don't know why people keep using anything from google"

Because gmail is one of the best email services around?
Facebook works best when you don't use it :) I prefer in-person discussions. If that's not possible, calling > texting > email > physical mail. every other solution is irrelevant to me.
Love the idea and the site. Comments would have been nice but I understand that's not a small task to code and run.
Jocuri cu mario - Cele mai noi jocuri cu mario
Jocuri cu mario pentru copii de toate varstele.Pe site gasiti cele mai noi jocuri mario , fii alaturi de noi jucand jocul copilariei.
You'd actually need to build the software that gets used, not just protocols.

The majority of the browser usage is with three pieces of software: IE (Microsoft), Chrome (Google), Safari (Apple). None of these players really have a huge stake in 'openness'. We're computing at their mercy right now, and if/when they decide to adopt some new protocols (or drop support for others) we all just have to suck it up. Move to Firefox is a good option right now, but might not be in a few years.
+1 for the lovable name.
Jocuri de gatit - Cele mai noi jocuri de gatit
Jocuri de gatit va ofera cele mai noi jocuri cu mancare unde puteti prepara singuri mancarea si invata cum se gateste, jucati noua colectie de jocuri de gatit.
The OP does this for a living. That is why they wrote then article.
Lots of things potentially have tremendous value. If Reddit were building a profile of you based on your clicks and votes, they could give you incredibly targeted advertising.

Clearly Google wants all its user data piped through G+, and developing separate signals for Reader wasn't worth their time. Notice also how they've done absolutely nothing with podcasts since discontinuing the side project that was Google Listen. Unlike iTunes, Google has no podcast directory whatsoever. My guess, they can't reliably index audio so they have no interest in the medium, despite its growing popularity.
It's not like your friends would suddenly not know who you are anymore. You do also talk to your friends in person right? I use a fake name on FB and so do lots of my friends. Like the OC says; there's no magic.

I also use an alias email address. Together you can use FB apps without spreading too much easy data around.
It's off-topic, but could anyone critique a rule for (not) naming things I came up with recently:

If something (an expression or function) is used more than once, give it a name. If it's used once, name it iff you would otherwise comment to explain it. Otherwise, inline it.
The idea that science is done discrete tiny steps is a bit disturbing to me. It's not just doing a PhD, it's all of academia. Most Funding Agencies give away their money in tiny chunks, for short term projects, for individuals or very small teams. And scientific publishing has moved to publishing scientific advances in tiny bits, one paper at a time.

This works great for some things; but a lot of work is prohibited in this way. For example, it's almost impossible to get funding for databases or other long-term projects. Researchers that do work on long term projects constantly have to apply for new grants, always presenting their ongoing work as something completely new.
The blog post certainly illustrates the importance of a good copywriter...

"Tool to get rid of dust."
It's like all those Mac reviews. Boot up time and the appearance of the default desktop is all the reviewer cares about.

If you want real useful info, go to a industry site not a pop tech chat board like HN.
> Lua is a scripting language, perhaps a bit more structured than it's more popular counterparts (JavaScript and Python)

I wouldn't say it has more structure than Python or JavaScript. Lua has only these types: number, string, boolean, table, function, nil, userdata and thread. Table acts as a hybrid between list and map, just like Array/Object in JavaScript. And users rarely are exposed directly to userdata/thread, that's more something you'd use when you write a library (use userdata to emulate classes etc). The Lua VM is also much simpler than the other two, it's a simple stack machine. There are no tuples like in python, no first-class support for classes.
Better go yandex than bing. They at least manage to be ahead of google in some niches.
*It is necessary to seem like you are extending human knowledge to get a Ph.D
Poe'd?

This is exactly the buzzword mumbo jumbo that OP was asking to have clarified.
"As crazy as it may sound, today even a billion-dollar business is simply a distraction to Google "

"If the company maintained every niche product with N thousand fans, even paying ones, it’d become the very bungling bureaucracy we love to hate. For a company with Google’s ethos and standing, any such dead-end, non-revenue-producing product that’s retained is holding others back"

For any future CEO's of large companies that might be reading the above please keep in mind that sop for this situation is to sell the product or service to another company. This has typically been how business has always operated. Even if the business lost money there is someone out there who would buy it. Taking the "don't have time for this we are moving so fast" is nonsense. The "distraction" and "rounding error" card is way overplayed.
I agree with you. Being sociable for its sake can be its own stressor. Better to hang with people where you can be authentic, be yourself. How one finds balance and happiness in their work-life make up will be different for each person. There is no one-size-fits all lifestyle :-)
This is utterly trivial.

The s2png program can be written in about 5 minutes by anyone with a good image library in any language. You didn't even write the program yourself, you linked to a Sourceforge project, labeled version 0.01, that hasn't been touched in seven years.

And I don't understand: What exactly is the value-add of your Github project? It 7zips the files and handles splitting and merging of large files?

And wait...you actually had to use Wine for this? Try apt-cache search libgd and you'll find the (single!) dependency is already packaged (at least on Linux Mint 14, which I presume means these packages also exist on most Ubuntu- or Debian-like systems):

sudo apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev libgd2-xpm
When I was first learning Cocoa/CocoaTouch I found it hard to jump from the books I was studying to my own apps. Creating a TabBarViewController, fine. Retrieving location, simple. Creating views and sub-views, there are 100's of tutorials and books with step-by-step code examples. However, when it came time to bring all those pieces together into a real app there was (and still is) a huge gap in available resources.

App architecture, memory utilization, debugging/unit testing and code style are areas that I'd love to have Ash cover.
The only reactions I've gotten re: the TSA have been:

1) General annoyance at how much time it adds to the process;

2) People who don't like taking orders from TSA workers (on class/race grounds);

3) Slightly exhibitionist reactions from female friends who don't mind the naked scanners.

At least (1) is by far the most common reaction, but I'm not even kidding about (2) and (3).
Depends on what you're doing. There are plenty of cases where, for example, the Java collections library doesn't quite do the trick for various reasons. E.g. the standard collections are very memory inefficient for storing primitive types, or the standard linked list implementation doesn't support all the operations you might want - e.g. being able to clone an iterator.
> "I think both parties, shareholders and employees, should get whatever is fair from their arrangement. What is considered fair should be decided by accepted values and by negotiations, where each party exerts whatever power it has to achieve a stronger position."

I actually agree with this. In this case the drivers have no power since many other drivers are willing to step in to take their place. Uber has all the power, so they are going to do nothing about what this small group of driver's demands. Life goes on.

> "No. A current employee is not a replaceable part of machinery, and should not be treated the same as a prospective employee."

Unfortunately in this economy drivers are pretty close to commodity labor. If you don't want to be treated like commodity labor its best to not be commodity labor.
Whereabouts in London ideally?
Does anyone have more info on Apple tracking users, he didn't post a link. All I can find is the log file debacle from two years ago.
(Almost) all my friends have got fake names as well. It's very much de rigueur.
A better worded reply than my off-the-cuff one. I think I better log-off and get some sleep!