skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know this is commonplace on desktops, but it really freaks me out on my phone. Especially with Facebook's track record of, say, going through my contacts and adding the facebook "email" (which nobody in their right mind would use over a real email system), consistently (but technically legally) violating my privacy, and enabling opt-out "features" that are usually unasked for and unwanted.

In short, Facebook is the last app I would want auto-updating.

EDIT: I realize you can refuse the update, but what's the point? It doesn't look like you can see what has changed.
Even in the US, declaring bankruptcy won't get rid of student loans.
A Brief History of Applause, the 'Big Data' of the Ancient World
I'll add it to the ask HN now, and to the app later today. Thanks!!!

For others who see this comment: We serve the SF Peninsula: Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Stanford, Atherton, Mountain View, Portola Valley, Menlo Park, Redwood City, Los Altos & Los Altos Hills - basically anywhere 15 miles from Stanford, CA. If you're somewhere that isn't listed, but you're in the area, we'll still come to you.
You mean like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tee_%28command%29
i believe currencies are traded in the form of FOREX futures, which are contracts that must be settled on a date sometime from now. they are not mediated by an exchange like NASDAQ if memory serves, its just one big crazy open market.

i would say bitcoin trading belongs in the category of DIGEX then, a digital currency exchange.
Was the paid market for RSS readers really that big before Google Reader? There were tons of free readers (as you say, it's a pretty simple product to make). I don't remember any big-name paid RSS readers.
The landlords sound like the social and app platform owners and the restaurants like app makers.
work to cover your debts first. You can work full time and spend a few hours a week working on a side project until your debt is paid down
Cats pushing cats - viral video roundup
I wonder if all the parts they are using are alcohol-safe. That tubing would preferably be platinum-cured silicone (which is expensive). PVC is not a good idea for this application.
Mailbox Is Joining Dropbox
I had this problem when I was younger. Finally I realized I was happier when I didn't have a bunch of things to do weighing on me. I guess my advice boils down to:

1. Simplify: Cut the fat out of your life... unnecessary complications, bills, negative people, automate everything, etc. Less is more.

2. Focus: Go skydiving (or equiv near-death experience) occasionally, it will put all your problems into perspective immediately (as tiny).

3. Perspective: Travel, for the same reasons.

4. Strategy: * Do one thing-you-don't-want-to a day. * Doesn't sound like much, does it? Well, that's 7 boring things done per week and they add up quickly. If that still isn't enough, see #1.

5. Get pro. help if you are still depressed, but you may not need to after the above.

Extra cred: Dale Carnegie's book about enjoying your life is a fun read.
Hi everyone, I wrote this article. It's the first time I've done anything like it. I wish I knew more techniques of static analysis in particular, although I have a long way to improve all around. I'd love to hear comments and/or questions about anything written. I didn't want to put the specimen itself on my site for obvious reasons, but anyone here that is interested is welcome to ask and I'll be happy to share. Thanks for taking the time to read!
What lessons have you learnt from outsourcing?
Is it really true that the web app was getting no traffic? I know quite a few non-tech people that use it to follow blogs
We also thought about saying Aspirin-As-A-Service.

The truth is, it's a much more dangerous risk for us to die without anyone knowing we exist.
Cambridge University Reveals psychological profiling based on Facebook 'likes'.
Dropbox acquires email app Mailbox
What is the number 1 question a startup founder is asked?
For niflet.com I skip sites that don't have an RSS / Atom feed. It's maybe 2% of them. For political sites maybe 10%; it seems a lot of those sites predated WordPress et al. You probably know this already, but for WordPress try adding "/feed" to the URL. This works for lots of other non-WP sites too. The blog author might not even know what an RSS feed is.
A company gets X in revenue from a product. Whether that X comes from ad revenue or subscription fees seems immaterial.
Dropbox Acquires Mailbox
How are they doing that technically?
UI-less sync scheme between numerous devices, simpler application backends as the work of actually aggregating (querying and parsing feeds, notifying, ...) was handled by Reader and the client just had to implement a UI to that.
Here is Vanguard's email contact form:

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/ContactUsSecureEmail?isCont...
Thank you.

In the spirit of understanding, can I try to summarise your points as I get them

1. Programming as it is currently practised is still very focused on implementation / procedural.

2. Anyone who uses a DSP / other system to perform a task they want (agency) is doing some form of programming, and that is valid, as it is a step on the path of literacy.

3. The path of literacy might not be towards the current endpoint of neckbeards and Assembler and 10 years to be good.

4. There is likely to be new languages, new systems that will enable people to do programming / achieve agency at different points and with different degrees of abstraction

5. Its Lisp isn't it :-)

I agree with you. Which tells me I may have misunderstood!

But I am perfectly happy to agree that some form of code literacy is a good thing, and that the language of the future has not yet been invented I am also quite prepared to believe.

Aw, hell, it is Lisp :-)

Edit: I like the idea of OLPC etc being about how to meddle.
I suspect that the machine you are referencing might be the one in Nand2Tetris - an interesting project that takes undergrads from Nand gates through to compilers and languages on a virtual machine interpreting the CPU built from the interpreted Nands.
GOTO and weird optimization may be very useful in some circumstances but there's a case where they'll never be desirable: security.

I'm 100% that the future security-wise is stuff like esL4 (the L4 micro-kernel, but which has been formally verified to be free from a lot of common mistakes typically leading to security exploits).

So before criticizing things as "toys" because they have don't have goto etc. you have to realize that there are ends (security) that do justify quite some means.

And don't get me wrong: I've done my faire share of 680x0 and 80x86 assembly coding and just loved to be "in control" of everything. It gave me a sensation of power.

But now I much prefer to look far ahead and dream about the days where we'll be able to use provers on not just micro-kernels that are 7000 lines long (and already on such a trivial number of lines already find hundreds of potential security exploits which have all been fixed) but also use provers on much bigger programs.

So saying: "I want to be able to modify a lookup table by accessing two bytes as if they were a 16-bit word so that on the next pass I'll automagically JMP to this place" (I'm just making that up) is, IMHO, a bit shortsighted when considering the real problems we face today.

Most people have way enough power and totally underused computers (often with many cores idling). The problem is hardly CPU perfs.

I'm not trading security for performance.
Yes!

And if whoever in the government is handling that really wants to be evil, he can give your debt to third degree cousins.

Of course, those third degree cousins can sue back to not get the debt, and there is a fair chance for they to win and avoid it... But if the government is hell bent enough in taking your money (usually happens when you debt is taxes debt) it can try that.

Brazil has two types of heirs, mandatory, and others. You cannot give more than 50% of your inheritance to others in your will, the point of that law is to now allow someone to give money to a distant cousin instead of wife, kids or parents. The issue is that this law summed with the debt inheritance, means that distant cousins are potential (But not mandatory) heirs of your debt, and evil enough government lawyers can make it happen...

My guess is that this was setup because Brazillians had the habit to go in debt sprees when they knew they would die (for example, guy know he has cancer, then he buys a yatch and enjoys himself until he dies, this law is to prevent that, but the side effects are terrible).
Hackers and technical folks and just the kind of people who hang out here on HN tend to be very inflexible and on the side of being "technically correct" over being "right".

From a security perspective, this should never happen. The author is absolutely, positively, without a doubt correct in his stance on this. Being called in such a way and having very little and/or weak security protocols as described is not only a security breach waiting to happen but it really is, as the author points out, training people to get phished.

But there's a bigger picture here. And that's the picture of Vanguard as a company having years of experience in talking to, working with, dealing with, and learning about their customers. Just like the manager says in the post, they need to balance security with service (no they're not mutually exclusive but they're not one and the same either).

In the end I think this okay. It's not technically correct but it seems like its the right thing to do. Now the reason for this call is never described (which gives some credence to the theories here that this actually never happened along with a lack of other details) but assuming here for the sake of argument that the call was just to talk about something that isn't of super high significance (let's say it was a sales call to upsell something) then a couple of security questions should suffice. If it's to talk about a 10 million dollar bank transfer to some off-shore account then maybe we should be in an uproar here.

Another point to consider is who is responsible for security? Obviously the company that hold your data should be reponsible for the safety of that data and should have measures in place to prevent fraudulent access to it. But then there's also the responsibility of the customer who needs to take care of their account credentials and make sure that if someone accesses one of their private accounts somewhere that there isn't a domino effect. I don't think it's Vanguard's responsibility to make sure that all of their customers use different, long, and random passwords on their Gmail and Facebook and what have you so that one day someone can access one of those and get into their Vanguard account. I mean, that's certainly a nice-to-have but customers have a responsibility to secure their data just the same as companies do. We want to be educating regular folks about security all the time but the moment it comes time for them to apply what we're teaching them we turn around and act like they're off the hook for being ignorant of security best practices. It's a double standard if you ask me.

I know we all like some good old fashioned manufactured outrage but before we get the pitchforks out let's look at the big picture, and not just one aspect of the issue here.
Maybe OT:

When RSS gained popularity I got myself a decent RSS reader and subscribed to a lot of feeds. What happened was that after a short period of time I had +1000 unread posts. At this point I stopped using RSS for a while because it was just too much noise. A few months back I discovered RSS again for myself but this time I did not subscribe to every site I found interesting. There are a lot of news sites which I visit often and they also have a feed in most cases. I do not subscribe to them because I visit them anyway and they are most of the time high volume feeds. Instead I only subscribe to sites (almost always interesting blogs from fellow developers) who write a new post maybe three times a year or so and I only subscribe to blogs from developers/people who only post if they have something very important to say. This made RSS useful to me again because I would never every remember to visit all those sites twice a year… If I see a unread item in my RSS reader I know that I have to read this post soon because it will blow my mind again.

Who of you is doing it in a similar way?
Well yes the words are up to the site owner, but I think you underestimate just how hard it is to explain what RSS does, and why you'd want to do it. Honestly if you can find a way to do that in something short enough to put on a button, then you've pretty much solved the future of RSS.
And now all my scripts fail.
Elon Musk Refuses To File Patents
TortoiseGit supports them both. Even if none of them did...anemic? Really? I didn't think I was assuming; it was fairly self evident to me, based on the amount of hyperbole being too damn high.
I don't want to run in to a discussion on economic theory, but P/E has to be taken with a pinch of salt when looking at large firms.

Risk is the important thing for investors, P/E is normally a measure of value vs Growth expectation, but the Price will always be waited by the risk.

No matter how you cut it, people expected something from Apple with the stock valuation of last year. People are worried there is a trend of Apple loosing its ground, even loosing its after sales prodcuts things like music for example for Spotify.

I'm not suggesting that everyone assumed explosive growth, and $1400 a share by 2014, just that share prices are based on future expectation, not present state.

People (well the market) obviously that to be something more than they do now.
Going left while you know you shoud to go right
Actually if you look at the market share figures, they're both expanding their market share without having to really go for each other due to the growth in smartphone usage (that is them picking up users from feature phones or new phone users) and those migrating away from BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and so on (between Samsung and Apple they're currently squeezing everyone else out of the market).

As things stand globally both are growing share of market, revenue, activations and total installed user base.

In terms of trend however there are a few interesting things happening. Over the past couple of months Android actually dropped overall US market share for the first time since if started taking off. In absolute terms it still grew, but less than the market as a whole.

The market got bearish on Apple sometime last year. What's really interesting though is it was about the same time that, in the US at least, the iPhone started growing faster than Android, a trend that has not only continued since then but has actually been increasing: http://twitter.yfrog.com/oe7etlp

The TL;DR version: Most investment funds, run by the same organisations who employ / fund / listen to these analysts, under perform the market. While what they say is interesting, the fact they don't get something might not be that big a deal.
NetNewsWire was huge if you were a Mac user, and was released in 2002. NewsGator had a Windows app and paid syncing service, and bought NNW (it's changed hands a few times, now at Black Pixel). Both of these predated Google Reader and were paid apps.

There are also plenty of paid apps in the mobile space that sync with Google Reader.
Gmail sends a Sender: header with the account's primary email address, which some email programs treat as the "actual" sender. Some mail programs display this as "From alias@example.com on behalf of primay@example.net" and then those programs use the primary as the return address.

According to Google, they don't include this header if you upgrade to Google Apps for Business.
Why does this make big headlines? Does it somehow violate Google's Terms and Conditions or is it something that hasn't been done before?

P.S. I am not an Android user, so I might be unaware of obvious benefits/harms.
Can anyone tell me why every one of these articles has this quote or a similar on in there?

"We’ve heard people say that RSS is a thing of the past, and perhaps in its current incarnation it is..." I've seen about a dozen posts on HN about Google Reader being retired so RSS readers clearly still appeal to at least this demographic. My girlfriend will also dearly miss Google Reader so it can clearly appeal to non-technical folks as well...

What has replaced RSS readers, Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? As someone who doesn't use social media I would say no. Google Reader is, for me, still the quickest way to get interesting news / information. I don't understand why all the articles state RSS is dead as a fact.
Agreed -- anti-competitive law is pretty clear on the fact that scale and market dominance in one market cannot be leveraged to gain significant market share in another market for this exact reason
The asking should come before the axeing.
Not sure if the acquisition makes strategic sense for Dropbox, but at least I have some confidence that Mailbox wouldn't simply disappear: Dropbox core product has a freemium model, and they are very successful company.
I am doing exactly that and I'm very picky with my subscriptions.

To put it in perspective:

> Since March 20, 2007 you have read a total of 9,085 items.
Exactly because Facebook cannot monetize it, nor could Facebook deliver their advertisements.
Why did they call? You focus much of the post on security best practices which is indeed very important but I think it would also be very helpful to know the reason they called to begin with. There's a huge difference between someone calling in the way you described to say "it looks like based on your account activity you might want to buy our XYZ service" and someone calling to say "this to confirm that $10MM bank transfer to that offshore account, now what's your account number again?".
GOD DAMNIT NOT AGAIN!

I really do hope that they progress on the path they started instead of just acquiring mailbox for the talent. I know they said that they would but thats what we heard about Sparrow when they were bought by Google and the results sucked.

Good luck to everyone on the mailbox team, I love your product, please don't kill it.
I'm skeptical that it would be enough to even come close to pay the engineers working on the project, never mind supporting the data storage for all the users
I would suggesting seeing a psychologist. I hesitate to offer advice given the huge variability in brain chemistry I've encountered. People are just inherently wired differently a lot of the time.

That said, and take this with the grain of salt that I don't know you, stop judging your progress against your peers. Everyone has their own life, and the best thing you can possibly do is to find some activity that you honestly enjoy and do that. Who cares if your high school friends are in top law schools? Some of the most interesting people I've ever known didn't bother graduating because they just basically weren't into it.

Unfortunately, your resources are probably limited, but if you can I'd suggest taking some time off to travel to a new environment (if you're social enough to interact with people there). A change of environment seems to do wonders for a lot of people with similar motivational issues.
Dropbox acquires white-hot mobile email client Mailbox
I like the idea, but I wish that they would do something about the Android app. It's supposed to be on par with the iPhone app, but I have found it to be much slower, and a lot of the internal links and notifications seem to take me to non-existent pages. On top of that, it seems like no matter what my actual network state, I occasionally see "Network error" at the top of the page before it actually does anything.
This is unhelpful.

It doesn't explain WHY. Alright so the file is in the staging area and needs to be committed to a repository, ok. What is the significance of this? Is a staging area a type of repository? What happens if I don't commit? Why have the add and commit stages at all - what value does that provide? Why not just have stuff either committed or NOT? etc.

Unfortunately it is one of those learning exercises written by someone who has forgotten what it was like to learn this stuff, so they presume the reader has tons of "obvious" information (or more importantly a mental model for how a git-like system SHOULD work).

Or maybe it was written with a particular audience in mind (i.e. people moving over from a different version control system).
How about NOT going down the medical route entirely?

Instead, you're the first Happiness-As-A-Service (HAAS) company in the world!
I have an easy fix: don't have soldiers doing police work.
PyCon 2013: Everyone gets a Raspberry Pi
Jesse Noller announced at the PyCon 2013 welcome talk that all attendees would recieve a Raspberry Pi Model B
This is a very clever move by Dropbox.
This is a nice interview. I attended a one day workshop on Datomic taught by Stu Halloway this summer, which was great, but a post like this is prolly a better intro to the main concepts.

The way that Datomic is accretive over time is the key data model decision, and it lets each temporal state of the DB be a value. From the article:

"The most novel thing here is "retrieves the database". In Datomic, you have the concept of the "value of the database" - the database as a whole, as a data structure. The Peer Library is responsible for pulling as much of that data structure into memory as necessary to satisfy your queries.

In this way, your queries run largely in your application rather than in a central database server, allowing for easy read scalability. It gives more power to your application rather than keeping all the power in a central server, where you have to worry about bottlenecks.

Finally, Datomic does not implement its own storage solution but instead relies on storage as a service, allowing you to choose which storage backend you use. Right now, the following backends are supported:

The filesystem
DynamoDB
Riak
Couchbase
Infinispan
SQL database"
The guessing and notifying that youtube keeps wanting to push is so annoying. At some point they have to learn that what are friends like has no relevance on what we like.
i also think this line of thinking is silly. the Googler is assuming a set of features is what made Google Reader the best RSS reader on the market. while that is true in essence (features do add up to the overall product) i don't think any 1 feature in reader was killer. rather, the collection of all the features made the app itself killer.
"Free is so often bad..."

Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps, etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared base of stuff on which to build.

But when it comes to services, totally free can sometimes be bad. That's because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping."

Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which (prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of total IE dominance of the web.

Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping. If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge in order to steer all traffic to them.

I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on this.
netcat comes pretty close...