skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the fox/henhouse analogy is as foregone as you describe. Say what you will about the CIA and the law, but there are lots of restrictions on their work inside US borders (where much AWS infrastructure is located).

Furthermore, while I'm acting mostly on assumption here, I doubt the agency is going to Amazon because they can't build and/or afford their own setup.
In the late 90's I took an intro psyc course and the prof wrote his own online textbook, mass 300 student lecture and we all had to "subscribe" to his book for $40 each, he taught 3 sections a semester. He had $72k a year on sales, because you couldn't pass the course without the "book". It was one the most god awful eye bleeding design I've ever seen. But, yes you CAN make decent money off selling your own textbook to students on the 101 level.
Pinboard does, for $25/year. I've tried to find a self-hosted solution, but haven't been able to do so yet.
Free works, but for whom? Certainly a lot of companies are doing well by giving away everything, but how long will the acquihire exit strategy remain open? Furthermore, the user is getting absolutely screwed. There have been a lot of notable services that have popped up over the last few years and then some big company came in to pick up the talent and dumped the product and subsequently its users.

I've been fortunate to only get screwed twice, first with Gowalla and now with Google Reader. Although I used Google Reader for longer and much more frequently than Gowalla, in a way I feel less screwed (if at all) by Google. Google Reader is a very portable product by its natural connection to RSS. Google has also taken a few important steps towards making data portable for it's millions of users.

It took less than a minute to transfer to another service. I'm testing out Feedly for now, but I would rather host my own RSS reader and take control myself. If a consumer product provides adequate data portability the idea of hosting my content for me is something I feel perfectly comfortable doing.

My point is its less concerning that everything is free, but more how anti-competitive these services are with my data. If I can at any moment retain control and back up everything or move it over to a competing service, I'm okay with investing time in adopting a free service.

However, moving your data between services as they inevitably shutdown does seem like a short term fix. I think Marco's idea for a mirror of the reader API is a great long term solution[1]. For the average user, people would probably opt for a popular host. For people who want to host it themselves (probably a minority), they could do so with ease.

[1] http://www.marco.org/2013/03/14/baby-steps-replacing-google-...
Totally agree, and I think part of the popularity of this whole 'web application' swing is because browsers like Chrome et al are so well sandboxed also. It makes it almost entirely risk free to automatically download and run random code (javascript), something that would be entirely unthinkable if done natively in today's environments.
It seems to me that it's a good idea to have an automated sales process and as much self-service as makes sense, anyway, for the customers who want to work that way.
That's an interesting point. A major complaint about DMCA has always been that it allows copyright owners to criminalize otherwise legal acts by adding DRM. But the usual examples have always been fair use rights, like making quotations, or researchers and libraries trying to preserve historical documents. Those uses have always been "collateral damage", which the copyright owners didn't wasn't specifically interested in preventing.

But with this ruling, it is now clear that the thing that region codes aim to prevent would be completely legal except for the DMCA's circumvention provision. So in some sense, this is a much more blatant example of copyright owners writing their own laws.
I'm the developer of ShareJS (sharejs.org) - and we have realtime JSON editing too.

The technology is compatible, and it should be pretty easy to make ShareJS compatible with the GDrive client API.
KISS web based rss reader
Good point - I had never thought of it as friends vs. non-friends before - just professional vs. non-professional. So maybe the filter should be "is this something I would say around a stranger regardless of whether the environment is professional or non-professional?" Still, for far too may, I think the answer might still be yes. It's as if people think there is some sort of sound-proofing around them - or don't care that there isn't.
In that scenario, once you've adjusted for the risk associated with investment you'd give up all hope of "making money" - with no aggregate monetary growth(1) it would be like "investing" in a game of poker (sure, you might back the surprise winner but...). It's amazing how much less risk averse you are if you lose ~2% per annum from sitting on cash and you can make money from a slightly-worse-than-average investment portfolio (and there's a 2% return for an average investment)

Arcane hypothetical edge cases are unhelpful for exposition. It's easier to look at the conventional alternative: everybody in the world uses a means of payment which diminishes in value at a slow but stable rate. Now the average person that invests in production gains, and the average person holding cash is incentivised to convert that cash into something they want or funding the production of something others want. Isn't this better?

(1)strictly speaking we're better off looking at money as a flow, in which case the velocity of circulation comes into place, but a fixed money supply certainly wouldn't induce that to increase....
Security (e.g. theft resistance) and UX are pretty poor right now.
I think it's best to rephrase that data and say "using a real credit card makes the transaction look more legit". (But it should be obvious that fraudsters want to "protect their privacy". In this case, it's the difference between going to jail and not!)
Pinboard.in does this too. The site's founder, Maciej Cegłowsk has a nice post comparing Pinboard's archives to other sites': http://blog.pinboard.in/2010/11/bookmark_archives_that_don_t.... (Note: May be out of date.)
I also really like that you don't need login information with sites like Satoshi Dice and bitbet:

http://bitbet.us/

Your sending address is your authentication. So frictionless, so good.
While they might lose the extreme tin foil hat customers, this deal will only serve to enhance their trustworthiness as a company. "The CIA trusts Amazon with THEIR data...heck, so should I." etc.
... and then he'd just be re-implementing (highcharts)[http://highcharts.com]
Thanks HN: Graphdat hits 500 accounts
Logically and financially, sure... but try telling your fiancée-to-be that.
Keep in mind that it is both new and experimental.

If you are comparing them based on functionality and performance you are missing the point.

It is my opinion that this easily bests external implementations by reducing moving parts and removing the asynchronous nature of the updates to search indexes.

The text index is updated atomically and in real time. Best of all: it's not another part of your stack that needs to be setup and maintained.
In the last couple of months, Bitcoin has passed the phase of "BC is nature's way of teaching economics to nerds" and entered the phase of "BC is natures's way of teaching political power to nerds"

Reading through the recent Treasury Department guidance this morning, it looked to me like the U.S. is initially attacking where hard currency comes in and leaves the system -- no matter where in the world that takes place (plug: http://freedom-or-safety.com/blog/the-other-bitcoin-shoe-dro... )

I imagine they'll leave that decision out there for a while -- months or years -- before they start heavy enforcement. But enforcement is coming. And reading through the AJ link, it looks like BC is beginning to integrate quite nicely into the EU banking system.

So now I have an anonymous virtual currency -- that governments can track the movement of. Which might require special licensing, permits, and insurance to broker. Perhaps I'm missing the point here?

We're getting to the point where the big boys step in, and my bet is that it's not going to be comfortable for the people who started the whole thing. I expect more "integration" into the traditional banking system, at least until there's no value-add between cash and BC, and then we've reached our starting point. BC becomes nothing more than "collecting sharp sticks" in such a fashion as to be closely monitored by world governments.
Most people don't know/care about the statistical reality of pie charts and their lack of clarity. Maybe they are statistically proven to be bad at conveying differences in comparison to a bar graph, but if all you care about is the adoption of your charting API then you'd be a fool to not include pie charts. Sometimes being correct isn't the most important thing :)
It's linked within the article, but it's worth pointing out that "Have you ever tried to sell a diamond"[1] is very much worth your time, and has been discussed here many times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535611

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405698

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1110283

1: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...
Show HN: Vinder - a Vine search tool
Try sending her this article. I'd rather be single than marry someone who has so much more emotion than logic. To put it another way: If the ring is more important to the woman than I am, then she's not marrying me, she's marrying the ring. It's a huge red flag to me.
the ?apo and ?back links will do some nice statistics on click generation, and the numbers regarding user participation after first and second launch in an open source project will be good too.

might we see a paper coming in the future about this stunt? maybe an internal memo with a proper TPS report on how to maximize open source participation. of course release to the unnamed company internally only, let's call it Initech.
Anecdotally my fiancé specifically did not want an expensive ring and very much did not want a diamond. We're also trying to have the most cost effective wedding we can. We'd rather spend the money on a trip or a down payment on a house than on the wedding.
The Great Discontent: Trent Walton
I'd argue that telling someone "their new job was to look for a new job" is similar emotionally to a proper firing. Then what time contraint to you give this person? Someone will abuse the system.

I worked at a company who had an effective "no fire" policy, while it wasn't official, they just never fired to my knowledge. It was very frustrating being a competent employee there because the staff knew they wouldn't be fired and did very poor work--like the one person doing all the work in the school group.

Policies like this, while sounding pretty and caring, actually create poor workplace culture and punish your best employees.
I'm starting a project right now and Deployd seems like the only open-source Parse alternative. However, the fact that the last commit is from a month ago makes me uncomfortable. Anyone knows what's happening?
What other kind of behaviors would you find unacceptable for a man but not a woman? Do you consider yourself a sexist?
Reduced stress is an important quality of life factor. It has been shown to provide this, therefore it works.

"Spiritual well-being and coping. An analysis of 43 studies on people with advanced cancer noted that those who reported spiritual well-being were able to cope more effectively with terminal illnesses and find meaning in their experience. Major themes of spiritual well-being included self-awareness, coping with stress, connectedness with others, faith, empowerment, confidence, and the ability to live with meaning and hope."

http://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatmentsandsideeffects/com...
A Day with Ubuntu Touch
The same thing than purchasing something at 3am. Those are only behaviors associated with higher chances of fraud. With the models they work p(fraud|prepaid_card) > p(fraud|!prepaid_card)
Interviews of the worlds finest entrepreneurs.
I sent my GF the article :-D
Indeed.

"I came in here expecting firm proof that the CIA was using Amazon to spy on my Prime subscription."

While that's no doubt already happening, it's also abundantly obvious that Amazon is one of very few organisations that anyone, CIA or not, would go to for consulting/professional-services when setting up a large-scale in-house "cloud computing" infrastructure.

There's not a large pool of companies with demonstrated experience, apart from Amazon there's maybe Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Rackspace - I wouldn't add Apple to that list (since their "cloud" track record is pretty poor), from there you end up with vendor-lockin from options like IBM, Dell, and perhaps to a lesser extent Cisco.

Out of all of those options, Amazon seem to easily be the "best choice" if I were to be setting up a decade-long partnership to deploy a multi-data-center scale private cloud.
The Brackets 2013
Celebrate Your Achievements
I guess I should upload my script that does this with Octopress, and would probably work with Jekyll... Done: https://gist.github.com/nitrogenlogic/5200766
Mining arabic wikipedia metadata, phase1
i'm doing data mining for arabic wikipedia to see what's there in the metadata and i came up with the blocked users who's trying to damage the arabic content by adding inaccurate information without any source or trying to flame persons. This is phase1 for now and i'm working to get different results for other areas like modification behavior based on what's going on in the real word.
data source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
Wikipedia blocking policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy
Gah! The writer needs to read this:

http://www.its-not-its.info/
It's markdown, a few more sites use that syntax. HN uses formatdoc which is a very small subset of markdown.
(I didn't realize someone would reply. Here's my deleted post:)

Are young couples foregoing the rest of the expensive ceremony along with avoiding the ring? Could the price of wedding and engagement rings be one cause of the declining marital rate in the US?
What happened to the price of engagement rings over the past 10 years? How well does it mirror the prices of houses in the US?
Ask HN: What is Your "Reason Why" for Doing What You Do?
Mine:
1) personal freedom
2) contribution to humanity
3) a slice of immortality
4) to stick it to the haters (less so now that I have matured)
5) to provide social proof/a living example that one can set a goal and accomplish it (to inspire and encourage)

So what are yours?
Yeah, this is a big deal. It enables very interesting opportunities to create a map reduce engine that isn't awful or which requires Java.

People use Hadoop because they have to, not because it is great. Isn't it time for a better alternative now that the toothpaste is out of the tube re: map/reduce?

Java doesn't even have hash literal syntax! Why would you ever want to query document oriented data with it as your language of expression?
... which will drive away everyone overly impressed by flashy features and/or who like to whine about every little unimportant thing, like a social news site being down briefly, or not being able to see karma scores. Working as intended probably.
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch resigns, headed for Apple
Because many of the upvoters work for Forbes.
Data store show and tell: how we die
This to me is right mentality. If it is technology that is reusable in any/a lot of applications then it is a good candidate for being open-sourced. If it specific to what you are doing then it is probably not.
Each map reduce job can still only use one thread.

Before, under spider monkey, only one job could be executed per mongod instance. Now you can have many jobs executing in parallel on a single server instance but each one of them still only uses a single core.
Does anyone remember when they were young and you used to get 1st place, 2nd place, or 3rd place ribbons. Now they give you a ribbon for participating.

This "no fire" almost feels like the same. Granted I like the fact it encourages hiring managers to use their brain when hiring because a lot of organizations hire badly and this could potentially provide value.
> we just have to hope it is not used to spy but hey, I'd take the risk in trusting that they care more about our safety than spying on us all the time.

Given the federal government's past behavior regarding domestic communication, I think it might be more prudent to behave on the assumption that they ARE spying on us all the time. They tell us that they only look at the info they've collected about us if is connected with communications with overseas persons of interest -- but that implies that they will have already collected it. It's the only convenient way to have a well-populated history of activity for $Person.
Should startups do TDD?
Anecdote: I post links to my blog entries to G+ in case Google gives it undue weight in search ranking. A few people click +1, and it's in the search results of the few thousand people who have my G+ account in a circle.

But that's it. Anyone I find interesting enough to follow ends up in Feedly.
And how do you defraud a retailer using a prepaid gift card anyway?
I think we just have different expectations. I see HN as a YC-hosted water cooler - nothing more. It's not important to me that it be bug-free or fast or even up all the time. YMMV.
RGDP is such a subjective term that it's going to be impossible to design a decentralized currency that targets it. Maybe there's a more objective highly-correlate proxy that would work.

Then there's the problem that bitcoin is an international currency and GDP is a measure of national economies. As far as I know, Sumner does not have a theory for optimal monetary policy for a currency shared by a coalition of nations (i.e. the EU). The management of the Euro roughly stabilizes NGDP in Germany, but not in Italy and Spain which is the source of the current crisis in Europe.

On the other hand, an old-fashioned monetarist coin (constant rate of increase - "Friedman Coin") would be easy to implement and a lot better than a fixed supply coin. I'll leave others to figure out the "Sumner Coin".
(I work at Sift Science.)

We provide a score, and then let our customers decide what to do. The majority of our customers have a human review the user, and sometimes as part of that review, they'll do extra verification such as calling the user up. In other cases, customers will delay charging the credit card until they can verify it's legitimate.
I am a bit of a recovering hatter, CSPAN junkie, misanthrope. It's pretty debilitating. Reality is too broad to fully grasp, just get a sense of it and filter if necessary.
Heres the thread that tells all: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/c05...
I used to make posts like this. I'm starting to feel like these words will merge in the next 100 years, and either form will be correct for all usages.

This kind of errata in our language doesn't help us do anything and it just causes confusion and frustration.
JQuery key events for humans. Library release.
This would be somewhat easier to swallow without the picture of the boat.
"So here is a modest proposal: Let’s agree that diamonds are bullshit and reject their role in the marriage process. Let’s admit that as a society we got tricked for about century into coveting sparkling pieces of carbon, but it’s time to end the nonsense."

Hear hear, but good luck convincing zillions of single women that they'll be the first generation in living memory to miss out on their carbon.
There are aspects to beans that are hard to digest, and may inhibit the intake of some nutrients... that said, I'm not hardline on paleo, I do try to keep my net carbs under 100g/day, and consider my diet paleo-ish. I usually have a couple some eggs/sausage, lunch is usually a savory crepe (low carb wrap essentially), and 8-16oz of greens at dinner (huge salad, with a nominal amount of dressing).
(I work at Sift Science.)

One thing to note -- our system analyzes a whole bunch of patterns for each user. So just shopping at 3am by itself won't cause problems, nor will using a prepaid gift card by itself. But if a user matches multiple fraud patterns, then they're likely to get a high fraud score.
Code t-shirt
Isn't it much better to get very expensive gold jewelry instead of diamonds if one wants some?

That's also shiny and should keep its value much better (since gold requires nuclear reaction to make).
Can you make loans denominated in gold? I think you can. The volatility of bitcoin will settle down eventually. It's essentially the 19th century international gold standard for the 21st century.
Science and the English Language
Bitcoin apps spike in Spain as BTC touches $60 on Mt Gox
Ex Googler in the Bay Area looking for a challenging role at a company/startup
Not happy at my current job and I find myself doing routine jobs. I want to work with great people doing something more challenging and exciting. Looking urgently for opportunities in marketing/biz dev/operations/community. Have startup experience and have built large audiences in the past for online properties.
Thank you! I've been wondering how people do italics and the like. Your post helped me find an HN comment [1] which discussed the Arc source code for highlighting.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606843
2: http://arcfn.com/doc/app.html#markdown
I made the same point last night... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398602

I doubt there would have been a response.
I'm going to delete this post in 30 minutes, but man, I'm just screaming to say... it is so peculiar that he consistently kept making that mistake (along with a bunch of other ones). It looks like the guy is a graduate from Stanford's business school... and is the co-founder of Pricenomics. What the heck.

Edit: heh, I guess I won't delete it now (to preserve continuity of extant conversation). Sorry.
i wouldn't recommend trying to swallow the post... causes indigestion.
Using screen(1)
It's nice to be married to a woman who agrees. And a jewelers daughter at that!
This strikes me as a very dramatic title.
Maybe I'm spoiled as a nerdy (and interested in nerdy) gay guy, but I pity those in this thread saying that their fiancee wouldn't listen to reason about this. It slays me that "tradition" is so important to people that they will waste such vast amounts of money and prop up such a gross, violent industry in the face of reason.
>Using an old laptop with a old and depleted or soon to be depleted (especially when charged 100% constantly) wouldn't make me feel that comfortable

>and this assuming that is is sensible to use the power brick 24/7. Which I wouldn't assume.

True. I'd be hesitant to let this little Asus run 24/7 like this (it was intended as an information appliance/HTPC akin to the ones in the article anyway, not an always-on home server).

Regardless of the above I've got to note that it need not be an old laptop. I bought my 1001PX near new off an online auction. Its owner had only used it for a couple of months before breaking the screen. This isn't a singular case, either, and I have since seen similar units for sale (though I wouldn't advocate buying them in bulk).

>the coming i5 version also has hardware support for VNC

Now that's pretty cool! For all the potential security risks I'd like to see this feature catch on.
Some thoughts on complication and number of components. Isn't it a one of main paradigms of LISP and functional programming, that 100 functions over 1 dataset is better then 10 functions over 10 datasets?
Exactly, they're great for binary groups: <facet> yes/no
Because grammatical ability is correlated with business acumen?

Edit: sorry Clicks it was too tempting :)
> but try telling your fiancée-to-be that.

Yes, how else would you start reversing it?