skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last time I used Django, I loved everything except class based views. I thought my view code was much clearer and easier to work with after I switched to FBV's. I see the book touches on both methods, but overall is it opinionated one way or the other?
Any tips for rendering text? I'm doing a similar project for Quake 2 with Julia[1]. I haven't tackled text yet, but I probably will need to soon.

[1]: https://github.com/jayschwa/Quake2.jl
Thanks for the reply, I hope you didn't think I was just being a naysayer. This seems like a critical problem for marketing, if you have two audiences and you're catering to the smaller one. If it were me (grain of salt) I would go all in on something like "Zapier gives your employees superpowers".
Offshoring is despicable. I think it's germane.
My understanding of the original idea for derivatives was apportioning risks into pieces that could be independently valued by different experts/markets. For example, say a company wanted to finance an X factory in Y country. The original lender would have to be an expert at evaluating risk in the X market and the Y currency market, which is a small pool of investors. If derivatives could split the risk into X market risk and Y currency risk and sell them separately to specialists in each risk, then the factory was much more likely to find funding, at lower rates, etc. The "world" ended up with a factory that would not have been built, with all the associated wealth, which is positive sum. Am I missing something that makes derivatives negative sum in this case?
Taking a look at it just because. Don´t mind me.
That's awfully pedantic. By this definition there are no tickers on CNBC at all!
It's because they originally designed around a QFN packaged chip - later switching to a flip chip BGA (FCBGA) package.

There was (and is) hardware on the market that could be adapted to work - but the folks who sell hardware based AES256 applications tend to deal only in the financial/military circles.

Being 'first to market' in btc ASICs didn't seem to be their top priority (much to many peoples dismay).
Show HN: vim-autoformat-rails. Format Ruby/HTML/CSS with a single command
Amplifying your different-not-worse theme:

I sometimes wonder whether the human species would be better off if everyone had a strong case of what we call Asperger's.

So many tribal/cultural conflicts arise because of people's ability to connect strongly... Consider religious zealoutry and jihad, and other culturally-derived sources of conflict.

Our ability and willingness to be led (at a scope unique in the animal kingdom) has been a great organizing force in human history; but it has also been very destructive. The jury's still out as to whether it's a net positive.

If we all had strong Asperger's, would logic and reason rule the day more often than it does? Would that in turn be net positive?

Food for thought: Would we then need to treat non-Asperger's people as having a disorder of their own? The question sharply illuminates the true purpose of medically treating someone with Asperger's and other autism-spectrum "disorders": To help them fit in better with the majority and hopefully be happier. Not to "fix" them.
The Battle of Modern Javascript Frameworks
Yes, that's true. In fact, that's true of all employees at all companies (just replace "trader" with "employee" and "bank" with "company").

However, we do not know that this trader was underpaid relative to other traders. All we know is that he was unhappy with his bonus. Once you join the Manhattan rat race, you'll find all sorts of ways to be unhappy with your bonus no matter how big it is and regardless of whether you are paid the same relative to your peers or not. In Manhattan, the sky is the limit as far as apartment prices go, for instance. If you want a place just slightly nicer or in just a slightly more ideal location, after a certain point that might be an extra million right there. There's a culture of making everyone constantly feel poor, especially after a transition in the 1900s where it became hip to live in the city rather than out of the city.
"Without integrity, nothing works." That's not a law of the universe, and what does it even mean besides? Like, formally, what does it mean to economics? Sounds like nonsense to me.
They are not obligated to play by the rules and fairly compete with each other; if their goal is not to acquire bitcoins by mining but to disrupt the system by publishing problematic blocks, they don't raise the difficulty factor.

There are absolutely economies of scale for mining (it's just making and running custom hardware, a classic economy of scale business), it's just the combination of low profitability and a small market [1] means it's not worth doing unless you're getting paid to attack the network.

[1] at the very peak pre-crash price, $341 million/year of revenue for mining every single block.
This is nonsense. With a future, for example, both sides lock in future cash flows and can lead to a reduction in risk for each party. Reduction in risk for each party can be beneficial for each party.

You might as well say that buying milk is a zero sum game, because the milk is either over or under priced. That's just wrong. Financial securities have more to them than just their price.
The fact it can be used to quickly do safe micropayments online is a fundamental value.
Computing at CERN
"Physicists must sift through the 15 petabytes or so of data produced annually to determine if the collisions have thrown up any interesting physics."
Many comparisons have been made between fiat currency and Bitcoins, but to my mind that's wholly missing the point.

The Bitcoin protocol represents a way of digitally transferring a scarce resource without the need for a central authority. I suspect this is going to be a big deal eventually, because when we created a protocol for digitally transferring information without the need for a central authority, we wound up with the Internet.

Comparing Bitcoin to a fiat currency like the dollar is a little like comparing TCP/IP to the English language.
Anyone can file a re-examination request ex parte. The EFF have done this occasion, without an actual filed lawsuit from the Patent Assertion Entity(PAE="troll") but it still costs thousands of dollars in fees and the EFF lawyers time.
Just be aware that I'm going to either bring on a paywall ($5/month) or shut it down eventually.
...all the attention and people buying it hoping it will increase in value is exposing a lot of people to it that otherwise wouldn't have been. It's helping it grow much faster.

I feel like the same thing happened with Beanie Babies. Look where they are now. Is that a good thing?
There was a similar website, where customers posted a bounty for the cheapest travel itinerary meeting certain conditions, and anyone could submit a plan meeting those conditions, to try and win the bounty. Does anyone remember what it was called?
All currencies achieve credibility through hype - if it's going to work expect much more.
The best way to print name badges from an Excel spreadsheet
My understanding is that when conducting bitcoin transactions you can establish the fee you're willing to pay, the miners can optionally prioritize based on those fees. Theoretically it's possible that you'd have a transaction never verified or verified after a great period of time in the blockchain because your fee was set too low.
> Because if you had a choice what would you store your money in?

That's actually noted as one of the problems with a deflationary economy. People tend to store their capital instead of spending it or investing it, which puts a hamper on economic growth (or even maintaining the economic status quo). If your job depends on receiving income then you can appreciate why it also depends on other people spending money.

> It also insures that bitcoins can never artificially be devalued by any central organization.

Countries have actually sometimes arranged to devalue their own currency to help with the local economy by boosting exports, so in that sense it is beneficial to have a central organization in your country's control to do that. Given the ongoing economic crises in Europe I'm just not sure how good an idea it is to have economic policy so completely decoupled from currency policy.

But on the other hand that feature of Bitcoin does make it very useful as a collectible or commodity. You can "invest" in it without worrying that the Central Bank of Satoshi will make your dilute your investment tenfold or worse.
Are personal moments worthless? To marketers, yes. Let's keep it that way.
CampBX web interface is terrible, but I admit, ought to be a competitor since they at least appear to be run better than gox. TradeHill's first act ended badly. In Act II they have a min 10k deposit requirement.

I keep waiting for interesting news about coinlab's taking over mtgox, but so far, not much.
While it may be possible to value BitCoins that way, that's not the driving force behind current price tracking, any more than a 1933 double eagle or 1804 silver dollar affects the price of gold or silver.
I do it all the time in early stages of app development, moving between SQLite/MySQL/Postgres.

Once you get into production it's a different story. A good ORM makes it easy to swap to a different DB without need for code changes. What it does not help with is the much bigger problem of how to migrate the data, indicies, backups, replication, etc. that you'd have in place for a production database.
I think this is actually a great way of looking at it.
Well done, I love this stuff.
Will Software Eliminate Physical Retail? Not Quite.
This is news, but is it hacker news?
> That's awfully pedantic.

Welcome to HN.
PHP base64_decode()
Is there some reason to think a more "resilient" protocol is even possible? Can you even give a rigorous definition of the security properties these protocols are trying to achieve?

That aside, do you really think the government would not try to destroy Bitcoin even if it meant a new system replaced it? Have you not been paying attention to what happened with Megaupload? Governments are perfectly willing to attack systems even when they know the systems will be replaced, just to disrupt the users of the system and pressure people to avoid them.
Maybe you wouldn't get so flustered if you just mentally append " who want it" to the end of phrases like "Programming literacy for all". I mean, is it really so bad to make it as easy and accessible as possible for someone who thinks they might want to get into writing software but doesn't know where to start?
> It's really a new and largely unexpected development.

Not really, pay to play gaming has been around for a lot longer than smart phones and the associated apps. However, it's questionable how much Apple tried to foresee what the future use of IAPs would be.

Before the first highways were built, I doubt people would have expected hotels and fast food restaurants to become an almost parasitic infection around off ramps, but they did.

It's often more about the idea than what the idea can do.
Thanks for this question! The answer is complicated. :D

Let me tell you first why it does not help! In order to build a rainbow table, we must be able to build a lookup table (since they're just compressed lookup tables). But a lookup table is basically a brute force attack on a certain category of passwords! So, if your password would fall to a modern rainbow table, it can be brute-forced by modern computational clusters. Salting does not change that. Intrinsically the password is no more secure than it was before. (To make it more secure, use bcrypt, scrypt, or pbkdf2. Seriously, even PHP has pbkdf2 nowadays, you have no excuse[1].)

Now let me mitigate that naysaying a bit. If you salt every password with a random 12-character base64 string, you do indeed prevent building a lookup table for the database. And that's actually not bad. Security is best measured not in bits or in operations, but in dollars. If the value of the information is much smaller than the cost to crack it, you'll defeat a rational attacker.

Rainbow tables can be built in a highly parallel way, with attackers pooling their resources and attacking multiple systems. So it will generally cost more to brute-force a password than it will to break it with a rainbow table: the rainbow table lookup can be done with one CPU; but brute forcing may require a botnet or lots of GPUs.

[1] Okay, there is one excuse: you might want to be able to do password administration from phpMyAdmin using only built-in MySQL functions. If you are stuck in this particular case the REPEAT() and SHA1 commands can have a similar effect:

create function pw(salt char(12), password varchar(255)) returns char(40)
return sha1(repeat(concat(salt, sha1(password)), 100000));

but if you're not in this case, use something better.
I have a noob question if someone can answer it. It seems to me that mining is a computationally wasteful exercise.
Why don't crypto-currencies just reward the computations needed to keep and confirm transactions, which is actually an economically beneficial service?
Agreed. In conversations with data scientists looking to hire, we've never discussed Kaggle aside from "wow they reeeeeally focus on that evaluation metric."

In fact, our conversations quickly turn to the Netflix Prize, where first place won the competition with an algorithm that could not be ported to production, and we discuss how poorly these competitions map to reality.

None of the data scientists I know hire based on Kaggle score. Several don't even think positively of Kaggle.
I had the exact same experience, only 25 or so years later.

I learned how to program in Basic on a Casio25 calculator, and later on a TI82 (the Casio couldn't do key polling, and my parents wouldn't buy me a new calculator just for programming. So I broke it on purpose to get a new one. Sorry mom! I later got a TI-83, while all my friends had overpowered TI89-92; the underpowered nature of the TI-83 felt more romantic and elegant to me.)

2 friends and I got really into programming, making tons of games in BASIC. I made a grid based SimCity clone, a turn by turn clone of [1], a very slow dungeon crawler inspired by Diablo (my parents were fairly antivideogames, so my way of experiencing the games I wanted to play was to program clones of them), a flexible "engine" for text adventures (I was really into pen and paper RPGs but none of my friends were into it), etc.

Then one day we discovered assembly, and our mind was blown. We would sneakily use the library computers to print z80 reference sheets; it was awesome.

Middle & high school were awful times all around for me, but this definitely made it better.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegroun...
Mass WordPress Brute Force Attacks? - Myth or Reality
> In the early days of Twitter, most people couldn't think of anything useful coming out of tweeting 140 characters.

Pretty bad example. Twitter's been around for quite a while, and I still can't find anything useful to do with it. There's way more immediate benefit from owning a 3D printer, even at this stage, than a Twitter account.
Investors will generally only be keen to buy into an IPO if they know that there is the possibility of selling the stock in the future in an open market.
I wish they would, but the dev team of Ratchet ignores me and it's frickin obnoxious/frustrating. I sent them a link but no go. Whatever! I can only make this as best as possible. Thanks for your kind words!
Thanks.
I agree that anybody could answer these questions, but a fool's answers to these questions should be totally different from millionaire's.

Thanks for the 2 questions, I'd add these to my list.
Sure. What's the alternative? What did you think happened when law enforcement investigated serious computer crimes? If a financial institution has a key database popped and the Secret Service is called in to investigate, was it your expectation that the victim was required to carefully anonymize and blind all the data in that database? How could any criminal investigation work if that was the requirement? (Cliff's Notes: That's not the requirement).

The bill as written, even before the narrowing amendments, acknowledges the risk this subthread discusses. It does that by trying to define "cyber threat information", as information directly implicated in an attack. In the sponsor's notes on the bill on the House site, they explain that the definition of "protected entity" was changed specifically to prevent individual people from being considered as entities, so that person-specific data couldn't be handed over under CISPA authority.

The basic problem the bill addresses is this: large companies are under continuous attack. Let's stipulate that attacks come in two flavors: DDOS and targeted malware.

In both cases, there is clear utility in allowing companies to collaborate with other companies and with the government.

In the DDOS case, you want to share NetFlow information with your upstream ISPs and with DDOS trackers, because those are the organizations that generate black-hole and IP filtering rules, and they all work better if they have lots of different vantage points to work from. At the very least, you want to push sources back up to your immediate upstream providers so they can soak them up on their infrastructure rather than saturating your uplinks.

In the malware case, you want to share forensic information that would help identify (a) the vulnerability the malware exploits, (b) the C&C system the malware is using, (c) any evidence of the source of the malware, and (d) forensic information that would help investigators discern the intent of the malware.

In both cases, your company's general counsel is apt to inform you that the legal risk of sharing just that information is potentially unbounded, because nobody can predict exactly what claims could be made under ECPA, SCA, DPPA, HIPAA, FERPA, &c; nobody even knows what traces of information, overt or statistical, might be lurking in NetFlow.

So the situation we have today is that there is information sharing when attacks happen, but much of it is sub rosa, and you have to be in the right clubs to get access to the right sharing networks.

It does not make intuitive sense to me that electronic privacy should mean that basic low-level systems information incident to a real attack should incur unbounded legal risk when shared with other companies directly involved in mitigating those attacks.

You might disagree, and that's fine. But the notion that CISPA is actually intended to allow NSA to read your email is just not supported by the language of the bill, by any advocacy for the bill, or by any of the bill's amendments, and the problem the bill is addressing is a real problem (I have some limited professional exposure to it).
There's the TechCrunch deadpool.

http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/
When does Ruby gets supported?
(THOMAS being the Library of Congress document management system).
Is it a new style? It seems inconsistent within itself... for example sometimes the code starts one a new line after the opening brace, sometimes it starts on the same line, sometimes the closing brace is on the same line sometimes it's not. I don't know enough of Rust to know whether this means anything or the coder is just being sloppy.
Form Follows Function - "Architecture as Narrative"
This will probably seem obvious afterwards...but if you sign a contract with someone to provide a good or service for $0 and then fail to do so, that could be considered fraud.
>Lehman was emphatically NOT staffed by the best and brightest -- it collapsed.

"Lehman collapsing" might be unrelated to "individuals at Lehman succeeding". You make a big gamble and if you succeed, there is big bonus. If you lose, there are no financial penalties (at worst, you lose your job which should not be a big deal for someone who has already made millions. Like, Dick Fuld).
In fact, in absence of regulations like bonus clawback or multi-year bonus vesting, folks on Wall St. seem to have behaved in a completely rational way until 2008 crash.
There is no intersection between the NSL controversy and CISPA. CISPA is entirely opt-in. Google has to volunteer the information; it can't be coerced into doing so by the government. Even if Google wanted to share emails, voluntarily, it would not find authority to do so in CISPA, because CISPA scopes the kinds of information that can be shared to data incident to actual cyber attacks.
Sounds like AppGratis showed apps in a way that was completely different from the App Store. The App Store provides an immense pile of crap, which is in front of another immense pile of crap, and...repeat. You get the idea.

AppGratis shows a small number of apps each day and says here -- look at these -- I think they are good.

Some subset gets there because the developer pays, but my impression is that most do not.

Users wouldn't keep looking at AppGratis if everything was crap. There's a balance to be had.

On 5.6 -- if AppGratis sends ONE notification each day that says "new things to look at", is that advertising, promotion, or direct marketing? How is that different from any other news item push?

I think Apple was disturbed by the effect AppGratis could have on their charting system.
I believe with most psychological or mental conditions, the phrase "a person with ..." is used, putting the person before the condition. Just like you don't call a person with mental retardation a "retard."
Clues Emerge to How Twitter Will Promote Music
Congrats on making your product more and more beautiful and useful! By the way, you could have the top logo on your blog point to your site (it seems to be a popular request these days) :-)
He's too busy jet-setting around the country for that shit.
What you described (living out of a sleeping bag) is garden variety poverty. What people have forced upon them by circumstances, not something they really choose consciously as a way of making life better.
Most of the "to do X in browser Y" apply to older browsers (cough IE6 cough) and is rarely an issue in newer browsers which have been much better about following standards. If you use automated testing and do cross browser testing via Karma or JS TestDriver, you'll spot the very rare cross browser gotcha.

TBH with an attitude like that, you're keeping yourself dependent on jQuery and therefore preventing yourself from progressing as a professional software engineer.
This is a great bit of nostalgia, not just for Quake 3 but because quite a while back (2000-2001-ish) I wrote a Q3 BSP format renderer for the Nebula Device open source engine, written in C++. Sadly the code seems to be somewhat lost at this point. I don't have a local copy of it and some cursory searches for it aren't finding much, I suspect it exists in some now-obsolete branch of an SVN repo on SourceForge, but don't care enough to really go looking. Surprisingly there is still a tripod page with screenshots:

http://gmcbay.tripod.com/

Anyway, great work so far! I am curious why you're doing BSP rendering if your goal is to have a destructible/voxelized-style world, since the two things are on opposite ends of the spectrum of mutability.
Ask HN: Will Blink support &lt;blink&gt;?
Google Acquires smartphone data analysis startup behav.io
Google wants to build the Star Trek computer.
Hacker Claims He Can Hijack Any Airplane Using a Mobile App
>The Bitcoin protocol represents a way of digitally transferring a scarce resource without the need for a central authority.

Sure, but what you need is a way to exchange things without recourse to central authority. You can transfer bitcoins to the local bar, there's no way to ensure they transfer you back a drink. This is precisely why exchanges like Mt. Gox have become prominent - how else can you make sure the buyer transfers dollars to your bank account? So all you have are donations without recourse to central authority - which sounds a lot less revolutionary.