skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, the alternative is something like what many of your competitors (such as Parse) ended up deploying for handling these kinds of security situations, which allows you to write "real code" that runs in the cloud as part of the verification process: if you could run the OT verification algorithm on Firebase's servers, it allows you to avoid the problem of being unable to store trusted snapshots, but continues to offer the advantages of having someone else manage the complexity of operating the server and handling synchronizing the data. In such a case, the server could automatically generate the snapshots as part of a hook that would occur when the data is stored to the history buffer.

In this particular case, yes: you can drop the snapshots entirely, and have the clients download and replay the entire history state in order to synchronize as they open the document. That really isn't practical, though, and with your current implementation it is actually painfully slow to the point of being intolerable (although of course, you would then spend more time optimizing that path). I continue to not be convinced that you can implement a collaborative text editor that can be deployed in the myriad circumstances that Firepad both seems targeted at and that other HN users are commenting on with interest, and have it not have this problem of "users can break the synchronization".
Ask HN: Include "Show HN" on "Ask HN" navigation
I spend most of my time on the "Ask HN" section, using HN as dialogue tool, not a news curation system.

"Show HN" submissions also are looking for dialogue, feedback, just as "Ask HN", but the less awesome of them just get lost among all the "News". Just because they put a URL, doesn't mean they are the same type of "News".

Is too much trouble to create a rule that every submission with "Show HN" on the title also appears on "Ask HN" navigation? (also would fix the problem that this section is quite slow and not dynamic)
This effect has become really pronounced here in the UK.

If I could secure even 50% of my London rates > 1hr outside of London I would be laughing in terms of quality of life.

Alas, since the financial crisis, prospects seem to be better in London and worse outside than they ever were.
Right, except the IRS has included perks such as housing, automobiles, even frequent flier miles[1], as "income" for over 60 years.

I think the outcry here is that government has much bigger fish to fry than hounding taxpayers over a few thousands bucks worth of free food every year. Your slippery slope argument isn't too far fetched though: this same sort of tax policy is exactly how the U.S. ended up with its ridiculous employer-paid health insurance scheme.

[1] In some cases. See 91 F.3d 72
Python, Catastrophic Regular Expressions and the GIL
Seriously, anytime I find a company that freely shares the details of a newer faster way, I'm more a fan. Though with the negative points MS has earned, they're still in the red in my book.
I don't know that it's a really great idea to throw Che's image into a page related to your product, just because of how polarizing a figure he is, but I'm pretty sure it's only there as a casual reference to "the revolution isn't dead, by any means," and doesn't really have anything to do with glorifying Che or otherwise calling him a "hero."

I could think of far more deplorable historical figures someone could stick a picture up of other than Che.

While I don't necessarily agree with his ideals, I can respect certain aspects of his persona and drive.
I hope he gets sued.
It's not used for most CNC machines - you want a solid CAD model like STEP/IGES for this.
Content Marketing for Accounting
Just re-discovered if your outgoing iMessage is hanging, you can tap-and-hold on the blue bubble, and then choose "Send as text message". Beats waiting for the service to time out...

edit: clarified
> Some men honestly don't see it.

It's not a question of not seeing it, it's a question of dwelling on it, allowing it to degrade one's effectiveness. You need to realize that men face the same kinds of erosive, degrading comments from their peers, but they (at least successful men) process them differently -- they ignore all but the constructive suggestions. And so do successful women.
Can you please send a git-mergetool patch to the git mailing list? This will save everyone the trouble of needing to discover how to configure it. Feel free to contact me offline if you need some pointers.
As far as Che goes:

At this point, the Che portrait is sort of the reverse story of the swastika. The swastika started out as a symbol of something good and got turned into a symbol of something monstrous; Che started out as something monstrous and got turned into a symbol of something good. That good being, I suppose, a consumerist, photogenic representation of rejecting consumerism.
Australian opposition announces National Broadband Network plan
Totally - especially because these are hard to maintain if they go wild I assume.
“So when we tell them, ‘You could get a job at a company like Facebook, you could be earning $100,000 plus, they pay for your insurance, they feed you, and you can work from home and wear casual clothes.’ They’re like, ‘What are you talking about?"

Indeed. What is he talking about?

Teaching coding to high school kids in under-performing schools is great, and may help some of them find an excellent career path they might never have thought about. But I think Carson is raising false hopes in many of the kids by exaggerating the potential impact of the program in their lives.

He seems to have totally forgotten the reality of supply and demand. It may be true that right now entry-level developers can command $40,000 a year. However, whenever it becomes well known that workers in a certain field can command high salaries, it motivates many more people to enter that field in anticipation of earning those salaries themselves. This tends to cause a glut in workers, and salaries fall as the competition for jobs increases.

One sign that this is already happening is the rapid increase in enrollments to computer science undergraduate programs over the last several years.[1] Adding thousands more to the pool of available workers will only bring salaries down farther.

The more high schools this program is successful in, the more this effect will come into play, especially if the program gets "rolled out to every high school in America" as mentioned in the article.

Also, companies naturally seek to minimize costs by looking for cheaper sources of labor through outsourcing to other countries or by bringing workers from other countries here on H-1B visas. This is already happening.[2] As time goes on, these efforts will likely be increasingly successful, and will impact entry level jobs the most.

I think it would be much fairer to the students to tell them this is one skill they might be able to base a successful career on, if they have an aptitude for it and are willing to put in the effort to get really good at it. Otherwise, he's placing unrealistic expectations that might eventually hurt the students if they don't become reality.

[1] http://cra.org/govaffairs/blog/2012/04/undergrad-computer-sc...

[2] http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/03/30/visa-program-h...
Think you're reading it wrong. The $100,000 jobs are very different from the $40,000 (or whatever) entry level jobs. Entry level could mean something entirely different with high school vs college graduate developer jobs. In NYC the $100,000 jobs don't seem to be entry level, and there seem to be more mid/senior developer job openings than mid/senior developers looking for new jobs. It's been this way here for at least one year.
The real value in bitcoin is that it provides settlement from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world in at most a couple of hours. Very few other options exist for such rapid settlement.

Whatever happens with bitcoin, that pace of commerce exists in the world now.

To me, the interesting thing to be doing at this point is figuring out how to take advantage of that speed with new business models.
I commented out the DOM update portion of the code and left just the Javascript code running. It still hung Chrome, so it's Javascript related, at least on Chrome's version of Javascript.
Textbooks should be free too. It doesn't make you crazy to say so.
Interesting, to me it looks like an 's' key from a keyboard. I've always assumed that's what it's supposed to be.

I never thought it looked like a disk drive. I guess it looks like an external desktop hard drive a bit though.
I actually did this the other day to show a friend that a newspaper had greatly exaggerated the number of prostitutes in Spain (300.000).

There are 40M persons in Spain, 50% are women, 50% of women have an age suitable for the trade, it is impossible that 3%, or 1 in 30 are prostitutes.
Flashing is not the same as giving a ticket. Camera detects orthogonal movement to the expected traffic flow, photo is taken. Photo reviewed - was a person turning legally, no fine issued. There's a red light camera near me that frequently flashes the end-of-sequence people turning, but they're not getting tickets for that.

There is, however, a different issue in my state - thousands of speeding tickets have been declared null and void because the police couldn't prove that the speed cameras were correctly calibrated.
Debunking the myths about the programmer's brain
I'm with you, Middlebrow. I love the idea of giving poor kids direct vocational training for vocations that are solidly middle class. We need more such programs. But I'm not crazy about the sales pitch that they can take this small but useful bit of vocational training, jump right into $40K/yr jobs out of high school, "and if they’re good, they’ll get fast-tracked up to $100,000 within a couple years."

"Fast-tracked to $100K"? How is it that his programming class is going to get them into this special express lane to big bucks a couple of years out of high school? Is this some affirmative action program certain employers have agreed to? Or is this supposed to be a description of our industry in general? What percent of new high school grads who took a programming class does the industry consider "good" and fast track to $100K in a couple of years? If the answer is that, well, it DOES happen, well so does becoming a millionaire before you even leave high school. It happens. But the question is, is it likely enough to be sold as a significant benefit of the program?

I'm happy to see good vocational training in high school. I'd just be much happier to see it sold for what it should be: a way to give kids enough of a start on a useful skill that they can see with their own eyes that they really could, if they continued, become valuable enough to others that they could earn a good living with their own skills. They should then also be taught HOW to continue on to a professional level (including ancillary skills such as writing and math) after the program ends so that the claims can be about helping most of those who continue succeed in a realistic way rather than being an infomercial about a few outliers on a fast track.
You can make good money as a developer anywhere in the U.S. What you'll run into outside of the tech hubs is that it's much harder to find interesting work, but it does exist.

There are a lot of professions that pay much better than writing software, that is clear, despite our massive egos we must admit that (unless you work for one of the few tech companies that can pay exorbitantly, but usually then you are sacrificing the rest of your life). If you want to make $300k+ your best bet is to be a really good salesperson. It probably has the best ratio of low education costs / high potential salary.
A good rule of thumb for determining overreaction is who swears first. The student may have felt entitled to try out multiple classes and come in late, but the professor felt entitled to make a private matter public, public shame her.
20x times faster than BerkeleyDB is quite impresive. Would love to see a implementation of this.
> AT&T is warning them the gravy train stops when they let in Google.

The AT&T gravy train just gets replaced with the Google gravy hyper-rail.
This seems backwards from what we actually want to do, but also has significant compliance concerns.

It's obvious how to tax consumption. It's (fairly) obvious how to tax income. How would you tax savings?

Is buying stock in a company "saving" or "consuming"?
Is buying Bitcoins "saving" or "consuming"?
What about gold coins/bars?
What about guns and ammo?
What about a collector car? Artwork?
What about a house for personal residential use?
What about a house for rental/income use?
What about just holding suitcases of $100 bills?

It seems like there would immediately spring up a system of "not treated as savings" savings mechanisms. I seriously doubt that you'd accomplish your intended accounting simplicity...
I agree, eliminate the taxes on company B.
Emacs was designed to work extremely well with Unix, or any other host operating system, and provide a way to easily gather tools (or fairly quickly replicate them in an os agnostic/portable manner) and provide a cohesive and expressive user interface to work with the output of those tools.

You find Emacs "a bit odd" because it's necessary to put in about a week of diligent study in, that's the barrier to entry, STUDY.

Other editors are just editors, that may or may not have extensions, Emacs is a textual environment.

If you look at it from the perspective of games, It's kind of the difference between Pac Man and Minecraft.
Yeah, if AT&T is trying to play some kind of "chicken game" with Google, they will lose, because Google doesn't care that much about the profits as they do about dramatically increasing the competition in the ISP market. In fact, higher valuer/buck is Google's goal in all of this. AT&T is falling right in Google's "trap", sort of speak (which is a good thing for us).

While Google may indeed have some thoughts that with all this popularity and head-start they could become a major ISP in US, their primary and original goal was exactly to get other companies to start offering Gigabit and affordable fiber connections, with no other limits or caps.
Just one privacy question:
Imagine If I log in using the same email to Service1 and post some comment. And later, using the same identity I log in to Service2 to post some pictures. Does Service1 and Service2 (imagine the share some data) know that it was the same person?

PS. Good work, it looks quite convincing!
> It's true that psychological case histories are published, but much more carefully.

Yes, that's increasingly true as time passes. Freud's case histories were marked with the subject's real initials, and this practice continued up to the 1950s. I'm not excusing, just explaining.

Even in modern times, very detailed case histories are published as long as there's no credible risk of associating the study with a particular individual, or consent is obtained from someone able to give informed consent.
It would not be hard. We have seen over and over again how anonymous data can suddenly be tied down.

Example:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/anonymous-phone-loc...

Remember: Attacks only get better, not worse.
Anyone know if the IRS serves free coffee in its break rooms?
"Does your idea solve a problem that people actually have?"

It's too easy to believe people have problem X when you toying with a new idea. I would much rather ask.. "Does your idea solve a problem that YOU actually have?"
The Che picture ended any interest I had.
>democracy != tyranny

Depends on how popular your opinion is.
It's probably best to not get lost in the details. The solution to this is real simple and can be very effective and hassle-free for everyone. The IRS will hardly care about the coffee or water or the private phone calls you are allowed to make on your company phone. The easiest solution to this is to just have a reasonably high cutoff point for such perks, like "companies can only spend $150 per month per employee on such perks and leave them tax free".

Problem solved. Now most companies offering only small stuff that has traditionally been offered to many employees (coffee, water, ...) are no longer affected and only those who offer substantial perks are included. This is also less work both for the companies and tax collection agencies.
That's why many things in the metric system are designed on a grid with edge length 60 - it gives you many possibilities for subdivisions. For example the dimensions of most furniture is based on this - 30 cm, 45 cm, 60 cm, 90 cm, 120 cm and 240 cm everywhere.
The cost of the lunch is $10, but is the value to the employee $10?

The problem with taxing a product is that the actual value is unknown. In your example, taxing the lunch as $10 of income is actually giving the benefit to Company B due to the "reverse inequality of exchange". IE if you buy a $10 lunch, you actually value it more than the $10.
I picked up my parents from the airport last month. It showed me the time of arrival updated in realtime while I was going to the airport. At the airport, once the flight had landed, it started showing me the checked baggage collection belt number.
> If you don't do that then the optimum financial endgame for a company like Google is to basically turn into some mega corporation that pays its employees almost minimum wage, but provides "free" meals, housing, food, transportation etc. which they don't have to pay any taxes on because it's not being sold to anyone and can all be written off as internal costs.

What I find interesting about this is that that seems to be the route Google was going anyway. I remember reading a while back about Google building housing near Mountain View to house employees.

In a way, it's not too different from the old company towns of the industrial revolution (see Pullman Strike) and there is a certain logic to it:

If you want to retain people, hire them right out of college and drop them into a situation that is very much like the university experience. Long hours, lots of work, but free food and you can more or less walk to work and see your friends on a regular basis. It could be pretty attractive to someone straight out of college.
I thought Google voice didn't use VoIP.
god this is going to be good

Edit: Is anyone actually recording the market movements? It'd be really neat to see minute-by-minute how this goes down.
It's a bit like a teenies version of Emacs.
> Second, why would they put the picture of a communist leader who used to shoot defectors and kill artists? Why is he any sort of hero?

It's a play with the word "revolution".
Poll: How many Bitcoins do you have
Just curious how BitRich the HN crowd be.
0:
1-5:
6-10:
11-25:
26-50:
51-100:
100++:
I'm not very well-versed in economics, but would setting prices to a relatively non-changing BTC value not actually be a good thing to stabilize its value, if enough people were to do that?
Cash Is Dead Long Live Cash
Industry Is Like The Rap Game
I tried switching to the Soda theme as directed, didn't like it. And I'm dumb, and forgot to back up the original prefs file. Could someone remind me what the default theme is called?
Perhaps my favorite book. When trading book recommendations with my friends the conversation will often go like this: "It's very good [the book in question], not "Cryptonomicon. good", but I think you'll like it." Cryptonomicon is a "10" on the book scale.
Wow, nice tip. Seems like combining this with Sublime Todo (https://github.com/robcowie/SublimeTODO) would make for a really good setup.
I pretty much need to "try again" when sending any message, sometimes it sends without any issues, but most of the times just shows me the exclamation red icon, and I need to try again.. And then sometimes it goes, others it fails again.. And this can go on for 2 or 3 more tries. It actually worked better when it was launched than now.
Fine then. I thought you were willfully splitting hairs, but that's not the case.
Shapesmith is also doing backend nurbs (OpenCASCADE + erlang server) with front-end rendering.

I think it would be possible to implement nurbs (or brep) in javascript, once there's an open source (and maintainable/legible) library that actually does nurbs intersection.

OpenNURBS doesn't count because Rhino has kept all the interesting bits to themselves. BRLCAD has had people from GSoC implement some of the remaining closed-source parts of the OpenNURBS library, so maybe they have had some recent progress on this front?

OpenCASCADE doesn't count because trying to extract just what you need is like trying to rewrite the multiple decades of software piled up in there..

Edit: Nick, didn't we have this exact conversation before in some HN comments like two years ago? I feel like we did and I feel bad for not remembering the url. Maybe this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320172
Facebook's app value proposition is not to be an app store - it's a social networtk
> #4 Bitcoin is destructable

We can probably expect a Trojan to infiltrate a exchange and destroy the wallets and backups at some point just for the lulz.

Security is hard and I don't see expect of these exchanges to handle security right.

Ok,I'm being cynical.
For those unfamiliar with the current state of Internet service in Australia:

The current government has founded a company called NBNco (National Broadband Network Company) to connect 93% of Australian homes via fibre. The remaining will be covered with a fixed-wireless and Satellite.

This comes at a cost of $44b and completion date of 2021.

The opposition party has just announced their plan, which is to connect 22% of households directly to fibre, 71% via fibre to the node, utilising the existing copper network for the last few hundred metres, 4% via fixed wireless, and ~3% via satellite.

This comes at a cost of $30b and completion by the end of 2016.

What it comes down to is, should the Australian people be spending an extra $14b and five years to connect 71% more of the population directly to fibre?

A lot of the discussion revolves around whether people really need > 100mb/sec (FttH), or whether >25mb/sec (FttN) is suitable for the next "x" years of technology.
Episode 21: What it's like to work at Automattic
When you look at that map, the majority of manhattan doesn't have fios available, let alone the other boroughs.
This is a bad idea. I can come up with a TODO at any time; I especially do when I’m in the middle of something and have staged local changes. In that case, this:

git commit --allow-empty -m "TODO: $*"

Will do the wrong thing—committing my staged changes even if I didn’t want that, and giving them a wrong commit message. If the change is small, I might not notice. If I were going to involve Git in my task tracking, I would much prefer something like this:

todo() {
touch TODO
printf "%s\n%s\n\n" "$(date)" "$*" | cat - TODO > TODO.tmp
mv TODO.tmp TODO
$(git config core.editor) TODO
}
Now they need to introduce lower priced option for 512M.
I agree 100%, I feel that until one of the large ISP's commits to fast internet nationwide- they won't stop expanding.
how is 20% of first years salary cheaper than a recruiter? seems like the same deal but without the annoying phone calls
I'm in DoD and we don't. Actually I'll take it a step further, I'm in the NAVY, where we joke that the whole Navy runs on coffee, and we make the government employees bring in their own snacks/coffee/etc.

Some random employee brought in their Keurig machine and lets the other employees use it. That what passes for "perks" for the rank-and-file.
Doctors don't start out with $150-200k. Remember that they have to go through residency first, during which they make $40-60k. Which may sound decent, but when you realize they have to work 80+ hours AND with a ton of debt, it's actually pretty dismal.

Even after that though, they make around 125-175k. Most doctors do not start making over 200k until ten or more years of practice. And again, that's with around 1500-1900 hours per year, which is considerably more than most software engineers.