skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the link. I saw that. I was hoping to find something using webkit. I found dryscrape but wasn't sure how popular it is. Also I was trying to find out what the standard practice is. Do people build it to suit their needs so that they can optimize it for scale and performance?

The scraping need seems generic enough to me to create a library or tool similar to dryscrape. The only problem is dryscrape is specifically for linux. I was hoping to to find some cross platform solution so that I can have it on my dev machine before moving it to the linux server.
Speaking of a better bitcoin, why can't the proof of work aspect be something that's useful instead of a huge waste of electricity?

It's not a huge waste of electricity. It provides security for the bitcoin ecosystem.
I'm biased, since I'm a Firebase dev, but honestly, Firebase is great for solving /all kinds/ of use cases. :-)

We've had people build everything from emergency response simulations synchronized across multiple devices to iOS apps for grandparents to read books with their grandkids over long distances.

Firebase is great any time you need real-time updates, collaboration, or you just want to get something up and running without having to spin up your own servers.
Does anyone know of an HTML-friendly equivalent of this? I.e., something similar that allows pasting/editing HTML?
It would be awesome if it supported audio, music, mouse coordinates, realtime keyboard input, and variables.

And if it already does: then something must be wrong because I would have expected many awesome SVG games on Newgrounds if it worked well.
What gives you the numbers you've written? I mean why $5000 and not orders of magnitude more or less?

Also, if the currency trading means wealth transfer, just what will come to mean the dollar as currency if it's going to be 5000 for one BTC?
I agree that Bitcoins were designed as an instrument to facilitate transfer of value and not as store of wealth. But the example of a transaction you just gave in your post is not how people spend currency. No one converts a currency (100$) to another currency (0.478 Bitcoins) for immediate spending in the real world. People generally minimize number of currency conversions (to save transaction costs) and store the currency (wallets or banks) for some time before spending it, and storing volatile currencies carries huge risk.

The current price explosion is not good for bitcoin if you look at it as a currency. People who believe this is a bubble will just cash out of bitcoins anticipating a fall and the (apparently) greater number of people thinking the value will rise will just hold on to the coins. The only way this price explosion can be helpful is in providing media exposure to bitcoins and cryto-currencies. Only after we have sustained period of stable prices we can hope of bitcoins becoming a major facilitator of transaction.
I may be wrong, that was my feeling due to the increase in Ada exposure at FOSDEM, Ada has become one of the standard language tracks in the last years.

The opening talk in 2012 was done by Ada Core.
When hiring engineers for my company, I might ask, what are the trade-offs in using PowerPoint-style slides to make a technical presentation? And I would expect an astute engineer who has thought about technical communication to refer me to either serious

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

or humorous

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

discussions of the defects of PowerPoint slides as a communication tool.

The slides shown here cover some interesting ground, and I was glad to see the specific reference to Enrico Fermi, who popularized the kind of estimation question discussed here in certain circles. Certainly, it is beyond dispute that

"Although most engineers remember key numbers related to
their field, no-one has every detail at their fingertips

"Hence we need to estimate not only the values of numbers we need, but which numbers are appropriate, and how to perform
the calculation

"the emphasis here is on 'order of magnitude' estimates – to the nearest factor of 10

"it is also important to remember that these are rough estimates and to place only appropriate reliance on the results"

The last point is the most crucial. It is vital to remember how much uncertainty there is in your estimates, or overall in your model that includes both exactly measured and estimated values. The model is not reality. It is not easy to get engineers to remember that they have to look into the mechanism of the model to understand how it works. That's why a NASA Mars probe failed when one part of the engineering team used United States customary units while another used metric units to design modules of the probe that were supposed to communicate values to each other.

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
Didn't people really really want to do that with Jobs?
Since we are on the subject. How much memory for a VM would be optimal for a git server running on 12.04? This would just be for personal use. Can it get by with 256 MB allocated?

I know there is a lot of "it depends" on this.
Scientists Are Struggling to Wade Through the BS of Fake Academic Publications
Forget Google: Head-Scratching Questions from Japanese Job Interviews
I'm working on implementing it myself right now, and mine just says "Sign in" (albeit with their design).

If they recognise it, then they'll know. If they don't, then they don't need to.
Why Can't Google Make Its Own Version Of Facebook Home?
Here's some that I have found useful:

Hack Your Education by Dale Stephens - http://goo.gl/O27Z8

Lean Startup - http://goo.gl/YVGuU

Startup Communities by Brad Feld - http://goo.gl/CaGTA

Rework by Jason Fried and DHH - http://goo.gl/IzGeB

The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman - http://goo.gl/Ucf3u
Why is there a huge blurred building in this particular interserction?
The UX isn't perfect, but Persona does have a few advantages that ultimately make it better for the end user:

1) Doesn't require a popup. The idea with Persona is that browser developers would build a Persona/BrowserID-type dialog directly into the browser, as opposed to requiring a popup/webpage. This may help mitigate phishing.

2) Better privacy for the end user. With other, uri callback-based systems, your IdP's know what sites/services you're accessing. With Persona, this becomes a bit more difficult, as there is no callback mechanism.
Behind the scenes of the new Web Payments API from Mozilla
No, programmers don't code all day
I see Elon Musk as a person who believes that the Sky is not the limit, and has the drive, money and intelligence to establish this.

He may not have the skills/patience to lead a family life, and is not alone in this regard.
> he era when a man or a woman is defined by his relationships and family is over, and good riddance.

No it's not. Those things help to define a person. I don't think you entirely got the nuance that the OP was getting at.
I have to admit some confusion. You're not looking through your commit history when you're trying to figure out which branch a historical commit was on?

The reason for the rebase/fastforward workflow is to basically synchronize changes. You might have five developers working on seven different feature branches at a time. But they're only going to be merged back to mainline in the order they're completed, which you don't know ahead of time. Once they're merged back, you don't necessarily need to record the history of the feature branch separately. Often you're going to squash changes anyway.

It's also a better idea to rebase from master and merge to master, but even if you merge both ways, the commit message still reports the source and destination branches. If you're disciplined about using feature branches, master is the branch with commit after commit saying "merged to master".
You know, there exists a technique that makes "get something in for the next release" obsolete.
Basically: have the marketing and sales people sell and market the thing your engineers wrote last week, not the thing you hope they will write next week.
The OS installer will need more, but that should fine.
Business Insider screws up evolution reporting
Coffee meetings
You know, we have a word for it. It's called "sacrifice." I'm a family man myself, and I'm very close to my parents and sister. That said, I have a lot of respect for people who forego the traditional family lifestyle to work on big, important problems[1]. Elon Musk is one such man. Therefore it is unfair to judge him for his failed marriage.

As for his children, think of it this way: if SpaceX manages to pave the way to a "Space Age," then billions and billions of children in the Earth's future will benefit from it in more ways than imaginable.

[1]The caveat here is that the problems have to be both difficult and important to solve for humanity as a whole. Space travel, global warming, cure for cancer, etc. The big problems of our day.
The campaign is flexible, she will get all the money at the end, even if she's under the goal.
Engelberg/instaparse
My start-up is also not a grind. My wife and I are the founders, and we put in our hours early on, but now we work a very regular 9-5 schedule. At least one of us has to leave around 5:15 to pick up our son.

Our employees are also not asked to work crazy hours - we don't rush to get releases out, we're profitable and growing, and we're not concerned about flipping the company tomorrow. Our employees are also now in their late 20s, and we expect them to have children and normal lives too, and we want them to stick with us through that.
Except that in many cases, e.g. Python, the canonical implementation is not the fastest one.

So of course, the presenter will carefully select the best implementation to prove his arguments, even if there are others available that contradict him/her.
Bitcoins are divisible up to eight decimal places. So there are rather more units than that potentially available to circulate.
"Sign in with your Email" is pretty clear.

via https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/persona/branding
>This bug on their Bugzilla is 11 (!) years open

Wow. And that's not the first time I've seen Bugzilla reports open for years. Does nobody work on these features or something?
Hackers crack Ubisoft's uPlay security, able to download games for free
Not only does he run a porn site, he posted this to his porn site's blog. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming.
Can someone recommend a good article about how Persona exactly works under the hood? I've seen zillions of news about Persona but haven't grasped the main concept. Comparison with OpenID will be appreciated also.

Many of articles say that Persona is great and awesome etc. but do not explain what are the advantages and security implications.
Congratulations on the new release. Ironically, I tried Yeoman in earnest for the first time yesterday.

I've got deep respect for the authors, but I've had a pretty miserable experience with Yeoman so far, even after giving it another try this morning. In particular:

* Using the web app generator seems to download an absurd number of dependencies every time. It takes minutes to download everything to start a simple app, about as long as it takes me to install Rails from scratch on the same system.

* After generating an app, I've yet to be able to actually run grunt on the result ... it always errors out with something. If it's not a jshint warning that causes it to abort, it's a Compass warning.

One of the great joys of writing HTML5 + Javascript apps is that the experience tends to feel clean and unencumbered. So far, Yeoman has done nothing but make my workflow much more complex and error-prone. Things just feel ... rickety. At the end of the day, I gave up and used Initializr [1] to start the app. Didn't even want to bother trying out Brunch [2], I was so frustrated.

I wanted to love it and I know there are folks out there who've had great luck with Yeoman; hopefully some of them can chime in to tell me what I'm missing.

[1] http://www.initializr.com/

[2] http://brunch.io
What is the problem here? You expected more at the stop line? Why?
What do you mean nobody? Austrian economists are a legitimate school of economics and they are in favor of deflation. It was Austrians who were able to predict most of the collapses we've seen over the century. When Keynesians said it's impossible to have inflation and high rates of unemployment, it was Austrians who said they were wrong, which was proved in the 1960-70s.
I'm all for not burning out, but I feel like there's something missing from all these articles admonishing people to work less.

It's great that people can work 5-6 hours a day, no weekends, and still build a great business. But if that's truly more efficient, should we expect to see some massive billion dollar companies run that way? How much did Bill Gates, Larry & Sergey, Jeff Bezos, etc. work when they were getting their companies off the ground? When they look back, do they feel the time was wasted, or do they feel it was necessary?

Or to the Metalab example, who's to say that the success Andrew experienced when he cut back on his work was not due in part to the long hours he had put in previously?

Not trying to admonish people to work more - just saying there's some missing analysis here!
Show HN: Firepad-based editor for Stash
Since WhatsApp is a company that just recently discovered SSL and learned that you shouldn't use the IMEI number to generate the account password ... everything just can become better. They are also successfully ignoring support things like multiple devices or a client for the computer.
In the context of a 10000-year flood, it's interesting to consider what the southern North Sea looked like until ~6200 BCE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
North Korea to 'launch missile TOMORROW'
@iooi: The blurred building is there because someone requested it blurred: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_privacy_conc...
Put pesticide in the bowl. Try to get soup out of the bowl. Feed to son. This old debate will rage on forever.
It's not "image format file" - it is Scalable Vector Graphics format, there was pageSet in SVG Print draft already. It would be useful because a graphics (text layout) may span several pages, like in PDF.
Lets back up: why are you trying to figure out what branch a historical commit was on? What problem does that solve for you? I've never found that information terribly important or interesting.
I had never heard of these "atmospheric rivers" prior to this article and started doing a little reading.

"Atmospheric rivers are typically several thousand kilometers long and only a few hundred kilometers wide, and a single one can carry a greater flux of water than the Earth's largest river, the Amazon River." [1]

That's really impressive. I'm curious about their density and whether airplanes have to avoid them, or if they're able to fly through.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_river
Only as long as nobody comes along with a tiny bit more computing power than the rest of the Bitcoin system and decides to double spend their money. Ultimately, you would need to use half of all computing power in the world for Bitcoin for it to be secure.
I always forget how difficult it is to convey sarcasm in written form. My bad.
This is really all you could contribute to this discussion?
This Is How Google Glass Really Works
Not to make excuses about this issue and Bitcoin, but the main problem here is that while Bitcoins limited supply solution brings with it lots of other problems (including frequent but not 100% reliable deflation) - no one has yet even postulated a fully distributed and mathematical means of reliably producing either inflation, deflation, or steady-state value.

Limited supply is a dirty, sloppy hack - but the only known one to most likely maintain the value of a cryptocurrency over time.
Glow-in-the-dark nerdiness
SVG really isn't well suited for games.

I think it's an awesome and underutilized technology, don't get me wrong, but SVG has a place and it really isn't games. The furthest I've gone is a Go game in SVG, but that's a special case.
People really don't like spending 6 hours trying to get something to compile.

Compiling and running a possibly incorrect program that seems to work is more rewarding than trying to figure out how exactly it was that your compiler inferred a type different than you intended.
Personal pet peeve: It's 2013, and we're still calling these cyber criminals "hackers".

This story is shared on ... HACKER News. Are we all criminals aficionados here?
But that's a broad category. There are a lot of instruments that need repairs and maintenance that are not pianos, and they tend not to cross instrument categories, or even individual instruments. A flute repair person will not likely also repair oboes, for instance. Also, piano repairs and piano tuning are not always done by the same people.
if time was fungible, then working 40 hours instead of 60 hours would only make it take 50% longer in calendar-time to get the thing done. And if you have some other income stream, then that extra time might not matter much.
And if getting enough sleep and seeing your family makes you mentally healthier the calendar-time penalty might be less than 50%. Maybe a lot less.
Why are you keeping hundreds of branches open at a time?
So I can log in everywhere using the exact same username? This will make it SO much easier for the user data trackers to capture and aggregate all of the information they can about me. I think I'll take a pass.
Yes; we would first need some unambiguous way of communicating with the IDE what we want it to do, and we'll call that a "programming language"
Yes, we made it go cray-cray.
Traction Tracker: 84 Y Combinator Companies With Significant Traffic Growth
No, Tony Stark builds and code everything himself. From scratch.
I have reported spammers/phishers to Hetzner in the past and experienced the same: Hetzner's default policy is to forward a complaint to the server's owner - which also kind of surprised and annoyed me.
On the phone, support staff told me that Hetzner sees itself just as an uninvolved messenger between both parties.
Apparently, their support ticket system automatically forwards all complaints to the server's owner without any way to opt out.
The support person offered two alternatives: send anonymous complaints through a freemail service, or send the complaint to the personal address of a support team member, so that they can manually enter it into the system.
Yes, this is pretty annoying.
It might happen other way around - MtGox is overwhelmed and stops working _because_ of the fact that the fiat currencies are falling and the only currency that makes sense to estimate things and services into becomes... well, you know it.
Just to clarify: most servers haven't K:lined the blocks, but D:lined them (even though the efnet.org article says 'klines'). K:line = kill line, D:line = deny line.
The difference is where the check happens, after the client has had a chance to identify and a identd response is received or not, or at the TCP level on remote IP address alone (D:Line).

D:Lines are less resource intensive obviously. Not much difference for the client though :)
Sometimes I'll have the "isn't money/currency a weird concept/abstraction" conversation with my dad, so I want to tell him about bitcoin. The Wikipedia article is good, but is there a better article I can have him read?
I don't understand the correlation between the position of the lights and the position of the stop line. You can have a stop line 10 feet away from the intersection and still have traffic lights on the other side.
Actually, in my experience, not being able to see the lights once you crossed the stop line can also be quite dangerous, and it has happened to me more than once in traffic jams.
Have a Leaking Chimney? It's Time For Flashing Replacement | LGC Roofing Blog
Why Business is Addicted to Habits
Asana Adds More Powerful Search
Look for example here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490#c113

Some guy offered that his company could implemented it. No one said yes.
Those sounds really interesting, thanks. Looking forward to seeing more of the real-time web evolve.
Even if so, as the article notes, if you switch to some other, yet still "productive" task, you are still task switching and losing a lot of momentum on the original task.

Also there will always be distractions; daydreaming if nothing else. At a previous employer my main work machine was not connected to the Internet (a nightmare for other reasons, like if I was on the Internet-enabled machine, may as well check email...). But even then, when waiting for a test that would take several minutes, I'd find myself reading a print newspaper.

These forced delays kill productivity for me like nothing else. Losing the task at hand every couple of minutes to retest or really slows down output.
NSA is development, FBI is production ;)
> I don't understand why it doesn't have more mindshare.

Because all they've published so far is API specs and fluffy PR sites that try to portray it as "oh so much better" without offering any insight about why it is better. They can claim "more privacy" all day long, but without any details about what gets stored where and why it is supposed to be safer, they don't make a compelling case.

Look at this page for example: https://login.persona.org/about (the "how it works" page) - it has 0 details about these claims and unfortunately, we're already tired of reading how Google and FB respect our privacy. From "outside", it looks like we need to give Mozilla our (existing) credentials and trust them to handle them with care. Why should we? I feel safer making pwgen passwords for every new site I need to register at.
You're Not Really Following BarackObama on Twitter
FREELANCER SEEKING WORK - Toronto, remote

I used to be CTO at 500px, and a couple of other local startups until I decided to concentrate on shipping features. I am a full stack web developer with over 10 years in the industry, mainly specializing in Rails (with Javascript/Coffeescript), HTML5, CSS3 and Ember.js. I also specialize in dealing with Scale problems and designing large systems, and team coaching and mentoring. I can dive into any project and be immediately productive, or build something greenfield to get you to MVP.

Email : john@revolutionlake.co

Web : http://revolutionlake.co

Github : http://github.com/johnmcdowall
I agree with the problems, i.e. that web standards and implementations are messy, but not with the solutions. It just seems like a big pipe dream -- "oh I wish we could start over from scratch, rewrite the web, and make things clean". Will never happen.

I also don't agree in 2013 that moving say HTML5 to a VM is a good idea. There's nothing stopping anyone from releasing a VM now. You could release a new VM and an application platform. I mean that is essentially what, say, Android is. But even Android clients will always be a subset of all web clients.

I think people proposing this mythical VM don't have a clear understanding of what VMs are. They are fairly specific devices. Do you think Dalvik, something like v8, or the JVM, or .NET, can form the basis for all future computing? It's an impossible task for a single VM. Even Microsoft is taking more than 10 years to move a decent amount of their own software to their own VM, on a single platform. All VMs necessitate design decisions that are not right for all devices. Even Sun had diverging VMs for desktop and mobile.