skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is the difference of running a bitcoin app to, say, a forex site in terms of security?

It depends on what you mean by "forex site". If you mean "a bucket shop, which uses as its source of random numbers currency fluctuations", then a forex site is approximately as risky as a bitcoin exchange, modulo the fact that the forex frontend almost certainly has no lever on it which will actually cause outgoing wires and the bitcoin exchange almost certainly does. That's actually a pretty big modulo, come to think of it. [Edit to add: This is just talking about software security. Bitcoin exchanges have a legal security problem which forex sites don't, because you can use Bitcoin exchanges to move money and you can't conveniently do that with forex sites.] If by "forex site" you mean e.g. a bank's foreign currency trading desk, you're asking me to compare the US Army and the Boy Scouts in terms of potential to conquer arbitrary nations.

what do you mean with major result in cryptography?

SHA-256 has some time complexity associated with it. A major result in cryptography gives some variant of attack against it with radically lower time complexity than we currently think attacking it requires: say, it allows a speedup of 2X, 4X, etc etc. (It is unlikely, but conceivable, that it would go to O(1) all at once.) This is like every other cryptographic algorithm. Producing major cryptographic results is hard. Weaponizing them is harder, still: 2X improvement probably doesn't make any attacks practical which weren't practical before, it just posts a "Warning: this algorithm will die in the foreseeable future, transition off at the earliest convenience" notice to all interested parties.

But, again, Bitcoin advocates love wrapping themselves up in crypto because it makes them feel secure. Crypto is one teeny tiny little bit of their systemic security. It isn't the important bit. That's a very impressive looking deadbolt you have, there, and defeating it would probably be pretty difficult, but the pane of unreinforced glass right next to it looks a little promising and, if you check with your 17-year old architect who is doing this in his spare time, he might be able to confirm that your house only has two walls and no ceiling.
I thought the statement was obviously a playful joking way to point out this was his personal opinion.
I actually wrote an article on Apple stock movement history. Basically, Apple tends to have this significant rallies, followed by notable retracements between 50% - 61.8%.
http://thetechblock.com/apple-stock-movement-history
I suggest you install the plugin variation and try it through Gmail, at least if that is at all a viable option for you. It has been working quite well for me both in 64bit Debian testing and Win7 on 64bit.
The fact that there is a risk of a DoS attack without hard-coded limits on global transaction volume sounds like a much deeper flaw in the design of Bitcoin. It is particularly troublesome given the existence of protocols that do not have this problem, like Chaum's offline digital cash systems (which have been extensively researched by cryptographers).

What is Bitcoin's excuse for this problem? Surely it cannot be that a goal of Bitcoin is to remove central authorities, if some central team of developers has the power to change this system parameter at will. I suppose the only real excuse is that Satoshi was not even aware of that body of work, which would not be all that shocking given the fact that it is not even cited in the Bitcoin paper.
I like it, but I wish there was a way to see what kind of hourly rates they charge.
> If we suffer an economic collapse (whatever the cause), we're taking the world with us. As such, there is no currency with the properties that people are looking for.

Yes exactly. And I hear too many people in the US say they feel like we are on the verge of some kind of massive revolution or civil war, which seems preposterous to me. Your average person would rather just get by than get involved in a bloody, civil conflict. There is a growing economic divide in the US, as well as a somewhat large rate of unemployment (mostly made up of the young and self-entitled, and older folks who's skills have become fairly obsolete), but compare it to countries where there have been actual civil wars in recent times and we're nowhere near that level of destitution and disparity. You need to get into multi-generational inequity, corruption, and despair before enough people will put aside their own relative comfortable complacency to get involved in armed conflict.

So buying gold for the coming apocalypse is silly.
TLDR; lots of books that are under the extended copyright regime in the USA are public domain in other countries such as Australia. What does this mean when you can access them on the Internet. Uses Great Gatsby as an example since that is Public Domain in Australia
I heard they just closed a 1.5 mil seed round with Andreessen Horowitz.
Currency should never be used as a primary value store. You should minimally hold as much currency as you need to perform the transaction. The only purpose of currency is to facilitate trade.
We do need both. But some of the things you mention (like constructing vtables) could be applied to MRI's VM model without writing a compiler from scratch. Frankly, I would much rather have large performance improvements now than in 2-3 years.

(I agree about JRuby. I also wonder why Rubinius, which showed so much promise at the beginning, has stagnated. Is it simply the lack of developers?)
This is awesome! When Scoutzie first launched, I thought "Why does this have to be limited to mobile designers?" - so it's really great to see that it has now expanded into more areas.

Right now, there is not one "marketplace" where a business owner can go to find the best designers, especially for websites. Without knowing their options, I've seen many businesses settle for a) a crappy site by their local yellow pages outfit b) the first result for "[my city] web designer" c) one of those do-it-yourself site builders or d) no website at all. A centralized directory of vetted designers makes a lot of sense for easier discovery.

One other thing that would make sense is an Airbnb-style rating system, so designers can start earning a verifiable reputation based on prior work that originated through Scoutzie.
SoShare - Your free and simple large file delivery service.
> Do you believe we really need 15 hours of sleep in the winter, but can get by on barely 8 in the summer?

Yes, inasmuch as we "need" sleep at all. There are many species that dramatically shift their sleeping patterns over the course of the year--such as never sleeping during months-long migrations--and come out with no "sleep debt" accrued at all. This lends to a conclusion that the brain really just requests a certain amount of sleep, and is unhappy if it doesn't get it--but it can request less sleep in the first place with no physiological effect.
What Is Facebook EdgeRank and Why Does It Matter?
The data seems a little suspect. For example the L line shows Montgomery Station has having low income. AFAICT there's (a) almost zero housing at Montgomery Station and if there is it's most likely super rich as it's directly in the Financial District.

My only point is before I can even try to get any meaning from this I need to know the data makes sense. Maybe there are a bunch of low income apartments near Montgomery Station but if so they sure are well hidden.

edit: Checking the Fremont line it shows the median income at Montgomery Station as $112k where as the L line shows the same station as $23k. Something seems wrong or else I don't understand what it's showing.
I give Linode a lot of slack. When people say "Oh, they should be more secure" I often say "Really?"

In an ideal world, yes, they should be more secure. However, as in this case, they got taken advantage of via a zero-day attack, with others planned well outside the scope of what Linode could have planned for. Which is insane. Can you even name something, anything that they could have done to protect themselves? Additionally, given the unique form of attack, figuring out what was going wrong was probably not possible. Thus, they knew as little as you did.

And then, everybody switches to some other provider. But do they switch to "super secure, we examine every byte of the software that we run to make sure we're bullet proof" hosting provider? NO, everyone just switches to another commodity VPS provider that is vulnerable to all the same super high level attacks that Linode is vulnerable (maybe even more attacks, given that Linode actually has a tremendous amount of experience).

In reality, you're only getting more security by switching to a less prominent hosting provider, A.K.A. security through obscurity. Which is the worst kind of security because it's not secure at all.

It's like getting mad at the mayor of your city when a meteor falls on your house: unproductive and misguided.
It is largely used in black market transactions, it exists without any regulations at all, and there are almost no mainstream businesses that actually deal in it (and even those that do are doing so through an intermediary service that is giving them dollars/etc.). For most people, it sounds more like a scam than something they can trust their money with.
This article claims that eventually, the companies will come around: that "Companies are entrenched in their systems and don’t dare touch it if it’s “working”" but eventually they'll come around.

Has anyone done any research on the opposite possibility: that most companies simply ossify around the "acceptable" enterprise software when they're newer, and don't so much adapt as die off, leaving room for more recently founded companies that aren't attached to some ancient system?

The difference is of critical importance to someone trying to sell into that market, it's the difference between being Mercedes and Unilever.
It's like a compass.
But for pizza.
I'll add that if you need to background anything, django-celery makes it easy.

celeryd is also good for scheduling tasks with either single or periodic execution.

http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/getting-started/firs...

You can also use it in a typical task queue role. It will pickle or serialize the Python objects that accompany tasks for transmission over the wire.
Freedom, beer and open-source
The question is not if it can't be cracked, but who will be able to crack it. If a security analyst will be able to break it you should not worry that much as long as you adhere to good practices, but if a person without the proper knowledge will be able to break it, because it's a trivial vulnerability (ex. SQL injection via GET parameters), you should be really, really worried, because it means that something is wrong and it should be fixed soon.
I'm not a developer, but I love indie games.

We are living in a Golden Age. I dropped maybe $10 on Minecraft back in Alpha. We are buying desert island games for the price of a latte.

I think I bought To the Moon for $3. Maybe $5. And the next time it went on sale I bought it 5 times to give away copies.

Or Binding of Isaac, I think I paid 1.25 for my first copy. And I am closing in on 300 hours there.

Price is no longer a discriminator for great games. You can plop down $5 and get Steam keys for 5 to 8 games. If even one of them has good reviews, you can afford to take a risk on the rest. I was tempted by my conditioning (sponsored by modern retail) to say that the other games in the bundle are practically free.

So a good strategy to find your best new games is wait for the bundle, buy 10, cherish 1. If you can stand not to play on release day, you will gain a lot of solid gold and an enormous backlog. If you're going in with eyes wide open, it's a win win for players and developers.
http://www.ferfal.com/
Thanks Vlad, glad you're sharing our view. Indeed, why wasn't a centralized verified repository available before ? :) As per the reputation system, we've began with the most critical features to verify identify and build trust where clients also need to uphold their reputation - stay tuned for more!
meteor is not to build static web sites. Its for build Single Page Apps.
I see what you're saying: So it's that you want to hire an agency to build a product!

It would hard to have an agency build a product that you would flip like a real estate deal. The problem is that an investor isn't buying the product, they buying or investing in the team that made the product.
It is very secure as long as those ~30 characters are chosen randomly.

Also you need to learn about http://brainwallet.org/ to store bitcoins in your head by merely memorizing a human-friendly passphrase!
+1. Exact same situation here - started taking melatonin on the advice of my doctor, and it completely changed my morning routine (so long as I actually take it and go to bed about 7-8 hours before I wake up - it's not magic, and doesn't let me go to bed at 1am and wake up at 5am, but does let me go to bed at 10pm and wake up at 5am).
You don't have to provide an email when you sign up for HN though...
From someone who wasn't asked but has input... ;)

It's not a Python package in the sense that you might mean, but using virtualenv is absolutely fundamental to good Python development (at least the kind that lets you keep your sanity).

South is also exceptional; however, the developer recently ran a successful Kickstarter campaign dedicated to creating an improved version intended to be merged with Django itself, so that's something to watch for.

Django-CMS has proven invaluable for many of my projects and clients, though it's very heavy and more of a project-tacked-on-to-your-project than just a package. It's great to know, though, and very powerful.

django-registration can be useful if you're into full-on user profile usage, though many sites don't actually need this. There's a separate project that provides a set of default templates for this package, and it's almost more useful than django-registration itself.

livesettings is an outgrowth of django-cms that's pretty useful when you need what would otherwise be settings.py constants that can be modified at runtime without a deployment and server restart. Be careful, though, as overuse of this means you might have design issues.

feedparser is a very, very easy way to consume XML feeds.

If you want to parse something in a very user-friendly way, BeautifulSoup is hard to beat. If you're into the nitty gritty and/or need serious performance, lxml serves the same purpose but kicks far more ass.

If you need to interface with Amazon's AWS environments (EC2, S3, etc.), boto is a brilliant library.

These are more Python-in-general than Django-specific, but that's often a good thing.
I, too, was lucky enough to get in on the preview and read most of the book. I've read a couple of these books and this one takes the cake. It's huge, very thorough, and incredibly easy to follow along.

If you're thinking about getting into Meteor, you should definitely grab a copy. It's a really easy read that teaches you a lot.

Oh, and Meteor is sexy, I'm glad you're a fan Richard. I'm a big fan of your site and can't wait to see you get engulf in the Meteor hysteria. :)
I don't see the EFF campaigning against mobile telephony or credit cards.

The EFF is concerned about privacy matters involving mobile devices. https://ssd.eff.org/tech/mobile
I've been building (more or less solo) a web app marketplace for our startup for about a year now. I love Python, and had dabbled in Django and Flask prior to this, but built nothing with either to any significant degree. I went with Django because I was able to get something up relatively quickly, and I feel like that was a solid decision. I also am relatively confident in my ability to move towards Flask in the longer term if the Django app becomes too much, but I haven't experienced that yet.

Also Heroku has been mostly a godsend, as I haven't had to spend nearly any time on sysadmin stuff. One thing that caught me early on, not sure if it's a bug or what, but in Heroku, if you use git URLs for some of your packages in pip requirements (which is useful if you need to customize a package or more frequently fix a bug and can't wait for it to be pushed to pypi), Heroku's package cache has trouble knowing when to update unless you a) change the package version in its setup.py (may or may not be a good idea) or b) change the Python version in runtime.txt (kind of a pain as generally that means two deploys for an update, bump down one minor, then back up).
Because they said there was no civil war going on in Syria.
> And to be clear, just writing that your project is MIT licensed or sticking it in a package.json or making a small remark in your README doesn't cut it.

My point is that it does cut it. It's up to the licensee to include the license, not the copyright holder. There is nothing improper about specifying the license and not including it in its entirety. That's just your personal interpretation of it, that has nothing to do with copyright law.
Good enough is the enemy of perfect.

One of my duties is managing my company's backup systems. We use NetBackup, and despite it having a pretty old codebase underneath, it works fairly well. However, its interface is right out of 1998. Usability features you would expect in a modern program are just missing.

Where it shines is in its ability to script/automate a lot of tasks. Users who only use the GUI are surprised to see that their list of annoyances aren't really valid; NetBackup just doesn't put as much emphasis on shiny.
(one of Scoutzie founders here). We will be releasing more search and filter features that will allow you to refine your options on multiple criterion, including budget. Coming soon! :) For now, you can submit a proposal, stating your available budget, which allows designers to quickly judge whether you fit into their ballpark range.
Is it a startup's job to address existential risks to the system(s) that they participate in?
If you follow many blogs of people in the data visualization community, you'll see right away how often they talk about an iterative process in drawing out a story.

There's a big exploratory component, where they investigate possible approaches and try and find something interesting they can show.

On the one hand, you want some significant features and relationships that exist in the data to be apparent to any intelligent reader who spends a little time studying your visualization.

On the other hand, you don't want to distort the data, or impose an interpretation on it that isn't warranted.

For a well-done visualization, there is definitely a lot more work going into the final product than simply plotting some dimensions against some other dimensions.

As an example, the New York Times pours a lot of money (and therefore talent and person-hours) into their visualization work. Some of the behind-the-scenes of that operation is blogged about here: http://chartsnthings.tumblr.com/
Sacha is an awesome designer.
Startup helping recent grads learn the art of networking
Flask is so simple that it's definitely worth picking that up regardless (in any case, I think it's well done and worth having in your arsenal).

However, for large web projects, Django beats it hands down. Doing similar work with Flask would require so much wheel-reinvention that it'd be hard to justify your time or your client's money when it's all built quite well already.

Of course it's not perfect, and it's not for everything. But it's a great general-purpose, medium-performance web framework. It becomes a pain on very high-traffic sites (perhaps more so than JVM-based solutions and on par with scaling Ruby frameworks), but if you use it in the right place and/or team up with systems people that know their stuff, it's a powerful tool for quickly building complex websites in a maintainable and intuitive way.
Creating the account and confirming your email address is the opt-in, for certain things.

For example, it's reasonable for an account manager to email you as a customer and see how the product demo is going and ask if you need any help with something. If you don't care to hear from them, then let them know but that is not spam.

Spam is sending someone email when they've never contacted you before or still sending someone messages when they've asked you to stop.
Plot.ly: Matlab for the Web
I've been working on this tool for a few months. Would love to hear any and all feedback from the HN community and MATLAB/Numpy folks.
I'm going to go with, no. Having easily stockpiled and manipulated hard currency (fiat or no) makes waaay more sense to me than some combination of words or what have you in my brain wallet.

I don't think there's been any real demonstration of the use of bitcoins for non-connected transactions--theory does not a practical application make.

Better off trading bottle caps or ring tabs.
Ensuring security and ensuring I could never possibly memorize it...
I think I just sent you an email, if you don't get it can you drop me a line at markjr [at] you-know-where

What you're describing isn't supposed to happen and I want to figure out how it did.
Note that periodic execution, one of the more useful aspects of celery, is not supported on all backends. If you're using rabbitMQ, you're golden. If you're using most or all other transports (including SQS), you're likely SOL and will have to resort to either bare cron jobs or something like django-cronograph that accomplishes the same thing.

celery is definitely nice, but it does have its limitations (like everything else).
Thinking it? Just go to any city and as stated in TFA, you'll notice most of them are immigrants.

Is it racist to notice an industry is almost entirely made up of immigrants?
I agree with this, I am currently working in an Enterprise focused company and I generally look at our job as being custom integration. Not because that is the best way to develop software, but the best way to engage with these large clients. It's how they want to be engaged. In turn you charge them appropriately, help guide them away from the obvious traps, and have a fundamental knowledge about what your domain expertise is. The last one is important to know what to say yes/no too. It can be very profitable, but frustrating from an engineering point of view due to the unnecessary complexity created when multiple "vendors" are developing software to glue the client enterprise together. Lots and lots of glue.
Not complete without The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, one of the most lovably awful songs ever recorded:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGF5ROpjRAU
After readying HN for many years, I've finally created my own project. It's designed to help teach college students and recent graduates how to use informational interviews to reach their career goals. Its is probably more applicable to students in fields with a less defined career path or a less technical degree. I would love any and all feedback.
I think the standard method of dealing with this is to have your users upload the items to the local web server and then have some sort of async task or cron job responsible for moving the files to S3 later on.

Of course this means you'll have to keep track of where the uploaded file is currently located, but if you ever want to scale to multiple web servers you'll need to do that anyway.
This is supported quite well via django-storages. Unless the libs you're using are doing something manual instead of using Django's built-in file handling, this will neatly override the local-filesystem defaults and send all of your content to S3.

http://django-storages.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Even with the printout in hand, how does the recipient actually make the coin "theirs"? Can't the sender thwart the transaction if they gain Internet access before the recipient is able to (by transferring the coin to a wallet that's ready to receive it right away)?