skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's probably a reason most browsers have been so slow to adopt it - especially Opera. Perhaps the reason Chrome is the only browser supporting it is that Google can leverage the web crawlers to scan for malicious use of the attributes.
I think it's clear that anything that can "work" will be deemed illegal. Because "terrorists" and "money laundering".
Ask HN: What's the new Slashdotting?
Back in the olden dayes, the unit of flood demand was a Slashdotting [1]. If you wanted to make sure your site stayed up under a sudden flood of interest, you figured out what a Slashdotting looked like, simulated that, and you were probably good. Later my yardstick was "an Oprah". I had good data on what it looked like when Oprah mentioned your site on her show, so I would build for that. But that's getting a little dated.

So: what level of traffic do HNers simulate to test what a flood of public interest looks like?

Big bonus points for hard data from actual flash crowds.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdotting
Is this cultural to the US? I've never known it to be an issue here in Australia, and it's always quite a surprise to see someone with a longer than 2 year stint in the first 5-7 years of experience.
This is what I kept trying to say on here but always get downvotes.

Nation states will fight hard and dirty against digital currencies, as it completely undermines their fiat currency inflationary economies.
"Born into the club" is probably overstating it.

"Pay your dues", perhaps, but competent person -> funded (or employee at funded company, or just someone known for doing something awesome) -> EIR, could be 2-4 years.

VCs are probably less stupid about credentials than e.g. Google under Mayer with the "core schools" crap. Maybe less stupid than "core schools" in admittance. I suspect being a Thiel fellowship person, a core developer on a really popular open source project (nginx dude for sure, probably Ver if he wanted to do something in bitcoin on his own, etc.) would be more than adequate. Or YC/500 Startups/etc.
I feel like someone could make a buck or two by offering a mail2forum gateway. That way, you can appease all the people complaining about how they want a phpbb-style forum (yes, I know phpbb was not first), and you can appease all the people that want to use email. Except, every time I have worked on this sort of tool, or seen others working on it, the community totally ignored it and didn't use the forum side at all.. oops.

I wish there was a legitimately good version of Google Groups out there. At this point, I can't decide which interface (Yahoo Groups versus Google Groups) is worse. It's like trying to decide between SourceForge and LaunchPad... yeah right.
Turbocharged Community Building
I think the point with using something like Bitcoin to back a blinded currency is that the physical identities of the people could be secret, so no particular government would be in a position to compel them to do or not do anything. Normal market forces, reputation, etc. would be enough to assess performance risk.
After I read Abelson & Sussman's article I asked a bookstore to order their book. It took a month to arrive (this was the 80s) and I'm thankful for that month, because that period of trying to develop their themes further for myself made the book a richer experience. Anyone else here encountered a textbook first in distilled form?
I think the greater achievement came with Google image search, someone had to tag all those photos.

They wrote an algorithm that takes that data and recognises new images with it. As long as there is a way for us to tag inaccurate matches then it should be able to continue to learn. I imagine any flagged matches are being reviewed carefully.
As long as they still offer the option to host your own I'm OK with that.

Self-hosted communities are an amazing life blood of the free and open Internet.
i think i know ... its

http://rubykaigi.org/2013
The index isn't the information on all your files (it's not the .git directory). The index is an intermediate holding location between the file system and actually storing all of those files as a commit in the commit tree. It's the current state of the proposed next commit.

Your description misses (or conflates) an entire tree of information (the HEAD tree), and it's arguably the most important one as it holds the whole of your git repo's history.

I didn't fully understand git till I read Scott Chacon's "A Tale of 3 Trees" which explains what reset is all about and goes into the details: http://git-scm.com/blog/2011/07/11/reset.html

I love git, but I do not think it's obvious or intuitive without some explanation. It's different than any other SCM I've used in the past. I created this presentation a while ago that I think highlights some of the real concepts that people need to know to really understand git: http://tednaleid.github.io/showoff-git-core-concepts/
well said.. I'm an ops guy that likes working with small companies and I've come into a lot of startups where dev did the ops and it was a mess. No one knew if backups work, monitoring was a mess at best and the way things were setup, nothing would scale at all
Why is O(N * N!) not written as O(N!)? It seems that N * N! < (N+1)! and we don't care about constant factors.
Ok and where/how do I get it?
Apple enjoyed Irish tax holiday from the start (in 1980)
More likely a bug in the ACPI support of the specific motherboard model.
Well that makes sense because IQ is dependent on a wide variety of factors in addition to genetics. The nutrition of the mother as well as exposure to certain chemicals during the pregnancy plus actions/drugs used during the birth can play as large if not greater part in the IQ of a child as genetics.

The child's treatment during formative years 0-7 will have an immense impact on whether certain predispositions (I.E. psychopathic tendencies) are expressed later in life.

Dr. James Fallon, who was part of a documentary I saw a while back, was describing how he was shocked to discover that he had the brain of a psychopath, but his life turned out very differently because (and I'm paraphrasing) "when I look back at picture albums of my childhood, I'm always seeing smiles".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fallon
Designing a more effective website footer
I'm a sysadmin by profession but when I write code I don't want to have to worry about backups, scaling, etc. Those things get in the way of creating the product. What we deem as "cloud" infrastructure has gotten us partially there by eliminating the need to think about scaling the service and allowing that to dynamically occur on heroku or aws. There is obvious still some issues with availability within zones or regions but the layers of abstraction for hardware have come along way. Automated backups are definitely being explored by cloud providers but I don't think its a guaranteed service as of yet. In the next few years we wont even have to worry about that. We'll just be able to go back to versions of data in time because of the way in which data is already snapshotted in certain datastores.

Although I guess people still forget that anything can and will fail at some point in time. That automated backup wont work one day, it'll be corrupted or just wont run.
Make Your Product A Lighthouse
As I can see in the screenshots and videos, it's built on top of NetBeans RCP, which is cool :)
It's not "The universal operating system" for nothing.
Both I think. http://www.joeffice.com/why.html
You really don't know if you made "the right choice" for your emotional well-being because you can only see one of any number of possible outcomes.

If you'd have gone with Big Bad Microsoft, a lot of things could have happened. At the instant of deciding - you could have learned how to make decisions based less on emotions and more on logic. You could have helped change the company culture instead of being relatively ineffectual. I wonder - what has your hate-based (I assume) decision really changed for anybody outside of a small Boston startup?
I agree with having a variety of public spaces (conference rooms, lounges) for the right context.

I've also found that open plan is great up until you hit the size of your team. One large, open room with only people you work directly with is perfect. Giant hanger-like engineering floors with 100+ people and little dividing the space is a disaster.

A large open plan floor with central, quiet conference rooms anyone can use or phone booths is great. The outer space should be divided into team rooms with their own open layout of 10-15 people or less.

My startup currently shares a large, open-plan loft space with 3 other companies. We each cordoned off one corner of the space with hanging dividers. It's just about perfect.
UserVoice is also an alternative, free for one user.
It seems inevitable to me that Google is going to shut down Google Groups or else fold it into Google+ in some unpleasant way. Maybe when that free option is taken off the table there will be more room for a commercial solution.
I just tried it on my photo collection and it's incredible. It even works for famous places, e.g. I searched for "western wall" and "dome of the rock" and it found them. I can't imagine how that works
Is Global Warming Cooler than Expected?
I'm still getting the warning.

Latest MacGPG2 & Homebrew.
Twin Tyrants - Hitler, Stalin
> if you do a Linux kernel upgrade, you will want to recertify.

The difference is that, if you automate the certification process, you can run it against the bleeding edge branches all the time well before the packages are incorporated into the official release. Any sign of trouble will happen months, if not years, before it's time to upgrade.

You can have a cozy enough relationship with Microsoft, but I doubt they'll let you put their sources on your Jenkins (or BuildBot) servers so that you can run your certification tests continuously. To say nothing about making the Windows build process CI-friendly. That in itself is an undertaking bound to take longer than the shelf life of any operating system.
"The truth is that Lisp is not the right language for any particular problem. Rather, Lisp encourages one to attack a new problem by implementing new languages tailored to that problem."

This is why I don't use LISP. It is the case that math is closely related to language, so those with an overdeveloped math functional unit in the brain also have an overdeveloped linguistical unit. This leads to treating every problem as a linguisic problem, because that is what their brain is best equipped to solve.

While this works for them, it doesn't for me--my brain attacks problems completely differently, and so language centric toolbox is not what I prefer to use.

I don't have a problem converting my solutions into any given language. In fact, I prefer to translate them into a representation closer to the machine for better performance.
SQLAlchemy Migrated from Mercurial to Git
When I type in "handsome", it consistently shows pictures of myself. Just goes to show that image recognition has a long way to go.
RubyKaigi ? Interesting !

I have found something else :

https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/issues/74

We should have soon a new Ruby website.

:-)
Rustboot: a 32 bit kernel written in Rust
Separating focused, creative work from interrupt-driven work is essential. Context switching between them is expensive.

On my engineering team we tried to collect all interrupt driven work together (triaging bug reports, working on deployments, production issues) and let it only bother one person. This is a sacrificial duty of your long-term productivity we all rotate each sprint (bug duty).

I find it easier to do interrupt-driven work when I'm full time in an interruptible context. I'd much rather be on-call for a week once every couple of months than be interrupted several times a day.
A few years ago it was Digg, now it can be Reddit.
Most popular currency for money laundering, terrorism supporting, child pornography and drugs selling is ... USD DOLLAR!
The Principle of Constant Optimization
It is not in any sense a 'fork' (did you mean clone?) of MS Office. It has a different use case and long-term goal. This I have concluded from reading the article.
I think Quora (http://www.quora.com/) and Branch (http://www.branch.com/) are relevant here.
Measuring galactic velocities with a USB TV tuner [pdf]
You didn't read past the first line, did you? The experiment was in Dauphin, Manitoba.
It's not the same people not getting it. More and more people are using git every day so they are the ones who do not understand the git terminology/technology.
I always thought that was done using keywords on the page the image was taken from (and image captions, alt text, titles and filenames). This is reinforced by what you see when you go many pages ahead in images and see things that don't seem related to what you searched, but the keyword is there somewhere on the page.
Link to the APK files - https://github.com/zhuowei/Xenologer
Summary here: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-for-budget-radio-astronomy/
I worked in a similar, one-giant-open-area office for a year and didn't enjoy it.

My team was a cluster of 8 fixed desks in a giant sea of engineering, with people always walking through our area on their way somewhere else. The noise level was so high they installed custom white-noise generators that have an unnerving effect when you spend all day with them.

Contrasting this to another company where there were separate team rooms of 5-10 people for each group in the company and it was much more pleasant while still having a lot of the same benefits.
How about statistical data that a clinical depression occurs mostly among women?)
>> bad people many times use e-currency for repulsive things like child slavery

>Do people not use fiat currency, as well, for repulsive things like child slavery?

Or do they use computers, and weapons, and, and, and...?
Brain Functions That Improve with Age
That is an interesting (as in "Huh, interesting!") claim. Do you recommend any reading on this cognition topic? (Concerning language and math.)
The ultimate lulz issue for fully anonymous and resilient payments is probably the Jim Bell/Tim May "Assassination Politics" model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm
http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.t...

Essentially I could say "I bet $100k that Marcus Badperson will die on the morning of 15 June 2013"; best way to collect is to do the deed yourself (or subcontract.)

The terrifying thing is not so much that someone might be willing to pay $100k to kill someone, but that 1mm people might each be willing to pay $0.10. Not so much kickstarter as kickender.

(this whole thing was my first contact with the federal court system, since I hosted a mailing list archive for the cypherpunks list on which a lot of this was discussed, when Jim Bell got prosecuted back in 1997 for attacking an IRS office. I was so glad I was running a really mediocre mailing list archive where anyone who sent mail directly to the list address on the machine could inject messages, and by picking the right message id, overwrite...and for getting the world's most awesome attorney on retainer...)
Only 5 days to go for free compact OS on Kickstarter
Yes, but the resources it passes around are handles to buffers in memory (as little copying as possible). Not so trivial to pass around the network (well, most networks). I suspect a VNC-like approach would work easiest and most generally, but performance would suffer (though I've found situations where VNC beats remote X11, even over very low latency connections).
Sound Bulbs | Variations on normal by Dominic Wilcox
It could, but then one would sacrifice syntactic extensibility. It's a deliberate tradeoff.
It also helps ensure that it stays achieved.
I never liked stack overflow, so let me try here: because git is distributed, you actually have two "copies" of your code; one that's a mirror of what's on the server (origin/master), and one that's your local checkout (master). Things that in SVN you would just do by contacting the server (e.g. svn diff . https://server/repo/trunk) you instead do against your "local server copy" (git diff . origin/master).

So there's an extra stage to think about; rather than making changes to your local checkout and committing them to the server, in git you make changes to your local checkout, commit them to your local repository, and then push them to the remote server. But this also works in the other direction: rather than fetching changes from the server directly into your local checkout, you fetch changes from the server to your local repository, then from there into your local checkout. At least, if you want to. "fetch" does the first of these, while "pull" does both of them together.

Now, you can naturally ask why we would ever want this additional complexity, but as I said at the start it's the whole point of a DVCS. Conceptually, your repository on github and your local repository are the same kind of thing, rather than a client/server relationship. You can use git without using remotes at all, in which case you'd never use push, fetch or pull; in that mode it behaves rather like SVN (just with the repository being on the same machine as the checkout). Conversely, you can use it in truly distributed fashion, where there are several federated repositories, none of which is physically distinguished from the other. At that point there is no real notion of committing to the "canonical" repository, because there isn't one, but what you can do is commit to, and checkout from, your local repository, and you can synchronize your repository with another repository in either direction (i.e. you can send commits from your repository to another, or receive commits from another repository to yours). When using it in this fashion it becomes very important that these are different operations and you want to be able to manually control when each step happens.
Intentionally or not, the nickname of the submitter is very telling.)
The nutrition of the mother as well as exposure to certain chemicals during the pregnancy plus actions/drugs used during the birth can play as large if not greater part in the IQ of a child as genetics.

Interesting. Identical twins raised separately have a correlation of .76, while fraternal twins raised together have a correlation of just .55 and non-twin siblings raised together have a correlation of .47[0]. To me that suggests a strong genetic (though not necessarily heritable) component. And perhaps the .08 difference between fraternal twins and non-twin siblings is explained by differences in the mother's nutrition.

How do you measure the effect of nutrition? What studies are you looking at?

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlations...
This has worked well for our teams. As a social norm of software development I always IM/email someone with their headphones on and don't interrupt them.

It's also a nice courtesy to IM someone before dropping by their desk so they aren't surprised and you can check if it's a bad time.
> rman666
> Piss off. Did you consider adding a disclaimer
> indicating English is not your native language?

Not really, especially since English is my native language. As a result, I'm somewhat confused by your reply. Someone criticized the initial post, and I pointed out that the criticism might be misplaced. Not sure why you responded at all, especially as unpleasantly as that.

Could you explain further?
I meant that SarBox defers IPOs until stupidly late, so "normal" investors, reliant on the protections of the public market, don't get to invest early enough to make real money.
Teacher resigns - says what she loves is extinct
Finished studying as of November last year, actually. And sure, send me an email, cassandrexx on gmail.
One school of thought is that depressed people are in closer contact with reality due to their lack of defense mechanisms that keep others happy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism

I don't think the evidence has completely verified this hypothesis, but I think there's some truth to it. I think it may be a contributing factor to the Dunning-Krueger effect in that depressed people are willing to accept things that others won't while having little self-confidence
Online discussions are crap. Quickly derailed by well-meaning or not well-meaning people, the original question or discussion is sidetracked by something more interesting, or irrelevant.

I'd like to see structured evidence-based discussions that aim for a conclusion without allowing people to talk in circles. Anecdotal evidence would not be allowed. Anything off-topic would not be allowed.

HN gets derailed the whole time by something tangentially related to the original posting, and I guess people like that: but we should also aim for communities where structured discussion is possible.

Something more debate-like perhaps.
It dropped a lot when I tried using it, and the "in browser and Adium and a Pidgin" combination was super unstable -- caused it to crash a lot more. It may have improved, but I couldn't get it to stay connected more than 15 minutes. This was about 2 years ago maybe?
completely n00b question : how does Debian compare with Ubuntu ?
When discussing e-currencies, I find myself asking what the incentives are in using them. What I find is that the biggest reason to use e-currencies is not any intrinsic benefit of the e-currencies itself.

Rather, it's the current banking system that has drawbacks which pushes myself and, I assume, others, to look for alternatives. For example, thanks to the move of digital cash over physical, banks has gone from being a care taker to a service provider. That might not sound as a big change, but it has a huge impact on the power balance of the bank vs the consumer. I personally am no longer in control my own money. If I wanted today to take out my own money from the bank here in Sweden, I would have to go down there and ask for permission. If I then give them a reasonable argument why I should be allowed to take out my cash from the bank, then they might allow me to come back in a few weeks and take out the cash. If they do not like my argument for taking out the cash, then they are perfectly legally allowed to deny me access to my money.

And that's only about access to my own money. We also have the personal information derived from transactions I make. That data is not even remotely under my control, as it is given out to be data mined by anyone within EU or who has a EU treaty for data sharing (like US). It can also be sold, or data mined by the bank itself, and the bank could claim copyright ownership on it.

Therefore, a major benefit of e-currency is that it removes the negative aspects of the current system. It doesn't really need to be anonymous or a cryptographically-secure form of value representation. It just need to be digital and in control of the individual who "owns" the cash. Those priorities might not sound as attractive for criminals, but for me it sound as the way e-currency will grow.
I don't think that being an employee at a funded company gets a person anything. Companies don't just let engineers have investor contact. The one case I saw where an engineer got investor contact was someone who was so unethical and incompetent that he got his mentor (the CTO) fired. (This was that startup from hell that I worked at in the winter of 2011-12. Initials TSS.)

You basically have to play degenerate political games to get investor contact as an employee of a funded startup. It really is a two-class world these days.

My experience is based on what I've seen in New York, but everything I've heard about the Valley is that it's the same. Well-connected douches will always have a competitive advantage over real people. We get our shot when tech becomes uncool/nerdy again and those assholes go back to whatever douche Valhalla they return to.
Sky's Android apps hacked by Syrian Electronic Army, removed from Google Play