skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're a 2 man shop providing 2ndary education to a very targeted demographic. I'm the only programmer / sysadmin / anything technical.

I originally developed the website with a separate mobile version using some code to detect the type of device and decide to redirect and when. This, is a pain in the butt as i'd always forget to make changes to the mobile version when i changed the main site (A LOT on my plate)

I'm in the middle of developing version 2 of the site and developing the main site side by side with mobile devices so 1 site can do both desktop and mobile.

When this new version is done, I'll finish developing the iOS native app (i've started it, but put it on hold for the new ver 2 site)

1: I want both a mobile version and a native version - I feel a native iOS app will provide a better experience - BUT - i also think i'll run into the same problem as before; updating the main site and not updating the ios app - maybe by that time i can hire another programmer... As i'm a Apple user, I have multiple iPhones / iPads / iPods to test on. I don't even want to think of how many devices I'll need to build a proper native Android app.

2: I'm never happy; I'm constantly re-writing my code, persuing new / better ways to do stuff; i'm never done. Technology choices are always my choice but I make sure my partner knows why i'm doing something and hes open to question anything he wants, especially if it requires money / time / blood.

3: Version 1 was full steam a head, lets get it done and out there. It has a lot of short-comings - most of only i as a developer know of but some visible. Version 2 is much more planned; I took the time to build prototypes, play with different ideas, think about why i was doing something and not just programming away. I'm happy i'm moving to a scalable main website and i'm pretty happy we'll have our first of 3 planned iOS apps (native app, game and magazine). I try not to do things I'll regret, but making a mistake in the process of learning is ok.

4: How long building such a site would take as the only developer with a day job. I'm committed and hopefully the payout comes someday, but being the only programmer on a fairly large project kinda sucks.

5: I collect as much analytic information as I can. My data to date shows me the vast majority of my users are iOS users (reason for native iOS app), are between 20-30 years old, etc.. Someday it'll be monetized and version 2 will have interactive interfaces.

I'm not done yet so you can't see it!
I've been trying not to get too worked up over the whole NSA/PRISM issue, but the potential success Google Glass changes the magnitude of the issue.

By proxy, every Google Glass owner will be acting as a remote recording device for government agencies. Everyone in the line of site/hearing range of the device forfeits privacy.
Things like this are potentially crazy-huge[1]. When contracts are flying back and forth, it is nearly impossible to detect small changes in already-reviewed sections. Does Comparisign cope with editing format changes? Sadly it is not uncommon for parties to switch format (normally from word to pdf) to hide the fact they are making changes.

The big nut to crack to really complete the offering is approvals. Currently some large companies use things like Exchange meeting invites and the such with "if you mark as attending, this will count as approving the changes" and other such tricks. Allowing for each individual change to be approved, then to require pulling the latest copy directly off the site and printing for final signing would fix so many problems, and make life a lot easier in big companies.

And things like this are for more than just contracts - all kinds of business documents from minutes to employee reviews require approval by multiple parties

Throw some auditing and standards[2] around it, and you'll have a very tempting enterprise offering indeed! Long term, look to implement various forms of SSO, made massively more complex by the need to allow at least two separate organisations to work together on documents.

[1] I've heard this asked for by a number of people I know, all of which have said this would have avoided a number of headaches for them!

[2] ISO 27001 at the least. 99.5% uptime would be the minimum, and get someone with some service management experience involved to do a proto-SLA. And even though you're not explicitly storing card details, your clients might want card and bank account details in there, so don't be surprised if PCI-DSS is asked for at some point
Here's a much more detailed discussion of this idea, and possible loopholes:

http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics

For example, evolution could easily have failed to make enhancements that would burn too many calories, because food used to be scarce.
What are your opinions on Pagodabox?
I don't know what you're imagining the Ecuadorean embassy to be, but it's actually just a large-ish apartment in a normal apartment building. There aren't that many doors, probably only a front door and a fire escape. And from the photos, I don't think they're on the ground floor either, so they can't even tunnel out...

That's one of the reasons they want rid of him - they didn't have much space to start with.
> I hate how something as interesting as this is ruined by partisanship ...

There's a good chance the NSA leak is a gambit by Hillary Clinton's faction to attack the administration.

You know, like the IRS leak.

Anyway, they are all just responding to incentives. American culture has degenerated into soviet-style communism, which means central committees frittering away resources on intelligence catfights and insane megaprojects. The American people are getting the government they deserve, and they're getting it good and hard.
Not used it. Would you recommend it?
It's hard to say. I get the sense that there's a huge disconnect between the demographics of all Linux users, and the impression one might get of those demographics by doing a survey of blogs, forums, mailing lists, online polls, etc.

For example, if you just read the most popular Linux forums, you could easily get the impression that every single Linux user despises Ubuntu with every fiber in the fabric of their being, and that they would never use any closed source product under any circumstances, and that they would only consider paying for anything if what they were paying was itself 100% open source.

As far as I can tell, though, that's not necessarily the case at all, with the Steam/VMWare/Humble Bundle cases being well-known counterexamples. As far as I can tell, nobody really knows. The Humble Bundle cases are interesting because Linux users have historically paid more than users from other platforms, on average, but is that because most Linux users want more closed source Linux software, or is it because a subset of Linux users want to encourage more closed source, and are voting with their wallets to demonstrate that?

Anyway, nobody knows. But if you are correct that the vast majority of Linux users are not opposed to closed source, then that would imply that pretty much the entire online Linux community is a hugely disproportionate misrepresentation of Linux users as a whole. Given that Linux as a platform is far more reliant on having a healthy online community than other platforms, that would be a big problem. However, my gut feeling is that you are correct, and that the online Linux community is a vastly disproportionate subset of Linux users, and that it's unfortunate that the online community is so dominated by one particular type of user.
And those delays can be bypassed by clicking the 'link' link, and then replying. ;-)
Couldn't get past the fact that the interviewer probably did 0 prep work for this.
Until they extradite him to the US that is...
Syrian Rebels Manipulate Google Maps
Good question! While I can't give legal advice, it is my understanding that the answer is NO! :)
Just regarding the message UI...

First off, I don't think they are explicitly trying to fade out older messages. The received message bubbles are gray and don't seem to have a gradient effect going on; it's only the sent ones which are colored (green or blue) and have the gradient. So I think Apple's goal here really was just a gimmicky gradient effect for the colored (sent) messages.

More evidence for that is that the bubbles themselves don't seem to change colors as you scroll; rather they are just sort of a mask for an underlying gradient layer underneath (so you can have one large bubble which fills the screen and is light on top and dark on the bottom).

But even if their intention was to make older messages fade out, it was still severely misguided. It is trivial to discern which messages are older (they are higher in the chain and therefore further from the text input for a new message). Users of iOS have been familiar with this for years (and isn't the new UI supposed to move away from explicit visual cues since the assumption is people are used to it by now?).

Moreover, it actually hurts usability, since users now have to scroll more often to get messages in the readable portion of the screen if they want to read through a conversation.

And, on top of all that, if there is only one sent message in the conversation, there is actually no way to bring it into the readable portion of the screen due to the snap-back! (Further evidence that this was intended to be no more than a visual gimmick.)
The Ruby code is running the full Rails stack. Instead with Go he went almost bare-metal. That alone makes a BIG difference.
"PGP is certainly not easy for anyone, and that's the problem"

I have managed to explain it to people with no technical background, and they were able to use it within a day. It is really not that complicated. Most people give up on it not because of the difficulty of using it, but because they want to be able to read their email from whatever random computer they happen to find lying around. Smartcards are part of the solution, but you would need browser support (yeah, I am looking at you Mozilla) and the willingness to buy them.

The wrong approach is to assume that everyone is completely stupid and absolutely helpless. People in general lack knowledge about computers; they does not mean that they cannot be taught something new.
Do you have data supporting the 99.9%? I suspect that's high; there are buildings within five blocks of where I'm sitting that have a zipcode that crosses a state line, and I don't think it's the only state-crossing zip in my area (Washington, DC, for what it's worth). In any event, even if it's accurate, it doesn't take that much traffic for a .1% error rate to start to add up to non-trivial number of users, especially because that .1% is going to have a noticeably-jarring experience, as opposed to the alternative (collecting all fields) which everyone is already completely accustomed to.
I completely failed to find the sources for this :(
Needless to say, it's a little unfair of me to so casually and easily remark "the page out of context seems faintly scam-like" without pinpointing exactly why, and offering "ideas for how to make it seem less sketchy". This kind of thing is also very subjective, anyway! However, in my opinion, it might be an improvement to drop the caps on "FREE" and perhaps the exclamation marks on the two quoted sentences too. The comment around here by "stfu" about the buttons is also interesting, and hadn't even occurred to me, but seems like a good observation.
Added in a fee waiver request to the form!
You need a million users to raise a (consumer) seed round
The UK postcode system is accurate enough that a lot of online retailers will ask you first for the postcode (5 - 7 character) and then they'll offer the short selection list of valid addresses (mostly just house numbers) for that code. It's great.
Perfect Forward Secrecy means that even if you want to you cannot decrypt old messages, since the keys used are ephemeral and destroyed at the end of the session.
This is a non-problem:

1) The other road users are operating at a slower speed so it is considerably easier to get out of the way.

2) emergency access is affected by the issue causing the emergency ( a crash for example )

3) normal congestion will put the effective speed lower anyhow.

4) traffic calming can actually increase the throughput of a street For example, converting a street with 2 lanes each direction to a single lane with a central left turn lane: eliminates the congestion caused by people stopping to make turns from the left lane.
Synthetic Blood Is Coming
Regarding the motion to quash, it seems as though it would be rejected outright by the court clerk since you're not filing it in person and I'm guessing there is a motion fee to file with the court.

I am a lawyer and would be interested in helping you make this more effective, if you are interested.
Also, regarding fees, I really don't expect that the NSA is going to respond to your FOIA request without a fight, so I personally think it's a non-issue. The idea here is the protest, not an expectation that you'll actually get your records!
I understand your point, but I don't see any reason to believe it.

It seems to me that it's in the NSA's (and every other gov't organization's) best interests to do everything in its power to increase its own reach and influence. It's naive to assume they are working against their own best interests unless you have some sort of evidence to back that up.
The problem is not the project.. the problem is with the society..
the male society... they/we dont use to deal with women as human beings but as objects... thats pretty sad in our society

Women are treated as male commodities :(
yep, yep & thanks :)

Most of my peers either use Excel, blindly learn by rote a series of 'voodoo' commands to input into a very specific program running on a dusty old Win98 machine. Get out a calculator. Or beg their CS/physicist girlfriend to help...
So why grant patents on software?
We're still using Skype and starting to introduce irc.

One main advantage that Skype had going for it was a little known feature on the Mac Skype 5 and 6 clients: ChatStyles [1]

The Mac Skype client used a copy of webkit to render the conversations and at one point provided instructions to let you hook into that and style the conversations the way you like with HTML templates, css and javascript.

We took advantage of this feature it to add communication short cuts, the main example being that if someone typed #1234 in a chat and the person receiving the message was using our ChatStyle #1234 would become a clickable link to the appropriate bug in our issue tracking system.

Skype silently killed this feature in an update a few weeks ago, so our thought is to go with IRC and and use an IRC bot that can provide these kinds of shortcuts.

If there is another chat system that allows you to customize these kinds of things, I'd love to hear
about it.

[1] http://joemiller.me/2011/05/24/alternative-skins-for-skype-5...
It has always been there, in the nightlies.
> The passphrase can be brute-forced significantly more easily than breaking the encryption itself.

Doesn't brute forcing this depend on the strength of the passphrase? For large enough N, if neither can be done in the next N years, does it really matter if it's significantly easier? Isn't there a non-negligible likelihood that in the next N years we'll figure out ways to break stronger forms of encryption but we won't figure out how to brute force strong passphrases efficiently?
someone saw the "ios in the car" icon?
http://cdn.iflowreader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/apples...
To me, this is the most ugly icon I have ever seen. ever!
> Stuxnet?

Probably not, once a vendor is aware the bug has a relatively short life and using it increases the possibility of detecting your attacks. To avoid constant maintenance, one must review code for new exploits and then not inform the vendor.

More likely they watched for indications that their bugs were independently detected to keep ahead once they were operational.
Fear causes people to think irrationally.

this is the most amazing thing I've read all day. someone using the argument that 'fear causes people to think irrationally' to justify government snooping.

Let's step back to base principles. What's the claimed reason for snooping? To stop terrorists.

How much of a threat are terrorists? If you think about it rationally, not very much.

10K per year die from drunk driving. That's three 9/11's per year. You wouldn't consider allowing the government to filter your facebook and email for strings like 'i've been drinking, now I'm driving', so why would you allow that for a much smaller problem?

Here's something else to think about rationally. Stop and look around the world and history. Have terrorists caused more deaths and taken away more individual rights than governments? I'd say its governments by an enormous margin (I'm not talking about the US govt by itself, although I bet if you dug up all the stuff like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment you might get close even in the US).

We're graced with relatively good government in the US but you don't have to look too hard around the world (Iran, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Afganistan pre-9/11, Rwanda, Bosnia) to see that it's perfectly rational to be wary of government power (its even more obvious if you consider historic examples like the Soviet Union, Nazis, Armenian).

tl;dr it's irrational to fear terrorists, ergo no need to sacrifice your civil liberties
That option is present only in WebKit nightly builds, and has been since when the new Web Inspector was introduced.
You're calling me dishonest for quickly mentioning a critical omission of a subject (the "well-regulated militia" bit) without quoting the full amendment?

That is an insult in itself. <insert my muttered response to you here>

I wasn't even taking a stand on the issue of "gun rights", simply that it's more than what its proponents make it out to be.

The bit about messing with people is because any time I deal with pro-gun people they are almost invariably sanctimonious assholes who are unwilling to talk about the issue as a whole. People like that don't want dialog, so insults will have to do.

No, the less laws the better. Let's just make sure they're good ones.
I would acquire yelp maybe.
I do wonder if they couldn't have reverse-engineered a solution by sniffing the network traffic. I hope they at least tried.

Or perhaps disk images + AppleScript? I dunno if iTunes in those days supported ripping from an image.
Start with full-on solar intensity of 1000 watts per square meter. 100x100 meters gives the power input needed. Focus that on 1m^2, then focus that in turn to 1cm^2. Sounds doable.
It's available on Kindle and Nook, but I didn't see a completely DRM free option. Kindle DRM doesn't bother me that much personally because I can view the books on every device I own, and on the web.
For a slightly different take on it, see the Red Dwarf Novel "Better than Life"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Than_Life
Hell yeah, I'll give those boys with the funny accents a bitcoin.
While an interesting read, I can't help but feel your postlude basically negates most the rest of the article, leaving it as only that; and interesting read.

Then again, I'm not subject to the same problems, being an hour north of SF and happily in a relationship (with kids!), so I'm probably not the target, and may not get the same things out of it.
Upvoted because yes, it is outdated. I started doing Java professionally in 2001, and stopped years later.

It still seems as though these frameworks are all playing catch-up, with e.g. things like migrations.
Yeah - I do agree with your main point, it was just the malaria thing that bugged me. Saying that hackers can't be effective in the public sector, whether as hackers or jut as people, seems myopic to me, which we appear to agree on.
Things My 10 Year Old Has Never Seen (And Likely Never Will)
In somewhat related news, I wonder how much longer MariaDB will be a "free for all" given Monty's view on open source and open development seems to have changed:

Fluffy summary:

http://readwrite.com/2013/05/31/mysql-co-founder-wants-you-t...

Original interview:

http://www.zdnet.com/open-source-its-true-cost-and-where-its...
Hahaha pretty much agreed, it was right next to the Multitasking and Siri icons on their promotion page. That's what happens when you combine the "straight from the tube" green with pure black and tack on a purely resized Siri icon.
1. The IRS thing is completely separate from the NSA stuff, and the comment I responded to was discussing the NSA.

2. The IRS stuff is also way more complicated than it seems. They're supposed to target political organizations, because they don't qualify for the tax-exempt status. And there was really only one large political movement forming new organizations in that time frame. I haven't seen any actual ( as opposed to speculative) connection to the "political elites" yet. Everything I've read points to institutional laziness rather than a politically instigated targeting.

Now, I'm not saying these things shouldn't be investigated! But claiming that they should currently be as big a scandal as Watergate doesn't sit right with me. It diminishes just how fucked up Watergate was.
Wow! The things to learn. I am not sure how I feel about this or what to get out of it, although I am feeling a bit dizzy/warm. Should we buy music from Apple or other "nicer" companies? Pretty messed up though what Jobs did, although posting their business plan was most likely what made "them" angry. I am with you though that if it was confidential, you should have been given notice.
I've gotten wordpress and a couple of other projects running on it, and it does have a free option you can try out. But it's also the first such service I have tried so I can't compare it to others.

But I can say they've been courteous and helpful with trouble tickets.
Hi Kiro,

We wrote a simple Python back-end service that stores authentication information -- if you think of the dashboard as a rich client, it needs some way to persist some items that are unrelated to the API such as email address and password login credentials, so that's what this simple service does.

However, Balanced's API has CORS-support enabled, so we can make API calls to the API from the Ember app directly (no need to proxy through a back-end service).

This will reduce latency to the user to give a perceived feeling of responsiveness once implemented. Interestingly, simply implementing the dashboard as an AJAX app and having the requests fire in parallel as opposed to serially with our existing dashboard has already given a massive performance boost.
Was going to reply to arkitaip, but you nailed it on the head. I have really enjoyed working with Go, but the much more limited ecosystem does mean rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself more often.

So I agree, I don't think you can say Go is just as fast for development in every case.

But these are much more interesting discussions than these silly micro benchmarks...
And that's probably true. I can't remember the first time I felt I got shafted (personally or in business) but I am sure I was fuming angry. There's truth to the concept of growing a thick skin. You really need it for business.
The "nearly powerless regular citizens" in question are, for the most part, political groups looking to use a tax loophole to gather and funnel institutional money to their causes. Not only weren't they "in many cases prevented" -- they were all approved, and able to proceed with their political activities flouting the letter and intent of a law designed to encourage "social welfare".

[Edit: clarity]
He brings up a very good point that a lot the information humans pickup is from each other's faces. The nonverbal feedback facilitates turn-taking in conversation as well as emotional feedback.

Perhaps Glass causes visceral reactions because of the combination of its foreignness (unlike glasses) and proximity to the face.