skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're building a Google Reader replacement, we'd love your advice.
A bit of background, we're a relatively new digital agency (specializing in the development side of things) based in England, and we've settled upon a Google Reader replacement as our first major project after the simple fact that I didn't find an alternative that I personally liked. Simple, right? Now, we've been working on this for a while - and we're almost ready to open our doors to the public (within the next few days), but before we do so (and possibly have a poor first impression), we'd love to hear what features you'd like to see in a Google Reader replacement.

Anybody who contributes a feasible idea or suggestion will receive a premium account indefinitely, free of charge. And yes, before anybody asks - our primary offering is free (we'll be offering a few premium only features in order to ensure financial stability).

So, any suggestions? You can see a screenshot of our web ui at http://i.imgur.com/vxqhcgO.jpg - and you can sign up for the beta (invites will start going out tomorrow) over at http://yomu.eu/ if you're interested.

-------------------------

For those interested, our technology stack currently consists of the following.

Backend

node.js (express, socket.io, the usual suspects).

Database

NuoDB (formerly NimbusDB).

Why NuoDB over say MySQL or Mongo? Well, I've personally been working with Nimbus for a while - and I love the damn thing. Performance is great, and the ease of scaling is a major selling point.

Hosting

Self-scaling Amazon EC2 infrastructure.

-------------------------

Applications for Android and iOS are already on the roadmap, and are tentatively scheduled for late July.
Congratulations! That's truly awesome. Any tips for a novice developer who would love to start contributing?
Microsoft Ventures' site -- http://www.microsoftventures.com/ -- has this nugget right at the top, in large lettering:

"You have an idea so brilliant it burns. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. You just have to make it happen—now."

There have been plenty of posts on Hacker News about entrepreneurs and hackers being bad at work-life balance and/or trying to create better work-life balance with varying degrees of success. It's a real issue, and I think the common consensus is that entrepreneurs with poor work-life balance are more likely to experience burn-out (or other problems like alcohol or drug issues -- or depression) which will ultimately make them less effective at whatever they're doing.

So I wonder two things:

1) How much of this "work at the expense of all else" mentality is, in fact, driven by marketing like this on the Microsoft Ventures site? (Edit: Not that it's Microsoft's fault, but that this attitude is common in marketing relating to start-ups and entrepreneurship.)

2) Should having this kind of "work at the expense of all else" language in the most prominent position on the Microsoft Ventures site make me conclude that they actually kind of don't "get it" as far as start-up entrepreneurship goes? Or, at least, that they are trying to take some "cool" stance and "appeal to the kids" with some slightly more sophisticated form of the "EXTREME" everything marketing aimed at teens and twenty-somethings about a decade ago? Because it makes the site feel more like an ad for Mountain Dew or Red Bull than an advertisement for an organization that really cares to understand how start-up culture should work. Which, I guess it is, since the end-game for Microsoft is most likely to get more cool new companies to use their (otherwise struggling?) software platforms.

I understand I'm judging based on one throwaway tag-line, but it's literally the only non-menu-item piece of text on the screen when I visit their site. So I feel I have to give it a fair amount of weight.
Maybe for the next Ludnum Dare...

nice write up comparison of lua based game engines: http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2012/09/21/Battle-of-the...
Print version should be available Q4 this year
EpicMail: Secure Email for the truly paranoid.
The feeder is written in python with gevent (will talk more about that in part 2). Every thing runs on ubutu at linode. For twitter, the library we used was tweepy. Tweepy is cool but required some tweaking. We used the filter/streaming api at twitter.
The word conspiracy brings a lot along with it. I don't think the government is conspiring to "take away people's freedoms" any more than the terrorists "hate our freedom". They're both straw men.

What I do think is that the government is doing what it always tends to do in these situations: kill flies with bazookas. Why? Because they can. They don't answer to anyone, so they can exert a ridiculous amount of resources and infiltration that no other body could feasibly get away with.

No evil man thinks they're doing evil.
It's depressing that this article is so high on HN right now. It's another example of a poor report trivializing an important debate. Meanwhile, many of the comments here are snarky and sardonic which further degrades the dialog. This is a serious subject and should be treated as such.

It's easy to shout hurray for your side. It's easy to demonize your enemy. According to the government, Snowden is a traitor. According to many frequent HN readers, the government is completely out of the control. Neither of these claims is true, but they are difficult to get past.

Although Snowden is certainly not a traitor, the accusation is serious. His life and freedom hang in the balance. Politicians and political pundits are looking for an easy solution when they demonize Snowden. Making him out to be the enemy makes it easier to keep the country calm about the issues he unveiled.

While Snowden isn't a monster, the surveillance programs are not evil either. They are shocking. They evoke emotional response. They can be frightening -- especially since we don't know how much deeper the programs go. Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism. Regardless of the cynicism you bring to the topic, the primary goal of these programs is to save lives. Accept that, take a breath, then reevaluate your grievances.

I'm not suggesting that there's nothing to be angry or worried about. I'm certainly not saying that the programs are right or benevolent. I'm saying that this is important and meaningful and needs to be treated as such rather than another opportunity to win points in some silly political game.
Stupid terrorists are like stupid bomb makers. A self solving problem. If they didn't use encrypted communication before I can't imagine they will start now.
Your depression doesn't define you, and there's no reason to bring it up.

It's perfectly reasonable to explain a work-history gap with "training/investing in yourself for a new career".

It wouldn't be a bad idea to do some pro-bono work for non-profits or something open-source, to reference on an interview. It doesn't need to be big.

There will be places that judge you on all of the things you mention, but programming is one industry where being able to do the job matters more for enough people to make a difference. If you can actually do the job, you'll find one.
Thank you! Please report any bugs, that goes without saying… ;)
Programming For Non-Programmers: How To Approach A Developer
> They don't have much in common apart from zombies and the title.

According to the BBC, the book doesn't even have zombies: "Richard Matheson, who wrote the 1954 vampire novel I Am Legend"

I haven't read the book, so I might be making an unfair judgment here, but I was fairly sure it was about zombies as well.
News: “Joyent Expands Cloud Offering - Object Storage & Data Services Platform”
You would post texts as images.
Absolutely it's serious. But if we're talking laying someone off because you can't make payroll, that is quite different than dismissing them for cause. Generally the latter is what I think of as 'firing'.

There are scenarios one can construct that are quite painful, the person you convinced to move out of their home town away from an ok job and family to work for you who, due to the high cost of living, had a really long commute and got into a vehicle accident their first week, because they had been putting in 80 hour weeks to come up to speed quickly, that put them into the hospital but they they hadn't worked long enough to qualify for California Disability Insurance. Can we make it any worse? Perhaps their girlfriend found out she was expecting that week and so that was why this poor guy was rushing home? And your startup goes out of business because the lead investor pulled out just before the round closes, so now they don't have a job.

I'm sure we could pile more on.

My point is that the common case, the general case, is that people have multiple jobs throughout their lives. Sometimes it is wonderful, sometimes it sucks, but when they are 60 looking back at their 20's it will be part of a much larger tapestry of experience. If for the majority of people it isn't the end of their world.
The problem that the article author doesn't mention is that trust is itself a heinously difficult problem.

The NSA knew a lot about AQ prior to 9/11. They had intel that could have prevented the USS Cole bombing. If they had worked together better with FBI and CIA prior to 9/11 that attack likely could have been averted as well.

That's the reason no General got fired for Manning. Congress themselves foisted the much-closer integration of intel community elements to prevent another 9/11. Instead of agency in-fighting there would be close cooperation. The analysts doing the actual intel work would no longer have barricades placed in the way of doing their jobs.

Manning betrayed that trust. That alone should have been enough for NSA to change their own internal information security controls so there is definitely more recrimination that should follow (if it hasn't already)... but at the end of the day you can't get around the fact that the less you trust your employees to do their jobs, the more difficult it becomes to do the job at all.
Heh, and I'm sure we could swallow some or all of the rest of it in postal costs in general, were I to order one for personal import from the US.

BUT if we're examining the £99 price point, I'd assume there would be economies of scale for the importer that's shipping to (for instance) amazon.co.uk, in terms of US->UK shipping. And that's if it is all shipped from the US to the UK, rather than coming from the Chinese manufacturer via the Hong-Kong distributor straight to Britain, in which case the costs should be comparable.

I probably couldn't personally import one from the US for much cheaper than the UK price, but that doesn't mean I can't still feel a bit miffed!
Machine Learning in the Cloud
GNOME privacy fundraising campaign
Resources for Mac and iOS Developers
Yet Another Reminder that Cybercrime Isn’t Going Away
I've read the updated chapters. Love it so far.
It'll be interesting to see how if and how you introduce concerns. So far I've seen no best practices on this. Just an empty directory created.
Show HN: wordpress-haml-sass - WordPress Theme dev toolkit for 2013
Get the toy out of a Kinder Surprise without breaking the egg
Setting up a Machine Learning Farm with Spot Instances + Auto Scaling
No problem. That's a nice site, thanks.
How many times has it happened already that we're unaware of? I think it's safe to assume that there wouldn't have been any public hearings on that. It is terrifying enough to imagine all of the ways for the NSA to abuse their power/capabilities for their own purposes. It is a whole other kind of terrifying to contemplate the notion that the NSA's capabilities are in the hands of bumbling idiots.
Not enough memes. Obama memes are very popular right now, but it's not an option on the site. Otherwise, pretty site.
Great advice for finding development talent!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Martin_%28author%29
stop thinking; start acting. History is created by those who act. If you think too much, you will end up not doing anything
Agreed: like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
I really like Clojure. My only gripe with it is that you absolutely need to know the Java standard library/ecosystem if you intend to do anything non-trivial with it. (And my Java experience ended in 2003.)

Though they are more and more 'native' clojure libraries being released.
Ok you touched my heart, lookup Breno Salgado in your prism(I'm brazilian so no need to hold yourself!) and you can have all my data and conversations, lets get to know each other better! Kisses, <3
Climbing Mt. Everest
Could be a new jobs program.
What are your favorite MacPorts?
Congrats, you guys rock!
really good laugh ! thanks for the gif.
While I can't comment on the UBL part, I will say that the stratfor part made me pee a little in my pants. I don't mean this to come off as condescending, but stratfor is one of the biggest jokes by people who do real intelligence. It's like saying "if you want to know what's really going on in the world and what's really important, watch Fox News.".
yes and that seriously hampered him in exerting direct control over al qaeda.

before he was found there where numerous articles showing that Bin Laden was losing control and getting hacked off about affiliates doing their own thing.
Not that this takes away anything from what you've said, but $5000.00 is the limit in NY.
I am starting to see people with high academic credentials in lower esteem the more time goes on. Congrats, you spend six figures on a reading list.
Try doing WebSockets in a Rails app for example. Rails was born in an age of request/response and sometimes it shows. And I say that as a Rails enthusiast.
Though I haven't and most likely won't do anything substantial in the language, I've got a lot out of Rich Hickey's talks that have steadily appeared on the web. He seems an extremely thoughtful designer and steward.
I'm assuming that Oracle lets you do this via some sort of a sql file/script?

Not that I know of. When I took the SQL tuning class where I learned about it, they had an interactive admin panel for tracking down, identifying, and fixing query plans.

But I'm not a DBA, I haven't used Oracle in a few years, and I do not know what all is available there.
A Semantics Approach to Information Management
I don't buy the concept that terrorists don't use common online services. Does anybody actually believe things are safer if you use HushMail et al as your provider? While it's unlikely that the NSA has asked HushMail to FTP up all of its account data as it apparently did with PRISM participants, one would be highly naive to assume that intelligence services have just decided to leave certain providers' data untouched just because they're unwilling to lay out the welcome mat. One would therefore logically conclude that with very basic steganographic measures, it's easier to hide among the hundreds of millions of mails that Google processes each day than the thousands processed by HushMail or other minor email providers (or even a fully-hosted custom mail server at "terrorists-r-us.com").

Furthermore, if you use any cryptography at all besides SSL you're probably already on an NSA list somewhere, but GnuPG alleviates all of these concerns and I'm sure that some terrorist organizations have discovered it. In this case, there should be no issue using Gmail or other services for your communication.
I never seem to learn about these interesting people until they're dead. :-/
Thank you for this info.
If you are the sort of person who is surprised by this, you need to get out from under the rock you live under. This is what any self-respecting intelligence gathering organization is going to say. Not revealing whether or not information exists (let alone the actual information itself) has been a staple of the trade from the very beginning of the intelligence community. This response would be identical regardless of current events.

edit: typos
Show HN: A slick online TV for watching live with friends
We do plan to add more built-in memes very soon and perhaps categories and whatnot. Until then you can use any image on the web with ?template_url=*

Enjoy! http://dropmeme.com/?template_url=http://blogs.telegraph.co....
Stats on how the .01% dominate elections
Great team working on Apptimize! Will definitely try it for our mobile app when we make that transition from web.
For simple collaborative tasks, git is rather simple. You'll need just a handful of commands.

And as a bonus, you're using a tool that has the capacity to grow as necessary.
> Is there a way to make the linux root password composed of two passwords?

This could certainly be done via a custom PAM module. Of course, we should also consider that admins will often have physical access to the systems. I can't think up a purely technical solution to enforce the 2 man rule.
Suggestion - Add a very concise screencast with audio walking an average person through setting this up.
Please, just re-read what you wrote and tell me you're saying this with a straight face.
If you like the general concept, you should check out BashReduce. As silly as it sounds, it is quite powerful.

http://rcrowley.org/2009/06/27/bashreduce.html
That's a good point. It's not really where I wanted to go with this article though but it's an interesting perspective to think about !

Also I see a lot of people saying that they expected something else from the title.
I want to say that this was exactly my intention, as I'm getting kind of fed up of having 90% of HN frontpage occupied by NSA stories (I mean it's a big deal, but that doesn't mean we can read anything else, does it?).
nothing in common , the book is actually quite disturbing and carries a strong message. But we cant expect Hollywood adaptions to respect the original material ... ( i'm looking at you WWZ )
Co-Author here: I'm part of the team that is helping write The Rails 4 Way. Just to address your concerns, we have gone through the existing manuscript and removed everything that isn't best practice today. On top of that, we are covering all the new Rails 4 features, and important gems/techniques valuable to a Rails developer today. The second half of the book is going through a big revamp right now. Look for updates in the coming weeks.
Hmmm, blackmail.... could be the way to go. Strong word, but, negotiating from a position of power?

My presumption is that the politicians are playing this down because of perhaps the information the NSA has on them. I assume the power is in the web of information people have on each other. So, a balance is maintained, or something like that. Well, going public seems ineffective. It seems these people have games to play to mitigate the damage caused by public disclosure. You know, divide up the issue, make it black and white, make it about traitors and good guys, and so on. So, maybe the next person who feels a tug of conscience might decide: OK, I have all this info, I can either release it to the voters, who will no doubt be manipulated, or I can bowl up to a few senators and use the information to make them force change, like like the system already seems to.

Makes me think of the end of Clear and Present Danger, where Ryan has some information that could kill off the presidency. The President points out that what he actually has in his hand is a chip which he can play in the halls of power. Perhaps Bradly and Snowden had it wrong. Perhaps why should have played their chips?

Dunno. Is that how it should work? Play them according to their rules? Forget the whole honest, open and decent thing, and get secretly, politically dirty? Do deals under the table? Get change that way?

I really don't like the idea of that at all, but it seems that anything decent and honest is easily disposed of as a matter of routine.
> To the OP, I suggest you launch with 3.x and upgrade immediately after to 4 and start taking note of deprecations.

I think this is the most likely outcome. Thanks again to everyone for the discussion too.
Doesn't this make your key susceptible to known-plaintext attacks?
After 4 decades of reading/watching sci-fi, I've evolved to reality based entertainment. :p

Actually if you read John Barne's article on world-building,"How to Build a Future," where he talks about building the universe for the "Thousand Cultures" series, he discusses in detail the issues with local interstellar travel. (Since he has to plot around them.)

Also Star Trek is space opera, you probably should be reading hard sci-fi.
What if we take the birthday "paradox" into account ?

Unfortunately Wolfram Alpha refuses to calculate the result for very big N.

Also: I'm the only one seeing this Hacker News page because it says "kaoD" at the top-right, and I'm the only one who knows my password (or at least I hope so).
DoA.
Happily, that is what they are planning. This is the apparently based on the first chapter of The Red Men by Matthew De Abaitua.
Ask HN: Is it too late to avoid wasting my summer?
I'm in my penultimate year in an honours CS course at a Scottish University, and have failed to procure an internship or any work experience over the summer. I'm based down in the South East of England (just outside Reading), and have pursued a few places in London, to limited success. Most recently been rejected from Twitter after interview (one of the nicest rejections I've had!).

I don't think I'm unable to apply myself, having had several years of experience in programming in a few languages (Python, C, Java, JavaScript, Haskell...) and having done projects relating to coursework, hackathons, and fun.

It feels like it's too late to do anything relevant to computing, for experience, except at the expense of money. Last summer I did an internship in my CS dept. at university, and whilst the experience was valuable I made a loss overall. This compounded over term time, and I'm now £1800 overdrawn with a limit of £2000; so whilst I don't want to concentrate on the money issue, it is an issue that does have to be addressed. I may have an offer for a place in Edinburgh, but I don't think it is going to pay enough to be able to live there, and I really don't have the buffer to be able to afford another loss.

It feels really late in the day to find an internship nearby, and my university term starts again in September. Is it too late? Should I just look at getting an ordinary retail job, damn the consequences for my CV? I suppose I could try to do FOSS stuff in my spare time.

Would there be small companies in commutable distance that wouldn't have even considered interns still? It seems like most formal application processes are long over. Is it worth my while continuing to cold email companies?

Thanks for reading this far. I'd love to hear any input anyone can give on the matter.
They do have to offer a much higher level of warranty in the EU than they do in the US. While I have no idea whether the OUYA team thought of this, I suspect that it impacts the entire electronics industry.

For example, I had a laptop fail on me (years ago) due to a poorly designed motherboard, device fails at about 13 months old of course, manufacturer offers a new mb for close to the cost of a comparable low-mid end laptop. I sign up to a forum and find the thread, add my rant, buy a new laptop and forget about it. Except on the forum thread the european users are claiming that they are getting their laptops fixed free because the manufacturer is obliged to fix product flaws (which this clearly was) for three years. If that is true, then it has to be factored into the price also.
Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries' compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.

simple as that: we can't tell you what you want to know, because we think you are a terrorist.