skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the most important point here is that you should hire engineers from your domain, but not necessarily your exact technology stack -- in their case it's simple because almost no engineers know Erlang well, so they have to hire "database people" and convert them, but I think it's more generally applicable.

Personally, I would much prefer to hire a "web person" regardless of the stack they're used to than, say, a "Java person" who has never written a website. But even more specifically, I would look to find somebody whose interests are in my domain, as they will always have better ideas and motivation than a strictly mercenary engineer.
This level of insanity is pervasive. And I suspect it could be mitigated by better reporting tools.

One of the things that Microsoft did really well was to enable their system to capture enough information to reproduce a bug based on what the customer was currently running. Seems like browsers could benefit from that too.
A few grad students and I started something quite some time ago out of MIT called OpenWetWare.Org that was meant to help organize things like this and included calenders, lab notebooks, stocks, lab webpages, simple sample tracking, et cetera using a wiki (when they were all the rage :-). When we had buy in from the whole lab it's awesome, but as you mention, over a couple of years, much of that initial enthusiasm faded. In looking at which worked, and which didn't, it really comes down to how much the PI of the lab cares about this stuff; if s/he uses, appreciates, and instills it into lab practice, some of those groups have continued to use it to this day with really in-depth information. In most others, it tends to fade because it is not a priority and is usually seen as a waste of time by the PI.

I'm about to start a lab (at UCLA), I'm trying to figure out how best to begin making such a culture... but it is an interesting problem that does need a solution.
I wonder how to upgrade from 18 to 19 smoothly
The site is definitely buggy. I'm getting the following errors in Chrome:

no pushstate application-2667ae701c78991056dcdf4c46459327.js:19
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'replace' of undefined ace.js:1
Given URL is not allowed by the Application configuration.: One or more of the given URLs is not allowed by the App's settings. It must match the Website URL or Canvas URL, or the domain must be a subdomain of one of the App's domains.
Sorry wasn't clear in my post, that was the broken code I had to fix. I added the comma and got the unknown error message.

However I just reloaded the page and it's showing a different code snippet and says 1 of 3 completed.
I think the important question for HN, here, is: what "app ideas" map, in the end, to "having a distributed database as core technology"?

If you're building the next Facebook, is that, fundamentally, a distributed database?

If you're building an MMO, is that, fundamentally, a distributed database?

If you're building a payments platform, is that, fundamentally, a distributed database?

And so forth.
Ask HN: what is your opinion about identity verification? necessary?
My startup is a peer to peer marketplace. I have been thinking about how to build trust and safety in the marketplace. One of them is to do an offline identity verification such as ID card, passport, driver license, etc.

What do you think of ID verification? is it necessary? How do you build trust and safety?

Also, I have been researching about firms that do ID verification. I know that Jumio, miicard and LexisNexis are some of them. Jumio is used by airbnb, so I contacted Jumio and a rep replied to my inquiries immediately and asked several questions. I answered that my startup is in stealth mode and, since then, it’s blank, 3 weeks have passed and no more update, I even sent a follow up email a week ago and to no avail. It seems like Jumio does not want my business.

So now I am considering LexisNexis and/or miicard as an alternative.

Have anyone use identity verification service with them and can you share your experience with them integrating it with your startup?

Thanks.
Thanks, sounds like good advice.

How do I approach the agencies (for PHP or non-PHP)? Cold emailing won't work, no?
Let the X.nyc goldrush begin.

s.nyc (sync), th.nyc (think), p.nyc (pink), etc...
I reckon you could make hardware tamper-proof by setting the hardware in a booby-trapped container that would self-destruct if tampered with. Make sure that the only two connections coming out of the booby-trapped container are power and a data connection over which the memory of the device cannot be accessed, such as ethernet.
...but said proof was actually based on an error; a real proof for God's existence wouldn't come for centuries after much more advanced theological tools were discovered and refined.
The Future of Travel: Humanity
> Equilibrium is coming.

So yields, returns, and inflation are finally stabilizing as the market matures and approaches its "true value"? Nope, because equilibrium is a concept which works well in the natural sciences, but quite erroneous as applied in economics. This is George Soros's argument in his books about the Principle of Reflexivity, which differentiates social systems from natural ones.

What is happening, is merely that trading volume/volatility has tapered off since the '08 crisis. That's expected; empirically, volatility continues to be clustered and autoregressive (a self-exciting process). Its a cycle that will pick up again (one can expect), eventually.
Facebook indeed has a long history of really dumb memory leaks that browsers can't do anything about, combined with memory leaks that are exacerbated by browser bugs and require improvements to garbage collectors and stuff. It's rough.
German government rejects asylum request from Snowden
Map: Tracking how countries are answering Snowden’s asylum requests
I follow KPoulsen from wired, on Twitter. Although I do question US media, to explain why, Snowden brought his story to Washington Post first and had to push them to publish by going to The Guardian[0].

[0] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/nsa-leaker-shop...
Cool! We finally have downloads back!

It looks like this fails on tag names that have a slash in them.
Integrating Internet-Scale Data Sources into a Strongly Typed Language
Reader's Dead and Google doesn't want us to remember that.
This has been around for some time. I believe they're using technology from ITA, which was acquired by Google in 2010 [1]: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/

(It's also what most flight hackers use to search for tickets.)

[1] http://www.google.com/press/ita/
Isn't advertising your personal information, relationships and whereabouts the whole point of Facebook? If it's private, don't put it on Facebook.
I ended up making it all the way past the third question (though I had to enter the same solution a few times). I ended up getting the invite page but then just left.
I would rather have a wise and experienced developer X than a developer with Y experience in Z.

As long as you are hiring people with skills in solving similar problems to the ones you are having or are anticipating on having.

Edit: However that may not work for you. I think that a senior Perl developer would be more than competent in any language you point towards. While the opposite may hardly hold true. The presumption is that one believes that a senior Perl developer really exists.
The large database company example is especially telling. The company I work for chose Java mainly for the benefit of a large talent pool, but we have great difficulty hiring people. I think it's because we're in the middle of nowhere and don't pay Silicon Valley wages. I think if we had chosen a more "offbeat" language (to borrow mosburger's adjective) we would have had a novelty factor that would increase interest in the job. After all, we're doing interesting stuff, but our technology decisions make us seem very dull.

Edit: Please note I don't have the authority to make a technology change and see what the effect would be on our hiring, despite the good ideas of those replying to me.
A tribute to Stanislaw Lem. Thanks Snowden.
I'm developping on some platforms.

But i have to admit, nothing beats visual studio in awesomeness / completeness
Why do they need the trust and goodwill of a lot of power users?
I think the biggest pluses for Erlang as a language are that fault-tolerance (Erlang "let it crash" + OTP supervision trees) and distribution of tasks (process interact via message passing, be it across procs or nodes) are built-in language features. They aren't libraries or afterthoughts. This subtle shift manifests itself in all Erlang code. There's rarely a fear that some esoteric library you want to use has a memory leak because it's keeping state in some static hashtable, or that semaphores are used incorrectly causing a race condition.
If you can pay someone 9 euros at age 20, but have to pay them 10 euros when they turn 21, what happens when they turn 21?

How do employers know they can legally pay one person less than the other? Does the employer find out they are 16 and then lower their pay to 6 euros?
We'd love to receive these test cases as pull requests if you have the time to contribute them. :)

https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks
I just switched from Chrome to FF. The performance is close enough, and good enough for both, that it's a secondary consideration at this point.

I switched because I got tired of hearing Chrome constantly accessing my hard drive. I wound up going through the list of Chrome switches here (http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_s...) to try to alleviate it. Some things helped but not to an acceptable level. I use W7. Using procmon I could see Chrome constantly re-reading keys from the registry and writing to temp files even though caching and pre-fetching were disabled.

I was also was concerned for Chrome accessing my laptop SSD. Even though I couldn't hear it I could see the lifetime allotment of reads and writes being flushed.
>the SMS generation is more likely to search for your brand than use a QR code

I keep hearing this. I keep seeing the opposite. Have data, or...?
This is a phenomena worth understanding, if you don't already:

"I had an entertaining and ironic conversation about this recently with a manager at a large database company. He explained to me that we had clearly made the wrong choice, and that we should have chosen Java (like his team) in order to expand the recruiting pool. Then, without breaking a stride, he asked if I could send any candidates his way, to fill his gaps in finding talented people."
Time in the small flies when you are having fun, time in the large passes more quickly with routine. At least that's how I perceive it.
> I mean, when I said "Under your logic...," I'm just extending your argument in the obvious way...

Extending my comments to the point that I am allegedly suggesting disregarding private property laws egregiously to erect a sign at your private, personal residence and then call that constitutionally protected free speech is the obvious way?!

We have very different notions of obvious, friend. Your last sentence read as having very little to do with extending my argument in a way that would be obvious to other sensible citizens and, instead, extending it in a way that distorted its meaning entirely to shoe-horn it back into your preferred view of seeing protecting free speech in the public sphere as something that ought to be beholden to a others' definition of whether or not they approve of the message, allowing for legal punishment and incarceration for sharing one's views in a public way.

Can someone put a sign up on your house and it be constitutionally protected free speech? Nope. Can persons stand peaceably outside your house with a sign airing their grievances? Yep, absolutely. Can they write on the sidewalk or street in chalk to get your attention? I'm willing to bet they can, so long as they are not inciting violence or threatening you. You don't own the street or sidewalk. It is public space. And if you are going to abuse the justice system to apprehend and punish them, well, at least you're sticking to your principles. But I hope also that you call the authorities on any children in the neighborhood who might also be writing in chalk on the street. Or any businesses that might so abuse the public space as to write on sidewalks with chalk to grab the attention of consumers.

You called for jail time and a fine for writing in chalk on a sidewalk. You called it graffiti and vandalism. There was no destruction of public property. There was no private property damage, to my knowledge.

You further suggested that there ought to be some kind of litmus test for who deserves First Amendment protections. Thankfully, the founders were wiser than you and did not make our right to speak freely dependent upon passing a test that evaluates our entitlement to constitutional rights beyond that of being a citizen.
Goodbye SourceForge!
Ubisoft Database Hack Exposes Email Addresses, Passwords
I've been watching Joyent and SmartOS in particular with interest for a while.

A few questions to satisfy my curiosity.

First, I'm assuming that you're running SmartOS on your own dedicated servers, not a public cloud like Joyent. Is that correct? If not, the rest doesn't apply.

Do you use Ansible in the global zone, in individual non-global zones, or both?

Do you build a new zone for each deploy of an application and each new version of a piece of infrastructure? I imagine this is the way to achieve the idea of immutable infrastructure.

And one other little thing: Do you boot SmartOS via a USB key, PXE, or something else?
Think about everything you see online and don't submit. It matters.
We use Erlang at 2600hz and I feel like this is an Echo Chamber of the kinds of conversations we have around the table. Erlang is a beast, but if you're doing hard work it's more about the idea than the tools.

Lots of wisdom on this blog post. The truth is that if you're passionate about doing something hard, and communicate that passion, people are drawn to it.
If you look at the page of the Talmud, it actually resembles an on-line forum, or more precisely some Wiki with discussions around some subject:

http://www.hebrewbooks.org/shas.aspx?mesechta=1&daf=3&format...

It's more of a printed version style, but even hand written editions which predate the printing press had a similar arrangement.
How is that "pretentious"? Seriously. Do you even know what that word means?
This is perfect, thank you.
An Interest Graph for Promoting Tweets
If I understand correctly, IE11 is only a preview version not the final release.
I was a vocal critic when GitHub discontinued their downloads product earlier this year. I work on open source projects with compiled binaries. GitHub's answer to distribution had been "Use S3" which I never found satisfactory.

As soon as they release an API, I'll be migrating all my projects over.

EDIT: Just added my first release. Super easy. https://github.com/hawkthorne/tmx2lua/releases
Really no reason to truncate after hashing. The output size of any cryptographic hash function should be more than small enough to send down the wire and hash again properly.

Really though, just reject passwords over a few KB. Nobody will ever notice that limit except for people trying to fuck with you.
he was so excited he forgot to write it =)
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU...

I'm glad it's their fault, i was actually getting depressed not finding my error...
Another thing about the algorithm and article is, this is supposed to be a "real world problem" that the interviewer asks because they're struggling with it themselves. But what would a single randomly chosen item from a huge set mean to "real world" operations? That you would very occasionally get a very usual value? - You'd have to run the scan many times for that and whatever other thing you were thinking of.

Basically, the algorithm is "cool exercise in probability" that any deeper look will discover has just about zero use or practicality in the actual "real world". Which kind of throws into the zone of obnoxious interview brain teasers despite claims to the contrary.
If a title is misleading or linkbait, we're meant to adjust it on submission. It'd be a good idea if the rule were just that you must use original titles, but it's a bit more nuanced and does seem to need some human oversight.
Does anyone know whether a similar contest exists with common "easy to read" languages and relatively quirk-free like Python? It would appear to me that doing the same would be harder in such a language, though not at all impossible. I'd love to go through some examples.
There are plenty of tools for installing images on bare metal machines.
Luminus appears to be a clojure framework, not a php framework.

Thanks again for posting these tests.
likewise. I would have never been so negative on the discontinuing of downloads if they released this prior.

this looks really good.
New York City granted .NYC
Apparently there wasn't a lot of collaboration on the site code itself; as has been mentioned, it's pretty buggy. Or maybe that's the REAL test...
For me it's had an almost opposite effect.

Many people here on HN will probably remember around 2 years ago Steve Yegge gave a talk essentially saying there was a moral imperative for programmers to learn statistics and get better at machine learning. The idea was that this was going to get us beyond cat picture sharing and towards curing cancer and other social goods. It was a cheesy talk in someways, but it did inspire and I learned a ton in that area.

I think the new "moral imperative" (take that term with a grain of salt as I'm not a big believer in moral imperatives) in software is to become an expert in security for the benefit of the community. To understand and improve the tools available for people to protect them. Don't just know that Tor, TrueCrypt, etc exist but understand them to the point where you know how you would start implementing them yourself.

Personally I always found the security community interesting, and working on hard problems but it never really interested me. Recently I've been reading as much as I can. I have a long way to go, but I feel that this is important.

I can read papers on cutting edge research in Machine Learning pretty fluently now. When it comes to truly understanding the technology around encryption, anonymity and privacy, I want to get to that point as soon as I can.
The sock puppets are most interesting. Would any be posting here?
Facebook’s Data Center Network Architecture
Maybe "Steam for 3D printing"? Well, I guess Steam has social features too... How about just "A store front for 3D printing."
I was inspired by a blog post I saw here and ended up creating a chrome web store app and an android app for creating site-specific passwords based on a master password.

https://github.com/kzahel/passwordmaker
https://github.com/kzahel/passwordmaker_android

I simply don't trust 1password, lastpass, etc.

The one problem I have is that many websites place artificial restrictions on password length, types of non-alphanumeric characters, requirements on number of numeric digits, etc. It would be nice if there were an updated collaborative list of these artificial restrictions somewhere.

Currently I simply update the password generator to conform to these restrictions whenever I need to create a password for a dumb website.
> very likely less than ten million (http://www.quora.com/How-many-users-does-Google-Reader-have).

How did you get 'likely less than ten million' out of a Quora comment saying 'tens of millions'?
It's possible. The site does instruct the user:
"The code does not execute properly. Try to figure out why."

Maybe it's not talking about the function.
While on the subject: does anyone know a software/service for automating software releases?

I usually perform these steps manually:

create a new tag, merge the “next” branch into the “master” branch, run “make dist” from a clean checkout, do a handful of sanity checks on the result, gpg-sign it, push it into a separate git repository for the website, archive the current docs in the website, update the website’s docs with the new docs, send posts to a mailing list, twitter, google+, update the changelog with a placeholder for the new version.

I realize not 100% of that is reasonably automatable, but is there anything which tries to tackle this problem?
How to Talk to Investors about Marketing and Growth
The play-slick results seem to be missing. Was there some sort of problem?
Right, mine is a pretty specific use case. However, if a thesaurus lookup can figure out that nah is close enough to no that it should just normalize the response to no, that's a win for the user. (Scraping urban dictionary to act like a thesaurus would be a decent way to decipher txt spk and euphemisms as well.) Yes/No questions could be special cased to accept more oddball responses off the bat..'for sure', 'totally', 'no way', etc.
> My understanding was that Google Reader had somewhere around 12 million users.

My understanding is that the better figures are closer to twice that: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns#fn5 (and that Reader users were very active).
So, as the other answerers said column belongs in the bsdmainutils package whose source and particularly debian patches you can explore through sources.debian.net.

The patch you are looking for is probably http://sources.debian.net/src/bsdmainutils/9.0.5/debian/patc...
Ask HN: Anybody used Integrate?
It's an advertising marketplace to help firms to outsource their advertising needs.

You pay per lead or per action typically, and their publishers compete to get you the best rates, etc.

We are thinking about using them, wondering if anybody has any experience with them?

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/integrate
Here's an example in action:

https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs/releases
I feel ashamed of my government. They had the chance to stood up for civil rights, show that they are still a democracy. But obviously Germany is not sovereign country anymore, probably has never been since end of WWII.
An async script for AdSense tagging
You just start paying them more when they turn 21. Not sure if it kicks in at the start of the month/day/hour of their birthday though.

https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates

You wouldn't lower the pay, you'd likely just start them out at the lower rate.
Oops! My mistake in classifying. Many apologies to fans of Luminus. I've just corrected this.
Any info on how does it stack up against skyscanner / esky ?

edit: after a few minutes i can say that while the UI is 100x better than the aforementioned competiton, the flights my usual route i take few times a year (LDN - KRK) only display the price for the most expensive companies, which sort of defeats the point of using a crawler/search engine for this. hopefully they will add easyjet/ryanair/etc soon.
Is there any coordination of transportation going on, since there's likely no BART service?
Lots of what they produced can be said to be frivolous too - just produced at a much slower rate.
They might be horrified until they realize that copying a book is as easy as Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Then they'd be ecstatic.
Yep, Google Just Killed RSS Alerts Too
Google took it's war on RSS one step further on Monday killing the RSS option in Google Alerts as well.

Google’s solution for those using them, was simply to start using its email alerts.
I don't have a source to back this up right now, but the claim when the sockpuppet program first became news was that they were only operating in non-English communities, e.g. terrorist-affiliated web forums, and that they said it would be illegal to use domestically, therefore they avoided any English usage. Whether that's actually true… who knows.
I crave an API. Really want to play around with some visualisations.