skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you enjoy watching others code (unedited)?
I've had this idea of making screencast of coding in a "natural" environment, with minimal editing. You'd see me building something, how I fail and debug things, look up stuff on the web, and so on.

I am wondering if other people would enjoy watching something like this, or would rather stick to fully edited high-quality screencasts?

Edit based on comments: Thanks for the responses so far. Just to clarify, it wouldn't be a 5-hour long unedited video with me coding. It would be a focused video (30-60min or so) on a certain topic, with a later voiceover explaining what I'm doing, but no "sophisticated" editing or teaching.
So to find out how hard this was I recently tried to setup smime, and it actually isn't really that hard. No plugins required and fully integrated with Mall.app on mac, and my iOS devices. For easy steps on how to do this see here:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/10/secure-your-e-mail-unde...

You can get a free cert from COMODO:

http://www.comodo.com/home/email-security/free-email-certifi...

What make s/mime easy to use is that those who receive the smime attachment on compatible software can see and validate signatures even without setting up their own s/mime identity. They can also accept your public key so when they do setup s/mime they are ready to encrypt message to you just using the signature attachment on one of your messages.

So s/mime at least has an intermediate value even if you are the only one of your friends using it. You can sign things and they can confirm your signature.

Also gpgtools (https://gpgtools.org) just released a new version that has a plugin for the latest Mail.app. However, public key infrastructure is a little more complicated process, and you'll have to explicitly acquire each person's key, and a signatures can not be validated until the recipient also has gpgtools installed.

As an ex cypherpunk, s/mime seems to have a number of security issues with it. First is how it is generated. When I got my cert from COMODO as outlined above the file was saved from the web browser to my downloads file. This struck me as odd. Does this mean they could have copy of my cert? This is convenient, but keys should be generated securely by the user on their own machine.

Also there is the issue of security in terms of how does the signature work. Does it sign then encrypt, or encrypt then sign, or sign then encrypt then sign again? See the non accepted answer by Adam Liss for a discussion of the security issues of this here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13512026/how-to-check-if-...

Nevertheless s/mime works well in many tools and on iOS devices, and is not nearly as hard as most people think. Someone who wants to sell certs could make a video that even grandma could follow.
Your earliest press releases are from 2 years ago. How can you have lost that "only" VP of Engineering who as your co-founder was part of the team back then, be recruiting for the position a year ago, and be recruiting for the position now, but this time it is only been for the last 3 months ... well, I suppose you could have just not actively tried to fill the position during the gap, but that at least suggests it's not really that important. And why didn't you mention that?
Loved this essay, but I'm a little confused by this footnote.

"[5] If you're building something for which you can't easily get a small set of users to observe—e.g. enterprise software—and in a domain where you have no connections, you'll have to rely on cold calls and introductions. But should you even be working on such an idea?"

When pg says, "Should you even be working on such an idea?" -- is he saying that he questions any startup that is focusing on enterprise and which cannot be sold to fellow founders in a YC batch?

He once wrote "enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge amounts of money", so I suppose he doesn't love enterprise software that doesn't have a long tail customer base.

But, wouldn't this exclude a lot of interesting ideas in education, healthcare, government, finance, etc.?
you made the job ad look pretty bad now to people reading it with out knowning the first version...

Note:
Any notion that 500friends is ageist is a complete fabrication. This can be validated by looking at our team (link).

really? this is how you chose to start your job ad now? that sounds so desperate, i'd never apply - not saying that i would have before, sorry :)
Ahhh. That makes a helluva lot more sense.
It's long, but at least PG gets to the point. So many articles have a title like "Why x is y", and then start like "The cool evening air smelled of honeysuckle in <place that, initially, would seem to have nothing to do with x or y>", and are multiple pages long even though having a web page be more than one page long makes no sense.
Sure, Gentoo is fantastic for the control it gives you ... by making extreme flexibility relatively convenient, you get various benefits such as resource gains and additional security through minimalism. It's not for everyone, but it's an extremely valuable member of the Linux distribution space.

However, I disagree with the author suggesting Gentoo is anything near Linux from Scratch (LFS). A base 'stage3' (initial filesystem) image for Gentoo is quite large these days (~170MB compressed) and includes python, perl, bash, etc. (Squashfs with busybox and a kernel is a base Linux system!)

Like any project, Gentoo's not perfect and has its issues. While I personally prefer it to others, I also see the value in other systems for people with different goals (such as reasonably automated security updates, strong commercial support, etc.). As always, right tool for the job.
It's saying roughly "I know enough to know that it takes years of study before you can read research papers in crypto. I am happy just to read canonical textbook resources, even if they are from the 90s"

I think you could have tried a little bit harder to understand it before posting. Obviously English wasn't the author's first language and there's a risk that the author might perceive an insult to his English language skills. It's really nice that HN is a discussion between people with a wide variety of native languages as I'm certain you'd agree.
Can't recall where I saw it, but: Novice users use the stock kernel because it just works; power users build their own kernel and optimise it to get every last marginal scrap of power out of it; advanced users use the stock kernel because it just works...
I'm not Ixiaus but I am his best friend and co-founder (and totally going to give him hell in the office tomorrow for posting on HN when he's supposed to be on vacation. ;)

Anyway, he gets up at 6AM every day and runs through a spaced repetition routine. He's written about his process here: http://ixmat.us/articles/2012-12-01_usable-org-drill.html
Gentoo is hard but it pays off in tough situations. The benefit is more about elegant and efficient customization rather than performance. It's not for most situations but I am very grateful that it exists and that I took the time to learn it.
You're missing the point of the linked list. A simple coding test like "program a linked list" during an interview is just a negative filter. Someone who can't write a linked list certainly is not a good programmer.
I like it!

Clicking on a link and having a figure appear solves a small but real problem.

In mathematical papers it'd be nice to be able to do the same with equation references --- click on the equation number, and the equation would magically appear in the margin. Ditto bibliography entries, theorem statements, definitions, and so on. I guess there are possible solutions other than having them appear in the margin, too.
Some people work in areas where fine-grained control of their environment (library versions, kernel options, etc.) is a requirement. Others do it to learn. IMHO you could benefit from being less hasty to judge and dismiss others.
Python: Tuple vs List vs Dict vs Set
Ah, that makes sense. Don't know how I feel about being uniquely identified though. I thought they were just gathering things like movements and gender.
I think you're looking at a vocal minority. :)
"Obviously English wasn't the author's first language"?
Hacking a $9 Remote Control Car with Arduino
Honestly, I would pay for a site that was only hard-core tech articles. Hacker News' guidelines are decent, but are incredibly open. Citing sentence 3 of the guidelines:

If you had to reduce [what's on topic] to a sentence,
the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
intellectual curiosity.

That's a vast, vast pit of 'anything goes'.
I don't know the specifics, but perhaps the company's target market isn't hackers in the true sense of the word. Example: many people are "techies" but when you push their knowledge a bit further most of what they know comes down to trivial knowledge about product specs between two or three devices.
I'm not an expert, but I have looked into some of the basics before and computer vision is really freaking hard to do very well. It's relatively easy to get a basic proof of concept up and running, but in a store you have people carrying shopping bags, people moving products and things around, employees going about their business, people pushing shopping carts around, and have kids running around. I'm sure this presents a considerable challenge to accurately track what's going on just by relying on analyzing video feeds without human intervention. In contrast, it's pretty much easier to just track WiFi signals.

As long as no personally identifying information such as a phone number or some sort of phone ID is gathered without a customer deliberately giving it to the company and tracking cookies aren't used without permission, I wouldn't think there's much of an issue here. I might even appreciate, with some kind of deliberate opt-in, seeing some coupons or sales info showing up on my phone when I'm spending 5-10 minutes in one single section of the store.

This is still a potential privacy issue if they're somehow using cookies or some other information to track people without their consent, but as it's presumably on private property this is a different kind of privacy issue than government spying.
I don't know why everyone is skipping over the obviousness of this device; it works by psychology, not by technology.

It's not a bomb detection device; it's a nervousness alerting device.
This matches my own experience. For example, I use it for custom diskless images that run with some fairly specific kernel features and init system customizations to support from-boot ethernet and switch redundancy via bonding at the same time as root on NFS (for cluster integrity, ie. split-brain avoidance, even in the event of system failure within switching fabric). I would hate to try doing that with mainstream distributions.
https://github.com/btwael/mammouth/issues
I think this is slightly misguided, dogs don't have a low stature in the religion, but sadly, many ignorant Muslim mistreat them or will make claims based on those ignorant views (as relayed by those articles).

Muslims are required to wash what part of their body or clothing enter in contact with the dog saliva, but this likely a hygiene measure. It doesn't mean they are forbidden to touch the dog or its saliva in the first place.

Eating dog meat is forbidden, but that doesn't mean the animal has a low stature. I haven't done research on this, but I suspect the same could be said of pigs.

And using bears -- which meat is also forbidden to Muslims -- won't make people less ignorant :)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/15/islam-on-dogs-can-y...
http://www.islamicconcern.com/dogs.asp
Hey <sup>&#8482;</sup> would have gotten you that trademark logo
Hacker News. Khan academy discussions. That's about it for what I've been able to find though.
Black on off-white works well and is fairly universal (like here on HN). Unless you know you're aiming for a particular crowd with a specific style (eg green-on-black to evoke hacker-geeks), stick with something close to fairly universal.
Perhaps you would like this. I submitted it recently but it didn't make the front page.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/08/how_%E2%80%9Cecon_101%E2%80%...
Backbone, or anything non consumer end, are pretty much done or will be done soon. Especially with the massive growth of Mobile devices.

The problem is the last mile. User End. With Super Outdated Software and Router that dont support IPv6.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned - sometimes it helps to have a second voice explaining things, if you didn't get it the first time. If there's something about the professors explanation that is the problem, even if they're accessible it may not help.

A good TA can help approach things from a different direction.
Presumably, you enter YC with pre-existing domain knowledge and/or network or you have a way to gain those quickly.
Is it necessary? Of course not.

However -- to some, me included, maintaining an operating system environment is somewhat of a hobby. Operating systems like Gentoo provide standardized ways to configure how an application is built, and more importantly it provides ways to configure what compile-time features are (and are not) included in the binary. While most people wouldn't find the effort worth the yield, there are people who spend years of their life meticulously making a ship in a bottle. People enjoy it anyway.

Another draw to Gentoo for me is the way they handle package management. You can stick to stable, and packages will be relatively well-tested and mature, or you can choose unstable which will offer you bleeding edge packages. You can also have a stable system, and mark only a few packages unstable. Not many distributions offer a system like that. They are usually completely stable, or don't offer a way to keep most of your system stable while letting a few packages be unstable.

I've used Gentoo for a long time, and my maintenance is nearly nothing these days. Few problems arise (a new GCC version breaks a program or something), but I've actually gained enough practical knowledge to go about fixing these problems rather painlessly for the average case.
Reminds me of the time I emailed a HN discussion to a friend in an adjacent room in the office. She hit the link and then closed it in a panic as soon as she noticed the word "Hacker" in the tab title.
If you're on 10.8 and want to use the built in notification center:

gem install terminal-notifier
make; terminal-notifier -title "Make" -message "Done compiling..."

You can of course wrap that in a bash function to make it a bit shorter just as the TFA does.
People are complaining about this being an advertisement and it kind of makes me sad. I don't often invest time in looking at dedicated hosting offers so for me this was neat. Heck it actually got me excited considering moving some of my old ideas to this infra at an affordable price.
I don't particularly see an issue with this, but I welcome any insights to convince me otherwise.

You have no expectation of privacy when in public. My question is whether there is any difference to someone following you around a mall as you go through your shopping journey (whether with cameras or in person even), as compared to someone following your phone?
OFF TOPIC

> hell

For what its worth let me assure you there's no hell or haven. We've got just this little life and that's it.
There is an automatic way of doing this is OSX[1]. You may also want to use terminal-notifier instead of growl[2]. My experience was that the bash prompt became too slow. However, results seem to vary.

____

[1] http://tech.superhappykittymeow.com/?p=332

[2] https://github.com/alloy/terminal-notifier
I'll write a blog post about it. It also includes a a designed curriculum, strict reading schedule, discipline in doing exercises, creativity in self evaluation, self awareness of strengths and weaknesses and tailoring the curriculum to them. I have a twenty page writing piece on my processes and philosophy that I will finalize. It appears there is a desire for it and I would love to interact with others sharing my journey!

Send me a message at my email in my profile!
"There is a long history of exaggerated concern, rightly derided by economists, with the replacement and hence displacement of workers by machines."

- Judge Posner

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/03/automation-and-emp...

To be fair, the tone is stronger than his ultimate argument. He goes on to outline four or five examples where the short term effects could be pretty devastating.

It's important to note that in the long run, labor markets reach an equilibrium, adapting to any current technological capabilities.

Then again, it's also important to note that in the long run, we're all dead.
P4 micro-optimization. ... what the heck are people doing here that this is relevant to their interests???? :P

CMOV on current CPUs is quite fine— when it doesn't make a dependency mess, when the alternative is a poorly predicted branch, and when the dual execution is cheap / can be hidden.
tlp;dv
They do it because it's fun for them and they have the free time to do it. They'll swear up and down it's because they have to have absolute control over every aspect of their system because that's so, so, so important and necessary to everything they do, but in reality it's because they've got the time to do it and they're fundamentally doing it because it's fun and interesting for them.

Nothing wrong with that, that was me at one time. Of course, at the time I too swore up and down that all the time I spent maintaining my system(s) was because it was somehow really important for me to do so, and I only had a vague suspicion that it was really just me having fun learning about stuff and hacking around on all sorts of low-level things that I wouldn't get to mess around with otherwise. I still do it when I find the time but it's usually with a little more self-awareness about my motivations for doing so. :)
Indonesia (and probably Malaysia).

Anti-fraud for e-Commerce is a long way to go. Most people still transfer money via bank using SMS (and they take screenshot of their cellphone for proofs to the seller).

Twitter, Instagram, Line, BBM, WhatsApp, and Facebook are being used for eCommerce.

Most of their customers won't mind if they were "tagged" (in Facebook) by sellers while westerners would complain like there's no tomorrow (and unfriended their friends if the sellers were their friends).

I'm just in awe to see how SE Asia countries are using social media.
Google hack-a-day. It's what I read now instead of alt.hackers. Might be too hardware-centric for this crowd, though.
tldr - entertainment for onlookers will probably be low, but educational content COULD be high (but requires more work on your part of course)

So I think that building is way more interesting for the person who is doing the building. To keep engaged, you would have to essentially mind dump your thought processes as you go, an incessant stream of words which couldn't keep up with how fast you think/try solutions, etc.

At best, it would be a tutorial screencast on workflow, or a "how I develop" piece (which could definitely serve it's uses, possibly if you created some platform for people to share these screencasts, so people got a look at how others worked or though even), and at worst, a really boring chance for people to criticize each other.

I think the entertainment value would be very low, and learning/improvement probability is high, but it's very hard to accomplish either of those things without engagement.

Of course, You could build an entire successful youtube channel if you market yourself as "regular guy builds X" or "regular guy builds a node app" or "regular guy programs an arduino" so that people with little to no knowledge, or those who are starting out, or those who love ridiculously indepth how-to videos to watch. How you would differentiate yourself is probably how much educational stuff you could pack in there (for example: a lot of screencasts have some guy on a macbook using vim breezing through creating a node app, but what about if your audience has just graduated from a raspberry pi they got as a gift? How would they learn how to build/download/install vim? how to use vim? how to even get node installed? etc).
Why not just leave the "{{ }}" out and assume the mammouth file is 100% PHP?
When using terminal-notifier, use the -group ID and -remove ID together -- otherwise, the swipe-to-notification-area gets cluttered. Alternatively, do a sleep and close it automatically.
This maybe should be titled:

"Robots to revolutionize farming, remove entire classes of jobs from farming communities, for better or worse"
err. It's European which means the US government can't do whatever they want with your data.

There seems to be a lot of noise at the moment with people re-evaluating who is in control of their data, this is just another variation of that theme.
How are they doing this if the device isn't associating with an access point or broadcasting beacons?
Off-topic but do you get mistaken for the lecturer Dan Grossman? Especially around here since he did a coursera functional programming course earlier this year?
My interpretation: this is just saying your success is likely to be higher if you work with what you are familiar with.

If you deal with enterprise problems and enterprise software, go for it. If you haven't ever dealt with enterprise problems, what are you doing making a start up for what you don't understand well.
For those of you wondering whether this is worth supporting, the answer is Yes.

I work with a lot of smart engineers, and periodically ask them what they do for personal backup of images, video, etc. I don't think I've yet talked to someone who was satisfied with their system.

Git annex (with the assistant) brings me closer to my ideal system than I've been before: a drive at home, one in my desk drawer at work for fire-proof backups, easy automatic shuttling of data between them using my phone or USB sticks, and pluggable cloud storage if I decide I want it.

Oh, and a friendly, responsive and excellent developer behind it, developing software in a cabin, in the woods. :-)
It hosed my machine. The problem was I hadn't upgraded in a while, so when I did upgrade some of the hacks they had in place to upgrade seamlessly no longer worked due to library incompatibilities. Even the Arch IRC channel couldn't help :(
Very cool, but it looks like its just a different syntax for PHP. What's the long term goal for this project?
Articles like this (semi-political stuff) tends to get flagged and thus, disappears from the front page at speed. When I clicked the link to read the article, it was around #6 with 20-something points after 2 hours; when I refreshed HN ten minutes later, it had gained ten points but fallen all the way to the second page (~30 odd places).

I'd say there's a not unreasonable chance that the article was flagged because a reader didn't like the history it puts forth.
But if you try too hard to get that one domain, you may not reach a point where it's "good enough to stand alone, outside..." because, while your execution was good, you moved in the wrong direction.
Someone following you in person takes...well...a person. Following you digitally takes some electricity, bandwidth, storage, and code.
I don't know what you're talking about. Maybe it's you.