skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the goal is to build a paid for blogging platform, it seems to me that App.net is doing all of the right things (or perhaps the goal is paid for live chat rooms, since they also seem able to support that). The infrastructure so far seems impressive, and Dalton has been transparent and highly communicative about much of what App.net is doing.

The only thing missing from all of this is for someone like Dalton to actually say "We are building a paid blogging platform." When App.net was initially described, it sounded like "This will be just like Twitter, but you will pay for it." And that never made sense.

It seems to me they now have the infrastructure to support several business models that people might actually pay for (blogs, private chat rooms, etc) but if anyone at App.net has said what the intended business model is, then I missed the announcement.
Hi Ed,

Pleased to meet you. I may be in communication soon regarding the results of my testing with python2.6 + Pyrax.
Vietnam to ban discussion of news on social media sites
Streak’s (YC S11) New iPhone App Is A CRM Service With Gmail Baked In
There are lots of telephony services out there with great margins.
> Screw going to amazon et al to buy anything that changes as constantly as a car. or a cellphone.

You've made it clear you're a person who requires extensive test-driving. Amazon's cell phone business doesn't seem to be hurting. I've ordered my last two cell phones online sight-unseen. Same for recent laptops and a Nook. I'll take the uncertainty of holding a modern device over the sales staff.

> I bet my right arm that you wouldn't ever buy a car from amazon if you couldn't test drive it at the local shoddy dealer.

The average car age in the US is now 11.4 years old[1]. My car will likely be 15 before I get another one. In VW's terms, that's at least three generations of progress. I'm buying a car for a decade, and none of the problems that come up in a decade will be revealed by a test drive.

Regardless, I merely agreed it wasn't currently an option and the parent may have a better experience with the internet sales department of his or her local dealerships.

[1]: http://www.edmunds.com/car-news/average-age-of-cars-in-us-ju...
Yeah the sweet spot (or interesting spot at least) was clearly moving. Gaming has been stagnating for the last few game cycles (oh look, Gears of War 7). Obviously the lack of new console hardware was holding back a jump forward in various aspects, but that's just evolution rather than a technology inflection.

VR of course is the inflection. Carmack will add a lot of fuel to the fire. It's truly appropriate that he have a ground floor role in pushing this all forward. So much better than his abilities being used for Quake N.
Yes. Anchoring price and legitimacy.
Give Snowden Immunity
Well, no issues unless you want to use AOSP 4.3 on the Nexus 10, in which case it has the exact same issue [1] as being discussed

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-building/OvPkV...
I hope that Mozilla and Ubuntu are more successful in keeping binary blobs under control on their hardware. It will probably mean avoiding Nvidia and Qualcomm hardware though. Whether or not this is even realistic or possible is an interesting question.
AFAIK he's still at Google, just not doing the AOSP release guru thing anymore.
JBQ is a great guy, and well loved from his days working for Be Inc. His wife cool too, if notoriously opinionated :-) Wish him all the best! Stand by your convictions.
I hear you. I pointed out a nissan leaf to my wife and she was like 'what if we want to go on a vacation?' 'what if we have two more kids?' we wouldn't be able to fit our luggage or go farther than 100 miles away from home! I did mention that in those times which would be rare, we could rent a vehicle with enough space, but she was not having it.
Netflix Algorithm
Fort Disco: The new brute-force botnet
Currencies are not just stores of value. Real estate is a store of value also, but nobody uses land or buildings as currency.

Once upon a time, gold was used as currency. Merchants would have scales, weights, and other equipment needed to deal in gold. That is not how gold is used in today's world; there are only a few highly niche markets where gold is used as currency, and everywhere else you have either fiat currency or currency that is backed by gold (with fiat currency being vastly more popular these days).

It is also wrong to separate printed money from the rest of the money supply when you are talking about fiat currency. Paper money is just a representation of the currency; the value of a dollar bill is equal to the value of four quarters and equal to the value of a bank account with one dollar in it. Fiat currency is an abstraction created by laws, which is implemented in various ways (paper money, coins, electronic transactions, etc.).
Even better, remember when people used to talk on "party lines" with no privacy at all?
So it's a repeat of the OLPC Marvell issue, starting negotiations after the deal is done.
I went to Prismatic and was annoyed that there seemed to be nothing on the landing page explaining what it was and how to use it. In search of enlightenment, I clicked the "blog" link, and was suddenly immersed in a series of amazing technical articles about Clojure. If you're interested in Clojure it looks like it's worth following their blog even if you don't care about their product.
Agree. The $5 lifetime fee was all it took to keep Metafilter from being diluted after reaching critical mass. Simple and effective.
Nerdboat: Developers, Designers and Tinkerers on a boat - one ticket for free
This kind of stuff is run-of-the-mill when working with the large chipset/SoC vendors. I've worked on projects that have crashed and burned because at the last minute the chip vendor decided they're not going to provide the SDK for the chips we've bought and designed in.

Vendors suck (some more than others) and it's not Google's fault that they can't convince the vendor to open source their device drivers. This sort of thing is extremely common in the embedded world and when you're making a device to a price point often times you have to put up with this sort of nonsense because only one vendor makes a chip with your feature set at a given price point.
Could you elaborate on the debacle part?
It'd be interesting to see upvotes given only to users who've gotten X karma and downvotes being given to users who've gotten Y (Y>X) karma (the way downvotes are implemented now). it would likely encourage people to really browse the comments rather than just assume whatever's at the top is what they must agree with to survive. doubt this would ever work in practice but it's an interesting thought experiment at the least.
I can see that. I was thinking that some hybrid would be interesting since I am just not sure a basic income would actually be affordable. Something like everyone is guaranteed X and anyone working for Y subtracts Y/F from X where F is some factor (2 or 3 maybe). I get the feeling the "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."[1] might manifest. I do wonder[2] if something radical like takers of basic income cannot vote or serve jury duty might push people to work.

1) Benjamin Franklin

2) not advocating - this part violates some of my basic beliefs
Recommended 100%, a friend of mine has one and save a lot of money in gasoline, also it looks good.
I knew about that. Maybe I just want a good example application to use as a reference…
So you copied code that reimplements RSA into your script... why not just call something that's already available? (for example that pear package itself)

IV filled with 0s? Probably doesn't matter that much in this case, but... are you sure?

$comando - that's not English.

Regarding usability of this script: there are two libraries hiding in that file. One for RSA and one for interaction with mega service. Why not make them separate and reusable?

Also there's no usage instruction. Which variables need to be filled in? Is $master_key a global setting, or something used internally? Moving settings to a separate file (just import config.php for example) would make this much more clear.

Finally, you cannot just slap a new license on this code and put it in public domain. Most of the code comes from http://julien-marchand.fr/blog/using-the-mega-api-with-php-e... and the RSA bits come from Pear package which is licensed under the PHP license. If you keep them separate, you can put your own code in public domain though.

But if it all works... good! You made the first step and that counts :)
I think Malda is circling in the wrong waters. He's following and rubbing shoulders with the folks with money and influence, but the interesting stuff is all being done by a bunch of other people who are spending their time actually doing stuff. Frankly, I don't think Robert Scoble has even the slightest fragment of a fucking clue as to what the tech landscape is going to look like in 2023 or who is going to be a big part of it. Just because they have money, a legacy, and a reputation doesn't mean they are relevant. I think that might apply to Malda as well as anyone else.
But TOTP != Google Authenticator. The advantage of TOTP is that, as an open standard, it can be implemented by anyone.

For example, here's an hardware token implementing the protocol: https://www.safenet-inc.com/products/data-protection/two-fac...
The invasion of Iraq had everything to do with 9/11. Without 9/11 or something like it, there never would have been enough support for an invasion of Iraq to actually carry it out.

Yes, among the people at the top who planned it, it was not a reaction to terrorism. But the public support for it absolutely was.

Our democracy is far from perfect, and much of government is corrupt, but the government is still by and large a reflection of the people. The people's massive overreaction to terrorism allows, even requires, the government to do bad stuff like invade Iraq, wiretap every American phone call, and more.

We need to convince the people to stop overreacting to terrorism so that the government loses that excuse to misbehave.
Indeed, bootstrapping is a tricky problem, and in more fields than just computers and tech. But bootstrapping is not an impossible problem to solve. Machinists and toolmakers first build crude tools, which in turn allow them to build better tools than they could with just their bare hands and wit. A hacker trying to write a self-hosting compiler in a high level language first starts with another compiler or another language to build the first iteration of his compiler. The Linux kernel can use an initramfs to set up a userspace and run the tools needed to...set up userspace.

So bootstrapping is not an impossible problem to solve. What makes politics different that an improvement in politics can't be bootstrapped?
Evaluating the Security of Hosted Build Servers
Obama cancels meeting with Putin over Snowden asylum tensions
I dislike the idea of hellbans just because it is invisible to the non-banned community, and they are unaware of how they are being "shaped." I think I've seen it happen on a "maker" blog where the comment wasn't really negative, but just not positive enough. In that case the moderator was trying to maintain a "very positive" environment. Pernicious.
I once spent some time once tracking down some of the history of how Wine went from officially being "WINdows Emulator" to "Wine Is Not an Emulator" even though nothing had actually changed about how it actually worked. Here's a copy of what I found:

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

It might be nice to have a history of how the name "Wine" went from meaning "Windows Emulator" to "Wine is Not an Emulator". I did some poking around on this a long time ago. Here are the results, with references, if someone would like to clean them up and add them to the article.

I believe the first suggestion of the "not an emulator" name was in this usenet post [1]. This was in 1993, prompted by concern over trademark issues with the name "Windows Emulator".

In this post [2], Bob Amstadt responds to the above post with more interesting history:

My orignal line of thinking was "winemu", but I didn't
like that. Then I thought of shortening it to "wine".
This led me to think of "whine" and "whinny". I liked
"whine", but felt that it was too long.

By 1997, the "not an emulator" interpretation was in use, but as an alternative, according to the Wine FAQ from late 1997 [3]:

The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows
Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right.
Use whichever one you like best.

The dropping of calling Wine an emulator happened between releases 981108 and 981211. The 981108 release notes [4] said:

This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator.

The 981211 release notes [5] said:

This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of
Windows on Unix.

The dropping of "Windows Emulator" seems to have been for two reasons. One was that Wine could be used for more than just taking a Windows binary and running it on Unix. It could also be linked with code compiled on Unix, to give a native Unix binary port of a Windows program. The other was that most users were only familiar with emulators that emulated hardware, which tended to be slow. Wine might get an undeserved reputation of slowness because of that, so they stopped calling it an emulator. I have been unable to locate the references I had to support this paragraph. I think they were posts in comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine from around 1997 or 1998, if someone better at Googling than I wants to try to track them down.

----------

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.os.linux.mis...

[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.os.linux.mis...

[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-wind...

[4] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-wind...

[5] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emulators.ms-wind...
I think their options were either to delay the launch of the new Nexus 7 and possibly break a contract with Qualcomm or release it, let some non-devs enjoy the nice new hardware, and focus on the next new products. Makes sense to me, but I don't think Google benefited as much as they would have if Qualcomm would have allowed the source code to be published.

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/32057-why-google-went-qual...
'Dot-com,' the Most Ubiquitous Suffix on the Internet, Was Almost ... 'Dot-cor'
Survivorship = (1 - churn)

With this definition, a churn of 0.75 is a survivorship of 0.25.

You're perhaps being misled by the offhand phrase "the survivorship is the inverse of the churn"; in that sentence "inverse" is not being used in the mathematician's strict sense of "reciprocal", but in the more colloquial sense of "a thing that moves in the opposite direction from the previous thing".

None of us understand where 32 months came from.
Washio is hiring engineers.
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Ask HN: Learning about building stateless servers
One of the things that I am working on in my project is to build the stateless server, so that scaling becomes easy as more requests come in.

- One of the key things is how to handle user authentication in such scenarios

- One of the methods that I have used in past is, server sending the immutable token(os username, md5(password)) and client sends that token with each request

- Problem? It turns out to be expensive because with each call I need do validate username, password against database and surely it will become performance bottleneck

- I heard today another approach where servers signs the token(with some data and timestamp(is needed)) and sends it to client. The client(read Backbone, Angular, etc) will intercept HTTP calls and send this token to server on each subsequent request

- Advantage? You no longer need to persist cookies on the disk(better security) and server on receiving token decrypts data and validates that it can read the information(no database lookup, voila!)

- What I need? I would like to learn more about second approach, where is it being used, how servers signs the data and validates it

Please share your experiences, I am listening
They forgot to put it in quotes. They consulted "scientists".
You're right that it's impossible to fully disentangle the performance of the database server from the frameworks' ORMs and their platforms' drivers and connection pools. We indicate which database server is being used in each test permutation and one can make very rough observations from the data--such as "MySQL appears very slightly faster in this type of use-case than Postgres"--but like I said, that's not really the purpose of the project. If one wants to compare database servers, there are many better resources for that insight.

You're also right that nothing can predict how your application will perform under load until you build it and test it.

By testing the fundamentals of web application frameworks, however, we hope to inform a preliminary selection process (along with self-selects such as comfort level with code type and community) to give you a rough idea of capacity before you build out the full application. I feel especially that the massive spread of the performance numbers--covering many orders of magnitude as it does--is illuminating to newbies and also valuable to seasoned pros.
> I found it kind of amusing that the mere description of people having to do actual work already seems to be so shocking to middle class people.

Indeed. "They don't have air conditioning!"

Oh...so the Amazon warehouse workers are like every other warehouse worker, factory worker, agricultural worker, miner, oil drilling hand...
Plus one for mentioning the F/OSS "Planets"! They were/are great.
When the competition starts using your own improvements/innovations against your products, you are obliged to keep the secret.
SF Publishes All City Codes on Github
Founder here... for obvious reasons, the article didn't dive too deeply into the technical details so happy to answer any questions on how we embedded Gmail into our App.
Questionably coding, but I always loved this IRC snippet:

<sdmkun> tar -xzf merc.tgz what the fuck

<sdmkun> how the fuck do you people remember this shit

<bucketmouse> just think with a german accent

<bucketmouse> XTRACT ZE FILES
Why does this weekly newsletter suck?
So, but, really: I am interested, as are a lot of other people. Hence the gnashing of teeth.

I'm not thrilled by the security community's black-and-white stance that if it can't stop a defcon attendee, then it's not real security and it's not worth doing.

If my mom can be stopped, and it's simple to stop her, then I really don't get the resistance. 'False sense of security'? Yeah, that ship has already sailed. That's why the Guardian is writing articles like this - people are surprised to learn HOW trivial it is to steal passwords in chrome.
The Twitter thing was kind of a misunderstanding. App.net, as far as I understood it, wants to be a paid platform for a variety of applications. Just that they won't show ads, and they won't remove features, cripple features, or limit the API in order to serve advertising or monetary interests.

They're trying to implement something where you sign up once, as a user, and you can use multiple apps on top of it, and in all these apps you'll have the same data (your friends, messages, etc), yet unlike facebook, they're not blocking apps or limiting the API or putting adds in your news stream, or deliberately removing friends' posts from your news stream so that others have to pay in order to appear in your stream again.
Seems really interesting but I can't get it to compile on OS X.
Links are not buttons. Neither are DIVs and SPANs
To make it harder to bootleg vendors, for example.
Telecom geek here: why do you have low margins?

Where are you buying your DIDs and Routes? What switch are you using?

I'd love to help, I literally eat sleep and breathe this stuff. There's no way your margins should be skinny unless you're playing LCR games, in which case you make it up on volume.

Source: I work at 2600hz, the bootstrapped open source telecom cloud company. We've bootstrapped to 30+ employees on a pure telecom business so I have some experience here.
Boy I sure hope not. In case there are, let's continue to imply that they're making poor choices. While we're at it, let's also shit on other people's work which we haven't read so that we can make sure that as many people as possible can feel our contempt. Especially when the authors of said work are right here, right in this very thread!
Federal judge: Bitcoin, “a currency,” can be regulated under American law
You make it sound like that stance is elitist, but it's the opposite: it's our knowledge of how easy it is to get the level of "Defcon Attendee" that motivates us not to implement cosmetic security features.
"low margin" being 60-80%
How do you know that HN isn't using a weighted voting system? Ever since points were taken out of the UI there could have been an algo added between arrow-clicking and vote-registering.
Nielsen's tracking of Twitter's relation to TV is missing the point
Ask HN: what is the site of a guy that gave away free stock photos?
i remember reading here about a site of a guy that made available for free some beautiful stock photos of smartphones and macs, the photos looked like 'landing page' photos, there was a photo of a mac in a wooden table with a cup of coffee. someone remember what site was that?
So how long after robot warehouse workers do you think we'll have robots enforcing laws? I'm getting a picture of Soylent Green but with robots instead of humans controlling the crowds.
I've even had good experiences with Scion. Their whole "no haggling" business works for me.

The car itself on the other hand... a little bit of buyer's remorse.