skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One idea for jumpstarting a new HN-type site is to spider HNSearch, gathering the first 100,000 stories ever submitted to HN, along with comments. Then set up your site so that your frontpage is a doppelganger of HN's frontpage circa 2007. I.e. today your frontpage should look how the HN frontpage looked on August 7th, 2007.

That way there's (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments. Before long, new real users would start to participate, e.g. by replying to doppleganger comments. At that point, it's inevitable that the new site would start to get traction as long as those new users keep coming back, which they should because the frontpage is interesting.

This could only work if someone had the balls to actually deploy the currently-released Arc 3.1 version of Hacker News, though, rather than rolling their own version in Rails. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to clone HN's featureset, but it's interesting to note that not a single one of the HN knockoffs successfully cloned HN's entire featureset. Most of them were a halfway implementation.

Anyway. Just a fun idea.

EDIT: I just stumbled across a dump of HN from April 24, 2008: http://rapidshare.com/files/3129266675/ycombinator-news-2008...

It contains a snapshot of the first 172,575 items (submissions/comments) and a snapshot of the profiles of the first 6,519 users.

Have fun! Maybe someone can use the data to put together a cool visualization or something.

EDIT2: Just to be clear, this idea is firmly tongue-in-cheek.

EDIT3: Statistics time! According to that snapshot, when HN was 558 days old there were 38,693 submissions and 133,882 comments. The snapshot claims there were only 6,519 users. That would be an average of 20 comments per user and 5.9 submissions per user.
" You have to run, before you can fly,
You have to X, before you can Y ",

Rhyming reminder of which axis is vertical, and which horizontal...
SockStress: DC21 Presentation
Correct, and this is the point that is being missed by so many, despite their hyperbole. Chrome could prevent the display of the password as a design choice, but the password must be reversible otherwise how could you send it on to the authenticating server? Only the authenticating server stores non-reversible hashes.
To be clear: IJulia is still in a pre-release state but we're working on getting it ready for general consumption in the next couple of weeks. Fernando Perez's G+ post has a nice write up of the situation:

https://plus.google.com/105051551851350439748/posts/GMNjgaug...

The Julia/Python interop, on the other hand, is already quite mature and complete thanks to the incredible work of Steven G. Johnson (of FFTW fame), who has also done the lion's share of the work on the native Julia kernel for IPython.
I didn't realize Bluetooth had such a tight accuracy radius. I was looking into NFC for another project I was working on that required the two devices be touching each other. The digital poker chip, for casinos and the like to see their chip flow in real time.

I do a lot of Retail & IT Consulting and this is very interesting to me. What other use cases did you have in mind that you haven't posted on your website?

You website states it will ship this Summer, with Summer nearly over - is this still the case?

Really looking forward to offering this to my Retail clients and working with your team on implementations.
Sorry Ted, your cohorts bear a lot of blame for blaring 'terrorism' each night.
https://lobste.rs is the "invite-only HN".
It kinda sounds like he's suggesting a massive, public, social media platform where the 'good stuff' naturally bubbles up to the top. 'Good stuff', in this case, being what you're interested in and nothing else.

And while that would indeed be awesome, it's also pretty obviously a pipe dream. Maybe some breakthrough with AI would help with that, but until then I don't think we have the technology to do that.

So, for now humans are in control, and as we all know, the public is filled with marketers, trolls, and other forms of bagbiters that tend to ruin such things when they get big enough. Hakuna matata, I guess.
Trello introduces Power-Ups: Calendar, Card Aging, and More
Another reason why it is so important to secure your online accounts with two-factor authentication wherever possible.
hm ... Goer, Golanger ... damn
One thing to keep in mind is that OpenJDK is different from Dalvik, and their JITs are very different.

Dalvik optimizes more heavily in favour of memory space (one of the reasons for its tracing JIT approach as opposed to method JIT approach).

Indeed, on the desktop, Java does very well on a lot of these benchmarks. My goal with these measurements, though, was to get an idea of what kind of performance could be expected by people who were writing asm.js code for Firefox OS devices, and how it compares to performance of similar code on other mobile platforms.
That brings us right back to the original startup article, why use what boils down to a biometric hand geometry scanner with a piece of custom plastic instead of the hand, when a hand is more secure, easier to use, etc.

If you're going to go for wild stuff for the sake of wildness, go gonzo, go all the way.
I thought this was common knowledge? The article makes it seems as a just discovered thing.
Payment gateway transition - mobile
What is the best way to manage the transition of a payment gateway? Specifically, I currently use Paypal but will be moving to Stripe. I can update it easily on my site but am concerned about older versions of my mobile app that will be out in the world with folks who won't download the latest app and therefore won't have Stripe on their mobile units. Am I overthinking this or is this an actual problem? What's the best way to manage it?
Its the very definition of sticking your head in an echo chamber.

I come here because I don't want Only 3 or 4 people's idea of what's important. That's the point of an aggregator / voting system, let me know what the masses deem important.
Who is using Julia? Is it gaining traction in the academic community?
you sir are an idiot.
Ah, yeah that's obviously a problem.

Maybe some kind of "top 10" of HN as voted on by the "elite" - no extra, private comment area, no special form of communication, no nothing except the additional ability to contribute a vote towards a "top 10".

I'm also not really even sure such a thing is necessary. I still love HN for it's content and conversations.
Racket is actually both a language and a distribution of a set of tools for building languages - e.g. the Racket distribution includes not only Racket and Datalog, but Algol-60 just to show off how flexible the tool set is.

One of the advantages and curses of the Racket community is that it comes out of academia rather than business like Clojure. The benefit is that it has good documentation and someone somewhere is writing or has written a thesis about just about anything based on Racket. The downside is that Racket is many things to many people and there is no canonical source like Rich Hickey or Linus.

I'm not smarter - Hell, I don't even know what a destructuring bind is. But [it is the internet after all] maybe you want

(match...)

http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/match.html?q=match&q=r...

Anyway, There's always IRC.
Yep. Something is right in the world. The future is suddenly looking really good.
Facebook and email records from players led to MLB suspensions
Teaching Programming to Homeschoolers
You're right, I meant to write PowerPC.
Check out my pure javascript git implementation. https://github.com/ryanackley/git-html5.js

It has a complete workflow at the moment. You can see it in action here: http://tin.cr/tailor.html.
I just had to go take a piss though.. like really bad... I couldn't think... and by the time I got back, all my passwords were stolen by my sister's idiot friend...

Wish my passwords were at least behind my Google Account username/password :/
Short version...

"MLB filed a lawsuit in March against Biogenesis of America, Bosch and others, complaining they interfered with the contracts between MLB and the union. The suit was unusual and may never reach trial, but it did give MLB the ability to file civil subpoenas...

"It's like traditional law enforcement methods," Tygart said. "Even without the powers of law enforcement -- wiretaps, search warrants -- you can still have success in obtaining these documents.""
Considering the huge amount of work behind Quartz and Core Animation, I feel quite pessimistic about this goal.

How about creating a translation layer from ObjC and CoreGraphics sources to js and canvas in WebKit based browsers with some JavaScript engine?
Good Math: A Geek’s Guide to the Beauty of Numbers, Logic, and Computation
Subject Filters for HN
Rob Malda's interview in the WP made me think: why not filter hackernews by subject matter?
He said that he didn't care about the latest version of coffeescript, but wants to know about "Tech Culture"
I don't care about Tech Culture at all, but I really do care about new tools and workflows.
I also care about NSA/Snowden revelations on different days.
Why not have filters or a point system based on whether the article is a "tool", "news", or "tech culture" (actually, you guys probably have a better category system).
Then when people give points, the natural filter just aggregates points (what you have now), but people can subtract out "tech culture" points and you get a different feed.
you sir are not an idiot, contrary to the guy you are replying to.
I've done work to translate familiar 2d fps aim views to 3d and it feels very natural. I had tons of people at QuakeCon jumping right in a fragging just as well as they do in 2d. If you have a rift you can try it -
https://github.com/swax/Quakespasm-Rift
True, chrome circumvents safari's password security by merely querying the keychain without prompting for a password. What stops anything(or anyone) else from doing it? Absolutely nothing.

You've fallen into exactly the trap they wanted to avoid. You assumed Safari's password security mechanism was more secure than it is. If chrome can access it without a password prompt, I can too. In fact, there's probably some nice apple script one liner to do it.
In the article, Malda is not all that enthusiastic about Twitter being the heir to those sites: "But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting... It’s different, chattier, I get more pictures of what people ate. It doesn’t necessarily bring people insight."

But he does seem to believe that the future is something decentralized like Twitter (which is still run by a single company, however).
Is there some way to get this in a daily email?
I think there's a lot of victim complex in it too, as in people see themselves as deserving a break, and others punishment, such that harming others for personal gain is justified.
SockStress : DC21 Presentation
> why use what boils down to a biometric hand geometry scanner with a piece of custom plastic instead of the hand, when a hand is more secure, easier to use, etc

I completely agree.
I think this is the real debate. Since when did Browsers get into the account/password storing industry? Isn't this why we have browser extensions in the first place?
Data URI Performance: Don't Blame it on Base64
I think it all begins with educating people about the issue and motivating them to care about privacy again. Ideally they would find this so distasteful that politicians must fix it.

If there isn't a political solution, it falls on the technical community to design encryption and privacy into their products that "just works". Here, ideally, the default state of Internet servers and clients would be to encrypt traffic so that they can be used through a service like TOR without worrying about an exit node snarfing usernames and passwords. Then look at integrating TOR functionality into these servers and clients as transparently as possible such that they will relay internal traffic by default and prefer hidden service connections to servers that are both public and private to reduce the need for exit nodes.

At the end of the day strong encryption can simply be made illegal, so it's more important to try to get society back to a "mind your own business" outlook. That can start with a concerted effort to talk about it among family and friends, especially at the moment when it's not a partisan issue.
> In other words, just do your job anyway, just taking the inadmissible evidence as a hint of what to look for.

But then you're allowing evidence collection by any means.

I'll just break into your house and rifle through your documents and possessions until I find evidence you have committed a crime. Better yet, I'll kidnap and torture you until you confess to something. Once I have that (illegal) confession, I'll start my "parallel construction" until I find another way to prove you guilty of whatever it was you confessed to.

See any problem with that?
I've been out of the webdev loop for years so I've never used Vagrant, but I've read a bit about it and I see it mentioned all the time. I understand that Vagrant is used to quickly set up virtual machines (and all the required software) to replicate a production environment so that you can test your web app on it without having to clutter your own machine with that software.

I understand that you can have a Vagrant provider for VMWare and VirtualBox, but what does it mean for you to have a DigitalOcean provider for Vagrant?

Also, maybe someone can drop a few words in on the typical usage scenario for Vagrant? Other than automation, how else does Vagrant help a developer, and how does it tie into the various VPS services (such as AWS, DO, etc...)?
https://lobste.rs is what you're talking about. Invite-only, hardcore relevance in topic submissions.
A good way to think of the difference between pattern matching and destructuring is that pattern matching is a conditional construct and destructuring isn’t.
Degree of difficulty matters. The technical ability of the attacker matters.

With this feature, it's trivial for absolutely anyone to steal my secrets in seconds.

Without this feature, the time-to-compromise goes up, as does the technical knowledge required. The degree-of-difficulty (which, yes, is still low), goes up.

It is cosmetic, but INTERFACE MATTERS. If you don't want people doing something, don't have a feature that makes it trivially easy.

Hell, if chrome devs really aren't going to do anything at all about this, then a better solution here would be to bring the button to the FRONT of the interface. 'View All Passwords', right beside the 'back' button, navigates you to a raw txt file of websites and passwords. Then, at least, there would be no excuse, no naive assumption that chrome is doing SOMETHING to protect your passwords.
I stopped math at highschool precalculus, and I've been afraid of it ever since. But I think I can foster a new relationship with math through this book. I am currently reading Quicksilver, and I was sold when I read about Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the Irrational and Transcendental Numbers chapter (http://media.pragprog.com/titles/mcmath/irrationals.pdf)
be the next baton holder

For X to be the next baton holder, X would need to be quite widely adopted, and the superficially matlab-like look and feel of Julia should really help in this.
Long before Chrome even existed, anyone with a flash drive could have used any of these apps (http://www.nirsoft.net/password_recovery_tools.html) to trivially recover plaintext passwords. Plugging in a flash drive (or merely downloading it off the internet) and running a small program (which even saves the hassle of having to show manually hit show on each of the passwords or navigating the menus of the settings page) can reveal not only Chrome passwords, but IE, Firefox, Opera, Wireless Keys, VNC, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, AIM, Windows Live Mail, Outlook, IncrediMail, Eudora, Netscape Mail, and Thunderbird.
You're a marketer too, you're marketing your opinion.
> The devices could pickup the signal and estimate the location very precisely, down to inches - so it is definitely a technology that could be used to indoor-navigation for robots, machines in the factory or doctors in a hospital.

There has been a _lot_ of research in this area that I have seen and almost everything seems to ignore multipath propagation. I think the more interesting approach is fusing RF localization with other sensors (example paper [pdf warning for those fearful of them] https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/37074/perv... )

Just wanting to point out that it is much more complicated than simply picking up the signal and homing in.
I can't wait to see the Javascript implementation of Linux.
The spectral norm test appears to be wrong. On C++ & Java it gets the math expression in the A function wrong, and produces NaN, which apparently has a huge performance cost. Taking the correct version from the Javascript (and converting to a double correctly) gives the correct result, and (OpenJDK) Java runs twice as fast.
Historic deal done to publish HeLa cell line genome
> Why can't I go online and order the Jeep (or whatever else) I want and have it delivered or pick it up from a non-jackass?

True, you can't go to Amazon Cars or equivalent, but there are options. Have you tried the internet sales department? Edmund's called it "a valuable time- and money-saver."[1]

> I wish the car manufacturers would get with it.

It's not like they haven't tried to make the buying experience more pleasant. Saturn was doing no-haggle pricing as early as 1990[2]. Scion is doing it today[3]. Gut feel is that the buying experience just isn't that important to most people with durable goods. The car is what brings us into dealerships, not the sales staff.

[1]: http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/how-to-get-an-internet-pri...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Corporation#1990.E2.80....

[3]: http://www.scion.com/buy/pure_price/
See https://www.pncvirtualwallet.com/tour/online-money-managemen... for helpful use of JS in online banking
Add the v2 (2006) redesign to the reasons people like me (uid ~100000) left. It simply became terrible to use, terrible to comment on ("slow down, cowboy!"), terrible to moderate.

It is the "retailer with PDF-only catalog" of news sites.
You realize that DO scales up to 960$ /month right (96GB24 Cores960GB SSD )? The 20$ package competed directly with linode.
Ah - fair point. How can I repeat the asm.js results on my laptop?
Don't vote. Spend time with your family, effect change locally, do something that makes a difference. I'm spreading peaceful parenting, the NAP, and philosophy. This is where real change will happen. Involving yourself in quasi-religious political rituals, getting caught up in a politician's silver-tongued promises and the destructive divisiveness of political ideologies is exactly what the oligarchy feeds off.
And it is amazing that JS is even in the same ballpark as Java

It's not. The comparison is between C++/native, C++/asm.js and Java/Dalvik.

Yes, one of the C++ benchmarks goes through an intermediate Javascript stage, but the whole point of asm.js is that we can do so without too much of a performance penalty.
I'm not sure why you think there would be (a) the appearance of activity, (b) a constant stream of interesting content on the frontpage, and (c) interesting discussion in the comments on August 7th, 2007.

Also, HNSearch's API won't allow you to gather that many stories.
THC-Hydra v7.5
I'm sure there is demand, but your site is basically just an email form. Why would anyone fill that in unless they knew you had insane marketing experience or some other reason?
MetaFilter has successfully used the "pay $5 for an account" model as a means to balance access against exclusivity. It may not be a tech site but considering it's still basically just an open access group blog (with a few bells and whistles) the model seems to have served it quite well.
I think his logic toward Twitter is very flawed. Sure, you can get the bulk of your interesting news there from specific feeds, but where's the discussion? People use Reddit, HN, Slashdot, Fark, etc., because they could have conversations about each item.

People want to discuss how a story makes them feel and how it affects them. People need access to random people, that's why this doesn't work as well on social sites like Facebook. Finally, it needs to be at least psuedo-anonymous so people can explore their thoughts without real-life repercussions.
I've never had a bad experience with Amazon or any of their third parties across hundreds (!) of transactions. Long time collector, I purchased two pieces of art yesterday via the beta. Known gallery, brick-and-mortar. It's already a total debacle.

Late 90s press quoted Bezos as saying he wanted Amazon to sell everything except livestock and gasoline. Compared to art galleries, there's less bullshit and more ethics among the beef and oil companies.

But I pushed the button yesterday specifically knowing Amazon had my back. That says a lot.
My personal opinion is that it just feels - given all the hype - that DigitalOcean are not here to build the best possible hosting provider for developers.

I just don't feel there is anything special about DigitalOcean, nothing that indicates to me that the founders really care about the technical nuances and details of server hosting.

Instead, my impression is that the company will continue to be pimped and supported until a profitable exit is reached. It seems to be all about money. It's hosting today, but tomorrow it could be nursing homes.
One thing I learned is don’t spend your entire life playing predictive defense against attacks that will never happen. Real people are very clever. If they choose to attack you they’ll attack you in ways you can’t predict.

I wish our government would heed this advice...

I also liked how Rob said that his CMS was an evolved system and not designed.
This has been my experience as well, because I can't think of everything and am better suited to incremental design.
I'm subscribed to the Hacker Newsletter, but it´s weekly:

http://hackernewsletter.com
Seeing as the js-git project is maturing quickly, I was thinking it might be time to integrate into npm.

https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues/3765
Show HN: Streakflow -- goal tracking with build in motivation
Great idea! I love this and give you props for putting together a site that showcases new ideas. There's so much noise out there that it's nice to have a site that weeds through that noise. Awesome.
If you're not going to protect people by implementing a simple master password mechinism (Google Account, on by default if you are logged in), you should at least warn people that saving their passwords is risky.

The Chrome user interface doesn't let average users know their passwords are stored in such an easily accessible way. "Do you want to save your password?"... If they knew, it would 100% of the time be "Hell no!"... but Chrome asks by default, which puts millions of average users at risk... what a shame.
> Neither party cares about the issue because the people don't care

And why don't the people care? Corporate-owned media has a huge amount of influence on what people care about. But in the never ending search for ever increasing profits that is built into their structure by law, they, like the major political parties are "just giving people what they want" too by chasing ratings in order to gain larger market share and increase advertising revenue. So both intertwined systems, the political system and the mainstream media, are working fine, right?
I hope the US is actually doing something smart/tricky. The CIA (or whoever) say this is because of some chatter. Can't they decode the chatter? Maybe they are pretending they can't.
Finally a worthy Google Calendar replacement?
Defending against the BREACH attack
Clickable: http://commoso.com