skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I talked to Rob at a LinuxWorld several years ago. I got there kind of late and he was answering questions to a medium sized group of socially awkward computer nerds. No one wanted to get on the mic and ask a question for a Slashdot T-Shirt, so, being the extrovert that I am, stepped up to the plate.

I had recently read an interview with Rob online where someone asked him about Digg and Reddit and the popularity of user chosen content. His answers seemed like the question really got under his skin, so I figured I'd fuck with him in public.

I got on the mic and asked him what he thought about the trend of user submitted content. He immediately snapped at me that someone had already asked a similar question and called me a noob. He rambled on about quality vs quantity and all that, my eyes glazed over and I waited to get my free T-Shirt. I still have it! That experience more or less cemented my opinion of 'ol Robbie. Just thought I'd mention this story..
Scoble sucks. The dude has some interesting thoughts, but his signal to noise ratio is abysmal.

But I guess the point of this article is that as communities like Slashdot, Reddit, or HN grow, the signal to noise ratio for any individual user becomes lower and lower.
First AEC industry hackathon
> Perceptions (I see an elephant) are different than ideas or thoughts (I think there are pink elephants in parallel universe).

There is a difference between perceptions and ideas, though its pretty hard to illustrate because you can't describe a perception without categorizing it by ideas that are external to the perception ("elephant", for instance, is an idea, not a perception), and even short of description to others, ideas shape our internal experience of sense data on a pretty fundamental level.
Wow, I'll say that's extreme, bordering on criminal. Do they wipe down the oil lines with a Q-tip, or something?

I went with the dealership charges. Oil changes were US$20-25 and they top off all fluids and tires and give you a free car wash. I can't remember the other maintenance costs off hand, but they came really close to the US$650 for the extended warranty.
I'm one of dulwich's contributors and Jelmer has done some great work on Dulwich.

You might want to check out Gittle (https://github.com/FriendCode/gittle), a high level library for managing git repos, I wrote using dulwich.
It's definitely a tough market, and competing with Jeff Bezos in a low margin market is certainly not an enviable position, however it's certainly possible.

You can buy a 1U server that could fit 100 DO sized droplets for about $5,000. Scale that up a little bit, and you can see that it might be profitable although low margin.
No way! This is the price is right rule. Go over and you lose it all!
I hope those pseudo-personal emails don't get more frequent. I don't need more "spam", and it makes me feel a little rude not answering direct questions in an email.
> 2) Now I know they are going to stick around for a while.

Remember Slicehost? They might stick around but not in the form that you like especially given that DO are playing the startup game rather than growing organically, building a solid business, and then taking money at a later stage for targeted expansion, like Atlassian and Github.
This is essentially what we do with sports news at fancloud.com. By the time the tweets make it through our filters the end result is much more newsworthy then a raw twitter stream.
But the two big parties collude to prevent smaller parties from keeping, so that we don't have that choice. Many states have laws that make it prohibitively difficult for third parties to get on the ballot at all. In states where it doesn't look so bad, there are frequent challenges to the ballots, such that significant financial resources are necessary to defend oneself.

For example:

Gary Johnson won a nine-week legal war for the right to appear on Pennsylvania's ballot. His Libertarians had put in more than enough signatures, more than 20,601, to keep Johnson on. (Major-party candidates only need 2,000 signatures.) His opponents were, mostly, Republicans. And those Republicans managed to clear one other candidate off the list [1]

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/10/22/third_party_can...
Hey ... I don't (and didn't) run a massive government agency. Probably never will. (At least, not after writing this sort of specious crap).

That fact gives me a certain degree of latitude to (a) be inconsistent and (b) spout bullshit.

Asymmetric information warfare, (like guerilla warfare) offers the weaker party far more freedom to manoeuvre than the stronger party enjoys. In other words, it does not matter too much if I am rude, if I exaggerate, plain make stuff up, deploy dodgy humour and plainly bitter and twisted sarcasm (the lowest form of wit, to wit). Not that I would want to characterise all this guff as information warfare. I am just writing things down as I see them. Speak truth to power and all that. Plus, I get to be as ugly as I damn well like, whilst the "Elmer Fudd" comments never stop rolling for poor old Michael Hayden.

Indeed, I would be more inclined to see NSA bods as mates than enemies (the low-level techie ones, at least) -- and despite the many many many provocative statements that I have made in the past, I still feel like we are all, fundamentally, on the same team, working towards the same goals. Put me in the same position as Snowden, and I probably would not have made the decision to leak. I may have bitched about it a bit by the coffee machine though.

It is a pity that these leaks have occurred ... in the sense that they should never have had to happen in the first place. Of course the security services are going to spy on people. It is their job. ... but the fact that even one of their number felt anything less than rock-solid certainty in their mission and their methods speaks volumes about the way that they are going about their task.

Secondly, the villain of the piece isn't really the NSA -- or, indeed, any of the agencies from any given nation-state: It is the tidal-wave of technological change that is upsetting the status quo ... not the agencies who suddenly find their powers vastly enhanced by the past half-decade of progress.

This article does the issue better justice than I am able to: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/aug/05/nsa-p...

When, in the past, I used to worry about that phenomenon of accelerating technological change which we glibly term "the singularity", I focused, along with everybody else, on the economic disruption that would come from the inevitable concentration of wealth

... never for one second did I consider that privacy and surveillance would roll along as a sort of bow wave, heralding the magnitude of the technological shocks still to come.

[Edited to make it slightly less clumsy]
Much needed! just submitted http://pepnest.com :-)
There are days when I wish that Hacker News was divorced from Y Combinator.

I don't care about karma, "hellbans" seem like a mean waste of a person's time, and the thought of HN as a rolling job interview for "the cool kids table" actively discourages me from participating.

Sure, the "interview" aspect helps them find people who are skillful self-promoters/developers, but honestly, as a user, wouldn't you prefer to keep the self-promotion to a minimum?

When I see my 18th front page "HN: Flavor of the Day - Me Too" or "Lorem Snowden" post, I start to long for the days of pre-Twitter F/OSS "Planets".

Planets where dev, ux, design, and business people came together to talk about what makes technology, projects, and people tick. I learned more about how to treat people and run a project from early to mid-2000 era http://planet.gnome.org/ than anywhere else.

There will be another HN, but it'll most likely have a very limited scope and come from a place of genuine enthusiasm.
For me, they are really good on the low end. I love the fact that they offer a $5 per month instance size. Plus, since I joined during the beta period I get unlimited bandwidth for free. This beats the $15 per month AWS instance sizes or the lowest Google option of like $30 bucks. Also, it's like 2x faster than AWS. Finally, for hacking you can easily use a $5 server to replace a service like Cloudant as your backend during testing. I've had cases where I would have been charged hundreds of dollars for API calls which a $5 DigitalOcean server handled marvelously. Or you can use it host a high performance blog: http://jasonormand.com/2012/07/20/introducing-lempress-super...
Absolutely agree with you. It's a general problem with using any performance metric as a sole-focus driver for optimization. You'll find the optimizations may drive behavior beyond where the metric has direct value. That's a truism if you're talking about performance of prison contracts, computer systems, factory throughput, or even capitalism as a whole.

And really, that's what a well-running oversight function should be doing in the case of prison management, adjusting metrics to drive the system toward good whole-society outcomes. Public vs private prisons theoretically doesn't matter, except that introducing private prisons introduces a dynamic where corruption of the oversight function and metrics is used for optimization of profits.
Taking Control of What’s Next and Recommended Layers
anecdotally, probably half and half. even personal connections can be slow and are super busy :). the other 10 were cold signups that surprised us, but enjoyed what we were doing.
Android-based IVI head unit gets iOS playdate
This is awesome news. I received my Oculus in the first batch and have had a ton of fun playing around with it (save the occasional nausea, but that's really game-specific).

Agree with some comments here that the Rift needs more VR-specific content, but it's still early and with news like this I'm confident that great VR/Oculus-specific content will emerge soon.
AR integrates computer-generated sensory input realistically into reality.

A wristwatch and Google Glass are no more AR than a piece of paper with a map on it is.
> If I could just find someone who made a Hacker News digest, with the 10 best items from Hacker News, that would be a really good Slashdot.

There is hckrnews [0]. You can filter by top 10, top 20, top 50%, homepage and all. I usually start by going through the top 10 and progress outwards if I'm looking for additional posts.

[0] http://hckrnews.com/
How exactly do you prevent something like this? How do you ensure that the stats sent over the internet are coming from an actual approved client?

My instinct tells me the simplest solution would be security by obscurity - adding some validation token that the client generates by some obscure and hard to reverse engineer manner. Is there any better way to 'validate' your client?
I've seen Kindles of all types at most Best-Buys and Targets in my area.
So how do I fight pithy one-liners that have no substance?
3 Easy Steps to Get The Most from MongoDB and Node.JS
Nintendo 3DS actually has basic demonstrations of AR as well. They use cards with images on it that can be replaced in real-time by simulated 3-D objects using the 3DS camera.
In 3 years, they'll sell it for $8M.
If we're only talking about exploiting a device across a network, sure turn it off or disconnect it from the network. But there's more to security than that.

One can always take the device and turn it on for oneself.

If one can't exploit the device, one can resort to rubber-hose cryptanalysis.
The problem is that painting the world black and white generates much more traffic. I would bet a lot of money that "Stealth Startups Are Stupid Most of the Time" wouldn't have worked nearly as well for the author unfortunately.
Not sure why there are complaints about it only working when the phone is online. Twitter will only work with a phone online anyway.
The Time I Flew on the Enron Corporate Jet to Meet Jeff Skilling
I did, and wasn't sure why he even bothered saying the first part (unless it was edited out of sequence or something). Regardless of the problems, he seemed pretty down on aggregators, and seemed more about following specific people for news.
Have yet to take a look in Julia, but I've been playing around with Elixir for a while and looks great. Elixir macros particularly got my attention:

http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/5.html

There is a book on Elixir coming out from Pragmatic Programmers sometime and will be written by Dave Thomas, which might generate a certain buzz too. This may be a good time to dive into it a bit more.
Obama: 'We Don’t Have a Domestic Spying Program'
Caveat Refactor: to refactor or not to refactor, the question is that?
Moreover, who's interested in following soundbites from "successful people" in isolation? The point of sites like Slashdot and Hacker News is the opportunity for discussion in depth. You can't get that from Twitter.
User-side development: Why UX is more than the front end
Based on what? Here is an elegant statement of the opposite point of view by Peter Thiel, which includes a coherent argument. http://blakemasters.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels-cs183-...
This is so typical that the software designer looks at things only from the engineer perspective. Now I can see all the passwords my girlfriends saved in her chrome browser without me knowing any hacking knowledge. All I need is once in a while she didn't log out her browser account when she goes to restroom. God knows if any of those passwords is duplicate to the one she uses in online banking. You might argue that she doesn't log out the account exactly because she didn't know the threat of exposing her password by not logging out. But things like this happen, it just happen, everyday everywhere. Carelessness is in human nature. Now I get to know this issue because I check out Engadget from time to time. But I am sure my girlfriend doesn't. I am so sure that I can restrain my temptation of looking at her password when I love her. Hopefully we won't break up in the near future.
I know them, great group of guys. Congrats!
It's possible to have computer Internet connectivity in an area with no cell phone reception. I go to a place like that about once a year at least, or so.
I don't think eBay is Amazon's end goal with this. In the long run, it is more about Southeby's and Christies's. It will be a long slog to establish a reputation as a reliable source, but we all know Amazon is willing to go long.
Guaranteed Way To Generate An Income Working From Home
Multi-User iOS and the Fingerprint Scanner
I'm reminded of the first half of the fictional short(ish) story "Manna"[1] by Marshall Brain.

[1] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I hope you'll provide the option to exclude Tomodo from people's robots.txt so that those on relatively rigid platforms [1] have a straightforward and standardised way to opt out (rather than asking another file of people)?

[1]: hint: not me :P
It is asserted multiple times in the article, but is there any evidence that Amazon uses temp workers at all their facilities or just in this one UK example? I haven't seen any accounts of heavy use in US warehouses, but they could be out there.
More meaningful would be to check if the all services are available. i.e. work with each company and check the services every few time intervals [i.e ping services are pre determined interval].

Frontend looks sleek, and maybe useful. But there does not seem to be a lot of money in it.

Myself , internally, I use something similar to http://www.twikstik.com/live?q=24&id=0&ch=statuspage , which tracks my all different services.

simple solution for my monitoring needs.

And yes, I auto-surf reddit. http://www.twikstik.com/live?q=24&id=0&ch=enjoy%20reddit!
Would one possible solution be to show a random word on the screen and add that as part of the authentication request? This would allow it to pair up with what you currently see on the screen and keep it simple enough where IP address or other technical details aren't required to be known.
Happens at the lower end too. I was ready to buy a new car after 10 years with my previous car. I researched 2013 hybrids and decided on the Honda CR-Z. A 2 seater that has an available 6 speed manual transmission which was the big selling point for me.

Call my local Honda dealer to find out if they have the 2013 6MT in stock. "No but we have a 2012." I'm not interested in the 2012 model because the 13s have a better battery and electric motor--more HP and torque on a fairly underpowered car. They have no interest in finding one or ordering it.

I understand that it is a new model and they don't have anything in stock yet but a complete disinterest in working with a new customer can't be good for a business. I went online and a week or so later found the car that I was looking for though I had to drive 30 miles to get it. A month later the original dealer calls back to find out if I want to buy a car. Stupid approach to business.
Julia and Elixir definitely seem worth checking. I especially like the interchangeability between Erlang & Elixir.
You should probably direct your anger to the author of the article for exposing this to people like your druggie cousin who comes over for your birthday party if that's your main concern.

As long as your password keychain is unsecured, EVERY browser does this -- it's just a matter of knowing where the passwords are stored in the browser as plaintext. If you don't want people to access your accounts, then secure them. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either your passwords are conveniently stored in plaintext so you can login easier, or you take actions to secure your account and add a step to the login process.
Ah yes, "investigative journalism", or as I like to think of it, "journalism". Not just reporting.
Android AOSP maintainer quits
But I don't think the power has shifted to individuals; it's just an illusion that it has. Look at some 'celebrities' on Twitter and G+, for example. I don't just mean pop celebs, but celebs in any industry. Has the 'power' shifted to them really? The power is still in the platform and the extent to which those people are exposed to others in that platform. When the rules of the platform change ('real names' only, etc), the people who had 'power' may lose that power overnight.
Yes, thank you for explaining this so clearly. Of course I wouldn't knowingly give physical access of my computer to a malicious hacker, but if my friend asks to use it for 60 seconds while I take care of something else, I'd like to be able to do that without logging out and back in as a guest user. Convenience does matter in these kinds of situations, and deleting these "Show" buttons will make it more difficult for the untrained user to pull a prank or worse.
This would prevent you from using twitter on a PC when your phone does not have internet connectivity. I.E. someone at an internet cafe in a foreign country.
If this works as well as Python's requests library, then you are my hero. I hate dealing with email in Python, because the standard library interfaces to email are horrible.

I have a have a project that could use this now, so I will give it a shot. I will report back with my findings.
GistBox Clipper - save content of any code tag directly as a gist
a lot of people tweet quite infrequently - I don't see anything of theirs, sadly.

the ones who do tweet often enough I get to recognise (at least, their avatar.) If not, and I see an interesting tweet, I just go and re-read their description. I only "know" about 30 or 40 people who are on twitter at all.
what makes you think that people that hate to remember passwords will want to remember a password that locks them out of their password? This is stupid. Users that care about security will LEARN about more secure solutions one way or another. Don't treat humans as dumb fucks.
This message has affected me emotionally. I don't know why. Something about the urgency of it, and the humanity.

I suppose my guess is that something will grow organically out of what we have. I don't think it will be ideological.

One example might be localization. If Amazon is subject to the same taxes as a brick and mortar business, it might become less important and local businesses more important.

If not, we're all going to end up in the Army. See you in the cybercorps!
As the creator of CoffeeScript, I hope so too!

A big part of the original idea with CoffeeScript was to exhaustively annotate the compiler so that folks could take it, and run off in more radical directions. Whereas CoffeeScript is intentionally conservative (no standard library beyond what JavaScript offers is allowed, for example), the fact that LiveScript is a fork off Coco, which is a fork off CoffeeScript, is a wonderful tangent.

There are static and optional typing flavors, asynchronous-flow-control flavors, macro-oriented flavors, functional ones, contract ones, and of course the rewrite of the basic language itself. In open source, there's enough spotlight for all of 'em.
Hey nawitus, thanks for the feedback. From what we've seen so far, the majority of signups have reacted positively to the personal emails. Usually, there's some type of question that we can help out with off the bat.
Only if you happen to agree with this guy's value judgments.

He counts ad blocking and "pirating movies" as unethical! The former assumes some nonexistent contract obligating people to do whatever a website asks, and the latter amounts to "whatever Congress decided to put in current law is your ethical obligation". Lots of principled people disagree on each of those.

Then he goes on to treat his value judgments as if they were statements of objective facts, and examines the mentality supposedly involved in rationalizing conduct he assumes is unethical - leaving a gap in his reasoning, at best. You can't reduce ethics to psychology.

It would have been more interesting if he'd taken on bigger issues. For example, "(How) can I make an honest living if all my job prospects involve exploitive practices? Is there a third way between being an antisocial hermit and a capitalistic sociopath?"
There's been a whole lot of articles about heavy use of temps in US warehouses. I think I recall one from a few months ago which talked about how the average temp in some CA warehouses was around 90 degrees most of the day and was staffed almost entirely by temp workers.

Edit: found it.

> Amazon uses temporary employees in its Breinigsville warehouse, works them to the point of heat exhaustion--no, really, it parks ambulances outside--and then lets them go after they've failed to perform.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/09/what-it-ta...

And it seems there's an update -
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/06/amazons-wa...
Some observation on HN these days: Many threads about PERL vs Python ... etc, .Net, Java, or whatever programming languages some people really hates are just moving towards polarizations as religion/politics discussions.
If first time hearing about it then that thought may make sense. However Carmack is the person who launched Oculus into the media spotlight with his demo of the Rift at E3 last year. He was following a 3d hacker/enthusiasts forum, saw posts about a prototype Palmer Lucky created, asked if he could get a prototype and was sent one (apparently the only one), adjusted Doom3 for it, demoed it to media at E3 and it took off from there.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=carmack+e3+oculu...
This is the direct download link for Chrome extension:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sFAuoZ0uOo
Cars are often used to increase social status, and that's not exactly irrational.
You can't use mouse/keyboard well if you can't see the mouse/keyboard.

I can't imagine being able to properly play PC games while also having to constantly look at your mouse/keyboard.
Eventually people will do that for you, as a service, and then give you just a digest of the interesting things those people had to say without all the inane minutiae.

These people will be called "editors," and the circle will be complete.