skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Public and open-source contributions aren't a measure of skill..."

Exactly. Because they're falsifiable. I'd personally rather work for people who value skill, not falsifiable data.
Does anyone have an invite to it? It looks interesting (my email is in my profile). Thanks!
Yes, these benchmarks by Mozilla are biased, but I wouldn't be surprised if Asm.js actually performs as well as Dalvik for 2 reasons. First, the Dalvik VM has always been optimized for memory footprint and not speed. Secondly, Google has focused their recent performance optimizations on the NDK, the platform that everyone uses when performance is critical. I think Google feels Dalvik is good enough for everything else.

I've looked at every change log since Android 2.0 and the last time I saw any performance tweaks to Dalvik was with the addition of JIT in 2.2. Dalvik is about 3x slower than Oracle's Hotspot[1]. Until Google moves Lars Bak to the Android team or buys Myriad for their Dalvik Turbo, I don't see this changing anytime soon.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2388956
This difference becomes increasingly ambiguous when many of your friends and acquaintances are VCs, entrepreneurs, or employed at tech companies.
The first time my Dad attempted suicide I was 9 years old.
Slightly misleading, only a paragraph or two were really about Hacker News in particular. More about why there won't be another "x", of which Hacker News is one iteration.

I'm glad Malda spoke to the issue of volume. A lot of users on Hacker News (with varying levels of prominence, seniority and notability) have noted the issues arising with volume.

The NSA scandal was the most recent example of this. Political discourse on Hacker News is almost cancerous it's so bad. there is widespread misinformation and a quick glance at the "New" page shows that the guidelines are frequently not even regarded for submissions.

I think Malda is on point with his view of Hacker News being at critical mass right now.
I read Slashdot for many years. Slashdot introduced me to the open source movement and shaped my conception of civil liberties greatly. I remember what the place was like on 9/11: when CNN's servers couldn't keep up, I kept going to Slashdot (and then IRC, something I didn't know much about). Slashdot was a great source of news about geek culture. I liked that it was that it was curated by editors, because as a teenager I had no idea where to find out about the sorts of things they talked about.

However, what led me to leave Slashdot wasn't any sort of Eternal September like effect. Yes, there were many troll comments there, but there's also lots of options to adjust moderation types to suit one's particular interests. Rather, what I found was that the editors themselves seemed to stop caring. Article summaries would be blatantly incorrect or have distorting editorializing in them. If the whole point of the Slashdot style of reporting was to present a small number of quality stories each day, how could I trust the site when what the editors presented was inaccurate?

When I came to HN I was surprised to discover that articles simply have a title and URL. Sometimes there's editorializing in the titles, but in general its pretty good. But I can understand what Malda is saying when he expresses his frustration in wading through the front pages of HN. I don't know if the solution is to implement topics of some sort or not, but the user volume on this site is picking up enough that I think some sort of organization beyond a single ranking algorithm is required. It might also lead some interesting stories that never make it onto the front page to reach an audience. This problem of course isn't unique to HN... whether its Slashdot or Twitter or Facebook, getting the signal to noise ratio to an appropriate level is a really hard problem.

That being said, in my short time here I have learned a tremendous amount -- albeit much of which lies in my bookmarks!
I think he is focusing on VR. Though he prefers AR, he does not consider it as productive a way to spend one's efforts in the near term.

"So my personal opinion (which is not necessarily Valve’s) is that it makes sense to do VR now, and push it forward as quickly as possible, but at the same time to continue research into the problems unique to AR, with an eye to tilting more and more toward AR over time as it matures. As I said, it’s not the definitive answer we’d all like, but it’s where my thinking has led me. However, I’ve encountered intelligent opinions from one end of the spectrum to the other, and I look forward to continuing the discussion in the comments."

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/two-possible-paths-int...
Are there really people who prefer to learn from thin-repackage ebooks and ghetto screencasts?
Worth watching - perhaps the most excruciating flashmob ever.

But, it seems to me that it reflects well on the internal company culture.
I think you can generalize that to just one reason: the crowd became too large.

It grew to the point that most articles were about things that any given reader wasn't deeply informed on. So the deep technical discussions produced far less chatter than the more general-interest/less-technical discussions and faded out of view.

You also saw a bevy of those less-technical people offering their less-technical opinions on technical articles, whenever those things contained some keyword that registered. And, because there were so many more of them, this caused thread quality to suffer.

So politics floated to the top, technical discussions became mired in less-technical opinion and technical folks left.

Reddit isn't much different.

It just attempts to duck the growth problem by enabling splintering into sub-reddits, which in turn splinter, on and on. And instead of "leaving reddit" the way people just stopped reading /., people just leave various sub-reddits.

Which, as far as discussion goes, is effectively the same thing. The old forums becomes noisy, generalized, politicized and hollows out. People leave to find new ones.

People may not be leaving the reddit platform but that's a distinction that really only matters to the people running reddit. (and maybe someone who's really attached to their profile/karma/whatever)
He said that in the very next paragraph. FTA...

"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. [snip] So I’m not sure that there is a clear heir apparent. There's power in what reddit does, and what Hacker News does and to a lesser extent what sites like Slashdot still do. But the power has shifted to individuals."
Steps To $5,000 In Monthly Recurring Revenue
Hm? I was able to verify the submitter's claims (see thread for details), but have yet to receive any email regarding it. I did receive an email earlier about the duplicate Ubuntu host keys; perhaps that's what you're thinking of?
Some of the LP-ish people recognized this dilution to be a problem, and started the Free State Project. Which is a migration to a state (they chose New Hampshire) in order to aggregate enough people to form a solid voting bloc.
As an aside, his blog seems to be affected by a serious amount of pingback spam. He might want to use some filtering on pingbacks.
I suppose that depends on what you're looking for. For example, for quite a few years my friends and I had an invite-only forum where we hung out, posted interesting links, etc. All told, about 30 of us at the peak. It was great, while it lasted.

A group of like-minded individuals could, and have many times, do something similar. Besides the problems you listed, you also have the one we eventually ran into: stuff gets stale after awhile. You have very few new members coming in, and various rifts appear in your community where people butted heads.

I'd also like to add that while as a community we do tend to be on the elitist side, we also tend to have a strong "info should be free" side, which may conflict with closed societies like this.

I think to really succeed here, we need to keep it public, but also keep the people who have already proven to be distasteful out. That was easier back in the day when people only had one email address if they were extremely lucky. Far harder today without requiring some sort of personally identifiable information, not to mention some way of validating it.
he goes on to say "But if you follow 50 people, that is an epic time commitment." - which it is, if you try and use it like a filtered hacker news.

I follow like 2,000 people on twitter. I don't read even a small fraction of what's posted; I use it as a news weather-vane - what do the [politicos|hackers|normals] think is annoying/cool enough to tweet about this morning?
I really hope people would promote Livescript or GorillaScript more, as better compile-to-js languages.

...Coffeescript stole the spotlight and nobody wants to hear about anything else, but it's mediocre and boring language-wise!
see http://bellard.org/jslinux. He implemented a PC emulator in javascript and then just compiled a version of Linux to run on the emulator.
I concur. I can't really use it for any important projects right now, so I'm just following along and playing with it for simple and small scripts where breakage and failure are not a problem :)
Designing with HTML & CSS
I'll go you one further. Obama could give a speech in the Rose Garden this week carefully explaining that NSA requires access to American communications, all of them, in order to defend the country against terrorist attacks, and that while privacy is "important", the expectation of perfect privacy in your cell phone and Internet communications isn't reasonable because it helps terrorist cells without providing much benefit.

I would recoil from such a speech, but the public probably would not.

The American public currently has a weak expectation of privacy in their electronic communications. But they make virtually no meaningful demand for that privacy. Thwarting terror attacks are a much higher priority to them. Want evidence of that? Well, the body-conscious, vain, generally out-of-shape American public routinely submits to electronic strip searches to get onto airplanes. You think they care if someone's screening their calls to catch Abu Shahid?

They would accept that argument. And with that acceptance, the expectations of privacy and the notion of what "reasonable" searches are would be, in short order, redefined --- those rights being explicitly predicated on contemporary mores by the Constitution.

When I look at it from this angle, it becomes apparent that while privacy is inconvenient to the USG, and something they feel they have to work around, it's not something they're intent on eliminating. Despite the rhetoric from the tech punditry, the USG has not stated that it's reasonable for them to surveil US citizens; their defense has instead been that they are not surveilling them. I too think that's a falsehood, but it's truth or falsity is not the only thing that matters about it.
Oh, they did, together with libkqueue and libpthread_workqueue.

http://darling.dolezel.info/en/Build#Grand_Central_Dispatch_...
Just for the record, Elixir was favourably reviewed by the creator of Erlang itself.[1]

[1]http://joearms.github.io/2013/05/31/a-week-with-elixir.html
This is interesting.

Do you think a service like Twitter would ever have the option for a user to differentiate between news-worthy tweets/posts from "minor tweets" about a person's everyday life? Or would there not be a clear enough distinction?
I hate to say it, but this kind of service is what drove me from mainstream brands altogether.

* Wanted to buy a Ford Boss 302 Mustang. $43,000 MSRP car advertised as track-ready. Dealer said he wanted to mark up the car $25,000, and required that $25,000 as a deposit. I said for that kind of money I'd buy a Porsche Boxster S, and walked out. I found the experience similar at other dealerships.

* Got some calls the next year about the Boss 302. They were willing to sell them at MSRP. I can test drive it right? Nope. How about with a $20,000 refundable security deposit to show I have the cash -- can I drive it then? Nope. I told them I'm not buying a car that will see track duty unless I can drive it. Again, said I'd buy a Porsche.

* Went to Porsche dealerships. Interested in a Boxster S? Well, let's take out a Boxster first to see if that might be enough power, since it'd save you money. Not enough torque? Awesome, let's go wring the neck of a Boxster S _for an hour_. You like it? Fantastic. Hey, here's some free lunch. Not looking to purchase today? No problem, you come back in February when you have the down payment you want saved up and we'll get an order going for you. We'll mail you some goodies too.

Needless to say, dealer gets my deposit ($5K, same as it'd be for a 911 Turbo S) in February to start the order.
Give a knowledgeable person physical access to a computer, and all of the clear text views in the browser do not matter. Just crack the user's password and you have access to any stored passwords. The password paradigm is not perfect. There is no perfect solution. Personally I like being able to check passwords easily, while being intelligent enough to put barriers in the path of the 'general snooper.'
Overwhelmed? 4 Steps To Business Sanity
[Koush] Chromecast: Cast movies on your Desktop Computer
Web security and attack vectors, seriously. Will be helpful regardless of the technology you'll choose to build web apps.
Multiple Apple Systems offline
> many of these recent "terrorist incidents", not 9/11, were in fact created by our own agencies

I don't think they consciously did it. But I do think our policies and heavy-handedness have created more terrorists than we've defeated.
DEFCON: The Documentary has been released
>If Schneier is as unhappy with today's programs as he was with 2005's, then perhaps he should communicate a bit more clearly that today's occupant of the Oval Office could end any of them with a phone call.

I want to believe this is true.
This probably didn't come through well in the transcript, but his point was that other people (e.g. Slashdot's corporate overlords) wanted the graph to go up and to the right, while Malda wanted to focus on catering to a focused tech audience. He's pointing out the conflict, not ignoring it.
Regarding the heater, I'm not too familiar with the pre 2013 models, but all 2013s come with standard heated steering wheel and heated seats. This is because running the standard forced air heater uses a significant amount of power by comparison.

Most 2013s (all except for the base model) also come with a heat pump instead of a resistive heater, so efficiency of the forced air heater has also improved relative to earlier models (and relative to other similar cars).

For people who live in a mild climate, (sf bay area for me), temporary battery capacity loss due to cold weather, or permanent battery damage due to excessively high ambient temperatures, are not an issue, and given the plethora of chargers in this area, I'd say that almost 100% of the driving my family does outside the daily commute (my wife and I drive separately, and we only have one Leaf), is done with the Leaf. I was skeptical about the car initially, but the leases are inexpensive enough not to worry about and it's been a pleasant surprise.
Slashdot died the day it got political and worse when such became entrenched. By political I mean election oriented material to the point that crossover polluted seemingly unrelated stories.

Hence why during a discussion here about politics I stated I would prefer a "hide" flag next to the "flag" link that I could use to remove stories from my view under the notion that maybe someone wants to get into that stuff here.
I can completely see why Adobe (Edge Code/Brackets) and Mozilla want this. It's a missing piece for coding completely in the browser. But I think it goes way beyond this, and once people start playing around with having git sandboxed inside the browser we're gonna see some really, really interesting ideas come out of it. I was sad that his second funding wasn't seemingly headed for success, and it's pretty awesome Mozilla laid down $25k to revert that.
Polymorphic records are worth a mention.
A Magnet-Assisted Intubation Device
If you look at some of the recent demos with the Oculus you'll see that AR is not necessarily mutually exclusive with a full field of vision headset. Some of the most exciting demos in my opinion involve moving around in a real physical space while wearing the headset. The headset shows a digital re-creation of the physical space along with anything else that the developer wants to overlay onto to the scene. You're basically using the physical world as a skeleton on which you can hang the digital meat. Check out this kickstarter for example: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/62367895/atlas-virtual-r...
Strangely enough, "new version of blahblahblah" is much more interesting to me than anything "tech culture" ever will be.
From Idea to MVP: How We Designed Our Logo
Sharing our experience drafting our Logo for the first time.
The last time I was in the market for a car, from my own personal experience, given that I have no legitimate data, the prices at Carmax seemed to be roughly equivalent to the asking price for comparable vehicles at most used car dealers. I suspect you could get a similar purchasing experience from most dealers by simply not negotiating.
>"Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe."

I tried to start using Twitter that way maybe 5 years ago and found that there was just too much noise - jokes, tales of breakfast and banter that I just don't care to see.

I actually feel like it's the right kind of model though. Aggregating content streams from people of similar interests. It's the filtering that's lacking for me.

Every time I think about following someone on a social site I want for the ability to follow only a specific category of their content and possibly re-share it in the same focused fashion.

G+, Flipboard and likely a host of others have done things toward this direction, but I have yet to see anything gel for me.

Ideally, I see all of this categorization and recommendation happening automatically. If a service could recommend news or articles to me and categorize those I specify with the same accuracy I perceive from Netflix with movies, or even the new Gmail inbox I'd be pretty happy.
1. None of the HN knockoffs can really clone Hacker News because, for one thing, it's missing everything in the original HN's code. pg mentions that there's a missing "secret sauce" that ties it all together. That, and you really need to have some sort of heavy involvement in the community before you try to start it, so you'll need someone of pg-level importance to start it. Specializations could be started by very knowledgable HN users in their field but very general implementations would need an all around "ideologue." EDIT: I don't know if you're already aware of this, I'm just explaining because the way you wrote it appears as though you may think the Arc code is packaged with a full implementation of HN.

2. I don't think this would be allowed via the HN Search API...that's a lot of content.

3. This is a cool idea, but how would you get people to participate and add content to what is essentially a ghost, rather than just come back here, where there's news? I also don't think it solves the problem HN is currently facing. It merely puts a bandaid on it until we get back up to 2013 level volume.
So Putin's way of cancelling the Obama meeting was giving Snowden asylum?
There is wide variety of applications from proximity marketing, indoor-navigation, automatic check-in, contact-less payments till home automation, public transportation, etc.

We are extremely focused on the retail and believe that you have to provide users with a context and not to annoy them.
Better shopping in IKEA or product search and navigation in Walmart are the obvious solutions.

There are more specialized application - check e.g www.swirl.com they focus mostly on fashion stores or shopkick.com focused on rewards and using audio beacons.

If you pre-order beacons now will ship this Monday and you will have an access to our SDK and source code of sample apps.
Please note the Apple iBeacon profile is not public yet, but our beacons have over-the-air update feature so you will be able to update it using your phone whenever Apple or Google beacon profile is ready.

We posted also a simple hack explaining how to turn iOS6 device into a beacon, so you could actually start experimenting now: http://blog.estimote.com/post/57087873876/a-simple-way-to-si...
No magic in this security vendor quadrant
Did you read what Malda said after that? He then explained why that isn't a suitable alternative for the exact reasons you just stated.

He basically explained you have to eat all the insignificant minutia of individual peoples' daily lives, no matter their public stature, if you want their opinions and views on the world at the same time.
Would someone involved in the art world please comment.

I always thought seeing a painting in person would be crucial to buying art (if you're in the really high end). There's more than just how the painting looks and its provenance. It's a physical object that has layers, textures and patterns to it.

But then again, if it's only a stays symbol then who cares?
Chain of trust? Maybe the USG is an organization that's too large to put your trust in.
Yes, degree of difficulty matters. We don't disagree on that. It's the fundamental rule of security.

What we disagree on is the specific degree in this case. You think it's significant. I know it's not. Chrome's security design is denominated in thousands of dollars. This is a penny feature, and one with potential liabilities; it could cost more than it benefits.
Your customers are asking you to put a lock on that safe. Yet you keep telling them to go lock the front door.

That's great, thanks for the reminder. I'll go use another safe that has extra security.
> while it lasted.

What happened to it? Why did it die?

I've had a similar forum many years ago but haven't been able to replicate the experience since.
Can you clarify why the master password isn't offering any protection? It encrypts your other passwords so that they are not stored in plaintext on the filesystem; this alone seems like it's offering a little security, since my (perhaps mistaken) assumption is that it's more likely for someone to be able to read a file on your filesystem than to read in-memory passwords stored in RAM.

EDIT: Your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173111 probably explains your view on this; that there are few attacks in practice which would be thwarted by encrypting passwords at rest, and that the false sense of security on the part of the user would be disproportionately high.
So long as the majority of people believe they have the means to butter their slice of bread while being entertained by the circus…

"Believe some say the neon signs by the loudspeakers repeating that everything is fine"
While i agree with the first four points, the first sentence of the "use ruby" bit could not possibly be any more wrong. To quote:

> As you start writing code and realizing how powerful it is you will never want to install anyone else's crappy module again!

This stands directly in opposition to the DRY principle, which applies to ANY language, not just Ruby. As you get more experienced in developing software you end up using more libraries by other people, because you are easier able to figure out which ones are good and which ones aren't; and also because you're more comfortable with figuring out foreign APIs.