skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I appreciate Dalton's insight into incentivizing good behavior by treating a social network as infrastructure rather than an advertising/media business, I can't help but feel he's simply asking people to trust App.net because this time it's really different. What would prevent App.net from pulling a Twitter? Or from PRISM'ing our data? App.net seems like an incrementalist approach to a problem that requires more of a revolution. I wish there was something else with even half the traction of App.net if only it provided a distributed social network with no central point of failure and a solid API to build from.
Yeah according to advertisers, ads save lifes after all! (AMBER)
It reminds me of the volume control in iPad some time ago, it was horizontal under the movie, it looked like the time bar.
> What happens if a government starts abusing its power, spying on its own citizens, starting wars at their expense and detaining and killing innocent people all over the world?

You mean like the US? This is why I like the idea of one world government.

Let's treat each country in the world like a single individual, such that we have about 200 people on the planet. To me, this approximates how an anarcho-capitalist society would function, since there is (basically) no governing body. Yet the rich individuals in this system quite clearly abuse the poor individuals. Life is very nice though if you're a rich individual. I cannot see any guarantee that this won't happen with true anarchy.

If we had one world government, everybody would be subject to the same laws, there would be no outsourcing of torture and environmental destruction, there would be no military, and there would be no war. Importantly, your lot in life would not depend on where you were born, since there would be no immigration barriers. And there would be the full spectrum of political choices available.

Why is it such a problem that the US government collects taxes from a population earning fiat currency in an economy that the government provides? I like paying taxes, it keeps the country running. It also means that those people less fortunate than me are guaranteed some level of basic protection.
from app.models import ModelName

admin.site.register(ModelName)

Django documentation for this:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/
Meh, whatever. I can’t believe people still have flamewars about programming languages on the Internet like it was still 1996.
Eventhough the backend for ZeroMQ was written in C++, the front-end, and the main language bindings as it were, are in C. That means it was already trivial to write language bindings.
Really?

Microsoft's HR departments are completely siloed by business unit, and they don't share notes. If the rec you're applying for dries up, they do F-all to guide you into a new one. Each time you engage with a different BU you're completely back to square one.
Sure, but there are other small steps that can make incremental differences. Cheaper than driving a car (insurance, registration, fuel bought from a megacorp) is riding a bike now and then. Or getting coffee from the little place on the corner rather than the chain. Or even buying from the third biggest fast food company in the country rather than the first biggest.
Reebee sounds like a sure winner. Who hasn't said "gee, I sure could use more opportunities for people to market at me"?
"the real effect would be seen if we elected Congress that way as well."

Elaborate on that a bit - I know it's popular to say that Congress has a low approval rating, but no one votes for "congress" - they vote for their congresspeople, who typically have high approval ratings. There may well be other effects I'm not spotting, though...
Indeed. Life is short - if there aren't screenshots, I'm not willing to put in the time to find out whether I'm interested or not. As it happens, this is a very nice looking project, which makes the absence of screenshots even more surprising.
> He promptly told me that 1) I was diametrically incorrect in my choice for meeting her needs, and 2) it didn't matter, even in the least.

This is why I hate talking to sales people in brick-and-mortar stores. Appearing confident rather than actually being correct is probably good for closing sales and for short-term customer happiness, but it's no good for the longer-term (ie, when you get home and realize you made the wrong choice).
Happy to see Panorama Education here, definitely a bright group :) Also refreshing to see that they are profitable, given that these days profitability is frequently, though not always, left out of the equation for young startups.
Very interesting idea. I can definitely see the progression towards a more minimal browser that offloads functionality which used to be part of the browser into the page. However, I think we have reached a minimal point where browsers have already stripped down as far as they can.

Looking at a browser like Google Chrome basically all that is left is tabs, forward and back buttons, refresh button, search/url bar, HTTPS indicator, and right hand menu button.

We couldn't get rid of the back and forward buttons because while JavaScript navigation works inside the page, it doesn't work very well to go back from your site to the site that the user came from, because security is designed to prevent you from easily reading history.

Additionally the refresh button couldn't be replaced by an in page control because if the JavaScript in the page has an error and stops working the refresh also stops working, which would make people unable to refresh the page.

I wouldn't trust an HTTPS icon that was powered by JavaScript inside the page so that also has to be part of the chrome.

The only item on that list that could be removed is the right hand menu button. And since that does stuff like print, bookmark, and settings that also doesn't work as part of the webpage itself.

But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong and we'll find a way to strip the browser down even more, but I don't think that will happen until we develop voice, gesture, or thought controlled interface devices that are faster and more efficient than typing into a search bar or clicking a button. Then we can get rid of all the buttons and controls completely. But at that point the entire experience of browsing would be extremely different, not just the browser chrome.
pj is a woman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Jones
It beggars belief that GCHQ would send out Sean the Enforcer to say "Oy! Give us the fookin secrets or we break yer fookin kneecaps!" and the fling around 0.01% of their office equipment. Signals intelligence people simply do not do that. Actual spies rarely do it. Hell, spies in badly written television try to avoid it.

What would really happen is that a GCHQ man from Eton would call up one of his old school chums at the newspaper and they would work out some quid pro quo over tea. Quietly. Discreetly. Like professional spies.

It is barely possible that a rogue group inside GCHQ did this in a spasm of stupidity. It is just an unlikely chain of events for a rogue group to form, obtain the information, and on their own decide to make a spectacular public intervention. That sort of thing simply is not cricket.

My bet is that an outside handler goaded the GCHQ misfits squad into doing something, possibly even planting false orders. France, Russia, and China all have good reason to run GCHQ into the ground.

NSA? Not so much. Britain has long used intelligence sharing with the U.S. to punch way above their weight in international politics. The NSA would not casually throw such a valuable partner under the bus.

Whatever happened, we can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever squad of fuck-knuckles organized the newspaper job are being questioned until their fingernails curl up. And then reassigned to surveil bears in Siberia.
Wow, how many people feel like what Greg is describing is 90% of their lives?
Is his description really about ADHD and bipolar?
I feel like he was describing me, though I don't feel I would label as depressed. I started watching a BBC documentary about depression a few days ago, and the description of depression made it sound so horrible that I was truly shocked and saddened for anybody living with the condition.

What Greg describes is nothing like that. Now, I don't regularly hide under the bed to avoid people, but I've always suffered insomnia, regularly take on projects outside of my abilities (sometimes successfully), have a slew of unfinished projects and ideas, feel like everything is ripe to happen now, have days where I regularly don't want to get out of bed (but rarely stay later than 10), etc. etc.

Anybody else out there feel the same? People have always said I'm different, but I've never really understood how. I just assumed everybody else was like me, and would occasionally put on a braver face.

At the same time, I'm hesitant to get involved with the professional medical establishment because I abhor the idea of being fed drugs that affect my thought patterns. I'm beginning to work with meditation to try to keep myself better focused, and have been doing Yoga every day for the past 9 months.

Keen to hear the feedback and experience from others in the community.
"- Their passwords aren't case sensitive."

Not a huge deal.

"- Within 20 minutes of informing a security specialist not affiliated to blizzard he was able to write a script that compromised every single battle.net e-mail address."

I don't remember this ever happening.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the way forward in software engineering isn't "better" languages like Haskell or Clojure, but with better tooling.

I think Carmack's talk shed light on the fact that as humans we have very limited cognitive capacities when it comes to programming and "smarter" languages help us a bit, but we need automated, "smart" tools - like static analysis tools.

I think of Visual Studio and Resharper and how much ReSharper finds that I can learn from and how it frees me to concentrate on business logic.

Years ago I remember reading an article or an interview with a Sun research scientist where she described programming of the future where languages and tools will be much more lenient of your mistakes and programming will be much more of a two-way conversation with your tooling.

That and tools like language work benches are the only ways I see to go forward. Everybody using Haskell is just a modest (if that) step forward.
While it's certainly possible to write numerical code in S-expressions, it's often not very pleasant. Compare Julia's "2x^3n - 2y^2 + 1" with the S-expression for the same:

(+ (- (* 2 (^ x (* 3 n))) (* 2 (^ y 2))) 1)

(I think I got that right.) Which would you rather write – or read? Mathematical notation and code tend to lean rather heavily on syntax to lessen the mental burden on the programmer. It's far less egregious but I also prefer `f(x)` to `(f x)`.

In general, we all felt that basic Matlab syntax is pretty good for numerical programming and linear algebra and would actually be fine if you got rid of some of the weirder choices (like indexing with parens and required trailing semicolons).
Agreed, I've been trying to consider an end to end solution. A single site by a single company is a bad idea... easy to shut down... PGP encryption at the client requires delivery of public keys from the desired recipient, but potential man-in-the-middle attacks mean you can't even trust that the public key you're receiving is from the recipient you think it does, your mail server could act as a go-between on behalf of your client software to go get the public key for the recipient, but that's not safe either. In the end, when nothing electronic can be trusted as sacred, how do you encrypt in such a manner as your recipient can decrypt it reliably without it being insecure... plus, if you encrypt messages end to end, how do you handle the issue of SPAM?

There are many challenges to overcome and basically as you stated, the whole concept of email needs a complete overhaul. It needs to be secure, distributed and open source.

Unfortunately, much as I'd like to claim the expertise to be able to put all this together, I would need a team of experts to help me solve the problems any solution is going to face and get it to market. This is by no means a one person job, the challenges are hard-to-solve problems and the solution needs to be usable. The reason that nobody encrypts their email now is because the payoff isn't worth the headache of trying to understand what needs to be done. I'm struggling to understand what I need to do to get GPG installed on my computer for crying out loud.
So then if we eliminate government assistance for workers, the corporations will be forced to pay them more? That means Walmart will be forced to pay above minimal wage.
Those are not the whitehat terms at all.

But that doesn't matter since the argument was ridiculous in the first place. If you cannot understand or read rules, that doesn't meant they don't apply to you. Also, he understands English very well.
Are you a mouse user or do you use a touchpad? I have a theory that the new OSX scrollbars only really work for touchpad users and everyone with a mouse hates them ;)
Don't confuse altruism with good faith. He was obviously not being altruistic - he wanted to be compensated for the vulnerability he had found - but he was not being malicious in his TOS-violating behaviors. There was no intent to cause damage, to exploit the bug for personal gain, or to otherwise be a bad actor. That is what "acting in good faith" means; the things he did were benign and intended to bring the issue to Facebook's attention. The fact that he wanted to be compensated for his discovery doesn't diminish that.
To clarify that, the general thrust is to unify everything onto G+, eventually. Should be fairly obvious and I inferred as much even before I joined Google.

Good luck with that. I fear the day when my Apps domain is forcefully migrated to Hangouts. Hopefully there will be an alternative to Apps by then that is actually worth using.

(One of the people present during my firing needed to summon his boss using internal Hangouts. He eventually gave up, went back to his desk and got his laptop because the experience is completely unusable while mobile. It was hugely amusing to watch, and drove home the dogfood drama for me -- you know what I'm talking about.)
I think this is likely damage control. However, it also shows that Americans are lucky to have our founding documents.

While they aren't always effective in stopping government overreach, and we are living in a dangerous time for the ideals expressed within them, at least our government will always have to pay them lip-service.
Robots and Indian engineers.
At $70,000+, it's still out of reach for most people.
Occam's Razor mate. GCHQ did it. There is no reason to perform mental gymnastics to exonerate them.
Food API
They get nothing. I think those “reward” levels are just a cute way to trigger anchoring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring) and make the job of choosing how much money to give easier by suggesting some choices. In fact, the $13 contributors don’t get anything extra either – they get “access to Mailpile's online source code”, but that’s already available at https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile.
Ugly code: Because coding isn't just about "it works for me"
I spent several years working 40 hours a month. I am not programmed to work. I hate working 40 hours a week.

-written from work
NewRelic integrated a free t-shirt offer into their signup process, driving leads through the funnel by offering a free shirt if the new trial customer installs the NewRelic monitoring agent. Here's a case study we did on them, 30% increase in leads by integrating t-shirts + marketo + salesforce together using the Printfection platform: http://www.printfection.com/resources/case-study-new-relic/

T-shirts work. Especially for all of these SaaS platforms and tech companies where all of the marketing is virtual. Everyone is doing email and inbound marketing. However, sending out t-shirts in the mail, that's different. People remember the (one or two) companies that have sent them swag in the mail.

There's nothing like a t-shirt giveaway via Twitter, or a random VIP thank-you gift that arrives in the mail. It shows you care, because sending a shirt costs a lot more in time + money than sending an email.
An argument based on mind share alone can explain the difference. (I.e. almost everyone will come into contact with C.)
Love the concept.

The npm install errored out, I got it going via sudo, loaded a large project with it and it crashed.

I will be back in a month to have another go. :-)
If you read the wikipedia entry is says that the destination id is required. I assume these must be created somehow and communicated to the sender before being able to receive anything.

So long as this is occurring, the way the scheme works, unless you download every message, it could be determined which id belongs to whom. Once you determine that it is easy to track originating packets to that destination since it is not an onion system.

Additionally, without side channel communication ( in person or posting that address somewhere publicly ) it is impossible to anonymously communicate to an intended recipient.
I'll help test in the US I'm located in CA... find my email in profile.
Exactly. You need to shower the right people with t-shirts. It's no different than any other form of marketing - you have to have a plan. You have to know who to target. When done right, targeting your ambassadors and showering them with gifts of swag can really boost your marketing.
And make the same mistakes as your forebearers...
As for “horizontal progress for vertical content is bad”, I’m pretty sure that’s right, but that’s mainly relying on my intuition. If I think about the concept and scroll my page up and down while imagining a horizontal scroll bar, my mind just rebels and thinks “this is not right”. It’s just obvious to me that a scroll bar should be vertical when you scroll vertically.

I can also offer some reasoning: when the scroll bar is vertical, it moves in the same direction as the direction of your scrolling movement on the mouse. This makes it easier to mentally connect your fingers’ scrolling movement to the scrolling on the screen, which makes the device use easier and more intuitive. In the case of iOS and OS X 10.7 and later, your finger movement is in the same direction as the content rather than the scroll bar, but it’s still something on the screen moving with your fingers. But a horizontal scroll bar moving when you push your fingers vertically is too abstract a concept for your mind to intuitively grasp, so it’s harder to use.
I had it all wrong. App.net is the new Ning. Or, I still have it all wrong.
Amazon provides the subscribe and save service to fill this need. You can set up the frequency of delivery and the quantity of units and never have to worry. They give you a nice discount on the order if you do it this way as well
Good advice. I'll add one more thing. If you're dealing with credit cards, the private key should be on a hardware security device with the only backups stored on a couple USB sticks sitting in a safety deposit box at a bank.
Pretty odd seeing buttercoin transition from a kind of group coding project on reddit into a massively funded start up.

Contrast: http://buttercoin.net/ and http://buttercoin.com/
> Appearing confident rather than actually being correct is probably good for closing sales and for short-term customer happiness, but it's no good for the longer-term

Well, that depends--and that's where my metaphor breaks down. The customers went home satisfied and remained satisfied (at least, that's what their consistent repeat business and smiling faces would suggest).

Tomatoes and website loading times matter to you in the here and now but don't have any lasting effect on your life. That's not the case for making a major purchase.
Latest SkyOS Beta released as freeware
https://www.truelinkcard.com/

If I understand the service correctly, you can pre-approve companies before you are charged. I think this type of service can be useful outside of their target audience of the elderly.
Most likely a custom algorithm -- I had to make my own for LearnGitBranching since most tree algorithms don't exactly fit the needs of a VCS visualization. Imagine the author did the same, but its all open source
Metrecal
Genuine question: If this is open source, how come USD23 gives you access to source code?

I think this is a great product and will contribute but I could not understand this part the about source code
I just posted this to Tim's Blog:

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

It seems probable that soylent is better than much of the manufactured food on the market. It also seems unlikely that soylent is better than quality whole food.

I take Nassim Taleb's approach. We don’t know what we don’t know about food. I’d like to address two of Shane’s points. I'm listing the objections Shane raises, then his reply:

Shane's first point:

Objection: The body needs whole foods, not atomic nutrients; the synergy between diverse ingredients is what matters in nutritional uptake.
Shane's reply –> This sounds nice, but has not been scientifically proven. (Shane links to the naturalistic fallacy)

My reply: It’s true that nature doesn’t prove something is good. We can nonetheless have a strong presumption that the body does best on whole foods.

We have thousands of years of history of humans doing well on whole foods, and zero evidence that the human body can do as well on artificial foods.

Nassim Taleb would tell us there is a presumption in favour of natural system that has stood the test of time. Human biology is very, very complex. If whole foods serve it well, they may do so for reasons we can fathom.

One problem for Soylent is that it would have to prove itself safe on the timescale of a human lifetime. That’s very, very hard to do.

Shane’s second point

Objection: We don’t know what we don’t know about nutrition (i.e. Soylent might be unexpectedly harmful).
Shane's reply —> That’s not a good reason to not try to innovate. Why not do some tests?

My reply: See my point above. How can you test that Soylent is better than whole foods? There is a massive potential for false positives.

With natural foods, if something seems effective, it probably is. We would have discovered poisonous or second order effects long ago.

With an artificial food like soylent, it could appear effective for, say, ten years, while introducing a variety of malignant effects.

Or maybe it is totally healthy. I have no idea. How can we know? You can’t prove a good is safe without using it for a long, long time.

That said, I would expect soylent to be better than a diet of pure artificial junk food, as many americans eat. They’re also engineered foods, but in that case we can positively identify the harm.

One additional problem of soylent: the designers assume we need a steady inejection of the same macronutrients every time we eat.

We know positively that this is false. Bodybuilders have long known that carbohydrates are more effective after a workout. As with increased protein after a workout.
Felon. Pornactress. Tranny.  Hire or help me choose a project to work on.
Thank you cl8ton!
sorry, your email is not public.
Can you mail me? info (4t) veriring (dOt) com
I assume, and hope, the manager emailed the team after I was walked. If not, I would agree.
This has got to be the most stupid, ad hominem, ignorant comment of the whole HN.

Congratulations!
Interesting, I didn't know that! I've always liked the pins-down configuration on my Macbook since in order to release the connector, the clip is on top (that is, I don't have to lift the laptop/etc in order to remove the cable). Connector orientation stuff is fascinating (my favorite being the upside-down configuration of power outlets in new buildings, apparently so that if a plug is partially pulled out, a straight metal object falling atop won't sit on live pins).