skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thinking about giving your iOS7 users a fancy new interface? Maybe think again…
Delegation seems pretty similar to inheritance to me. What am I missing?
Interesting 28C3 talk about German railway safety mechanisms (for people understanding German):
"Can trains be hacked? Die Technik der Eisenbahnsicherungsanlagen" [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwaKYZfgY8k
The great Isaac Asimov spoke of this back in his day, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.h...

"Well, the earth's population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling every 40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a World-Manhattan is coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!

There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death rate; (2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of A>D. 2014 will have agreed on the latter method. Indeed, the increasing use of mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair stiffening arteries and breaking nerves will have cut the death rate still further and have lifted the life expectancy in some parts of the world to age 85.

There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently."
Where are you going to move your data where it's less likely reachable by the NSA and the GCHQ? Another UKUSA member country? Any country in Europe? A third world nation?

You're only shifting eyes from western intelligence to a third world dictatorship, or Russia's FAPSI and GRU units. And in some cases, moving your data out of the US may subject it to even more scrutiny or dragnets.
I am impressed by how much time I've spent on the site (and still don't understand exactly what it does or why it's worth $40/user/mo.) I am also impressed by how the future of web development is a node.js package.

To the creators: you are clearly capable of creating slick marketing (the site looks great!), I'd advise spending some time working on your value proposition. The "Just code / Just branch / Just works" trifecta is pithy, but it doesn't exactly explain what Bowery offers. (Also, having your learn more CTA redirect to the docs -- which start out with how to install Bowery -- is not ideal.)

(Also, as an FYI: the link to 'Philosophy' in the docs is broken.)
The media has brainwashed (very smart) software engineers into believing that working as a programmer in San Francisco is like being a painter in Paris in the 1920s; that for $116,000[1] in one of the costliest cities in the U.S. you should forgo a meaningful personal and family life and instead make it easier for brands to surface their tweets in people's feeds. That having an interesting job and work/life balance are mutually exclusive things.

[1]http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Software-Engineer-Sa...
Explainshell.com
explainshell.com is a nifty little website created by Idan Kamara that takes difficult Linux command line man pages and one liners and makes them much easier to understand by breaking down a command into it’s respective parts.
I was hoping you had a much shorter embedded version of http://d-project.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/misc/qrcode/js/
Losing too much of Ruby would make it pointless. But there are certainly edge cases that we could lose readily and not care very much.

When was the last time you saw anyone redefine operators on Fixnum for a good reason, for example?

My pet peeve is small things like freezing many of the base classes by default, for example. As well as a "meta programming module" in the standard library that'd gather up as much as possible of what people (ab)use eval() for today in specific, narrowly tailored methods that implementations could provide specialised versions of. A limited "general purpose" eval() that is not allowed to modify the class hierarchy would be another good thing - anything that'd combine to allow implementations to defer type and method cache guards and invalidations as long as possible would make it far easier to improve performance, with very little impact on most developers.
> I'd sign a pledge saying I will never work on any apparatus (software, data centers, anything at all) that are used for mass surveillance.

Anybody that ever worked on Hadoop could not sign such a pledge.

Anybody that ever worked on Linux could not sign such a pledge.

Anybody that ever worked on solr could never sign such a pledge.

And so on. You get the idea, it is not possible to contribute to open source projects that have applications in large scale data storage, mining, generalized operating system work and so on without as a side effect making the apparatus of mass surveillance possible.

The only safeguards that will really work are very strict legal ones, transparency and accountability. As long as the last two are not present the first is meaningless (which is the situation we are currently in).
Headphone microphone not available on Mountain Lion
It seems like this would yield a really enjoyable workflow. The pricing model (http://bowery.io/pricing/) makes it difficult for me to transfer into an actual monthly price. Seems like that could be remedied with a few scenarios.

Also, one of the things I love about heroku is the free starting point. It really lets me play with an idea without committing to hardly anything. Is there a similar free starting place with bowery?
When you have a clear vision of your product, you don't need a lot of people to execute. The only thing in my experience doesn't scale well is customer support and sales. So, an early start up could do a lot with a small number of employees.

Now, once you need to generate revenue, you will need to add people (a lot of them) for sales and support. It gets worse if the revenue model doesn't prove to work well, then you'll need to hire more to try out new things in the hope that you get to something before your funding runs out.
1. $2 usd is cheaper and already works.

2. Maybe you want to watch netflix on your TV, and there you can only change DNS servers.
Was going to mention the better_errors gem group as well, it's the first thing I put into my project. It helps a ton, especially as a beginner.
> To apply the uniform access principle to the Part type, we could change the struct definition and provide setter/getter methods

If you have to apply it, it isn't uniform access. The point of the principle is that the call-site shouldn't distinguish between getters and fields so that the implementer can change that decision freely without breaking callers.

Nice article, though!
Altruism and defaults are powerful things. In fact, they're the only thing enforcing rules about "nonstandard transactions", without which the blockchain would have been DDoSed all the way to a terabyte by now.

And the checkpointing system is a backup measure used to maintain stability because PPCoin is still small; it is not intended to be the primary mechanism holding it up. If you want to see an altcoin without checkpoints, look at any of the ones that got killed by a 51% attack.
In some scenarios it simplifies the code greatly.
It may or may not be applicable to your app.

Just a few weeks ago I was able to convert a nightmare-ish recursive asynchronous method to a `foreach` loop with `await`s inside.

It's cool when you can do this:

var providerExceptions = new List<Exception> ();

// Try each provider in turn
foreach (var pi in providers) {
token.ThrowIfCancellationRequested ();

try {
return await GetSession (provider, isLast, options, token);
} catch (TaskCanceledException) {
throw;
} catch (Exception ex) {
providerExceptions.Add (ex);
// Fall back to next provider
}
}

// Neither provider worked
throw new AggregateException ("Could not obtain session via either provider", providerExceptions);

Or this:

async Task<Session> GetSession (AccountProvider provider, bool isLast, LoginOptions options, CancellationToken token)
{
if (!SessionManager.NetworkMonitor.IsNetworkAvailable)
throw new OfflineException ();

var account = await GetAccount (provider, !isLast, options);
if (account == null)
throw new Exception ("The user chose to skip this provider.");

var service = provider.Service;
var session = new Session (service, account);

if (service.SupportsVerification) {
// For services that support verification, do it now
try {
await service.VerifyAsync (account, token);
} catch (TaskCanceledException) {
throw;
} catch (Exception ex) {
throw new InvalidOperationException ("Account verification failed.", ex);
}
}

return session;
}

Depending on the conditions, the method may or may not “freeze”, but the calling code doesn't care.
The fact that there are more people living in South-East Asia than anywhere else is a little less astounding (but still amazing & unbalanced) if you take away the deformation of the Mercator projection.

Large areas like Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Australia are pretty stretched out when compared to SEA on our world maps.
Unlike most development environments, Bowery requires an internet connection.

And I'm out.

So, this seems like a sort of Google App Engine, but running on Node? BoweryDB and the Cache sound just like what App Engine provides - except that the App Engine also runs on my local dev box.

The problem with this (and the App Engine) is that it's totally locked in. Your database is proprietary, your middleware is proprietary... at least App Engine is backed by Google. What happens when you guys go bust? There's no way I can use a platform like this without knowing I have an open fallback out there somewhere.
Ask HN: Static site hosting with _real_ SSL?
You can host static sites on Amazon S3 and with http://mysite.com. But you can't buy an SSL cert and use https://mysite.com.

Can any cloud provider offer this? *

*Amazon CloudFront doesn’t count; it’s $600 per month. Using s3 alias URLs doesn’t count because they are fugly and require extra work to hide from users.
'Follow the Money': NSA Monitors Financial World
I think the cool part is that that you could do all of this stuff and not have to worry about any of the infrastructure.

The node package only works inside of the hosting environment. You're paying that much money for everything to be hosted. It says in the docs that there's no local development environment.
Breaking News - Ground Footage From The Navy Yard Shooting
In core.async code inside (go) blocks are run via a fixed thread pool (a large one, but still fixed), when you use <! and >! the code after the put/take is turned into a callback that is attached to the channel. The thread is then released back to the pool. This allows for extremely lightweight async code. In addition, goes can actually be GC'd when they deadlock and can never continue (all references to the channel a go is taking from are dropped).

Code inside (thread) blocks run on a dedicated thread. This allows for long running or IO bound processes to execute without clogging the main thread pool. Thread blocks do not rewrite their bodies into a state machine (unlike go blocks) and as such must use <!! and >!!. Since these threads are dedicated they do not return the thread to the thread pool when blocking. This allows for slightly better performance at the cost of an entire JVM thread for the life of the block.

TL;DR - Use <! and >! with go. Use <!! and >!! with thread. Mixing the two can have very unexpected results. In fact, using <! inside a thread block will result in a runtime exception.
You have to log in and they associate your IP with your paying account. So they only accept requests from known IPs.
There is value to BTC price stability, and it definitely isn't surprising considering a stable BTC price supports MtGox's bottom line.
Architecting Systems with Many-Core CPUs
The US is mostly fields of dust, rock, and sometimes grass. States, cities, and geological structures get named after people we've long conquered and run out.
For a purely local backup (I rsync my NAS to a datacenter myself) KeepVault seems unnecessarily complicated, as I have to get an account and I cannot seem to make a local backup to a network share/drive (I only see local drives in the selection).
That is a great example of why this idea is completely infeasible. You can't replace a small component to get NFC. NFC requires a large antenna (think roughly the size of a credit card). That has RF implications with other emitters ont he device (BT, Wifi, LTE). Also, all the RF modules in a PhoneBloks phone would require individual shielding to pass regulatory compliance (since the phone will never be tested as a whole the individual parts have to be certified), which will significantly increase their size and cost.
> A NYC-density city that large would be interesting.

I'd hate to live in a place that large and dense, it sounds like an excellent place for the next avian flu or ebola outbreak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infec...

It's all about the surface, the number of uninfected people in the pool that are susceptible x the interactions with infected people. In a place like that this would be a massive lurking danger. (and there are cities that get pretty close to this and I really wonder how long that lottery will hold).
To a certain extent that's what the JVM is -- you just have to target its bytecode :-).
Measuring the stability of BTC requires more consideration than simply the technological merits.
I mean, I get the idea behind these platforms without building your own platform services. However, if you actually plan on growing as a company it would seem to me these services have very specific walls in terms of functionality. I've never worked to the company reported that didn't wind up leaning on things like complex SQL queries and other abstractions that these people are telling us we don't need.

I can see how this would work for a limited set of apps that only have simple API needs. Given that, it's perplexing that they would make such ridiculous claims and it's hard to take them seriously. When you just want to run a simple report using a SQL closet and have to tables and uses a fancy GROUP BY, you will be left out in the cold and have to run a gigantic batch job in whatever programming language you use to figure this out. I am not impressed.
While I can see a colorable argument that under DMCA this is illegal (circumventing a copyright protection), I think that the argument that there are a variety of reasons a user could change to a different DNS server, and relying on DNS to identify the location of users is an inherently incomplete copyright protection, would prevail.
Given the heightened awareness around all of the recent news, you can safely assume people are actively looking for existing backdoors in firmware. Theorizing about a single provider is a bit unfair, especially given there are other services who are actively engaging in business with intelligence agencies. It would be much easier and more reliable to just snapshot your instance and do work on it offline instead of trying to do a remote exploit on the hardware running it.
You could always add a 'don't use this for evil' clause to your licences… http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code

(This is not a serious suggestion)
Why? Good thing I saw this I normally just delete all those we want to acquire your company emails.
Of editors and algorithms
The Baltic Anomaly - Dive for Truth
> What if I develop simple statistical models based on the number of squares that are already filled in?

What if you were unable to? NP-hard problems are weird like that. What if the underlying statistical distribution had random variance or some other strange features that make traditional statistical models useless?

Maybe the issue is that we're trying to use intuitions developed with everyday problems that are essentially linear ("mow the lawn", "drive to the store") in places where they're not appropriate. Unlike usual everyday tasks, NP-hard problems (such as Sudoku or coding) have no known "royal road" - sometimes you just have to try all possible solutions.
Hey thanks for checking it out. We're working on a few ways to make the pricing easier to digest.

We've been discussing a free starting point, but haven't solidified anything just yet.

Right now we're bootstrapped. There's only three of us, so the focus so far has been on getting the product in a useable and workable state.
The Art of Fear Blogging
The DPA doesn't apply because there is an exemption for National Security.
Asimov is fantastic, but he wasn't always right. The population growth rate is roughly half (1.1% vs 2%) what it was in the mid-sixties when that piece was written, and it continues to trend downward as more countries with lots of people advance their development. That's a bit more than "slackened", IMO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_ra...

As it turns out, developed societies trend toward a lower growth rate. We're not 100% certain why, but no great propaganda machine is required.
Can we remake the Internet by encrypting every packet with ECC? Something like DJB's CurveCP [1] to replace TCP, but with some user-friendly improvements (seeing proper names and links, not just strings of random characters). DJB said the performance overhead to do that is only 15 percent [2], which seems well worth it to me.

I feel that to feel really protected against the NSA in the future we'll need something like that, along with starting to demand open source firmware from all hardware vendors. In the meantime we can use ECDHE to encrypt all sessions.

[1] http://curvecp.org/

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8EGA834Nok&feature=youtu.be&...
Or move it around a lot.
I hope someone will do a time-lapse of this salvage project. This is a huge and unique engineering undertaking.
Looks to me like a proprietary web framework nicely integrated with a proprietary database and proprietary cache.

If their DB & cache really are as great at automatic optimisation as they say then I might be interested as stand-alone products to run alongside my current stack; not a great fan of vendor lock-in though, so I think I'll be skipping it for now :(
Solution seems to be mostly about covering symptoms than addressing underlying issues.

"technical architecture of the code could change with a developer simply deciding to do things in a different way from the rest of the team" tells me there's no strong code review culture, or code discoverability, and you've simply moved the problem from a lower level to a higher one. While people might be adhering to Python idioms, they're probably not going to write the code that's idiomatic to the organization or make the best use of internal libraries.
Cypersecurity pro on Nasdaq website: 'I needed 10 minutes to hack'
Unfortunately, this is true.
There was a line from a talk about Rust[0] that really stuck with me, commenting on the design choice to only garbage-collect task-local heaps using reference counting with cycle detection: "we wanted to avoid spending the next 20 years writing another world-class garbage collector." It is not just a single person project to write a really good GC.

0: I think it was this one - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Rust

Edit: wording and precision
When Tech Turns Nouns Into Verbs
> In my understanding, in golang

The distinction is that it's not go, `go` blocks are macros doing a bunch of transformations. `<!` and `<!!` have the same purpose (get a value from a channel) but not the same context, `<!` can only be called inside a (go) block and will be transformed into a parking of the thread (yielding to the runner), whereas `<!!` works at a lower level and will block their whole thread.

> The scheduler will run other goros on the threadpool until the blocking call finishes.

`<!!` and the coroutine scheduler are not aware of one another, calling `<!!` from within a coroutine will block the scheduler. `<!!` (and `>!!`) exist specifically to be called from outside the scheduler (from outside a `go` block)

Likewise, `Thread/sleep` is not aware of the coroutine scheduler (it would have to be monkey-patched), calling it will also block the scheduler itself. core.async provides `timeout` for the purpose of parking a coroutine.
You can't control for something you don't realize is a variable.
The population difference is a factor of 20, so superficially it would be less than a factor of 20.

There is a practical concern that Wyoming is already full. So a lot depends on either keeping or eliminating federal land, national parks, farm/ranch land, that sort of thing.

In practice I think you'd be talking about making Cheyenne a factor of a thousand larger, rather than paving Yellowstone national park. Cheyenne is about 20 square miles, so we're talking 20K square miles. Wyoming is about 100K square miles, so we'd only need 1/5 of Wyoming to move Manilla into a Cheyenne-like sprawl.

I find it hard to believe that Manilla can feed itself now, so moving to WY and not being able to feed itself is probably not a new problem WRT the plan?
Pretty accurate assessment. I almost certainly would have not gotten in had I not had a chance to talk to a few YC alums.

Side Note: Jason was absolutely the reason I got in. YC should do whatever it takes to get him to become at the very least a part-time partner. They and all future YC companies will be better off with him involved.

From my own experience, the OP is absolutely right about the no BS part. Just explain what you're doing. You don't need to sell it or exaggerate (doing so will actually hurt your chances). I think the most important thing to explain is why people/companies want what you're making. The next most important thing you can do is teach them something. If they are able to learn something new about a market from you, you're chances of acceptance go up.

The in-person interview day is pretty exciting. It's sort of like the first day at the dorms (which for me was in 1995). It's perfectly acceptable to walk up to someone, say hi and and just start talking.

If you're thinking about applying, you should.
I'm not quite sure what it does, but it looks like a framework which integrates your hosting solution?

Also, Is it me or is the pricing ridiculous?

The names great.

I might have misunderstood a lot, it's very unclear and I'm confused. Also if the UI are part of the package, they look too "bootstrappy", if that's a valid complaint.
A similar provider is unblock.us. The /etc/resolver tip is OS X specific. On Linux you can use dnsmasq.
Founding a company is like unplugging from the Matrix
The longer you're unplugged, the more you realize the comfort is not worth going back for.
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
$1 per KB read per second.

I'm confused, what does it exactly mean? You pay $1 for every KB read from DB, so 10MB will cost you $10.240 or what?
Please explain what "the reality" is in regards for what they use it for that is more frightening.
You are right. Since its an automated system, you can't get follow up questions. You can only practice by replying to a script. I believe this is the biggest drawback with my approach. I was thinking of it as a way to build your confidence by actually hearing yourself on the phone after the interview.

I like the idea of having developers interview each other. Thanks!
AppEngine's lockin is significantly overstated. AppScale exists and works well.
Teaching them something is a great point.