skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Perfect the first time" is so deeply engrained in their corporate identity that the CEO feels the need to personally apologize when they don't achieve it (see: Apple Maps).

Apple Maps wasn't a failure of "perfect the first time", it was a failure of iteration: it was an existing Apple app using Google data that, as part of an OS update, Apple "upgraded" with a new version using non-Google data that performed, in many users opinion, less well than the previous version.

> Compare that to the new Google Maps, which was pretty shitty when it went to open beta but has been getting progressively less so.

When Google maps was released to "open beta", it wasn't a new version of base app delivered as part of the OS bundled into a premium-priced hardware device that was widely seen as a downgrade in functionality from the prior version. It was a free web application that added to, rather than replacing, the existing options in the space.

> Google's users cut Google the necessary slack to allow them to release imperfect products and improve on them. Apple's do not.

Google's users get mad when they perceive Google to make products worse in subsequent versions just as much as Apple users do. Google tends not to put premium price tags on its first public release of products, while Apple does, and people paying premium prices for products are less inclined to grant the maker slack.
This might be the result of an incredibly misleading tweet and article posted by Value Walk to which I will not link as I find their actions to be reprehensible.
Apple does plenty of iteration, just in a different way. Think about copy and paste on iPhone, MMS messaging, multitasking, etc. They work depth-first rather than breadth, so instead of dozens of half-working features, you get one or two complete features. I think it opens Apple up to more criticism, especially combined with their secrecy, but the criticism and even trolls only help contribute to more buzz.
What exactly is gwern?
I ran into an RCS project of my own, just 2 days ago. There are code repositories out there older than git that are still important.
here, there's a subtext that Tor actually made NSA's job easier

Are you reading anything from that subtext beyond, "Tor has a high concentration of the kind of users we're interested in, so let's keep it a juicy target rather than squeezing too hard?"
esailija is the author, and I believe he mentioned that he is planning to write an optimization guide (specific to the library, though it will probably contain generally useful info).
I'm not sure about the "hacked system" answer, I don't think it demonstrates a novel insight used to identify something exploitable. It's obvious that pure graft and time will let you sell a lot of raffle tickets, but would you still have won if your competitors deployed an equal amount of effort in the same way? Did you win because of a unique insight that yielded a competitive advantage, or did you win because your competitors didn't care enough? That's not clear.

That said, I do think it demonstrates some ability to hustle. Here, what you're really doing is getting HN to write, or rather optimise your YC application. You're exploiting the vanity of HN, i.e. everyone wants to look smart by providing an ingenious comment. You synthesise the best into your application, and make off like a bandit. That would be a pretty novel hack in itself. :)
AUFS is what runs the dotCloud platform. The reality is AUFS is pretty amazing, and used in production, and stable and mature as you say.

But, having to require a patched kernel is a huge barrier for adoption.

AUFS will return as soon as possible as an option. It will just long term not be the default option.
Can we pleeeeease make this the new default icon for the OnionBrowser Bundle?

(edited to remove broken image link)
Interesting data about melatonin, but I am very wary of appeals to "nature" and "natural" in articles like this. Such references are often proxies for the concept of "good" or "healthy", but that's not necessarily true. Epidermal sun damage is natural too.

For example biphasic sleep is a pattern that arises when the darkness period is significantly longer than the human need for sleep. If the darkness period is reduced to about the same length as the sleep need, then the sleep period is less interrupted. But humans are not any more or less healthy under either sleep regime.
I'm not questioning that it's hard to build as much as I am that people will go out of their way to get it. But best of luck to you, prove me wrong!
> Sure, all business do forecasting. That's pretty simple stuff.

Lots of it involves predicting the behavior of complex economic and social systems using empirically-tested (scientific) methodologies.

> That's true, where should I be looking? Can you link to specific examples?

If you want to know about where science is used to predict the behavior of complex systems, one place to look would be the scientific literature of fields which are concerned with the behavior of complex systems.
Arethuza: Absolutely. I have been "kicking" every feature my co-founder has brought to me, before I build them. Recently he told me build a feature which shows a google map, with customer thumbs up displayed by locations for a feature. Before building this thing, i "kicked" it by putting a mocked maps image with a button on top saying "enable report". Within days it was clear that this feature was not a top priority.

Also I use FK to monitor our existing features and ask feedback on them. I love that now i don't have to write 4 lines of code to monitor 1 line of code. FeatureKicker's no-change solution to monitor and get feedback on existing features rocks.
Look at people's IPhones. A lot of its users use apps not built by Apple.

Search, Mail, Social Network, Maps, Photo-sharing, etc.

Yeah, Apple will always make tons of money but IPhone/IPad will become just a device that hosts these apps. If most of the apps people need are available in another platform, the costs of switching is going to be low.
That is encouraging, sadly not aware of anything comparable in the UK, though was unaware of this avenue you mention and with that thank you.

Sad about the investment needed for the limited return window which would be enough time to promote the benifits intime for the market to mature just outside the window of opertunity.

Does make you wonder how many good useful medications are kept back due too fiscal investment to get the various approvals. Not aware of a universal World accepted standard of drug approval, certainly would make sense cost wise for the global return. But guess there is money in running trials as well.
It was at mid second page with 10 up votes after 35 minutes when I made this post originally.
And a computer. And an internet connection. And enough computer experience to get tor running. And enough savvy to find SR's address in the first place. And a customer base with all of the above. I think my point stands...
In general, the pattern of regulation of "dietary supplements"[1] in United States law allows a lot of claims that go beyond the available evidence to be made without legal consequences. In an environment like this, I would do more than just listen to anecdotes from satisfied users.

[1] "Dietary supplement industry says 'no' to more information for consumers (again)" 3 October 2013

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/big-supp-resists-giving-...
I recommend you read the article first. Check out the ROI section: http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#roi
If Linux would be closed source, RedHat would have much more expenses. No more free beta testing from Fedora users.

Also Microsoft and Apple are probably on different market. For most deployments Windows or MacOSx based servers are not even considered.
cool. tup looks sweet.

Yes, the lazy compile (JIT) or "build on request" as you put it plays a huge factor when it comes to performance. Because it doesn't rebuild the world each time there is a change it is able to expend the cpu cycles when it matters most.

Under the hood we have the HTTP and the precompiling system decoupled. The precompiling is done with a library called Terraform which acts as a uniform source agnostic compiler. Harp wraps this with a HTTP layer and and SSG layer. See https://github.com/sintaxi/terraform
> governments are ultimately the overseers that permit networking infrastructure comprising the internet to be built...society depends on accountability

There are two conflicting thoughts here. If we're not entitled to the same anonymity that those spying on us have, then we're servants, not members of a just society.

We can have a government as overseer of communications or we can have a just society. We can't have both.

It's an adage so old that it seems trite but it's still true: We can have Liberty or Security but if we pick Security over Liberty, we'll lose both.
Show HN: Daily Content, Video, Interaction for 7 Different Social Networks
>	Were the people selling/buying drugs on Silk Road top-level drug merchants?

This is unknown, but my assumption after looking at transaction records is yes.

> Or were they suburban kids?

I'm not even sure what "suburban kids" means. I think there's a wider demographic of low end product buyers, than what you describe, but yes.

> How did the actual delivery of drugs work?

From public sources, it appears the dealer would typically use prepaid shipping and drop it into a public postal box for delivery.

> And doesn't the government have ways to detect drugs in the mail?

Yes, and it seems like criminals are always one step ahead. I know that this summer, just prior to DPR's arrest that dealers were using some scheme that involved multiple layers of sealed mylar to counter the gov't's detection techniques. Sometimes these bags were stashed inside a figurine or some other object, and sometimes they were slipped inside the pages of a magazine.
You're probably right, although having said that I know lots of people who don't have an IT background who use BitTorrent because it is less hassle than DRM.
What chance does a ragtag team of people from various backgrounds working part time on a open source project have against a determined enemy with billions in funding and hordes of PHDs working full time with single goal of violating privacy of netizens.
Thanks for the explanation. I like how you put it :)
I didn't read it that way at all, in fact, it sounds like Tor is sufficiently robust that a good number of NSA employees were tasked with finding exploits. In terms of the exploits found, it looks like all were against the browser.

Tor is a well-designed and robust anonymity tool, and
successfully attacking it is difficult. The NSA attacks we
found individually target Tor users by exploiting
vulnerabilities in their Firefox browsers, and not the Tor
application directly.
I actually love the technical improvements in Windows 8, enough that I'm considering buying a license for Server 2008 to run as my desktop.

Server 2008 has the features you speak of "and has metro too." Whereas Windows 8 shoves Metro down your throat. I have tried to use it, I keep changing the settings one at a time so that when I launch a file or try to load a program I'm not jerked away from my traditional workspace screen.

I'm not one of the guys that's lamenting the death of the start menu — I use OS X on a daily basis and get along just fine with cmd+space and searching for my apps by name. I don't like how ADHD the Metro UI is, I don't like how Microsoft seems to have not even remotely considered the cognitive cost of screen-switching. It's completely unnatural to jerk me back and forth between two completely different window managers. It's stupid of them to launch Metro apps by default when there's two apps of the same name, one Metro and one not.

Microsoft castrated shadow copy, pressing 'delete' instantly removes files without asking to confirm deletion (yes, Mac does this to, but on Mac it's a keypress combo of cmd+backspace which is unlikely to happen by accident), and worst of all, now that all UX access is search-based, the fact that Windows' search feature is completely, horribly useless really shines. I can never find documents by name or content with search on Windows, funny how that works just fine on Mac. With Windows 7, I had it set up so I could work around the inept search ranking algorithm, with Windows 8 I cannot.
I've always just abstracted the DB away with objects and lazy-load any 'subqueries' that I might want to have/use/get (or autoload them if necessary).
There is. A bit of a googling gives me:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-centers-that-recycle...
These valuations makes joining MongoDB right now a very bad idea.
I do agree that a style with discrete steps would also be appropriate.

To the other points, no, not all bar graphs do the same thing. Bar graph bars are often the width they are due to data binning, where the width has significance.

The graph was trivial, but made less clear by the 3D isometric projection. the spatial distortion is reduced but not canceled out by the space.

3D pie charts share the same failure. Yes, as long as the tilt is slight, they are still mostly readable. But it will make "closer" wedges appear larger and "farther" wedges appear smaller. It's visual dishonesty and unnecessary.

Just because one can finagle understanding out of a visualization does not make it a good visualization.
3D Printing, Music, the Internet, and the Future
Cuba's DIY Inventions from 30 Years of Isolation (video)
> I was skeptical ... Namely, I was used to web speed: iterative, launch before perfection, leverage your community.

If that's not a one-sentence summary of the iPhone's release history, I don't know what is.
> Back then, when they were the age 10gen/MongoDB is now, nobody valued those companies at (the appropriately adjusted equivalent of) 1.2 billion, because there was no clue they would be the winners.

Actually, MongoDB (formerly 10gen) is 6 years old. After 6 years, Salesforce's market cap was around $3 billion. (They IPO'd after 5 years.)
Semantic-UI & AngularJS - Basic Registration Form with Validation
"Even the Android hegemon, which supposedly poses an existential threat, could easily fracture if Samsung decides to go their own way."

I highly doubt Android would fracture if Samsung goes its own way. A number of manufacturers (Motorola, ZTE, even Xiaomi) would fill the void if Samsung leaves Android.

I highly doubt Samsung would do it. Samsung doesn't know platform. Microsoft does but it still struggles to convince developers to build on top of Windows Phone.

If Samsung leaves, it loses all the Google apps and services. I highly doubt that Samsung could build a decent Map, Mail and other essential apps.
Developments in Microphone Technology
This is one way the NSA can attack Tor. if they just want to de-anonymize a connection, not get access to the content, (.e.g to locate the Silk Road Sever), in theory they can just analyze all their passively collected data form major fiber backbones to identify and locate the user.

Tor, including hidden services, was never designed to protect against someone who could observe all or almost all traffic in the Tor network. Given that data, it's rather easy to correlate timing information. Indeed, Tor fundamentally allows this since it aims to be a low latency network.

Given the NSA's extensive tapping of key fiber lines, we should assume they can actually observe the necessary traffic.From the original paper announcing Tor: "A global passive adversary is the most commonly assumed threat when analyzing theoretical anonymity designs. But like all practical low-latency systems, Tor does not protect against such a strong adversary." --- Tor: The Second Generation Onion Router [0]
[0] https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des...
3mg might be too much. I am not a doctor, but my sleep doctor is, and she recommended half that amount -- right around sunset.
For sure, but can't the same be said of their Mac lines? I'm sure iOS will always be a minority in terms of market share, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are the dominant player in the part of the market where people actually PAY for their product compared to free Android phones.

The tablet market is a good example of this, aside from Kindle's no Android tablet has really taken off and I think it's because of some of those points I enumerated above.
Freedom lover with Tor client installed.
I'm not saying that it's "too "mathy"", just that it's commonly trotted out as a good resource to develop programming skills when, IMHO, it's better suited to honing mathematical reasoning. All the single page programs in the world aren't really going to help somebody become better at writing real programs.
Twitter's planned IPO already has a big winner
Flow-control macros often become plain functions in Haskell, thanks to a combination of lazy evaluation and monadic syntax. `while`, `for`, `or` etc are all just regular functions.

That said, macros are still useful for embedding foreign language snippets as literals (e.g. XML). GHC's TemplateHaskell extension takes care of that use case; it also provides quasi-quotation facilities that turns Haskell snippets into syntax tree literals for heavy-duty metaprogramming.
The upgrade process is 100% painless. You run the upgrade, it reboots your PC, and then it reboots it back into your desktop. No questions asked. OS X is absolutely not designed to be wiped and reinstalled, that's your problem if you do. While I have to format my Windows computers once a year for various reasons, I've been using OS X unformatted since the day I got my first MacBook in '06. Just used the migrate utility once when upgrading to my new rMBP. If you usually wipe and reinstall, that's on you.

Homebrew's been working great for me throughout the entire Mavericks beta. The last time Mail.app corrupted my inbox was probably on Snow Leopard, everything's been good since.
Stopped reading after this spelling mistake on the first line of text:

"We already have extreamly reliable"
Kernel32 user32, advapi32, etc. Are you really going to tell me that the namespacing and naming convention for their API, which mind you, used handles and annoying type defs, was anything spectacular. I really hope you are kidding.
I reverse engineered windows for years, know a huge amount of documented and undocumented api from ntdll and so on. The API is water trash, you lose when you question my know-how on this topic.
I used to have a wildly erratic sleep schedule. Then I had a baby. Now I sleep from 10 pm to 7 am every single night.

While I know a lot of people have sleep disorders, I think a lot of people have bad sleep schedules simply because they can.
The more we learn about the NSA's capabilities, the more it seems like the Manhattan Project. They are developing the "cyberwarfare" equivalents of weapons of mass destruction. This exploit delivery network goes so far beyond any legitimate purpose it might serve that it belongs in the same moral category as hydrogen bombs.

EDIT: The above is somewhat hyperbolic and unclear. The NSA's capabilities may have legitimate uses. Similarly, there may be legitimate military uses for nuclear weapons. But building nuclear weapons creates the risk of worldwide nuclear destruction. Similarly, building this kind of highly efficient exploit system creates the risk of destroying all Internet security. The potential destruction far outweighs whatever good the weapons might accomplish. That is why I said they belong in the same category.
If links should be permanent, what happens after a HTTP DELETE?
Do you support the sale of digital content in general? If so, isn't there a moral issue in allowing one person to have for free what another person had to pay for? (Unless you're implementing some kind of "pay what you can afford" system.) Isn't that theoretically "stealing"? What's the solution?

> Renting of digital data is a stupid idea to begin with.

I don't think it's stupid. I think it allows consumers flexibility; they can pay more and fully own digital content, or they can save money and pay less for temporary access.
The Nordic countries have a rather mild climate despite being so far north. To have a comparable temperature in the Americas, you'd usually need to be a couple of thousand kilometers further south. (E.g. I guess the climates of Boston and Stockholm might be roughly comparable, but Boston is actually on the same latitude as Rome).

So if you tell an American that something is almost at the Arctic circle, their intuition will tell them it's a very rough and almost uninhabited place. You tell it to a Finn, and they'll think that it's where the fourth largest metropolitan area of the country is, or where you go for a comfortable ski holiday.
I think one of the unintended consequences of shutting down Silk Road so publicly will be that the existence of the Tor network is now being advertised to lots of people for the first time.

A lot of regular people are probably now saying, "Wait, I can actually buy drugs online without getting caught or ripped off?"

We'll see if there is another spike in the Tor users after this news cycle: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html
Hopefully the community will continue moving forward by getting actual work done. These technologies are all cute, but nothing here, except the scale of marketing, is groundbreaking.
Why reports of Bitcoin’s death are greatly exaggerated
Acidic loving species rejoice!
Android vs malware: how to run a secure, open ecosystem
> I don't know why the author keep talking about world economy while the only examples he presents are U.S. only: mortgage crisis, debt fuelled spending, etc. In Europe there wasn't nothing like that and yet Europeans have been hit hardest by the recession.

Look at the countries that got hit hardest in Europe. Spain had a larger housing bubble than even the US. Ireland also had a housing bubble. Greece went on a massive debt-fueled spending binge.
This accompanying article has useful context:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack...

> But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled 'Tor Stinks', states: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users," and says the agency has had "no success de-anonymizing a user in response" to a specific request.

So only with "manual analysis" can intel agencies have any success, and that appears to be with a small subset of users who have other vulnerabilities. But when targeting a specific user, the NSA appears to have had no success in de-anonymizing them.
Because shutting down a service where the majority of exchange is conducted with an adequate amount of peace only forces such exchange into streets where volence is often unavoidable.
Thats great feedback. Thank you :)
The third type doesn't need college at all.
I imagine that today, in 2013, an enterprising 20-something year old who's dealing drugs for a living is more than competent enough to do all of the above; and my understanding was that SR was more like eBay than BestBuy - your customer base will find you.
Best post I've read on HN in a while!

I think there is a fundamental difference between building hardware+system software vs. building web services and apps. In the former case, you have to get it right and then release. In the latter case, you can afford to iterate for a while as you keep getting better.

Some of the hardware I've bought from Google has made me feel like I'm beta testing it. I don't get that feeling when I buy Apple hardware.

This makes me wonder if other players in the Android space are following Apple's playback. The specific player I am thinking about is Samsung. Why are they doing so well where other Android manufacturers are doing just okay?
It's the Earth.
Got it. Thank You
you left out sitting in a public library and logging into your online cartel that anybody could watch and get the IP you ssh into
Only meeting with 2 people and only spending an hour on site. This is probably the best interview process I'll read about in the next few weeks on HN.