skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that randomly connecting nodes is a good model for how software complexity arises, since connections between software components are not made at random. When was the last time you threw some dice to decide whether some piece of your user interface would be connected to business logic or directly to your database server? There's usually a (non-random) reason for why we add a piece of code, and the reason why complexity gets out of hand is that we don't, for various reasons, refactor our architectures to eliminate accumulated complexity before it's too late (and then nobody can understand it anymore, and you end up with the ball of mud).

It's also interesting to note that Foote and Yoder's "Big Ball of Mud" paper[1] portrayed the mechanisms for mud-ball formation as a set of anti-patterns. It's an interesting read. Their give some pretty thoughtful explanations for how software transmogrifies into a mud-ball, none of which include random processes.

[1] http://laputan.org/mud (1999)
Interestingly the email subscription box on the page goes against the validation recommendations made in the post. Tried to subscribe with "Matt Swanson <matt@mdswanson.com>" and was told it was an invalid email.

(I do understand that it is mailchimp and not the author)
I love the typo in the red box when you're not logged in "This page is ment to register your account to allow us..."
The Digital Biological Converter
Is that really a dark pattern. If Limit Tracking is On then theoretically your tracking is limited, no? Also Apple let's you get a new UDID if you want to wipe all data. Not the most lucrative way to handle advertising data. My biggest problem with tailored adverts is the uncanny valley. The more accurate they are the more it creeps me out.
Also Crashes Ff on my mbp early 2011 with 10.7.5
Archlinux all the way!

Very versatile linux distro and always updated with the latest packages.
"it's changing the character of the neighborhood"

So what? What's wrong with change?
I think we basically agree, but your reply was a dogmatic one. Discarding the notion of political change without bothering to listen to, or express arguments.

Gradual change do not exclude fundamental change - eventually. Revolution is after all just evolution speeded up. It's just a different approach.
I have the Real Deal of Celiac too, and my advice to anyone else is really to just drop the wheat entirely. A lot of those Gluten-Free substitutes seem to have sky-high glycemic indexes, which is really not good.

(Glycemic indexes are notoriously hard to directly measure; even the numbers you may scare up on the Internet are often only approximations. So I can't prove my statement. All I can say is that when I eat many of those products, I get the same essential reactions to them I do when I eat candy. Which I don't do anymore, either. Of course, in some cases, it simply is sugar... for instance, look at [1] . 18 grams of sugar in 28 grams of cake = 64% sugar! I went to substantiate a claim I wrote here that some of the things were 50% sugar and did more than that. Of course, compare with [2], non-gluten free, 16g sugar in 26g product) for 62% sugar.)

[1]: http://www.generalmills.com/ColorBoxImage.aspx?ImageId={2370...

[2]: http://www.generalmills.com/ColorBoxImage.aspx?ImageId={C84C...
The #HamOnt Big Idea Labs Workshops
It's a tiny place.
Zero to Product/Market Fit (Presentation)
I was wondering who signed me up for my own list :)

I like the "push the boundaries" thinking though! There is no reason why I couldn't add the JS library to the form at the bottom.
direct link to the project (as opposed to the article about the project): http://bengrosser.com/projects/scaremail/

the artist uses NLP in Python to do analysis of an original text (Fahrenheit 451), uses that to swap out nouns/verbs with "scary" versions, then uses Markov chains on the fly in Javascript to generate unique scary stories for each email.
>>I guess I could use an example of some systems that were not just repeating goals.

Don't go to the gym or workout or eat good just because you want to lose weight. Do it as a habit. Be motivated by the good feeling you get post workout everyday, not because you want to lose 10lbs or bench 200... Don't weight yourself, don't set a "goal". Just go. five times a week. Just keep going. Find a running club, and run because it's a good way to hang out with friends twice a week. Play a sport. Eat vegetables. But don't force them down, experiment with ways to integrate them into tasty meals. Then keep playing with recipes, and suddenly you're eating super healthy just because it's fun to try cooking some crazy plant from the store and you're making all these cool dishes.
You are right, the final choice of the algorithm is with the server. I am not sure though if it is possible to give other ciphers a higher priority on the server without completely disabling RC4 (which is still better than no encryption / no connection).

Edit: effhaa mentioned http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_ssl.html#sslhon... for apache in another post.
Totally freakin' awesome. This is how aliens will torment us in the future, being beat about the head and shoulders with our own moon.
Bypassing the HTC One lockscreen during restart
I find such "artistic" projects to be contemptible. If you want to change society, you have to go through political, legal or commercial challenge, otherwise you will be ignored. There are already too many smug artist types who take up causes; your message will thus be drowned out.
The New Trend: Micro-Surveys VS. Surveys
The Software Defined Hype Cycle
Wont work really, thats what is done in London and its still expensive
Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn have a rent problem, but most people commute from the outer boroughs, Long Island, and New Jersey where rent is much cheaper.
I don't think there's anywhere in the US that has 24/7 public transit that goes 50 miles out from a city. To expect that is unrealistic. You're lucky it even exists, most cities don't even have any transit that goes that far.
Check the FAQ here: http://web-mode.org/

It might be a problem with othere modes:
"Syntax coloring does not work

Do not enable rainbow-mode or whitespace-mode with web-mode (see above).
Moreover, some users might report issues when using themes that not play nicely with web-mode.
Tip: when using emacs in a terminal, always try to enable 256 colors compatibility (xterm-256color)."

Update: Fixed some typos.
Magento product return RMA
Thanks for the insight. Ali Çehreli has a free book in the works, and once that's ready it'll be visibly featured on the front page. Also, obviously we will add a link to this very tutorial. Thanks again!
What is it like to organize HackMIT?
Your reasoning relies entirely on the ability to quantify environmental damage, but it's not clear how you would quantify this. To me it appears completely arbitrary how you decide "this damage is 2.5x worse than the other damage"
i think validation should be done via sending an email to the email address on hand and then requiring the end user to click a link in the email to activate. for one, this validates that it's the actual user's account and then this also validates the address form without having to be pre-emptive at the start.
Ask HN: What are programming jobs that require travel?
That doesn't say where they made their money - it shows where their money went, meaning where the highest profits were possible. Of course you can recycle those profits into those high-profit systems. Important distinction to make if you're wanting to understand these systems.
Why was I downvoted for that?
SpaceX Grasshopper Rocket Launch Reaches Record Height (744m)
This is already the case. Gas plants take very little time to start up and shutdown. Combining thermal storage with the solar plant allows it to act as more of a base load power system. I would guess the goal is allowing utility companies to decommission more costly intermittent plants with solar replacements.

While not exciting this weekend the link shows a graph of Ontario's electricity supply mix. During the week you can see the variations in gas plant performance, from no work output to full work output within an hour.

http://media.cns-snc.ca/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricit...
You can run discourse by issuing an command on any Linux host: https://index.docker.io/u/srid/discourse/
World’s fastest wireless network hits 100 Gbps, can scale to terabits
>Why should they? Of course they can commute, just like many highly-paid professionals choose to commute too. Nobody considers a short commute a fundamental human right.

A car is extremely expensive. Unless you're planning on making the public transportation system usable (which would be a herculean task).
Weve invented drones that can deliver textbooks but were still using physical textbooks?
CC installer - and Photoshop, Lightroom and Acrobat XI Pro - are all working without a hiccup on my 2013 rMBP and 10.9 beta 1 through GM.
The joke is that such political, legal, and commercial avenues are equally pointless. Even throwing huge sums of money, such as what the Koch brothers do, won't change the fundamental messages or opinions of average people.

What an art project like this does is embrace that apathy and nihilism and simply express the artist's defeatist joy. It is a prank in the style of Banksy more than an art project. A scrawl on the wall to be painted over tomorrow, but who cares. The adventure is the doing, not the owning.
Github Cards: The unofficial Card for your GitHub profile
So how much of a 1kW mining rig will be converted into bits and bytes, and how much into heat, in your estimation?
This is just blogspam. The original article was posted here and discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6540842 (173 points, 27 comments)
My last computer retired - 1 month ago. It was more than 5 years old, running Windows XP. XP is still very popular and I would expect it to still be supported and it's 12 years old.
Where did you get your 7 year magic number from?
People used to put up with the same violence in NYC, till they got sick of it and elected mayors who cared about fighting crime more (messrs giuliani and bloomberg). Back in the messrs koch and dinkins eras, NYC was a dump, by and large.

San Jose takes crime seriously and it's constantly up there among the safest large cities in the US.

One can only wish The EB will take crime more seriously. SF is slowly taking crime more seriously. Maybe the EB can lear from SJ and SF a bit.

Undoubtedly some people will raise the issue of profiling criminal behavior[1]. If I had to choose between simmering street violence and occasional police excess (where one can seek redress), I'd choose the latter. Not sure why the EB is so anti-police so much as to spite their own safety. The good of being better policed vastly outweighs, to me, the occasional bad cop. But to each their own.

One phenomenon I don't understand so well. In NYC I'd see people dress us as (wannabe) mobsters (acquire their style), but they were no mobsters, tho maybe they idolized them in some way --they would complain that they'd get flack from the police. Maybe if they didn't try to pretend to be toughs the police wouldn't think they were toughs. I can see some similarities in the 'anarchists' in the EB.
Yeah, that seems to violate the goal of the avalanche effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect
"too many blogging platforms, not that many quality content providers."
There has been a lot of issues with storing commodities such as grains in massive piles in open air (for futures trading) and fungal blooms. I wonder how much "gluten sensitivity" is actually vomitoxin* sensitivity, from a food industry that has had most regulational oversight removed.

As someone who has seen the inside of a QA lab at ADM, I think this is a much more likely scenario. The technicians either give good tests that pass the already loosened standards, or they get fired. There was a big problem with Vomitoxin in 2010, due to a lot of wet weather, but that has subsided with this year's drought in the midwest, but many coastal areas which also farm are seeing much more rain this year.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitoxin

Combine this uncertainy or "back scratching" quality issues, with typical industrial food practices such as fumigating with phosphene and Sulfuryl fluoride, using more insecticide than recommended and all the fun and exciting stuff coming down the GMO pipe, it's no wonder consumers have lost their appetite for American commodities. They're getting sick from them. All these techniques are tested to have "minimal" impact on the health of consumers, but combine them all, and who knows, certainly not scientists, but people do from first hand experience. How many food recalls have already happened this year? Compare that with other years.. These recalls are not from better testing and transparency because these recalls are for food already in the market and sickening people.
I wonder if iTerm2 could be patched to support the PowerNap functionality - and so send SSH keepalives whilst the system slept (assuming of course your underlying network substrate didn’t change).
I don't think taste conflicts with problem solving skills. They can coexist - because design is choosing which solution to apply to a problem, and the choice reflects your taste / stylist preference. Rarely is there only one answer to a problem. Agreement in taste is important else it will be hard for you and your designer to move any design decision forward to implementation.
Yeah it is kind of like authentication vs authorization when managing users. Just because a user is correctly logged in, does not mean that they should have access to something in the system. Just because a valid email is entered, does not mean that the person entering it is the owner of said email. Though these two concerns are often conflated!
> because even it costs $8,000 of resources, to mine $10,000 of BTC, it would still be a profitable enterprise. (In the meantime, you just wasted $8,000 of resources, to make... Nothing that puts bread on the table, a roof over my head, etc.)

Huh? I don't understand this analysis at all. If a musician takes $8,000 of resources (recording equipment, labor, etc.) and creates an album that earns $10,000, is that also $8,000 of wasted resources? You list things like food and shelter, so is your point that all resources not used directly for basic human needs are "wasted"? Remember that the musician (or the bitcoin miner) can use their $2,000 profit to purchase their basic human needs.

> Since the government has the sole monopoly on printing money, it is (Most of the time) far more valuable than the paper it's printed on.

It would be more fair if you also tried to estimate the total cost of government, or of the part of the government that manages the centralized currency. It's definitely not just the cost of making physical bills.

> BTC, on the other hand, is barely more valuable then the 'paper' it's printed on - or, the electricity that was used to produce it.

The reason a bitcoin is valuable is because it is definitive proof of difficult work. This is fundamental to how the decentralized trustless transaction log works, and is the only reason bitcoin users can be relatively certain that there is no fraud on the network. I think you see this as wasteful because you don't consider the cost of governments' management of currencies.
Car break-ins happen in every city. A single break in is not a good gauge of crime rates. You don't have to be a genius thief to know nice neighborhoods are a better place to steal from since that's where the money is.
What exactly does "system-oriented" mean? The article seems sort of contradictory to me. On one hand he is saying having goals is for losers and you need to be system-oriented instead, but on the other he is saying that his goal was to make it rich and he just tried a bunch of stuff until he reached that goal.

The example of the person constantly looking for a better job is also confusing. Isn't the goal of that person to have a better job and he is just repeating the same goal over and over?
Part of the argument here is that if government regulation has created artificial scarcity: if market forces were at work then more living spaces would be built.

On the other hand, the market isn't everything, especially in the near-term. The market, for instance, won't create diversity in the city; it will create a monoculture of whatever is working that decade. So, right now, in SF, it will create a monoculture of tech workers as, in Manhattan, it almost created a monoculture of finance workers in the '80s/'90s. Monocultures lack resilience and if NYC hadn't traded its finance economy for a tourist-driven one, it could have been hard times. Booms and busts may be okay from a Liberal philosophy point of view, but it's hell on the people caught in it.

The other thing about diversity is it's part of the reason people move somewhere in the first place. One of the reasons tech has moved from the Valley up into SF is that SF has more diversity, so it's not all tech all the time. It would make sense to try to preserve what it was you wanted in the first place (even if, a la any gentrifying neighborhood, it may be a bit of a lost cause.)
This is interesting. With the "remotization" of the workplace where anyone, especially engineers can work from anywhere, instead of moving outward, we're moving inward to these "hubs".

I wonder if this is in part because, now that our work is less social, we want our environment to be geared toward more social, i.e. big cities.
There is another technical angle; RC4 is usually quite a lot less CPU intensive than the alternatives available. Not using RC4 can easily mean stuttering video playback, greatly diminished battery life, and even lock ups. Very few users are open to accepting that issues like that are "better" for them.

Many RC4 deprecation efforts have faced rollback in the face of issues like this; especially on hard to fix embedded devices (think TVs, Cars and phones) with comparatively weak CPUs.
Personally, the "Finance" growth part of the graph over the years worries me. Creating wealth from thin air and lobbying :|
Are you sure?

http://gigaom.com/2012/02/17/why-lte-sucks-your-battery-that...
Knee-jerk disabling of RC4 because it's "weak" would almost certainly reduce the security of the Internet, because you can't simply evaluate TLS ciphersuites based on the strength of their core cipher; there are lots of deployed TLS clients that can't do block cipher crypto securely right now.
Why doesn't 'VC' fall under 'Finance'?
The character of the neighborhood is what's drawing in a lot of these new people, and it is what they are inadvertently destroying by moving in. The only solution, as I see it, is increasing density and creating more housing that's affordable, whether you're on an Amazon SDE budget, or a bartender budget.
The far-end (~50 miles) of the mainline regional rail line in Philly (used to be the R5, I forget what it's called after they renamed it) has half-hour coverage in the mornings for commutes, settling back on hourly during the day. To be fair that is unusually good coverage, but it is certainly possible to do elsewhere.
If you take 5 books per 1000 people over 20 years, that's 100 books per 1000 people. Of course, many of the same writers are on their 2nd+ novels so 1 in 10 seems unlikely, but I could see 1 in 20 people having a book published in their lifetime if everyone keeps publishing at the same rate they did in 2007
Doing open source, you learn little nuggets like this. I learned about `Array()` when checking out how Rails routing allowed you to pass a symbol or an array, like:

resources :photos, only: [:index, :show]

resources :photos, only: :show

For those interested, this is the relevant code: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionpack/lib/ac...
like putting a fence on some land?

like having rights to some nation natural resources (energy on the graph if not clear)

all wealth is created out of thin air for the 1%. they just adapt every time the not 1% comes closer to their turf.
Failing to figure out how to send an email to an individual when they sign up may be a problem.

In the case of validation I tend to look at it as "What is the minimum I can check for to ensure that I can get the data that I need out of this form?"

Too much and it becomes arduous to sign up, too little and the app ends up trying to send an order confirmation to "Matt Swanson" instead of "matt@mdswanson.com"
Everywhere you find addicted users, look at who is feeding them, and you'll find perverse incentives: whether they're page views, contextual ads, or in-app purchases. Aggregators compete amongst one another for users, so they trickle out all content. They claim that quality content is voted to the top, but it is ultimately thinly-masked groupthink. Comment sections are often intellectual wastelands rife with people needing to yell and/or 'win' Internet points for no reason at all.

The world needs innovative thought, not people reinforcing the 'right' opinions. I find social media is particularly bad at this: why is it normal to ingest everyone's opinions on a daily basis? Why don't we want that mental space for ourselves?

We're far too content with the cheap substitutes for things that truly satisfy us. Facebook uses this to great effect, and aggregators do too.
It's kind of alarming how in recent years, "Finance" pulled ahead of "Tech & VC", according to the second graph. But there's one line on the graph that's missing from the legend. Sloppy.
The ridiculous CA tax rates are already keeping people like myself out. I'd lose at least 10% of my income if I moved to CA.
Time-saving tool for AngularJS
Does it really, though? Any hard numbers to back up the "it works"?
That's a design goal for cryptographic hash functions, which these are not.
A RC helicopter is not a toy. Helicopter blades are really dangerous, and a helicopter is at least 10 times harder to control than a quad drone. Flying a RC helicopter is like balancing a stick on your finger, with strange inertia and with optical feedback only. The drones have built-in stabilization circuits, but this is optional (and quite expensive) for RC helicopters. Most RC helicopters cannot hover by themselves, the hovering is actively controlled by the handler at all times.

The blades are long, very strong (usually carbon fiber) and the linear speed at the end point can reach more than 100km/h. Even a smaller 450-class RC helicopter blade can break a bone, and that was a class 700 one. Compared to that, the small drones are realy friendly - most of the drone propellers can be stopped by a finger without getting hurt.
Armed with APIs, developers will drive the composable enterprise
Market forces will definitely apply, but my concern is that the market will react too slowly. That by the time the market can react and raise wages the labor pool will be shrunk too much and either services won't be available, or they will be too expensive for even those who could otherwise afford to live in the city. You can't just get a labor force to move back to an area overnight (just like these problems aren't going to appear overnight). So, in order to compensate, the market will swing wildly until it can stabilize.

That's what I'm worried about. Populations shift, people move, cities grow. But, if you're running a city, you want growth to be stable and predictable. If you drive out all of your lower-income workers to other cities and "import" your labor, you are setting yourself up for an unstable labor market in the future.

These things need to be planned for, and it doesn't seem like there is a lot of thought being put into it.
Honestly, I think that's what the Bay Area needs to aim at. But of course it's probably more impossible a problem to solve, even more so housing issues.
Loved the post. Glad you could take the PennApps and MHacks models and fit them to your situation. This Ishaan kid sounds like a bitch though.
Picking the Bridge