skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
oh my god, you're my new best friend. I was despairing of finding any opinion on HN that wasn't so mired in being too politically correct that it could have been written by a cold, dead fish with a robot brain powered by HAL. my extreme cynicism of HN comments has been temporarily rolled back.

> A lot of things that shouldn't talk HTTP are expected to just because there's an army of programmers who don't know better.

this worries me actually - there is such fantastic momentum with new developers and new tools pushing a very narrow set of technologies forward simply because they haven't had broad exposure (experience) to other ways of building yet that we'll arrive (or perhaps have arrived ...?) at a point in the future where we really begin to suffer from a sort of deficit in available sophisticated technologies because of a long heritage of using HTTP/HTML/JS/Webkit/MVC for frickin everything. Those teaching won't know any better and it will be up to those who have been taught to dive farther and farther back in time to when there was more diversity to find and appreciate different solutions. A little dystopian, perhaps, but justified. Cross pollination of disciplines and variety will save us.
No, because we're not team hn.

Saying "go back to 4chan" is exactly the kind of team hn behaviour that people don't like.
15 Blogs That Can Give You Tech Startup Press Coverage
Here you go:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/658/what-can-an-a...

http://learncryptography.com/51-attack/
"haphazardly accumulated features" is not an explanation, it's a subjective point of view.

If you really need it, here's a very good write-up which should cover that in an impressively detailed manner:

http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
Malicious attackers or disgruntled employees could also gain access to the pool and do nasty things.
Why holacracy will not work in India
> If a Facebook client, a mail application, a simple 2D game or a music player lags on such a mobile phone, it does so because it's a piece of crap.

Fair point. It has more to do with the way these apps are cobbled together out of heterogeneous chunks of code, just to make them look "cool". The native frameworks are lacking in terms of their ability to easily customize the controls, so people start applying crazy hacks just to mimic some functionality seen in another app, without any regard for the performance. It just has to "work".
Mining power can centralize -- there are some solutions to this. One of them is https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool
Ember Components: A Deep Dive
From the perl man page (back when it was all one page)

When I was a student I took an internship at a small software company in the English countryside.

I was given the task of fixing 100 or so Oracle Forms (version 3, still based on green screen technology). A field in the database was being resized from 1 to 2 characters, and I had to fix the display layouts and any related variable declarations in the code.

The Oracle forms editor had a terrible UI, I had to navigate around the form and drill down in each block or UI element to see the related code. There's wasn't much of a search facility. After a bit I decided there had to be a better way.

I started by grepping the forms files, to see where the code was referenced. This helped, but didn't tell me where in the form the code was, so I still had to navigate around the form looking for the places it was used.

I'm not sure why I picked up on perl, but I printed out 90-odd pages from man, spent some time reading through, and came up with a script that did a high-level parse of all the form files and told me which forms and code blocks contained references to the field.

The other developers thought that this task would keep the intern distracted for a few weeks, but I finished within a few days.

So they game me another pile of more complex changes to do. Sigh...

Other than that the Camel book is good, and the perl Cookbook.
I'll be looking at ClojureScript in 2014. To me, the web is great despite all the difficulties, just because you can push stuff immediately. If only we could have skipped all the mobile "apps" stuff, and they would just be links to offline pages implemented with JS, NaCL, WebGL, etc..
How Well Do you Know Your HTML5? Test Your Knowledge
It's dropping nicely, down to 39% over last 24 hours.
In denmark we have the danish communist party, which is exactly that... But no... There is no real support for it.

A party called something like "the unity party" has something like 10% percent of the votes!.. And they're actually an old fashioned communist party with modern ideas of how to "get there"...

It's really interesting to watch the news and listen to the ways words are being used and becomes labels, that are spreading across all news medias, until nobody remembers what the actual story was - just that it "sounds bad".
Senses prevail: India's Voter Database will not be gifted to Google
MEPs seek video link with Snowden for NSA spying probe
Thanks for the recommendation, I'm reading it now and I'm liking it so far (I've read "Do the Work" and I didn't like it as much). I agree that The War of Art is a little bit self-helpy, but I got a lot of value from the other non-self-helpy part.
You asked for an explanation of the downvotes.

You have been given an explanation of the downvotes.

What you chose to do with that information is up to you.
I thought ranting about PHP and JS was so 2013
> And those are the ones I know (or, well, knew) who still remember college times. Some still likened back to their high school years.

I don't understand the relevance of this. There is no conflict between remembering swathes of your college and high school years, and forgetting other swathes. It covers a lot of time (and your 20s cover even more than that); there's plenty of room to forget large parts of it while remembering others.
this is where "light-weight" comes in. you could do something like use werkzeug's secure cookies and sqlalchemy for sessions and databases respectively.
That is not correct, the consequences are still very bad.

What can you do with 51%? You can (theoretically) revert a transaction that has been confirmed, by mining blocks attached to a prior point in the blockchain and getting a longer chain than the rest of the network.

What can't you do? You can't spend someone's coins when you never had their private key to begin with. Making a transaction is an act of "signing" and public-private key cryptography is not dependent on the block chain style technique for sending messages, only for making sure that they got through and maintaining them as a ledger.

You can probably single out arbitrary transactions and make sure that those are the ones that are reversed -- your transactions, so the evidence would point back to you, and whomever accepted your bitcoins as payment for something, would potentially know it was you who wronged them.

You could also decline to single out a transaction, just reversing all transactions after a given block and starting a "new life" for all the people who spent their coins after that. When you refused to re-sign the transactions that you made, you would then out yourself.

All of this is fairly academic since the person in charge of 51% of the hash power (GHash.io owner/operator) is a known actor, the hordes have not trusted him/them anonymously, and it turns out that miners have the least incentive to perform this kind of attack, since you lose an amount of revenue equal to the contents of the number of (your) solved blocks that you reversed. They would be more likely in my opinion to accept hashes and proof of work, but then renege and refuse payment to their miners, since this is really a less sophisticated attack and either way you should lose all of your credibility as a pool operator when you are discovered.
Nice try Phil. Please get your Ripple propaganda off of HN. Ripple currency, XRP, is magicked up by Ripple Corp which owns nearly all of it and is the purest form of a pyramid scheme.
ah makes sense, thanks!
Ask HN: JPEG Compression - Which tool makes the smallest files?
There are a number of tools for compressing JPEG files. Do some compress better than others? If so, which tends to compress the best?
It can (and should!) be written more elegantly

[5, 10, 1].sort(function(a, b) { return a - b })

Or, in ES6:

[5, 10, 1].sort((a, b) => { a - b })

That's starting to look pretty nice if you ask me.
Even without that collusion, if you control 40% you still have a high probability of pulling off a double-spend attack. My recollection (sorry, I don't have a link, so I might be wrong) is that someone somehow associated with GHash.io already pulled something like this off when they were still below 30%
> The paranoid view is that Google is an NSA frontend.

The sad thing is that they don't even have to be that on purpose. They collect so much data on every person, that NSA is going to use them as a frontend anyway, which is exactly what they did, until they discovered what NSA was doing recently, and made some changes, by encrypting data in transit within their network. However, I still don't think they are encrypting data at rest. So if NSA breaks their transit encryption again, they will be free to collect all the data again.

The day when Google can naturally be seen as an enemy of the Internet and human privacy has come. Up until SOPA/ITU they could still be seen as a net ally, because they did help with some pretty big issues against the Internet. But from now on, I don't think they will be doing anything as major in favor of the users, while they are doing major actions against users of the Internet, such as trying to kill the privacy law in EU. So they are a net enemy to the Internet already.

While they've created that "campaign" with some other big companies against the NSA, the goal of the campaign itself sounds very weak to me. They're just trying to be more transparent with what they can tell people about what the government is requesting of them. I think they could do so much more, such as joining Mozilla's "StopWatching.us" movement. The reason they aren't doing that? Because Google is "watching us", and they probably believe joining such a campaign would be detrimental to their business, even if fighting for user privacy is the right thing to do.

So whether they have a clear stated goal of "killing privacy worldwide" the way NSA does, or not, it doesn't matter. Because the incentives to do just that are too strong for them, and they are pushing them in that direction anyway. For them to stop doing that would require rethinking their business model that's based on "tracking everything" (which I think should happen), and align themselves with the users.
I don't know much about the particulars of BitCoin mechanics, but the general spirit of this story seems like a natural evolvement of any unregulated organization. People who favor unregulated markets/societies dislike the concentration of power in the hands of a central authority, but the reality is that in any social system there will always be concentration of power in the hands of the few. I've read a hypothesis[1] that it was this dynamics that propelled the neolithic revolution (the transformation of humans from nomadic hunters-gatherers to settled farmers): most people suffered as consequence (hunger, disease, less leisure), but a few benefitted greatly.

The same thing happened in the American Gilded Age. In that period of unprecedented (and largely unregulated) growth, much of the US population became quickly enslaved by a few members of an elite group, later called the robber barons (Rockefeller, Frick, JP Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Mellon et al.), and it took tremendous efforts by the American press and then by President Roosevelt (the first) to partially dismantle that semi-feudal structure and strengthen the central government, to free the populace from the stranglehold of the robber barons.

While a central power can be abusive, it is almost always better than feudal oligarchy, at least if it is governed more-or-less democratically.

So while BitCoin is an algorithm intended to avoid a single organizing entity, it is no replacement for a social pact, enforced politically by some fair means. Perhaps a better algorithm could somehow prevent any sort of concentrated power, but I doubt it. The desire for power (even with the best of intentions) is so essential to humans, that it probably cannot be circumvented by technology alone.

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/19/111219fa_fact_...
I'm pretty sure young techs are able to learn technologies they not have been taught into.
India's Election Commission, a constitutional body responsible for conducting free and fair elections in the country, has finally heard the concerns of the citizens and has called off its plans to use google to help voters locate polling stations. In the guise of providing this as a social service, Google was trying to get the demographic data of the entire population of India directly from the government. What was that again? "Dont be evil"? yeh! right.
We have very few automated tests.

He could have just written that one sentence.
It is kind of telling that people seem to have become inured enough to the extremely anti-male nature of such laws in the US that they are seriously discussing whether or not sending a man to jail over sending a Google+ invite to a woman is okay or not, saying "it depends upon the circumstances" and whatnot.

Are you kidding me? Seriously, seeing "You got a Google+ invite from X" can cause you so much mental harm that you have to send another human being to jail? In a sane world, this would invite investigation for possible human rights violations. As it goes in the USA today, apparently people are shrugging their shoulders and saying "Well, you know, he did send her a Google+ invite..."
Well I don't care enough about those to buy a PS4 just for them. And the PC has been dying since forever. I grant you that the unified memory, etc. is really nice, but as we've seen from e.g. the PS2 - how hard it is to program for a system doesn't really matter in the end. And the PC is not in any way hard to write programs for.
>Browsers suck too.

I think browsers are great from a user perspective. Everyone knows browsers, they are familiar with using them, navigating with them and all importantly making purchases.
Coding with Javascript I agree can be like working with one hand tied behind your back, just because of its limitations, but you know what, loads of us can build apps with this and we can be guaranteed it will work on most devices!
I imagine Dart may provide a better playing field for the developer in the future.

>Mobile sucks.

I tend to agree, although Xamarin and Titanium are trying to help.

>UX-quality bar on mobile is high and there is no fast or cheap way through; it requires inspiration and iteration.

I think Microsoft went a lonq way with Windows 8 "Metro" style design to basically tell developers, "build this way" then we should have great consistency with UX across mobile app landscapes
Here is a link to the news paper article announcing this http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation...
Cute Baby Turtle
I don't think many people can understand half of what Google's UIs are trying to do or say anymore, even while we interact and use them. I wouldn't expect your local cops to be more knowledgeable from a printout.
Blender's hardly used in high-end VFX production, due to scalability and interface issues...

Houdini's got dual 2/3 support though.
> The potential for abuse is high. The actual abuse is high.

And that is terrible, but I am not necessarily sure it is net terrible. To decide that, we would need to compare it with the terribleness of having no expedient legal recourse when you reasonably fear a partner might harass, assault or kill you. I've no doubt the implementation details suck though.

Ninja edit: Words.
"The sales guy starts taking requirements" - "the developer has an idea for a feature".

Sorry, but that's a recipe for shitty products.
It's an interesting debate, and in particular UI bindings often need higher level access. I'm not convinced that the trade off of being locked into whatever Apple decides is the one true language and API is worth the gains though.

I'd be much happier with mobile dev if the situation was more like that of developing for the web - use any language you want as long as it can output HTML to be presented in the browser. That has been a limiting, but at the same time truly revolutionary, feature of web software which freed it from domination by large software vendors and restrictive practices like those we've seen on iOS or (to a lesser extent) Android.

If all the platform vendors had standardised on an API in say c as web browsers or unix have, we'd have a much more convincing case for mobile taking over the world and competing with the web - given the current situation of competing ecosystems with draconian restrictions I suspect they will all be subsumed by the web at some point.
'real-life Lisp' (aka Clojure) is just bullshit.

There are many more real-life Lisp applications which are not written in Clojure.

I'm a long-time user of Scheme and especially Common Lisp. Macros are a consequence of Lisp. Lisp is originally about computation with symbolic expressions (see McCarthy). Application of that to Lisp itself leads to macros and similar. Macros were introduced 1963 to Lisp, extremely early on.

As a Lisp programmer one needs to understand what macros are for and when they are useful. By default I write functions. I also tell people to think in functions first.

But in real life, the more advanced Lisp applications are full of macro usage and macro definitions.

Sure they are harder to debug. But Lisp programmers have developed tools to deal with that. Not everyone wants to learn such a complex language, or is able to learn it or has time to learn it. There are a lot of simpler tools and even simpler Lisps - but for those who want and need this, a language like Common Lisp will provide the necessary flexibility.
I think this would apply to early Ruby On Rails. PHP libs and interpreter are actually fairly good.
If we ever end up in the same part of the world, we should grab a beer :-). I share your worries.
The science behind how fonts make you feel
The opt out is another one of those things, build in a way, which more or less says: "no, no... you don't need to... just come on down to the office and sign this paper... no hard feelings..." ;)

It's interesting how many journalists are using Tor and privacy tools like that and how few are helping make privacy a mainstream concern.

I totally agree that this project is a good thing! More of it!
It can (almost) only help to make more people aware of why it is important :)
You can mine Bitcoin on your computer. The chance of discovering a 'block' and receiving the 25 BTC reward are however very low as it's very competitive. Mining solo, you're playing an 'all or nothing' game and you could run for months, even years without earning any reward.

Pools are collections of people who mine Bitcoin. When a block is discovered by someone in the pool, the reward is shared amongst everyone who is in the pool relative to their contributed hashing power (often minus a small fee for the pool operator).

Ghash.io is the largest pool, and the member of the pool control a good 35-45% of total hashing power on the Bitcoin network. A pool with >50% the total hashing power is bad, because the operators in charge of the pool could carry out malicious acts on the Bitcoin network without any members of the pool being aware they are contributing to these acts.
I'm a card-carrying member of the anti-Google brigade, but Fleischer's actual blog post wasn't all that bad - http://peterfleischer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/turning-our-bac...

> Privacy is all about the individual human being. So, it's somehow fitting that the biggest privacy surprise in 2013 was created by one individual human being, the courageous whistleblower, Mr Snowden, who opened the world's eyes to the almost unimaginable scale and scope of mass government surveillance. We'll have to wait until 2014 to learn if governments do anything meaningful to improve transparency and oversight of their spy agencies' work. I have low expectations.

And this:

> More countries around the world passed privacy laws modeled on Europe's. The US continued down its path of exceptionalism: the Federal government debated, but did not pass, any meaningful privacy legislation, but many US States actively filled the void with sweeping new privacy laws, fulfilling their historic role as laboratories of potential future Federal laws. Technology advanced, raising new questions and igniting new debates. Law suits and prosecutions came and went, and in my personal case, happily, mostly went.
All Norwegians become millionaires as oil fund balloons
"See every organization still running on XP ? They may be sentence to death in 3 month, that may be the hardest way learn it."

Huh? XP will just be chugging along, for another decade probably in some places. There are still business being run on DOS software FFS. What is the easiest - pay for a complete replacement somewhere in the next decade or two, or upgrading everything every few years to stay with the times?

(written from Windows XP and not likely to move for at least another half year...)
Been there. Can confirm.
Right. I'm going on the article's assertion that relocating to the UK will make it easier to launch an IPO in a US market.

Tax would be a big part of that. I expect that American familiarity and comfort with UK companies would be another.
Could you elaborate? It'd be interesting to know more.
> What does suck, indeed, is when people try to use tools that were meant to make HTML docs look nice to build an office suite. They inevitably end up with an office suite that sucks, but that's not the browser's fault.

Yet, because it runs in the browser and is available everywhere, that's why I use Google's Docs. And GMail's web interface is better than any email client I tried until now.

> Browsers are fine as long as you use them for what they are meant to be used: browsing HTML files.

Phones are also fine as long as you use them for what they are meant to be used: initiating phone calls.

So why use browsers as application platforms? Just as in the case of phones becoming potent computational devices, the answer is - because we can and because it brings benefits that aren't easily solvable by any alternative.
If I'm at my desktop, my Model M. If I'm using my Macbook, I may use the Model M if I'm also using an external display, but I stick to the chiclet keyboard for the most part.
I'm not from the US, so that concern sounds bizarre to me.
If you haven't already written your own horrible hacky string handling framework, python 3's unicode support is much nicer. And IMO, for projects of the size I work on, super() alone justifies the upgrade.

But I think to talk about porting is to ask the wrong question. The main reason for python 3 isn't to port existing projects, it's to make python a good choice for new projects.
exactly.

Maya 2012, Nuke 7 are on 2.6.4/5

Maya 2014, Nuke 8 are on 2.7.3.

It's a chicken and egg situation - until VFX houses (often with close to a million lines of Python code integrating stuff) need Python 3 (I don't see why they would based on the new features), they're not going to ask companies like The Foundry and Autodesk to add support for it.

And the commercial companies aren't going to waste dev (and huge amounts of test time) on a feature 95% of their customers don't want or need.

Houdini's got dual 2/3 support, but I find it very difficult to believe any big studio is using the 3 support (as it wouldn't integrate with the rest of the pipeline).
How many small businesses are making money shipping software on windows ?
I really hope they mean 99% accuracy.
When to propose a relationship to your Anonymous Visitor