skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is pretty huge. I'd be interested to know what overstock's strategy is for converting bitcoins back to fiat. I also wonder if there will be any tax implications here for purchases made in countries such as Norway that don't consider bitcoin real currency.
Discounts on 12 SaaS products for startups
Kids tablet runs Android 4.4 on 64-bit Intel Atom
nice work, ry
It does seem to be the blind leading the blind much more than in other forums.
> You're better off making the disclosure anonymously.

When the info comes from an anonymous source they can't take their frustration out on the messenger. (Instead of thanking the messenger as they should.) I don't get why these hackers often give up their anonymity.
Is Koa the Future of Node Frameworks?
Thanks - sorry, I didn't mean to write quite so harshly and would probably tone it down a tad if I could still edit; I meant to just put an opposing viewpoint down, since you wrote with an exceptionally strong position. The truth is probably somewhere in between our two comments.
Bitcoin is automatically exchanged to USD for them by coinbase at the time of the transaction.
"Formally proven correct" is not necessarily the same as "doing what the customer wanted".

Which one do I care about? Which one pays me?
Gittip Button: Add Gittip to Github
8 reasons Uruguay's not all that
Custom server or public?

We created a custom server. We wrote our own server code, that's just how it was designed.

Android

If you think it will be hard, you're probably right. Thanks for the info.

Resolution

Yeah, 144x144 is definitely a bit blurry. With a bit more work you could upgrade the resolution for 1-on-1 chats. We didn't put that work in yet.

Audio

You could control the volume per feed -- but that said, when you use the Voice Processing I/O unit, Apple does a pretty good job figuring out a decent microphone level, so it was not necessary.

I can provide more detailed answers but you should contact me privately.
Sounds like a great idea! How do I contact you?
I am hacker AT my username dot org
How much volume are they actually going to get though? I'm excited to see more outlets accepting bitcoin, but to this point it still feels more like a marketing gimmick.
I took and take several classes, so far on coursera and edX - and I love it. Taped lectures with quizzes, weekly assignments, exam and maybe even a peer-rated project are definitely a great way to learn something! My goal always is to finish with a certificate because this gives me an idea on how well I am doing.

As a matter of fact I do not like Udacity very much. It is too playful and too unorganized compared to a lot of courses on coursera and pretty much all courses on edX. Udacity tries too hard to educate everybody by being very friendly at all times - this either leads to courses which start out all bubbly and funny and all of a sudden turn complex too suddenly - or courses that stay on that trivial level.

MOOC is awesome but what Thrun apparently doesn't get is that this concept still requires dedication and disciplin from the student. And you can design your class whatever way you like - either the student has it or s/he doesn't.

Also he is comparing apples and pears with his ratio #succesfull/#registered.

#registered of course is a marketing driven KPI and sould be as high as possible, so every time somebody clicks "Learn free" it is counted. But you have to "register" to just figure out what the course really is about and whether it is worth taking!

Also he is a business man and by switching to the new course format it is much easier for Udacity to monetarize - what a surprise. Opposed to edX and coursera, Udacity is kind of a one-man-show and he is maybe too ambitious and lacks patience (see biking with somebody else).

An article on my experience:
http://www.joyofdata.de/blog/social-network-analysis-lada-ad...
Am I the only one amazed at the level of foresight the Norwegian politicians are displaying here?

In comparison, the US government seems so....mismanaged.
Actually that's not 'highly proficient'. This is:

def read_words(words_file):
return [word for line in open(words_file, 'r') for word in line.split()]
len(set(read_words('test.txt')))
Japan plans nuclear reactor meltdown to help prevent another Fukushima disaster
+1 for openness
Certainly not. The point isn't that vacations are terrible and people who take them are somehow lesser. It's that if you love what you do, then you can't wait to do more of what you do. Vacation is another thing you can be doing but is not this beacon on a hill that you escape to after a year of servitude.

If you don't really enjoy what you do, then you would probably spend most days watching the clock, so you can go home. Watching the
calendar, so you can have one or two weeks to yourself.

Of course, you may love what you do and can't wait to do more of it, but have external obligations and contexts that make you feel you need a vacation (from life more than work) and, therefore, take time off to go do that. But that isn't the context of most of these discussions. Most of these discussions are presented as some sort of meager escape from the toils of oppression. That's sad.
I would think that most merchants who asynchronously fulfill will assume the transaction was successful, then have a callback to validate before shipment and handle failure scenarios.
This is a perfect example of what my statistics professor always warned us about: if you base your statistics on a terrible model, you'll end up drawing terrible conclusions!
You can do HTTP streaming, where clients access a resource of indefinite length. This should work well enough with native clients and even some modern browsers (with EventSource aka Server Sent Events, or streaming XmlHttpRequest).

Long-polling with retries is not so bad though. Even with WebSockets you'd still want a periodic heartbeat. It's all the same amount of traffic really.
OP here.

As a developer and a gamer I always wanted to make games, but I never actually did it. To change that I threw myself a public challenge: build a new game every week in html5 using Phaser (a javascript framework).

The games are quite simple for now, but that's because I'm still learning. Let me know if you have any feedback, so I can increase the quality of my games over time :-)
something like flippa?
Reactive Android, Part 1
It's sad for sure that a few really cool documents were lost, but they needed to be destroyed to remove the mold threat.

The "mold threat" argument is so utterly vacuous -- it's hard to imagine that anyone making it can really be taking themselves seriously. And this pooh-poohing of the documents as being merely "cool" reflects a staggering degree of ignorance about the value of primary documents in historical (and legal) research.

At the same time... it's not hard to imagine county bureaucrats thinking pretty much exactly in these terms. "Wha, a buncha photographs? Old title papers? Whoze goona be innersted in that? Someones gonna get SICK from all that ICKY mold and we might get SUED!"

Yep -- that must have been exactly what they were thinking.
Calling one of the most successful sites on the Internet a "missed opportunity" is a bit odd. Whether you want junk or you want quality, it's there (dig into the subreddits).
The Most Devastating Cyber Attacks of 2013
ASK HN: Looking for a programmer partner for a big competition. Interested?
Hi everyone. I am a PhD student in Information Systems and currently preparing a proposal for a $10,000 prize competition. My proposal is very neat and involves crowdsourcing. I am looking for a partner with some coding (programming) skills to help me with the programming (API) part for the prototype. I am pretty sure that I can win the award if I find the right partner. We will register as a team and the award will be equally divided. Please email me at moqri.mo@gmail.com for more details. ﻿
Writing a modern web app with Go, TDD, REST, and AngularJS [video]
Please add (2013) to the title, since it's not new.
This would appear to be the same environment as the demos from the article. Note the 'Node' graffiti on the wall, and the general shape of the room.

I'd really like to see a before/after comparison, to see what the original environment looked like, as well as an actual description of what they've done.
Interesting design decision to hide the connection's address until you send them an email. It at least notifies the recipient that you now know their address. And the recipient gets the sender's address in exchange. It shows that Google has some concern for privacy here… but does it actually do anything? Why hide the addresses in the first place?

I wonder how it interacts with "undo send" …
Kicked up an exchange game based on Bitcoin testnet
www.galtstreet.com
I think it's a pedantic point, as I believe that language is as language does.... however, there's no reason why it couldn't be like "gold", which is also highly divisible. You need the "s" plural for things that can't be divided (like dollar bills). Thus, we don't get paid in "golds".

That said, semantically, coins aren't usually thought of as divisible things in a modern context-- they are pluralized, so bitcoin will probably be pluralized in the same way.
That's a good point. However, it's till tempered by the fact that I haven't added ~40kb to the app to get it.
That is actually many times bigger than I would have guessed. That they're accepting Bitcoin is pretty huge for the Bitcoin movement then.
Ask HN: Is my sideproject/startup worth the hussle?
Hello,

My name is Matiss and I'm a 19yr old European WEB developer with a passion for tech/startups.

About 8 months ago I started working as a volounteer on this (http://hmworship.com/) offline web app. Basically it saves song chords and lyrics for use on the go. I've learned a bunch of technical things in the process, but I've never had anyone mentoring me or showing/telling me how to do better startup related things (e.g. marketing, copywriting, acquiring users, getting customers etc.).

Currently this project has about 500 native users and a few foreigners. I'm not earning a single penny.

What would you suggest me to do? Should I try to monetize or is it not yet the right time? Do you think that this idea is worth the work or should I just abandon/open-source the project? I'd appreciate any comments since I don't have much expertise in this field.

Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.
This is great. These kinds of open sourced production apps help people adapt more of haskell.
All I know is that they somehow come up in my google results fairly often and usually unrelated to the context of my intended search and it always felt like it was SEO'd junk crapping up my results. I added them to my google filter to keep them from showing up in my searches anymore, along with all the inane commentary from their community discussion underneath each song.
wow such insight much deep very agile programming used
If a Google engineer murders his neighbor over the weekend, is Google liable?
This Mental Metabolic Diet Stuff
Console aka NSLog/printf-like patch for Quartz Composer
Nano-Engineers Produce Liquid-Repellent Paper
> until you send them an email.

It's not "until you send", but "until you receive a reply".
Scaling up from 10, 100, to 1000 cores is fast (3s per engine in parallel). However, something like 1000 cores would currently require spinning up new instances (1-2 minutes) if deployed in the cloud.

The distributed filesystem is meant for easily sharing code and medium sized data across containers. In the cloud, it is best to to use S3 directly for large data and local disks for high IO tasks. For on premise deployments, there are more options.

I'd be interested to hear about your use case. Feel free to drop me a line at tristan@senseplatform.com
The more people rely on Bitcoin, the more volatile the economic activity surrounding it will be. It's not a 'failure' any more than a gold standard was a 'failure', but it's also suboptimal.
> In comparison, the US government seems so....mismanaged.

Pretty much all others do ... Europe is sinking in debt because politicians use it to fund the bribes given to voters to get them re-elected.
From the Snowden leaks to Adobe's loss of 38 Million passwords,this article runs through some of the most significant security breaches and cyber attacks in 2013.
Is licensed/copyrighted? Do the IOCCC have any implicit license?
He wasn't working for Uber at the time.

I am an independent contractor, working for several companies. If I make a mistake while working for Company A, is Company B liable because they also employ me at other times?
Hate to go against my gold bug brothers, but no monetary supply requires a physical backing; just confidence.

Yes backing a currency in gold will give confidence. Yes backing a fractional reserve with a military and resources will give confidence.

If bitcoin can TRULY deliver on its promises as a payment transmitter, than it may just get enough confidence to become a currency as well.

As it stands now however, it looks like a speculative commodity.
It looks like he wasn't doing any Uber-related business at the time: "The driver was not providing services on the Uber system during the time of the accident." It'd be more like a NY driver having an accident on his own time I'd think
Ahh, that makes much more sense now. Thanks for the clarification.
Yes, it's definitely still polling. It is polling about once per minute. However, at least it's only polling at the application protocol level, not the connection level. Browsers and the GRIP proxy support keep-alive so the same TCP connection is very likely to be re-used for quite a while.

HTTP by nature is request/response. To speak pure HTTP, there isn't a way around polling that I know of. Avoiding polling means implementing your own protocol over HTTP, or using WebSockets (see Comet or implementations in Socket.IO, Firebase, SignalR, etc).
I think this is one of those situations where the analogy just doesn't work, but well done for trying!
R version for comparison (;

length(unique(scan('test.txt',character(),sep=" ")))
As more people use it the less volatile it will be.
> Interesting design decision to hide the connection's address until you send them an email.

That's not what the article says. It says that it hides your email address until you send the connection an email (and, conversely, hides the connections email address until they send you an email):

Quote: The good news is that your email address isn’t visible to a Google+ connection unless you send him or her an email. The reverse is also true: his or her email address isn’t visible to you unless he or she sends you an email.
If you contact someone who has taken a restraining order against you there will be consequences regardless, I don't see how this changes things pertaining to that.
If google gave the engineer the gun or heavy machinery that was used in the crime, perhaps. If negligence on google's part can be proven. (For example, giving a gun to a convicted felon)
Uber drivers aren't employees. Nor are they independent contractors. Uber is crystal clear that they only operate as an intermediary for hiring a private driver. Sure, there's some value-add, like keeping track of the money, but if it got to that, a good lawyer would be able to get them off the hook.

They issued a statement "expressing our condolences," which is really all that should be expected here.
But I'm not trying to use any lyrics site. Rap Genius garbage just always popped up on my (to me)-unrelated searches. People can respond to me with how they're not spam or they're not as spammy as other lyrics sites, but the point is that they pop up in the same frequency and same context as every other link-farm/content-mining crap-fest on the internet, like ehow, cha-cha, yahoo answers, mahalo, paidcontent, and so on.
I mostly agree with this article, but we are not there yet. I work with scientists who love the IPython Notebook technology. Some claim the IP[y]: Notebook to be the best thing since the Mosaic web browser and the most important development in scientific computing in a decade. I tend to agree, it is a revolutionary technology and the idea of executable papers is tantalizing. But there are also big problems. In particular, setting up a Python environment with all the necessary libraries is a real pain in the neck even with technologies like pip. For a fee, companies like Enthought are making good progress at taking the pain away (though what happens when you have awkward custom dependencies?). Cloud solutions for preconfigured IP[y]: Notebook servers is another exciting possibility, but not ideal if you work with big data where you want your data local to your Python environment.

Also, as I understand, taking advantage of multicore parallelism is not trivial because of the Python Global Interpreter Lock. I have also worked in JVM environments where parallel computing is becoming significantly easier and I don't see that happening in Python anytime soon. I would love to be proven wrong, of course.
Get your scrum team hyped for standups
Udacity does not equal MOOC - It is just one platform offering online courses and it is inferior in quality and conception to most courses on edx.org and coursera.org. Thrun has a big ego and thinks because he didn't succeed with HIS goals - then the concept of interactive and gradid online learning is doomed. No matter how smart he might be - but that is simply stupid.
Many C# and Java-heads complain that Python lacks support for auto-completion. Which is true

Isn't that an IDE issue and not a language issue? I have no problem with the auto-completion in ipython for instance, though even ipython notebook is only useful for writing simple amounts of code. PyDev though works well too for larger projects albeit a bit sluggishly.
You are confusing sex with gender.
Why would Overstock want a bunch of tiny cars? http://www.fiatusa.com/en/
Uber prices dropped 20% in SF
Completely agree. Was just curious if it showed up in the UX at all.
I think it's important to distinguish frameworks from libraries. With libraries, your code is the caller; you can compose things as you like, including with your own code for cases not covered by the library. But with frameworks, your code tends to be the callee; you must conform to (and are thus limited by) the assumptions the calling code has baked-in by the framework authors. My sense is that the pain from this inverted directionality is what drives these bespoke frameworks.
"The driver was not providing services on the Uber system during the time of the accident. We again extend our deepest condolences to the family and victims of this tragic accident."

If a NY Taxi driver got into an accident off the clock, how would the company be liable?
Cool. I'm not trying to buy it I'm afraid, but it might put off people who are interested. I know it made me wonder if there were export restrictions or something stupid like that, I know crypto stuff has had issues with that in the past.
Yes, actually it is. Uber didn't have anything to do with the accident.
The same applies to people who learned EJBs and J2EE in 2002 too, right? I remember doing Java web development circa 2006 and the new hotness in the Java world was JSF and Spring. And anyways, Java web development was dying then and all the cool kids were moving to RoR and Django. I remember arguing vociferously against the choice of JSF in my company and advocating for Rails; I finally quit in 2007, and the CEO called me up in 2009 and saying "Yeah, we made a mistake. Where should we go now?" They finally went out of business around 2011.

I think the lesson is that tech is a harsh industry to be in regardless of which tech you choose, and you should count on your skillset being obsolete in 3-5 years regardless. And your goal should be to learn the latest and greatest as quickly as possible, grab all the riches and other goodies around you while you can, and bank them for the lean years when the industry completely shifts around you and you have to learn something else.
Now Email or Contact Your Google+ Connections right from Gmail
I guess I just don't see it. To my cynical eye, it seems mostly like an easy way for Overstock to generate a bunch of positive press and perhaps make a few extra sales from bitcoin boosters.

Sure, it's a nice milestone for bitcoin, but the importance seems, well, kinda overstated. I mean, a decade ago a bunch of big ecommerce sites took Flooz too, right?

But hey, I thought the iPod was too expensive and Twitter was useless when they launched, so what do I know.
I work on photosynth, so allow me to respond (albeit with a bias).

Photosynth was designed to work with the most common use case - pictures taken with cell phones at different, undetermined angles, with 10-20 seconds in between each shot.

Contrast that with the camera system used for THORSKAN - http://i.imgur.com/VE1qXwS.png

That's 72 professional DSLRs set up to take pictures of the object simultaneously. I'm not discounting THORSKAN's accomplishments, these are some extremely beautiful demos. But they can't be created by your everyday user.

Eventually things like photosynth will get on this level, but the camera technology in phones will have to change. Luckily, this is already happening. Intel's CES announcements focused on stereo camera systems in laptops and portables, and MS has an investment in it with the kinect already. Having even two cameras shooting at the same time dramatically improves results.
[Show NH] LightWeight and flexible IRC client library for Go
The rapid container
overlooked space for improvement
Was he in an Uber owned car? Don't Uber drivers own the car they drive in?
Not in my experience. Only the 'such and such added you to their circles' notifications.
The Greatest Myth About the Robotics Industry
Is there a tax guide that would explain the consequences of me using some of the bitcoin I bought in 2013 to buy an item on overstock this month?

As I understand it I would have to record the value I paid for the bitcoin in 2013, calculate the value it appreciated between when I bought it and the amount I am using to buy the item. And then report this as capital gains on my 2014 tax return?

This sucks, this makes using bitcoin a lot more work than just paying with a credit card. Plus, it might mean having to hire an accountant instead of just using turbo tax?
The complete damage formula for Pokemon (ARM Assembly required)
There's no actual bitcoin transaction going on that needs to be verified. When he purchased his watch, Coinbase decremented his balance in its database, and incremented Overstock's balance in the same database. No currency (crypto- or fiat) is involved until someone wants to make a deposit or a withdrawal.
52 of the very best web designs from 2013
Is there any evidence that the naked short selling was a real thing beyond the insistence of the CEO?
Apple makes developers wait to release new versions (approval process) while Android does not. As a result, iOS is a better choice for A/B testing since it has longer cycles of deployment.
The button to bid on ebay leads to an error page.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Error?errid=17&item=271367475209
Also worth reading: http://llvm.lyngvig.org/Articles/Mapping-High-Level-Construc...
eBay doesn't allow intangible items to be listed. http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-no-item.html
I think reddit being picture heavy is just a cause of its exploding popularity. Ever follow a subreddit from infancy to infamy? You'll see as it grows, there will be more and more posts of just pictures/memes, which in turn will cause users to complain, mods to step in to filter these out, more subreddits dedicated solely to memes about this topic, etc.

While I do think RES is awesome, most of my non-tech friends who browse Reddit (usually on their phone) haven't even heard of RES.
I was listening to a podcast where the hosts claim that the CEO is a libertarian and loves the idea of BTC as opposed to Federal Reserve Notes. But in addition, it does give them press coverage as well.