skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content.

Its my personal opinion that this has really hurt the depth of content. Its still a fun site, just very different then when I first went there ~6 years ago.

EDIT: Not to say RES isn't a great project and super useful. I use it and really appreciate it. Its just interesting how ease of use can shape the content and culture of an online community.
R is actually one of the most pure languages out there; it basically says "I have vectors; they can have missing values, be nested, and can have other vectors as attributes. And I have functions with lexical scoping. Now go and build the rest as you like." So people did this, one better, one worse -- but the core and beautiful stuff here is that all those approaches will work together and just do the job.
Ask HN: Have any good website ideas? I'll implement them, open source
Hey HN- currently in a rut because I want to program but I don't have any good website/app ideas to implement. Post any website ideas you want implemented and if there's enough support I'll make it, 100% open source.
Deliberately-straightforward -- agreed. But "highly proficient" after writing one or two scripts? That's quite a stretch.

For instance, one of the questions I give in phone screens is for the candidate to write a program to count the number of occurrences of unique words in a text file. The "after writing one or two Python scripts" approach is something like this:

counts = {}
f = open('test.txt')
lines = f.read().split('\n')
for line in lines:
for word in line.split(' '):
if word:
word = word.lower()
if word in counts.keys():
counts[word] += 1
else:
counts[word] = 1
f.close()
count_items = [(count, word) for word, count in counts.items()]
count_items.sort()
for count, word in reversed(count_items):
print word, count

Whereas the "highly proficient" (and much simpler and more Pythonic) approach might look something like this:

import collections
counts = collections.Counter()
with open('test.txt') as f:
for line in f:
for word in line.lower().split():
counts[word] += 1
for word, count in counts.most_common():
print word, count
This is actually one of the very few things that has bothered me about Stripe – they don't make their volume pricing public (Amazon does, now Balanced does). We've had to email when we hit larger sums to get pricing reduced.

Edit: although to be fair, I asked them about this, and they said their processing costs vary user to user, so they don't have a simple matrix (rather, they apply discounts based on the costs associated with an account). That's probably the best possible answer short of a pricing matrix...
Looks nice.

How well does the distributed filesystem perform and what size data sets an it handle?

How quickly can you ramp up 10, 100 or 1000 cores?

Improved performance in these areas are the big things that would get our group to adopt a new platform.
Emojis in Real Life
Folks may be interested in this piece by Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/11/26/python-r/

He looks at the contention that Python is killing R--based on various data sources--and ultimately concludes:

"While the original argument is certainly defensible, then, I find it ultimately unpersuasive. The evidence isn’t there, yet at least, to convince me that R is being replaced by Python on a volume basis. With key packages like ggplot2 being ported, however, it will be interesting to watch for any future shift."
I'm not entirely sure the faculty cost will be lower longer-term, but it depends on a lot of factors that influence how the market will develop, so I can't say for sure. One reason I think it might turn out higher is that MOOCs may be taught by fewer but more super-star professors than traditional universities. Right now the difference between a top and a mediocre professor in pay is not huge, maybe 2x-3x. But if MOOCs succeed in producing really massive-scale courses, the most popular, charismatic professors could become real media superstars. And if they do, and the market is big and competitive enough to support it, they might be able to garner huge salaries through bidding wars between MOOC providers.

For example, imagine that someone like Richard Feynman, rather than giving his famous lecture series at Caltech for his regular Caltech salary, were doing it in a future era of well-developed MOOCs. He announces he's going to do one final series of physics lectures, but he hasn't decided which MOOC company he's going to do it for. I bet he could negotiate a huge fee for that, much more than even a top-end professor is currently paid. Moving back to the modern day, what if, say, Elon Musk offered to teach a MOOC? You could go for a cheaper, less well-known lecturer, but then you risk looking like the 2nd-rate MOOC company compared to your competitors.

If that's how the market develops, MOOCs might have to pay fees closer to what the public-speaking circuit currently pays prominent lecturers, if they want to attract the top speakers. And those fees are orders of magnitudes higher than what a professor currently makes.
> if it's still present sell it to the highest bidder let them deal with the consequences.

Them, and the innocent victims of this breach - the people who just wanted to buy a bus pass.

Why not disclose anonymously and publicly, instead of selling the data off?
$50K may be a little aggressive. This guy...

http://tcrn.ch/1ajBm3P

...had a Techcrunch article pushing his sale and wound up with $16,600....

https://twitter.com/nSchmidt7/status/157877483792908288

Good luck anyway, I do hope you get a few $50K+ bids,
The question, "What level of math is programming roughly analogous to?" isn't necessarily answerable. However, you've provided context so if I can be allowed to rephrase the question as "What level of maths is required to create a standard CRUD platform (language not relevant)?", it would definitely be algebra.

Sure you might be able to do it with a knowledge of nothing more than basic arithmetic, but you're going to be able to understand and manipulate data more efficiently with a solid understanding of algebra.

That being said, Objective-C isn't the easiest language to pick up, especially as a first language. If your 11 year old starts to struggle, maybe point him at something like Python which has a shallow learning curve, great support (especially for beginners), and can do pretty much anything (ignoring the argument of whether it _should_ be used for things like drivers).

If your son chooses software engineering as a career. Advanced calculus may well be required. I've had to debug complex legacy code before that implemented computations rooted in calculus and without that knowledge, I wouldn't have been capable of succeeding.
As a European, I have never heard of Overstock. Though they actually do ship here and prices can be displayed in Euro's.

How big is this site? What is their angle? Are they just like a smaller amazon.com? Overstock sounds a little like lower priced articles from left over stocks or something...
No shipping restriction. I'll see if I can fix the ebay thing.
Hey! Don't hesitate to contact me when you launch. We have a comparison website for money transfer services. We love to feature new services (specially around mobile money)- www.tawipay.com
Every time I hear about another case like this, I struggle with how I feel about it. I think it really depends on how he discovered the issue, and how far he took those findings. Let's say he just happened put a quote in a field and noticed that it broke the response from the site. That is a good indicator that a SQL injection might be possible. If he stops at that point and reports his findings, I don't see an issue with that. In my mind, it is like being at a friend's house, where you have permission to be, but noticing that their safe is wide open with their valuables visible to all. Or maybe being in a store and noticing that they've left the cash drawer wide open. However, if he continued to probe and see if he could get data using a SQL injection vulnerability, I feel that is more like walking up to the safe and jiggling the handle, or checking to see if that cash drawer is locked. I don't think your friend or the store owner would be very happy, and the site admins probably wouldn't be too happy about it either.
Should firms be required to report any suspicious activity found by any team in any location to every regulator that covers them ?

Don't know about "any activity, any location", but the SEC's position is that JPM failed to report specific activities to U.S. Treasury's enforcement unit (FinCEN), as per the requirements of its charter.

If you need more clarification as this finding, you might want to look into the court documents.
Open Source IMAP Mail Filtering App Makes Your Email a "Hackable" Playground
tl;dr They are realtime. They don't want full blown Rest frameworks for just reactive views. So, no AngularJS or EmberJS.

What about Knockout.js? It's just 16kb.
I am curious how one can break into robitics as a web developer.

The two obvious paths I can see are: a) quit job and get masters or even PHD in robotics; b) become rich and found a company like Elon Musk.
> If the courses aren't valuable aside from the benefits of learning (which can be accomplished through other means),

The combination of lecture, graded exercise, guided reading (usually) and time constraints that Coursera and EdX courses have is, IMO/IME, a very good combination for learning that makes them better than many other alternatives for the purposes of learning (Udacity is, comparatively, fairly bad at some parts of this.)

> Meanwhile, it's hard to take the courses seriously when only 5% of the enrollment finishes the course.

I think that completion is a bad metric. One of the benefits of MOOCs is that it lowers the sunk cost of entry which encourages broader enrollment, particularly enrollment by people who are experimenting with the content or less certain that outside commitments will be able to be contained in a way that allows completion.

The idea that % complete is a measure of how many people are deriving an educational benefit is wrong.
That's an interesting approach, but it's still pooling, although I wouldn't know better.

Does anyone know what the alternatives are? Can you avoid pooling and still speak HTTP?
Questions below:

Our tech implements server-mediated video chat for up to 6 participants. It requires some processing power on the server, but it is designed with a "scale-out" architecture so you should be able to get it running cheaply at scale without major rewrites.

Custom server or public? ( fms/wowza/etc. ) How many streams per server can it handle? Why bother with a server doing relay if its only 6 people?

It's currently iOS only, but it should work to copy the iPhone code's structure to implement clients for all relevant platforms -- Android, WinPhone, Blackberry, web, and/or desktop.

It is my understanding that developing video chat for android is a major clusterfuck. Not only does each O/S version create crazy complications, the differences and nuances required just across phone models is a nightmare. For instance, on a Evo you need to flip the image. On a newer droid the f/b camera is reversed from the API. Its enough that developing video chat for android is a nightmare in disguise

Performance will be critical for slower devices, so you'll need to implement it carefully.
The video codec is h.264 at 144x144. (We experimented with up to 320x320 and found that with current connection quality on phones, especially on urban wifi and 3G, sticking with a low-resolution default tends to produce the best user experience.)

Don't things look like shit in 144x144 for non-group calls? Do you scale larger when its just a 1 to 1 call?

The audio codec is Opus at 16 KHz.

Are you muxing connections together on the server? Do you lose individual volume control per feed?

I think the most important question is related to server technology. If you can only get a small amount of users on each server, its not going to be possible to be profitable moving forward.
New App Will Scan Your Date’s Face Quickly to See If They’re a Sex Offender
This seems to be the state of society we are in: If somebody uncovers a problem that exists, he is reported to the police. But if one organization spies on everybody and uses the data in irresponsible ways, they are promoted.

I have no doubt, that the coming generations will have big difficulties to distinguish between right and wrong.

We don't have the problem now with single fallen states, but with a fallen human kind.
thats NOT an antisemic show. This is a "pretexte" for censoring him !
Betabrand defaces own website in recruiting stunt
Not at the moment. Right now, the biggest single dashboard is 60GB. You can launch as many dashboards as your plan allows if your application can be distributed, but I'm guessing that isn't the case for you.
Google just made it really easy for strangers to email you
Yii framework custom methods inside datatable row
Tip on how to use custom HTML inside a datatable row.
If someone has a restraining order against you, you probably shouldn't have them in your circles in the first place (you also should pay attention to who you send emails to, either way).
I just bought a watch using their bitcoin checkout. Since I was already logged in to Coinbase it a single screen to approve the payment. Then back to a page saying my order was complete. Couldn't be easier.

This is a win for bitcoin but its a huge win for Coinbase. Their payment flow works well and I am sure Overstock accepting it will make it an easier sell for other merchants.
Boooooo.
Right; we've gone back-and-forth on how best to implement our volume pricing. The upside of a clear pricing matrix is that it's clear. The downside is that it's conservative -- we can (and do) give lower pricing than what we could commit to in a matrix like this to many users.

Perhaps we should release a matrix of what we do on average (or a set of minimum discounts) or something.

(As ever, feel free to drop me a line to discuss -- patrick@stripe.com.)
Because "Being white hat gets you in trouble more often than not." is so obviously untrue to anybody with even the vaguest relation to the industry. It implies that more than 50% of the time, when you disclose a vulnerability responsibly you get in trouble. When it's more likely much much less than 0.1% of the time.

People getting in trouble for reporting vulnerabilities is highly rare. Show me 100 cases of it, and I'll still tell you it's rare.
It also looks like it generates a lot of boilerplate stuff for you.

I personally prefer Flask's simplicity of "do as you will" over "here's an entire project for you" that lots of frameworks use.
Oddly enough, this implies something HN people might find enlightening:

Bayesian inference--you know, the mathematically-correct way to update a model of the world based on information--is inherently racist. (And sexist, and a bunch of other -ists.)

(If people don't get the joke, this is a bit like the statement "science is inherently leftist." That doesn't mean science is wrong; it means you should re-evaluate your opinion (and moral gut-reaction) of exactly what it means to be leftist. Or, in this case, racist or sexist.)
I think the left over stock is how they originally started. Based on where they are now, I'd categorize them as a smaller Amazon.
> the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine

Well, yes and no. The view I espoused was pretty similar to what Warren Buffet says, and that guy has owned a factory or two in his day. Even in the US, which has less government, there are a number of programs for those who don't have much. Perhaps you'd like to see more - fair enough - but the exact level of support is open for debate, isn't it? I don't think we'll ever agree on precisely what it should consist of. The Nordic states seem to work pretty well with more government. Probably depends on a lot of factors...

So I don't think there's any big cabal, really.
Yeah, but if you have a test suite you add Python 3 and silence the existing failures.

They likely already know where a lot of their failures are going to be even without tests. The effort involved in fixing those known failures alone is prohibitive. The fact that the rest of regression testing will be easier with tests is nice, but doesn't reduce the work required to a level where they can justify doing it.

Now you can (at least partially) avoid writing new code that wouldn't work on 3,

Once you're on 3, you can just run your code and see if it works on 3. You don't need tests to avoid writing code that works on 2 but not 3.

as well as gain the option of refactoring things to resolve compatibility - with lots of freedom to decide how much effort to spend on that if any.

I don't think resolving compatibility issues is optional...
Inject code, teleport between systems. There was some lack of server-side validation last year, but that seems to be fixed now.
While I know Alexa is far from accurate, it does show overstock.com to be the 621 largest universal site and 160th in the USA. That should show you scale.

In 2010 (Fiscal Year) they has $1.1 billion in revenue with 1600 employees. They are publicly traded with a market cap just under $750 million.
Tech startup raising money for affordable housing project in SF
Wish people would stop using the term "bitcoins" as if they're singular metal entities, it seems to be where the perception that they are "too expensive" comes from.

Bitcoin. Divisible to 8 decimal places.
At my first programming job I was at an ISP and was making the bandwidth provisioning and enforcement system. I was trying to tell the networking operations guys that it was pretty good these days and they said "Oh - OK we are putting the dev team behind it moving forward". Apparently my face was priceless. I know that sinking feeling in my gut changed my mind about a lot of things that day.

Dogfooding is good - it certainly changes how you think about things anyway.

It isn't sufficient for good software, but may be necessary -or at least when possible (sometimes you make software that has no direct application to your life...).
I think you completely missed my point. "Byte size" in javascript is an analogue for slow app execution (page rendering and code paths), not slow downloading or bandwidth costs.

Also, I'm not suggesting we "re-invent the wheel" or code everything from scratch. I'm an advocate for composing your app from small modules. Modern js is incredibly good at this.
"I dont particularly like how google has gone from being a great search engine to being this huge insane money and data slurping machine, but as long as one can avoid it, then, does it matter?"

The problem is that you can't avoid Google. How many websites use Google Analytics? How many serve fonts via Google Fonts? Or serve JQuery via Google? How many sites serve up ads from Google's ad network? Google's tentacles reach every corner of the web. Android lets Google track you across mobile and tablet. Now they can track you on desktop with ChromeOS which potentailly tracks everying you do in the OS. Some people are fine with this if it means a more personalised service. I find the privacy implications horrendous.

Consider the following scenario: you visit a site with Google Anlaytics, then a site that serves up fonts through Google, then a site that serves JQuery via Google. Then you sign into GMail to check your email and immediatly sign out after. Then you vist YouTube (signed out). Does Google join up these journeys? We don't know. Google's privacy policy is deliberatley vague about what they capture.

People simply aren't aware of the amount of tracking that goes on. It's clearly not in Google's interest to be placed under greater scrutiny over what they track and record. The tech community are happy to oblige, giving Google an easy ride on such matters.
Dog's Reaction to Defective Dog Siren Video
Does Overstock.com have to wait at all for the transaction to be verified by the hashing network? Or do they consider it immediately verified?
> Programming isn't analogous to math

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry-Howard_isomorphism
Not sure if it fits for your problem but I've been using weinre to debug on mobile devices: https://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/docs/latest/
So Gmail offers now autocomplete for G+ contacts but not for contacts in your actual Google Contacts (address book)?!

You obviously don't use gmail. It's worked this way forever. And, the picture in the article shows this, too.
I purchased off of cheapair.com using bitcoin yesterday and they use CoinBase as well for the merchant account. Extremely beautiful and seamless way to purchase, although I was a bit worried that it was actually just 1 button click to pay. I wasn't aware it was coinbase at first (I didn't read anything so partially my fault), but clicking the button made the payment and there was no verification. I would expect this to be a 2 step process. (I may have remembered this wrong, but I thought it was only 1 click to purchase)
We didn't see much of a need to expand beyond long polling, if for nothing more than simplicity's sake. Realtime is a small feature in small parts of the application right now. Keeping it very simple and coupled with our RESTful API let us roll it out quickly.
Nice! maybe I should do one in angular/svg just to close the loop with my previous blog posts? Maybe.
Thanks for the tip. Most of it is done by python-dateutil though so I think it in C already. I'm basically checking ~500 recurring events to see if they occur today with django-schedule.
If the economy were zero-sum, we would be far poorer today, with 7 billion people, than 200 years ago, when there were only 1 billion people, right?

I don't believe in things like "the market will sort everything out", by the way. There are winners and losers, and I think society has some duty to help take care of those who get the short end of the stick. But I don't think "don't let the factories move" is the right way to help those people, long term.
Isn't the same as accepting dollars? Or Euros? Or pesos? Plural seems right to me.
I made a complete AOT/JIT compiler from and back end in 20,000 lines of code. It can assemble, as well.
The mixing of professional and personal is quite dangerous.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-han...
If I remember correctly, which is doubtful, picture posts became more popular, and while Reddit has the ability to shape the types of content that make it to the front page, they chose not to as this seems to express the will of the users.
Smells like plausible deniability. The "mold" claim is especially dubious.
I don't think Snapchat has admitted to any mistakes. What they have said is they are sympathetic to users who have had their data stolen by hackers.

They are using the word sorry in the "we are sympathetic" sense, not the apology sense.

Sorry you feel that way. Sorry your kid got sick. Sorry your car got broken into. The classic non-apology apology.
The site is pretty big. Been around for a while. I just watched a documentary from many years back about stocks and they talk about overstock.com being a victim of naked short selling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overstock.com
In December I found a glitch in my university's directory that let me have access to personal info of over 60,000 professors, students, and staff.

I was thinking of writing an email to the IT, but fuck that. I'm not paying for someone else's mistake.
Too late, already deleted my account. It was a useless app anyway. I personally had no use for it. Friends would send me random stuff all the time but I honestly didn't care. It was usually mass chats anyway.