skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone suggested a way to fix that in Bitcoin, but I don't know if they're going to use this solution or not:

> tl;dr: We suggest a protocol modification to the block chain that securely allows blocks to be generated around once per second, can handle over 200 transactions per second at these rates, and consumes under 0.5 MBps in terms of bandwidth (less at lower rates than 200 TPS). All of this with no increased susceptability to 50% attacks. This essentially solves the problem that caused Satoshi to set the 10 minute target for the block creation rate. We also analyze the number of transactions per second Bitcoin can handle with and without our modification. We note that block propagation times are the primary obstacle for scalability.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=359582.0
How does Stallman fund his life? I'm assuming he gets paid a salary. So he's ok with doing work for money himself, but not ok with other people monetizing their efforts in a slightly different way. I don't understand.
FWIW, I actually much preferred Illustrator's v/a distinction to the 'click on a point' / 'drag over line' distinction here.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2013/12/download-copy-of-your-g...
Where is the download link to the portable edition??

Please consider adding the ZIP-archive again (portable ed.).

(I found it browsing the sourceforge archive, but that's painful)
How to have local versions of tracked config files in Git
Good idea. Times are from my laptop, which is less beefy than the test rig we used:

First query: 996s
First query with your variation: 593s
Second query: 67s
Third query: 21s
That was easy. Thanks. :)
I use a managed cPanel host and setup "catch-all" email addresses on my domains to forward to my gmail account. In the event of an outage or Google deciding to delete my gmail account I could change the forwarder or simply begin to use cPanel's built in mail clients. Having your email hosted at your own domain is one of the easiest things to do to gain control over something you normally let somebody else manage.

As to running your own email server? Don't bother. Unless you plan to stay on top of exploits, DKIM keys and SPF records you'll wind up with serious mail delivery problems.
Scheduling time for yourself and sideprojects is super important. I just started to do this recently and it's making a world of difference. So lock down a night a week or whatever and make it your "sideproject" time rather than grabbing a beer with someone or whatever.

Great Post Justin! I love how open you are with this stuff :)
And I thought the reaction to Michael Jackson's death was huge...

This will probably go down in history as quite a record. I'll wait for the post-downtime analytics.
That would actually kick the Bay Area class war into overdrive.

Think about it: every time your neighbours develop their property (thus raising the market value of the area), your own land taxes would go up. If you're of the great majority of people whose income isn't riding the tech-boom train, then you'll soon be driven off your land by unpayable land-tax liabilities.

While the article claims that property taxes "penalize" people for developing their land, the fact is that people who develop their land must have money, and therefore have the ability to pay taxes. The same cannot necessarily be said for people who don't develop their land. Land taxes would penalize the latter severely.
>>> And I bet that all those infected scripts come from one infected website.

Or one platform - Wordpress.

"Checkmarx, makers of an automated code review solution, recently looked at the top 50 plugins for WordPress examining them for vulnerabilities. Their analysis, published here, found 20% of the top 50 were vulnerable to the most common web attacks. Even more frightening, 7 out of 10 of the leading ecommerce plugins were vulnerable."

"To put this in perspective, this means that vulnerable plugins were downloaded to install in websites about 8 million times!"

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/7-10-leading-word...
SoundCloud Has a New Pile of Cash, and Wants to Cut Deals with Big Music
How Viber, Yahoo Messenger and Skype Can Improve Their iOS ASO
Snowden:"People at the working level at the NSA and CIA are not out to get you"
The PG chart shows them tripling in 6 months.
counterfeiting is a closer counterpart in my opinion as interest is capped by the amount of money you have while mining is only capped by time and porcessing power. Anyway, all the money generated from the Fed, loans and interest is complicated to think about. I thought it was simpler to illustrate the whole thing with "printing money." Most people can perceive the bad part of counterfeiting and relate that to excessive mining, which is basically the point I was trying to convey.
This was happening during the outage. Oops.
anecdote : being very reclusive, going to a social event will weigh on your brain, so much that a night feels like a week. So much randomness compared to your own routine. Exhausting but not far from what your body feels after a good workout.
I am assuming the ad offer would take many things into consideration. the main one being distance, I doubt you could really use such a feature to actually get to somewhere you need to go.

I would also like to point out that every ride they give, and every offer a customer uses, they are getting that much more data to create better behavior guesses which will help show the ads that would be used instead of abused. I also could see this being offered only after you have put in a destination (and thus also your credit card which means you actually need transportation) and if you are going to an area with a ton of restaurants at 5pm, it might instead suggest a restaurant (not near the destination). this couldn't be abused as easy.

I honestly don't see a way this couldn't be profitable in the long run knowing how Google uses all of their behavior data. (this all really depends on the car being self-driven)
getting

Service Unavailable

Error 503

EDIT: Looks like the issue is intermittent
It seems to be back up, but struggling under the load of probably millions of users checking their email.
With no confirmations a double spend is easy (would require a custom Bitcoin client designed for the purpose). Is it likely? No. So, if I ran a coffee shop, I'd hand over the goods without confirmation. If I were selling a house or a car, I'd wait for a whole lot of confirmations. Digital goods probably don't need to wait, either, particularly for returning customers.

So, yeah, I agree...I just want to be clear about why the risk is low: Because most people aren't going to cheat you out of a cup of coffee.
Look, I don't carry water for FSF or Stallman, but it's easy to make that statement in the context in the world they helped create. You can't imagine how much OS licensing used to cost, which would definitely be an impediment to non first-world populations (from an infrastructure, education, and economic point of view to the extent they can be separated)

edit: to expound, the world they helped create is one where there is a durable, vibrant, and mainstream OSS culture where anyone with a halfway decent internet connection can download the source code & compilation tools for a state of the art OS. Radicals become irrelevant when they win.
I think you've completely missed the point of free software.
It's just business. Your game (which looks cool), if it had no IAP and social features, would make a few hundred thousand bucks if it was an outstanding success. Whereas, Clash of Clans / HayDay / Candy Crush make between $500k and $1M per day.

If you were a publisher, where would you put your investment?
The crazy thing is, the email means less to me than the chat logs. Maybe 60% of the words i've ever said to my wife have been over gchat while we're at work.
are you actually making money off that? check my profile for a link to an open source project of mine that has similar functionality with a lot more content management features.
The Google AppsStatus dashboard looks broken at least in Chrome 32 and IE 11.

The status indicators orbs are either missing and misaligned.

http://www.google.com/appsstatus
There goes my 'grilled soylent patties' startup idea. bummer.
It is not negativity, it is the real world.
The author put up his wares and someone reviewed it and shared his thoughts. Hopefully, maybe, someone will come along and say "hey I checked in a fix for it!".
Still down in Ireland.
Ok, the iPhone device security is really quite strong. As for whatever else Apple does, it's not relevant to this discussion.
Google used to have spam filtering as a (pay to use) service: http://www.google.com/postini. My e-mail (I don't use gmail) used it before it was shutdown. Now they use http://www.roaringpenguin.com/.
That is not mining. Mining dollars happens when when banks engage in fractional reserve banking, lending out money that is simultaneously "in" a depositor's account.

But that doesn't create money, so much as temporarily creates an illusion of more money existing, hoping that there will not be a bank run to withdraw all of it. With non-reserve banking, when gold is passed around as money (possibly with seignorage), it is mined by digging in dirt.
I've seen the argument made that somehow RMS and the gcc developers are against making gcc more modular. Where is everyone getting that idea, because that's not what I'm reading.

Indeed, this quote from David Edelsohn in response to ESR seems to indicate they are interested in making the gcc more modular:

>GCC is working toward re-factoring its code base toward a more
compositional approach for "toolification". One can look at
presentations from the recent GNU Cauldron 2013 for discussion of the
topic.

So what am I missing?

[1] -- http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00212.html
Clang IS free software, and RMS agrees. The difference is that GCC discourages proprietary extensions and subsequent lockdown.
Do you trust their security?
So? It was functional. I hit the website just the other week to update my local XAMPP install, and didn't think for a second about the design. I don't rely on it much any more since I have a VPS, but I can use it test locally when my internet goes down (which unfortunately is getting to be too often lately.)

The new design is nice looking, but I just checked and to download the portable version I am filtered through to the sourceforge.net page for the project, which I never enjoyed navigating. It's not that difficult, but it's more laborious that the direct link that used to be on the downloads page.

Their download page is also very unclear at the moment. You don't know which link is 1.8.2 and which 1.8.3 without hovering over the link. How did that sneak by?
You should be. That was very naughty of you.
I came to HN because it is the one place where I knew I might find some intelligent discussion of why it was down.
I should note that only Google Apps Gmail seems to be affected. My non-Google-Apps account is working just fine.
Minuum co-founder here:

Please check out our data collection policy at http://minuum.com/data/ . We actually wrote a fair amount of it ourselves to try and reduce the “legalese” aspect. Hopefully, as you suggest, we can work to increase transparence more in the future.

As someone below mention the key reason we introduced network access was to enable language packs.

We also collect some analytics, but it's limited to data which is inherently anonymous. We really want to build an amazing keyboard that people will want to use every day so it’s critical we be able to answer basic questions like “Is the keyboard installed?” and “Was it used today?”. Otherwise we couldn't validate our design decision.

As stated in our data collection policy, if we ever want to collect anonymized typing statistics or other data related to what you type, that would be strictly opt-in and we would be as transparent as possible about it.

And yes, as others mentioned, we only access contact information if you use the import contacts feature in the settings.
I still can't attach files or use my contacts. Seems pretty flaky.
"Stallman wants you to use Free software because it's free-as-in-ideology, not because it necessarily works well or does what you want."

And I think, that's a better position to be in; I mean, freedom is more important than to have good softwares.
Note that that lower confirmation time results in lower security for the network and higher susceptibility to double spend from a well-equipped mining operator. A lucky miner could capture 50%+ for 2 minutes a lot more easily than for 10. Satoshi didn't set the block time to 10 minutes arbitrarily.

Network speed increases and increasing network hashing power and distribution make it less of an issue...but, the issue remains. Litecoin and Doge are less secure than Bitcoin in this regard and more susceptible to 50% attacks.

Edit: It's clear I don't actually understand all the implications of this. But, all of the replies below me don't seem to either. I need to re-read the Bitcoin paper.
> Who said it was bad?

RMS.

> People have said it is not copyleft.

RMS says that it is bad because it is not copyleft. Specifically, he says "The existence of LLVM is
a terrible setback for our community precisely because it is not copylefted and can be used as the basis for nonfree compilers".

Do you not think that "terrible setback for our community" is a subset of "bad"?
I am killing myself trying to make time. Not recommended.

Two Kids, one full-time job, one part-time job and a growing number of side projects... WHY? BECAUSE.
That, and if the 40-bit hash is used for aes full disk encryption (encrypting the device requires pin or passphrase). And, if full disk encryption uses proper key expansion, why don't the just use the same thing for the pin? (maybe so that if you reuse pins, you couldn't easily get the pin from an unsecured device? But then again, how hard could it be to brute force 10^4 keys, given that the device will need access to the salt before deriving the decryption key anyway? No HSM seems like it has to be a fail here, no matter what...).
Same here, it seems it just came back up for a 2nd time ...
>Linus stands directly against this sort of idea

Linus and the rest of the Linux kernel developers make it intentionally hard to keep out-of-tree modules working against the kernel for the same reason that GCC does, which is to have the code included into the main project where it will benefit all end users instead of having proprietary/out-of-tree modules/plugins which are available to a select audience.

I can't see how you can claim that Linus stands 'directly against this sort of idea'. They seem very much aligned to me.
Eric Schmidt On Inequality
they could also try http://schoolnotez.com/ :) it is also downloadable: http://schoolnotez.com/schoolnotez.zip
That's why you use Google Apps for Domain with a domain name you have control over. That way you can switch providers but keep the same email address.
Drudge serves the same purpose as Twitter. Places like those are bad at specifics but are really good at things like "shit's going down in Boston around the marathon".

They're not good at specifics, which is how an unrelated electrical fire at the JFK Library got lumped in with the bombings.
Use your phone for work email? Your employer can erase it
Start freelancing, then raise your rates and use my little calculator [1] to "make time", then work on side projects.

Also: as someone who did a lot of side-projects over the last few years, my advice is "start a side product" instead (if you want to end up living out of it, that is).

[1] https://www.wisecashhq.com/goodies/bootstrapper-calculator
This is exactly why I've abstracted my Gmail accounts behind my own personal domain. If Gmail starts charging/gets shut down/I get tired of it, I can switch over to another email provider that supports custom MX domains.

I (almost [1]) never use my actual Gmail address.

[1] The only time I use it is for Google services (i.e. Adsense) that require a Gmail account.
It is up for me now, except that I am unable to add any attachments to emails.
The rough line of reasoning here is that non-free software will, eventually, allow business tactics which run counter to software thriving and the best technology reigning.
The short and skinny for me:

> The short answer is: I work on side-projects whenever I have a spare moment. I sacrifice other things (watching TV, reading the newspaper, playing video games) so that I can do creative work.

In late August of last year I had come to the conclusion that I needed to start and finish a small project to get a feel for what it takes to see things through and gain perspective on what it takes to bring an idea to reality. I've been building things for as long as I've been able but in software it's never, "finished," and I always have my nose to the grindstone. So I picked a hobby I'm passionate about, scoped out a project I felt could be reasonably completed in my spare time and at the advice of a friend I signed up to be a vendor at a local comic/arts/games festival... and I only had an idea!

Needless to say it put a lot of things into focus. I did sacrifice time with my wife in the weeks leading up to the event. I spent every spare moment I had when I wasn't at work or taking care of my family on it (with the occasional night off of course). I realized pretty early on that I wasn't able to do everything: I farmed out illustration and typesetting work to other freelancers. I never did find an editor in time which hurt the project a little I think. But every step of the way up until that milestone I was thinking about what I needed to do next in order to get there.

And when I was finally there? I printed twenty books. Sold six. And couldn't have been happier with the outcome. I have a website up, the beginnings of a fun little project and this year my goal is to work on marketing and promotion: something I have never done before.

You just have to play with the hand you've been dealt.
The Amiga might have something to say to you about modern personal computing.

Well, I should clarify. The Amiga was -demo'ed- in 1983 but not released until 1985.
Just get a digital ocean VPS for 5 bucks and configure it.
Test Javascript MV* Framework by extending ngScenario
Wikipedia credits Paul Buchheit:

> The idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google,[55] and went on to be developed by Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. Google announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004.
Apparently, not the team responsible for GMail.
Unfamiliar special characters give me the vapors, too!
I agree. Also it serves to be notable so people keep talking about it.
If you don’t have Paul Buchheit in your list of programming gods, your list must be very short. Anyway, probably the fist version sucked and he used a lot of internal libraries.
What is that, like, 800 bucks? High rolling.
I'm an end user. You probably are too. As an end user the GPL benefits me by granting me access to the code, to make alterations, to republish as I see fit.

Most end users don't care. Some do.
Scratch that, very intermittent up/down. . . mostly down!
Not always the case if you can ride public transit. I've gotten a couple coding projects done on the bus.
I watched it. Made me think that this site serves the potentially positive purpose of showing that sending nude pictures to people is generally a bad idea. By extension, people will then view "trusting the interwebs" with private information as generally a bad idea as well.

Either way, he's a scumbag and the site is terrible, but it's an interesting social experiment.
I would love to see some instructions to deploy something on a custom server or VPS.

I'm currently using NameCheap's e-mail service because setting up the software was too complicated.
up but flaky...
DKIM and SPF are not that hard to set up. And it's a low enough barrier for entry considering that's all we have to stop spammers.

Edit: not sure about SenderID, to be honest.
Or if you do, take the bus or train! I still commute once a week to the city and that 40-60 minutes is priceless.
My philosophy is that when you're giving people free money you shouldn't have to make much effort to notify them.

If people want the money let them come to you. If it's unclaimed after a year the policy could be that you'd donate it to charity. Which would keep with the spirit of tipping. (Or unclaimed funds could be divided between existing users each year, or returned.)

There are lots of things you could do.

Another interesting idea is to have a finders fee. So If an existing user helps track down the owner of an unclaimed account, they get a fee like 10%.
I just complained about that in reply to another comment. I understand that they don't want to have a bunch of links on the download page, but I wish the "More Downloads" link expanded inline with direct links to the most popular downloads (portable versions, and please put the .7z there alongside the .zip) instead of having to make three additional clicks on sourceforge.

Also, the provided links are not even clear about which version you are downloading. You don't know which is 1.8.2 and which 1.8.3 without hovering over the link.
Tool for compiling your iOS apps to other platforms...
When was the last time anyone had to patch their qmail instance? When was the last time qmail even needed to be patched?
US law schools often phrase it exactly as invitation or solicitation to an offer. I definitely don't claim to have any authoritative knowledge on its applications in any jurisdiction.
On the flipside, overfiltering that begets controversy like this tells the PTB what people care about. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, so sayeth the sociopath, and hey, any information on undesirables is gravy.
This is a very important principle.

For a time, Target used Amazon's website code. Here is what they found. People leave reviews of books that they like. People only bother reviewing microwave machines when they didn't work.

This meant that Amazon's code didn't work out as well for Target as it did for Amazon...
My brain hurts from contemplating what you wrote.

The point of gmail is that they take the configuration and headache of maintaining a mail server away from you. If you're okay with running your own qmail/sendmail, then there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail. Google didn't invent email. They just run some of the world's largest mail servers as a (mostly) free service.
Well in a sense they are not. The difference was made up by Apple many years ago (before the John Hodgeman commercials even) that Apple Computers were not PCs. The point made sense to the extent that they used their own architecture and chips (not just Intel computers running a different OS).

But in the classic sense yes iPads are Personal Computers. They just are not PCs in the 'I bought an IBM' (when you purchased a Gateway/Dell/Compaq) and you really mean an x86 sense.
The levels I'm thinking of are the ones that require 200 green or multiple combos of special candies. Add in the chocolate things and the tornadoes and it just gets worse.

I don't know if it was poor design or purposeful to get more money out of people, but I tend to think the latter because of just how many places it begs to buy things.

People probably do get frustrated and quit. I know that's what I end up doing. Especially when my gaming habits are 30 minutes here and there. I just want a short session, not play for 5 minutes and have to pay more or wait 30 minutes to play more.
Agreed, minimal languages like Q work really well.

any bird:`int$"hehand"=2^`int$"hebush"

(./) 2_iscomp:any 3,'s:"a",'"crowd"
I care about free oxygen for all, but if the only way to get it was by buying it, I would still buy it, and applaud those attempting to enforce it.
It's also notoriously difficult to break into (in the software space) for Western companies. With Japan, there's the isolationist culture, and with China, there's the Great Firewall.