skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I switched from Chrome to Firefox Nightly (i.e. Firefox with Australis) a couple of months ago.

I really like it. There's no noticeable performance hit, but I'm definitely finding it more stable. My favourite recent feature addition is the ability to pin add-on shortcuts to the new Firefox menu, which I'm finding a massive improvement over using the add-on bar/ramming stuff into the same toolbar as everything else.
Ask HN: Best way to (technically) produce an ebook?
Hi guys,
i was wondering what the best way to produce an ebook is. Imagine there a mixture of plain text and a fair amount of source code and images.

* How do you author the book? Word? Latex? Any of the 5 gazillion other tools available?

* What tools do you use to reliably produce a good looking mobi/epub/pdf file from that authoring source?

* Links to any discussions appreciated

Thanks
This is awesome. Its amazing it took so long for someone to actually make this a reality. Thanks for helping make the world flat stripe!
I've seen Upworthy work from up close and from my experience this post misses out of a few keys.

1) The process that drives Upworthy' success is the way they write and TEST headlines. Sure their current title types won't work forever, but they are incredibly good and testing and improving on processes. I would expect this to continue.

2) The majority of sharing (and thus traffic from) facebook is done on individual profiles (and not the organization's facebook page). One video I worked on was shared by 90,000 individuals. Accessing the profiles of that many people is the key to making FB work for any organization. This focus on the page is misguided.

Sure the reduction in reach from their fanpage will impact their ability to spark initial interest, but that's just one of the channels they use.
A "free list" is a fairly standard programming pattern, though it's not as common to see now with memory management and GC in most languages. At the base level, all it is is a list of currently "free" (i.e. available) resources that have been pre-allocated.
Well, I did Erlang-inspired runtime patching and even hot module updates (reloads) with Python and gevent.backdoor. However, it was a hack (loading new module and [non-atomically] replacing all references to old one), especially if compared to Erlang approach.
I have in the past (as someone who publishes artistic projects on the Web) employed other people to collate and filter the feedback we've had. It's a lot easier to face an 80-comment thread where 20 comments are contentless abuse if you can just read a single line that says "Negative, no specific focus: 25%".
> One angry message has more effect than ten friendly ones.

This is something more people need to be aware of in general: these kind of messages are processed by two entirely different mental systems that do not cancel each other out, with the negative emotions having a much larger relative weight because they evolved out of the "avoiding things that kill you" mechanisms, which is kind of a big deal in evolutionary terms.
This. For sure.
I don't understand your comment. He complains that it is too hard. Isn't that also your point?
That's also true. Different people have differing opinions about what should be national policy vs. state policy, and it can actually be counter-intuitive/paradoxical until you really look into it.

For example, most American conservatives favor strong national defense, but minority pockets of conservative areas are strongly anti-federal and favor local militias. It seems odd, but you'll find that most of that bent veer that way from both the Constitutional right to bear arms in a well regulated militia (unspecified as to who regulates it, but that's a small technical quibble), combined with an American leeriness about government (that the same amendment seems to voice) and you can kind of see how that kind of thing arises.

And there's similar sentiments all over the political spectrum.

As an American, the E.U. looks similar in this respect. Politics are tied up in originator theories (the E.U. was meant for xxx) and a European nation vs. local nationalism. With Europe being perceived as being very liberal from an American perspective, it's interesting to see politics that would be framed here as extreme conservatism as part of the normal modern European political debate and it's a good lesson that not everybody is wholly liberal or conservative on all issues.

As to what I support, this current overly complicated system, of overlapping but non-equal areas of trade, borders and monetary systems (the EEA, EU, ESDP, EFTA, EuroZone, Schengen, and on and on and on) seems unsustainable in the long-term.

It simply makes more sense to say "if you're in Europe, you are part of the EU which implies you are part of common defense, common trade, common monetary policy and so and so forth" and not worry about which part of the venn diagram a particular nation is. My prediction is that this will happen within the next 50 years. And 50 years after than everybody will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.

From an outsider's perspective, Europe today is better than Europe was even just a couple decades ago and I think it's largely due to this unification movement. Having a larger government override local concerns seems particularly difficult for Europeans right now, but as an American we're quite used to it and find it generally tolerable.

As a frequent visitor to Europe over the last few decades, I enjoy the more unified Europe more, it's just easier to get around and do things, even if some of the local flavor has been lost (I used to love collecting all the various currencies, now it's just Euros, bleh).
This has to stop!
With traditional merchant accounts, it's up to the merchant how much they check. As long as the 16 digits are correct, the processor will process the transaction. All of the other data (CVV, exp date, name, address, etc.) is optional.
This has been called The Problem with Facebook ('Facebook uses its filtering power to make money [...] we are all advertisers') by the guy currently on the frontpage for his 'Facebook Fraud' video ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514 ).

The Problem With Facebook

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g
Yahoo Acquires Social Diary Company Wander For Over $10M
I've found that writing concise and effectively worded personal letters, in my own words, and faxing them to my representatives in Congress, does seem to have some effect.

I lay out my case, demonstrate that I am knowledgeable on the topic and obviously paying personal attention to it, and that I can think and reason rationally including when I vote.

That, they -- and/or their staff -- seem to notice.

Of course, now my Congressional representatives seem to be beginning to hide their fax numbers. So far, my Google-fu has remained sufficiently strong...
Professional Coaching industry is all set for a makeover
I'm sorry, I might just be misunderstanding so please correct me if I'm wrong but...

The main vulnerability he talks about is if a major provider were to be hacked and have their file replaced (or go rogue, entirely). In either case, is any login system that doesn't use two factor authentication and allows for password resets via email really going to do any better?

Edit: I realize he points out that 2 factor auth really is the only solution here, just, it seems like the criticism applies much more widely than just against Persona.
I love OSH Park. Their boards are very high quality and their design rules allow for some small traces, spaces, annular rings, and drills. Small relative to other batch-based and small-volume services, anyway... the limits are still a little too big for properly escaping common BGA packages, which is the hurdle I'm trying to overcome right now.
My mistake, the original article suggested Christie could not take control:

But a big reason that Christie hit Camden's police unions so hard was simply that he could. He'd wanted to go after New Jersey urban schools...But a series of state Supreme Court rulings...
I am not knowledgable enough about Square itself to know what they are "disrupting", but their chargeback section in their sellers agreement is no different than that of a standard merchant account. Seller liable for all chargebacks; they reserve the right to hold an unknown reserve; charge a larger fee; or close the account.

Do they try to differentiate themselves via customer service?
Always had Firefox as my default, even when it was stuck on large, slow releases and was lagging a bit behind Chrome as far as features and speed.

My reasons are pretty trivial, and I'll readily admit Chrome can be better to work with in certain dev cases, but I like being able to customize the UI. (I think the back/forward buttons belong to the right of the address bar where they're easier to reach with a mouse and I like having an RSS button, dang it.)
No, I mean ZeroMQ takes care of the underlying queue for free (there is an underlying set of queues, which can be persisted if necessary)
To sort an array/collection in Go, you must implement an interface with 3 methods: https://gobyexample.com/sorting-by-functions

It's boilerplate, which generic methods would avoid.

There are shortcuts for sorting common types by their natural order in Go, so you only have to write this for custom types or custom orderings.
Pullup, the site you join via pull request
It's all wet.
The delivery guy could just fill it up from the tap at the selling location.
Sure. I'm just saying that you actually have to make that comparison. The Nazis were not so amazingly evil that any conceivable means justifies the end. You actually have to weigh it up.

Given that the Soviet Union far outstripped Nazi Germany in terms of systematic murder during WW2, it would take a stronger argument to convince me that Nazi Germany + Soviet resources would have been any worse than the Soviet Union + Soviet resources.
Oh sod off.

The point about things like this is that by raising awareness and getting people on board to do concrete action, we move the "collective consciousness" in the direction we'd like to see it go. Imagine if 20 years ago everyone had that attitude about gay and lesbian rights. Imagine if 80 years ago everyone had the same attitude about equal rights for minorities.

You people are jackasses. Just because someone can't dedicate their full time job to fighting this doesn't mean they don't care or are lazy. And even if they did dedicate their full time job to it, what exactly do you suggest they do? The first thing that comes to mind to me is that they should start trying to rally others. Which is, as it turns out, exactly what is being done here.
Show HN: Podiversity: Netflix for audio podcasts
The difference is that in the math class, what sent people away was not a lack of success but a lack of interest. The people who remained at least found the idea of performing proofs better than a sharp stick in the eyey. In the author's class a person could be interested and passionate about coding and not succeed and a person who felt that a few hours solving a homework was a lot of time spent coding could.
Ask HN: Ethics of selling domain to prospective client?
I recently petitioned a local business to freelance design/develop a site for them. Ahead of our first meeting, I did some domain searching and found a great domain name (it's a domain hack).

I feel that the domain could be worth something on its own, but I'm not sure that it's ethical at this point to try to sell it to them. Do I give it to them? Give them the option to purchase it (cost?)? Solicit to a larger brand? sit on it? I would've never have found it if they didn't appear interested in having an online presence.
You're welcome. Anything specifically?
Along that line the pool at USC had an underwater speaker system. It was nominally to allow coaches to give input to swimmers as they were swimming but we managed to put music on it a couple of times. Fun but annoying to the other swimmers if they didn't like your music choices.
Well said. I think your adwords example is spot on.
My suggestion is to just use RabbitMQ. It's written in Erlang, it uses a BerkeleyDB-like backend for message storage. It's non-distributed, "durable", and optionally with persistent and non-persistent messages. It has a web interface to examine messages. Second suggestion is to use JSON for your messaging format, although it's possible for basic tasks to put all the info you need in the headers.
I think you're misunderstanding justinsb's point a little bit. To be concrete, you have to remember to use "defer" in Go to clean up resources and locks, or else someone trying to use "recover" won't handle panics properly.

This won't unlock the mutex on panic, which is observable if someone is trying to recover():

func F() {
mutex.Lock()
... do something here that panics ...
mutex.Unlock()
}

But this will:

func F() {
mutex.Lock()
defer mutex.Unlock()
... do something here that panics ...
}

This is basically the same set of hazards as maintaining exception-safety in C++ or Java. So in this regard panic is very much like an exception system. (Of course, it has very different idiomatic use.)
Yahoo-Yelp Partnership Another Bold Move for Marissa Mayer
I don't care too much about the "delightful functional idioms" (on the grounds that merely adding generics to Go will still leave us pretty impoverished on that front anyhow) and doubt the Go team does, either. Probably the biggest and most visible pain point of missing generics is here: http://golang.org/pkg/container/ In particular, the pain point is that there aren't very many things there.

Missing generics does not mean that no alternate data structures ever get written; as you can see, there are three of them there, which is greater than zero. However, it does mean they are more painful to use, consistently, everywhere, and no matter how much we'd all like to pretend we are infinitely disciplined programmers, pain matters, and in practice programmers visibly shy away from harder things. It is simply a fact that we must deal with. Generics missing from the language are a problem because it means that doing the right thing is harder than doing the wrong thing of just, say, using the wrong data structure because it's more convenient. A language (or an API or a library) should make right things easier and wrong things harder; it is a legit criticism when the right thing is impossible and the wrong thing (extensive copy & paste) is the only choice.

Maps & slices are great and all, but they do not correctly cover all use cases, and the sort of servers that Go is otherwise very suitable for is also exactly where you might end up needing something other than those two things for performance reasons.

I'm living without generics in Go, of course, because everyone programming in Go is. But I definitely see a lot of places here and there where I'm writing 5 lines extra, 10 lines extra, here, there, a little bit everywhere, that I simply should not have to write. Or, far worse, debug. Too often in Go I'm copying & pasting code where I should have generics, too often I'm fiddling with data structures at a lower level than I really need to.
From Germany over France, Netherlands and the US:

--- speedtest-sgp1.digitalocean.com ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 50 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 277.878/291.729/306.448/5.964 ms
How to Manage a Team That's Older Than You
Something that came up as a side-topic in Korean aviation is how the complete lack of a hobby flying industry has been very harmful in terms of feeding the commercial pilot requirements. Pilots learning to fly large airliners have a fraction of the total airtime on far fewer aircraft than the typical pilot from a country with hobby flying.
> This is a denial-of-service attack made possible by some misunderstandings in Bitcoin wallet implementations

So... they didn't handle transaction processing correctly either. Are there any exchanges that are handling this properly?
Because of an easily fixed bug in the software of some exchanges?
Probably due to the code they reused from back when they were a site to trade Magic cards.
Podcast: Microsofts New CEO Discussion
Braintree's had 130+ for a while: https://www.braintreepayments.com/docs/ruby/reference/curren...
Can someone give me a ELI5 breakdown of what's happening in the bitcoin world right now? First MtGox and now Bitstamp.

Any reading material on the subject (for a newbie) would be greatly appreciated.
If only there was some regulation. Then maybe I would consider trusting these exchanges.
Just pushed a fix should work now if you refresh
I scratched an itch in this space to create, in Python, a web hook task queue. I wrote it up here http://ntorque.com -- would love to know if the rationale makes sense...
hmm yeah, was too preoccupied with getting the layout right, so some typos crept in :)
Paper is edible; compared to small plastic toys it's practically delectable. As long as the ink is safe for consumption then there seems little to object about.
Knowledge sets us free. Let's return the favour.
Sounds like he wants seller protection, which is why he switched to Paypal.
C precompiler macros can be (and are) used to provide generic-like semantics.

Go has no such "blessed" precompiler-macro system.

Templates/macros are an ugly solution, but they are a solution.
> Are there any exchanges that are handling this properly?

I very much doubt it ;)
Wrong exchange.
Victory in the battle, not the war. But the ability to win a battle is huge.
Quite the article title.
It looks a lot like a bank run to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run

EDIT: See this for a more thorough description of what I mean: http://www.dailytech.com/Mt+Gox+Bitcoin+Bank+Run+Intensifies...
Aptly: Debian Repository Management Tool
Does anyone know how to look at cookies? I seriously cannot find cookies in the Firefox dev tools, the new interface is so irritating and disorienting. Plus I think everyone is just trying to collectively pretend that cookies don't exist anymore.
How to recognize a super-company when you see one.
Two hard months into CL – my feedback for the community: lisp
From what I understand of Cryptocat, if said hypothetical third party could decrypt it, wouldn't the entire security model be broken with respect to said hypothetical third party?
I am lucky that about two months ago I moved over to Coinbase from both Mt Gox and BitStamp. I wonder now if Coinbase is going to start having issues.
1/3rd of US healthcare costs is administrative. Single payer (Medicare for all) fixes that.

The lowest hanging fruit, biggest bang for the buck, best ROI, the most logical common sense way to control US healthcare costs is to switch to single payer with universal coverage.

Sure, do all the other kabuki, like quality of care, healthcare insurance exchanges, price transparency, generics, whatever. Because better is better. But know that you're weeding the flower beds while the house is burning down.
I'm a big fan of transparency. I'd explain the situation and let them know that you believe what you now own is valuable, but that you're happy to give them the first rights to (whether they hire you or not).

Could offer it as a deal sweetener if they do work with you, but also just offer to sell it at a reasonable price if not. Truth is today it's prob not much more valuable than what you paid for it, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to get at that price.
It's opensource, check it out: https://github.com/tfrce/thedaywefightback.js
Being a Mt. Gox client which had some money on their server as they paused BTC withdrawals, this gives me hope that the flaw on their side was indeed purely technical and that they're not nearing bankrupcy just yet.
Build­ing Mon­goDB into your Inter­net of Things: A Tutorial
The author has some good points. Ultimately, it is a kind of slacktivism. And a mass effort of one day won't fully counter the efforts of a few who are paid very well to advance the contrary agenda, the other 364 days of the year. And I speak as someone who was intimately involved in the anti-SOPA efforts.

But I disagree that it's completely futile. I often meet people who've never even heard of Snowden. So awareness raising can be important. Ultimately I think we're going to need new organizations and institutions, and new relationships with elected representatives. But until that day, it's worth doing what we can to delay the worst aspects of the surveillance state.
+1 just for 'mental antibodies'
Not too bad. It will encourage people to maintain control of their bitcoin
Taboos are alive and well among the scientifically literate. If you don't believe me, just check out the cognitive dissonance in this thread.
I have a feeling that people in the Bitcoin community are going to start learning the results of a truly free market, lack of regulations, and the dangers of dealing with a bank that you can't trust.
Yes, confidence in a currency is very important to its survival. The crazy volatility, the inability to withdraw sometimes, the competitors, the uncertainty everywhere. Bitcoin is not helping itself.
Ahh, yes, regulation. Like when big exchanges lobby the government, then monopolize the market and do whatever the hell they want while charging high fees? Great idea.

What you want is an independent audit, not regulation.
Both of these exchanges apparently implemented the Bitcoin protocol incorrectly. Their code that verifies a transaction has completed is incorrect, so they can be tricked into thinking a withdrawal did not happen when it actually did (or that a lesser amount was withdrawn). They need to fix their code, as there is a proper way to verify a transaction occurred or not.

Some reading:

http://qz.com/175565/why-nobody-can-withdraw-bitcoins-from-o...
Yeah, Stalin is a great savior of humanity. Let's give him a Nobel prize for killing only 10 million while he could easily kill everybody. Thank you for showing me the path of enlightened.
Fair enough. I just couldn't help myself.

Gotta like a good pun!
Wow! The complacent incumbents in Canada are about to get a can of whoop ass opened on them.
My business partner wrote this article. It really helps put things into perspective when reading any analyst's commentary on Apple.
...I love that.
Google Cloud Platform now signs HIPAA BAAs
This guy sounds like a douche.
Both actually :)
There's a large attack being directed at Bitcoin exchanges that is trying to exploit what seems to be a common misunderstanding about the Bitcoin protocol. It's the same misunderstanding that forced Mt. Gox to go down.

http://www.coindesk.com/massive-concerted-attack-launched-bi...
Sometimes also referred to as an object pool.

What makes this implementation special is that its pooling is both thread-local and global, and is plugged into the runtime/garbage collector. The former makes it much much faster than any pool the user could implement, and the later means is plays nice as resources become more scarce.
I sense ambiguity. For clarity: I meant "why can't it be both that bitcoin reduces the need for Stripe and that Stripe reduces the need for bitcoin", not "why can't we have both services?". You may well have understood - your answer could be appropriate either way. Competition reducing the need for a particular offering is a big portion of the reason competition is good.
Do you have some sort of guidelines when and when not to do hot release upgrade?

I still have to find anybody shipping whole updatable releases with erlang - couchdb, rabbitmq, any big open source project, nobody is doing it. I think it's a bit overrated, because realistically nobody will want to do this in production, unless it is audited and tested in every possible way. If you have to update external resources with the code_change callback it can fail miserably. I have no problem using it in production for small changes that I fully understand, but big release - wouldn't do it. Too many things can go wrong at the same time to react. You have to audit and test the upgrade and the rollback, which means extra code in code_change to handle the rollback too. Quite heavy.
Politics is often about finding bad solutions to worse problems.