skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not really not sure about the unconstitutional argument, but it's extremely common. Normally it's done more explicitly by hiring off duty officers. NYPD has the paid detail unit to organize private details for businesses. Where I live in Atlanta, every neighborhood you'd want to live in has their own privately paid force of off-duty officers patrolling. I'm more surprised that facebook is basically offering a grant/donation than outright hiring their own off-duty officers.
I have a python implementation, but haven't found the time to share it yet.

Funnily, I independently "invented" this before I found JSON5. I called it "yottson", because that's how JSON would be pronounced in German and what I sometimes call it in my head. Its a fitting name, because it is my ideosyncratic "almost JSON".

Formats like this are mostly meant to be used for configuration files. For example the sublime-text configuration files are JSON + comments. I don't know what all the hate is for, it's clear that you wouldn't send this over a wire to a client expecting pure JSON. In fact, the serializers in JSON5 and in Yottson only ever create standard-compliant JSON. Its a case of "be liberal in what you accept, strict in what you send".

One thing I'd still like to implement though is lossless parsing. The parser would keep track of all the comments and whitespace, so that when you change a value programmattically in the config file, it only modifies the value and preserves all the indentation and comments. Right now, as I mentioned, writing the file programmattically always results in pure compliant JSON, but kills all comments.
MD5 (Atom.zip) = 5454bd3a8271c93f5225cd2b57cdab81
The article discusses a few workarounds. I didn't like the tone, but it's interesting, not only a long rant.
Yep, HTML5 promises, but Flash delivers.
Judging from the linked article [1] other competing activities (TV, radio, etc) all seem like discretionary ones, so I would guess that it is referring to "leisure" reading, rather than reading as part of work. Likely to be mainly fiction too.

[1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nop-world-culture-sc...
Ask HN: How to write a web app that will outlast the latest JS trends?
HN is rife with JS framework wars, comparisons, latest feature news, libraries of the week, etc. What are surefire strategies for building a web app that won't have to be completely rewritten in 2-3 years? If I choose to write a web app in AngularJS and then in 2 years the Web community decides to coalesce around the new latest and greatest framework, technology, then it seems like I'll be in a rut.

How do you write a modern web app and be sure it will still be maintainable in the 2-3 year time frame?
Exactly right, attention is the prime issue. We could really do with a few more prominent content hubs that help people connect with promising new content.

However, there is a secondary issue, and that is of appetite. Appetite for novelty. We seem to often crave more of the same, rather than taking a chance on something unfamiliar. I do this too, for example I only go on Crunchyroll to watch Naruto-related shows, despite there being a large selection of other shows I could watch. What can be done to help open people up to new experiences?

As much as I dislike people banging on about how great things were in the 1960s, the one factor that does seem to be markedly different about that time was an openness to novelty within the masses. Logically there's no reason that can't happen again, but I don't know how it'll emerge.
Yeah, now updates within the app are broken.
$ shasum -a 256 Atom.zip

4614ec62feaea32392ad7f6b3a80534c8ad0c758ed210cabafcc86c5c49a49a1 Atom.zip
It's enough to mention that you like Linux and HTML5 to get all the upvotes...
Probably because GitHub was built with Macs. And it's not like they haven't open sourced a thing...
Well, if you're Indian and can take the survey you're probably in the pool of well educated who can read. Poor survey, extreme sample bias, HN deserves better.
“This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.”

― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
> a bruteforce over the MAC space wouldn't take long

Indeed, best supercomputers are running today around 10 petaFLOPS (= 10^16 FLoating-point Operations Per Second) and there are 2^48 ~= 10^15 possible MAC addresses.
Well, I suppose I can try.

While I understand that Github is a private body and that their site is, well, their site ... forcibly deleting someone's gist simply because they don't like that that someone has found a way around their invite process smacks of underhandedness.

Will they suspend his account permanently as a result of this leak? Will he have his account limited in some other way, preventing him from having private repos, for example?
Will they lash out against anyone sharing Atom.zip that they can trace back to a github account?

It's just all very "our show, our rules" of them to delete the gist.

And yes, I understand that it is their show. And yes, their ruleset too.

Doesn't make me feel any comfier in the knowledge that they'll simply delete anything that they don't approve of.
Liquidity is what makes markets fluctuate less generally. Part of bitcoins high volatility is directly attributable to the dearth of exchanges. The dearth of exchanges is directly attributable to regulations that're difficult to comply with (mainly because of the license cost and difficulty of the process), and to established Banks/MSBs not willing to use their already being in compliance with those regulations to explore bitcoin.
True, there's no proof that they did it.

I'd still put money on them having done it.
Except that in practice, this has just meant that people have defined their own ad-hoc extensions to JSON that add support for comments, since it's so useful for stuff like JSON-formatted config files.
How dare they collect usage data to improve their free product!!!
As disappointing as the sample size is (average 1k people per country), more important is the absence of info of where they all come from (pessimism says 1 city). (optimism says 2)
Notice the other comments set the user agent - to one I assume is used by the app itself when it does auto updates. You probably need to set that:

-A "Atom/0.1 CFNetwork/1.5
The SAS versus R Debate
Ideally you would have a strict subset of YAML rather than a totally different language for compatibility reasons. You can call it the Friendly, Readable, Declarative YAML standard so we can have a standards war that is FRDY vs. JSON.
You aren't wrong, but you only described half the feature.

Send an email to someone new from your facebook chat.

Regardless, this is clearly a different product, if you want to try really hard to think it's not, that is your prerogative.
It is rather disappointing that github heads down the Mac OS path while they base their company around a concept which is rather strange to most things Apple - openness and sharing. Writing for Mac OS first also makes it harder to port to other platforms as it is a rather idiosyncratic platform.

If they insist on pushing Mac OS AND want to be seen as a good free software citizen they might want to consider putting some effort in the GNUstep project. Once GNUstep is up to par they should be able to build for that on Linux and Windows with minimal porting efforts.

Still, I'm disappointed in the lack of vision many of these so-called 'open source' companies exhibit. Don't they realise that by pushing these closed, proprietary platforms they undermine the very base of their own existence? The software and community which github depends on was not the result of the generous sponsorship from Microsoft and Apple after all...
Desktop Commentary
Get commentary of an ongoing match on your linux desktop !
But metadata is also data.
James Bond does say this in Casino Royale.
This is not meant to be adopted, as in, replacing JSON everywhere.

It doesn't make sense for REST APIs. It doesn't make sense for communication between programs. In fact, its basically impossible to use this implementation for that, because (the last time I checked) JSON5 just used the JSON reference serializer. If you create JSON programmatically, it will always be valid vanilla JSON!

The use case is hand-written JSON. Either for configuration files (like Sublime Text). Or if you have hand-written data that you would otherwise put in a object in a .js file. You might want to separate your data from your code, but you can't just dump the javascript object literal into a json file, because it's not valid JSON. And maybe you want to leave comments in there, or trailing commas in lists.

If you send JSON over the wire, its trivial to sanitize it:

JSON5.stringify(JSON5.parse(sloppy_json))

This will also remove comments of course, if you are concerned about them eating bandwidth.
If you can buy things with something, then it's money.

No need to complicate things, bitcoin is money..
Yup. Well: it was Nokia, a paper pulp mill named after the nearby river/town, that diverged into tires and then electronics (pivoting appears to be a very Finnish practice). When they focused on cellphones, they sold the tire division as ‘Nokian’ (the genitive of Nokia, as in: ‘of Nokia’) but the main valuable brand is now apparently ‘Hakkapeliitta’ for winter tires. The name ‘Nokia’ however remains associated to a company that made tires in the XXth century, like ‘Ma Bell’ might not exist anymore in the US, but still means something.
I don't get the point either, how is POSTing JSON + a zip file easier than using scp/rsync to copy html to the server? I guess the author has a very specific/restricted environment that the post fails to describe.
Why would it surprise you if on Hacker News there were people educated in robotics?
That's incredible. It's the third time an Israeli company break the $1B mark in less than 6 months, isn't it?
I enjoyed this article. It is indeed rare to have serious studies on the long term human inventions and what it means to our species.
New DIY Cloud Computing Platform
for anyone clicking around like me searching for the code, and more description on the bird name(assuming it's some mozilla thing), it is[1] (and the repo [2])

i was assuming this would be some sort of xulrunner app(for some reason a non native chat client strikes me odd for some reason, but meh). it's actually an old seamonkey "fork" from what i gather, but i'm not sure if that's still the case.

can someone comment on why a browser is more desirable? i'm guessing it's, because of random bugs appearing where dns or other things may be leaked, and crossplatform support.[3]

i'm starting to think that the "right"(there i said it) way to deal with all this is if we follow with the portal approach[4](someone had a debian version, feel free to post the link). but instead of running portal on a seperate device it'll be a container in a container(or light vm). that way the outer container(vm) is the sandbox(portal), then you can run whatever app you want. and yes, i really what i propose is a major pain in the ass to setup, and won't work in windows that well, but meh i don't see why we couldn't make it easier. the main issue in my opinion would really be the privileges it might need.

[1]: https://wiki.instantbird.org/Instantbird:related_links#Thing...

[2]: https://hg.instantbird.org/

[3]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1676

[4]: https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi
You say that like it's a hard thing.
Thank you. Can anyone else confirm this?
I think you didn't get my point -- they engage in such activities because they couldnt succeed somewhere else and think the cause of their failure is that women do not have same opportunities. Moreover, it's easy to get attention with this subject. Women and career is a foolproof topic press and media love. Women who really succeed do not have the time to engage and they do not need to. They don't need this special treatment because they are successful because of what they do and not what they are.
Do you think:

- "Liberals" is a group of people who all think the same way.

- The only reason nuclear power isn't widely used is "Liberals not caring about climate change".

?
It is pretty depressing. On a more positive note: if you look at this list of books published per country per year, the UK does pretty well (even better if you divide the number of books by population)

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

It suggests there is at least an appetite to purchase books in the UK - even if we're not reading them!
It's not free (as in speech nor beer). Unless something has changed (I haven't been following), it will become paid after the beta period is over.
Sorry to tell you, it is not free.
https://atom.io/faq
"We haven't settled on pricing yet, but you can expect it to be competitively priced compared to similar editors."
If you store JSON in a version control system, then it is usually hand-edited JSON. (If it is generated programmatically at runtime, then the data is in a database.)

And if a file is hand-edited, it's format should have niceties that make hand-editing more pleasant, like optional trailing commas, and comments.

By making the format more suited to hand-editing, you also make it better for diffing and VCS.
I believe that the final product isn't going to be free - so that changes the landscape of the argument. Then again, maybe they won't have analytics in that version.

Note: I'm not making a comment on it being a paid for app - they've released bucket loads of open source code they wrote to create the editor. For that they should be praised.
Is this even a discussion? Anyone serious about analyzing data will use either R, Python (with Pandas/SciPy, etc), or Julia. For truly immense data sets that require pipelines, you'll use tools like spark, hadoop, etc - but SAS is basically a slightly improved excel.
Reading what? Newspapers? This survey is meaningless. At least use the number of books as your measure. Maybe what this shows is that the UK has the fastest readers in the world.

On the other hand in my experience readership is rather poor in the UK. All I hear at work is how amazing some TV programme was and you'd expect positive sample bias in a software shop.
>That depends on what you consider "OK".

What I consider OK is that we have had great growth in the breadth, scope and capabilities of the modern web. I've been on it professionally since 1996, and followed it even before, and I don't think there's anyone who would disagree with such a statement.

From a joke environment based on plain text circa 1993-4, we know have the ability to emulate whole CPUs inside a Javascript VM, AND with usable speed. And then there's ES6 with a whole lot of additions to the language.

>Netflix uses Silverlight. There are an awful lot of nobodies using Netflix.

Well, in the US. The world is 20 times bigger than the US. I'm not even sure why US users put up with Netflix pulling this shit.

>Blub users always think that things are OK.

Well, other's have it worse. They always think that the "blub" concept, a random idea in an essay, is something that's true, universal and settled, were it's just someones opinion. The blub idea, furthermore, is about the "expression problem", and it's condescending to people by assuming that that's all that matters.

People chose to write something in C, C++, Assembly, Lisp, Haskell whatever for lots of reasons, and the success of that undertaking involves a lot more reason than "expression". Things like community, libraries, toolsets, hireability, existing codebase, documentation, speed, heck, even familiarity, play a role as much, or even more, important than the mere "expression" capability of the language.

And, statistically speaking, the oh-so-expression language people don't have much to show for it, whereas the blub C/C++ people have tens of thousands of indispensable programs used by billions. Sure, they are much less, but at one point they were much more (Lisp existed before C/C++), and they also had nice funding going on until the mid-eighties, with not much to show for it. 3-4 C people in AT&T laid the foundation for most of what we use today. Were are the equivalent non-blub people, who had an impact in fields other than PL design?
Yeap, opposite of makefiles. I opt for TOML. YAML is great for fixtures.
It's the same with fiction writing - there are far too many people doing it, and the quality is ever more variable. I don't think this is a bad thing, just a sign of an industry in transition. I really like the fact that large numbers of people are encouraged to become creators.

But there really does need to be some way for a consumer to find what they're interested in, and for an artist to reach those who might be interested in their work. At the moment the old mechanisms seem to be vanishing, and it's not clear what will take their place.

I've seen people try forming communities with shared worlds to spark interest, new approaches using Patreon and Kickstarter, the ever unreliable flooding of social media. But the truth is that as a reader I'm finding it harder to search for things I like and as a beginning writer, I'm seeing my more advanced friends drop out of the midlist.
This really means harassing and arresting problem students and undesirables who are loitering near businesses.

It's also safer if they let the cops do the skull-cracking. This way Zuck doesn't have to give an awkward press conference about why his security guards were filmed beating up some teenagers in the parking lot.
Wow, awesome article. As someone who has lived in both the U.S. and Europe, this hits the nail on the head re: the difference in attitudes between U.S. entrepreneurs and most European ones.

I actually come away from this article inspired to try another start-up, after a pretty significant failure last year.
Because failure is much more expensive to European investors and it's not as easy to build huge successes in Europe.

So if they did they would quickly be out of money.

This is why the Samwer Brothers from Rocket Internet is doing things the way they are and can have so many startups they do.

Their copy-cat approach is very un-european but in reality the only way for European investors to be less risk-averse.

The safty-net comes with a price. Even in Denmark which is rated as on of the easiest ways to start a business the reality is that it might be easy to start a business, but it's very hard to scale it.
I don't think this is a very good thing to do. GitHub have shown that they don't want people circumventing the invite process so this move is totally unethical.

We should really try to support our own greater community...
There are no cited sources that support the premise of the article, that Europeans fear failure too much.

The cherry-picked 2011 was about the peak of the Eurozone crisis and austerity measures, obviously a special time.

Compare the EBAN 2011 slide in the article with optimism of the 2012 slide:

http://www.eban.org/e5-1-billion-market-shows-european-angel...
I can only speak for myself, but I don't want something incompatible with JSON, or completely different.

I want a format that looks like Javascript or Python code, and that is a strict superset of JSON (e.g. can parse all valid JSON). I want to pluck my object or list literal from my Python or JS code, put it into a config file, and have it work, no matter wheter I have final commas in lists or not. I want to be able to insert comments. And I want to be able to describe it as "JSON, but you can use comments", so people will be able to understand it immediately and edit the files. This is similar to what Sublime Text uses for its config files, for example. EDN, or more prominently YAML are just not well-known enough (and the latter is hellishly complicated).

Also, a nicety of JSON5 is that it serializes into plain JSON, so interopability is always ensured.
Mayor security vulnerability found in Android VPN implementation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/
>> "it's not as easy to build huge successes in Europe."

Why? Could you explain this further?
Creationism Math
What you're talking about is not DRM, much the opposite.

> If you see DRM as simply and securely distributing read access permission, then there's no reason this can't be achieved with OSS.

There is. If it's open source, the special sauce can't be special any more. The entire mechanism of DRM would be broken.
Not to mention that the population of Crimea is over 50% ethnic Russians.
>Are we seriously going to keep insisting on json as a configuration format?

Yes. It has good universal support, often without needing any libraries, it's simple, succint, and has good tooling.

>As Stormbrew already pointed out, we already have a format that is ideal for configurations (and sure, data exchange, why not), and it is called yaml.

Let's just not go there. YAML is a pain in the ass to parse, has different incompatible versions, the libraries are of widely varying quality, is not natively (without third party stuff) supported in most languages, and it's generally a mess.
While the app looks pretty cool and I have no beef with the app specifically, introducing yet another IM app is just going to fragment the market further and cause more issues than it solves.

There are so many different ways to communicate currently, that soon we aren't going to be sure what app to best contact a particular person with. You've got Email, SMS, iMessage, Facebook (Chat), WhatsApp, Twitter, and those are just are some of the top ways.

Everyone has their favourites and because of this, communication is getting more annoying and difficult purely because of the diversity of choice. Its not helped by large companies vendor locking their customers into a specific way of messaging, fully knowing that not all of the people they contact are there.

I have a strong opinion on this yet I have no real solution.

Whats the chances of the top tech companies coming together to create and implement a secure open protocol and/or app allowing end users to message anyone regardless of platform? I guess its pretty bonkers.
true I forgot to paste it back, same difference though:

$ curl -sLI https://www.atom.io/api/updates/download -A "Atom/0.1 CFNetwork/1.5"
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 12:55:36 GMT
Set-Cookie: request_method=HEAD; path=/; secure
Status: 404 Not Found
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Request-Id: 23d92789-1d1f-4ed0-bb95-9e2ff4b33bbf
X-Runtime: 0.014090
X-Ua-Compatible: chrome=1
X-Xss-Protection: 1; mode=block
Connection: keep-alive
The code isn't meaningless, it just exhibits undefined behaviour. This doesn't make the program wrong, it just means the standard has nothing to say about what precisely might happen. If the compiler chooses to infer the presence of an equivalent to VC++'s __assume (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1b3fsfxw%28v=vs.90%2...) from the presence of undefined behaviour, it's within its rights to do so, but this particular approach is by no means mandatory.

In fact, most of the compilers I've used actually don't do this, and are (in my view) all the better for it.

See also this rant on gcc's strict aliasing, borne of the same philosophy: http://robertoconcerto.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/strict-aliasin...
It doesn't matter whether it is free or not. My only aim was to provide information that might be relevant for some people interested in trying out Atom (admittedly I mixed this information with my personal position towards Google and the ever-present tracking aka surveillance) so that they know the implicit price of its usage.

You are free to use Atom or anything else, but you should always have as much information available as possible to correctly judge what you pay for any given thing.
Because the parsers for that configuration format are unsafe too? Duh!
Why would you be "in a rut" if the way you built your site is no longer the latest fad in 3 years?