skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole "package signing" thing can be validated against the source tarball with a bit of due diligence. The key is "source packages". As in, `apt-get source`. See:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/28372/how-do-i-get-the-source...

When you do that you'll get the original tarball that was used to create the package along with any patches. You can compare that tarball to one you can find on the Internet (usually in more than one location) and they usually have md5/sha1 signatures.

The rabbit hole goes very deep and yet there are people (like me!) who actually do do that sometimes. I suspected that the tuxtyping package may have been modified (due to corrupt .wav files being included) and went through the whole rigamarole of validation. I double and triple-checked the signatures against the binaries, sources, and everything else I could find in the package repositories (and mirrors).

Turns out it was just some filesystem corruption that added some extra bytes to the tail end of those .wav files. They're harmless.
Installing FreeBSD 10 to ZFS with a script
On being a proud non-technical founder
Nice!

I was lucky enough to have the pleasure of working with a few of the smart folks who were responsible for those weather visualizations.

They were created by a little known startup in Minneapolis, Minnesota called EarthWatch Communications. At the time they were creating 3D displays of weather data long before such visualizations were commonplace on every TV weather forecast.
Would love to see an open source tool like this for parsing general text / csv / fixedwidth / html in a similar way.

Very nifty concept.
Can someone share a use case?

It seems cool for... something.

edit: thanks all, very interesting.
"Set up receipts@example.com as Google hosted email, automatically parse all Amazon/SaaS subscription/etc emails and update the bookkeeping system" would already save me (or, well, my bookkeeper) 5+ hours a year.
Sometimes "that's impossible" or "you can't" is the answer you find out. :)
One way we've seen it used is to parse out info from receipt emails into a spreadsheet or expense tool.
Not the command pattern. The "Big Ball of Mud" architecture.
Amazon workers' suit to be heard by US Supreme Court
There will always be misallocation of resources, because the environment we live in can't be perfectly predicted. People's tastes change, the climate changes, sometimes people die unexpectedly, etc. Unpredictability leads people to make investments based on uncertainty, and that will always lead to "mistakes".

Interestingly, the startup ecosystem is a little replica of this in which the best investors understand that capital in fact must be misallocated if we're going to find The Next Big Thing (tm) [1].

Anyway the point I want to make is that just because resources are misallocated doesn't mean we can't smooth the transitions to reallocation. In fact, I would argue that because some misallocation is healthy (otherwise we aren't taking enough risks), we should have in place a system which does smooth the transitions.

Basic income is a proposal for smoothing labor transitions, comparable to how bankruptcy smooths capital transitions.

[1] http://avc.com/2013/11/loss-ratios-in-early-stage-vc/
I have to agree with some of the risks of cyber bullying with this. And like you, I don't know of a bullet proof method for mitigating that risk.

Some possibilities that come to mind, maybe using a combination of two or more of these:

- Require FB auth. Remove anonymity (to an extent) from the equation.

- Launch with a canned, relatively small number of broad compliments.

- Allow only community approved compliments. If new ones are added, block until they're approved.

- Allow submissions only until the list (without revealing the recipient's name) has been approved by multiple community members. Then lock the list allowing only up votes on existing compliments.
Sure, so whenever someone cancels their Planscope account I send myself an email with their name, email address, LTV, plan, and cancelation reason (this is also stored in my database.)

With this, I could simply CC that email to Zapier, they'll yank out all that info and shove it into a Google Spreadsheet, which will let me do certain things that would be a pain to program myself.
Problem is that it's not the app which is leaking the information, it's the API. The API unfortunately is well outside of Apple's control here.
https://twitter.com/sexysez95_sarah - fake account promoting puffchat seems pretty sleazy. https://twitter.com/Queenselfie96 also seems suspicious
The first half sounds like an echo-chamber hugbox
The second sounds useful, but mainly because the content was useful. Did any of the conference address what a female founder is specifically?

I'm still concerned that a Female Founders Conference would exclude men or people of other genders. Yes it's great to have a platform to stand as a woman, but what about trans* or non-traditional genders? Where do they go then? The whole idea of feminism is inclusion, which means including trans, queer and other genders and YES including men too.
Losses Mobilize the Bitcoin Police
I think the following is a reasonable path:

1. Read more books. Turn off Twitter, FB, whatever, and open your Kindle app. But be picky. Don't read crap.

2. Read every day. 30 minutes minimum at the same time every day.

3. Write code that implements what you learn.

4. Write code that is more consistent. Learn to write in patterns. Use patterns that you both learn from a.) books, b.) reading other people's code, and c.) that you come up with on your own.

5. Program by using coding standards. Either your own, or if you're in a company then follow the team's standards.

6. Review what you've written. Identify alternatives to the patterns you've used. How else can feature x be implemented? What do you like about each approach? What do the experts say about each approach. Then read everything you can about various approaches to a given problem and implement as many of them as you have time for.

7. Read some code written by someone way beyond your skill level in a language you know. Take in how well they write. Pick one thing they did well, read about it, understand it, then integrate it into your coding.

8. Rewrite something you wrote at least a year ago. Can you easily find a better way to implement this code? If yes, then rewrite. If not, then read more.

9. Learn one new tool that helps improve your workflow and get to a point of daily use.

10. Speed up. Use automation to eliminate the basic coding that you already know well and that is now wasting your time. Use whatever is easy for you whether its templates, macros, boilerplate, generators or automation. Just pick one and automate away the stuff you've already learned.

Repeat.
Is it possible to extract repeating patterns? example would be extracting repo name, number of stars, language and project description from GitHub Archive daily digests.

sample mail: http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/?u=439aa16a39e4b10e0b65ff2e...
This is exactly what I'll be doing.
Oh My Star - Github Stars Organizer
Breaking changes in JSON (RFC 7158)
I understand the empathy factor, but i believe it is misguided. The devices are not human; they never will be. Human, as a construct, is something that has developed over a long time based on physical constraints and chance. Applying the same logic, by choice, to devices is the point i am trying to discuss towards.

I think a device that purrs when you plug it in, makes a sharp whine when you drop it, and uses its vibrations to communicate subtle emotional reflections [buzzing for a little longer when you pick it up after down time, getting excited in the morning and over clocking just a touch,etc] will generate empathy and attachment to devices. The smart phone is uniquely capable of transmitting a number of emotional reflections through a number of ways. The voice element is so basic; an automated slave that you constrain to human speech patterns. I think looking at the device as a creature then building interactions from there.
I really want to open source the core parsing bit which is based on diff-match-patch but I've got some cleanup to do before... It is probably not hard to reverse engineer what we're doing, it is pretty simple!
If you know anything about Windows security you will know that it is completely broken by default and there's no workarounds. I know, I know, "Citation Needed". Here you go:

> Neither the NT hash nor the LM hash is salted. Salting is a process that combines the password with a random numeric value (the salt) before computing the one-way function. Windows has never stored hashes in human-readable form, so there has never been a need to salt them.

Taken from Microsoft's own documentation: http://bit.ly/1juRmCT (Using Bitly because the link has parens and HN sometimes doesn't like that). Microsoft's argument boils down to this: Because they don't provide a GUI to view password hashes they're secure!

People gave LinkedIn and Adobe crap for their leaked password dumps not using a salt (or using reversible encryption!) and yet here we have MILLIONS of Windows installations all over the world doing the same damned thing. What's worse is that Active Directory also doesn't store password hashes using a salt. If your domain admin credentials ever get stolen the attacker is mere minutes away from cracking every damned password.

For giggles, here's a tool you can use to dump not only your saltless Windows password hashes but the actual passwords. This is because Microsoft also uses a reversible encryption scheme: http://blog.gentilkiwi.com/mimikatz
That's clever! I had never thought to CC/BCC into our parser...
Tarsnap's privacy policy is pretty terrible. Tarsnap reserves the right to "at their sole discretion" share your information. Even in the case where authorities don't go through due process. This is completely unacceptable to me. Privacy policy for a service like this should be "Warrant or GTFO".

https://www.tarsnap.com/legal-why.html
I stopped reading at the first paragraph. What an inflated sense of self to think that ones' own feelings after leaving academia imply a dire situation for all of academia.
Did anyone use CloudMade at all? It's always been Mapbox for me
Since the original one is really long; would make the install script even less readable.

Also, git.io allows only shortening github repos; so there should be no harm
I remember seeing that at the local auto show last year. I couldn't help but think that if you see a mouse in the car they did something wrong.
For people whose main complaint is watery coffee, but are not opposed to pod systems in general, try Nespresso. I find them a lot better than the coffee I have had from Keurig and Starbucks machines.

The coffee is pretty good -- better than most coffee shops, but not as good as a great one. Apparently they are actually used by a lot of restaurants when you order a coffee.
Assuming they don't execute in sufficient quantity for there to be liquidity issues, at each point the price will change to incorporate the market's guess as to how much they'll be buying relative to how much various parties want to sell - which will be entirely accurate after (3), and fairly accurate after (2). Whether it goes up or down for 2 and 3 depends on whether the market has over- or underestimated just prior, but it will certainly be up at each point over the Fed holding a different policy. Since the Fed's policy is what we're discussing (rather than whether we should be long or short T-bills just prior to each event), the distinctions you're making aren't terribly important.
What's worked for you all for making the leap from lone programmer to working on a team with a mentor/people who are smarter than you?

I ask this as someone somewhere between "beginner" and "intermediate". I've used git on a bunch of projects, but normally get hung up with branches or with trying to undo changes. Even harder than version control, I think, is getting a lone beginner programmer to write tests. When I'm writing something, it's always tricky figuring out exactly what it is I should be testing. When time is a limiting factor, it's hard to get from "I know I should be doing this" to actually doing this.

When you are good enough to make your own projects work the way you want them to work, but not good enough to contribute to the open source projects you actually use, how do you break out of your bad habits that you know you will need to break when part of a team/large project?
I was reading about the Sicilian Defence, which got me deep into another variation - The Yugoslav Attack[1] Video [2]

I'm curious to understand if chess masters have all of this committed to memory, and thats something one needs to excel at Chess.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Defence,_Dragon_Variat...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgYY4c7ijy8
It was also extremely repairable compared to modern computers. Everything was modular and upgradeable, including the CPU board, which just slid out of the machine on a lovely tray.
It depends what you want out of it, but the thing keeping me from going to industry is that none of the people I know who've made the transition are allowed to publish most of the interesting stuff they do. I don't have to ask anybody's permission to write a blog post, publish a detailed technical paper, publish a high-level overview paper, or anything else.

I know there are places that are more open-minded towards publishing your results in the open literature, but the majority of companies seem to put roadblocks in the way. I know some people who have done very interesting work (one at Exxon, for example) and will never be allowed to talk publicly about it, because it's their company's trade secret now.
Why do you think you need a database to hold user registration information?

Why won't CSV, XML, JSON or text files formatted some other way work?

Keep in mind that "learning databases" is not like "learning wordprocessors" or "learning spreadsheets", but if your serious this self paced course from Coursera might be a place to start.

https://www.coursera.org/course/db
I had to create a small ADO class for advanced C++ last year.

It was... terrifying.
I could never justify the cost of a Keurig when a traditional coffee maker costs just 20% the price. After using a drip machine for many years I finally decided to brave a more unique solution, the Aeropress. Now I know what great coffee tastes like. I tried a Keurig equivalent recently and I can't believe how much worse it tastes. With a Keurig you pay a premium price for poor quality coffee.
Agreed. But partisan hackery is like porn. You know it when you see it.
FYI, a neat existing command-line music player that's already on debian repositories (and I'm guessing others as well) is called `mocp`.
My experience in a tier 1 tech support job is:

1. The user clicks yes. They might read what they clicked yes to.
2. The user doesn't usually read prompts
3. The user will not read error messages, even if they are to their benefit.
4. The user doesn't know how to "google" problems
5. The user will sometimes even ignore IT professional help even when they call us. This is usually a "bitch session" with no clear resolution.
6. You will tell the user what to do, and they will also say yes. They still don't understand.
7. Users will install software and not understand how to remove said software (control panel<remove software).
8. Users are not curious. What would be obvious to simple reading they will ignore.
9. Only when the computing environment is unbearable, will they call in. Or it will be the simpleton user who wants you to do their work for them.
Had no trouble finding it earlier, but I just clicked the Store button in the nav and skipped the product page entirely.

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ links to ?product=arq3 though, text "per computer for Arq 3".

Please consider integrating or linking http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/ (as found in the HN comments somewhere around here), it's been invaluable when talking with people about Arq today.
It seems like an awesome feature. Just I don't like the landing page... If patio11 wouldn't have shared on twitter saying how awesome it is, I would have closed without caring too much - just one more thing on The Internet I simply am not bothered with.

The explanation, the first paragraph simply doesn't really give a clear idea on what it does and what's the benefit for me, and, imho a random user is not really motivated to try and figure it out.

I believe a simple nice diagram

[email] -> [zapier] -> [internet]

with some example integrated in it would do a much better job.
Trained for discounts
I personally like the hard coded values and the extremely long line lengths.
It is not possible to extract something (today) that would be generated inside a for loop. I'd be curious if anyone has ideas on how you might do that.

If you need support for more complex emails and extraction rules, you might look into using http://mailparser.io/.
We've got some particularly complicated html RegEx for Email parsing at our company. We manually write new ones for new email layouts as we get them. I'd be interested in any information on how you're solving the issue, as I love how you've tackled it at least on the UI end.
I would like this for PDFs. Do you know an app that can handle that?
Say you want LinkedIn messages to import to your CRM but they don't offer integration. Zapier the email notifications for your application. It's API by force, if companies don't let you in the front door just use another entrance.
ASK: Do you like SnapChats full screen message?
Do you like Snap Chats full screen message? What do you like about it compared to the traditional message screen (e.g. Whatsapp)?
Hacker News filter
I am playing with it now. I want to have my EZPass (RFID auto tolls) statements sent to my inbox. Right now I get an email with a url, then I have to type a PIN code, just to see my monthly statement.

I am too lazy to do it every month, but it would be nice the statements just appeared in my inbox.
Tablet photography, voice dictation on rise
Police quiz 62-year-old who advised Cameron on web filters on child porn charges
> the problem is that fundamental research requires funding

In biology, yeah, although I think what a lot of people here are doing is reading stories about high-capital-cost fields (experimental physics, biochem, etc.) and then applying it to their own field, which on HN is mostly computer science. CS research really does not require a lot of funding, outside of specific areas (mostly hardware and robotics stuff). Also, because of a robust industry hiring many people away, the supply/demand situation in CS academia is not as bad, and you can always join them and go to Google/Palantir/Microsoft/whatever if things don't work out. I don't bring in much in the way of grants and I get by just fine, because computers don't cost a lot in 2014, and I don't do the kind of research that requires armies of minions. If I need a 10-computer cluster to run something computationally intensive for a few days, cloud costs are so low nowadays that I can just pay for that out of pocket, never mind trying to figure out how to get it paid by a grant.

Getting a decent job in CS academia where you have some time and freedom to actually pursue research is not at all like winning the lottery. Especially if your focus is not just the top 20 universities and being a famous MIT professor with a big lab. There are many, many places with small to medium-sized CS departments, which will pay you a modest salary and let you do whatever you want.
Certainly. I remember learning early on that RAID != backup, and an easy conceptualization of Sync is RAID 1 at the file/folder level.

I'd recommend that someone using Sync for backup purposes take snapshots of they're syncing for backup purposes.
I had the opposite experience; I found it easy to scan through comments explaining what the code does, and hard to read the code itself. So I would comment every single thing to explain it in English so that I didn't have to resort to code. Of course I could drop into code mode and rely on logical axioms and learned patterns, but it wasn't as intellectually satisfying as "getting it" with pure intuition.

Something similar still serves me well as a general mental framework for approaching programming and debugging at a very local (procedure) level:

1. Make sure that the English language description of the algorithm is logically correct.

2. Make sure the code actually corresponds to the English description.
This is great. It looks like just the tool I need to try to beat my broken iTunes collection back into shape - it was once perfect, but a burglary of my machine and backup drive (same location, stupid me) meant I had to scrabble together a messy version from various backups etc. iTunes is unusable for me due to the collection size so I mostly just use spotify instead of fighting with it.

I tried a test on a single artist tonight (2pac) but ran into a bit of a roadblock. There's no 'merge' function. So if you have an incomplete album in the library and you import a directory that contains the rest of the tracks, your choices are to delete the incomplete one or to put the new tracks into their own album. This might sound like an edge case but if you have an album that's currently in 2 directories (cd1 and cd2) then you're fairly well screwed.
It is important to note that beets never forces you to use default format. If you want it to use your metadata you can tell beets to import it as is. More importantly there are two plugins that look perfect for you: (in order of effort)

Rewrite Plugin: The rewrite plugin lets you easily substitute values in your templates and path formats. Specifically, it is intended to let you canonicalize names such as artists: for example, perhaps you want albums from The Jimi Hendrix Experience to be sorted into the same folder as solo Hendrix albums.[^1]

Inline Plugin: The inline plugin lets you use Python to customize your path formats. Using it, you can define template fields in your beets configuration file and refer to them from your template strings in the paths: section of the configuration file.[^2]

[^1]: https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/v1.3.3/plugins/rewrite.html

[^2]: https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/v1.3.3/plugins/inline.html
How to design the Worst UX in 3 easy steps
The really bad for-profit "schools" don't concentrate on extracting maximum tuition from each student. That would require at least minimal attention to the quality of the service being offered, which erodes margins. They don't care if existing students leave, so long as an at least equal number of new ones replace them, so they spend all their money on marketing instead.

At better schools, there's a whole different set of dynamics to explain why rich kids stay in and poor kids don't. This is hardly the forum for that discussion, except to note that the net result is approximately the same. Lots of kids leave college with a big pile of debt and no degree. When such a high percentage of lower-income students end up worse off than they started, it's quite rational to consider that a more entrepreneurial focus might actually serve them better.
A viral video experiment. Purposefully bad. All wrong or all right?
This is a stale thread but I thought I should reply:

I made no claim that about direct access to servers, but I guess since the rumors of direct server access and "PRISM" are synonymous in popular news articles, it was misleading to use the term. My point still stands if you replace "PRISM" with "NSA's dragnet surveillance", which is surely happening.
Make an enterprise offering. Ops teams would kill for this.