skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclosure: the Identity team at Mozilla work for me.

tldr; we couldn't get it to work.

Let's get something straight first. I'm not a fan of excuses. Persona failed to achieve its goals, and I'd rather we own up to what it was good at, and what it failed at, learn from it, and keep fighting for better authentication on the internet because that's what matters. We play to win at Mozilla based on the principle that to have influence in a market, you need adoption. We're willing to play the long game when we have some line-of-sight to success, in other words, but it was clear that even if we had a team of 100 on Persona we were not going to see adoption.

Persona was never close to being shippable on desktop. It's true that we spent effort trying to make Persona work for Firefox OS, and that effort did not result in a fantastic on-device experience. Sign-in to web? Yes. Sign-in to device? Not so much. Federated login is really hard, unsurprisingly, for UX reasons as much or more than raw technology reasons. This is difficult stuff, and changing user expectations about how an "account" works is very, very difficult.

As the AAR linked to in this post iterates, there were a lot of factors involved in why Persona never took off, but most important was the 3-way cold-start due to needing large numbers of users, supporting IdPs (email providers), and many RPs (websites) before the system as a whole could get to critical mass. There was simply no evidence at all that adding a native implementation would have pushed any of the large IdPs (i.e. email providers) to support the system. In fact, the opposite is true; when we decided to start offering more Firefox services ourselves we effectively had the kinds of authentication/authorization challenges any large IdP would have and we found Persona unfit for our needs. (entropy generation as one example, covered in the FAQ)

We could have kept adding complexity to Persona to support Firefox/Mozilla specific use cases, but I believe we made the right call and let Persona focus on its core value prop - sign-in to the web with a verified email. We spent time and money to stabilize and fix inconsistencies in the API, and signed up to continue running the core secondary service for the Internet. We've invested heavily, and continue to invest in pushing identity on the web forward.

One last comment: It's important to note here that we did choose the underlying BrowserID protocol for use with Firefox accounts, incurring significant engineering cost (supporting your own authentication stack is not free), so that if we're successful in becoming a large IdP, we get a chance to fight this federation fight again without being in an adoption stalemate next time. Will that future system be exactly Persona? Almost certainly not -- we have to be willing to iterate the design and protocols until we've got something that works -- but we do believe that BrowserID/VEP is the right technology to be building from, and that we should let Persona continue to fulfill its current sweet spot for sign-in to the web for sites that love the way Persona works.
Cool, can someone give useful ways this might be used in a browser?
> Shouldn't a private company find a better way?

But they do. When I went to apply for work on the NASA Space Shuttle in the early 1970s, I entered a room filled with college degree holders, and I didn't have one. But I had something better -- the prior night I had drawn up a circuit diagram showing how I intended to solve their technical problem. When the interviewer saw the diagram, he cleared his throat, rose from his chair, went into the other room and told the college degree holders that the position had been filled.

Things are even better now -- because of the speed of technical change, companies are more willing to consider life experience and other factors apart from formal education. I have a young friend who dropped out of high school and was almost instantly hired by Google, for an excellent reason -- he knows a lot about the kinds of things Google cares about.

My point is that the chasm between the real world and the classroom has never been greater, and students need to listen to many different voices, not just those of teachers.
This is a great example of a use case for using Bittorrent Sync. They just need to create a read-only secret for each dataset they want to share and then put it on the website. Then the data is P2P'd for cheaper and much easier to maintain. Plus if the Government shuts down or has an issue the data can still be transferred.
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I'm sure we would read about a single road accident claiming a few hundred lives as well.
Save Files directly to the Cloud without downloading them
Well, yeah, it's a book by the same name, but is it the same quality (well, it's not just the same name, of course, but a new author obviously can make a big change in quality, in either direction ;-)?

In any case, my recommendation was referring to the old edition by Stevens alone, no clue about the new one, though at least the newly covered material seems appropriate to me.

(For anyone who might not be aware: W. Richard Stevens died in 1999, so the new edition is by a different author, though apparently based on the old material.)
This provided a lot of insight into an area that I knew absolutely nothing about. Thanks for taking the time to type it all out.
It's easy to forget how expensive computers were in this time period. A new high end mac (or PC) could easily set you back $10,000 or more. A Mac IIfx was $8,970-10,970, monitor not included.
CUPID: The Drone That Will Shoot You With an 80,000 Volt Taser
Crypto-Trade Matching Challenge: 25,000 UTC for Core Development Fund
#PrayForMH370
did you notice i italicized "basic" on my comment, it depends on your view of "basic"

on HN level, i say they're all basic
I wish they'd make something like this that captured time lapse imagery... The construction going on in Brooklyn Bridge Park looks roughly like where they were at last summer. Would love to see the summer turn into this winter we've been experiencing.

Really awesome stuff :)
Style HN to your heart's content
Haha, maybe I should create an email client that just doesn't work. Then emails would certainly be unsendable.
Malaysia Airlines loses contact with plane carrying 239 people
Apple starts 2014 with 41.6% US smartphone share, Samsung at 26.7%; BlackBery...
Apple has continued its dominance in the start of 2014 being as the top smartphone as of first month of this year with 41.6 percent share.
The project is open source, you can submit an issue (or a PR) here: https://github.com/gsa/data.gov
Malaysia Airlines lose contact with plane bound for Beijing
Dina was great during the Windows XP days when ClearType wasn't the default screen setting. On Windows 7, where ClearType is already set, it doesn't look as good as it did before. (This is just my perception, of course.)
I think many hn readers would relate to the SAT example via the hiring process. You can get amazing engineers, even if you can't pay them as much as Google, by offering them a chance to work on more interesting projects or in program languages they find more interesting.
It's the "square/angular" look I don't like. I prefer a rounded font.
I'm not sure where the headline came from, but the website lists three cables, one that is 850 pounds for the first meter, another is 1600 pounds for a meter. And the "cheap" one starts at 40 pounds (for .75,?)
The two expensive ones are over 1400 and over 2600 USD!
Why everything needs to be "Hacker News" of something? Is it the circlejerk effect or just pure laziness?
Khan academy delivers to thousands of people with the use of blackboard recorded in a movie.
sigh

I know. But here's a guy being hopeful. :-)
US Geological Survey confirms Fracking caused 5.7 quake in Oklahoma
Combined with the marketing/PR bump from the show's viewership, the deal was fair for both sides. Great piece of tech. This team will do a lot with $300k in growth capital.
I'd love to see a blog about that!
Have you seen efn.org?
Not exactly. Their designed advance width is 1120 "font units". The TrueType convention (which I followed) is 2048 font units per em. So they're close but not quite 1/2 em wide.

However, many rasterizer round the widths to whole pixel sizes. Taking that into account, I do see them coming out to exactly half the width at certain sizes on this machine.
I'm from melbourne, australia, where its ~15 hours to LAX, or ~24 hrs to LHR. I'll take that large % off flight time please :)
max < at > usedox.com
My current favorite monospaced/coding font is (or, was) "Cosmic Sans Neue Mono"

It's apparently been renamed to "Fantasque Sans Mono", in part because it was suffering from the name similarity to Comic Sans... (a shame, I thought that was kind of funny :)

https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans

http://openfontlibrary.org/en/font/fantasque-sans-mono

I find it nicely quirky/playful looking compared to the somewhat stolid appearance of many monospaced fonts, while still being extremely readable and practical... :]
Seeing Professors fail at what they teach is very instructive. You see that they are not replaying prerecorded material from their brains.
If you want to learn about IP, TCP, UDP and some of the protocols below this I would highly recommend reading Richard Stevens book TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols.

For two reasons: It's probably one of the best introductions to the subject that has ever been written, and it's a model example of how a technical book should be written.

I'd be hard pressed to find a reason not to go this route at least once in your life. I know the material pretty well but I still re-read Stevens books every few years just because it is so good.
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How about https://github.com/creationix/js-git ?
Have A great sunday with Sacred King by Red Sonnet
No, I wrote specifically in the beginning that I'm talking about Linux.
Snowden: I raised NSA concerns internally over 10 times before going rogue
The overall structure of the thing looks pretty promise-y to me.
I have an iphone 4 on Sprint with IOS7 -- I am about to become homicidal on whomever approved this abhorrent combo of clusterfuck.

Ive better watch his back!
Fair use is mostly to allow reviews and criticism for created works. Not to keep culture vibrant.
Using someones work, it its ENTIRETY as part of a montage isn't transformative.

Nothing here strikes of transformative, or fair use. It is someone copying someone else's work. And this has nothing to do with commercial vs non commercial
Satoshi on P2PFoundation: I am not Dorian Nakomoto
Yeah, and? Wouldn't you be offended if someone took your work, and then completely ignored you?
Wow, I never knew how different the US was to the rest of the world with smartphone market share. Gartner says [0] that Apple has just 12% worldwide, whereas Samsung has 32%. Android as a whole is at an incredible 82%.

[0] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2623415
TCP/IP Illustrated books are super detailed. If you don't want to dive quite that deep I recommend "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet".
Her derivative work is not fair use. So she doesn't need to argue that. And the other person has NO case of fair use.
After transitioning from an iPhone to a (Samsung) Android, the iPhone screen seems so small that it's like a toy. My friends who have switched had the same experience.

I don't want to start an iOS-Android flame war because iPhones are great in many ways and both sets of devices have their pros / cons. But IMHO Apple should continue to invest in bigger and better displays if it expects to compete effectively with Samsung.
Good call. I should've remembered it. At a size of 8 or 9, I much prefer DejaVu Sans Mono where it's more readable but packs in more lines. However, I'd say anything 10+ I start to prefer Ubuntu Mono much more 'cause the letters are more balanced and not too tall.
Welcome to the world of propaganda.
> I don't understand how people who understand the relationship between CSPRNGs and (say) CTR mode can believe that there's merit to using /dev/random after urandom has been seeded.

If I were more cynical, I'd say that the NSA is spending money on giving such people a loud voice, so that they can filibuster attempts to actually fix things across the board. ;)
Marketshare is one thing.. but the more interesting number is the percentage of dollars spent by consumers on each platform.

(I believe Apple also takes the crown there, by an even longer shot)
Malaysia Airlines loses contact with passenger flight
>Welcome to the world of cheap (hidden cost) iphones.

FTFY.
learning by doing reminds me of Jaron Lanier experiments in embedding people into 'animals' [1]. I believe your brain is eager to swallow analog and massive data, and actually doing things will be much more mechanically sympathetic and fruitful. Maybe that's why scanning a book by running pages under your thumb leaves a better trail in my brain than having symbolic bookmarks on an e-reader (for small numbers obviously)

[1] don't know how, maybe a suit with VR goggles in a game with tweaked physics and different limb constraints, anything to throw your habits off.
It's not Smalltalk with C syntax. It's C with C Syntax and an object system with Smalltalk syntax smashed together.

It is having both that is the beauty of it, in more ways than one. Very expressive high level code and low-level bit banging when you need it. Dynamic, explorative programming that can be hardened to stricter typing regimes once a design stabilizes.

What I am complaining about is not just that this duality seems to be getting lost, but that it is lost by apparently combining the worst of both worlds, the expressiveness and rigidity of statically typed language and the performance of a dynamic language. And what's worse, it appears that it's being done without even a conscious decision, but more by drifting aimlessly, picking up features and practices more or less haphazardly.
Conversely, when I use my father's iPhone, it fits really well in my hands.

Its pretty well known that apple does user testing with children, and by designing a product that all ages can use they reserve a place in the mind of the next generation of smartphone users.
To provide a counter-anecdote, I really wish there was a flagship-class Android device the size of current iPhones. My Nexus 5 is difficult for me to use one-handed and makes itself known in my pocket more than I'd like.

Sony's Z1 Compact is close in screen size, but its external dimensions are nearly identical to the Moto X, which has a 4.7" screen.
Help yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4538678

And check out the parent thread. It's dated but there is a lot of great stuff there.
Wow, that ending hit me like a ton of bricks. I certainly have sympathy for those who invested their life savings into the Mt Gox crash and lost everything, but I doubt I could find a single one of them that could trade places with Hal and have half of his positive attitude.

Really helps put things in perspective.
I would have thought with modern day signal and satellite tracking technology, event like this has become obsolete.
then what you want is NOT a phone is a HUGE phone

i don't know about you but people carrying Samsung Galaxy phones look ridicules when using the phone (and not to mention Galaxy S V is even BIGGER than S IV)
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What should actually happen is that /dev/random and /dev/urandom should provide the exact same interface: block at boot-time until they're seeded with "sufficient" entropy, and then never block again until the system is rebooted. Periodically, some entropy should be saved to disk, to be used to re-seed during the next boot.

Also, both should be a lot faster. With some buffering you should be able to use them to replace libc's rand() with little to no performance penalty.

Every application developer who wants "random" numbers should simply get cryptographically-strong random numbers, period. We should not expect them to choose, since it's just another opportunity to make a mistake.
it looks like they only offer dsl, is there any way that could come close to 50Mbits?
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I had a funny experience when I got my Galaxy Note II a year or so ago. I had a Nexus 7 that I used at home all the time for web browsing and general stuff. But the day I got the Note II was the last day I used the Nexus 7 for much of anything. There just wasn't enough of a difference to matter. I had everything on my phone and nearly the same screen size as the Nexus 7 - but in a lightweight version that fit in my pocket.

More recently, I was cleaning out a drawer and found my old Google Ion (HTC MyTouch). The screen height on that phone is just about exactly the same as the screen width on my Galaxy Note 3. (My daughter has the Note II now.)

Maybe the reason these big phones work so well for me is that I don't use them as phones much at all. They are pocket Internet tablets.
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Apple has always been about premium product and premium margin.

Samsung (and other Asian companies) are more into market share. Charging premium price would be nice bonus but for someone playing catch up, lower price with greater marketshare makes more sense.
Good addition. Dina is thinner but very similar in proportions to DejaVu at size 8. But at 8 or above, it doesn't cut it, having less lines and lacking enough weight to focus. (Note: I use a white background, which obviously affects everything.) That said, Dina outshines DejaVu in readability for anything smaller.

Edit: Dina has a lot of beauty. Nice blocky style once it's large enough. It's also excellent at a very tiny scale in a web browser.

Edit2: Sublime is giving very different and inconsistent results vs. some IDEs and other interfaces. Blah, really depends.
Newforms – a form-handling library for React
Great Walls of America 'could stop tornadoes'
This is an interesting opinion to me. My background:

I had a "dumb phone" until Sept. 2012 when I bought myself an iPhone 5 as my first smartphone. I'm a large guy (6'4") and have been more than pleased with the size. It fits in my pocket perfectly; I can use one hand to do everything; I don't have any trouble with the display at all.

However, I've noticed this general trend towards bigger phones as the future. In my mind, I always thought the larger the phone, the more the hassle. Phablets look utterly ridiculous. In your opinion, what are the benefits to a larger phone? Do you game? Is text larger/easier to read? I am genuinely interested.

As another note: I have my iPhone in a case. It's not an Otter Box or anything, but when I take it out of the case occasionally it feels ridiculously lightweight and small. After a few minutes/hours, the feeling normalizes and then suddenly the case, which was perfectly fine just a few hours ago, feels quite cumbersome. Could this be a factor in your perception?
> Maybe the reason these big phones work so well for me is that I don't use them as phones much at all. They are pocket Internet tablets.

Exactly. I try avoiding talking on the phone as much as possible. Text/email is the way I prefer. And reading/browsing is what I do most on phone. Hence bigger screen is a big plus.

I think one reason big phones took off in Europe/Asia was because much larger percentage of people use public transportation, meaning they spend an hour or more every working day sitting/standing in bus/subway. How do you use that time? Of course you read/watch/browse using your phone and bigger screen is a big plus. Talking on the phone is usually not practical.

Americans mostly have to drive which means they can't browse/watch while moving from 1 location to another.

I'm pretty sure NONE of the top Apple designers/execs commute to work in a public transportation or be driven in a limo, hence they don't understand WHY bigger screen phone is so attractive to a big chunk of users out there.
CoinPayments.net (payment gateway for cryptocurrencies) shutting down
Malaysian plane with 239 onboard has crashed off Vietnam coast
Just skimming documentation, when a wild function signature appears!:

six.get_unbound_function(meth)

Meth, but even once.
This is bryan. Networking team. You will never guess, we stick by our privacy policy policy. They are be 1000x bigger than you
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Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Live
As a user and a consumer, I don't care about average spend per platform. I just want a solid phone that will work reliably and stay out of my way. Market share, profit margins, market cap don't matter at all to me. I just want a decent phone at a reasonable price.

As a developer, I look at the comparatively larger number of Android phones worldwide and weigh that against average spend. A global marketshare around 80% may make the average spend thing a non-issue depending on what app you are trying to sell (and at what price, and to what demographic).
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Updates for reasoning behind all of our decisions was made public, we fulfilled perks to our backers, and have been continuously upgrading devices plus apps based on user feedback. It's called a start up and yes, things change.

As to your account and that you only choose to comment only here and have no other submissions, it leads me to question who you are and if you actually are an indiegogo backer. If you are, if you shoot a mail to support at phonehalo.com, they respond within 24 hours and have resolved 99% of all issues.
i wouldn't call a high school teacher a low paying job. i guess it is compared to software.

In the US at least, it sounds very reasonable to go to college to get a history degree if your goal is to become a high school history teacher.

To me, it sounds perfectly an achievable goal to decide to go to college, get a major in history, know that you're not even close to the best historians out there, and expect a job teaching high school. just like the guy in the article assumed.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out, and might have been a waste of money. But there was nothing unreasonable in his thought process, from my perspective at least. I would even bet it won't be too tough for him to get a teaching job in the future.
I remember seeing one at the Paris flight show when I was a kid. It looked like nothing else. You'd think it was a fighter jet, except it's so massive and streamlined, it's more like a misplaced, oversized prop from a sci-fi flick. Absolutely amazing aircraft. Anybody has a list of other "odd" planes? I know about the giant Soviet plane, the Kalinin K-7 [1], though while being "special" it's not particularly elegant and never went beyond the prototype stage.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalinin_K-7
Larger percentage of people in Europe/Asia commute via public transportation, meaning they have more than an hour a working day where they can't do much else other than read something.

With smartphones people started reading/browsing/watching/gaming. And of course for these, bigger phone is more attractive.

They couldn't care less what they look like as long as they get the functionality they want out of the phones.