skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why not setup a web application, and host everything on your servers? Then, offer different plans based on the amount of work they're receiving.

This is the beauty of web applications, they don't need to run their own hosting, manage a VPS, or register a domain. I think that would be overwhelming for non-profit art organizations, so if you can get them started in minutes with a few clicks, you'll be more likely to win them over.

Customizing software for each organization seems like a nightmare, along with the support to follow. If they're hosting things on their own, you'll have to troubleshoot that as well. You might make more money per organization, but I think you'll reach far less.

You said the core of the software is fairly simple, and some groups don't need anything too complex. Start there, get the core of the software working, and get something online. Approach these groups, get feedback, get them signed up, and start growing. When you have a few customers, you can start adding more features, and building out the software. Don't try to build a monster app all at once, you'll end up over your head, get frustrated, lose interest, and be less likely to ever finish.

Remember, everything takes far longer than expected. Keep it simple to start.
Is the lopsided Universe telling us we need new theories
Show HN: Lyrics Quiz Based on RapGenius
Great examples and way ahead indeed!

On a similar note, it would really help if the website for the Wolfram Programming Cloud had just one bloody-awesome/blow-me-away example or tutorial that would make it accessible to a lot of capable programmers who may not have used a Mathematica Notebook.

Folks who haven't used Mathematica ever - I recommend the Home Edition. Yes, it is worth paying for it!
No reason for any surprise or conspiracy theories.

1. You visited a site that had "pizza" all over it

2. The page drops SIXTEEN cookies, including all popular ad networks: Criteo, Vizu, SkimLinks, Quantcast, and Google's DoubleClick.

3. For the next couple of hours (or whatever duration specified by Domino's media agency), pizza ads will follow you everywhere.

While Skype may be parsing your chat to detect keywords, this would be complicated and potentially against their ToS. Using your browsing behavior is simpler, and a lot more precise.

If you're worried about privacy, you should protect your browser in the first place. Start by forcing the Do-Not-Track option, then install Ad Block, and opt-out from all ad tracking networks [1]. Or simply use Incognito mode.

Companies can still use IP and browser fingerprinting to uniquely identify you, but that's more work and not portable across ad networks. Not worth the effort for them, just to target a bunch of HN-ers.

[1] http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/
"Ngo’s ID theft business attracted more than 1,300 customers who paid at least $1.9 million between 2007 and Feb. 2013 to look up Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, previous addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and other sensitive data"
SPOILER ALERT: answer to regex crossword referenced by the 2nd link: http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2013/coinheist.com/rubik/a_regula...
I personally will never buy a Nest or any home automation devices that _require_ any external service(s) to control and function.

OTOH, I'm probably not part of the target market, as I'm perfectly happy futzing around with Vera* and VLAN/VPN/SSH tunnels.
I really don't know what your skill set is and/or Rails requirements, but $30-$40 for hosting seems pretty high. My product uses 3 Java Virtual Machines and a Postgres Database and I can get it too perform quite well on a 512MB Digital Ocean instance ($5 a month).
> We should instead supplement our sturdy but silent black boxes with a chattier partner. The new device would not survive a catastrophic breakup. Nor would it receive the omniscient breadth of data trusted to a black box. Instead, it would (1) receive a subset of flight data (e.g. location, alerts, and pilot inputs) and (2) immediately send them to a ground-based datacentre. These data would back up air traffic controllers' radars in real time.

It seems to me you've described ADS-B[0], which this plane had and which will become a requirement in US and EU soon. Looking at sites like flightradar24.com, which use ADS-B data, it would seem most airliners already use it. The only difference from your requirements is that ADS-B doesn't broadcast any information about pilot inputs.

According to records from one of the sites which use ADS-B, the signal from this plane just stopped [1]. This could have happened because of a severe failure in flight, or maybe because the plane descended below cruising altitude which happened to take it out of receiver range. In either case, it shows that the proposed scheme would be of limited use and it might not have helped in this particular case.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...

[1] I'll search for the source when I get back to my computer. It was discussed in /r/aviation.
By accident?
always start with something core to your product. If there is only one feature you can add to your current product, what will you add? If there is only one organization you decide to support, which one will you choose? Choose only one and make people in that organization REALLY happy.

Dare to say no to feature request. As your service grows, always ask your self the question: do I really need that one more feature?
Sorry there was a little intentional derision in that comment.

My gripe is more that for the multitude of problem domains that you can represent in mathematica, a huge amount can be done off the shelf for the same effort with something a lot cheaper if not entirely free. Very few people need or use the capabilities past the very basics.
I would have asked the same thing before I started reading /r/talesfromtechsupport.
People have to be Armchair X to a certain degree, in countries that you are alluding to - it's a prerequisite to a democracy.
Social media connect under "Follow tldr" is broken for me (Chrome 33 on OSX).

Also, use "e.g." not "i.e." -- while similar, the contextually mean different things. The former is "for example", the latter is "for instance."

Really gave me doubts to the integrity of the website if such a simple grammar mistake was made on the front page, in the call-to-action.

Food for thought.
"Color depth: 24 bit"

Ah, now there's your problem!

Seriously, no support person is ever going to need this information.
It's more about what people use it for and how they use it rather than capabilities. I was a little cranky and sarcastic initially and I don't think that came across clearly!
Here's another good one, mainly in PHP https://leanpub.com/build-apis-you-wont-hate
The slow death of Silicon Roundabout
App idea for someone: make a simple alarm.

I have a few Nest devices, and they all do motion detection. If I'm away for a few days, I'd love an alert if my Nests detect someone in the house. It could alert me to check a security camera, and then to call the police.

It could do fancy stuff, like only alert me if I'm not at home by checking my phone's location. Or perhaps you could set off the fire alarm to try and ward off intruders.

I imagine alarm systems are on Nest's roadmap. I'd be worried if I was ADT.
Hey Dan, Improvely looks like an awesome product. Incredible work for a one-person shop. Our company was talking about a click fraud monitoring system last week. I'm going to pitch this to the rest of our agency tomorrow.
Commenting to also save some of the other recs HNers have provided.
Nest does not require Internet connectivity. It is optional.
http://support.nest.com/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest
Is Maybe chaining the same as lifting?

I worked on a toy example for this before.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7690864/haskell-style-may...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9692630/implementing-hask...
Who is he pandering to?

He's in congress. So aside from his financial backers, he just needs to pander to the Republicans in his district who make it out to the primary. Because in most seats, the winner of the primary + the way the seat leans determines who wins the seat.

Thus he only needs to appeal to a small niche. And how any of us feel about it is irrelevant. Understand that, and you understand the polarization of politics in the USA. Understand the polarization, and you understand a lot that is wrong with this country. :-(
It's probably a good idea to try to quantify the actual _scale_ of what is happening.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-26/chart-day-how-five-...
These are kids building this product in Silicon Valley.

I'm surprised there isn't more work done already -- this industry is notorious for having operating inefficiencies.

But hey, that's what a free market is, right? Let the market decide which competitor is best. These guys are funded and need to generate that return, right?
Do you have a way to track call metrics? We'd like to be able to track conversions from a Google Voice number.
The notebook REPL has actually been around way before Mathematica. Probably 1972. Perhaps it wasn't semantically complete but it was essentially there. I would suggest the concept is obvious.
5 Secrets of Effective Distributed Teams
You can use the approved resolver. Just set up a DNS record delegating some subdomain to the fake DNS server, and then any unsuspecting resolver will work for you, sending the request upstream to the authoritative nameserver.
AirHelp – Get compensation from delayed, cancelled or overbooked flights
Really wish there were better defense attorneys onboard in these cases because at their core these instances boggle the logical mind.
Do the sizes of different types of file have any impact? For example, does a 50kb image have more impact than a 50kb JavaScript file? (I'm guessing yes, since the js file will tend to be compressed for sending, whereas the image is already compressed)

How about the use of cdn for common files? Is there a correlation between, say, the use of Google's jQuery cdn service and faster/slower sites? What about distinct domain lookups for multiple files? Is rakuten loading all those files from a single domain, while Google spread the 10 requests around a pile of specialist static file servers?

It's interesting data though!
This made it to the homepage yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7366254
Well no.

What happens when the GPS says one thing, and the "internet" says another?

what takes precedence?

The "Internet" isn't safe, reliable or even bullet proof.

New technology isn't a golden bullet. Often its just a re-invention of the wheel. (whatsapp for example, is just MMS without the guaranteed delivery.)

I don't want my plane being crammed full of shiny new tech, especially if its not proven. Th reason why there is bureaucracy is to make things safe.
Guess who developed military theory that was used in the 60's? It was the guys in the 40's and 50's who were fighting conventional wars against conventional foes.

> Wouldn't Korea (1950-1953), the occupation of Japan (1945-1952) or the occupation of Germany (1945-1949) be better examples?

No, because military strategy evolves from military theory. Military theory doesn't happen overnight. It develops over time from hard lessons which almost always involve a lot of body bags. WWI is a prime example of this. You have outdated strategies and theory mixed with new weapons that no one was accustomed to using on a large scale. The lessons learned were applied to WWII by WWI veterans.

I also don't lump 70's Vietnam with 60's Vietnam. We were beginning to develop effective strategies to mitigate the guerrillas. However public support at home was pretty much gone.
Well you could simply package the hosting costs into your general solution/whatever. This way you can avoid directly discussing what hosting you're going to get them and how much it would really cost them.
But it does sound odd. How much is your software going to cost?
> There was an article on reddit questioning why we can track a rover on Mars but not a commercial airliner on Earth.

We can track any commercial airliner on earth, but not under 5 Km of water.
[irony]
Because fairness, justice and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives!
[/irony]
UAE is not really a democracy.

I think that's a issue. Only a few people are made rich by the exploitation of oil. And they aren't entrepreneurs. They use foreign companies to bring them money and that's not faire. Like because they manage to exploit people, we should give this local kings money and power? I can see why nothing is better than that.
Standard library doesn't always make things easier. We have urllib but do we recommend requests for doing http requests? So either Twisted is ported or someone else write a new Twisted-like (but simpler?). I know Guido doesn't like callback-style programming.
we lose contact with the Mars Rover by design. There's a 3 hour window of communication each day. Outside of that window, the rover is on its own.
Do you have specifics on why strcat would be vulnerable? Or is it just because "abc"+"def" == "abcd" + "ef"?
> Why Afghanistan needs democracy I will never understand, and why the US must bring it there puzzles me further.

Because democracy is the Trojan horse of the American imperialism.

I understand Americans don't like to see it that way, they'd rather think of themselves as good people and they are. But their elites are bloodthirsty bastards bent on conquering the world.

Look at the cold hard facts about American military "presence" in the world and tell me it doesn't look like an empire occupying its conquests ...
Cool. So what happens when Chrome updates or I accidentally turn off Dev mode? Does Chromebrew get wiped?
> People do not need huge languages with as much stuff as possible crammed into them.

I think you should replace "people" with "systems programmers" in order not to express an opinion that will in time (if not already) prove to be anachronistic and narrow-minded.

And the kinds of things we're "cramming in" (in reality, very slowly and methodically adding) have little to do with what you'd find in the languages you mention.

Think of it like this: standard libraries are great, but give you access to functionality that is effectively linear in the amount of stuff you learn, because they cannot be too tightly coupled in order to remain modular in the usual way.

With the Wolfram Language, you have more of a network effect: the more you learn, the more useful what you already know becomes, because the topic modelling you did over there can produce a network you can cluster over here and that you can then decorate with the graphics primitives you just learned about.

> The whole idea of claiming "moar data" solves everything comes across as incredibly naive and ignorant of what people like Tony Hoare, Dijkstra, or Alan Perlis have said about computing.

What is the "everything" that needs to be "solved"? Writing systems software?

I'm sure having graphs and images and timeseries built into your language isn't tremendously useful for writing a server. But people have already written servers. We don't need more languages to write servers (other than Rust or Go, perhaps).

We "need" the next generation of smart apps, things you couldn't even contemplate if you didn't already have access to curated data and algorithms that all work together. Or rather, that's what Wolfram Research is trying to make possible.
Know that I went out for a run (fusion of location and biometrics data). Turn the a/c on before I get back. Handy.
First of all you need to make a decision. Do you require your users to entrust the client software with their passwords or not.

If you can do that, the solution is pretty simple. Do it as you would do it with any website. Simply use https (TLS) to transmit username and password and return a session cookie to use in subsequent requests. Run your API over https only.

If you don't want your users to entrust client software (i.e. apps) with their passwords then use https with OAuth.

The reason why using https alone works well for web apps is that users can trust their browsers. Browsers can know the password and they probably won't steal it.

However, if you provide an API and you expect many different client apps, including some dubious ones, to use that API on behalf of your users then users cannot trust the client software and hence you should use OAuth.

The decision doesn't depend on whether or not your application stores sensitive data, because users often use the same password for different sites. So if you like your users and you provide an API for mobile apps to use, you should use OAuth.
I agree, putting one more layer on top of JS does not allow to do substantially different things. But I would argue that this is the only option. Google is pushing its PNaCl [1] clients where you can run C++ code in your browser independent of the platform. Isn't this partially solution to the chicken-and-egg problem? It may get adapted because there is a strong player behind it. It also allows substantially different things to be on the web. For instance you can run some heavy computer vision app analyzing webcam stream directly on client side. Apart from notable JS exceptions [2].

[1] http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl
[2] http://liuliu.me/ccv/js/nss/
Ok, one of the biggest problems in that time was the continuing spread of Communism, namely China. It wasn't solved. The global landscape would be far different today if China was never a communist state. Cuba is another example of an unsolved problem.
This idea in this blog post is not novel...it is actually an idea called "Distributed Anonymous Corporation" which was described in this blog post last september: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-rob...
> But their elites are bloodthirsty bastards bent on conquering the world.

That's probably true of most countries in the world.
There is a relation, but Snowden is not in trouble for his opinion. It's like if somebody has an opinion that robbing rich people is OK, and acts on it, and gets arrested, the arrest would not be for an opinion but for the robbery. The robbery was without doubt related to the opinion, but the opinion is not the base for the prosecution, the specific criminal action based on it is.
Impossible to conquer on any reasonable budget. I'm sure with enough money and troops to truly blanket the country you could.
If you're worried about not being able to get access to "security people", I'd recommend looking at OWASP (http://www.owasp.org) which has a lot of good free information and also chapter meet-ups which are free.

Interestingly one of the problems I've faced running an OWASP chapter is how to get more developers along to it.

Also security.stackexchange.com can be quite useful
Hey at least he didn't say "kill Snowden" ... you see they're making progress :-)
I think a lot of commentators expect from a f2p game to behave like a pay upfront game. Game and bizmodel need to be in sync. Both models have game designs that work better in the respectable monetization model. F.e. Payupfront games usually have flashy graphics. F2P often use tcg mechanics.

I wonder why you would like to pay up front for a promise rather than trying to play a game for free and if and only if you think it is worth it pay some money.

I believe we can all vote with our money which model we believe is best. Let the market forces figure out which model will be dominant in the next ten years.
My experience has led me to hold the belief that the organizations I am targeting are more interested/willing to pay a person (and community member) for one time services than they are for ongoing maintenance costs and subscriptions. This may well be my own misunderstanding and lack of marketing knowledge, but that's what it feels like I'm faced with.

This is software that I can only really see reaching at most 40 institutions. All of whom are cutting budgets and are as resistant to change as a not-for-profit tends to be. And it's software that I want to make and want to give them for as cheap as possible. I'm not worried about my own take on this, I just want to give them the solutions they need and make it affordable.

I think I'm just getting too worried and heady. I need to buckle down, trim the fat on the deployment, get it to fit on a low-rent VPS, and spend my time from there really working with companies to make it work.
I wish Law would be completely expressed in a logical language. If that were true all interpretation would be automatically handled by computers and software tools would help non-lawyers avoiding the cost of lawyers.
> I'm not sure I understand why any python developer would care

And you did say that some people - people who write plugins or develop Mercurial for living - do care later in your sentence. That's some developers. And the parent was asking whether Python 3 was safe to use. It's nice to know that some major Python projects are not ready for Python 3.
Processing in RapydScript
If you are used to use Processing in plain Javascript.
You can now use RapydScript, a Python like language.

Press 'Sample' an 'Run
More examples will be added

You can learn more on RapydScript here:
https://bitbucket.org/pyjeon/rapydscript
Regards
#Giveaway: 3 Chances to Win an Annual PixelKit Subscription
"Who says: 'Here reigns freedom' is lying, because freedom doesn't reign."

-- Erich Fried, "Herrschaftsfreiheit"
DDOS as a Service has been around for years, the difference is that Google is trying to muscle in and undercut the competition with a free service. Unlike the extant players their customer service is nonexistent, so I'm sure the big DaaS companies won't lose too much business...
<i>USA is probably behind in terms of "spying" when compared to the Soviets</i>

From hypothesis to demonstration in less than 10 words.
Off course, but only the US has enough money to do it.
Fwiw I despise my country's elites as much as the American ones.
I think it's pretty safe to go with Python 3 for new and/or personal projects. I started moving all my stuff to Python 3 a few months ago and Fabric is the only major project I use that hasn't been ported.
From our office in Auckland we got to watch the massive AC72's trialling in the harbour before shipping off to SF last year. They're unnaturally fast, skimming along much faster than the wind. Amazing machines.
skype is showing ads from some network. the network scanned public content for the site visited previously. nobody is reading any skype messages. user is just paranoid.
At the bottom of the section "Arguments for over or under":

"In the academic field of evaluation, Michael Scriven writes that the question of the correct way to insert toilet paper is a 'one-item aptitude test' for measuring one's evaluation skills. These skills include the evaluative attitude, practical logical analysis, empathy, teaching, and being a quick study. To prove one's competence, one may either derive the 'one right answer' or prove that the test is or is not culturally biased."
I've had surströmming. Twice. And it's not that bad. There's this pattern of people NOT RINSING it.

First: You're supposed to open the can, submerged in a bucket of water. That'll avoid the spilling AND rinse the fish.

Second: You're supposed to eat it with other stuff. The traditional swedish way is: wrapped in soft bread (think swedish wheat tortillas), with lots of sour cream, mashed potatoes, chopped red onion, ...

Consumed that way, the fish is surprisingly good (it's still a bit.. intensive.. but I'm sure that I'd love it, given enough time). It's the blue cheese of fish.
If you're not belted in, you may meet the water very swiftly.
Sony and Panasonic announce the Archival Disc format
Compared to Snowden, Galileo was treated much more leniently. The worst he got was house arrest, he was friends with many influential personas of the time and had opportunity even after conviction to continue his work, communicate with others, receive visitors, etc. I doubt Snowden would be allowed the same if he ever returned in the US.
Would be funny to use either as a snack on a plane.