skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well that's an interesting website, but honestly I think it's not possible to fund fundamental research using crowdsourcing: For example, the last group I worked in consisted of about 6 full-time researchers, 4 PhD students and about 3-6 master students / interns. The salary and infrastructure costs there probably already amount to more than 1 M$ / year. In addition, expenditures for electricity and other required materials (in our case liquid helium) amount again to several 100k$ / year. And this is just what keeps the lights on, doing actual research projects typically requires again several million dollars per project over the course of 3-5 years. To raise that amount of money through crowdsourcing seems very unrealistic and would put the scientists at the "mercy of the masses", so with all due respect I think it's not a viable idea.

There could be other interesting use cases for this kind of platform of course: I think in research education this could be a great tool to collect money for student projects at schools and universities, which in the long term will benefit science a lot by producing more scientists :) I just think that funding professional, institutionalized research is and should stay the job of the government.
He wrote the code to show you that you don't need to import IOException you can use a catch all to avoid a throws statement in the method header.

This is bad code as he said.
I thought this was a joke then I came to the comments and everyone is being serious. I guess they've changed what "it" is.
Thanks, but ultimately, leaving when I did was extremely positive. I ended up in NYC in the employ of Techstars which turned out to be a much better place for me.
Uhm, are these supposed to be arguments against me?

That it's common for all of these sites, who have massive surveillance and SEO structures built into them, to have gigantic stylesheet collections doesn't change the fact that they are bloated nightmares of code.

If I said, "filing taxes is a nightmare", and you said, "oh yeah, but what about all the other people who file taxes, some of them even more complex than yours?" That wouldn't change the fact that filing taxes is a convoluted, intentionally obfuscated, Lovecraftian construct, summoned forth from the depths of Hades itself.
Cool, but (there's always a but) there's one parameter sorely missing -- speed. What's the point of having a humongous pendrive if you need two days to copy its contents?

Unfortunately it's not as simple as price and size, with the advertised speeds tending to be higher than measured. Also, a while ago I got a drive which promised pretty nice nominal read and write speeds; it turned out however that it had a small buffer and for larger files (or more of them) the transfer speed slowed to a crawl within a few seconds.

Tricky items, those little drives.
By the way, nobody should ever use "foo".equals(someVariable) anyway. If anything, it should be someVariable.equals("foo"),
unless you really know what you're doing and are ok with null being a valid value of someVariable.
"It's electric" is by far the best variation.

It should probably have been clearer what the different buttons at the start do. I selected "Classic", and then spent quite a while looking for the twist. I'd assumed you were letting me choose the graphics or something like that.
The burn amount shouldn't be proportional to the rating.

I realize now the system described above is faulty, as the vendor must not be able to hide transactions with a low rating. Also, of course the review value shouldn't be specified by the buyer before he has received the goods. But I'm pretty confident this can be worked around with the right protocol.
>>In terms of boilerplate code, I'd love to see his exact examples.

Seriously, this is likely asking proof regarding the presence of sun during broad day light.

>>With annotations, I've found that plenty of Java code is actually not verbose at all.

Again. Are you really serious?

>>If he churned out thousands of classes when actually he could have reduced the number of classes to 50, then that's an example of poor management and poor workmanship, certainly not a problem with the language.

You certainly haven't ready his book 'Higher Order Perl'.
all it contains is the word: "backups".
> My dumbphone you press-hold camera button and that's it.

Sony smartphones work the same way
Lovely bit of history... the anarcho-syndicalists were the third element of the Spanish Civil War. And if there's one thing the fascists and communists could agree on, it was that both hated the anarchists more than they hated each other. Unfortunately, when you organize at the level of a farm or a factory, you're no match for an enemy that can throw 1000 troops at you in order to crush you. Noam Chomsky's history of the Spanish Civil War is an insightful and depressing read. :(

I worry about coops in the business world for the same reason. They have limited defense against massive corporations that decide they are enemies. But that's true of any small business.
This is fun stuff. I'd love to read more of them in the future, but there's no feed link. Has RSS really died? I'm often surprised by how many sites skip including these now.
I realized over that week that if getting rich means hating your neighbours/being hated by your neighbours, having no one to reach out to, maybe I don't want to be rich. At least not financially rich.

Or at least not in that neighborhood. You have an anecdote... that's all. I'm sure there are others that match it, but being a dick to your neighbors and having neighbors that are dicks to you is not a necessary pre- or post-condition of financial wealth.

You can end up in that situation regardless of how much money you make. What you should probably take away from that experience is that you value community and wish to have positive interactions with your neighbors; perhaps financial wealth shouldn't be a priority for you, but I don't believe this situation could really inform you on that point.
"than these "we almost died" posts because they prove more instructional"

Agree.

Also noting that hotmail in particular (1/2 of the n=2) was a free service.

There wasn't much that the customers who lost their mail could do legally (most likely) because they weren't paying for the service. So I am guessing it wouldn't be something that you could hire a lawyer to pursue [1] or even band together for a class action.

[1] Which is a really important concept actually. If you are providing a service to a customer and charge either nothing, or a very cheap price, and have a good contract, the chance of someone hiring a lawyer to pursue an action is pretty small.
Perhaps more importantly to the author, I noticed this when I tried to share via twitter. display:none; on the comments div worked fine.
Chinese internet: Mobile wars
Owner-owned corporations are the kind of Feudalism that a capitalist can really get behind.
At the bottom of the page:

Keybase.io is also a Keybase client, however certain
crypto actions (signing and decrypting) are limited to
users who store client-encrypted copies of their
private keys on the server, an optional feature we
didn't mention above.
Some PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 collisions that start with the URL of this Hacker News thread:

$ ./brute-force.py 'https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465849#'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465849#aaaaaaaaaaaaabufhkcn 💥 VID9Qf*}8w9sBtI@TK5k
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465849#aaaaaaaaaaaaabwwhwta 💥 Bgvi4F~6M#utux ~\H4m
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465849#aaaaaaaaaaaaacjypwdz 💥 Tn/ZyN'Zs6?d){Ytd?}i
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465849#aaaaaaaaaaaaaewyefbo 💥 r;9U\DZh!2de#bt <2*o
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465849#aaaaaaaaaaaaaezrsysb 💥 wl)@eb.1Avvp?|NtT(\c
…
I remember finding that book in the college library and sitting down to "read" it. I was fascinated that someone would make such a thing.
What? I thought this was Hacker News, not Marketing News.
Yeah, do what you love and love what you do. And when you really do it, work stops being just job, it's life as well. And there's no separation between you at home and you at work. Simple yet, very important idea. You can't get tired of work if you really love it.
Nice upgrade. I have used Clojure for several customer projects and some of my own little projects like cookingspace.com and my-foc.us

Clojure is a very practical language and basically stays out of your way during development.
Performance/Bandwidth vs price would be interesting as well. But it probably correlates with $/GB.
Database requests, ORMs and for loops technically are part of "things which happen between the url and the view" ;). More to the point, they certainly are all equally important, but web requests was slightly more difficult because that wasn't covered in the engineering course.

Whether a top-down approach is better than a bottom-up approach to learning, that's debatable, I'd grant you that. My experience tells me that going top-down is better, because practical high-level skills are more useful than theoretical low-level knowledge. It's the same way knowing how to drive a car is more useful than knowing how an engine works. If the OP decides halfway that web development is not for him, at least he'll still know enough to be able to build a functional webapp, which can be a boon to whatever profession he chooses next.
My children attended a charter high school run as a teacher's co-op - no principal or formal administration. It works very well, although I'm not sure it would scale as a model. Certainly, I've never seen such high levels of teacher satisfaction anywhere else, and I'm sure the cost of a principal and assistant principal easily funds three more teachers - a big deal at a small school.
I noticed the same thing.

Easiest thing for me was "view source code" and copy from there.
Do you have a citation for that?

Because I'd totally buy that the number of expressions matters.

But I really doubt actual lines matters much.
no just no! why would you do that....
See comments below.

(A cool thing btw. Just to make sure you don't get me wrong)
A healthy language ecosystem on the JVM is a good thing, glad to see a new Clojure release.
Look ma, JavaScript only Off-Canvas menu
The off-canvas menu is pretty popular nowadays. You know, the little button in the right upper corner which opens the navigation with a slide-in effect. That's what we are going to build in this article. The interesting things is that we are not going to use CSS neither HTML, only JavaScript.
I would put lambdas in the "major shifts in the language" category.
Not sure what to do with it by now. I'm really excited to see it reaching the front page. Maybe this is an indication that a "scatterplot-shopping-site" could actually be a good idea. Yes, there is a lot of ways this could be improved. Would be quite easy to add filtering and different views.
> What if you’re not happy living a frugal/basic lifestyle?

I think this is an unnecessarily deterministic view of happiness. It seems to imply that every person has a set of randomly assigned, unchanging things that make them happy. If you happened to get assigned happiness from frugality, then lucky you! But if not, then I guess you'll have to find a way to get really rich to buy all the thing that make you happy, too bad.

In fact, if you aren't happy living a frugal/basic lifestyle, you probably won't be happy with an extravagant, wealthy lifestyle either. Happiness comes from within.
Because it's rare to find companies using it. I'd love to write clojure, but everyone wants me to write ruby or javascript.
PageFetch, a game in information retrieval
So someone builds a nice secure and useful framework/platform which is great. But why not put some effort to mention some more details or documentation about how to use it, sample, tutorials etc?
Like many people on the mailing list, I've been using the Clojure 1.6 betas and release candidates. Don't expect dazzling new features; rather, 1.6 is a nice solid step forward.
I have to admit - when I first saw this I heard that record scratch sound and the universe stopped for a moment.

Technically-speaking, this is pretty cool thing. Socially, this is so wrong on so many levels, I'm surprised no one has done it before.

We could probably power a small city with the electricity generated by future-Stallman spinning in his grave over this.

Though, we also have to allow that he might become zombie-Stallman.
Keep It Short
Jokes like this derive their humor by encouraging alienation from our bodies.

There is nothing wrong or unusual with being aware of our tongues.

There is nothing superior or powerful about others who make try to make us uncomfortable with ourselves.

This is nothing spooky, troubling or surprising about our breathing (as some similar posts elsewhere suggest "you are now breathing in manual mode. you just realized you have a skeleton.").

There is no reason to allow ourselves to experience any anxiety through becoming aware of our own bodies.

The only reason any of this "humor" works at all is because we are so thoroughly conditioned to have our minds focused outside of ourselves, on our work, on our needs and those society puts upon us that we rarely get to focus on ourselves and our bodies. And when we do, it's all too often because someone else is "rating" us or when we're trying to please others.

Let's all commit to dismissing false humor that suggests focusing attention on ourselves is anything but familiar, comfortable and impervious to psychological hijack by others.
Ask HN: Are there any services helping think better?
It seems like lots of value can be created by thinking. Are there any thinking aids?
"First, Mylar allows the server to perform keyword search over encrypted documents, even if the documents are encrypted with different keys."

I thought some big tech corporation owned the patent on that.
I saved 15 minutes by not reading this blog post :)
Also of note:

* https://crypton.io/ a zero-knowledge web framework from SpiderOak

* http://hails.scs.stanford.edu/ a secure web platform framework for untrusted 3rd party plugins
You can obfuscate the index quite a lot, and combine it with additional work on the client to compensate.

E.g. a traditional reverse index is generally conceptually turned into relations <word,word-id> and <word-id,document-id,position> (though in reality there's tons of tricks to store them more efficiently by removing a lot of redundant information).

If all indexing passes through the client (client downloads and decrypts every message, and uploads bits and pieces to update the index with), and the client maintains the <word,word-id> relations (optionally passing it back to the server encrypted, in chunks), you've improved things a bit, but only a tiny bit (anyone with access to the index can apply some fairly trivial statistical attacks that makes it uninteresting to attack the encrypted real messages).

You can improve on that by leaving off or fuzz the position to reduce the potential for statistical analysis, at the cost of recall. E.g. if you drop position entirely, you can get the server to tell you which documents contains the individual words in "service built with Mylar", but you'll have to retrieve all of them to determine if the phrase is present.

You can also do stuff like "inventing" additional detail. E.g. assign "fuzz" word-id 42, but based on some operation on the document id, you might also/instead assign it word-id 201. The problems with each of these type of attempts at obfuscation is that they alter your search patterns, and you'd need to figure out how to obscure from the server that word-id's 42 and 201 in fact are two different subsets of the same thing, or you're still leaking information. You can also record outright wrong information, at the cost of having to download more messages to weed out the false positives when searching.

You can "scale" your tradeoff between accurate recall and information leak pretty much arbitrarily from letting the server only see a single bit of your word-id and a single bit of your document id's, to the full word-id, document-id and position, depending on how much work you're willing to do client side - every bit you chop off means you need to retrieve a larger number of documents to post-process the results to get something useful, but gives the server less information about your document collection.

You can improve further on it by letting third parties provide "indexing services" and farm the indexing to them, without ever letting them see the documents. You could even break the collection into pieces and merge the results client side, so no single service has the whole picture. But of course it just raises the bar for an adversary.

But you are of course right that all of this is going to leak information that might be useful to an adversary - the approach taken just moves the difficulty bar up and down a bit. Ultimately all you can do is make an assessment about how much the information is worth to you and make an educated guess based on that about how much you can "afford" to farm out to servers that are not under your physical control...
http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/encsearch.pdf

Dan Boneh talked about this at trustycon this year. It's a pretty interesting concept.
If they hold your key, your privacy can be violated. By them, by someone who buys the company or by a secret government court order.
Stalled Ventures | No idea left behind
This bug is now fixed! Thanks for pointing it out!
HubSpot launches iOS app, adds Brian Balfour as VP of Growth
Battery life was one of the big things that OS X 10.9 touted as an improvement. Apple expended significant engineering effort in reducing energy use to squeeze more out of their current batteries[1]. On the mobile side of things, they developed the M7 co-processor to allow access to sensor data without having to wake up the CPU, and famously never supported flash, both in an apparent attempt to save battery life. They seem to me to be very interested in battery life and I think any technology that could increase it by significant margins would be something they would snap up.
Still heavily used in games and finance! Though, you're right about MFC.
Of course, and the same is true of every backup solution. The way to mitigate that problem is with a decent backup rotation scheme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme
This is what you get when following his investments:

In 2001, Schmitz bought €375,000 worth of shares of the nearly bankrupt company Letsbuyit.com (de) and subsequently announced his intention to invest €50 million in the company. The announcement caused the share value of Letsbuyit.com to jump and Schmitz cashed out, making a profit of €1.5 million. One commentator suggested that Schmitz may have been ignorant of the legal ramifications of what he had done, since insider trading was not made a crime in Germany until 1995, and until 2002 prosecutors also had to prove the accused had criminal intent.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigati...
If enough people do it, reading time will go down and bounce rate will go up. If that happens, someone might notice and decide to change something. I think there's no other way than that to tell them that their approach sucks.
I like the idea of the article. However, I don't think you understand free will or the idea of choice. Not everyone gets to have this perfect little say in what they want to do.
The "obvious" is irrelevant.

Under US antitrust law, if you conspire with others in the marketplace to fix prices, you can be prosecuted. Doesn't matter whether you're fixing prices for labor, pizza, cats, photos of cats.
As it should be, in my opinion :)
I suspect the answer is similar to "why don't they stream FDR-data, live, for all flights?".

That being: the airlines feel the cases in which extra measures matter are only a small subset (flights with problems in incredibly remote areas) of a small subset (flights that have any problems at all) and thus not worth the extra cost/complexity/risk to all the other flights.
Yeah I remember reading this story as well, here's the link to the WSJ that covered it when it came out back in 2010: http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/09/07/the-perfect-salary-fo...
I'll look into adding this. (I think I'll have to add it to the bash wrapper.)
> Yeah, same thing, sure. You realize that for 90% people, even most at the hot companies, a job is above all something they do because they want or need the money, right?

I realize it, and that's extremely sad, because it doesn't have to be that way.
"When has this ever worked in the real world?"

Much of everything related to decentralized systems are just new and can not therefore be backed by previous working examples.

"merchants will just pay for positive reviews for themselves and negative ones for competitors"

Of course they will! Boys will fight, that's part of their nature, but we can set rules nevertheless. If rating will cost money and merchants will be willing to pay for it, let them! In the end, the artificial rating will have to be paid with real money coming from real customers. This real deal will have to be larger than the artificial one (in order to sustain it) and thus it will be costly to be fought against, like in an uphill battle.

___

As an improvement to this system (in order to make it harder to be gamed), I add the automatic distribution of the review paid costs to a pool of recent reviewers.
According to the association that represents the pharmaceutical industry in Britain, the shortages you refer to were due to pharmacies taking advantage of exchange rate differences to sell medicines abroad rather than supply the UK market[1]. This would imply that the costs of medicine are not usually significantly lower than the rest of the EU, at least when the currency markets are not in flux.

There is some information available on the cost of prescription medicines in the UK (see [2]) but I don't know where the equivalent datasets would be for other countries. Would be interesting to do a comparison.

[1] http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/news/2012/Pages/280212.aspx

[2] http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?q=title:"prescriptio...
Anatomy of a large-scale negative SEO attack
Yeah that makes sense. But I'm not sure the token should only be generated upon a successful transaction. This would make vendors not want to issue the token if something goes wrong.

When the buyer creates the unsigned multisig transaction, he could request the token from the vendor, so the buyer gets a token in exchange for the unsigned transaction. The token could simply be a unique, random number signed with the vendor's public key.

Upon completion of the transaction (multisig transaction is signed by two parties and published to the network), the buyer could publish a special transaction (the "review transaction"), referencing the vendor's ID (his public key), the token, and the review score/value, along with an optional comment.
Game Programming in C with the Ncurses Library
You mean like Lumosity?
http://www.lumosity.com/about
"Nothing is beneath a leader in times of crisis"

I've worked for people that believe this, and others that don't. Nothing builds morale and loyalty like rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard stuff with your employees.

I once had a project manager who couldn't write a lick of code, but whenever a deadline approached or something blew up, he'd be right there at 10pm with everyone else bringing in fresh pizza, testing whatever he could, and giving pep talks. Contrast this with someone that says, "get this done by tomorrow, OK?" and then walks out the door. Who do you think is going to have a higher performing team in the long run?
10 tips for making money selling domains on Flippa