skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crowdfunding web applications? Is this becoming a new thing?

Send us 100k, and we'll finish our beta application, and give you rewards, like your name in the code, or for $500, you can have a coffee with us on video chat. Or for $25,000, fly yourself here, and we'll give you a tour of the city and cook you dinner. Does this not sound crazy to anyone else?

If they raise an extra $150k, they'll develop extras, such as a plug-in architecture to enable an ecosystem of open-source plug-ins for different discussion and decision-making protocols that will scale to much larger groups. I don't know what the hell that even means, but isn't it a little irresponsible to even consider such features when you haven't made an official release, and proven the concept has any long term traction?

If you can't tell, this entire thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. After 18 months of beta they're unable to launch, or make enough sales to organizations to fund their development, so they're asking the crowd for a 100k donation? I don't believe their software is as life changing as the video makes it out to be, and I don't think they have a viable business. I expect them to burn through the money, launch, and fade away.
What about when people make charts where the x and y axises are unrelated or stupid? If you plot oxygen consumption and death you'd find that almost all people who died last year consumed oxygen.
What's really creepy is the fact that the big bankers can get away with laundering billions in drug cartel profits, yet not a single person has yet to answer for these crimes.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mex...
Weekly Newsletters for Front-end
Galactic Runts Host Beasts
> The Gang of Four pattern you mention most likely work around weaknesses of Java.

Except it was written with Smalltalk and C++ in mind.
The other problem with Ripple is that it is set up as a "get rich quick" scheme, but only for the founders. In order to carry out transactions you need XRP, they're the only ones who can sell you more XRP, and they have the ability to change how much XRP every transaction costs at any time.
This is similar to Henry George's philosophy:

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

There's a foundation of some sort in San Francisco that introduced it to me. It's a quite interesting idea. The TLDR is capitalism for what you produce, and socialism for natural resources.

I'd like to see it tried out somewhere if it hasn't been already.
HN-DDOS, probably.
The SSL/TLS protocol unfortunately uses some known-bad constructions, which lead to intractable issues (see: BEAST, Lucky13 for examples)

NaCl's goals are vastly different to those of SSL/TLS. SSL/TLS aims to provide a simple, clean interface with sane defaults for the majority of simple use-cases, whereas SSL/TLS aims to provide an interface with near-infinite flexibility for the case of providing an encrypted, authenticated tunnel.

NaCl also deliberately does not support lots of ciphers, as that makes it easy for developers to choose poorly, for example, (Alleged) RC4, as is supported in OpenSSL.
I don't want to and you can't make me.

For farther comments on the issue, read up on the element of hubris in Greek mythology.
The claim of Ada Lovelace being the first programmer rubs me the wrong way. Obviously, Babbage would know how to program his own computer. He designed the damn thing.
I've just checked the GRUB source code and I think it will clear the .bss section even if it's loading an ELF file.

grub-core/loader/multiboot_elfxx.c has a function named grub_multiboot_load_elf32/64 which actually loads the segments of the ELF file. A segment has two fields defining its size: filesz (which is the amount of bytes to copy from the file) and memsz (which is its actual size once loaded). If memsz is greater than filesz, it zeroes the trailing bytes:

if (phdr(i)->p_filesz < phdr(i)->p_memsz)
grub_memset ((grub_uint8_t *) source + phdr(i)->p_filesz, 0,
phdr(i)->p_memsz - phdr(i)->p_filesz);

The .bss section is placed by the linker at the end of a segment and increases memsz by the size of it (but not filesz, to avoid having to place lots of pointless zeroes in the ELF file) - for example this is one of the segments from my kernel's ELF file, which contains the .bss section at the end:

LOAD off 0x0000000000020000 vaddr 0xffffffff8011f000 paddr 0x000000000011f000 align 2**12
filesz 0x0000000000004be0 memsz 0x0000000000017678 flags rw-

Here you can see memsz is 0x17678 bytes and filesz is smaller at 0x4be0 bytes. The difference between them is the size of the .bss section.

grub_multiboot_load_elf32/64 is called in the case when the address tag is not present, so the .bss section will be cleared by GRUB in this case as well.
This makes me really sad. 32bit mode x86 assembly is such a mess compared to amd64 -- I guess it's a good excuse to work with qemu and arm, if nothing else ;-)
While it's obviously a decent size Series A, it's no-where near the largest European Series A this year.

WorldRemit based in London did a $40m A round last month.
They are long overdue for one =)
Show HN – The most favorited social media content
You can't stay in business selling one version of your software to customers long term.
If you can't stay in business then there are no new features and the product dies.
I understand when laypeople don't understand the software business, but you expect more from the development community.
There is a poster on the wall of the shop I walk past occasionally. This is in print media too, and having the same advert on TV, print and web probably is something Apple likes.
Yeah, but they push down the rents on the older apartments. At least thats the way it worked in my city, which has a similar housing situation.
I think this should be one of them. You should not be able to sign away the right to work on other programming projects on your spare time.
Heartbeats are not logged on a standard configuration, so if people other than the confirmed parties independently discovered the vulnerability, told nobody (or at least nobody who would tell anybody), and then exploited it on systems where heartbeats are not logged (which would be most of them), then how could anyone possibly know?
Anyone got any more information on "Basically an iPad in 1981" - the Ohio Computers Centerpoint?
I've seen that set of slides before. But it's quite dense and seems to require (at least for me) Kahan's speech to get all the nuances.

As for the horrible floating point support, are there other factors than lack of signaling NaNs, being unable to set rounding mode and exception policy, floats using floats for intermediate results?

For many purposes such flaws don't seem that bad.

Why is Java code unable to use vector instructions? I guess there's something in the Java spec that prevent compilers from using them, but what is it? I think that the 80-bit floats the Intel FPU offers are used in Java by default unless a method is defined as strictfp, but this a different issue.
i have been to a few of these and its well worth the trip
I believe standard procedure would be for IRS to report it to US-CERT who are part of the Department of Homeland Security.
C is (pretty) easy to use as a structured, portable assembler (eg: you get loops, easy-to-use variables, which you don't have in assembly) -- and easy to interface with assembly.

Pascal might be another good alternative -- as it also doesn't require a run-time. I don't think go will ever (officially) support this kind of thing, rust most likely will.

For an example of something that's not C, have a look at Marte OS, implemented in ADA:

http://marte.unican.es/
It's worth noting that Tails doesn't make you impervious. Tails uses Tor, and Tor is vulnerable to NSA and GCHQ attacks. Specifically, they have the capability of deanonymizing individual targets. I hypothesize that this capability works by monitoring Tor traffic worldwide, then performing a timing correlation between an origin and an endpoint.

Here's an example: Let's say (for the sake of example please) that the NSA can passively monitor Google searches in realtime. Let's say you search for a phrase that sets off their monitor: something like "a Tor user has Googled for Snowden." They'd like to know who you are. How would they do that?

One way is to record the fact that from your home computer originated some Tor traffic at almost the same time the Google search took place.

It's unclear exactly how they deanonymize Tor users, but one piece of info that may corroborate my hypothesis is that in a Snowden screenshot, you can see the NSA has a tab called "Tor Events" in one of their tools.

The need for websites to load quickly is Tor's Achilles heel, because it enables timing correlation. The fact that few people use Tor exacerbates the problem.
The Paradox of Popular Psychology (2012)
Mejorar nivel calidad AdWords
You're missing sarcasm tags there. I hope.
You realize that's not going to work, right? Besides, California isn't a lifeless chunk of rock with no economy and roving bands of killer robots. It's "ruined" in the sense that it's trendy to hate on Californians, Texans, New Yorkers, and anyone from "not here."

Who knows, maybe the ex-Californians will vote yes on Prop 1 so we can keep our buses.
Zebra Technologies May Acquire Motorola Solutions For $3.5B
appreciate your skepticism, thanks for sharing that.

for some context, Loomio is a bootstrapped startup that, though unlike many startups we're not selling equity nor selling advertising, because we believe these investments compromise neutrality. We're not doing this to get rich or to get someone else rich, we're doing this because we think it's something that can make a difference. And it already is

keep asking good questions
Uh, Gates not a programmer? You might want to check your history. By all accounts he is, or was, an excellent programmer who definitely got his hands dirty.

[edit add refs]
Joel's Bill interview - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

Pancake problem - http://archive.today/20120916031916/http://www.npr.org/templ...
I'd actually released code to get private keys a day or two before Cloudflare wrote that blog post on the principle that it was easy enough to do that numerous other people probably already had in private. Didn't help; people still kept concluding that it was impossible to get the private key. Cloudflare were the most publicity-hungry by a little but they weren't the only offender; ErrataSec screwed up pretty badly too for example, as did Akamai and I think one or two others.
Loomio is a great platform. A simple, yet elegant way to tap into the collective knowledge and decision making in organizations. Really recommend it!

I've already supported the crowdfunding and planning on contributing to the open source community as well. There is huge potential in Loomio!
Will Eastern Congo see the first app to win a war?
How would you get around the restrictive Youtube API? With such rules as having the embed visible?
"new technology tends to be developed by people trying to make their fortunes"

How about the internet? The web? Nuclear energy? All of this has been payed for by taxpayers.

EDIT: I am getting a couple of down votes, so I am assuming people are asking for some sources. Most of the research, for internet at least, was actually funded by the department of defense [1]

[1] http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/histor...
good to know, we're on cloudflare, and do have caching in place. were there any pages in particular that were slow?
Bicycle Wheels and Tyres
Hi, thanks for your comments. We launched a functional and useful alpha in early 2012, followed by a public beta in 2013, which was open to everyone to use. 15,000 people have already signed up and people are using the software right now all over the world. You're welcome to use the Loomio protoype right now, either the hosted version in the cloud, or install your own instance.

Set up a Loomio prototype group here: https://www.loomio.org/group_requests/new or grab the code from http://github.com/loomio/loomio

So if we're talking about the beta prototype, characterising us as "unable to launch" isn't fair. What the crowdfunding campaign is for is building Loomio 1.0, a redesign and expansion of the core idea we've validated.

The stretch goals would allow us to unlock matching funding from the New Zealand government, including taking on some big technical challenges. You are right that these are not yet well-defined, since we're still a ways off from starting to work on them. But there are serious challenges around scaling up meaningful online discussion and decision-making to large groups that I don't believe anyone has really solved yet. We want to take them on.

We've hung in there for 2 years already, and put together an amazing team. The incredible support of over 1000 people is now going to allow us to release Loomio 1.0 later this year. We're not going anywhere!!

So sorry it leaves a bad taste. If there's anything else you'd like to know that might help you understand it better, please let us know! We're a genuinely earnest and well-meaning group trying to build something we think can help people.
You can Be whatever you want to be
Manformation.org
Some alternatives: Whonix: (vm isolated or hardware device isolated, tor) https://www.whonix.org/ and Qubes OS: (sandboxing different processes, needs torVM to do tor things) http://qubes-os.org/trac

A nice comparison: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Comparison_with_Others
Cutting down square album covers to a circle isn't always very nice. Plus, I had a couple of audio glitches while the player was in a background tab; never experienced anything like that with SC player.
I don't see anything ironic about it. It's pretty basic economics that higher [scarcity * demand] leads to higher prices.

Someone thought that all that protection was free?
OclHashcat – advanced password recovery
it's an interesting approach. I would be interested to see whether world-politics is capable of generating and addressing a range of diverse perspectives.

in my experience, without a focus on dialogue this isn't easy.
Actually, I recall a short documentary about the production of the Apple ads and as far as I remember Apple uses real photos of products, not CGI. But probably because of the difficulties of capturing photos of LCD screen(white balance, polarization, luminescence intensity and so on) they may be replacing screens with screenshots.
It sounds like the problem was that UnrealScript was initially too simple for the applications it was pushed to, which led to more and more of the underlying system being exposed through the interop API.
"Badly specced" can be a number of things. Some domains have naturally well specified domains, others do not. The business rules of a company, a countries' tax code or building code usually is not an elegant business domain. It's usually a horrible mess of incremental decisions accumulated over decades. Often even logically incomplete or inconsistent.

Here is an excellent example of a design-by-committe specification for a domain that is incoherent, illogical and complex (Part of a modern day building code):
http://www.fierabolzano.it/bauschau2005/congress/EN_1995-1-1...

Of course no implementation can be more elegant than the underlying business logic, the question is: how does the language help me write an implementation that is as nice as possible when the business domain is horrible?

I think Haskell code often looks beautiful but I attribute that not only to it being functional/pure/compact/elegant but also to the code usually being examples of "clean" domains (mathematics, etc.) being implemented in a way that is suited for demonstration, and the fact that it is usually written by excellent developers (who are the ones who tend to preach FP, for good reason).

What I'd like to see are some large-ish real world examples of FP architecture for horrible business problems, not nice ones.
Similarly, Free (the ill-named ISP and mobile phone provider run by Iliad in France) uses "13:37" on most ads as a geek joke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet).
Banksy draws GCHQ
Of course not. They thought that you were taking the piss in a shocking way.

I did once mail a correction to a story about a new EU regulation which had been a high profile item across BBC News. It was quite a fundamental thing, and I got a short mail from a senior editor, thanking me and angrily lamenting that it wasn't a difficult thing for his reporter to check, state of journalists these days, etc etc. The story was changed.

--edit: make a bad pun worse.
the golden years of British innovation are the '50s and '60s

The golden years of British innovation where in the 50s and 60s all right but 1850s and 1860s, maybe even earlier. By the end of the WWII Britain was a shade of its former self completely eclipsed by the US. Although to be fair, tax policy probably wasn't the decisive factor.
I know that it's taboo on HN to get overly political

Not any more it isn't.
Or just call it "WideOpenSSL" until they are done fixing the code and writing tests.

I like how the OpenBSD team is picking up the ball here instead of throwing up their hands in despair, even if it means forking the code.
C64 Reloaded
I hardly know how to respond. The decline curve of frac wells was new information to you, and you have no idea how much gas is present in clathrate deposits (but assume I have no insight). Why do you want to continue this discussion? Why do you imagine that I would?

Let me leave you with some thoughts:

1. One random mistake in the article is the characterization of bitumen production in Alberta. He describes in situ, but a larger portion is still open pit.

2. One thing the author is correct about is judging energy by EROIE. What do you suppose is the EROIE of clathrate methane production? It either requires heating or CO2 substitution. What is the value of using more than one bboe to produce a single bboe?

3. "I would argue that hopefully alternative energy sources will free up enough petroleum from electricity production" - as is clear from the chart I posted, of the 34.7 quadrillion BTUs of petroleum consumed by the US, 0.22 goes towards the production of electricity. That is true across the world except in some very oil rich countries, very isolated countries, or very poor countries.
Mozilla appoints a Marketing guy as interim CEO
Portable chinois
Sadly, (Cold) fusion seems to be in the same boat (see ecat etc.). People want to believe...
OpenBSD has a great security record, definitely excited to see what they can do if they take over OpenSSL maintenance.
...which, for relevant purposes, have the same basic flaws as Java.
for auth at the moment we have (in no particular order):
google, facebook, persona
groups can set their own threshold for entry. one option is manual approval where the applicants email is visible to coordinators and the applicant supplies an introduction.
simple but quite effective
what the heck is the PAX column? Feeling stupid, never heard of that, and Googling doesn't help.

Pax tires? as in run-flats?
Finally, an article on the situation that puts an accurate (i.e. large) amount of the blame on the cities of the peninsula and south bay.

Also, prop 13 is the worst thing ever. Reading that section was really depressing.
those examples all sound like very good parallels. you're building something "by hand" to learn how they work/are constructed. the software you ship you will still build using "robots" (eg linux, nginx, your framework of choice) but do so remembering the lessons you learned.
Why we ditched our free plan
Could this not be caused by increased income disparity, rather than energy use efficiencies? I would be interested in looking at people throughout the years with some kind of comparable inflation-adjusted income to see how their energy usage has changed over the years.
Which app does that?
Glad you like it... I'm hoping to push out the next part later this week, and I've got a few more drafts queued up that "just" needs some proofreading.

Working on getting it to the point where it can fully compile itself now, and hope to get there over the couple of months.
That "unlikely" quote isn't entirely consitent with the rest of the article, and was also about the cause of the previous ice age's end...

In contrast, also from the WP article,

"A study from 2010 concluded with the possibility for a trigger of abrupt climate warming based on metastable methane clathrates in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) region"

and

"In 2008 the United States Department of Energy National Laboratory system[28] and the United States Geological Survey's Climate Change Science Program both identified potential clathrate destabilization in the Arctic as one of four most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change"
From the first chapter of this book, it is described that each layer adds more abstraction. The first layer (input) works on individual pixels, the next layer on a part of the image. Each deeper layer can make more high-level decissions.
Judging by what little I've read of libssl, having tests wouldn't be that much help, as any given test would be spread across three different .c-files and two .h-files and depend on ten different defines, and a few redundant macros. /s
TLDR "Stupidity combined with an unwarranted trust in government to over-ride reality".
That's mostly a problem with the terrain geography in the area (trains can't easily cross the grapevine without a tunnel underneath it or a much longer travel time).
You can hack SD cards actually unlike the article states, Bunny's blog post and presentation at Chaos Computer Congress mentions of this possibility. SD cards have microcontrollers and with enough resources their guess flash media can be subverted. Diversity of these controllers and variety of "proprietary" standards the way these flash controllers work however can be the entropy that makes SD controller hacking very unlikely - but you never know.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

my 2c
Why would you say unable to launch isn't a fair assessment? If you had a functional and useful alpha over 2 years ago, and 1.0 isn't released, I'd say that's spot on. You're going to be in for nearly 3 years, $100k from the crowd, and an unknown amount from your supporters and team before officially launching. 15,000 users on free software is a small number. I'd be worrying the small number isn't because the big launch has happened, but because the concept doesn't have enough appeal. I've launched a few different projects in the past that hit 15,000 users in a week, and the majority of those died within months or a year.

Nonetheless, congratulations on raising $100k from 1,000 users. That shows some dedication from the community, so you must be doing something right. Hopefully I'm wrong on my forecast, and good luck on the project.
I imagine this expansion will hopefully lead to a larger batch being selected this year as there are more mentors available.
Had to debug a Cucumber problem involving recipes in a Chef cookbook. I was building up a TDID toolchain at the time. After wading through six google pages of salad, decided to use different tools.
Sure, but you need 2-10 people no 30 000. You definitely make remote teams work from remote offices.

Also is the problem with executives in companies like Google. I believe a lot of them bought properties and they have no incentive to change the market dynamics. They working against company best interest.
Laptops definitely all have volume control on the keyboard, and even my current (wireless) desktop keyboard has volume control. Is this still not standard on wired desktop keyboards?
The Spawn of Craigslist
How? Where is this? I'm not seeing it. I'm also not seeing Office in the Chrome Web Store.