skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In general, when doing sales, sometimes it is easier to lead with the pain point and then introduce the solution. For example, "Setting up a dev environment takes a day. Sometimes you need one in a minute, like if you're interviewing somebody and need them to demonstrate coding ability on a company laptop. We turn any browser window into a fully-functional dev environment, and it's as ephemeral as the browser window is, so if you close it the company laptop is back in its original state without requiring a sysadmin to wipe it and start over. Next applicant gets a new browser window. Is everyone clear on why a dev environment which doesn't take 2 days to set up or tear down is a useful thing to have? Great! Would you like me to talk about who is willing to pay serious money for this, or do you want to hear what special sauce goes into making this Just Work for your favorite programming stack?"

My guess is that even technically inclined people connect to that more than "OK, so we have cloud-based virtualization technology which spins up ephemeral application containers then hooks them to a proprietary in-browser IDE and shell prompt. It's a Frankenstein monster of Docker, Github, Heroku, and a browser-based IDE. No, the IDE's not the primary value add. No, AWS/Heroku is not a direct competitor. No, no, you don't get it, let me try again..."

Edit: Incidentally if you just conceptualize the product as pain-first rather than solution-first then you'll phrase your strapline as "Dev environment for any stack on any machine in a minute" rather than "Virtualized insert words increasingly disconnected from anything you care about here."
Downvotes noted. Apologies.
'interesting' flags are usually tested with various segments.. so some people will see a flag set to a given value, others a different one.
RubyForge shutting down
Deis PaaS 0.8.0 – CoreOS
Removing notices can be a crime subject to a fine: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506#d
Having people like Iain – with this kind of knowledge of numerical programming and optimization – help you out with your code is one of the major benefits of Julia programming :-)
Stefan Karpinski wrote a very nice overview of multiple dispatch with many examples and some discussion of design implications:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/StefanKarpinski/b8fe9dbb36c...

(he gave this as a talk at Strange Loop 2013, but the video seems to still be embargoed)
What useful distinction is there between a mobile phone which is hooked up to a physical keyboard plus a 30 inch monitor and a desktop computer? It seems inevitable that smartphones will eventually be powerful enough to "act" as the "computer" in "desktop computer like" setups or as the "computer" in "tablet like" devices but why call those systems "mobile phones"? Isn't it more useful to categorise in terms of human-computer interfaces (physical keyboard + monitor = desktop, physical keyboard attached to screen = laptop, large touch screen = tablet, small touch screen = mobile, etc.)? Or does dcurtis actually predict a future where people want to program without physical keyboards and watch movies on 5 inch screens?
Usually only certain traffic signals are equipped with the detectors, but they do in fact use strobe lights to trigger the light switch and it does happen immediately. It doesn't work with any emergency lights, though -- a separate, specific strobe light be must installed to trigger the signal.
Obviously this doesn't keep people 100% anonymous.

This for the millions of users that want to try apps without having to fill in multiple onerous registration fields and without having to worry that if they use facebook login, the app will spam all their friends and post to their newsfeed.

This is actually very smart, and I will be implementing it soon. Definitely not an "idiot" move for developers to implement.
That was an extremely interesting comment. It would be helpful to mention that it's essentially an overview of bacteriophages, viruses which target bacteria. Describes their initial development, reasons why they aren't currently widely used, and links to more information about possible future development.
why this over a cat | sed | sendmail < bcc distro_list?
The original version also - yes, in 1969 - involves hacking the traffic light control computer system to cause chaos in Turin. The elite computer hacker who pulls off this feat by sneaking into the traffic control center and replacing the reel to reel tape on one of the mainframes is played, rather depressingly and entirely to type, by Benny Hill. I guess they didn't have the go-to computer hacker stereotype quite worked out in 1969, but they knew that geeks had potential as comic relief...
Thank you for the insanely detailed write up.

What I want to know is what kind of magic YC saw in the application that got the team the interview. Because even from the team's perspective "There was no business model to speak of, the market size was unclear, we didn’t have much of any secret sauce, we hadn’t been working on it that long and the list goes on."

Is this an instance where the team was so compelling it warranted an interview?
>Shao and I had lots of experience in starting companies, product management, management consulting and developing

Maybe this is just me being nitpicky but "lots of experience" to me says that this person is an expert in their field. Guy obviously has done great things, but I wouldn't say he is an expert. Flawed as it may be, the 10,000 hour rule I think is a good rule of thumb to determine expert status and is roughly 10 years of full time intensive work, which he doesn't really have.

This is part of a wider issue with the tech community that seems hypocritical. In one breath many in the tech world say that "results are what matter" and that age and experience are nothing but numbers. Then in the next breath these same people will tout about all the experience they have and how they are experts and have this and that experience.

Can't have it both ways though. Either experience qua experience is worth something or it isn't. I would generally fall on the side of it isn't, so lets just not even mention it.
And therein lies the problem. For some areas of the world OSM data is excellent.

But the internet is global. It might work correctly for you when testing, but somebody in another country finds your app utterly useless.

Even if Google Maps has worse data for some areas than OSM, globally it's far more consistent.

Given that there's far, far cheaper options for mapping than Google while still providing excellent data (ArcGIS comes to mind), if you're building a commercial product with an international market in mind you're still better off using a commercial GIS solution
99% Invisible should turn up on HN more often. It's a very interesting and very well produced podcast that should interest a lot of people here. The episodes are short and it's worth digging through the archives.
It's a pretty significant move and a big shift towards Agent Zuckerberg's ultimate goal of replacing the internet and freedom of information and privacy.

Can someone give me some perspective on why Mozilla's Persona is not used more for authentication purposes?
I suspect that Babe Ruth might actually be comparable. People that know a little bit about baseball know him. People that know a little bit about cricket know Bradman.

Ali and Jordan on the other hand are pretty much known by everyone. Pele would be another good example.
Medical records sell for about $60 apiece on the black market
It's my understanding that you have to do this on Linux as well, and it isn't enough to just build your project with CGO_ENABLED=0, you'll also have to rebuild the go-toolchain with CGO_ENABLED=0 for it to work. But perhaps this has changed in recent versions of go?

Eg:

cd /tmp
git clone git@github.com:apg/wipes.git wipes.git
cd wipes.git/
go get github.com/gorilla/websocket
go get github.com/gorilla/websocket
go build
ldd wipes.git
# > libc.so.6 among others
export CGO_ENABLED=0
go build # makes no difference, produces identical binary

Afaik, in this case it's 'net/http' that pulls in a dependency on cgo
(again, unless we rebuild the whole go toolchain with cgo_enabled=0).

Not that this is terrible as such, but it's a gotcha if you want to run
the resulting binary in a chroot, or on a host with a different version
of libc...
Worked through a "teach yourself HTML" tutorial on AOL. This must have been early 2000s. I remember being fascinated from the get-go. The concept that this was how you build web pages was just incredible to me.

To practice, I built all kinds of toy sites. Fan pages for bands I liked. Homepages for myself. I would take a site and try to duplicate it. Anything.

Then I learned about servers and hosting so other people could view my sites.

Eventually I picked up PHP which really opened my eyes to what could be done with websites.

Somehow or another I found Python. Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Python" made the language click in a way other tutorials never did.

Found Django shortly thereafter (2007-ish) and the rest is history.
The ability to communicate is the first thing that I look for in a founder. It's difficult to get customers, raise funding, hire employees, and build a substantial company if you aren't able to communicate in a concise and effective manner.
The problem with that is that most of the buttons would take you to pages that don't exist. I guess the browser could crawl them first, but what would really be the point?
Precisely. This may sound pedantic or academic, but in practice when static overloading and dynamic dispatch differ, the static behavior is usually not what you want. In my experience, this makes it painful to make code that is polymorphic in multiple arguments behave correctly in C++ (double dispatch [1] is one of the necessary but awkward tactics that's used), whereas multiple dispatch just works. And of course, almost working and actually working are a world apart even though they sound so close.

[1] http://lostechies.com/derekgreer/2010/04/19/double-dispatch-...
Transcendence: An AI Researcher Enjoys Watching His Own Execution
Thanks a ton Iain, it pushed it down by 60% on my end as well. About the C code, I used -O2, the specific compiler flags are in the rnn_perf.sh file.

https://github.com/ninjin/ppod/commit/ce7665a2cfd045332e9861...

Julia is really tempting for my next project, the benefits of scripting without all the OOP cruft and a community that just shines. Also, did I mention the awesome meta programming?
I enjoyed it. Kind of a sad story though. What's with the other reddit guys refusing to be in it?
This may be my fault for not submitting the slides. I haven't figured out how to turn the IJulia notebook into a PDF :-\
URLs are supposed to be atomic; there's no guarantee that truncating a url is going to lead you anyplace useful. The fact that it often does started as an accident of early implementations (hey, show a directory listing by default) followed by a security backfill (damn, directory is showing; better drop an index.html in there) which lead to a convention (better put something meaningful at each level of the url, because people will try them and we don't want 404 errors.)

I don't think the convention can be assumed to be true for any website to the degree needed to implement a feature like you suggest. There would be too many errors when people click on those buttons, and people would blame the browser, not the website.
That's right -- I knew them as "silver boxes." But apparently they were called "chrome boxes" in other circles:
http://www.aboutphone.info/lib/phreak/boxes-2.html

Interesting times.
To be secure, your app would tell the user what code to add. So after I tell you I'm 'zaroth', you say please add 'gHypQwnm' to your about (show a link to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zaroth) and a link 'Verify'.

I add it, submit, click back twice, click verify on your site, and then go back to my HN profile and remove it. It sucks from a user interaction standpoint, but better than asking the user for their HN password!
At first I was concerned by this, but as long as the URL is accessible - by clicking the domain chip - I could see this being a good thing. Most non power users never directly manipulate URLs, so there's no real need to display them so prominently. The domain on the other hand is important, and showing only it without the rest of the URL serves to significantly emphasize it.

As long as there remains a power user toggle to show the full URL, seems like a positive change. Of course, I may be missing some edge case.
A Low Cost Atomic Force Microscope
It's CC share alike, so you should be able to.
Aren't a couple of those "less than objective" judges coming up on retirement?

What then?
I think we do just fine not changing regulations too quickly. The banking industry worked smoothly until we tinkered with regulations starting in the 90s. The Internet was private enough until the Patriot Act. Also, anyone in a regulated industry can tell you, regulations change every year (or more often) and many resources are poured into just staying compliant.
I'm not a lawyer but I do read FCC regs for fun...

A passive faraday cage on your own property that's not open to the public probably isn't an issue. As far as size goes you would be subject to local building codes of course.

Once you get into active jamming however that requires you to transmit and to transmit you need a license from the FCC. The right to transmit anywhere in the US is under the FCC's jurisdiction and doesn't have anything to do with the landowner. It may seem strange to divorce airwave rights from property rights but it's not that different from water rights or mineral rights or airspace rights, which have a long legal history of being divorced from landowner rights.

When you open your faraday cage to the public it gets a little tricky too, because if a "licensee" has the legal right to be somewhere according to you and the legal right to transmit or receive according to the FCC then you can't really legally prevent them from doing both at the same time. This idea, which is called the "OTARD rule" in some situations, is interpreted to force landlords to allow tenants to install WiFi and satellite equipment on rented property for example.

There probably is an FCC rule that would prevent stores or movie theaters or similar public places from jamming via a Faraday cage, but since actively jamming is cheaper I am not aware of any actual instances of this type. So in that sense it's a test case, but I'm reasonably certain which way it would go.
This sounds a lot like AOL to me. No sense of the URL in there, just the keyword search. It was a big hit with the non-power users too if I remember correctly.
It's funny because I didn't notice that at first. Followed up with "ohhhhhh, right". :-P
What are the libraries like for Julia at this point? The big thing holding me to R is the breadth of libraries for a) various statistical methods and algorithms and b) plotting.

I'm kind of desperate to get away from R at this point, but reluctant to move to Python (not that I have anything against Python, but I would really like to add a high performance language to my toolkit than something inbetween).
I saw this in the comments on the tech crunch story about JAH. It's priceless:

Please change the title of the article from: "Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism And Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit", to "Julie Ann Horvath Describes Harassment From The Founders Wife, The Founder, And Has A Problem With Hula Hoops (For Some Reason)"
It is interesting that they have misspelled 'jl's last name twice, especially since one instance of it is in an email they quote from her.
I could imagine how you could cross-reference data from the towers and start seeing a pattern. You might even be able to track it to a specific location over time. Seems totally doable with access to enough information.
I somewhat expected this, given the trend of where things seem to be heading with software these days. In the name of "usability" configuration is removed, UIs are "simplified", and gradually the choice and freedom of the user is degraded. Opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them, or to explore and discover, a chance for users to grow. Dumbing-down software only encourages more of the same.

The "senior trying to use a computer" image is interesting in that it seems to imply that the seniors of the future will be just as clueless about how to use the Internet as the ones today, which may unfortunately not be far from the truth.

I predict that eventually browsers will become almost unconfigurable, highly locked-down, and be less controllable by the user than a television. As the article notes, "the URL will [...] that many users will never even realize is clickable." From there, it's not hard to imagine at some point the decision to remove even that "clickableness", on the basis that "no one will bother to", and by that point the frog has been thoroughly cooked. Open-source or not, almost no one will have the will or knowledge (except the few elite) to modify them to make them work as they desire. Users can be more easily "herded" and persuaded, if they have little knowledge of how things work; just keep them consuming and complacent, because knowledge is power, and we don't want them to have too much of that. Appease and mollify them with eye candy and doublespeak. Welcome to the future of corporate control, mindless consumption, and fashionable ignorance.

Sorry for the negativity, but this trend I find really unsettling.
Wouldn't this make it that much easier to phish non-power users?
No it isn't - in this case triangulation is the correct technique. Trilateration is when you measure distances. For instance, locating the epicenter of an earthquake is done by comparing the time at which various waves arrive, and making calculations based on the known speeds of those waves. Doing that with the speed of light at terrestrial distances is very tough and will be prone to inaccuracies and large errors. Instead, you measure the angles at which the signal is strongest, and that is triangulation.
Thanks!

One lesson was that we should have invested more in our tools upfront. We largely depended on Unity's built in editor to create our content. If we had built level editor tools, and an art workflow based around that, content creation would have gone much faster. And we might have gotten to the point where we could have offered a level editor to players.

Our team was four core members, with a composer and a GUI / 2d artist helping out on contract. We also had help on the business side. With the game starting as a hobby project, we didn't have much structure, and the work got divided simply by people taking on the jobs that they had the time, interest, and skills for. On that front, we are fortunate that things worked out as well as they did. The project started at a Global Game Jam in January 2012, so we were a little over two years from start to release.
Ironically, the author of the blog post has a blog post (on Quora) talking about how Quora is superior to Medium (because Quora is centered entirely around surfacing interesting content to you).
Last month Patrick Geraghty, an administrative law judge with the National Transportation Safety Board ruled "the FAA regulations approved for manned aircraft did not apply to unmanned aircraft any more than they applied to paper airplanes or balsa wood planes."

The FAA is appealing the decision, but as of right now it may pique their interest, but it's not illegal.

Article: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/07/us/drone-pilot-case-faa/
Full decision: http://www.kramerlevin.com/files/upload/PirkerDecision.pdf
In JavaScript, "this" is not a variable, or a binding in the local scope. It is a keyword, so it is magic. It was a terribly idiotic design decision, because the variable you'd want to close over most of the time is "this", but since it's not a variable, you can't close over it -- it's dynamically bound, in a really stupid way.

It's the cause of a lion's share of JavaScript bugs. No matter how well you know JavaScript, and how pedantically you understand how "this" works and why it's such a terrible design flaw, you will ALWAYS make mistakes with it, and you will ALWAYS have to go carefully over your code line by line looking for misuses of "this".

Whenever your JavaScript program is misbehaving, the first thing you should do is to search the relevant code for "this", and think carefully about how it might be bound. And even if your JavaScript program is not misbehaving in a way you can detect, you should still do that anyway, because it might just have some very subtle bugs caused by "this".

I've been writing code that starts out with "var self = this;" and then ONLY using "self" and NEVER using "this" except for the first line of a function that goes "var self = this;". That way there's a lot less chance of making mistakes, although it's still possible for that first "this" to be incorrectly bound -- you only want to do the "var self = this;" in top level functions, and all functions contained in them should use self and never use "this".
> That doesn't really make sense

Capitalism, man. Without a financial incentive, you dramatically reduce the use of drones. Approve commercial usage and you'll have dozens of drones flying around after every celebrity and politician everywhere they go.

Businesses will have drones hovering outside their doors all day with CCTV. Intersections and major roads will have a few drones above them monitoring traffic.

How about a reality show based on filming what goes on in backyards in suburbs all over the country. "Oooh look a pool party... lets hover around streaming this over the internet, there's sure to be some nudity or a drunk fight eventually".
The mmap pattern
Adding Haskell's `where` keyword to OCaml
It depends on what you need. DataFrames [1] is a pretty good replacement for R's data frames. Distributions [2] is pretty amazing. Gadfly.jl [3] is a great ggplot-style plotting library that integrates nicely with IJulia [4]. If you have questions about specific things you need to do and want pointers, post on the julia-users list [5] and you should get some good answers.

[1] http://harlanh.github.io/DataFrames.jl/

[2] http://distributionsjl.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[3] https://github.com/dcjones/Gadfly.jl

[4] https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl

[5] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-users
Facebook is 'evil' because their actual, factual business plan is collecting and selling your personal information. You just can't really argue your way out of that one.

No, of course I don't think the people that work there are off their rocker, or actually evil -- I just don't intend to participate in their monetization plan is all.
This isn't an original view, but I suspect that PCs will become specialized devices for particular groups (professional writers / coders / video editors, or those who aspire to do professional work; PC gaming enthusiasts; a couple of others), while most other people doing most other things will migrate to cell- and tablet-like form factors; maybe they'll have a computer around for something but does it matter if the computer is five or even ten years old?

The migration factor would seem to be an important part of Dustin's point—along with the idea that teens and 20-somethings are leading indicators, as they were for social networks, mp3s, etc.

(I'm typing this on a 27" iMac but would broadly define myself as part of the "specialist" group.)

Incidentally, cameras appear to be following a similar trajectory to PCs, with sales falling off in the last two or so years. See e.g. http://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/when-will-the-panic-star... or http://www.dslrbodies.com/newsviews/march-2014-nikon-news/ha....