skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's probably sampling bias. I'm assuming you work in startups since you're on YC. I work for a large corporation and the only millionaires I've met in my short career are executives that climbed the ladder. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
WeChat grows to 396 million active users
One reason is that versioning is really hard. Now that Python comes standard with Linux distros, and in fact some of the built in tools are written in Python, it becomes really hard to upgrade. So you can never touch the version that your OS ships with or you'll break some part of the OS. But those are usually years behind and developers generally want the new hotness so you end up installing newer versions elsewhere. There are tools built around this like virtualenv but you end up with a bunch of different versions of Python installed in different places, and then installing modules becomes something that happens outside of your system's package management software so you can't track dependencies etc. And python itself has really weak package management, or rather several competing and incompatible systems but you'll download modules that use each of them so you end up with all of them. At least Ruby and Perl were able to standardise on one each.
I like the new look. What is the icon in the bottom-right and top-left for?
> You mean the Web has evolved into a Doctor Frankenstein's monster like hodge-podge of kluged together hacks, layered on top of layers of other hacks, layered on top of still more hacks

So it's like every other successful platform in history, then.
That's practically cheating--Neal Stephenson wrote the entire Baroque Cycle trilogy in longhand[1].

[1] http://www.nealstephenson.com/photos.htm
I think your peers at an Ivy League school are much more likely to be wealthy, and slightly more likely to be interested in academics. Perhaps some of this disagreement comes from the other schools used for comparison. I figure the OP is looking at good schools either way.

You should also be careful about the top professors. The best professors are experts in their field, but you may be better off taking a class from someone who loves to teach, rather than someone who is an excellent scientist. Famous professors are much less valuable to an undergrad.
I proposed two techniques, putting all headers in Accept (works now) and allowing CORS-* headers by default (just a proposal)
As a developer I can build out an interactive prototype from designs much much faster than by just using jQuery, so I am an audience for this. Proving out interactions early is (usually) much more important than having re-usable code at the start of a project..

Our designers - who know enough code to make use of this tool - can prototype interactions from their designs without asking a developer to help them. They are an audience for this.

Are we really going to have another "why do we need this automation tool when we can do this by hand?" conversation yet again on Hacker News?
This is a separately published version of the article being discussed in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744771
My expectation is that they'll end up giving us something that'll make it easier to work around the lack of generics, but I don't know about getting actually full-on generics. Honestly, I don't want them - they make it way too easy to make overly complex code.... much like class inheritance. I've been developing for 14 years and can count on one hand the number of times I needed something like a tree or graph. Certainly, if you're working on scientific or mathematic projects, you may use them every day of the week, but if so, maybe Go isn't the right language for you, and honestly, it doesn't have to be everything to everyone.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should keep NPAPI around forever... and I acknowledge security as a legitimate concern. But power and extensibility are legit concerns as well, and I worry about an overly restrictive environment where the evolution of media on the web is forced into lockstep with the evolution of browsers, without even the option of going "off the reservation" and using something radically different.

Of course, at the end of the day, this is one HUGE advantage of OSS, and with many of the major browsers being OSS, someone could always fork a browser with whatever kind of plugin support they want if they really need it (and are able to support it).
Hardcore would be Edlin or ed. At least KEdit gives you a window.

(Apparently Edlin is still available in Windows8, though requires 16 bit support).
You can use https://github.com/openresty/lua-nginx-module#ngxlocationcap... to do multiple parallel requests
While keeping everything public is probably good for bioinformatics projects that focus just on building tools, it would be disastrous for other areas of research where revealing a particular gene under investigation or specific genomic locus may result in loss of credit. This problem must be fixed at the publication, CV, and tenure committee level, not by GitHub.
There is no law that says that information can not travel faster than light is there? The law is just a out mass/energy.

On top of that I believe faster than light transfer of information has already been experimentally shown to exist.
>We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.

Then so be it. If Mozilla's mission is to improve and defend the "open" web, then EME should never have been considered for implementation. We shouldn't sacrifice our goals for the sake of market share.
Thanks for being a HelloSign/Fax user! Any feedback, good or bad is very helpful.
Machine learning medical search engine launches
Legitimate reasons to directly access the OS are typically "there isn't a browser API for this yet". We have multiple Open Source browsers now; submit a patch to one or more of them to add a new API, and ideally start working to standardize it. The result will be far better and more secure than a one-off custom plugin to pass through specific OS functionality.
As easily as Mozilla can make an open-source DRM client... simple (DRM will be broken sooner rather than later, if it hasn't been already), but you can't distribute it. So we're back to "pirate channels", like all the movies today.

And in any case, this misses the point: non-technical users won't distribute pirated content, even if they could rip it. Who are they going to distribute it to? Friends? Whoever wants free movies, can get them easily. But the main advantage of streaming, on-demand-ness, remains in the hands of the big players, who can afford to lease the servers and pay for the bandwidth.
<audio drm="true">
<img drm="true">
<article drm="true">

As soon as you let them put a foot on your house is absurd to believe that the rest will not follow.
Sensores que Mudam de Cor Para Representar os Esforços Internos
Not particularly. Lua doesn't do anything to make storing utf-8 in strings difficult. You have to bring your own Unicode library for doing anything nontrivial, but that's true of everything in Lua. Using ICU from Lua isn't substantially different from using it from any other lanugage.
The point is to put the slippery slope argument into context. Mozilla had made the sandbox very explicit and divorced form the rest of the content in the DOM.
>We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.

Then so be it. If Mozilla's mission is to improve and defend the "open" web, then EME should never have been considered for implementation. They shouldn't sacrifice their goals for the sake of market share.
I enjoy my kobo. The single purpose (novels only, constant airplane mode) aspect is a big part of it. E-ink and 3 week battery life helps make it feel like a non device. It doesnt trigger my 10 second attention span mode.

It might be nice to have a nice light clamshell e-ink writing machine. All it does is write novels.

Anything that helps. For ggrm, I propose we take away any computer that runs any software other than wordstar. Get winds of wi ter written already! I need to know what happens. :)
This doesn't seem useful if you are pricing out anything less than a full (or multiple) racks of servers.

For 2 servers with moderate specs (8 cores total, 16gb each) it claims the 3 year cost will be $120K. Most of that seems to be due to the assumption that 2U requires a full rack costing $30K up front plus $2.5K/mo in datacenter costs.
well, I'm not a bioinformaticist (as a matter of fact my personal intent is to develop pharmaceuticals in the public), but I do see it as a chicken and egg problem, in other words, it's possible for github to become an instrument for that change.
LAN sync is only available on Dropbox and is incredibly useful.
Regardless of whether or not gluten-intolerance is as widespread as some claim it is, I'd like to see a simple change to food labeling to make it easier for those who want to know what they are eating to find out: versioning on labels.

The way it works now, I go to the supermarket. I see, say, a frozen spaghetti and meatball entree. I carefully read the long label to see if it has anything that makes me want to avoid it [1]. It passes. I buy it. I like it. Can I now just buy it again, without reading the label?

Nope! Food companies like to tinker with their products to improve consumer satisfaction and to cut their costs and increase their profits, so I need to read the label again.

If they put version information, such as a last change date, on the ingredient list I could then just glance at the date and see if it has changed since I last bought the item.

This should be doable at almost zero cost to the food producers if it is phased in by making the switch to versioning on a given product the next time they are changing the label.

[1] I have no known foods that I must avoid for medical reasons, but I have some admittedly irrational requirements. Some time when I was a kid, I decided for some reason to stop eating meats other than beef and pork. I have sometimes described myself as a lacto-ovo-bovo-porco vegetarian.
That’s what I kinda suspected. It would be hard for me to imagine someone mistaking sensitivity to the listed foods with a gluten problem.
Please post to HN when you have some sensible default config options built in! I really want to try your tool but can't be arsed to whitelist everything one by one.
To save others the search: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=923590
Some places don't use turnstiles. Instead, you voluntarily validate your ticket with a machine. To ensure compliance, random checks are performed, with a large penalty if you don't have a valid ticket. It's a pretty nice system.

Similarly, some places don't use DRM. I don't think it's made it into the video space yet, but legitimate DRM-free music is common. It seems to work pretty well.

To say that DRM enables the service to exist only works if there's no other, better way. But there is, and the only reason we don't get to have it is because of customer-hostile policies from media companies.
Perhaps, but it's another test I have to pay for, so.

(health insurance may pay some, but I'll still have a bill in 3 months staring at me asking for money.)
While I'm not a fan of the telecoms, AT&T shouldn't be getting flak for this. Google is snoop-by-default (not holding it against them, they are a company looking for profit just like any other), at the very least, AT&T is making the choice here clear.

Fiber's privacy notice:
https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html

It looks like the same snooping that's in all the other google apps (whether to serve you ads or otherwise). I'm glad that it's out in the open, and hopefully it causes people to think about the value of their privacy (and feel a little bit more paranoid about their lack of it)

I'm not sure who said it first, or where I heard it, but the belief that "everything google does is a loss leader for adwords" holds true here -- this is why I believe they're going to snoop-by-default, and not think twice about using your data as it flows through their fiber.
Hi, I'm part of the team. In that case we would get a "black box". We need full control over the process.
Chris Dixon: Why Bitcoin is disruptive, bubbles are relative etc
Things that come to mind immediately:

Dropbox works equally well across platforms with near 0 synchronization issues. It's just a folder. They aren't trying to add cloud to their own platform, they don't care what device you use or if you use Apple's word processor or Microsoft or Google Docs.

Dropbox has has a firebase/Parse style API you can use to build applications that store that application data in the cloud.

My favorite Dropbox API uses:

automatic syncing of O'reilly Media books. Whenever O'reilly updates one of their ebooks, I always have the current copy, because O'reilly syncs it with Dropbox.

1Password synching.

automatic Hackpad backups (they had that even before they were bought).

I installed this new app the other day, Trickster from the Mac App store, it automatically detected I was using Dropbox.

But I'll mention some negatives:

Those new recent android apps were really bad and I uninstalled them. Carousel and that other one, I don't even remember what it was now. They were just terrible apps, at least on my Galaxy S4.
I've been using mozilla since forever. I believe in The Mission.

If I went to view media and a message told me it wouldn't work because of DRM, I wouldn't switch browsers to view it. "The medium is the message," and the message you get from DRMed media is rude and uninviting.
Ask HN:  What books would be good for a CS101 course?
To clarify: I'm a self-taught programmer (Python/Django, for now) but there are clearly large gaps in my knowledge base. What books are good to read that might help teach the sort of skills that would be learned in a CS101 course? Note, I'm not necessarily looking for textbooks (although I'm not opposed) and ideally I'd like things I can read on the subway or whatnot, i.e., texts that stand alone without my having to be in front of a computer--I have more than enough resources to learn from while I'm coding. I'm also most interested in practical vs theoretical knowledge, but I'm open.
The secret is to make the upgrade path seamless - if I have to navigate an obstacle course of library dependencies, config file format incompatibilities, system conflicts or complicated data migration issues, I'll just skip the whole affair.

All too often devs get blinders on and don't realize that most people don't have their domain knowledge and therefore it's not quite so easy for them to see the forest for the giant stacked trees that are lying across the path.

If you can't avoid that morass, the new version better offer something so compelling you can't possibly skip it.
At our lower tiers, no, but if you're looking at doing a significant amount of requests happy to talk about bulk pricing - ed [at] hellosign [dot] com
You forgot to mention the blue shadow on the active window.
I think what you're actually talking about is really
the desire for Referential Transparency[0] vs. the mutable/immutable distinction.

I certainly agree that, to some degree (as long as you have some way of guaranteeing referential transparency) then the default for local variables being mutable/immutable doesn't really matter. The important thing is the RT bit, and if Rust can guarantee that (via no-aliasing or linear types or whatever) then it's already ahead of the bunch in terms of safety.

Of course mutability can prevent algebraic reasoning and trivial reuse via simple algebraic extraction of code/functions, but so can strictness, so...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_transparency_(compu...
Would You Pay For Google Glass? Now Available to the Public
Nobody really uses the analog hole. It's actually easier to do it digitally, and will remain so, because securing a device against arbitrarily many attackers with physical access and arbitrarily large amounts of time and resources is a practical impossibility. The analog hole is just the formal proof that DRM can never be effective, because if you can see it or hear it you can record it.
First Product Lessons learned
Hi,author here, would appreciate your feedback about my post :)
'Users Behaving Badly': Sysadmins Speak Out
No, but that's their justification the vast majority of the time. They don't limit it to foreign governments or militaries either. They do engage in economic espionage, fact. They do single out anyone they don't like which isn't limited to terrorists in these campaigns: "radicals", among them Wikileaks supports, fact.

Stewart Baker has discredited himself[1], his opinion is worth jack shit frankly. I wouldn't trust anything he says, not only because he was behind many of these programs as council but also because of Eben Moglen's interactions with him during the almost-prosecution of Phil Zimmerman, and suggest you do the same.

That the documents are 'sensationalized' is the favorite refuge of NSA goons: when Keith Alexander's comment about collecting it all became public, SEXINT, PRISM, etc. He talks about all of those and leaves no doubt that this characterization is horse shit after the third chapter.

[1] http://www.skatingonstilts.com/skating-on-stilts/2014/04/hid...
This is the premise of "Delta Innovation Class"[0].

[0] http://www.deltainnovationclass.com/
We've been using it in production for about 6 months as the endpoint for an analytics system. We went from 5 medium EC2 app servers down to 1 micro instance in testing for our load at the time (we have an HA setup in production). Blazingly fast. Less than 100 LOC for the service.

The author of Lapis is also very responsive to PRs and bug reports.
Nope, switched to BTSync. I'll investigate syncthing and whatever else comes along, but basically anything-but-Dropbox.
And lo, Python became Perl, and the cycle was complete.
Why bother with letting grandma store Netflix movies locally in a hypothetical DRM-free world when you can just use BitTorrent to download them now?

There's no reason a BitTorrent movie downloader couldn't be made just as easy to use as a Netflix downloader. If one doesn't already exist, it's not because DRM is somehow stopping it.
CTO to CTO: Werner Vogels and Don Neufeld
What about Netflix requires DRM? I know that the studios currently require it but what benefit does it actually serve? How much of the content on Netflix is not available to pirate if so inclined?
The turnstile is actually a great analogy for DRM, including all of its flaws. And the turnstile isn't what allows subway service to exist.

A turnstile isn't very hard to jump over. If the turnstile is the only enforcement mechanism, anyone who wants a free subway ride just has to vault over (or perhaps also glance around to see if there are cops nearby, google whether there are monitored cameras, or pull a hoodie over their face).

There's an alternative, though: most places in Europe, there are no turnstiles, and nothing preventing you from getting on public transit without paying. It's a "trust but verify" system: you are required to validate your ticket before you get on the train, and occasionally someone comes around the train to check if you have a valid ticket, and issues a fine if you don't have one.

With this method, the users aren't inconvenienced, enforcement costs are reduced, and everyone's happy. With the turnstile, you get massive queues at busy stations during rush hour, and by making this one mechanical device your sole point of enforcement, you've actually made it more likely that people who don't want to pay will cheat the system.
Creating a VMware ThinApp package for Firefox in
Russia threatens to disrupt GPS navigation in fight over sanctions
> There is no law that says that information can not travel faster than light is there?

Yes, there is. Information has to be carried by some form of mass/energy, so if mass/energy can't travel faster than light, neither can information.

> I believe faster than light transfer of information has already been experimentally shown to exist.

No, it hasn't. If you're thinking of the CERN neutrino experiments a couple of years ago, that turned out to be an equipment error.
Reminds me of the classic:

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/The_Best-est_Version_Control...
(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Sift Science).

For online purchases (card-not-present transactions), the merchant takes on all of the fraud risk. This means that the banks do not have much incentive to protect against fraud. The merchants must go on the information they have, which probably doesn't include the card holder's verified phone number.

Sift Science has been successfully protecting online businesses for over a year, and it turns out that machine learning is (unsurprisingly) a good tool for this sort of classification problem.
Thanks for taking the bait. :-) I don't have time to write about it today, but hope to someday. Since this won't be the last time the government creates a website, the government needs to get good at this stuff. The tech team did an amazing job rescuing the site, and I hope the geeky lessons (especially from the testing perspective) get shared someday.
Network Neutrality and the Economics of Congestion
Nope, permanently moved to SpiderOak
The major DRM platform out there is Netflix on Silverlight, and it's not particularly locked-down at all.

Of course there are others, but they hardly matter at all in terms of marketshare.
double-tapping has the same effect as a long-press in this case. It brings up the contextual menu.
I have written two novels (unpublished) and about to start a third.

These days I use a minimal writing app called iA Writer. The file is saved to DropBox automatically and I also push commits to GitHub everyday as a way to keep track of revision history. A nice clean system that provides backups and no distractions from the writing itself.

When I am working on a novel I do a few things that help me immensely to keep the momentum going, which is really important:

1) I don't revise anything as I go.
2) I have a min/max daily word quota.
3) I write at a specific time each night (for routine).

Before I discovered those practices I started so many writing projects I never completed.

Good luck to you!
As a sidenote, openresty (nginx+lua) is probably one of the most underrated technologies we have available nowadays. In my experience, every webapp can offload a ton of work(1) to openresty. The lua code is usually much simpler that the equivalent code in the app.

(1) think caching, auth/acl, security filters, some of the stats, some of the logs, etc
If you sign your tags with your GPG key, and only rely on tags signed by GPG keys that you trust, then you can trust the tag as much as you trust the holder of the key.
UK Government Willing To Block EU Net Neutrality Deal
Awesome stuff. I use sift science, in addition to some basic fraud prevention, and what they are doing has allowed me to sleep easier at night.

Kudos to the Sift Science team!
Thanks. Is there any way to efficiently track the releases of these journals, or at least interesting articles in the fields I'm interested in?
Edited this comment - misread your comment. Correct, thank-you for the feedback!

Edit #2 - when you say offline/online, I'm assuming you mean in terms of an online store, versus a physical retail store.

I took it as if the transaction was done in realtime to the backend FI system, or if it were verified offline at a terminal. In EMV terminals at a physical merchant location, transactions can be either online or offline ;)
Interesting ideas, but I don't think these suggestions would be so simple. They would put a burden on consumers to always have a phone at the ready. What happens if your phone can't connect to GPS inside a store? What if you don't have your phone with you (or if you don't have a phone at all)? Buying goods and services would be far less convenient.