skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, that's really sweet, but it's been almost a decade and it's definitely time. I've got some stuff coming up (will post more about it later on so as not to take any of the attention away from mathowie's post) which is all good news. It was really time for me to get a little more librarianing in.
Most blogs have insanely high bounce rates after the first page usually so all that extra script downloading rarely pays off.
Point taken.

It uses the US Social Security Administration's list of baby names from 2012 and does a weighted random selection, so that more popular baby names chosen in 2012 are more likely to be chosen (but less popular ones still come through pretty often.)

The gender-neutral names work similarly, by finding the intersection of boy/girl names in that dataset and weights the names by the popularity of the name and the evenness of the boy/girl distribution.
bandcamp could integrate a social community aspect? they already host music?
Some folks feel like the war on drugs infringes upon their freedom of religion. There have been some exceptions made [1], but the general populace is prohibited from using substances that have been used entheogenically for thousands of years[2][3].

It's a shame that our founding fathers didn't explicitly spell out a right to the dictate the contents/state of your own mind. Perhaps it is implicit in the other rights: what good is freedom of speech and religion if I'm not allowed to enter a contemplative state of mind in which I could have significant insights about my life and spirituality?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Freedom_Restoration_A...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peyote#History

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom#Early
Ask HN: Name the manufacturer of your country's phone network equipment
In light of the recent revelations that the NSA has used DEA access for legal intercept in various countries, in order to introduce country wide SIGINT intercept.

I have a question, what infrastructure hardware manufacturers and country of origin are used in your country phone network?
Metafilter has a lot going for it (personally I think it's probably the best non-private community online, particularly in the sense that once you're an active participant it truly is a "community"), but willingness to change anything about Metafilter is not among its virtues: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/13786/The-Green-Should-Be-Whi...

Perhaps this event will provide the catalyst necessary for the Mefi community to accept some modernization.
Robohand Introduces RoboLeg, Affordable 3D Printable DIY Prosthetic Leg
I wonder why errors and simple strings aren't just length-delimited as well. What do you gain by having both methods in one protocol?
Until we have more encryption details, I agree with yanatan that the only current value is in automating something I already do manually (deleting a link once the receiver has accessed the content).
Also agree with hexagonsun that sending passwords in plaintext is stupid. You could, however, send it via this channel, and the username via another (text message, IM, whatever). Still not super-great, but better than nothing, I suppose.
Mapping the interiors of buildings using magnetic fingerprinting
Gotta be able to blackmail the one percent
This made me wonder if it's possible to automatically reverse engineer a small binary file into human readable (and understandable) source code.
Assuming you know the language and compiler used (and all of its quirks and optimizations), and considering that human written programs aren't so random and their patterns are most likely predictable, I think it should be possible though not at all trivial.
Are there any projects attempting this?
Text 2048 with love from Japan
What I have never understood is why google has put so much concentration on punishing the Websites that receive web spam. Why not balance it and punish the sites that don't prevent it. Punishing them sites will firstly de-value the link + push webmasters to actually do something on the other end. Sometimes it is out of the site owners control because they cannot prevent that link from being created. The google updates right now encourage negative SEO because that webmaster has no control of that link creation. If you start punishing the people who have control and are able to prevent spam then it makes them focus on being better at moderating that and allowing more relevant links from blog comments and such.
Indeed. I referred to that same thing in another thread couple months ago:

> This is just the result of transitioning HTML to an applications framework. Now the application you use to view articles is not your browser, but Blogger (or WP etc).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7558912

(The context was rant about webapps that "hijacked" keyboard shortcuts unnecessarily)
Anistock.com – Video Backgrounds and Stock Footage library
We don't we just stop using google hangouts if they are such a PoS? Is it the screen sharing? Everyone is already logged in? I find them infuriating, and only use it begrudgingly.
A couple notes, the three card system zoom-in's get a bit pixelated/rough looking, which isn't necessarily a super flattering look for a first impression.

Also, I don't want to sign up before knowing your price. Turned me off immediately, and I'm probably a potential customer and would have had much more interest in a trial if I knew the price before hand.
Artstor Liberator Chrome Extension – Guerrilla Open Access
They are protecting their racket
Is that better or worse than being fired by the invisible hand? If your company stays the same when new competitors (Reddit, StackExchange, and Quora have been mentioned) appear, whose fault is it?
I don't think you're missing anything. That's the same idea I got.

There's no mention of authentication or encryption, whatsoever. Other than the obvious problems with putting plaintext secrets at a publicly-accessible URL, the whole security model seems to be "we promise to delete your stuff, trust us."

I find it really ironic that this is coming out right after the whole Snapchat scandal. (This is like Snapchat for documents.)
Verizon's new XLTE network doubles bandwidth for latest iPhones and iPads
You're never, ever comfortable: Julia Grace, Head of Engineering at Tindie
I've heard that for small niches, Facebook ads work pretty well.

An acquaintance of mine used this for reaching some pretty specific niche, like males from a specific country, in a specific age range who like some type of cars.

He said that it worked better than other online alternatives, but as always YMMV.
Coding style (Java): Avoid abbreviations in names
That's likely. The Intercept also cited fears of "increased violence", which implies the country is already undergoing some amount of violence.
While not what I'd do for every site, it's a pretty neat tool for some use cases.

In particular, Heroku has moved to a similar setup with Boomerang [1] - a JS include that puts the nice Heroku branding at the top of your add-on configuration pages.

It neatly sidesteps the need to make a component/template for every single framework and backend in use by their different partners.

I could also see it being useful as an easy "drop in" way of tying the branding+nav together on a number of different sites within an organization (so your auto generated docs, your tutorials, etc all live on different systems but easily look the same).

1 - https://github.com/heroku/boomerang
Hi Iburinoc, I'm one of the developers for Torpedo.

Files aren’t encrypted, but for secrets (i.e. text) the encryption happens server-side. We originally wanted to do client-side encryption (before heartbleed), but opted not to in order to keep the API simple.

When we get a secret, a random key is generated, that key is used to encrypt the secret using AES 256 bit encryption, the key is then mixed up with an identifier for the secret and that's included in the URL. We don't store the key itself anywhere on the server, nor do we store the URL (as it contains the key).

When request comes in to view/download a secret, we extract the decryption key and secret identifier from the URL, look up the secret, decrypt it using the key, then send the decrypted contents to the user (over HTTPS).
We are in crazy bananas email backlog Mail.app database corruption digging madly hell with the challenges right now, but if "getting all the challenges all at once" won't destroy your motivation and you've been on HN long enough that I'd know you by reputation (you count), I'm happy to send all of them over.
Display a dynamic balance for any Bitcoin address
a lot of it isn't about making the knowledge hard to obtain, but rather to provide a blanket of deniability.
I didnt realize Keith B. Alexander was Chinese. Good job on bringing appropriate charges and finally impeaching that bastard.

..oh wait
In a fantastical world yes. Google wallet and NFC require one thing that means they can't be readily adopted as the main method of payment - power, and more specifically, personal power. In the real world, relying on a system that requires such a fragile device to be a) powered up and b) functioning, is a Bad Idea. Notes can be washed, ripped and screwed up and still act as legal tender, a bank card is resilient to most conditions and has 2 levels of redundancy beyond the chip (magstripe and raised lettering - the problem with any major payment method is that it has to have failsafes. Imagine the NE (and specifically NYC) had another blackout - how do people think that would go if all methods of payment had to be powered? Even last time, you could still use cards with the traditional click clunk machines.

Chip and pin (and paywave, a nfc like solution) are great but they require failsafes to work consistently.
DISCLAIMER: I'm one of Experts Exchange's volunteer administrators.

Google penalized sites that redirected from SERPs or buried content below a lot of "sign up here" stuff very heavily; you can even make the case that it could have been called the "EE Penalty" instead of Panda, if only because Google's web search team (i.e. Matt Cutts) collaborated heavily with the Stack ownership in developing the algorithm changes and consequences.

That's not to excuse EE's management's behavior -- quite the contrary. From the perspective of longtime users, EE's string of decisions, the consequences of those decisions, and its reactions to those consequences starting not quite a decade ago nearly destroyed what had been a vibrant community.

If there's anything good to have come of it, it's that EE has finally moved -- about six or seven months ago -- to a business model that allows the non-member to see what members see: the entire question and solutions. Joining for free does have a few minor advantages; paying (either with a credit card or by answering questions) has more.

But it took a long time for EE to learn those lessons and begin to implement those fixes. Whether Quora will learn them is a whole 'nother story; like so many other sites, it built its systems and market-share without much thought given to how it was going to monetize.

EE made that mistake too, in 1997. Quora has a lot of money backing it up, so it can maintain its facade for a long time... but I wouldn't be placing any bets on it being around 15 years from now if it actually had to depend on income.
Back in the day with the Nextel phones and service the two way walkie talkie bit use to be impossible to monitor. The FBI made them basically break the security on it. Then right inside their data center they had a rack of their equipment. For engineers there was no drama in listening in to any phone call (press a button basically). Now that all this has come out, I would not be the least bit surprised if the FBI just pressed that button without a warrant. They definitely didn't need physical access.
HN looks almost exactly the same.
Elasticsearch 101: Introduction to Elasticsearch
That is a really interesting problem to calculate. What would that water mountain look like? Could you even tell?
For people that don't like clicking links without knowing what it is: This is a video from Vsauce - "What if the Moon was a Disco Ball?"
Maybe. I'm still unhappy that my bank stores my password as a case-insensitive string.
Ask HN: Promoted beyond my level of competence?
Throwaway. September of last year, I had been at my (small, non-engineering focused) company for 6 months as a Lead Engineer. My boss quit, and as the highest ranking / most qualified, I was offered the position of Director of Engineering, with the promise that a CTO would be hired soon. Received a 20% raise and a lot more responsibility. I looked at it as a challenge, but probably would not have applied for the job. Fast forward, I've now been in charge for 8 months (no CTO hire yet) too stressed, and not really enjoying all of the random troubleshooting, prioritizing, politics, and managing the team. I don't get to write code too much anymore.

Anyone else been in a situation? Is this an example of the Peter Principle? Is it ok that I don't enjoy these challenges as much as I enjoy technical challenges?
I'm waiting for you to send me the $31.50 to read the full-text.

Their conclusion is about a specific claim for fish oil, re CAD. Examine.com is looking at more than just CAD. If it has a health benefit outside of the CAD claims, then I don't see how you can call it snake oil. Particularly, a reduction in triglycerides. The abstract of what you linked (again, just let me know where you'd like to send the $31.50 so I can read this full-text that you are linking to) is discussing one effect of fish oil and Examine is looking at any possible effects (and many say it has negligible to no effect, but some do).
If you're still interested in doing this for any reason, check out confd [0] for populating templates based on etcd values.

[0] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/confd
The obvious solution would be to create XSLT processor in JavaScript to override the browsers processing.

(no, don't do that, i was just joking)
> The word "character" is used to describe them because they are certainly made of characters.

In OP, the word "character" is used because they're characters and they're hard to search for when you don't know clojure and you're trying to understand what the hell this crazy crap is. So the goal is to match "clojure $something character", something along those lines.

> The dispatch macro is a special case that is not a form, but represents reader macros that are applied to forms as they are read.

Yes, but that's missing the purpose of OP. If you don't know that ' is `quote`, what do you do?

> And the docs do in fact give plenty of examples. I'm not sure how you can say "no examples" when there are examples for most of the things described on the page.

No, the docs give no example aside from metadata (and even then it's not great) and syntax-quote. For other macro characters it gives the expansion, no example and little to nothing in the way of explanation.

> Just to be as clear as possible:

Yes, the point being that those things are hard to search for

> #(...) - an anonymous function literal form

That's not a function literal form, `fn` is the function form (and `fn` a layer over it which handles binding forms), `#()` is a reader macro over that*.
TV-B-Gone Inventor Mich Altman on bullying, failure & hacking.
How fast will the chip and pin card respond to requests? Does built-in rate-limiting (or just limitations of the chip on the card) mitigate this attack? How big is the authentication keyspace?

It sounds (from the brief; Reading the paper now) like this is a fairly standard replay attack. The terminal generates a transaction id, asks the card to sign it, then transmits that to the bank to prove identity. In this case, it's a 'pre-play', because the bank verifies that it's never seen the signature before by blacklisting the transactionid. This is not very effective if you can keep retrying.

It looks like they do give some numbers: "Thirty seconds is the standard authorisation time limit; this
might allow for more than 100 transactions to be skimmed". That's not a whole lot, in a truly random 32 bit space, but in a world where many ATMs have predictable or deterministic sequence numbers, that's plenty for a chosen plaintext attack.

The attack works like this: You run a shady merchandise store. You hack your card reader; Instead of generating one ARQC for one transaction, when the customer enters their card and pin it generates five. One for your real transaction, one for four other specially chosen numbers.

You then take your special chip+pin card, armed with the public credentials of that card, and responses to those four transactions, to the local market with a freestanding ATM. You kick out the power to the ATM, "accidentally", causing the state of the ATM to be known. Then, you withdraw cash; A few hundred, or whatever's in the account. The ATM asks your card for a signature of it's 'random' number, but the 'random' number is one of the four you copied from the card in step one.

As the authors pointed out: "The deeper protocol design ﬂaw is that while the terminal generates the random number, it is the issuing bank that relies on it"
awesome, ok, then you try to go reconstruct a vtable and want to kill yourself
Mark Imbriaco: Empowering Developers Through Infrastructure
> Monetarily speaking, we're not quite as powerful as, for instance, oil and defense

Apple alone has more cash on hand than Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, and Raytheon are worth combined. They have plenty of money; what they lack is the knowledge and motivation to use it effectively for political purposes. The attitudes expressed on this site a few weeks ago about refusing to play the game with respect to state and national politics is the reason oil and defense have far more influence in Washington than tech.
The Famo.us session (along with a couple others) at last year's HTML5 conference in SF is what made me decide to make the shift to full time iOS development. Every benchmark was presented in terms relative to native app development: "transitions are 95% as smooth as native apps;" "rendering times take only 3% longer than native apps."

Of course mobile web development is important, but I don't really see where Famo.us's market is. Full feature desktop web?
Zerocash (Fully Anonymous Bitcoin)
Labels and comments go a long way to making an assembly project readable. I don't know how an automatic tool could interpret the human intention behind a label.
I honestly haven't been bothered by the lack of ad-hoc polymorphic.

I'll add to the cons though just for completeness.

- The standard lightweight way of achieving higher ranked polymorphism is through record types, which is strange.

type wrapper = {call: 'a. 'a->'a}
let myFun x = (x.call "asdf", x.call 10)

As far as I know (someone correct me) both Haskell and OCaml require that you do something special to indicate this level of polymorphism, so that in itself is not a "Con" for OCaml, but there could have been a way to annotate the argument to the function itself as a polymorphic function without needing the intermediate record wrapper type (I believe Haskell has this feature). A benefit of the OCaml approach is that you get to pretend that HM inference is powerful enough to infer that degree of polymorphism and not annotate your function arguments (because record types must be predeclared) and it recognizes the type of record based on the `.call` access.

- The syntax is kind of strange some times. Some of this is because they've eliminated the requirement that every `let` have an `end`. That does end up making other things more pleasing to read:

let x = y in
let p = z in
expresion

- There are three ways to declare functions.

Syntactic sugar for curried function. Each argument allows one pattern matching case inline.

let f x y =..
let f (x1, x2) (y1, y2) = x1+x2+y1+y2

Same as syntactic sugar above but anonymous. Still only one pattern match per argument.

fun x y -> ..
fun (x1, x2) (y1, y2) -> ..

Anonymous, non-curried function (which only allows a single argument) but allows multiple pattern match cases on that single argument.

function Some x -> "1" | None -> "0"

So there's some intricacies to the syntax, but these are pretty mild annoyances and they have other benefits that aren't immediately apparent. Something as trivial as syntax shouldn't be something that you base your language decision on, especially since OCaml has always allowed highly configurable (almost arbitrarily configurable) syntax via CamlP4 (and now even simpler extension points).
Focus Fusion crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo
Collusion in the sense they all operate from the same playbook.

It isn't any more 'collusion' than DuckDuckGo and Google 'collude'. They operate from the same playbook [e.g. I make money from ads providing search content] and optimize revenues based on their goals. DuckDuckGo differentiates on privacy, Google differentiates on other things.

If you have a duopoly in most markets [e.g. AT&T + Comcast], now that AT&T has bit the bullet, why wouldn't you join them and offer 20% more data in your plan and call it a day? You can extract most of the same value and fence them in by offering more.

It is the same reason in game theory, you have gas stations near each other generally.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/05/21/why-gas-stations-...

Each of you sit near each other and divide the market in half.
Test your AWS skills
Hey guys, sorry about that. We just rolled that message out a day or two ago. The browser-detection is based on https://github.com/gabceb/jquery-browser-plugin but obviously needs some work. Working on a fix for that now.
Funny, I was just having a real-life conversation in which I was saying that I prefer the Metafilter style and find it difficult to follow HN/Reddit threaded conversations because it's non-trivial to find updates and all the action ends up in the first thread when there might be some good stuff below.

Chowhound has a nice compromise where it's threaded but all the comments you've already seen are folded by default. I'm sure there must be other communities that do the same thing.
Any post that involves "best practices" or any specific programming language should have a date attached. Programming languages change and best practices change to follow suit.

When I'm looking up a topic it sucks to get halfway through an article and realize that half of the methods it recommends have been deprecated. If the author had bothered to put a date on the post I would have known to avoid it.
If it's happening server side the best you guys can give is "we won't look, pinky swear" - sorry, might as well just use Dropbox.
doesn't give me any appreciation for what they must have been doing

I suppose if they made a commitment to having one employee moderating at all times, that would take at least four employees, and even then it would require overtime and some funny scheduling. Imagine if reddit replaced the little arrows with salaried people deciding the fate of every post. It would take 100s of staff.
Exactly. Bottom tier should be $49, with another tier up at $99, and possibly a top "enterprise tier" at $199.
not even Google Maps have full building number information. at least not world wide - I've been to several European countries where building numbers are ignored in Google Map searches (sometimes you actually get no result at all if you include a building number)