skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your last paragraph basically says "remove the biggest flaws with Metafilter's design compared to HN's - and then they are pretty much the same". ;)

I won't go into the color scheme since I guess that is a matter of taste, but at the same time I don't think it's an accident that you don't see the same color combinations used anywhere else ;)

The comment nesting and placement of the comment credit line(s) is actually really important. It is vital to make the different comments easy to visually separate from each other. HN has one line above and one line below each comment, effectively boxing them in. That, plus the comment nesting, makes HN's comment threads easy to read and skim over.

Metafilter on the other hand has just one line below each comment. Unlike on HN, where the line has a lower contrast/eye focus than the comment text, the line on MF is using the same colors as the links in comments. That is completely counter-productive, and objectively bad design.

Since MF doesn't have comment nesting it should do something else to visually separate the comments. Most other sites subtly change the background color, but there are also other ways to do it.

High contrast/big size should be used for things that should be focused on, and small contrast/small size for things that shouldn't be focused on. On HN the contrast between the color and size of the objects mostly make sense (although self posts should have darker text), but on MF it is all over the place.
Apple patent application adds key feature to bendable OLED displays
Judging by the prefix to one of the link pasted hashes, looks like PBKDF2 with sha256?
Yeah. They should really make it a different colour or something to stop people getting annoyed.
Overall, this is a mixed bag. The general motivation and high-level concept is good, but even at the manifesto level some of the specific statements seem pretty bad.

Pros:

- General concept of leveraging asyncronous communication and minimizing disruptions to workflow; most organizations could probably benefit from considering this in their process improvement efforts, because its something that many don't do well,

- Preference for documented process (which is very important for team ownership of process and continuous bottom-up experimental and evidence-driven process improvement), and again its a place lots of organizations, of all types, seem to fall down on.

Cons:

- The idea that product owners can just assign priority; I think the best priority concept to come out of the agile tradition is that the product owner determines the value of a work item to a client, and the team estimates the effort of the item, and the priority is assigned in descending order of value/effort ratio.

- Related to the above, the idea that you can dispense with backlog grooming with no replacement. Backlog grooming is essential to get work properly divided into reasonably sized chunks (to avoid wasted effort on an improperly-scaled item) with independent value, and to assure that they are in a state ready to assess both independent value of the chunks and the work effort associated with them to set priority.

- Related to both of the above, the idea of skipping planning meetings, which aren't frequent so as to pose significant flow barriers, and for which (aside from shifting things that require the input of the team to being done without input by the PO) the manifesto provides no real alternative.

- skipping daily standups (proper daily standups should be scheduled so as not to be interruptions in workflow, and are designed to enable flow, not impede it, but providing both an important venue to address barriers and by constraining the disruption to other people that trying to do so by broadcast rather than regularly scheduled brief meetings would impose.)

- (mostly tangential, but, hey, its false and its right up at the top) the premise that "Scrum" (a top-down defined process-over-people-do-it-by-the-prescribed-Scripture-as-interpreted-by-your-centrally-Certified ScrumMaster®-or-you're-doing-it-wrong methodology) is implementation of Agile, which prioritizes, as the first element of the Agile Manifesto, people and interactions over processes and tools, is, while popular, dead wrong. Lots of the things in the Scrum guide are things that Agile organizations have found work for them and so do -- but Scrum is pretty much the opposite of Agile, and is the exact kind of packaged one-size-fits-all solution that the Agile Manifesto was a reaction against.
DSL is expensive everywhere in .ch , switch to cable if its available in your area:

http://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/internet/internet-at-h...

Not sure about Geneve, but in Vaud and Neuchatel it's available.
Thank you sir or madam.

I really just wanted elaboration on where they were going with the fact that Carmack made some modifications to the prototype.
1.453 bitcoin. Reference to the fall of Constantinople, or patternicity at work?
If it's liable to change, it's not a natural key. Yes, requirements change and flexibility is a good thing to build in, but any system needs to be designed with a set of invariants in mind. And those invariants need to be effectively communicated to stakeholders. These invariants are useful, as they help people understand the system.

Usernames are a great example. If users want to refer to one another (or to themselves) they're going to need a consistent and transparent way to do so. Showing them a username which is behind-the-scenes mapped to a synthetic key is just leaving the door open for bugs to manifest down the track.

The benefits flow on when you are presenting related information live or through an API -- a human-readable foreign key means you can provide useful information without having to perform a join. This does wonders for debugging and discoverability.

Useless use of opaque keys (integers or shudder GUIDs) when a perfectly good natural key is available is in my experience a tremendous code smell. It leaves the opportunity for lazy developers to forget about invariants -- in schema design you'll see such things missing unique constraints, and then foreign systems to which the true keys aren't exposed doing horrible, fragile things whenever they have to traverse a relation.
MOTO Hyosung Comet GT 125 NAKED
FutureAdvisor: Mint for your Investments
The iMessage problem is something that needs to get fixed. It recently took my friend almost 30 days to get SMS to come through on her Android after switching. Google can make this work with Hangouts (when switching devices), but then again Hangouts is cross-platform.

In regards to this article, the title is a bit misleading. It notes a server glitch, but only talks about this server side problem in the last 2 paragraphs.
A simple, persistent, counting API used to count arbitrary stuff
Rural Ireland has the same problem. Streets usually do have a name, but often they have more than one name and it's not clear which segment has a name and which another. Houses don't have numbers but names, and it's often not written on the house. Postcodes are only available for Dublin.

And it's funny how people don't see it as a problem, even after you spell it out.
It is always important to keep in mind that Facebook (et al) does not sell your personal information, the sell access to a generalized profile. Now, that may still make some people uncomfortable, but it is not in Facebook's best interest to identify individual users to advertisers and not only would that be illegal (in violation of their policies) but it is not a sustainable business model. They want you and these advertisers to keep coming back.
That Damned Mandolin
It also says: "Fiber7 basiert auf dem Ausbau von Glasfaser-Infrastruktur (sogenannter Layer 1), den die ehemalige Monopolistin und verschiedene städtische Energie-Werke seit einigen Jahren vornehmen."

I assume that the FTTH are what the EWZ and others built, but then the connection to the backbone etc. is their own, and not the shared one that the EWZ offers for other providers. Not sure how this technically works but obviously init7 doesn't have their own fibers to every customer.
Drones to deliver Pizza to your houses in Mumbai
The silva field guide to birds of a parallel future
"In fact, even in RDBMS’s developers should be using a natural key as their primary key instead of an auto-incremented ID. This will lead to better performance when the natural key is the most commonly used identifier, but is often not considered out of a habit."

As a database architect I always use auto-incrementing as the primary key. This ID is actually a surrogate key for the real primary composite key, which I assign to a unique key.

So, with the unique key in place, the performance will be nearly as good as you'd expect for direct looks by key attributes. However, the performance gain using the surrogate ID within join tables and as foreign keys is much greater.

"It’s also worth noting that over their years of use in SQL databases they’ve become somewhat of a crutch when designing the data model for a system."

They are not a crutch. They are a wonderful feature. One could model with GUIDs if necessary or something similar for your surrogate key but nothing beats the simplicity of an auto incrementing ID.

Even a NoSQL database like MongoDB creates a unique _id for you for each document.
All personally identifiable data should be stored in a non usable form. You'd think people by now would know that eventually your data will leave your protection.
Why the ":s"? Are they supposed to offer it for free?

Jokes aside, this, hopefully followed by a (class-action?) lawsuit, is the only way that the companies will learn how to properly store user data. The engineers have been talking about "best practices" for a very long time, but it appears managers only understand the language of money.
Interesting point and this loops back around (in my mind) to the beginning. 6 triangles into a half dead thread, the only thing to do is quote Douglas Adams:

"..we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world."

Why do we even have an expectation that someone in the street will help us any more than we have an expectation that someone in a different country would help us.

The majority of us have, right now, the ability to help someone with similarly urgent problems. Medical or nutritional. There are still people campaign out after their house got blown away in the Philipines earthquake.

Thinking about this as "not my area" is an anonymous mentality. Like saying "I support education projects. I don't know anything about refugee projects." She is asking "Why didn't you behave like my friends and neighbors"

We could help them without endangering ourselves. If I was one the the bystanders who didn't help this person, I would feel ashamed. Is this sentiment a vestige?
Ask HN: What languages include implicit condition checking?
Not even sure if I'm using the right name. I've been doing a lot of precondition / type checking in PHP, and it occurred to me that it might be a cool language feature to bake into a language. For example, perhaps I could write `$i = count($keys) = count($values)` if I want $i to be set only on the conditions that $keys and $values are equi-lengthed array. An more advanced implementation could include auto checking a function's inputs, based on some set of rules defined in syntax or comments.
it's going to be computationally difficult but not impossible to break an individual password, but breaking all of them is unlikely in our (solar system's) lifetime.

However, if you were targeting a specific user and they didn't use a particularly strong password, it's possible that you could brute force it.
yes! Uber needs to win!
A related plug: my python-lzjb project which is what it sounds like: a 100% pure Python implementation of LZJB, the compression scheme used in ZFS among other things.

See https://github.com/unwind/python-lzjb.
Are you sure that's not the plot to one of the unfinished Douglas Adams novels?
Even worse, Jane Smith decides she hates that bleep John and they get divorced. She really won't want to see Smith as part of her username anymore.
Hey, you can buy it cheaper!

0.5 BTC here

http://pastebin.com/Tfs07HDp
> First of all, both agile manifesto and this new one annoy me, mostly because the statements are far too open ended and vague to be of use.

The Agile Manifsto isn't supposed to be "of use" in the sense of a canned methodology, its supposed to be a starting point for thinking about what works for you rather than adopting canned methodologies. So, that's as designed.

(The Async Manifesto doesn't really seem vague -- it dictates specific practices as well as general principles. So I think its unfair to ding it for vagueness, and better to ding it for the specific practices being generally ill-conceived.)
Looks to me like the $ signs are acting as delimiters, and that that hash is made up of:

cipher/hash: pbkdf2_sha256

cost factor: 12000

salt: zhMKabMgayvK

hash: iniviUCcX9y2PYJcm0AoB3MhybRA1z2Cec1DZnLWxWc=

This exact technique (pretty much) is described here: http://exyr.org/2011/hashing-passwords/. It's a decent, secure way to hash passwords.

Cost factor of 12000 seems solid to me (depends on the hardware they're running on but I'd say brute forcing your way through that would be pretty impossible)
I assume 12000 iterations by the looks of that $ delimited string, I assume they're storing the parameters as,

hash_func$iterations$salt$derived_key
Mesh networks. But I think those don't have a business model.
Cato The Younger
You can't access group chats that way, unfortunately.
Great miscalculations: The French railway error and 10 others
DO NOT USE USER-SUPPLIED DATA AS KEYS

Database keys are more-or-less equivalent to pointers. In the case of natural keys, they're pointers that (a) do not have ASLR, and (b) are exposed to the user.

As the article mostly ignores, you will guess wrong about what can be reasonably considered permanent or unique. Email addresses change (and aren't always unique), names change (and aren't unique), etc. This is much harder to fix if you used that guess as the basis for your entire data model.

The problem with proper keys was given as "auto_increment doesn't work on distributed systems". This is rather silly, as there are plenty of alternatives (GUID, UUID, the mentioned snowflake keys).

It's also interesting that proper keys are a "crutch" for designing data models and are best replaced with cleverness, and apparently are only useful to dictate record order (I know that Oracle at least doesn't work that way). This brings to mind "debugging code is twice as hard as writing code; if you write code as cleverly as possible, you are by definition not clever enough to debug it". DON'T BE (OVERLY) CLEVER. Do the least-fragile thing that doesn't add complexity (that is, doesn't add complexity visible to you.). Only do clever things that add fragility if you have an actual measured reason to do so.
Hashing the username (like you mentioned) and comparing
those character by character (like above) should yield the
exact same timing for any inputs.

I like to use a "constant-time compare" against an HMAC of the inputs with a random key. You can initialize the key just once, it doesn't have to be a nonce, just an unknown value. The point is the attacker no longer knows or controls what value is on 'their side' of the comparison, so timing becomes irrelevant.

For the comparison itself, I usually see |= and XOR being used and then the final value being checked to be non-zero, rather than a boolean. I think the theory is the compiler is a lot less likely the exit the loop early if you're accumulating with XOR versus a single branch flipping a boolean to be false.

Here's a good write-up with some sample code: http://codahale.com/a-lesson-in-timing-attacks/. Note in that write-up they are talking about timing attacks comparing HMAC results, but that is when the attacker has control over the HMAC result not the HMAC input. If the attacker provided value is being fed into HMAC with a secret key, then you are absolutely safe from timing attacks. If the attacker has control over the HMAC result, and you are checking if that HMAC is valid, then you are back to defending against timing attacks by trying to achieve a constant-time compare.

The only thing left to leak is the HMAC will clock differently based on the block-length of the input. But block size is rather coarse, and in this case you could limit inputs to be less than one block size in all cases.
The iterations are listed as 12000. This value is supposed to double every two years and is around 128k I believe currently.
Nothing for recommender systems?
So, should I also change my security question?
But then, why store them ?
Or you could write better CSS...
The list is missing the Hyatt Hotel Walkway Collapse:

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

The contractor made a small design change to make things easier for themselves and ended up causing a bolt to hold twice the weight it was intended to hold. 114 people were killed and 216 were injured.
They should start auction on e-bay. ijs.
Oh, that explains why I thought PDF.js is horrible across the board! If you judged the source of PDF's solely by the ones I read, you'd think every PDF in the world is either produced by LaTeX or is a restaurant menu.

Are there statistics about what other sorts of PDF's people read? How else are PDF's made? I always assumed that people that use word processors would exchange files in their word processor's format, but maybe some people export to PDF? (I'm not familiar with the habits of word processor users.)
I can very easily be productive for 8 hours at my second job at a beer distributer.

My other job doing email tech support I struggle to not take a five minute break every hour to clear my head. I still get bellow five hours a day of productivity because I have to sit in a ton of meetings on the off chance that I might need to say something or they just want more eyes on whatever they're doing.
From the linked sample data, passwords are pbkdf2-sha256 while name/address/phone/birth date are clear text.
Amusingly enough the feudial system still slightly exists in Africa. Who the west calls war lords aren't very different from Feudal Lords, Barons, and Vassals.
That looks awesome. I'm considering ordering one for the kids.

This paragraph is pretty hilarious though:

"Osmo is crafted for kid‑durability and always ready to go: no batteries, or Wi-Fi required."

Well, yeah.. Except for the actual iPad.
Well, the original markdown.pl heavily uses regexps.

From having tilted at this windmill a little myself, I think:

1. It's tricky enough to handle correctly all the under-specified corner cases of basic markdown -- not to mention the popular extensions to it. The cognitive load of doing it with complex regexps gets heavy, quickly.

2. I'm incredibly impressed with all the work that John MacFarlane has put into the problem, for example in [Pandoc] and [Cheapskate].

[Pandoc]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc

[Cheapskate]: https://github.com/jgm/cheapskate
I had this exact same idea yesterday.

I loathe Facebook altogether and did not miss it one iota when I quit for 3 months earlier this year. I had to go back to it, however, when I caved and added Facebook login to my chrome extension project.

Thanks for the new tool.
I have had the fortune of working on this IIT right after my IIT :). I worked on implementing the research software used by Giulio Tononi and his research team. I added a visualizer in OpenGL, and optimized the calculations for calculating integrated information.
This blew me away.
https://blockchain.info/address/1Kfxm6Y5bRDnC9JLwq6vpYYcw439...
> almost everyone except for the philosophical extremist agrees that we are conscious and that a stone isn't.

It is possible for me to imagine a conscious being that, mute and immotile, can't give any outward indications of consciousness. I am not an extremist.

So "almost everyone" is not thinking rationally on the subject.

I doubt very much that stones are conscious, it's not worth exploring that question in a practical sense. But to dismiss a theory, even an outlandish one, based only on my admittedly-flawed intution... that's highly unreasonable.

The trouble is that this is no longer a philosophical question, that it can't be a scientific question until we have an objective definition, and worst of all... it's very much a political question now.

How is that you say? It's a political question for many reasons. The abortion controversy touches on it, animal rights touch on it, etc. Everyone's groping for an answer that proves chickens are soulful and shouldn't be eaten, or that it's ok to scrape away their unborn child with a curette because they couldn't be bothered to figure out how to use a condom or take a pill.

> Sure, we'd like to think that none of the entities he describes are in fact conscious. But if that's the bullet I have to bite in order to get a decent theory of consciousness, then I might be OK with that.

What's decent about it? This theory is useless in a scientific sense. Can you construct an artificial consciousness if this theory is true? No. Can you test consciousness with it, if it is true? Again, no (though some will dispute this, naturally). Can it lead to other theories that are themselves useful? Well, that remains to be seen, but it's difficult to imagine why that might be so... this doesn't seem like a rough idea that merely needs refinement.
5 reasons why Newry businesses should join Twitter
Looks interesting. I want that technology but just to transfer paper notes/sketches to digital. I've tried using stylus on iPad for wireframes etc. but I can't quite get it to work same as sharpie & paper.
That sounds not very far removed from: "She burned the dinner after I told her I was hungry.
Interesting to compare the Partnership for American Innovation with this list: http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2014-03-12/offshore-pr...

And, Apple and Microsoft have previously funded patent trolls (IV). And IBM has more than 50,000 patents and brings in over $1 billion annually in licensing revenue.
There's a very interesting quote from that page towards the bottom:

"Jim and I believed in the Jeffersonian ideal that a inventor has a lock on an idea for a limited period of time. There were many ideas in this code that could have been patented, however we chose not to pursue it. We chose the Trade Secret route. Because of that, this code did not end up in the hands of a Patent troll. Now it can be mixed back into the culture, to be recycled and reinvented."
MacKeeper Is Malware
Haha, smartasses :D
It is possible to extend, but extensible requires more. In this case, ParsedownExtra looks to directly extend the Parsedown class. This is fine for a single extension, but it discourages utilization of multiple independent extensions.