skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Patrick's tool is far more than an boolean "is this a progressive JPEG or not." Comparing it to the "file" utility is a gross underestimate.

It takes a JPEG, converts it to a progressive JPEG, and then uses an animation to show you how that image will look loading as a progressive JPEG vs loading as a the original JPEG. You can see, for example, after 0.5 seconds, how does the progressive JPEG look vs. how much of the original JPEG is rendered?

This is incredibly powerful and helpful for people focused on frontend web performance

Comparing this to "file" is l
To be fair, he also said that reasoning at multiple levels of abstraction is an acquired skill, albeit a difficult one to acquire.
emailed, thank you
Calling Snowden a 'traitor' is a very ill omen for us as a country. There are many parallels to Ellsberg, but I feel that he had more public defenders/support than Snowden. We've moved even farther to the stance that any action taken against/criticism of the state is unpatriotic and a stone's throw away from traitorous. This was especially the mentality immediately after 9/11 and it clouded our judgment so much that having a reasonable discussion about invading other countries was impossible. 13 years later, we've traded our own privacy and the respect of most of the world for bombing the intractable enemies our war-like tendencies created in the first place.

It's also an ill omen that Andreessen, one of the poster-children for a transformative, open medium would come down on the side of a secret, power-drunk apparatus vs. a civil disobedient who used said medium to try to wake up a complacent populous.
Dividing the world into "Snowden's allies" and "Snowden's opponents" harms your ability to learn what really happened. I am not one of Snowden's allies, but I also don't attend the secret meetings of the "Hang Snowden For Treason" society.
> "In the Java space" meaning deployed in a Java servlet container.

I didn't say nor mean to imply that. Technically, Solr is based on servlet technology whether stand-alone or not, you can choose to deploy it in a web container of your choice or use the Jetty instance it comes with for the "stand-alone" experience. I don't know much about Elasticsearch's architecture personally.
What are the new features of the Xbox One controller as compared to those of the Xbox 360 one ?
Words matter. A four year old, unless developmentally disabled, is not a toddler... A toddler implies someone who "toddles" as if at a very early age, and leads readers to infer that the child was closer to 2 than four. (Unless my daughter was precocious when she was walking at 11 months.)
You can't use github.io, only [project-name].github.io. Sure they could use a fake-but-similar project name, but then again, they already could with github.com/[project-name]. I don't see the big difference for the user.
Are you looking for questions about the language itself that you could answer without looking things up? If so, that is foolish. I have 5 years experience and still look up things in the os module that I've used 10 times before.

Are you looking for challenges & things you could build to prove to yourself that you are a good programmer?

Here's one:
Given an expression of the form
(+ 3 5), return the result of applying the mathematical operation to the two numbers.

execute("(- 9 4)") should return 5

execute("(* 3 9)") should return 18

execute("(% 4 0)") should raise an error

but I suspect what you really want is exercises which you know are really at your level. This is trickier and it might mean that a class is your best bet. Perhaps one that applies python to data science.
Got it, thanks! I was confused as you couldn't unkeep after selecting a bunch of keeps at once. No one should ever design UX around me, as I'm weird, but something to perhaps keep in mind.
Looks like your site is down, perhaps you should reconsider outsourcing to save a buck.
> [SoundCloud hasn't] made many improvements in the last couple years.

What, do you think, needs improvement?

I use the application for recording and storing occasional riffs I come up with as private tracks, and to listen to new music from people I follow occasionally. As far as I've experienced, they need not make a big improvement over the site as it is now, but given that I'm not a power user, I might have missed lots of stuff.
Summary: investors who focus too much on short-term results are bad for the long-term success of the companies they buy and sell.

High-frequency traders are somewhat similar, in that they don't care enough about the long-term health of the companies they buy and sell. Therefore they are bad.
For what it's worth I entirely agree with you about people who dislike this and are also unsurprised by it. Andreesen makes it very clear he not the latter.

He is claiming both that we should be unsurprised by it, and that because of this lack of surprise it isn't a big deal that we should care about. I am emphatically not coming down on people who are now, and have always been, against this type of surveillance.
Private Cloud with a single click?
But it handles memory more like Rust than Go or something. And it's not weird like Clojure and Scala. And it doesn't have their performance quirks. And you can use the same language for iOS front ends as you do for back ends! Just like NodeJS for web apps!

Don't worry about tens of person years, there are more than enough developers who could use the attention.
I don't think there is any other mainstreamish language with enforced option types. Even Scala and F# just cave and allow nulls everywhere. Swift's constellation of features is very interesting IMO.
It could but should not. A better product for that might be Optimizely, where you can use your actual URL. However, I once worked with an extremely obsessive owner of a business and she sat by me each time I made any changes to the copy on the website to make sure it flowed correctly when in situ, I would have sent this to her to make my life a little easier had it existed back then.
Microsoft did spend $100 million developing the new controller, so I hope they've got some improvements to show for it. I haven't used it much myself.
A bluetooth module costs a dollar and is the size of a USB plug. The aversion to bluetooth is weird.
"For me obviously he's a traitor," Andreessen said. "If you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor' there's a picture of Ed Snowden."

For a US Citizen the actual definition of treason is:

Treason against the United States, shall consist
only in levying War against them, or in adhering
to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless
on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same
overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have Power to declare the
Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason
shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except
during the Life of the Person attainted.

It might be a tad bit hard to convict him under that definition.

The fact that it has hurt overseas business is a function of the government policy and not the leaker. Snowden wasn't the first at the NSA to blow the whistle, and given what happened the first time, I'm not sure what other course of action people expected.
I do contracts for many startups and I am surprised how many don't follow a good practice.
"google how to search" as an autocomplete for google search makes my head hurt.
Wired: A Smart Sensor for the Quantified Garden (YC W14)
yep, absolutely not a surprising reaction if one looks at just visible connections between top VCs and other elite here in the Valley and In-Q-Tel, Palantir, etc... (and if one looks at the amount of invisible ones... Valley has always been doing a lot for Military Industrial and these days it is Intelligence Industrial Complex - don't get me wrong, i'm really grateful for the Valley existence as the greatest technological R&D center :)
The tarnishing of American business has nothing to do with Snowden.

Snowden will never be a customer of Andreessen's companies' products. The US Government very likely will be.

He doesn't care about the ethics of the situation. He just knows that revenues in other countries for the Valley are going down and that he can't very well bite the hand that feeds the Valley domestically.
What if the audio-tweet contained no words?
Considering that Apple basically requires an xcode/objc project to deploy iOS apps, I believe Swift will become a popular cross-compiler target especially for GC'd languages. I wouldn't be surprised to hear similar news from RoboVM, MonoTouch, RubyMotion, etc in the coming months.
Ruby: absolutely. It's not quite as straightforward as Python , but it should be feasible using binding_of_caller. If any Ruby people want to help us figure this out, please drop us a line or stop by https://github.com/rollbar/rollbar-gem/issues/117

Excluding sensitive data: yep. This feature uses the same scrub_field list that's used to scrub sensitive data from the request (GET/POST/headers/etc).
Assuming that there will be more nodes on the Tor network as a result of a financial incentive for running such nodes, how will the TorCoin deal with over supply of nodes, therefore the drop in payout per node?

Can TorCoin be used to subsequently purchase more bandwidth? How would this bandwidth differ from the free bandwidth? Lower latency?
What is optimistic version number? The site it is linked to seems to be down currently.
Writing User Stories Like It's 1999
That's literally my entire point, stated in the form of disagreement. Why would you use a new tool that has no support and no clear advantage or distinguishing features, when there are a dozen with fully fleshed out ecosystems?
Why do you think that people currently resident in the US are inherently better than those not currently living in the US?
Michael Bluth's seems a bit high since him and his family are pretty much always broke.

Also Peter Griffin hasn't worked at the happy go lucky toy factory in like 10 years.
Because he already knew a guy, and he knew the guy was good, and he wanted to work with that guy. And "why did he have to hire someone from abroad" is a question that makes no more sense than "why should he have to hire someone local?"
staff designers provided me with an html template to make it render, then because they made me threaten legal action to get paid for the contract where about 80% of the work was performed as a volunteer in the first place, i lost my volunteer access.

the acm are actually a bunch of assholes who mostly spend their members' dues buying hardware and software licenses, much like the government, but it's nice to see that at least they have kept around the work i did which was focused on making the site performant and reliable, which seems to have stuck around for the better part of a decade.

but they are at times a beacon, and it's neat to just be surfing the web and stumble into something you've built.
> If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent.

Patently false. See, among numerous other incidents and legal cases, United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992). The US can and does arrest foreign citizens in foreign countries for offenses committed in foreign countries without the consent of any foreign country, and has done so overtly for quite a long time.
> Why did the author have to hire someone abroad to come in? We have so much talent sitting right here in the US.

Have to is the wrong way to look at it. He hired this person because he thought he would be the best at the job. Why should he have to prefer the talent in the US?
Looks like your ego didn't allow that. There's plenty of talent in the US.
Why using real world data matters for building effective security models
I meant they have fallen behind features/bug fixes. Poor wording on my part.

But yes, I agree. They don't have any real competitors at the moment, so that may be part of the reason they aren't improving their product. Don't get me wrong, I think they have an awesome product, I just thought these UX issues were temporary until they worked out all the bugs in the new site, but it has been a while now.

I'm really interested to find out why they pulled Soundflake off the app store though. Anyone know?
It's an "it just works" technology that also goes very deep and solves a number of problems where the competing solutions are an order of magnitude more complex and/or expensive.
Reminds me of the great prank vaticano.org in 1998: http://0100101110101101.org/vaticano-org/

A real piece of art.
I don't understand why he said this publicly, even if he believes it. It does him and a16z no favors with likely startup founders, foreign governments, foreign corporate partners, the security/privacy community, etc. a16z doesn't need any help with LPs or the US Government.

(I think he might be right as a first-order effect for the majority of people, but the second order effects hurt US companies, individuals, etc.)
I'll agree with the first premise. But I don't think the 2nd bit follows.

The reason speculation based on short-term results is problematic is that it creates perverse incentive structures that discourage a company's management from thinking too much about the long-term success of the company. But that's only possible because speculators are able to create market demands that punish and reward specific kinds of behavior. But HFT doesn't really create demand; it only responds to it. So the analogy fits in every spot except the only one that matters for the sake of the argument.
OpenDNS Top Domains List
I chose my words carefully. When an adult confronts a child and terrifies them verbally, that is assault. That's not my opinion; that's the law. Because it is so easy for an adult to create a credible fear of violence in a child, it is very poor judgement for adults to directly confront children.
This is a classic "shoot the messenger" move. I'm amazed Andreessen can't see that.
I think some people have also forgotten what a complete disaster Microsoft was right up until the mid 2000s. IE exploits, Windows exploits, IIS exploits (remember Code Red?). They well and truly earned their reputation.
I wonder what will happen when "the money" realize the US (and SV/SF) is one of the worse places to assemble a team and is only there because of, guess what, the money.

You can get work visas for lots of interesting places (Canada, Europe, etc) in a much shorter time and for a smaller cost

So, yeah, I wouldn't bother with Silicon Valley
They're about the same as far as features. Immediately noticeable is that the Xbox one controller is much more comfortable to hold and has an improved D-pad. They got rid of the battery compartment on the back so if you have large hands that doesn't get in the way.
Thanks! I'll keep an eye on it :-)
How do you see composing as different from creating in this context?

(Not being sarcastic. It's an interesting distinction.)
We've seen a huge difference in contributions on Helpful after spending more time fully spec'ing out work to be done.

https://assemblymade.com/helpful
Learning from rage
Note: the page plays sound when you first visit it.
> he's clearly more annoyed at the economic cost of the revelations to Silicon Valley businesses

I don't see that - he didn't bring up the economic/business angle, the reporter did.
1. Swift is not a mainstream language. Maybe you trust in Apple's ability to turn it into one.
2. Haskell and Common Lisp, but maybe those aren't "mainstreamish".
That is a disquieting case that sets an insane precedent, but note that it does not enable the USG to use unwarranted foreign SIGINT to introduce evidence in a criminal case. (Hopefully this comment clarifies instead of sounding dismissive; that citation was very helpful).
Although many of these tips might seem trivial and obvious, I've often seem developer who self-identified as 'senior' not follow these practices.

Git and Github are communication channels and you should think about effectively communicating with your audience when you are using them. Very much in the same way that you are when you are writing emails.

The other interesting point about Git is that, very often, you are your own audience when you're revisiting the history of particular months after you've written the original code. You should definitely start thinking about your workflow a little more.
In technical fact, not impossible but, in fact, common. In spirit, you don't really employ top talent, in the sense that subordinating it wastes it. You sponsor it and become a beneficiary of it.
Ugh. The memes. HFT is not "liquidity". The purpose of the "speed" is to elicit information.
Ask HN: Is there a Watsi for school fees/buildings?
One of my friends is a Franciscan priest from Kenya. He's trying to raise money to build a high school (and pay teachers) in a rural area outside Nairobi, which currently lacks a high school. I wish I knew of a good online platform I could point him to. I know of Schools for Schools, but they're limited to Uganda.
It's certainly easier to DIY these days for some things -- electronic music comes to mind, but there's no replacement for a properly treated studio with all the appropriate equipment on hand. You get what you pay for.

> many artists do not actually need professional mastering

Almost everything sold commercially has been mastered, the only stuff I have heard unmastered is on Soundcloud/Youtube for a reason. Having a skilled third party polish a track is essential.

> why not make your music free

Why is this acceptable for a musician but not for a film director, actor, programmer, or any other career professional? Should all films now be made DIY with volunteer actors and we'll just have hobbyist special effects and post added? What are these hobbyists supposed to do to pay rent and eat?

Music is an expensive business, and digital downloading hasn't changed that. That's why it's frustrating to hear people feel entitled to free music, even if there's not much we can do to change it.
I'm not an expert here by any means but I think HFT seems like stealing to most of us because it is largely hidden from public view and from any serious scrutiny. The price it extracts is largely unknown and not well understood by those who are paying it. The biggest HFTs seems like a shadow government running the markets and extracting a hidden trade tax.

As for the argument that the value they provide is "liquidity", that also seems dubious. I've seen that argument thrown around a few times now, but I'm not entirely convinced that HFTs, as they exist and work now, are achieving this goal fairly, nor that this is necessarily the best solution.
The title says a team, suggesting that you can't build any team at all in US. But the evidence presented shows that he couldn't build a specific team: there exists a team he couldn't build in US.
Huh, okay, I guess that's sensible. Thanks for pointing that out, I haven't been paying much attention to the latest in ARM, so I hadn't heard that.
He probably copy pasted the code from within NodeBox, which is what he's using.
Lyft Nabs Exclusive AnyPerk (YC W12) Deal To Give Drivers Tons Of Discounts
> That is a disquieting case that sets an insane precedent, but note that it does not enable the USG to use unwarranted foreign SIGINT to introduce evidence in a criminal case.

That's what parallel construction is for, which is rather orthogonal to the issue of whether the target is a foreign citizen located in a foreign country at the time of the arrest or a US citizen in the US at that time.

And also note that options for action based on NSA surveillance aren't limited to arrest followed by criminal prosecution.
It's the primary language for a huge platform. I don't know how much more mainstream you can get. This seems a bit like saying, "I'm not sure the newly elected US president is a significant figure in US politics."

And no, neither Haskell nor Common Lisp are anywhere in the same city as the mainstream. For an idea of what I mean, pick a reasonably significant "target domain" for the language and consider how many major applications are written in that language. There is no platform on which Haskell or Common Lisp get used very much compared to other languages. Objective-C is clearly a dominant presence on iOS, C# rules Windows, Java has a lock on the enterprise, C and C++ are the bosses of systems programming, Haskell is…an interesting language whose motto is "avoid success at all costs."

And also, I don't think Common Lisp has enforced option types. (car '(1)) is 1 while (cadr '(1)) is NIL. Am I mistaken?
Swift is a LLVM frontend, as long it does compiles source code to the LLVM-IR, all of the LLVM "ecosystem" in the backend applies here.. so its pretty much multiplatform by now, since LLVM compiles to virtually all platforms and OS's..

Only Apple specific Api's wouldnt be available.. but even this.. there are always obj-c clones here and there for the apis..

So once they release the source for the Swift frontend, the possibilities for the Swift code are endless
Unfortunately, people in positions of authority have no incentive to apply wisdom and common sense. Imagine if they ignore this report, and something bad happened to the child? They'd be crucified. It's far easier to take the report, do the minimal amount of investigation required by policy, and then let a prosecutor apply their discretion as to whether charges are pressed.

The same perverse incentives apply to the prosecutor as well. It's no skin off his back to charge the mother, and he can always say "it's for the children!" if queried about it. But should a child die, when both the police and prosecutor could have done something, is something our society won't allow.
Yeah, I think you're right. It's the wholesale copying of a large chunk of the Java API rather than just the name of one thing.

Tangentially, I really disagree with the ruling. First, we have to figure out where to draw the line: if you can copyright a big API, can you copyright a small one (like, say, Iterable)? Second, there's legal precedent for allowing partial copies in cases where it's necessary for interoperability (Sega v. Accolade). Finally, the appeal for Lotus v. Borland allowed for wholesale copy of a command hierarchy for user interfaces, which has parallels to application programming interfaces that I think any programmer would find obvious. My favorite quote from that case:

[51] That the Lotus menu command hierarchy is a "method of operation" becomes
clearer when one considers program compatibility. Under Lotus's theory, if a
user uses several different programs, he or she must learn how to perform the
same operation in a different way for each program used. For example, if the
user wanted the computer to print material, then the user would have to learn
not just one method of operating the computer such that it prints, but many
different methods. We find this absurd. The fact that there may be many
different ways to operate a computer program, or even many different ways to
operate a computer program using a set of hierarchically arranged command
terms, does not make the actual method of operation chosen copyrightable; it
still functions as a method for operating the computer and as such is
uncopyrightable.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/49_F3d_807.htm

Anyway, I know you didn't ask for my opinion on the ruling but I just wanted to rant a little :) The circuit's ruling really pissed me off. Programming is hard enough without having to worry about whether or not our APIs are covered by an existing copyright.
A traitor is someone who betrays his country to another country. Which country would that be in this case? Not Russia or China, they already knew exactly what the NSA was up to. The only people Snowden betrayed his government to was the citizens of his own country, because he felt they have the right to know what their government is doing. Whether or not you think he was right to do it, it is not treason by any definition.
The Evolution of Entrepreneurship
How is it better than Solr?

I havent looked at Elastic Search in a long time, so I really do want to know. Not trying to pick a fight. ;)