skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for sharing! I'm not a developer, but an analyst. I know SQL fairly well and some javascript, but no coding experience apart from writing code for google analytics. How easy/cheap would it be to build a custom analytics solution like that? It's probably beyond my personal skills, but do you think it's possible for someone with my skillset to find a developer and supervise them? Can you point me to some resources or stories of it being done?
Yes, but this (free SSL everywhere) can (and should!) become the bandwagon that all other service/hosting providers and CAs should adopt.
In the modern-day version of The Jungle, Jurgis would have had the job title "Sausage Hero".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization#Non-firs...
If I was a teacher, there's no way I would use this... privacy concerns aside, there's nothing to suggest that Google won't suddenly shut it down in two or three years when whoever is maintaining it gets bored of it, like Google has with so many other projects.
I'm to assume people on HN have no desire to do something productive or useful with their time?
Is this like coursera?
I'm not sure your strong criticism of Goodhart's Law is quite fair. It is stated so as to be pithy, but I think it is fairly obviously meant to be applied only to those situations where the thing being measured in some sense "judges itself" by that score, and adjusts its performance to try and improve that score.

This is quite likely the case with school children, but often not the case with, say, industrial processes. If, however, you make someone's job dependent on meeting some particular target for that process, then a feedback loop is created that can lead to the kinds of problems being discussed.

If the feedback loop isn't there, then the metric will remain as useful as it ever was. So the point is, be wary of unintentional feedbacks in your system, not some grandiose rejection of the possibility of optimisation.
This Is What Democracy Looks Like
We get it; as a hipster, you find it offensive. we all get it.
According to the article, they are already doing that.
People should go to a proper Uni, end of story. Anyone not getting a masters or PhD is not worth hiring, because they just lack brainpower and skills to compete on hard problems.
I have to admit that the changes brought about by the S&L crisis in the US pale relative to the changes to South Africa's landscape in the early 1990's.
> counter-example

That's not a counter-example (necessary vs. sufficient).
And you are assuming there are productivity gains. Their workflow is handled just fine by cvs. Moving to git would provide very little benefit.
> If faced with a choice between money and doing the right thing, corporations are legally obligated (c.f. Dodge v. Ford) to pick money every single time.

That is a popular meme, but it is simply not true. More recent court cases[1][2] have found that corporate directors have broad discretion in their decisions as long as there is no fraud or conflict of interest. If the board of directors chooses to prioritize doing the right thing over pure maximization of profit, the shareholders' only recourse is to choose a new board of directors.

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Smith_Manufacturing_Co_v_Bar...
> Clearly the missing data in the github workflow is so detrimental that it's not worth the extra developers it might attract.

There is historical path dependence. Linux has changed workflows before, but each time it was controversial. I can see where it wouldn't be worth igniting a holy war.

The more interesting question is what new projects should do. Even Linus puts new things (https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface) on Github.
At its core, it is an on demand limo service.
In my experience, directory scripts are similar to forums in that most of them are about a decade old, and very few of them have anything new or exciting to bring to the table.

That being said, my experience of directories is quite limited, so I'd be very interested in hearing about any newer directory scripts on the market.
Building apps in Swift using Storyboards
Public beta now! Accurate suggestions, good design, some little bugs.
For Python it doesn't get easier than Whoosh (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Whoosh). Both indexing and searching are done in Python, no need for external services or processes.

Features are limited and performance won't be the best, but sometimes ease of use and maintenance are all you need.
Those are just expectations. They're not anything you can beat someone over the head with, and as such are illusory.
Hey Antr, Jacob from SumAll here. Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with us. The tweets you're talking about that "spam" your accounts were most likely the performance tweets that you are free to toggle on and off. Here's how you can do that: https://support.sumall.com/customer/portal/articles/1378662-...

Best,
Jacob
Tomorrowww – Browser plugin that wipes out cancer from your online life
Startup Burn Rate Lessons from Metallica
Many Universities already use stuff like Blackboard[1] which for the most part is TERRIBLE (at least how I remember it in school.) These pieces of software are already around, and if anything competition in the space will hopefully make things better.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.
This article comes off as a bit boastful and somewhat of an advertisement for the company...

"What threw a wrench into the works was that SumAll isn’t your typical company. We’re a group of incredibly technical people, with many data analysts and statisticians on staff. We have to be, as our company specializes in aggregating and analyzing business data. Flashy, impressive numbers aren’t enough to convince us that the lifts we were seeing were real unless we examined them under the cold, hard light of our key business metrics."

I was expecting some admission of how their business is actually different/unusual, not just "incredibly technical". Secondly, I was expecting to hear that these "technical" people monkeyed with the A/B testing (or simply over-thought it) which got them in to trouble .. but no, just a statement about how "flashy" numbers don't appeal to them.

I think the article would be much better without some of that background.
I was really hoping this was like Google Takeout, but with adaptors for all different sorts of services. I thought the value prop would be to backup and analyze your own data, not to sell it to the same people who already creep everyone out when Facebook sells them your data.
I was looking for a much more personal article from the headline.
if they can stole /etc/passwd they probably can stole /etc/shadow, no ?
I don't think he's complaining just because of the tweets.
Another cautionary tail:

(pi^5+pi^4)^(1/(3+2+1)) = 2.7182818...
"as well as putting the IT boom in a historical context"

From

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

The gross world domestic product in 2012, using 2012 value dollars, was a bit under 72 trillion dollars.

Gross facebook revenue per google in 2013 was 7.9 billion dollars.

Some arithmetic done in my head and to one sig fig facebooks revenue is about one ten thousandth of the worlds GDP.

Fortunes can be made in tech, but its always going to be a rounding error compared to food, shelter, etc. There's just too many people eating, for example.
It is wrong in a rather odd way. Whoever did it seems to think paragraph tags are just line breaks.
this is all fine and good, but if you're goal is to see what works best between X new versions of a page and you are rigorous in creating variants, Optimizely is a great tool for figuring out the best converting variant.
Assuming I understand what they're offering here, I'd consider something like this for self-hosting a Facebook game having no valuable data, as Facebook requires apps to use SSL, and users tend to shy away from bright red browser windows with dire warnings about untrusted security certificates.
iOS App Store App Preview Videos
No Firefox, no thanks!
> Gordon Brown brokered the deal with jgrahamc to sell out personal privacy for a pardon for Turing (joke!)

For some background on this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Government_apology_...
Governor vetoes bill that would have limited police use of drones
Compare to Prose https://github.com/prose/prose:

- uses Jekyll. CMS-free. Does blogging. also Markdown based, but additionally supports HTML formatting

- host your own web server, or use GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is for free and you get GitHub's superb traffic capacity and uptime. https://pages.github.com

- GitHub instead of Dropbox for storage, collaboration and versioning

- host your own Prose instance, or use http://prose.io
I see two very small iframes with identical elements (firefox).
Ruby: Nitpicking Array(arg)
As other's have mentioned, it's entirely possible to have multiple fields with different analysis chains. Elastisearch handles multi-languages very well. You just have to start changing the defaults, since the defaults assume a single language for all fields (namely English).

E.g. "title_german" and "title_english" can each have their own analyzer specific to the language. Or you could have a single field "title" which then uses multifields to index a "title.english" and "title.german" field.

The key is that at search time you need to use a query that understands analysis. So you should use something like the `match` query, or `multi_match` for multiple fields. These queries will analyze the input text according to the analyzer configured on the underlying field (e.g. english or german)

There is a ton more information in The Definitive Guide book, in the chapter on languages: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/cu...

Topics include: language analysis chains, pitfalls of multiple languages per doc (at index vs search time), one language per field schemas, one language per doc schemas, multi-language per field schemas, etc
Ask HN: Do you use shared spreadsheets at your office?
Are you organizing your work by sharing spreadsheets with your colleagues? If so, what's the purpose of these shared spreadsheets? e.g. do you use shared spreadsheets to organize your office space?
Sierra Nevada Corporation Files Protest Over NASA Spacecraft Selectio
"Bread and...circuses"
Lecture 2 Notes – CS183B – How to Start a Startup – Stanford University – 2014
This is opt-out? Srsly?
GitLab Flow
Hard to read this without thinking about the transformation of the greater music industry, and album/CD sales number trends.
Web 1.0 dinosaur Metafilter modernizes, slowly
Microsoft slips 'Windows TH' name onto new technical preview site
Life-long born-and-bred New Yorkers probably didn't grow up in Manhattan.

"New York City" is not synonymous and interchangeable with "Manhattan below 96th St".
The 4k Programmer: Using a 4k TV as a monitor
Oh great, another misuse of A/B testing

Here's the thing, stop A/Bing every little thing (and/or "just because") and you'll get more significant results.

Do you think the true success of something is due to A/B testing? A/B testing is optimizing, not archtecting.
Trampolino: Arduino powered liquid pouring system
So SumAll spams your followers by default but you can turn it off if you know how?
That's not what the parent did. He called them hipsters. Hipsters, at least in the HN circles, is not a complement. It's a disparaging term. He called them hipster without any force of argument.

Also, definition 5: rough or immoderate vehemence, as of feeling or language. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/violence
No. /etc/passwd is world-readable by necessity. /etc/shadow should only be readable by root. Your webserver should not be running as root.
burn!: modern startup views itself: a family surrogate -
Productos Antideflagrantes [pdf]
Show HN: Collex.io – create collections of links, photos, videos, text
This concern would not make a whole lot of sense for teachers. The matter of fact is that the stability and longevity of this service is far more certain than the typical length of LMS contracts in school districts or the length of time that certain online educational platforms manage to stay relevant with current technologies.
Six Monkeys – email interactions thru physical Internet connected objects
Reminds me of an art installation that worked like an ATM for your data. You plug in your cellphone and based on how much data it was able to scrape it would dispense money. Usually less than a buck. Was interesting to see how many people were willing to try it.
Atlas is an established brand in the big agency/brand space. For now that's what this product is focused on.
I suggest talking to the departments in which you are interested. At the Phd level its a small world and matchmaking matters. With the right research interest just about anything might be possible...and people in academia may provide alternative solutions to your general ends [e.g. a scholarly life of astrophysics research rather than an astrophysics Phd].
Where's the part where he "(almost)" got fired?
And encrypted snail mail has been a thing since ancient times. So what?
Had he charged 3k$+ it might be unethical but 400 is nothing.
Oh! It makes sense. :)
I grew up in Roanoke county, neighboring Bedford. We had books that mentioned this treasure, and I've always harbored a dream of deciphering the text then casually buying the property where the treasure is. If it's not a hoax maybe I can spin up some AWS instances and get cracking :)
They are incredible as in literally not credible.
I'm afraid people (regular people - not the HN following sort of people) are going to start getting confused between all the Circles and Squares and Stripes and so on.
Scaloid: Less Painful Android Development with Scala
US bank cards only ? This is "global" in the "World Series" sense of the word, for the moment.
Agree, but if the code is used even only once, it gets loaded to memory. So if you've got a complex_generic_container<T1, T2>, its code gets loaded for every combination of types used.
Lyft has surge pricing also - called Prime Time - but is structured in a way that makes me more willing to participate. The extra price goes 100% to the driver, Lyft does not take a cut.

I'm always wary of Uber manipulating surge pricing since they profit off of surge as well. Without the extra profit motive it's easier to trust that surge pricing really is a supply-management tool instead of a price gouging one.
BIG IDEA: What we are not seeing yet is all this data being converted into something meaningful that front line customer service analysts can use when managing customers.

- See more at: http://www.information-age.com/technology/information-manage...
The Ten Startup Nation Movers and Shakers You Need to Know
Why Microsoft's engineering changes will be the real Windows Threshold story
Could make for an interesting codec idea though! A codebook based compressor that works on corpora of audio/video seems doable. More interesting would be a codec that aims not only to exploit models of human perception to throw away bits, but also exploits those models to produce "canonical" compressed forms that would be suitable for byte/block level deduplication. Of course, interesting things are hard, and errors would be hilarious. (See: Xerox and their copiers that change letters and numbers in documents...)
What about using a program for that like iA Writer on the Apple platform, which than is synced via Dropbox to that server?

In fact I am using that, but with a different Markdown blogging plattform. ;o)
The headline isn't really what this article is about, particularly the disparaging of Optimizely. Might I suggest "The dangers of naive A/B testing" or "Buyer beware -- A/B methodologies dissected" or "Don't Blindly Trust A/B Test Results".
I have a hard time understanding someone starting a new PHP project in august 2014 and choosing CodeIgniter.
Except, apparently, they aren't actually that good at _that_. If an A/A test to not yield 100% chance of 18% uplift, what gives you any degree of certainty that other tests won't have equally skewed results?
Thanks for pointing that out, I seemed to have missed it.
> A self-signed cert is about as secure as no cert at all.

It protects enormously against a casual attacker who is able to sniff network traffic but not MITM you.
Building a Simple AngularJS App in 5 Minutes
How does someone detect "hover" on mobile platform?
This is not the case, though. It is possible to eliminate vast portions of the full search space for some problems.

I will not claim a full understanding of this, but the latest volume of the Art of Computer Programming has some really deep treatments of this. The main takeaway being that it is possible to work with such things for many problems without just approximating. (Though, yes, for large N you do both approximations and clever algorithms that let you deal with as large of an N as possible.)
If you've given up control of the DNS on your domain to a third party, they can do whatever they want with that domain - they ultimately control email, web, and any other services on that domain. so if you use cloudflare, you've already given up that control and trust them completely with your domain.

This is what makes me hesitant about using cloudflare or recommending it to clients; you give up a lot of control over your data and domains.
Making a Bayesian Model to Infer Uber Rider Destinations
I recommend this, too.
Customize the content and stop losing money
Literary Lions Unite in Protest Over Amazon’s E-Book Tactics
Err, "I♥NY".
Show HN: Hybrid geolocated chat app
Not unless they got root. /etc/passwd is world-readable, /etc/shadow is restricted to root.

edit: damnit nknighthb, beat me to the punch! I'll add that privilege escalation attacks on Linux are common place and it won't be difficult to get root once they can execute arbitrary code. Installing a rootkit/backdoor is the typical first step once you get inside a box; if you can't get root immediately you can either brute-force a root login or sit and wait for a new 0day to pop up (which is probably every quarter for Linux systems).

Of the 50 distinct kernel exploits announced this year, the following are ones which either give privilege escalation or expose memory of the kernel: CVE-2014-0038, CVE-2014-0049, CVE-2014-2523, CVE-2014-0100, CVE-2014-0131, CVE-2014-0077, CVE-2013-1860, CVE-2014-2851, CVE-2013-6383, CVE-2014-0196, CVE-2014-3153, CVE-2014-4027, CVE-2014-4014, CVE-2014-0206, CVE-2014-4699, CVE-2014-4943, CVE-2014-4652 through 4656, CVE-2014-3534, CVE-2014-0205
OK so this is a pretty basic question about something I don't understand. If companies are making money, why do they need to keep getting more money from investors? Don't they eventually have to actually make enough profit to pay back the investors? Or is the assumption now that companies don't operate on profit, and are mainly there to either eventually fold up in bankruptcy or serve as winning lottery tickets for the investors when a bigger companies buys them?
A self-signed cert at least prevents wiretapping. Even if there is a man in the middle only that "man" can get your data. Not great but a lot better than nothing.
Thanks to one and all.
Arse-Sum! Arse-Sum-Ness!
It can be done quickly and accurately. Check out Peter Norvig's implementation of Viterbi algorithm for text segmentation.

Segmentation is typically used for scripts of languages like Thai and Khmer that don't feature word boundaries. I don't know the ins and outs of German word compounding, but it should work for breaking apart compounds too given a fully conjugated/declined word list as input.
> US bank cards only

source?
A text column with a list of {comma, space, ...}-delimited values representing a set, e.g. of tags, is something you occasionally see.
SAM wants people to create innovations without coding
But as far as I know, Blackboard (or Moodle or Sakai or...) data is stored locally at your institution, not housed on a Google server somewhere. I think the data mining possibilities are much lower in that case.

I'm all in favor of disruptive competition in that market, mind you! But I don't think it's easy.
CodeIgniter is indeed not the best choice - Laravel or Symfony would of been a better choice. However, some people can build faster with CodeIgniter - it has a lower learning curve & some people can just work faster with it.

I am actually currently hacking up a proof of concept in CodeIgniter - will definitely replace it however with a different framework in the near future. For a project like this however, open sourced and aimed for people to use for production, a different framework choice would of indeed been nicer.
You can dismiss my claims (hey, I'm just expressing my opinion), but to make one point clear: I have over 20 years experience writing software professionally (yeah, I got my first paid programming gig at a relatively young age), and I've been following Scala since its initial release. A few years ago I tried switching my project's team from Java to Scala, and the results of the experiment were very negative. True, my hands-on Scala experience (which was rather comprehensive at the time) ended several years ago, but much has changed for the worse since then, though some has changed for the better in the past few years. I don't need to try and switch a ten people team to Scala with every major version in order to make valid claims. What killed us then was that Scala was posing as "a better Java" -- less boilerplate etc. -- while in fact it was "a more complex Haskell, minus all the constraints which make Haskell safe" (in addition there were serious compatibility issues and more). We found that Scala code was less readable, and getting people to understand other people's code was a lot harder than in Java. In short, the language was the exact opposite of what a large scale, dependable project required, so we ended the experiment. Since then, Scala has gotten a lot more complex with even more features.

Also, your insistence that Scala isn't a research language is based on... I don't know what. Unlike, say, Clojure or Erlang, that tried to solve specific software engineering pain points (state management, fault tolerance), Scala started as a research language designed to test a PL hypothesis: how well can FP and OOP mesh, and will doing so be helpful. It also experimented with advanced type systems, and recently with statically typed language. None of the motivations behind these features was an industry problem. No one in the industry said, "you know what, type safe macros is what's going to make our automation control software easier to maintain". Their motivation came from conjectures compiler writers had about novel language features and how they might be used when writing a piece of code. You can deny this all you want, but those are facts. What is opinion is the analysis of the result: I claim that the result is a kitchen-sink language with too many features -- most of them marginally useful when building the next stock-market exchange -- and all of them contribute complexity whose cost far exceeds its benefit, resulting in a language whose net contribution to industry projects (not research projects) is negative. Feel free to disagree. If you think valid claims only pertain to the discussion of the for comprehension syntax, then you should try managing large projects and see that it's the philosophy of the language and combination of features that matters.