skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With a tree based multi-cast protocol you have to have 1 node act as an authority over all others, which defeats the point of the DC-Net, as that node can simply lie provided its corrupted? While you can claim the network is distributed provided the root node changes at a constant interval, there will the chance that [1/nodes] messages can be forged. (if it doesn't changed you don't have a distributed network).

You could reduce this chance by having multiple root nodes.

While this would increase traffic redundancy

roots * traffic

you would lower the probability of a forged message by

nodes ** roots

And still allow for each client to verify each root node's results with each other.

With as few as 3 root nodes and 15 nodes you'd be around <0.05% of forged messages. If you increase to ~100+ scale nodes only 2 root nodes are necessary.

But as always the devil is in the details.
There definitely is some major messiness with the system, but:
4 fluid drams in a Tablespoon (No 0.5Tbps unit?)
2 Tablespoons in a fluid ounce
4 fluid ounces in a gill (No 0.5 gill unit?)
2 gills in a cup
2 cups in a pint
2 pints in a quart
2 quarts in a half gallon
2 half gallons in a gallon
63 gallons in a hogshead

Okay, yeah, there's a lot of messy units outside of this series, and some holes. We have the apothecaries' system, the avoirdupois system, the customary system. A hundredweight is 112 LBs because a Stone is 14 rather than 10. A mile is some number of feet I always have to look up.
O'Reilly

Learning Perl

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018452.do
>C has loops and functions

Which leaves...

> But you're right that modern use of goto is typically used in error handling to replace specific use cases of exceptions in a primitive way

Exactly. I pointed out the context of "goto considered harmful". Obviously the one that applies to C is the one that is the reason for all the gotos in C code.
I think they put majority of the blame on Google, but maybe it was because their SEO team wasn't able to get them higher on Google's pagerank? Or competition?
Agree that bullshit offers need to be weeded out, but I don't think it would make sense for an Acquiror to propose a price without sufficient information to base that price on. Justin's post mentions bullshit offers as not putting time pressure or promise of term sheet delivery, but the email indicates they're interested in getting it done as soon as possible. Hard to say if this really was a bullshit offer, but don't think an indication of price through an email, especially prior to an NDA, would make sense.
Reminds me of Season4's Ep3 (Two Girls One Code) of The Good Wife.

Two startup founders who developed voice recognition software were negatively affected by tweaked search engine page ranking of ChumHum after refused being acquired.

Coincidence?
Unless you click "change search settings" (on that pulldown dialog) and deselect all the other providers.
I don't think Google did anything intentional, but it probably doesn't matter.

They probably were doing something that would raise a flag at Google, but the Googlers knew how to get around that. So they let the app run, then let the system kill it. Meanwhile, they could do something very similar that would not raise the flag, and it'd work.

It's not intentional, but if you work down the hall from the guys who control a ton of web traffic and others who are responsible for app security, it helps. One might even say that it becomes an unfair competitive advantage.
Show HN: SOVND, an OSS replacement for Soundrop.fm
More companies we've never heard of and that nobody uses? Still sounds like money laundering
I must have missed the memo - at what point did writing become equated with being a doddering fossil or luddite? :-)

(Not that you were implying either)
I didn't mean to suggest Rosetta should have been manned. I was giving concrete examples of how humans can save missions.

Venus has a highly corrosive atmosphere, and surface probes die within a couple hours. I can't find figures on the cost of historical Venusian surface probes, but I think it's safe to say they're more expensive than Rosetta and tremendously harder to operate from a planet away. I also don't think it's a stretch to suggest that humans could make a 10 or even 100 time multiplier on their effectiveness.
While most of these seem like common sense, it's surprising how few people actually practice these. Might seem repetitive and "I've already seen this" to some, but I hope many will learn something new (and implement it!) from this article. I can't recommend strongly enough the practices put forth in this article.
You can send a email to the moderator: hn@ycombinator.com (better search: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=how+to+block#!/story/sort_by_date/... )
Ask HN: A new site for programmers and startups, what do you think about it?
Do you think this site provides many benefits to programmers and startups? Or is it more of a headache having rookie programmers in your team. This is the site: www.ghacklabs.com
Your definition of literacy and the popular view are dissimilar. The common definition is just "the ability to read and write." Nothing more, nothing less.

I looked for a definition which contained the term "cursive" and was unable to find one.
New eSignature software
SpaceX does not file patents. [1] The assumption is that the protection offered by the patent is outweighed by the downside of giving your competitor a roadmap of how you did it. My guess is that just knowing it can be done will be a huge part of enabling someone else to develop similar technology.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-patents-2012-11
I'm measuring 496m long, so not that many possibilities.
Fingers are lot more active on iOS than Android
Nice primer, but it omits a crucial part of "taming a testless code beast": Making it testable.

Before you even get to step 1, chances are that if you already have a "testless beast", it's not testable. That is, the right abstractions aren't in place to be able to properly mock or fake your dependencies.

To me, this is one of -- if not the -- hardest part(s) of adding tests to an already existing codebase. This is particularly true when dealing with a statically-typed language.

This is why you'll often read how important it is to start an application with testing in mind: as you write your tests, you'll be forced to make your app testable. Otherwise, it's extremely easy to forego some of the necessary abstractions needed for testing -- and conversely, extremely hard to make sure you have all the necessary abstrations in place if you don't include testing from the beginning.

So this article shouldn't be read thinking that it's "that simple" -- the hardest part isn't even mentioned here.
I took some data off our network database. We measure a lot of gestures as part of the product. I found this quirky data nugget which i think is worth a comment.

According to our network data, and it might just be skewed, we see a lot more gestures per visit being performs on mobile web in iOS than in Android.

Why do you all think that is?
You have some valid points but I think you may be incorrect on this one.

> 1. You launch eastwards so you get the bonus speed from earth's rotation

Once the ship leaves the ground the earth's rotation has little to do with the flight except for landing location.

source: I play KSP
It looks like an organization called "g10code GmbH" is in charge of funding development, not "some rando", and indeed it seems like they're willing to enter in to contracts with companies for development of specific features that company might need[1].

I don't know how the tax situation for donations works out for a GmbH, but they seem to be in a similar position as several other open source projects.

Various parties fund Tor development by giving money to "The Tor Project, Inc.", a 501(c)(3) corporation[2].

The same is true of Freenet, "The Freenet Project Inc", another 501(c)(3) is in charge of funding development, and Google itself has been among the entities that have donated[3].

[1] https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html

[2] https://www.torproject.org/about/findoc/2013-TorProject-Form...

[3] https://freenetproject.org/sponsors.html
Don't agree. There are so many variables to consider, that one usually needs more information to get a good understanding of a business and to understand where the value creation is happening. That obviously doesn't mean you need to hand out proprietary information to everyone who is going on a fishing expedition, but not doing so will absolutely kill any deal before it's even put together.

Consider the following: how would you value a business, if you don't know how it is structured, how it operates, and how much revenues and profits it's generating?

I can potentially see that working for some cool technology startup, or an acqui-hire, but not for an actual business with revenues (and more importantly, profits).

Those small acquisitions, they're not investments for Google, they're expenses. The $500m-$1bn+ ones, those are investments. Big difference in thinking.
The default search changes if you have never touched the search option.
ChangeTip must die
Conglomerates are often worth less than the sum of their parts because profits from successful businesses can be easily transferred to other businesses that are poor investments.

In the case of Yahoo, the market believes that it will destroy a substantial portion of the value of their share of the Alibaba business by making bad investments into core Yahoo.
As someone who bombed their first developer interview, do not get discouraged if you don't know the answer to a question. Make it clear you're willing to learn and what your current skill level is.

Good luck!
Cli ImageScraper [python]
>An early demo of a computer-generated character, referred to in the documentary as “mathematical plastic surgery.”

A spinning 3D model with textures in 1982? That's pretty impressive.
Blockstrap – HTML5 Framework for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755288
Made with Code_Google
Just had a mental image of an Echo in the embodiment of the Elf.

The makings of a truly terrifying horror movie.
A fuel mine deep inside a gravity weel as big as our own. It's very usefull for going into space again, but not for a refueling station.
What the hell is this? An incubator? Venture capitalists? A social group? The design of their page is obstructive, and really only serves to link to a bunch of social media sites.

Also, what's with this weird kick to bring tech companies to France?
I liked the first section in particular. They may be obvious steps, but sometimes when you have the 'where the hell do I start' feeling, it's useful to just have some solid steps laid out.
Every wild testless code beast was once someone's pet.
That's kind of like saying that you always find what you're looking for at the last place you look.
If you still have the screen, the ATSC_THTF_SY14343_ST2975C_CMI_V500dk1_P01_20140707 FW improves the apparent responsiveness of movements at 2160. It's still 30Hz, but feels closer to 50. Includes other improvements as well.
link to method (I think): https://github.com/mstorsjo/vlc-android/blob/master/vlc-andr...
Crazy parents road trippin hahaha so white
> I tend to think that Internet folks have overly exaggerated impressions of the risk profile associated with having basic biographical information available, by the way. This is not a unique cross we have to bear -- every dentist, lawyer, McDonalds franchisee, etc has the same "problem." The vast majority are never targeted by the Internet hate machine.

But, be careful of interpreting that as, "there is no risk." The internet hate machine does find a new victim on a regular basis and toy with their lives for its own amusement, it's just that probability is on your side thanks to the really large number of people on the internet.

Small town politics can be a little nasty too, especially if you're a local business owner that makes the mistake of getting involved in it. But, your business probably doesn't depend very much on your reputation in town. (Mine does.)
I don't think this logic applies to steamships. Larger vessels travel faster and provide an economies-of-scale effect that drastically reduces operating cost per unit of freight. The initial investment is large but in the long run it makes shipping a lot cheaper.
You mean another one? Wouldn't be such a bad idea, they have done that in the past according to this[1] blog post, and it seems to have been incredibly successful: "36.741 EUR raised out of 24.000 target".

[1] https://gnupg.org/blog/20140206-crowdfunding-complete.html
ASP.NET MVC Routing: Play Traffic Cop with Your Routes
The Falcon 9 still has to deal with heat cycles, vibration, and soot/chemicals byproducts from the engines. The heat cycles and vibration lead to work hardening and cracking or softening of components. Soot can and will get into everything and destroy bearings and connectors.

Even the spray from the ocean combined with the heat from the latent heat in the craft can lead to accelerated corrosion.

They're shooting for a final touchdown speed of 2m/s which seems fairly slow but that's still a lot of mass to stop very quickly. The ocean helps soften touchdown for sure.

It would not surprise me if the turn around procedure was to r&r the entire bottom third of the craft and (possibly) the fuel tanks. The removed components could get inspected and rebuilt and flown again.

It won't be anywhere near the scale of the shuttle turn around but it won't be as simple as hosing it off and fueling it up.

SpaceX has of course considered all of these things and it will be an amazing thing for space travel if they pull it off.
This is pretty bad, but I believe it is only possible to get an access token if you also allow malicious/non-trusted users to either create new OAuth client registrations (`Doorkeeper::Application` models) or modify the redirect URI of an existing OAuth client registration. The reason is that the access token is delivered over a redirect, not in the response to the form POST. Doorkeeper does check for a valid redirect URI.
personally i like to write the mvc skeleton myself and decide which frameworks will be used and go from there. or a leader for the backend who assigns out small tasks as small as a "function to draw this btn or move this element" or to "find me a library that does X and is..." and then he can merge them in... then once it takes shape you can share the files and the work.

i suppose usually for me one guy (say techsupp or network admin) sets up the svn/webserver/db, one guy decides on frameworks, one guy writes the skeleton, one guy starts on the interface, art guy does art stuff, typically the lead dev is watching over all this and merging stuff and when ready gives orders and access to the repo. if theres at least some structure and one template or working file/interface the juniors will have more success imo.
Honestly, I'm really impressed with the UI of that little search box.
Of course you will get the "worlds biggest" before any sort of collapse. Its like the same adage when trying to look for something 'it is always the last place you look'.
Mayer is 39. She probably doesn't think she's middle-aged (even if she is, and if she is, I don't want to hear about it either ;> ).
>they are now migrating to Windows internally instead of GNU/Linux

Do you know why? Is it because it just makes it more convenient for everyone if the BND just gives the NSA access to their machines directly? I'm not even completely joking. What could possibly be the rationale for doing that?
Awesome, this is something I've wanted for a while and didn't realize Chrome had finally added it!

It lets you have different users in different windows simultaneously, or it makes you switch the entire environment all together?

Thanks!
Docker Support Done Right
Do you still need to restart firefox to switch users (or switch accross all open windows at once), instead of being able to simultaneously have different users in different windows, like the new Chrome feature seems to do?

It's the simultaneous different 'users' (ie, cookie stores, mostly) in different windows that is exciting to me.
How it was the C source code 25 years ago
We have just such an app. Rails 2.3.8, (won't even upgrade to .9 cleanly) EOL Debian Lenny. No tests. At all. Started to do this. Figured out how to get it under test, when bugs are fixed they get tested. Every once in awhile I'd grab the most important piece of the project and put it under test.

Gave up after awhile. It's a poor use of time. The app's been maintained for years, its failure modes are well-understood. It's stable. There are other parts of the infrastructure that need attention.

I managed to convince my superiors that now's the time to replace it. Rather than devote countless hours to this time sink, I decided to stop adding to the legacy app, cordoned it off and now treat it like a Superfund site. I replaced my work machine a while back, I keep the old machine around because it's the only thing I can work on it with. I feel like I'm putting an environmental suit and gloves on every time I open it up. All new functionality is built outside the app and interacts with it as if it were a black box.

We now have an agenda and a plan to replace it. And the projects I'm working on now will bring a lot more value and capability. We even got them to expand my department.

What I'm saying is that organizational problems shouldn't be treated like technical problems. A large, untested, legacy application that a lot of business is riding on is an organizational problem and not a technical one. They decided not to devote the resources to properly maintain it, you need to put forth the case that it's a serious problem and that it needs more than your efforts to fix. That's how organizational problems are solved, one person takes the initiative and gets people behind him and makes it happen. Not by being a cowboy.

Trying to take code that was written in one era, and bring it into another era is a huge waste of time and resources. Figure out what you need to really solve the problem and ask for the resources to do so, after you've gotten your ducks in a row and at least made efforts to do it other ways. Your career and your sanity will be better off for it.
As far as tests are a descriptor of the business logic, another really difficult part that is also omitted from this article actually figuring out who the person in the organization that can authoritatively tell you what the business logic is can be really tricky. Sometimes that person no longer even exists. Simply writing tests that test that the existing code does what it does is not always productive.
Docker – What Problem Does It Really Solve
Scaling up with embedded testing
Congrats on adding Docker support. Looking forward to trying it out.
Cuba and the U.S. will begin to normalize relations
That doesn't make much sense. The value of anything is what people are willing to pay for it.
In Florida (28 degrees north) the earth surface travels at 400 m/s eastwards. (earth circumference * cos(28) / day)

A spacecraft that would launch from the ground and start westwards, would, after gaining the first 400 m/s relative to its starting point only be stationary relative to the earth's center. Then after 800 m/s, it would travel at 400 m/s westwards. Say if your orbital velocity is 8.0 km/s.
Your total delta vee would be 8.4 km/s.

In comparison, an eastward flying rocket would start from 0.4 km/s , and would need rocket propulsion only for the remaining 7.6 km/s. A 10% saving compared to the westward rocket!

In reality it's a bit more complex as you don't launch straight east or west anyway, and ISS is at a 50 degree inclination etc...
Show HN: Ski and snowboard mountain conditions + skier Instagrams
What evidence? we don't have enough data to draw conclusions on this matter, we barely sent a very limited robot on mars and some probes in the solar system, the universe is huge.

We can't initiate contact because of primitive technology, we barely made it to the moon with huge costs.

Why aren't advanced civilizations that can reach us contact us? we don't know, there are many theories

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Explaining_the_pa...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis
I made a credit card donation through Stripe, but it was declined and flagged as potential fraud by my credit card company (Amex). I was able to donate successfully after logging into my credit card web site, verifying that I had attempted the transaction, and then resubmitting the donation on the GPG site.

So if you get an error message during the donation process, check for messages from your credit card account.
This is measurement of how much you lose by breathing.

The study authors, Ruben Meerman and Andrew Brown from The University of New South Wales, said: "None of this biochemistry is new, but for unknown reasons it seems nobody has thought of performing these calculations before."
It is really a chicken and egg problem. On the one hand, it would be good to refactor the code to help write some tests. On the other hand, you really shouldn't refactor the code with tests to prove that you haven't broke anything. In either case, you are correct that it can be extremely difficult.

While there is no easy answer, I've found that in these situations, I still try to write a test first. The difference being that I try to write a test that exercises the code at some API level that I don't want to break. These test start off really ugly and require a ton of work, but they ensure that refactoring the lower level code to make it more testable doesn't break things. Eventually, the tests and code at the higher level can be updated safely.
The Good Wife takes lots of stories from real life. I'm thinking specifically of the episode when a show (like Glee) lifted a cover of a song (like Baby Got Back) from an artist (like Jonathan Coulton) who didn't technically own the copyright to the lyrics or melody.
Turn it up to just 32 GB, and it is just as stark.
And if you cannot afford to pay, here is a well deserved bullet for your head.
Oh wow! Thanks for this heads up!
I really, really, really want to move to using a tiling window manager. Watching YouTube videos of people using them well, you can't help but think "Damn, they're really crazy efficient". But I can't find one that has good enough documentation that I can learn it on my own (and since nobody else at my office uses it, somebody has got to be first.)

I'd love to get into http://i3wm.org/ but can't find anything to push me over the ledge, so I keep resigning myself to checking out projects like the one in OP and thinking "Wouldn't that be nice..."
US reportedly beginning talks to loosen Cuba embargo
If you're talking about building blocks, goto is also a necessary evil...
How information moves between cultures
No Nexus 6?
What are some of the potential usecases where this could be used, in place of Tor?
Dungeons and Developers: 5 Traits of Great Tech Leads and Dungeon Masters
You mention that, "finally, both the hypervisors and the guests run finely-tuned, bare-metal OSes, with only what’s needed, and nothing more." I'm curious what bare-metal OS do you use?
Humanoid robot with open electronics
Tell that to the algae in the ocean. Anyway we won't run out of fossils. But I am hopeful for replacement. We almost tamed production, battery tech is progressing. The only hard place for fossil fuels to be replaced if push comes to shove is air travel.
98.6% of TorrentLocker Victims Refuse to Pay Bitcoin Ransom
Outsourcing, Do It Right
As good as qmail is, the official release is so far behind the times it's ridiculous. The unofficial patches, made unofficial by a stubborn refusal on the part of the author to merge them in, have fixed most of these issues, but then what's the point of using qmail if you have to use the untrusted version?

Sadly qmail is a lesson of how you can be correct and completely wrong at the same time.

Imagine a completely secure operating system that only runs on 32-bit systems. Could you actually advocate using it in a serious production capacity?