skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think picking the right idea is the most important thing. A lot of the "never launched" side projects I see were just too big an idea to do as a side project. You need something relatively small, that you can build and launch quickly in a short amount of time. Find a problem that people are willing to pay to have solved, but that is relatively small in terms of time to develop a solution that will solve the problem.

You can do this as a side project because there are lots of things that can make a great side project, bring in a few 1000 dollars a month or more, but wouldn't be interesting to someone trying to launch a business they want to scale.

Look at tools and plugins for software people use already, especially software that has a reasonable pricetag and that people us in their businesses. Anything you can sell to people for whom time is money is a really good start!

I launched a side project 5 and a half years ago which went on to become our entire business. I wrote about that, in a way that I hope will help other people do the same, in my book The Profitable Side Project: http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project
In cattle country, the law is "fence them out," ie. if you don't want your neighbors' cows grazing on your land, it's your job to fence them out, instead of his job to fence them in.

Claim: We need something analogous to "fence the out" for "being offended" if we want to construct a broadly participatory society, complete with free, open, and vibrant debate. In other words, perhaps our society should standardize on the convention that it is your job to not be offended by things, instead of other peoples' job to not offend you. Perhaps this might boil down to civilly agreeing to disagree.

Given a large number of religious/ideological groups and a larger number of issues with non-negligible probabilities of offending someone, it becomes likely that many statements in the public discourse will be offensive to someone.

We can model the situation binomially and compute the likelihood of at least one success (offending some group) in N trials, where N is the number of events in the public discourse per day (perhaps 10^5 in today's fractured media landscape) and the probability of offense is on average perhaps 1/(.001N). It's not hard to see that at least one success will probably happen every day. That's why I think we need a more robust system for dealing with this.
Are you saying the NYPD, the DHS and the NSA are terrorist organizations that benefit from terrorism?

Be careful. Expressing that opinion openly and convincing others of its truth is ThoughtCrime. And could lead to your being extraordinarily rendered to a country that would torture you; or to your being tortured by agencies allied to those named above.
I'd be interested to hear what decentralized technology projects HN readers are working on and/or most interested in -- and hopefully that a community could help with. Care to share your favorites below?
> If you're doing something without scale, it will die when you lose interest.

I read most of patio11's advice as being about exactly this: how to build a not-necessarily-scalable business that you can lose interest in without it dying. (Namely, by contracting out content-generation and community management and treating the commissions/wages of those people as part of your user acquisition costs.)
I think it is only denying freedom of expression if the guy asked for it to published in the NYT? Other people have already published it so it is already being published, and thus people are able to see it.
In my opinion the best way to start a profitable side projects is to limit the scope of the project.

I fall into the category of starting too many things that I don't finish. I've recently realized that the size of the things I was working in was just way too big, especially since When working on a side project you are working around your life schedule.

After limiting the size of my projects I've found I am completing all of them
Does anyone made them to read it?
There certainly could be harm in trying it. Love is powerful, relationships are fragile, people are easily confused.
Islam isn't a race. Racist merely because many Muslims share an ethnicity in France? But then, they weren't skewering only Islam. I'm genuinely trying to understand this criticism.
Searching for car removal in Sydney? We offer free car removal
people interested in this should check out secure scuttlebutt [1]. it's a decentralized data network built around logs (think kappa architecture [2]) with ecc keypair identities, proof of authorship, and content-addressed linking

1. https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt
2. http://www.kappa-architecture.com/
The whole point of my comment is that it was a joke. HN, at least officially, frowns on humorous remarks. But I've found that it's not always true.

I fully expect that I will be "spontaneously" bombarded with these questions on dates in the coming months. And they will lose all efficacy because people will prepare for them in the same way that they prepare for idiotic brain-teasers and HR questions.
Could also be a touch of not wanting to get murdered in there too.
very similar question from 12h ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8865860 and currently in #5 spot on 'Ask HN'
I want to start an English version of Charlie Hebdo. There are tons of materials to make a bi-weekly publication. Who wants to join?

I'm really serious about this.
Yes, I worked on GC as a summer project. Turned out to be way harder than anyone had thought because LLVM isn't really set up to handle high performance GC. I have a talk on it here:

https://elliottslaughter.com/2012/09/rust-precise-gc/
There is a pragmatic perspective and a theoretic perspective. Pragmatically speaking, empirical methods can get one pretty far. It's better to have full coverage of empirical tests across an entire system than limited coverage of formal tests, for instance. So, on that account, you may be correct from a pragmatic perspective.

From an epistemological perspective, a test suite to confirm a property using chosen examples is not nearly as good as a formal proof that guarantees a property over a given domain. For simple cases, such as branch coverage, the test suite may be good enough. As complexity increases, or when testing things like modular arithmetic over an elliptic curve, unit testing leads to false confidence.

But, just like in empirical testing, it's possible to build bad proofs. This is where the specialization comes in. There may be plenty of competent engineers who can hack at a test suite, but their results will not be nearly as comprehensive as someone trained in formal verification.

It all comes down to epistemology. What do we know, and how do we know it? What possible defects exist in our system, and how bad can they be? Can we ship yet?
After struggling with thrift's Go binding (it happily generated broken Go code with the Aurora project's thrift file), I'm now skeptical that any of the others really works. I've never encountered a more frustrating project in this space.
This is a good question. Just my two cents, but he says it is a "very dark place" which I assume means bad. If so, then there must be some resistance or dissatisfaction with his situation (not that I blame him). I think Eastern schools of thought advocate something similar (i.e. allowing your self/ego to vanish) but with complete acceptance of how things are, which leads to peace.
You do realize that islam is a religion, not a race, right? Playing the racism card in situations like these is quickly becoming the new Godwin.

Besides, given that most Americans wouldn't even know what kind of cartoons we're talking about, it would have actual news value to show them.
What you can learn from Panic’s approach to email marketing (2010)
Point, but the destructive views of minorities promoted by this publication is classic imperialist journalism.
Make sure that the people who you are working for during normal hours don't try to make predatory claims on your side-project IP, to start with. Apply the minimum amount of violence necessary to ensure this, preferably zero.
I'm helping out on a project that is a mix of decentralized and distributed. It is "a (nascent) specification for distributed, immutable, derived, addressable data. It defines a layer for addressing data, providing a foundation for downstream functions such as data caching, transport, discovery, and computation." https://github.com/tdxlabs/fondo I know there are related projects (mentioned and linked in the repo above), but this one scratches an itch for me, and I'd like to see who else is interested. Feedback of all kinds is encouraged.
The problem is, it is too often a one way street, as per the examples here
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/06/police-increas...
No -- compression isn't the bottleneck. ssh's tiny TCP buffer size is the issue.
Philosophically, there is only one best way to interpret data - if you know the underlying causes then that provides the only explanatory power you need. A similar argument could be made to our understanding of multiple physical phenoma prior to Newton deriving His equations - your statement is equivalent to saying that there are multiple valid interpretations of how the planets revolve around the sun and apples fall from trees.
Fact of the matter is, they wouldn't publish offensive cartoons making fun of the Holocaust, Jews, Christians, 9/11 victims, women, etc., so it's not very surprising they won't publish these cartoons, either.

If you want to see offensive cartoons there are plenty of websites just a google search away.

It's funny how many stories are posted on HN about being sensitive to women/minorities/whatever, with comments full of people saying how open and accepting people need to be, then this comes up, and the dominant theme is "We need to publish offensive stuff everywhere, because fuck that group who's different than me."
Mazda doesn't use turbos, yet manage to be competitive in the European market. Their engines, like the 2.0 SkyActiv are well liked by motoring journalists.
I have Meniere's disease myself and I have to say I thought I'd never see anything about it on HN, since it supposedly affects 0.2% of the population. That said, I'm very excited to see this article. While I'd never wish it on anybody else, I'm glad somebody else who has it is trying to do something about it.

I've been able to control the vertigo almost completely through consistent exercise, and it often comes back when I slack off a bit, but my hearing has never returned even partially, although I should maybe perform a more consistent test to actually measure the loss. This article definitely gives me hope that someday that might change, and I can stop having to turn my good ear or constantly worry that something might happen to that ear as well.
You mistake your own ignorance for my Islamophobia - Charlie Hebdo made many comics ridiculing politics, Catholicism (especially Catholicism) and religion as a whole.
Any kind of testing or review can lead to false confidence. This is why its important to use multiple approaches in the hope that their errors are not completely correlated.
Does that apply to all views, or just those which you find ridiculous?
What about being bigoted and prejudiced contributes to a democracy?
"Grid fins worked extremely well from hypersonic velocity to subsonic, but ran out of hydraulic fluid right before landing."

"Upcoming flight already has 50% more hydraulic fluid, so should have plenty of margin for landing attempt next month."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553963793056030721

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553964281025548289
Those cartoons are offensive to a group of religious people. The cartoonists had the right to freely express themselves. All of us should defend their right to express their opinions, but we don't have to agree with them and popularize something we disagree with. I think the NYT, CNN, Fox News, etc. made the right decision not showing these offensive images.
My company has three offices. We have about 200GB of shared storage. We often need to access and write files that are 10-20MB in size. Currently we have a centralized file server at the main office and a VPN. Using the file server at the main office is a pleasure, using it from the other two offices is slow. I am looking for a stable distributed filesystem, so that I can have a full copy of the data on a server at each of the three locations. I wish to share between each server and it's local clients via both NFS and Samba. Clients should be able to read and write to their local server, and the three servers should collaborate to keep all their data in sync. Can Ori offer this? Something else?
Why such tools are more common on OS X?
If being offended somehow turns someone into an extremist, in reality they already were one. Bombing civilians is one thing, bigoted cartoons are quite another. Claiming a religion demands, and therefore sanctifies, terrorism in response to speech is not just absurdity beyond reason, it's a path to oblivion.
In this instance the pictures provide important context, to wit they should be included regardless of how offensive it might be.
These days she probably wouldn't make tenure. Certainly you're not talking about Olga Taussky-Todd?

Did you start a PhD?
What exactly are you serious about? Translating Charlie Hedbo into English? Or just being involved in a satirical publication? There are a number of satirical publications that already exist in the US.

I'm not sure that the political sensibilities of Charlie Hedbo or the content will really resonate with Americans, though the content may do better among other Anglophones.
For the other clueless readers:

MAC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_authentication_code

[Please spell out your acronyms the first time, nerds]
How would you guarantee the trustworthiness of a node? How do you guarantee that a node is actually doing what it is supposed to and not inserting malware into its results? Reputation systems can be gamed (and will be if there's money at stake).

I like the notion of trustworthy, general-purpose, publicly distributed computing: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustwo...
Razzle Dazzle
You don't have the right to never be offended.
> It's funny how the TSA has had virtually zero success in catching terrorists, yet we still allow them to anally probe us in the cause of safety.

Yeah, they don't catch terrorists because their presence stops terrorists from trying certain kinds of attacks. That's the whole point. Also I don't know why you think they don't screen the 23 year old arabs more thoroughly -- because by all reports, people that are more "terrorist-looking" do get screened more thoroughly and frequently find themselves subject to "random" inspection.
The health concerns of radiation exposure of backscatter X-ray have never been properly characterized at all. One specific concern that was raised with airport scanners is that existing methods of estimating safety limit dosage simply don't work with backscatter, which deposits the majority of radiation in the surface layers of the subject (i.e. in the person's skin), which has much lower volume (and therefore higher radiation absorbed per volume) than the whole body. (http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2010/11/5810/ucsf-scientists-speak-...)

The privacy concerns are peanuts compared to the potentially massive harm that the X-rays caused in terms of skin cancer susceptibility.

The worst case is pretty scary and regardless of the outcome, I think the government (we the taxpayers) will be on the hook for huge liability litigation in the future regarding these machines.

It has legitimate uses for scanning cargo, and I see little issue with imaging a car if there's nobody in it, but one of these things driving down the street irradiating everyone is potentially a massive health problem.
It's definitely their decision but here is my thought:

A news story just broke in which people were killed because of certain images. Is it not good journalism to show the images that caused the attack?
Yes; there are also efforts for Java, AFAIK
I am starting to think that the killer app for a decentralised web is actually business. Think of the typical large corporation:

* Massive reluctance to use cloud services and active blocking of services like Dropbox.

* Centralised "intranet" style software is usually slow and badly designed.

* Internet connections are slow, but local network connections are usually fast.

* Desktop computers spend most of their time completely idle and will often have lots of spare disk space.

* Centralised services are very expensive to maintain and difficult to develop.

Simple P2P apps that would run on corporate networks and require no maintenance could be very powerful.
All of them. Go on, make a comic about some view I hold you think is ridiculous, maybe it spawns a good discussion.
You need Haskell only to build the Bond compiler. Once you do that, you get a native, stand-alone executable for your system (you don't need Haskell to run the Bond compiler). You use the Bond compiler as part of build process for programs using Bond. Programs using Bond don't have any Haskell dependency.
The thing is, email is already distributed. SMTP, NNTP, ftp, talk, finger, etc., we already have all these decentralized applications and protocols. But the adoption of dynamic IP allocation and firewalls has made it quite inconvenient to run these services. Now there's a whole other layer built to deal with these issues, and so there could very well be a pendulum swing in the direction of decentralization all over again.

My feeling is that if we could reclaim all those good old protocols (ftp, and all the other above-mentioned ones) and if we could run them locally easily and added a couple more generic services such as bittorrent and gnutella (for search), we'd have a nice decentralized stack to build new applications on.
Ask HN: What else can JavaScript be used for?
Coming from the web development field, I'm interested in what other areas JavaScript is being used in. I know there have been applications in art, education, games, and robotics. I started compiling a list of different uses for JavaScript. [0] What am I missing?

[0] https://github.com/webguyian/javascript-uses
Living in a given society requires that one either accepts the norms of that society or works with the society to change them. Terrorists work AGAINST the society by use of force to try and elicit a change out of fear. Most times it backfires.

The use of the word extremism is not ideal here. One can hold extreme views on the subject and still function normally within a society, provided he or she respects societal views and voices disagreement within societal norms. Terrorists resort to terror and violence to voice disagreement.

In western societies personal freedoms are valued higher than a given religion. Islam does not value personal freedoms in the same way, but if Islam is to peacefully fit in with western norms, it has to adapt or continuous conflict is inevitable.
When we allow others to dictate what we can write simply because it might offend them, where's it going to end.

Pretty soon they'll start insisting that women should not sit next to them in a public bus because they find it offensive.

Give then an inch, they ask for a mile!
CES: Everything Old Is New Again
All the major Norwegian newspapers and TV channels published the images, depite them not doing it the last time.

I honestly find it quite surprising that most of the US media bowed to the demands of the terrorists, since the US is normally considered a bastion of free speech.
Similar things have been done for decades. The Porsche 959 (1986-1989), Toyota Supra MKIV (1993.5-1998 USA), and FD RX-7 all had a sequential turbo setup, but they were all using two turbos of the same size. All The exhaust gas is diverted through a single turbo at low RPM to spool it quickly, then after a certain RPM is reached gas begins being diverted through both turbos equally.

The problem is the control systems and extra plumbing get pretty complicated. The setup in the Supra is lovingly referred to as "the rat's nest"
Private Rocket Fails to Stick the Landing
"Passive" scanners violate the 4th amendment just as much as "invasive" ones.

Kyllo vs United States determined that thermal imaging without a warrant was a search and constituted a violation of a person's 4th amendment rights.
"Off the wall" and "through the wall" surveillance are one and the same.
It's the same as with not showing photos from ISIS with the heads being cut off.

Or not showing naked leaked photos of Jennifer Lawrence.
> in my trivial example if the accumulator (C_n) at the maximum value, it would overflow for any non-zero input

Depends on what you mean by "incorrect". :)

The SMT formulation isn't doing infinite precision arithmetic. It's just proving that the result computed by (the SMT encoding of) the C macro is equivalent to the 64-bit SMT bitvector defined by "Concat(c2, c1, c0) + 2 * ZeroExt(2W, a) ZeroExt(2W, b)".

> A lot of effort, to prove very narrow properties-- ones which might be misleading about the correctness of the software, on models which may not well match the actual software, and which gives assurance that rots a bit over time because it's not sufficiently automatic.*

To some extent, I agree with you. It is a little difficult to find off-the-shelf tools that work well directly on the source code, especially for software. But I think it's a just a matter of time before these issues are resolved. The hardware scenario has certainly improved in leaps and bounds. A group I've worked with has been somewhat successful in pushing the use of the JasperGold model checker at Intel, and I've heard quite a few people with no background in using formal tools tell me that they're happy with the tool and are much more confident in their code thanks to use of this tool.
These comics were mocking any form of extremism, and one could argue that extremism needs to be ridiculed.
New Research Links Scores of Earthquakes to Fracking Wells Near a Fault in Ohio
but but but ... sales of drugs might be used to fund terrorism (tm) !!!!

Seems to me, reading between the lines, you sympathize with terrorists.
No, I don't think it would be "good journalism," it'd be "sensationalist journalism."

Nobody gets upset when they replace the word "nigger" with the phrase "the 'N' word", so why get upset over this?
TV of the future may be a sphere
Je suis David Brooks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/david-brooks-i-am-...
>>But most Federal Drug Administration regulations for medical X-rays do not apply to security equipment, leaving the decision of when and how to use the scanners up to law enforcement agencies such as the NYPD.

Brilliant.
I don't really understand the question. It's a programming language and it can be used to do things that programming languages can do.

So to say it can 'do' education seems to be a strange comment. It can be used to write programs that help with education, and you can use it as a language to teach programming - but both of those things are true of Python, PHP, Lisp, Java, etc.
Nope.

Should be rewritten as a movie review:

"releasing the documents would hamper the department's ability to ... endanger the lives of New Yorkers."
Well, that's part of the freedom of speech.

If you can't say things that will offend people YOU DON'T HAVE FREEDOM OF SPEECH

It's that simple

And I'd MUCH rather live in a world where we can offend Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Cientologists, etc
Nordic countries point the way to cashless societies
I should have probably said "non-compiler application" rather than just "application".
Where's the paper? :)
What's the project? What's the team working on it? What's the budget? What's the timeframe?

Without answers to any of these questions, the question has about as much utility as "what's your favourite colour?".