skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oort objects are ill-behaved (erratic orbits). Inevitably some would wander off. Neighboring stars would have at least some Oort objects? Or we need to imagine a mechanism that prevents this.
Massive clouds erupted into Mars’ atmosphere and no one knows why
Show HN: Plyr.io – A simple, accessible and customisable HTML5 media player
I don't know specifically why the article focuses on Poincare and anticipating Godel (it seems like a bit of a stretch).

But Poincare's writings on the philosophy of mathematics and science are really excellent.

link: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37157/37157-pdf.pdf
I didn't mean to imply that there was a hard line between railroading and complete freedom. The best games are probably a blend of both, offering some controlled story experiences and some freedom to explore and discover. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite video games include The Elder Scrolls series and Vogel's work.

It is tricky to balance difficulty. To again draw parallels between tabletop and video games: if the players get a powerful weapon at too low a level, it can wreck the fun of the adventure because there's no more challenge. The unfun solution (in my opinion) is to take away the weapon or in some way punish the players. Instead, a good GM offers new challenges that keep the weapon relevant.

Dark Souls has a good example of this. You can get a powerful sword fairly early which makes the first third or so of the game a bit easier. But it doesn't ruin the game or anything, because the challenge is still there and the later parts of the game scale beyond that weapon.

Dark Souls in general is an interesting example of a game that has several linear structures in it's gameplay, but still feels open and rewarding to explore. In many ways, what you explore most is your own ability to best the game and better master the environment, rather than exploring the environment itself.
Curious how long you have to wait to take ownership of the bit coins after the sale. Also, why wouldn't the gov just sell these via an exchange directly?
I have so much to say, but it's all been said before, and nothing changes. If you don't fit into this society, where
do you live? Yea--Alaska, and end up like Chris McCandless?

I can only speak for San Rafael, CA. These people just want
a place where they can pitch a tent without getting a ticket, and an outhouse. "Build it--they will come?" I can't argue
it anymore. Oh, yea--San Rafael--We know you are actively using the "Break in the glass" theory.

It is like they are making the problem seem so complicated; nothing get's done? Or, maybe that's what they want?

I do know this--I don't joke about Homelessness. I don't know when it became O.K. to joke about Homelessness? I know I cringe whenever Jimmy Fallon uses the homeless in his shtick? Fallon is the first one to come to mind, but I hear it too much.

I feel sick even writing about it.
That's not just what he said, he also said, "By encouraging people to rely on tools like Truecrypt, you are, in a very small but real way, endangering them."
Security standard proposed for Bitcoin exchanges and wallets
Well, you could use any virus that uses a pre-integration complex.
This happened to me, but in my own experience I find myself spending >40% of my time doing things that are not programming. This may be a symptom of the org I work in, but I suspect it's not uncommon for people in these positions to double up as SCRUM masters, code reviewers, mentors, and/or meeting organizers.
I am slowly coming to the realization that there's only so much I can know or care about and maybe it's time to dig in on the things I know pretty well and put the rest aside for later. I'm starting to eval tools and languages with a view to how they help me now, not how useful they'll be in the future.

It's the only way for me to stay sane.
The Poor Man's Voxel Engine
Any community organizations or non-profits in need of a CRM/Salesforce solution should check out CiviCRM. It's free as in freedom, and free as in price. No $200+ monthly fee and 1-3% commission.
Uncluttered and ornament-free is functional but it is also a bit boring.

Less is a bore?
Even better, I just became "tech lead" on a project here at my company.....

I'm the only technical person on the project, so the only person I'm leading is myself!
Interesting post, reminds me of a book that I read recently on similar topic - "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope" (http://amzn.com/0061730335)
From Wikipedia:

TrueCrypt is a discontinued source-available freeware utility used for on-the-fly encryption. It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or encrypt a partition or the entire storage device.

Since TrueCrypt is dead, what is the purpose of auditing it?
Is there an official team that is ready, willing and able to take over maintenance and development?

If anything should be audited I would think it should be one of the forks.

But the author makes the following comment on the other thread:

----------------------------------
Also: speaking in no "official" capacity whatsoever, I'd advise you to stay away from the forks of Truecrypt.
Unless something new has come to light since last I looked, the licensing situation on the TC code is weird:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/distributions/2008-Oct....
... which means there is a pretty strong disincentive for people with serious crypto and systems expertise to invest their time and energy building on it. You don't want to trust crypto platforms with built-in adverse selection problems.

---------------------------

So the forks have issues and the main project is dead??
But we needz more money to audit it more?

I am also unclear what the first expensive audit accomplished if it did not cover encryption. Sounds like having an inspection on a house that covers part of the
roof and two rooms and nothing else like the foundation. Does anyone have a link
to the original campaign to raise money?
Nice one Sam!
i would recommend listening to the part on "common mistakes of new tech leads".

do you really want a project manager -- who hasn't contributed anything to the code base -- to evaluate skills, make recommendations, organize, and mediate for a team of a 8 or 10 software developers? probably not.

as a "tech lead" in a very, very large organization, i would say finding 30% of your time to code is very hard to do. especially given you are the one sitting in the meetings explaining progress, deflecting new arbitrary "but can't you just..." tasks, and speaking with authority on cross-team dependencies all day.
I'm really confused. It appears to have no HDFS support? So how do you get data in and out of the cluster? I guess the InputFormat just takes care of that magically?

Also the code isn't even close to Google style. I guess that's not so surprising, come to think of it.

This is really pretty interesting. I've wanted to be able to do this for a while, and marshaling everything through the JNI I guess is the easiest way to do it.
Thanks for the comment. I'm under the impression that once you have your foot in the door so to speak, (a job that you perform well in) that a degree is for the most part a formality. Am I incorrect?
I have met the Transitmix team while I was at Code for America and all I have to say is that these guys are just plain ol' awesome. If you have not seen their demos yet, search them in YouTube. Amazing stuff.
History of taxis before the Haas Act:
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2013/01/73990...

"n 1932, 16,732 cabs roamed New York City streets, according to taxi historian Graham Hodges’Taxi! A social history of the New York City cab driver.

The competition “was merciless,” according to Hodges, and “Many cabbies turned to petty crime to help make ends meet.”

There were strikes, and there were fare wars."

The solution isn't to wipe out the medallions. The solution is to issue more until you achieve the balance you seek.
I sent you an email, thanks.
Lots of good advice in this thread but it seems you may have pushed your dopaminergic system into a bit of overdrive. Lots of novelty can leave lots of dopamine floating around your pre-frontal cortex which puts things on a hair trigger. It primes the brain for learning and has the side effects of making reaction times faster and unfortunately more spastic, which destroys fine motor skills like handwriting. It also lowers filters for novel stimulation which makes you more easily distracted. Longer term it will inhibit oxytocin release and make you less bonded to your social group, increase your tolerance for risk and has the side effect of making you feel that you don't measure up and need to prove yourself. If your ADHD drugs are dopamine agonists or partial agonists it likely would have made the problem worse.

Generally you may find yourself more productive if you break your day down into research, planning and implementation. During your planning phase you should limit yourself strictly to pencil and paper and remove computers, cell phones and other electronics. Use this time to design your product in your mind, break it up into sub-components and how they will interact. If you hit a wall due to a lack of knowledge you should work on it until you can write down a specific question that you can't answer and then address it in your next research cycle. Once you have something actionable only then do you move onto implementation and if you run into problems go back to planning.

I am going to warn you that the planning stage will be torture in the beginning! You will feel a huge need to 'get something done' because the lack of novelty will lower dopamine. It will be easier if you do your planning sessions in the morning when your brain has had some time to clear itself of excess dopamine overnight.

Some other supplements that will help clear out excess dopamine include SAM-e and/or TMG; melatonin at night; H2 blockers like Tagamet at night (the are antacids but raise prolactin levels), low dose lithium, avoiding blue light in the evening by using f.lux on your devices and/or blue blocking sunglasses and meditation. Usual caveats apply. I'm not a doctor, your results may vary.
Show HN: Picnic CSS Build System
> Since TrueCrypt is dead, what is the purpose of auditing it?

I asked that question, and received a response from tptacek here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9070420
Machine Learning to rescue hacked power grids
First, that's not particularly relevant to the question of what happens to the browser itself. Second, the field of "things you can run that is not Javascript" when not in the browser is already incredibly rich, so we already live in a flexible world. Third, frankly I'm not particularly overwhelmed by the prospect of Javascript's longevity in the server space being a long-term phenomenon... an awful lot of what gets linked on HN is less "cool things to do with JS" and "how to deal with the problems that come up when trying to use JS on the server".

And fourthly, and why this reply is worth making, bear in mind that if the browser becomes feasibly able to run any language, rather than having Javascript occupy a privileged position by virtue of being the only language, the biggest putative advantage that Javascript-on-the-server has goes poof in a puff of smoke. If Javascript has to compete on equal footing, it really doesn't have a heck of a lot to offer; every other 1990s-style dynamically typed scripting language (Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) is far more polished by virtue of being able to be moved forward without getting two or three actively fractious browser vendors to agree on whatever the change is (just look at how slow the ES6 has been to roll out, when I'd rate to contain roughly as much change as your choice of any two 2.x Python releases). And it has no answer to the ever-growing crop of next-gen languages like Clojure or Rust. Without its impregnable foothold in the browser, Javascript's future is pretty dim. (In fact I consider the entire language catagory of "1990s-style dynamic scripting language" to be cresting right about now in general, so Javascript's going to be fighting for a slowly-but-surely ever-shrinking portion of pie.)
Yeah, ffis are just calls like any other, with the usual annotations and types on parameters and return values, etc. They just happen to be to functions on the outside of the asm module.

edit: btw, there is a full example here https://github.com/dherman/asm.js/#example
Thanks for your kind words, your valuable comments and very interesting suggestions! Will consider...
It's worth noting, I believe the effort to audit TC began before they "shut down".
It kinda blows my mind that the US government thinks this is a case they can actually win.

If they actually do, it's pretty much all over for democracy in the US.
Pfft. Real men (and women) use stty -icanon.
Yep all off-shore people want is an opportunity at on-site. Not to learn new tech or experience a different culture or have better management skills. But to earn some $$$.
There are some good companies that do really quality work at off-shore(mostly India) - like ThoughtWorks, Nagaro etc.

Since I am one of those off-shore guys who's now at on-site. But not one day has been like when I feel I am in software business, its human resources business.

Also, I find American managers much better than Indians(I am Indian myself .. just speaking out honestly). Americans rewards talent better, are not racist and don't encourage nepotism.
It requires you to compile a proxy into the application:

OkHttpClient client = new OkHttpClient();
client.networkInterceptors().add(new StethoInterceptor());
Get better at the things you hate - and then learn to love them. In your case, it's pushing ideas to completion. Reduce the scope, forget the critics and embrace the small iterations.
When reading the post, I had the impression that OP has never worked on a large project and seen what it's like to iterate on an existing project to improve it incrementally by working on the critical questions that may only make small changes to the overall app / project. Instead they're always thinking about and working on the large decisions (that are more or less inconsequential in the big picture) that you need to make when starting a project from scratch. I saw one comment about "fear of missing out". I think it's more along the lines of "fear of making the wrong decision and not knowing how to fix it". "Fear of the unknown" maybe. I think it's a useful exercise to think about and work on your early-stage execution (ie. figuring out how you'll prep things for a project, and learning about and understanding the implications of those decisions), but without any experience executing on the later stages of a project, it won't do any good.

There are generally alot of questions that need to be answered early on in a project, but once you've committed you just need to be confident that your skills to architect the project will be solid enough that they will keep you out of trouble, and the code will be modular enough that if you do spot big mistakes you can easily fix them within the existing architecture, avoiding the need for a complete (or large-scale) rewrite.
That is correct. Nevertheless it may also be convenient for someone to sign the document after dragging it in the stampd box.
Io.js Podcast with Isaac Schleuter and Mikeal Rogers
Cooking is a very different problem to providing a light source, and providing heat via electricity is very inefficient.

From what I remember, there have been several attempts to provide people in those areas with efficient stoves, but they haven't been very successful.

A quick search turned up the following paper discussing the problem: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945541/
> Just don't play it on "lunatic" difficulty

Lunatic? I can't even beat a game on normal...
I've experienced all range of standups. My current teams (I have two) both get in / get out in under 15 rather consistently. On occasion, parking lot items may extend beyond the 15-minute mark, but these are typically NOT requiring all team members' participation (so non-participants are free to leave). As a SM, I keep the team on track, reminding them to stick to the 3 questions and not much else (we do enjoy some banter - few teams take themselves so seriously that they don't allow any banter), but I keep the overall standup short, to the point and respectful of our time.
> were HIV to mutate away from being able to bind to those chunks it too would become less virulent when attacking the real proteins.

Forgive my ignorance, but are there any indicators to predict whether a virus will evolve one way or another?

What I mean is, once it comes in contact with these mimic proteins, instead of mutating away from binding to these proteins, can it not mutate in such a way that it increases its virility so that it will bind onto more proteins in an effort to combat "false positives"? So it'll become even more virulent in individuals that have not received this treatment, and maintain its current virility in individuals receiving such treatments?
There are many types of leader and a flat organisation just means that you won't get to be a "type 1" leader, or an imposed leader if you will. That doesn't mean you can't rise to the position using skills and personality.

If you really want to go for leadership in your career look up some courses and books on the subject and talk to a mentor or even HR about developing a career plan.

Good luck!
Thanks, I'll keep you in mind as I get started.
This was a nice overview. Thanks.
Ask HN: How to implement realtime tracking in a webapp
I recently started to help out a startup which already had some software in place.

The front-end is written in Angular.

We wish to track activity of the users, especially how much people are currently active on a page(actually thats a route).

Currently we have a polling mechanism in place to update the data on the front-end. So I attached additional logic which creates a REDIS key with with the IP and a cookie, to track each client. Keys are structured in a similar manner:

viewing:resource:ip:cookie

And there is a TTL on each key. Consecutive call refresh that key. Now I only count the viewing:resource:* keys and I have a number of people on this resource.

But the solution is done in an urge of drunken 'brilliance'. How do the big players track concurrent online visitors on webaps?
Spark whistling past the data platform graveyard
The price of 3D-things
Inversion from DC Voltage – Power Circuits
Friend of mine took over a team which had a guy with the opposite problem (though he was a pretty nice guy too). He had the skills to do the job. Indeed, he'd been doing it for three or four years. Then one day he just decided he didn't like software development any more.

Now, a normal person would have gone one of two ways. Either they'd start looking around and find something they thought would be more interesting and then leave for whatever that was, or they'd grit their teeth and keep doing the job they didn't like because they need the paycheck and couldn't find anything that paid enough (guys with families, mostly).

This guy, though, figured the things he liked paid less, so there was no hurry to leave. But he didn't have enough personal integrity to actually do the work while he was still drawing a paycheck. So he just stopped working. He'd show up for work every day and surf the web, listen to ball games, talk on the phone, etc.

It took some time, but eventually my buddy sat him down and said "Look, you need to start actually working instead of just showing up to the office," to which the guy replied "No. You're going to have to fire me".

He made my friend grind through all the paperwork to actually fire him. It's a big company, so it took awhile. They gave him verbal warnings, written warnings, put him on a "performance plan", and eventually he was fired. It took months. He wasn't disappointed or resentful or anything. He just took his couple months of free money and waited around for the paperwork to go through.
Not to mention how much the US governments advocates against encryption they can't have backdoors to. They have a lot more influence over the encryption in Windows than TrueCrypt. Not suggesting they DO have backdoors to Bitlocker, there's not enough evidence, but the probability is much higher.
Bingo. If there's nobody else already out there selling what you're thinking about doing, there's probably a reason. And the reason is probably not "nobody thought of this yet".
Why wouldn't you go for a Lego Mindstorms kit?

You could probably build a similar thing almost out of the box (BYO marker and whiteboard) and you can replace the various parts with your own bits as you get more advanced.

I suppose if you knew what you were doing going an Arduino is a cheaper option though.
This seems like an amazing tool for transit agencies, nice job.

I saw a screenshot of one of the CapMetro routes in Austin on your homepage. Have you been working with CapMetro recently?
Windows maintains good compatibility for userspace applications, but they don't guarantee driver compatibility. A Windows 95 program might run on Windows 7, but drivers for Windows 95 probably wouldn't!

Truecrypt manages to create virtual disks that look a lot like regular disks, so I assume it does some kernel-level stuff to make that work.
I should elaborate on ActorSelection: while this is how you look up an actor reference, it's not inherently a 1-1 lookup to a single actor.

Technically, ActorSelection does not point to a specific ActorRef, it points to every ActorRef that matches the expression given. Wildcards are supported in this expression. So it's an expression that selects 0+ actors

ActorSelection will also match two different ActorRefs with the same name if the first one dies and is replaced by another (not restarted, in which case it would be the same ActorRef).
Perfectionism and procrastination can be tightly-coupled.

This page [1] convinced me, against my own intuition, that I'm a perfectionist. I thought I was lazy, but I'm not. Perfectionism is simultaneously one of my greatest strengths and weaknesses.

If you can identify perfectionism and put a name on it, it's easier to manage. This book (short, small, cheap) [2] contains useful coping strategies.

[1] http://depts.washington.edu/hhpccweb/content/student-health/...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Procrastination-Lollygagging-P...
The creepy mansion demo
Go 1.4.2 is released
Ask HN: How do your enterprise customers pay you?
If you are a SaaS company, how do your customers pay you? Credit, ACH, etc, monthly vs. annual contract. Any good resources on the subject?
My first job was building something like this into sugarcrm circa 2005. It was more of a generic workflow tool and is a great way to automate business process. Not not sure how enjoyable it was for people to come into work, check their taskboard, and find 20 identical tasks on their list of things to do that day though.

It certainly exposes bottlenecks if they weren't obvious already.
What's needed is for Microsoft to make Azure machine learning accessible to a wider audience, via visualization tools with the level of ease of use like Tableau.
Having worked at both, I can assure you that ThoughtWorks are thought leaders in the agiile development and change. It's hard to get in and you have to be talented to stary there.

Accenture on the other hand, they make it hard to get into the consulting arm, but the tech arm (Accenture Solutions) is easy to get into (although you'd be surprised at how maby people tank in the interviews) and even easier to coast through, producing crappy software and bleeding their clients dry.
Elearnhero, useful courses for startups and entrepreneurs