skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Direct debit is rare in Australia/New Zealand (most people prefer to perform transactions themselves on a one-off basis)

I disagree; I used to work in an ISP billing department and about 50% of our customers used direct debit.
Then ~25% on credit card; and 25% via BPay.
I read it as him hoping that the first immortal person will be his senior (increasing the likelihood of immortality for himself), and not his junior (reducing that likelihood).
I agree, but lexers and parsers are especially stateful pieces of code.

I'm not a static typing person (I like Python, bash, and C), but I have resolved to write all future parsers in OCaml or a similar language.

For other types of code, if you don't have a code path explosion, you can do OK in C. For example, numerical simulation code.

Unfortunately async code in C like Nginx tends to also produce this code path explosion. And kernel code is also littered with state machines.

Another interesting thing is that SQLite's parser is generated with Lemon. It's not even a hand-written parser in C (like Lua), which would be much worse. I guess all the crashes were in the semantic actions of the parser?
I can't believe how laughably bad router security still is. It's fascinating how these exploits came to light. Where do you even start to map to the related system calls?
> Do you need to understand the internals of every tool you use?

If possible, I like to understand. For Wordpress, I can't (too big). For simple projects, I can and I enjoy it!

> Why would you install a development tool on the server? Do you install gcc on servers too?

At the moment of my last comment, I didn't know at all how Jekyll works, and knew nothing, zero, about Ruby. Never used in my life. Thus my comment. I had a quick look, in the meantime.

> it does not generate static pages, and actually generates them on request-time.

Exactly. Like a CMS, like a blog, like a Wordpress. I never said my tool generates static HTML that should be uploaded to server after each new article. I don't want this by the way.
(True that some people thought it was a static generator. My bad, because few documentation yet (currently writing it...))

> gp's question was how this compared to Jekyll, and that's what I answered.

Sure, no problem. I just don't understand why the awfully in your comment.
The point of this tool is not to be a static generator. I never said that. Why is it "awful" to just drop .txt files into the server, and let the server and PHP generate content on request-time?
Some fraction of HN users are professionals in the primary fields it covers. By definition DIY'ers are not professionals.
I'd personally love to see this. Think it would be very valuable to the community.
I chuckled at this as well, so I filed an issue: https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/issues/9

Should be fixed by now :)
It's 2015. Do you know where your data is?
Any good web-based regex tools that you use daily?
Is Christianity Dark Enough for Millennials?
AmEx, Jawbone Team Up to Allow Payments via Fitness Bands
For the record, I honestly believe an investigation into these topics by the OP could result in a real solution to their actual problem. It certainly seems more productive than identifying edge cases of what was probably a poorly phrased question.
What are the Java 8 features being used here, besides the obvious lambda expressions?

(genuine question, I haven't stayed current with Java)
I think this comment was made on the wrong window.
edit: to clarify: there was a thread about crowdfunding in colorado relatively near to this thread.
Exactly, nature does what works.

The biodegradability thing is pretty funny too, again human waste absolutely pales in comparison to trees and lignin, at least water bottles can't reproduce.
Eric is most probably no longer reading this, but I'm really curious what he thinks about landing pages. A lot of startups use them as their MVP nowadays, but I think they are doomed to fail because you have nothing to present to your potential customers.

I'm also wondering what his thoughts are on what the best ways to drive good traffic to a MVP are, without getting biased stats (by inviting all your friends and family for example).
We have an inhouse solution which is basically a set of external functions that work with built in streams in a way that avoids frustration.

Some of them can be found in https://github.com/spion/promise-streams - the others we haven't extracted to an npm module yet. (Promise streams also has a minimal extension of built in streams to make them work better with promises).

We never managed to find a full replacement though. Probably not worth the effort either given that it will always have to wrap existing streams, and the only drawback of external functions is that you cannot invoke them as methods. Although, one contender that I have hopes for is WHATWG streams [1].

note: to replace event emitters we built https://github.com/doxout/promise-observer which gives you a lot more power and control in terms of execution order and goes away with the "multiple events per object" stringy design that makes things harder for typesystems like typescript/flow.

[1]: https://github.com/whatwg/streams
I had a different experience. I played with Shopify, and canceled my account.

They kept charging me for years. I eventually noticed, and asked for a refund on the completely empty, completely unused account which was being charged to an expired and canceled card (something I didn't even know was possible until this incident).

Support said no, and offered a discount if I wanted to use Shopify in the future. I said I'd have to resort to a chargeback and I'd let my credit card company see if they agreed with my interpretation of the situation or not. The head of support literally yelled at me the moment I used the word chargeback, revoked his previous offer, and said they had no need to return my money, even though they hadn't earned it.

I wound up in touch with their VP Revenue who agreed that he didn't want to take any money they hadn't earned. But instead of refunding my money, he just dropped contact with me and never responded again.

If they were to respond to this publicly, they'd say I was angry with them. And that's true. I became angry after their head of support yelled at me. I still can't believe that happened, it was the worst customer service experience of my life. My blood pressure goes up a little just remembering how I was treated.

So basically, I'm glad you're happy with them, but they stole a couple hundred bucks from me and lied about their intention to give it back. My experience makes me believe that anybody who had good experiences is, almost certainly, just lucky. That or I'm in the .001% of supremely bad luck.

If I'm truly in the .001%, their vp revenue can circle back and give me the money he promised (I'd be easy to identify on their side, since if they never yell at customers, and never lie to customers, then it should be super-easy to remember a time that they yelled at and then lied to a customer).
+1...just make sure you ship before everyone forgets about you :). I've heard 10% conversion from signup list isn't unrealistic when products finally ship.
This already exists: RC cars. The only difference would be 1:1 scale instead of 1:10.
The problem for nuclear is that with the way the bulk electricity market works, shaving off the peaks could hurt the ROI of building a new nuclear plant significantly. In New York and New England, suppliers bid in how much power they are willing to supply at a given price, the market operator runs a giant LP solver over the bids and transmission constraints between locations in order to satisfy demand in each location, every supplier that is scheduled in a given location gets paid the price of the marginal watt in that location. So nuclear plants bid negative to make sure they get scheduled and rely on other positive-price sources getting scheduled in order to turn a profit.
To me the original title is confusing. I wouldn't have known what was meant by "Designer Duds." Duds can be used to mean clothes, so it almost sounds like an article about designer clothing... haha.
Is it known that Apple leaders endorse the contents of Becoming Steve Jobs?

Perhaps Apple chooses to promote the work for the publicity despite its angle on Jobs' career stages. They might dislike the Isaacson biography now but they promoted it plenty when it came out...
The facebook comments ui is not easy for the reader. wish zack went to reddit too.
I think "damning" might be a bit much -- it's got bugs. Like everything on earth, it's not perfect.

I was going to say it's full of meta-programming too, which should allow for simple fixes to have far-reaching implications (indeed, bugs would have same effect), but looking at the repo and build, I'm not seeing signs of meta-programming in effect. Fossil[0] (also initiated by Richard Hipp, and used to (created explictily to) manage the sqlite codebase) however, is a meta-programming example. Point is: C is not untenable, still offers a lot, and has great tooling built up around it. Don't give up on it, but know it's strengths and weaknesses.

[0] http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
This particular fund might be acting a bit more aggressively than some others, but big pension funds are huge investors. Calpers (the California state pension fund) has over $300 billion in assets, and often acts to try to improve the performance of the companies that they own.
TCP did that with their smart bulbs. They removed the local web interface in a silent update, bricking the bulbs for a lot of users. It's really bad manners, and I wish they would at least have options to re-add the missing features. It ultimately just alienates customers.
My comment comes from experience of being in progress of doing an Honors CS - Honors Math double major. After having completed Honors Calculus I/ II, Honors Linear Algebra Imy /II circuits in my first year I felt about 2-3 years ahead in my knowledge of mathematics and associated rigor -- this was especially evident when I was taking combined CS/EE courses and seeing student struggle with concepts that I thought were basic (infinimums, supremums, etc.) but apparently are not covered over the course of 2 years in the regular streams.
I was in a dev team for a network security appliance. It is really sad they way they treat vulnerabilities and security advisories. There were very few people who know what the actual vulnerability was.The vulnerability would be listed as one of the last items in a release checklist. Gets assigned to a guy who has no clue whatsoever. The guy fixing the issue would google a patch. apply it. has no way of testing it comprehensively. He will run a basic test case. He will make up a report with a lot of security jargon for the managers and advisory team. And the next release would list the vulnerability as fixed.
Why punish entrepreneurs who want to start a company because of a few bad apples? Anyone who invests in anything needs to do their research, understand the risks and make the right choice for themselves.
The thing about fundraising is, you don't get to choose your audience or their mood. All you can really control is how you react and how you present your business, and you can tactfully drive the conversation where you want it to go.

Now that I've pitched 80-90 additional times, I must say PG's approach in this video is above average, if anything, when it comes to giving the entrepreneur the benefit of the doubt -- so in my opinion it's really not on him.
You're still conflating "prove" with "reason". I don't need to prove things about my code in order to reason about it. For example, I can just look at the code in question to know whether it has side effects, and most code doesn't.

In fact, most proofs I have seen don't particularly help me reason about the code in question. On the other hand, a simple imperative execution model does help me reason about the code.
Generally what they were already doing, as only one or two actually installed docker in the first place. They use Gulp to manage their dev systems, but I'm not sure if they use any other tools.
It varies. I very rarely downvote something just because I disagree with it, but will do so freely if it's based on an obvious fallacy or false premise, or it's pointlessly rude or antagonistic. I try not to do so too often, but I don't actually know my ratio of up- to down-votes, so I'm probably a bit more negative in practice than this idealized concept.
You could try checking if the nameservers assigned to the site are operated by the domain's registrar and if so if they are used primarily for that registrar's parked domains.
Wow, what a coincidence to hear from the original author!

I never looked at (or even located) the actual password generation code, but only worked on the password verification code,
as it's way easier to do it in that direction. What I initially did was to use the PCSX emulator's cheat finder feature
to locate the memory address of the variable that holds the length of the entered password, then placed a memory breakpoint on that
address in the NO$PSX emulator, which then lead to the discovery of the virtual machine.
After some reverse engineering of the VM's instruction set and programming the VM tracer, as I knew
the address of the VM instruction that incremented the password length counter, I could mash
one button for 24 times, and then look at the differences in the instruction traces when the final password character was entered.

The function `check()` in https://github.com/dezgeg/crash-bandicoot-password-cracking/... is a bit cleaned-up version of
the verification function written in JavaScript, mentally translated from this trace dump: https://github.com/dezgeg/crash-bandicoot-password-cracking/...
. All the cryptic variable names in the JS come directly from the virtual machine's "registers".

The function make() in the JS is my implementation of the password generator, i.e. inverse of check(), which
wasn't too hard to figure out. I never did bother to find a closed-form expression for the inverse of `mixAndPermute()` function,
so maybe that's where the modular exponentiation hides, but I personally don't have enough number theory-fu to crack that.
Tracking Event Data for Newbies
Does anyone have thoughts/opinions on the algorithm presented in "Simple and Efficient Construction of Static Single Assignment Form"[1] by Braun, et al? I'm mostly wondering whether there are any non-obvious "gotchas" that aren't apparent to me as a non-expert.

1. http://compilers.cs.uni-saarland.de/papers/bbhlmz13cc.pdf
I second this. I am getting happier by the day with my react client side architecture and am now casting an eye to my server side (currently a Django-rest-framework api) to determine what the best fit there would be.
Would love to see this as well. I'm the creator of the Scala driver and always looking for ways to improve the api.I know you may not be using Scala but having insight on how other devs would use it always helps. Plus I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do change feeds hehe.
It's pretty dark considering it promotes cannibalism of the savior.
Show HN: Open-source voting platform
I realize I may have come across somewhat pugnaciously above. I am honestly curious about this, though.

What utilities/where are talking about this right now? What level of talk are we talking about? Public statements? Designs? Construction permits in the works?
How far should we take that maxim? It implies that no one should ever attempt this, but that leads to nothing new (unless you are first recognised as a crypto guru -- but how could you become one?).

I think it's worth drawing a distinction between the algos/maths and attempts at implementations. Otherwise we wouldn't have things like OCaml-TLS and others.

http://openmirage.org/blog/introducing-ocaml-tls
Minimum sustainable success
Thank you Slava. Put all these numbers on the front of your webpage :)
Sure.

I guess the bit that really grates on me is the "just give us your private keys, and trust us!" approach, especially with someone who's then routing not insignificant percentages of the total web traffic through their infrastructure.

Snowden showed us the NSA can and does target "high volume" opportunities for mass surveillance - if you look at the PRISM slides and estimate what percentage of global email their "top ten" targets represents, how much would you bet against them already having a similar program in place backdooring Cloudflare (and Akamai and all other significant players in the SSL CDN market)?

It's probably a false hope, but I feel my own SSL cert on a VM on a more Lavabit scale "local colo" is - while no safer from a targeted NSA/GHCQ/DSD probe looking for _me_ specifically - still significantly less likely to get caught up in a firehose scale "collect all the things" program.

Although, it's probably just as likely a "red flag" that marks me as a "potential terrorist" at least as accurately as having a public PGP key or a secure messaging app… :-/
Ask HN: How do I (a non-programmer) get _back_ into tech?
A couple years ago, I got a job as a community person for a finch startup, mostly through luck, as the existing community manager was a friend of a friend of my girlfriend. They took a chance on me, despite no relevant professional experience, because I showed I had the skills through years of blogging and doing a podcast. (The podcast is now defunct, but I'm still blogging.)

It wasn't a great experience, and six months later I inherited the entire community role after my boss was unceremoniously fired after getting a better offer. I did my best, but chafed at the unethical tasks I was asked to do, like importing directories of email addresses of our target audience into our mailing list, and using that number as our "total users" for fundraising presentations. After another six months, and being verbally berated by the CTO, I quit/was fired.

Currently, I'm working as a web producer for a publishing company, and while it's an okay job, the only challenging part is dealing with. I want to get back into a tech-focused company, where I can be challenged by interesting stuff, and solve problems instead of putting ads in people's faces. I"m not sure what I should be working on doing. My skills are primarily writing, HTML and CSS, and some social media/community management/email newsletter stuff. I don't necessarily know if I want to go back into that community role, unless I know the company is operating completely above-board, but I'm not sure what else I'm qualified for. Front-End UI/UX might be an option, especially if I can pick up some jQuery to add to my skills.

What course of action would you suggest, HN?

(Also, I'm keeping the name of the startup I worked for quiet, as they have a tendency to threaten former---and current---employees with lawsuits if they piss off the founder. I think my non-disparagement clause expired, but just to be safe...)
A 16-year-old company with 17 datacenters and 800+ employees is hardly a startup anymore.
Parallella Chronicles Part Six: Moving Multiple Bytes Simply
I still don't really grok what value keen.io provides. The storage and querying of data (including unstructured) is pretty easy (and has been for a long time) with numerous ready-to-go solutions.

Is the value mostly on the visualization and dashboard portion? Is it some sort of WYSIWYG query editor?
100% agree on "willingness to reach out" solving most problems.

However, people should at least be aware that humans rely on heuristics [1] to make sense of the world. In a positive sense, this means we don't have to stop and determine what a door handle is and what it will do every time we see one. In a negative sense, it leads to stereotypes that are usually incorrect.

Being aware of these will at least bring your attention to things you otherwise might have overlooked, such as having clean writing/grammar (conveys a sense of professionalism) or modifying your body language.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic
Good question. I'd love to hear an answer.
Fair enough. Out of interest, used to = how many years ago? I'd wager it's waning.

(Rationale: need for strong country-specific presence to justify increased integration cost vs. credit card only, consumer gets zero points/benefits)
I <3 Kyle / Keen, but that could have gone better tbh; open office hours seem to add a lot of pressure. Kyle didn't get what PG was asking though:

1) mixpanel - you = ?
2) why use keen over mixpanel?

Succinctly (+ all in imho of course); Keen is a level lower than Mixpanel; - a more powerful, more flexible, API driven events platform. Users would be anyone that wants to track and report on things which aren't the norm for mixpanel, who's product is good but pretty prescriptive in it's use.
...and now you have two problems
I haven't used QT Creator. Does it have many refactorings like Rename function, Extract function, etc? I'd suggest you watch this video to see if it would be beneficial to you : http://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/2014/12/refactorings-in-clio...
"Even with a principled approach, I think I managed to build a system that only I can really get around in."

Interesting. Power vs difficulty in debugging.

" BOT filled its goals of an architecture that is infinitely extensible and runtime modifiable, but that degree of power came at a cost - despite its simplicity the resulting program is very hard to follow. I've recently come to understand that this is because mixins are fundamentally an anti-pattern and BOT is basically dynamic mixins."

BOT is described here: http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/01/24/the-ide-as-data/
Exoskeletons v wheelchairs: Disability advocates clash with futurists
I think that he means per month in electricity costs. ;)
As @imslavko said, when using Meteor with MongoDB (which I believe is the only production ready DB driver) it observes the oplog [1] for changes. You can use the polling observer too though.

You can find out more about the LiveUpdate core project of Meteor on their site [2] - it basically says the implementation of Live Updates for each db driver is independent to what the db is capable of. Specific mention of RethinkDB and Firebase is made as DBs that are built with making realtime data something that you get for relatively little work.

[1] https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/mongo/o...

[2] https://www.meteor.com/livequery
You are still confusing logical inferences from unproven assertions with evidence. You claim that what you need to test is narrower, and I understand your reasoning as to why you think that this is true, but there is no evidence that your claims are actually true.

On the other hand, there was a paper just recently (can't currently find it), with empirical evidence that surprisingly few tests were required to weed out large swathes of potential misbehavior, much fewer than could reasonably be expected.

Or there is Robert Smallshire's data mining of github errors that showed type errors in dynamically typed languages as being exceedingly rare (1-2%), when everyone just knows that they must be common and problematic.
Any thoughts about multi-doc transactions?
In my mind what I'm thinking of could theoretically cost in the low 10's of US$. At scale my hunch is costs would theoretically go down as low as 1's of US$ per device. Yes, less than $10.
The OpenWRT wiki pages for the routers usually has some detailed info about the hardware. That won't tell you about hardware problems they might have that they didn't investigate but you can usually find photos of the boards to see what's there. [1][2][3]

[1] http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040#photos_v10
[2] http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt610n#opening_the_case
[3] http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wndr3700#photos
Not much is revealed - sounds like data leakage prevention at the end-point.
Digital music revenues overtake physical sales for the first time
This barge is in a turbulent ocean, so it's already doing a lot of work just to stay somewhat still. Plus the vision tracking on the rocket is already accounting for the movement of the barge.